Der Spiegel examines the online obituaries of numerous suicide bombers now available at Islamist “martyr sites.”

A reprise of my Hallowe’en post of past years:

It is that time of year again. What has become a time of disinhibited hijinx and mayhem, and a growing marketing bonanza for the kitsch-manufacturers and -importers, has primeval origins as the Celtic New Year’s Eve, Samhain (pronounced “sow-en”). The harvest is over, summer ends and winter begins, the Old God dies and returns to the Land of the Dead to await his rebirth at Yule, and the land is cast into darkness. The veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead becomes frayed and thin, and dispossessed dead mingle with the living, perhaps seeking a body to possess for the next year as their only chance to remain connected with the living, who hope to scare them away with ghoulish costumes and behavior, escape their menace by masquerading as one of them, or placate them with offerings of food, in hopes that they will go away before the new year comes. For those prepared, a journey to the other side could be made at this time. It is fortunate that Hallowe’en falls on a Monday this year, as there is evidence that the pagan festival was celebrated for three days.

With Christianity, perhaps because with calendar reform it was no longer the last day of the year, All Hallows’ Eve became decathected, a day for innocent masquerading and fun, taking its name Hallowe’en as a contraction and corruption of All Hallows’ Eve. All Saints’ Day may have originated in its modern form with the 8th century Pope Gregory III. Hallowe’en customs reputedly came to the New World with the Irish immigrants of the 1840’s. The prominence of trick-or-treating has a slightly different origin, however.

The custom of trick-or-treating is thought to have originated not with the Irish Celts, but with a ninth-century European custom called souling. On November 2, All Souls Day, early Christians would walk from village to village begging for “soul cakes,” made out of square pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes the beggars would receive, the more prayers they would promise to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors. At the time, it was believed that the dead remained in limbo for a time after death, and that prayer, even by strangers, could expedite a soul’s passage to heaven.

Jack-o’-lanterns were reportedly originally turnips; the Irish began using pumpkins after they immigrated to North AMerica, given how plentiful they were here.

The Jack-o-lantern custom probably comes from Irish folklore. As the tale is told, a man named Jack, who was notorious as a drunkard and trickster, tricked Satan into climbing a tree. Jack then carved an image of a cross in the tree’s trunk, trapping the devil up the tree. Jack made a deal with the devil that, if he would never tempt him again, he would promise to let him down the tree.

According to the folk tale, after Jack died, he was denied entrance to Heaven because of his evil ways, but he was also denied access to Hell because he had tricked the devil. Instead, the devil gave him a single ember to light his way through the frigid darkness. The ember was placed inside a hollowed-out turnip to keep it glowing longer.

Folk traditions that were in the past associated wtih All Hallows’ Eve took much of their power, as with the New Year’s customs about which I write here every Dec. 31st, from the magic of boundary states, transition and liminality.

The idea behind ducking, dooking or bobbing for apples seems to have been that snatching a bite from the apple enables the person to grasp good fortune. Samhain is a time for getting rid of weakness, as pagans once slaughtered weak animals which were unlikely to survive the winter. A common ritual calls for writing down weaknesses on a piece of paper or parchment, and tossing it into the fire. There used to be a custom of placing a stone in the hot ashes of the bonfire. If in the morning a person found that the stone had been removed or had cracked, it was a sign of bad fortune. Nuts have been used for divination: whether they burned quietly or exploded indicated good or bad luck. Peeling an apple and throwing the peel over one’s shoulder was supposed to reveal the initial of one’s future spouse. One way of looking for omens of death was for peope to visit churchyards

The Witches’ Sabbath aspect of Hallowe’en seems to result from Germanic influence, and fusion with the notion of Walpurgisnacht. (Familiar with the magnificent musical evocation of this, Mussorgsky’s Night on Bare Mountain?) Although probably not yet in a position to shape mainstream American Hallowe’en traditions, Mexican Dia de los Muertos observances have started to contribute some delightful and whimsical iconography to our encounter with the eerie and unearthly as well.

What was Hallowe’en like forty or fifty years ago in the U.S. when, bastardized as it has become with respect to its pagan origins, it retained a much more traditional flair? For my purposes, suffice it to say that it was before the era of the pay-per-view ‘spooky-world’ type haunted attractions and its Martha Stewart yuppification with, as this irreverent Salon article from several years ago [via walker] puts it, monogrammed jack-o’-lanterns and the like. Related, a 1984 essay by Richard Seltzer, frequently referenced in other sources, entitled “Why Bother to Save Hallowe’en?”, argues as I do that reverence for Hallowe’en is good for the soul.

That would be anathema to certain segments of society, however. Hallowe’en certainly inspires a backlash by fundamentalists who consider it a blasphemous abomination. ‘Amateur scholar’ Isaac Bonewits details academically the Hallowe’en errors and lies he feels contribute to its being reviled. Some of the panic over Hallowe’en is akin to the hysteria, fortunately now debunked, over the supposed epidemic of ‘ritual Satanic abuse’ that swept the Western world in the ’90’s.

