Monthly Archives: June 2004

Cities Say No to the Patriot Act

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“Forget drug-free and nuclear-free zones. A growing grassroots movement seeks to make the United States a Patriot Act-free zone, one city at a time.


Or, at the very least, the people behind the movement hope to make their cities constitutional safe zones.


In the past two years, more than 300 cities and four states have passed resolutions calling on Congress to repeal or change parts of the USA Patriot Act that, activists say, violate constitutional rights such as free speech and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure.


Barring that, the resolutions declare that their communities will uphold the constitutional rights of their residents should federal law enforcement agents come knocking on the door of local authorities for assistance in tracking residents. This means local authorities will insist on complying with federal orders only in ways that do not violate constitutional rights. The resolutions are not binding, however, and do not affect the federal government’s actions.” (Wired)

Why the FCC should die

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Declan McCullagh:

“It’s time to abolish the Federal Communications Commission. The reason is simple. The venerable FCC, created in 1934, is no longer necessary. Its justification for existence was weak 70 years ago, but advances in technology since then have eliminated whatever arguments remained. Central planning didn’t work for the Soviet Union, and it’s not working for us. The FCC is now an agency that does more harm than good…” (CNET)

Nature-Nurture Dept.:

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Simplistic headline belies more provocative content:

Causes of violence traced to human nature: “Artistic cruelty is hardly a thing of the past,’ writes Steven Pinker, Harvard psychologist and author of The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.


In explaining human thought and behavior, Pinker, whose courses include ‘The Human Mind,’ ‘Cognitive and Behavioral Genetics’ and ‘Evolutionary Psychology,’ argues that to refuse to acknowledge our evolutionary human nature distorts both the science and scholarship of today. Contrary to the title of his recent book, Pinker believes and argues with clarity, human beings are not born with a blank slate on which parents, environment, culture and society write. [This does not contradict the title, IMHO. The title makes it clear that Pinker thinks the ‘blank slate’ concept is misguided. — FmH]


Although the book covers a variety of topics including nature versus nurture, it is the chapter on violence I turned to upon learning of the recent revelations of human abuse once more against humans.”

Hoarders Show Unique Brain Pattern, Study Finds

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As a clinical psychiatrist, this finding is of professional interest in terms of adjusting the assumptions I bring to bear when assessing and treating hoarders. But the more crucial impact is the questions the researchers raise about the basis for diagnostic classification. Lumping disorders by symptomatic appearance makes sense if you are trying to talk to your patients about the pattern and sources of their distress. If, however, it is biological adjustment that is your main concern, it has to be done differently.

: “New research into the brain patterns of compulsive hoarders shows the disorder may have been misclassified and victims could be getting the wrong treatment, U.S. scientists reported on Tuesday.


Brain scans show the biology of America’s estimated 1 million compulsive hoarders is significantly different to that of other people diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, the team at the University of California Los Angeles found.


Hoarding is usually classified as obsessive-compulsive disorder, a catch-all term for a range of symptoms such as constantly repeating actions like handwashing or checking to make sure a stove is turned off.


‘Our work shows that hoarding and saving compulsions long associated with OCD may spring from unique, previously unrecognized neurobiological malfunctions that standard treatments do not necessarily address,’ Dr. Sanjaya Saxena, who led the study, said in a statement.


“In addition, the results emphasize the need to rethink how we categorize psychiatric disorders. Diagnosis and treatment should be driven by biology rather than symptoms,” Saxena added. ” (Yahoo! )

Forever Young

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Book Review: Forever Young: A cultural history of longevity by Lucian Boia:

“Where did we go wrong? Adam lived to the age of 930 and his grandson Methuselah to 969. The first generations of Chinese and Indian people are said to have lived for thousands of years. In our time, however, Jeanne Calment only clocked up a measly 122 years.


Historian Lucian Boia of the University of Bucharest, Romania, is as much concerned with the mythology of longevity as the reality. In Forever Young, he demonstrates how little our obsession with cheating death has changed.” (New Scientist)

Bush Campaign Seeks Help From Congregations

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“The Bush campaign is seeking to enlist thousands of religious congregations around the country in distributing campaign information and registering voters, according to an e-mail message sent to many members of the clergy and others in Pennsylvania.

Liberal groups charged that the effort invited violations of the separation of church and state and jeopardized the tax-exempt status of churches that cooperated. Some socially conservative church leaders also said they would advise pastors against participating in such a partisan effort.” (New York Times)

I Get Around

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Several people have pointed me to this weblogger’s account of another curious intersection in Nicholas Berg’s life. He was apparently interviewed by Michael Moore for Fahrenheit 9/11, although the footage did not end up getting used in the film.

“Berg seemed to live quite a life of adventure with very marginal means of support. You have to wonder whether he had a secret sponsor. His propensity for ‘running into’ certain people is beginning to look like a pattern.” (xymphora )

Reagan is Dead at 93

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I have no difficulty grieving for the star of Bedtime for Bonzo but I won’t shed a tear for Reagan as a former President (Washington Post) whom I recall mostly with contempt, and with incredulity for the uncritical adulation rolling in now he is dead. Some progressive webloggers caution us to “be wary of giving fodder to the wingers who are just dying for the opportunity to see us gloat about Reagan’s death, and to spew venom at him and his legacy.” While there is no gloating, and I wish the Reagan family some solace in their loss, it is the rabid right’s problem and not ours, IMHO, if we resist the revisionist whitewash coming down the pike and give a candid appraisal of Reagan’s deplorable presidency. As someone pointed out, the Republican hue and cry about ‘politicizing’ the Paul Wellstone funeral several years ago means they would never, never use Reagan’s death for their partisan ends, now would they? In any case, I cannot help it that I will remember him for doing more, and more irrevocably, to dismantle the care for our least fortunate citizens than anyone until George W. Bush, bolstered by his incoherent ‘Reaganomics’; for bastardizing some of the most time-honored American ethical values in a ‘Republican Revolution’; and as a mean-spirited jingoist reaping ridiculously unwarranted credit for the end of the Cold War and the collapse of world Communism.

