Tibetan Buddhist Internet Radio

“…One of the most breathtaking ever built” says one architectural critic. (BBC)

McCain is clearly positioning himself to pick up the pieces of Bush’s failure in 2008. I read the “…have the team that he wants around him…” comment as being about letting him have enough rope. Unfortunately, whether it is McCain or a Democrat who will inherit the mess, as the Bush administration fails, so goes the country and the world in the meanwhile.

A new weblog — Mind Hacks: “Neuroscience and psychology tricks to find out what’s going on inside your brain. Mind Hacks is a book by Tom Stafford and Matt Webb.“

From the Sunday Times of London:

“I’m not particularly proud of being visceral, but I am admitting it. My attacks on George Bush have nothing to do with science or the scientific method. I just can’t stand the man’s style, the way he swaggers and struts and smirks and the way he looks sly and deceitful and the way Americans can’t see it. I’m irritated by the way they think he’s just a regular guy you can have a drink with.” [thanks, abby]

Spoiler alert: If you are a fan of The Wire and have last night’s episode on TiVo and haven’t watched it yet, don’t read any further, and certainly don’t read the New York Times story to which the blink points. Not only does HBO seem to have no compunctions about killing off major characters in many of its dramatic series, but the actors seem to find out only when they get the scripts for the episode in which they meet their end. [As to the details, I actually thought Stringer Bell wwas going to get whacked by crony Avon Barksdale, not Omar.]

The article discusses the ‘insanity defense’, which has been based on 19th century science bearing on individual responsibility for one’s actions.

The insanity defense has fallen into disfavor because of the public perception that it is abused, especially since the acquittal of John Hinckley in his attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan. But, as a neuroscience-grounded psychiatrist (it is forensic psychiatrists who evaluate and testify on the criminal responsibility of criminal suspects), I grapple with questions of whether my patients have the ability to conform themselves to standards of right and wrong all the time. I support a modern, scientifically-informed insanity defense as much as I decry its abuse as a slick defense tactic. Those who are legitimately not responsible for their actions are entitled to the defense and ought not to be penalized because others will misuse the insanity plea. On first blush, there is nothing special about the insanity plea in this regard. The burden of providing opportunities for justice inevitably leaves loopholes in many areas. The answer is to close the loopholes rather than throwing out the baby with the bathwater. But there is something special about a plea of insanity, which is the public’s lack of understanding of the nature of mental illness (and, for that matter, of free will). In general, psychiatric disturbance is stigmatized and its bearer is seen as ‘bad rather than mad’. Much as there is a special burden on the court system not to err against suspects of color because of the historical reality of racism in our society, there ought to be a parallel burden not to err against mentally ill suspects.

Related:

How the Justice System Criminalizes Mental Illness — Brent Staples (New York Times op-ed)

And:

In a timely coincidence comes this story in which it is suggested that bizarre and dangerous behavior not otherwise easily understood (although not in this case direct violence towards others) may relate to the relapse of a disease process. (Yahoo! News)

You know about Google Suggest by now, right? It is a page with a Google searchbox which drops down a list of autocompletions, based on popularity, of the search term you are starting to type into the box. Here is the Suggested Google Alphabet (he means the Google Suggest Alphabet, more properly):

And Jerry Kindall suggests an ego-ranking based on Google Suggest. Every term gets a score x.y in which x is the number of letters you have to type in to get your name on the drop-down list, and y is the position of your name in the list when it shows up. Gelwan is 8.4 and Follow Me Here is 11.1, for example. Keep in mind, however, that those rankings change with the relative popularity of the search.

This I don’t understand. With food supplies dwindling at the Space Station, NASA says that if there is more than around a two-week delay in the scheduled Christmas Day Russian resupply mission, they will have to evacuate the astronauts. But if they can mount a mission to evacuate at that point, why can’t they mount a mission to merely deliver some more food??