The horror film has become inextricably linked to Hallowe’en tradition, although the holiday itself did not figure in the movies until John Carpenter took the slasher genre singlehandedly by storm. Googling “scariest films”, you will, grimly, reap a mother lode of opinions about how to pierce the veil to journey to the netherworld and reconnect with that magical, eerie creepiness in the dark (if not the over-the-top blood and gore that has largely replaced the subtlety of earlier horror films).

In any case: trick or treat!

The real one, near Darmstadt, Germany, said to be the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, including photos. And here you can listen (Real Player) to the famous 1952 ‘Frankenstein prank’ in which something was waiting for an Armed Forces reporter who visited the crypt under the castle on Halloween night. [via boing boing]

Renaissance paintings photoshopp’d to add monsters (Worth1000.com via boing boing)

Der Spiegel examines the online obituaries of numerous suicide bombers now available at Islamist “martyr sites.”

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The Guardian calls it “a new low” in Bush’s presidency as he “reluctantly” accepts Miers’ withdrawal from consideration for the Supreme Court in the face of overwhelming pressure from within the Republican Party. And it is the week of the 2000th US military casualty in Iraq… and of Hurricane Fitzgerald! But let us put a stop right here to this being characterized as a surprise or Washington being stunned. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to see this coming, and I blinked to the rumor that Miers’ nomination would tank awhile ago.

The dysadministration presented the Miers withdrawal as a way of avoiding a looming constitutional crisis over Senatorial demands for papers on Mier’s work as White House counsel that the president considers privileged — documents senior members of the Senate Judiciary Committee said no one had requested. A transparent lie if we have ever seen one from this cabal.

Bush will likely hurry to name a new candidate to distract attention as rapidly as possible from expected Treasongate indictments, and of course he already has a thoroughly vetted shortlist left over from the Roberts and Miers deliberations. If Bush was scraping the bottom of the barrel with Miers, what lies ahead? Although many progressives are jubilant, that old saw about being careful what you wish for may apply, and Bush’s troubles with the Right are likely to be far easier to fix than our contempt for him from the Left. As someone said, the next nominee may make “Robert Bork look like Thurgood Marshall,” especially if Bush bows to the pressure to pander this time to the Reactionary Right that did the Miers bid in. Some are suggesting that the Miers nomination was a Machiavellian plot engineered by Rove to fail so that he could push through someone further to the Right with less of a fight. It has also been speculated that, with Rove distracted by his own difficulties, the Miers nomination is what you get when Bush runs the show himself, a caricature of pure cronyism divorced from qualifications.

As far as the reactionary bona fides of the next nominee go, Bush may be a little damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. Tim Grieve, considering to whom the president might turn next, opbserves that he can’t nominate Gonzales, who has the same privilege problem that Miers had from his legal work for the White House. He cannot turn to a middle-of-the-roader who would infuriate the Right wingnuts further. Has Bush exhausted his stock of women willing to fall on their swords for the man they love? Does he have the political capital to push through someone contentious? The dysadministration strategy in its last few nominations has been to both select candidates on the basis of opacity about their personal stances on partisan issues and to train them intensively to stonewall in the face of confirmation scrutiny. This obviously backfired with Miers, who was such a cipher that those concerned about her ideology could imagine the worst and those concerned about her qualifications would surely come up wanting. Legal analysts suggest Bush will abandon the search for someone who is not already a judge, and that he is looking for lightning to strike twice with another John Roberts clone, equally prepared to stonewall in front of the Judiciary Committee.

Any Bush signals to the Right that he has finally found the cojones to advance an ideologue and risk the fight he has not had the stomach for recently will give the Democrats the ammunition to raise principled objections… if they have the stomach for the fight. If the Democrats are emboldened enough by the freefall in Presidential fortune, perhaps the “nuclear option” lies ahead after all! One crafty way Bush might just squeak past this would be to appoint a current or former Senator, who might mobilize whatever vestiges of bipartisanship and civility remain in the Senate toward a colleague.(How about Orrin Hatch? At least it would get him out of the Senate…)

In any case, the Left can breathe a momentary sigh of relief that the Right scuttled Miers’ chances. It is now likely that Sandra Day O’Connor will still be on the bench when the Supreme Court considers three abortion-related cases on Nov. 30th.

Related: the New York Times summarizes other webloggers’ reactions to Miers’ withdrawal here.

The Village Voice turns fifty, and here is a gallery of memorable front pages from its lifespan. I started reading the Voice almost forty years ago, so this is the gallery of my coming of age.

