“It may be the book that got a new generation reading, but the huge Harry Potter tomes are giving some children headaches, a US doctor says.

Dr Howard J Bennett, of George Washington University Medical Centre, has recently diagnosed ‘Hogwarts headaches’ in three young patients…

The children did not have a history of such symptoms and the only connection appeared to be that all were reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix at the time.” —The Age

This is part of a longstanding tradition in the letters section of the New England Journal of Medicine of tongue-in-cheek case series designating whimsically-named syndromes reflecting the medical consequences of contemporary cultural trends. The lay press often picks up these stories and reports on them in earnest, but, hey, this is medical humor for ya, although sometimes the cases are poignant. It can be read, more profoundly, as a somewhat ironic comment on the human propensity, which reaches its greatest and most tortured fruition with the medical field’s ‘designer diseases’, for endless classification and subdivision of categories.

“Famous clinical psychologists used the Rorschach Inkblot Test to arrive at incredible insights. But were the astounding performances of these Rorschach Wizards merely a variation on astrology and palm reading?” —Skeptical Inquirer

I have previously written about the incredible value of intuitive psychological testing, including the Rorschach, in psychodiagnostics, and the perils of skeptical debunkers lumping it in with paranomal phenomena.

Psychological testing is only a problem if you expect it to conform to scientific standards. Here’s the secret — interpersonal perception and interactive skills do not conform in that way. It is not that the Rorschach is similar to vaudeville performance based on ‘cold reading’; turn it on its head — cold reading is based on the same intuitive depth perception about people, although usually unrefined by clinical training of course. The same parallel exists with hypnosis, where the same skills may be used as stage entertainment or valuable clinical tools. Calling it ‘mere entertainment’ and calling it ‘unscientific’ are two time-honored debunking tools often uttered, as here, in the same breath.

The ability to read others is both revered and reviled, in an unbroken thread from the peculiar marginal position of the shaman through the psychiatrist cartoons that perennially adorn the pages of the New Yorker, revealing the literatis’ fearful fascination. (There’s also that predictable reaction when someone at a dinner party asks me what I do and I decide to reveal to them that I am a psychiatrist. All of a sudden their demeanor changes and they are reviewing their prior banter with me to figure out what they might have revealed inadvertently to my supposedly penetrating gaze. Yet they are too fascinated to simply avoid me thereafter, so what follows are all manner of ‘curbside consult’ and friend-of-a-friend query in displacement.) And most people think of psychics as parlor trick performers or hucksters on late night television. The human propensity to detoxify potent magic by turning it into mere entertainment, protecting ourselves against its impact by putting it up on stage and therefore inside a frame distinguishing it from ‘reality’, is primeval, and reaches its apotheosis in a society that has lost its capacity to experience the sacred and the mysterious.

And the psychotherapist’s role is always performance art, in an important sense — it exists to induce the willing suspension of disbelief in the listener/analysand, to enlist them in building a shared, compelling, but fictive, belief system, spinning yarns which heal by making more usefully coherent and sensible meaning of their life. The lack of falsifiability (the empirical scientific standard) of some of the claims about a person’s life that come from psychotherapy is only a problem if you have not been enlisted in believing, or if the resulting ‘truths’ are put to nefarious uses as they are in ‘recovered memory’ cases, where the level of ‘reality’ they signify is confused. (“The map is not the territory,” as Korzybski said.) CSICOP doesn’t seem to understand that, in which case there is ‘no use arguing about religion’.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging: The Perfect Imperfect Instrument: “Spatially, it is the gold standard, but poor temporal resolution has researchers looking for something better”:

“According to legend, functional neuroimaging can trace its roots to the stroke of noon on a day in the late 19th century, when Italian physiologist Angelo Mosso observed a sudden increase in brain pulsation in his test subject, Bertino the peasant. Using an elaborate contraption, Mosso had been measuring the pulsations coming from a soft spot in Bertino’s skull, the result of a head injury. Intrigued by the sudden pulsing, Mosso asked Bertino if the chiming of the local church bell had reminded him of his forgotten midday prayers. When Bertino said yes, his brain pulsated again. Then Mosso asked Bertino to multiply 8 by 12. Again, Bertino’s brain pulsated. Thus was borne the notion that blood flow in the brain is related to cognition.

That notion remains the basis of what some neuroscientists consider the most powerful in vivo brain imaging technology in use today, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Since its emergence in 1992, fMRI has dominated the field of human brain mapping and has been featured in thousands of published papers–nearly an order of magnitude more than for any other functional imaging technique.” —The Scientist

FmH readers know of my love affair with this technology, given the psychiatrist’s voyeuristic romance with structure-function correlations in the brain — although more than one observer has referred to this, with all due irreverence, as neo-phrenology. I often point to dramatic fMRI findings here. This article is a good nontechnical overview of the technology, its strengths and limitations. There remains debate about what is actually being measured by fMRI scans, although the consensus is strong that it is an accurate reflection of brain activity during specific tasks.

