This incredible (in the literal sense of the word, as in “unbelievable”) argument by Andrew Sullivan posits that “American society has rescued itself from what seemed to be terminal decline caused by family breakdown.” He goes on at length about how the cause was the cultural degeneracy of the ’60’s and ’70’s. Between my reaction to this and the smears on the anti-war movement I discuss below, why do I feel I am the sole defender of the legacy of the counterculture?

I have a hard time with both sides of his argument — his notion of the causes of societal breakdown and his sense that things are better — and his use of the term ‘pessimist’ as an epithet to dismiss most thoughtful social criticism that doesn’t proclaim the ‘good news’ as fervently as he would like. Funny, I’m a traditionalist too in some senses, and I think that social anomie and cultural distress relate to loss of community structures, family values and meaningful interpersonal relatedness, that modernity is a disease humans did not evolve to live with from either a mental or a physical standpoint. But it is a question of which conditions of modernity are the destructive ones. It is just that it turns things entirely on their head to say that neoconservative social policy is part of the solution instead of part of the problem. Sullivan may be right to argue that an open society can self-correct more rapidly because of the free flow of information. It is just an incredible illusion to think that that’s what we have here in American society despite the stories we tell ourselves. It is increasingly tiresome to hear people continue to cite the drop in crime, when sociologists have no consensus that it is even a real or enduring trend. Sullivan even cites the claim that cancer rates are down and cure rates are up, while most perspicacious medial observers who know what they are talking about have no such faith for cancer overall, although there have been modest gains with isolated specific tumors.

What planet is he living on when he asserts that he is talking about “a society that its biggest health problem is obesity and its biggest environmental problems are cars that are big enough for our grandparents to have lived in”? Every tired old saw is trotted out, uncritically, from Reagan’s ‘achievement’ in “defining government as part of the problem” to Clinton’s in “abolishing welfare-on-demand.” It is, at least, nice to hear him concede that it is not that the U.S. doesn’t have any social problems left; they are just in “isolated pockets” and he is sure we will eradicate them soon. Sullivan is writing in the Times of London for a British reading public that is several decades behind the US in adoption of neocon ignorant authoritarianism. Woe to those who listen to this pap.

Here’s a loose association, but has anyone seen Crash? This brutal (and somewhat over-the-top) film about a variety of pathologies in human interaction starts with a memorable voiceover monologue by Don Cheadle during the opening credits about how the problem with LA is that everyone is enveloped in steel and glass and isolated from the normal experience of interpersonal contact as they travel through the urban world.

Yes, but don’t stray too far from identifying the central factor — the erosion in bedside manner on the part of physicians, which is a result of productivity pressures but also deficiencies in curriculum design in medical schools and, indeed, in the criteria used to select medical students in the first place. These failings, in turn, reflect the depreciation of compassion as a societal value and the impact of that change on shaping aspirations to and expectations of a medical career.

FmH’s host was unreachable for about the past twenty-four hours or so, so welcome back, readers, I missed you (both of you). I haven’t contacted my web host yet to figure out what happened, but this followed a lightning storm again. Could the microwave internet link atop the Prudential Tower have gotten hit again, as it did several weeks ago?

Can anyone suggest a way that I could set up automtaic monitoring of my website so that if it is unreachable I could receive an email, a text message or something?

…and I’m exasperated. Excitement about a nascent anti-war movement is infused by naiveté, massively unwarranted assumptions, and derogatory misconceptions about the Vietnam era anti-war movement from people who weren’t there.

Kos speculates on the basis for Cindy Sheehan’s appeal, in part citing Jeff Feldman‘s contention that the ‘grieving mother’ meme has ‘captured the nation’s imagination’ and raises the possibility of “a visible anti-war movement centered around a broad-based unassailable concern, a mother’s concern for her children.” Kos suggests that “the country has turned against the Iraq Debacle” without the emergence of a visible anti-war movement and even gives the nod to the suggestion by atrios that this be attributed to the absence of a ‘Vietnam-style’ anti-war movement. He suggests that this family-centered concern might resonate “in a way a more traditional anti-war movement might not.” He is all aquiver over the possibility that this might be the strong breakthrough to the Heartland, and fingers as an aim “push(ing BushCo) toward accepting the reality of the demise of the neocon dream.”

