How about a serif font for awhile?

I don’t know whether to be delighted or dismayed to discover that David Edelstein’s taste in whisky appears to be similar to mine, and to find him publicizing it. I am not much of a drinker and have been known to comment that ethanol could disappear from the face of the earth without a whimper from me… except for single malt whisky. Single malt drinkers are the snobs of those who imbibe distilled spirits, and those of us who gravitate to the seven peaty varieties from the Hebridean island of Islay, off Scotland’s west coast, turn their noses up at the rest of the run-of-the-mill snobs in the quest for an experience of sublime ferocity. My devotion to the Islay malts led me to make a pilgrimmage to the island the focal point of one of the bicycle touring trips to Scotland, perhaps my favorite place on earth, which I have arranged for myself every few years for the past several decades. Alas, unlike the Islay devotees Edelstein describes in his article, I was not able to bring the island’s aroma home with me.

Edelstein, Slate‘s film critic, does a good job of describing the lay of the land in preparing Slate‘s readership for a ‘net whisky tasting. I was excited to learn that Ardbeg, perhaps the most sublime of the sublime, is to become available again now that the owners of the popular highland malt Glenmorangie have resurrected the distillery. In one of the most thoughtful gift-giving acts anyone ever did for me, a friend searched high and low several years ago for a bottle of Ardbeg when it was largely inaccessible. I still sip from it, but perhaps I do not have to remain so parsimonious if it is becoming available again! Counterbalancing these glad tidings is Edelstein’s news that the other of my Islay favorites, Lagavulin, is becoming rare due to distillery shortages. I hope Edelstein’s influence in creating snob appeal doesn’t singlehandedly drive up demand and hence the price of my next bottles. Think I’ll head for a wee dram now…

“Justice Scalia chose a terrible moment to go duck hunting with the vice president and ride on his airplane. That decision, and his refusal to recuse himself in the upcoming case, are clear examples of bad judgment that his colleagues on the court can no longer responsibly ignore.” —New York Times editorial

The Bush machine aims its poison darts at another military hero — Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski. “There they go again. Whenever the Bush machine is put on the defensive, it immediately goes on the offensive, and character assassination is one of its favorite weapons. I’m not talking about the attacks on John Kerry’s patriotism. I’m talking about the poison-tipped assault on another military veteran, retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, whose damning eyewitness account of how neoconservative zealots in the Defense Department bulldozed the facts and drove the country to war was published in Salon last week…” —Salon

Antidepressants may tinker with our evolutionary mating instincts: “…(L)ovesickness has been with us for more than 3,000 years. But psychiatrists may be unintentionally “curing” us of that experience and other aspects of romantic love with modern antidepressant medications.

So argue the anthropologist Helen Fisher, and the psychiatrist James Thomson Jr. Their case, sketched out in Fisher’s recent book, Why We Love, centres on how certain antidepressants could be blocking chemical pathways in the brain that were paved by evolution to help us meet and keep mates.” —Times of London

“Search Google for sites added today, yesterday, within the last seven days, or last 30 days.”

Huge Underground Facility in Central Washington State; US $3,950,000.00: “Underground tunnel level 5 stories below ground level.

Underground has a constant unheated temperature of 55 degrees.

Wall thicknesses 2 feet to 14 feet.

Built to withstand a 1 MEGATON blast within 3,000 feet and survive!

Private water system with 700′ well.

360 degree view. Few Neighbors. Private, secluded location.

Possible Uses: Ultra Secure, Ultra Private, Personal/Corporate Retreat

World Class Winery – Plant Vineyard above, Store Vintage below

Backup Data, or other long term storage

Year Round Youth Camp or Boarding School…”

1 silo could be a 155′ Rock Climbing Wall

1 silo could be a 100′ deep SCUBA Training Pool”

“Not one vehicle came close to crossing the finish line, after hitting walls, fences and other obstacles, but there were some successes.” —New Scientist

Tower Records is apparently bucking the odds and emerging from bankruptcy intact and stronger. —Sacramento Bee

“The Royal Opera’s sexually charged production of Lady Macbeth reignites one of our most burning cultural conundrums – the ‘Shostakovich Question’... The ‘Shostakovich Question’ is a debate is over the relationship between the composer and the triad of Stalinism, Mother Russia and Shostakovich’s own deep humanism. It asks: why did Shostakovich remain in the USSR, while others like Stravinsky left? Was he obliged by a love of country to acknowledge, if not accept, the government? Or was his life torn between a public and private self? Indeed, was every musical phrase a thread woven through a tortured tapestry of dissent, a passionate but coded cry of opposition?

