‘When National Public Radio was launched in 1971, it promised to be an alternative to commercial media that would “promote personal growth rather than corporate gain” and “speak with many voices, many dialects.”

In 1993, when FAIR published a study of NPR’s guestlist that challenged the network’s alternative credentials (Extra!, 5/93), incoming NPR president Delano Lewis was still boasting about being a place where the unheard get heard (The Humanist, 9/93): “Our job is to be a public radio station. So therefore the alternative points of view, the various viewpoints, should be aired.”

Today, current NPR president Kevin Klose insists that diversity and inclusivity are among NPR’s top priorities (Syracuse Post-Standard, 7/31/02): “All of us believe our goal is to serve the entire democracy, the entire country.”

NPR, which now reaches 22 million listeners weekly on 750 affiliated stations, does frequently provide more than the nine-second-soundbite culture of mainstream news broadcasts. But is the public really heard on public radio? And is NPR truly an alternative to its commercial competition? A new FAIR study of NPR’s guestlist shows the radio service relies on the same elite and influential sources that dominate mainstream commercial news, and falls short of reflecting the diversity of the American public.’ (FAIR)

“Dating is hard enough, but when you’ve got kids, the stakes go through the roof.

The danger of ‘lethal child abuse’ rises dramatically, especially for the youngest children, when there’s an unrelated man in the household, according to recent studies. Academics call this the ‘Cinderella effect’ – the propensity of stepparents, whether married or just live-in partners, to hurt offspring who aren’t blood relations.” (azcentral.com)

“A handgun that Saddam Hussein was clutching when U.S. forces captured him in a hole in Iraq last December is now kept by President Bush at the White House, a spokesman confirmed on Sunday.” (Yahoo! News)

Do you suppose Bush is captivated by the spam email ads promising enlargement of his private parts as well?

I wrote about the controversy over Ted Rall’s cynical take on Tillman’s death when it happened. Here’s the crowning blow on Tillman’s tragic misguided patriotism:

“Pat Tillman, the former Arizona Cardinals football player who died in April while a U.S. soldier fighting in Afghanistan, likely was killed by friendly fire, an Army investigation has concluded.” (azcentral.com)

The St. Petersburg Times continues to rake up the muck in its backyard about the Co$:

“A 7-year-old wrongful death lawsuit filed by the estate of Lisa McPherson against the Church of Scientology reached a surprise settlement this week, ending one of the most fiercely contested and enduring legal battles in Pinellas County history.

The out-of-court agreement ends the last remaining legal threat facing the church after the widely publicized 1995 death of McPherson, a Scientologist who died after 17 days in the care of church members in Clearwater.”

“Ashcroft cites al-Qaida plan, but how credible

is the information?” (MSNBC)

Bob Herbert: “The treatment of the detainees in Iraq was far from an aberration. We routinely treat prisoners in the U.S. like animals.” (The New York Times Op-Ed)

16 Reasons to Find God: “People are not drawn to religion just because of a fear of death or any other single reason, according to a new comprehensive, psychological theory of religion.

There are actually 16 basic human psychological needs that motivate people to seek meaning through religion, said Steven Reiss, author of the new theory and professor of psychology and psychiatry at Ohio State University.”

16 Reasons to Find God: “People are not drawn to religion just because of a fear of death or any other single reason, according to a new comprehensive, psychological theory of religion.

There are actually 16 basic human psychological needs that motivate people to seek meaning through religion, said Steven Reiss, author of the new theory and professor of psychology and psychiatry at Ohio State University.”

Jack Beatty comments in The Atlantic: In the wake of Iraq, the term “neo-conservative” may come to mean “dangerous innocence about world realities:

“Paul Wolfowitz could not come up with the right number when he testified on Capitol Hill recently—he was off by about 30% in his estimate of the number of Americans killed in Iraq, which at this writing is 786. He’s a busy man. You can’t expect him to remember how many young Americans have died for the ambition of his adult life. Had he been asked what they died for, he would not have repeated what he told Vanity Fair last year. He would not have said, “For oil.” By now, on message with the rest of the administration, he’d have said, “For democracy.”

Tragically, any good the US could have obtained from bringing democracy to Iraq has been vitiated by the mayhem Wolfowitz’s obsession with toppling Saddam Hussein has inflicted on the Iraqi people—the 7,000 to 10,000 civilians killed, the torture victims, the populace so brutalized and humiliated by an occupation to which Wolfowitz appears not to have given a thought that over 80% want us out now. And those are just the short-term, intra-Iraq harms. Long-term, according to the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph Biden, US interests in the Middle East have been set back a decade by Abu Ghraib. “

The Bush orthodoxy is in shreds, writes

Sidney Blumenthal in The Guardian. A series of investigations has shattered neocon self-belief:

“At a conservative thinktank in downtown Washington, and across the Potomac at the Pentagon, FBI agents have begun paying quiet calls on prominent neoconservatives, who are being interviewed in an investigation of potential espionage, according to intelligence sources. Who gave Ahmed Chalabi classified information about the plans of the US government and military?”

Giant mushroom baffles experts: “A giant three-tiered mushroom which measures a metre across and was found in the tropical forests of the Republic of Congo has left experts in the capital Brazzaville scratching their heads.

‘It’s the first time we’ve ever seen a mushroom like this so it’s difficult for us to classify … but we are going to determine what it is scientifically,’ Pierre Botaba, head of Congo’s veterinary and zoology centre, told reporters on Thursday.

The giant fungus stands 45 centimetres high and has three tiered caps on top of a broad stem. The bottom cap measures one metre across, the second one 60 centimetres and the top one is 24 centimetres wide, Mr Botaba said.

The bizarre-looking mushroom was found in the village of Mvoula about 60 kilometres from Brazzaville and transported carefully to the capital by the local chief.” (ABC News)

“The final internet chatroom exchange took place on 28 June last year. ‘U want me 2 take him 2 trafford centre and kill him in the middle of trafford centre??’ said one message. ‘Yes,’ came the reply.

