“Over the past three years, President Bush has been plugging away at his faith-based initiative — and it’s doing better than you think.” — Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange [via AlterNet]

Expanding the boundaries of corporate malfeasance to new lows of dirty dealing, these ten companies are the worst offenders in a year that saw a lot of offenses. —AlterNet

“Mel Gibson’s controversial film on the Crucifixion is being hailed by US Catholics as the best recruiting tool for 2,000 years.” —Guardian.UK

Bruce Schneier: How We Are Fighting the War on Terrorism: “In recent years there has been an increased use of identification checks as a security measure. Airlines always demand photo IDs, and hotels increasingly do so. They’re often required for admittance into government buildings, and sometimes even hospitals. Everywhere, it seems, someone is checking IDs. The ostensible reason is that ID checks make us all safer, but that’s just not so. In most cases, identification has very little to do with security.

Let’s debunk the myths…”

Maureen Dowd: “Now, with the White House looking untrustworthy and desperate; with the national security team flapping around and pointing fingers at each other and, of course, Bill Clinton; with even the placid Laura getting testy; and with Newsweek reporting that the Justice Department is reviewing whether Halliburton was involved in paying $180 million in kickbacks to get contracts in Nigeria at a time when Dick Cheney was chairman, anybody else would be sweating.

Not deadeye Dick. His heavy lids didn’t blink when it turned out he’d blown up a half-century of American foreign policy alliances on a high-level hallucination.” —New York Times op-ed

In Rare Talk Show Interview, Bush Defends Decision on War —New York Times

I previously mentioned that Cory Doctorow has put his new novel online. Now he points us to this Speed Reader remix, “based on the research of Xerox PARC researcher Rich Gold, which flashes the book, one word at a time, up on the screen, at a high rate of speed. It is astonishingly readable, and makes you feel like you’ve found a back-door to your brain’s comprehension nodes.” I think I will try to read the book this way.

This is interesting. Billmon wonders if the Massachusetts Supreme Court has not handed Bush the November election by making the gay marriage ruling now, just in time to consign John Kerry irrevocably to the dustbin of history by putting some beef the voters can really take a bite of into the inevitable “Massachusetts liberal” line of attack.

‘James Joyce’ rants on kuro5hin.org:

“You are all pretentious twats, every last one of you. You’re all latte-sipping, iMac-using, suburban-living tertiary-industry-working WASPs who offer absolutely no new insights on anything whatsoever apart from maybe one specialist field if we’re lucky. Most of you think that you’re writing original content and that you’re making a contribution by licensing your spewings under Creative Commons ‘Some Rights Reserved’ licences, just because it’s the hip thing to do. You think you know all there is to say about blogging because you understand the concept of HTML and CSS, but the horrible truth is that 40% of you are all using the same shitty default layout. Then you take pictures of yourselves looking pensive or making vague allusions to mythology.”

For the record, I don’t use Movable Type, nor an iMac (I’m surprised he singles it out and that anything other than Linux passes muster!). I think lattes have become effete but, when I do drink one (never never at Starbucks) I avoid sipping it. I am not a WASP and do not live in the suburbs. I am not even clear about what a tertiary industry is. Some of my readers feel that I distinguish myself when I write about my one specialist field. I challenge myself to write original content every once in awhile but suspect I am not that good at it. Yes, I plead guilty to carrying the little Creative Commons logo here because I thought the concept was hip. Nope, I created my own layout, I know at least enough HTML and CSS to be proud of that, but more proud of the assistance I received from other generous members of the weblogging community in my efforts. However, alas, no javascript, which would have been really hip, as you put it. Can’t recall the last mythological allusion I made and no pictures of myself, pensive or otherwise. I guess my weblog (I would go further than you do; “blog” is not even barely acceptable, and I apologize for any instances of using the word that have slipped through) might squeak by?