The ‘Shostakovich Question’ was blown open by the publication in 1979 of Testimony, by defector Solomon Volkov, who claimed his text was a memoir based on conversations with Shostakovich prior to the composer’s death four years earlier, ostensibly confirming that Shostakovich’s music was indeed coded dissent against Soviet totalitarianism.” —Observer.UK

“A maturing enthusiast wonders, how well will the youth-charged movement age? Grown-up raps by the likes of Jay-Z may offer a clue.” —LA Times

On the popularity of prescriptive grammar books: “(A bookseller) suggests they are tapping into a widespread feeling that English is being debased by things such as computers, especially email, which have led some to do away with punctuation altogether. ‘Text messaging, of course, has just about wrecked the English language,’ (he) adds.” —Sydney Morning Herald

“Spain’s new prime minister-elect today reiterated that Spain will withdraw its 1,300 troops from Iraq, barring a United Nations mandate for a continued military presence.

Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said ‘the war has been a disaster, the occupation continues to be a disaster. . . . There must be consequences. There has been one already,’ he said, ‘the election result. The second will be that Spanish troops will come back.'” —Washington Post

Socialist win stuns press:

“The Spanish press analyses the Popular Party’s shock election defeat in the wake of the Madrid bombings.” —BBC

“Scientists may have discovered the solar system’s 10th planet, more than 3 billion kilometers farther away from the sun than Pluto.

NASA is set to make an official announcement later Monday U.S. time.

The object — about 10 billion kilometers from Earth — has been given the provisional name of Sedna after the Inuit goddess of the sea….

Sedna is the largest object to be found circling the sun since Pluto was discovered in 1930.

The discovery has also sparked debate over what constitutes a planet.” —CNN

“Justice Scalia chose a terrible moment to go duck hunting with the vice president and ride on his airplane. That decision, and his refusal to recuse himself in the upcoming case, are clear examples of bad judgment that his colleagues on the court can no longer responsibly ignore.” —New York Times editorial

“Although there has been plenty of debate about the legalities of downloading, one important question has so far gone unasked: will downloading affect how pop music sounds in the future?

In other words, will the way that people access music have an effect on the content of that music?” —CBC

“It’s never been more fashionable or popular to be gay or lesbian than now, if television coverage is anything to go by. If they’re not building or renovating homes, they’re winning Oscars and thanking their boyfriends, getting married in San Francisco, or “zhushing” straight guys. Does this mean queer is the new black?” —The Age Or is the depiction of gays in popular culture a marketing dream?

” “Lucky me, I hit the trifecta,” said George Bush in the immediate aftermath of September 11, according to his budget director. War, recession and national emergency liberated him to soar in the political stratosphere. But after several faltering starts this year, he felt compelled to relaunch his campaign with $4.5m (£2.5m) of television advertising in 16 key states…

The trauma of September 11 has been squandered as a political factor. Just as Bush has misspent the goodwill of the world, he has wasted his opportunity to create any consensus at home. He had planned to run his campaign on the Bismarckian formula of the primacy of foreign policy and Kulturkampf. But his trifecta has been turned upside down: David Kay’s confession that ‘we were all wrong’ on WMD in Iraq; job stagnation; increased recriminations about 9/11 as the commission begins its work in earnest. Bush, moreover, is patently using 9/11 not for ‘changing times’ but to advance his reactionary social agenda. Rather than appearing ‘steady’, he is setting himself against change, including changing his own policies. What he has left is a negative campaign. If he cannot elevate himself on the presidential pedestal he must throw himself into the abattoir of the culture war.” —Sidney Blumenthal, writing in the Guardian.UK

Certainly, the outcry about the Ground Zero ads is rampant on the Left, and certainly it has upset an outspoken number of those who lost loved ones on 9-11. But will it significantly alienate the electorate as a whole? I am not sure, since for noncritical viewers, the ads certainly pluck all the right heartstrings. There are still an awful lot of ‘United we stand’ bumper stickers on the cars I pass on the highway each morning. Even those who do not question the necessity of the perpetual WoT® or the War President’s prowess in leading us ought to wonder at his judgment if he could so badly miscalculate the impact of the first ad he chose to run in his reelection campaign.

