President Bush’s Movements and Actions on 9/11

“Bush’s actions on September 11 have been the subject of lively debate, mostly on the internet. Details reported that day and in the week after the attacks – both the media reports and accounts given by Bush himself – have changed radically over the past 18 months. Culling hundreds of reports from newspapers, magazines, and the internet has only made finding the “truth” of what happened and when it happened more confusing. In the changed political climate after 9/11, few have dared raise challenging questions about Bush’s actions. A journalist who said Bush was “flying around the country like a scared child, seeking refuge in his mother’s bed after having a nightmare” and another who said Bush “skedaddled” were fired. We should have a concise record of where President Bush was throughout the day the US was attacked, but we do not.

What follows is an attempt to give the most complete account of Bush’s actions – from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska to Washington, DC.” Center for Cooperative Research [via Booknotes]

Fun and games going on in the Texas legislature!

the meaning of living in a city —

Psy-Geo-Conflux 2003 marks the inauguration of an annual event dedicated to current artistic and social investigations in psychogeography. Part festival and part conference, it brings together visual and sound artists, writers, and urban adventurers to explore the physical and psychological landscape of the city.

In 1955, Guy Debord defined psychogeography as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.” (An Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography). It has also been summarized as “the active search for, and celebration of, chance and coincidence, concurrently with the divination of patterns and repetitions thrown up by the [meeting/collision] of the chaos and structures of cities, personal histories and interpretations. It is based on the technique of the “derive,”an informed and aware wandering, with continuous observation, through varied environments. It can be sought and can lead anywhere.” (Psychogeography: a working definition) context

“Artificial intelligence pioneers point to advances made in law,

medicine and other arenas as proof of the vitality of their work. But

Marvin Minsky, co-founder of the field, calls AI research ‘brain-dead.’ Wired

F.C.C. Prepares to Loosen Rules on Media Ownership: “The government proposed the most significant overhaul of its media ownership rules in a generation today, including a change that would allow television networks to own enough local stations to reach 90 percent of the nation’s viewers.

That change— a result of increasing the cap on ownership and simultaneously preserving a 1980’s formula that discounts the reach of UHF stations — is part of the package of proposals that officials said appeared to have the support of the Republican majority of the Federal Communications Commission.” NY Times The vote will be along strict party lines, it seems, and in the same kind of doublespeak we’re getting used to in the foreign policy arena, is promoted as encouraging free airwaves. Is Colin Powell proud of son Michael? [thanks, Abby, who suggested I put this blink in the “It Can’t Happen Here” Dept. of FmH]

“For years the classroom has been the setting for the free expression of ideas, but two weeks ago certain ideas led to two students being taken out of class and grilled by the United States Secret Service.

…When one of the students asked, ‘Do we have to talk now? Can we be silent? Can we get legal counsel?’ they were told, ‘We own you, you don’t have any legal rights’…” KRON-TV

Also: Vt. Cop Photographed Class Projects: “A uniformed police officer persuaded a custodian to open a school in the middle of the night so he could photograph class projects he found objectionable as an American and as a military veteran.” Lycos News [thanks, walker]

“Comcast will shake up the digital video recorder business today by unveiling a system to go on field trial in Philadelphia midyear that records TV shows and uses cable lines to distribute them through the home.

Samsung will make decoders with built-in DVRs — which record TV shows to a hard drive, making them far easier to use than VCRs. Set-top units for other TVs will access that hard drive. Ucentric Systems will provide the software to sort through TV schedules and help users select shows to record.

What makes the Comcast system different from DVRs such as those from TiVo and ReplayTV is its ability to piggyback on the cable system to create a home network. That eliminates the need for extra connections or equipment.” CED Broadband Direct News

This seems to be an effort to introduce DVRs to the masses, remedying their renowned inability to program their VCRs’ clocks and, in the process, restoring control to the media giants who are threatened by the viewercentric TiVo attitude. Although a spokesperson touts the notion that the Comcast system is as “full-featured” as existing DVRs, I’ve heard rumors that this and other systems planned by cable giants do not allow you to fast forward through commercials and may limit which programming you can record at all. Anyone with more information on this? (TiVo, it should be noted, has just introduced a home networking upgrade that works via ethernet or WiFi, as current users are well aware.)

‘While previous research on infant development has demonstrated that newborns prefer to listen to their own mother’s voice to that of a female stranger and will even change their behaviour to elicit their mother’s voice, Dr. Kisilevsky’s research proves tthat this “preference/recognition” begins before birth.’ Hard to understand why the article is headlined as it is; of course it is not the poetry per se…

A single family with speech abnormalities may hold one of the keys to the origin of human culture.

For most of us, learning to speak in our mother tongue is so natural and instinctive that we need no formal instruction. And ‘natural’ seems to equate, at least in part, to ‘in our genes’, as studies of identical and non-identical twins to tease out the genetic and environmental components of this trait have shown. These are the genes that set us apart from our closest primate relatives and equip us with the unique combination of physical, articulatory and neurological features necessary for spoken language again.

Dr Simon Fisher, a Royal Society Research Fellow at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics in Oxford, was studying for his PhD when he came across Steven Pinker’s book, The Language Instinct, which speculates on the genetic basis of speech development. He was intrigued by Pinker’s ideas. Now, almost ten years later, he is setting up a research group to look at the molecular basis of speech and language development. His research revolves around a key discovery made in the laboratory of Professor Tony Monaco, director of the centre in Oxford – that of the first gene shown to be necessary for the acquisition of spoken language.

“A film franchise so sloppy, so irresponsible, so lowbrow

that it’s almost criminal. Here’s 50 Reasons to stay away on May 15th:

1. The Matrix Murders

The first film killed 13 students at Columbine High School, the disturbed trench-coated teens imitating the pipe-bombing, shotgunning film’s finale. How many troubled teens are out there Reloading with the release of the sequel?

The site is by “Dr. Albert Oxford, PhD, chairman, London Film Institute”, who adds, “Sign Dr. Oxford’s Petition. It is my understanding that if I can get 5,000 signatures, Warner Brothers will not release the films.” It’s a troll, of course Could it be this Albert Oxford?

New bills to deviate from standard green with the introduction of “subtle background colors.” In some way, this is supposed to be an anti-counterfeit measure. Digital imaging has been such an enormous boon to counterfeiting that the last round of currency redesign during the ’90’s, widely rationalized as necessary for security, has failed to stem the tide at all. And one rare-currency trader and anti-counterfeiting expert is quoted in this article as saying that the new design won’t make any more of a difference. On a different note (sorry), the new bills are not supposed to create problems with the increasingly ubiquitous bill-acceptor machines, sources claim. CNN Money

Blogs play a role in homeland security Computerworld

Seth Finkelstein bursts the bubble of the Klingon interpreter story. kuro5hin

As usual, if it sounds too unbelievable, we should be looking further rather than just parroting the widespread attention. Mea culpa.

“Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope’s powerful new Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) have taken the deepest visible-light image ever made of the sky.

The 3.5-day (84-hour) exposure captures stars as faint as 31st magnitude, according to Tom M. Brown (Space Telescope Science Institute), who headed the eight-person team that took the picture. This is a little more than 1 magnitude (2.5 times) fainter than the epochal Hubble Deep Fields, which were made with the Hubble’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. It is 6 billion times fainter than what can be seen with the naked eye.” Sky and Telescope

“a shelter for found photographs. found on the street, at fleamarkets, thrift shops, in archives, in abandoned lofts… the photos exist on their own, lost in time. who and where are these people? are they still alive? why are the photos lost, abandonned, or thrown away? it’s not our goal to find out, time tales is not looking for answers. time tales wants to be a home to the lost and forgotten in this world.” Found via the Solipsistic Gazette, which also has a link to the photographs of one of my favorite tech journalists, Declan McCullagh, e.g.:

Four separate overnight bombing attacks struck Western targets including residential compounds in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, causing an undetermined number of deaths and dozens of injured, Saudi officials and diplomats said today.

