Monthly Archives: March 2004
Throwing Rice
I quite agree with this observation by Ed Fitzgerald:
I think this is own major difference between George W. Bush and his father. Both obviously value loyalty to an extreme degree, but Bush Senior, being a more accomplished man himself, also has an awareness of, and respect for, competency and the abilities needed to get a job done. Bush Junior, never having had the need to complete anything himself, always having been rescued from the jams he gets into by his Poppy and Poppy’s friends and connections, clearly has no way of making an independent judgement of competency and capability, and therefore seems to rely almost totally on loyalty as his primary indication of worth. If true, this explains why we’re hearing that Bush himself is running the anti-Clarke campaign, since Clarke’s disloyalty must be punished.
Ed is riffing off an excellent piece by Steve Gilliard considering Condoleeza Rice’s competency. It is pretty clear to me that Bush has no means of evaluating competency and would thus tend to depend on narrow judgments of loyalty. He is sounding more and more Nixonian. Policymaking shaped by personal vendetta? Chilling. Not only does it explain running the campaign against Clarke personally but for me it resurrects the speculation that it was personal for him against Saddam Hussein.
US chose to ignore Rwandan genocide
“President Bill Clinton’s administration knew Rwanda was being engulfed by genocide in April 1994 but buried the information to justify its inaction, according to classified documents made available for the first time.
Senior officials privately used the word genocide within 16 days of the start of the killings, but chose not to do so publicly because the president had already decided not to intervene.” —Guardian.UK It was not only public opinion that demanded the genocide be concealed but the fact that the US was obligated under international covenants to act in response to genocide. But, on the other hand, it is doubtful an international response could have been mounted rapidly enough to stop the bulk of the killings, which started the very night the moderate Hutu president of Rwanda was killed n a mysterious plane crash and which tallied 800,000 within three months. State Dept. briefings during that period resorted to the most obscene sophistry to avoid saying the ‘g’ word. How many ‘acts of genocide’ dancing on the head of a pin does it take to make a genocide?
Bush Scores Points By Defining Kerry
Polls show that the Republican ad blitzkrieg has largely been successful. American voters who know nothing about Kerry have their opinion shaped primarily by the negative ads the Bush campaign has put out since the Democratic primaries ended. Expect the ugliest of campaigns… —Washington Post
U.S. to defend Muslim girl wearing scarf in school
“Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Alex Acosta said government lawyers would support 11-year-old Nashala Hearn, a sixth-grade student who has sued the Muskogee, Oklahoma, Public School District for ordering her to remove her head scarf, or hijab, because it violated the dress code of the Benjamin Franklin Science Academy, which she attended.” —CNN
Why Clarke Helped Bush
Dick Morris: “If voters are focused on terrorism on Election Day, Bush will win. If their gaze is on economic issues, Kerry is likely to prevail. The struggle between the two candidates is, at its core, a competition between these two issues for domination of the national agenda.
In this context, what happened last week?
Superficially, Bush was on the defensive as Richard Clarke testified that he was not sufficiently focused on al Qaeda, had failed to respond appropriately to the 9/11 attacks and was preoccupied with Iraq. The daily tracking polls of Scott Rasmussen indicated that Kerry went from two points behind Bush when the flap started to three ahead at its peak. Rasmussen shows, however, that Kerry has since lost his lead and the race is now, again, even.
But what really happened was that the nation’s focus was further diverted from the economy onto the issue of terrorism. Kerry is not about to close the huge gap Bush has opened up on this issue. No matter what negatives emerge on Bush’s conduct in dealing with terrorism, it will still be the president’s issue.” —NY Post op-ed
Note to Eric: U Need 2B More Careful
“Did you hear the one about the guy at Starbucks? No? Okay…” —Al Kamen, Washington Post
Grinning and Baring It
Richard Goldstein on the crimes of Courtney Love; he likens her to Janis and frets: “If you step back a bit from this vaudeville, it’s hard to ignore the evidence that Courtney is a woman in crisis. She faces drug possession charges. Her daughter has been removed from her custody. The 10th anniversary of her husband’s suicide is coming up. Sure she markets her madness, but the primal currents that course through her act are real. That’s what makes her a hunger artist. And she doesn’t just put her personal pain in your face. In the tradition of Joplin and Finley, her art answers Sojourner Truth’s fearsome, if rhetorical, question: Ain’t I a woman?
But Courtney’s ‘tude also evokes a much less salutary tradition. Entertainers like her are often rewarded for being out of control, and the reinforcement accelerates their downward spiral. That’s what happened to Janis, and for that matter, Judy Garland. Baring the breast can represent a rebellion against this sacrificial rite. It’s a gesture of agency. Check out the manual of psychological disorders and you’ll see that exhibitionism is regarded as a quintessentially male pathology. When women do it, they lay claim to the phallus.