I am amazed as the groundless homilies uniformly describe him as the man who gave back “hope” and “optimism” to the nation. My first take was that that signifies little more than having been in the right place at the right time, since the nation had nowhere to go but up from Watergate and our defeat in Vietnam. But actually it is more than just being properly situated. The uncritical adulation for his ‘character’ reflects an idealizing projection onto Reagan of desperate American yearnings for a benign father figure to help us bolster our threatened fantasies of decrepit American grandeur and righteousness. The painful upheaval of the ’70’s had deepened and enriched American cultural adventurousness and humanism but it was as if the public found it unendurable and took the first opportunity they could to put an end to it. We needed someone like Reagan; who better than a B-movie actor trained for little else than being the target and embodiment of collective projections? The power of this process is exemplified in the public’s ability to ignore the breakthrough of more realistic glimpses of Reagan’s deficiencies. The most telling moment in the Reagan presidency for me was his ‘joking’ about unleashing a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union when he thought the media microphones weren’t on. Similarly, the public could ignore the abundant evidence that, by the time of his second election campaign, he was a doddering and faltering man, already showing signs of dementia, with only a vague and unfocused insight about the issues needed to lead a superpower, and increasingly covered for by his wife and his entourage. (As a psychiatric resident during his second campaign in 1984 demonstrating at one of his Boston campaign appearances, I achieved some notoriety by going on record in an interview with Boston radio station WBZ to say so.) Twenty-four years after his election, the man-in-the-street interviews at his passing show us that that idealization is undiminished and, not surprisingly given where we find ourselves now, the yearnings even more intense. (And, in a similar vein, the kneejerk villification of the ’70’s continues undiminished.)

In the face of the distortions with which Americans see their worst presidents, the assessment of the world audience of the emperor’s state of undress is more telling. While the lack of esteem and confidence, the alarm, the loathing, with which Dubya is viewed by foreign observers is almost unanimous and unprecedented, there are parallels to the the recognition by the rest of the world that a country consumed with pop culture fantasies of gunslingers, chintzy romance and cops’n’robbers had gotten the icon it deserved when it selected an untalented two-bit actor like Reagan. (Now, if it had been a comic genius like Jerry Lewis, it might have been a different matter, right?).

Reagan is often referred to as the model whose presidency Dubya is trying to emulate, and indeed Dubya does follow in his footsteps in many regards. Reagan was the first postwar president who made a virtue of not being very bright (Nixon was not very bright either, but showed no recognition of it), tapping into the same anti-intellectual current in American culture that Bush exploits so well. In an understatement about a man who never learned to do much else besides following a script, Nancy Reagan reportedly said, ‘He doesn’t make snap decisions, but he doesn’t overthink, either.’ But Reagan could get away with his folksy tone because it was, true to his origins, full of homespun wisdom (The Scotsman ) and humility of which Bush’s cocksure public presence is entirely devoid. And while Bush and his neo-conservative handlers appropriate the populist Reagan as the patriarch of whom they are the spiritual heirs, Reagan did not think much of the Bush dynasty and ‘Reagan Republicans’ do not feel well served by the patricians (American Conservative). Reagan’s ideological platform, rigid and simple-minded as it was, was organized around a principled opposition to big government, while the Bushes’ is unprincipled support for government of and for the big. There is a sense in which Republicanism ended when Reagan was succeeded by Bush Senior.

But I would be remiss if I did not throw in another parallel between the two execrable presidencies, aptly drawn by billmon:

…But all this pales in comparison to Reagan’s war crimes in Central America. We’ll probably never know just how stained his hands were by the blood of the thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of defenseless peasants who were slaughtered in the Guatemalan highlands, or the leftist politicians, union leaders and human rights activists kidnapped and killed by the Salvadoranian death squads, or the torturned in Honduran prisons, or terrorized by his beloved contras.


Did Reagan’s men covertly support these murders? Or did they just look the other way? Did Reagan ever know just what kind of charnel house he helped create? Or did he live completely in his fantasy world of freedom fighters and “founding fathers”? Either way, it was in Central America that Reagan most clearly earned that nickname the hippies pinned on him back in Berkeley: “fascist gun in the West.”


Looking back, it’s also easy to see the propaganda connections between Reagan’s war in Central America and the current Orwellian nightmare in Iraq. There were the same moral oversimplications – pure goodness versus absolute evil – the same flowerly rhetoric about freedom and democracy (to be administred to impoverished campesinos with machine guns and torture chambers.) There was the same lurid hype about the dire danger to the homeland – as when Reagan famously warned that Nicaragua was just a “two-day drive from Harlington, Texas.”


And of course, we’re even looking at some of the same actors – Elliot Abrams, John Negroponte, Colin Powell. To a large degree, the Reagan administration’s covert wars in both Central America and the Middle East formed the template for how the war in Iraq was packaged, sold and – unfortunately – fought.

Another parallel between the two administrations is in the area of anti-ballistic-missile defense. Bush’s NMD Program shares with its antecedent, Reagan’s Star Wars boondoggle, their technological inanity. Historians have argued (not very compellingly, I find) that it was the threat of Star Wars that compelled Gorbachev to commit to mutual arms reductions; Bush’s NMD program will only destabilize the arms race and increase the risk of nuclear conflagration.

We were lucky when the sociopathic Nixon died that his criminality and disgrace muted the nostalgia of even the most partisan. Nothing will spare us from the outpouring with Reagan’s death. The timing is convenient; expect the volume to be turned up drastically during this election season on the Republican beatification and appropriation of his legacy (Washington Monthly ). We can certainly expect a sentimental, over-the-top Reagan tribute at the Republican National Convention this summer. Although the trend is well underway already, atypically while the icon is still alive although having faded into the twilight of the death-in-life of advanced Alzheimer’s Disease over the past decade, expect many more bridges, highways and public buildings to be named for him in states with Republicans in power inthe coming months.

