Thanks to Alwin Hawkins, who knows I like to keep watch on the paramilitary right, for sending me this item. Militia member ‘filled with rage,’ plotted ambush: After the arrest on firearms charges of Norman Somerville, a 43-year old former Special Forces (aren’t they all?) veteran and self-styled radical militia member in the Grand Rapids, Michigan area, investigators at his home discovered an impressive arsenal with an underground bunker, booby traps and pictures of Bush and Rumsfeld centered in the crosshairs of a gunsight. Informants said he was angry about the death of another militia member in a shootout after a police officer died trying to serve him a warrant. They said Somerville planned to cause an auto accident and mow down responding officers with a machine gun he has mounted in his jeep. While they said he was crazy and rageful and had told their children to avoid the man, neighbors said they had not realized “he was stockpiling back there.” Has the post-8/11 climate suppressed all but the most unbalanced rageful of the rabid ultraright? There haven’t been many news reports similar to this in recent months, I am struck after being pointed to this one. —Grand Rapids Press [thanks, Alwin]

The How and Why: “I first learned the term ‘turboing’ when I worked second-level telephone technical support at Xerox. It refers to the actions of a customer who goes around the normal technical support process by contacting a senior person in the chain of command.

In this article, I’ll describe the Art of Turboing: why you should do it, what it will do for you, and how to do it successfully.”

“Many progressives are praising Dennis Kucinich for saying all the right things — and then they’re backing other Democrats. But the Cleveland populist says he’s running to win.” —Salon

This account of the revelations in a new book by Gerald Posner alleging that our ‘allies’ Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were working with Osama bin Laden in the leadup to the Sept. 11 attacks extends the impression of many critics of the Wot® that we are ‘sleeping with the enemy’. While much has been written about the interrogation techniques used on captured top al-Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah (including withholding medical treatment for wounds he suffered when captured, drugging him, and creating the charade that he was being turned over to Saudi interrogators), Posner is the first to report what Zubaydah revealed — essentially that four Saudi princes and the chief of the Pakistani air force were deeply involved in supporting bin Laden’s efforts and knew in advance of the planned attacks. Four of these five have since mysteriously died. Posner has reportedly received independent support for these details from sources inside the CIA and the Bush administration, even though they are denied by the Saudi and Pakistani governments and Zubaydah has recanted, claiming his confessions were coerced. Posner speculates that the surviving accused conspirator, a senior Saudi prince and longtime head of their intelligence services, may have had the others killed as part of a coverup.

The evolving relationship between al Qaeda and the Saudi regime has turned hostile since the May 2003 al Qaeda bombings in Riyadh, which gave the Saudi government the political capital to defend itself against the militant Islamic elements to whom it had long perceived itself as vulnerable. Even as the House of Saud had distanced themselves from bin Laden as his horrific tactics became clearer, they may have felt they needed to continue to conceal their prior involvement, even including foreknowledge of the Sept. 11 plans. Are prior sympathy and complicity, however, necessarily the same thing?

On the other hand, I have found appeal in the assertion that a covert element of the strategic interest in Iraq in the neo-con grand design is that it would allow the US to extricate itself from elements of its strategic investment in Saudi Arabia, which they see as increasingly a liability. If this is the case, one might suspect that the Zubaydah insinuations about the House of Saud suit their purposes of portraying the Saudis as no longer our allies and placing them in our gunsights. Sources, thus, conclude that the administration confirmation of Zubaydah’s insinuations represent a disinformation campaign. It is asserted that they are contradicted by data emerging from the interrogation of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, now in US custody and more instrumental in planning the Sept. 11 attacks.

In short, it seems more plausible to some administration observers that the leak of classified material is a smear campaign against the Saudis than an accurate leak from CIA sources. On the other hand, there is that matter of the censorship of the pages in the 9/11 report ostensibly bearing on the extent of Saudi support for al Qaeda. The 9/11 commission was clearly not a neo-con front with an interest in a smear campaign. (It strikes me, as well, that this controversy has to be seen in light of the recent tension between the White House and Langley over the Valerie Plame leak.) The Saudis apparently feel their image in the US bears rehabilitating. They are making a major PR effort to ‘spin’ their cooperation with anti-Islamist terrorism efforts dating back long before Sept. 11, indeed back to 1997, although some of their claims are dubious. —Salon

“The forces that brought you the Harry Potter films are locked in a titanic struggle with the powers behind the Lord of the Rings series for the services of a woman hailed as the new J.K. Rowling.

Her name is Cornelia Funke, a 44-year-old German mother of two, who is taking children’s literature by storm. Championed by Barry Cunningham, the man who ‘discovered’ Rowling, Funke has sold half a million copies of her detective story, The Thief Lord, which spent 25 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and won several awards.

Her new book, Inkheart, the first part of a trilogy, promises to be even bigger. So big that Heyday Films, which produced the Harry Potter movies, is slugging it out with New Line Cinema, the company behind the Lord of the Rings series, for the rights to the big-screen version of Funke’s stories.” —Guardian.UK

Noble lies and perpetual war: “Shadia Drury, professor of political theory at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, argues that the use of deception and manipulation in current US policy flow directly from the doctrines of the political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973). His disciples include Paul Wolfowitz and other neo-conservatives who have driven much of the political agenda of the Bush administration.

…Perhaps no scholar has done as much to illuminate the Strauss phenomenon as Shadia Drury. For fifteen years she has been shining a heat lamp on the Straussians with such books as The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (1988) and Leo Strauss and the American Right (1997). She is also the author of Alexandre Kojève: the Roots of Postmodern Politics (1994) and Terror and Civilization (forthcoming).

She argues that the central claims of Straussian thought wield a crucial influence on men of power in the contemporary United States. She elaborates her argument in this interview. ” —opendemocracy

“In 1970, Miles Davis was at the height of his powers, recording the Jack Johnson sessions. Now Sony are putting unheard music from this period out on CD. So why are some of the jazz legend’s fellow musicians appalled?” —Guardian.UK

“In the past few years, middlemen have siphoned off growing numbers of popular and lifesaving drugs and diverted them into a multibillion-dollar shadow market. Crooks have introduced counterfeit pharmaceuticals into the mainstream drug chain. Fast-moving operators have hawked millions of doses of narcotics over the Internet.

The result too often is pharmaceutical roulette for millions of unsuspecting Americans. Cancer patients receive watered-down drugs. Teenagers overdose on narcotics ordered online. AIDS clinics get fake HIV medicines.” —Washington Post

“Their findings included a much more dire assessment of Iraq’s dilapidated electrical and water systems than many Pentagon officials assumed. They warned of a society so brutalized by Saddam Hussein’s rule that many Iraqis might react coolly to Americans’ notion of quickly rebuilding civil society.

Several officials said that many of the findings in the $5 million study were ignored by Pentagon officials until recently, although the Pentagon said they took the findings into account. The work is now being relied on heavily as occupation forces struggle to impose stability in Iraq.” —New York Times

“The countdown to freedom has begun for the illusionist David Blaine, who is due to leave his Perspex box on Sunday night.

Tens of thousands of spectators are expected to watch the 30-year-old American be lowered to the ground, placed on a stretcher and rushed to a private hospital.

He has apparently spent the last 43 days in the box, which is suspended next to London’s Tower Bridge, apparently surviving on nothing but water.

A nutritional expert has warned that Blaine risks sudden death if extreme care is not taken when he begins eating again.

The magician has described suffering severe heart palpitations, blurred vision and breathing difficulties as his fast neared its end.” —BBC

“The forces that brought you the Harry Potter films are locked in a titanic struggle with the powers behind the Lord of the Rings series for the services of a woman hailed as the new J.K. Rowling.

Her name is Cornelia Funke, a 44-year-old German mother of two, who is taking children’s literature by storm. Championed by Barry Cunningham, the man who ‘discovered’ Rowling, Funke has sold half a million copies of her detective story, The Thief Lord, which spent 25 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and won several awards.

Her new book, Inkheart, the first part of a trilogy, promises to be even bigger. So big that Heyday Films, which produced the Harry Potter movies, is slugging it out with New Line Cinema, the company behind the Lord of the Rings series, for the rights to the big-screen version of Funke’s stories.” —Guardian.UK

Sick, wounded U.S. troops held in squalor: “Hundreds of sick and wounded U.S. soldiers including many who served in the Iraq war are languishing in hot cement barracks here while they wait — sometimes for months — to see doctors.

The National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers’ living conditions are so substandard, and the medical care so poor, that many of them believe the Army is trying push them out with reduced benefits for their ailments. One document shown to UPI states that no more doctor appointments are available from Oct. 14 through Nov. 11 — Veterans Day.

‘I have loved the Army. I have served the Army faithfully and I have done everything the Army has asked me to do,’ said Sgt. 1st Class Willie Buckels, a truck master with the 296th Transportation Company. Buckels served in the Army Reserves for 27 years, including Operation Iraqi Freedom and the first Gulf War. ‘Now my whole idea about the U.S. Army has changed. I am treated like a third-class citizen.'” —UPI

Iraq Coalition Casualty Count

Want a Raise? Standing Tall May Help —Yahoo! News

“Philip Pullman, the prizewinning children’s author, argues that we are creating a generation that ‘hates reading and feels nothing but hostility for literature’. ” —Guardian.UK

The strange case of Britain’s outspoken envoy in Uzbekistan, who was threatened with sack and faulted for shortcomings after upsetting Downing St. “Inquiries by the Guardian have discovered that Craig Murray, one of Britain’s youngest ambassadors, was subsequently called back from his Uzbekistan post, threatened with the loss of his job, and accused of a miscellaneous string of diplomatic shortcomings in what his friends say is a wholly unfair way…

‘He was told that the next time he stepped away from the American line, he would lose his post,’ said the source. During a visit earlier this year at the height of the political tensions prior to the Iraq invasion, the former development secretary, Clare Short, is reported to have said to him: ‘I love the job you are doing down here, but you know, don’t you, that if I go, you go.’ She eventually resigned over the Iraq war.” Murray had a depressive episode in the aftermath, requiring treatment with antidepressant medication. Shades of David Kelly?