Less than 24 hours later, a 14-year-old boy was critically ill in hospital with stab wounds in the chest and stomach. At first it seemed as though a brutal, but straightforward, robbery had gone wrong. But yesterday the young ‘victim’ became the first person in this country to be convicted of inciting their own murder.” (Guardian.UK)

Government computer surveillance rings alarm bells: “Nine months after Congress shut down a controversial Pentagon computer-surveillance program, the U.S. government continues to comb private records to sniff out suspicious activity, according to a congressional report obtained by Reuters.

Privacy concerns prompted Congress to kill the Pentagon’s $54 million Total Information Awareness (TIA) program last September, but government computers are still scanning a vast array of databases for clues about criminal or terrorist activity, the General Accounting Office (GAO) has found.” (Computerworld)

“The newest NASA space telescope, with its ability to see past obscuring clouds of cosmic dust, has spotted what astronomers believe is evidence of the youngest planet observed so far, a gaseous body that could be less than a million years old.

Announcing the first major findings of the Spitzer Space Telescope on Thursday, scientists said the observations could indicate that planet formation around stars is more common and more rapid than previously suspected.” (New York Times)

LBV 1806-20: “A University of Florida-led team of astronomers may have discovered the brightest star yet observed in the universe, a fiery behemoth that could be as much as much as seven times brighter than the current record holder.

But don’t expect to find the star — which is at least 5 million times brighter than the sun — in the night sky. Dust particles between Earth and the star block out all of its visible light. Whereas the sun is located only 8.3 light minutes from Earth, the bright star is 45,000 light years away, on the other side of the galaxy. It is detectable only with instruments that measure infrared light, which has longer wavelengths that can better penetrate the dust.”

Freudians at War: “On the surface, this is a parochial argument about labels and credentials, a tempest in a Viennese teacup — or at most, a professional turf war. But you don’t have to probe the protagonists too deeply to discover that this is also a battle over the nature of therapy itself — what it is, what it does, how it works. And it quickly becomes apparent that alongside the intellectual controversy is a bare knuckles fight over money, power and prestige. These people, after all, are professionals of the ego.” (New York Times)

“Centuries of “experimental philosophy” and cognitive neuroscience have led to a revolutionary understanding of how the brain makes the mind.” Neuroscientist and psychiatrist William Calvin reviews Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain—and How It Changed the World by Carl Zimmer and The Birth of the Mind:

How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates

the Complexities of Human Thought

by Gary Marcus. (Natural History Magazine)

“But human rights campaigners said the Iraq prison abuse scandal proves that the US needs to be held to account.

‘Given the recent revelations… the US has picked one hell of a moment to ask for special treatment,’ said Richard Dicker of Human Rights Watch.” (BBC via the null device)

Matthew Yglesias:

“I’m a bit surprised that there hasn’t been more discussion of the overwhelmingly male (on the order of 80%) cast of political blog readership. At first glance, one might think of this as an internet issue, related to hardy perennials regarding women and technology in general, but I think it’s a manifestation of the broader fact that women don’t seem very interested in politics. All the political magazines have overwhelmingly male readerships, and surveys consistently show that women are less informed about politics than men, even when you do controls for income and educational attainment. I saw one book which alleged that women are even less likely than men to be able to correctly identify a candidate’s position on abortion, despite the CW that women care about this more than men. Indeed, the research even showed that women do care about this more than men, in that among those who knew where the candidates stood, it was more likely to be a factor in women’s voting decisions.

So I have no idea why that is, and it probably has some deep and mysterious roots out there somewhere. On the other hand, one thing I’ve long thought is that following politics is less the manifestation of high-minded concern for public affairs that we junkies would like to think of it as, and more like sports fandom — a semi-arbitrary decision to follow something and develop an emotional attachment to a team just because it’s fun. Certainly women don’t watch as much sports as men, even though there’s been tremendous growth in women’s participation (which has a pretty different appeal — I wouldn’t care to play tackle football, but it’s fun to watch) in athletics over the past several decades.”

Looking at the comments to Yglesias’ challenge, I think the difference is real and facetious attempts to put it down to a difference in online polltaking miss the boat. In so doing they prevent us from acknowledging the meaningfulness of the observation.

Both the comment about politics being like sport and the comment about the different modes of discourse men and women use are part of the answer (not that there is one answer that explains it all). Psychologically, Carol Gilligan explained several decades ago the developmental roots of fundamental psychological differences between males and females. Although I am being reductionistic, women are embedded in relationship and maintain interpersonal liaison, while men are confrontive and competitive and their relationships more often disjunctive.

The modern political process in the US is relentlessly mean-spirited, amplifying of distinctions between oneself and one’s opponent, and conciliation and concession are seen as weakness. Statistically, this would be abhorrent to more women than men, although the male “sissies” on the Left who are better able to embrace the feminine in themselves share their female compatriots’ disdain more often for the little men (usually white) playing with their toys in Washington with a deluded sense of their own importance. (Months ago, I published a link in my weblog to a piece of software that claimed, by analyzing a prose sample, to tell if the writer was male or female. A large element of what it looked for was the syntax of disjunction vs. the syntax of connectedness. By the way, I was complimented by its opinion that my writing was feminine…)

I suspect that in more mature democracies than that of the US, the disparity between men’s and women’s participation would be lessened, especially in those where (a) political discourse remains civil, and (b) coalition is necessary to govern.

What do you expect from someone who idolized Strom Thurmond and was stupid enough to advertise the fact? (The Washington Monthly)

Atrios is right.

I read Gore’s speech and thought of the Presidents who become elder statesmen after they leave office, unencumbered by the need to build a national constituency and able to speak from truth instead of power. Gore seems to have bypassed the President phase and gone right to the statesman-like. He eloquently encapsulates the extent of Bush’s betrayal of American ideals with a quiet but sustained outrage and concludes with some between-the-lines regret that he acquiesced to the theft of the Presidency from him by the Supreme Court in order to “do what I could to prevent efforts to delegitimize George Bush as he took the oath of office.” Has there been any talk of what role he might have within, or as an advisor to, a Kerry administration?