[Ah, but, you might say, it wasn’t his ad, it was his handlers’. But the same people making his p.r. decisions for him are the ones making his policy decisions for him… As Elvis Costello says, joking on his current concert tour that he had seen Vice President Dick Cheney at an all-you-can-eat buffet, “Let’s hope he doesn’t die of a heart attack. Then who would be president? His Texan hand puppet.”]

“A mother was in jail on charges of murder yesterday after refusing to undergo a caesarean delivery in a case that reignites America’s debate on the competing rights of foetuses and women.

In what was seen as a test of new state and federal legislation expanding the definition of human life, Melissa Ann Rowland, 28, was accused of exhibiting ‘depraved indifference to human life’ for disregarding the advice of doctors to give birth to her twins by caesarean section.

One of the twins, a boy, was stillborn. The other, a girl, survived and has been adopted. If she is convicted of causing her unborn son’s death, Ms Rowland could face life in prison, press reports said.

It was not clear yesterday why she ignored repeated medical advice last winter that the twins were in danger. The prosecution argues it was vanity, and that Ms Rowland told a nurse she did not want a scar.” —Guardian.UK

Addendum: On further reflection, I largely agree with other observers who doubt the ‘vanity’ rationale. First of all, it appears Rowland had both a history of prior C-sections — which makes a mockery of prosecution claims she was motivated to avoid a scar — and a history of mental illness. The evidence suggesting that the woman was terrified argues that it may have been anything but ‘depraved indifference’ which impaired her ability to cooperate with medical advice.

[On the other hand, I need to express my scorn at the scurrilous comments that are beginning to appear to the effect that one cannot imagine vanity as a motivation after looking at the widely disseminated wire photo of Rowland. Not that it is up to any of you to rule on whether someone’s appearance even at their best justifies their putative vanity, but the woman appears terrified and exhausted; she was alone, postpartum, one of her babies having been taken away and the other stillborn, and she had just been booked on murder charges.]

It is certainly not as cut-and-dried as pitting the rights of the foetus against that of the mother. While the death of the baby boy is grievous, it may not be reprehensible, and the case may perhaps be better considered to pit the rights of the mother against those of a Utah prosecutor with a morally conservative agenda and opportunistic visions of an illustrious career move from a sensational case.

Post-mortem drug test errors increasing:

“A technique for inferring how much of a drug a patient has taken may be putting innocent people behind bars.

The problem seems to be that doctors are incorrectly applying the method to corpses, in a bid to establish how much of a drug a deceased person took, or was given, before their death. That error can result in vastly inflated readings…” —New Scientist

“Putting The Weirdness To Work” Business Week wants to bring its readers up to speed on the truly strange properties of the quantum world.

“Purported al-Qaida videotape claims responsibility while 5 arrested in Madrid: Authorities found a videotape claiming al-Qaida carried out the Madrid terrorist attacks, Spain’s government said Sunday, hours after three Moroccans and two Indians were arrested in connection with the bombings.”

And: “A top Clinton-era expert on Europe and security warns that if the deadly Madrid bombings prove to be the work of al-Qaida, it could transform politics throughout Europe.” —Salon Charles Kupchan, formerly President Clinton’s director for European affairs on the National Security Council, hedges his bet, saying that the enhanced perception that they face a common enemy could edge Europe closer to the Bush position. We might see a strengthening of the hand of the rightwing nationalist movements throughout the Continent which focus on the disenfranchised and largely unassimilated Islamic immigrant populations in European nations. I think it is more likely and more justified, given that the majority of Spaniards opposed Aznar’s support for the invasion of Iraq, that the bombing will be seen as retribution as well as reinforcing the perception that the US actions have made the Western world less rather than more safe. We will see if Aznar is repudiated in this weekend’s Spanish voting; the timing of the bombings just before the election may not have been a coincidence.

“Forces are finally converging for a genuine debate on President Bush’s missile-defense program. The Republican-controlled Congress is looking for ways to cut $9 billion from the military budget (which, at $420 billion, is getting unmanageable even for hawkish tastes). It’s becoming painfully clear that rogues and terrorists are more likely to attack us with planes and trains than with nuclear missiles. And a recent series of technical studies—bolstered on Thursday by a high-profile Senate hearing—has dramatized just how difficult, if not impossible, this project is going to be.” As readers of FmH know, I have been trying to keep the folly of the missile defense program on everybody’s radar screen, because of my concerns about how destabilizing it would be for the nuclear balance of terror. If Fred Kaplan, writing in Slate, is right, the balance may be shifting against support for it on the most pedestrian of grounds — fiscal realism.