‘Joyce’ ‘s concerns about the rhetorical faux pas‘s and the sheeplike manner in which a single opinion echoes through the weblog universe (yes, I will never use the term ‘blogosphere’ either, although ‘blogroll’ isn’t galling to me at all), on the other hand, make more sense to me, and I do wonder about the impact weblogging has on Google. I (heart) kuro5hin, and think they deserve the increased hits they are getting from this rant. One of the comments on the post refers to this stunt as ‘pulling a Janet Jackson’; will this become the accepted term for offensive attention-getting antics like this? Then, there’s the reader who posts what he calls a ‘serious refutation’, which consists of reposting every paragraph of Joyce’s rant and following it with a one-liner about how he disagrees. I hope he’s being tongue-in-cheek. As I said, I (heart) kuro5hin.

Lileks bleats particularly loudly these days; reading his site is better than taking ipecac if you feel the need to be sick. First, he goes on at length (unbelievable length) about actor Patrick Stewart (Jean-Luc Picard)’s statement that space exploration is the height of arrogance before we “get things right” on our own planet. Lileks feels Stewart is foolish to squander the goodwill he earned in his premier role, especially because Lileks admired how he “projected the values of Western Civ into the inky void while confronting the baffling nuances of worlds we have yet to imagine.” Yes, he does love the sound of his own voice. He goes on to suggest that, instead of stopping space exploration, we ban filmmaking and divert the resources to helping the unfortunate. He knows how impeachable an ignorant rant ignoring the value of artistic output is, so descends into some incoherent sputtering in his final paragraphs.

Then, if you still have the stomach to scroll down, you get to this reflection on the Kerry campaign, which seems to distress him because the Democrats are starting to say such cruel cruel things about his beloved President (having gone AWOL from his military obligation etc.) and because they have the temerity to quibble with the new religion of preemptive imperialism and permanent waronterrorism:

I?m waiting for an ad that simply puts the matter plainly: who do you think Al Qaeda wants to win the election? Who do you think will make Syria relax? Who do you think Hezbollah worries about more? Who would Iran want to deal with when it comes to its nuclear program ? Cowboy Bush or ?Send in the bribed French inspectors? Kerry? Which candidate would our enemies prefer?

I take it back. He’s too funny not to read merely because he makes me ill.

I have been predicting for some time that Bush is going to announce the capture of Osama bin Laden just in time to try to clinch the election for himself. Here goes Sen. Charles Grassley (R.-Iowa) priming the pump.

“I think they’re on his trail now in a way they haven’t been all year. It will happen because we will be able to divert more resources [to hunting down bin Laden].”

In a curious turn of phrase, Grassley said, “Obviously, he’ll be caught between now and the election.” Obviously?? What does he know that you and I don’t?

Just as he did with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory Doctorow is making his second novel available for free downloading. You’re welcome, and he explains why.

For you Firebird fans out there (my default browser since ver. 0.5) this MozillaZine discussion thread must be read before you install 0.8. Otherwise you have only yourself to blame.

I have been waiting for news of whether the investigation of the ‘outing’ of Valerie Plame would lead anywhere. It seems so!

“Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer’s identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said.

According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, were the two Cheney employees. ‘We believe that Hannah was the major player in this,’ one federal law-enforcement officer said. Calls to the vice president’s office were not returned, nor did Hannah and Libby return calls.

The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah ‘that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time’ as a way to pressure him to name superiors, one federal law-enforcement official said.” —Insight on the News

It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch o’ guys, if you ask me…

What’s a “Chido”? ‘Chidos are caricaturized sculptures with a claymation style. E-mail us a picture, and we’ll mail you back a Chidomation figure. Does “Chido” mean something? Yes, “chido” is the current word for “cool” among hip Latino kids. If something’s “sweet” in English, it’s “chido” in Spanish.’

