“Making a major foray into partisan politics, multibillionaire George Soros is committing $10 million to a new Democratic-leaning group aimed at defeating President Bush next year.

Soros, who in the past has donated on a smaller scale to Democratic candidates and the party, pledged the money to a political action committee called America Coming Together, spokesman Michael Vachon said Friday.

The group plans a $75 million effort to defeat Bush and ‘elect progressive officials at every level in 2004,’ targeting 17 key states: Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

‘The fate of the world depends on the United States, and President Bush is leading us in the wrong direction,’ Soros said in a written statement. ‘ACT is an effective way to mobilize civil society, to convince people to go to the polls and vote for candidates who will reassert the values of the greatest open society in the world.'” ABC [thank you, Richard]

A federal judge sentenced a man to a year in prison Monday for creating an anarchist Web site with links to sites on how to build bombs. CNN

While a recent legal ruling to which I blinked here promised some protection to webloggers against libel actions arising simply from their linking to defamatory material, the implications of this ruling for webloggers and, in general, for freedom of expression may go a long way in the other direction. Do webloggers have to take care not to link to advocates of subversion on the web at all?

Digital Cameras Go Disposable, and for $11 a pop. PC World

“Harvard Law School is planning to put more than a million documents from the Nuremberg trials on the Internet, allowing ready access to records of hearings into the war crimes of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.” Newsday

This is, believe it not, billed as part VII of a series. It is a post-poem itself, a string of word-things sparyed at us: “…(T)he post-post poets write the real stuff, the basics, the poem without the baggage of meaning and connection, the liberated poem itself, stripped and streaking down the freeway, no claim on your time or attention longer than the time it takes to watch one run by. Was it human? Was it naked? Did it wave? Was it a prank? What college is it from? What were those word-things it sprayed at us?” Web Del Sol

The whys and wherefores of ‘releasing a salty, protein-rich fluid from the lacrimal apparatus, improvising adjustments in the muscles of facial expression, adding a few non-specific and incomprehensible vocalisations, and convulsively inhaling and exhaling air with spasms of the respiratory and truncal muscle groups.’ FT Magazine

Feds: Hijackers Crashed Flt. 93 on 9/11: “A Sept. 11 hijacker in the cockpit of United Airlines Flight 93 instructed terrorist-pilot Ziad Jarrah to crash the jetliner moments before it slammed into a Pennsylvania field because of a fierce passenger uprising in the cabin, recently disclosed testimony by the FBI (news – web sites) director shows.

The theory described by FBI Director Robert Mueller, based on the government’s analysis of cockpit recordings, discounts the popular perception of insurgent passengers grappling with terrorists inside the cockpit, trying to seize the plane’s controls, immediately before the crash.” Yahoo! News

Schwarzenegger’s much-touted candidacy to replace embattled Gray Davis seems at first nothing so much as unbelievable, even after Reagan. It is ludicrous and contemptible that, recalling a governor for his supposed failings at complex budgetary management, the people of California would put an actor (if you can call him that) with absolutely no fiscal experience into the role, for no reason other than his hyped-up celebrity. But actors have long been in bed with politicians — in Schwarzenegger’s case, literally. And in a media-driven political landscape where voters have an MTV depth-of-attention and passively pliable hero worship, it makes a strange kind of sense. An actor’s skills — playing a role, making the unbelievable believable, banking on charisma that has nothing to do with real human worth — are increasingly indistinct from those of a political leader. The lines are divorced from reality and their only goal is to spin a yarn convincingly out of whole cloth. Political campaigns have long since stopped being run as anything other than media events. Fitting that his candidacy was announced on late-night TV. But then I knew what a turn for the worst we had taken when Clinton showed up as a saxophone-toting guest on one or the other of them.

It is no wonder Reagan is revered, in the circles of his constituents, as a great, heroic and successful President; he was the perfect blank screen on which to project their hopes and agendas and, as is Dubya by reason of his dim-wittedness, a perfect front man for the scriptwriters behind the scenes, especially by the beginning of his second term when he already suffered the early manifestations of Alzheimer’s dementia. It remains to be seen if Schwarzenegger is as much of an infinitely malleable cipher. Fortunately, governator or not, he cannot become President on Constitutional grounds because he is not native-born… or will a rising cachophonous chorus of American celebrity-worship demand that that be changed as well?

As Gray Davis sits stunned by how likely it is now looking that he will lose the governor’s mansion, public discussion suggests that the recall process may set a wonderful populist precedent. Politicians may start to fear, the argument goes, that if they do not do their job well, they may lose their position. The ideal of serving at the people’s pleasure will have some teeth to it. I fear the opposite consequence; that the last vestiges of potentially responsible governanace are dropping to the need to pander to least-common-denominator popularity polls. The only saving grace may be, I hope against hope, that the ludicrousness of giving the governor’s mansion to the Terminator may become so emblematic of the decline of American politics that it catalyzes a backlash.