There’s an awful lot of extrapolation, and ill-founded extrapolation at that, from the mere ‘possibility’ going on here. What I wrote below in my riff on the MSNBC piece about disengagement scenarios bears repeating; I think there is a great distance between the turning tide of public sentiment, as reflected in opinion polls, and any potential impact on neocon autocratic decisionmaking. This confusion is largely based on a somewhat naive and unwarranted faith in the so-called democratic political process which surprises me.

Furthermore, it is an utterly specious assertion to say that a ‘Vietnam-style’, ‘traditional’, ‘visible’ anti-war movement is a liability, or that the Vietnam-era movement did not appeal to family values, to families’ grief about the senseless loss of their children, or to the Common Good of our country. Soulsearching and sophisticated strategic thinking about how to build a mass movement and galvanize anti-war sentiment was a constant presence in the anti-Vietnam movement. One organizing strategy was to appeal to the, shall we say, selfish concerns about the domestic costs to the US (in terms of lives and dollars spent) to hook the Heartland, which Kos gushes over as a basis for organizing the anti-Iraq movement. But that was one component and one component only, of a movement with multifaceted appeal. As a sole organizing strategy it is IMHO a way to build a movement doomed to failure. I listen to NPR as my sole broadcast media source of news. Throughout the war, almost at random, they air features about this or that small town’s reaction to the death of a favorite son serving in Iraq. It is an attempt, to use a hackneyed media phrase, to put a human face on the war. I turn those features off in anger at our powerlessness to stop the senseless deaths and anger that there aer no profiles — from NPR or anybody else — of grieving Iraqi families whose children BushCo have murdered. But the Heartland, if they are even tuned to an NPR station in the first place, turns them off as well, and Cindy Sheehan is not going to change that. In fact, the Heartland is up in arms not with, but about, Sheehan.

The movement against the Indochina war, as I say, was much more than the selfish domestic concerns behind Kos’ ‘turning of the country against the Iraq Debacle’. It was about one of our finest human sentiments — global compassion, unselfish, without borders, feeling the pathos of the suffering we were inflicting on the people whose country we had invaded, who we were (literally) massacring, whose society we destroyed in the name of democracy. There were also significant ideologically- and spiritually-based pacifist and anti-imperialist strains melded into the struggle against the Vietnam war, and it was tied to a broader critique of the American projection of power and, indeed, the American way of life in ways that the cowed post-9/11 American public largely dare not utter. This is of course because the American countercultural critique of America parallels and aligns with the third world’s critique of America, including that which fuels extremist anti-Americanism and is, arguably, one of the reasons we are the terrorist target par excellence. Coalitions of widely varying concerns found common purpose in a shared endpoint, that the US rape of Indochina deserved to be zealously fought.

This may be the phobic avoidance behid atrios’ assertion that an anti-war movement today would succeed only in the absence of ‘Vietnam-style’ elements. Buying into the claims of supporters of the war that the anti-war movement gives aid and comfort to our enemies was always, and continues to be, a way of being manipulated into impotence. Of course there are some differences. While some in the ’60’s counterculture revered Ho Chi Minh as an inspiration or an ideological touchstone, I doubt there is any reverence for Saddam Hussein. (Besides, there’s no easy rhyme for his name, unlike that in ‘Hey hey Ho Chi Minh, the Vietcong are gonna win!’). And we live in a far more paranoid country now than we did then (although if you had asked me in the ’60’s I would have been hardpressed to envision the possibility) — while the in-your-face sentiments of wearing a teeshirt with the VC flag or a button saying ‘Cictory to Vietnam’ were everywhere, has anyone seen a ‘Victory to Iraq’ button yet? Can you imagine it?