The United States Embassy in Riyadh said 44 Americans had been injured, some of them seriously, and there were local press reports of at least three deaths. The three were identified as a Saudi, a Lebanese and one Westerner. Neither the American nor the British Embassies could confirm that any of its citizens had been killed, but both said they expect the casualty figures to rise during the day.

…Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, due to travel to Saudi Arabia from Jordan today, said at an early morning news conference in Amman that the violence had likely been carried out by Al Qaeda, since it bore its hallmarks.” NY Times

What exactly does it mean these days to say that an attack bears the hallmarks of al Qaeda? Little more than that it is an Islamist reaction to the US’s continued projection of force into the Middle East, which the WoT® and the invasion of Iraq have intensified. I’ve always found the thesis attractive that one of the underlying incentives for us to seize Iraq was to establish another power base in the region and end our assailable reliance on the vulnerable Saudi regime. Confirmatory evidence comes in Rumsfeld’s announcement, as soon as the Iraqi adventure was brought to a satisfying conclusion, that the

US will withdraw all combat forces from Saudi Arabia by this summer, ending military presence that began as joint operation to contain Saddam Hussein after 1991 Persian Gulf war but has become dangerous for US troops because of terrorism stoked by Osama bin Laden; US anger has also swelled since Sept 11 terrorist attacks in which 15 of 19 hijackers were Saudi; Sec Donald Rumsfeld and Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz say in news conference in Riyadh that ouster of Hussein creates ‘safer region’ that allows pullout; photos; only small longstanding training program will continue; US is already pulling out of sprawling air base for new base in Qatar; prince denies asking US to withdraw, but announcement is broadcast on television; Saudis have suggested departure will help them institute political reforms (M) The United States said today that it would withdraw all combat forces in Saudi Arabia by this summer, ending more than a decade of military operations in this strategic Middle East nation that is America’s largest oil supplier. NY Times

It is not so much that the region is safer, it seems, as that it is too dangerous for us to stay in Saudi Arabia. This may be where the otherwise too-simplistic war-for-oil thesis comes in. Of course, we’d also remain in a position to project force back into a fundamentalist Arabia after the House of Saud is overthrown, if it is strategically necessary.

Not Finding Weapons of Mass Destruction a Crucial Detail: I’m actually already bored by press coverage of the Weapons of Mass Disappearance, (Frustrated, US Arms Teams to Leave Iraq, Washington Post) but Ivins has other fish to fry as well:

“We ought to be beating our chests every day. We ought to look in a mirror and be proud, and stick out our chests and suck in our bellies, and say, ‘Damn, we’re Americans!’ ” — Jay Garner, retired general and the man in charge of the American occupation of Iraq.

Thus it is with a sense of profound relief that one hears the news that Garner is about to be replaced by a civilian with nation-building experience. I realize we have all been too busy with the Laci Peterson affair to notice that we’re still sitting on a powder keg in Iraq, but there it is. In case you missed it, a million Iraqi Shiites made a pilgrimage to Karbala, screaming, “No to America!”

Funny how media attention slips just at the diciest moments. I doubt the United States was in this much danger at any point during the actual war. Whether this endeavor in Iraq will turn out to be worth the doing is now at a critical point, and the media have decided it’s no longer a story. Boy, are we not being served well by American journal- ism.

“Turkey’s outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) has warned that it will retaliate with force if either Turkey or the United States move to purge northern Iraq of its militants.

Some 5,000 rebels are believed to have found refuge in the mountainous area across the border since 1999, when the PKK declared an end to its 15-year armed struggle for Kurdish self-rule in southeastern Turkey and withdrew into Iraq.” Khaleej Times (Dubai) [via truthout]

Was race the issue in the Jayson Blair case? Writing in Alternet, Farai Chideya thinks so, arguing that as long as true diversity is not tolerated in the newsroom, there will be a pull for minority reporters to be “shapeshifters” and “charming liars” spending more effort ingratiating themselves to their editors to fit in to a lily-white environment than they do at good reporting. In essence, she argues that focusing on Blair’s misdeeds is blaming the victim. While Chideya may find my dismissal of her thesis an indication of either or both my own covert racism or my ignorance of the true dynamics of the newsroom (I plead to the latter), I think she sets up a straw man — that the Blair case will be ammunition for a new assault on affirmative action principles — for which I see no evidence, and then defends against it with a tortured argument that makes little sense in light of the evidence of journalistic malfeasance among white reporters as well. Do they, not being oppressed by institutional racism, plagiarize and fabricate for different reasons than minority con men, who are because of their oppression less culpable? In fact, Chideya might just as well turn her own hypothesis on its head and argue that minority reporters, not really fitting in and under more job insecurity, would be under increased pressure to do a scrupulously honest job and keep their noses clean rather than cut any corners. But that wouldn’t explain away Blair, would it? Pulling the race card here is clumsy and nonsensical political correctness at its worst which, I suspect, will offend the bulk of upstanding hardworking capable journalists of color.

By the way, William Safire’s much-blinked Times op-ed piece, ‘Huge Black Eye’, halfheartedly castigates his rightwing friends’ schadenfreude about the ‘diversity gone wrong’ aspects of the story without actually strongly contending that Blair’s being black did not have anything to do with his downfall.

Addendum: On re-reading my post, I wondered if Chideya might equally apply her argument to Colin Powell in the Bush Administration — that he will be under extra pressure to be a shapeshifting con man to fit into his institutional culture. Ironic, given the juxtaposition with my recent post flirting with the longstanding controversy as to whether Powell is as much a lying sociopath as the rest of the Bush regime or a dupe who is being lied to and whose integrity co-opted. If Chideya thinks there’s as much institutional racism in the halls of the White House as those of the New York Times, would she be arguing for cutting Powell some slack? Here are her published references to Colin Powell, according to Google.

new notebook PC prototype, which has yet to be revealed to the public, shows how a notebook can metamorphose from a tablet for capturing handwritten text to a mobile entertainment or messaging console, all while retaining a built-in keyboard.

CNET News

A book created over a 20 day period in the spring of 2003 as a response to the US invasion of Iraq. It is simply one US citizen’s outlet for feelings of frustration, disbelief and impotence in the face of a war that should not have happened and that has been mounted by an administration drunk on its own power and delusions of grandeur. While thousands die needlessly a world away, hundreds of thousands of US citizens are watching as their civil rights are steadily eroding. Still millions of Americans believe without question propaganda manufactured daily by the Bush Administration and treated as legitimate news by our national broadcast media…” [thanks, miguel]

“As tens of thousands of American troops arrive home from a war in which a number of them faced vicious fighting, the military is scrambling to smooth their return to civilian society.

Five killings last summer involving Army couples at Fort Bragg, N.C., including three soldiers who were recently back from the war in Afghanistan, raised a troubling question: Had the soldiers’ combat skills spilled over into their domestic lives, with tragic consequences?” NY Times

(Dublin, GA): Man reports burglary of marijuana to police. TechFocus

“A report on CNN claimed that a US hospital is frantically searching for someone fluent in Klingon.

The hospital, in Multnomah County, needs an interpreter for mentally ill patients who apparently won’t speak any other language.

It’s also looking for people fluent in another 55 languages, although it doesn’t say which of those are terrestrial and which extraterrestrial.”