“While global warming is being officially ignored by the political arm of the Bush administration, and Al Gore’s recent conference on the topic during one of the coldest days of recent years provided joke fodder for conservative talk show hosts, the citizens of Europe and the Pentagon are taking a new look at the greatest danger such climate change could produce for the northern hemisphere – a sudden shift into a new ice age. What they’re finding is not at all comforting.” —Thom Hartmann, CommonDreams

The Pentagon’s Weather Nightmare: “The climate could change radically, and fast. That would be the mother of all national security issues.” Recent studies of temperature data locked in Arctic ice cores indicate that warming trends push the climate to a ‘tipping point’ with a sudden lurch from one state to another over a timespan of less than a decade. The major impact on the northern hemisphere would, paradoxically, be drastic cooling, not warming; the major mechanism appears to be the disruption of the Gulf Stream (which warms northern latitudes) induced primarily by decreases in the ocean’s salinity caused by icemelt and rainwater runoff. Although not caused in the past by warming induced by greenhouse gases from human activity, research establishes these drastic flip-flops in the past.

The Pentagon’s concerns arise from the fact that dramatic shifts in climate may overwhelm certain societies’ ability to cope and drastically upset geopolitical strategic balance. The focus in climate research is thus shifting from gradual to rapid change. Hollywood is getting the concept too. Next summer’s disaster flick, The Day After Tomorrow, already being advertised at your local cineplex, envisions an ice age caused by global warming. While the climate scientists have far less than the filmmakers to say about the human drama of the coming ice age, the details are what Pentagon planning is all about. Some of the Defense Dept’s visionaries in long-term strategic threat assessment have apparently turned their attention to this scenario. Fortune magazine here summarizes an unclassified Pentagon report from this think tank, which spins an environmental and geopolitical forecast based on a sudden ‘conveyor collapse’ over the decade beginning in 2010. Suffice it to say it is not a pretty picture, and could reduce humanity to a brutal struggle for basic survival resources unlike anything seen in recent centuries but, with the technological capabilities of modern warfare including nuclear weaponry, of unheard-of brutality.

The Pentagon report does not indicate what recommendations its planners are making and it certainly does not indicate how they will be received by the dysadministration, who are the environmental equivalents of Holocaust deniers. Because of the US’s resources, climate diversity, technological superiority and military might, it fares better than other regions in the ‘wargame scenario’, and it is likely that Pentagon planners are focusing on protecting us against the anticipated hordes of starving have-nots. As Fortune‘s essay euphemistically puts it, “we should… identify ‘no regrets’ strategies to ensure reliable access to food and water and to ensure our national security” and “form teams to prepare responses to possible massive migration, and food and water shortages.” Since ecological catastrophe is at our doorstep, and it is too late to do anything to avert it, it’s every man for himself, ‘no regrets’, in other words. And for me it’s too late to regret having brought children into such a world.

As the reader who pointed me to this said, it is a blistering piece on Bush and Iraq by a Baltimore Sun editor: “Imagine how the loved ones of the dead may feel as they watch the spectacle of political jockeying over who should take the blame for a war being started on the basis of flawed intelligence, over whether there will be an investigation, and over the effect the timing of such an investigation may have on Bush’s campaign to get himself re-elected.

If I were such a parent, or spouse, or child, or wounded soldier, I expect my fury would be visceral and overwhelming. I would not let these men forget what they had done to my family. Blood is on their hands.

Beyond those Americans who have lost – and continue to lose – relatives and friends in the war in Iraq, the rest of America should be appalled. For what the architects of the war in Iraq have done to individual families, they also have done to the whole American family, diminishing the nation’s dignity and stature, and its safety.” —Baltimore Sun [thank you, Richard]

Osama’s voice on tape proves that the leader of al Qaeda is still alive. Or does it? “On January 4, Al Jazeera broadcast yet another audio tape purported to be from Osama bin Laden, in which he exhorted his followers to ‘continue the jihad.’ The voice referred to the capture of Saddam Hussein, proving the tape was recent. An anonymous CIA official confided to the New York Times: ‘It is likely the voice of Osama bin Laden.’ In an interview with CBS, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge agreed.

I pronounced bin Laden dead in my May 2002 and September 2002 columns. Am I ready to retract this claim, and to pay off several bets I made back then? No, not yet. I think Osama bin Laden is still dead. And I don’t think I’m just being stubborn. To understand my logic, consider the following three issues: the state of the antiterrorism effort, the technology of voice identification, and the most likely alternative hypothesis that could explain the audio tape.”