I am surprised at The Times [or should I be?]. It is obvious that it was an appointment that was bound to run into confirmation difficulties from the inception, and not because of any domestic help issues. I imagine the Democrats signalled that his recent questionable performance in training security forces for our WoT®, which role Bush did not even mention in announcing the appointment, was not going to be passed over in the confirmation hearings. Then there are questions about shady financial dealings and rumors that high level Homeland Security staff were panic-stricken about the appointment. Hasty choice indeed.

It has been pointed out that the real loser in the Kerik debacle may be Rudy Giuliani. Kerik was his protegé and he was pushing for the nomination. What price will he pay for embarrassing the imperious Bush, who can never take responsibility for his own mistakes?

Healthy But Laments ‘Too Many Doughnuts’: “A team of 10 doctors led by Dr. Richard Tubb, Bush’s personal physician, and Dr. Kenneth Cooper, head of the Cooper Aerobics Center, issued a statement saying they ‘find him to be fit for duty and have every reasonable expectation that he will remain fit for duty for the duration of his presidency.'” (Reuters) I continue to maintain that the public is as much entitled to an annual accounting of the mental health of its commander-in-chief as the physical, but apparently no evaluation was done and no conclusions drawn in this sphere. All we know is that he is a good liar and a sniggering smirker.

Martin Kelley, a Pennsylvania Quaker who edits Nonviolence.org, was called by a CBS publicist with a tip that CBS was “doing a program on an issue that’s central to Nonviolence.org’s mandate: conscientious resistance to military service.” He posted a brief entry on this, thinking it would interest his readers, but has been linked to by the “who’s who of blogging gliteratti” as exemplifying the vast left wing media conspiracy. Kelley begs to differ, and avows that the media court the top political weblogs all the time.

The site has thoughtful primers on the philosophy of nonviolence, its history, a ‘pacifist dictionary’, war tax resistance, conscientious objection, direct action, voluntary simplicity and resistance to the Iraq war and militarism in general. And he could use small PayPal donations.

And:

Martin Kelley’s Ranter site is a ‘“blog” commentary on many topics, most notably Quaker theology & peace issues. If I had to be pigeon-holed I’d say that I’m a Post-Liberal Christian, a Hicksite Conservative Quaker, and an Emergent-Church curious Gen-Xer.”

Yes, ‘accountable’. Three years of his life (less time off for good behavior) = the lost fifty?sixty? years of his victim’s. That’s American accounting for you. And American ‘mercy’ as well.

Healthy But Laments ‘Too Many Doughnuts’: “A team of 10 doctors led by Dr. Richard Tubb, Bush’s personal physician, and Dr. Kenneth Cooper, head of the Cooper Aerobics Center, issued a statement saying they ‘find him to be fit for duty and have every reasonable expectation that he will remain fit for duty for the duration of his presidency.'” (Reuters) I continue to maintain that the public is as much entitled to an annual accounting of the mental health of its commander-in-chief as the physical, but apparently no evaluation was done and no conclusions drawn in this sphere. All we know is that he is a good liar and a sniggering smirker.

Also:

On the 56th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, The Progress Report explores the US’s declining moral leadership.

Mental Notes is a weblog by a Texas psychiatrist. In his sidebar, he has compiled a list of other weblogs by psychiatrists. In addition to listing mine, here are his other links:

• Shrinkette
• Rebel Doctor
• PsychNotes
• Brainworld
• Dr Jones
• Thoughts from the Headoc
• Adrian Warncock
• Intueri
• Interest Free

I have browsed them a little. It should not surprise you that they are quite diverse from both stylistic and content perspectives. Other than for completeness’ sake, some would never belong on any self-respecting blogroll of mine. Several are eloquent and fascinating. Please consider sending me any other links to psychiatrists’ weblogs you find, so I can keep the list up to date.