There’s something about a rampageous woman flashing men that resonates with power. You expect guys to rear back in horror, as they did before Sojourner Truth, or to throw lit matches, as they did at Finley. That was then and this is now. David Letterman was anything but fazed by Courtney’s desk dance. In his insouciance, you can glimpse the liberal man’s defense against the phallic potential of women. Don’t try to repress it—that’s for Republicans. Just sit back and enjoy the show.
If I have to choose between The Stepford Wives and MTV Spring Break, I’ll definitely opt for the latter. But at least conservatives take sexual transgression seriously. The liberal solution is to tame it by trivializing it. That way, male distance is maintained. The classic gesture of female incursion is neutralized. And ultimately the joke is on desire.” —Village Voice
Learning From Prozac:
Will New Caution Shift Old Views?: “Since the ascendancy of the biological approach to psychiatry in the 1980’s, Americans have tended to view psychiatric illness as something that should always be treated with drugs and to believe that medication is the only intervention needed. But the real story of 20th-century psychiatry is how complex mental illness is and how difficult it is to treat.
If there is are lessons to be learned from this controversy, they are that antidepressants should not be dispensed like candy, that depression is a serious problem and treating it a serious enterprise, that therapy should always be considered as an option and that, at the least, patients who are given medication should be carefully followed by people who ask them how they feel.”
—Tanya Luhrmann, professor at the University of Chicago and the author of Of Two Minds: An Anthropologist Looks at Modern Psychiatry, in New York Times
"I still think the world is ending, but perhaps a bit slower than I thought."
![//www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2004/03/27/maus.jpg' cannot be displayed]](https://i0.wp.com/www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2004/03/27/maus.jpg "Self-portrait of the artist")
The Age profiles Art Spiegelman’s new work and its reception: “Spiegelman’s role as a staffer at (The New Yorker) became decidedly precarious when the editors saw the working drawings for his new book, In The Shadow of No Towers, which illustrates his emotional and political confusion since September 11.
‘The work is on my feelings towards the hijacking and then the hijacking of the hijacking by the Government. I’m not so sure The New Yorker is being complacent. I’m sure I’d be welcomed back once I had found the right medication.’
Spiegelman’s new book is sure to cause as much, if not more, ruckus as MAUS. It depicts a government out of control, or, more chillingly, totally in control. ‘They had an agenda already on their mind before September 11,’ he says. ‘Drying up funds for health and education and moving the funds upward to the rich, all made more implementable by the war in Iraq.’
Works in progress from The Shadow of No Towers were roundly rejected when he first showed them to publications in New York. They finally found a home in a Jewish newspaper in Manhattan, The Forward.
‘They are a peculiar format,’ he says. ‘They’re broadsheet, colour works.’ MAUS was black and white in paperback format. ‘I’ve finally got them placed in The London Review of Books, Liberation in France, Die Zeit in Germany and La Republica in Italy. So I’ve found my own coalition of the willing.'” [via walker]
Customer Disservice
These Days, Consumers May as Well Keep Their Complaint To Themselves: “But wait a minute. Wasn’t it only a few years ago that Americans were seeing in practically every ad, every TV commercial that the customer was number one, that ‘service is our middle name?’ Didn’t Nordstrom, the upscale department store with a mythic service reputation, have every retailer quaking in his Ferragamos?
That was then, and this is now, say those whose job it is to pay attention to the passing parade. Service was a fine buzzword when the economy was soaring; came the downturn and customer service came close to getting squeezed out of the corporate budget. ‘It’s a frustration,’ said customer service consultant Tschohl, ‘because corporate America is not spending any money to train its staff.'” —Washington Post
RIP Jan Berry, at 62
Pioneer of Surf Music Sound, Dies: Jan was half of ‘Jan and Dean’ along with Dean Torrance. I think Jan and Dean’s “Little Old Lady from Pasadena” may have been the first single I saved up my $.50/week allowance to buy. In a life-imitates-art tragedy, Jan suffered a head injury in 1966 when he crashed his speeding Corvette that largely ended his (and Dean’s?) career. By that time my tastes were migrating further north to a preoccupation with Bay Area psychedelia but I never ceased to get a thrill from the falsetto trill of “two girls for every boy…” [Surf music hasn’t really stood the test of time, but should I be embarrassed to say?] —New York Times
‘Lunatic’ Asteroid?
“The Earth has only one true Moon, but astronomers have found that we also have a ‘quasi-moon’ – a travelling companion through space that is circling the Earth while actually orbiting the Sun.
The object, the only quasi-moon discovered so far, is an asteroid called 2003 YN107 which circles the Sun in an orbit almost identical to Earth’s, but follows a corkscrew path that from time to time means that it appears to orbit Earth.” —New Scientist
Buckyballs cause brain damage in fish
“Nanoparticles cause brain damage in fish, according to a study of the toxicity of synthetic carbon molecules called ‘buckyballs’.