— Richard Muller (a security consultant and Berkeley physicist), MIT Technology Review

“The court effectively shut the door on any legislative or judicial challenge to its historic ruling last November. By the same margin, 4-3, the majority reaffirmed its opinion that gay marriage is constitutional and anything to reverse it is unconstitutional…

That advisory opinion to the Senate, which had been contemplating the passage of a civil union bill that would fall short of recognizing gay marriage, seemingly kills any short range chance of overturning the Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling in November, which declared same sex marriages to be constitutional.

The November decision has been targeted by Catholic bishops and Gov. Mitt Romney for reversal, who responded to Wednesday’s action saying, “While we’ve heard from the court, we haven’t heard yet from the people of Massachusetts.” ” —The Boston Channel. The forces of reaction are planning a constitutional convention to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman; if the court will no longer tolerate unconstitutional practice, then change the constitution, as simple as that.

“Mr. Lebrecht’s evidence for the coming demise of classical recording could be viewed alternatively as proof that for once the free market is working. If some greedy major labels are getting the comeuppance they deserve, let them go under.

Smaller labels like Nonesuch and Naxos, which once just filled in the gaps with records of specialty repertory and adventurous artists ignored by the majors, are proving that it is possible to release important recordings at midrange prices and still pay the bills. And though the financial repercussions from the downloading of CD’s have the recording industry feeling besieged and impotent, some bold orchestras have, like many rock groups, taken matters into their own hands and released self-produced CD’s, recorded live and available on the Internet.” — New York Times

“Roger Stone, the longtime Republican dirty-tricks operative who led the mob that shut down the Miami-Dade County recount and helped make George W. Bush president in 2000, is financing, staffing, and orchestrating the presidential campaign of Reverend Al Sharpton.

Though Stone and Sharpton have tried to reduce their alliance to a curiosity, suggesting that all they do is talk occasionally, a Voice investigation has documented an extraordinary array of connections.” A surprising investigative report by the Village Voice, if it is to be believed in the face of vociferous denials from the Sharpton campaign. I wonder if Stone is still working for the Republicans in this effort, if you catch my meaning.

This New York Times editorial lauds Ariel Sharon’s surprise directive to Jewish settlers to begin preparations to leave Gaza to the Palestinians, noting that the combined population of Israel and the occupied territories approaches parity. Supporters of the two-state solution ought to be encouraged, although the plan obviously does not go far enough in several respects. First, there is no timeline for implementation. Second, the purity of Sharon’s motivations is sullied by speculation that it is timed to deflect attention from the bribery scandal brewing around him. Most importantly, it does not include the West Bank, where the controversial Wall under construction dominates the landscape and where the Jewish “settlers’ ” presence is arguably more inflammatory.

“The Pentagon canceled its so-called LifeLog project, an ambitious effort to build a database tracking a person’s entire existence.

Run by Darpa, the Defense Department’s research arm, LifeLog aimed to gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees or does: the phone calls made, the TV shows watched, the magazines read, the plane tickets bought, the e-mail sent and received. Out of this seemingly endless ocean of information, computer scientists would plot distinctive routes in the data, mapping relationships, memories, events and experiences…

Researchers close to the project say they’re not sure why it was dropped late last month. Darpa hasn’t provided an explanation for LifeLog’s quiet cancellation. “A change in priorities” is the only rationale agency spokeswoman Jan Walker gave to Wired News.”