Addendum: [thanks, Charles]

Are you interested in the nature and meaning of psychosis? This is an abstract of a study which compared the frequency, distress and intrusiveness of anomalous perceptual experiences in 336 subjects from the general population and 20 psychotic inpatients. 11% of the population sample scored above the mean of the psychotic patients’ sample. A factor analysis of the population data suggested three clusters — one involving “clinically psychotic-like” phenomena; one attributable to temporal lobe epilepsy and other seizure-like processes; and a third “chemosensation” cluster largely involving olfactory and gustatory anomalous experiences. This suggested to the authors ‘that there are multiple contributory factors underlying anomalous perceptual experience and the “psychosis continuum.” ‘

I beg to differ. They are really not demonstrating any “psychosis continuum,” since they use ‘psychosis’ as a wastebasket term synonymous with anomalous perceptual experience. All they are demonstrating is how virtually meaningless it is to talk about psychosis in that way, and that is why their headline finding — that a proportion of the general population score higher on their measure than those hospitalized for psychosis — is less surprising than it sounds. If you lump together a heterogeneous grouping of patients with ‘psychosis’, only some of them will be off the charts in terms of anomalous perceptual experiences, because having anomalous perceptual experiences is only one way of being psychotic. Yes, some psychotics have hallucinations, in which they cannot assess the reality or meaning of various perceptual experiences they are having. But others’ psychoses consist primarily of a disturbance in the content of their thought, i.e. so-called delusional thinking. Finally, some people are considered psychotic because of a disturbance in the form, not the content, of their thought processes, with profoundly disorganized, fractured, incoherent and illogical reasoning.

Patients with diverse disturbances of their mental processes and brain function may be given the same psychotic diagnosis despite the fact that they are probably undergoing very distinct disease processes, psychological or neurophysiological alterations. For example, considering the quintessential psychotic disorder, schizophrenia, different thinkers have defined it differently based on different clusters of core symptoms (among them Kurt Schneider, responsible for the so-called “Schneiderian signs” alluded to in this article). They are all talking about schizophrenia but probably pointing at different schizophrenics.

Moreover, we have come to realize that none of these supposedly defining core symptom clusters are pathognomonic of schizophrenia per se and they can occur in many other psychotic illnesses — mania, psychotic depression, organic psychotic disorders including those arising in epilepsy, toxic and metabolic psychoses, etc. — as well.

Now we reach the next juncture, in which it is suggested that the same anomalous experiences occur in a population without psychiatric diagnosis as well. First of all, that may not be strictly true. Most epidemiological studies have found a significant incidence of psychiatric illness, undiagnosed, in a randomly selected population at large. It is a truism that only the mental health profession thinks that it treats most of the mental illness in the population.

If the authors are suggesting that what really distinguishes a psychiatric patient from a member of the general population undergoing anomalous perceptual experience is how much distress the experience causes and what sort of sense the person can make of their experience, they are coming closer to my notion of what the core deficits are in psychotic experience. As I see it, these embody fundamental disturbances in the sense of the self, its boundaries, and its relationship to the world beyond those boundaries. Such disturbances render anomalous experiences utterly incomprehensible and terrifying, literally unendurable. Even perceptual experiences which others of us might consider not the least bit anomalous but rather ordinary cannot be made sense of if you do not know if they are coming from within you or outside yourself, whether they are providing information about your internal or the external environment, whether they are shared by others or uniquely experienced by yourself, etc. etc.

In a sense, this study is illustrative of all that is wrong with modern psychiatry. Yes, psychiatry is supposed to inhabit the province of subjective experience. But a descriptive focus on symptoms alone defines nothing when the self is written out of the equation.

Explore, if you will, the world of E-Prime. Arising from the thinking of Alfred Korzybski and the International Society for General Semantics which he founded, E-Prime consists of the subset of the English language left after expunging it of the use of the verb ‘to be’ in its two major functions of connoting identity (“I am a weblogger”) and predication (“I am nice”). Proponents feel that these uses of ‘to be’ cause major confusion of thought and consequent social problems. To start with, consider how the use of the same verb for identity and predication readily obscures the distinction between opinion and fact. Moreover, it readily lends itself to stereotypy and inflexibility.

This paper claims that using “E-Prime in Negotiation and Therapy” can challenge dogmatic viewpoints, clarify confusion, and defuse conflict in daily life. I don’t conduct myself as a strong proponent of E-Prime in my life; awkward circumlocutory constructions arise whenever I try to write in that way. But the difficulty in using it perhaps speaks to how early in our lives the associated thought patterns were ingrained. Language doesn’t determine what we can and can’t think, but it does readily shape what can be thought with ease as opposed to with difficulty, IMHO. Does the challenge involved in thinking ‘outside this box’ perhaps indicate the importance of doing so? The blinks above have plenty of further links if you want to explore your identifications and predications more thoroughly.

In the great tradition of US covert combat violating international boundaries and trampling the rights of neutral parties, US forces in Iraq are increasingly engaging Syrian border forces. We have “pursued insugents” into Syrian territory; there have been Syrian casualties. Although this will never be admitted, I am sure this is by design and not an inadvertent blunder by MBM (Man’s Best Military ®). It is likely US special forces are involved in covert operations in Syrian territory.

