While there is no question that Iran covered up a nuclear program and was in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, it is still unclear if it was anywhere near making nuclear weapons. In any case, its candor in cooperating with the recent ultimatum takes the wind out of the sails of an American drive to keelhaul Iran before the UN Security Council, whose members appear to be favorably impressed by its cooperation. After the contempt the Bu**sh** administration demonstrated for the UN process over Iraq, it is not likely member countries will be bullied into enabling Washington’s agenda once more. AP/Salon

Nicholas Kristof: “Considering the savagery with which the Snarling Right excoriated President Clinton as a ‘sociopath,’ blocked judicial appointments, undermined U.S. military operations from Kosovo to Iraq, hounded Vincent Foster and then accused the Clintons of murdering him, it is utterly hypocritical for conservatives to complain about liberal incivility.” New York Times op-ed

“L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Iraq, made a hurried return to Washington on Tuesday as Bush administration officials held an urgent round of meetings to discuss ways of speeding up the transfer of power to Iraqis [i.e. extricate ourselves in hopes of salvaging Bu**sh**’s reelection prospects —FmH].

The meetings reflected dissatisfaction with the pace of progress in Iraq and a growing conviction that Mr. Bremer must abandon his methodical plan to move gradually toward the election of an Iraqi government over a year or two, officials said.” —New York Times

Related: More Iraqis Supporting Resistance, CIA Report Says

“A new, top-secret CIA report from Iraq warns that growing numbers of Iraqis are concluding that the U.S.-led coalition can be defeated and are supporting the resistance.

The report paints a bleak picture of the political and security situation in Iraq and cautions that the U.S.-led drive to rebuild the country as a democracy could collapse unless corrective actions are taken immediately.

L. Paul Bremer, head of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, who arrived unexpectedly in Washington for strategy sessions on Tuesday, essentially endorsed the CIA’s findings, said a senior administration official.

The report’s bleak tone and Bremer’s private endorsement differ sharply with the upbeat public assessments that President Bush, his chief aides and Bremer are giving as part of an aggressive publicity campaign aimed at countering rising anxieties at home over increasing U.S. casualties in Iraq.” Knight-Ridder [via CommonDreams]

“New York Times columnist Paul Krugman tells how he found his voice, why Bush makes him miss Nixon, and why he insults Fox News whenever he can.” AlterNet

This article, originally published in 1997, collects tales from children in Dade’s homeless shelters which amount to the creation of a new mythology, if you believe the reporter. In a prior existence, I studied social anthropology with a particular interest in folklore and mythology. One of the things I learned is that it is not as easy as it might appear for an outside observer to impose coherency on a body of myth that is scattered throughout a population. One is essentially doing cross-cultural fieldwork in looking at this rich, fascinating oral tradition in the making. I wonder if this writer is trained in this way. She certainly has a grasp of concepts like what Claude Lévi-Strauss called bricolage when she writes, “What these determined children do is snatch dark and bright fragments of Halloween fables, TV news, and candy-colored Bible-story leaflets from street-corner preachers, and like birds building a nest from scraps, weave their own myths.” Have a look:

“On Christmas night a year ago, God fled Heaven to escape an audacious demon attack — a celestial Tet Offensive. The demons smashed to dust his palace of beautiful blue-moon marble. TV news kept it secret, but homeless children in shelters across the country report being awakened from troubled sleep and alerted by dead relatives. No one knows why God has never reappeared, leaving his stunned angels to defend his earthly estate against assaults from Hell. “Demons found doors to our world,” adds eight-year-old Miguel, who sits before Andre with the other children at the Salvation Army shelter. The demons’ gateways from Hell include abandoned refrigerators, mirrors, Ghost Town (the nickname shelter children have for a cemetery somewhere in Dade County), and Jeep Cherokees with “black windows.” The demons are nourished by dark human emotions: jealousy, hate, fear.” —Miami New Times [via bOING bOING]

Here is an interesting connection: has anyone read Denis Johnson’s Fiskadoro, which came out in 2000? Set in a post-apocalyptic south Florida, I see some similarities. Could Johnson have been influenced by this article’s original publication?

Reasons Not to Invade Iraq, by George Bush Sr.: “On 21 September 2002, The Memory Hole posted an extract from an essay by George Bush Sr. and Brent Scowcroft, in which they explain why they didn’t have the military push into Iraq and topple Saddam during Gulf War 1. [I posted a damning excerpt here on FmH.] Although there are differences between the Iraq situations in 1991 and 2002-3, Bush’s key points apply to both.

But a funny thing happened. Fairly recently, Time pulled the essay off of their site. It used to be at this link, which now gives a 404 error. If you go to the table of contents for the issue in which the essay appeared (2 March 1998), ‘Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam’ is conspicuously absent.

Because of this erasure, we’re posting the entire essay below the portion we originally excerpted. ” —Memory Hole

“A group of more than two dozen House of Representatives Democrats on Monday said they had introduced a resolution urging President Bush to fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.” Yahoo! News

“An attempt by developing countries to put management of the internet under United Nations auspices is likely to be shelved at next month’s world information summit in Geneva – but the issue is now firmly on the international agenda, summit sources say.” Financial Times

“If only such largesse flowed to all of us. ‘Fair compensation’ is a relative term, yet HR consultants and executive headhunters agree some jobs command excessive pay that can’t be explained by labor supply-and-demand imbalances.” —Chris Pummer, CBS

…When They Were Your Age

Make them think your Windows XP computer is running Longhorn! Be the first on your block!

“Ten British people have put their names forward to become the first in the world to undergo a face transplant…

Teams on both sides of the Atlantic are now confident they have the skills to attempt the operation.

Surgeons insist the procedure, which involves transplanting an entire face from a corpse to a living person, will only be available for patients with the most severe facial disfigurements – and not as a cosmetic vanity treatment.” —This Is London

“A quasi-religious cult is using the Internet to recruit teenagers who are encouraged to act as werewolves, howl at the moon and eat raw meat.

Counsellors at the Cult Information Hotline have received several complaints about the group, which has more than 50 members throughout Queensland.” —news.com.au

“Malcolm McLaren, the subculture hacker who created the Sex Pistols, discovers the new underground sound. It’s called chip music. Can you play lead Game Boy?” —Wired

“Israel stands today at an important crossroads, trying to decide which of three roads it will travel.

If it chooses one road, the United States will be able to walk proudly alongside Israel as its friend, ally and, if necessary, its protector against any that threaten its security.

But if Israel chooses either of the remaining two routes, it will repudiate the shared values and strategic interests that have united Israelis and Americans for decades. Those Americans who count themselves as friends of Israel have an obligation to make that danger clear. “

If a two-state, land-for-peace, solution is defunct, Israel is poised to commit either to expulsion or apartheid-like disenfranchisement of the Palestinians. — Jay Bookman, Atlanta Journal-Constitution [via CommonDreams]

“The big papers are taking President Bush’s Middle East speech seriously, so far. They’ve noted his rhetoric seems to challenge 50 years of symbiotic coddling of non-democratic Middle East regimes, justified up to now on the argument of pursuing our national interests. As Robin Wright of The Washington Post notes, there will be no further entertainment of the once-convenient notion of ‘Islamic exceptionalism’—where Islam was assumed to be incompatible with democratic government and therefore excused from otherwise universal human and political rights standards.

Privately, many will point to the surreal moment in the speech, made November 6 at the National Endowment for Democracy, where he described the principles for “successful societies” with a list of everything his administration has done to weaken American democracy at home. Sadly, Bush’s double standards and Animal Farm rhetoric are no longer big news.

But the flaw in his argument—revealing an intentional deception—is.” —Patrick Doherty, TomPaine.com

TB drug plus virtual reality relieves fear of heights. “A common antibacterial drug has helped phobics to overcome their fear of heights. Combined with standard behavioural therapy, D-cycloserine (DCS) speeded recovery fourfold compared with therapy alone.” A report from the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans. —Nature

“Setting the stage for a historic clash between presidential and judicial authority in a time of military conflict, the Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide whether prisoners at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are entitled to access to civilian courts to challenge their open-ended detention.” —azcentral

“She Doesn’t Look Disabled. Some Doctors Believe Her Condition Isn’t Real. But for the Author, Fibromyalgia Makes Every Day a Struggle.” —Washington Post As a psychiatrist who has long had an interest in controversial syndromes on the boundary of mental health and other fields of medicine, I have written on, taught about and treated fibromyalgia and “fibromyalgia” since it first came on the radar screens. There is a “real” syndrome but I believe it is also necessary to put the diagnosis of some, perhaps most, sufferers in quotes; the central triad of symptoms — debilitating chronic muscle pain, fatigue, and sleep disorder — can represent either a physical ailment or somatization, i.e. the physicalization of essentially mental distress.

The credibility of the diagnosis in a particular cse is established by the story and also the examination, in that the pain can be reproduced by palpation by a knowledgable examiner (usually a rheumatologist) of several dozen ‘trigger points’ in the muscle of whose existence or location the patient was unaware. While this is a controversial finding, I believe the research showing chemical and microscopic structural changes in biopsied muscle fibers in affected areas. Given the strong emotional component to the disorder, one way to think about its etiology is that people who are prone to experience stress as muscle tension are somehow chronically damaging their muscles, perhaps because the blood flow to chronically tense muscles is altered. I have also been impressed by the evidence that an added mechanism is in play. Impairment of the normal nighttime phased secretion of growth hormone from the pituitary gland given the altered sleep pattern in emotional distress, especially depression, may be important. GH is crucial to the repair of normal daily wear and tear in muscle fibers throughout the body; sleep deprivation causes muscle aches even in people who do not have fibromyalgia.