Robert Kuttner: “After an excruciating delay, chickens are finally coming home to roost for George W. Bush. For over a year, critics have been pointing to the president’s systematic misrepresentations of everything from Iraq to education to budget numbers. But the charge hasn’t really stuck, until very lately. This past week, however, Bush seems to have hit a tipping point.” — Boston Globe op-ed

“Dietary supplements are unregulated, some are unsafe — and Americans can’t get enough of them.” — The New Yorker

The Plot Thickens at The New York Times Book Review: Major changes are apparently afoot and the publishing industry is watching closely. As the editorship of the book review changes, it will emphasize nonfiction over what they claim is the glut of poor novels masquerading as serious literature these days [I have been disappointed for several years in the declining coverage of serious fiction, however.] Reviews will be more contentious and varied in length, and interspersed with author interviews and coverage of the publishing industry… and more reviews of the kind of mass market books once eschewed by ‘serious’ literary critics. — Poynter Online

DRM-free, and the artists get paid: “Imagine a world where music and movies could be freely exchanged online, where artists are recompensed and the labels don’t lose a cent, and where 12-year old girls need not fear harboring an MP3 of their favorite TV show theme tune on their PC.

All that could be yours for less than the price of a subscription to Napster: for less than $6 a month. Harvard University Professor Terry Fisher has completed the first comprehensive examination of various alternative models and the one we outline here offers such tantalizing social benefits, that even the most jaded sceptic ought to pay attention. Professor Fisher belongs to the school of forensic sceptics rather than the school of wide-eyed techno-utopians, and he’s spent three years trying to make the sums add up. We think it’s worth a look, and we think you ought to take a look too. (To make his task even more difficult, Fisher’s license model also takes on the additional onerous task of compensating Hollywood, too). ” — The Register

“The Supreme Court agreed last month to take up Cheney’s appeal in a case that involves his refusal to disclose the identities of members of his energy task force. Three weeks later, Scalia and Cheney went duck hunting together in the marshes of southern Louisiana.

Scalia maintains there was nothing improper about the trip, but it has prompted more than 20 newspaper editorial demands for President Reagan’s conservative appointee to stay out of the Cheney case.” —Fox Scalia retains the right to make his own decision about whether to recuse himself, unless a party with standing in the case asks him to do so and he refuses, in which case — albeit highly unlikely — the entire Court could review the question of his conflict of interest.

Joshua Micah Marshall: “When I look at the federal investigation being launched into the Janet Jackson boob incident, I realize what I like about this administration: they believe in accountability.”

“Never mind the investigation by the Federal Communications Commission into the Super Bowl halftime show that ended with the baring of Janet Jackson’s breast. Where is the inquiry into the crude, crass Super Bowl commercials celebrating a dog trained to bite crotches, a flatulent horse, a monkey pitching woo to a woman, a man tortured with a bikini waxing and an elderly couple fighting over a bag of potato chips?” —New York Times

“CBS announced today plans to enhance its ability to edit out any inappropriate and unexpected events from the Sunday, Feb. 8 broadcast of the “46th Annual Grammy Awards” on CBS.”

“And did no one notice that her tit was adorned with a little silver sun? The sun is a star, and since it’s decorated with a silver star, we can only assume this mammary has seen battle! Her boob is as highly decorated as John Kerry! And John Kerry threw his medals away. Janet (“Miss Jackson” if you’re nasty) wears hers with pride.” —Wonkette

Everyone knows, of course, that Bush fell asleep and missed the incident (after assiduously staying away from pretzels during the first half, I presume).

And, of course, in response to this new media crisis, Michael Powell is doing his part to reduce the record budget deficit, threatening to fine each of the 200 or so CBS affiliates that aired the offending segment up to $27,500 each, although he would personally like the penalty to be ten times higher. However, the Jackson flap is only one of recent celebrity exploits on TV that have the decency freaks howling for blood.

And TiVo reports that the “costume malfunction” was the most-replayed television moment in the history of the DVR. (I knew that the cloud around its silver lining is its amassing data about its users’ viewing habits, but I was not aware TiVo’s datamining is so detailed as to include a log of all rewinds and reviews. )

Will he seek to replace Cheney on the Republican ticket? [joke…]

“Bush’s approval numbers dip.” —CNN [Memo to David Brooks et al: Now do you begin to grasp what ‘electability’ might mean?]

And furthermore:

Support for going to war with Iraq also dipped below 50% for the first time, to 49%. The proportion of Americans who were certain that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to develop them before the war fell dramatically. More than four in 10 said the administration deliberately misled the public about whether Iraq had the banned weapons.