“The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved a new option for people with Alzheimer’s disease, the first treatment specifically for late stages of the illness.

The drug, memantine, has long been sold in Germany, and many people in the United States have bought it over the Internet.

Now that memantine has been approved, Forest Laboratories will sell it in the United States under the brand name Namenda for patients with moderate to severe symptoms of Alzheimer’s. The company said the drug should be on pharmacy shelves in January.

Memantine does not offer miraculous benefits. The drug agency’s scientific advisers, in evaluating it last month, worried that memantine’s availability could give false hope to families of the most severely ill.

In studies, some patients who took memantine have experienced improvements in memory and thinking skills. But for the vast majority, the drug merely slows the pace of deterioration, letting patients maintain certain functions a little longer.” —New York Times

David Brake pointed me to this, as he puts it, ‘hugely entertaining’ chat session at the Guardian with their ‘barefoot doctor’ (free registration with The Guardian is necessary to view the session), who took unremitting abuse from several cynically angry participants. To wit:

Given that 95% of what you preach is superstitious nonsense and that the Observer effectively pays you to plug your products (available at an incredibly over-inflated price at a Boots near you!), how do you sleep at night?

thankyou for asking – generally on my right side so the blood can go more easilly into my liver, there to be purified as i sleep – this is the taoist sleeping position known as coiling of the five dragons – it’s advisable as it tends to prevent an overload of blood to the heart, which would produce unsettling dreams and possibly even waking delusions the next day

generally on my right side …. and possibly even waking delusions the next day

guess you must toss and turn in your sleep as much as you do in print…

Of what, exactly, are you a doctor?

Also, I know two people with Multiple Sclerosis. Should they massage their kidneys clockwise or anticlockwise? And what is the correct chant?

Fidel Castro reflects on Gabriel Garcia Márquez on the occasion of the publication of his autobiography: “He and I share a scandalous theory on the relativity of words in language. Also, as a public man obliged to write speeches and narrate events, I agree with the illustrious writer on the delight of finding the exact word – a kind of shared and inexhaustible obsession – until the phrase fits our criteria. Above all, I admire the fact that when an exact word doesn’t exist, he calmly invents one. How I admire that licence of his!

Now, with the publication of his autobiography, we have Gabo on Gabo. A book of his memories, a work that conjures up nostalgia for the thunder at four in the afternoon, which was the time of lightning and magic that his mother Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán missed when she was far away from Aracataca, the unpaved village of eternal torrential rain, traditions of alchemy, the telegraph and turbulent, sensational love which populates Maconda, the small town found in the pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude.” —Guardian.UK [via walker]

Reflections on the three-star general Rumsfeld recently put in charge of the hunt for bin Laden, whose “insistence that the Axis of Evil is a manifestation of Satan’s power aimed at destroying this ‘Christian nation’ makes him a walking provocation for an Islamic world already spooked by Bush’s glib calls to mount an international ‘crusade’ against terrorism in the weeks following Sept. 11.” — Tony Norman, —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Addendum: Billmon points out that his brandishments for Bush’s God-given role contravene Defense Dept. directives prohibiting partisan political activity in uniform.

Mayor’s bakery visited by FDA: “Some say it’s retribution for the city’s decision to ask Congress to investigate Bush.” —SF Chronicle

“Apple Computer unveiled the Windows version of its closely watched iTunes music jukebox software and song store Thursday, in a rare foray away from the Macintosh platform.

Like the iTunes Music Store service it unveiled for the Macintosh computer last April, the new jukebox software for Windows is free and offers a one-click access to downloads of an expansive music catalogue, with most songs priced at 99 cents. The company had promised to launch the Microsoft version, widely anticipated to be unveiled at Thursday’s event, by the end of the year.” —CNET

Paradigms U Like: “We want the freedom to believe what we like, ignore facts, sugar-coat reality, but then we have to recognize that there is a price to pay. If we abdicate reason and clear thinking and reality checks, the result is not only that pesky scientists can’t gainsay our beliefs–neither can we gainsay those of fundamentalists, theocrats, obscurantists, Nazis, Holocaust deniers. We have to choose, we can’t have it both ways, we can’t embrace irrational ideas we just happen to like and reject the ones we don’t. If you insist on setting sail for the realm of hunch and intuition and thinking with your gut, you’re likely to meet some fellow voyagers who are not all peace and love and light.” — Ophelia Benson, Butterfiles and Wheels

The fatal grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge, “a threshold that presides over the end of the continent and a gangway to the void beyond.” The essay starts with an arresting story, as is often the case in New Yorker style, in which one of only twenty-six survivors of jumps or falls from the Golden Gate gets a second chance… to jump again. It goes on to discuss the romance of jumping from the bridge, as contrasted to its sister the Bay Bridge, to suicide from which is considered tacky.

“Almost everyone in the Bay Area knows someone who has jumped, and it is perhaps not surprising that the most common fear among San Franciscans is gephyrophobia, the fear of crossing bridges.” The notoriety of the bridge inspires a peculiar pride in those in the Bay area, the article suggests. Even after an atrocious incident in which a jumper first threw his three-year-old daughter over the railing before followiing her down, a majority of citizens oppose a longstanding suggestion that the low railing be augmented by an anti-jumping barrier. Despite evidence that barriers have substantially reduced fatalities at other famous locales of high elevation, the idea of a barrier is opposed on grounds of aesthetics, cost, the facile and misguided attitude I might call ‘jumpers’ rights’, and the idea that ‘the jumpers will simply go elsewhere.’ Although this notion makes common sense, it is not true. A 1978 study followed up on 515 people who had been prevented from jumping from the bridge between 1937 and 1971; 94% were still alive or had died of causes other than suicide. For the thirty or so jumpers who go over the railing each year, current intervention methods (surveillance cameras, emergency phones on the bridge, and alleged special patrol attention) catch fifty to eighty, by most estimates.

Many are surprised that in San Francisco, where every platform seems to have an audience, the concerns about the Golden Gate’s fatal attraction inspire apathy. Suicidologists see that as a reflection of the time-honored stigmatization and abhorrence of the suicidal. This has taken a perverse form in the Bay Area media’s ‘countdown fever’ to the milestone 500th (in 1973) and 1000th (in 1995) suicide from the bridge. Among others, the Marin County coroner’s office, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Association of Suicidology have pleaded with the media to downplay the suicides. While there is good evidence that media coverage can inspire copycat suicides, no one needs to publicize the Golden Gate as a venue; it is ubiquitous in the Bay Area. This may perhaps be part of the reason that several wrongful-death lawsuits brought by survivors of Bridge jumpers have been thrown out of court.

The essayist concludes that building an anti-suicide barrier

would be to acknowledge that we do not understand each other; to acknowledge that much of life is lived on …the far side of the railing. (Its designer) believed that the Golden Gate would demonstrate man’s control over nature, and so it did. No engineer, however, has discovered a way to control the wildness within. —The New Yorker

The article says that many who work on the Golden Gate Bridge deal with the constant presence of suicide by distancing themselves from it. ‘I don’t like those people, I’ve got my own problems’, one is quoted as saying. But from its non-technical perspective, this thoughtful essay joins the ranks of important psychiatric papers which urge that the only way those of us who deal with the suicidal can be of help is to embrace fully the dizzying encounter with what it means to be truly and poignantly contemplating ending one’s own existence. Boston psychoanalysts Dan Buie and John Maltsberger, for example, under whom I was privileged to study, in a classical paper in the Archives of General Psychiatry in 1974 which remains unsurpassed as a primer of suicide assessment and treatment (but do psychiatric or psychological trainees ever get exposed to it anymore??), suggested that we are faced with two typical potential reactions to the suicidal patient — hatred or avoidance. The impact of disgust or contempt for the patient is intuitively clear; what Buie and Maltsberger point out is the malignant effect of trying to avoid hating them by avoiding them or their issues. Most of us do not have the stomach for the discovery that the barriers between us and them are so slim and that, in getting to know them, we might be getting to know something horrifying about ourselves. This is, I fear, a large part of the societal stigmatization of the mentally ill and a contribution to keeping the jumpers going over the railing.

“As the Nobels have been unveiled all week, reporters have been calling up laureates every day and asking where they were when they heard the news, and how does it feel to be a winner. But what about the losers? Where were they and how did it feel?” —Washington Post Of course, the Post chooses the most controversial no-Nobel laureate in recent years, because of his unpopularity among scientific colleagues he has alienated with his narcissism and his Creation-science viewpoint.

“Coetzee’s new novel, Elizabeth Costello, published this week, follows a celebrated but self-doubting novelist as she travels from Amsterdam to South Africa to Massachusetts to the very gates of Heaven for a series of addresses on topics ranging from literary realism to the problem of evil to the fate of the humanities.