Back from this digression: both atrios’ suggestion and Kos’s weaker assertion that it could succeed without them are, then, laughable. Any parallels one attempts to draw between the anti-war movement of then and the nascent or ‘potential’ anti-Iraq movement will have to do a far better job accounting for how the latter could succeed without:

• a fervor and passion;
• a morally-infused outrage;
• boundary-less compassion that encompasses but transcends concern for the selfish domestic costs of the war;
• embracing the spectrum of diverse opinions and positions that lead to opposition to the invasion, the occupation and US military adventurism in general;
• a willingness to take substantial personal risks and sacrifices to stop the crimes against humanity that the US commits with impunity;
• the proliferating, explicit centering of the political platforms of candidates for both local and national office around their opposition to the war;
• a willingness to commit acts of civil disobedience and war resistance;
• encouragement of significant resistance within the military itself (despite the fact that there is no military draft, there are significant conscription-like recruitment activities);
• the growth of a panoply of charitable organizations raising money for both anti-war public relations campaigns and humanitarian aid for the war’s victims;
• substantial involvement of the moral high-ground in the form of the clergy;
• and indeed an entire strain of popular culture suffused with anti-war passion

One final comment. Even were a movement to gain the momentum and zeal of the Vietnam-era anti-war movement, “push(ing BushCo) toward accepting the reality of the demise of the neocon dream” is about as likely an outcome as the imam of a Washington mosque succeeding in converting Paul Wolfowitz or Dick Cheney to Islam. Don’t persuade them; disempower them, ignore and sidestep their contemptible agenda in an expression of the popular will. Don’t ask the President to end the war, tell him it is over. Stop cooperating with the war effort in all ways possible.

Several thoughts on this MSNBC story. First, we’ve come a long way toward extrication when the mainstream media are asking when, not if, we are withdrawing. Framing it in terms of public opinion is problematic, though. My most potent reaction to the news that public support for the continuing US troop presence has fallen so far was to be enraged at the powerlessness of public opinion to have an influence even though Bush’s popularity is at a record low for this point in an incumbent’s second term (Yahoo! News) . One could argue that it is the numbers in the polls that are causing the Bush dysadministration to discuss their contingency plans for withdrawal at all, but this is a megalomanic leadership cabal with contempt for what the American people want… certainly when that is in disagreement with their own aims but even when the sheeple agree. Shouldn’t the withdrawal of public support turn into a demand to put a stop to the madness now? During the Vietnam era, as public opposition rose even to a far greater pitch than anything we have seen with respect to Iraq, we still had to blockade government buildings and troop transport trains and facilitate an underground railroad to spirit conscripts and deserters away to Canada to make the war stop. What is to be done simply because the tide has turned? Our elected representatives could at best waffle on appropriating funds for the war effort, but do you think that would stop the executive branch maniacs from finding a way to continue to prosecute their autistic intentions? Our ‘representative government’ is an oxymoron, it is clear.

Apart from whether the people have a right to have a war stopped when their opinion turns against it, though, I struggle with the fact that attacking Iraq was no more justified when it was a glint in Baby Bush’s eye and more like 1% or 2% of us, not 30, 50 or 60%, were declaring that it was not in our names. The measure of this immorality is not really a matter of the weight of public opinion, ever, is it? And especially not when public opinion itself has been so debased, when the powers of propaganda are so refined and the public mentality so execrably malleable as they have become in 21st-century Amerika.

So if we can’t reasonably expect the arrogant and autistic Bush cabal to pay any attention to the polls, why bother? The simple answer — the voting public themselves should be chastened by their own shift in public opinion. As the saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” To put it another, oft-quoted, way — “a people get the government they deserve“.

“Two peas in a pod may not be so friendly when planted in the ground and even two parts of the same plant, once separated may treat the former conjoined twin as an alien ‘enemy,’ according to a Penn State researcher. ” (Penn State via robot wisdom)

A Quicktime movie.

“Experience shows us that when we look at something with a certain attentiveness, we can feel the character and quality of the object in a way that a self-interested or token glance does not give.” — C.J. Moore, author of In Other Words: A Language Lover’s Guide to the Most Intriguing Words Around the World (International Herald Tribune via robot wisdom)

Tony Soprano and Crew Will Return for ’07 Season: “In a deal that will extend the run of the most successful series in the history of cable television for another year, HBO announced yesterday that The Sopranos will not end with its next season starting in March, but will continue with an additional eight episodes starting in January 2007.” (New York Times ) As a clue to what this is all about, it is in the business section of The Times, not the arts coverage. David Chase, guiding light of the show, had previously stated he felt he was nearing the end of his creative ideas for the show, but it became apparent it could be milked for substantially more…

Wife-Beatings in Africa (New York Times )

…Erotic images can turn you blind. (New Scientist) The results lead to calls to ban provocative roadside billboards to reduce traffic accidents.