But, because I believe this syndrome has its origins in emotional distress and is a condition in which the physical manifestations come to predominate, it is attractive to many other emotionally distressed individuals who prefer to see their problems in physical rather than psychological terms, who are invested in an outmoded dichotomy and not open to a mind-body interactional perspective. Now granted, I work in a psychiatric setting and so my sample is skewed. But, for every legitimate fibromyalgia case I have seen, two or three young women come my way with chronic depression, complications of a trauma history, and/or borderline personality disorder (a triad of overlapping but not synonymous concerns) who are hell-bent on having fibromyalgia as the explanation of their social and occupational dysfunction instead.

Why am I making such an issue of this? Physicians and other clinicians who jump on the bandwagon of a sexy and faddish novel diagnosis ‘enable’ the dysfunction of such patients in a number of ways in which their patients are unconsciously invested, including suppporting disability claims and maintaining these patients (who may be prone to substance abuse as part of their psychiatric disturbance) on narcotic painkillers and addictive muscle relaxants for their supposed “fibromyalgia”. Many physicians are not open to examining their own “enabling”, since patients are uniformly appreciative of this kind of service, and we all like to please our patients. Legitimizing the disorder in such cases is a disservice to such patients, pandering to their unconscious maneuvering to look everywhere but at their own responsibility for their behavior patterns. By displacing them from a focus on their real concerns, such treatment prevents such patients from developing effective coping strategies that would alleviate or control distress in a lasting way and perpetuates their maladaptive way of doing business with the world instead.

Furthermore, fibromyalgia illustrates a more general phenomenon seen with controversial and murkily-defined syndromes. It remains a ‘wastebasket’ diagnosis, a syndrome diagnosed by clinical impression rather than diagnostic tests. If we lump together a heterogeneous cast of characters only a subset of whom have the “true” disorder, research efforts to characterize the processes behind it and clinical efforts to find effective treatments are compromised by the dilution of any relevant results in the mixed sample. In a vicious circle, the harder the condition is to characterize correctly, the harder it will be to characterize correctly. The more it attracts people for maladaptive reasons, the more it will continue to do so.

Paul Krugman: “Yesterday’s absurd conspiracy theory about the Bush administration has a way of turning into today’s conventional wisdom. Remember when people were ridiculed for claiming that Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, eager to fight a war, were hyping the threat from Iraq?

Anyway, many analysts now acknowledge that the administration never had any intention of pursuing a conventionally responsible fiscal policy. Rather, its tax cuts were always intended as a way of implementing the radical strategy known as ‘starve the beast,’ which views budget deficits as a good thing, a way to squeeze government spending. Did I mention that the administration is planning another long-run tax cut next year?

Advocates of the starve-the-beast strategy tend to talk abstractly about ‘big government.’ But in fact, squeezing government spending almost always means cutting back or eliminating services people actually want (though not necessarily programs worth their cost). And since it’s Veterans Day, let’s talk about how the big squeeze on spending may be alienating a surprising group: the nation’s soldiers.” —New York Times op-ed

Doggy cool: “They are the latest must-have accessory for the pampered pet: sunglasses for dogs.

Owners anxious that their pet should be at fashion’s cutting edge will have a choice of frames, lenses and colours to match any outfit that their dog may be wearing. Top of the range is a chrome frame with blue reflective lenses.” —The Age [via walker]

Milt Bearden, a 30-year veteran in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations who served as senior manager for clandestine operations, writes that the Iraqi insurgents could have taken their cues from Chinese military tactician Sun Tzu’s 2500-year old Art of War: “attack their strategy, attack their allies, attack their army…”

Sun Tzu also said “know yourself and know your enemy, and of a hundred battles you will have a hundred victories.”

There were two stark lessons in the history of the 20th century: No nation that launched a war against another sovereign nation ever won. And every nationalist-based insurgency against a foreign occupation ultimately succeeded. This is not to say anything about whether or not the United States should have gone into Iraq or whether the insurgency there is a lasting one. But it indicates how difficult the situation may become. —Seattle Times

Ironically, Sun Tzu was invoked as the inspiration behind the US “Shock and Awe” bombardment (Asia Times) of Baghdad which started the US attack on Iraq.

“Scathingly attired, this raconteur has been reminiscing about the cancellation of Baywatch as well as pondering the demise of the Dave Clark Five. He has deliberately kept the interview short for several reasons:

1. Most people are short and not tall.

2. Attention deficit disorder is sweeping the nation.” —Outburst, [Journal of Mundane Behavior]

Earlier in the week we read news reports that the dysadministration, frustrated by the Iraqi Coouncil, is mulling doing away with it. But like this? Sorry, no joke — “Iraqis marched in anger through the streets here Monday after the killing of an American-appointed local Iraqi council leader by U.S. military guards under disputed circumstances.” —Washington Post

…for a trivial, somewhat scurrilous experiment in participatory weblogging: I know there are community weblogs, such as MetaFilter, in which thousands of participants create what some would assert is a vibrant cross-fertilizing conversation, while others would say the signal-to-noise ratio just decays from the effort. FmH has an audience far smaller, by, oh, at least several orders of magnitude, who I know are demanding, reflective, erudite readers in breadth and depth. I have always been puzzled, and sometimes solicited feedback, about the fact that other weblogs log many more reader comments, even many more per capita. Unsuccessful, I am tired of trying to figure out why, with rare exceptionsm, it is not happening here. (Is the commenting system too cumbersome? am I cultivating passive consumers despite — or because of — my attempt to be provocative? deadening thought?). Most conversation among the likes of you would likely be breathtaking, so I am going to try to take direct action to goad you into it on at least a trial basis. Not that you have to work for your daily dose of FmH, but I would like to propose that, for the next week, everytime you come here you scroll down, pick one post about which you have something to say, and enter a comment, one thoughtful comment. A couple of extra clicks, thirty seconds’ more time on my page. Begin with a bias toward those posts that do not yet have any comments. Amplify, fertilize, contradict, dispute, synthesize, eviscerate, perseverate, tangentialize, analogize on anything here… Then, as your reflections accumulate, you will inevitably be riffing off the comments of others. You know, of course, you can do it anonymously, if that matters; just not contentlessly. Indulge me, think about it for a moment, you really have no good reason why you would not try this for a week.

Why do I want to do this? [Stop reading here if your bullshit meter is turned on, it probably won’t make a whole lot of sense.] Surely, it is not because I care about the cumulative total of the little numbers in the parentheses at the end of every post per se. I have been interested for a long while in transformative social processes and the power of small communities, you might say on a tribal scale, a participatory scale, how group process works, how organizations think. Information processing constraints place an upper bound on face-to-face interactional possibilities around one to several hundred members; the possibilities for consensus- and confidence-based ‘social contracts’ move into a symbolic and some would say unworkable sphere with larger social groupings. Now, don’t nitpick, I realize that the community of readers of FmH is in no sense like a tribal culture. This is not a participatory democracy; webspace-rooted avatar-to-avatar interactions are in important respects different from face-to-face; cultural ecological niche contingencies as a shared experience are replaced by — what instead? — in a web community. Most of you would recoil from considering that any sort of community at all is manifested or embodied by merely coming to the same webpage from time to time.

Yet there is a coincidence of size. The readership of FmH is around the same order of magnitude as allowed in tribal culture and far different than weblog-communities more on the scale of city-states, nation-states, republics, representative democracies… with different possibilities. I have been far less interested in growing the scale of my readership; something has suggested that what at first appeared to be an uncanny hindrance to growth to which I have had to accommodate might be seen as an opportunity instead. I have always been fascinated by the transitions from quantitatively to qualitatively different states in human interaction; what interactional density at a nexus of people of this size would precipitate a quantum leap or tipping point? If so, how deliberately can the push be made? I am willing to take this wherever it might go… which most likely will be nowhere, right? Comments?

The Windows GUI as the Matrix: “…(Y)ou are asleep, a prisoner of your ignorance. And the only way to escape is by getting to grips with the machines, by learning their language. If you don’t get inside them, they will get inside you. Adapt or die.”

…If your children’s children can’t speak the language of the machines, they will have to get a manual job – if there are any left.

This is yet another reason why Windows is such a dangerous commodity. It lulls us into the pernicious illusion that we can deal with computers without adapting to their logic. By presenting us with colourful screens and buttons for us to click on, Microsoft encourages us to believe that we can force computers to adapt entirely to our preferences for visual images, without having to adapt ourselves to their preference for text.

But not only does this prevent people from getting inside the machine and keep them in a state of blissful ignorance, it also proves to be a deceit, for in the end the user still has to adapt to the machine anyway… — Dylan Evans, co-author of Introducing Evolutionary Psychology [here alleged to have been an inspiration for Matrix Revolutions], Guardian.UK

• “I don’t want to be famous; I don’t want to conquer the world; I don’t want
  
  that kind of life,” says Sarah McArthur Amsbary, who was a theater artist
  
  and teacher and earned her master’s degree in English, then stepped out of
  
  the work force when her daughter was born. ”Maternity provides an escape
  
  hatch that paternity does not. Having a baby provides a graceful and
  
  convenient exit.” —New York Times
  
  

• Lady Boss Busted: ‘Is the “glass ceiling” a matter of choice?’ —Reason
  
  

• Teenage girls just want to get married and stay home —Observer.UK

Salon has gotten hold of the entire script of the cancelled CBS miniseries “The Reagans”. The 213-page ‘shooting script’, which likely matches the version CBS intended to air before it caved (when it is aired on Showtime, which acquired the film from CBS, it will likely be further edited) is presented as a downloadable 8 MB .pdf; you have to be a premium subscriber to Salon or get a day pass.