Coetzee has long been hailed as a powerful and controversial, if often oblique, commentator on the ravages of apartheid. But Elizabeth Costello, which was long-listed for this year’s Booker Prize, reveals little of Coetzee’s views on South Africa’s continued reckoning with its past. It does, however, raise another unsettled and unsettling question that is likely to make some readers deeply uncomfortable, even angry: By raising billions of animals a year in often squalid conditions before brutally slaughtering them for their meat and skin, are we all complicit in a ‘crime of stupefying proportions’?

Those words are Elizabeth Costello’s, whose two lectures on animal rights — ‘The Philosophers and the Animals’ and ‘The Poets and the Animals’ — make up the longest section of the book. But the preoccupation is very much Coetzee’s own, and one that has moved increasingly close to the moral center of his work.” —Boston Globe

A skin patch that boosts the ‘male’ hormone testosterone markedly improves the sex lives of women suffering from a loss of sexual desire, following the removal of their ovaries. Testosterone increased desire scores and sexual activity in these women by about 40 per cent compared to a placebo.

The international team of researchers tested the patch in European and Australian women who had suffered early menopause due to the surgery and developed hypoactive sexual desire disorder. The disorder is the most common female sexual dysfunction and can be caused by depression, medication or natural menopause.” —New Scientist

Caffeine improves sperm speed and could help with infertility, suggests new research, but cannabis causes ‘burn-out’. —New Scientist

Your click sponsors free mammograms for indigent women. Click daily.

“Flattered though we are that Wired Magazine would borrow from Gizmodo to publish an email newsletter, this analysis by Adweek is blushmakingly over the top. ‘Although it’s rare for any publisher to do a press release about an e-mail newsletter — much less throw a launch party for it at New York’s Starfoods restaurant — the Gizmodo relationship will provide Wired with an extra dose of East Coast media credibility.’ So let’s get this straight. Wired defined web culture, it’s owned by New York’s most illustrious magazine group, and it’s relying on a blog to make it hip. Sure.“

Wesley Clark: “The decisive phase of the American campaign to invade Iraq and seize Baghdad was remarkably successful. But there were also problems that should not be ignored.” —New York Review of Books

“The Supreme Court, in a silent rebuff on Tuesday to federal policy on medical marijuana, let stand an appeals court ruling that doctors may not be investigated, threatened or punished by federal regulators for recommending marijuana as a medical treatment for their patients.

As a result, doctors in California and six other Western states where voters or legislators have approved marijuana for medical uses like pain relief may now discuss it freely with their patients without fear of jeopardizing their federal licenses to prescribe drugs. Advocates of medical marijuana greeted the court’s action as a significant and surprising victory.” —New York Times

The court-ordered removal of a feeding tube from a woman in a vegetative state upholds the wishes of her husband and legal guardian, pitted against her parents and siblings who insist that she wishes to live in a bitter and heart-wrenching battle. (Note to self: execute living will.)

The debate centers around the opacity of the so-called ‘persistent vegetative state’, unanswered questions about how much cognition and awareness, if any, people experience when in that state, and how irreversible it is. I have previously written about studies visualizing brain activity in such states and the promise they have of addressing these questions. In the meanwhile, what we’ll have to settle for is the vivid imagination of family members clustered around her whose wishful thinking expresses itself as reading intention and meaning into her spontaneous moans and reflexive gestures. And the grandstanding of a former Operation Rescue anti-abortion luminary who promises that her presence will attract media attention with comments like, “This is someone who’s cognitive, folks…”

Mrs. Schiavo’s situation is not nearly as cut and dried as some other right-to-die cases, because she is not elderly, comatose or hooked up to a respirator. And most of the facts are in dispute. Mr. Schiavo says his wife once told him that she would never want her life prolonged artificially; he believes doctors who have testified that Mrs. Schiavo is in a persistent vegetative state, unable to think or swallow food. A doctor appointed by the court supported this finding, as did those hired by Mr. Schiavo.

But other doctors have testified that with intensive therapy, their daughter could eat and perhaps even speak.

…Dr. Goodman said that disputes as intractable as the one between Mrs. Schiavo’s husband and parents were extremely rare, and that the animosity was turning the situation into the “ugliest end-of-life case ever.”

The Schindlers use the word “hate” to describe their feelings toward their son-in-law. They even theorize that Mr. Schiavo strangled their daughter that night in 1990, pointing to at least one doctor’s finding that she had a rigid neck when she arrived at the hospital. Shortly before her brain damage, Mrs. Schiavo, who her family described as shy and insecure, told them she wanted a divorce.

The Schindlers also question why Mr. Schiavo did not spend the $1 million he won in a medical malpractice suit on rehabilitative therapy for his wife.

Mr. Schiavo’s lawyers have suggested that the Schindlers wanted custody of their daughter just to get some of the malpractice money. On Tuesday, George Felos, Mr. Schiavo’s lawyer, repeated what his client had said all along: that he loves his wife and is simply carrying out her wishes. —New York Times

UC-Berkeley linguist George Lakoff focuses on how language shapes political discourse and manipulates the political sentiments of the voters. He suggests a method of analyzing the rhetoric around the Schwarzenegger victory that indicates the peril the Democrats are in. “Newspaper and TV reporters require a story. Each story requires a frame. How was the election of Arnold Schwartzenegger framed? Here is a selection…

It is a general finding about frames that if a strongly held frame doesn’t fit the facts, the facts will be ignored and the frame will be kept. The frames listed above don’t do very well at fitting the facts – though each has a grain of truth. Let’s look at the facts that each frame hides…

…(M)uch of what occurred in the recall election is the same as what has been going on for some time in American politics. The Schwartzenegger election, I propose, should not be seen as an entirely unique event, despite having unique elements, but rather part of the overall political landscape…

In short, Arnold’s victory is right in line with other conservative Republican victories. Davis’ defeat is right in line with other Democratic defeats. Unless the Democrats realize this, they will not learn the lesson of this election. And indeed, conservatives are busy trying to keep Democrats from learning this lesson…

The Democrats ignore the power of framing at their peril.”

George Monbiot writes in the Guardian as to why Appeasing the Armed Forces Has Become a Political Necessity for the American President: “…(W)hile we are slowly becoming aware of the corporate capture of our governments, we seem to have overlooked the growing power of another recipient of this back-to-front lobbying. In the United States, a sort of reverse military coup appears to be taking place.

Both the president and the opposition seem to be offering the armed forces, though they do not appear to have requested it, an ever greater share of the business of government.

Every week, the state department makes a list of Mr Bush’s most important speeches and visits, to distribute to US embassies around the world. The embassy in London has a public archive dating from June last year. During this period, Bush has made 41 major speeches to live audiences. Of these, 14 – just over a third – were delivered to military personnel or veterans.

Now Bush, of course, is commander-in-chief as well as president, and he has every right to address the troops. But this commander-in-chief goes far beyond the patriotic blandishments of previous leaders. He sometimes dresses up in the uniform of the troops he is meeting.

He quotes their mottoes and songs, retells their internal jokes, mimics their slang. He informs the ‘dog-faced soldiers’ that they are ‘the rock of Marne’, or asks naval cadets whether they gave ‘the left-handed salute to Tecumseh, the God of 2.0’. The television audience is mystified, but the men love him for it. He is, or so his speeches suggest, one of them.

He starts by leading them in chants of ‘Hoo-ah! Hoo-ah!’, then plasters them with praise and reminds them that their pay, healthcare and housing (unlike those of any other workers in America) are being upgraded. After this, they will cheer everything he says. So he uses these occasions to attack his opponents and announce new and often controversial policies.

The marines were the first to be told about his interstate electricity grid; he instructed the American Legion about the reform of the Medicare program; last week he explained his plans for the taxation of small businesses to the national guard. The troops may not have the faintest idea what he’s talking about, but they cheer him to the rafters anyway. After that, implementing these policies looks like a patriotic duty.

This strikes me as an abuse of his position as commander-in-chief, rather like the use of Air Force One (the presidential airplane) for political fundraising tours. The war against terror is a feeble excuse. Indeed, all this began long before September 2001; between February and August that year he gave eight major speeches to the military, some of which were stuffed with policy announcements.

But there is a lot more at stake than merely casting the cloak of patriotism over his corporate welfare programs. Appeasing the armed forces has become, for President Bush, a political necessity. He cannot win the next election without them. Unless he can destroy the resistance in Iraq, the resistance will destroy his political career. But crushing it requires the continuous presence of a vast professional army and tens of thousands of reservists.” [via CommonDreams]

“The current brouhaha over the outing of an undercover CIA officer brings to mind vivid memories and comic ironies. The 1982 law that now threatens Karl Rove, or whoever it was who leaked the officer’s name, is the Intelligence Identities Protection Act – and it was adopted to silence me.” — Philip Agee, Philadelphia Inquirer [via CommonDreams]

“The United States long has winked at Israel’s policy of ambiguity about its nuclear weapons. American leaders have turned a blind eye to the Israeli program ever since President Nixon struck a deal with Prime Minister Golda Meir in 1969 that the U.S. wouldn’t insist on inspections as long as Israel did not go public about nuclear weapons or test them openly. Now, the disclosure by senior Bush administration and Israeli officials that Israel has modified U.S.-supplied cruise missiles so they can carry nuclear warheads from submarines is a dangerous step.