The soccer-ball-shaped molecules show great promise in nanotechnology. But the preliminary study raises the possibility that nanomaterials could cause significant environmental harm, although much further work is needed to establish the extent of this risk.” —New Scientist
Abridged too far
“I went to the library to get my daughter The Wind in the Willows. What I found was a happy-face, Disney-esque conspiracy to rob the classics of children’s lit of their drama, their passion and their soul.” —Hilary Flower, Salon
How to Fix Your CD Player
“Every year countless CD players get junked because of one simple and easily-fixed problem: they fail to ‘find’ CDs placed in them or they skip. Both of these faults are commonly caused by a misaligned read head.
In this article I provide details of a simple method which I have successfully applied to a number of ailing CD players. I hope that some of you will find it useful and that it will reduce the number of these devices that end up in the trash.” —kuro5hin
The Height Gap
Why Europeans are getting taller and taller — and Americans aren’t. “Like many biases, this one has a certain basis in fact. Over the past thirty years, a new breed of ‘anthropometric historians’ has tracked how populations around the world have changed in stature. Height, they’ve concluded, is a kind of biological shorthand: a composite code for all the factors that make up a society’s well-being. Height variations within a population are largely genetic, but height variations between populations are mostly environmental, anthropometric history suggests. If Joe is taller than Jack, it’s probably because his parents are taller. But if the average Norwegian is taller than the average Nigerian it’s because Norwegians live healthier lives. That’s why the United Nations now uses height to monitor nutrition in developing countries. In our height lies the tale of our birth and upbringing, of our social class, daily diet, and health-care coverage. In our height lies our history.” —New Yorker [via walker]
Of Mice and Men:
New York Times: Why Test Animals to Cure Human Depression? With the recent furor about whether antidepressants can promote suicide, why not test them on animals to find a more definitive answer? The answer illustrates some fundamental differences between drug development in the rest of medicine and that in psychiatry, which treats ‘higher’ cognitive functions that by and large have no direct analogues in laboratory animals. For example, there really is not a good ‘animal model’ for human depression, which involves feelings of guilt and worthlessness that have no animal analogue of which we are aware. Indeed, after the serendipitous discovery that some compounds alleviated depression, animal testing was developed to help speed the discovery of subsequent antidepressants. All tests that assay antidepressant effectiveness in animals rely on one aspect of depression, of controversial value, which is called “learned helplessness” and is based largely on the work of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman. Essentially, animals treated with compounds that turn out to have human antidepressant properties struggle longer before giving up in any of several paradigms in which they are made helpless to fend off an adverse stimulus. Seligman insists that the antidepressant amelioration of learned helplessness represents a good animal analogue of depression and its treatment despite significant differences the actions of these compounds have in animals as opposed to humans, such as rapidity of onset and regions of the brain affected. Indeed, animals do not at all have a well-developed prefrontal cortex, that most recently evolved and most human of brain regions where the cognitive aspects of the depressive experience such as worthlessness, self-reproach and, yes, probably the helplessness and hopelessness reside. So it may be the case with antidepressants, as I have argued with other classes of psychoactive drug discovery driven by animal testing, that depending on such an imperfect ‘animal model’ restricts us to discovering only a small and imperfect subset of potentially therapeutic substances. [It is even worse with animal screening of potential antipsychotic medications; the target symptoms watched for are side effects, virtually ensuring that antipsychotic medications that were discovered with the aid of animal testing will be poorly tolerable!] One thing is certain with respect to depression at least; there is no ‘animal model’ for suicidal self-destruction per se, and thus no way to screen our medications for promotion of suicide, as the recent concerns emphasize. But since, as FmH readers know, I do not believe antidepressants actually promote suicide at all, not to worry about the lack of an animal test… [In a psychopharmacological stand-up comedy routine, the comedian would have Eli Lilly asserting that they had definitively proven that Prozac does not promote suicide, since no laboratory rats killed themselves after receiving large doses of the antidepressant…]
Stumbling Down the Road
Keep your eyes on the counter at the bottom of the lefthand sidebar if you are interested in milestones. Sometime in the next two weeks or so, the half-millionth visitor will register on the meter. Thank you for all your attention, and onward toward a million. Wiill it take another 4 1/2 years, do you suppose?
Beware! Carbohydrates will ruin your health
Dave Barry: “I probably shouldn’t admit this to you younger readers, but when my generation was your age, we did some pretty stupid things. I’m talking about taking CRAZY risks. We drank water right from the tap. We used aspirin bottles that you could actually open with your bare hands. We bought appliances that were not festooned with helpful safety warnings such as, ‘DO NOT BATHE WITH THIS TOASTER.’
.