“Sip on a mocha latte while using headphones to listen to any of 250,000 songs you call up on a computer. Then order the ones you like — burned on your own CD — to go… BusinessWeek has learned that on Mar. 16, the Seattle coffee giant will unveil an in-store music service allowing customers to do just that, using Hewlett-Packard (HPQ ) tablet computers to make their choices. The first musical Starbucks opens in Santa Monica, Calif., and the service will expand into 2,500 stores over the next two years.” It is hard to tell if this has any chance of succeeding to an extent that would justify the enormous hardware costs; it depends on whether it will tap a customer base essentially different than iTunes users and the like, and whether the song selection and ease of use of the interface are beckoning.

Victorinox is making a Swiss Army Knife with 128 Mb of Flash memory built in. —Engadget

Bush Exaggerates Kerry’s Position on Intelligence Budget: “Bush is correct that Kerry on Sept. 29, 1995, proposed a five-year, $1.5 billion cut to the intelligence budget. But Bush appears to be wrong when he said the proposed Kerry cut — about 1 percent of the overall intelligence budget for those years — would have ‘gutted’ intelligence. In fact, the Republican-led Congress that year approved legislation that resulted in $3.8 billion being cut over five years from the budget of the National Reconnaissance Office — the same program Kerry said he was targeting.” —Washington Post

Bad Science Slandered a Generation’s Favorite Drug. Now a New Study Aims to Undo the Damage. “On February 24, the DEA issued Dr. Michael Mithoefer a Schedule I license to legally obtain Ecstasy for a study of its potential therapeutic effects in the treatment of PTSD. Researchers hope that the drug, which melts anxiety, will help PTSD patients talk openly about the experiences that scarred them. It is the first study of Ecstasy-enhanced psychotherapy ever green-lighted in the United States, one that’s been in the making for almost two decades. ‘There’s been so much struggle over this approval process,’ says Rick Doblin, director of MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, the organization sponsoring the research.” —Village Voice

and illegal downloads are murder. —CNNN (Liquid Generation)

“You can sue but you can’t hide”: “For months, an obscure Texas company run by doctors has been operating a Web site, DoctorsKnow Us.com, that compiles and posts the names of plaintiffs, their lawyers and expert witnesses in malpractice lawsuits in Texas and beyond, regardless of the merit of the claim.” —New York Times

For a small monthly fee, subscribers were able to search the site to “assess the risk of offering your services to clients or potential clients”, as well as add names to the database “from official and unofficial public records.” While the site took pains to counter claims that it is a blacklist by acknowledging that some malpractice lawsuits have merit, the potential for abuse is clear.

Indeed, after being publicized in the New York Times and elsewhere, the site has ceased operation, citing the public outcry.

DoctorsKnow.Us has permanently ceased operations as of 3/9/04. The controversy this site has ignited was unanticipated and has polarized opinions regarding the medical malpractice crisis. Our hope is that this controversy will spark a serious discussion that results in changes that are equitable to both patients and physicians. All charges that have been collected will be returned to members and trial members.

I suspect, rather, that it was the threat of a lawsuit from someone who the site has ‘blacklisted’ that led to this rapid response. [What do you expect when you create a listing of litigation-prone individuals?? Since the site did not attempt to differentiate lawsuits with merit from those brought in a ‘frivolous’ (I hate the term, because the people who bring ‘frivolous lawsuits’ are doing it in anything but a spirit of frivolity), i.e. ‘predatory’, manner, they are vulnerable potential lawsuits both from patients whose ability to have legitimate medical needs met was damaged or potentially damaged by their listing and from those whose interest in bringing suit is more opportunistic and predatory.]