Native Languages: Legacy and Lifeline:

“The languages of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara tribes are fading into silence, one voice at a time, as fluent elderly speakers die.

Those languages, embedded in a native Plains Indian culture thousands of years old, welcomed Lewis and Clark on their epic trip west.

But most children today on the Fort Berthold Reservation in west-central North Dakota grow up in homes where English is the language of daily life.

The Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara, today jointly known as the Three Affiliated Tribes, are fighting to save their languages — and culture — from extinction.

Choose a tribe from the menu … to learn about their struggles … and hear what is lost when a language dies.” —The Fargo (ND) Forum [via The Media Center]

Ask Newsknife:

“When Google News was launched over a year ago there was mild nervousness amongst journalists. Was this a new kind of news site that might beat them at their own game? …We checked to see how well Google News, compiled “without human intervention”, picked the top two stories chosen by leading US news sites.

…

Google News initially picking the Top 2 stories of the moment around 59% of the time, improving to around 63%. CNN and Yahoo! News hover throughout at around 77%, a remarkably consistent performance.

Over the year Newsknife has probably studied Google News more closely than most people. We are a little surprised at the results. We thought Google News “hit rate” at choosing the popular top two stories might have increased more over the year, especially as Google are still calling Google News a BETA (not final) version. This suggests they’re fine tuning it.

Actually, we’re surprised Google News is still a BETA version after over a year….”

Newsknife has some ideas about how Google News can increase its ‘hit rate’ through automated processes, but tells human editors they don’t have to go back to the job market just yet. I agree with their observation that Google’s strength is pulling together a massive cluster of links to news pieces covering a single story, but that it fails a version of the Turing Test by being unable to appreciate nuance in news coverage. The article gives an example:

For example, if a terrorist bombing has just occurred the first wave of news should give details of the bombing. The second wave might be reaction from around the world. At what point should reactions be introduced? And some reactions are more important than others.

In Newsknife’s opinion this is a challenge for Google News.

“BBC teams in Bristol and London have found a way to send video and sound from mobile phones and put them on TV — and now the BBC is using the technology for undercover reporting. Andrew Harvey looks at this pioneering technology in a fascinating article for Ariel, the staff magazine and daily news online service of the BBC, reprinted here on CyberJournalist.net with permission.”

The following useful exercise comes from Mark Kleiman:

“One idea about drug law enforcement is that by making the illicit traffic more expensive and dangerous for the people who sell drugs, enforcement can push up the prices of drugs and therefore reduce consumption.

The old criticism of this approach, based on the notion that demand for illicit drugs was highly inelastic, turns out to be incorrect; cocaine and heroin, at least, seem to have greater-than-unit elasticity, so a price increase will actually decrease the total amount consumers spend. So increasing drug prices would seem to be a useful goal.

The bad news is that, in the face of mass distribution, enforcement has a very hard time increasing prices. When I learned about the illicit drug markets around 1980, heroin traded at wholesale for about $250,000 per kilogram and at retail in New York for between $2 and $2.50 per pure milligram, reflecting a kilo-to-street markup of about 10x.

Now, after twenty years of intensified drug law enforcement, the wholesale price is about $70,000 a kilo and the retail price in New York about 20 cents per pure milligram. [*], a factor-of-three reduction at wholesale and a factor-of-ten reduction at retail, reflecting a greatly reduced markup. The general price level, as measured by the CPI, has roughly doubled over that period, so the inflation-adjusted price of a pure milligram of heroin is actually down about 95%.

The price drop for cocaine has been a little bit smaller: from about 80 cents per pure milligram in 1980, the price fell very rapidly until about 1988, and has since stablilized (in nominal-dollar) terms at about 15 cents per pure milligram, which adjusted for inflation is a deline of about 90%.

All of this happened in the face of an enforcement effort that increased the number of drug dealers behind bars from about 30,000 in 1980 to about 450,000 today.

The policy implication would seem to be that enforcement has limited capacity to increase the prices and thus decrease the consumption of mass-market illicit drugs, and ought to focus instead on reducing the violence and neighborhood disruption associated with the illicit trade, by targeting the meanest dealers and the ones whose trafficking is most flagrant, rather than the largest.” [thanks, walker]

We Want Your Soul:

“A fantastic opportunity…No car? No home? No collateral for loan? Bad debt? No problem, no repayments. We want your soul. You can receive a guaranteed CASH SUM for life, in exchange for an agreement that entitles WWYS® the rights to your soul from now until all eternity.

Find out the current value of your soul – click here now for a free, no obligation quotation.

How does WWYS® work?

Medical and operant conditioning science has made huge advances in recent years and due to our various strategic partnerships WWYS® is able to identify the genes and lifestyle choices that make up what is commonly referred to as the soul.

Soul extraction is painless and worry-free. You need never remember your previous soulful existence, and look forward to a “life” of money and security.”

[They tell me that my soul is worth £8023 and that 85% of people have a purer soul than I do. Beat that.]

Update: I wrote below about the ongoing trial of a suspect in the 1977 brutal slaying of the mother of my friend Pam. It has just come across the wires that Eric Anderson has been convicted of 1st degree murder and given a life sentence without chance of parole. —Boston Globe Sleep soundly, Pam.

Addendum: Pam writes:

By the way….Rick Nagle tells us that the Cold Case Unit is no longer…There are still many families out there that have a cold case that still needs work. If anyone has any connections to state law enforcement, now would be the time to put in a good word for your local Cold Case Unit!

“I hadn’t written in my blog for a while. I turned on the computer and wrote a new entry. I clicked the ‘submit’ button, thereby restarting my blog.” [Think of it as an exercise in mindfulness?]

—-networkworldmap.com

Rumsfeld retreats, disclaims earlier rhetoric:

“In the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said U.S. forces would be welcomed by the Iraqi citizenry and that Saddam Hussein had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

Now, after both statements have been shown to be either incorrect or vastly exaggerated, Rumsfeld – with the same trademark confidence that he exuded before the war – is denying that he ever made such assertions.”

This man is either so outrageously arrogant that he believes he can rewrite history at will or his memory so impaired that he has no choice but to live in a fantasy world of his own confabulation. In either case, it is hard to see how he would be seen as anything but an intolerable liability by the Bush White House. It must be considered too great a hit to Bush’s credibility to oust him with even the kindest spin before the election, too easy to impute that it would be an admission of sin (although, surely, the Bush administration does not care to, or is too inept to, operate by any semblance of the old adage about avoiding even the appearance of impropriety!). A conspiracy theorist might wonder if Rumsfeld will be eliminated by an ‘accident’ before he does too much more damage, and revered and mourned as a hero in the WoT®, instead. After all, as Josh Marshall said,

It’s become conventional wisdom that the Pentagon, or rather the civilians at the Pentagon, muscled out the State Department on key issues of planning for Iraq. My recent reporting tells me it’s much more a matter of Cheney and the Office of the Vice President. Much more.

The Senate majority leader is the latest Republican to protest in the aftermath of a leaked memo outlining a strategy by Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee to highlight contradictions between intelligence reports and dysadministration claims about Iraqi weapns programs. No one doubts that the Democrats would be fools if they did not time revelations to affect Bush’s chances of rewinning the White House next year, but to my way of thinking it would not be unpatriotic at all but in the highest service of the nation to expose the irregularities in the Bu**sh** approach. The Republicans of course pull out that tired old horse of accusing the Democrats of undermining the WoT® Ironically, the memo was an uncirculated draft by a staffer and would probably not have been made public but for the Republicans’ desperation. The Republicans accuse the Democrats of politicizing the traditionally nonpartisan intelligence committee and making it impossible to do its crucial job, but again that is the pot calling the kettle black. The most partisan acts these days are those of Republicans refusing to leave the sinking ship of loyalty to the dysadministration..

Freewayblogger.com: “Here’s how it works:

When you put a sign on the freeway

people will read it

until someone takes it down.”

—[via Billmon]

The freewayblogger’s latest exploit is a big ‘Quagmire Accomplished’ sign.

“The Los Angeles Times has ordered its reporters to stop describing anti-American forces in Iraq as ‘resistance fighters,’ saying the term romanticizes them and evokes World War II-era heroism.

The ban was issued by Melissa McCoy, a Times assistant managing editor, who told the staff in an e-mail circulated on Monday night that the phrase conveyed unintended meaning and asked them to instead use the terms ‘insurgents’ or ‘guerrillas.'” —Reuters . Supposedly, the ‘resistance fighters’ term evokes “the French Resistance or Jews who fought against Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto.” The assistant managing editor of the New York Times told Reuters he agreed with the LA Times‘ decision ( “I don’t think it’s the kind of cool, neutral language we like to see.”), but the foreign desk editor of the Washington Post disagrees, on the grounds that the term is a technically accurate description.