This is a hostile move aimed at intimidating Israel’s neighbors. But it won’t deter countries such as Iran from developing their own weapons; instead it will only encourage them to move ahead.” —LA Times editorial [via CommonDreams]

Dispatch from the front lines of travel: “I am terrified of offending the person I’m about to meet, as it has become clear to me that ‘on time’ here 1) means 10 minutes early; and 2) is a religion. Well then, you say, I really should have planned ahead. Yes, but can I explain to you how fricking hard it is to find anything here? This is the place where, quite literally, the streets have no name. I’m not sure why they still haven’t bothered to name them, but they haven’t. Seems not to be a priority. Consequently, people don’t give you addresses here to find things (because there are no addresses). They give you schematics.

(Note to self: Develop proposal for Japanese government, whereby I become minister of street naming…)” — Seth Stevenson, Slate

Manchester (UK) citizens can volunteer to spend twenty-four hours as simulated Camp X-Ray internees at facsimile of the jewel in the crown of the US WarOnTerrorism®:”This is performance art with a mission to dump state terrorism on the doorsteps of the inner city. It is meant to shock. ‘As art goes, it is pretty straightforward,’ said its creator, Jai Redman, speaking in his guard’s uniform from the other side of locked steel gates.

‘There is nothing complicated about it. This is a fully-operational miniature version of the US internment camp at Guantanamo Bay. What is the point of painting a picture of it or showing photographs or a video of it? People have seen those and are immune to them.

‘I wanted to create a mirror image of the site and place it in the community which is the home of Ron Fiddler [known as Jamal Udeen], one of the British prisoners in the camp, and see what local reaction would be.'” —Guardian.UK

Reformed cocaine addict is £50,000 Booker winner: “DBC Pierre, the unexpected winner of the £50,000 Man Booker Prize last night, promised to use his entire winnings to pay back some of the debts he ran up during a nine-year period as a cocaine addict and heavy gambler.

The virtually unknown author, who won for his debut novel, Vernon God Little, turned last night’s prize-giving ceremony in London into an astonishing exercise in self-pity.” —Telegraph.UK

In a surprise decision that confounded all predictions, a little-known Australian writer named D.B.C. Pierre was awarded the Man Booker prize for his novel Vernon God Little at a gala dinner in London last night.

“Unbelievable!” said Toronto bookseller Ben McNally, who each year puts together a Booker-themed window display at Nicholas Hoare Books on Front St. E. “I don’t have any copies.” —Toronto Star

Anybody out there read this yet? Do you intend to?

“Could the Patriot Act threaten the growth of e-commerce?

That is the question being raised by some online booksellers and e-tailing analysts, who suggest that the Patriot Act, passed in October 2001 to give the government new counterterrorism capabilities, has already changed the way some companies and consumers do business online. For some consumers, it has meant fewer online purchases of politically incorrect books. For the Web sites, it has meant changes to privacy policies and marketing strategies, among other things.” —New York Times

The BBC reports that A Palestinian splinter group has reportedly claimed responsibility for the Gaza convoy blast that ‘kills four’. While the major Palestinian militant factions were quick to say they have no quarrel with non-Israelis, resentment is growing over the perception that the US sides with Israel. The US gave the usual assurances that it would bring the perpetrators to justice, and the FBI has already dispatched a team to the Middle East to investigate. The three American dead were security guards with a convoy of US officials interviewing Palestinians for Fulbright scholarships to study at US universities. Not your usual imperialist behavior guaranteed to foment resentment; while other indigenous movements are attentive to resisting cultural assimilation to Western ideals and values, this has not been an impressive focus of the intifada. I highly doubt this attack was predicated on resentment that Palestinian youth are being offered opportunities to study in the US.

So are these people crazy? If this was not a gross miscalculation, what possible advantage could they gain from drawing the US directly into the battle? A US that has shown it will assimilate anything and everything to the WoT®; will respond with withering indiscriminate military force, sending in yahoos who are exquisitely equitable and democratic to all their opponents — all ‘hajjis’ are terrorists and deserve to die. Are the Palestinians who planned this bombing watching Iraq and thinking that, in Palestine too, the US military will inspire a massive popular uprising much more effectively than Israeli oppression has?

—and why he won’t: “The president needs to apologize for Iraq — but he’s constitutionally incapable of admitting he was wrong. ” —Salon

“Nearly three years ago, in number 26, we commented on the promise of the semantic web to convert the Net into a self-navigable and self-understandable space. Where are we today?

The key point of the semantic web is the conversion of the current structure of the web as a data storage (interpretable only by human beings, that are able to put the data into context) into a structure of information storage.

In order to convert data into information we have to put it into context by adding metadata, data that contains the semantics, the explanation of the data it refers to; in the end, the context.” —Inf@Vis

“The new chip is a parallel processor capable of performing 25 billion floating-point operations per second, or 25 gigaflops.

According to the company, the chip has the potential to bring supercomputer performance to the desktop.

An ordinary desktop PC outfitted with six PCI cards, each containing four of the chips, would perform at about 600 gigaflops (or more than half a teraflop).

At this level of performance, the PC would qualify as one of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world.

‘That’s a supercomputer on the desktop,’ said Simon McIntosh-Smith, ClearSpeed’s director of architecture.

The souped-up PC would cost about $25,000, ClearSpeed said. By comparison, most of the supercomputers on the Top 500 list are clusters of hundreds of processors and cost millions of dollars.” —Wired News

“Who did we miss?

So, are you congratulating yourself on having read everything on our list or screwing the newspaper up into a ball and aiming it at the nearest bin?

Are you wondering what happened to all those American writers from Bret Easton Ellis to Jeffrey Eugenides, from Jonathan Franzen to Cormac McCarthy?

Have women been short-changed? Should we have included Pat Barker, Elizabeth Bowen, A.S. Byatt, Penelope Fitzgerald, Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch?

What’s happened to novels in translation such as Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Hesse’s Siddhartha, Mishima’s The Sea of Fertility, Süskind’s Perfume and Zola’s Germinal?

Writers such as J.G. Ballard, Julian Barnes, Anthony Burgess, Bruce Chatwin, Robertson Davies, John Fowles, Nick Hornby, Russell Hoban, Somerset Maugham and V.S. Pritchett narrowly missed the final hundred. Were we wrong to lose them?” —Guardian.Observer

US soldiers bulldoze farmers’ crops:

“US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops.

The stumps of palm trees, some 70 years old, protrude from the brown earth scoured by the bulldozers beside the road at Dhuluaya, a small town 50 miles north of Baghdad. Local women were yesterday busily bundling together the branches of the uprooted orange and lemon trees and carrying then back to their homes for firewood.

Nusayef Jassim, one of 32 farmers who saw their fruit trees destroyed, said: ‘They told us that the resistance fighters hide in our farms, but this is not true. They didn’t capture anything. They didn’t find any weapons.’

Other farmers said that US troops had told them, over a loudspeaker in Arabic, that the fruit groves were being bulldozed to punish the farmers for not informing on the resistance which is very active in this Sunni Muslim district.” —Independent News

“A controversial IVF technique could see babies being born with three parents, scientists have suggested.

Experts in China say they have created embryos using eggs from two women and sperm from one man.” —BBC

Taking your freedom: “Why are so many people and small to medium companies see one of the biggest dangers of this century in TCPA/TCG (Trusted Computing)?

We drafted a small text, after which you shoule be able to answer it for yourself.”

Maureen Dowd appears to agree with my longstanding impression that Dubya is a malleable puppet under the control of ‘handlers’ from his father’s era:

“When Bush the Elder put Bush the Younger in the care of Dick Cheney, he assumed that Mr. Cheney, who had been his defense secretary in Desert Storm, would play the wise, selfless counselor. Poppy thought his old friend Dick would make a great vice president, tutoring a young president green on foreign policy and safeguarding the first Bush administration’s legacy of internationalism, coalition-building and realpolitik.

Instead, Good Daddy has had to watch in alarm as Bad Daddy usurped his son’s presidency, heightened its conservatism and rushed America into war on the mistaken assumption that if we just acted like king of the world, everyone would bow down or run away.”

But Dowd thinks, or hopes, there are grounds for encouragement:

“Last week, for the first time, W. — who tried to pattern his presidency as the mirror opposite of his real father’s — curbed his surrogate father’s hard-line crony Rummy (Mr. Cheney’s mentor in the Ford years).

The incurious George, who has said he prefers to get his information from his inner circle rather than newspapers or TV, may finally be waking up to the downside of such self-censorship. You can end up hearing a lot of bogus, self-serving garbage from Ahmad Chalabi, via Mr. Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, instead of unpleasant reality.

I hope Mr. Bush at least read the news coverage of his vice president’s Iraq speech on Friday, which was a masterpiece of demagogy.” —New York Times

See my comments below about Shiite anti-American demonstrations earlier this week.

“An anti-American cleric, whose forces clashed on Thursday with American soldiers and killed two of them, has proclaimed his own government in Iraq.

The move failed to produce any signs of popular support on Saturday but did appear to notch up his defiance of the American-led occupation.

Mainstream Iraqi leaders roundly condemned the announcement by the cleric, Moktada al-Sadr. The Baghdad City Council denounced it, as did members of the Iraqi Governing Council, the overall leadership body appointed by the United States.

Mr. Sadr, 30, is evidently challenging the authority of the Governing Council while trying to build a following among poor and alienated Iraqis among the Shiites Muslims, who make up a majority of the country’s population.” &mdashNY Times

“A newspaper has noticed that several US media have published identical letters from soldiers based in Iraq but which are signed by different people. And many of the letters have already been published in US newspapers.