It is said that the US dysadministration will not commit itself to toppling Bashir Assad for fear of who might replace him. That is certainly more likely to be a surmise — or wishful thinking? — by the press than a clear indication of dysadministration thinking, though, which doesn’t usually involve such foresight or acumen and which has ongoingly demonstrated that it has learned nothing from the debacle in Iraq. Why, then, rattle sabres with an outraged insistence on action in the face of the Hariri assassination report and the overblown and disingenuous focus on Syria as a supposed source of, and a safe haven for, foreign jihadist insurgents? This is clearly a pretext for US military adventurism and an excuse for utter US failure (which is mostly said by critics to be a failure of our counterinsurgency measures, but the real failure was, of course, creating and perpetuating the conditions for insurrection and civil war by our invasion and occupation!). The real “jihadist extremists” spreading their ignorant and dangerous fanatical faith are the neocons running US foreign policy.

This brings up to date a story that forms one of the centerpieces of the Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer’s terrifying exposé of extremist Mormon fundamentalism. If you think you know the depths of the America you live in, reading Krakauer’s book may change your mind.

BTW, I heard that Bill O’Reilly said something on his radio show along the lines of, “The bombings will continue as long as the American presence does.” Although he was saying it to attempt to inure the public to the continuing death toll until we “complete our mission” (as Dubya always puts it) it is actually, precisely, an argument for the opposite, of course. And it also eerily reminiscent of that old saw about how “the beatings will continue until morale improves”…

Rocket guidance engineer and sometime science-fiction writer Will McCarthy has figured out the science of how the dead might walk again, and he is not talking about Wade Davis’ type of zombies, who aren’t really dead. [via the null device]

(New Scientist)

And: Bird flu has taken another human life. A Thai man is the 67th victim as the H5N1 strain of the influenza virus crawls from Asia to Europe and toward Africa. More ominous yet, an Indonesian cluster of infection in the same family suggest the possibility that the feared mutation allowing human-to-human transmission, the precondition for the pandemic, has occurred. This Reuters piece is a good summary of the current epidemiological status of the viral threat.

Update: He’s still here. (Reuters)

according to the Boston Globe. How many have you seen? How do you sleep at night?

Interesting controversy rages around plans for the Dalai Lama to address the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting about the research in which he is collaborating on the cognitive effects of meditation practice. Over five hundred researchers have signed a petition urging the lecture be canceled, fearing the loss of credibility to the field because “it will highlight a subject with largely unsubstantiated claims and compromised scientific rigor and objectivity.” Supporters of the Dalai Lama say that many of the petitioners are of Chinese descent and motivated politically. As a college undergraduate thirty years ago, I was a research assistant to then-graduate student Richard Davidson in his fledgling research into the psychological effects of meditation. Davidson is now the Dalai Lama’s major neuroscientist collaborator and the object of the petitioners’ discontent, partly because he is a meditator himself or, as one of the drafters of the petition puts it, a “declared believer playing a dual role as advocate and researcher,” a characterization which Davidson, quite rightly in my estimation, considers overblown.

Of Jakob Nielsen’s Top Ten Weblog Design Mistakes, I estimate that I commit at least 5.5. Another, his no. 8, “forgetting that you are writing for your future boss,” I also commit but does not concern me in the least.

Larry Johnson gossips that 22 inndictments may be being looked at. (No Quarter)

Sources close to the investigation say a senior Cheney aide is cooperating with the prosecutor, says The Raw Story.

“…Sparked by today’s Washington Post story that suggests Vice President Cheney’s office is involved in the Plame-CIA spy link investigation, government officials and advisers passed around rumors that the vice president might step aside and that President Bush would elevate Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice,” as reported in US News & World Report.

Is Colin Powell implicating Cheney? (The Agonist)

Why stop there? Unsurprisingly, Bush knew: “An angry President Bush rebuked chief political guru Karl Rove two years ago for his role in the Valerie Plame affair, sources told the (New York Daily News).”

But Ed Fitzgerald predicts: “To sum it up: There will be indictments, some people who have done wrong things will be prosecuted, other people who did wrong things will skate, the administration will not be taken down, or neutered. Bush and Cheney will still be in power, somewhat weakened, perhaps, and missing the talents of some of their people, but still running the country.” [thanks to richard for the image from 2politicaljunkies.com]

Mapping Where You Think You Live: “A website called CommonCensus.org is hoping to shed some light on how Americans perceive their surroundings.” (Wired News)

Carve a Fancy Pumpkin With a Dremel (eHow)

Suspected Cluster of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) cases. This sporadic prion disease is similar to vCJD, variant CJD, which is contracted by eating beef infected with the agent of ‘mad cow disease’ (BSE; bovine spongiform encephalopathy), but the etiology is unknown. It is not clear if this is really a ‘cluster’; while the diagnosis can only be definitively established via autopsy, only five of the nine suspect cases were autopsied because of a reluctance to handle affected brain tissue, and the final verdict is not in from tests of the tissue of those who did have the autopsies. It is not clear to me how geographically close the cases were and it would certainly be interesting to see what epidemiological features they shared, if any. Could it be a statistical anomaly?

…says “former liberal turned conservative” “columnist” (I think I’ll put that one in quotation marks) Cinnamon Stillwell, writing about a suicide bombing by a 21 year-old engineering student outside the packed football stadium of the University of Oklahoma on October 1. The powerful explosion killed only the bomber himself, and no one else was injured, although the power of the blast was considerable, according to onlookers.