Reagan is Dead at 93

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I have no difficulty grieving for the star of Bedtime for Bonzo but I won’t shed a tear for Reagan as a former President (Washington Post) whom I recall mostly with contempt, and with incredulity for the uncritical adulation rolling in now he is dead. Some progressive webloggers caution us to “be wary of giving fodder to the wingers who are just dying for the opportunity to see us gloat about Reagan’s death, and to spew venom at him and his legacy.” While there is no gloating, and I wish the Reagan family some solace in their loss, it is the rabid right’s problem and not ours, IMHO, if we resist the revisionist whitewash coming down the pike and give a candid appraisal of Reagan’s deplorable presidency. As someone pointed out, the Republican hue and cry about ‘politicizing’ the Paul Wellstone funeral several years ago means they would never, never use Reagan’s death for their partisan ends, now would they? In any case, I cannot help it that I will remember him for doing more, and more irrevocably, to dismantle the care for our least fortunate citizens than anyone until George W. Bush, bolstered by his incoherent ‘Reaganomics’; for bastardizing some of the most time-honored American ethical values in a ‘Republican Revolution’; and as a mean-spirited jingoist reaping ridiculously unwarranted credit for the end of the Cold War and the collapse of world Communism.

I am amazed as the groundless homilies uniformly describe him as the man who gave back “hope” and “optimism” to the nation. My first take was that that signifies little more than having been in the right place at the right time, since the nation had nowhere to go but up from Watergate and our defeat in Vietnam. But actually it is more than just being properly situated. The uncritical adulation for his ‘character’ reflects an idealizing projection onto Reagan of desperate American yearnings for a benign father figure to help us bolster our threatened fantasies of decrepit American grandeur and righteousness. The painful upheaval of the ’70’s had deepened and enriched American cultural adventurousness and humanism but it was as if the public found it unendurable and took the first opportunity they could to put an end to it. We needed someone like Reagan; who better than a B-movie actor trained for little else than being the target and embodiment of collective projections? The power of this process is exemplified in the public’s ability to ignore the breakthrough of more realistic glimpses of Reagan’s deficiencies. The most telling moment in the Reagan presidency for me was his ‘joking’ about unleashing a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union when he thought the media microphones weren’t on. Similarly, the public could ignore the abundant evidence that, by the time of his second election campaign, he was a doddering and faltering man, already showing signs of dementia, with only a vague and unfocused insight about the issues needed to lead a superpower, and increasingly covered for by his wife and his entourage. (As a psychiatric resident during his second campaign in 1984 demonstrating at one of his Boston campaign appearances, I achieved some notoriety by going on record in an interview with Boston radio station WBZ to say so.) Twenty-four years after his election, the man-in-the-street interviews at his passing show us that that idealization is undiminished and, not surprisingly given where we find ourselves now, the yearnings even more intense. (And, in a similar vein, the kneejerk villification of the ’70’s continues undiminished.)

In the face of the distortions with which Americans see their worst presidents, the assessment of the world audience of the emperor’s state of undress is more telling. While the lack of esteem and confidence, the alarm, the loathing, with which Dubya is viewed by foreign observers is almost unanimous and unprecedented, there are parallels to the the recognition by the rest of the world that a country consumed with pop culture fantasies of gunslingers, chintzy romance and cops’n’robbers had gotten the icon it deserved when it selected an untalented two-bit actor like Reagan. (Now, if it had been a comic genius like Jerry Lewis, it might have been a different matter, right?).

Reagan is often referred to as the model whose presidency Dubya is trying to emulate, and indeed Dubya does follow in his footsteps in many regards. Reagan was the first postwar president who made a virtue of not being very bright (Nixon was not very bright either, but showed no recognition of it), tapping into the same anti-intellectual current in American culture that Bush exploits so well. In an understatement about a man who never learned to do much else besides following a script, Nancy Reagan reportedly said, ‘He doesn’t make snap decisions, but he doesn’t overthink, either.’ But Reagan could get away with his folksy tone because it was, true to his origins, full of homespun wisdom (The Scotsman ) and humility of which Bush’s cocksure public presence is entirely devoid. And while Bush and his neo-conservative handlers appropriate the populist Reagan as the patriarch of whom they are the spiritual heirs, Reagan did not think much of the Bush dynasty and ‘Reagan Republicans’ do not feel well served by the patricians (American Conservative). Reagan’s ideological platform, rigid and simple-minded as it was, was organized around a principled opposition to big government, while the Bushes’ is unprincipled support for government of and for the big. There is a sense in which Republicanism ended when Reagan was succeeded by Bush Senior.

But I would be remiss if I did not throw in another parallel between the two execrable presidencies, aptly drawn by billmon:

…But all this pales in comparison to Reagan’s war crimes in Central America. We’ll probably never know just how stained his hands were by the blood of the thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of defenseless peasants who were slaughtered in the Guatemalan highlands, or the leftist politicians, union leaders and human rights activists kidnapped and killed by the Salvadoranian death squads, or the torturned in Honduran prisons, or terrorized by his beloved contras.


Did Reagan’s men covertly support these murders? Or did they just look the other way? Did Reagan ever know just what kind of charnel house he helped create? Or did he live completely in his fantasy world of freedom fighters and “founding fathers”? Either way, it was in Central America that Reagan most clearly earned that nickname the hippies pinned on him back in Berkeley: “fascist gun in the West.”


Looking back, it’s also easy to see the propaganda connections between Reagan’s war in Central America and the current Orwellian nightmare in Iraq. There were the same moral oversimplications – pure goodness versus absolute evil – the same flowerly rhetoric about freedom and democracy (to be administred to impoverished campesinos with machine guns and torture chambers.) There was the same lurid hype about the dire danger to the homeland – as when Reagan famously warned that Nicaragua was just a “two-day drive from Harlington, Texas.”


And of course, we’re even looking at some of the same actors – Elliot Abrams, John Negroponte, Colin Powell. To a large degree, the Reagan administration’s covert wars in both Central America and the Middle East formed the template for how the war in Iraq was packaged, sold and – unfortunately – fought.

Another parallel between the two administrations is in the area of anti-ballistic-missile defense. Bush’s NMD Program shares with its antecedent, Reagan’s Star Wars boondoggle, their technological inanity. Historians have argued (not very compellingly, I find) that it was the threat of Star Wars that compelled Gorbachev to commit to mutual arms reductions; Bush’s NMD program will only destabilize the arms race and increase the risk of nuclear conflagration.

