“This week in The New Yorker and here online, Virginia Heffernan profiles the comedian Tina Fey, who is the first woman with the title of head writer for Saturday Night Live. In this article from December, 2002, Malcolm Gladwell examines the creative process behind the show.” While I have never been a fan of SNL humor, I am a great fan of Gladwell and his observations on groupthink.

“A former Pentagon officer turned whistleblower says a group of hawks in the Bush Administration, including the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, is running a shadow foreign policy, contravening Washington’s official line.

‘What these people are doing now makes Iran-Contra [a Reagan administration national security scandal] look like amateur hour. . . it’s worse than Iran-Contra, worse than what happened in Vietnam,’ said Karen Kwiatkowski, a former air force lieutenant-colonel.

‘[President] George Bush isn’t in control . . . the country’s been hijacked,’ she said, describing how ‘key [governmental] areas of neoconservative concern were politically staffed’.” —Sydney Morning Herald

The essential point of this accusation is that foreign policy analysis is now routinely bypassing civil service and military professionals and routed instead through ideologically-chosen political appointees. This neatly fits with Seymour Hersh’s profoundly important examination of the breakdown in cooperation between the CIA and the executive branch around the uraniumgate lies in his recent article for the New Yorker, “The Stovepipe”, which I summarized here several weeks ago. Although one might question the evidence for Kwiatkowski’s assertion that Bush is not in control and that the foreign-policy machinery has been hijacked out from under him, that he is not willingly collaborating or at least acquiescing to this process, I do not doubt it. Readers of FmH know that I have felt since his dysadministration took power (and, let us not mince words, I do mean “took”) that he has largely been a puppet of his senior appointees. The evidence becomes clearer and clearer both on the basis of the ever-mounting indicators of his intellectual dullness, for those who needed convincing, and his track record in office. Discerning observers are fools to hide behind pat confidence that ‘it can’t happen here’; historians will cite numerous precedents for regimes with puppet rulers where the actual authority was vested covertly in their more ruthless and controlling ministers. A courageous press, and a united Democratic opposition, would focus heavily on this between now and the 2004 elections. Those cynical progressives who are fond of dismissing partisan politics with generalizations about how the two parties are no different (I know, I’ve largely been one of them… until the Bush people seized power) would be well-advised to pay more attention to the extraordinary nature of the palace coup these Republican ideologues have pulled off in a manner we would have never seen under President Gore.

“The photographs in this suite are the result of mean averaging every Playboy centerfold foldout for the four decades beginning Jan. 1960 through Dec. 1999. This tracks, en masse, the evolution of this form of portraiture.” —[via boing boing] These are non-lascivious, by the way. Only that of the ’60’s is the slightest bit suggestive, to my viewing, which may indicate something about the evolution of voluptuousness over the past few decades. Tanlines are increasingly in, it would also seem…

“The real lesson of the postwar mess is that while occupying and reconstructing Iraq was bound to be difficult, the fact that it may be turning into a quagmire is not a result of fate, but rather (as quagmires usually are) a result of poor planning and wishful thinking. Both have been in evidence to a troubling degree in American policy almost from the moment the decision was made to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s bestial dictatorship.” — David Rieff, New York Times Magazine. The ever-decorous New York Times reporter may be faulted for his use of “may” in the first sentence of this concluding paragraph, after the portrayal he just finished presenting…

“‘The possibility of scientific annihilation of personal identity, or even worse, its purposeful control, has sometimes been considered a future threat

So wrote Dr Jose Delgado in his 1969 book Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilised Society. Delgado documents the myriad applications of electrical stimulation of the brain, from helping the blind see again to keeping criminals and dissidents under remote control. The Spanish neurologist’s hopes rested on a device he called the ‘stimoceiver’. Once inserted into the required part of the brain, the remotely operated stimoceiver could stimulate it electrically. In a dramatic demonstration in the early 1960s, Delgado entered a bullring and, at the press of a button, stopped a charging bull dead in its tracks. Delgado saw great potential in his creation, but he did note one possible problem: ‘The existence of wires leading from the brain to the stimoceiver outside of the scalp… could be a hindrance to hair grooming.'” This essay explores how the technology has fared in the three-plus decades since Delgado’s controversial pronouncements. —Guardian.UK