US intelligence fears Iran duped hawks into Iraq war:

Rock of Ages: “”Youth is a quality not unlike health: it’s found in greater abundance among the young, but we all need access to it. (And not all young people are lucky enough to be young. Think of those people at your college who wanted to be politicians or corporate lawyers, for example.) I’m not talking about the accouterments of youth: the unlined faces, the washboard stomachs, the hair. The young are welcome to all that — what would we do with it anyway? I’m talking about the energy, the wistful yearning, the inexplicable exhilaration, the sporadic sense of invincibility, the hope that stings like chlorine. When I was younger, rock music articulated these feelings, and now that I’m older it stimulates them, but either way, rock ‘n’ roll was and remains necessary because: who doesn’t need exhilaration and a sense of invincibility, even if it’s only now and again?

When I say that I have found these feelings harder and harder to detect these last few years, I understand that I run the risk of being seen as yet another nostalgic old codger complaining about the state of contemporary music. And though it’s true that I’m an old codger, and that I’m complaining about the state of contemporary music, I hope that I can wriggle out of the hole I’m digging for myself by moaning that, to me, contemporary rock music no longer sounds young — or at least, not young in that kind of joyous, uninhibited way. In some ways, it became way too grown-up and full of itself. You can find plenty that’s angry, or weird, or perverse, or melancholy and world-weary; but that loud, sometimes dumb celebration of being alive has got lost somewhere along the way. Of course we want to hear songs about Iraq, and child prostitution, and heroin addiction. And if bands see the need to use electric drills instead of guitars in order to give vent to their rage, well, bring it on. But is there any chance we could have the Righteous Brothers’ “Little Latin Lupe Lu” — or, better still, a modern-day equivalent — for an encore?” — Nick Hornby, (The New York Times Op-Ed)

I don’t know about Hornby, but as an over-50 listener to rock-and-roll I am still finding alot in my listening, new and old, that inspires exuberance and a singing-out-loud (but when I am alone in the car with the windows up) type of joy… Having an iPod and finding alot of new music through the mp3-blogs has put me onto alot of indie rock that amazes me, and I have yet to hear anything about Iraq or child prostitution.

Oh, and, while we’re at it, if us old codgers are able never to outgrow our rocking, why can’t some of you young upstarts get into classical music? (Boston Globe op-ed)

The Day Before Tomorrow at Your Local Movie Theater: MoveOn is organizing a drive to leaflet viewers exiting movie theaters from tomorrow’s opening day showings of The Day After, the Hollywood disaster blockbuster about global warming. It is a rare opportunity to engage voters at a time they may be most concerned about environmental catastrophe and impress them with the disastrous course we have been led down under the Bush regime. You can download this .pdf and print out flyers to distribute. Friday afternoon showings are important because the chances of press coverage are greatest on opening day. Sign up.

High-tech homo sapiens: “Currently, having a 200-year lifespan or an intelligence quotient double that of Marilyn Vos Savant might seem pretty far out. But some enhancement advocates are even more creative. Right now, over at a website associated with the World Transhumanist Association, a community of people is eager to get bioengineered bodies as soon as possible. Here’s the running list—half tongue-in-cheek—of some of the possible body modifications.” —James Pethokoukis, US News

In other words, TiVo viewers watch more commercials:

“Digital video recorders (DVR) typically are seen as the ultimate threat to TV advertising, giving consumers unsurpassed control over what they choose to watch or not watch on their TV sets, including TV commercials. And while it is true that most DVR subscribers do fast-forward through TV commercials when watching programming in replay mode, new research indicates that the net effect of DVRs actually increases the likelihood that viewers will see a TV commercial not decrease it.” (Media Daily News)

The main reason for this is that, with overall higher TV viewing satisfaction, TiVo viewers watch more TV overall. Even though they zap through a number of commercials, on net it appears they watch more than non-TiVo viewers. I know this is not true for me; I skip virtually 100% of TV advertising, especially since I enabled the 30-second skip hack, making skipping an ad dead simple. If studies such as this reassure the powers that be that they do not have to fight a pitched battle against the DVRs, I am all for it.

UN troops buy sex from teenage refugees in Congo camp:

“Teenage rape victims fleeing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo are being sexually exploited by the United Nations peace-keeping troops sent to the stop their suffering.

The Independent has found that mothers as young as 13 – the victims of multiple rape by militiamen – can only secure enough food to survive in the sprawling refugee camp by routinely sleeping with UN peace-keepers.” (Independent.UK)

I don’t suppose anyone ought to be surprised to find that the US has no monopoly on this kind of barbarity. It gives you pause about the UN peacekeepers being the kneejerk choice to supplant the American Huns in the Iraqi occupation, though…

A group of feisty rabble-rousing women has found “this way of just mobilizing, energizing, inspiring”. Could the Axis of Eve become George W. Bush’s worst nightmare? SF Chronicle

A BBC Radio 2 documentary narrated by Brad Pitt, who was approached once producers found out he is a huge fan. As someone who was listening to Drake before his 1974 death, I have to look askance at those who, like Pitt, found him in the last five years, since his recurrent popularity was propelled by — what was it? — a VW commercial? Still, you could do far worse…

The Talk of the Town? Further evidence of the continued crossover of weblogging into the mainstream, as if we needed it.

Although my wife keeps pushing me to write “something useful” instead of this weblog, I am not sure there is a book in me… or that anyone would ask.

AFP may have picked up a three-week old satirical piece from The Daily Farce as if it were news. When I read it, I was curious that this was not being reported more broadly. Does life imitate art or is truth far stranger than fiction could ever be these days? There has been an accumulating series of stories in which satirical stories, usually from The Onion, are picked up by the news media and reported as true, but those have usually been in the non-Western press which perhaps can be excused for not grasping the subtleties of skillful Western tongue-in-cheek. If this story was an invention, one is prompted to wonder what has become of the Sydney Morning Herald‘s fact checkers? and of their sense of humor?