“The Bush administration’s doctrine of pre-emption presumes that American intelligence can ferret out the most secret of foreign science with near infallibility.” — William J. Broad, NY Times

Since when do we nominate the warmongers for the Nobel Peace Prize simply because they won? Reuters

I’ve been a little nervous since hearing where Neal Stephenson is going with his next book, Quicksilver. Maybe a “prequel” to the immensely satisfying, massive Cryptonomicon would work, but what’s one of the more ingenious science fiction writers operating going to do way back in the Baroque era? He seems to be trying to escape his genre roots, and I hope he isn’t shooting himself in the foot by doing so. (It does charm me that he’s gone all the way retro by writing the book by hand with a fountain pen; I am an aficionado of fine pens and write with them day in day out in my work.) This preview helps me feel I could get into it, though. Too bad it’ll be too late for summer reading.

I agree with Rafe Colburn; I too am still waiting for the article that analyzes Colin Powell’s February speech to the U.N. claim by claim to show the extent to which we were lied to about the pretexts for the war. More than that, though, I’m waiting for Powell’s postwar memoir, the searing indictment of how he was misled and betrayed, his reputation exploited as fodder for the Bush regime’s search for credibility. Not that it’ll necessarily be true, mind you; I’m still not clear how much of a willing accomplice Powell has been. But it’ll make a nice book contract, since any further political aspirations he could have had have pretty much run aground by now.

Given the American public’s blasé indifference to the fact that they’re getting fooled again, Rafe is right to ask and answer:

The other question that must also be asked is why I care in the first place. We went to war with Iraq, we won the war, and there’s little doubt that Iraqis are better off without Saddam than they were with him. The reason I’m still keeping track of this stuff is that I firmly believe we were led to war under false pretenses. I said it before the war, I said it during the war, and I’ve said it since. Next year we’re going to have a Presidential election in which the incumbent is a man who played upon the rightful fears of Americans to gain their assent to a war fought for reasons that he and his advisors would rather not openly acknowledge. I think we deserve better treatment from our leaders than that.

The Times airs its dirty laundry in agonizing detail. The article is frank about the extent of fabrication and plagiarism in ex-reporter Jayson Blair’s high-visibility national reporting on such issues as the Washington sniper attacks, the domestic reaction to the invasion of Iraq, and the rescue of Jessica Lynch. The crucial issue in this abrogation of the public trust in the Times, however — how he could get away with it for so long — is glossed over in one brief paragraph:

The investigation suggests several reasons Mr. Blair’s deceits went undetected for so long: a failure of communication among senior editors; few complaints from the subjects of his articles; his savviness and his ingenious ways of covering his tracks. Most of all, no one saw his carelessness as a sign that he was capable of systematic fraud.

(Sound of the wind blowing as The Times neatly sidesteps any corporate responsibility). In an accompanying editorial note, the mea culpa is similarly tight-lipped: “The Times regrets that it did not detect the journalistic deceptions sooner. A separate internal inquiry, by the management, will examine the newsroom’s processes for training, assignment and accountability.”

Why Is Jonathan Simms Still Alive? “Jonathan Simms lies in a bed at a hospital somewhere in Belfast — the British courts will not allow the press to say exactly where. He is thin and pale, and on the wall behind him his parents have propped photos taken in happier times, to show the staff the handsome 18-year-old locked within this shell. It is hard to see the connection between that vibrant young man and the one who lies here now, jerking with involuntary spasms.” NY Times

Study Says Not ‘Till 26. I had a friend who was running for political office many years ago . Asked about his platform on abortion, he jokingly said he thought it should be legal until the fetus was 21 years old. Perhaps today he’d say 26…

Man Advertises ‘Son for Sale’ on Internet

A man who jokingly offered his five-year-old son for sale on the Internet has had to explain himself to police after a complaint from a concerned web surfer….

‘Hyperactive kid for sale, good at vacuuming, not great at washing dishes because he’s too short,’ the ad read. ‘Guaranteed to annoy. Five pounds ($8) or nearest offer.’

Yahoo! News

TiVo is on the ropes due to broadcast industry backlash. Apple should step in and buy it “and once again redefine the intersection of culture and technology.” Business 2.0

“The rear door of a Russian-built cargo plane burst open as the aircraft carried police officials and their relatives across Congo, and 129 passengers were sucked out, airport officials said Friday.” Boston Globe. Nightmarish…

“Microsoft quietly published a report on its support pages last week confirming that a right click on files using Windows Explorer in XP does gnash away eating up at your CPU time. But there’s a relatively easy way to stop it doing that.” The Inquirer

Beware of men with different size feet or one ear smaller than the other… Independent/UK

The FBI has a new theory on a central mystery of the 2001 anthrax attacks after finding evidence in a pond in Maryland that may suggest how an ingenious criminal could have packed deadly anthrax spores into envelopes without killing or sickening himself.

A piece of equipment and other evidence recovered this northern winter from ice-covered ponds in Frederick Municipal Forest have reinvigorated the 18-month-old case, leading officials to explore a novel theory with shades of science fiction.

Some involved in the case believe the killer may have waded into shallow water to delicately manipulate anthrax bacteria into envelopes, working within a partly submerged airtight chamber. When finished, the killer could have hidden the evidence by dumping contaminated equipment and clothing into the pond. Sydney Morning Herald

The theory strengthens suspicions about former US Army infectious disease researcher Steven Hatfill, who also has diving qualifications.

Many people are looking forward to the PBS Masterpiece Theatre adaptation of Zadie Smith’s ‘White Teeth’ tonight and next Sunday, Zadie Smith included.

“It’s funny that Wal-Mart decided to censor laddie magazines the very same week the Bush administration soared with laddie politics.” — Maureen Dowd, NY Times

of living under a brutal totalitarian regime for a quarter century?: “…A minor incident, perhaps, but one that reveals many of the psychologically most debilitating forces at work in a brutal totalitarian state: the intrusive cult of personality; the ruthless indoctrination of children; the pervasive atmosphere of paranoia; the frightening potential for one inconsequential event, remark, or gesture to become grounds for severe reprisal. Today, as the people of Iraq are suspended between the death of the old system and the uncertainty of the new, the emotional consequences of living in this regime are most likely to be experienced by the victims, the torturers, and the millions of silently complicit citizens who simply tried to survive the 24 years of Saddam’s tyranny. As the experiences of Cambodia, Chile, Germany, South Africa, Rwanda, and the former Soviet Union have shown, repairing the hearts and minds of the citizenry may prove far more difficult–and more important–than restoring the electrical grids or the water supply.” US News

And: “the strained relations between Germany and the United States took a turn for the worse yesterday after a senior Berlin diplomat was reported to have told Foreign Ministry colleagues that America was turning into a “police stateâ€�. Times of London

Beware of men with different size feet or one ear smaller than the other… Independent/UK

“If we are not alone in the Universe, why have we never picked up signals from an extraterrestrial civilisation? This long-standing puzzle, known as the Fermi paradox after physicist Enrico Fermi, who first posed the question, is still one of the strongest arguments against the existence of intelligent aliens.

But two physicists have come up with an intriguing solution. They suggest a way in which aliens could send messages to each other across space that not only disguises their locations but also makes it impossible for a casual observer to even distinguish the messages from background noise. Messages sent by this method could be criss-crossing our Galaxy without us ever knowing.

At first glance, sending a message without giving away your location appears impossible. If a signal – a stream of photons – comes from a single source, its origin can always be determined by measuring the direction of recoil of a detector struck by the photons. But Walter Simmons and his colleague Sandip Pakvasa from the University of Hawaii at Manoa have come up with a cunning way around this.” New Scientist [via EurekAlert!]

[It doesn’t seem very plausible to me; read the article. “I want to believe…”]

‘And so a fashionably technologically illiterate groupthink replaces reason in the corridors of power. Questioning the existence of Iraqi WMD at the Pentagon in mid-March 2003 was a good way to get yourself called “French”, even though the whole idea of WMD production by Iraq had become technologically preposterous.’