We were lucky when the sociopathic Nixon died that his criminality and disgrace muted the nostalgia of even the most partisan. Nothing will spare us from the outpouring with Reagan’s death. The timing is convenient; expect the volume to be turned up drastically during this election season on the Republican beatification and appropriation of his legacy (Washington Monthly ). We can certainly expect a sentimental, over-the-top Reagan tribute at the Republican National Convention this summer. Although the trend is well underway already, atypically while the icon is still alive although having faded into the twilight of the death-in-life of advanced Alzheimer’s Disease over the past decade, expect many more bridges, highways and public buildings to be named for him in states with Republicans in power inthe coming months.

The Skinny on Tenet Resignation

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  • ABC: Tenet’s Resignation, ‘Strictly Personal,’ Says Brother
  • Reuters: Bush Says He (sic) Sorry Tenet Left CIA
  • Defenselink.mil: Rumsfeld Says Tenet’s Work Helped Save Lives on Battlefield
  • The Australian, Australia: Bush ‘didn’t ask Tenet to resign’: “US President George W Bush did not ask CIA director George Tenet to resign and had no advance notice he would do so, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said …”
  • Seattle Post Intelligencer: Bush: Tenet leaving shouldn’t hurt morale
  • E-Commerce Times: No Shock at Tenet Departure: “… Tenet’s departure was the worst-kept Washington secret this side of John Kerry’s political vacillations — his fate sealed when Bob Woodward outed him as …
  • New York Post: Tenet Exit Has Spooks Spooked: “The stage has been set by CIA Director George Tenet’s resignation for major reforms in the nation’s intelligence networks that …”
  • International Herald Tribune, France: CIA after Tenet: Terror warnings are not enough: “Some critics of America’s intelligence services will mistakenly see George Tenet’s resignation as director of central intelligence as a reaction to …”
  • East Valley Tribune, AZ: Scuttlebutt about Tenet: “The scuttlebutt in Washington is that George Tenet is resigning as director of the CIA because several harsh reports were about to descend on his head like …”
  • Pacific News Service, CA: Tenet or Not, CIA Must Learn Mideast’s ‘Secret Language’: “The resignation of George Tenet as CIA director, following a string of disastrous failures at the agency, underscores the greater failure of the US …”
  • Common Dreams: Bush’s Erratic Behavior Worries White House Aides: “… The President’s abrupt dismissal of CIA Directory George Tenet Wednesday night is, aides say, an example of how he works.”
  • Providence Journal, RI: RI delegation surprised by timing of Tenet resignation
  • Peoria Journal Star, IL: LaHood shocked at Tenet’s timing
  • Bloomington Pantagraph, IA: Durbin, LaHood say Tenet not the problem
  • Pacifica Radio: Fall Guy for the Bush Regime? “Geoge Tenet resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency for “personal reasons,” but many analysts say that Tenet is a fall guy for an …”
  • NewsMax, FL: Report May Have Hastened Tenet’s Resignation: “…Tenet’s resignation comes just as a critical, 400-page report from the Senate intelligence committee was readied for public …”
  • GOPUSA: Pelosi: Tenet Only first of Many Who Should Go
  • SunHerald.com, MS: Tenet out; CIA debate rages: “George Tenet’s resignation as CIA director does little to solve the many inherent problems plaguing US intelligence, say former spies, lawmakers …”
  • Dallas Morning News: Did Tenet jump or was he pushed?
  • NDTV.com, India: Chalabi slams Tenet: “Former Iraqi governing council member Ahmed Chalabi has launched a bitter attack on Tenet saying the former CIA chief is to blame for false information on …”
  • CNN: Chalabi blames Tenet for feud with US
  • NewsMax.com, FL: Hillary Clinton: ‘Pro-Chalabi Supporters’ Forced Tenet Out
  • Miami Herald: Text of Tenet’s Letter of Resignation
  • Duluth Weekly, GA: Collins Surprised at CIA Director George Tenet’s Resignation: “… Georgia Republican Congressman Mac Collins, a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence was surprised Thursday that Tenet decided to …”
  • Council Bluffs Daily Nonpareil, IA: Harkin: No sorrow for loss of Tenet: “Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, doesn’t feel sorry for George Tenet, who resigned Thursday as CIA director. … He (Tenet) misled the president and everybody,” Harkin said. …”
  • The Spoof (satire): Tenet Starts Avalanche of Resignations: “Within hours of throwing in the towel, newly resigned CIA chief George Tenet has unwittingly started a domino effect in the Bush cabinet. …”
  • Town Hall, DC: “Tenet stacked up an impressive number of failures during his tenure, but pinning America’s atrophied intelligence capabilities on him is a little like blaming …”
  • Capitol Hill Blue, VA: With Tenet Out, FBI Chief Tries a Power Grab: “… Mueller on Thursday proposed the creation of an intelligence service within the FBI, a move that came on the heels of the ouster of CIA Director George Tenet. …”
  • NewsMax.com, FL: Daschle Wants Real Reason for Tenet Resignation: “Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle told interviewers that he was taken by surprise when he heard of George Tenet’s resignation, but that he looks “forward to …”
  • Providence Journal, RI: “… No great insight is needed to figure out why George J. Tenet resigned Thursday as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. His …”
  • The Rolling Head, Chattanoogan, TN: “George Tenet got Washington-ed. George Tenet got Bush-whacked. George Tenet got fed to the angry volcano gods. … Tenet was a high paid bellboy. … ”

Forbidden Photos, Anyone?

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“Mike Epstein is not a terrorist, but if a proposed ban on photography on New York trains and buses goes into effect, he might very well find himself treated like one.


‘How can they ban photographing unusual sights aboard trains and in stations?’ wonders Epstein, who operates Satan’s Laundromat, a website dedicated to ‘urban decay, strange signage, and general weirdness.’ …


You bet. The MTA’s move to stop the shooting of unauthorized pictures or video has pissed-off everyone from photobloggers to subway advocates and free-speech activists. To show their opposition to the ban, a group of photographers plan to gather at the main information kiosk in Grand Central station this Sunday, June 6, at 1 p.m. They’ll fan out across several train lines, shooting photos throughout the system in a peaceful demonstration.” (Village Voice)

Meta Efficient:

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A Guide To the Most Efficient Things in the World: “The information presented here will be of interest to those who wish to live more simply and self-sufficiently.

Incorporating the tools and techniques outlined here can dramatically decrease your dependence on petroleum, electricity, gas for heating and cooling, municipal water and sewage utilities. Once implemented these sources will be available to you perpetually.”

