“Pentagon officials view Wednesday’s horror in Fallujah as the Iraq war’s Mogadishu incident: a disaster that may be a turning point for American policy. We will not flee, as we did in Somalia, but Fallujah should teach even the administration’s most die-hard optimists that the mission is deeper and muddier than they’d imagined, that the country they have conquered is far uglier and far less pliant than they hoped, and that a new course of policy is necessary if we want to sustain the occupation.

Many are wondering how President Bush will retaliate for the brutal slayings of the four American contractors who were shot, beaten, dismembered, dragged down the street, and strung up on bridge poles. The universal feeling is that some response is necessary to let the insurgents know they can’t get away with this. The question is what kind of response?” —Fred Kaplan, Slate

Guillermo del Toro’s heavenly Hellboy: “The highest praise I can bestow on Guillermo del Toro, the 39-year-old Mexican-born director and writer, is that he’s in a class with Peter Jackson as a fan-boy who gets it—a brilliant filmmaker who has a kind of metabolic connection to horror and sci-fi that helps him transform secondhand genre material into something deep and nourishing. Del Toro reaches into himself and finds the Wagnerian grandeur in schlock.

Which brings us to the delightful Hellboy, which is based on a clever comic-book series of the same name by Mike Mignola that fuses superheroics with the sort of mythic religious demonology of H.P. Lovecraft, plus a bit of Men in Black macho cheekiness. ” —David Edelstein, Slate

“According to news reports, the Americans who were killed and mutilated in Fallujah were ‘private contractors.’ This is a euphemism for ‘mercenaries’: ex-military soldiers of fortune who operate outside the rules of combat.” —MemoryBlog

And: Robert Fisk: “Most Of The People Dying In Iraq Are Iraqis”: ‘Veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk reports live from Baghdad. Fisk describes the “grotesque, gruesome, terrible” attacks in Fallujah, the contracted mercenaries that have infiltrated Iraq: “They swagger in and out with heavy weapons, with automatic weapons and pistols as if they’re cowboys” and the deteriorating situation throughout the country: “The violence and the insecurity, the sense of anarchy is greater.” ‘ —Democracy Now!

Where Was the Air Force?: “George W. Bush, writes former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, ‘failed to act prior to September 11 on the threat from Al Qaeda despite repeated warnings and then harvested a political windfall for taking obvious yet insufficient steps after the attacks.’ That incendiary charge, coupled with his apologetic testimony before the commission investigating the attacks, has reignited a long-simmering debate: What did Bush know when and how quickly should he have done something about it?

But both the 9/11 commission and liberal opponents of the Bush Administration are focusing on the wrong question. Nothing has surfaced from the 2001 ‘summer of threat’ beyond a bunch of vague they’re-up-to-something caveats. The specific details intelligence agencies would have needed to stop the attacks before they happened–potential hijackers’ names, dates and times, targets–were maddeningly elusive.

The really big unanswered question of September 11, 2001 is this: Once it became obvious that at least four passenger jets had been hijacked–at one point that Tuesday morning, Clarke says the FAA thought it had as many as ‘eleven aircraft off course or out of communications’–why didn’t our government intercept them?” —Ted Rall, CommonDreams

“Consider this theoretical possibility: if no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, is it also possible that there are no al-Qaida terrorists in Guantánamo? It seems far fetched, put so bluntly. If only by chance, it would seem likely that some of the detainees might be terrorists. The US secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, argues that the inhumane incarceration, the secrecy and the abuse of any principles of justice are all justified by the fact that these prisoners are the hardest of hard cases. But given what we know of those who have been released, the refusal of the US to open the evidence to challenge, and the secrecy that surrounds the prison and all who languish there, the proposition is worth considering. And since none of us have been allowed to know much, it is worth listening to those who know a little more.” —Isabel Hilton, Guardian.UK [via CommonDreams]

A conversation with Martin Seligman: “The third form of happiness, which is meaning, is again knowing what your highest strengths are and deploying those in the service of something you believe is larger than you are. There’s no shortcut to that. That’s what life is about. There will likely be a pharmacology of pleasure, and there may be a pharmacology of positive emotion generally, but it’s unlikely there’ll be an interesting pharmacology of flow. And it’s impossible that there’ll be a pharmacology of meaning.” —The Edge

