Truthout still has this article up — “Oil was the main reason for military action against Iraq, a leading White House hawk has claimed, confirming the worst fears of those opposed to the US-led war.” However, the Guardian has withdrawn the article, perhaps because it was a serious misrepresentation of Wolfowitz’s comments. Not very believable on the face of it, when you think about it, that Wolfowitz would admit we went to war for the oil merely because even if Wolfowitz is among the most craven, he is also among the most crafty in the Bush cabal. It is really only the headline that takes him so seriously out of context; if you read the article, you’ll see he was really drawing an economic contrast between North Korea and Iraq, explaining that because Iraq is ‘swimming in a sea of oil’ we could not hope to use a path of negotiation based on bribing an impoverished nation, as in our attempt to manipulate North Korea. Thus we had no choice with Iraq, in his estimation, but the more belligerent path.

Thanks to mark wood for pointing me to these: Scientists need no longer be afraid to ask the big questions about what it means to be human with empirical evidence now answering ancient philosophical questions about meaning and existence.

• Lecture 1: Phantoms in the Brain – Professor Ramachandran shows how phenomena such as Capgras’ delusion illuminate fundamental aspects of our minds such as body image, emotions and the evolution of humor.
  
• Lecture 2: Synapses and the Self –

  How does the activity of the 100 billion little wisps of protoplasm – the neurons in your brain – give rise to all the richness of our conscious experience, including the “redness” of red, the painfulness of pain or the exquisite flavour of Marmite or Vindaloo?
  

• Lecture 3: The Artful Brain –

  Professor Ramachandran draws on neurological case studies and work from ethology (animal behavior) to present a new framework for understanding how the brain creates and responds to art. He will use examples mainly from Indian art and Cubism to illustrate these ideas.
  

• Lecture 4: Purple Numbers and Sharp Cheese –

  Professor Ramachandran demonstrates experimentally that the phenomenon of synesthaesia is a genuine sensory effect. For example, some subjects literally “see” red every time they see the number 5 or green when they see 2.
  

• Lecture 5: Neuroscience – the New Philosophy –

  Professor Ramachandran argues that neuroscience, perhaps more than any other discipline, is capable of transforming man’s understanding of himself and his place in the cosmos.
  

BBC The lectures are by Vilayanur S Ramachandran, Director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition and professor with the Psychology Department and the Neurosciences Programme at the University of California, San Diego. I’ve linked to Ramachandran’s discussion of “mirror neurons” at The Edge recently.

We’ll Bomb Who We Want! Micah Ian Wright’s wonderful ‘remixed’ war propaganda posters are now collected as a book.

“At a tech conference last week, journalists in attendance were told

anything they heard at panel discussions was ‘off the record.’ But

bloggers, not held to the niceties of traditional journalism, posted

away. Time to rethink the rules?” Wired News