But for sheer insanity, the wildest thing we did was – prepare to be shocked – we deliberately ingested carbohydrates.” —International Herald Tribune [via walker]
Modern Ruins
Phillip Buehler: “I photograph modern ruins because I find it disturbing to find familiar objects and technology to be abandoned. I’m reminded that nothing is permanent, that everything is always in a state of transition. And we see ourselves in our own transitions, sometimes too focused on where we’re going to notice and appreciate where we are.
I created this homepage so I could gather people’s stories and recollections about these modern ruins when they were alive as well as to help me better understand why people are fascinated them. I’ve included them throughout the site. If after visiting you have something to say, please send me e-mail or sign my guestbook.” [via Viridian mailing list]
Beware! Carbohydrates will ruin your health
Dave Barry: “I probably shouldn’t admit this to you younger readers, but when my generation was your age, we did some pretty stupid things. I’m talking about taking CRAZY risks. We drank water right from the tap. We used aspirin bottles that you could actually open with your bare hands. We bought appliances that were not festooned with helpful safety warnings such as, ‘DO NOT BATHE WITH THIS TOASTER.’
.
But for sheer insanity, the wildest thing we did was – prepare to be shocked – we deliberately ingested carbohydrates.” —International Herald Tribune [via walker]
Hard-Disk Risk
Declan McCullagh makes a hobby of buying used hard drives to see what data has not been erased from them. For example,
“I took the drives home and started my own forensic analysis. Several of the drives had source code from high-tech companies. One drive had a confidential memorandum describing a biotech project; another had internal spreadsheets belonging to an international shipping company.
Since then, I have repeatedly indulged my habit for procuring and then analyzing secondhand hard drives. I bought recycled drives in Bellevue, Wash., that had internal Microsoft e-mail (somebody who was working from home, apparently). Drives that I found at an MIT swap meet had financial information on them from a Boston-area investment firm. Last summer, I started buying drives en masse on eBay…
Much of the data we found was truly shocking. One of the drives once lived in an ATM. It contained a year’s worth of financial transactions—including account numbers and withdrawal amounts—from a organization that had a legal requirement to not divulge such information. Two other drives contained more than 5,000 credit card numbers—it looked as if one had been inside a cash register. Another had e-mail and personal financial records of a 45-year-old fellow in Georgia. The man is divorced, paying child support and dating a woman he met in Savannah. And, oh yeah, he’s really into pornography.” —CSO
…And it is so easy to completely wipe a disk irretrievably.
Boo-Boos in Paradise
Top doc backs picking your nose and eating it
“Innsbruck-based lung specialist Prof Dr Friedrich Bischinger said people who pick their noses with their fingers were healthy, happier and probably better in tune with their bodies.
He says society should adopt a new approach to nose-picking and encourage children to take it up.
Dr Bischinger said: ‘With the finger you can get to places you just can’t reach with a handkerchief, keeping your nose far cleaner.
‘And eating the dry remains of what you pull out is a great way of strengthening the body’s immune system.
‘Medically it makes great sense and is a perfectly natural thing to do. In terms of the immune system the nose is a filter in which a great deal of bacteria are collected, and when this mixture arrives in the intestines it works just like a medicine.
‘Modern medicine is constantly trying to do the same thing through far more complicated methods, people who pick their nose and eat it get a natural boost to their immune system for free.'” —Ananova [via dangerousmeta]
Can the revulsion that this image causes most people be explained entirely in terms of their socialized manners? Given the evidence that the emotion of disgust serves an important evolutionary purpose (BBC), could there be an evolved disincentive to picking one’s nose, in contrast the the advantages touted here??
F u t u r e M e . o r g
Send an email to yourself — or anyone else, for that matter — to arrive at a specified date in the future. [via boing boing]
Bush League Follies
As BillMon points out, the latest Rasmussen Presidential Tracking Poll, from a pollster who some have seen as biased toward the Republicans, puts Kerry at 46% and Bush at 45%. Meanwhile, Rumsfeld is singing out of the other side of his mouth these days (Village Voice), testifying to the 9-11 commission that the 9-11 attacks were a law enforcement issue and not under the mandate of the Dept. of Defense, which defends the US against threats outside our borders. So where does that leave the administration’s ignoring all the pleas in late 2001 to treat bin Laden’s actions as crimes rather than acts of war, and arrest and try him rather than bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age? And, of course, there’s Condoleeza Rice, who sings out of both sides of her mouth at the same time. And The New York Daily News reports that Richard Clarke turned the Bushies’ best week, when they “had John Kerry on the run” into one in which they are scrambling to spit the crow out of their mouths. Discrediting and refuting Clarke are now apparently the White House’s sole preoccupation. It seems to me that this puts the final nail in the coffin of the President’s claims to be a ‘war president’, which would depend on uniting the country behind his vision and leadership no matter how unpopular the decisions he had to make rather than descending to pitiful, politicized squabbling which divides the country further. But you already knew that…
The New York Times reports we are fashioning a legal subterfuge to keep US forces in control of the security situation after the June 30th deadline to hand over responsibility to the Iraqis. And the Washington Post has dismal reports on the level of the morale of US troops in Iraq.