But the premise of the site ignores the notion that vulnerability to a malpractice suit may have more to do with the manner in which the physician conducts her or his practice than the nature of the patient. I am not just talking about avoiding the sensational, egregious errors or abuses we hear about in the news, like amputating the wrong leg or taking out the wrong kidney or, in my own field of psychiatry, sleeping with your patient. Long ago, at the beginning of my training, I read an article making the radical proposal that the best way to avoid malpractice suits was to practice without malpractice insurance. While that suggestion was abit too waggish to risk, the point is a good one. If, as a health care provider, you practice as if the only thing that protects you against the consumer dissatisfaction and ire of your patients is your good graces, you have gone a long way to defuse the risk you face. Readers of FmH know I have urged you to consider yourselves entitled to get adequate explanations for your provider’s medical decisions and have final discretion about all decisions affecting your health care. Unfortunately, this collaborative or consultative model of the relationship between physician and patient is the first victim of the pressures of the modern productivity-driven healthcare system. If ever taught in the medical school curriculum, it is during the first year, to be scoffed at and rapidly forgotten as soon as the student hits the wards for clinical rotations and never resurrected thereafter.

“The most-read webloggers aren’t necessarily the ones with the most original ideas, say researchers at Hewlett-Packard Labs.

Using newly developed techniques for graphing the flow of information between blogs, the researchers have discovered that authors of popular blog sites regularly borrow topics from lesser-known bloggers — and they often do so without attribution.” —wired

This achievement, reported in the current issue of The Lancet, strikes me as a potentially monumental medical advance. In a procedure led by Cornell University reproductive endocrinologist Kutluk Oktay, frozen ovarian tissue removed from a 30-year old woman before she underwent cancer chemotherapy and then retransplanted back into her abdomen six years later resulted in reversal of her chemo-induced premature menopause and restored fertility. The transplanted ovarian tissue produced ova which when fertilized in vitro with her husband’s sperm developed into a normal embryo. Unfortunately, it did not proceed to a pregnancy when reimplanted into her womb, but the team is confident that it is only a matter of time before a successful pregnancy and a live birth result from this procedure. —CNN.

In fact, in a related development, this has been achieved in a study with a rhesus monkey in Oregon. —BBC

It seems prudent for women in line to undergo procedures such as cancer chemotherapy which could make them infertile to begin banking ovarian tissue for freezing and eventual reimplantation. Until now, women have been able only to have eggs harvested and fertilized in vitro and the frozen embryos that result banked for potential future use. [Correct me if I am wrong, but I do not think frozen unfertilized ova can be thawed to be fertilized years later.] The obvious shortcoming of the existing procedure is that the woman cannot have a child with any other potential future partner. It goes without saying that this can open up other Pandora’s boxes — for example, how about healthy women storing ovarian tissue so that they might conceive late in life, overcoming their menopause. Ethical concerns have arisen about the several extraordinary cases of women who have already had interventions to allow a pregnancy late in their lives; this could conceivably become much more common.

Even apart from fertility issues, it strikes me that the potential to reverse premature menopause with one’s own functioning ovarian tissue, without hormone replacement therapy, is enormous on its own accord.

The idiocy of an induction ritual that was designed to “frighten (the inductee) by letting him think he was placing his life in their hands” is graphically illustrated as his initiator pulls out a loaded pistol instead of the one in his other pocket that fires blanks; the inductee is shot in the head and killed. Everyone calls this “an accident”, but bringing a loaded weapon to the ceremony suggets to me a depraved indifference to the life of the victim. The immature folly of the initiation ritual mentality that ranges from college fraternities to these Masonic Lodges to the secret societies of the elite ruling class enrages me.

“Abu Abbas, the Palestinian mastermind of the Achille Lauro cruise ship hijacking in 1985, has died of natural causes in U.S. custody in Iraq, a top Palestinian official has told Reuters.

‘We have been informed that Mohammed Abbas or Abu Abbas, head of the Palestine Liberation Front, who has been held in American custody, has died in Iraq,’ he said, adding that the death was ‘related to his deteriorating health situation’.

The U.S. military in Baghdad said it had no information.” — Reuters Should we be more curious about the ‘natural causes’, the ‘deteriorating health situation’, and the lack of further information available from his US captors?

“All whaling – whether for commercial or scientific purposes – should be stopped on the grounds of cruelty, demands a major new scientific report.

The report, published by a global coalition of animal welfare societies, contains ‘hard scientific dispassionate evidence that there is no humane way to kill a whale at sea‘, according to a foreword by naturalist and broadcaster David Attenborough.” — New Scientist

“If you want my title, it’s professor of pickpocketry. My wife, Bambi Vincent, and I spend seven months each year traveling the world to film pickpockets and other street thieves who prey on unsuspecting tourists. As a security consultant to business travelers, law enforcement and corporations, I live to expose the latest tricks of scoundrels.

