“In the rancorous debate over euthanasia, assisted suicide and other ways for terminally ill patients to end their lives, doctors note that one option is always legal: a sane, alert person can simply refuse to eat or drink.

It is an option rarely taken, but now the first survey of nurses whose patients took it has contradicted the popular assumption that such a death is painful and gruesome. Almost all the 102 Oregon nurses surveyed said their patients who refused water and food had died ‘good deaths,’ with little pain or suffering, generally within two weeks.

The study, which appeared last week in The New England Journal of Medicine — by coincidence, the same week that The British Medical Journal devoted an entire issue to studies on death and dying — raises difficult questions for those on both sides of the debate. Its authors hesitated to publish it for fear of encouraging suicides.” NY Times [via dangerousmeta]

“‘I believe marriage is between a man and a woman, and I think we ought to codify that one way or another,’ Bush told reporters at a White House news conference. ‘And we’ve got lawyers looking at the best way to do that.'” CNN

BushCo must think the impact in terms of delivering fundamentalist votes to him in ’04 will outweigh the loss of votes from the 10% of the American population who he is telling don’t have the right to marry the person of their choice. And however many others, not gay themselves, who happen to agree that they should have that right. But then again, those are by and large votes he lost already a long time ago, so maybe there’s nothing lost in their opinion. But, as Nick Gillespie reminds us at Hit & Run,

As liberals gear up to bash Bush for his reactionary thinking on this point, they ought to remember the actions of the only twice-elected Democrat president since FDR. When Bill Clinton signed The Defense of Marriage Act in September 1996–an act specifically intended to foreclose state recognition of same-sex marriages–he noted that he had “long opposed governmental recognition of same-gender marriages.”

“US leaders now see themselves as priests of a divine mission to rid the world of its demons.” — George Monbiot, Guardian/UK

“Former Vice-President Al Gore is coming under pressure from political supporters and friends to jump into the 2004 presidential campaign even though he ruled himself out in December…

(A) former DNC official, who was active in Gore’s 2000 campaign, said his prediction of another Gore campaign is based on more than a hunch. But he declined to offer specific evidence.

He believes, as other Gore confidants do, that the political climate has changed significantly since December, making Bush more vulnerable to defeat in his bid for a second term.

“Things have dramatically changed since his announcement,” said the official.

“Bush has lied to the country, no one is articulating a foreign policy that’s resonating.” ” The Hill

I pointed last week to the North American counterpart of this gallery of images from Japanese psychiatric medication advertisements [props to b0ing b0ing]. I find them far more disturbing and, at times, inexplicable than their North American congeners.

Psychologists’ puzzlement at why yawning is contagious is at an end. A new study in Cognitive Brain Research finds that it is correlated with people’s empathic ability. The 40-60% of who do not catch yawns appear to be the ones with the least ability to put themselves in others’ shoes in other regards.

Contrary to the folk wisdom that it precipitates a deep breath to counteract oxygen decrement, yawning does not appear to have a physiological function. It may have evolved primarily as a social clue —

Contagious yawning may have helped our ancestors coordinate times of activity and rest. “It’s important that all group members be ready to do the same thing at the same time,” Ronald Baenninger, who has studied yawning at Temple University in Philadelphia, says. Guardian/UK

[I must be really empathic; I yawned just reading the article about contagious yawning.]

Adam Phillips’ revealing new edition of Freud: “…(W)hat does it mean to read Freud as literature rather than as theory? The first books in the New Penguin Freud, published in June, offer some answers. Significantly, the series has started not with major theoretical works like The Interpretation of Dreams or anthropological ones like Totem and Taboo. Instead, the first four books are concrete, practical, and anecdotal: The Schreber Case, The ‘Wolfman’ and Other Cases, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Together, they suggest four ways of approaching Freud as literature.” Slate

Telling Them Can Reveal a Lot: “…(L)ying is much too interesting to be left just to the mercy of moral examination. Lies may not be as sexy or revelatory as dreams, but they can tell us a lot about the psychology of their owners.

There may be nothing uniquely human about deception: some experts say chimpanzees can fake out rivals. But lying requires something special that, so far, seems the sole province of humans: a theory of mind. To lie effectively, one has to have a notion that other people have minds and can be deceived.” — Richard A. Friedman, MD, NY Times

Even bacteria seek each other out, according to a new study. EurekAlert!

On the other hand, on the subject of ritual abuse (see item below on ‘false memory”), “A gang of suspected people traffickers which is believed to have smuggled a Nigerian boy into a Britain for a ritualistic killing was arrested during a series of raids in London on Tuesday.

Among the evidence seized by detectives was an animal skull with a nail driven through its head, which may have been used in a ‘black magic’ ceremony. One line of inquiry being investigated is that members of the gang had the boy murdered to bring the criminal enterprise good luck – a procedure that has taken place in West African in the past.” New Zealand Herald

Graduate student Susan Clancy, as it transpired, had no idea what she was getting herself into, wading into the middle of perhaps the hottest controversy in decades in academic psychology when she joined the psychology department at Harvard eight years ago and decided to study “recovered memories”.

At one end of the field of ”trauma memory” were people like her new professors and future co-authors, the clinical psychologist Richard McNally and the cognitive psychologist Daniel Schacter, chairman of the Harvard psychology department and one of the world’s leading experts on memory function. At the other end were Harvard-affiliated clinicians, including Judith Herman, Bessel van der Kolk and Daniel Brown, whose scholarly writing on the psychological effects of trauma remains highly influential.

What the two sides disagree on is whether painful memories of traumatic events can actually be repressed — completely forgotten — and then ”recovered” years later in therapy. Many clinicians say yes: it is how we instinctively protect ourselves from childhood recollections that would otherwise be too dire to bear. Most cognitive psychologists say no: real trauma is almost never forgotten; full-blown, traumatic memories dredged up decades later through hypnosis are almost invariably false.

Clancy decided to do laboratory studies of memory functions in those reporting recovered memories. After listening to the histories her subjects reported, she could not help feeling that they had an air of confabulation about them. In the most extreme cases — the rash of reports of Satanic ritual abuse of a decade or so ago — it has become well-accepted that there can be frankly “false memories.” Clancy guessed that there were a category of people who were psychologically prone to creating false memories and who might demonstrate this tendency in standard laboratory testing of their memory function. In fact, subjects who claimed to have recovered memories of previously repressed abuse were more prone to false memories on her tests than control subjects, and were more prone than subjects who had been incontrovertibly abused and had always remembered, never repressed, memories of that abuse.

The research was criticized by both academic and lay opponents of false memory, the most extreme equating her findings with “cheer(ing) on child molesters” or concluding she was probably a child abuser herself. (Freud was assumed in some circles to have harbored, or perhaps acted upon, incestuous fantasies toward his daughter for revising his earlier theory in which he had taken at face value the memories of his female hysterical patients that they had been victims of incest to conclude that these were fantasies.)

Because of the controversy that surrounded the implications as to the veracity of memories of abuse, Clancy abandoned studying that group in favor of one whose memories are considered to be incontrovertibly fantasies — those claiming to have been abducted by aliens. (Ironically, both her opponents’ ‘camp’ [Judy Herman, Bessel van der Kolk and Dan Brown] vis à vis recovered memories, and the foremost — or perhaps only — academic proponent of alien abduction, John Mack, were/are based at the Cambridge Hospital Dept. of Psychiatry of Harvard Medical School… where I did my training and had my first faculty position. All four were esteemed senior colleagues and friends of mine, despite my clear sympathies in their opponents’ camps on these central issues.) In bowing to the pressure of political correctness by suspending her study of abuse survivors, she thought she could still make a crucial scientific contribution around her hypothesis that there are ‘false-memory-prone’ individuals, further study of whom might help us to understand more about the phenomenon.

But Clancy was in for quite a surprise, as her findings were savaged by the alien abduction proponents as well. ”I can entertain the possibility that there are other life forms out there without accepting your story that a spaceship picked you up!” she was driven in exasperation to reply to one grilling on a talk radio show. Her mistake seems to have been her confidence that there can ever be a consensus that anything no matter how outlandish, particularly in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, can be beyond controversy.

Ten years from now, Susan Clancy may remember 2003 as a year of agreeable spadework in the trenches of academic inquiry. But if she does, it will be a false memory. The truth is that Clancy’s research, which she hoped might mend fences — at least partly vindicating both sides’ positions — has managed to tick off just about everyone: sexual-abuse survivors, therapists, experiencers, even a creationist or two.