I caught this just before it went off the scroll at Boing Boing: “An anonymous reader sez, ‘The BBC made a unique deal with Real Networks which disposes of their spyware tactics. Basically, if a user clicks on a link to download Real Player from a BBC website, the referrer script sends them to a page where they can download an expiry-free, spyware-free and nuicance-free version of the player. It’s because the BBC have such a stringent public service remit, that it was offensive to charge people a license fee for BBC content, then make them pay all over again for the facility to view/listen to it.'”

Visited countries: “Select in the table below the countries you’ve visited and produce a map of the world with those countries in red. You can even put the map on your website or blog by simply pasting the code you’ll get!” —World66

“Our fourth annual review of the most shameful, dishonest, and just plain stupid moments of the past year. —” Business 2.0

Thirty years ago, one of the most significant papers in the history of psychiatry, psychologist David Rosenhan’s “On Being Sane in Insane Places”, was published in Science and rocked the psychiatric establishment. Rosenhan and eight other volunteers faked their way into psychiatric hospitals with the single complaint that they had hallucinated a voice; they feigned no other symptoms, spoke honestly about their lives after admission, and reported that the voice had stopped once they were in the hospital. One and all were diagnosed as schizophrenics and their subsequent behaviors — for example, Rosenhan’s note-taking during his hospitalization — were pathologized in light of that diagnosis.

Rosenhan and his confederates were given some therapy, and when they told of the joys, satisfactions and disappointments of an ordinary life – remember, they were making nothing up save the original complaint – all found that their pasts were reconfigured to fit the diagnosis: “This white 39-year-old male … manifests a long history of considerable ambivalence in close relationships … affective stability is absent … and while he says he has several good friends, one senses considerable ambivalence in those relationships.”

The other patients sensed that the volunteers were not truly psychotic, he reports.

Rosenhan drew the conclusion that, in an important sense, diagnosis resides not within the person but in the context, and that a diagnostic system so vulnerable to error should not be considered reliable. The backlash was immense, and included some of the most prominent psychiatrists in the field criticizing his findings by observing that diagnosticians do not expect to be deliberately lied to and that the volunteers had not acted ‘sane’ after their admission —

Had their behaviour been normal, they would have walked to the nurses’ station and said, “Look, I am a normal person who tried to see if I could get into the hospital by behaving in a crazy way or saying crazy things. It worked and I was admitted to the hospital, but now I would like to be discharged from the hospital.”

Furthermore, although Rosenhan’s intentions in not identifying the facilities in which the deceptions had taken place were honest, critics at those hospitals could not challenge his accounts of how the pseudopatients were perceived or treated.

Thoughtful psychologist Lauren Slater (who is ‘out of the closet’ about having a psychiatric history herself), to whose work I have admiringly linked here in the past, reviews Rosenhan’s study and its critics’ counterclaims —Guardian.UK. Robert Spitzer, the brilliant but conceited guardian of the diagnostic system as embodied in its bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, (who mounted one of the fiercest counterattacks on the original paper and did not have a kind word to say for the misfurtunes that happen to have befallen Rosenhan in the intervening decades) said that with the current refinement of diagnostic criteria, Rosenhan’s findings “could never happen today” …So Slater decided to replicate the experiment again. Her experience departs from the Rosenhan experiment, both in its outcome and the kindness with which she was treated, but is at least as dramatic an indictment of the way psychiatry is done today as Rosenhan’s was thirty years ago (…and she puts it back in Spitzer’s face). I share her unspoken disdain for his cockiness, and as well her veneration and affection for Rosenhan (who was as she wrote, ironically, institutionalized and mute with a mysterious paralytic illness; he has since recovered, equally mysteriously), whose study albeit flawed should be considered heroic and whose crucial lessons we in the mental health field ignore at our peril.