The spray comprises “glatiramer acetate (Copaxone), an approved MS drug that acts as a decoy for errant immune-system attacks, and Protollin, an adjuvant that stimulates innate immunity”. In essence, as I understand it, it provokes an immune response in the brain and endeavors to protect normal brain tissue from that response, so that only the amyloid plaques are scavenged.

No patience for wading through the hyperbole? The Hype Machine aggregates all the songs other mp3 blogs are offering for download.

Much media buzz (Google News ) about a study by the Bay Area Center for Voting Research ranking the ‘most liberal’ and ‘most conservative’ cities in the US. Detroit and Provo Utah head the respective lists. Most local press coverage of the findings went no further than merely reporting on the ranking their own city received; top-10 or top-25 lists, or any broader perspective, are remarkably lacking, with a few notable exceptions which discuss the overall trends and comment on the methodology:

It seems clear that ‘liberal’, for the purposes of this study, should not nearly be taken as synonymous with ‘progressive’ or ‘lefty’ and largely reflects the voting pattern of urban minority voting blocs. Here is the BACVR site where you can read more about the study and access overall lists of both ends of the spectrum, as Microsoft Word documents.

You go, Cindy! Readers: unless you enjoy being sick to your stomach, don’t read that fatuous snakeoil salesman Bush’s contemptible comments about his empathy for the losses of American mothers and fathers and his determination to honor the dead by continuing to kill more. (Yahoo! News)

If you are so inclined (I mean inclined away from your usual horizontal position at that time of night), get to a dark place outside after 4 a.m. Eastern time, 1 a.m. Pacific time tonight.

Transformation to a curable infection? The problem with the current strategy, antiretroviral drug therapy, for HIV infection is that it only kills the virus when it is replicating, but a large pool of dormant infected cells in the infected patient’s body lie in wait. These periodicaly get reactivated and produce fresh virus. Thus, unless every last dormant HIV-containing cell is destroyed, the patient must take antiretroviral therapy for life to address any potential future recurrence of active infection.

Now it turns out that one of our mainstay anticonvulsant medications, depakene, is markedly effective at eradicating dormant HIV-infected cells. In the current study, three of four patients given standard concentrations of depakene for three months showed an average 75% reduction in the size of the pool of infected dormant cells. So far there is no good explanation fo why this should work, but there’s no looking a gift horse in the mouth in AIDS research. Finding strategies that work against the ‘dormant pool’ is a preoccupation of AIDS researchers these days, now that they’ve got the hang of current antiretroviral therapies; I think what researchers must be doing is throwing all sorts of pharmacological agents at the problem in hopes that something will serendipitously prove effective and safe, as depakene seems to promise to be.

As a psychiatrist, I am intrigued by this finding because there is a pool of HIV-infected patients who have already been receiving therapeutic doses of depakene for many years; namely, those HIV (+) patients who have bipolar mood swings or any of a variety of other conditions with mood lability or instability I treat. (Apart from those who come by their HIV infection and their mood instability independently, the infection itself can promote an organic mood disorder. I was for a time earlier in my career the psychiatric consultant to a major urban HIV clinic, so I have seen many such patients.) Depakene and its derivatives are mainstay mood stabilizers in the psychiatric pharmacopoeia. Furthermore, I am sure there are a significant number of HIV (+) patients who receive depakene for seizure disorders, either related or not to their immunodeficiency disease. Someone ought to look back at the depakene-receiving patients’ viral loads and survival rates as compared with those receiving different mood stabilizers, other psychiatric therapies or no psychopharmacological therapy at all.

Texas law allows marriage-by-blog

I appreciate the sentiments, but he could have dramatized them more effectively…

You don’t say…

Inevitable and imminent, says Robert Baer in The Atlantic:

James MacGuire, a former Corporation for Public Broadcasting executive, writes in New Criterion:

I have been following the Atkins case and related concerns. Ironically, one of the issues was whether the compelling stimulation of collaborating on his death sentence appeal accelerated his intellectual development out of the officially retarded range.