Daniel Brown, the trauma therapist, is convinced that there’s a ”political agenda” to Clancy’s abduction study. As he told one reporter, ”It’s all about spin.” Her own brother — a corporate lawyer for a top New York firm — has ripped into her about the abduction study for assuming outright that none of the abductions occurred.

One of the more telling critiques of Clancy’s work came from people who felt it undermined the admissibility of recovered memories of torture in international war crimes tribunals. Perhaps in penance, Clancy getting out of the frying pan of Cambridge academic controversy to take a visiting professorship at the Harvard-affiliated Central American Business Administration Institute in Managua, Nicaragua, where she will study the effects of “verifiable life-threatening events: diseases, hurricanes, land mines.” Time will tell whether this is indeed an escape route from the flames… NY Times Magazine

Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, excerpt:

“‘Many assumptions about politics were destroyed along with the World Trade Center, and Borradori seized the opportunity to ask Habermas and Derrida how their theories fared. These men represent two central strands of European philosophy—the one building on Enlightenment notions of universal rationality, the other suspicious of the commitments often hidden in its language. . . . But Habermas sees the outbreak of terror mainly as a failure of communications, and Derrida sees it above all as a failure to develop a concept of world hospitality to replace what he thinks is the outmoded Christian notion of a toleration that is really only charity. Despite their theoretical convictions, they seem here to see the problems more as philosophical than as a failure to integrate economics and the social sciences or develop a strategy against misery and poverty.”

And: The mixed-up debate over the new European patriotism:

“The Iraq War has made for some strange bedfellows, in philosophy no less than in politics. On May 31, Jrgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida issued a joint declaration, ”After the War: The Rebirth of Europe,” in Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and France’s La Libration. In it, the great theoretician of communication and consensus and the doyen of deconstruction put aside their considerable intellectual differences to call for a unified European response ”to balance out the hegemonic unilateralism of the United States.” But what they were really after was the creation of ”a European identity,” a sense of patriotism to rival that which, for better or worse, has dominated the United States since Sept. 11.” Boston Globe

Blissed Psychedelic Freaks Bequeath Skykissing Guitars to Industrial Autopsy Aesthetes:

“Thesis: Industrial music, in its original late-’70s incarnation, was the second flowering of an authentic psychedelia. (‘Authentic’ meaning non-revivalist, untainted by nostalgia). There was the same impulse to blow minds through multimedia sensory overload (the inevitable back-projected, cut-up movies behind every industrial performance—attempts at “total art” only too redolent of 1960s happenings and acid-tests). And industrial, like psychedelia, believed “no sound shalt go untreated”; both adulterated rock’s “naturalistic” recording conventions with FX, tape splices, and dirty electronic noise.” The Village Voice

“When the World Transhumanist Association met for a conference at Yale last month, they discussed the future rights of those who will be half-man, half-machine. Erik Baard looks at uploading consciousness, bio-Luddites, and that nagging question: Who are we? ” The Village Voice

“Take a snapshot of philosophy in Britain today, and you’ll get a picture that is recognizable not only to North American philosophers but also to academics in other disciplines in the humanities. Many agree that the field is becoming more diverse, more interdisciplinary, and more relevant to the concerns of wider society. Look closer, however, and the British philosophical landscape is significantly different from that in North America. Examining these differences is instructive, not only for philosophers but for anyone working in the humanities, and perhaps for some of their scientific colleagues as well.” The Chronicle of Higher Education

“General John Abizaid, the new commander of Centcom, on July 16 became the first senior US official to acknowledge that what the coalition faces in Iraq is a ‘classical guerrilla campaign’.

A study on guerrilla warfare in Iraq by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think-tank, blames bad planning by the US administration and the low priority given to ‘conflict termination’ and nation-building strategies by the Pentagon.

CSIS military specialist Anthony Cordesman says the US has not learned the lessons of past conflicts, that ‘even the best military victories cannot win the peace’.

He writes: ‘Unless this situation changes soon, and radically, the United States may end up fighting a third Gulf war against the Iraqi people . . . It is far from clear that the United States can win this kind of asymmetric war.'” Financial Times

“This report is intended to provide accurate information to U.S. servicemen and women stationed in Iraq. Our pledge to you is that this report will contain only fact. We will not embellish. This is the straight story. Please forward throughout the ranks.”

“President Bush and his Republican Party are facing a political backlash from an unlikely group – retired veterans.

Normally Republican, many retired veterans are mad that Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress are blocking remedies to two problems with health and pension benefits. They say they feel particularly betrayed by Bush, who appealed to them in his 2000 campaign, and who vowed on the eve of his inauguration that ‘promises made to our veterans will be promises kept.'” San Jose Mercury

Poetry website goes from bad to verse: “A new program allows a poem to evolve, to see if people can collectively create attractive verse – the early signs are not pretty.” New Scientist

The Last Word: “Christopher Alexander, an architect who was born in Vienna, raised in England and now lives in California, … something of a prophet without honor in his own profession, …produces the kind of books every serious reader should wrestle with once in a while: fat, challenging, grandiose tracts that encourage you to take apart the way you think and put it back together again. Depending on whom you talk to, they’re either canonical or completely off the reservation; among architects, he has some devoted followers and plenty of scornfully dismissive critics, particularly among the champions of the avant-garde. A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building, two seminal works he wrote with five colleagues, have continued to sell well since they were first published in the 1970’s, but despite his position as emeritus professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, their influence on his profession (outside the continuation of some of his ideas in the New Urbanism movement) has faded. Instead, laypeople use A Pattern Language to design their own homes, and The Timeless Way of Building has been a major influence on, of all things, a school of software engineering called object-oriented programming.” NY Times

Pentagon Prepares a Futures Market on Terror Attacks: “The Pentagon office that proposed spying electronically on Americans to monitor potential terrorists has a new experiment. It is an online futures trading market, disclosed today by critics, in which anonymous speculators would bet on forecasting terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups.

Traders bullish on a biological attack on Israel or bearish on the chances of a North Korean missile strike would have the opportunity to bet on the likelihood of such events on a new Internet site established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The Pentagon called its latest idea a new way of predicting events and part of its search for the ‘broadest possible set of new ways to prevent terrorist attacks.’ Two Democratic senators who reported the plan called it morally repugnant and grotesque. The senators said the program fell under the control of Adm. John M. Poindexter, President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser.” NY Times

“They are called smart pills or brain boosters or, to use the preferred pharmaceutical term, cognitive enhancers.

But whatever the name given to compounds created to prevent or treat memory loss, drug companies and supplement producers — eager to meet the demands of a rapidly growing market — are scrambling to exploit what they view as an enormous medical and economic opportunity.

…

Much of the excitement among pharmaceutical companies, which have dozens of drugs in development, stems from advances in clarifying some of the brain processes and biochemical pathways that can hinder or help memory storage and retrieval, said Dr. Paul R. Solomon, a professor of psychology at Williams College…

But it will probably be at least five years before any of those drugs meet the standards for approval by the Food and Drug Administration, researchers said.

Clearly, the market for memory enhancers is growing with the aging of the population.

Dr. Steven T. DeKosky, a professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, says he has noticed a marked increase in anxiety among baby boomers, who are watching their parents descend into Alzheimer’s and hoping that new medicines will help them avoid the same fate…

Even among those who are already suffering memory loss, Alzheimer’s is far from the only source. An estimated four million Americans have it, but millions more suffer from other disorders that can lead to dementia, including Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, stroke, head trauma and schizophrenia.

Experts estimate that an additional four million people have a syndrome called mild cognitive impairment, which may progress to Alzheimer’s. People with the impairment can function on their own but have gaps in their memories.” NY Times

“An internet resource on psychical research and survival after death”.

The International Survivalist Society was founded 11th April 2002 by Thomas M. Jones of the UK and David Duffield of the US. It cooperates with several distinguished psychical researchers and parapsychologists across the globe and is independent of any other organisation.

The ISS has four primary aims. These are:

• 1. To disseminate the scientific case for survival after death. This is achieved through the ISS website.
• 2. To achieve an intellectual balance in mainstream media outlets and to be given equal time and space to put forth the scientific case for survival after death.
• 3. To campaign against misinformation and inaccuracy. High-profile critics often give misleading and inaccurate accounts of survival research, often of a discrediting nature. The ISS demands that the media report objectivity, fairly and without bias.
• 4. To provide a valuable and comprehensive research tool for both lay-persons and academics. This is achieved by publishing a vast quantity of eminent survivalist material from the most distinguished scientists in the field.