The temporal resolution problem is not a technical limitation of the scanning methodology but a biological one — the changes in blood flow and metabolism that it visualizes in activated brain regions occur slowly, over 1-2 seconds, in response to task demands (far slower than the speed of thought, if you will). So it becomes impossible to segregate different stages in the brain’s response to a task demand. In many ways, the CNS remains a ‘black box’ with regard to the subtleties of mental events. Yet some think we are not nearing the limitations of the power of fMRI technology but rather near the beginning.

It may take a different kind of analysis of the data, the article suggests. One limitation of fMRI conclusions is that they depend heavily on the assumption that the brain is modular and that the activity of different regions during a mental event may be considered independently. In experimental studies using much more complex multivariate analysis to correlate changes between the voxels of scans, a crude kind of ‘mind reading’ even emerges:

…(T)rained observers first scanned volunteer subjects for several sessions while the volunteers looked at certain objects such as baskets, garden gnomes, and teapots. Cox and Savoy used a multivariate statistical approach–one designed to detect interactions among voxels–to identify brain patterns that corresponded to each object. When the volunteers’ brains were scanned again later, the observers used the patterns, which covered a large region of the cortex, to guess which objects the volunteers were looking at. Their guesses were up to 85% to 90% accurate. The study highlights the significance of coarse-grained neuronal patterns that extend over large areas, patterns that Cox and Savoy would not have found if they had relied on conventional fMRI statistical methodology.

Multivariate approaches to fMRI data are growing; they probably represent around 5% of the data analysis of current studies but will grow to predominate, some observers suggest, and with it will come a fundamental enhancement of our understanding of the interactions between various brain regions in mental activity.

Yet I have always worried about another assumption on which interpretation of the significance of fMRI data depends heavily. If you will allow me an apparent digression, this is a concern that first arose as I began to think about our romance with another technology, television, several decades ago, heavily influenced by Jerry Mander’s* estimable 1977 book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. Along with examinations of the way t.v. mediates experience, colonizes experience, and affects viewers’ physiology, one of Mander’s arguments, perhaps the most compelling for me as a student of human emotion and interaction, is how its inherent biases as a medium (despite anyone’s best intentions about what content it carries or what programming you choose to watch) shape our assumptions about human experience. Television is inherently better at conveying the coarse-grained aspects of emotion and interaction than the subtle; it delineates the exterior at the utter expense of the interior. As an example, because the histrionic outburst or the ugly grimace is resolved much more readily than the flicker of recognition or the momentary tightening of the corner of the mouth, it shapes the depiction of emotion at all levels including the scripting, direction and acting portrayal. More importantly, it directs the attention of consumers of the medium toward the dramatic and external aspects of experience and behavior and shapes their assumptions about what is most significant in human reality. Now you see where I am going; I worry that fMRI has a similar, inherent ‘flair for the dramatic’, and that the understanding of mental events derived from its data will always implicate regions with extensive, easily visualized changes rather than subtle flickers of difference. Gregory Bateson once defined information as a “difference that makes a difference.” We must be careful that the differences we see using fMRI are truly informative; our assumption that a region which undergoes a dramatic change in activation level during a mental event figures more centrally as a mental substrate of that event than another region with a more transient or subtle change in metabolic activity (perhaps because it was already highly active?) may be a questionable one.

*Mander, although less well known, deserves a place in the pantheon of cultural critics alongside, for example, the recently deceased, celebrated, Neil Postman. More recently, Curtis White in his crucial 2002 book The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves, has done Mander one better. While Four Arguments showed why and how the medium of television stops people from the thinking that would interfere with their political obedience and consumption, White argues that this is the effect of both high- and lowbrow popular culture as a whole.

Philosophical scrutiny of paranormal claims by Paul MacDonald, a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia. —Philosophy Now [via Abyssal Mind]

“A plague of locusts is being blamed for an epidemic of allergic attacks in central Sudan. At least 11 people have died and thousands are reported to have been hospitalised, suffering from what Sudanese officials are calling ‘lung eczema’.

The outbreak centres around Sudan’s second largest city of Medani, 180 kilometres south of the capital Khartoum. The annual locust swarm has been particularly ferocious in 2003 and experts believe it has triggered an allergic reaction in the local population, aggravating asthma.” —New Scientist

• from Hawaii
  
• from NYC
  

both from today’s New York Times.

The BBC renders Jakob Nielson’s take on freeing yourselves.

“From: the Peacewatchers at USAF’s Fairford and Welford bases in the UK

Since Saturday, people in the Highlands of Scotland have been witnessing large movements of US warplanes overhead. Experienced observers say the large numbers are reminiscent of those that preceded the bombing of Iraq in 1998 and military strikes on Libya in the1980’s as well as the first Gulf War.

At the weekend warplanes were flying over at a rate of roughly one every 15 minutes. As well as watching them from the ground the plane spotters have also been able to overhear pilots talking by listening to their radio frequencies.

At this rate some 288 warplanes would have passed over Scotland in three days.