The latest case of so-called ‘astroturf’ is reminiscent of a story we broke in January – Google hunts down ‘President Bush is demonstrating genuine leadership’. It transpired then that the Republican Party was behind the ‘astroturf’.

According to The Olympian, it received two identical letters from different soldiers in the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Airborne Infantry Regiment, but on doing a news search discovered identical letters in 11 different newspapers. The letters paint a positive picture about how Iraq is returning to normal. But according to the Olympian, polls show that support for the war is dropping in the USA.

On investigation, the newspaper discovered that the soldiers named in the letters do exist, but the individuals don’t know why the letters were sent under their names to a number of newspapers. One squaddie didn’t find out about the letter until his father read a letter signed by his son in his local West Virginian newspaper.” —The Inquirer [not The Enquirer] [via Dave Farber’s Interesting People mailing list] How high up in the dysadministration or the Republican Party do you think the instigation to do this goes?

“Michelle Thomas is learning to ‘see’, not with her eyes but her ears.

Blind since birth, Ms Thomas is able to recognize the walls and doors of her house, discern whether the lights are on or off and even distinguish a CD from a floppy disk after only a week using a revolutionary new system.

She is ‘seeing with sound’.” BBC

A computer reconstruction of one second of sound as seen by the vOICe system:

Choice words on the significance of the Schwarzenegger phenom from Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Gene Collier:

• “Two-thirds of the people who voted for him believe he will not have to raise taxes to rectify a $10 billion budget deficit. They are psychotic. One academic has called it ‘a rescue fantasy.’

  This is what happens when you get out the vote.

• Millions who rarely, if ever, vote, by a 64-36 percent margin preferred Kindergarten Cop to Cruz Bustamante. Bustamante had labored under the ridiculous notion that as lieutenant governor, he was somehow more qualified than Arnold.
• Forty-four percent of those exit-polled said they’d made up their minds more than a month ago. In other words, when actual issues were put on the table in the past few weeks, they’d already tuned out. This is what passes for citizenship in the 21st century.
• The best case scenario for the Schwarzenegger administration is for Arnold to go down in history as the most important (if nowhere near the most competent) governor in history, important because Arnold was somehow the one pretend politician, in our hour of darkest ignorance, who awakened Americans to what’s become of our civic life, our public discourse, and to where our sprawling national apathy has led us.
• The worst case scenario, and a scenario eminently more plausible, is that elected officials nationwide will become substantially more skittish about making difficult policy decisions for fear of triggering a recall, that they will never really be able to stop campaigning and that the bitter political partisanship that exploded and ruptured the legislative process during the Clinton-Lewinsky affair will continue to steamroll any attempt at reasonable negotiation on and careful resolution of public issues.
• The recall election that brought down Gov. Gray Davis and inserted Arnold was a small-time Republican fantasy until millionaire San Diego legislator Darrell Issa threw a few million dollars at it. Some 48 hours before polls even opened, California Democrat Zoe Lofgren warned of an instant retaliation recall. And, Lofgren told The New York Times, ‘I don’t think there is any way to stop it.’
• Democrats may have no choice. Republicans have gotten so adept at challenging elections, it’s hard to imagine that a close presidential election next November that doesn’t go Bush’s way won’t be thrown into the courts again.
• This is tragic, but while the politicians engage in the most divisive public rhetoric, the public and the media have no moral base for objection because they are both immensely culpable in the enabling climate. In America today, most serious public issues are debated by parties on the extreme opposite edges of those issues. The moderate and often perfectly sensible people in the middle, the vast majority that could enact viable compromise, are instead watching ‘Everybody Loves Raymond.’

  In California, in Pennsylvania, in Washington, D.C., and in so many other places, there simply is no centrist constituency.

• To quote the great social observer and comic George Carlin, ‘You know the one group I never criticize? Politicians. Politicians are put there by the public. Garbage in, garbage out. You get the leadership you deserve.’
• The media are equally bad. The thunder you hear in the distance is from hordes of short-attention-span editors and producers and reporters and columnists fleeing California, lest they be required to illuminate the complex economic issues that brought the Schwarzenegger Phenomenon to the table in the first place, rather than just provide a shameless conduit for celebrity culture.
• Arnold Schwarzenegger cannot become president but only because he wasn’t born in the United States. If he could run, he could win, even if he knows nothin’ about nothin’. We’ve already proven that.”

“A writer who met Capt. James J. Yee at Guantánamo this spring wonders if the atmosphere there is bound to turn chaplains and translators into turncoats.” NY Times Magazine

“In America’s rundown urban neighborhoods, the diseases associated with old age are afflicting the young. And stress could be one reason.” NY Times Magazine

See my comments below about Shiite anti-American demonstrations earlier this week.

“An anti-American cleric, whose forces clashed on Thursday with American soldiers and killed two of them, has proclaimed his own government in Iraq.

The move failed to produce any signs of popular support on Saturday but did appear to notch up his defiance of the American-led occupation.

Mainstream Iraqi leaders roundly condemned the announcement by the cleric, Moktada al-Sadr. The Baghdad City Council denounced it, as did members of the Iraqi Governing Council, the overall leadership body appointed by the United States.

Mr. Sadr, 30, is evidently challenging the authority of the Governing Council while trying to build a following among poor and alienated Iraqis among the Shiites Muslims, who make up a majority of the country’s population.” &mdashNY Times

I don’t have the heart to say much about the outrageous Texas redistricting; my contempt for the Californians who think Schwarzenegger is what they need in the governor’s mansion (no, but he is what they deserve), Rush Limbaugh’s admission of his addiction to prescription analgesics; the dysadministration’s pro-war propaganda dog-and-pony show (and how they are only willing, as was the case with Ashcroft’s circuit in defense of the USA PATRIOT Act last month, to speak in front of safe audiences at venues such as conservative thinktanks); the fact that the Valerie Plame scandal is already well on its way off the radar screen of a country with an attention span shorter than a TV commercial; and a myriad of other issues spurring me on to rage fatigue this weekend…

Happy third blogiversary to ::: wood s lot ::: . By his own past admission, Mark found FmH one of his original inspirations and I was flattered by his emulation (and, even if sometimes unacknowledged, his echoing of a number of links from here) early on in his weblogging career. From such humble beginnings, he has grown into a signature voice presence filling a unique niche and appearing on nearly everybody’s blogroll, perhaps in no small measure because his own sidebar is probably the most voluminous of any webpage that does not explicitly call itself a ‘ web portal’ (oops! look at his current epigram). And it appears he does read everything he blogrolls, and he notices everything going on in the weblog world. I would never think of ignoring his anniversary because he appears not to ignore anyone else’s; he is like the distant uncle whom you hardly know but who sends you a birthday card without fail every year with a $5 bill tucked into it. (What are we then to make of the fact that he notes almost nonchalantly that he was late in noticing his own blogiversary this year?)

When I started FmH nearly four years ago and weblogging was so novel that one had to describe what one was doing, I explained, ‘Unlike a list of “cool links”, the links in a blog are “hot”, more timely and dated and, as one commentator put it, of “finer granularity”.’ A weblog reflects one’s use of the web, and Mark uses the web in an entirely different way than most. That he has never timestamped his entries is for me a signifier of his aspiration to be timeless instead of timely, as contrasted with most others in the weblog universe. You could call up many a page from his archive without indication that it was not today’s posting. [The absence of a timestamp also keeps him above the fray of who found a link first and who has to attribute it to whom.]

Thus, wood s lot functions as an extraordinary sort of ‘common book’ or source book of memorable, deep, often abstruse, at times obscure references and quotes. Although some would say that it indicates I don’t understand, I find the solipsism, self-indulgence, and preciousness in some of the postmodern discourse which Mark favors by linking to frustrating and maddening. (Oh well, there goes the sound of FmH being removed from a number of blogrolls…) Yes, yes, I know, the meaning of the text is no longer supposed to reside in the text but in each reader’s experience of it, so it is my problem, not his. The experience of reading wood s lot is often a visceral confrontation with the yearning to know what it all means. Does he intend to deconstruct meaning or convey it? I suppose one of the things it means is that I am hopelessly stuck in the modernist ethic in which meaning is author-centered, intentional and singular. But I suppose that is already clear to readers of FmH. I suppose what we get to ask more directly through the encounter with wood s lot than other weblogs is whether the weblogger can legitimately aspire to be an artist.

Mark rarely sullies his selections with his own voice. Having been a faithful wood s lot reader from the outset (despite my modernist, rather than postmodernist, vantage point) I have grown to feel that that is too bad that we do not know what it means to him. Although it is arguable that one may convey meaning assertively solely through one’s choice of material to post (FmH could also be accused of leaning in that direction at times; perhaps I have more readers who like my selection of links than my commentary), my birthday wish for the fourth year of wood s lot is that Mark might give us more direct glimpses of who he is himself, how he reacts to the world and what he thinks about the things he posts. And what he does when he takes a rest from his mercurial surfing, cutting and pasting. So, happy birthday, uncle, this year I send you a birthday card, but I include a little note letting you know how much the family seeks to know you better, get past your remoteness. Somehow I sense you are not constituted solely by your embrace of others’ sociopolitical commentary and cultural criticism, that there lies a mystery within an enigma waiting to be unwrapped a little.