We often collaborate with a network of researchers, academics and scientists who share our aim to promote the scientific case for survival after death.

as Instruments of Both Spiritual and Scientific Exploration: John Horgan, a freelance writer and author of The End of Science and The Undiscovered Mind:

“…This trend is unfolding worldwide. I just attended a conference in Switzerland at which scholars presented findings on the physiological and psychological effects of drugs such as psilocybin, LSD and MDMA (Ecstacy). At the meeting, I met an American chemist who had synthesized a new compound that seems to induce transcendent experiences as reliably as LSD does but with a greatly reduced risk of bad trips; a Russian psychiatrist who for more than 15 years has successfully treated alcoholics with the hallucinogen ketamine; and a German anthropologist who touts the spiritual benefits of a potent Amazonian brew called ayahuasca. Long a staple of Indian shamans, ayahuasca now serves as a sacrament for two fast-growing churches in Brazil. Offshoots of these churches are springing up in the U.S. and Europe.

Several non-profit groups in the U.S. are attempting to rehabilitate the image of psychedelic drugs through public education and by supporting research on the drugs’ clinical and therapeutic potential. They include the Heffter Institute, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico; the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), based in Florida; and the Council on Spiritual Practices in San Francisco.” The Edge

“Julian Barbour, a theoretical physicist, has worked on foundational issues in physics for 35 years. He is responsible for a radical notion of “time capsules which explain how the powerful impression of the passage of time can arise in a timeless world”… Cosmologist Lee Smolin notes that Barbour has presented ‘the most interesting and provocative new idea about time to be proposed in many years. If true, it will change the way we see reality. Barbour is one of the few people who is truly both a scientist and a philosopher.'” The Edge

of whom I was aware as a member of the Edge community, visited FmH after a search engine pointed him to a reference I made to him. He signed my guest book appreciatively, which pointed me to his homepage. Pickover, according to his Edge biography, is a research staff member at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center, in Yorktown Heights, New York. He is the holder of more than a dozen patents dealing with computer interfaces, and he has written some twenty books on a broad range of topics, including Time : A Traveler’s Guide, Surfing Through Hyperspace : Understanding Higher Universes in Six Easy Lessons, Black Holes : A Traveler’s Guide, Future Health : Computers and Medicine in the 21st Century, Keys to Infinity, The Science of Aliens, The Paradox of God and the Science of Omniscience; Calculus and Pizza: A Math Cookbook for the Hungry Mind.

“Pickover’s primary interest is in finding new ways to expand creativity by melding art, science, mathematics, and other seemingly disparate areas of human endeavor”. He is the Brain-Boggler columnist for Discover Magazine; an associate editor for Computers and Graphics, Computers in Physics, and Theta (Math); and on the editorial boards of Odyssey, Idealistic Studies, Leonardo, Speculations in Science and Technology and YLEM. His site is a somewhat overwhelming departure gate for endless flights on the frontiers of science, philosophy, fringe studies, art and culture. Go.

“Concerned that information about your file-sharing username may have been subpoenaed by the RIAA? Check here to see if your username or IP address is on one of the subpoenas filed with the D.C. District Court. This information is drawn from the court’s publicly available PACER database and will be updated when that system is updated.

For more information on limiting your liability, check out How Not to Get Sued by the RIAA for File Sharing (and other Ideas to Avoid Being Treated Like a Criminal).” Electronic Frontier Foundation

“Concerned that information about your file-sharing username may have been subpoenaed by the RIAA? Check here to see if your username or IP address is on one of the subpoenas filed with the D.C. District Court. This information is drawn from the court’s publicly available PACER database and will be updated when that system is updated.

For more information on limiting your liability, check out How Not to Get Sued by the RIAA for File Sharing (and other Ideas to Avoid Being Treated Like a Criminal).” Electronic Frontier Foundation

Hussein Bodies Shown to Skeptical Iraqis NY Times; Arabs ‘shocked but convinced’ Ireland On Line; Hussein Photos Don’t End Doubts Detroit Free Press.

US Under Fire for Displaying Photos:

The U.S. decision to allow TV journalists to film the bodies of what it says of deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s two sons was harshly criticized by law experts, human rights advocates and media specialists Friday, July25 .

“The release of the bodies in public acts in contravention of the Second Geneva Convention, which provides protection to the war casualties,” international law professor in Cairo university Abdulla Al-Ashaal told IslamOnline.net.

“The Convention stipulated that war deaths should not be mutilated,” Ashaal said.

For human rights experts, allowing journalists to air the graphically depicted mangled bodies did not take them by surprise, since the U.S. occupation forces had committed many of such large-scale violations before and after rolling into Baghdad on April9 .

Hard to determine if this was a calculatd affront on the US’s part or a typically culturally insensitive blunder like all the others that leave us scratching our heads about why we are hated:

In the Arab world, moral prospective of releasing dead bodies in a battered state is almost a taboo given its contradiction with a wide religious belief that death should be treated with sanctity.

“Publishing photos of mutilated corpses is haram (Forbidden), under the Islamic Law or Sharia,” said Mohamed Emara, a prominent moderate Islamic scholar. Islam Online, UK

Rumsfeld Glad He Released Grisly Photos Reuters; On TV, a sharp divide over the display Washington Post. With Photos US Buries Old Dilemma:

This squeamishness about violent death is a relatively modern sensibility. Highwaymen and bandits were once drawn and quartered, and hung in pieces at country crossroads as a cautionary display. In the modern West, however, the industrialisation of death has been coupled with a curious reluctance to display photographic evidence of what that industrialisation means. The photos of Pearl Harbor show no American dead. The government banned publication of any photos of dead US servicemen until more than two years into WW-II. ‘‘Eventually they decided this was dishonest and released three photos from Buna Beach in New Guinea,’’ said historian and critic Paul Fussell. ‘‘The pictures of the dead didn’t show any faces.’’ Fussell acknowledged the photos did at least show bodies, but said, ‘‘Unless you show guts hanging like Christmas decorations, you’re not showing what war is about.’’ Indian Express

“Important for the Iraqis to see them’:

Rumsfeld said it was crucial to convince skeptical Iraqis that two of the most vicious characters in their father’s regime were gone. And he said the decision was consistent with the terms of the Geneva Convention, which prohibits the display of enemy bodies for purposes of curiosity.

It was also likely a sign that Washington’s credibility on the streets of Iraq had badly eroded and a signal the Bush administration was aggressively trying to stem the daily attacks on their soldiers — attacks that spiked upward after Uday and Qusay Hussein were slain by U.S. troops in Mosul in a four-hour firefight Tuesday.

When enemies of the United States have paraded American casualties in past conflicts, it has provoked rage here, most recently when Rumsfeld himself was angered when Iraqis allowed television to film dead Americans and PoWs cowering in fear after their capture in the early stages of the war in March. Toronto Star

It is distasteful gloating, equivalent to the Iraqi release of the bodies of US troops killed in the invasion which the US condemned as a lurid indecency and a violation of the human rights of the war victims. We don’t get to be the arbiters of right and wrong, applying our own relativism whenever it is convenient. The hypocrisy, which is probably Rumsfeld’s to own, stands naked for the world to see along with the photos, and is equally abhorrent. When we violate the Geneva Convention, the higher purpose by which we claim to justify it makes us unfettered by moral niceties. Oh, but that’s the story of the entire invasion of Iraq, isn’t it? Consider the other convenient effects of the timing of the killings and the furor over the photos and ponder whether it was a calculated effort to divert attention from the mounting “Bush lied” furor; his plummeting approval in the polls; the damning Congressional report on 9-11 The Nation

concluding, among other points, that Iraq of course had nothing to do with al Qaeda UPI

; and the brewing scandal about the administrations redaction of parts of the report that would be ‘too upsetting’ to our friends the Saudis. And whether the pitiful minds in the White House actually believed it would halt the rising tide of killings of the occupying American forces NY Times.

Now it’s right war, wrong reason: “A school of thought is emerging that Saddam Hussein was not so much covering up his possession of banned weapons as his lack of them.” — Daniel Schorr, NPR’s senior news analyst writes in the Christian Science Monitor. Was Hussein’s lack of cooperation with UN weapons inspectors an attempt at keeping up the pretense of having WMD as a deterrent against hostile neighbors such as Iran and the Kurds?

Republicans fret about impact of Iraq, economy on Bush’s standing

For the first time since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, rank-and-file Republicans say they are worried about President Bush’s re-election chances based on the feeble economy, the rising death toll in Iraq and questions about his credibility.

“Of course it alarms me to see his poll figures below the safe margins,” said Ruth Griffin, co-chair of Bush’s 2000 campaign steering committee in New Hampshire. “If he isn’t concerned, and we strong believers in the Bush administration aren’t concerned, we must have blinders on.”