A review of a tendentious book by Max R. Bennett and P. M. S. Hacker (Blackwell Publishers, 2003): “What has neuroscience to do with philosophy? Everything and nothing, depending on what the interpreter in question takes the neuroscience to have shown. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience – the result of a collaboration between a distinguished neurobiologist (Bennett) and the leading authority on the philosophy of Wittgenstein (Hacker) – aims to shed a light on how neuroscience has been both influenced by and an influence on philosophy past and present. The overall tone is highly critical and those whose work tries to show that neuroscience can help answer philosophical questions (e.g. about emotion, cognition, volition, consciousness etc.) are likely to be offended by this controversial book which points to the multifarious ways in which scientists display conceptual confusion when interpreting their own work.” —mentalhelp.net

“We showcase videotaped conversations between some of the worlds greatest thinkers, including many Nobel Prize Winners. Please become a member (it’s free) and we will provide you with free transcripts of the discussions! If this is your first visit with us, please go to our help page before you get started.”

“Summary: The evolutionary origins of depression suggest tips for overcoming the blues. An appreciation of the evolutionary perspective on depression can help those who are acutely suffering. ” —Psychology Today A good nontechnical discussion of one — of several — evolutionary theories of depression.

“True gadget gurus alert! (The) Omnifi mobile audio wireless digital transfer system …lets users transfer their music collection to their car wirelessly over an 802.11b connection.

…So a user can transfer their music collection via PC onto the DMP1 hard drive, and then pop it into their car stereo system. Or they could leave the hard drive in the car, and wirelessly stream updates to the car while it’s sitting in the garage. The SimpleWare software includes a scheduling application that lets users download information to the car (such as local weather, news and traffic reports) at specific times. So while you sleep, you can get new content shipped to the car before you leave for work the next morning.”

“A ‘no holds barred’ expose of the subtle, sometimes deceptive techniques employed by ‘sneaky snake’ salespeople to separate you from your money. Forewarned is forearmed; after reading this, you’ll at least have a fighting chance to avoid being ‘bit’.”

Related: 1-800-Annoy me now: “12 ways to get out of recorded-message hell and get a live customer service rep.” —CNN Money This not only saves frying the callers’ nerves, but may preserve jobs for otherwise increasingly redundant telephone answering personnel. Many of these company-specific solutions involve hitting ‘0’ one or more times, which is what I do anyway whenever I get a voicemail system (and, believe me, I jump through hoops trying to connect to real people at healthcare facilities in my professional communications). If reaching a live individual is difficult, be sure to make a properly routed customer complaint about the company’s voicemail system as part of your interaction, if you have the time.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s Singular Crusade: “On July 9, the Raleigh News & Observer printed a full-page advertisement representing the views of a coalition of conservative students and state legislators. The ad — billed as an “open letter” to state residents — lashed top officials of the University of North Carolina, who preside over a summer reading program for incoming freshmen. UNC-CHAPEL HILL DOES IT AGAIN, the ad proclaimed. INCOMING UNC CHAPEL HILL FRESHMEN ‘EXPECTED’ TO READ BOOK BY RADICAL SOCIALIST. The “radical socialist” was the writer Barbara Ehrenreich, and the book — “a classic Marxist rant” that “mounts an all-out assault on Christians, conservatives and capitalism,” according to the ad — was Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.” —Columbia Journalism Review

“Attention Win users — hassle-free Linux for everyone here. Download the image (free of charge), burn it to a CD, and run Linux, straight from the CD, without installation, disk partitioning and other hassles that usually prevent people from giving Linux a try. This kind of CD makes a wonderful Linux-to-go solution: you might carry your favorite desktop configuration in your pocket, sit in front of a non-Linux box, boot from the CD and be in front of your preferred environment in minutes. DemoLinux 2.0 includes the GNOME and KDE environments, Enlightenment, StarOffice, lots of games, development tools, and a full load of utilities.”

FCC: You Can Say That on Television —FoxNews

“It may even mark the beginning of the end of the dominance of television in American life.” —ABC News

Contrast this news with the smirking Bush crowing about the Commerce Dept’s figures on the third quarter ‘recovery’ in the economy. “About 12 million American families last year worried that they couldn’t afford to buy food, and 32 percent of them actually experienced someone going hungry at one time or another, the Agriculture Department said Friday.

It was the third year in a row that the department has seen an increase in the number of households experiencing hunger and those worried about having enough money to pay for food.” —Salon News

This is the Guardian‘s perspective. In my opinion, they should ahve flip-flopped the top 20 with nos. 21-40, essentially!

FCC: You Can Say That on Television —FoxNews