Here’s what Donna Wentworth says in a recent post to her Copyfight weblog:

Here is what I have said from the inception of FmH:

Early on, when it still seemed necessary to explain to people what this weblogging stuff was all about, this was on the main page of FmH. Now the link takes you to my “About FmH” page. My usage of the term was already old by 2001 when I revisited it in response to a reader’s question.

You will notice that I use ‘blink’ simply as a contraction of web+link, while Wentworth is making more of a distinction between the one-liners and the extended weblog entries. Perhaps she was not reading weblogs when almost all blinks were one-liners and weblogs were exactly that — annotated logs of one’s websurfing, so that others in your social circle could see what was interesting you. That’s what I saw when I woke up to the weblog phenomenon over the latter half of 1999, and that was the nature of the weblogs that directly inspired me — honeyguide, camworld, rebecca’s pocket, and the late lamented robot wisdom, for instance. While there were also online diaries or journals as well, the two phenomena did not converge for awhile longer. It was a long time before I dared to think readers would be receptive to any post longer than about a three-sentence paragraph.

The only notice my usage of the term ‘blink’ got was a peevish comment once on MetaFilter from someone who found it too cutesy. (I can no longer find it by searching MeFi, alas.) I couldn’t take too much umbrage at him, however, because his dig at me was in the context of trashing the fact that the word ‘weblog’ had universally been replaced by ‘blog’, a phenomenon about which I share his disdain. [I know, I know, I’m not being consistent. Maybe if ‘blink’ became overwhelmingly popular, I wouldn’t like it either. Story of my life… — FmH] And no one has even deigned to notice that I proposed using it as a verb as well.

Since to my knowledge the usage of ‘blink’ has so thoroughly failed to take hold, I wonder how in the world Bruce Umbaugh recognizes I should get the credit.

“When someone famous or otherwise notable dies, The Memory Hole often files a FOIA request for his or her FBI file. We post the ones we receive, but not everyone has a file. Mainly for the aid of other researchers, this page contains a running list of deceased people who are not the subject of a file, according to the FBI’s FOIA office.” (Memory Hole via pas-au-delà) [It’s a short list. — FmH]

Most of you have heard by now of the story of the potential oil spill from the breakup of a disabled Malaysian freighter in the Aleutians yesterday, and the Coast Goard helicopter crash during the attempt to rescue the stranded crew. I first heard coverage of this on NPR and puzzled over the name of the island where the calamity has ensued — Unalaska. At first I could not figure out, literal me, why they kept referring to this as an Alaskan story if it happened at an Un-Alaskan location. Does anyone know how Unalaska came by its name?

My prayers go out, by the way, for rapid containment of the oil spill. From what I understand, No. 6 fuel oil is nasty stuff, and there are 500,000 gallons of it on the foundering ship.

Another fascinating fact I learned in the NPR coverage was that the nearby town, Dutch Harbor AK, is apparently the US’ largest producer of processed seafood products (like the fish that goes into fast food fish sandwiches).

Adam, in sending me this poignant story, mentioned other anecdotes he has seen establishing that animals grieve their dead companions. This search (Google ) will be revealing if you want to pursue it further (although, sorry, because of the syntax I used, it includes some items about grieving for departed animals as well as grieving by animals). Some of what I find poignant in this article, however, lies in the anthropocentric attitude it betrays. An earlier version of the article actually had it in the headline; now it was altered (because of such criticism, I wonder??) but it is still the premise of the article that it is acceptable that the zoo keepers decided to allow the gorillas to mourn their loss. I know that in this instance, since Babs was euthanized, they had to deliberately determine to bring the body back into the gorillas’ enclosure for that purpose, but should it really be a matter for our discretion whether the animals we steward are allowed to grieve?

Also:

Although it is not exactly clear that the mental activity detected represents images flashing through the monkeys’ brains, it is suggestive of being a precursor of conceptual representation and thus closer to human thought than many had appreciated. The human ability for empathy for others of our kind is built on our capacity for a ‘theory of mind’; we can conceive of the mental experiences that must go through another’s mind based on our sense of congruence with our own inner experiences, to which we have introspective access. Does this study help us to conceive better of what must be going through a monkey’s mind under certain circumstances, implying that we can begin to have a theory of monkey mind and thus a more empathic connection to our primate cousins than otherwise?