Unless… do I have him all wrong? I know he still frequents FmH once in awhile; perhaps he will respond. As perhaps will FmH readers who also read his page.

Finally, there is that longstanding issue of the quirky deconstruction of meaning in his naming of his weblog, about which I have had some back-and-forth banter with Mark over the years. Anything but “wood s lot” would convey more meaning: “wood’s lot”; “woodlot”, even “wood slot” could work for me. That “s” dangles vertiginously without bridging, as I have said, like an itch I can’t scratch…

Vatican in HIV condom row: “The Catholic Church has been accused of telling people in countries with high rates of HIV that condoms do not protect against the deadly virus.

The claims are made in a Panorama programme called Sex and the Holy City to be screened on BBC One on Sunday.

It says cardinals, bishops, priests and nuns in four continents are saying HIV can pass through tiny holes in condoms.” —BBC

I caught the tail end of Terry Gross’ interview on Fresh Air with the original man who can dish it out but can’t take it. He spent most of the time beefing about all the people who are critical of him and about Gross for reminding us all, contrasting the treatment he got to the reception she had previously given Al Franken. I have never before heard Gross lose her composure as she did under this onslaught, stammering with a quavering voice and trying to regain her edge. She shouldn’t have gotten so flustered— it is O’Reilly who comes out of the piece sounding like a fool (to start with, for ever agreeing to an NPR interview?). Finally O’Reilly made it easy for her — he walked out on the rest of the interview, leaving her with dead air to fill, which she readily did by reading aloud from one of the press drubbings of O’Reilly’s new book, Who’s Looking Out for You? It was this review that had started O’Reily whining about how unfair it was that the reviewer had reviewed him instead of his book. and how he would never do that… and then proceeded to call the reviewer in question a pinhead and throw insult after innuendo at NPR, Fresh Air and Gross. She missed an ironic opportunity, however. Instead of being so adversarial with O’Reilly, when he complained about how much she was focusing on the media criticism he has been receiving, she should have told him she was bestowing on him the courtesy of an opportunithy to answer his critics. Give ’em enough rope, Terry…

Situation in Iraq ‘better than you probably think,’ Bush says The Star, Toronto

“Lonely hearts have spent millennia trying to capture the pain of rejection in painting, poetry and song. Now neuroscientists have seen it flickering in some remarkable brain images from college students suffering a social snub.

The brain scans reveal that two of the same brain regions that are activated by physical pain are also activated by social exclusion.

‘This doesn’t mean a broken arm hurts exactly the same way that a broken heart does,’ says Matthew Lieberman of the University of California, Los Angeles, who led the research. ‘But it shows that the human brain sounds the same alarm system for emotional and physical distress.'” New Scientist If it is so —that social disconnection is as ‘painful’ as physical injury — we have been so heavily selected to avoid it that it would not be too much of an extrapolation to call the need for connectedness a basic or instinctual ‘drive’. New Scientist

Fanciful DARPA projects to eliminate battlefield evacuation of the wounded near reality: “‘It sounds coldhearted, but a wounded soldier can be more disruptive than a dead one. At minimum, you need a couple of guys to carry him out. And once he’s out, it hurts unit cohesion,’ said Jim Lewis, with the Center for Strategic & International Studies. ‘So the more you can do upfront to stabilize someone — and the more that person can do for themselves — the better.'”

…The technologies, developed under a broad Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency effort called Persistence in Combat (PDF), all sound pretty far-fetched: a painkiller soldiers could take — before they get hurt; a sensor that scans the eye for internal trauma; a bandage that stimulates skin repair with electrical impulses.” Wired News

“At least 35,000 people died as a result of the record heatwave that scorched Europe in August 2003, says an environmental think tank.

The Earth Policy Institute (EPI), based in Washington DC, warns that such deaths are likely to increase, as ‘even more extreme weather events lie ahead’.” New Scientist

…not to hold that cellphone too close to your head. Wired News

He Thinks, Therefore He Sells: “Jonathon Keats, a 32-year-old conceptual artist and novelist, has announced plans to auction off futures contracts on 6 billion neurons in his brain, which he copyrighted this spring. The copyright, like all copyrights, lasts for the life of the creator plus 70 years, thanks to an extension granted by 1998’s controversial Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.” Wired News

Shirin Ebadi, who on Friday was awarded the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize, defies Nobel

history, as the odds for winning the coveted award are heavily stacked in stacked in favor of male US-European notables. The recipient was ‘shocked’ to learn she had been awarded the prize. The Vatican was disappointed (Reuters) that the Prize was not awarded to the Pope; although the Nobel does not officially acknowledge its short list for its prizes. he was rumored to be in the running. Czech President Vaclav Havel and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva were also seen as possibilities (SF Chronicle). Former Polish prime minister Lech Walesa, 1983 peace prize winner, called the decision ‘a big mistake’ because the Pope did not win. The Pope, however, plans to send her a message of congratulations. Sant’ Egidio, a Catholic lay community whose work for peace and human rights, particularly in Africa, had made it one of the leading contenders for the prize, released an approving message.

According to ABC, the Iranian government was ‘happy’ with the award, which however the BBC reports is divisive in Iran. Ebadi is considered a thorn in the side of Iranian hardliners (CNN); the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 saw her removal as the nation’s first woman judge. She is opposed to foreign intervention in Iran, not that this will make her an appreciably thorny problem for the U.S. dysadministration hardliners with designs on the region and a remarkable disdain for world opinion.

Radical new anti-copying strategy: “Illegally copied games protected by the system work properly at first, but start to fall apart after the player has had just enough time to get hooked. As a result, the pirated discs actually encourage people to buy the genuine software, the developers say.” New Scientist

further evidence those inscrutable ingrates just do not appreciate their liberators: “Up to 10,000 Iraqi Shias have taken to the streets of a Baghdad suburb to denounce the US for ‘terrorism’.

The protest came during the funerals of two Shias allegedly killed by US soldiers in Sadr City on Thursday.” BBC The promise of Shiite rage at the US occupation gives new reason for fear among US troops. The government line has been that Saddam loyalists and foreign terrorists are behind the attacks on the occupiers and that the Shiites welcomed American liberation from oppression under Saddam.

“Lawyers for Lee Boyd Malvo revealed yesterday that they will argue he was insane during the Washington area sniper shootings last fall because he had been ‘indoctrinated’ by his co-defendant, John Allen Muhammad.

Earlier yesterday, a Prince William County judge hearing Muhammad’s case barred all mental health testimony from his trial next week because Muhammad refused to be interviewed by a prosecution expert.” Washington Post

No, California Is Not Falling Into the Sea: “Forget what the talking heads tell you: California is not falling into the sea, people. And if this is a sign of the coming Apocalypse, it is only the latest of its type. Or have you forgotten the kind of folks we elect here on the left coast? Ronald Reagan, Jerry Brown, George Deukmejian, Pete Wilson, Gray Davis – those are the governors that have run things here since I was born, and I’m not sure how Arnold could be much worse.” —Christopher Scheer, AlterNet

“I was led to reconsider my reactions to Limbaugh’s troubles by a surprisingly compassionate editorial in the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ is a leading purveyor of brittle condescension and scorn, the first apostle of hard-ass conservatism. But the Journal asked its readers to feel human sympathy.” —William Greider, AlterNet

“Welcome! The Artificial Language Lab is a place where we study invented languages (also known as constructed languages, etc) and discuss language design issues. I hope this laboratory can furnish some of the specimens, tools and materials that you will need for your own experiments.” Languages examined include: Damin,

Glaugnea,

Interglossa,

Lingua Ignota,

‘Plan B’,

Ro,

Sona,

Spocanian,

Suma,

Taneraic,

Universala Lingva Kodo,

UNI,

Volapük Revised,

Vorlin, and

Zengo. [via caterina, who likes Glaugnea]

A review of this book by psychologists Scott Lilienfeld, Steven Jay Lynn, and Jeffrey Lohr, which attempts to alert potential consumers to the distinctions to be found among mental health treatments with respect to their scientific validation. This is an important issue, since nonvalidated therapeutic techniques can be not only useless but dangerous or lethal — e.g. the death of a Colorado girl in 2000 at the hands of “rebirthing” therapists. I am not sure if this is the fault of the book, which I have not read, or of this review in the Skeptical Inquirer, but this approach risks confusion and invalidation of potentially useful approaches by lumping three sorts of controversial therapeutic techniques together — those whose claims are based on scientifically valid reasoning but whose empirical validation is less than robust; those which have empirically proven efficacy which we do not understand in scientific terms (yet?); and those which are most like absurd quackery, preying on the credulity of the desperate and untutored. From among the therapies they touch on, for example, I would place critical incident stress debriefing (for which the lack of efficacy in some careful research studies has hit the media and the profession like a bombshell in the last few years since Sept. 11) in the first category; EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) in the second category; and Thought Field Therapy in the third. Although it is not likely such a book, which is densely written and technically argued, will reach those at the mercy of the third sort of therapies in order to inform and protect them, that is its supposed raison d’etre.