The shoddy (although well-intentioned) way in which clinicians drew their conclusions about Slater’s feigned distress is, unfortunately, the norm rather than the exception throughout the mental health field today. Patients are referred into my psychiatric hospital bearing labels determined by sloppy, uninformed, arbitrary guesswork bearing no similarity to the elaborate process of applying criteria which should be used to diagnose them accurately. Once stuck on, a diagnostic label follows a patient around immutably. This ‘conceptual abuse’ would not be so provocative to watch if it did not dictate the patient’s medication treatment and to a large extent the interpersonal attitude toward them by many in the mental health field.

Slater’s article on Rosenhan’s work is adapted from her just-released book, Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments Of The 20th Century. According to the publisher’s website, some of the other chapters cover “Harlow’s wire monkeys, Moniz?s lobotomy, Skinner?s pecking pigeons, Milgram?s horrific ?shock? machine, Kandel?s surprisingly illuminating sea slugs and the light they cast on the molecular workings of memory.” I know she also covers the controversial work of Elizabeth Loftus on “false memory”, and I wonder if she covers Milgram’s other seminal work, the famous “six degrees of separation” study.

Gary Trudeau had John Kerry’s number in October, 1971. —Slate

I am amazed at the number of people who post entries in their weblogs that would get them in trouble if the wrong people read them… and then are astonished when they do, and the weblogger gets fired, has a family blowout, loses a friend, or a relationship, or gets an unexpected visit from The Authorities. To complement the Darwin Awards (which “honor those who improve our gene pool…by removing themselves from it”), we ought to have a set of Social Darwins (for those who do society a favor by removing themselves from the social running in some way), and I would nominate some of these ‘kiss ‘n’ tell’ webloggers. I am confident that any trouble into which I get as a result of my posts here will have been deliberate, not inadvertent. Oh, wait just a minute, I’ll be right back, there’s a knock at the front door…

The scream that may not have been; a reporter makes a cogent case that it was an artifact of the sound equipment used that night. —ABC [via Interesting People]

“Breathing new fire into the old cliches that war is hell and love of money is the root of all evil, American soldiers have found a way to wrest Western capitalism out of the Iraqi sands where part of Hollywood’s most popular devil movie was filmed…

Last month, Capt. Nik Guran of the 2-320 Field Artillery Regiment, a ‘major unit’ of the 101st Airborne Division stationed in the small Iraqi town of Hatra, inserted a copy of The Exorcist in a portable DVD player. As the film began, Guran had the weird realization he was sitting at the location where director William Friedkin shot the opening sequence of his 1973 horror classic.

‘He recognized the sun temples,’ Friedkin recently said by phone from Hollywood.

‘And then the Army hatched this idea,’ Friedkin continued, ‘to turn the whole area into a tourist attraction and call it ‘The Exorcist Experience.”” —Houston Chronicle [via walker]

This site keeps track of the dead and wounded among the occupying forces, slicing and dicing the statistics in various ways as well as keeping a running narrative account.

“A German cannibal was convicted of manslaughter but not murder Friday for killing and eating a man who had asked to die, and he was sentenced to eight and a half years in jail.

The court rejected the prosecution’s plea for a murder conviction and life sentence because the victim had instructed Armin Meiwes, 42, to kill him. ” —Yahoo! News

“How is it that the dog, alone among Earth’s species, comes in so many shapes and sizes?” —PBS Nova

Genetically engineered plants turn red when growing over a mine. “A genetically engineered plant that detects landmines in soil by changing colour could prevent thousands of deaths and injuries by signalling where explosives are concealed.” —Nature

Twins born to woman who acted as surrogate for her infertile daughter, to the dismay of reproductive ethics campaigners. —ITV

Found in a garage in Oxfordshire, England —Sydney Morning Herald

“The African-American vote could make all the difference in South Carolina. But given the way three local Democratic activists are feeling, the party might be in big trouble… The Democratic Party is the party that talks about the black vote and attaining it by any means necessary,” Aiken said. ”Now, that does not equate with ‘We value the black vote’ as much as ‘We have to attain it in order to get what we want.”’ The routine currency in this exchange is emotion — for white candidates a little soul power soaked up from a gospel choir and shed just as easily. Candidates parade through church, Aiken noted, but, she said: ”Has anyone done a follow-up visit after a campaign? You know, ‘I came to your church, asked for your vote, the preacher gave me the pat and we prayed. Now I’m in; I’m going to make one more trip back, at least to thank you.”'” —New York Times Magazine