Poor Republicans may be destined to have more sleepless nights if they believe everything they read in the polls…

Also: National Hispanic group says Bush administration has disappointed Latinos [thanks, Ray]

“The Secret Service used ‘profoundly bad judgment‘ in seeking to question a Los Angeles Times cartoonist over a political cartoon depicting a man pointing a gun at President Bush, a senior House Republican said Tuesday.” Ironically, the cartoonist is apparently a Bush sympathizer not threatening but commisserating with the President’s current political woes, according to This Modern World, which I thank for this blink.

“A vegetarian ‘ape-diet’, based on the foods our simian cousins eat, is as effective in lowering cholesterol as an established cholesterol-lowering drug, reveals a new study. High cholesterol levels increase the risk of cardiovascular disease.

The key components of the ape diet are plant sterols, found in plant oils and enriched margarines, viscous fibre, found in oats, barley and aubergine, and soy protein and nuts.

People with raised cholesterol following this primitive diet had their levels of bad cholesterol slashed by about a third – the same reduction provided by the statin drug, lovastatin.

…(H)umans may be evolutionarily adapted to the diet, which is similar to that eaten by gorillas and orangutans.”

New Scientist

“A new genetic study deals a blow to claims that humans reached America at least 30,000 years ago – around the same time that people were colonising Europe.

The subject of when humans first arrived in America is hotly contested by academics.

On one side of the argument are researchers who claim America was first populated around 13,000 years ago, toward the end of the last Ice Age. On the other are those who propose a much earlier date for colonisation of the continent – possibly around 30,000-40,000 years ago.” BBC

“

Rosy cheeks seem to be crucial in the dating game, for monkeys at least.

Females of a common primate, the rhesus macaque, prefer males with red faces, a study has shown.

It signals high levels of testosterone which, in many male animals, mean a healthy immune system and good genes.

A rosy glow might also act as a similar cue in humans, say British researchers.” BBC

Paul Krugman, on the New York Times op-ed page, reminds us that intelligence analysts protested being asked to cook the books by BushCo way back last fall; they are now vindicated, as are the military professionals who expressed doubts about whether the resources committed to the Iraqi war could manage the post-invasion circumstances. Military experts say our military strength elsewhere in the world has been weakened by the extent of our forces deployed in Iraq; that the war will seriously impact future recruiting; and that our unilateralism has already made erstwhile allies run for cover as we ask for assistance in occupied Iraq or elsewhere. The dysadministration response to those who notice that the Emperor has no clothes is to smear them. Krugman notes,

“…if we’re going to talk about aiding the enemy: By cooking intelligence to promote a war that wasn’t urgent, the administration has squandered our military strength. This provides a lot of aid and comfort to Osama bin Laden — who really did attack America — and Kim Jong Il — who really is building nukes.”

He finishes up with a kicker about the Wilson affair, concluding,

We’ve just seen how politicized, cooked intelligence can damage our national interest. Yet the Wilson affair suggests that the administration intends to continue pressuring analysts to tell it what it wants to hear.

From John Robb’s Weblog, I’m learning a little — enough to scratch my head about whether this is interesting at all — about this new class of apps that promise, as Robb describes it, to “provide a PC-based organizational system for all the digital data a person accumulates during a lifetime… (to) make sense of the gobs of information we are going to store in our 1 Tb computers in 2006…” There’s MyLifeBits, for PCs, which is from Microsoft and which Robb suggests will be seriously flawed by being inflexible and monolithic. DevonThink, so far only for OSX, is a “freeform database with a browser interface that organizes your local data by similarity” and looks pretty interesting to him. And then there’s Dashboard, about which all the recent buzz is about.

I’ll surely investigate this phenomenon further, but for now I’m dubious about their usefulness to me. Maybe I need to get the terabyte hard drive first or progress further along the continuum to benign senescent forgetfulness (in which case a terabyte-range handheld PC will be more useful to me than a desktop, of course). Robb suggests these will be great for webloggers but I suspect he doesn’t mean my style of weblogging.

As Robb asks, “what do we call this category of software” anyway? And, other than the amount of their muscle, how is it different from the heavily-indexed freeform databases (like Ask Sam) or the index-based PC explorers (like Lotus Magellan) I’ve made use of in my remote past? Here are Dashboard‘s stabs at answers to both of those questions:

The dashboard is a piece of software which performs a continous, automatic search of your personal information space to show you things in your life that are related to whatever you happen to be doing with your computer at the time.

While you read email, browse the web, write a document, or talk to your friends on IM, dashboard does its best to proactively find objects that are relevant to your current activity, and to display them in a friendly way.

We call the dashboard an “association engine.”

Part of my hesitancy is about that “friendly way”. I’d be relieved if I didn’t find it intrusive and annoying, even if my machine’s performance didn’t take a hit. I sound like the computerist version of a luddite, I realize, but I’m reminded of that old Twilight Zone episode in which the aliens arrive promising all sorts of boons to humanity. At the end, just as the world’s leaders are about to place their fate entirely in the hands of the aliens, our hero runs up breathlessly to announce that he has just finished translating the aliens’ handbook, To Serve Man. “It’s a cookbook!!” he stammers.

is here. What’s New?

The American Gallery of Psychiatric Art [via dublog]

“But why did Kelly have to die?” Guardian-Observer/UK

Cast your vote here:

I want my representative in the U.S. House of Representatives to vote to impeach President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard B. Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, and Attorney General John D. Ashcroft for high crimes and misdemeanors, and to have the case prosecuted and tried in the U.S. Senate.

a nation that commits political assassinations to get a better hand from a deck of playing cards. CNN No matter how despicable these brothers were, think of what you become if you rejoice at their deaths. And what the detestable leadership of our country has become, to conduct regime change by smart bomb, with no scruples, and with lie after lie to have their way, the ends justifying the means, with no hesitation about the cost to our souls.

Ray at Bellona Times asks:

‘I can’t decide whether the inability to distinguish either “apologizing” or “taking responsibility” from “making excuses” is a characteristically American trait or more generally human. Introspection is no help. Please advise.’

Aaron Lazare, psychiatrist and Chancellor/Dean, University of Massachusetts Medical School, dissects the essence of a well-formed apology:

“One of the most profound interactions of civilized people is the offering and acceptance of apologies. Some apologies have the power to heal and restore damaged relationships, avoid or undo vengeance and grudges, and diminish guilt and shame. Failing to apologize or offering faulty apologies may lead to strained or broken relationships, grudges, and even vengeance.” [more] For A Change

Enetation (my commenting system) tells me: “There have been a couple of failures of the comment counter in the last week caused by what appears to be a suspect chunk of code on the user forum which has caused the database sync to stop. We will upgrade the forum software this week.” I receive an email every time you click on “Comments?” and post a comment. I’ve noticed recently that, after someone has commented on a particular post, the counter has not been changing to reflect that. For example, I know there is a comment on the “Black Dots” item from 7/20 below. Until you start to notice that it is fixed (i.e. that you start to see “[1 Comment]” showing beneath this post, since I’ve placed a comment there), if you are curious about whether a particular post has comments, you must investigate by clicking.

This morning Mozilla 1.4 (under WinXP) would only give me a blank page when going to the default URLs for FmH. A friend writes that the same thng has happened intermittently this week with Mozilla for Mac. It seems to be spontaneous, unrelated to any changes I’ve made inthe weblog or in the browser, and it resolves spontaneously too. Sometimes, if a person tries to access the page just when I’m republishing after an update, they’ll get a blank page, but in that case a refresh seconds later will show all the content. This is not that problem.

When I can’t get here in Mozilla, Mozilla Firebird and IE6 still work, so I know the page content is still there. In fact, if I go to alternate URLs for the page, I can get there in Mozilla too, if that is a clue. I’ve turned off Mozilla’s built-in popup blocking to see if that was the problem, without it making a difference. I never find this with any other webpage I visit.