“Microsoft’s efforts to fight counterfeiting have hit another snag with the posting of a new method claimed to get around a Windows piracy check.” (CNET) Apparently all you have to do is run the downloaded GenuineCheck.exe tool in Windows 2000 compatibility mode and it will return a valid code. Microsoft will probably fix this at some point, but it works for now.

The tsunami last December reawakened memories of a recurring nightmare I had as a child of fleeing a towering wall of water roaring toward me on the beach. But a tidal wave, as I learned in the aftermath of that disaster, while massive and deadly powerful, is not necessarily that towering. These ‘rogue waves’ in excess of 100 feet in height, on the other hand, are the stuff of my nightmares…

Renowned autism researcher and theorist Simon Baron-Cohen writes in the New York Times:

“Ron Howard, in director’s chair, has heard from concerned Christians as he turns The Da Vinci Code into a film.” (New York Times ) The movie studio has dropped a veil of secrecy over the project. Officially they say that it is only because the book’s plot is so well-known. But privately, it is acknowledged that it is because of the explosive challenge to doctrinal Christian dogma it presents.

Dr Berti’s study really has little to say to the medical community or even the lay public. Whoever will think this is news after being familiar with Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, published in 1986?! And psychiatrists have never felt that the denial (and the related phenomenon of neglect) seen in stoke victims was a psychological problem; it fits none of the characteristics of psychological denial. Furthermore, denial of illness and the need for treatment, even in the face of profound dysfunction and inability to care for oneself, is frequently seen in some of the more severe psychiatric illnesses, notably schizophrenic conditions. I suspect these supposedly psychological cases too are caused by dysfunction in the specialized parts of the brain necessary for the recognition of dysfunction and debility.

All Seven Crew Alive. I had been following this urgent rescue mission closely, hoping we would not see a repeat of the horror of the Kirsk disaster of several years ago when Russian pride prevented them from calling for international help in a timely fashion and 118 crew members perished.

Dr Berti’s study really has little to say to the medical community or even the lay public. Whoever will think this is news after being familiar with Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, published in 1986?! And psychiatrists have never felt that the denial (and the related phenomenon of neglect) seen in stoke victims was a psychological problem; it fits none of the characteristics of psychological denial. Furthermore, denial of illness and the need for treatment, even in the face of profound dysfunction and inability to care for oneself, is frequently seen in some of the more severe psychiatric illnesses, notably schizophrenic conditions. I suspect these supposedly psychological cases too are caused by dysfunction in the specialized parts of the brain necessary for the recognition of dysfunction and debility.

Thousands of people in Japan marked the sixtieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. 140,000 were dead by the end of 1945 from blast and radiation, with a similar toll from the Nagasaki bombing three days after. The Japanses count the Hiroshima toll now as standing at 242,000. Neither the argument that it was not inherently more heinous than the impact of conventional weaponry such as the firebombing of Dresden nor the argument that it saved lives by shortening the war justify the unleasing of nuclear terror in these first and only uses of atomic weaponry against human targets. Hiroshima Day should stand as a ‘day of infamy’ just as we consider Pearl Harbor Day to be; Americans need to remember it with as much awe, revulsion and resolve as the Japanese do.

Related: Weblogger Susan Kitchens remembers too. She is ‘blogging like it’s 1945’, chronicling the dawn of the age of atomic war as if the events were happening now in realtime, just displaced by 60 years. (2020 Hindsight)

Related: Cindy Sheehan, as depicted here via daily kos, is another hero we should be celebrating for her outspoken exposure of the fact that the emperor has no clothes, as far as the Iraq war goes.

A journalist quoted in the article put it succinctly:

“Sky watchers, be alert: the space shuttle Discovery and the International Space Station are going to fly in tandem over parts of the United States this weekend.” (NASA)

Christopher Hitchens writes in Slate that everyone is tiptoeing around John Roberts’ faith; he’s tired of it:

He ends up, however, having more vituperation in store for Antonin Scalia than Roberts. [thanks, walker]

I apologize (belatedly) for FmH’s inaccessibility most of the day Tuesday. We had what was perhaps the most dramatic and violent thunderstorm I had ever seen in Boston on Monday night, and apparently a lightning strike brought down the microwave link at the top of the Prudential tower upon which a number of Boston area ISPs depend for their connectivity to the web. As a result, FmH’s domain was unreachable.