By the way. if Spec. Wilson is, as described in press coverage, “a disgruntled soldier,” there were hundreds or thousands gathered to hear Rumsfeld. What most of the media clips of this interchange did not include was the rousing wolf-whistles and cheers that went up from the assembled masses in response to his insolent question.

“The barriers that are meant to be protecting the world against killer diseases and nuclear war are crumbling, warns a high-powered report to the United Nations.” (New Scientist)

A Sentence: “Millions of inscrutable e-mail messages are clogging corporate computers by setting off requests for clarification, and many of the requests, in turn, are also chaotically written, resulting in whole cycles of confusion.” (New York Times )

Life Imitates Spam? (New Scientist)

In the ascendency of evolutionary psychology, recent decades have clarified how much influence one’s hereditary endowment exerts over behavioral factors. The current study focuses on socially responsible behavior, a.k.a. “being nice”, and finds the expected hereditary effect but also a robust influence of upbringing (New Scientist).

Does this surprise anyone, that one’s upbringing and, perhaps even more important, peer influences can affect one’s social competencies or kindness regardless of what temperamental variables one has inherited? The article phrases things interestingly in talking about genes for socially responsible behavior. Usually, it is expresed in the converse manner, that genes influence antisocial behavior or delinquency. Is this just a matter of semantics, or of the glass being half full vs. half empty? It seems to me something basic is at stake in conceptualizing what is commonly referred to as “human nature.” Are we inherently ‘good’, with flaws or lacks in our genetic makeup necessary to cause us to act in an antisocial manner? Or does it take something specific in our constitution to influence us to behave in a prosocial manner? Furthermore, there are implied notions of social structure in deciding what is antisocial. Prosocial behavior, as the evolutionary biologists grapple with it, has several distinct components that have to be explained separately. First there is cooperation and mutuality; it is rather easy to see how that conveys a selective advantage. But quite distinct from that as a foundation of the social contract is altruistic behavior (Google ), which has presented more of a challenge to explain evolutionarily.

I am actually surprised that a critic of the study is quoted as being surprised by the finding of an environmental impact on prosocial behavior. He comments that, if true, this is different from other personality variables. But it seems to me that prosociality or antisociality is not a personality variable, i.e. not a temperamental factor. It is rather, fundamentally, a way of behaving or a set of behaviors. It may be shoddy thinking to equate ‘niceness’ with social responsibility. Furthermore, antisocial behavior may not actually always be related to not being ‘nice’. The neurocognitive machinery for empathy may have alot to do with it as well or instead, and it is not a given that empathy and ‘niceness’ or kindness are conflated.

“The finding may explain why teenagers act compulsively and take more risks. It has been seized on by campaigners who want to ban the death penalty for under-18s in the US.” (New Scientist) Of course, the fact that teenagers have difficulty envisioning the consequences of their actions is no news to a parent or a teacher of one…

And:

Responsible Chefs Urge Consumers to Choose ‘Good’ Fish:

The FCC crackdown on media indecency is fueled by a dramatic increase in public concern, right? The statistics would seem to say so, but apart from the public outcry after the Janet Jackson NFL debacle, more than 98% of indecency complaints to the FCC in the past two years have been from one advocacy group, the Parents’ Television Council. (Media Week) Should we let, essentially, 23 people dictate the ‘community decency standards’ by which the FCC is supposed to be governed?

The Rolling Stone list is here

This is a commentary in Roanoke VA’s newspaper by poet Colleen Redman, whose poem My President Bush Dream appeared here on FmH last month.

The author may be forgiven for her Proustian aspirations (or was the title the responsibility of her editor??); her article grapples with one of the unappreciated distressing issues of modern life, with which I have been struggling both professionally and personally.