If you missed it, here is a transcript of Gen. Anthony Zinni’s remarks on 60 Minutes. (CBS News)

This is essentially a catalogue/encyclopedia of all the extant languages of the world. It is the labor of the Summer Institute on Linguistics, which takes the business of learning and teaching indigenous languages seriously since it exists to train missionaries to speak the languages of the heathens they go to live among for the purpose, among others, of producing a translation of the Bible into the local tongue (and, where the local speakers have no writing system, throwing one in as part of the bargain). The Summer Institute has a complicated relationship with those doing ethnographic research and indigenous rights advocacy, who generally stand against the cultural imperialism of conversion work but unabashedly reap the benefits of its linguistic trailblazing in many regions such as Central America, where I worked as an undergraduate doing ethnographic research. Here’s the entry for the indigenous language I used to speak, for example.

The Ethnologue also exists in book and CD form, since there are probably still places the SIL goes where there are no broadband connections. [via Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools]

The SIL also offers a suite of computerized tools for linguistic field work, which sound very powerful. Perusing this stuff makes me wistful for my fieldwork days (which was before even the days of the laptop; I wonder, by the by, if there have been any anthropological monographs on the impact of the advent of computers and computerized research techniques on the indigenous people anthropologists go to study). I used to say that there had been a natural transition between being an anthropologist and becoming a psychiatrist; that clinical psychiatry is an exploration of the cross-cultural differences between oneself and the neighbors in one’s own culture [and sometimes the ethnopharmacology as well], but it is just not the same. Perhaps I ought to make housecalls, since I loved the fieldwork experience so well.

In any case, here’s SIL’s fascinating-sounding suite of linguistic software tools:

• LinguaLinks Library 5.0:

  Provides information, instructions, training, and advice in a ‘show-and-tell’ mode designed to support fieldwork. Contains the entire contents of 223 journal issues, 149 online books, glossaries, bibliographies, and other reference resources. Includes useful computer applications for language learning and literacy.

• The Linguist’s Shoebox 5.0:

  SIL’s classic language data manager, now with additional features and improved ease-of-use.

• SIL FieldWorks 1.4:

  A suite of software tools to help language teams manage cultural data, with support for complex scripts.

• Speech Tools 2.0:

  A suite of software that enables you to record, store, and analyze language sounds and music, as well as to help you in language learning.

• LinguaLinks Workshops 5.0:

  A world-class tool for managing lexical semantic and text data.

• Language data management and analysis software:

  SIL Language Software 1.0 and the individual subsets include several stand-alone programs. Some are to carry out auxiliary functions. Others are included as supplemental resources for language workers.

• Character sets and fonts:

  Provides generic character sets, language definitions, and keyboard files as well as methods to create encodings for your language definition from one or more existing character sets.

• WordSurv 4.0 for Windows:

  Tool for comparative analysis of word lists to help determine linguistic relationships.

“Lake Circuit Judge Lorenzo Arredondo appointed an attorney Thursday to represent Cabic at a hearing to determine whether he is a wolf-dog hybrid.

For Cabic, the outcome is a matter of life and death.”

Steal It Outside Your Group:

Also: Thumbing His Nose at Academe, a Scholar Tries to Auction His Services:

And would you legalise this, Mr. Dershowitz?? Pentagon admits to 37 prisoner deaths:

Ginsberg’s Celestial Homework: A “specialized Reading List for ‘Literary History of the Beat Generation,’ a course taught by Allen Ginsberg at Naropa Institute during the summer of 1977.” The original reading list (page 1, page 2, and page 3) has been reverently turned into a web page — into which I could submerge myself for a long time — by journalist-psychonaut Steve Silberman, who was in Ginsberg’s course in the late ’70’s, and several friends. There is a brief biography of each author behind his/her photograph and, where they are available online, you can navigate to the texts included.

A fix is available by running LiveUpdate from your antivirus client on the desktop.

“Is there any reason why an alien with a green epidermis couldn’t produce its food by just hanging around in the sun?

There is. And the reason can be traced to energy efficiency…

As a typical adult, you need at least 2,000 Calories a day. Making the conversion to less arcane units, that works out to about 100 watts of power, 24 hours a day. But remember that if you got your energy through photosynthesis, you would absorb only 8 watts for each square meter of skin. Most of us have about 3 square meters of epidermis, roughly half of which is in shade at any given time (more, if you insist on wearing clothes). So that’s just over a dozen watts of daytime power, nearly 10 times less than our burn rate. To provide the energy for one day’s worth of your gusto-grabbing lifestyle, you’d need to bake on the back patio for three weeks.” (Yahoo! News)

I don’t know if people elsewhere in the nation are following the ongoing struggle over gay marriage here in Massachusetts in much detail now that May 17^th has come and gone, but needless to say the battle continues. By an overwhelming margin which should be seen as a rebuke to Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, the Mass. Senate votes to end 1913 law the governor has been using to prevent out-of-state same sex partners from marrying in the state. It is not clear if the Mass. House will follow suit because of the opposition of conservative, oligarchic (and Catholic) House Speaker Thomas Finneran. The 1913 law, which was designed to prevent interracial marriages, makes it illegal for an out-of-state couple to marry in Mass. if there would be any impediments to their doing so in their home state. Originally, the State Attorney General ruled that Massachusetts would allow marriages between out-of-staters from ten other states which do not specifically define marriage as the union between a man and a woman, but apparently under intense pressure he has reversed himself and said that no gay couples from any of the other forty-nine states could marry here. Town clerks have been ordered to submit records of this week’s marriage license applications to the Governor’s office for scrutiny. The governor’s spokesman says Romney has no choice about the 1913 law because he cannot “pick and choose” which laws he enforces. A friend just sent me a clipping of this interesting rejoinder (which, by the way, is penned by the founder of the venerable Boston Computer Society) in the Boston Globe‘s letters section, which I have not yet been able to find online:

May 21, 2004

AGAIN Eric Fehrnstrom has defended Governor Romney’s overreaching interpretation of the 1913 law banning out of state couples from marrying here with his refrain that “The governor cannot pick and choose which laws to enforce” (“Senate votes to end 1913 law,” Page A1, May 20). It’s time someone called Fehrnstrom on this spurious argument. The fact is, the governor chooses which laws to enforce every day. Massachusetts has a panoply of so-called “blue laws” that have never been enforced in modern times by a Massachusetts governor. These include the law requiring citizens to get written permission from their doctor before taking a bath. The next time Fehrnstrom uses this argument someone should ask if Romney intends to begin enforcing the blue laws as well?