On what grounds did McCoy make the call, I wonder, that (a) that is the connotation readers will take from her reporters’ choice of terms; or that (b) the alternative terms suggested will be more neutral or innocuous? I actually find both “guerrilla” and “insurgent” to have heroic connotations, my political sentiments having been shaped by my opposition to the US intervention in Vietnam and support for a number of guerrilla insurgencies since. She claims it is not on the basis of reader complaints, but even if it were, how would that be an accurate gauge of (a) those readers who had not reacted negatively to the connotations of ‘resistance fighter’ and (b) the relative merits of alternative terms to which readers had not been exposed and therefore about which they could not complain? Sorry to spin out my tortured, hairsplitting logic, but I just don’t get it. Hey, at least the LA Times reporters weren’t using the term ‘freedom fighters’ instead…

Website collecting the writing of this prolific, incisive fellow-traveller who has been publishing in Wired recently but whose output I have been following since the days of his associations with the Grateful Dead and Allen Ginsberg. In the past few years, he had the privilege of an extended interview with the reclusive inspired neurologist Oliver Sacks (I linked here to his resulting portrait of Sacks in Wired) his research for which led Silberman, made curious about the comment made by a waggish admirer of FmH who called me ‘the Oliver Sacks of weblogging’, to my site here.

Responding to my link below to a piece about the sculptural works of a profoundly mentally handicapped woman surely unaware she is ‘making art’, Steve wrote to say he is working on a piece about jazz pianist Matt Savage, an 11-year-old ‘musical savant’ with an autistic-spectrum disorder — “an in-depth examination of what the brains of rare prodigies like Savage tell us about the biological nature of intelligence and creativity…” Autistic phenomena have been another of Steve’s interests (as it is one of mine), I glean, dating at least from the acclaimed piece he wrote (again in Wired) in December, 2001 (and, again, to which I linked here at the time) on the ‘geek syndrome’, about the connection between autistic traits and technology. The term ‘geek syndrome’, coined as a headline for his story, has become lingua franca for this association. You FmH’ers are among the ‘relentlessly curious’ for whose benefit he posts a slew of links to some of his older writings; dig in.

Addendum: Ironically, as I finish the above, I am pointed to another piece by Silberman about an experience, again bearing a resonance to something I post here, whose potency leaves him concluding that “talking about things I had or had not written seemed ridiculous, like gossiping in front of a mountain.”

I hadn’t realized, until I saw this linked to at Booknotes, that only six senators were present for the voice vote on the $87b Iraq appropriation. USA Today calls them courageous for sticking around for the vote and says we have ninety-four cowards among these august representatives. More telling, of the six only Sen. Robert Byrd voted no. To my way of thinking, we have ninety-nine cowards, not ninety-four. And among them are several men who are vying for your vote next November, of course.

When I linked a few days ago to the USA Today article about the superiority of the intelligence the insurgents are using in fighting against the US occupation, a reader —[thanks, ezrael] commented that someone must have been asleep at the paper’s editorial desk. This is another piece that might be interpreted as uncharacteristically critical of the powers-that-be.

… that may stretch our conception of art:

• Art for Cockroaches:
  

  monochrom invites artists to design a gallery-space for cockroaches. Each design is exhibited for a month and then replaced. The audience — consisting of 40 individuals — are fed fresh fruit daily (preferably apples or bananas) and are cared for. You can come and visit the audience, every Thursday, when monochrom has its weekly meeting at Museumsquartier/Vienna. monochrom guarantees the well-being of visitors.

  “I think it’s about time to herald the era of a new awareness in the
  
  human-cockroach-relationship.” (Don Pollock)

• jwz receives a gift of a painting…
  

  …by an actor who was Johnny Weissmuller’s costar in the Tarzan movies in the 1930s and 1940s. The artist is now 71 years old and living in Palm Springs, Florida, enjoying his new career as a painter.

  His name is Cheeta, and he’s the world’s oldest living primate.

• Judith Scott (born 1943), a fifty-five year old woman with Down’s Syndrome, has spent the past ten years producing a series of totally non-functional objects which, to us, appear to be works of sculpture…
  

  …except that the notion of sculpture is far beyond Judith’s understanding. As well as being mentally handicapped, Judith cannot hear or speak, and she has little concept of language. There is no way of asking her what she is doing, yet her compulsive involvement with the shaping of abstract forms in space seems to imply that at some level she knows. Judith possesses no concept of art, no understanding of its meaning or function. She does not know that she is an artist, nor does she understand that the objects she creates are perceived by others as works of art. Whatever she is doing she is definitely not concerned with the making of art. What then is she doing? Unmistakably she is working, and working hard. Her formidable concentration surpasses that of most professional artists. Is it possible that she is obsessionally involved in an activity that is without meaning? Does serious mental retardation invariably preclude the creation of true works of art? Is it plausible to imagine an artist of stature emerging in the context of massively impaired intellectual development?

From Atrios:

“At this point, I think we need to not ‘fail miserably.’ I’d like that to be a resounding success, with a liberal democracy, complete with gay marriage and all, flourishing in Iraq, but the plutocratic colony we’re in the process of establishing to the benefit of our war profiteers isn’t exactly moving in that direction. The truth is, as Big Media Matt points out, the Bush administration is in the process of ‘cutting and running’ as much or more as any of the Dem candidates (even Kucinich!) are suggesting. I have a hard time believing that the promises of troop reduction will ever really materialize, but in the end it’ll be a war between Rove and the Neocons. Normally I’d put my money on Rove, but I’m not sure in this case.”

I love how succinctly he puts the dysadministration dilemma — Rove vs. the Neocons. This would imply, however, that Rove’s expertise at selling presidential Bu**sh** is based on less rabid ideological grounds than the Perles, Wolfowitzs, etc. What exactly are Rove’s conservative bona fides?

Bruce Sterling is back in the weblogging business, courtesy of a new blogspace Wired is developing. Sterling’s outlook has always seemed to me to be quite amenable to weblog-consciousness and I was always disappointed with the lack of investment he made in his previous venture in this area. Schism Matrix. He pledges to be prolific this time around (possibly because Wired is paying him for this effort?). IMHO, so far what he has got up at BtB makes up for volume by lacking in depth, however. Not compelling.

I hadn’t realized, until I saw this linked to at Booknotes, that only six senators were present for the voice vote on the $87b Iraq appropriation. USA Today calls them courageous for sticking around for the vote and says we have ninety-four cowards among these august representatives. More telling, of the six only Sen. Robert Byrd voted no. To my way of thinking, we have ninety-nine cowards, not ninety-four. And among them are several men who are vying for your vote next November, of course.

When I linked a few days ago to the USA Today article about the superiority of the intelligence the insurgents are using in fighting against the US occupation, a reader —[thanks, ezrael] commented that someone must have been asleep at the paper’s editorial desk. This is another piece that might be interpreted as uncharacteristically critical of the powers-that-be.

“Not since the Vietnam War has the Army punished a soldier for being too scared to do his duty.

But on Friday, Sgt. Georg Andreas Pogany will appear in front of military court here to face charges he was a coward.

The Army says he is guilty of ‘cowardly conduct as a result of fear’ and not performing his duties as an interrogator for a squad of Green Berets in Samarra, Iraq.

But Sergeant Pogany says he did not run from the enemy or disobey orders. The only thing he is guilty of, he says, is asking for help for a panic attack.

On his second night in Iraq, one month ago, Sergeant Pogany, 32, saw an Iraqi cut in half by a machine gun. The sight disturbed him so much, he said, he threw up and shook for hours. His head pounded and his chest hurt.

‘I couldn’t function,’ Sergeant Pogany said in an interview on Tuesday in his lawyer’s office in Colorado Springs, not far from Fort Carson. ‘I had this overwhelming sense of my own mortality. I kept looking at that body thinking that could be me two seconds from now.’

When he informed his superior that he was having a panic attack and needed to see someone, Sergeant Pogany said he was given two sleeping pills and told to go away. A few days later, Sergeant Pogany was put on a plane and sent home.” —New York Times

It is not precisely true, from a psychiatrist’s perspective (and with the caveat that one does not diagnose sight unseen from a distance) that this soldier had a ‘panic attack.’ It is more likely he is suffering from acute post-traumatic stress, of which panic-like symptoms are a facet. PTSD develops when a person is inescapably exposed to something beyond the pale. This is precisely why the Army had better rush to perfect those drugs to stop soldiers from incorporating traumatic memories about which I wrote several months ago here so they can get back to functioning like the unfeeling automatons they are supposed to be on the battlefield. We are routinely going to expose them to things beyond that which any human nervous system was designed to withstand, and they had better learn to feel nothing in response.

Toddler Lives After Being Declared Dead: ‘A toddler who was revived nearly two hours after she was believed to have drowned — and 40 minutes after doctors had declared her dead — was responding to touch and sound Saturday, hospital officials said.

Mark Langdorf (search), chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of California, Irvine, said it is not uncommon for toddlers to survive drownings after showing little or no signs of life, especially if the water is cold.

What was unusual in Mackayala’s case, he said, was the time involved.

“If you had said she came back to life after 10 minutes I would be surprised, but 40 minutes is just exceptional,” he said.’ —Fox News

“The Bush White House, irritated by pesky questions from congressional Democrats about how the administration is using taxpayer money, has developed an efficient solution: It will not entertain any more questions from opposition lawmakers.” —Dana Milbank, Washington Post. This is, of course, on top of the White House initiative several weeks ago to bypass pesky questions from more critical national news sources, such as the Washington Post and the New York Times, and go directly to the regional press in the heartlands to plead its case. This is one of the most outrageous manipulations this dysadministration has pulled off, but where is the outraged response? More evidence of how easy it is for an anti-democratic cabal to completely and rapidly subvert democratic processes once they hoodwink the complacent and gullible polity to cede them power. The beerhall putsch, 21st-century-style, continues. Will the public awaken in time for November ’04?

“In my attempt to realize ‘death’, I have decided to watch the dead body of a dog continuously at the coast.” Photographs and commentary by Manabu Yamanaka [spelling correction by FmH].