A writer working on a book about mid-life memory and memory loss, she goes on to note that the embarrassment and inconvenience of these “senior moments” hide a more primitive emotion of fear that they are a portent of further memory loss to come, and of “decades of dependence, of life with a diminished mind trapped in a still vigorous body.” Now in my early fifties and having the same changes in my memory, I resonate with this. And as a psychiatrist caring for patients who have descended into the deep memory loss of Alzheimer’s and other dementias, I am even more spooked on a daily basis. Even though I can, intellectually, quote you the statistics, it is difficult not to be viscerally misled by the skewed sample of aging I see in my work. And so are my patients. Those who, even though not profoundly demented, are experiencing some memory difficulty inevitably ask me, “Doc, please tell me, is it Alzheimer’s?” (or, as one patient put it to me recently, “…Oldtimer’s?) But most of us do not even whisper these unspoken fears or, if we do, we frame them as humorous.

The author suggests that, in this ‘information age’, memory loss and lack of easy access to your own databank feel like more of a vulnerability than they were in the past. I find this dubious, however, since self-knowledge has always been the essential human attribute and awareness of its impairment likely to have been distressing since the origin of consciousness. However, the information we must coordinate and access in modern life may arguably be more diverse and voluminous than in ‘the old days.’ This may be in part the price we pay for the breakdown of community and family stability in the modern world — there is less of the routine, unchanging, the comfortably familiar to tether us. In that sense, experiences may tax memory more than they would have done for our forebears of one or two generations previous. What counterbalances this, however, is the evidence that mental activity ‘exercises’ memory and keeps it strong; that intellectually active individuals develop dementia at a lower rate than the intellectually stultified casualties of modernity. (Recall the research finding about aging nuns who do crossword puzzles?)

Another sense in which the information age is a hedge against memory loss, of course, is technological aids. Both in my professional and my personal life, there is less trivial data I have to remember as long as I can carry around my laptop or my PDA or access an internet search engine. I am reminded of a vignette in one of the Sherlock Holmes novels in which, if I remember it correctly (grin — forgive me! In an essay about memory loss, it is hard not to be self-referential!), he is annoyed that Watson has told him that the earth orbits the sun because the fact, useless to his daily life, takes up valuable space in his memory. Although there is no evidence that human memory has a fixed capacity that can get filled to the brim, this is an instinctual reaction, and one which is reinforced by the electronic memory metaphor. In this sense, I have at times sardonically referred to my PDA as a peripheral brain and think in terms of dumping off less essential data to this peripheral storage. This works better for some forms of data than others. For example, just considering the two most common functions of the PDA, no matter how completely my appointment schedule is entered into my PDA’s calendar, unless I am going to have alarms going off all the time I have to keep some notion of the shape of my day in mind. On the other hand, between the contact lists on my PDA and my cellphone, I no longer have more than a handful of phone numbers memorized. It sometimes seems that I am well on the way to the obsolescence of the ten-digit phone number (and why not? Who accesses websites by their IP addresses?). Of course, there is nothing unique about using a PDA for this purpose. I relied on my Daytimer for a decade or so before I got my first handheld (an HP 95LX, if memory serves). In a more recent and profound change, with the instant information access of the internet, my peripheral brain in a broader sense now be said to be embodied by a weblike network extending around the world. Could the legacy of the ‘information age’ be that memory is becoming a property of the hive mind instead of the individual?

The essayist interviews Oliver Sacks about why we are so bothered by memory lapses. Sacks points out that it also has much to do with our personality style. Someone who prides themselves on control and order may be less tolerant than someone more “easygoing”, he observes. I am certainly in the former category, so much dependent on my intellectual functions for my self-valuation that it is difficult for me to recognize that anyone could be “easygoing” about their mental capacities! (That may go a long ways in explaining why I have so much difficulty with George Bush…) For a moment, the essayist feels reassured, that her memory loss is normal, and all she has to do is get used to it.