As evidence accumulates that one should not scoff at the placebo effect, which may represent a considerable part of the healing power (or, shall we say, the mobilization of the patient’s intrinsic healing power?) of techniques scientifically understood or not, I am surprised that “unscientific” is essentially used as an epithet and a sole criterion in evaluating these therapies. Psychoanalysis itself is an artful belief system, scientifically unverifiable, which exerts its power by the skill with which the practitioner enlists the patient into sharing the belief system. One might describe psychopharmacological healing in the same way, and not just if one is trying to be a wag. Perhaps what the authors ought to be driving at is a distinction between techniques which appeal to and utilize our intelligence (by which I mean our intuitive and ’emotional intelligence’ as well as our reasoning faculties) rather than insulting it…

“Whales blasted by military sonar appear to die of the bends. The finding suggests the use of sound waves to detect submarines under the sea might need to be restricted.

Scientists from Spain and Britain have uncovered the first evidence that cetaceans suffer from the formation of nitrogen bubbles in their vital organs. This is a classic symptom of the decompression sickness suffered by divers who surface too quickly, and can be fatal.” —New Scientist The association between large-scale naval exercises and large-scale whale beachings has been noted before; this may explain why. Deep-diving whales startled by sonar may surface precipitously, causing the decompression disease which can be fatal; or the sonar’s sound waves may actually hasten nitrogen bubble formation. I had assumed that the sonar was disrupting the whales’ inner ear mechanisms, which actually may not be incompatible with the present explanation.

“Perplexing observations beamed back by a NASA spacecraft are fuelling debates about a mystery of biblical proportions – is our Universe infinite? Scientists have announced tantalising hints that the Universe is actually relatively small, with a hall-of-mirrors illusion tricking us into thinking that space stretches on forever.

However, work by a second team seems to contradict this, and scientists are now busy trying to resolve the conundrum.” —New Scientist The new work is based on analysis of the size of fluctuations or ‘ripples’ in the cosmic microwave background radiation that is an artifact of the conditions of the universe soon after it came into existence. A finite universe would place constraints on the size of the ripples, as scientists think they are now seeing. But if the illusion that space is infinite is a ‘hall of mirrors’ effect, other scientists, remonstrate, there would be some symmetry in the background radiation pattern observed in different directions, which is not seen. ‘Round and ’round we go…

In an interview iwth the Financial Times, Rumsfeld showed how annoyed he was by not being informed in advance of the formation of the Iraq Stabilization Group, a vehicle for national security advisor Condoleeza Rice to oversee the ‘postwar’ occupation and ‘reconstruction’ as well as give more of a say to the Dept of State. Both the military occupation, of course, and the civilian ‘reconstruction’ under Paul Bremer have been under Defense Dept oversight. White House spokesman Scott McClellan scrambled to cover dysadministration embarrassment that Rumsfeld had been left in the dark, and Condoleeza Rice did her usual dissembling, claiming that she had conferred in advance with the Defense Secretary, which he disputes. —NY Times

“The Qatar-based al Jazeera network–often called the CNN of the Arab world–is known for broadcasting images and reports that the Western powers would rather you not see. The news outlet has a reputation for not backing down, but that seems to be changing. With its star reporter under arrest (he’s been accused of being a part of al Qaeda) and the station at least temporarily silenced in Iraq, al Jazeera has apparently caved to US pressure.

According to Arab News, the station yanked two political cartoons from its Arabic and English-language Website when a US official from the State Department complained that they were ‘inflammatory’ [read more].

…(W)e now present both expunged cartoons.” —The Memory Hole

And other revelations from David Kay’s report. : Fred Kaplan in Slate dissects the President’s insupportable propaganda about the Kay Report proving that Saddam Hussein was a threat. Furthermore, the report supports the conclusion that the UN inspection process was what kept any weapons development in Saddam’s Iraq at bay. “Saddam wanted and, in some cases, tried to resurrect the weapons programs that he had built in the 1980s, but that the United Nations sanctions and inspections prevented him from doing so.” In answer to skeptics who wonder why, if he had no weapons, he would not cooperate more fully with the inspection process, it has already been pointed out that he most likely felt he needed to keep up the pretext that he had something to hide in order to keep his neighbors afraid of him and maintain his strength in the regional balance of power, as well as to guard his national pride.

“The Bush administration has run into such stiff opposition at the United Nations Security Council to its plan for the future government of Iraq that it has pulled back from seeking a quick vote endorsing the proposal and may shelve it altogether, administration officials said Tuesday.” —NY Times

“Back when he was among the Republican leaders hot on the scent of Bill Clinton’s adultery, Orrin Hatch, the Utah Senator and writer of gospel music, said Clinton’s only way out was a public confession. The President should apologize and ask forgiveness — from Congress, and from the American people. Only by coming clean in detail could he be fit to stay in office, Hatch said.

Fast-forward a few years, and what do we have? Senator Hatch goes before the National Press Club and, as paraphrased by The Salt Lake Tribune, says ‘Arnold Schwarzenegger should not be judged on past improper advances towards women but as the devoted husband he is today.’ (Gee, why didn’t Clinton think of this brilliant ‘devoted husband I am today’ defense?) Moreover, Hatch already feels strongly enough that Schwarzenegger is of United States presidential caliber that he cites him as an argument for amending the Constitution, so that foreign-born American citizens can run for the Oval Office.” —Matt Bivens, The Nation

“Representative John Conyers, Jr., the Ranking Member, on the House Judiciary Committee sent the following letter to Senior White House Advisor, Karl Rove, asking for his resignation…” —truthout

We are living in monocular times: “the spectacular has become monocular. a narrow band of so-called entertainment pushes its way through the eye of a needle and expects us to accept global monoculture. one culture for all. one culture to bind us. one culture to blind us to lived experience.

we resist its baneful bronze eye. we replace monoculture with palimpsest and revel in its wild, untamed diversity. in place of sameness and seperation we assert difference and participation. where there are walls we desire spaces. and where there are spaces we desire access. and when we have access we can begin to play.

above all, we desire pleasure. and to the monoculture that seeks to commodify all that we desire, we respond that its leisure is not our pleasure.

this shit is.”

“Have you been looking for the 10 best places to throw up? Do you want to know where to to shop like a mermaid or shoot deer while drinking? Do you go in search of the city’s mysteries, good food, or characters? Welcome to “Hidden New York,” the Voice‘s guide to underground vices, subway buskers, peep shows, secrets at the Natural History Museum, and much more. Enjoy your trip to the dark side.” —The Village Voice

…With Chocolate and a Microwave. —What You Need to Know About Physics [via abby]

Most gorgeous photo of the Horsehead Nebula I have ever seen. —Astronomy Picture of the Day

Did the ‘Hell on Earth’ suicide come off as promised? The original plan was for a man with a terminal disease to commmit suicide onstage during the metal rockers’ Saturday evening concert in St. Petersburg. To avoid threatened interference by authorities, that plan was altered several weeks ago with the suicide to take place at a separate, undisclosed location and to be broadcast live on the web in conjunction with the band’s performance. But the website’s host shut it down before show time, supposedly because of the number of hits the site was getting. Now the band’s front man is noncommittal about whether the suicide actually occurred as planned, but a radio host who had been following the band in the leadup to the ‘event’ says he has been given a videotape of ‘something that looked crazy’ and appeared to show a man commmitting suicide. Yet the county’s emergency dispatchers and medical examiner’s office said there had been no calls about a suicide as of Sunday afternoon. —St Petersburg Times

“Just about every aspect of the death penalty provokes acrimonious debate, but this method of killing, by common consensus, is as humane as medicine can make it. People who have witnessed injection executions say the deaths appeared hauntingly serene, more evocative of the operating room than of the gallows.

But a growing number of legal and medical experts are warning that the apparent tranquillity of a lethal injection may be deceptive. They say the standard method of executing people in most states could lead to paralysis that masks intense distress, leaving a wide-awake inmate unable to speak or cry out as he slowly suffocates.” —NY Times

…about the blue Photon Micro-Light being banned in the US because it can be mistaken for a police car??

I haven’t heard Elvis Costello’s new disc, North (“…the only record I’ve ever made that aspired to beauty as the prime objective”) yet and I am less likely to want to after reading this Guardian profile. I am classing myself among those who fail to appreciate the genre-bending for which others lavish admiration upon Costello. Yes, he is delving into every style of music except that at which he excels. I can’t decide whether he has left me far behind or vice versa. No, cancel that; yes I can. Costello’s hauteur about his critics —

“The latest furore is such bollocks. The truth is that every single time I do something different there’s a small – and totally untalented – chorus of people who jump up and down and make a fuss about it: ‘He’s betrayed himself.’

Five years later, the same people are kissing my arse about the same piece of work. My view is that they should go straight to the last page and mail in their apology now.”

— has me decided. Oh, and not only are those who give a critical drubbing to North untalented but they are biased, he insists, by their resentment of his ending his marriage with Cait O’Riordan and embarking on a relationship with Diana Krall (hmmm, from the punk to the torch singer, how fitting). Then there’s the matter of the celebrated 1979 racist slurs about Ray Charles, for which his apology (if that is what it was) was entirely unconvincing.

I’m pretty sure that, if I dropped $18 on the new disc, my reaction would be along the lines of the critic cited in the Guardian article who opined, “… this soporific pseudo-Sondheim sucks.” It is a painful point when you realize that you won’t waste your money on an artist whose every new release you once awaited with uncritical bated breath. I should have learned my lesson, oh, around five years ago already. I got nothing from his Brodsky Quartet collaboration or his Burt Bacharach. Costello’s raucous attack music has given me endless joy, and my kids and I have the Rhino re-releases of his classic discs with all the bonus material loaded into the car audio system as the constant. pumped-up, buoyant soundtrack to long rides. With endless undiminished pleasure from his back catalogue, I don’t have to think about the long slow slide of another cultural icon under the weight of his own pomposity.