Lovely storm, in any case. I went walking barefoot in the bombast and the torrential downpour around 12:30 a.m. Among other things, it washed the mulch out of many a garden and the gravel off many a driveway in my neighborhood.

The Columbia Journalism Review looks at the role of journalistic credulity in spreading Big Pharma’s marketing lies:

The skinny on the multiple varieties. Did you know Diet Coke is the New Coke formula (without the sugar)?

Fascinating weblog on cognitive science.

A reminiscence: “To those Americans old enough to remember March 28, 1979, the nuclear meltdown at Three-Mile-Island was, like September 11, a tragic day when America lost some of her innocence. On this day, public confidence in the safety of nuclear power was decimated in a cloud of toxic blue smoke.” With fascinating “powers-of-ten”-like sat photos.

Thoughtful and impassioned piece from Salon’s television critic in response to the evolving denouement on Six Feet Under, which is the only thing I watch on television these days and which is near completion of its final season. Caution: spoilers! Don’t follow the link if you are a SFU viewer who hasn’t yet seen the most recent episode unless you hate surprises.

And, by the way, a note to other webloggers who write about dramatic surprise plot developments in ther favorite TV shows. You often act as if there are only two classes of TV viewers — those who don’t care about the shows you are writing about (and thus won’t mind that you’ve spilled the beans) and those who saw it last night exactly when you did (and thus won’t mind that you’ve spilled the beans). Haven’t you ever heard of TiVo? VCRs? the concept of the spoiler? Just by scanning the weblogs I regularly read, no fault of my own, I could not avoid learning what happened on this week’s SFU despite the fact that I am three weeks back in watching the show on TiVo. Thanks alot.

I have to admit to some schadenfreude at the news that Central Asian despot Islam Karimov has ordered the US to vacate the airfield in Uzbekistan which has been, according to military experts, an indispensible staging area in the occupation of Afghanistan. Since apparently none of the surrounding Central Asian states offers a viable convenient alternative, we certainly put all our eggs in one tyrant’s basket.

This should be seen as a template for one of the ways in which the US has progressively squandered the post-9/11 goodwill of the world as it has become more and more clear that the Central Asian wars have little to do with the fatuous stated goals of spreading democracy and freedom and everything to do with spreading American hegemonism. Karimov has apparently made this decision in consultation with both Russia and China. US military spokespeople have, however, put an incredible and self-serving spin on the decision. We wave aside principle and whore ourselves by getting in bed with a dictator whenever it has suited us. Nevertheless, by a verbal sleight of hand, Pentagon talking heads cite recent US support for humanitarian aid to Uzbek refugees, as the impetus for Karimov’s decision, evincing that the Bush dysadministration had made the “right choice” to favor the spread of democracy even at great potential cost and inconvenience to ourselves. US WoT® strategists are sitting scratching their heads about how the US could have been brought to our knees by this contemptible petty dictator who didn’t fully realize that his own geopolitical aspirations were not supposed to matter as long as US interests said otherwise. Oh well, the score is Coalition of the Unwilling 1, US 0.

Not very important in the overall scheme of things to ‘lose’ Uzbekistan , you might think? A parallel change of temper could have the US out of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia (where King Fahd’s death might be an opportunity for an upsurge of fundamentalist antagonism for the royal family) next…

Arianna takes on Judy Miller, via Daily Kos: ” Those who think Judith Miller is some kind of hero, let’s not forget who we are talking about. Arianna reminds us…” This is just jaw-dropping and enraging, if true. [via acm]

Why should it still be news that self-fulfilling prophecy plays a role in a variety of illnesses??? These are the conditions where it is most obvious and should be least controversial, on the borderland between mind and body. More daring are similar assertions about illnesses we ‘know’ are ‘real’ such as cancer and heart disease…