— Jonathan Larson, author of Elegant Technology, Asia Times [via walker]

2000: director of a company which wins $200m contract to sell nuclear reactors to North Korea

2002: declares North Korea a terrorist state, part of the axis of evil and a target for regime change

Rumsfeld’s spokesperson says the Defense Secretary just “does not recall” the issue coming before the board back then. ‘ “One could draw the conclusion that economic and personal interests took precedent over non-proliferation,” said Steve LaMontagne, an analyst with the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington.’ Guardian/UK

Who do you hire to police a country recently ruled by a neo-Stalinist dictator, whose cops were little more than thugs with badges, and whose army was recently at war with the very forces now issuing their marching orders? If you’re the U.S. State Department looking to police Iraq, you hire Dyncorp, a scandal-ridden U.S. military contractor with ties to the CIA and the NYPD.

Much controversy surrounds the recent $22 million contract awarded to Dyncorp Aerospace Operations (UK) Ltd. to “re-establish police, justice, and prison functions” in Iraq. Over the past decade, Dyncorp has been accused of everything from running an illegal sex ring in Bosnia to killing children in Equador as part of “Plan Colombia.”

The company is also under fire for its connections to the strife-wracked NYPD.

According to the New York Post, “The State Department is looking for present and former NYPD cops willing to help restore order to Iraq by rebuilding and training new police departments.” Though the search is nationwide, the article reports that Dyncorp, which is spearheading the search, is “especially interested in [hiring] present and former Big Apple law enforcers.” The estimated salary for the officers is $80,000 a year.

Yet an NYPD deployment to Iraq would be only the latest international adventure for what is rapidly becoming the world’s leading globalized police force. Indypendent

“The insistent claim of traditionally secretive Saudi authorities that a series of violent incidents across the Kingdom in recent months was the work of criminal gangs is becoming extremely threadbare.

With the assassination of a district police chief in the northern province of al-Jawf, a hotbed of Islamic opposition to the monarchy, on 20 April it seems to be increasingly clear that the violence is politically motivated, in all likelihood by supporters of Osama bin Laden.” Foreign Report [via Jane’s]

‘North Korea belongs in the axis of evil.’ Not. “North Korea is not crazy, near collapse, nor about to start a war. But it is dangerous, not to mention dangerously misunderstood. Defusing the threat that North Korea poses to its neighbors and the world will require less bluster, more patience, and a willingness on the part of the United States to probe and understand the true sources of the North’s conduct.” Foreign Policy Debunks the platitudes and myths one after another.

From Cursor:

“As autopsy findings indicate that a British cameraman killed last week was shot dead by Israeli soldiers, the Israeli military begins requiring foreigners entering the Gaza Strip to sign waivers absolving the army from responsibility if it shoots them Guardian/UK. They must also declare that they are not peace activists and are not part of the International Solidarity Movement.

Antonia Zerbisias asks: ‘Where is the outrage over activists’ death?’ A Google News search of Rachel Corrie (dead), Tom Hurndall (clinically dead) and Brian Avery (face shot off), shows that almost all of the coverage is coming from outside of America’s mainstream media.”

As some others see us: “(European writer) Stefan Straub reads the biggest syndicated columnists in the US, and is very, very afraid.” openDemocracy

“Clear Channel Communications, the radio broadcasting and concert promotion giant, plans to introduce a venture today that will sell live recordings on compact disc within five minutes of a show’s conclusion. The venture, Instant Live, will enable a band’s still-sweating fans to leave with a musical souvenir instead of say, a pricey T-shirt or a glossy program.” NY Times

Related: HearItAgain.net ‘offers offer high quality, unedited recordings of various concerts from throughout the world. HearItAgain.net was created by fans for fans so concert goers can literally “Take The Concert Home”.’ Concerts are offered in mp3 format. It looks like, so far, their catalogue consists only of two Frank Black and the Catholics shows, which are priced at $11.95.

How Democrats Can Beat Bush in 2004:

Michael S. Dukakis served with honor in the U.S. Army for two years. Three decades later, he was ridiculed for riding in a tank while wearing a helmet and a goofy grin. George W. Bush, a simian-faced draft dodger, hitches a ride to an aircraft carrier decked out in full “Top Gun” regalia and CNN calls dubs him our “warrior president.”

Life isn’t fair to the Democrats. No matter how much they suck up to corporate CEOs, they can’t compete for contributions with Republicans who invite their backers to write legislation. Most registered voters are Democrats, but too many are disloyal swing voters and apathetic no-shows to assure victory. And even when Dems do win the most votes, cheating Republicans bully their way into office.

As things stand, Dems seem poised to get their collective ass kicked in ’04. While unified Republicans aren’t even bothering to hold presidential primaries next year, nine small-time Democrats are vying for the chance to take on a ruthless incumbent with bottomless pockets. Democratic frontrunners include Joe Lieberman, a wet-lipped whiner, right-wing even by Republican standards; John Kerry, a wild-eyed, helmet-haired war waffler doomed to Dukakian disaster in November; and John Edwards, a rich southerner capable of beating Bush if DNC insiders could see past his dark trial lawyer past. But it’s still early. Hard as it is to believe now, one of these guys could win. After all, Bill Clinton emerged from a similar clutch–the “seven dwarves”–in 1992. — Ted Rall, Yahoo!

Also: The Moral Imperative: “(UCBerkeley linguistics professor) George Lakoff says that conservatives know how to influence voters, and Democrats haven’t a clue. It’s all in their language.” TomPaine

“The United States of America that we thought we knew is gone, finished, kaput and we only have ourselves to blame.

Most of our fellow citizens, who continue to mouth platitudes to freedom and democracy, have not yet been bitten by the police state that grows more powerful by the day with the blessings of Republicans and Democrats alike.

We no longer have a country that operates on the consent of the governed, if, indeed, we ever did. But we did have the illusion, perhaps foolishly so in the face of the reality that has come to pass. We the people are now superfluous to the decisions made by the ruling elite in Washington, the state houses and city hall…” — Bev Conover, Online Journal

With Saddam Hussein’s regime in ashes and Syria threatened into at least temporary compliance, Iran is simply next on the list. And, say what you want about the neocons and their bid to remake the Middle East, they are nothing if not methodical.

(…)

For now, though, Ledeen and his compatriots in the White House don’t seem to be contemplating an invasion of Iran. Rather, they’ve discovered that the United Nations may have its uses after all. Now, US officials are pressing the UN to declare Iran in breach of a global nuclear arms treaty, alleging that Iran has been secretly producing enriched uranium at one of its power plants. The US is pushing for enhanced inspections that would rein in Iran’s program. In fact, while much about Iran’s weapons program is still unknown, it does appear to be farther along in its quest for nuclear arms than Iraq ever was during the last decade. As the New York Times Steven Weisman reports, that’s cause for alarm in Washington and Tel Aviv.

(…)

The US has also been trying to convince erstwhile allies Russia, France, and Germany to put pressure on Iran. Not surprisingly, Washington hasn’t had much luck with this tactic yet. “Very sound evidence is needed to accuse anyone. So far, neither the United States nor any other countries can present it,” a Russian official said yesterday. Mother Jones

Gamble on Buddha:

A casino may seem a strange place for a Buddhist epiphany.

But for David Everard now known as the Venerable Kelsang Lodro, a teacher of Kadampa Buddhism at the Heruka Buddhist Centre in Woodstock Road, Golders Green the time he spent as a croupier was instrumental in his journey of spiritual enlightenment.

“It was about 15 years ago, when I was 32. I was a croupier and a gaming inspector in casinos. Obviously, when you come into contact with the incredibly rich, you soon realise money doesn’t bring happiness some of the most miserable people in the world are very rich,” he said.

…Can you think of anything more preposterous – and dangerous – than determining matters of war and peace based on public opinion surveys? Yet all indications are that Bush and chief strategist Rove are chronic poll watchers and takers. A scary thought when you consider how consistently unreliable polls turn out to be.