Capitol Hill Blue: Bush Knew About Leak of CIA Operative’s Name

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Capitol Hill Blue: Bush Knew About Leak of CIA Operative’s Name: “Witnesses told a federal grand jury President George W. Bush knew about, and took no action to stop, the release of a covert CIA operative’s name to a journalist in an attempt to discredit her husband, a critic of administration policy in Iraq.” (Capitol Hill Blue) It was this testimony that led the worried Bu**sh** to seek private counsel earlier this week, God love ‘im. (You can tell how much I am enjoying this; if the Democrats have it in them to act with alacrity, could this be the scandal that brings the dysadministration down?)

The Public Editor: Weapons of Mass Destruction?

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Or Mass Distraction?: “From the moment this office opened for business last December, I felt I could not write about what had been published in the paper before my arrival. Once I stepped into the past, I reasoned, I might never find my way back to the present.


Early this month, though, convinced that my territory includes what doesn’t appear in the paper as well as what does, I began to look into a question arising from the past that weighs heavily on the present: Why had The Times failed to revisit its own coverage of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? To anyone who read the paper between September 2002 and June 2003, the impression that Saddam Hussein possessed, or was acquiring, a frightening arsenal of W.M.D. seemed unmistakable. Except, of course, it appears to have been mistaken.” — Daniel Okrent, New York Times ombudsperson

"I play the kind of punk rock music that has existed since the time of the great painters in the caves at Lascaux…"

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An evocative portrait of the music of The Mountain Goats, a.k.a former psychiatric nurse and elliptical poet John Darnielle, the discovery of whom has been just about the best thing (along with John Vanderslice, the Fiery Furnaces and Broken Social Scene) about my personal indie rock awakening:

“Songs begin with acts of God: ‘First thing that happened was a river overflowed’; ‘Let the stars come out, and the moon shine bright / We’re sleeping on the porch tonight / Wind blew all the power lines down / Watch where you step if you go walking around.’ Characters are summoned up in a matter of seconds: ‘That fifteen thousand dollars / That turned up in your purse / You’ve done something awful / I’ve done something worse.’ Questions are raised about just what sort of species is being addressed: ‘I get letters telling me since I moved away / You’ve taken to hanging out on that rock about a mile from shore.’ Doomed relationships are summed up in two lines: ‘I know you hate it when I get my headaches / Well I’ve got a real prize tonight.’


We don’t always follow characters, however; sometimes we follow the lyric itself as it metamorphoses into animals, shimmies up trees, or heads north toward Alaska ‘where there’s snow to suck the sound out from the air.’ We hear it describe the continent eroding, or the rising flames of burning ships 73 years before the start of the Christian era. We hear the singer’s heart become an onion rising up in his throat with the first spring thaws. We are warmed by a western sun that always seems to be sending out ‘signals’ as it sets; we hear the old songs of Bacchus crackle through transistor radio static. Above all, we hear the strumming and that unmistakable nasal tenor, and we are made aware of every word that is sung.” — Jim Fisher (Salon)

Elijah

streak the windows.

smear the walls with coconut oil, yeah.

fill a cast iron kettle with water and magnolia blossom.

let it boil.

let the water roll.

let the fire take its toll.

i’m coming home.

i’m coming home.

dust off the idols.

give them something to eat.

i think they’re hungry.

i know i’m starving half to death.

i know you’re waiting.

i know you’ve been waiting for a long long time.

and i’m coming home.

i’m coming home.

set the table.

those three extra places —

one for me,

one for your doubts,

and one for god.

let the incense burn in every room.

feel the fullness of time in the empty tomb.

feel the future kicking in your womb.

i’m coming home.

i’m coming home.

— John Darnielle

Boston Student Faces Felony Charges for Iraqi Prisoner Abuse Protest

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//boston.indymedia.org/usermedia/image/7/4vert-korean-enters4.jpg' cannot be displayed]

“Joe Previtera, a twenty one year old student at Boston College, was arrested Wednesday and charged with felonies after dressing as a hooded Iraqi prisoner in front of a military recruitment center on Tremont St. in downtown Boston…


Previtera faces misdemeanor charges of disturbing the peace and felony charges of making a false bomb threat and using a hoax device. The charges apparently reflect the District Attorney’s concern that Mr. Previtera might have been mistaken for a terrorist.” (Boston.Indymedia)

Make It Happen — Vote

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With all due props to Ed Fitzgerald, I just had to appropriate this joke from his site and post it in full:

“One sunny day in 2005 an old man approached the White House from across Pennsylvania Avenue, where he’d been sitting on a park bench. He spoke to the Marine standing guard and said, ‘I would like to go in and meet with President Bush.’


The Marine looked at the man and said, ‘Sir, Mr. Bush is no longer president and no longer resides here.’


The old man said, ‘Okay’ and walked away.


The following day, the same man approached the White House and said to the same Marine, ‘I would like to go in and meet with President Bush.’ The Marine again told the man, ‘Sir, Mr. Bush is no longer president and no longer resides here.’


The man thanked him and, again, just walked away.


The third day, the same man approached the White House and spoke to the very same Marine, saying ‘I would like to go in and meet with President Bush.’


The Marine, understandably annoyed at this point, looked at the man and said, ‘Sir, this is the third day in a row you have been here asking to speak to Mr. Bush. I’ve told you already that Mr. Bush is no longer the president and no longer resides here. Don’t you understand?’


The old man looked at the Marine and said, ‘Oh, I understand. I just love hearing it.’


The Marine snapped to attention, saluted, and said, ‘See you tomorrow.'”

Berg beheaded?

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No way, say medical experts: “American businessman Nicholas Berg’s body was found on May 8 near a Baghdad overpass; a video of his supposed decapitation death by knife appeared on an alleged al-Qaeda-linked website (www.al-ansar.biz) on May 11. But according to what both a leading surgical authority and a noted forensic death expert separately told Asia Times Online, the video depicting the decapitation appears to have been staged.” (Asia Times)

A compiled list of doubts raised by dubious webloggers did the rounds several weeks ago; now these medical experts echo many of the same suspicions.