After we observe a thief in action, we usually try to lure him into conversation and pick his brain the way he picks the pockets of his victims. Most thieves love to brag, though on other occasions we’ve had rocks thrown at us and knives pulled on us, and we’ve been hit and spat upon.

I keep my money tucked inside my trousers, in a thin leather pouch that hangs from my belt. I also have a wallet stuffed only with newspaper, which I use as bait. It has been stolen from my hip pocket more than 100 times. Sometimes I confront the thieves and it magically appears on the ground. But other times I steal it back; that’s the quickest way to establish rapport with pickpockets.” — New York Times

“Politicians who spark a culture war for the sake of their own power are playing with fire, and journalists who exploit a culture war for the sake of its unleashed furies are throwing gasoline on the flames. At the beginning of the presidential election contest, that is history’s warning to America…

The phrase “culture war” comes from “Kulturkampf.” That word was coined in the 1870s when Germany’s George W. Bush, Otto von Bismarck, launched a “values” campaign as a way of shoring up his political power. Distracting from issues of war and economic stress, the “Kulturkampf” ran from 1871 to about 1887. Bismarck’s strategy was to unite his base by inciting hatred of those who were not part of it…” —James Carroll, Boston Globe op-ed

“This image required 800 exposures taken over the course of 400 Hubble orbits around Earth. The total amount of exposure time was 11.3 days, taken between Sept. 24, 2003, and Jan. 16, 2004.”

“The next generation of Web search engines will do more than give you a longer list of search results. They will disrupt the information economy.” — Salon

Phase one of the Bush campaign strategy seems to be to attack Kerry on”flip-flopping”. Bush’s recent public statements suggest he has a one-track mind on the topic. His critics counter with two genres of response. Some point to the President’s own flip-flopping, for example most recently changing his position on how much time he will give the panel investigating 9-11. Others suggest that the flexibility to change one’s position in response to changing circumstances and the courage and candor to admit that one’s prior position was mistaken upon further reflection are desireable attributes in a national leader. Bush’s fault, this argument goes, is often that he is too rigid and changes his mind too little. That both diametrically opposite responses are valid indicates the meaninglessness of the entire ‘flip-floppiness’ concept as a measure of a candidate’s fitness. (Who was it who said that the most profound truths are those whose opposites are also true?) This early in the campaign season, the conventional wisdom goes that no one is yet listening (although that may be proven wrong in the 2004 race; polls are already indicating an extraordinarily high proportion of voters who have made up their minds). so this may be a throwaway issue for the Bush campaign. I’m convinced that the Republican big gun will be to tar Kerry with the ‘ultraliberal’ brush. Expecially because Bush is such an inflexible, one-track thinker, I expect a phased rollout of campaign issues so he can focus on one at a time. So we will start to hear the ‘L-word’ later, probably by the end of the summer.

Last isolated Indians south of the Amazon make contact: “A group of previously uncontacted Ayoreo Indians has emerged from the forests of Paraguay, under pressure from deforestation all around them. The 17 people (five men, seven women and five children) are in excellent health, but acutely short of water. Colonists who have settled in their territory have taken possession of the permanent water holes for cattle ranching, leaving the Indians unable to get water in the dry season.

The Indians made contact with fellow Ayoreo who were planning to establish a new community in the last sizeable area of forest in the region. For ten years the Ayoreo and their supporters have been trying to protect the zone from accelerating invasion. Now, ranchers and farmers occupy large parts of the Ayoreo’s forest.

Under national and international law, the Paraguayan government should have titled the area (some 550,000 hectares) to the Indians. But after ten years, only around a quarter has been titled. Some landowners continue to send in bulldozers to clear the forest, defying court orders which were supposed to halt all work in the area.” —Survival International press release

“GOP committee says MoveOn.org’s spots are illegally financed” —CNN

(A Quicktime video). [thanks, dennis]

“If you thought you liked the iPod because of its looks, think again. It could, according to one academic, be a way of regaining your personal space…

Dr (Michael) Bull is one of the few academics, possibly the only one, to spend time researching what owners of iPods and other music players do with their gadgets, why they listen to them and what difference they make to their lives.” —BBC

CIA director disputes Cheney assertions on Iraq. —Knight-Ridder

C.I.A. Chief Says He’s Corrected Cheney Privately: “George J. Tenet told a Senate committee that he had intervened on several occasions to correct public misstatements on intelligence matters.” — New York Times

“Did you ever wish you could hide your location when talking on the phone? Ever wanted to give the impression you were somewhere else?

