“A war of words is breaking out between the creators of the Netsky, Bagle and MyDoom Windows worms.

The malicious programs’ creators are putting taunts and insults in successive variants of their viruses.

The spat began because Bagle’s creators are jealous of all the media attention that the Netsky virus is getting…

The war of words has being conducted via fresh variants of the viruses which have different messages hidden inside them.

There are now nine versions of Bagle, six versions of Netsky and seven versions of Mydoom circulating online.” —BBC

“There are good reasons why Africans don’t view their fauna with the same sentimentality that Europeans do”. After reviewing the “respect tinged with fear” that characterizes the attitude of Africans toward the wildlife whose destructive incursions they have to live, the essayist draws a parallel with the the way Europeans once regarded the wolf and the bear. The difference is that Africa’s big beasts have not been exterminated by their human co-inhabitants.

“In whatever form it takes – the slaughter of the ‘big five’ by white hunters in the colonial era, or the demand for ivory and rhino horn which continues to drive poaching today – the biggest danger to Africa’s animals has always come from outside the continent. And while in Hollywood’s imagination, it is usually westerners like Joy Adamson or Dian Fossey who are thought to be at the forefront of the conservation struggle, there are many Africans who take a leading role in preserving their wildlife.” —Guardian.UK

Molly Ivins: “Anyone see any reason to think Haiti will be better off without Jean-Bertrand Aristide? Just another little gift from the Bush foreign policy team, straight out of the whacko-right playbook.

Jesse Helms always did think Aristide was another Fidel, not being able to distinguish between a Catholic and a communist. We know the main armed opposition group is a bunch of thugs and that they have been joined by old Duvalierists, including members of the Tonton Macoutes, the infamous torturers.

The Bush administration wanted this to happen – it held up $500 million worth of humanitarian aid from the United States, World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and International Monetary Fund. Without U.S. or multilateral help, the country spiraled downward.

So here we are, reduced to hoping for the best again.” —AlterNet

How a finely tuned pair of nostrils keeps the US space corps from stinking to high heaven.: “Even a little bit of air pollution can turn into a major problem in the cramped quarters of a space vehicle – silent but deadly. At the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, NASA odor-testing panels mount ‘smelling missions’ to determine whether something on board a spacecraft will convey that not-so-fresh feeling. Their method: Stick some guy’s nose in it.” —Wired

The Philadelphia woman’s ten-day old infant had supposedly died in her crib in a house fire six years previously. She was convinced that the little girl at the birthday party was her own daughter, however; on a pretext, she obtained several strands of her hair and confirmed her hunch with DNA testing. The girl had been kidnapped from her crib by a family acquaintance (with a history of a prior arson conviction) who raised her as her own after setting the fire as a cover. — Atlanta Journal Constitution

First redesign of the lowly nickel in 66 years. Jefferson remains on the front but, on the rear, Monticello is gone in favor of a commemoration of the Louisiana Purchase (left). Another new nickel acknowledging the Lewis and Clark expedition (right) debuts this fall. — Chicago Tribune

The anatomy of prion disease: “In the novel Cat’s Cradle, an eccentric scientist develops a substance called Ice-9 that crystallizes every drop of water it touches. Eventually, it freezes the world’s oceans.

Now, 40 years after writer Kurt Vonnegut imagined Ice-9, researchers think his creation is the perfect analogy for the renegade proteins that destroy the brains of people infected by the human form of mad-cow disease.

Once prion diseases infect a body, the proteins change shape and, with a kiss of death, turn their neighbors into clones of themselves. Clumps of misshapen proteins form, overwhelming neurons and poking holes in the brain. Death is inevitable.” — Wired

Bill would let certain companies own facts, and exact a fee to access them: “Ostensibly, the Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act (HR3261) makes it a crime for anyone to copy and redistribute a substantial portion of data collected by commercial database companies and list publishers. But critics say the bill would give the companies ownership of facts — stock quotes, historical health data, sports scores and voter lists. The bill would restrict the kinds of free exchange and shared resources that are essential to an informed citizenry, opponents say.” — Wired

Jimmy Breslin in Newsday on how the hub hub about the proposed marriage amendment and the controversy over the Mel Gibson film obscured notice of two remarkably important news stories — Alan Greenspan’s forecast of the demise of social security and the approval of the first cancer drug that works by inhibiting tumor angiogenesis. [thanks, adam]

“Dressed in black, a 35-year-old Frenchwoman has married her boyfriend.