The article makes some important stipulations about the multifaceted nature of memory function and dysfunction. Memory for names, words, facts, for procedural capabilities (“how-to memory”), prospective obligations, are all differently mediated and differentially susceptible to impairment. Perhaps because she is a writer, she pays far less attention to an entire other realm, nonverbal memory, equallly complex and in parallel with the verbal. I wonder — is the fact that I often find the face or the voice of someone I meet familiar because I have reached a point in fifty-plus years of encounters that everyone is virtually certain to remind me of someone else? or is it more that I can no longer retrieve the nonverbal memory behind the sensation of familiarity with as much precision as I once could?

The author goes on to describe her pursuit of a comprehensive neuropsycholigical evaluation of her memory difficulties which confirms that she has some deficits worse than those considered typical for her age range. One of the specialists she confers with pushes the hypothesis that such complaints often relate to mild traumatic brain injuries. She scoffs at first but realizes on reflection that, between childhood horseback riding and horseplay with her brother, she has certainly shaken her brain around abit. In reality, head trauma preferentially affects attentional processes, but the results are often mistaken for memory difficulty. Separate from memory function and equally complex, the machinery for attention is crucial. To recall something, one must not only store it effectively and access it efficiently on demand but must pay attention — which involves focusing, filtering out the competing and the extraneous, efficiently shifting when demanded, etc. etc. — to it sufficiently to acquire the memory in the first place. Looking back at my discussion above of the relationship between memory problems and the conditions of modernity, it is strikingly evident how susceptible attentional processes are to interference by the constant datastream overload to which modern life subjects us. Furthermore, there is some evidence that attentional processes are quite vulnerable to other erosions of our information-processing capacities by modern life which are more of a neurochemical, organic nature, e.g. due to accumulating environmental toxins and dietary effects. In this light, I have long felt that the attention deficit disorder concept — with which I have been clinically involved since it was recognized in its modern sense around two decades ago — is so overly broad as to be clinically meaningless. While there is a real entity of ADHD that involves physiological and neurochemical dysfunction in the brain’s attentional circuitry, most of the patients diagnosed with this disorder or ‘recognizing’ it in themselves are really just at sea with the information processing demands of their lives. (Not to mention those for whom it is merely a pretext, consciously or unconsciously, to earn a stimulant prescription — which, by the way, will help almost anyone feel and function better, ADHD or not, although in a self-fulfilling-prophecy manner, benefit from a stimulant will often ‘confirm’ the diagnosis in the mind of the patient or the prescribing clinician.)

The issue of head traumas is critical, in my opinion, and often neglected. Whenever I see the dramatic cognitive deficits that occur after serious head traumas — e.g. in a fall or a motor vehicle accident, or the even more dramatic entity of dementia pugilistica after the repeated blows to the head incurred in prizefighting — I wonder about the cumulative effects of more subtle, easily overlooked knocks to the head I would venture to say we all incur throughout life. Think about it; how many times have you hit your head, even without loss of consciousness or even “seeing stars”? There is a selection bias here; if a neuropsychologist presses you to recall childhood head trauma, memory will usually serve. This would be a very very difficult hypothesis for which to design a research protocol (since you cannot very well follow a population prospectively for the thirty or forty years necessary; and even if you had the will and the funding to do so, most mild head traumas go unnoticed and leave no telltale signs on imaging or lab studies) but I am convinced of the likelihood that cumulative mild head trauma is very important to deficits in cognitive functioning. I was knocked senseless at least a number of times during my youth playing touch football (no helmet), being body-checked or tackled during steal-the-flag or ring-o-levio [does anyone know what that is anymore?], taking a spill off my bicycle or while skiing (no helmet), or wrestling with my brother. Call me paranoid if you will, but I have told my children, for example, not to ‘head’ the ball when they play soccer. We are born with a fixed number of neurons, and conserving them is one of the unrecognized priorities of modern life, it seems to me. As the author’s consultant suggests, direct knocks to the head might not even be necessary to experience brain damage. Rapid acceleration-deceleration and rotational torque on the brain can also be injurious. Are we ‘moderns’ more frequently doing things to the CNS that outstrip its evolutionary protections? Think of the reports, for example, on the nasty G-shock to which the brain is subjected during roller coaster rides.