I’m noticing the inflammatory Right starting to relish rubbing our noses in the Schwarzenegger candidacy. James Taranto’s obsequious Opinion Journal piece from the WSJ has him offending European sensibilities because he is a flamboyant macho American and, to boot, an American by choice. And Lileks bleats (he takes pleasure in calling it that himself; nothing like disarming the critics who would shut you up by shoving your own foot as deep as you can down your own throat) about how it will revitalize politics by enlightening the celebrity worshippers to some new possibilities. Lileks is not opposed to admitting that the appearance of likeability and trustworthiness in an otherwise unqualified candidate are the only things Arnold has going for him, but then I suppose that should be no surprise from people who worship George W. Bush.

Addendum: Although so far emanating from people who know enough to be embarrassed, and therefore couched as tongue-in-cheek, the cries to amend the Constitution to allow a Predator presidency have begun:

It drove the Angry Left nuts when Dubya baited the US military’s honey-trap by telling would-be terrorists in Iraq to “bring ’em on” — Dubya’s Texas drawl simply ruled when delivering that line. But The Terminator can deliver not only an ominous accent but a physical presence that bodes major mayhem. Certainly Dubya, Arnold, and Clint Eastwood-as-Dirty-Harry collectively comprise the “Axis of Righteous Über-Taunters,” or at least the “Masters of Super-Menacing Sound-Bites.” I very much want our President to be someone who can, when appropriate, take a blunt, pithy, and aggressive phrase, and then deliver it into the CNN microphones in just the utterly convincing way that will turn it into the shrieking, bed-wetting #1 cause of recurring nightmares for even non-English speakers like Osama bin Ladin.

This is consistent with my longstanding claim that Bush’s inarticulateness has been a major part of his appeal to the idiot fringe of the Right.

The new 15th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style is out this month, making heads swoon in some circles. I think it an equally important gauge of the evolution of living English — the written side in this case — as the more-often-discussed changes in successive editions of the OED are for the spoken side. The tension between de facto usage patterns and prescriptive rules is such fun to watch if you don’t take either one as your ultimate touchstone.

“Blocking the formation of neurons in the hippocampus blocks the behavioral effects of antidepressants in mice, say researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Their finding lends new credence to the proposed role of such neurogenesis in lifting mood. It also helps to explain why antidepressants typically take a few weeks to work, note Rene Hen, Ph.D., Columbia University, and colleagues, who report on their study in the August 8th Science.” EurekAlert!

You heard it here first; we are in the midst of a fundamental paradigm shift reconceptualizing how psychiatric medications work and, by extension, the nature of psychiatric disease. For more than fifty years, since the advent of the modern psychopharmaceutical age, mechanisms of action of these drugs have been conceived of in terms of their effects on neurotransmitters at the synapses between neurons. This filtered down to the lay public as the “chemical imbalance” notion of psychiatric illness. As my diatribe here about Peter Breggin’s diatribe against biological psychiatry last week suggests, this model for psychiatric illness and drug action has not lent itself readily to empirical validation and the CNS remained a black box. As far as it has gone and as far as it has been believed, the neurotransmitter theories of mental illneess have functioned in the same way that mythology does. I don’t mean that this is useless, but it has no ready answers to the agnostics’ challenges.

But I suggested that Breggin’s critique was a straw man agrument, railing against a reductionist and outmoded version of psychiatric knowledge without much relationship to contemporary findings. Findings like the one discussed in this news item take us into a realm where we understand that structural, as well as functional, changes in numbers, connectivity and vitality of neurons in specfic brain regions underpin psychaitric conditions, and that the medications known to be effective against those diseases can be demonstrated to protect against or reverse those neuronal-structural changes. Even Breggin suggested that he might be persuaded by pretty pictures demonstrating the reality of psychiatric illness.

This is true not only for depression and antidepressants, as discussed in this study, but for other major mental illnesses as well. In schizophrenia research, for example, a new focus has emerged in the last decade or so on the neurotransmitter NMDA, now considered a widespread and crucial excitatory agent in the brain but virtually unstudied just several decades before when I went to medical school. NMDA is important not only in the classical neurotransmitter sense (of its level of activity underlying the functional state of various neuronal circuits in the brain) but because it is an “excitotoxin”, causing neuronal injury. There are ways in which life stresses injure or destroy neurons, and there are ways in which health-promoting activities (medications but also exercise, stress reduction, nutrition, rest, etc.) protect against or reverse such damage, visibly, demonstrably. The perennial tortured efforts to bridge the longstanding gulf between the physiological and the psychological in psychiatry by suggesting pie-in-the-sky models of how experience might be transduced into brain changes are finally bearing empirical fruit, and with that advance will fall the last vestiges of the artificial distinctions betwen brain and mind.

Better Ebola Vaccine for Monkeys Offers Hope for Humans:”Federal scientists have developed a fast-acting, single-shot vaccine that makes monkeys immune to the Ebola virus six times as fast as an earlier version.

If the same approach works in humans, it could control or prevent outbreaks of the rare infection that causes high fever, severe pain, bleeding from the eyes and usually death within a few days.” NY Times