Will We Say ‘Never Again’ Yet Again?
“The perennial refrain about genocide is sounding hollow as 1,000 black Africans are being killed by the Arab-dominated Sudanese government every week.” —Nicholas Kristof, New York Times op-ed
The Brain? It’s A Jungle In There
The immensity of Dr. (Gerald) Edelman’s project — explaining the development of the human mind — overwhelms. Yet his ideas about how consciousness arises from the firings of neurons begin to seem eminently plausible because something similar seems to be happening in the hum and current of your own brain, in the excited state brought on by Dr. Edelman’s voluble mixture of calculation, charisma, enterprise and brilliance.” —New York Times
Court Opens Door To Searches Without Warrants
“It’s a groundbreaking court decision that legal experts say will affect everyone: Police officers in Louisiana no longer need a search or arrest warrant to conduct a brief search of your home or business.
Leaders in law enforcement say it will provide safety to officers, but others argue it’s a privilege that could be abused.
The decision was made by the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. Two dissenting judges called it the ‘road to Hell.’
The ruiling stems from a lawsuit filed in Denham Springs in 2000.
New Orleans Police Department spokesman Capt. Marlon Defillo said the new power will go into effect immediately and won’t be abused.” —New Orleans Channel
It is inconceivable to me that this decision will stand on review by a higher court. It is unbelievable to me what abuses some try to push through…
For stargazers, 5 planets offer rare show at dusk
![//www.pbs.org/wnet/hawking/universes/assets/images/u.ptolemy.jpg' cannot be displayed]](https://i0.wp.com/www.pbs.org/wnet/hawking/universes/assets/images/u.ptolemy.jpg "Solar System (Ptolemy)")
“Five planets are arrayed across the evening sky in a spectacular night show that won’t be back for another three decades.
For the next two weeks, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn — the five closest planets — should be easily visible at dusk, along with the moon.
‘It’s semi-unique,’ said Myles Standish, an astronomer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. ‘They’re all on the same side of the sun and stretched across the sky and that’s what is kind of pretty’…
Stargazers should look to the western horizon just after sunset. Mercury, Venus, Mars and Saturn will be lined up in the sky with Jupiter close to the eastern horizon. They will span about 135 degrees. Saturn will be almost directly overhead.” —Houston Chronicle [via dangerousmeta]
Dick Clarke Is Telling the Truth –
Why he’s right about Bush’s negligence on terrorism: “I went to graduate school with Clarke in the late 1970s, at MIT’s political science department, and called him as an occasional source in the mid-’80s when he was in the State Department and I was a newspaper reporter. There were good things and dubious things about Clarke, traits that inspired both admiration and leeriness. The former: He was very smart, a highly skilled (and utterly nonpartisan) analyst, and he knew how to get things done in a calcified bureaucracy. The latter: He was arrogant, made no effort to disguise his contempt for those who disagreed with him, and blatantly maneuvered around all obstacles to make sure his views got through.
The key thing, though, is this: Both sets of traits tell me he’s too shrewd to write or say anything in public that might be decisively refuted.” —Fred Kaplan, Slate
‘September 11th Should Have Been Stopped’
‘No one anticipated the kinds of strikes that took place in New York and at the Pentagon.’ – ‘The 9/11 Debate,’ Washington Post editorial, 03-24-04
That line from the Washington Post has been repeated ad nauseam by other newspapers, and across radio and television. It has achieved the status of bedrock conventional wisdom, of something axiomatic. These statements are a paraphrase of National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who said on May 17th, 2002, ‘I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile – a hijacked airplane as a missile.’
This kind of thinking elevates the attacks to something mythical, a magic trick, an act of God that no mere mortal could possibly have interfered with or anticipated. In fact, it was an operation planned for years by men who left clear tracks. As such, it could have been stopped. It should have been stopped. Saying so, however, interferes with the cultivation of a national attitude of vengeful victimhood, an attitude the Bush administration is actively promoting for its own benefit and political protection. Surely we were victims of terrorism on September 11, but was this unavoidable? Are the Washington Post, Condoleezza Rice and others correct in stating that no one anticipated these kinds of attacks?
The facts say no. —William Rivers Pitt, truthout
I agree with Pitt but only in a limited sense. Administration pronouncements about how 9-11 could not have been anticipated are certainly self-serving knee-jerkism but only a detailed examination of the thesis that its perpetrators ‘left clear tracks’ could convince me, and that has not yet been done for all the fog of hyperbole. No matter how inept (and as you know I will stand by my assertion that he is the most inept ill-qualified president of the postwar era at least) a president Bush is, it is inconceivable to me that he is not correct in defending himself by saying that if he had known, he would have acted. A comprehensive examination of the adequacy of the administration’s threat assessment and prioritization must be done but, the evidence aside, the insistence that of course Bush knew something ahead of time on which he did not act strikes me equally as knee-jerkism, premature and automatic. It makes me quite uncomfortable how little in the service of a reasoned political critique of the Bush administration it is.