Does anyone more adept than I am with HTML and Mozilla understand why this is happening? Is it my browser, the server, or something about the page? or something else? Has anyone else experienced this with FmH or any other page in Mozilla? Any thoughts appreciated…

William Safire lays out a guerrila war strategy for the Iraqi opposition to the US occupation (and takes a tortured stab at suggesting a US response). He states as a given that Saddam is alive and orchestrating such a strategy now. “The elusive Saddam plots his comeback Countering his strategy will take guts – and faith”. STLtoday With twisted logic, Safire’s strategy to win in Iraq is to press forward blaming the domestic opponents of the war and the ‘liberal media’ for the American failure in Iraq. He advises that the American public keep the faith that the WMD will be found (“Drop the premature conclusion that if we can’t yet find proof of the destructive weapons, they never existed. “) and not question that Saddam Hussein’s regime represented a threat to the world… or still does; he blithely justifies the “loss of one soldier’s life” (uhhh, Bill, you scholar of linguistic artifice, that is one soldier daily) by counterposing the imaginary “loss of thousands of civilian lives caused or abetted by a vengeful dictator”. Pure sophistry. Are BushCo and its lapdog coalition following his advice: (Wolfowitz: ‘Finding WMD is now secondary’ WPXI vs. Blair: ‘WMD will be found’ ExpressIndia)?

Safire’s last suggestion is the most subversive: “This above all: To end guerrilla war in Iraq, find Saddam. Those he terrorized must be assured the tyrant will never come back.” Is he trying to make the dysadministration look more like the bunch of contemptible buffoons they are? An October administration report warned that a defeated Hussein would be a threat (Washington Post) , BTW. Just as with our inability to find bin Laden, what is crucially important is that the American public forget that we are unable to find Saddam, Bill. Don’t remind them.

Do Food Additives Cause Republicans? “If you can’t effect change through the electoral process, try adding a little P & G yellow to the Freedom Fries.” — Dante Langston, Orion

“…(W)hat cheers me are the ways people are learning to read the silent histories of objects and choosing the objects that still sing.” — Rebecca Solnit, AlterNet

“The Bush administration didn’t like the odds of being forthright with us, and so they went another route. Now it’s time to follow that route to the logical conclusion. You can’t start a war based on a premise and then come around after it’s over and say, ‘Who cares if that was bogus? Based on the real reason for the war, things are going great!’ Well, actually, you can. The question is whether or not people are willing to go along with it.” — Rafe Coburn

“A report by internal investigators at the Justice Department has identified dozens of recent cases in which department employees have been accused of serious civil rights and civil liberties violations involving enforcement of the sweeping federal antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act.

The inspector general’s report, which was presented to Congress last week and is awaiting public release, is likely to raise new concern among lawmakers about whether the Justice Department can police itself when its employees are accused of violating the rights of Muslim and Arab immigrants and others swept up in terrorism investigations under the 2001 law.” NY Times

This is ridiculous: Ronald Reagan tied for number 1 with Thomas Jefferson?? Rush Limbaugh on the honorable mention list? No women and only two men of color (MLK and Frederick Douglass) on the top twenty, along with Harriet Tubman on the also-rans. Right Wing News

Dismayed Americans contemplate Canada: “A husband and wife in Minnesota, a college student in Georgia, a young executive in New York. Though each has distinct motives for packing up, they agree the United States is growing too conservative and believe Canada offers a more inclusive, less selfish society.” CNN [Boundless opportunities to Californicate new territory?]

At Party Meeting, Most Rule Out Supporting a Democrat: “The Green Party emerged from a national meeting over the weekend increasingly certain that it will run a presidential candidate in next year’s election, all but settling a debate within the group over how it should approach the 2004 contest.” Washington Post

“Executives at Amazon.com are negotiating with several of the largest book publishers about an ambitious and expensive plan to assemble a searchable online archive with the texts of tens of thousands of books of nonfiction, according to several publishing executives involved.

Amazon plans to limit how much of any given book a user can read, and it is telling publishers that the plan will help sell more books while better serving its own online customers.

Together with little-publicized additions to Amazon’s Web site, like listings of restaurants and movie showings, the plan appears to be part of a strategy to compete with online search services like Google and Yahoo for consumers’ time and attention. ” NY Times

Ed’s Musings from Space: “While he’s living aboard the International Space Station, Expedition 7 NASA ISS Science Officer Ed Lu is writing about his experiences. His letters are listed below, beginning with the most recent addition.

You can also ask Ed or Commander Yuri Malenchenko a question by going to our Ask the Expert Web page.” HSF – International Space Station

“Science lost its way, and women lost out”. Boston Globe

A Plague of Black Dots: “In the coming months a black spot will pop up everywhere . . . on store windows and newspaper boxes, on gas pumps and supermarket shelves. Open a magazine or newspaper – it’s there. It’s on TV. It stains the logos and smears the nerve centers of the world’s biggest, dirtiest corporations.

This is the mark of the people who don’t approve of Bush’s plan to control the world, who don’t want countries ‘liberated’ without UN backing, who can’t stand anymore neo-con bravado shoved down their throats.

This is the mark of the people who want the Kyoto Protocol for the environment, who want the International Criminal Court for greater justice, who want a world where all nations, including the U.S.A., are free of weapons of mass destruction, and who pledge to take their country back.

A bus stops in traffic, a major logo on the back is covered with a funny black spot. Hey, is that supposed to be there? A sultry model leans forward on a billboard; a round, dark blob is stuck on her cleavage. Huh?

Take the pledge and spread the meme.” Adbusters

Call your elected officials!: “A month ago the FCC dramatically relaxed media ownership regulations, stifling the cornerstone of American democracy: a free, fair, and open public debate.

Because one million Americans raised their voices against the FCC decision, the Senate Commerce Committee recently sent a bill to the Senate floor for a vote that would roll back many of the rules. Today the challenge is to get that bill to the floor of the Senate and House for a vote.

Call your Congressional representatives and demand that they support the rollback. Enter your zip code and find out if your elected officials are currently supporting rolling back the FCC. If they are supportive co-sponsors, then thank them for their support and ask that they keep the bill alive. If they are not a co-sponsor, ask them to become one.” Media Reform Network

“The latest signs of ad creep make it clear – advertisers are anxious. Mega-roaster Starbucks sends its copyright goons off to a remote northern island to sue a local coffeehouse. And McDonald’s is also a kids’ literacy champ? Watch out everybody, the giants are getting desperate.” Adbusters

The Booker Prize-winning author of The Light of Day talks: “In the end I produce a novel and it is there for the public, it’s there for the reader and it’s not part of the package that they should know how it was for me as I wrote it…” identity theory

“Now, when one receives a jar of dried kangaroo excrement in the mail what should one do? What’s the protocol?” spark

Gerald Wallace Goode: “Accompanied by the whistle of a freight pulling out of the Phoenix yard, the four of us held a sort of wake for Caleb Weehunt whose remains lay in the ditch separating Ed Collo, Frank Marsh, and Milt Ralls from me.” Troika

“Baghdad has not figured so prominently in the news since the days when the caliph Harun al-Rashid earned his place in the Arabian Nights and Sinbad the Sailor flew to safety on a giant roc. That was 1,200 years ago, and today’s city is no longer a place where Neo-Platonist philosophers lock horns with Islamic theologians and palace ladies eat off jewel-studded golden platters. But Baghdad in the age of the Abbasid caliphs was the greatest of all cities, the political and military heart of the Islamic Empire at its height. Between its founding in A.D.762 and its destruction in 1258, the city was home to a huge advance in the breadth of human knowledge, so that it is remembered today not only as a place of pomp and luxury but as a city of scholarship and philosophy…” The Wilson Quarterly

“What qualities would someone need in order to defeat George W. Bush? An imaginary dialogue”. — Jack Beatty, The Atlantic

“Simon Winchester, the author of Krakatoa, talks about the natural and cultural reverberations of a famous volcanic eruption.” The Atlantic

“The aim of this activity is to tell you something about your moral intuitions. It comprises twelve questions.