“Alan Richman traveled 23,750 miles and consumed more than 150,000 calories while taking the measure of 162 burgers across the country—with one goal: to find you the best damned assemblage of ground beef and buns this country serves up.” (GQ [via kottke] )

(Metroblogging San Francisco)

Arianna takes on Judy Miller, via Daily Kos: ” Those who think Judith Miller is some kind of hero, let’s not forget who we are talking about. Arianna reminds us…” This is just jaw-dropping and enraging, if true. [via acm]

Weird as he may be and anathema to most serious chess players, Bobby Fischer’s variation on chess is attracting attention in the tournament world. In the game, the ranks of pawns are lined up as always, but white player gets to arrange the other row of pieces behind the pawns in random order (except that the king must be between the two rooks and the bishops must be on opposite colors). The black pieces are set up to mirror the positions of the white. The point is to free chess from the rote play of memorized openings, since there are 960 possible starting positions for the game (thus, the game is sometimes referred to as Chess960; it is also known as Fischer Random Chess). “Competitors live and die by skill alone from the very first move.” Fischer had proposed the game in 1996 and it finally caught on in Europe in 2001. As this Wired coverage points out, it also holds strong appeal for chess programmers for the same reason; chess programs’ analysis of the openings in a conventional game relies on a digital lookup table version of an opening book. It is not clear yet if the game tips the odds toward either human or computer in a person-machine match, as compared with conventional chess. Fischer, now in jail, continues to publicize his chess variant, and announced he does not play conventional chess any more. Anatoly Karpov has just publicly challenged Fischer to a match at his own game. (A rudimentary chess player, I would do as well at Chess960 as at conventional chess, since I have memorized exactly zero standard openings…)

I have previously written about this here, but August and September are crucial months for organizing around opt-out issues:

M.G. Bloche and J.H. Marks (New Engl. J. Med. 2005 353:6): The International Committee of the Red Cross and others agencies charge that the aggressive ‘counter-resistance measures of US military interrogators at Guantanamo constitute cruel and inhuman treatment and torture. A number of studies are starting to explore the complicity of medical perssonnel with such abuses. One aspect of the violations of detainee rights has been the sharing with interrogators of the confidential data on prisoners’ health status (gathered by healthcare workers either in the course of healthcare of the prisoners or explicitly for intelligence purposes) to shape interrogation techniques. Sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation, sexual provocation and humiliation, displays of contempt for Islamic symbols, beatings, and feigning (or real!) efforts to kill the detainee are among the approaches which might be chosen or shaped by health and mental health data on the particular prisoner.

Although denied by the Pentagon, evidence exists that interrogators did in fact use detainees’ health data to design their interventions. An inquiry by the inspector general of the US Navy found that access was supposedly carefully controlled at Guantanamo but interrogators sometimes had easy access to health data of their prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. But Bloche and Marks’ study found that the claim that medical confidentiality of Guantanamo detainees was shielded is sharply at odds with the facts. A policy statement from the military command with jurisdiction over GTMO instructed health care providers that communications from enemy detainees were not protected by medical doctor-patient privilege, and that providers had an obligation to convey any information germane to US ‘national security objectives’ obtained in the course of their work to security personnel. Behavioral science consultants had ready access to health records and also helped shape and implement interrogation techniques, in effect acting as a bridge between privileged health data and intelligence agendas. I have also heard from a different source that, to evade the stringent standards of physician-patient privilege, other non-MD health professionals with less explicit codes of ethics were used in their place or alongside the doctors ministering to these prisoners. Interrogators themselves have in fact had access to health data on their prisoners, and psychiatrists and psychologists participate in designing and implementing interrogation strategies with resistant prisoners involving extreme stress.

Thunderwords of Finnegans Wake:

Related:

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
DA
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
DA
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands

I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon – O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine a la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih

— T.S. Eliot,
from “V. What the Thunder Said,”
The Waste Land

Addendum: The Nielsen-Haydens are offering teeshirts, mouse pads etc. with the ten thunder words emblazoned upon them here. (Scroll down to the bottom past the rest of their swag.) Sport your credo and support a worthy website.

You can download a PDF of the information to print out as a flyer.

“When we buy into geriatric rock, prime talents pay the price” (Boston Globe)

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