Claims of the discovery of superheavy elements 113 and 115, opening intriguing vistas. “The discoveries fill a gap at the furthest edge of the periodic table and hint strongly at a weird landscape of undiscovered elements beyond…Rather than being round, nuclei in that region and beyond could contain bubbles and have strange doughnut-like shapes…” —New York Times

Mos Def as Ford Prefect in the Hitchhiker’s Guide feature film. —Reuters

Bowing to pressure from lawmakers, the White House reverses its opposition to an independent investigation of intelligence failures. —Washington Post. Right now, administration strategy is all about damage control; Bush’s team appears divided over whether it would be worse to acknowledge that the data on which it based its decision was wrong, or to remain ‘publicly agnostic’ about the quality of the intelligence. The thing to watch will be how the administration limits both the scope (will the inquiry address not only generation but administration consumption of intelligence data?) and duration of the investigation. Rather than making this go away quickly, an effort that the White House reversal seems to acknowledge has failed, they may try to draw this out so any damaging allegations do not come out until after November. Expect the White House to drag its feet mightily in cooperating with requests for crucial data from an independent commission.

“Monsanto, the world’s largest genetically modified seed company, has been awarded patents on the wheat used for making chapati – the flat bread staple of northern India.

The patents give the US multinational exclusive ownership over Nap Hal, a strain of wheat whose gene sequence makes it particularly suited to producing crisp breads.

Another patent, filed in Europe, gives Monsanto rights over the use of Nap Hal wheat to make chapatis, which consist of flour, water and salt.

Environmentalists say Nap Hal’s qualities are the result of generations of farmers in India who spent years crossbreeding crops and collective, not corporate, efforts should be recognised.” —Guardian.UK This would be like patenting the use of flour to make pizza dough in the US.

In examining the insidious marketing strategies Big Pharma uses to put profits ahead of people’s health, I have often noted the lack of a constituency for patients with the devastating disease on which I focus most, chronic schizophrenia. This article focuses on the challenges the drug companies face in marketing newly-developed (and monumentally expensive) antipsychotic drugs for this population.

Since the mid-1990’s, a group of drug companies, led by Johnson & Johnson, has campaigned to convince state officials that a new generation of drugs – with names like Risperdal, Zyprexa and Seroquel – is superior to older and much cheaper antipsychotics like Haldol. The campaign has led a dozen states to adopt guidelines for treating schizophrenia that make it hard for doctors to prescribe anything but the new drugs. That, in turn, has helped transform the new medicines into blockbusters.

Ten drug companies chipped in to help underwrite the initial effort by Texas state officials to develop the guidelines. Then, to spread the word, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and possibly other companies paid for meetings around the country at which officials from various states were urged to follow the lead of Texas, according to documents and interviews that are part of a lawsuit and an investigation in Pennsylvania. —New York Times

The marketing pressure the manufacturers exerted allegedly includes payoffs and other illegal or marginally legal practices. In comparative studies, these drugs have comparable efficacy to the older antipsychotics. Early claims that they are more effective have gone by the boards. Pitching them to prescribers has largely relied on claims that they are better tolerated and safer than the older drugs in terms of side effects. While this is true (patients on them develop the devastating neurological effects of the older drugs far less often), they turn out to have important metabolic complications (effects on glucose and lipid metabolism, weight gain and in some cases cardiac risks). Psychiatrists like myself and other physicians are the objects of a relentless full court press from the manufacturers to diffuse prescribers’ concerns about such liabilities to their patients. Suffice it to say that physicians should be collectively ashamed of how they have handed control over what they learn about prescribing new medications to the pharmaceutical companies that profit from those drugs.

This site keeps track of the dead and wounded among the occupying forces, slicing and dicing the statistics in various ways as well as keeping a running narrative account.