Thanks to Seth for pointing me to this story; he shares Stillwell’s sense that officials’ rapid dismissals of the act as that of a ‘lone gunman’ with a history of mental instability smelled funny. But Stillwell draws heavily — almost exclusively — on wingnut sites who were the sole sources of conspiratorial conclusions drawn from the claims: that the bomber had a roommate of (gasp!) Pakistani descent; that he may have visited the campus Islamic Society center; that the explosive used in the bombing was the same substance so-called “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and the London Underground bombers used; and that the bomber’s apartment reportedly contained “a significant amount” of Jihadist literature (a claim which investigators have debunked… probably part of the coverup in progress, if you ask me).

Now we turn from the sublime to the ridiculous. The fact that he was a Westerner “would have come in handy for avoiding official scrutiny” — thus he must have been a terrorist — and the fact that he did not live at his fraternity house and that members of his frat did not know him as an Islamic convert somehow further suggest covert activity on his part. Similarly, the fact that these events did not attract serious mainstream press coverage suggests that there is a coverup going on. (BTW, search for ‘Joel Henry Hinrichs’ on Google News if you doubt that the issue is attracting any press coverage.) Believe it or not, he had a beard “too similar to those worn by newly observant Muslim men to be a mere coincidence”! And the fact that this occurred in the same state as the 1995 bombing of the Murragh Federal Building, by this perverse logic, suggests that both were Islamic plots.

This shrill, hysterical absurdity reminds me of nothing so much as the incident sometime last year (about which I wrote in FmH, although I cannot find the reference just now) by an alarmist and somewhat reactionary “writer” who believed she saw a group of Islamic men on her airline flight conspiring together but nobody would do anything about it! Then, as now, that was probably because there was nothing more to such fears than proof that people can see what they want to see. One of the most reprehensible aspects of reactions to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was the rush to assume that the Muslims were responsible. Incredibly, some are still holding on to that bigoted and ignorant sentiment. Stillwell’s concluding plaint is that “… if a terrorist attack in America’s heartland doesn’t jolt the country out of this fantasyland, what will?” Unfortunately, the only ‘fantasyland’ I see around here is the one she and others of similar ilk call their homeland.

Here you will find the more levelheaded Wikipedia entry on the incident.

…says “former liberal turned conservative” “columnist” (I think I’ll put that one in quotation marks) Cinnamon Stillwell, writing about a suicide bombing by a 21 year-old engineering student outside the packed football stadium of the University of Oklahoma on October 1. The powerful explosion killed only the bomber himself, and no one else was injured, although the power of the blast was considerable, according to onlookers.

Thanks to Seth for pointing me to this story; he shares Stillwell’s sense that officials’ rapid dismissals of the act as that of a ‘lone gunman’ with a history of mental instability smelled funny. But Stillwell draws heavily — almost exclusively — on wingnut sites who were the sole sources of conspiratorial conclusions drawn from the claims: that the bomber had a roommate of (gasp!) Pakistani descent; that he may have visited the campus Islamic Society center; that the explosive used in the bombing was the same substance so-called “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and the London Underground bombers used; and that the bomber’s apartment reportedly contained “a significant amount” of Jihadist literature (a claim which investigators have debunked… probably part of the coverup in progress, if you ask me).

Now we turn from the sublime to the ridiculous. The fact that he was a Westerner “would have come in handy for avoiding official scrutiny” — thus he must have been a terrorist — and the fact that he did not live at his fraternity house and that members of his frat did not know him as an Islamic convert somehow further suggest covert activity on his part. Similarly, the fact that these events did not attract serious mainstream press coverage suggests that there is a coverup going on. (BTW, search for ‘Joel Henry Hinrichs’ on Google News if you doubt that the issue is attracting any press coverage.) Believe it or not, he had a beard “too similar to those worn by newly observant Muslim men to be a mere coincidence”! And the fact that this occurred in the same state as the 1995 bombing of the Murragh Federal Building, by this perverse logic, suggests that both were Islamic plots.

This shrill, hysterical absurdity reminds me of nothing so much as the incident sometime last year (about which I wrote in FmH, although I cannot find the reference just now) by an alarmist and somewhat reactionary “writer” who believed she saw a group of Islamic men on her airline flight conspiring together but nobody would do anything about it! Then, as now, that was probably because there was nothing more to such fears than proof that people can see what they want to see. One of the most reprehensible aspects of reactions to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was the rush to assume that the Muslims were responsible. Incredibly, some are still holding on to that bigoted and ignorant sentiment. Stillwell’s concluding plaint is that “… if a terrorist attack in America’s heartland doesn’t jolt the country out of this fantasyland, what will?” Unfortunately, the only ‘fantasyland’ I see around here is the one she and others of similar ilk call their homeland.

Here you will find the more levelheaded Wikipedia entry on the incident.

Of course, fungi are everywhere, so I am not sure how concerned one ought to be. Researchers say you should buy feather pillows instead of synthetic, if this worries you.