It is thought that the planes have flown on a route from the US over the North Pole to bases in Europe and the Mediterranean. The size and scale of the movement suggests that the US may be preparing to strike at a country in the Middle East in the next week to ten days.

Please pass this information on as widely as possible- the US may be planning to use the pretext of “foreign” terrorist attacks on US personnel in Iraq to attack Iran or Syria. Please alert any sympathetic elected representatives, media representatives and other sympathetic organizations.” —Portland Indymedia

Tens of thousands to mobilize for Nov 9th protest: “The day declared by the Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign in Palestine is gathering major momentum as cities across Europe, Canada, the US, Latin America, and Australia are joining in solidarity with the popular Palestinian mobilization that is to take place on November 9, the date of the fall of the Berlin Wall.” —Electronic Intifada Interesting spread of a new meme — Although Israeli treatment of the Palestinians has for a long time been likened to apartheid, it it my sense that there has been a vast increase in this ‘meme’ in the last week or so. Does anyone share that perception?

It could be a thread that unravels the bureau: “Evidence has surfaced recently that the FBI has been spying on foreign nations for years.

The revelation is so sensitive that in the wake of the secret surfacing, the FBI has embarked on a mad scramble to cover up the evidence. The Bureau has gone as far as to pressure a federal judge into sealing previously public court records that open a window on the FBI’s overseas spying mission.

In addition, with the help of the U.S. Attorney’s Office (John Ashcroft’s Justice Department) the FBI also sought, through a proposed court order, to seize any computer anywhere that the Bureau suspected might have contained the sensitive court pleadings.” —Online Journal

“The United States is one of 45 countries that refuses to sign the 1997 Ottawa Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines (APMs) and on their Destruction.” —Online Journal

Clear landmines with one click.

CBS Mulls Canceling Reagan Mini-Series, Sources Say: “Drawing Republican fire over the accuracy of its upcoming mini-series ‘The Reagans,’ CBS appears ready to present a kinder, gentler portrait of the ailing former President Ronald Reagan (news) than originally produced — if the network airs it at all.

Sources close to the production said on Monday CBS is considering canceling the docudrama, slated to air Nov. 16 and 18, under mounting criticism from political conservatives that the two-part series unfairly depicts Reagan and his wife.” —Yahoo! News

“The mainstream media continues to cooperate with the Bush Administration’s policy of giving short shrift to the Muslim psyche, and especially the Iraqi sense of place.

In the West — where the expressions ‘family, national pride, and friend’ are tossed about like so much salad — we are less likely to recognize the importance of diverse cultural perspectives, above all when they are linked to unassailable and even unwise fidelity.

So sayeth not the irresponsible and sometimes non-curious American news media, where nowhere have we heard a word about stunning Arab loyalties, even between those of contradictory opinion, that might be our ‘enlightenment’ answering the question concerning why exactly Saddam Hussein has not been ‘discovered’ — and may never be.

It is the Arab term ‘Dakhil’ which provides the underpinning for the arrangement in which the hunters, namely the US Military, and the hunted, namely former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti, now find themselves.” — Jeff Koopersmith, —American Political Journal

I asked the other day about the senseless illogic of surrounding an Iraqi town with razor wire because of Saddam Hussein’s supposed role in planning the ongoing insurgency against the American occupying forces. Koopersmith knows why it will not succeed. “Tribal vigor is on the rise in Iraq. Make no mistake about that fact — and, therefore, their ability and propensity to protect and hide their own increases each day…One need only think of a mother and child to come close to understanding this fealty.” I also wrote about mistrusting the academic objections to the similarities drawn between Iraq and Vietnam, that this is a matter “too important to be left to the academics.” The role that American ignorance of the cultural underpinnings of the indigenous struggles of these two peoples will play in our failure is one of those generalities worth paying attention to instead of drawing scholarly distinctions. (As Koopersmith concludes, “It is their, our, and our leaders’ almost complete failure to understand the Iraqi ethos that is indefensible, and that which may come to consume us, far more than today.” Substitute Vietnamese for Iraqi in that sentence, and it reads as true.)

Volusia County Memos Disclose Election 2000 Vote Fraud. Voting machine giant Diebold is trying to suppress the web exposure of these leaked internal memos using a dubious application of copyright law. Cease-and-desist orders are going out to sites which reprint them. (The link points to one which, being in New Zealand, is hopefully out of reach of US court jurisdiction.) If you have the means of and the interest in doing so, spread the link to these memos and help get Diebold caught with their pants down before they help steal the 2004 election too.

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s October 31 remarks at the “New American Strategies for Security and Peace” conference:

“…American power worldwide is at its historic zenith. American global political standing is at its nadir. Why? What is the cause of this? These are facts. They’re measurable facts. They’re also felt facts when one talks to one’s friends abroad who like America, who value what we treasure but do not understand our policies, are troubled by our actions and are perplexed by what they perceive to be either demagogy or mendacity.

Maybe the explanation is that we are rich, and we are, and that we are powerful, and we certainly are. But if anyone thinks that this is the full explanation I think he or she is taking the easy way out and engaging in a self-serving justification. I think we have to take into account two troubling conditions.