…The intention is to demonstrate that there are tensions in the way that people reason about morality. One important tension has to do with how central the idea of harm is to many moral frameworks. Previous research suggests that… most people judge the scenarios presented here to involve neither harm to the protagonists nor to anybody else; but that, regardless, plenty of people still think that these scenarios depict acts which are morally wrong… ” The Philosopher’s Magazine

An interview with Kenan Malik: “In his book, Man, Beast and Zombie, Kenan Malik argues that human beings are quite unlike any other organism in the natural world. We have a dual nature. We are evolved, biological creatures, with an evolutionary past, and in this sense we are simply objects in nature. But we also have self-consciousness, agency, and the capacity for rationality, and as a result we alone in the natural world are able to transcend our evolutionary heritage and to transform ourselves and the world in which we live. Science, though, is taking its time in getting to grips with this dual nature of human beings.” The Philosopher’s Magazine

The Branding of Human Culture — Douglas Rushkoff, M/C Journal

The Politics and Play of ®TMark: “®TMark is an online centre that organizes and directs funding for the ‘information alteration’ of corporate products (otherwise known as “sabotage”). In 1993, ®TMark was involved in its first high-profile act of sabotage when it channelled $US 8000 to the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO), a group that switched the voice boxes of 300 GI Joe and Barbie dolls. As befits a project affiliated with ®TMark, the critical content of BLO’s act was an alchemic stroke of humour and commentary. The protest lies within the ˜information alteration” of commodities that usually rely on their supposed virtues. The BLO offensive drew attention to the questionable labour practices of Mattel, manufacturers of Barbie, thereby undermining the perceptions on which Barbie’s popularity rests.” M/C Journal

“…Performers such as Manny and Kali are interesting not simply because they belong to a vast population of sub-celebrity performers people know so little about but because they belong to a far more special category: a distinct subculture that harbors some of the pop-culture entertainment world’s greatest risks and most creative energies. I call this culture the other bohemia.” — Alison Pearlman, Southwest Review

“Conservatives love to impose cost-benefit analysis on regulatory issues. So why not apply it to the Iraq War?” — Joan Claybrook, president of the nonprofit consumer group Public Citizen and former head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; and Alan Morrison, co-founder and director of the Public Citizen Litigation Group, The American Prospect

The Syrian Bet: “Did the Bush Administration burn a useful source on Al Qaeda?” — Seymour Hersh, New Yorker

“When beliefs can change as easily as the weather, so do your chances of hitting the jackpot — or experiencing revelation…” Donald Miller:

I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Baghdad Theatre in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes and he never opened his eyes.

After that I liked jazz music.

Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.

I used to not like God because God didn’t resolve. But that was before any of this happened.” Killing the Buddha

The National Funeral Directors Conference: “Schedule: 2 p.m. — Relieving Rigor Mortis:

City coroner Tak Hirimoto demonstrates the art of relieving

corpse stiffness with either shiatsu, Swedish or deep tissue massages. Say goodbye to broken limbs and difficult dressing forever!” Opium Magazine

“The joke was bad, the refusal to apologize worse. But Berlusconi’s gaffe may be a symptom of a European disease that’s hardly funny at all“. -Daniel Hudson, Telepolis

“Science lost its way, and women lost out”. Boston Globe

“Antidepressant use is not associated with an increased risk of suicide, according to a recent US study.

The findings, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, are in contrast to previous reports suggesting that use of antidepressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) may increase suicidal tendencies.

Dr Arif Khan, from the Northwest Clinic Research Center in Bellevue, Washington, and colleagues reached their conclusions after reviewing suicide data from US Food and Drug Administration summary reports. ”

As you know, I have taken a strong stand against what I have considered the irresponsible attacks on the medications for supposedly promoting suicide (or violence), which have often led to high-profile lawsuits with national press coverage. Among other consequences, patients suffering from antidepressant-responsive conditions become more reluctant to take the most suitable medications for their distress.

The use of the medications is in fact associated with suicide and other adverse outcomes. However, it is not the fault of the drugs but rather the conditions of modern medical treatment, with inadequate supervision of the potentially suicidal patient by prescribers who are often not trained well enough and do not have enough time to sit with their antidepressant patients. As I often rail against, this is partly the fault of pharmaceutical companies’ targeting doctors outside the psychiatric field to do the prescribing themselves without referring their patients to specialized mental health practitioners, persuading them how easy the SSRIs are to use, which is a recipe for disaster. Some patients on antidepressants become suicidal as they improve; others because they do not improve; and still others as a result of the agitating side effect of these medications can sometimes cause, akathisia. Still others are at risk because a psychosis concomitant with the depression goes unrecognized or untreated, and some may have altogether different unrecognized psychiatric or neuropsychiatric disorders mistakenly assumed to be antidepressant-responsive.

The chances of any of these being recognized and addressed appropriately are tremendously diminished if the patient is not under the care of a practitoner who has the time to sit with a patient, the skill to create an alliance that will allow the patient to reveal their inner life with frankness, diagnostic expertise and sophistication in assessing and managing psychiatric medication tolerability and efficacy, as well as the very specific proficiency to assess suicidality.

“Networks that mask the identity of users appear to be becoming more popular since the music industry threatened to sue individuals.” New Scientist

“Two different strains of HIV infecting the same woman swapped genes to form a new virus – it is bad news for vaccine researchers.” New Scientist

“Long-range US strategies to destroy enemy missiles in their vulnerable launch phase are unlikely ever to work, says an expert panel.” New Scientist

A true man of letters.

Keep the Global Ideal Alive, says Todd Gitlin: “Instead of shouting ‘US Out,’ those who opposed Washington’s unilateral war must get serious about creating an international vision of their own.” Mother Jones

“After father objected to possible for-profit use, son’s tissues sent to mortuary in boxes.” Austin American-Statesman [via Daily Rotten]

“UN May Be Asked to Help: Attackers firing guns and rocket-propelled grenades killed a U.S. soldier in Baghdad on Saturday as Washington considered asking the United Nations to help restore order in Iraq and contain a guerrilla insurgency.” Reuters

“British Prime Minister Tony Blair will appear on television on Sunday to face accusations his government hounded an expert on Iraqi weapons to suicide.

Dr David Kelly, a defense ministry biologist and former U.N. arms inspector, was found dead on Friday with his wrist slashed after being sucked reluctantly into a dispute over whether officials hyped intelligence on Iraq to justify war.” Reuters

“Though the Republican Party prides itself on being a champion of state sovereignty, one need only mention phrases like ‘medical marijuana’ or ‘drug law reform’ to see how quickly the Administration of George W. Bush becomes hostile to the notion of the autonomy of states. The latest–and perhaps most egregious–example of this enmity is about to become manifest via a new appointment: that of veteran Justice Department official Karen Tandy, soon to be new chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration.” — Jason Vest, The Nation [via walker]

…And How!

“The sergeant at the 2nd Battle Combat Team Headquarters pulled me aside in the corridor. ‘I’ve got my own ‘Most Wanted’ list,’ he told me.

He was referring to the deck of cards the U.S. government published, featuring Saddam Hussein, his sons and other wanted members of the former Iraqi regime.

‘The aces in my deck are Paul Bremer, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush and Paul Wolfowitz,’ he said.” ABC News

Related: Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV

“It was the end of the world,” said one officer Thursday. “It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers.” San Francisco Chronicle

Fox News hits a new lowest common denominator: Thanks to Adam for sending me this eloquent diatribe by Hal Crowther which, although it starts out being about Fox and Murdoch, ends up about alot more. You should read it all, but I can’t resist bulleting his most quotable rantlets, blithely taking them out of context for you:

• ” It’s the inviolable first rule of democracy that all politicians will praise the wisdom of the people — an effusive flattery that intensifies when they ask “the people” to swallow something exceptionally inedible.”
  
• ” The wondrous blessing God bestowed on (the) great chroniclers of contagious stupidity — (Gustave Flaubert,) Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken — is that they lived and died without imagining a thing like Fox News. It’s easy to laugh at Rupert Murdoch’s outrageous mongrel, the impossible offspring of supermarket tabloids, sitcom news spoofs, police-state propaganda mills and the World Wrestling Federation.”
  
• ” Fox News is an oxymoron and Cheech and Chong would have made a more credible team of war correspondents than Geraldo Rivera and Ollie North.”
  
• “…Fox News could easily be taken as pure entertainment, even as inspired burlesque of the rightwing menagerie. But the problem — in fact, the serious problem – is that Fox isn’t kidding, and brownshirts aren’t funny.”
  
• ” If reports are accurate, these troubled men are neither bad journalists nor even bad actors portraying journalists — they’re mentally unbalanced individuals whose partisan belligerence is pressing them to the brink of psychosis.”
  
• ” But the scariest thing about Fox and Rupert Murdoch, the thing that renders them all fear and no fun in a time of national crisis, is that they channel for the Bush administration as faithfully as if they were on the White House payroll… I swear I hate to stoop to Nazi analogies; but if Joseph Goebbels had run his own cable channel, it would have been indistinguishable from Fox News.”
  
• ” Murdoch’s repulsive formula has proven irresistible from Melbourne to Manhattan, and now, by satellite, he’s softening up Beijing. His great fortune rests on his wager that a huge unevolved minority is stupid, bigoted, prurient, nasty to the core. In America today, it’s hard to say whether Rupert Murdoch is an agent, or merely a beneficiary, of the cultural leprosy that’s consuming us.”
  
• “Is it sheer coincidence that the president’s stage manager, Greg Jenkins — responsible for the notorious flight-suit landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln, and for posing George Bush against Mt. Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty — was recently a producer at Fox News?