(…)

(W)ith their plummeting response rates, laughably small samplings and precision-flouting margins of error, these things are becoming less reliable than Rob on “Survivor: The Amazon” – and take a closer look at the latest numbers. You’ll see that the president isn’t flying anywhere near as high as Karl Rove would like us to believe. — Arianna Huffington, AlterNet

“For weeks, we have been hearing breathless media reports of possible discoveries of chemical and biological weapons by U.S. and British troops in Iraq. Within hours or days, if one scours the back pages of the newspaper, he finds that it was merely another false alarm. But what is never mentioned is that these weapons, made five, ten or fifteen years ago, are almost certainly unusable, having long since passed their stable shelf-life, according to the Department of Defense’s own documents based on a decade of international inspections, electronic surveillance and information supplied by spies and defectors.” — Cliff Montgomery, AlterNet

but do you really want to hear what’s on it? “Do celebrated pop stars really have better, more revealing, or more wide-ranging taste than a run-of-the-mill music fan?”

It’s the sort of stuff you might hear playing in the background at Walgreens—or maybe these are themes from several generations of eighth-grade dances. Scan the list of titles and artists, and you feel as if you’d heard it without even putting the disc on. Sort of like Crow’s music.

Slate

The headline doesn’t hint at what makes this newsworthy. Among others, the judge ruled that Saddam Hussein and the government of Iraq were liable for the damages given evidence they had responsibility for the terrorist attacks. Do you suppose the judge sees this case as a stepping stone to higher political aspirations in a GOP Washington?

I’m not talking about SUVs. Even though they’ve become so politically incorrect, especially after Arianna Huffington tied them to American imperialist urges Salon, many people who consider themselves Green justify — or don’t even try to — driving them (although I had to give Huffington’s thesis a second glance when I saw the pitiful stories profiling Hummer owners’ — mostly with cowboy hats, if I remember correctly — chauvinistic hauteur about driving the vehicle in which the U.S. forces were tearing across the sands toward Baghdad…).

But to gush over this, more Cadillac than Cadillac, as Mickey Kaus does here Slate, surely shows one’s true stripes. They even boast that it has rear-wheel drive. Kaus (when did he add gearheading to his political commentator resumé?) wrote this column last month touting the superior performance of rear-wheel drive, which seems almost entirely based on how a car feels when you muscle it through a power turn too fast and whether it is better to lose control front-first or rear-first. Would a neo-con, however, be troubled by the fact that we’re talking here about a Chrysler? You know, controlled by those antiwar Germans at Daimler? Coming full circle, Kaus’ RWD column suggests that the SUV boom has been due to the fact that they are RWD. By the way, some people (31 at last count) are so incensed about Kaus’ automotive writing they’ve mounted an online petition to shut him up.

Apparently incensed by the GOP’s lack of adamant support for Rick Santorum, some prominent evangelists are talking of withholding support from Bush’s reelection efforts. We could all live with that. The folks at NewsMax, the source of this story, don’t let on, but I’m sure they’re pulling out hair over it. [via American Samizdat]

Protesters planning to demonstrate during President Bush’s visit to Santa Fe this weekend can make a reservation with Santa Fe police ahead of time for their arrest.

“Should a person choose to be arrested in order to make their statement, we can arrange that upfront,” said Police Chief Beverly Lennen.

By reserving arrest times, Lennen believes people can avoid getting hurt because authorities won’t be caught off guard. Santa Fe New Mexican [via dangerousmeta]

‘Google is to create a search tool specifically for weblogs, most likely giving material generated by the self-publishing tools its own tab.

–snip–

It isn’t clear if weblogs will be removed from the main search results, but precedent suggests they will be. After Google acquired Usenet groups from Deja.com, it developed a unique user interface and a refined search engine, and removed the groups from the main index.’ The Register

“Europe, it seems, is a magnet for cat and dog fur. Cat blankets, so the aficionados say, are good for rheumatism.” BBC

“Groundbreaking, FDA-approved feasibility trial of an intraocular retinal prosthesis that appears to be able to restore some degree of sight to the blind.” EurekAlert!

“No one in American public life has become so much a pariah, so ready a punching bag, as the liberal. He can trace his lineage to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln (a Republican, no less) and Thomas Jefferson all he wants. He’s still a libril, and for that reason hounded from elective office, hammered on talk radio and — as if injury needed insult — hung out to dry in best-selling books.

The titles and subtitles of these volumes betray more than an adversarial point of view. They drip with bile.” Washington Post

Also: <a href=”http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_2_up_from_liberalism.html

“>Up from Liberalism: “Living with European socialism turned this Berkeley girl into a conservative.” —

Janet Daley, City Journal

“In our democratic age, experts are scorned as elitists. When did having standards and expertise become a bad thing?” — Sarah Bryan Miller, classical music critic, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Researchers propose a mathematical model of marriage. Chronicle of Higher Education

“An Arabic weekly is reporting an interview with a purported new spokesman for al-Qaeda who claims the terror network has completely reorganized. He says old operatives have been replaced by new ones who are planning an attack against the United States on the scale of Sept. 11.

The claims were based on e-mail interviews conducted this week by the London-based magazine Al Majalla with al-Qaeda spokesman Thabet bin Qais, the magazine reports in an issue to appear Friday.” USA Today

W.House Denies Bush’s Ship Landing a Costly Stunt ABC News , and Despite criticism, Bush ‘glad’ he jetted to aircraft carrier. CNN Furthermore, Iraq weapons proof ‘will be found’: ‘The commander of UK forces in the Iraq conflict has “no doubt” that evidence of weapons of mass destruction will be found.’ BBC It is all so darned entertaining that it brings tears to my eyes.

When Customer Profiling Goes Wrong: “More and more websites are trying to “get to know their customers” by tracking your purchases and asking you to rate the items you’ve bought. Of course the quintessential example of this is Amazon.com, who will offer up recommendations based on things you only thought of looking at.

This is a place to record some of strange recommendations you have received, from Amazon or others.”

Also: Your TV is watching you. “Advertisers want to use new technology to monitor your every click — and prevent you from tuning out their ads. And don’t even think of trying to escape.” Both from Salon

with its permanent “War on Terrorism”: “(Democrats) are hoping that a collapsing economy will doom Bush like it did his father. But his dad didn’t have Osama bin Laden in his corner — or Karl Rove…”

Also: Ariana Huffington: The 77-percent solution: “While Karl Rove crows over Bush’s postwar approval rating, the latest numbers are lower than you’d think.” Both from Salon

“The most interesting part of this is getting into the hardwiring of morality and free will,” Swerdlow said. “It raises the question, how free is free will?”

This philosophical question is being investigated by doctors across the country. And the answers they find through their research could have serious implications – not just for individual treatment but for the criminal justice system as well.

Brain scans conducted on murderers, for example, show that there is sometimes damage or poor function of the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that lies just behind the forehead and eyes.

Such scans and other scientific studies of the mind may one day be widely used in courts as evidence for the defense, as it was for Swerdlow’s patient.

“This guy was going to go to prison and what he needed was an operation, not incarceration,” Swerdlow said. WMBB (Florida)

Brilliant man in an asylum fights doctors to top court:

‘Physics expert with bipolar disorder tells judges he’d rather stay locked up for life than be forced to take medication.

–snip–

Mr. Starson is adamant that forcible medication would slow his thinking, dull his inspiration and make him appear disoriented.

“Our species is making every effort possible to communicate with your species and explain a situation to you,” he said in articulate, yet frequently disconnected, bursts of speech. ” ‘ The Globe and Mail

Of course, this case points out that, tragically, mental illness does not spare the brilliant. The article touts the ‘endorsements’ he receives from other physicists who “consider him a peer”, which misses the point. The tragedy is that, if he indeed has bipolar disorder, it is (unlike the chronic deteriorating course of the schizophrenic condition that affected mathematician John Nash) episodic, with preservation of intellect and personality between episodes; episodes are controllable; and relapses are largely preventable. Furthermore, contrary to his beliefs, controlling his illness will not rob him of his mercurial intelligence. Creativity, which is indeed often correlated with mental illness and bipolar disorder in particular, is unfettered rather than impaired by stabilizing the disorder.