Since the tragedy of 9-11 which understandably shook and outraged everyone in this country, we have increasingly embraced at the highest official level what I think fairly can be called a paranoiac view of the world. Summarized in a phrase repeatedly used at the highest level, “he who is not with us is against us.” I say repeatedly because actually some months ago I did a computer check to see how often it’s been used at the very highest level in public statements.

The count then quite literally was ninety-nine. So it’s a phrase which obviously reflects a deeply felt perception. I strongly suspect the person who uses that phrase doesn’t know its historical or intellectual origins. It is a phrase popularized by Lenin (Applause) when he attacked the social democrats on the grounds that they were anti-Bolshevik and therefore he who is not with us is against us and can be handled accordingly.

This phrase in a way is part of what might be considered to be the central defining focus that our policy-makers embrace in determining the American position in the world and is summed up by the words “war on terrorism.” War on terrorism defines the central preoccupation of the United States in the world today, and it does reflect in my view a rather narrow and extremist vision of foreign policy of the world’s first superpower, of a great democracy, with genuinely idealistic traditions. ” [more (read the whole thing)]

Recall the peculiar saga of Freud’s friend Wilhelm Fleiss and his notions of the relationship between nasal pathology and psychopathology, about which I have written previously at FmH. Now here is a new twist:

“A University of Melbourne team examined a group of people deemed to be at ultra high risk of developing psychosis and found those that went on to develop schizophrenia, rather than other forms of psychosis, all displayed the inability to identify smells. This deficit was present before the onset of any significant clinical symptoms of psychosis.

The study, the first of its kind, is published in the October 2003 American Journal of Psychiatry…

It has long been known that people suffering schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis are often unable to correctly identify smells. That is, pizza may be mislabelled as orange, or bubblegum as smoke. Before the current findings, however, it was unknown if this difficulty developed later, as a result of the progression of the disorder, or well before any symptoms of psychosis became obvious…

Their results suggest a promising discovery of the first potential marker for schizophrenia, and possibly for other psychoses.

Brewer and Pantelis’ detective work began with the understanding that a person’s sense of smell is intimately linked to the area of your brain that deals with emotions and related non-language functions.

‘It is the only sense that passes straight to this area of the brain, and so any vulnerability involving these neural circuits can affect our labeling of smell,’ says Brewer.

‘This area of the brain deals with the primary emotions. It is the part that processes such things as threat and emotion before transferring this information into the frontal (language) area of the brain,’ he says.

‘It is either the transfer of emotional information to the frontal lobe, or functioning in the frontal lobe itself that appears to be compromised in those suffering from psychosis.'”

There seems to be a sort of progress in awareness, through the stages of which every man—and especially every psychiatrist and every patient—must move, some persons progressing further through these stages than others. One starts by blaming the identified patient for his idiosyncrasies and symptoms. Then one discovers that these symptoms are a response to—or an effect of—what others have done; and the blame shifts from the identified patient to the etiological figure.

Then, one discovers perhaps that these figures feel a guilt for the pain which they have caused, and one realizes that when they claim this guilt they are identifying themselves with God. After all, they did not, in general, know what they were doing, and to claim guilt for their acts would be to claim omniscience. At this point one reaches a more general anger, that what happens to people should not happen to dogs, and that what people do to each other the lower animals could never devise. Beyond this, there is, I think, a stage which I can only dimly envisage, where pessimism and anger are replaced by something else—perhaps humility. And from this stage onward to whatever other stages there may be, there is loneliness.

No one knows the end of that progress which starts from uniting the perceiver and the perceived—the subject and the object—into a single universe.

I love this ‘reference library on demand’. You install a client on your computer that allows you immediate (with a broadband connection) reference information. Clicking on a word or phrase in any Windows program triggers GuruNet and submits the underlying text, returning facts about the topic. The New York Times called it “the best implementation yet of the information at your fingertips promise.” There is a free client that is plenty powerful but you may want to buy a full license after you try it. If you do, write me for a coupon that will give you $5 off. Yes, I know, this is a blatant advertisement for what is essentially a multilevel marketing scheme — after I sell five people on licensing it using the coupon code I provide them, I get my own registration fee refunded to me. Privacy-oriented readers may be concerned that GuruNet tracks your queries and shares aggregate (but not personally identifiable) usage patterns with third parties such as their corporate clients and third-party content providers. Nevertheless, I think the tradeoff is worthwhile if you are a heavy text-based computer user who ever needs to look up a word or a fact.

“Strong explosions were heard late Monday in central Baghdad, and it appeared the blasts were coming from the western side of the Tigris River.

Five blasts shook the area in quick succession about 9:10 p.m. The U.S. military command had no information on the incident.” —Washington Post. Perhaps they ‘had no information’; if the situation is dire enough, the military may simply repress the news. How would we know? After all, journalists were fiercely excluded by a military cordon from the site of the downed helicopter over the weekend, according to reporters I heard interviewed on NPR.