SounderCover gives you the ability to add a background sound to any incoming or outgoing call, giving the impression that you really are in the environment where the background sound is normally heard.”

Sonic devices that can inflict pain–or even permanent deafness–are being deployed. “Marines arriving in Iraq this month as part of a massive troop rotation will bring with them a high-tech weapon never before used in combat — or in peacekeeping. The device is a powerful megaphone the size of a satellite dish that can deliver recorded warnings in Arabic and, on command, emit a piercing tone so excruciating to humans, its boosters say, that it causes crowds to disperse, clears buildings and repels intruders.” —LA Times

A cosmic detective story about the demise of the world, in three parts. Jim Holt contemplates alternative cosmological notions about the ultimate fate of the universe, a good layman’s roundup. But, more uniquely, he considers the possible ultimate fates of intelligent life at the universe’s demise. These range from Frank Tipler’s seductive notion of “an infinite frolic just before the Big Crunch” to Freeman Dyson’s “vision of a community of increasingly dilute Black Clouds staving off the cold in an eternal Big Chill” to Michio Kaku’s idea of commandeering a cosmic lifeboat through a wormhole to a brand new universe. Kaku, by the way, feels solving superstring theory would be a necessary precursor to this development, and is exhilarated at the impending death of the universe because of the incentives it will provide to do so. Illustrious physicist Steven Weinberg has a more sanguine attitude toward the death of the universe: “For me and you and everyone else around today, the universe will be over in less than 10^2 years.” Holt, ultimately, ponders what if anything is the point of this cosmological speculation at all.

and the triumph of youth culture: “Life in that different day was felt to observe the human equivalent of the Aristotelian unities: to have, like a good drama, a beginning, middle, and end. Each part, it was understood, had its own advantages and detractions, but the middle–adulthood–was the lengthiest and most earnest part, where everything serious happened and much was at stake. To violate the boundaries of any of the three divisions of life was to go against what was natural and thereby to appear unseemly, to put one’s world somehow out of joint, to be, let us face it, a touch, and perhaps more than a touch, grotesque.

Today, of course, all this has been shattered. The ideal almost everywhere is to seem young for as long as possible. The health clubs and endemic workout clothes, the enormous increase in cosmetic surgery (for women and men), the special youth-oriented television programming and moviemaking, all these are merely the more obvious signs of the triumph of youth culture. When I say youth culture, I do not mean merely that the young today are transcendent, the group most admired among the various age groups in American society, but that youth is no longer viewed as a transitory state, through which one passes on the way from childhood to adulthood, but an aspiration, a vaunted condition in which, if one can only arrange it, to settle in perpetuity.” —Joseph Epstein, Weekly Standard

American Troops are Killing and Abusing Afghans, Rights Body Says: “US troops in Afghanistan are operating outside the rule of law, using excessive force to make arrests, mistreating detainees and holding them indefinitely in a ‘legal black hole’ without any legal safeguards, a report published today says.

Having gone to war to combat terrorism and remove the oppressive Taliban regime, the United States is now undermining efforts to restore the rule of law and endangering the lives of civilians, Human Rights Watch says.” —CommonDreams

Arianna Huffington:

• “You may share JFK’s initials, but you need to campaign with RFK’s passion.
• Don’t pick a VP by looking at the map.
• Don’t fall back on the tried-and-untrue swing voter strategy that has led to the prolonged identity crisis of the Democratic Party.
• Don’t run away from your voting record.
• Remember: He who controls the language defines the political debate. Bush Republicans’ control of certain magical words, starting with “responsibility,” has been a key to their success. You need to take back “responsibility” from the grossly irresponsible GOP.
• Strike a new bargain with the American people. Tell them, ‘Let’s put an end to the tyranny of low expectations. You can expect a lot more of me, and I will ask a lot more of you.'” —AlterNet

“The 2004 presidential race could turn on the Sunshine State, just as it did in 2000. And the early evidence suggests Bush is in big trouble.” —Salon