  If these elaborate tableaus Jenkins choreographs for President Bush seem clumsy, tasteless, condescending and insulting to your intelligence, you must be some kind of liberal.”
  

• “Fox is not what it seems to be. It’s not a news service, certainly, nor even the sincere voice of low-rent nationalism. It’s a calculated fraud, like the president who ducked the draft during Vietnam, and even welshed on his National Guard commitment, but who puts on a flight suit stenciled “Commander-in-chief” and plays Douglas MacArthur on network TV.”
  
• “On the wall above my bed of pain, two familiar quotations: “The tyranny of the ignoramuses is insurmountable and assured for all time” — Albert Einstein; and “Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.” — George Santayana.

  It violates democratic etiquette to call your fellow citizens “idiots.” (Unless they’re liberals — “We all agree that liberals are stupid,” writes Charles Krauthammer.) Fortunately, the PC wordworks has coined a new euphemism to replace the ugly word “retarded.” It’s “intellectually disabled,” and we have it just in time. How else could we describe a majority that accepts the logic of “supporting the troops”? Protest as I might, a local columnist explained to me, once the soldiers are “locked and cocked” I owe them not only my prayers for their safe deliverance but unqualified endorsement of their mission, no matter how immoral and ill-advised it may seem to me. ”
  

• ” When is it too late to wake the sleeping masses? When a Fox TV show for amateur entertainers turns up more voters than Congressional elections? The marriage of television and propaganda may well have been the funeral of reason.”
  
• ‘There’s a chilling suspicion that major architects of our current foreign policy are insane. Listen to Bush adviser Richard Perle, known since his Reagan years as the Prince of Darkness: “If we let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don’t try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage total war, (my italics) our children will sing great songs about us years from now.” ‘
  
• “…I believe that the split between liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican is inconsequential compared to the real fracture line, between Americans who try to think clearly and those who will not or cannot. What hope, a cynical friend teased me, for a country where 70 percent believe in angels, 60 percent believe in literal, biblical, blazing Armageddon, and more than half reject Charles Darwin? He didn’t need to add that creationists, science-annihilating cretins, have now recruited President Bush, who assures fundamentalists he “has doubts” about evolution. Whether the president is that dumb or merely that dishonest is beside the point. He knows his constituency.”
  
• “Novelist Michael Malone, a notorious optimist, offered a faint ray of hope when he urged me to ignore all the polls — if the government has intimidated most of the media, he argued, what makes you think the polls are credible?”
  

And finally:

• ” Are we so few, or are the numbers we see part of the Bush-Fox disinformation campaign — like Saddam’s missing uranium and his 25,000 liters of anthrax? This faint last hope will be tested in the presidential election of 2004. If the polls are right and Malone is wrong, as I fear, it’s going to be a long, sandy century for the United States of America, for our children and grandchildren and all those sweet singing children yet unborn.”
  

Related: Atlanta freelance writer and columnist Marc Schultz on how reading Crowther’s screed got him into a very contemporary sort of trouble. When Adam pointed me to the Crowther piece, he wondered whether Crowther is going to end up in Guantanamo.

Another take on why this four-year-old story is now suddenly big news. Brendan O’Neill says the Democrats could have ripped apart the uranium story more than six months ago, in time to divert the course of war… but they weren’t potential Presidential candidates then. Furthermore, evenn if the Niger connection hadn’t already been thoroughly discredited at the time of the SotU, experts were vocal about their doubts that Iraq could do anything to enrich uranium even if they obtained any. Given that few of the Democratic opposition (an oxymoron?) took any kind of principled stand against the war, the

…retrospective focus on the uranium claims is a cover for their own cowardice over Iraq, for their failure to take a principled stand against the war. Opposition politicians are grubbing about for something with which to beat the Bushies, as they clearly have no politics or principles with which to do the job. This sorry excuse for political opposition helps to explain why doubts about the uranium are everywhere, months after they first originated – and why someone like Senator John Edwards, who voted for war in the House of Representatives, can now get off on lecturing Bush about the ‘enormous failure’ in Iraq. The antis’ cynical approach – flagging up Bush and Blair’s lies instead of positing a principled alternative – can only harm political life in the long run. sp!ked

O’Neill acknowledges that the cheap shot is so opportune because of the squirrelly defensiveness and blame-shifting the proponents of war are doing on the issue:

Bush blames the CIA, while the CIA blames Britain’s MI6 for starting the story in the first place; MI6 is standing by its intelligence, though Tony Blair is apparently planning to ‘blame France for the uranium row’; and Niger, from where Saddam allegedly tried to buy the uranium in 1999, is said to be deeply upset ‘at suggestions that it would consider selling uranium to Iraq’

and concludes:

Those who launched the war in Iraq are now washing their hands of responsibility, defensively backtracking over the pre-war ‘evidence’.

It wasn’t the uranium story that caused these tensions within and between the Bush and Blair governments. Rather, the uranium spat has further exposed the defensive nature of Bush and Blair’s war, and its failure to unite the American and British elites behind any sense of common purpose.

As postwar Iraq spins further out of control, politicians and journalists in the West squabble over 16 words in Bush’s State of the Union address, and who is responsible for putting them there. This is about much more than a bullshit story about African uranium. The uranium spat is more like a sign of our unprincipled times.

Photo 5: Behind the Scenes: “Working at his desk in the Oval Office, President Bush reviews the State of the Union address line-by-line and word-by-word.” [thanks, walker]

I admit my attention has flagged; I’ve been stuck at a rather reductionist level: “Bush lied, of course, who’s surprised? That’s that”. I have certainly been interested in the public complacency about BushCo’s shameless manipulation and, as my blink to the Timothy Noah meditation below indicates, on the press’ diffidence since Bush took the White House about calling a lie a lie, until this significant departure. Noah is onto something; there was a degree of incompetency in this lie that is atypical of this dysadministration. I have been edified by the bulldogging the President’s new press secretary is getting on this issue, just because it places in high relief the audacity of the usual stonewalling defense; is it too much to hope that the public might begin to notice? This Modern World has just the transcript you need if you are curious about this.

Joshua Micah Marshall is doing a great job keeping up with what turn out to be intricacies of the radioactive lie, the identification of the NSC staffer who seems to have been the one who recommended that the infamous 16 words remain in the SotU, the administration’s apparent preparations to invoke executive privilege to make sure that that staffer never testifies to his role, the vengeful ‘outing’ of a Bush administration critic and, related, the tragic apparent suicide of the British government functionary who was apparently the source of reports on British distortions of the case for war. Seeing this balloon onward and upward, I find myself exhilarated at the possibility that it might mark a real turning point in the credibility of the administration and the credulity of the public. As the Daily Kos points out, the President’s approval rating has dropped a full nine points in the last month. One can only hope that the mounting disapproval has ‘legs’ and the voters whose sentiments the polls reflect have a good memory. We are getting to the point, especially if those in the Democratic primary race are not timid about keeping the issue in front of the voters (in an insistent way that does not backfire by coming off as merely exploitive and opportunistic), when it might persist as a live issue until November 2004.

Or could this erupt before the Presidential campaign, if the opposition were really courageous? If there are enough people interested in untangling the twisted skein of lies that seems to have been elaborated to cover up the original gaffe, could this blossom into a fullblown crisis worthy of the “-gate” designations we are beginning to see bandied about? Could it be worthy of articles of impeachment? “Clinton lied, Hilary cried; Bush lied; people died.” Ah, be still, my beating heart; almost too much to hope for…

Timothy Noah answers the question he spent Part 1 posing last week (“Why was the yellowcake lie treated like a major news event, when the earlier lies were not?”).

The yellowcake lie landed on Page One solely because it occasioned a brief and fatal departure from the Bush White House’s press strategy of stonewalling. “Bush Claim on Iraq Had Flawed Origin, White House Says” read a New York Times headline on July 8. Glancing through the story, Chatterbox initially puzzled over its Page One placement. Didn’t we know already that Bush’s yellowcake line was a lie? Then Chatterbox realized that the novelty component wasn’t the lie, but the Bush administration’s admission that it had told a lie. In the Bush White House, this simply isn’t done.

Noah implies, but does not explicitly state, that he believes Ari Fleischer got sloppy because he was a war-weary short-timer. Or could Fleischer have been nursing some sort of grudge against his boss? Could it have been a deliberate parting shot? The press’ rules of engagement don’t allow the press to acknowledge a lie when they see it, unless it is an incompetent lie, in other words, unless someone contradicts themself rather than merely contradicting someone else.