Freed Iranians accuse US of torture: “Two Iranian journalists with state-run television who were freed by US forces in Iraq after four months of detention have charged they were subjected to ‘severe torture’ while in American custody.

But in Baghdad a coalition military spokesman denied that anyone was mistreated in its custody.” —Agence France Presse

” ‘ She would not have believed London still had so many inhabitants…’ Michael Moorcock has begun a new short story for us. Now it’s up to you to continue it… Moorcock has called the story ‘Crowning the Kitten’. You can read his opening here.

The story will unfold in weekly instalments over the next six weeks, but how it continues depends on you.” —Guardian.UK

Anthony Bourdain’s A Cook’s Tour: “Jayne Margetts on Anthony Bourdain’s quest to eat the most gastronomically dangerous dishes on the planet”. —spike

“This week, washingtonpost.com and The Concord Monitor will host a series of live discussions with each participating Democratic candidate in the presidential race. Bookmark this page for the upcoming full list of scheduled discussions.”

I find much of interest posted to Abyssal Mind.

From game designer and author Greg Costikyan:

“Sometime in the 80s, I was living in Columbia University housing with my then-wife, who was studying for her MBA. A political worker came to the door, and asked us to make a donation to some political organization, I don’t recall which, to help fund the ‘fight against the radical right.’ Louise told him ‘but we are the radical right.’

Today, we have a president whose idea of cutting taxes is cutting them in such a way that the richest few percentage of the population gains almost all of the benefit; who has no compunction about leading the nation into a wholly unnecessary war, with no workable plan for how to manage the victory; whose administration consistently works to increase police powers and erode individual freedom; and whose party has been captured by fundamentalist Christian lunatics whose political agenda consists solely of oppressing women and those who make love in ways they don’t like.

It is patently clear that, today, the Republicans pose a far greater threat to American liberties than the Democrats.

I’m not of the ‘anything but Bush’ school. I could never bring myself to vote for someone who thinks censoring games is a good idea (Lieberman), seems to want to bring back the Smoot-Hawley Tariff (Gephardt), or came to political prominence through irresponsible race baiting (Sharpton–I’m a New Yorker, and I assure you that I remember Tawana Brawley, not to mention Crown Heights).

Still, today, the United States is in the hand of a dim-witted Yalie frat boy who listens only to neocon nutcase advisers and has no clue how close we are to a hundred-year war between the Islamic world and the West–and if he did, might think it was a good idea, since that would resemble some of the predictions for the End Times.

If the Democrats wind up nominating Dean, Clark, Edwards, or Kerry, I will almost certainly wind up voting for someone other than the nominee of the Libertarian Party in the next presidential election–the first time I will have done so since I was old enough to vote.”

He says Iraqi forces will fill the gap —Washington Post.



Really. The rush to remobilize the Iraqi army we disbanded when we invaded is a rush to use the ‘hajjis’ (recall: our expletive for all Muslims) as cannonfodder as soon as possible and to extricate ourselves as fast as we can, before mounting American casualties lose Bush the election. Oops, too late, Dubya. A majority of Americans polled now disapprove of the dysadministration’s handling of the Iraqi quagmire, a majority feel the death toll is unacceptable, and a majority would vote for an unnamed Democratic adversary to Bush (any) in the next election if it were held now. By the way, memo to American public: it’s about time. (Don’t get me started on the idiocy of Congressional calls to send more U.S. troops to Baghdad; if there is anything more out of touch with sane alternatives than the Bush cabal, it appears to be Congress. How about calling for extrication?)

Let’s see, the deadliest day ever in the U.S. occupation (although I would venture to say it will not be the deadliest to come, as all the evidence says the resistance is well-armed, increasingly organized, sophisticated, accurate, more and more assertive, more and more deadly… and more and more cheered by the Iraqi population) is the six-month anniversary of our action figure hero’s photo-op under the “Mission Accomplished” banner (which he now denies was his people’s responsibility… and he is right, it wasn’t their responsibility, it was their fault). Didn’t the smirking chimp say, at one point, “Bring ’em on”, enraging our troops’ families back home by seeming to invite the slaughter we are now seeing? Now we’re several weeks into a dysadministration public relations offensive accusing the media of underplaying the progress in Iraq in favor of reporting on the insurgency (which someone commented is like saying a thunderstorm obscures the sunny day behind it). Oh, and there’s that line about how the attacks on American troops are evidence of our success. What would indicate our failure? Total pacification and jubilant acceptance of occupation by the entire Iraqi populace? The Washington Post article notes that “during a southern swing on Saturday, Bush largely ignored the death toll in Iraq, referring specifically to Iraq only once in four speeches totaling 72 minutes.” Let’s face it, Dubya — there is nothing you can say; you’re a liar and you’re inept. You keep on lying, they keep on dying.