Web Bugs in Microsoft Word

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“Microsoft Word contains a security flaw that allows ‘web bugs’ to be included in documents. The fault lies with a Word feature called the INCLUDEPICTURE field, which references an image outside the document, either from a local file or a URL. A malicious person could secretly track who is reading a document by inserting a reference to an image from a server under his control. Every time Word loads the document, it will make a connection to the server to retrieve the image, revealing the local user’s IP address and other information.


This vulnerability was initially discovered in 2000 by Richard M. Smith. It received some press coverage at the time, but the threat was downplayed because nobody was known to be exploiting it at the time. In the four years since then, Microsoft has released two new versions of Office but has yet to correct the problem . Meanwhile, at least one commercial service has sprung up to help users exploit the flaw for surreptitious tracking.


I have written a program (available below) to scan for these bugs in Word documents and remove them. Unfortunately, the vulnerability in Word can be extended to any application that supports OLE, including Excel and PowerPoint, by embedding the tracking bugs as Word OLE objects. Since each application uses a different format for writing OLE data to disk, it would be very difficult to write a general-purpose scanner.” (via Freedom to Tinker)

Rudy, We Hardly Knew Ye

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This morning, a friend and I, reflecting on Bush’s free-falling poll figures, were musing about whether there might be a cut-and-run move at the Republican Convention. Could the party dump Bush and nominate someone else? The sensationalism of the news might propel a candidate over the top, and a September nomination would not leave much time for an effective Democratic counter-attack. Especially with the convention being in New York and timed to capitalize on the 3rd anniversary of the WTC attack, our speculation turned to the darling of 9-11, Rudy Giuliani. Could he pull it off? Not if this damning indictment of Giuliani gains any currency.

Chalabi accused of spy codes tip-off to Iran

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If confirmed, the leak would represent one of the most serious US intelligence breaches in recent years.: “According to the New York Times, the INC leader told an Iranian intelligence official six weeks ago in Baghdad that he had been informed by a ‘drunk’ American official that the US had broken the Iranian code and was reading the internal communications of Tehran’s ministry of intelligence and security.

The US discovered the breach when the Iranian agent – the ministry’s station chief in Baghdad, according to the New York Times – sent a message back to Tehran using the compromised code, apparently not believing the tip-off. According to the report, Tehran then tested the code by sending a bogus message mentioning a cache of weapons inside Iraq, presumably thinking that US forces would be immediately sent to the site. But no such action was taken, possibly because US intelligence suspected it was a trap.” (Guardian.UK)

Not only did Chalabi hoodwink the neo-cons, Patrick Nielson Hayden reminds us, but he made a fool of The Paper of Record.

But, as Josh Marshall points out, it is not just a question of a leak but where the CIA concludes it had to come from:

“If it’s possible to imagine anything more damaging to DOD [than the Iran/Chalabi revelations], and perhaps also to White House staff, it is the CIA’s conclusion that some information Chalabi turned over to Iran was available to only “a handful” of senior U.S. officials. That would be Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Cheney, and Cheney’s consigleiri, Scooter Libby, our sources helpfully explain.

— perhaps not entirely by coincidence, the Vice President’s office is already on extra orders of TUMS, as it awaits the promised Grand Jury indictments of those responsible for leaking the name of a secret CIA officer to newspaper columnist Bob Novak, allegedly to “punish” the agent’s husband, Amb. Joe Wilson, for revealing that President Bush used faulty intelligence about Iraq and Niger in the State of the Union Address two years ago. From our own days as a police and court reporter, we can tell you that Grand Juries often grind exceeding slow, but that if they report, not much gets left out.”

Bush, of course, is trying to distance himself from Chalabi. Atrios catches him in the lie.

And now comes the delightful news that Bush has engaged a private attorney in connection with the probe into the ‘outing’ of Valerie Plame. (Reuters)

So it’s okay to call ’em french fries again…

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‘I Was Never Angry with the French,’ Says Bush. ‘President Bush said he was never angry with France over its refusal to back the U.S.-led war in Iraq, as both countries sought to play down past tensions ahead of the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings.

“I was never angry with the French. France is a long-term ally,” Bush told the weekly Paris Match in an interview due to be published on Thursday.’ (Reuters). Via Daily Kos, with whom I wonder whether this should be categorized as a flip-flop or a lie?

the window, at the moment of flame

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and all this while I have been playing with toys

a toy superhighway a toy automobile a house of blocks



and all this while far off in other lands

thousands and thousands, millions and millions



you know — you see the pictures

women carrying bony infants



men sobbing over graves

buildings sculpted by explosion —



earth wasted bare and rotten

and all this while I have been shopping, I have



been let us say free

and do they hate me for it



do they hate me



                        alicia ostriker

"Poem"

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I lived in the first century of world wars.

Most mornings I would be more or less insane.

The news would pour out of various devices

The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,

Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.

I would call my friends on other devices;

They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.

Slowly I would get to pen and paper,

Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.

In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,

Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,

considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.

As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,

We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,

To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile

Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,

Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means

To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,

To let go the means, to wake.



I lived in the first century of these wars.



                        Muriel Rukeyser

Suicide Watch

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Unusually high number of suicides and psychological evacuations among US troops in Iraq invasion:

“Twenty-five soldiers have taken their lives during the past year in the Iraq war. In addition, there have been seven suicides among newly State-sided troops, including two soldiers who killed themselves while patients at Walter Reed Army Hospital, the Toronto Star recently reported.

The suicide rate for army troops in Iraq has been 17.3 per 100,000 soldiers, compared to the overall Army rate of 11.9 per 100,000 between 1995 and 2002. According to StrategyPage.com, this rate is higher than the rate for all branches of the military during the Vietnam War, which was 15.6, and higher than during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, which had a 3.6 rate for all branches.” — Bill Berkowitz, (Guerrilla News Network)

Compared to prior wars, Iraq is being manned by a higher proportion of older married GIs and reservists. There has been reduced pre-deployment mental health screening and, in some cases, the inappropriate mobilization of soldiers with preexisting mental health problems. Rumsfeld’s recent decision to extend the tours of units in Iraq, the general sense among the troops that the administration is ‘shorting’ them on resources and support, the feeling of having been lied to about the rationale for the action, the prospect of urban guerrilla warfare as well as being mired down and on the defensive are likely to exacerbate the problem. One can only wonder at the impact of the Abu Ghraib scandal in which any number of their colleagues so thoroughly dishonored themselves and the military edifice in general.