Jonathan Rotenberg, Boston

Start by firing Lucas, says this opinion piece:

A few days ago, I was doing the ego-surfing thing and looking for references to Follow Me Here I hadn’t seen before. I came across an entry by a weblogger who, linking to a FmH post she found praiseworthy, commented that I had redeemed myself as she had just been on the verge of dropping FmH from her blogroll because I was getting “too political.” Well, I plead guilty as charged, your honor. I suppose that, if you are still reading, it is because you do not mind. It was not my intention in starting Follow Me Here to be a political commentator. Cynical me! I fancied myself somehow above national politics and dubious about the relevance to any truly important aspects of life of the actions of the buffoons who choose to dedicate their lives to transparent and ingratiating vote-grubbing and giveaways to their rich friends. Local politics, I have always thought, is a different matter. ‘Think globally, act locally’ makes eminent sense. Nation states the size of the US are just to large and diverse to govern effectively and, seeing that truth, we should divorce ourselves from politics on the irrelevant and absurd national scale, I thought. Perhaps because of that disdain, I have never had the patience to follow the minutia of political machinations, and others on both the left and the right are far more erudite analysts than I aspire to be. Yet, since Bush’s election, the distinction between the merely banal, superficial and pompous and the malignant in politics has come to be clear. While I am not sure that national leadership can make much of a positive difference, it is clear how much evil it can do in the wrong hands. The most important fact in my experience of American public life has come to be not merely, as it is characterized, a ‘culture war’ around which sitcoms we choose to watch, which books move us, or which beverages we drink, but a life-and-death struggle for our souls between the life-affirming and just and the apocalyptic world-destroying (and, believe me, I am the first to get sick to my stomach of hyperbolic prose).

Not to suggest that those of you who do not have children should not be similarly moved, but watching my children grow up in the world George Bush has engendered is to a large extent what has transformed my sense of urgency around political issues. In my professional life as a physician, I fight to make small contributions to maintaining the life-affirming and dignifying effects of healthcare treatment in the face of its debasement. My weblog is becoming my little contribution to a similar but broader, multi-faceted struggle, over the outcome of which I am desperate and far far from confident, to pass on a world that is perhaps just abit more than debased, degraded and totally degenerate to our descendants. I do preach to the choir, but I hope there is something that deepens and widens your perspective and moves you toward further or more nuanced engagement in that struggle. I am logging essentially what widens and deepens my thinking and engagement. I was far more honored by a journalist reader’s recent comment to me that I am doing a good job on the war than I am troubled by those who might want to keep the blinders over their eyes. I hope that, if FmH is “too political” for you, it is because you have already gotten it, that you find all the thoughts upon which I harp already obvious and tedious. In any case, departing reader, fare ye well, and keep up the good fight.

Related: “Despite the worst foreign policy blunder in American history, George W. Bush and his millionaire supporters don’t know the meaning of the word shame”. Hal Crowther writes a devastating impeachment on indyweek.com:

“I never imagined 2004. It would be sophomoric to say that there was never a worse year to be an American. My own memory preserves the dread summer of 1968. My parents suffered the consequences of 1941 and 1929, and my grandfather Jack Allen, who lived through all those dark years, might have added 1918, with the flu epidemic and the Great War in France that each failed, very narrowly, to kill him. Drop back another generation or two and we encounter 1861…

The irreducible truth is that the invasion of Iraq was the worst blunder, the most staggering miscarriage of judgment, the most fateful, egregious, deceitful abuse of power in the history of American foreign policy. If you don’t believe it yet, just keep watching. Apologists strain to dismiss parallels with Vietnam, but the similarities are stunning. In every action our soldiers kill innocent civilians, and in every other action apparent innocents kill our soldiers–and there’s never any way to sort them out. And now these acts of subhuman sadism, these little My Lais.

Since the defining moment of the Bush presidency, the preposterous flight-suit, Fox News-produced photo-op on the Abraham Lincoln in front of the banner that read “Mission Accomplished,” the shaming truth is that everything has gone wrong. Just as it was bound to go wrong, as many of us predicted it would go wrong–if anything more hopelessly wrong than any of us would have dared to prophesy. Iraq is an epic train wreck, and there’s not a single American citizen who’s going to walk away unscathed.”

“Even more than the murderers who took my son’s life, I condemn those who make policies to end lives ” — Michael Berg (Guardian.UK)

Microwave mismatch proves our cosmos is a whopper. “There is not much room left for a small universe”, says a cosmologist, perhaps intending the pun, in response to new research throwing out suggestions that the universe could be a relatively small shape wrapped around itself. At a minimum, the universe is 78 billion light years across. (Nature)

Is there a Republican in the Senate or the House who is still credulous enough to believe this??

Also: ‘US Soldiers Started to Shoot Us, One by One’: Survivors describe wedding massacre as generals refuse to apologize. (CommonDreams)

New front in Iraq detainee abuse scandal?

“With attention focused on the seven soldiers charged with abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison, U.S. military and intelligence officials familiar with the situation tell NBC News the Army’s elite Delta Force is now the subject of a Pentagon inspector general investigation into abuse against detainees. The target is a top-secret site near Baghdad’s airport.” (MSNBC)

Exporting Abuse?

Wardens Chosen to Establish Iraq Prison System Had Past Abuse Allegations.

“A number of former state prison commissioners chosen by the Bush administration to establish a prison system in Iraq left their old posts after allegations of neglect, brutality and inmate deaths, an investigation by ABCNEWS has found.”