Related: The Brown Paste on Bush’s Shoes

“…first whiff…of the collapse of the Bush maladministration’s credibility and with it its operatives’ dreams of a Thousand Year Right…”:

“Surely, as my numerous detractors on the right-hand end of the speculum will point out, it is wrong to make mock of a president struggling so manfully against such dire evils as are abroad in the world? Surely we, the American people, should get behind him and support our troops? There’s a silly frigging idea. Bush is surrounded by concrete barriers and electric razor wire in Washington, DC. Our troops are sucking dirt in some hellhole on the other side of the world, overworked, underpaid, and going swiftly insane slaughtering the locals. You want to support our troops, get Bush in front of them. They’ll be home on the first transport out of Kuwait. Bush has had all the support he could ever ask for, and six trillion times more support than he ever deserved (I’m rounding the number to the nearest trillion for ease of reading). I for one am well pleased that the noisome brown paste is finally clinging to his shoes and ankles, and Rumsfeld’s, and Condi’s pumps, and on down the line of them, the whole vile, varicose, villainous gang of them embrindled with poo at last. O schadenfreude, O schadenfreude, Du kannst mir sehr gefallen!

The ruination of Bush’s utterly spurious credibility has been a long, slow process, entirely unaided by such old fallbacks as the free press and Congress, two entities that (in the good old days when a bottle of pop cost a nickel and you could purchase cocaine over the counter to alleviate toothache) Americans used to rely upon to moderate the behavior of even the most madcap Executive troupe. For two years no action by the Bush junta, be it ever so perfidious, got the slightest rise out of any of the traditional watchdogs. They were sunk in some kind of narcoleptic trance. Trample the Bill of Rights! Destroy our common weal! Wage unprovoked wars on the wrong moustache! Throw firecrackers at our fission-capable enemies! Capering like maniacs across the national and world stages, not an eyelid could the Bush operatives cause to bat, watchdog-wise. But Bush, or properly the Buffalo Bob types operating the monofilaments attached to his limbs, have finally started to get results. Through constant diligence, Bush and his gaggle of suck-buttock familiars have managed to force the slumbering Chihuahuas to react, however slightly. And it looks like there’s more to come.” — Ben Tripp, —CounterPunch [via wood s lot]

Joshua Micah Marshall on Language in Politics:

“We hear again and again how all the bombings and mayhem are obscuring all the good things that are happening in Iraq. But this is like how the thunderstorm ‘obscures’ the underlying sunny day.

Watching Paul Bremer today on CNN I was struck by his use of language like ‘enemies of freedom’ and terrorists to describe the people we’re fighting in the country (these are from my recollection, the precise phrases may be different.) People who kill soldiers are not, at least not by definition, ‘terrorists’. They’re guerillas or insurgents. This isn’t a matter of cutting them slack, but one of precision. And precision is required to know what we’re doing, what we’re trying to do, and how we can get from clarifying what our goals are to finding effective means to pursue their implementation.

This is part of what Orwell was getting at in “Politics and the English Language” when he lamented that “political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.””

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FCC: You Can Say That on Television —FoxNews

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

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

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

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

FCC: You Can Say That on Television —FoxNews

Won’t You?

We hold this truth to be self-evident:

Having George W. Bush as President has been and will continue to be a disaster.

We will not let our partisanship towards any particular candidate for President cause us to lose sight of this basic truth. As such, we pledge ourselves not to become enablers of any campaign designed to divide us in our struggle to remove Bush from power. We pledge that no more will we be:

Tools of those who would disrupt the Anybody-But-Bush movement.

Partisans who would rather bring down the other guy’s candidate than find reason to elevate our own.

Dupes who will automatically assume that anything negative about the other guy’s candidate is more likely to be true than the negative things said about our guy.

Fools who lose sight of the ultimate goal: the defeat of George W. Bush on November 2nd, 2004.

We will uphold this pledge to the best of our ability.

We will encourage others to do the same.

This we do solemnly swear.

The racial achievement gap in education is the major civil rights issue of our time. “…The glaring racial gap… between whites and Asians on the one hand, and blacks and Hispanics on the other… is an American tragedy and a national emergency for which there are no good excuses. It is the main source of ongoing racial inequality, and racial inequality is America’s great unfinished business, the wound that remains unhealed. Our failure to provide first-class education for black and Hispanic students is both an educational catastrophe and the central civil rights issue of our time.. . .True, the black high-school graduation rate has more than doubled since 1960, and blacks today attend college at a higher rate than whites did just two decades ago. But the good news ends there. Equal years warming a seat in school do not mean equal skills and knowledge, and the hard fact is that non-Asian minorities are leaving high school without the training that will enable them to do well in a society whose doors are finally wide open. This is not a story about lower IQs. It is a story of kids who have the ability to learn, but who have been tragically — and needlessly — left behind.” —Abigail Thernstrom (a member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute) and Stephan Thernstrom (professor of history at Harvard University), coauthors of the recently published No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, Boston Globe

Why Not? How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small This is the name of a new book, by Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff (who were interviewed this morning on NPR’s Weekend Edition), respectively professors of law and business at Yale. It is also, apparently, the name of a movement of sorts. They are ‘open sourcing’ their notion and inviting contributors to share design and innovation concepts in the public domain. See the website.