• 1st day

  – I patted him on head wondering if his life was happy one.

• 2nd day

  – His face seemed to be sad. I felt the odor became stronger.

• 5th day

  – Many crows crowded at the spot and were pecking his eyes and
  
  anus.
  

It goes on from there, with a stark unflinching zen-like photograph of the dog’s status each day. —[thanks, gary]

An interesting story surrounds this weblog of a courageous 24-year-old Iraqi woman (“Girl Blog from Iraq… let’s talk war, politics and occupation.”) to which I was pointed by an FmH reader [thanks, gary]. Riverbend offers realtime commentary on events in Baghdad, inside perspective on Western analysis of the situation, and a humane introduction to Iraqi Islamic mores and customs. She is even going to start posting some recipes, she has decided while laboring preparing the evening meals that break each day’s fast during Ramadhan.

But ‘riverbendblog.blogspot.com’ is being spoofed by someone at ‘riversbendblog.blogspot.com’ (note the ‘s‘) who also called his weblog Baghdad Burning but, as she describes in her Oct. 29th post (scroll down) ‘Riverbend and Multiple Personalities’ , is rife with errors of fact about Iraq, an antithetical political philosophy supported by cutting and pasting posts from US government sources, and grammatical errors she speculates are designed to sound like his idea of an ignorant Iraqi ‘hajji’. The spoofer, she discovers, is a retired US Air Force veteran of the Korean War and a ‘GOP Team Leader’, whatever that is. Two other sites (here and here) have been digging into the fraud. Skip the fine print if you are not that interested in the intricate details:

The story begins on Sept. 2, 2003. The retirees on soc.retirement were giving “Solerito” Troy, Korean War vet and GOP Team Leader, a hard time over a blog he suggested. It was called solerito.blogspot.com. He’d recommended it as a welcome antidote to the negative blogging coming out of Iraq. “Here is one that’s not supportive of Saddam and is interested in a better future for Iraq,” he wrote.

“And this one sounds exactly as if you wrote it, Troy,” a poster responds. “C’mon, fess up.”

He doesn’t. The Solerito blog has begun in the thick of things with the death of David Kelly, described as a friend of the blogger — who goes under the name “river.” But she is quick to adapt to our American ways, and before long has already achieved scorn for Hillary. “I long for the day we can watch FoxNews in Iraq,” she pines.

The Solerito blog has sort of run out of steam by then. But Troy/Diego, who has also been accused of being an infamous soc.retirement mischief-maker named Sordo/Bodine , and is also the kind of guy who tells people they are traitorous “basteds” who belong in hell — has moved on to stage two of the Doppleblogger Project, a cheeky new blog called Riversbend.

Except that Troy/Diego accidentally leaves, on the URL of his hit counter page, a reference to his nickname — “Solerito” (as spotted by Claude, a keen Atrios reader).

Many of his Usenet posts end with the nickname, which is Spanish for “saltshaker.” His signature:

El Solerito Troy,

Artist, HAM, Korean War, Reg. Army & USAF Retired, MOPH L38342 Unit 1849, Phi Theta Kappa, RNC 146441197-D186, GOP Team Leader, NRA 040959746 —John Gorenfeld

Interesting discussions on the two sleuthing weblogs arbout the ethics of posting the identity and the email address of the spoofer, of defacing the fake weblog, etc. Under pressure, the spoofer has modified his spot to be less of an infringement on the original, removing fake archives and stolen graphics, no longer claiming to being written by a “girl from Iraq”, no longer calling it Baghdad Burning (for awhile, calling it Baghdad’s Not Burning, duh). The spoofer violates several of the Blogger terms of service, and the author of the original Riverbend complained to them but was brushed off politely. The spoofer has apparently started two other ‘smearblogs’ with varying degrees of similarity to the genuine Riverbend.

…to Bonnie Raitt, Bonnie Bramlett and Rickie Lee Jones today.

‘…(T)here has always been a certain incommensurability between political activities that depend on mass mobilization and the idiosyncratic sensibility of the aesthete—even the public-spirited, politically active aesthete. For every argument that aesthetic concerns are a luxury in the face of political injustice, there is the rebuttal that aesthetic freedom is as necessary for the human spirit as any political right. “It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives,” wrote Theodor Adorno, “but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men’s heads.” —NewMusicBox

Hymn & Fuguing Tune: “Ten contemporary composers and performers, whose work has intersected with their own deeply held political beliefs, talk about what has inspired their music, and what they hope to achieve with it.”

An extensive interview with Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah about his growing career as a songwriter.

Diamanda Galás in conversation with Edward Batchelder; an interview in ten parts, or a complete .pdf transcript of the interview.

EDWARD BATCHELDER: The first thing I’d like to ask you about is the current project that you’re working on. I know that you have two CDs coming out in November, and one of them directly relates to the issue of music and politics. Could you start by talking about it?

DIAMANDA GALÁS: Okay. The project is Defixiones, Will and Testament. Defixiones means “curse.” Defixios were lead tablets that were placed in certain places, let’s say, on the graves of the dead to either warn people that if they touch the grave, their ancestors would come to a very bad end, or to put curses on, let’s say, circus performers, enemies of any kind, and all sorts of things. A person who has done a lot of studying on this is John Gager at Princeton. The purpose that I use it for is to discuss the graves that were decimated and desecrated by the enemies of the Assyrians, the Greeks, and the Armenians living in Asia Minor, Pontus, and Thrace. These enemies were the Turks. I use this as a basic description of the overall intent of the work, which is that we will not die in peace.

“Trying to eliminate Saddam…would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible…. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq…. there was no viable ‘exit strategy’ we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations’ mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.”

— George Herbert Walker Bush,

from his memoir, A World Transformed (1998)

[via wood s lot]

International Trepanation Advocacy Group (ITAG): “for the first time on this planet you are free to have maximum fulfillment… It is no longer necessary to follow a path and search for your true greatness…” [via bOING bOING‘s list of candidates for the week’s weirdest web links]

“President George Bush’s calls for democracy rang hollow in the Middle East, where many said on Friday they were appalled Washington was preaching liberty for Arabs while occupying Iraq.

The war on Iraq and Washington’s support for Israel in its bloody conflict with the Palestinians have antagonized many Arabs and Muslims who were already seething at the United States’ war on terror, seen by many as a battle against Islam.

And Bush’s sweeping foreign policy speech on Thursday, in which he challenged ally Egypt and foes Iran and Syria to adopt democracy, fueled Arab indignation.” Reuters

The BBC has a site devoted to coverage of Cult TV. How kind of them…

“National Public Radio will announce today the largest donation in its history, a cash bequest from the will of the late philanthropist Joan Kroc of about $200 million.

The bequest from the widow of the founder of the McDonald’s fast-food chain both shocked and delighted people at NPR’s headquarters in Washington yesterday. It amounts to almost twice NPR’s annual operating budget. ‘No one saw this coming,’ said one person.” Washington Post

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Bill O’Reilly.

This is a poll of BBC readers. Of the ten films on the list, I have seen four. Of those four, three do not belong on any ‘worst film’ list, and the inclusion of one of those makes me embarrassed for BBC readers’ film acumen.

“Why are we attracted not only to the biggest version of almost anything but also to the smallest, the weirdest, the first, the last, or the only? Why does something gain value merely because it is rare and authentic—the odd voyeuristic pleasure that comes from seeing on display the salt and pepper shakers from the mess kit George Washington may have clutched as he crossed the Delaware? Is it mere curiosity, or is it something more?” —Discover

“Gordon Graham challenges practically the whole of reigning orthodoxy in political philosophy in his remarkable book. To the bien pensants of political theory, ‘political participation’ and ‘democratic decision-making’ are all the rage, and theorists such as Amy Guttmann, Benjamin Barber, and Ronald Dahl constantly urge us on to more and more democracy. Like Hans-Hermann Hoppe in his excellent Democracy—The God that Failed, though with rather different arguments, Graham sets himself in firm opposition to this dominant trend.1 Graham is principally a philosopher of religion, and he brings to political theory the fresh perspective of an outsider.” —Mises Review

“The world’s largest iceberg has split in two after being pummelled by a powerful storm, it was reported.

B15, an 11,000-square-kilometre (4,400-square-mile) monster the size of Jamaica, was one of the biggest icebergs ever seen until it broke up last month, said the Antarctic Sun newspaper Tuesday.

The title of world’s largest iceberg now passes to C19A, near a French Antarctic base, which at 5,659 square kilometres (2,264 square miles) is about the size of Brunei.” —Yahoo!

Entrancing photo of creature found at 10,000 feet in the Pacific’s Japan Deep. —Yahoo!

“The (Israeli) court ruled the petition was not receivable.” —Sydney Morning Herald

Three drunken Finns in Nov. 2002 disastrous attempt are jailed. —The Australian

“Odin, Thor, Freya and the other Viking gods of yore will soon be providing divine authority for some marriages in Denmark.

Minister for Ecclesiastic Affairs Tove Fergo said Wednesday Forn Sidr will be allowed to conduct legally-recognized marriages.

The group, whose name mean ‘Old Custom’ in old Norse, worships gods from the Norse pantheon, like their Viking forebears from the 8th, 9th and 10th centuries.” —The Australian

“The nearest galaxy to our own Milky Way has been revealed. It is so close that the Milky Way is gradually consuming it by pulling in its stars. But it will be few billion years before it is entirely swallowed up.