“Some prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison were ridden like animals, fondled by female soldiers, forced to curse their religion and required to retrieve their food from toilets, according to a published report Friday.” (Associated Press )

GI: Iraqi boy mistreated to get dad to talk:

“A military intelligence analyst who recently completed duty at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (news – web sites) said Wednesday that the 16-year-old son of a detainee there was abused by U.S. soldiers to break his father’s resistance to interrogators.” (Yahoo! News)

Reuters, NBC Staff Abused by U.S. Troops in Iraq

“U.S. forces beat three Iraqis working for Reuters and subjected them to sexual and religious taunts and humiliation during their detention last January in a military camp near Falluja, the three said on Tuesday.

The three first told Reuters of the ordeal after their release but only decided to make it public when the U.S. military said there was no evidence they had been abused, and following the exposure of similar mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

An Iraqi journalist working for U.S. network NBC, who was arrested with the Reuters staff, also said he had been beaten and mistreated, NBC said on Tuesday.”

Shocking Details on Abuse of Reuters Staffers in Iraq (Editor & Publisher)

His Imperial Nakedness:

‘House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Thursday sharply questioned President Bush’s competence as a leader, suggesting his policy in Iraq is to blame for the loss of U.S. lives. That assessment drew a furious response by Republicans who called on the Democratic leader to apologize.

“The emperor has no clothes,” Pelosi, D-California, told reporters on Thursday. “When are people going to face the reality? Pull this curtain back.” ‘ (CNN )

FmH readers will recall I reacted similarly to the Brooks column when it came out, albeit far less eloquently and not couched in the formal language of moral philosophy. Of course, the issue of whether moral agency and causal determinism are opposed informs our purview on the Abu Ghraib torturers as well, as I have tried to suggest in my agonizing over the issue.

Related: Michael Ruse reviews Natural Ethical Facts: Evolution, Connectivism, and Moral Cognition by William D. Casebeer: —

This is only surprising to people who still believe in the mind-body dichotomy, of course…

“Some claim they are a new life form responsible for a wide-range of diseases, including the calcification of the arteries that afflicts us all as we age. Others say they are simply too small to be living creatures.” New research describes the isolation of miniscule cell-like structures from diseased human arteries, which self-replicated in culture and showed evidence of containing DNA. Furthermore, they seemed to be building RNA, as a mechanism that transcribes code from DNA would do. The controversy provoked by the claims of naonbacteria supporters have been likened to that in physics around cold fusion. Less than 100 nanometers across, the idea that these particles can contain DNA and the proteins needed to function has been ridiculed, and positive findings are ascribed to contaminants. Moreover, they point out, the Finnish researchers promoting the nanobacteria concept have already set up a company to profit from diagnosis and therapy of the supposed disease-causing entities. Both critics and proponents agree that the evidence to data is not probative but only suggestive. — New Scientist

sway with me, everything sad —

madmen in stone houses

without doors,

lepers steaming love and song

frogs trying to figure

the sky;

sway with me, sad things —

fingers split on a forge

old age like breakfast shell

used books, used people

used flowers, used love

I need you

I need you

I need you:

it has run away

like a horse or a dog,

dead or lost

or unforgiving.

— Charles Bukowski

Why your laptop is always running out of power:

“Another way to provide more power would be to invent a “new chemistry”—a new set of materials with which to build batteries—or to develop a technique for more heavily charging an existing chemistry. But there’s a tradeoff: Generally, the more electricity a battery can store, the more dangerous and toxic it is. Even the lithium-ion battery, a traditionally safe technology, has its own risks. If it were to somehow catch fire, it becomes “exothermic”—it doesn’t need oxygen to burn, so it can’t be smothered. It’ll just burn and burn and burn until there’s nothing left.

This hair-raising prospect means that anyone who wants to build a stronger battery has to deal with federal regulators, most notably the Federal Aviation Administration. If a super-potent battery caught fire on a plane, it could do serious damage to the aircraft. And if it’s a choice between having my laptop conk out after three hours and having a nice powerful battery that knocks the entire plane out of the sky, I’m siding with the FAA. The lithium-ion battery, lame as it can sometimes be, hits the sweet spot between stability and usability. (Computer chips don’t face these problems. When you make them faster, they get hotter, but that isn’t as scary a proposition. You can deal with hot chips by installing better fans, which, of course, require ever more battery power.)

The great hope for the future lies with fuel cells, which are a whole new paradigm for laptop power. When they run out, you don’t recharge them. You just buy new cells and shove ’em in, the same way you put double-As into a portable radio. This year, some companies promise to introduce the first cells. In the long run, they aim to have them widely available for two or three dollars a pop, with each one promising perhaps 15 hours of power.

But fuel cells have their own downside. If they’re made with hydrogen, they produce water as a byproduct, so you’d have to cope with your laptop urinating. And the airlines aren’t too keen about letting people carry hydrogen onboard either, since it can be explosive, too. Manufacturers are looking at making fuel cells safer by using less-potent fuels like ethanol and methanol instead of hydrogen, but they deliver less energy—and the FAA claims they can be a fire hazard, too. In this quest for infinite life there is, as it turns out, no holy grail.” Slate

How about murder?

More Photos Surface:

The Washington Post jumps on the bandwagon with this editorial:

This pervasive rot at the core of US military practice in Iraq and elsewhere, the editorial goes on to suggest, arose specifically from Bu**sh**’s decision to take the January 2002 advice of his White House counsel, in a blatant disregard for law and human decency, to ignore State Dept. objections and proceed with his decision to exclude Afghani detainees from the protections of the Geneva Conventions, although it was recognized that this could eventually undermine military conduct. As this policy on prisoner treatment spread to the Iraqi conflict, the president blatantly lied and stated that we were respecting the Geneva Conventions.