Never mind that, in pretending to know that Saddam tried to buy yellowcake from Niger, Bush told a lie. His real sin was not being a pro.

Blind alley in psychopharmacology and classification of disease:

“No new drugs for mood and anxiety disorders have reached the market for over a decade. Why is there so little innovation in a sector that accounts for the largest proportion by far of sales of psychiatric drugs?

The current division between anxiety and depression is increasingly recognised as inadequate. In the community, most mood disorders present as a combination of depression and anxiety. Yet the Food and Drug Administration in the United States, which has become the world bellwether of drug approval, indicates drugs either for major depression or for the various forms of anxiety recognised by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). As a result, the pharmaceutical industry is compelled to develop drugs for diagnoses that are of questionable clinical relevance. This is one reason for the big slowdown in drug discovery in psychiatric drugs. A return to the former unitary classification of mood and anxiety disorders as nervousness or cothymia might represent a way out of this blind alley.” British Medical Journal, Shorter and Tyrer, 327 (7407): 158

This is an exceedingly important article which demands close attention. It in essence fires a shot across the bow of some very important vested interests in psychiatry, both financial and, more significantly, conceptual, and, if it attracts any attention, will surely provoke a backlash. I will be looking in the letters section of the British Medical Journal over the coming weeks for the fallout.

The authors proceed from three principles with which my own clinical experience agrees:

# The concept of “major depression” is far too heterogeneous to be useful

# The subdivision of anxiety into separate micro-diagnoses of panic, social anxiety disorder, etc, is questionable

# The firewall between anxiety and depression ignores the fact that the commonest form of affective disorder is mixed anxiety-depression.

There is a constant tension between the “lumpers” and the “splitters” in psychiatric classification (“nosology”), which readers of FmH know is one of my preoccupations in my field. As you can see from the points the authors make, the answer is not simply coming down on the side of one of those camps; some “lumping” causes problems and some “splitting” causes problems. Then, as the authors point out, if psychiatric drug approval by the FDA is tied to the current scheme of diagnoses, there will be important conceptual failings in new drug development. I have long taught that calling the antidepressants “antidepressants” is a conceptual misnomer, and I have seen the way this language constrains practice. Many other MDs as well as patients are aghast at my claim that the “antidepressants” are better choices for treating anxiety than the “anti-anxiety” medications (diazepam [Valium] and its derivatives).

But as long as drugs vie to win FDA approval as indicated for specific diagnoses, there is market pressure to proliferate diagnoses as, essentially, marketing niches for the pharmaceutical industry. The authors make a good case that the interpenetration of academic psychiatry and the drug industry is the devil’s bargain in this sense. This is not just a problem along the dividing line between depression and anxiety either. Other classes of psychiatric distress, such as psychosis, aggression, irritability, impulsivity, and mood lability, are artificially carved out as separate domains requiring separate diagnoses and different medications — “mood stabilizers”, “antipsychotics.” A welter of diagnoses devolve on our patients, and they arrive at my doorstep with a shopping bag full of medications which interact additively and often destructively, if not merely redundantly.

But it is good business:

Industry has been busy behind the scenes in this handy convergence of eccentric new diagnoses and the market nicheing of compounds. For example, in May 1984, Robert Spitzer, the chief disease designer of DSM-III and DSM-III-R, convoked a meeting of the anxiety working group, cosponsored by “the Psychopharmacology Unit of the Division of Medical Affairs of the Upjohn Company.” At the end of the discussion of the relation between panic and agoraphobia, Spitzer announced, “Consensus favors the Upjohn model.”14 It is now routine for psychopharmacologists, such as Brown University’s Martin Keller, to receive as much as $500 000 (£320 000) in consulting fees from industry in a given year.15 USA Today has calculated that at 55% of the meetings of the various advisory committees of the FDA, “half or more of the FDA advisers had a conflict of interest.”

Sometimes the relation between academic psychiatrists and industry veers over the line of acceptability in the form of ghost writing—academics lending their names to articles drafted by industry hacks. This has been a problem in psychopharmacology since the 1950s.17 But only last year, Vienna psychiatry professor Siegfried Kasper was identified in the Austrian press as signing an industry ghostwritten article about an antidepressant.18 Under normal circumstances, the interpenetration of industry and academe can be fruitful, as talent and ideas wash back and forth. Yet when drugs start earning the kind of money usually associated with the oil industry, there is potential for trouble.

The authors conclude, eloquently and aptly:

We believe that the failure to advance the treatment of anxiety and depression is related to wrong classification. If you don’t have natural disease categories, you can’t develop drugs for them. If the Food and Drug Administration will accept only drugs that are effective for DSM diagnoses, and if the diagnoses are artefacts, the drugs are bound to be less valuable, even if in the short term they increase their market share. Companies must start developing drugs for mixed anxiety and depression and forget about dividing this giant illness segment into salami slices. Doctors could encourage this change by being more cynical about pitches from drug representatives claiming to have “the latest” in anxiolytic medication. Ask instead for the latest in nervousness.

And, I would add, consumers should ask the same of their prescribing doctors.

“It was an ugly ending by any measure, but particularly cruel in this case because the little girl’s life began the same way: wrapped in a plastic bag and discarded on a New York City byway.

In September 1994, days after her birth, Stephanie was discovered near her parents’ home, those who have seen her records say. The lack of oxygen in the bag probably contributed to mental retardation so profound that even when she reached age 8 she had only the awareness of a child younger than 1. She weighed 28 pounds. Although the records are unclear as to blame, the infant’s parents quickly lost their rights to care for her and she became a ward of the state.

The almost unspeakably grim end occurred despite intense intervention from the state practically from the girl’s birth. The eight years of Stephanie’s life, the years between trash bag and trash bag, offer a glimpse into the unevenness and unpredictability of care for perhaps the most vulnerable of New York’s citizens, severely disabled foster children.” NY Times

Want to send email to the President? Good luck. “Those who want to send a message to the president must now navigate as many as nine Web pages and fill out a form that asks if they support White House policy.” NY Times

Matthew Rossi’s book of ‘fantasies, lunacies and entertaining lies’, he of the inestimable “Once I Noticed I Was on Fire…”, will be out in August. And he will sign it for you if you send it to him with a ssae.

From Chuck Taggart I learn about “eMusic, an online MP3 subscription service that, in some ways, beats the living crap out of Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Not that I don’t love iTunes — in fact, I spent about $45 in there over the last few weeks, and there’ll probably always be stuff I want in there. But the kinds of music I’m really interested in — lots of roots, folk, trad, blues and indie rock/pop — are much more prevalent at eMusic than in iTunes.” I’m on it…

“Thousands of people serving in the military and American civilians living abroad will have that option next year in the nation’s most extensive Internet voting experiment, viewed by some as a step toward elections in cyberspace.” The key phrase is “thousands in the military”, as this system is run by the Pentagon. There’s a sidebar with a comment by someone from the Center for Public Integrity, a government watchdog group, which expresses concerns about the ability of the government to assure security in internet voting. “Security remains the top concern for the system’s coordinators and fodder for critics,” the article confirms. CBS News [via mousemusings]

But a more profound concern of mine is that this is a Republican use of Pentagon infrastructure to extend easy voting access preferentially to that segment of the absentee voters who would be most likely to vote Republican. [Or, a segment that BushCo thinks would vote for them, oblivious to the fact that he is demoralizing the military. CNN [via medley]] In any case, I agree with what Dennis Kucinich, also quoted on mousemusings, has to say on the matter:

Can we trust an administration which stole a presidential election, has attacked the bill of rights, and which deliberately misrepresented intelligence to lead this nation into an unjust war to faithfully protect the security of the 2004 election? I repeat my call on all Americans to join in a mighty protest so that we may protect the 2004 election from the kind of theft which deprived the American people of an honest election in the year 2000.

‘“The British are coming” — again. The launch of a U.S. edition of the unabashedly liberal Guardian may be just what the Bush-whacked U.S. press needs.’

McClellan debuts with dissembling about budget:

“In his first briefing as the President’s press secretary yesterday, Scott McClellan revealed an ability to spin just as ably as his predecessor, Ari Fleischer. Just as Fleischer and others in the administration have done, McClellan incorrectly suggested yesterday that tax cuts played no role or a small role in the the growing federal deficit, which the Office of Management and Budget said yesterday will be over $450 billion this year.

Asked about the new deficit figures, McClellan said the following: ‘Now, we had a recession. We also had declining revenues because of that. And we had a war on terrorism. That’s what led to the deficit that we are in today.'” Spinsanity [props to walker]