The military response is to use combat stress control teams and front-line recuperation centers to shore up GIs suffering psychological symptoms. It is clear to me as a mental health practitioner how inadequate this approach is on several grounds. First, it relies on the dubious assumption that the suicides are related to ‘combat stress’ (PTSD) syndromes and the discredited notion that early intervention can abort the progression of the syndrome. Furthermore, soldiers who come forward to seek services often suffer the consequences; this will discourage adequate evaluation and stabilization. For this reason, the actual incidence of psychiatric distress among the troops is surely being underestimated.

Given recent revelations of the shameful neglect of the medical needs of the wounded GIs returning stateside, it is no surprise that the psychological casualties are treated no less shabbily. Rumsfeld and his cronies are dramatically gutting the Veterans’ Administration’s ability to meet the treatment needs of military veterans. And given the likely failure of the Iraqi adventure, we can expect a host of reintegration problems among returning veterans on even a greater scale than the infamous abandonment of the Vietnam veterans once they returned from their tours of duty.

Hunt enthusiasts call the faithful

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“A group of hunting enthusiasts is setting up its own ‘church’ in an attempt to stop the Government from banning their favourite field sport.

The founders of the Free Church of Country Sports, whose supporters include a barrister, a publisher and several businessmen, claim that fox hunting is part of their religion and that legislation to ban it would be an infringement of their rights as a religious minority.” (Telegraph.UK via Neil Gaiman)

Listening Matters

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The “listening to” box at the top of the left sidebar is now working in recent versions of browsers (Mozilla, Firefox, and IE6) operating under Windows, but I have no idea what you’re seeing in Linux etc. and I understand the effects are variable in MacOS. A friend sent me screen shots of this page rendered in Camino, Safari, Mozilla and IE for Mac, which are all quite different [thanks, abby.].

Essentially, what is going on here is that a small plug-in to iTunes under Windows creates an XML file with a listing of the last ten tunes iTunes has played; this is updated and FTP’ed to my server every time the song changes. An XSLT stylesheet attached to the XML file renders it in HTML, which gets displayed in a small frame on this page. By tweaking the stylesheet, I have gotten Windows browsers to metabolize and display the file properly, but in one or another Mac browser you could be seeing any of the following:

  • a good-looking formatted list of artist, song title and album
  • an unformatted text dump of the data, plus the other data the plug-in is writing on each song that I opted not to display, such as year, timing, bitrate etc.
  • a text dump of the XML file, tags included
  • a null display

Have I forgotten any? Does anyone have a clue how to make this work across all platforms and browsers? (keeping in mind that, on my web host, I cannot use any tools like PHP to extract the data from the XML file…. As an aside, when I have the time, I want to figure out how to massage the XSLT transform to prevent the display of the empty parentheses ‘()’ in entries that do not have an album name.

I’m justifying this rigamarole because I am enjoying the challenge of this non-programmer’s little foray into XML, but maybe this whole endeavor is frivolous and you need to learn about my musical tastes about as much as you need a hole in the head. But, if this display is not working in your browser and you are for some reason really desperate to see what I am listening to, clicking on the word “listening” ‘s hyperlink takes you to the same information derived in an entirely different manner and displayed in my page on Autoscrobbler, a neat free open-source system that rices and dices my listening data in useful ways and has the added benefit of compiling listening data across all its users (from iTunes, Winamp, and sundry other music clients). (If you happen to have an Autoscrobbler page set up for yourself, drop me a note pointing to it if you’d care to, I would love to see what you are listening to. I feel a little hesitant about publicizing this, however, because the system seems overloaded and slow to crunch my data. In fact, they have temporarily closed to new sign-ups while they figure out how to cope with the volume they are experiencing.)

This is one of that genre of application that I am sure you have encountered through the years which, among other things, let you easily — without having to do any ratings — find out what else others who share some of your tastes are listening to, the idea being of course that you might discover on that basis other artists who would appeal to you but with whom you were not acquainted. However, I have to admit that, so far, this has not resulted in any earthshattering surprises for me, and I prefer to discover new artists serendipitously than deliberately, to jump grooves rather than remain in the same one…

‘Spirit of America’ Buzz

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Whenever Jeff Jarvis gets to the top of blogdex again, I know I am going to have something to write about. Doesn’t anyone stop to see through this guy before starting to murmur appreciatively? Recently, the buzz has been about his impassioned plea in support of Spirit of America, a program which organizes donations of supplies from the American people to the Iraqis ‘to help them rebuild.’ (Ominously, though, the donations are not, it seems, really to the Iraqis. See below.) Jarvis feels that, whatever one’s position on the war, this serves both our human obligation and enlightened self-interest. When he mentioned self-interest, for a moment there I expected he would confide in all candor that he hoped our good will would somehow buy us some leniency in the face of the Islamic fundamentalist rage likely heading for us innocent Americans for our government’s imperialist hauteur in the Middle East. Instead he’s just trotting out those tired old chestnuts about

“creating a foothold for democracy, freedom, modernity, civilization, and just friendship in the Middle East”

(Tired chestnuts is what you might expect given the hokey name of this organization…). As it turns out, paying protection seems closer to what this is all about; more on that later.

I’m stronger on the moral obligation side of this than the self-interest side, I must admit. Although I find it extremely naive to hope that individual efforts like this can compensate for the impact of the barbarian rape and pillaging of Iraq done in our names by our unelected government, I believe in asserting the moral distinction that it wasn’t me doing it. On second thought, maybe that is self-interest, since it is so much more to comfort me in my moral superiority than to do anything real…

Moreover, Jarvis seems to be caught up in a puzzling agenda of making this a special cause for webloggers, despite the fact that all the mission statements from SoA principals he quotes have a grander vision of signing up “a million Americans”. Jarvis’ reach exceeds his grasp — he does not seem to recall that only around 4% of those Americans who are even online read weblogs. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Jarvis hopes that his contribution to rebuilding Iraq will be — hold your breath — to bring weblogging to the Iraqi masses with “blogging tools translated into Arabic and free blog hosting, for example.” I’ll break it to you gently, Jeff — most of us recognize that it is far more urgent to rebuild the material infrastructure destroyed by the serial tyrannies of the Saddam Hussein regime and the US invasion than to implement any pie-in-the-sky notion of getting thousands of Iraqi Jarvis-clones mouthing tired clichés about democracy mostly for the consumption of the Western Internet audiences. But trust a TV Guide executive all puffed up about his influence on the “blogosphere” to think outside the box. Get a life. Here comes a controversial assertion — weblogging is more an effect than a cause of participatory democracy during nation-building, and it is a rather late effect at that. It is just on the cusp of having an impact on the political process in ‘mature’ democracies such as the US and Western Europe. (Oh, I forgot for a moment; Iraq will be springing full-blown into that mature stage of democracy under US tutelage, right after the June 30th reversion of ‘sovereignty’, right?)