Bipolar patients and schizophrenics, to generalize, resist admitting their illness and need for treatment for different reasons. In schizophrenia, as your mind’s ability to tell what is real deteriorates further and further, you cling all the more to the insistence that you can trust your ability to make sense as your only refuge against the terror. On the other hand, mania is just too self-aggrandizing and, well, downright pleasant for bipolar patients to give up willingly. It is hard to convince someone that their feeling of limitless energy, confidence and ability are symptoms of an illness, and that a more realistic appraisal would find them, like everyone else, fallible and constrained. Moreover, preventative medicines stabilize the manic side of the bipolar disorder better than the depressive side, so they are often left not with normalcy but distress when they are robbed of their mania. Nevertheless, a bipolar patient should have the right to make a shambles of his life if he wants to, as long as he does not represent a danger to himself or others. I hope that is the guiding principle in the Canadian litigation as it would be here in the US. It sounds as if it is; he apparently was hospitalized after making death threats against a neighbor. Mr. Starson is exceedingly unlucky, however, if this is indeed bipolar disorder. Episodes usually remit spontaneously after some time measured in weeks or months even without medication. But four years??

Mr. Starson, who repeatedly insisted that he be called “Professor Starson” and that the word “if” not be used in questioning him, said he is confident that he will prevail.

Breaking off a train of thought involving moon-walking astronauts, his claim to have invented the modular telephone and his plans for a team of 200 lawyers scattered worldwide, Mr. Starson addressed his case:

“Here, I’m basically dealing with the bottom of your species,” he said. “Your species deals with force so much. Force is not the way science operates. And the worst religion on the planet is psychiatry.”

this version of FmH… Curious?

“In the early 80’s the CIA published a sabotage manual and distributed it throughout Nicaragua. The anti-Sandanista pamphlet is full of tips on bringing down the infrastructure of the country. “The Freedom Fighter’s Manual” is illustrated with childlike cartoons and brief captions. Your tax dollars at work!” smog.net

“A Museum of Ambient Disorders originated as a gallery installation by the artist, Rosamond Casey, at the McGuffey Art Center in Charlottesville, Virginia in March 2003. The artist has created ten works of visual fiction, which are ‘collaborations’ with imaginary characters. The works are psychological portraits that begin with the ‘art’ or visual material her characters have left behind as a residue of a peculiar turn of mind: a worry, a craving, a secret wish or loss.

A Museum of Ambient Disorders is a collection of a collection of books, photographs, collages, sculptures, and paintings. Each piece suggests, through narrative clues and the urgency of the character’s mark, the conditions which have driven each individual to produce the work exhibited. The artist plays the role of collector and curator in addition to straddling the line between self and other.” Archipelago

… by tranquilising the aging brain.

“It is counterintuitive to say that in order to make Grandpa faster, slow down his brain. Nobody was really thinking about giving tranquillisers to an 85-year-old to perk him up – which is the implication of the study,” he says. But he cautions that the team has done no research in humans and that people should not start taking the drugs themselves.

Peter Tyrer, a community psychiatrist at Imperial College London, thinks the findings are “very interesting and novel”. He adds that doctors have sometimes observed a paradoxical effect of benzodiazepine drugs in which rather than calming down, people had become more alert and aggressive. “It is counterintuitive to say that in order to make Grandpa faster, slow down his brain. Nobody was really thinking about giving tranquillisers to an 85-year-old to perk him up – which is the implication of the study,” he says. But he cautions that the team has done no research in humans and that people should not start taking the drugs themselves.

Peter Tyrer, a community psychiatrist at Imperial College London, thinks the findings are “very interesting and novel”. He adds that doctors have sometimes observed a paradoxical effect of benzodiazepine drugs in which rather than calming down, people had become more alert and aggressive. New Scientist

Experts See Mind’s Voices in New Light

Auditory hallucinations are a hallmark of schizophrenia: 50 percent to 75 percent of the 2.8 million Americans who suffer from the illness hear voices that are not there. Like John, whose schizophrenia was diagnosed in 1981 and who spoke on the condition that he not be identified, many people with schizophrenia spend years pursued by verbal tormentors as relentless as the furies of Greek mythology. Suicide is sometimes the result, death seeming the only escape from unending harassment.

Yet psychiatrists who study schizophrenia have traditionally shown little interest in the voices their patients hear, often dismissing them as simply a byproduct of the illness, “crazy talk” not worthy of study.

Recently, however, a small group of scientists has begun studying auditory hallucinations more intensively. Aided by new brain imaging techniques, they have begun tracking such hallucinations back to abnormalities in the brain, finding that certain brain regions “light up” on brain scans when patients are actively hallucinating. And the experts are listening far more carefully to what patients say about their hallucinatory experiences.

(…) What everyone who studies hallucinations agrees on is that schizophrenic patients misperceive signals generated inside the brain. But scientists are still debating what is being misinterpreted and how this occurs. NY Times

Two theories are highlighted in the article as if they are diametrically opposed. Some mental health researchers think hallucinations represent a misconstrual of inner dialogue as if it were outer. (In my own psychiatric work, I focus on the breakdown in one sort of schizophrenia of mechanisms which maintain the boundaries between the self and the world. Among other things, this results in a confusion between the inner and the outer, self and not-self.) Other researchers think that cerebral tissue loss in schizophrenia results in a closer neural connection between the speech production and speech reception centers in the cerebral cortex. This is the cause, they feel, of there being no barriers to internal dialogue being experienced as if it were externally perceived speech. But, if we get beyond the artificial split between the neural and the psychological, are these really as distinct as they are made out to be?

The article also makes much of the success of transcranial magnetic stimulation in treating refractory hallucinatory symptoms.

In the treatment, an electromagnetic coil shaped like a Figure 8 is held to the patient’s head. The coil produces a quarter-size magnetic field that is then rapidly turned on and off, inducing an electrical field in the cerebral cortex’s gray matter.

Scientists do not know exactly how the treatment works, but they believe it dampens the reactivity of neurons, an effect that is then passed on to other connected brain regions.

Unlike electroshock therapy, long used for severe depression, transcranial magnetic stimulation does not induce seizures at the levels used in the studies and has a far more selective effect on the brain. Nor does the treatment appear to have the serious side effects, like memory loss, of electroshock therapy.

I think the verdict is still out on TMS. The new research about the meaning of hallucinations has far more interesting implications than simply rationalizing the use of another technology that, while appearing more subtle than others in the history of psychiatry, follows in a long tradition of disrupting and ablating mental activity because, imperfectly understood, it is distressing to the patient or — far more troubling — to the treaters.

“A cold virus genetically engineered to help it sneak into cancer cells can kill inoperable brain tumors in mice, U.S. scientists reported on Tuesday.

The effects were so stunning that the National Cancer Institute and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration are rushing to test the approach in people with brain tumors.

If it works, it will be the first treatment for malignant glioma, the deadliest form of brain cancer.” CNN

Nicholas Kristof: “The C.I.A. was terribly damaged when William Casey, its director in the Reagan era, manipulated intelligence to exaggerate the Soviet threat in Central America to whip up support for Ronald Reagan’s policies. Now something is again rotten in the state of Spookdom.” NY Times op-ed

The Bush administration has admitted that Saddam Hussein probably had no weapons of mass destruction.

Senior officials in the Bush administration have admitted that they would be ‘amazed’ if weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were found in Iraq.