My family and I escaped the sodden Northeast for a week in — where else? — the Pacific Northwest. I apologize, especially to several readers who wrote in alarm and withdrawal, for not posting my customary notice that I would be gone for awhile. It won’t happen again (the radio silence, I mean…). A belated happy new year to Jewish readers, an auspicious Ramadan to any Muslims who read this, and happy Thanksgiving to Canadian ones. [If you want to be prepared, I will be travelling again for several weeks in February…]

If you visit a Blogspot (Blogger’s web hosting vehicle) weblog which uses the Blogger navbar at the top, you now have the ability to flag its content as objectionable. Google (recall: the Blogger parent company now) reserves the right, if they agree that the content is potentially offensive (by whatever standards they wish to apply), to place a Content Warning Page in front of the weblog and to unlist it, although its content will still be available.

Some would argue that this is censorship, while others insist that because the content is not restricted this is reasonable. On FmH, in the weblogging world and in the web in general, it has seemed to me that pointing to content assumes an inherently more and more important role in proffering information and opinion. So it is arguable that removing pointers to something becomes perilously increasingly akin to restricting speech, which seems indefensible no matter how vile the speech is.

A great reason not to host with Blogspot, it would seem. On the other hand, the demands of any other weblogging platform will probably weed out many of the mindless dolts who promulgate hate speech and vulgarity, because it is so braindead-easy to do on Blogspot.

…as it is braindead-easy for the great unwashed masses who read weblogs to react with a click on the “flag” button to anything with which they disagree. Google is going to have its hands full investigating all the spiteful would-be stool pigeons (see story below). Perversely, it actually makes me wish I had a “flag” button here on FmH. After all, from its beginnings six years ago I have said you should let me know as soon as I offend you. After Steve Baum, “I like to keep track of those times when I get something right.”

Maybe I am preaching to the choir, but no matter how economical it is, you simply have no business doing business with a firm that does this. [via boing boing]

“…it’s how I live my life…” (glenrhodes.com)

Of course, fungi are everywhere, so I am not sure how concerned one ought to be. Researchers say you should buy feather pillows instead of synthetic, if this worries you.

Gizmodo is derisive about a pair of slippers with LEDs in them, saying most people are pretty familiar with where things are in their homes and can navigate in the dark. A commenter begs to differ, saying there will be a particular market for them among New York City apartment-dwellers, to keep the cockroaches away during those trips to the bathroom when you don’t want to turn on the lights and wake up fully.

George Will, with welcome audacity, in the Washington Post:

Merck claims its immunization against human papillomavirus strains which cause cervical cancer is overwhelmingly effective (New York Times ). There are more than a quarter of a million cervical cancer deaths a year worldwide, many of them in poorer countries where women do not have access to regular Pap smears that could detect the disease earlier. If this bears up, it could be a momentous health advance — enthusiasts say it could prevent at least 70% of cervical cancer deaths — although women would still need regular screening tests. Now, going beyond questions of clinical efficacy: what is Merck going to charge for the vaccine in the Third World? Would putting in the infrastructure for regular gynecological checkups be a less costly alternative to lining the pockets of Big Pharma? Is there the political will to do so?

Delight abounds at the recognition of the IAEA and Mohammed ElBaradei, which among other things is a reaffirmation of the role of diplomacy, a reinforcement of the urgent issue of nonproliferation facing the world, and a slap in the face to U.S. unilateralism in the Middle East and our undercutting of the United Nations.

Happy 74th birthday to the wry Desmond Tutu, who said: “When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.”

Also pointed to by the null device: one of the best medical webloggers, Dr. Charles, writes a doctor’s fictitious journal entry about the avian flu pandemic to come. Scroll down for some advice from one of his readers on preparing for it:

“1) It has recently been determined that most pulmonary illnesses are spread by hand contamination, not coughing or sneezing as previously believed. If you are out in public or around those who are during an outbreak, using alcohol-based hand sanitizer six times a day will reduce your chance of catching flu by 80%. If there is obvious contamination, use soap and water. Antiseptic soap is not significantly more effective than ordinary soap in this regard. Consciously force yourself not to touch your face in public until you have sanitized your hands.

2) The worst public sources for air and surface contamination are public restrooms and restaurants. Avoid them. Sanitize telephone handsets and often touched surfaces in work areas, especially doorknobs. Parts of automobile interiors can also be cleaned.

3) There are several known effective OTC anti-virals, and several more that may help. Some non-toxic metals are powerful antiseptics and can be used for decontamination, such as the calcium found in grapefruit seed extract (available in health food stores). A few drops can disinfect a quart of water. A tablespoon can also be added to a humidifier for an air and room surface disinfectant. Larger amounts could be added to a swamp cooler to help sanitize an entire house.

4) Other metals are not directly anti-viral, but inhibit viral reproduction in some circumstances. Silver and zinc in the proper form and place can have this effect in the human body. Colloidal silver in a nasal spray, for one, and Cold-Eeze brand throat lozenges for zinc. Cold-Eeze is unique in this way, as its patented form of zinc is readily uptaken into the mucous membranes, unlike most zinc supplements. With FDA approval, it can state that it lessens severity and duration of colds and flu. Perhaps it can do more.

5) Most colds and flus reproduce in the sinuses and trachea, so it is important to keep them a less friendly environment for viruses. The use of ordinary saline nasal spray to reduce large build ups of mucous removes breeding medium. NOTE: avian flu is different, in that it can reproduce in several other organs, including the liver.

6) Another newly discovered trick that may work is ordinary store-bought cranberry juice, which has been determined to inhibit cellular adhesion by several viruses, in quantity. It is unknown if it would work for avian flu, but drinking copious amounts as a possible prophalaxis should not be too much an inconvenience, if that is all you’ve got to protect yourself with.

7) There will undoubtedly be shortages of several items once an outbreak has occurred. Surgical masks, protective glasses, latex gloves, sanitary wipes and rubbing alcohol may all become scarce, so it is not unreasonable to stock up now.

8) The vaccination priority that we are used to has been changed because of the severity of this illness. Instead of giving injections to the elderly, infirm and very young, the emphasis will be on school-aged children (the largest human vector of the disease), and in outbreak areas. It would be wise to familiarize yourself with traditional quarantine measures, as they can be unexpectedly harsh. In time of an epidemic, the Health Department can be authoritarian.

9) The avian flu also has a large number of animal vectors, and until these are determined for certain, it would be wise to avoid large assemblages of animals and birds, even dogs and cats. Already, some birds have been identified that can carry the disease for great distances without immediately dying.

10) Flu vaccine takes from several days to two weeks for optimum immunity. This immunity may last perhaps six months or more in a healthy, young adult, and as little as two to three months in the elderly. A severe flu epidemic usually appears in two waves, and can last from one to two years.

11) Symptomology of avian flu so far seems to indicate that death occurs very quickly, perhaps within 72 hours, and is often from blood and fluid build-up in the lungs. Though this sounds morbid, some people may die in public and it is important not to touch the body. An incapacitated person may spew large amounts of infectious fluids about.

12) Traditionally, government has been slow to react to epidemics, often waiting too long before instituting strong restrictions on the public. However, this can be deadly serious, even if ineffective. There may be circumstances where armed guards are used, and response to public panic may be severe.”

Related: Brainblog rounds up resources for pandemic awareness.

Sex-selection technique lets farmers choose sex of breeding offspring in advance. Antibodies have been developed that are selective for the sex-specific proteins in a collection of sperm, removing whichever sex is not wanted. Obvious implications… (Globe and Mail)

Ed Fitzgerald writes at unfutz:

Leonardo da Vinci and the ancient astronomical riddle of Earthshine. (NASA)

I was reminded of the ongoing allure of Danvers State Hospital, here in eastern Massachusetts where I make my home, by this story of three “would-be ghost-busters” who were arraigned today on trespassing charges after taking a video camera onto the grounds of the asylum, which opened in 1878 and closed in 1992 amidst allegations of overcrowding, abuse and neglect of its wards. At their court appearance, the chastened men each admitted their fascination with ghosts and the legends that the hospital grounds are haunted.

Danvers’ imposing Gothic architecture (it inhabits a place in the National Register of Historic Sites) is one of the most overwhelming of the grand state psychiatric hospitals in Massachusetts, the majority of which — with their monumental edifices, their sprawling grounds, and their treatment of those in the state most tortured by severe mental illness — were closed in the deinstitutionalization mania of the ’90’s from which the mentally ill of Massacusetts and their caregivers have yet to recover. (Institutionalized treatment in massive and remote asylums was supposed to be replaced by community-based outpatient supports when the institutions were closed, but the budget-makers of the state conveniently forgot about that small detail.)

Danvers State occupies a unique place in the psychogeography of this region, like a scratch you cannot reach to itch. It has its own Wikipedia entry, which mentions urban legends that former patients have come back to the closed facility in hopes of finding a place to live, become squatters, and terrorized teenage joyriders who trespass on the grounds. It sounds like a cheap horror flick. Indeed area film director Brad Anderson set his haunting 2001 horror film Session 9, which has been described as “an homage to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, with the modern feel of The Blair Witch Project…,”.on the grounds. “It’s the scariest building in North America,” actor David Caruso, who starred in the movie, told AboutFilm.com. “It was always scary, and you could really feel the pain of the people that were at Danvers.”

A real estate developer, in what is becoming a trend at abandoned asylums throughout the continent, is planning to turn Danvers State into an upscale condo development. The developer maintains that the project will be a ‘showcase for attractive and respectful reuse.’ No doubt there will be no accommodations for those peripatetic squatter ex-patients… A group of advocates and former patients are pressuring the group to include a museum to the hospital’s history in their scheme. There are also ongoing moves for the rehabilitation of the cemeteries on the state hospital grounds, in which hundreds of institutionalized patients were buried in graves marked by their medical record numbers. After the 1992 closure of the facility, advocates accessed the archived records to identify the graves and put up headstones where possible.

I have written before in FmH about the infiltration movement and its eponymous webzine, about “going places you’re not supposed to go”. Danvers has been an object of veneration for infiltrators in the decade-plus since its closure. (The three trespassers would have done well to study the ethos and methods of serious infiltrators before their escapade, especially because Danvers State is across the street from the State Police barracks!) Here is a site on the infiltration of another venerable old Massachusetts state hospital, Metropolitan State in Belmont and Waltham, where I myself trained and later worked in the ’80’s treating patients devastatingly ill with schizophrenia, and which has been closed for more than a decade as well.

Opacity, a site by the pseudonymous Motts, who started out being photographically interested in ‘urban ruins’ but grew increasingly fascinated with the act of exploring itself, has a photo essay about the eerie grandeur of the abandoned Danvers State as well as a number of other facilities in Massachusetts and elsewhere.

None has been as obsessed with the closed asylum as Michael Ramseur, author of the reverent website, The Castle on the Hill as well as Haunted Palace, a 260-page history of the facility and The Eye of Danvers, an 88-page art history.

Danvers is just a stone’s throw from Salem, the center of Massachusetts witchery, and interest in the asylum overflows from those preoccupied with the Witch City. Some claim that the hospital was the inspiration for H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham Asylum, which in itself leads Goths to urge its preservation. Who knows what unmentionable horrors lie in wait in the decades to come for those who remain to be seduced by its terrifying summons?

Titilllating idea starts out as a joke but becomes ‘bona fide bosom buddy’ to breast cancer research:

Bandwidth-intensive information can now be streamed live from remote locations, over ultra-fast optical networks, as demonstrated at this week’s iGrid conference in San Diego:

Do not fail to zoom in as far as you can go.

I am amazed that, even at this point more than thirty years after I graduated, anyone would want to treat me like a Harvard alumnus (and I try to make that clear to the alumni fund solicitors!). Yes, I went there, and I do not hang my head in shame and mumble unintelligibly when anyone asks me where I went to school, although I am certainly familiar with that behavior from my own past. But I have not gone to a reunion of my class since the 10th and the tales I swap convivially are from times and places far from there. I no longer even know from what college most of those in my social circle graduated, and I keep up with those of my college-mates with whom I do not because of where they went to school but what sort of a life they have gotten for themselves since. And, it goes without saying, there are far worthier charities to which I target my charitable giving than the crucible of the ruling class.

From that introduction, you would think the article does not flinch in the face of such words. Nevertheless, a number of those discussed are asterisked out.

Dubner and Levitt float a unique solution that, at first, sounds quite Rube-Goldberg-esque, but bears thinking about. Very entertaining having them as Times columnists.

Thanks to walker for alerting me to this phenomenon and, more properly, to the fact that it has a name. Dhimmi is the Sharia (Islamic law) term for the status of a non-Muslim in a Muslim state. While some emphasize the official toleration of non-Muslims as a virtue of Islamic society, others focus on the restrictions that apply.

Some see in particular “an ongoing initiative by some Muslims to force British society to conform to Islamic standards.” Here is a website that exists solely to chronicle the supposedly stunningly rapid advancement of the “mentality of dhimmi servitude” in the West. In particular, there have been ongoing battles over the offense taken by the displays of pig-related items including toys, piggy banks and images of Winnie the Pooh’s friend Piglet.British schools have removed or restricted access to “anti-Muslim” children’s books including The Three Little Pigs, Charlotte’s Web, the Olivia and Babe series. Animal Farm, of course, offends as well. Supposedly, an employee of an Orlando, FL Muslim-owned business was fired for eating a BLT sandwich. And one commenter warns that depictions of dogs are more offensive than those of pigs..

In evaluating all this, however, we should take a hint from the fact that much of this alarm emanates from the righthand side of the weblog world, not exactly bastions of tolerance. This is in the mold of the longstanding tendency of the right to lampoon the excesses of political correctness as if they make a mockery of all of free speech and tolerance. Especially in the wake of the London bombings in the UK, one can expect an incidence of fearful misjudgments and overreactions from some British magistrates and civil authorities. String together the most egregious examples, throw in a sprinkling of US parallels, ignore all counterexamples, and you can thoroughly obscure the distinctions between toleration of Muslims in a multicultural society and encouragement of intolerant extremism. This all smacks of Dubya’s fatuous insistence that “they hate us because we are free.” Radical Islamists stand far less of a chance of bringing down Western freedoms (such as they are) than these anti-Muslim jihadists; we’re doing it for them. In general, we in the West have much more to fear from anti-Muslim totalitarianism than the ugly spectre of the Muslim kind these writers depict.

Was there a biological attack on the Mall protesters in Washington last weekend? Quite a coincidence that the sensors detected low levels of tularemia just at that time and place. The route of infection is by inhalation, and it is treatable with antibiotics but can be fatal if not recognized. (Washington Post; thanks, Uncle $cam)

Dubner and Levitt float a unique solution that, at first, sounds quite Rube-Goldberg-esque, but bears thinking about. Very entertaining having them as Times columnists.