Think twice before calling Iraq “Another Vietnam” : “It’s commonplace in the US media and in some policy circles to hear the conflict in Iraq described as ‘Another Vietnam.’ As an academic who has done extensive research on Vietnam, including its wars, I recoil from the phrase. Popular as a polemical device, it flunks as an analytical tool. Comparison of different cases is sometimes helpful; glossing over complex differences with a label never is.” — William S. Turley, professor of political science at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and the author of The Second Indochina War, writing in —Yale Global. However, this is one of those issues that may be too important to be left to the academics, it strikes me. His level of detailed analysis ends up finding that the details are significant and the generalities are, well, just generalities, with the word used as an epithet. It is a no-brainer to expect that academic analysis will reveal a myriad of differences between Iraqi and Vietnamese history and context. But the similarities — oops, the generalities — are instructive, illuminating the uncanny American capacity for arrogant unilateral imperialist bullying in the guise of omnipotent do-goodism. How about some detailed academic analysis of why this is such a perennial defining characteristic of American foreign policy across decades and party lines?

Sidney Blumenthal: “How can Bush feign shock at the carnage in Baghdad when he signed off on reports that predicted it?” —Salon

Fred Kaplan: Err War: “Back in Soviet times, there was a Russian army general who liked to bellow, ‘Analysis is for lieutenants and women.’ This brute-force approach to military matters didn’t serve the Soviet Union well in the long run. Unfortunately, the same attitude seems to be creeping into the U.S. Army today.” —Slate

“It’s the case that doesn’t exist. Even though two different federal courts have conducted hearings and issued rulings, there has been no public record of any action. No documents are available. No files. No lawyer is allowed to speak about it. Period.

Yet this seemingly phantom case does exist – and is now headed to the US Supreme Court in what could produce a significant test of a question as old as the Star Chamber, abolished in 17th-century England: How far should a policy of total secrecy extend into a system of justice?…

The case is significant because it could force a close examination of secret tactics that are apparently becoming increasingly common under Attorney General Ashcroft. In September 2001, he ordered that all deportation hearings with links to the Sept. 11 investigation be conducted secretly. In addition, the Justice Department has acknowledged that at least nine criminal cases related to the Sept. 11 investigation were being cloaked in total secrecy.” —Christian Science Monitor

U.S. Soldiers Seal Saddam’s Home Village:

“Soldiers stretched concertina wire around the perimeter of the village and established checkpoints. Residents over the age of 18 will be required to have registration cards to move in and out of the village, U.S. officers said.

The New York Times reported Friday that senior U.S. officials believe the former Iraqi leader, who is believed to have been on the run since U.S. forces took over Baghdad in April, is playing a major role in coordinating and directing attacks against American troops.”

The irony of ‘becoming what we detest’ is, I’m sure, lost on no one. It is easy to say this is no way to ‘liberate’ anyone, but the rejoinder from the powers-that-be is also an easy one, about security and protecting ourselves so we can get the job done, etc. etc. But there is a deeper irrationality here. Look at the two paragraphs I excerpted from the Guardian news story; these two facts get juxtaposed in all reportage on this action, with no greater connection than their proximity. Here it is again, further down in the story:

Lt. Col. Steve Russell, commander of the 1st Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division, said he did not know whether Saddam was directing parts of the insurgency, but the village is the family home of many former Baathist regime members. “There are ties leading to this village, to the funding and planning of attacks against U.S. soldiers,” Russell said.

I have looked in vain for any evidence of what those ties might be.

“Three websites that spotlighted a Massachusetts spammer’s bizarre quest for time-travel technology have been hit with an avalanche of what appear to be retaliatory messages. …While spammers commonly forge bogus ‘from’ lines in their ads to avoid detection, the choice of the victim sites appears to be malicious. All three recently published hyperlinks to an August report by Wired News that revealed Robert ‘Robby’ Todino of Woburn as the source of millions of bulk e-mails since 2001 seeking far-fetched devices such as a dimensional warp generator.

The spam that generated all the recent trouble appears to be connected to Todino. The messages, which bore subject lines such as ‘Stop Spam in Its Tracks’ or ‘Say Goodbye to Junk Email,’ advertised a website, Quickeasysolution.com, as the source of an antispam software program.

According to domain-registration records (registration required), John Miller of 4 Oak Street in Woburn, Massachusetts, registered Quickeasysolution.com on Oct. 12. Messages left on the voicemail of the mobile-phone number listed in the record were not returned.

Domain registrations for several sites previously operated by Todino listed the same fictitious street address.” —Wired News

Customer-Service Cluelessness: “Until a few years ago, my wife was a plastic surgeon. She quit for a lot of reasons, but one was the frustration of getting reimbursement from the HMOs.

(…)

And on it would go, until her career felt as though it were half surgery, and half paperwork.

From my outsider’s perspective, it looked like she had stumbled onto a new American business model: passive-aggressive robbery.

