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)