Next, let us consider for a moment that philanthropic efforts end up all across the map in terms of efficiency, administrative costs and overhead in delivering aid, vulnerability to misappropriation or diversion of funds or goods along the way, etc. For any given charitable contribution, how many cents on your contributed dollar actually end up doing direct good at the target end can vary wildly. Picking your charities responsibly, much less starting and administering an effective and efficient relief organization, is far from a no-brainer, no matter what instant pundits and erudite commentators we webloggers of the world fancy ourselves to have become. So, until proven otherwise, SoA sounds much more like a feel-good than a do-good organization.

And that was before I got a look at the SoA website and figured out what is really going on. It appears that most of the goods your donations to SoA would be buying are to be distributed by the US military

  • the Marines and SeaBees are giving tools to Iraqi tradesmen they train
  • the Marines are giving school supplies, balls and frisbees to Iraqi children “to improve relations with Iraqis and reduce conflict”
  • Air Force chaplains are seeking supplies for orphanages and schools

Take a look at this quote from their website, for instance:

“Americans in uniform delivering supplies to schools and orphanages demonstrates that Americans care about helping Iraqis move toward a brighter future. Let’s give our servicemen the supplies that are most needed for them to help Iraqi children…”

In other words, it appears that your donations would not go so much to rebuild Iraq as to attempt to placate the restless heathen masses with small bribes. It sounds abit like the 21st century equivalent of giving firewater to the Injuns…or blood money. Cynical me, but I wonder if the goodwill and humanitarian urges of the Children’s Crusade of webloggers Jarvis hopes to recruit aren’t being blatantly co-opted. Is it a stretch to suggest that the Bush administration is trying to privatize the reparations it ought to be paying for its war crimes?

And please don’t tell me that this assistance has to be distributed by the US military because NGO’s from the UN on downward are too skittish to risk functioning in Iraq yet. That only proves my point about the ill-advised haste in luminaries like Jarvis backing a hare-brained scheme like this when the experts we ought to trust know that development aid is premature. The US has dismantled a nation with no compensatory planning, is reaping the consequences of what it has sown, and this effort is nothing but a blatant propaganda attempt to unmire us from a morass of our own making. Youa re being suckered, Jarvis.

A humble suggestion — the moral imperative is all on the side of dissociating oneself from this essentially immoral effort, not acquitting one’s obligation by enthusiastically buying in. It seems to me that it would be more useful, if one is interested in avoiding wasted effort in rebuilding Iraq, to do something much more difficult — get the stars out of your eyes and catalogue and compare the existing humanitarian NGO’s doing this sort of work, run by professionals who have charity- and nation-building experience. Can anyone point me to any resources they have come across along those lines?

Jarvis points to (but does not deign to respond to) a dissent by Dave Winer here. Even though I am quite skeptical about this whole SoA venture and Jarvis’ boosterism, neither do I find Winer’s position well thought out. In saying,

“I think the best thing the US can do for the world is get our own house in order and stop trying to fix the world, something we’re exceedingly bad at,”

he shows he has no ability to maintain the crucial distinction between the American people and the American government under Bu**sh**. If Jarvis’ position is naive feel-good boosterism, Winer’s throws out the baby with the bathwater.

The way the music died

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“In ‘The Way the Music Died,’ Frontline follows the trajectory of the recording industry from its post-Woodstock heyday in the 1970s and 1980s to what one observer describes as a ‘hysteria’ of mass layoffs and bankruptcy in 2004. The documentary tells its story through the aspirations and experiences of four artists: veteran musician David Crosby, who has seen it all in a career spanning 35 years; songwriter/producer Mark Hudson, a former member of the Hudson Brothers band; Hudson’s daughter, Sarah, who is about to release her first single and album; and a new rock band, Velvet Revolver, composed of former members of the rock groups Guns N’ Roses and Stone Temple Pilots, whose first album will be released in June.

But how will these artists fare at a time when the record industry is clearly hurting?”

The Education of Alexandra Polier

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“Falsely accused of having an affair with John Kerry, the “intern” sifts through the mud and the people who threw it. ” Polier, both a political junkie and a journalist herself, writes an account combining her very personal suffering as a victim of vicious political rumormongering, her detailed public denial, and an investigation of the sources of the rumor.

“It was becoming clearer: No single person had to have engineered this. First came a rumor about Kerry, then a small-time blogger wrote about it, and his posting was read by journalists. They started looking into it, a detail that was picked up by Drudge—who, post-Monica, is taken seriously by other sites like Wonkette, which no political reporter can ignore. I was getting a better education in 21st-century reporting than I had gotten at Columbia J-school.”

In this case, she (and I) was surprised to find that the baseless rumors that she had slept with Kerry (she was actually dating his campaign finance manager for awhile) apparently arose not from the Bush team as she had expected but were at least partly attributable to the Wesley Clark campaign organization, such as it was. Of course, the Right made hay with the rumors, but neo-con zealot and former Bush speechwriter David Frum actually apologized publicly when he learned they were not true. Bottom-feeder Matt Drudge, to whose rumors the media are now indentured servants, too nervous not to listen for fear they will miss another scoop like Lewinsky, also gets quoted by Polier as regretful for his role… a little regretful at least. A good friend of Polier’s in Washington, who works inside the Republican machine, was instrumental in embellishing on Polier’s acquaintance with Kerry to further the Republican cause as well. I hope Polier has learned to choose her friends more wisely; loyalty is a cheap commodity in the political world. (New York Magazine via Richard; thanks!)