Unfortunately, now, in the age of high-tech services, it looks as though the practice has spread to other industries.” —David Pogue, New York Times [via walker]

“The new director’s cut of ‘Alien’ reminds us the film is a powerful purveyor of existential dread, not just haunted-house thrills.

Unlike its increasingly baroque series of sequels, Ridley Scott’s original 1979 Alien is a film about human loneliness amid the emptiness and amorality of creation. It’s a cynical ’70s-leftist vision of the future in which none of the problems plaguing 20th century Earth — class divisions, capitalist exploitation, the subjugation of humanity to technology — have been improved in the slightest by mankind’s forays into outer space. Although it has often been described as being a haunted-house movie set in space, Alien also has a profoundly existentialist undertow that makes it feel like a film noir — the other genre to feature a slithery, sexualized monster as its classic villain.” — Andrew O’Hehir, Salon

“Just in time for Halloween, a vampire-killing kit complete with a wooden stake and 10 silver bullets sold for $12,000 US at auction Thursday.

The kit, a walnut box that also contained a crucifix, a pistol, a rosary and vessels for garlic powder and various serums, was bought by an anonymous phone bidder.

According to Sotheby’s, some experts believe that such kits were commonly available to travellers in Eastern Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, while others think the kits were made in the early 20th century, possibly to cash in on interest in vampires sparked by the 1897 publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” —CNEWS Weird News

Images of Space Get Second Look: “Much like paintings of America’s Wild West commissioned by government surveyors became icons that redefined American culture in the 19th century, photographs of alien landscapes taken by the Voyager spacecraft have shaken our sense of self today.

The photographs of that second awakening, and other images from robotic space probes, were the subject of a panel discussion at the American Museum of Natural History titled ‘Far Out: Space Probes as Landscape Photographers.'” —Wired News

“It is becoming fashionable to question Darwinism, but few people understand either the arguments for evolution or the arguments against it. Mary Wakefield explains the thinking on both sides.” —Spectator

Do post-9/11 realities signal the death of Po-Mo? “No matter which side one takes in these post 9/11 conflicts — which could make the culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s look like child’s play — the rantings of late 20th-century postmodern relativists seem as quaint and distant today as the prattlings of Victorian sentimentalists.

The absence of a seductive replacement for postmodernism has left public intellectuals — can we use that word in a daily newspaper these days without smirking? — with a renewed respect and affection for the paramount movement of the 20th century: modernism.” —Statesman

“Race has become such a rare topic in Hollywood movies that The Human Stain – which deals with the even more rare subject of racial passing – seems to be the work of trailblazing radicals. Director Robert Benton, best known for Kramer vs. Kramer, has filmed an adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2000 novel to make a thoughtful, bold exploration of American values. It’s also one of the bravest – and strangest – Hollywood movies in recent years.” — Armond White, —Africana.com [via AlterNet]

Doctors turn on each other: “The long-running controversy over the MMR vaccination turned unexpectedly into an extraordinary public battle of words yesterday between two doctors responsible for the research paper which began the scare five years ago.

Andrew Wakefield and Simon Murch, both gastroenterologists at the Royal Free medical school in London, have taken very different paths since their paper was published in the Lancet in February 1998.

Dr Wakefield continued public backing for his hypothesis that the MMR triple jab could be responsible for rising rates of autism among children has made him a hero to many parents seeking a reason for their children’s distressing condition, but rendered him virtually a pariah to most of the medical establishment.

In contrast, Dr Murch and his team have kept a low profile.

All that changed yesterday, however, when Dr Murch published a strongly worded letter in the Lancet stating that there was no evidence of a link and warning of the likelihood of a measles epidemic because of the low rate of vaccination, which is down to 61% in some parts of London.” —Guardian.UK

Microsoft and Google: “Wall Street is not the only one wooing Google. Microsoft is as well.

Google, the highflying Silicon Valley Web search company, recently began holding meetings with bankers in preparation for its highly anticipated initial public offering as it was still engaged in meetings of another kind: exploring a partnership or even a merger with Microsoft.” —New York Times. Just what I need; for Blogger to be owned by M$.

“Franklin D. Roosevelt may not have had polio at all, but a paralyzing disease called Guillain-Barre syndrome, Texas researchers say.

‘We feel from the clinical evidence, which is all that exists, that it’s more likely that he had Guillain-Barre syndrome,’ said Dr. Armond S. Goldman, emeritus professor of pediatrics at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.

But Dr. Goldman added that polio could not be ruled out. ‘We felt it was unlikely, but we weren’t there,’ he said. He admitted that a different diagnosis ‘would not have changed a thing’ since there was no treatment at the time for Guillain-Barre.” —New York Times

“Across Europe and the Middle East, young militant Muslim men are answering a call issued by Osama bin Laden and other extremists, and leaving home to join the fight against the American-led occupation in Iraq, according to senior counterterrorism officials based in six countries.” —New York Times

Bush has not attended the funeral of a single U.S. soldier killed in Iraq. And veterans are starting to notice. —AlterNet