The previously unknown galaxy lies about 25,000 light years from Earth and 42,000 light years from the centre of the Milky Way, beyond the stars in the constellation Canis Major. It is twice as close to the centre of our galaxy than the previous record holder, the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy, which was discovered in 1994.” —New Scientist

48 human volunteers —New Scientist

“There’s sweet news about hot cocoa: Researchers at Cornell University have shown that the popular winter beverage contains more antioxidants per cup than a similar serving of red wine or tea and may be a healthier choice.

The study adds to growing evidence of the health benefits of cocoa and points to a tasty alternative in the quest to maintain a diet rich in healthy antioxidants, chemicals that have been shown to fight cancer, heart disease and aging, the researchers say.” —Science Daily

“This week, a respected biologist was led into a Texas courtroom. He faces no fewer than 68 charges and could end up in jail for the rest of his life. Has the FBI finally caught the anthrax attacker?

No. Thomas Butler merely reported that 30 vials of plague bacteria had gone missing from his laboratory at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. Many of Butler’s colleagues believe the justice authorities are making an example of him as part of a wider effort to ensure that scientists take more care with material terrorists might exploit.

Whatever the outcome of the case, that effort is having repercussions that go far beyond the fate of one scientist. New Scientist has contacted more than 20 prominent figures in the US working in bioterror-related fields.

Some refused to talk, and most who did did not want to be named. Their comments paint a disturbing picture. Some scientists, for instance, are refusing to work on projects involving agents that could be exploited as bioweapons, even though the US government is providing massive funding to boost such research.

Others are considering abandoning existing work. Irreplaceable collections of microbes essential for managing and tracing outbreaks, bioterrorist or natural, are being destroyed simply because labs cannot comply with the new rules.” —New Scientist

Why not to be ‘bright’ —Butterflies and Wheels

“Could a single trip on a piece of African rootbark help a junkie kick the habit? That was the claim in the 1960s, and now iboga is back in the spotlight. But is it a miracle cure? Daniel Pinchbeck decided to give it a go. And life, he says, will never be the same again… ” —Guardian.UK

Related: Peru seeks tribal cure for addiction:

Peru is home to the coca leaf, the main ingredient of cocaine.

In the last few years it has also become home to a new way of confronting drug addiction: by returning to Shamanism and traditional Amazonian medicines. —BBC

Among others, they are talking about the indigenous hallucinogen ayahuasca.

Also: Cannabis can help MS sufferers:

“Claims that cannabis can relieve the symptoms of multiple sclerosis have been reinforced by results from the world’s largest ever trial of the medicinal effects of the drug – but only just.

The main improvements seen were in subjective measures of symptoms, i.e. those reported by the patients, rather than in those measured using standardised tests.” —New Scientist Only subjective symptoms?? What could be more important?

Dinosaur secret revealed: “They lumbered cautiously on land. But when the biggest dinosaurs in history hit the water, they floated like giant inflatable pool toys, new Canadian research has found.

‘They were like colossal corks,’ says Donald Henderson, a University of Calgary researcher who says he may have solved a mystery about the long-necked dinosaurs that were the biggest creatures to ever walk Earth.”

“This controversy (over call centers) recently broke out in an unlikely place, the letters column of the Times Literary Supplement. After Susan Sontag praised Indians for putting their English-language skills to work through call centres, a furious professor in New Delhi denounced her for failing to see that ‘These poor young men and women are indeed the cyber-coolies of our global age.’ In the next issue, another Delhi resident wrote that what the professor considers exploitation looks to workers like a way to acquire skills as well as income. He acknowledged that while ‘it isn’t much fun to persuade someone in Detroit to pay his credit card bill’ (yet another function of call centres), it builds negotiating skills.

It is an iron law of international economics that the Exploitation Police will swoop down and denounce anyone who creates new jobs, particularly in relatively poor areas. The common complaint is that call-centre companies set up shop in places (New Brunswick is a good example) where they can find well-educated workers at relatively low wages. The Exploitation Police make this sound almost criminal. In fact, it’s the way capitalism has always expanded and the way that poor regions have traditionally turned themselves into less poor regions. To consider this sort of change deplorable is to miss the fact that business lives by ingenuity and perishes when it ceases to find new and cheaper ways to get its work done.” —National Post

William Mitchell says that networks should become so important to us, we become part of them. “Shot through with post-dotcom sobriety, Me++ describes the move from virtual reality – the old 90s idea of the net as a separate, alternative realm – to ‘augmented reality’ (AR), in which ubiquitous computing and mobile wireless networks are used to reconnect us to the real world.” —Guardian.UK

The Bush agenda behind the ‘partial birth abortion’ ban. —Alexandra Walker, Tompaine.com

The irony of CBS’ wimpy cancellation of the Reagan biography (Tompaine.com) under conservative pressure, it occurs to me, comes when you juxtapose the story with the Terry Schiavo saga in Florida. It has long stuck in my craw that rightwing reverence for the two-bit actor’s machine-made performance as President (in which he gutted decades of social reform and set an ongoing precedent for American cannibalization of the poor and disadvantaged) has led lawmakers to abandon a longstanding precedent and memorialize Reagan by naming airports, highways, buildings, bridges and whatever after him while he is still alive. One way to think about it is as a covert acknowledgement that Reagan’s advanced Alzheimer’s dementia amounts to a living death, that the man they knew is already long gone, even though his body still breathes and circulates blood. Isn’t there some incongruity, then, with the conservative cause celebre of refusing to let go of illusions about Schiavo and fighting dirty to keep her alive at all costs?

The only real discussion of race in today’s America is in a comic strip. “Of course, the real funnies are on the front pages of most papers these days. That’s where you can see a lot of black faces. The media love to cover black people on the front page. After all, when you live in a society that will lock up about 30 percent of all black men at some time in their lives and send more of them to prison than to college, chances are a fair number of those black faces will end up in the newspaper.

But to be honest, the newspapers don’t just show bad black. They have ‘good’ black people they cover too! Like Clarence Thomas. And Condoleezza Rice. See, they care.

Oops. There I go playing the race card. You see, in America these days, we aren’t supposed to talk about race. We have been told to pretend that things have gotten better, that the old days of segregation and cross-burnings are long gone, and that no one needs to talk about race again because, hey, we fixed that problem.” —AlterNet

Everyone is covering the report in Lynch’s ‘authorized biography’ that she was raped by her Iraqi captors. This is the story that should get more attention from a public with less prurient interest: “Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch has accused the military of using her capture and dramatic nighttime rescue to sway public support for the war in Iraq.

Lynch said she’s bothered by the military’s portrayal of her ordeal in Iraq. She said the U.S. military manipulated the story of her dramatic rescue — and shouldn’t have filmed it in the first place.” —Omaha Channel News

This is bizarre. (BBC) The British press is legally barred from specifying what the allegation against the Prince is, but offers bountiful coverage of his denials. The Guardian did, at least, win a court battle allowing it to say who made the allegations against the Prince, a former royal aide. The fact that the claims cannot be specified has not stopped Royal spokespeople from smearing the witness’ credibility with suggestions he is psychiatrically unstable. The Guardian said:

This newspaper is not publishing the actual allegations. Not only do they differ from the highly coloured rumours about royal affairs which have surfaced recently in the tabloids, but we also have no reason to believe the allegations are true. The saga shows the extraordinary lengths to which both sides are going in the bitter battle between scandal-hungry tabloids and an increasingly bruised royal household.

Six more.

Paul Krugman: “What Howard Dean meant by his flag remark was that Democrats must make the case to working Americans of all colors that the right’s elitist agenda isn’t in their interest.” —New York Times op-ed. I agree with Krugman that Dean’s remark could have been better phrased, but that his Democratic rivals should be ashamed of themselves for the way they are going after him. The pundits on the talk shows have focused on Dean’s unusual integrity for not excusing or retracting his statement under fire. I think Dean is proving himself to show grace under fire despite innuendoes about his non-Presidential volatility. But more importantly, he is keeping his ‘eyes on the prize’ — Dubya and the Republican abuses of the worst administration this country has seen int he post-war era — rather than descending to the level of politics as usual of several of his hack rivals.

Review of The Matrix Revolutions: “Everything that has a beginning has an end.’ This sentence appears on the front page of the production notes handed out at press screenings of ‘The Matrix Revolutions,’ which opens worldwide today. It is also uttered by the Oracle (Mary Alice) in response to a question from Neo (Keanu Reeves). ‘Where is this going?’ he wants to know. ‘Where will it end?’ Neo may be the One, but he can hardly be the only One posing such questions. The talk of endings in this, the third and ostensibly final movie in the series, is so insistent that you may wonder whether the Wachowski brothers, who wrote and directed it, felt the need to reassure the audience, and perhaps themselves, that it was really, finally over. There are still a few loose ends that might be spun into future sequels ” —A.O. Scott, New York Times

While the news about the confession in the Green River killings has been prominent, I am (peripherally) involved in another criminal justice story. One of my closest co-workers at the hospital was a 9-year-old girl out for a bicycle ride with her parents in a state forest in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1977 when her mother took a fork in the trail and was brutally murdered. Despite intensive efforts, no leads appeared in the case until the late ’90’s, due to dogged efforts by a detective in the Massachusetts Cold Case Unit who was fascinated by the case since he was a little boy and his father was the police chief of Plymouth when the murder occurred. The stuff of television, and in fact the case was featured in a 1999 CBS 48 Hours (scroll down to the last case). It took nineteen years to identify a suspect, two further years to charge him, and then five more years before the suspect came to trial. Today the prosecution wraps up the presentation of its case and it goes to the jury (the defense is not calling any witnesses). My friend and her family have had to endure reliving the events, confronting the depravity of her mother’s accused murderer, hearing grisly forensic testimony reconstructing the crime and her mother’s injuries, all with the knowledge that they may have to find from this some other closure than a conviction. Here is what she says as she heads to court today:

Please know that I am not expecting a guilty verdict. I am hoping people will keep their hopes and expectations reasonable. The DA and all those involved have certainly shown they have done the absolute best job they could do. There just may not be enough evidence to convict him, but we got this far and mom has had her days in court. For me, the verdict is a formality. It is for society. I know in my heart and mind what I feel and believe. My primary goal from this process was to get information as to what happened and I am getting so much more info than I ever thought I’d get…and so for me the process has worked.