I am more than a little impatient with all the soul-searching public debate over just how high up the responsibility for such savage practices goes. A wanton disregard for the law has been the rule in the Bu**sh** administration since the struggle they waged to steal the White House in the first place. Combine that with a grandiose (Salon) and misguided adventurist sense of mission, guided by voices¹ (Village Voice), against an enemy we reinvent daily as a self-justification for global war, and it is clear that a pervasive culture of barbarity and deceit (ABC News) is the inevitable outcome.

¹“It was an e-mail we weren’t meant to see. Not for our eyes were the notes that showed White House staffers taking two-hour meetings with Christian fundamentalists, where they passed off bogus social science on gay marriage as if it were holy writ and issued fiery warnings that “the Presidents [sic] Administration and current Government is engaged in cultural, economical, and social struggle on every level”—this to a group whose representative in Israel believed herself to have been attacked by witchcraft unleashed by proximity to a volume of Harry Potter. Most of all, apparently, we’re not supposed to know the National Security Council’s top Middle East aide consults with apocalyptic Christians eager to ensure American policy on Israel conforms with their sectarian doomsday scenarios.

But now we know.”

So… did he or did he not reappear on May 16th as promised, twenty years to the day after his ‘death’ ? LA Weekly

‘Verbivore’ Richard Lederer debunks an annoying riddle. This certainly has persistence; it is circulating in my son’s gradeschool, from which he just came home and posed it to me last night.

Profile of the supposed mastermind of the Madrid bombings and Nicholas Berg’s murder by two Nixon Center analysts, whch concludes:

Significant in my reading is that this analysis by conservative anti-terrorist hawks essentially concludes, as I have, that administration claims that he is “al Qaeda-related” are empty rhetoric. Indeed, the entity of “al Qaeda” has no fixed meaning except to western thinkers desperate to have an enemy they can grasp by naming it. Instead, there is a shifting alliance of zealots opportunistically coalescing when their missions conveniently converge.

“The figures in Fremont’s ‘Waiting for the Interurban’ sculpture were hooded yesterday, a reference to the recent prison-abuse photos from the war in Iraq.

A witness said the hoods were placed on the statues around noon. A chair next to the sculpture was also wired with jumper cables to look like an implement of torture, and a sign was duct-taped to a statue’s leg announcing weekly peace vigils at Green Lake.” — Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Good, provocative epidemiology which, as always, raises more questions. A team looking for an explanation for the puzzling and dramatic rise in the incidence of esophageal cancer in the industrialized world suggests that it correlates with the equally alarming rise in the consumption of carbonated beverages, finding that in places like China and Japan where the one hasn’t happened, the other hasn’t either. As always, critics caution that ‘correlation is not causation’ (to use the mantra we are all taught when we learn to decipher research findings). — BBC

Harry Potter and Left Behind are more alike than you might think.:

Steven Waldman, editor in chief of Beliefnet, goes on to compare and contrast. — Slate

Christopher Hitchens on what he refers to as the flaws in Seymour Hersh’s theory that bureaucratic and ‘butt-covering’ obstacles which so stymied the Pentagon’s terrorism-fighting tactics engendered frustration that top-level secret policy to apply ruthless methods resulted:

If I understand Hitchens correctly, he does not want so much to dispute Hersh’s analysis as to use its premises to preen and gloat about what he perceives as a devastating inconsistency in the anti-war left’s stance — that it both wanted to hold the Pentagon to the rules of engagement in the WoT® and hold the Pentagon to human rights standards in the detention and interrogation of prisoners-of-war. Where is the inconsistency? Actually, I am using a bit of the same sophistry here as Hitchens does; the real inconsistency he finds is that the left castigates the administration both for its lack of adherence to standards of humanity and for its lack of alacrity and success in capturing terrorist leaders. And for evidence of this he uses… one snide statement by Michael Moore, whose heart may be in the right place but who is surely a sort of loose cannon. Hitchens comes off simpering, and adds to it when he claims that the discovery of the supposed sarin-containing warhead proves there were WMD in Iraq all along.

Deadly April Battle Became a Turning Point for Fallouja: Along with the Abu Ghraib revelations, what may come to be seen in the history books as the point where we lost even the semblance of control over or reason for the occupation was the extraordinary news of the US forces turning over control of Fallouja to men who “pull(ed) their old olive-green uniforms and burgundy berets out of the closet and (went) back to work…” The Los Angeles Times dissects the events:

“Privately, Marines who began arriving here in March viewed the Army’s strategy throughout Iraq’s Sunni heartland as unduly confrontational.

But the grisly slayings of four U.S. contractors March 31 changed everything. Orders from a higher authority eclipsed the Marines’ “no better friend” intentions for Fallouja. “When the president says go, we go,” said Col. J.C. Coleman, chief of staff for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.

So the Marines were pushed to do something — a full-fledged assault on the city — that the Army had avoided, and military strategists now say was ill-conceived. Too few Marines were marshaled to confront a dug-in urban foe that proved unexpectedly resilient, well-armed and relentless.

The fighting quickly turned ugly, as did the images of dead and maimed civilians and fleeing refugees broadcast on Arab-language television. U.S. forces called a cease-fire after several days. Three weeks later, the insurgents had benefited from the chance to rearm, bring in new recruits and prepare ambushes, ensuring even more slaughter once the battle was renewed.

“In the end, the Americans left themselves with only bad options,” said Michael Clarke, professor of defense studies at King’s College, London. “They could either destroy the city, causing heavy loss of life. Or they could walk away. Both are a disaster, but the Americans chose the less disastrous of the two.””