The old saw about 20/20 hindsight should certainly be invoked here. Clearly those who claim they warned Bush and his cabal to pay more attention to al Qaeda turned out to be right; but, if it had turned out to have been ETA or Hezbollah or the IRA or the Jewish Defense League that was behind the WTC attack, so too someone would probably come out of the woodwork with a credible claim that they had voiced a warning in advance. Let’s not rush to assert that an administration should have paid more attention to any particular threat assessment simply because it turned out after the fact to have been correct. That is why the more profound aspect of Richard Clarke’s revelations is not the part about how he warned Bush to focus on al Qaeda but the portrait of the relentlessness with which Bush and his handlers pushed for the Iraq connection, pushed pitifully to hear only what they wanted to hear. As I have said over and over again, the dysadministration gets away with something if they succeed in persuading us that they made correct judgments with faulty intelligence. The distortions were not in the data they were being fed but in their consumption of it. The ‘failure of intelligence’ was not at Foggy Bottom but inside the craniums of those in the West Wing. Their threat assessment was done not by analysis of the intelligence data but by wish fulfillment, plain and simple.
Pitt implies that an attitude of ‘vengeful victimhood’ is the inevitable result of the notion that the attacks were unavoidable. I love the phrase; it is a pithy encapsulation of an attitude our government actively cultivates for its political and strategic advantage. But it arises from a deeper pathology than merely having been hit by a sneak attack. Those most taboo of taboo assertions in the fall of 2001 about how it was our fault we were attacked had nothing to do with the triviality of failing to notice the activities of a ‘sleeper cell’ of twenty Islamic young men and everything to do with remaining blissfully ignorant about the impact of our arrogant contemptuous enraging exploitative swagger on the world stage, the perversion of everything respectful and life-enhancing we could have been doing with our status as sole superpower.
Not every country surviving a major trauma becomes a vengeful victim with unbound rage and self-justified entitlement. It is arguable that the US did not do so after Pearl Harbor (although there are similar assertions that the administration then could have anticipated the Japanese attack but chose not to to advance its own agenda). And, although there are pitfalls in likening the national psyche to individual psychology, not every victim of abuse enters into a career of self-justified rageful victimhood. Those who do are in my field often called ‘borderlines’ (i.e. they are diagnosed as suffering from borderline personality disorder; link goes to the official diagnostic criteria), perhaps the most malignant, vexacious type of patient treated in the mental health field. Because of research establishing a tentative correlation in some cases, it has become fashionable to automatically attribute all borderline personality disorder to early trauma, which tends to create a self-fulfilling legacy and an ongoing legitimization of the patient’s rageful acting-out. This is a disservice to both trauma victims and borderline personalities. Once this tack has been taken in the patient’s psychotherapy, it becomes very difficult to undo the tenacious effect it has upon the patient’s self-conception to get to something that could be more helpful to them. The simple-minded equation of victimhood with a disorder of ragefulness, entitlement and impulsivity also leaves no room for the very important and largely undone research on the sources of resiliency — why some — many — victims of traumatic abuse do not go on to such lives of victimhood and psychopathology.
The study of the individual’s adaptation also shows us that it is an entirely natural response to overwhelming trauma to develop so-called magical thinking. It is comforting, and offers important aid in coping, to believe that, if one had been a little bit better in seeing them coming, there were warning signs that could have led to early recognition of the abuse and the possibility of effective evasive action. This pathological omniscience lets the victim feel that the next time they will do better at protecting themselves, an important prerequisite for continuing to function. Unfortunately, while it serves this interim coping purpose, ultimately the victim has to be disabused of the notion that they can anticipate and avoid all potential future threats. In the long run, it leads to much more realistic allocation of one’s resources to embrace the notion that life is contingent and not everything is controllable. Shifting back to the level of the national psyche, we see the administration in the throes of this type of ‘homeland security’ magical thinking about threat anticipation and avoidance, which is an enormous drain of resources and energy and largely a waste in terms of any real gains in security.
So the progressive insistence that Bush knew and did nothing is a dangerous rush to judgment compounded of one part knee-jerkism and one part magical thinking in response to overwhelming trauma. It does little if anything to further responsible criticism of the dysadministration, comprehensive appraisals of what precipitated Sept. 11th, or rational security considerations for the future.
Automatic Mix Tape Generator
“Here’s the deal: You send us a style, genre, word, phrase, emotion, or whatever else, and if one of our mix tape robots fancies your suggestion, that crazy set of circuits might just make a mix tape out of it — well, at least a tracklisting for a mix tape out of it.” —tinymixtapes.com
Sludge in the ’70s
Petaphilia
The Great American Man-Dog Marriage Panic: “I’ve never had sex with a dog. He wouldn’t respect me in the morning. But I have lusted in my heart for certain canines, and apparently I’m not alone. Lots of people yearn to marry their best friend, or so many opponents of gay marriage seem to believe.
“Why can’t we have marriages between people and pets?” the bishop of Brooklyn recently remarked. “I mean, pets really love their masters”—and, let’s face it, the feeling is usually mutual. Was the bishop being fanciful or does he really think America will go to the dogs if gays are allowed to wed? Only his confessor knows, but for what it’s worth, this is a major clerical fixation, and not just among Catholic prelates. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson have warned that gay rights will lead to bestiality. I hadn’t realized that so many men of God are worried about folks helping sheep through the fence.” —Richard Goldstein, The Village Voice
Weapons of Mass Sedition
“Can a sacred music festival lure us away from violence and toward reason?” —The Village Voice
‘The Complete Opportunist’
John Kerry was on the radar screen of the Nixon White House as a major concern as he became a vocal leader of the antiwar movement in 1971. Nixon made Charles Colson his pointman in attempts to discredit Kerry, whom they found a hypocritical ‘opportunist’ because he opposed the war even though he was monied and connected, unlike the grungy disreputable prototypical Viet Vet Against the War. They set up a pro-war veteran, John O’Neill, to counter Kerry’s impact, and arranged for a debate between the two on the Dick Cavett Show. Joe Haldeman predicted that Kery would run for office one day. “It’s said that when Kerry ran for Congress in 1972, as Haldeman had predicted, Nixon stayed up late on Election Night until he knew for sure that Kerry had been defeated”. —NewsMax [thanks, abby]
(April 28, 1971) President Richard M. Nixon takes a call from his counsel, Charles Colson:
“This fellow Kerry that they had on last week,” Colson tells the president, referring to a television appearance by John F. Kerry, a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
“Yeah,” Nixon responds.
“He turns out to be really quite a phony,” Colson says.
“Well, he is sort of a phony, isn’t he?” Nixon says.
Yes, Colson says in a gossiping vein, telling the president that Kerry stayed at the home of a Georgetown socialite while other protesters slept on the mall.
“He was in Vietnam a total of four months,” Colson scoffs, without mentioning that Kerry earned three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and a Bronze Star, and had also been on an earlier tour. “He’s politically ambitious and just looking for an issue.”
“Yeah.”
“He came back a hawk and became a dove when he saw the political opportunities,” Colson says.
“Sure,” Nixon responds. “Well, anyway, keep the faith.”
The tone was sneering. But the secretly recorded dialogue illustrates just how seriously Kerry was viewed by the Nixon White House. Some of these conversations have not been previously publicized, and Kerry said he had never heard them until they were provided by a reporter.
Day after day, according to the tapes and memos, Nixon aides worried that Kerry was a unique, charismatic leader who could undermine support for the war. Other veteran protesters were easier targets, with their long hair, their use of a Viet Cong flag, and in some cases, their calls for overthrowing the US government. Kerry, by contrast, was a neat, well-spoken, highly decorated veteran who seemed to be a clone of former President John F. Kennedy, right down to the military service on a patrol boat. —Boston Globe
(January 24, 2004) Bush Official Uses Nixon Tactics to Smear John Kerry: “In 1971, the Nixon White House tried to discredit John Kerry by telling President Nixon that John Kerry was sleeping in a Georgetown home while other veterans protesting the war slept in tents on the National Mall. Yesterday, before a conference hosted by a conservative PAC headed by a former Nixon aide, Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie repeated the same smear, nearly verbatim, in a desperate attempt to discredit John Kerry again, this time as his campaign to remove Gillespie’s boss from the White House is gathering strength.”
Clickback America
Reject George Bush’s Credit. “By racking up the highest deficit in American history (half a trillion this year alone!) Bush has asked every American for a $4,500 loan that WE are going to have to pay back in taxes later. As current and future taxpayers, this hits young Americans particularly hard. Send George Bush a note rejecting his request for credit and letting him know that prioritizing the war in Iraq and his tax-cuts-for-the-wealthy above our future is unacceptable. When you do, $1 will be contributed to the MoveOn.org Voter Fund.”
Whose agenda is it anyway?
Balance has long been an issue in public broadcasting, but the debate flares when some see a conservative push as a shove.: “Perennially cash-strapped public television producers and filmmakers would ordinarily be thrilled that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting recently unveiled a long-awaited initiative to fund $20 million worth of documentaries on post-Sept. 11 terrorist attack themes. Instead, a recent forum in New York where the organization’s executives explained more precisely what kinds of programs they are seeking for ‘America at a Crossroads’ turned into a shouting and name-calling session.
One producer drew sustained applause from many of the 275 or so attendees for complaining that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was ‘asking me to do the bidding of the Pentagon.’ An employee of the National Black Programming Consortium noted ‘this whole thing stinks,’ as he criticized a focus on the ‘Anglo-American world order’ by an expert panel of white men who were brought in to suggest documentary topics.” — LA Times. Wasn’t the enormous Kroc bequest supposed to insulate CPB against pandering to the powers that be out of fears for their fiscal solvency?
Related? NPR News Is Replacing Morning Host: “Morning radio will soon lose one of its most familiar news anchors. Bob Edwards, who for nearly 25 years has greeted millions of weekday listeners with the distinctive and richly toned opener “This is `Morning Edition’ from NPR News,” is being replaced as host of that flagship morning program. The decision was made by NPR management as part of an effort to update its programming.” — New York Times. And ‘updating its programming’ is a euphemism for what precisely??
Greenhouse gas level hits record high
“The level of the major greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, in the Earth’s atmosphere has hit a record high, US government scientists have reported.
The new data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also suggest that the rate of increase of the gas may have accelerated in the last two years. Carbon dioxide emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, are thought to be a principle cause of global warming.” — New Scientist
Why curry can leave you feeling off-colour
“More than half the curry houses tested in a trading standards survey were using illegal levels of three potentially harmful colourings in chicken tikka masala.
The study… showed that of 102 curry houses tested, only 44 kept their use of colourings within legal limits. One restaurant was found to be using four times the legal limit in its dish.
The chef James Martin, who spoke at the publication of the survey report, blamed the “English palate” for the high levels of tartrazine (E102), sunset yellow (E110) and ponceau 4R (E124) in the nation’s most popular curry. The colourants have been identified as possible sources of hyperactivity, asthma and cancer.
He said that public perceptions about curry would have to be changed if standards were to be improved.” — Times of London
Of God and the Flag
William Safire: “The only thing going for this time-wasting pest who’s hoping to strike ‘Under God’ from the Pledge of Allegiance is that he’s right.” — New York Times op-ed
R.I.P. Sydney Carter
‘The Lord of the Dance’ is gone at 88: “Sydney was a folk poet, a holy sceptic and an iconoclastic theologian – that last description would both bemuse and please him – in the amateur tradition of the folk movement, deconstructing the theology of the academic establishment and bringing it to life. He played a leading role in the folk revival of the 1960s and 70s, and it was then that he wrote most of his songs, composed both to please and to shock. Life, as he embraced it, was for dancing.
…When, in 1999 the mists of Alzheimer’s disease began to close in, Sydney’s second wife, Leela, lovingly cared for him and interpreted him to others. The past gradually receded into the strange land of lost memory. His friend Rabbi Lionel Blue wrote that now “our only contact is a thin thread of memory and his songs. I start singing them, and he joyfully joins in – and I leave him as he continues singing.”
More than 30 years ago, Sydney had written his own epitaph:
Coming and going by the dance, I see
That what I am not is a part of me.
Dancing is all that I can ever trust,
The dance is all I am, the rest is dust.
I will believe my bones and live by what
Will go on dancing when my bones are not.” —Guardian.UK [via walker]
Lord of the Dance
by Sydney Carter
by Sydney Carter
I danced in the morning when the world was begun
I danced in the stars & the Moon & the Sun
I came down from Heaven & I danced on Earth
At Bethlehem I had my birth:
Dance then, wherever you may be
I am the Lord of the Dance, said He!
And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be
And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said He!
(…lead you all in the Dance, said He!)
I danced for the scribe & the pharisee
They would not dance & they wouldn’t follow me
I danced for Peter & for James & John
They followed me & the Dance went on:
Dance then, wherever you may be
I am the Lord of the Dance, said He!
And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be
And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said He!
(…lead you all in the Dance, said He!)
I danced on the Sabbath & I healed the lame
The holy people said it was a shame!
They whipped me & stripped me & hung me high
And left me there on a cross to die!
Dance then, wherever you may be
I am the Lord of the Dance, said He!
And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be
And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said He!
(…lead you all in the Dance, said He!)
I danced on a Friday when the sky turned black
It’s hard to dance with the devil on your back
They buried my body & they thought I’d gone
But I am the Dance & I still go on!
Dance then, wherever you may be
I am the Lord of the Dance, said He!
And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be
And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said He!
(…lead you all in the Dance, said He!)
They cut me down but I leap up high
I am the Life that will never never die!
I’ll live in you if you’ll live in Me
I am the Lord of the Dance, said He!
Dance then, wherever you may be
I am the Lord of the Dance, said He!
And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be
And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said He!
![//graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/03/23/science/23clim-small.2.184.jpg' cannot be displayed]](https://i0.wp.com/graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/03/23/science/23clim-small.2.184.jpg "Kilimanjaro")