My heart is with you and your family, Pam…

“The Moon slides through the Earth’s shadow this Saturday night / Sunday morning (November 8/9)

giving skygazers in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and western Asia a chance to enjoy a total lunar eclipse. As lunar eclipses go, this will be a brief one though, with the total phase lasting only about 25 minutes. The orientation and relative size of the Earth’s shadow and the Moon’s trajectory are illustrated in this thoughtful animation showing the full Moon moving up from the lower right, entering the penumbra or outer portion of the shadow region, and then passing well below the center of darker inner shadow region or umbra. The total eclipse phase begins at 1:06 Universal Time, November 9 (8:06pm EST Nov. 8) when the Moon is completely within the umbra. While the off-center passage guarantees a short total phase, it also makes it likely that this November’s eclipsed Moon will be dramatically visible and colorful with a brighter rim along the southern edge.” —Astronomy Picture of the Day

“U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement officials say that after six months of intensifying guerrilla warfare, Iraqi insurgents know more about the U.S. and allied forces — their style of operations, convoy routes and vulnerable targets — than the coalition forces know about them. Indeed, U.S. intelligence has had trouble simply identifying the enemy and figuring out how many are Iraqis and how many are foreign fighters.

With local knowledge and the element of surprise on their side, the guerrillas are exploiting their intelligence edge to overcome the coalition’s overwhelming military superiority. Insurgents routinely use inexpensive explosives to destroy multimillion-dollar assets, including tanks and helicopters. Using surveillance and inside information, the guerrillas have assassinated many Iraqis helping the coalition, gunned down a member of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council, killed the top United Nations official in Iraq and blasted the heavily guarded hotel in Baghdad where Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying.” —USAToday

Here is another sense in which this is Vietnam all over again — and a sense in which we have not learned. The insurgents evade detection by blending into the general populace; the conspicuousness and unwieldiness of the lumbering U.S. military beast makes it an easy target; and superior firepower and military technology and prowess confer no advantage over simple weapons craftily used. Of course, the ‘simple weapons’ here include RPGs and portable SAMs that can take out tanks and helicopters, rather than the carbines and sharpened bamboo sticks that defeated the U.S. in Indochina. Moreover, US vulnerability may be due as much to our remarkable cultural insensitivity and bigotry as our reliance on high-tech warfare. And, as if that analogy isn’t telling enough, there’s the Battle of Algiers depiction of the post-conquest Algerian insurgency against the French. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz should rent it and weep — before they pursue their potentially disastrous ‘Iraqification’ strategy.

In a Washington Post op-ed piece, a Democrat and self-professed opponent of the invasion of Iraq, Steven Kelman, from 1993 to 1997 the administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, says “anyone with a working knowledge of how federal contracts are awarded” would find allegations from public watchdog agencies and Democratic critics that political favoritism underlies the decisions about awarding reconstruction contracts for Iraq and Afghanistan to be “somewhere between highly improbable and utterly absurd”. Such decisions, his major point is, are made by career civil servants rather than political appointees. True, heavy campaign contributions from the Halliburtons and the Bechtels do curry favor, but in areas far from contract awards whose outcomes depend on the favor of elected officials, such as “tax, trade and regulatory and economic policy” (as well as appropriations to pay for awarded contracts). He is trying to counter this “whiff of scandal” because it undermines the public trust in public institutions and civil servants and could add needless regulatory complications to an efficient procurement system.

I think blinking to this piece is important to provoke thoughtful opposition and dialogue rather than kneejerkism (kneejerkiness??). However, I have my doubts about Kelman’s thesis on several grounds. First, as a civil servant himself who probably believed in and took pride in his job, the fact that he takes umbrage at the accusations suggests that his counterattack may be too defensive. He points out that in his career, and those of the colleagues he has queried, no one ever tried to lean on him to influence his decisions, and that if they did they would lose rather than gain favor with him. Further influence of his integrity, indeed, but can we take that as evidence of the integrity of the entire process?

Then there is his protestation about the public impression that the government is taken to the cleaners by its contractors. This complaint is rather tangential to his argument about favoritism. Its gratuitousness surely stands as further evidence of his defensiveness.

A blanket assertion that there is a firm distinction between career civil servants and political appointees, and that there is a wall between the two such that the latter’s interests cannot under any circumstances influence the former, is difficult to believe, especially in a conniving and self-serving dysadministration such as Bush’s. There is an increasingly prevalent genre of op-ed analysis of the Bush White House by officials of prior administrations based upon their experiences of how government worked in the past; I find this increasingly irrelevant given the neo-cons’ profound reinvention of government in their own image. Am I being too conspiratorial? Recall the accumulating evidence that senior Bush officials have crafted a shadow civil service in the foreign policy and intelligence-analysis sphere which bypasses the constraints on their agenda that the usual channels confer.

In addition, he focuses too narrowly on what may be a semantic distinction only, that of awarding contracts vs. funding them, etc. He lets us know that the ‘structuring and management’ of contracts are potentially rife with abuse. He concedes that political contributions curry favor in plenty of other aspects of government decision-making, just not his.

In short, a closer reading of his column would suggest that one can conclude, first, that contract awards decisions under Kelman were not corrupt; secondly, that the contract award process may be more impartial than commonly assumed (“When did you stop beating your wife?”). But it certainly should not stand as a blanket refutation of the ‘cronyism’ charge.<p

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Related: Halliburton Contract Extension “Likely” Cancelled Amid Allegations of Overcharging Taxpayers:

“The Army Corps of Engineers is “likely” to cancel the no-bid contract extension granted a week ago to Halliburton for delivery of oil-related services amid allegations that Halliburton is overcharging the federal government to import oil into Iraq. The decision to revisit the contract extension comes in part due to the assertions from inside the Pentagon that Halliburton’s price for imported gasoline was “at least double what it should be.” —The Daily Mislead

“As American soldiers massed on the Iraqi border in March and diplomats argued about war, an influential adviser to the Pentagon received a secret message from a Lebanese-American businessman: Saddam Hussein wanted to make a deal.

Iraqi officials, including the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, had told the businessman that they wanted Washington to know that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction, and they offered to allow American troops and experts to conduct a search. The businessman said in an interview that the Iraqis also offered to hand over a man accused of being involved in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 who was being held in Baghdad…” —New York Times

They also offered to help out in the Middle East peace process and offered the U.S. oil concessions. These clandestine 11th-hour approaches by Iraqi representatives including director of Iraqi intelligence (destined to be no. 16 on the U.S.’s Iraqi most wanted list), with the reported approval of Saddam Hussein and offering “unconditional terms”, prompted a London meeting between Richard Perle and the Lebanese-American intermediary, who conveyed desperate, “begging” Iraqi requests for a direct meeting with Perle or another American representative. In the face of U.S. intransigence about Saddam yielding power, they apparently offered to hold elections within two years.

…(T)he Iraqis appeared intimidated by the American military threat. “The Iraqis were finally taking it seriously,” he said, “and they wanted to talk, and they offered things they never would have offered if the build-up hadn’t occurred.”

Mr. Perle said he found it “puzzling” that the Iraqis would have used such complicated contacts to communicate “a quite astonishing proposal” to the administration.

But former American intelligence officers with extensive experience in the Middle East say many Arab leaders have traditionally placed a high value on secret communications, though such informal arrangements are sometimes considered suspect in Washington.

Perle says he relayed these messages through channels, asking whether he should in fact meet directly with Iraqi representatives, and was told that his superiors were not interested.

…or does it? 25 years after it left the earth, and 13.5 billion kilometres away from the sun (or 90 times farther away from the sun than the Earth), competing papers in this weeks Nature debate whether Voyager 1 has left the solar system and entered interstellar space.

“Voyager 1 was launched 26 years ago and has nearly reached – or has already penetrated – the edge of the bubble surrounding the solar system.

The bubble is formed when highly charged particles from the sun, called the solar wind, collide with particles emanating from other stars in the galaxy.

The edge of the bubble, called the heliopause, is an ever-shifting boundary and it’s unclear whether Voyager 1 has passed through it.Scientists theorize that a barrier, called a termination shock, exists where the hot solar wind hits the cold, thin gas of interstellar space.

As particles of solar wind pile up on the barrier, they get hotter and skip back and forth across the boundary. ” —CBC

Scientists race against the exhaustion of its onboard power source in hopes it will find something interesting in the endless expanse of interstellar space it now enters on ithe final (but interminable) leg of its voyage.

“A list of nearly 200 scientific researchers has been compiled and given to federal officials by the Traditional Values Coalition, a conservative group that goes wild over gay issues and federal funding of research related to human sexuality.

The list, which has sent a chill through some researchers, is being used by the coalition and its government allies in attempts to discredit the researchers and challenge or revoke their federal grants. It’s a sloppy, dangerous and wildly inaccurate list, put together by people who are freaked out by the content of the studies, and unconcerned about their value.