But Christel Demichel’s wedding needed special permission because her policeman boyfriend, Eric, was killed by a hit-and-run driver 18 months ago.

The bride said she knew some people might be shocked but Eric’s death had not dimmed her feelings for him.

The wedding at Nice city hall, attended by the couple’s close friends and family, took place on what would have been Mr Demichel’s 30th birthday.” [A rarely-invoked law allowing posthumous marriages was introduced by Charles de Gaulle.] —BBC [thanks, Pam]

“Researchers in Austria and Germany measured the smallest time interval recorded, and found it lasted a ten million billionth of a second.

It’s about ten times shorter than the previous shortest measured interval, which lasted about one femtosecond or a million billionth of a second.” —Ananova

“French cinema chains are refusing to distribute or screen Mel Gibson’s controversial film The Passion of the Christ because of fears it will spark a new outbreak of anti-Semitism.” —Chicago Sun-Times

“A disturbing though little publicized movement is afoot in American education to transform the study of art into what is termed Visual Culture Studies. It seeks to broaden the proper sphere of art education–the visual arts–to include every kind of visible artifact. To quote the prospectus of a recently established academic program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison:

Anything visible is a potential object of study for Visual Culture, and the worthiness of any visual object or practice, as an object of study depends not on its inherent qualities, as in the work of art, but on its place within the context of the whole of culture.

In other words, one can henceforth treat the Nike of Samothrace and Michelangelo’s David, say, on a par with Mattel Toys’ Barbie and Ken dolls.” —Aristos

The first arts festival staged by people facing death will feature works from beyond the grave. “Ranging in age from 20 to 80, sufferers from cancer, HIV/Aids, motor neurone disease, multiple sclerosis and other incurable conditions will participate at London’s Riverside Studios, once home to BBC classics such as Dixon of Dock Green, Dr Who and Hancock’s Half Hour and now one of London’s flagship cultural centres.” —Guardian.UK

“Dr. Seuss is getting a United States postage stamp, a statue and, on March 11, a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. It’s all part of a bicoastal celebration of the centennial of Theodor Geisel, best known as Dr. Seuss, the man responsible for the Grinch, the Cat in the Hat and the Lorax, among other unforgettable creatures.” —New York Times. Please, though, don’t let the likes of Jim Carey and Michael Myers be the medium through which Dr. Seuss is filtered to the next generation!

rosebaby says: “go make a tick mark – even though it’s just USA Today, i don’t want those people thinking that a constitutional amendment promoting discrimination is ok.

USA Today is conducting a poll on the proposed constitutional amendment prohibiting same sex marriage. These USA Today polls can influence public debate.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-02-24-gay-marriage-survey.htm

note: um, apparently you can vote as many times as you want.”

Addendum: Not exactly a scientific sample of public opinion, but FWIW voting in this poll is running 4:1 against a constitutional marriage amendment, as of when I am writing this.

Josh Marshall tells us he went skiing for the first time in his 35-year life this weekend and learned about the virtues of controlling your rate of descent. He heartily recommends that philosophy to the president as well…

The US is issuing vociferous denials of deposed Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s claims that he was essentially kidnapped by armed US Marines and taken to the airport for his flight from Haiti. Aristide has insisted on this version of the story in phone conversations with members of the Congressional Black Caucus and an interview with CNN from the Central African Republic. I can see the importance of the US disputing his assertion that he was forced to leave against his will but his accusation seems to come down to the US persuading him that his departure could avoid a bloodbath and was in the best interests of the Haitian people. It is hard for me to understand why Colin Powell would have to deny this essentially humanitarian concern, and it would do no harm to agree that they took steps to protect him and his family by escorting him to the airport, so it is probably not true, although Colin Powell is certainly the dysadministration’s most artful liar-on-command. A spokesperson for the Central African Republic joins the US in insisting that Aristede himself asked for asylum there, while admitting that the US also intervened on his behalf to help find him a safe haven after another country refused to accept him. Colin Powell does admit that Aristede called the US ambassador to Haiti for advice and received support for resigning, and also says that after he decided to step down the US government “made arrangements for his departure”, which included bringing in a leased plane for his exit. Is it kidnapping if a group of armed men comes to your house unannounced and tells you you must accompany them away? How about if they tell you it is to protect you from almost certain death if you do not go along?