The author does a good job of reconciling herself to the alarming reality of her memory difficulties and why their onset and recognition took the course they did. She shares the experience that my wife and many of the women friends with whom she has compared notes have had, in noticing some cognitive derangement dating from pregnancy and childbirth. This is likely due to the combination of hormonal effects on the brain during pregnancy and the novel demands on attention caused by the life-changing arrival of an infant. The author was prescribed stimulant medication, and she considers in a sophisticated way the costs one pays both personally and more existentially for treating such ‘deficits’.. Ultimately, she is challenged to ask whether one can do other than pathologize and attempt to remediate age-related changes in memory function:

Perspective, insight, acceptance, wisdom with age — perhaps one of the other things we have lost with the erosion of the social, community and family fabric in the 20th century has been a place for these.

Related?

Lost time reclaimed, indeed. Syncronistically, while I was posting this piece about the loss of one’s past, Mark Wood was linking here to this piece that reminds us about the flipside of timelessness in psychopathology, the loss of one’s future:

Intriguing as this suggestion to use psychedelic time dilatation properties to address this futurelessness, the conception is not new. Freud’s dictum a century ago that the goal of psychoanalysis was not to turn unhappiness to happiness but rather to turn neurotic unhappiness to normal everyday unhappiness largely rested upon restoring a patient’s future to them. A teacher of mine, the late, consummate psychologist John Perry, put it only slightly differently when he described the alleviation of suffering achieved in psychotherapy as largely being to persuade a suffering patient that s/he is not in Hell but merely Purgatory. The fires burn just as hot in Purgatory, he would say, the only distinction being whether you know your stay there is time-limited and not eternal damnation.

Nothing you didn’t already realize.

Related:

A dwarf known as al Qaeda

I have long felt that the threat presented by al Qaeda is specious and that, moreover, the organization does not exist in any real sense except in the minds of the terror-obsessed Bush administration, which is interested in a perpetual Orwellian war against an illusory opponent. Al Qaeda is now a franchise brand name many unaffiliated or, at best, informally connected disgruntled groups or individuals use to add cachet to the threats they are interested in advertising.

Not to mention Marion Jones and all the rest of them, although there will be the most anguish about the sullying of the Great American Pastime. The author points out that the steroid scandal is really about denial. Readers of FmH know that my diffidence about spectator sports may disqualify me as an expert commentator on this issue, but these are my sentiments exactly. And, to further place things in a broader context:

“The United States brushed aside a call from 144 countries party to an international treaty banning landmines to join the deal, saying its military responsibilities prevented such a step.

Instead, the State Department defended Washington’s record as a leading supporter of global demining initiatives and efforts to promote the use of so-called ‘smart mines’ which deactivate themselves after a period of time to prevent them from causing permanent danger.” (Yahoo! News)

An update on a chilling effect [via walker]

Wonkette loves Hardball‘s Chris Matthews puttin’ the screws to Jerry Falwell:

Although I also find it delicious to catch someone in the logical fallacy of their bigotry, the sad truth is that making coherent sense is not important to this type of thinking.

Stop wondering whether civil war will erupt in Iraq. It already has. Yglesias:

“The use of misleading information as a military tool sparks debate in the Pentagon. Critics say the practice puts credibility at stake,” says the LA Times And what credibility, pray tell, does the US have left to lose?