“MoveOn is now over two million people strong in the United States. This number is unprecedented in the history of hands-on activist organizations with the freedom to operate in political campaigns. As MoveOn itself points out: ‘We’re bigger than the Christian Coalition at its peak. To put it another way, one in every 146 Americans is now a MoveOn member. And we’re still growing fast.'” —Don Hazen and Tai Moses, AlterNet

“I’ve met foreign leaders who can’t go out and say this publicly, but boy they look at you and say, ‘You’ve got to win this, you’ve got to beat this guy, we need a new policy.’ Things like that.” —Guardian.UK

Yes, the Bush campaign welcomes masochists with open arms. —New York Times

“Lowering cholesterol far beyond the levels recommended by most doctors can substantially reduce heart patients’ risk of suffering or dying of a heart attack, a study has found.” —New York Times

Defying Psychiatric Wisdom, These Skeptics Say ‘Prove It’: “They have been called assassins and parasites. They receive hate mail from the proponents of a variety of popular psychotherapies. The president-elect of the American Psychological Association has accused them of being overly devoted to the scientific method.

But the ire of their colleagues has not prevented a small, loosely organized band of academic psychologists from rooting out and publicly debunking mental health practices that they view as faddish, unproved or in some cases potentially harmful.

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In journal articles and public presentations, the psychologists, from Emory, Harvard, the University of Texas and other institutions, have challenged the validity of widely used diagnostic tools like the Rorschach inkblot test. They have questioned the existence of repressed memories of child sexual abuse and of multiple personality disorder. They have attacked the wide use of labels like codependency and sexual addiction.

The challengers have also criticized a number of fashionable therapies, including ‘critical incident’ psychological debriefing for trauma victims, eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing, or E.M.D.R., and other techniques.” —New York Times

Astronomy Picture of the Day: “The above picture will be replaced later today (between 9 and 10 am EST) by the newly released Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF). The HUDF is expected to be the deepest image of the universe ever taken in visible light. It is expected to show a sampling of the oldest galaxies ever seen, galaxies that formed just after the dark ages, when the universe was only 5 percent of its present age. The Hubble Space Telescope’s NICMOS and new ACS cameras took the image. Staring nearly 3 months at the same spot, the HUDF is reported to be four times more sensitive, in some colors, than the original Hubble Deep Field (HDF), currently pictured above.” [thanks, abby]

Spend like there’s no tomorrow…

“Actor-writer Spalding Gray, who laid bare his life in a series of acclaimed monologues like ‘Swimming to Cambodia’ while scoring big-screen success in ‘Kate and Leopold’ and ‘The Paper,’ was confirmed dead on Monday. The body of Gray, 62, was pulled out of the East River off Greenpoint, Brooklyn, on Sunday, two months after he walked out of his Manhattan apartment and disappeared.

The city medical examiner confirmed through dental records and X-rays on Monday that it was Gray’s body. The cause of his death was still under investigation, said Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner. Throughout his disappearance, his wife, Kathleen Russo, had held out scant hope that he might still be alive.” —NBC News

Shortly after leaving home that January evening, Gray called his son Theo to tell him that he loved him. Several witnesses confirmed seeing him on the Staten Island Ferry the night of his disappearance. The overwhelming likelihood is that Gray drowned himself, although the medical examiner’s office is being diplomatic in resisting leaping to conclusions. He had been depressed and made at least one previous attempt to take his life; his mother had killed herself. I wrote about his presumed suicide at the time of his disappearance, speculating that his suicidality might bear some relationship to his recent devastating motor vehicle accident not only via demoralization but the organic effects of his head injury. A friend and I were talking just the other day about the fact that the bodies of those who drowned during the winter months are often discovered as the waters start to warm at the end of the winter.

My thoughts are with his family and the many friends who loved him, and all who will be diminished by the passing of his trenchant observation and wry wit… [thanks, walker and abby]

His friend John Perry Barlow, who as of this writing has not yet commented on the confirmation of Gray’s passing, contemplated the possibility poignantly in January. He said at that time:

I fear that his children, and in particular his marvelous young sons, Forrest and Theo, will remember little of who he really was and what he really did. Worse, I suspect that much of what will remain as the memory of their father will be shadowed by who he became after depression closed its ghostly fist around his light. To the goal that we might re-remember him for them through our tales, I want to make a little book of your comments following the last three posts and give it to them. If any of you object to being included, and I hope none of you will, please let me know. They are better than the flowers one might send otherwise.

I don’t know, but it might not be too late to add your remembrances to Barlow’s memento mori.