Scotch Transparent Duct Tape: “The latest solution for quick, easy home repairs will go unnoticed, and that’s the beauty of it. The most recent addition to the Scotch duct tape family is the development of the first-ever transparent duct tape.

Like all Scotch duct tapes, the new transparent duct tape is strong enough to tackle almost any repair project in or around the home, vehicle, boat or job site. The clear benefit is that this duct tape is transparent when applied, making repairs less noticeable. Scotch transparent duct tape also lasts six times longer than other heavy-duty duct tapes, based on accelerated weathering, providing peace of mind that the repair will last a long time.”

This is the ultimate contradiction in terms. I mean, part of the idea of repairs with duct tape (actually, I am more of a fan of gaffer’s tape) is the insouciance of that silvery utilitarian sheen which boldly proclaims ‘quick fix’. I don’t even use the colored duct tapes…

“PublicRadioFan.com features program listings for hundreds of public radio stations around the world. Follow the audio links to hear your favorite programs and discover new ones.”

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“Subtle but effective, these 3″ diameter weatherproof stickers will get your message across. Designed to hold up for at least three years, this may be the last anti-Bush bumper sticker you will ever need!”

The lump in the White House thinks he writes poetry. Worse yet, his wife thinks he does.

Roses are red

Violets are blue

Oh my, lump in the bed

How I’ve missed you.

Roses are redder

Bluer am I

Seeing you kissed by that charming French guy.

The dogs and the cat, they missed you too

Barney’s still mad you dropped him, he ate your shoe

The distance, my dear, has been such a barrier

Next time you want an adventure, just land on a carrier.

Now it makes sense why she cancelled a White House poetry event because she was afraid the invited poets might have had something offensive to say.

Faith in FTL:

“‘I still believe in e=mc², but I can’t believe that in all of human history, we’ll never ever be able to go beyond the speed of light to reach where we want to go,’ said Clark. ‘I happen to believe that mankind can do it.

‘I’ve argued with physicists about it, I’ve argued with best friends about it. I just have to believe it. It’s my only faith-based initiative.'” —Wired

Should we have concerns about Clark’s willingness to submit to the rule of law if he becomes president. since he clearly has little reverence for the laws of physics?

art brut : self taught outsider and folk art: ‘art brut connaissance & diffusion was created in 1999. It is a French foundation with international scope, whose main objective is to research, study and make known Art Brut by means of exhibitions, publications and audio visual productions.

Our founding members are art historians, psychoanalysts, writers, collectors but also amateurs with strong interest in Art Brut. The diversity of our members contributes to the original crossing of different points of view.

Jean Dubuffet:

“Art Brut designates works executed by persons unharmed by artistic culture, in which mimesis, in contrast to what happens in the case of intellectuals, has little or no part at all. Consequently, the authors draw their inspiration (themes, materials, the means of transposition, rhythm, different styles of writing, etc.) from their resources and not from the clichés of classical or fashionable art.”

I am gratified to see this group cite Dubuffet and his 1945 definition of ‘outsider art’ as a defining influence. The art brut movement seems to have forsaken him recently to the extent that several listings of exhibits fail to mention the imposing Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne which evolved from Dubuffet’s personal holdings.

People with manic depression are being urged to demand better medical care: “The Manic Depression Fellowship says many doctors fail to provide patients with enough information or choice over which drugs they take.

It says this can cause people to stop taking their medication, increasing their risk of committing suicide.

The charity has now published a document outlining the different treatments available so they can demand a better standard of care.

Manic depression or bipolar disorder affects around two in every 100 people in the UK.

However, that figure is beginning to rise as more and more people are being diagnosed with the condition.” —BBC News

Several factors other than doctors’ failure to adequately inform their patients may contribute to patients’ failure to follow through with treatment for manic depressive disorder, better known these days in the US as bipolar disorder. There has been a drastic increase in the number of patients diagnosed with this condition for several reasons — a new gospel in child psychiatry asserting unconvincingly that mood and behavior instability problems in children and adolsecents that look nothing like bipolar moodswings are a form of bipolar illness; the reluctance in adult psychiatry, for reasons largely of political correctness, to diagnose people with a prevalent cause of mood instability, borderline personality disorder; and the growing carelessness in diagnosis — diagnosis by gut feeling — overall, whereby schizophrenic patients who show some superimposed moodswings are called bipolar instead.

Lithium carbonate, once the mainstay of prevention of moodswings in manic depressives and thought effective for around two-thirds of patients, has suffered a decling reputation as recent research suggests lower success rates. In my impression, this is related to the point I made above about the imprecision of diagnosis. As the category of bipolar illness broadens, research studies will be lumping in a variety of other types of pathology with ‘classical’ bipolar disease, and this will dilute out evidence of efficacy with the core syndrome. This has resulted in a general shift to the use of anticonvulsant (anti-epileptic) drugs, which also have mood-stabilizing properties and of which there is a bewildering and ever-growing variety. These medications may have lesser effectiveness — certainly some of them do — but they are expensive proprietary products of pharmaceutical manufacturers and aggressively marketed to psychiatrists. (Lest you think that psychiatric marketing is mostly carried out by salesmen visiting doctors’ offices, it is much more a matter today of the industry funding most of the psychopharmacological research which makes it to the journals, and much of the continuing medical education offerings at conferences and in various media which psychiatrists consume and which are the main shapers of their practice patterns after they are out of their training.)

In contrast, lithium carbonate is a dirt-cheap generic drug; self-paying for your prescription for lithium will probably cost you less than the co-pay if you got it with your insurance plan.

Another important barrier to treatment of bipolar disorder comes from the nature of the disease itself. While not always the case, it is often true that patients when manic are artificially happy, energetic, confident and blissfully unaware that they are in the midst of an episode of an illness even as they alienate friends and spouses, lose their jobs, drain their bank accounts and develop sundry other legal and financial problems with their impaired judgment. They almost never seek help voluntarily while manic but are brought in against their will by family or authorities because of the trouble they are in, and thus are resistant to treatment. Euphoric mania is virtually unique as a psychiatric illness in that its sufferers feel happy and cannot recognize that they are in trouble and distress (making for an interesting philosophical question of whether they should be treated…). Because the disease is so episodic, they will eventually return to a happy medium, so to speak, with intact judgment and recognition of the need for care.

But there is peril at the other extreme as well; there is often a temptation when they are in the depressed phase to stop their preventative medication on the mistaken belief that getting manic again would be an attractive alternative to the pain. This is a repetitive scenario I see time and again with bipolar patients with otherwise sophisticated understanding and sound judgment, who often have several go-arounds of this devastating disease before they ‘learn their lesson’ and remain on their medications. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that some psychiatrists are leery of giving depressed bipolar patients antidepressant medication, fearing that it might induce mania; this prolongs their misery.

Finally, there is another basis for patient resistance to accepting treatment. The corollary of accepting that you have bipolar disease is never being able to trust your emotions at face value. While normal people have moodswings in the natural course of day-to-day living, once someone has become known to have a bipolar process all mood variability becomes suspect as a harbinger of a fullblown episode. It becomes difficult for the patient and those around her/him to avoid pathologizing all emotional swings. This often sullies the person’s ability to have ‘normal happiness’, in effect, without thinking that instead of something good it is a warning sign of an illness. In essence, bipolar disease is potentially a betrayal of one’s relationship with one’s own emotions. One learns, in a sense, that to trust being happy — which the bipolar patient desperately wants to be able to do — one has to ignore or deny that s/he is bipolar. This becomes a strong impetus for the patient to reject treatment in an effort to make happiness possible and acceptable again.

There are other twists and turns in the skillful treatment of this complicated condition. (I hope I’ve suggested effectively that, even for the psychopharmacology of a ‘biological’ illness, the caregiver must have the ability to create an alliance, understand the dynamics of the patient, and help him/her introspect. This is my style of medication prescribing — inextricably linked with a very psychotherapeutic relationship with my patients. None of this “wham-bam-thank you ma’am, how ya doin’? write your prescription and out ya go” style of psychopharmacological followup that is so common in modern office psychiatry…) Suffice it to say that getting inadequate information about drug choices from your prescriber is just the tip of the iceberg as a contributor to a patient’s not following through with potentially stabilizing treatment for bipolar disorder. It is an urgent issue, both because of the devastating morbidity and, indeed, mortality associated with out-of-control bipolar disease, and because the illness is usually so treatable and the restitution of function between episodes usually so complete that it is especially poignant and frustrating when patients with this illness, among the panoply of psychiatric disease, will not stay engaged.

“Suicide is the second-leading cause of death among college-age Americans, with 1,000 students expected to commit suicide this year, health officials say. With demands for mental health services on campus at record highs and students more wired than ever, school officials now say online support could save those who might otherwise fall through the cracks.

They have turned to the Satows’ new website, Ulifeline, to reassure the ‘worried well’ — the healthy students who needlessly crowd school counseling centers — and to gently nudge those who truly need help to seek it. Since its debut last year, 72 colleges and universities have subscribed to the free service, noting that it centralizes help and information far better than their own sites do. So far, 1.3 million students have used it.” —Wired News

Do readers want to send me some questions you would like to see me answer in print? If enough come in, I would add a FAQ somewhere or other on my site, but only if the questions are truly ‘frequently asked’. Send me as many as you like.