According to administration sources, Saddam shut down and destroyed large parts of his WMD programmes before the invasion of Iraq. Sunday Herald

“The frenzy surrounding Bush’s speech last week affirmed how easy it remains to manipulate the major media.” LA Times

US insistence that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction is based on dubious intelligence from a shadowy Pentagon committee that now dominates US foreign policy.

By late last year, the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans (OSP) had grown to become President George W. Bush (news – web sites)’s main intelligence source, particularly over Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and the country’s links to al-Qaeda, the New Yorker reported in its May 12 edition.

But the OSP, the brainchild of US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, relied on questionable intelligence from the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi.

“You had to treat them with suspicion. The INC has a track record of manipulating intelligence because it has an agenda. It’s a political unit, not an intelligence agency,” a former senior CIA official specialising in the Middle East said in the article written by Seymour Hersh. Yahoo! News

Meanwhile:

Rep. Waxman asks Defense Secretary Rumsfeld about evidence that Halliburton has profited from business with countries that sponsor terrorism. Here’s the letter in .pdf format.

Thomas Pynchon’s introduction to a forthcoming edition of Orwell’s 1984. “George Orwell’s final novel was seen as an anticommunist tract and many have claimed its grim vision of state control proved prophetic. But, argues Pynchon, Orwell – whose centenary is marked this year – had other targets in his sights and drew an unexpectedly optimistic conclusion.” Guardian UK

[props to mousemusings]

about this Honda advertisement, viewable if you have Flash6. “Yes, everything in the ad did happen as shown. There was no computer generation involved.” As this Slate commentary points out, what I’m really doing by blinking to this is helping Honda spread its message ‘virally’ far more efficiently than if it were just a television commercial. It sticks in my craw but, just this once, I’ll tell you this is worth viewing. I won’t make a habit of it.

creates a poem from the content found at a URL. Here’s what feeding it this page gave me:

Follow Me

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rock had entered the

memorabilia you feel alone, afraid and

civil Liberties to

Air Force Counterproliferation

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on leaving the

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handwriting nor the biggest drop in less than any president Bush

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Junction hospital. NY Times

1:17 PM LinktoComments Comment .............. Stalin

to press for granted. The Mississippi

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to resist the brain during this start

an antispam

law.

Software Bullet Is Sought to Kill Musical Piracy: “Some of the world’s biggest record companies, facing rampant online piracy, are quietly financing the development and testing of software programs that would sabotage the computers and Internet connections of people who download pirated music, according to industry executives.” NY Times

Kurzweil and Meyer: “We’re entering an age of acceleration. The models underlying society at

every level, which are largely based on a linear model of change, are

going to have to be redefined. Because of the explosive power of

exponential growth, the 21st century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of

progress at today’s rate of progress; organizations have to be able to

redefine themselves at a faster and faster pace.”

“(Concord, NH) The Old Man of the Mountain, the enduring symbol of New Hampshire is no more. Sometime between Friday evening and Saturday morning the stone profile that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors each year, collapsed. On Saturday, May 3 at approximately 7:30am, two Franconia Notch State Park employees noticed that the Old Man of the Mountain had collapsed. At this time it appears as though the forehead and the nose are missing.” NH Parks & Recreation

Grieving for the passing of the Old Man is widespread. Concord (NH) Monitor. Some point out, rightly, that we should take it as an object lesson in the mutability of the natural grandeur we too easily take for granted. The rock had been rotten and shored up with cables and netting to hold its familiar profile intact for a long time; while some are surprised it crumbled, it was an accident waiting to happen. There is talk about rebuilding it, which I think would be a profanity. Instead, go deep into the mountains and, if you must, find other ‘rock faces’ with whose visages you can commune as intently. They are out there…

In a related vein, does anyone else know and delight in the “Simulacra Corner” feature of Fortean Times? Readers regularly send in photos of natural features that resemble faces, beings, etc. Spirits surely move across the face of the wild…

And: The Folklorist’s Pareidolia Collection: “I have recently uploaded my collection of hundreds of pareidolic images (pareidolia / simulacra) for everyone to view. The data includes images, articles, bibliographic information and other articles and links that I have found relevant to the study of this phenomena. [ Pareidolia: Misperception of an ambiguous stimulus as something specific (e.g.- seeing Jesus in the burn marks of a tortilla, or the face of Satan in the World Trade Center smoke)].”

Related to pareidolia is the concept of apophenia:

Apophenia is the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena. The term was coined by K. Conrad in 1958 (Brugger).

Peter Brugger of the Department of Neurology, University Hospital, Zurich, gives examples of apophenia from August Strindberg’s Occult Diary, the playwright’s own account of his psychotic break:

He saw “two insignia of witches, the goat’s horn and the besom” in a rock and wondered “what demon it was who had put [them] … just there and in my way on this particular morning.” A building then looked like an oven and he thought of Dante’s Inferno.

He sees sticks on the ground and sees them as forming Greek letters which he interprets to be the abbreviation of a man’s name and feels he now knows that this man is the one who is persecuting him. He sees sticks on the bottom of a chest and is sure they form a pentagram.

He sees tiny hands in prayer when he looks at a walnut under a microscope and it “filled me with horror.”

His crumpled pillow looks “like a marble head in the style of Michaelangelo.” Strindberg comments that “these occurrences could not be regarded as accidental, for on some days the pillow presented the appearance of horrible monsters, of gothic gargoyles, of dragons, and one night … I was greeted by the Evil One himself….”

According to Brugger, “The propensity to see connections between seemingly unrelated objects or ideas most closely links psychosis to creativity … apophenia and creativity may even be seen as two sides of the same coin.” Some of the most creative people in the world, then, must be psychoanalysts and therapists who use projective tests like the Rorschach test or who see patterns of child abuse behind every emotional problem. Brugger notes that one analyst thought he had support for the penis envy theory because more females than males failed to return their pencils after a test. Another spent nine pages in a prestigious journal describing how sidewalk cracks are vaginas and feet are penises, and the old saw about not stepping on cracks is actually a warning to stay away from the female sex organ.

Brugger’s research indicates that high levels of dopamine affect the propensity to find meaning, patterns, and significance where there is none, and that this propensity is related to a tendency to believe in the paranormal. New Scientist

In statistics, apophenia is called a Type I error, seeing patterns where none, in fact, exist. It is highly probable that the apparent significance of many unusual experiences and phenomena are due to apophenia, e.g., EVP, numerology, the Bible code, anomalous cognition, ganzfeld “hits”, most forms of divination, the prophecies of Nostradamus, remote viewing, and a host of other paranormal and supernatural experiences and phenomena. SkepDic

And so to William Gibson:

“…(He) had treated paranoia as though it were something to be domesticated and trained. Like someone who’d learned how best to cope with chronic illness, he never allowed himself to think of his paranoia as an aspect of self. It was there, constantly and intimately, and he relied on it professionally, but he wouldn’t allow it to spread, become jungle. He cultivated it on its own special plot, and checked it daily for news it might bring: hunches, lateralisms, frank anomalies.

Is (this) a frank anomaly?

Only, she decides, if she thinks of herself as the center, the focal point of something she doesn’t, can’t understand. That had always been (his) first line of defense, within himself: to recognize that he was only a part of something larger. Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer.

But he was also fond of saying, at other times, that even paranoid schizophrenics have enemies.

The danger, she supposes, is a species of apophenia…”

— William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

Gibson is fond of the concept, as a Google search reveals.

Related:

Counselling and Help for People with Unusual Experiences, Dr. Martina Belz-Merk, Outpatient Clinic (Ambulanz) of the Psychological Institute at the University of Freiburg

A review: Hauntings and Poltergeists: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, James Houran & Rense Lange, (eds.), Macfarlane & Co, 2001, ISBN 0 7864 0984 3.

