Your tax dollars hard at work: I have no convictions about the veracity and no knowledge about the origins of this powerfully affecting mpeg video. I received a link to it from a friend, who had received it from someone else, with the message,

“It is Pentagon footage of US Apache helos taking out a group of Iraqis

planting a road side bomb. It is from a distance of approximately two

miles, in the dark of night, using infrared.

The Iraqis can neither see no hear their impending fate. Turn on the

speakers so you can hear the commander.”

Anyone with familiarity or opinion about this should leave comments below, please. Exploring the homepage where it is contained is completely unrevealing.

“South Africa will be very interested in the Israeli disengagement plan published yesterday. The political, military, and economic aspects of the plan for the Gaza Strip and the enclave in the northern West Bank are amazingly similar to the homelands, one of the last inventions of the white minority in South Africa to perpetuate its rule over the black majority.” — Haaretz

“The crowd that gathered on Halloween night in 1964 to hear Bob Dylan play New York City’s Philharmonic Hall had no idea what storms lay ahead“. Review of ‘The Bootleg Series Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964 Concert at Philharmonic Hall’.

” ‘I heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world.’ That line, from ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,’ one line from a song in which, said its composer, Bob Dylan, each line could stand as a separate song, describes what you hear on the newest release in Dylan’s ongoing Bootleg Series.” — Charles Taylor, Salon

What story you choose to believe about antidepressants reveals a deeper truth about who you are. —Reason

“Local governments are refusing to comply with the Patriot Act” —Elaine Scarry, Professor of Values at Harvard University, Boston Review

“The idea that human beings are endowed with a special faculty for reasoning about other minds fits into a much wider and older tradition of debate about the origin of all concepts, especially relatively complex ones. Most psychologists would grant that some basic perceptual primitives—for example, color, sound, and depth—are derived from the physical world by dedicated innate mechanisms in the mind. But where do more abstract concepts come from—concepts such as house, belief, or justice? How, for example, does a child originally learn that other people have beliefs?” —Rebecca Saxe, Boston Review

“A couple of decades ago, in fact, physicians prescribed tests and treatments for their patients without serious inquiry into what their patients wanted.

Sometimes doctors did not even inform patients of their diagnoses, for fear that the news would be too much for them to handle.

But times have changed, and many experts now contend that the best treatment differs from patient to patient based on the patient’s values. For example, a man who cares little about the risk of impotence is better suited to surgical treatment of his prostate cancer than a man who highly values sexual function.

Trying to keep up with the times, I explained that it was not my decision to make. It depended on what he felt about the risks and benefits of his alternatives, I said. He became even more confused.” —New York Times

Boy killed by father’s dogs

“CHARLOTTE, North Carolina (AP) — An 8-year-old boy was mauled to death by his father’s four pit bulls, and prosecutors were considering charges against the father ranging from child neglect to murder.” —CNN

Juan Cole:

“The credibility of the US in the Middle East as a broker is finished, kaput, nada, zero. And the problem is that there is no other credible broker.

You know, my colleague Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University got slammed by the Neocons for having predicted that the Arab street would come out during the Gulf War and threaten the region with instability. Actually, there were huge demonstrations, especially in North Africa. But his critics pointed out that there were no real changes as a result. The power of the urban crowd in the Middle East cannot be sneezed at (see: the Islamic Revolution in Iran, 1978-79). But it is true that most governments in the Middle East have muddled through even if they have been associated with unpopular US or Israeli policies.

Rashid was right, though, about the danger of doing things that cause anger to fester in large numbers of people. And, it occurs to me that the very inability of those huge crowds to change anything (or even to go to the streets in most countries of the region, given the controls put in place by the secret police) gave rise to the frustrations that eventuated in the wave of terrorism we are now seeing. That is, the Arab street has not so much admitted defeat as ramified, into radical social movements with a religious cast, and (on the part of a small number of the really angry and frustrated) into terrorist cells.” —Informed Consent

I have been tracking the phenomenon by which the social censorship after 9-11 of any comments suggesting that the US was anything other than an innocent victim is finally showing its age. Vigilante arbiters of public opinion scoured the media for anyone hinting at what, for me was and is as plain as the noses on our faces — that the US with its cocky, arrogant swagger and disdain for world consensus has engendered the hatred that came back at us in spades on 9-11. And the Bush administration’s prosecution of the WoT® has continued to fulfill the prophecy. Although Cole is careful here to place his comments only in the context of the current Iraqi Intifada and the Bush endorsement of Sharon’s unilateral ‘solution’ to the Palestinian conflict (“Sharon and Bush just painted big red targets on us all”), it is clear he is joining the ranks of those uttering the forbidden thought.