The targeted studies cover a wide range of topics related to health and sexuality, including H.I.V. and AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases and adolescent sexual behavior…

For a right-wing coalition to be hung up on these matters is one thing. But the coalition’s list, which includes some of the most respected scientists and institutions in the country, is circulating among members of Congress and was forwarded to the National Institutes of Health, which is responsible for awarding the crucially important grants.” —Bob Herbert, New York Times op-ed

“Already tarnished by questions surrounding the huge no-bid reconstruction contracts won by his former company, Halliburton, in which he retains a financial interest, as well as his refusal to disclose to Congress what meetings he held during his formulation of Bush’s energy policy, Cheney is increasingly seen as a serious rightwing extremist and ideologue, and by far the most powerful number two in US history.

As much as Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and his neo-conservative advisors have become the lightning rod for criticism over the Iraq war and the administration’s hubris, Cheney appears to have acted as their principal patron and advocate with Bush himself, and more than any other official except perhaps Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the driving force within the administration for war with Iraq. ” —Asia Times

“Iraq, everyone agrees, is not Vietnam. In Vietnam the United States lost dozens of troops for every one it is losing in Iraq. The Viet Cong guerrillas had broad popular support. They were being supplied by great powers. And so on. But there is one sense in which the analogy might hold. Frustrated by the lack of quick progress on the ground and fading political support at home, Washington is now latching on to the idea that a quick transfer of power to local troops and politicians would make things better. Or at any rate, it would lower American casualties. It was called Vietnamization; today it’s called Iraqification. And then as now, it is less a winning strategy than an exit strategy.” — Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post

Join the NRA blacklist, sponsored by stoptheNRA.com.

Ribbit! is back!

“For literature now is in a dangerous zone where there seems to be little separation between the private act of writing and the public performance demanded of writers. Books are judged today as successful or not depending on sales and jury short lists. Meanwhile the critical climate, for all the media coverage of writers, is random and manic. Writers are either flung onto centre stage or ignored completely. New talents are discovered (this being the main and perhaps only virtue of any award system) but many significant artists such as Robin Blaser or Roy Kiyooka or Al Pittman can go through their whole careers being barely mentioned in the national newspapers. The best critics of our time, who are less obsessed with the frantic picking of a season’s winner, are published quietly and almost invisibly. Critical works such as George Bowering’s Errata or The Mask In Place, Robert Kroetsch’s The Lovely Treachery Of Words, Dennis Lee’s Body Music, or Don McKay’s Vis à Vis prove there are writers who can calmly separate the wheat from the chaff, who can write about what is truly valuable in our literature.” — Michael Ondaatje, The Star

This is the publicly-accessible author conference at the WELL (the almost two-decades-old online discussion center originally founded by Stewart Brand and the other CoEvolution/Whole Earth Review geeks and now part of Salon), currently featuring a discussion with prolific and iconoclastic science fiction (and more) writer Charlie Stross, hosted by Cory Doctorow. Here’s a list of past guests over the course of inkwell.vue’s five years. I’m going off to dip into the Kelly Link and Jeff Tamarkin (Jefferson Airplane) discussions, for starters…

“The community draft boards that became notorious for sending reluctant young men off to Vietnam have languished sinced the early 1970s, their membership ebbing and their purpose all but lost when the draft was ended. But a few weeks ago, on an obscure federal Web site devoted to the war on terrorism, the Bush administration quietly began a public campaign to bring the draft boards back to life. Especially for those who were of age to fight in the Vietnam, it is an ominous flashback of a message. Even floating the idea of a draft in the months before an election would be politically explosive, and the Pentagon last week was adamant that the push to staff up the draft boards is not a portent of things to come. Increasingly, however, military experts and even some influential members of Congress are suggesting that if Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s prediction of a ‘long, hard slog’ in Iraq and Afghanistan proves accurate, the U.S. may have no choice but to consider a draft to fully staff the nation’s military in a time of global instability.” —Salon [via wood s lot]

The ‘quiet public campaign’ consists of floating an invitation to become a selective service local board member on defendamerica.com, from the Dept. of Defense. The last time there was a push for full occupancy of the more than 20,000 slots in the selective service machinery was during the Reagan administration more than 20 years ago. As one of those who was ‘of age to fight in Vietnam’ and who has a son who I will never send to be cannonfodder for neo-con criminal dreams of empire, this is a hotbutton issue for me. It is hard to believe the dysadministration is foolish enough to go on record about resurrecting the draft just when the enthusiasm of the American people for mounting military casualties is at its ebb, and that it can try to ‘spin’ its way out of the resultant criticism by telling us that black is white, this is not a portent of things to come, when it has been caught in recent months in so many portentious lies around its military campaign. Almost certainly, this is too big a liability to go further in public before the elections, but people interested in seeing Bush dumped next year should make sure the public knows how far it has gone already.

According to some experts, basic math might compel the Pentagon to reconsider the draft: Of a total U.S. military force of 1.4 million people around the globe (many of them in non-combat support positions and in services like the Air Force and Navy), there are currently about 140,000 active-duty, reserve and National Guard soldiers currently deployed in Iraq — and though Rumsfeld has been an advocate of a lean, nimble military apparatus, history suggests he needs more muscle.

“The closest parallel to the Iraq situation is the British in Northern Ireland, where you also had some people supporting the occupying army and some opposing them, and where the opponents were willing to resort to terror tactics,” says Charles Peña, director of defense studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “There the British needed a ratio of 10 soldiers per 1,000 population to restore order, and at their height, it was 20 soldiers per 1,000 population. If you transfer that to Iraq, it would mean you’d need at least 240,000 troops and maybe as many as 480,000.

“The only reason you aren’t hearing these kinds of numbers discussed by the White House and the Defense Department right now,” Peña adds, “is that you couldn’t come up with them without a return to the draft, and they don’t want to talk about that.

The Pentagon has already had to double the deployment periods of some units, call up more reserves and extend tours of duty by a year — all highly unpopular moves. Meanwhile, the recent spate of deadly bombings in Baghdad, Falluja and other cities, and increasing attacks on U.S. forces throughout Iraq have forced the U.S. to reconsider its plans to reduce troop deployments…

“The government is in a bit of a box,” Ned Lebow (a military manpower expert and professor of government at Dartmouth College) says. “They can hold reservists on active duty longer, and risk antagonizing that whole section of America that has family members who join the Reserves. They can try to pay soldiers more, but it’s not clear that works — and besides, there’s already an enormous budget deficit. They can try to bribe other countries to contribute more troops, which they’re trying to do now, but not with much success. Or they can try Iraqization of the war — though we saw what happened to Vietnamization, and Afghanization of the war in Afghanistan isn’t working, so Iraqization doesn’t seem likely to work either.

“So,” Lebow concludes, “that leaves the draft.” ”

Time to dust off the old arguments against the selective service system — such as the inequitable burden on the poor and Americans of color and the fact that along with the draft inevitably comes the remarkablly inequitable system of draft deferments (which is likely to persist even if they claim the loopholes are being closed; after all, look at the tax code, for example!). Time to resurrect the public scrutiny of the war records evasive tactics of dysadministration figures. And time to re-alert the public to that provision of the ‘Leave No Child Behind’ education act of last year that quietly mandated that school boards provide a database of all their enrolled students to the selective service (even before the draft is resurrected, which would require an act of Congress, young men [not women] of draft age are required to register with selective service) unless they opt out.

Parenthetically, after we invaded Iraq and I began to publicize the cases of members of the armed forces who wanted out of our misbegotten enterprise, I had a public exchange with Rebecca Blood about whether there could technically be conscientious objection in a draftless volunteer military. I was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam draft era; I felt that, yes, keeping to the literal text, one can have ‘objections’ as a matter of ‘conscience’ to serving in the military even in peacetime. Rumsfeld may be making this a moot point. It is time to reeducate the American people about the mechanism for this ‘faith-based initiative’. The crucial hoop through which one has to jump to be a CO is to persuade your local draft board — your Republican draft board — that you are opposed to all military action rather than just the particular flavor of the moment. It is not too soon to work to introduce an ethically-based peace education curriculum to our children’s schools (and to our homes) if it is not already there, to help them shape their conscientious thinking.

And what if peace-minded individuals responded to the call to volunteer for the selective service local boards, to make sure that the ‘draft machine’ works exactly as it should, i.e. not at all. Come wearing your wooden shoes…

Thanks to Rafe Coburn for pointing me to this Village Voice piece by Nat Hentoff, causing me, like Rafe, to reconsider my oppositoon to the Bush nomination of Charles Pickering to a federal judgeship on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Hentoff: “…in some 50 years as a reporter, I have seldom seen such reckless, unfair, and repeated attacks on a person—not only by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee but also by organizations that gather financial contributions because of their proclaimed dedication to civil rights, civil liberties, and honest research. (People for the American Way, Alliance for Justice, et al.)” The arena of judicial nominations is the fiercest seat of partisan politics, where the noun “opposition” can always be prefaced by the adjective “kneejerk.” Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee feel they have alot of payback to do for how the Republicans treated Clinton’s nominees. Hentoff essentially says Schumer, Leahy and the like ought to be ashamed of themselves, and that their reputation hangs in the balance as much as does Pickering’s career. One person whose integrity has always gone unquestioned for me has been Hentoff and, by his rendition, Pickering sounds not only like the best one could expect from the Bush dysadministration but a conscientious nomination under any circumstances. What do you think?

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Welcome to everyone sent here by the linkage at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan website. I am grateful to be pointed to, and to be in such great link company.