“The question of how aggressive to be in treating late-stage Alzheimer’s patients is one of the most wrenching and contentious issues in medicine. For every patient who, like Mrs. Mull, reaches the final stage of the disease, there typically are about five or six family members faced with decisions about whether to authorize medical treatments for patients whose bodies live on though their minds are gone.” — New York Times

“In his first two years as president, George W. Bush set a trap. He pushed through tax cuts so big that they would inevitably force Democrats into a series of no-win arguments during this election year. Democrats could dedicate themselves to undoing the budget damage Bush had caused by favoring tax increases and spending restraint. Or they could ignore the issue of fiscal balance and propose popular programs…

The trap is working marvelously, even if the bad news in Iraq has pushed the budget mess off the front pages. True, competing Democratic factions are so eager to defeat Bush that they are largely holding their tongues. But the party’s deficit hawks and its advocates of new programs are not happy with each other, and both are trying to pull Sen. John Kerry in their direction. Kerry has no choice but to finesse the problem.” —E. J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post op-ed

“He was a stock character in 19th-century fiction: the wastrel son who runs up gambling debts in the belief that his wealthy family, concerned for its prestige, will have no choice but to pay off his creditors. In the novels such characters always come to a bad end. Either they bring ruin to their families, or they eventually find themselves disowned.

George Bush reminds me of those characters — and not just because of his early career, in which friends of the family repeatedly bailed out his failing business ventures. Now that he sits in the White House, he’s still counting on other people to settle his debts — not to protect the reputation of his family, but to protect the reputation of the country.

One by one, our erstwhile allies are disowning us; they don’t want an unstable, anti-Western Iraq any more than we do, but they have concluded that President Bush is incorrigible. Spain has washed its hands of our problems, Italy is edging toward the door, and Britain will join the rush for the exit soon enough, with or without Tony Blair.” — Paul Krugman, New York Times op-ed

Not only the fiftieth anniversary of Brown vs. the Board of Education, but Gay Weddings Begin in Massachusetts. New York Times Congratulations to Deb and Jane, friends of mine who are, tonight, finally a ‘happily married couple’!

Homophones and sound-alikes can often reek — or is it wreck or wreak? — havoc. In each phrase that follows, choose the preferred spelling:

1. anchors away/aweigh
   
2. to wait with baited/bated breath
   
3. to grin and bare/bear it
   
4. sound bite/byte
   
5. bloc/block voting
   
6. a ceded/seeded player
   
7. champing/chomping at the bit
   
8. a full complement/compliment of
   
9. to strike a responsive chord/cord
   
10. just deserts/desserts
    
11. doesn’t faze/phase me
    
12. to have a flair/flare for
    
13. foul/fowl weather
    
14. hail/hale and hardy/hearty
    
15. a hair’s/hare’s breadth/breath
    
16. a seamless hole/whole
    
17. a friend in need is a friend in deed/indeed
    
18. to declare it doesn’t jibe/jive
    
19. on the lam/lamb
    
20. to the manner/manor born/borne
    
21. marshal/martial law
    
22. to test one’s medal/meddle/metal/mettle
    
23. might/mite and mane/main
    
24. beyond the pale/pail
    
25. to peak/peek/pique one’s interest
    
26. pi/pie in the sky
    
27. pidgin/pigeon English
    
28. plain/plane geometry
    
29. to pore/pour over an article
    
30. praying/preying mantis
    
31. a matter of principal/principle
    
32. rack/wrack one’s brain
    
33. to give free rain/reign/rein
    
34. raise/raze Cain/cane
    
35. to pay rapped/rapt/wrapped attention
    
36. with reckless/wreckless abandon
    
37. to reek/wreak/wreck havoc
    
38. right/rite of passage
    
39. a shoe-/shoo-in
    
40. to sic/sick the dog on someone
    
41. sleight/slight of hand
    
42. spit and/spitting image
    
43. the old stamping/stomping grounds
    
44. to stanch/staunch the flow
    
45. dire straights/straits
    
46. a toe-/tow-headed youth
    
47. to toe/tow the line
    
48. to swear like a trooper/trouper
    
49. all in vain/vane/vein
    
50. to wet/whet your appetite

I am pretty much raged out about the prisoner abuse scandal, but it continues to grow, as per my several uses of the phrase “tip of the iceberg” in my posts when the Abu Ghraib news was first revealed. Let’s see; the Solicitor General seems to have lied to the Supreme Court in asserting that we have not mistreated prisoners when defending the administration’s assertion of the right of indefinite detention of US citizens without due process. Guantanamo detainees and prisoners in Afghanistan have been subjected to pretty much the same treatment as those in Iraq, we learn. In a sense, so have American women in the military.

To no thinking person’s surprise, the pattern of abuse apparently emanated from deliberate, secret interrogation policy formulated at the top of the Bu**sh** administration with all due recognition of the vulnerability of Muslim men to sexual humiliation. Easy enough for the dysadministration to dismiss such claims when they are made by Seymour Hersh in that effete rag, The New Yorker; but then you get a crack Newsweek investigative team confirming and amplifying on Hersh’s story. Now the list of dubious details raising suspicions about the Nicholas Berg execution videotape has grown to fifty or more. Given that it is conceivable to many that the Administration is capable of manufacturing this to divert attention from the unpleasant facts emerging from Abu Ghraib, what are we to think of chilling reports that Bush and his cronies are ready — or perhaps we should say eager? — for terrorist attack on US targets in the leadup to the November election.

Here you will find a short blog reader survey; if you type in ‘Follow Me Here’ as the referrer in question 22, I will get back a summary of demographic information about my readers and their preferences, which I will share with you here.

Lisa Rein’s weblog has links to the mirrors of streams of Colin Powell’s Meet the Press appearance yesterday in which he rebukes his own press aide for trying to take him off the air early, just as Tim Russert is about to ask a candid question about the Nigerian yellowcake uranium confabulation that was used as evidence of our need to invade Iraq. Powell orders the camera back on and the interview resumed, and acknowledges that the uranium story was deliberately misleading. Is this Powell’s swansong? [via boing boing]

Not only the fiftieth anniversary of Brown vs. the Board of Education, but Gay Weddings Begin in Massachusetts. New York Times Congratulations to Deb and Jane, friends of mine who are, tonight, finally a ‘happily married couple’!

U.S. bans coercion of Iraqi prisoners / No sleep deprivation or similar methods — ‘We will not even entertain a request’. — San Francisco Chronicle

Paul Bremer hinted at it several days ago, if you could believe al Jazeera. Now, if you can believe the Washington Post: