Monthly Archives: October 2007

Happy Samhain

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

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.

“Maybe at one time Hallowe’en helped exorcise fears of death and ghosts and goblins by making fun of them. Maybe, too, in a time of rigidly prescribed social behavior, Hallowe’en was the occasion for socially condoned mischief — a time for misrule and letting loose. Although such elements still remain, the emphasis has shifted and the importance of the day and its rituals has actually grown.

…(D)on’t just abandon a tradition that you yourself loved as a child, that your own children look forward to months in advance, and that helps preserve our sense of fellowship and community with our neighbors in the midst of all this madness.”

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!

Castle Frankenstein

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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.

The Evangelical Crackup

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“The 2008 election is just the latest stress on a system of fault lines that go much deeper. The phenomenon of theologically conservative Christians plunging into political activism on the right is, historically speaking, something of an anomaly. Most evangelicals shrugged off abortion as a Catholic issue until after the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. But in the wake of the ban on public-school prayer, the sexual revolution and the exodus to the suburbs that filled the new megachurches, protecting the unborn became the rallying cry of a new movement to uphold the traditional family. Now another confluence of factors is threatening to tear the movement apart. The extraordinary evangelical love affair with Bush has ended, for many, in heartbreak over the Iraq war and what they see as his meager domestic accomplishments. That disappointment, in turn, has sharpened latent divisions within the evangelical world — over the evangelical alliance with the Republican Party, among approaches to ministry and theology, and between the generations.” (New York Times Magazine)

Kucinich questions Bush’s mental health

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‘Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich questioned President Bush’s mental health in light of comments he made about a nuclear Iran precipitating World War III. “I seriously believe we have to start asking questions about his mental health,” Kucinich, an Ohio congressman, said in an interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer’s editorial board on Tuesday. “There’s something wrong. He does not seem to understand his words have real impact.”

…Bush made the remarks at a news conference earlier this month. He said: “I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them (Iran) from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”

Kucinich said he doesn’t believe his comments about the president’s mental health are irresponsible, according to a story posted on the newspaper’s Web site. “You cannot be a president of the United States who’s wanton in his expression of violence,” Kucinich said. “There’s a lot of people who need care. He might be one of them. If there isn’t something wrong with him, then there’s something wrong with us. This, to me, is a very serious question.”‘ (AP via Yahoo! )

While I certainly think that assessment of mental health should be left to professionals, I think it is irresponsible not to raise concerns such as Kucinich does here. I have long held that the President’s publicly acknowledged obligation to the people to be in good enough health to govern (as reflected in having an annual checkup and making the findings public) should extend to her/his mental health. The results of an annual, if not more frequent, mental health evaluation should also be made public. Would Kucinich, or any other candidate, commit themselves to that as a campaign promise, in light of Dubya’s evident imbalance?

One in 10 high schools:

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‘Dropout Factories’: “It’s a nickname no principal could be proud of: ‘Dropout Factory,’ a high school where no more than 60 percent of the students who start as freshmen make it to their senior year. That dubious distinction applies to more than one in 10 high schools across America.”

Is this a new kind of matter?

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The crystalline mineral herbertlewisite, in its pure form, may be not a solid but a string-net liquid, a new state of matter with unique quantum properties. Not only that, it may be the key to the deepest structure of the universe. (New Scientist)

Dramatic Comet Outburst Could Last Weeks

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“A comet that suddenly brightened earlier this week has astronomers around the globe fascinated. And the show could go on for some time.

Comet Holmes, discovered in 1892, had in recent years been visible only through telescopes until a dramatic outburst made it visible to the naked eye. In fewer than 24 hours, it brightened by a factor of nearly 400,000.

It has now brightened by a factor of a million times what it was before the outburst, a change “absolutely unprecedented in the annals of cometary astronomy,” said Joe Rao, SPACE.com‘s Skywatching Columnist.

The comet is now rivaling some of the brighter stars in the sky.

Anyone with a map should be able to spot it now.” (SPACE.com)

Identical twins reunited after 35 years

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They had been separated at birth to pursue study of ‘nature vs. nurture’. The child psychiatrist who orchestrated the study was without remorse when the twins confronted him. He had been willingly aided by the adoption agency handling their placements, whose psychological consultant felt that it was unhealthy for identical twins to be raised together. Aware that his study would be criticized, the author had locked away the report in the Yale University archives, not to be opened for a century. (Telegraph.UK)
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Speak No ‘Evil’

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What does ‘evil’ look like in a morally relativistic world leery of reductionism?: “Hannah Arendt predicted that, post-Auschwitz, the problem of evil would be a primary focus of contemporary life. And it might have been, except for the fact that, in a destabilized and reflexively ironic age, we are always checking to make sure we haven’t overlooked a mitigating circumstance or an admirable principle gone wrong. Fearful as some of us are about exhibiting a too-primitive and “demonizing” attitude — the kind of macho Us-versus-Them, Axis-of-Evil line of thinking that has made Bush and Company figures of easy derision — we have become increasingly tentative about assigning this stark designation. (In “The Myth of Evil,” Phillip Cole says that his book “asks the question whether evil exists at all and one possible answer I take very seriously is that it does not.”) Few of us would be hesitant to use the word to describe the genocidal regimes, for example, of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and Milosevic. But for the most part, we post-Manichaean postmodernists are more like Neville Chamberlain hoping to win over Hitler with a bit of coaxing than like Winston Churchill, who committed his country to fighting him. Given our a tradition of broad civil tolerance, it makes uneasy sense that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the half-buffoonish, half-demonic leader of Iran, was invited to speak at an ivy-towered bastion of learning, where he gave voice to his hate-mongering views.” (New York Times Magazine)

Doris Lessing: Sept. 11 attacks were not so bad

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“September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn’t that terrible.

Some Americans will think I’m crazy. Many people died, two prominent buildings fell, but it was neither as terrible nor as extraordinary as they think. They’re a very naive people, or they pretend to be.

Do you know what people forget? That the IRA attacked with bombs against our government; it killed several people while a Conservative congress was being held and in which the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was (attending). People forget.” (AP via Yahoo)

Doris Lessing: Sept. 11 attacks were not so bad

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“September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn’t that terrible.

Some Americans will think I’m crazy. Many people died, two prominent buildings fell, but it was neither as terrible nor as extraordinary as they think. They’re a very naive people, or they pretend to be.

Do you know what people forget? That the IRA attacked with bombs against our government; it killed several people while a Conservative congress was being held and in which the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was (attending). People forget.” (AP via Yahoo)

Death Knell, or Death-Knell, for the Hyphen?

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“The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the scaled-down, two-volume version of the mammoth 20-volume O.E.D., just got a little shorter. With the dispatch of a waiter flicking away flyspecks, the editor, Angus Stevenson, eliminated some 16,000 hyphens from the sixth edition, published last month. “People are not confident about using hyphens anymore,” he said. ‘They’re not really sure what they’re for.'” New York Times

World Privacy Forum: Top Ten Opt Outs

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“As privacy experts, we are frequently asked about “opting out,” and which opt outs we think are the most important. This list is a distillation of ideas for opting out that the World Privacy Forum has developed over the years from responding to those questions. The list below does not contain all opt outs that are available. Rather, it contains the opt outs that we believe are the most important and will be the most useful to the most consumers:

  • 1. National Do Not Call Registry

  • 2. Prescreened offers of credit and insurance

  • 3. DMA opt outs

  • 4. Financial institution opt outs

  • 5. CAN SPAM

  • 6. Credit freeze

  • 7. FERPA

  • 8. Data broker opt outs

  • 9. Internet portal opt outs

  • 10. NAI opt out”

Unbroken Chain

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“On November 16-18, 2007 UMass Amherst will host Unbroken Chain, the largest conference on the legacy of the Grateful Dead, and the first to be held by a major university. Scholars, artists, performers, students and members of the extended Grateful Dead family will gather for the event featuring more than 50 presenters for 20 panel sessions ranging from music composition and improvisation to an examination of the band’s business model – as well as a musical performances, gallery exhibits, and presentations.” //www.umassconnections.com/images/logo_CLEAR_NEW.jpg' cannot be displayed]

Related:

UMass course on the history of the Grateful Dead, taught by Robert Weir (no, not that one). (Boston Globe [thanks, Janet])

Silent Minds

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Jerry Groopman, one of my favorite physician-writers, on persistent vegetative state and related conditions. PET and fMRI scanning of some patients shows they are still having complex cognitive functions. Unlike Terry Schiavo’s supporters’ assertions, the issue is not that we are wrong about what goes on in a vegetative state. It is that some, or even many, patients are misdiagnosed:

“According to several American and British studies completed in the late nineties, patients suffering from what is known as “disorders of consciousness” are misdiagnosed between fifteen and forty-three per cent of the time. Physicians, who have traditionally relied on bedside evaluations to make diagnoses, sometimes misinterpret patients’ behavior, mistaking smiling, grunting, grimacing, crying, or moaning as evidence of consciousness. A neuroscientist showed me a video on the Internet of Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman who spent fifteen years in what most doctors agree was a vegetative state—tests revealed almost no activity in her cortex—and whose death, in 2005, provoked fierce debate over the rights of severely brain-damaged patients. (Schiavo died after the Supreme Court rejected her parents’ appeal of a judge’s decision approving her husband’s request that her feeding tube be removed. An autopsy showed extensive brain damage.) In the video, a man’s voice can be heard praising Schiavo for opening her eyes in response to his instructions, and the neuroscientist told me that he was impressed until he muted the sound. “With the sound off, it is clear that her movements are random,” the neuroscientist said. “But, with the voice-over, it is easy to make a misdiagnosis.” (The prognosis for patients such as Schiavo, who suffered brain damage owing to oxygen deprivation following cardiac arrest, is much worse than for those who suffer brain damage as the result of a head injury.)” (The New Yorker)

White House Is Leaning on Interim Appointments

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“With only 15 months left in office, President Bush has left whole agencies of the executive branch to be run largely by acting or interim appointees — jobs that would normally be filled by people whose nominations would have been reviewed and confirmed by the Senate. In many cases, there is no obvious sign of movement at the White House to find permanent nominees, suggesting that many important jobs will not be filled by Senate-confirmed officials for the remainder of the Bush administration. That would effectively circumvent the Senate’s right to review and approve the appointments.” (New York Times )

Progress Cited in Alzheimer’s Diagnosis

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Preliminary but exciting progress towards a lab test for Alzheimer’s Disease, which to now is only diagnosed impressionistically (until post-mortem):

“The researchers gathered more than 200 blood samples from people with Alzheimer’s and those without. Using 83 of the samples, they measured the abundance of 120 proteins involved in cell signaling and found they could distinguish the Alzheimer’s samples from the controls using 18 of the proteins.

They then tested their 18-protein signature on an additional 92 samples. The tests agreed with the clinical diagnosis about 90 percent of the time.

Perhaps most intriguing were the results of the test on 47 blood samples taken from people with mild cognitive impairment, a minor loss of memory that can be a precursor of Alzheimer’s. The test was able to predict with about 80 percent accuracy whether a patient went on to develop Alzheimer’s two to six years after the blood sample had been collected.” (New York Times )

A Person Could Develop Occult

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“There must be a rational explanation for all the supernatural phenomena on television. There must.

Because it is weird, and even a little freaky, that so many shows this season prey on the paranormal. Vampires have day jobs as detectives, store clerks reap souls for the Devil, reporters time-travel to get their stories straight, cheerleaders walk through fire and people of all kinds talk to dead people, sometimes quite chattily. ” (New York Times )

Unraveling the Knots of the 12 Tones

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“…[T]he invention of the 12-tone system was arguably the most audacious and influential development in 20th-century music. Its impact can be heard today in works far removed from the knotty scores of composers like Milton Babbitt, Pierre Boulez, Charles Wuorinen and its other formidable practitioners during its heyday in the third quarter of the last century. Elements of 12-tone style turn up even in Broadway shows and film scores. Yet an overwhelming majority of music lovers have no idea what the technique is, what exactly the music sounds like or what the fuss was all about.” (New York Times )

The Most Important Future Military Technologies

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“…[W]hat are we getting for our money? That $75 billion budget covers a vast array of projects, from perfecting new weapon systems like the Joint Strike Fighter plane to studying pure physics. Focusing on the research side of R&D, Discover looked at four key areas where the military is placing its bets: hypersonic vehicles, laser technology, using information technology and neuroscience to combine human and machine on the battlefield, and employing sociology and psychobiology to combat terrorism.”

The future of the past tense

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Mathematical model for language evolution advances: “Writing this week in the journal Nature, Erez Lieberman, Jean-Baptiste Michel, and colleagues in Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, led by Martin A. Nowak, conceive of linguistic development as an essentially evolutionary scheme: Just as genes and organisms undergo natural selection, words — specifically, irregular verbs that do not take an ‘-ed’ ending in the past tense — are subject to powerful pressure to ‘regularize’ as the language develops.”

I heard an interview with one of the investigators today on NPR. Utterly fascinating. Irregular past tenses persist proportionally to how common the words are. Uncommon irregular past tenses, like ‘stank’, are predicted to disappear sooner. In around five hundred years, the investigators predict, we will be saying ‘it stinked’ instead. In most languages, the past tenses of the most frequently used verbs — to be, to do, to go, to take, etc. — have remained irregular and will probably continue to do so. A related phenomenon is that other common words are very resistant to change, so, for example, the word for the number ‘two’ is very similar to that in other languages descended from proto-Indo-European, while less common words diverge more. The interviewer asked the simplest but surely the most profound question, to which the investigator being interviewed conceded they indeed have no answer — why do languages change at all?

ACLU: FISA Flood of 2007:

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“Two bills were introduced yesterday to fix the disastrous Protect America Act that was rushed through Congress in August, rubberstamping the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. Both were efforts to fix FISA, but we must make it clear that only the FISA Modernization Bill does the job. The RESTORE Act caves in to Bush’s fear-mongering in a major way by allowing for program or basket “warrants,” which aren’t really warrants at all. They’re the modern-day equivalent of allowing government agents to sit in our living rooms, recording our personal conversations. Only they’re more frightening, because the government now has the capacity to monitor us remotely and without our knowledge, and to save the information in a secret database forever. It’s no surprise that the Bush Administration is again using the threat of terror to bully Congress into giving them more power than it needs to keep us safe. To counter these misrepresentations, your representative needs to hear that America can be both safe and free by passing a FISA Modernization bill that protects our Constitutional rights. Please, call your representative right now. Tell him or her to support the FISA Modernization Act instead of the RESTORE Act.” (ACLU)

National Do Not Call Registry: time to re-up?

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I haven’t kept track, but someone just told me it has been five years since the Do Not Call registry was introduced. Registrations expire at the five-year point, so if you were an early adopter you might want to go back and re-register.

There’s also been a rumor going around that telemarketers are about to get a database of cellphone numbers. This site claims this is not true, as federal law prohibits using automated dialers (the telemarketing industry standard) to call cell phone numbers or any other phone number where the owner is charged for receiving the call. Thus, you do not have to register your mobile number with the Do Not Call registry. You can register it if you are ultra-paranoid. However, if you are among the most ultra-paranoid, registering it might concern you, since you would be broadcasting the existence of your mobile number, I suppose, much as we have all learned not to click on the ‘remove my email address’ link in a spam mail message.

Five of the six major cellular carriers (excluding Verizon) were supposed to be establishing an opt-in wireless 411 directory (Google Search ) in 2006. (Did this happen? I have Verizon service, so I would not have heard if customers were being invited to opt in.) This may be the source of the alarm that the telemarketers would be getting your mobile number.

Shifting Targets

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Seymour Hirsh writes in The New Yorker, with his usual access to inside sources, of the administration’s plans for Iran.

Now that the Bushies have redefined the war in Iraq as a strategic struggle with Iran, the position that we have to confront the Iranians has taken firm hold of the administration. Longstanding battle plans against Iran have been redrawn this summer, no longer centered on broadranging bombing attacks against suspected nuclear centers but on surgical strikes on Revolutionary Guard centers which the administration now claims have been the source of attacks against Americans in Iraq. Hersh says this reflects both the administration conclusion that they cannot get away with another WMD argument and the recognition that Iran has been the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.

Cheney is behind this desperate push to bring military action to Iran, disregarding the fact that Republican prospects for 2008 are crashing and burning wholesale. Hersh’s sources report an increased tampo of attack planning, largely by people without any experience with Iran, and caution that, as usual, the administration has not thought through the likely Iranian reaction. Hersh quotes the likes of Zbigniew Brzezinski as predicting that Iran will intensify its conflict with its neighbors, drawing Pakistan in and keeping the US embroiled in a decades’-long regional war.

A justification for attacking Iran based on its supplying weapons for Iraqi insurgent attacks against the US, as we heard, e.g., in Petraeus’ recent assertions, ignores several facts. The provenance of the terrorist weaponry in Iraq is far from clear. And Iranian-supplied armaments may well have been given to Iran’s Shiite allies in southern Iraq years ago when they were fighting Saddam. And despite the enormous presence of Iranians inside Iraq, direct evidence of their role in military training of Iraqis is lacking. Iraqi politicians routinely invoke outside interference to evade responsibility for their own failures. CIA sources have told Hersh that the intelligence about who is doing what “is so thin that nobody even wants his name on it.” [But lack of intelligence has never been a problem for this administration before, has it?]

The problem with a surgical bombing strike campaign, however, is that it only makes sense if the intelligence behind it is good. If significant targets are not hit quickly, it will escalate. The Israelis, alarmed that the US is abandoning its targeting of Iranian nuclear facilities, may press for such a broadening. especially if Iran’s proxy Hezbollah responds. Israel is not impressed by evidence that Iran is years away from being able to deliver a nuclear attack. Once they have mastered the nuclear fuel cycle and have the requisite materials, the possibilities of passing materials to terrorist groups or of unleashing a dirty bomb materialize. Recent changes of leadership in our allies (and erstwhile allies) in Western Europe may also factor into the shape of the American attack.

Not There

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“Todd Haynes’s Dylan film isn’t about Dylan. That’s what’s going to be so difficult for people to understand. That’s what’s going to make I’m Not There so trying for the really diehard Dylanists. That’s what might upset the non-Dylanists, who may find it hard to figure out why he bothered to make it at all. And that’s why it took Haynes so long to get it made. Haynes was trying to make a Dylan film that is, instead, what Dylan is all about, as he sees it, which is changing, transforming, killing off one Dylan and moving to the next, shedding his artistic skin to stay alive. The twist is that to not be about Dylan can also be said to be true to the subject Dylan.” (New York Times Magazine)

I’m dying to see this, I guess because I’m neither a non-Dylanist or a diehard.

Blogger Play

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This site plays a neverending stream of photos being posted to Blogger weblogs. If you have alot of screen territory and bandwidth, keeping it up and running somewhere in a corner of your visual field will give you a subliminal taste of the weblogging zeitgeist in realtime. However, I think you’ll soon get bored. It is amazing how banal most of the images are.

If you do find something arresting, you can click an image to be taken directly to the blog post it was uploaded to, or click “show info” to see an overlay with the post title, a snippet of the body, and some profile information about the poster. [Google/Blogger warns us that, despite their best algorithmic efforts, an occasional image that is NSFW may slip through.]

Not There

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“Todd Haynes’s Dylan film isn’t about Dylan. That’s what’s going to be so difficult for people to understand. That’s what’s going to make I’m Not There so trying for the really diehard Dylanists. That’s what might upset the non-Dylanists, who may find it hard to figure out why he bothered to make it at all. And that’s why it took Haynes so long to get it made. Haynes was trying to make a Dylan film that is, instead, what Dylan is all about, as he sees it, which is changing, transforming, killing off one Dylan and moving to the next, shedding his artistic skin to stay alive. The twist is that to not be about Dylan can also be said to be true to the subject Dylan.” (New York Times Magazine)

I’m dying to see this, I guess because I’m neither a non-Dylanist or a diehard.

Everything That Doesn’t Work Yet

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Kevin Kelly: “Alan Kay, a brilliant polymath who has worked at Atari, Xerox, Apple, and Disney, came up with as good a definition of technology as I’ve heard. “Technology,” Kay says, “is anything that was invented after you were born.” By that clever reckoning, automobiles, refrigerators, transistors, and nylon are not technologies in our eyes — just plain old stuff. But they were once technologies for my grandfather. By the same logic, CDs, the web, Mylar, cell phones, and GPS are authentic technologies for me – but not my kids! They’ll have their own technologies, invented in the last five minutes.

Danny Hillis, another polymath who used to work with Alan Kay, refined Kay’s definition a bit further in the 1990s, and a bit more usefully. “Technology,” Hillis says, “is everything that doesn’t work yet.” Buried in this sly definition is the insight that successful inventions disappear from our awareness. Electric motors were once technology – they were new and did not work well. As they evolved, they seem to disappear, even though they proliferated and were embedded by the scores into our homes and offices. They work perfectly, silently, unminded, so they no longer register as “technology.”

The satirist and novelist Douglas Adams further evolved Hillis and Kay’s definitions by suggesting a natural lifecycle for technologies. In a short essay in 1999 he proposed the world works like this:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.”

Does Physicians’ Experience Lead to Dulling of Empathic Reaction?

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Functional brain imaging compares physicians and matched controls and finds that the ’empathy circuitry’ of the brain is activated much less in the former when watching a video of an acupuncture procedure. The researchers take this as an indication that physicians’ training and experience has trained them to keep detachment. This is certainly true, and I have at times considered it the devil’s bargain into which I have entered to be a healer. However, I am not sure the study demonstrates this well-knwon phenomenon, as the researchers assert. First of all, I don’t think it is inflicting pain per se that leads physicians to a detached perspective. It is, more generally, being in the presence of so much pain and suffering. Secondly, the difference between physicians’ and nonphysicians’ experiences in watching an acupuncture video probably has less to do with tolerating inflicting pain and more to do with the fact that physicians know acupuncture not to be painful in the first place, unlike the lay observers.

George Bush, the Texan who is ‘scared of horses’

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‘President Bush may like to be seen as a swaggering tough guy with a penchant for manly outdoor pursuits, but in a new book one of his closest allies has said he is afraid of horses.

Vicente Fox, the former president of Mexico, derided his political friend as a “windshield cowboy” – a cowboy who prefers to drive – and “the cockiest guy I have ever met in my life”.

He recalled a meeting in Mexico shortly after both men had been elected when Mr Fox offered Mr Bush a ride on a “big palomino” horse. Mr Fox, who left office in December, recalled Mr Bush “backing away” from the animal. ”A horse lover can always tell when others don’t share our passion,” he said, according to the Washington Post.

Mr Bush has spoken of his fondness for shooting doves and cutting brush on his Crawford ranch in Texas, which he bought in 1999. The property reportedly has no horses and only five cattle.
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Mr Fox is the latest old friend to turn on Mr Bush as the US president faces a lonely final 18 months in office, derided for failures in Iraq and at home. Donald Rumsfeld, his defence secretary until last November, asked recently if he missed the president, said flatly: “No.” ‘ (Telegraph.UK)

Defector: Burma’s junta has executed thousands of monks

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“With more than a hint of smugness, folks in the West are rushing to declare Burma’s Saffron Revolution a failure. But now comes a report, via Hla Win, the defecting chief of the military junta’s intelligence operations, that thousands of monks have been executed in recent days and their bodies dumped in the jungle. Thousands more were reportedly taken to a stadium on the outskirts of Rangoon and beaten.” (Foreign Policy)
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Happy Birthday to Wallace Stevens

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Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow…
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep’s faded papier-mache…
The sun was coming from the outside.

That scrawny cry–It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

— Wallace Stevens

Poetry Prize Sets off Resignations at Society

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“The cloistered community of American poetry has, in recent months, become a little less like Yeats’s Land of Faery, where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue, and a little more like Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.”

The board of the 97-year-old Poetry Society of America, whose members have included many of the most august names in verse, has been rocked by a string of resignations and accusations of McCarthyism, conservatism and simple bad management.

The recent turmoil was driven, partly, by fierce discussion among board members earlier this year after they voted to award the Frost Medal, an annual honor given by the society, to John Hollander, a prolific poet and critic. The concern was whether it was proper to take into consideration some past remarks made by Mr. Hollander — remarks that some felt were disturbing — in bestowing the medal.

…In some ways the questions about Mr. Hollander’s remarks reflect a broader debate over whether the evaluation of artistic merit should be affected by the sometimes unsavory opinions or actions of the artist. Last year, for example, Germany was stunned when Günter Grass, the Nobel Prize winner, confessed that he had joined the Waffen SS, the military branch of the Nazis, when he was 17. At the time, some people argued that he should renounce his Nobel.” (New York Times)

Rafe is left speechless:

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“You want to know why they call it the “imperial Presidency”? Here’s why: Every morning, Josh Bolten, the chief of staff, greets Bush with the same words: “Thank you for the privilege of serving today.” Doesn’t that just tell you everything you’d need to know about President Bush? What kind of person willingly accepts that kind of obsequiousness on a daily basis? Maybe we should just call him Xerxes from here on out? Ironic that the man obsessed with war with Iran behaves most similarly to a Persian despot.” — Rafe Coburn (rc3)