“To understand what is distinctive about today’s Republican Party, you first need to know about an obscure and very conservative German political philosopher. His name, however, is not Leo Strauss, who has been widely cited as the intellectual guru of the Bush administration. It belongs, instead, to a lesser known, but in many ways more important, thinker named Carl Schmitt.” —The Chronicle

Louis Menand reviews Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism by Dominic Sandbrook, a young British historian:

“In 1970, McCarthy retired from the Senate and embarked on one of the weirder and (to those who had been his admirers) more distressing afterlives in American politics. He entered the 1972 Democratic primaries, intent on defeating Muskie, who was the initial front-runner. McCarthy put most of his money and energy into Illinois, and Muskie trounced him there, sixty-three per cent to thirty-six per cent. In 1973, McCarthy explored the possibility of running for Congress from Minnesota’s Sixth District, the part of the state where he was born, but he was made to understand that the Democrats of the Sixth District did not find the possibility thrilling, and he didn’t run. In 1976, he ran for President in the general election as an independent. In 1980, he endorsed Ronald Reagan, a perversity motivated by his loathing for Jimmy Carter. He ran for the Presidency in 1988, as the candidate of the Consumer Party, and again, as a Democrat, in 1992, when he was seventy-six. He received two hundred and eleven votes in the New Hampshire primary. Some of those who voted for him may have believed they were casting their ballot for Joe McCarthy (a confusion from which McCarthy probably benefitted throughout his career). McCarthy now lives in a retirement home in Washington, D.C…” —The New Yorker

“Ten years after Jerry Seinfeld got caught necking during Schindler’s List, reverence for the Holocaust still makes Larry David squirm.” —Nextbook

“For at least three decades universities have struggled with the problem of rising journal prices. Prices have risen faster than inflation since the 1970’s, and four times faster since 1986. Because this rate greatly outpaced the growth of library budgets, it was obvious that it could not continue for much longer. But it was not obvious how it would end. Even though libraries had responded by selectively cancelling subscriptions and cutting into their book budgets, these incremental actions merely postponed the inevitable large-scale responses to reclaim control over their budgets and address the deeper problem. In late 2003 major universities started announcing large-scale cancellations. More, they accompanied these decisions with public statements denouncing publisher pricing practices as unsustainable and inconsistent with the mission of science and scholarship, and calling on all academic stakeholders to join in building sustainable and compatible alternatives.

We’ve all heard about the major actions, at schools like Cornell, Duke, Harvard, and Stanford. But to understand what’s been going on, we need to see a more comprehensive account. I’ve put together this list of actions by U.S. universities since the fall of 2003, with enough links for those who want to read further and enough detail for those who don’t.” —SPARC Open Access Newsletter

“The old adage that people resemble their pet dogs may really be true, suggests a new study by US scientists.

Pure-bred dogs can be matched to their owners by strangers most of the time. But the same does not hold true for mixed breed dogs, say Nicholas Christenfeld and Michael Roy, psychologists at the University of California San Diego.

When judges were shown digital photos of dog owners and given a choice of one of two dogs – they matched the correct pair 64 per cent of the time when the dog was a pure breed, showed Christenfeld and Roy.

However, their study did not pin down what factors were responsible for this resemblance. ‘We can’t tell whether it’s a physical resemblance or a stylistic resemblance…'” —New Scientist

“The anti-impotence drug not only speeds sperm up, researchers found, but it also caused the vital reaction needed to penetrate an egg to occur prematurely…

“Most use it for impotence and aren’t contemplating having a family, so this has no implications for them,” (one of the study’s authors) says. However, younger men are using it recreationally, and they may be trying to start a family. Furthermore, an audit of fertility clinics by the team revealed that 42 per cent use Viagra to help men produce sperm samples on demand.” —New Scientist

“A compound based on a liquorice extract improves memory in older men, shows a new study.

The substance works by blocking the activity of a brain enzyme that boosts levels of the stress hormone cortisol. This hormone is thought to be responsible for eroding memory with age.

The drug, called carbenoxolone, was once used to treat stomach ulcers. But when given to men aged between 55 and 75 it sharpened their verbal memories within weeks.

‘You get subtle but definite improvements,’ says Jonathan Seckl who led the study at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Verbal memory, he explains, is needed for remembering recently received information, and is ‘crucial to normal functioning’ – for example, recalling the time of an appointment.

Seckl believes such compounds may be available for the elderly within five years to help improve memory and possibly even treat dementia.” —New Scientist