In this meaty tome, 19 writers – some accepting the existence of the paranormal, others denying it – approach the subject of hauntings and poltergeists from the points of view of physics, physiology, psychology, sociology, history and cultural studies. John Beloff in his Forword quotes from Gauld and Cornell’s 1979 work, Poltergeists, and the quotation deserves to be repeated here more fully:

“One cannot deny that, logically speaking, undetected trickery, undetected natural causes, undetected malobservation and undetected lying may lie behind all reports of poltergeist phenomena. But to assume without supporting evidence, and despite numerous considerations [..] to the contrary, that they do lie behind them, is to insulate one’s beliefs in this sphere from all possibility of modification from the cold contact of chastening facts. It is to adopt the paranoid stance of the flat-earther or the religious fanatic, who can ‘explain away’ all the awkward facts which threaten his system of delusions.”

Fortean Times

Bush’s self-proclaimed adherence to Christianity (during one of the presidential debates he said Jesus Christ was his favorite “philosopher”) and his constant reference to a new international structure bypassing the United Nations system and long-standing international treaties are worrying the top leadership of the Roman Catholic Church. Well-informed sources close to the Vatican report that Pope John Paul II is growing increasingly concerned about Bush’s ultimate intentions. The Pope has had experience with Bush’s death fetish. Bush ignored the Pope’s plea to spare the life of Karla Faye Tucker. To show that he was similarly ignorant of the world’s mainstream religions, Bush also rejected an appeal to spare Tucker from the World Council of Churches – an organization that represents over 350 of the world’s Protestant and Orthodox Churches. It did not matter that Bush’s own Methodist Church and his parents’ Episcopal Church are members of the World Council.

Bush’s blood lust, his repeated commitment to Christian beliefs, and his constant references to “evil doers,” in the eyes of many devout Catholic leaders, bear all the hallmarks of the one warned about in the Book of Revelations – the anti-Christ. People close to the Pope claim that amid these concerns, the Pontiff wishes he was younger and in better health to confront the possibility that Bush may represent the person prophesized in Revelations. John Paul II has always believed the world was on the precipice of the final confrontation between Good and Evil as foretold in the New Testament. Before he became Pope, Karol Cardinal Wojtyla said, “We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has gone through. I do not think that wide circles of the American society or wide circles of the Christian community realize this fully. We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, of the Gospel versus the anti-Gospel.” The Pope, who grew up facing the evils of Hitler and Stalin, knows evil when he sees it. — Wayne Madsen, CounterPunch [via walker]

“The Hartford Courant‘s recent move ordering a reporter to shut down his independent Weblog has stirred up a heated debate over how much control a media organization should have over its employees’ outside activities In a pair of point-counterpoint essays for CyberJournalist.net (springing in part from a discussion on Poynter’s Online-News e-mail list), blogger and online journalism columnist J.D. Lasica argues that The Courant’s decision was unfair, while University of Illinois journalism professor Eric Meyer defends The Courant’s actions.”

Pinned for five days by 1,000-lb. boulder, 48 hrs. after running out of water and determining he would die if he remained where he was, the 27-year-old hiker used a pocket knife to cut his arm off below the elbow, applied a tourniquet, rappelled 60 ft. to the bottom of the canyon, and was discovered while hiking out. He remained in serious condition at a Grand Junction hospital. NY Times One wonders whether the arm was irreparably injured already; whether he was able to feel pain by the time he did it; indeed, whether it was a rational decision or one made in inanition (and whether there is any point in asking these questions). [thanks, abby]

U.S. says Canada cares too much about liberties to successfully assist in the WoT®. canada.com network

Computing in the Real World, i.e. in the loo: visitors to portapotties at the Glastonbury (UK) festival this summer will be treated to broadband access and six-channel surround sound via a wireless waterproof keyboard and adjustable plasma screen, all courtesy of Microsoft. The duration of visits to the WC might be expected to grow, with a proportional expansion of the lengths of the lines for the potties. But never fear, there will be Internet terminals outside as well. PC Pro

“The administration is clearly right that a new arms control cannot rest entirely on the illusory safety of talks and treaties and U.N. resolutions“, says Bill Keller. “The autocrats most likely to be dangerous to us if they get nuclear weapons are the leaders least likely to care about staying in the good graces of the ”international community,” whatever that is. A new arms-control regime should distinguish among threats and offer a menu of options appropriate to the danger, from inspection to coercion. It would draw on military pressure and economic sanctions, along with the softer diplomacy that the counterproliferators scorn. It would not disdain international agreements but would demand smarter treaties, backed by intrusive inspections and rigorous enforcement.

And it would accept the solemn responsibility — a particularly American responsibility — to restore the special stigma of nuclear explosives. The destructive power of these weapons is unique and breathtaking, and almost impossible to confine to military targets. Chemical and biological weapons, horrible as they are, cannot match them as agents of catastrophe. A strategy that focuses exclusively on regimes and not on weapons themselves has several flaws, and the most obvious one is this: when regimes change, weapons remain.” NY Times Magazine. Adorned with three pictures of mushroom clouds from U.S. above-ground nuclear tests (before they were banned) of an obscene beauty that provides a visceral analogue of the seductive appeal these unholy armaments offer.

“This, then, is the promise — and the hype — of nutritional genomics, the second wave of personalized medicine to come rolling out of the Human Genome Project (after pharmacogenomics, or designer drugs). The premise is simple: diet is a big factor in chronic disease, responsible, some say, for a third of most types of cancer. Dietary chemicals change the expression of one’s genes and even the genome itself. And — here’s the key — the influence of diet on health depends on an individual’s genetic makeup.” NY Times

Two researchers, Jerrold M. Post and Amatzia Baram, concluded in a psychological profile of Mr. Hussein that he was more accurately described as a malignant narcissist, a label that has also been applied to Stalin and Hitler. Dr. Post, a psychiatrist at George Washington University, and Dr. Baram, an expert on Iraq at the University of Haifa in Israel, wrote the profile for the United States Air Force Counterproliferation Center. Dr. Post was also the founding director of the Central Intelligence Agency’s political profiling program.

Malignant narcissism, as defined by psychiatrists, is a severe form of narcissistic personality disorder. Like classic narcissists, malignant narcissists are grandiose, self-centered, oversensitive to criticism and unable to feel empathy for others. They cover over deep insecurities with an inflated self-image.

But malignant narcissists also tend to paranoia and aggression, and share some features of the antisocial personality, including the absence of moral or ethical judgment, said Dr. Otto Kernberg, a psychiatry professor at Cornell University and an expert on personality disorders.

Far from being psychotic, malignant narcissists are adept at charming and manipulating those around them. Political leaders with this personality, Dr. Kernberg said, are able to take control “because their inordinate narcissism is expressed in grandiosity, a confidence in themselves and the assurance that they know what the world needs.” NY Times

Pinned for five days by 1,000-lb. boulder, 48 hrs. after running out of water and determining he would die if he remained where he was, the 27-year-old hiker used a pocket knife to cut his arm off below the elbow, applied a tourniquet, rappelled 60 ft. to the bottom of the canyon, and was discovered while hiking out. He remained in serious condition at a Grand Junction hospital. NY Times One wonders whether the arm was irreparably injured already; whether he was able to feel pain by the time he did it; indeed, whether it was a rational decision or one made in inanition (and whether there is any point in asking these questions). [thanks, abby]

Nat Hentoff can scarcely conceal his enthusiasm that Conservatives Rise for the Bill of Rights! “A significant development in the movement to resist the Ashcroft-Bush dismembering of the Bill of Rights is the growing coalition between conservative groups and such organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union and People for the American Way.

This has been going on—with only marginal attention from the media—since the ACLU organized a broad-based, though unsuccessful, fight to defeat the first USA Patriot Act toward the end of 2001. And it was the conservative Republican libertarian, Dick Armey, then majority leader in the House, who stripped the Orwellian “Operation Tips” out of the Department of Homeland Security bill.” Village Voice