It also makes an odd kind of sense why Aristide would be enraged at the US and why that might turn into a clumsy ‘sour grapes’ accusation. There is a broader sense in which even if we did not have him physically kidnapped and spirited out of the country the US bears responsibility for what, of course, does amount to a coup. Haiti is essentially a ‘failed state’ that could not have existed without having been propped up largely by US foreign aid as well as prior military interventions. A veneer of quasi-democracy had been imposed upon a mixture of criminal thuggery, anarchy, class and even race war. The accident waiting to happen in Haiti whenever the US pulled the rug out from under it was a consequence of post-colonialism and misguided American noblesse oblige. It was only better than the alternatives for as long as the US would continue to support it. Whatever the merits and abuses of the Aristide regime, he knew he lived or died at the US State Department’s whim. Of course, the previous administrations that ‘enabled’ Aristide could not have foreseen that the Bush regime would only be invested in fostering ‘democracy’ in oil-laden Middle Eastern states laden with fundamentalist infidels and vital to our permanent WoT® footing.

But the consensus line —

President

Jean-Bertrand Aristide was… an undemocratic leader who

betrayed Haiti’s democratic hopes and thereby lost the support of his

erstwhile backers. He “stole” elections and intransigently refused to

address opposition concerns. As a result he had to leave office, which

he did at the insistence of the US and France.

— is subject to considerable doubt. Another version, exemplified by Jeffrey Sachs’ piece in the Financial Times, has it that the Bush administration’s sights have been set on toppling Aristide since they came to office, seeing him as a ‘Castro-like’ figure who could foment Western Hemisphere anti-Americanism from a populist base.

Such critics fulminated when President Bill

Clinton restored Mr Aristide to power in 1994, and they succeeded in

getting US troops withdrawn soon afterwards, well before the country

could be stabilised. In terms of help to rebuild Haiti, the US Marines

left behind about eight miles of paved roads and essentially nothing

else.

The political opposition that was galvanized by undermining Aristide, and likely to be the benificiaries of his overthrow, is an ‘American construction’, the remnants of dictator ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier’s regime, cronies of the CIA in one of the puppet regimes it was so fond of in our Caribbean and Latin America backyards. This puts a very different spin on the claims that Aristide ignored opposition concerns and that his popular mandate was illegitimate because the opposition boycotted the process. Again, I am not saying that the neo-cons needed to send Marines in to put Aristide on a plane. But their take on Haiti shaped US policy decisions during the last three years that made his overthrow just as sure as if we had.

Alot of what is happening in Haiti can easily be lost in translation, hinging on semantic differences about what constitutes “voluntarily” yielding power and the nuances of the word ‘kidnapping’; but also what in the Haitian context constitutes ‘democracy’, ‘opposition’, ‘legitimacy’ or even ‘nation’. Aristede’s ‘kidnapping’ accusation should be seen as the kind of lyrical symbolism connoting deeper underlying truths that seems to come so much more readily from Francophones but which can only be treated as a concrete black-or-white issue in the more literal English of Washington.

Why Brain Structure Makes Unintended Shootings Inevitable:

“The police killing of an unarmed 19-year-old on a Brooklyn rooftop last month appears to be a tragedy of nanoseconds and eons, a death delivered by a cop firing not because of a conscious decision but an instantaneous neuronal impulse hardwired from the days of our animal ancestors.

And there’s an obvious subtext of race. The shooter, officer Richard S. Neri Jr., is white. The victim, Timothy Stansbury Jr., was black. Scientific research has a say here too, probing whether our rawest reflexes can be primed by modern fears based on race.

Scientists are intensely studying the amygdala, a pair of almond-shaped neuron clusters inside the brain, to understand its role in post-traumatic stress disorder. The amygdala encodes memory with emotional weight, but it also alerts us to sensory information that we associate with danger. It’s the jittery small mammal inside us, always awaiting loud noises, sudden movements, and glints of teeth. The more we expect a threat, the more excitable it becomes.” —Village Voice

“Some parents may think it is undignified or detrimental, but babytalk is essential to the full development of a baby’s brain, says a researcher at the University of Alberta.

Babytalk, the universal cooing that mothers and fathers do to get their babies’ attention, is more important than we may have ever realized, says Dr. David Miall, professor of English at the U of A.

Babytalk helps infants to develop an understanding and appreciation of temporal arts, such as literature, music, and dance, and depriving babies of the alliteration, assonance, and other poetic elements inherent in babytalk could hinder their ability to produce and appreciate these arts when they grow up, says Miall, whose research was published recently in the journal Human Nature–An Interdisciplinary Biosocial Perspective.” EurekAlert!