Of course, while some will see this as an argument for massive increases in defense spending, it is much more an indictment of the Bush cabal’s military adventurism. The emphasis on the ‘deferred or cancelled procurement’ of the previous decade, which is intended to castigate the Clinton administration, made sense in a world where, for a brief period, capping the insanity of continued Pentagon spending became policy.

“The 20 Best North American Districts, Downtowns, and Neighborhoods” (Project for Public Spaces (PPS))

Fimoculous gears up for its usual effort compiling best-of-the-year lists. Readers of FmH will recall that I love these lists, but it does not appear necessary to duplicate his effort.

For those of you who watch Jeopardy! (I don’t, and could care less about gameshows, although throughout my life people have urged me to try to get to be a contestant on one of these things), I guess it is big news that Ken Jennings finally loses tonight and, as this Washington Post story puts it, loses on some rather mundane questions. But it is equally big news, it seems, that the news was leaked. kottke even had an audio clip of the crucial segment of the show, although he has taken it down under a cease-and-desist order. And, finally, it is also news how much of a relief it appears to be to Jeopardy!‘s host Alex Trebek that the mighty is fallen and he gets to be the star again.

“Net users are getting the chance to fight back against spam websites. Internet portal Lycos has made a screensaver that endlessly requests data from sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail. Lycos hopes it will make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers soar by keeping their servers running flat out. The net firm estimates that if enough people sign up and download the tool, spammers could end up paying to send out terabytes of data.

…The list of sites that the screensaver will target is taken from real-time blacklists generated by organisations such as Spamcop. To limit the chance of mistakes being made, Lycos is using people to ensure that the sites are selling spam goods.

As these sites rarely use advertising to offset hosting costs, the burden of high-bandwidth bills could make spam too expensive…” (BBC) In other words, a DDoS attack on spammer sites…

Thill is Salon‘s columnist on independent publishing. He starts a recent column with this wrap-up of the post-election state of affairs in Bushland, which strikes me as a concise summary statement for anyone who has had their head buried under the pillows for the past month:

[Oxymoron: medical skepticism about a profitable procedure?]

With all the furor last month about the size of Dick Cheney’s organ, is Junior now trying to horn in on the act? In this photo, by the way, crafty Vladimir Putin appears to see what is going on…

Also coverage from the Boston Globe and The Australian.

I have never travelled to China. When I dropped out and vagabonded around the world in the early ’70’s, I applied for visas to enter China at every consulate in every Asian country I passed through, but since I was hitchhiking and could not afford an organized tour they never gave me a second glance… More recently, especially as a member of the adoption community, a disproportionate number of my friends have travelled there. Still, it is hard to disabuse oneself of the stereotype of a primitive country full of throngs of bicycle riders in Mao jackets, struggling to modernize with the thinnest of veneers of glitz thrown over the poverty.

From one perspective at least, not so. These are ten small innovations in daily life the author, who I gather is a Toronto business writer, loved. (Globe and Mail via workopolis via Electrolite) Many of them exploit the technological advances of the ‘information age’ we find mundane and ineluctable in the West but which in China are implemented in ways whose thoughtfulness is arresting… and seemingly easy to do.

I know the constraints imposed by the newspaper column format, but I was left hankering for more than ten examples, and for some deeper implications. Given the less incremental — ‘leapfrogging’ is the term always used to describe the Chinese process — manner in which information processing and communications technology are being introduced in China, I wonder to what extent there is central planning of technology adoption, sort of like an official Media Lab for the country? (It strikes me it would be a fun job to have…) In the West, it is harder to see us implementing such simple exploits in convenience when they offer no competitive advantages to the profiteers who run our lives.

Also, shouldn’t China be considered a laboratory for observing the impact of rapid technological change on social structure? A goodly number of the items on Jan Wong’s list are particularly conveniences for the more urban and urbane, the traveller, the foreign visitor, shopping, attending cultural events, eating out, navigating the big cities by car. How do they impact the run-of-the-mill Chinese in day-to-day life? And how will they spread to the provinces, as cellphone coverage has?