![//us.news1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/nm/20040809/amdf650160.jpg' cannot be displayed]](https://i0.wp.com/us.news1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/nm/20040809/amdf650160.jpg "Kester the Jester")
‘This is a real job. He will have to amuse and provoke — although failure to do so will no longer risk beheading…’: “Nigel Roder beat six rivals by public acclaim on Saturday to become England’s first official jester for more than 350 years, succeeding Muckle John who lost his job when King Charles 1 was beheaded in 1649.” (Yahoo! News)
The eight-day tour begins Oct. 1 in Pennsylvania. It will number up to 40 shows, with several concerts in each of nine key ‘swing states’ taking place at separate venues on the same night.
The acts involved — Bruce Springsteen, Dave Matthews Band, R.E.M., Dixie Chicks, Pearl Jam and others — are united in the common goal of voting President Bush out of office in November.” (Reuters)
“RealPoetik is the little magazine of the vernacular, quotidian, witty and postmodern. Think of it as an attempt to invent an english lit (small e) for the last decade of the Twentieth Century. And the beginning of the Twenty First… [See archives from 1996-2003 by navigating to the site.] Send us your tired, your piss poor, your cynical, demoralizing, boring, quotidian postmodernist rants. Go ahead. Make our day.
To subscribe to the email version of RealPoetik send email to majordomo@ scn.org, no Subject:, and a single line of text which reads: subscribe RealPoetik Your Name (please note spelling of rpoetik).”
“MoveOn PAC asked their members who voted for Bush in 2000 to talk about why they are voting for Kerry in 2004. Academy award-winning documentary film director Errol Morris interviewed these former Bush voters on camera, and cut seventeen ads that tell their stories. These stories of disaffection are powerful statements about the failed Bush presidency.” You are invited to view and rate the ads for MoveOn; the highest-rated ads will be aired during the Republican convention.
Researchers reached the strange conclusion after completing a survey of British women who had recently become mothers. They found that for every extra year a woman thought she was going to live, the odds of her firstborn being a boy increasedsignificantly.” (Guardian.UK)
It has previously been known that the male:female birth ratio increases under favorable conditions, where a population is well-nourished and without adversity, while the balance tips toward females under harsher conditions. This will be to the advantage of the survival of the population as a whole, maximizing procreative chances under stressful conditions. Having less boys than girls when one does not rate one’s chances of a long life would seem to be the psychological equivalent, or parallel, to this.
Evolutionary biologists call this the Trivers-Willard hypothesis. It suggests that when a mother feels under pressure, from anything ranging from poor health and living conditions to scarce food, it makes biological sense for her to give birth to a girl rather than a boy.
“Having females is a safe investment, in that their reproductive success is consistent,” Dr Johns said. “Boys are more risky. They are more likely to die young, and if they don’t, they have to compete for females. They could potentially provide you with lots of grandchildren, but unless you can invest in them, you run the risk of having a ‘dud’ that doesn’t produce any at all.”
But if you want to conceive a girl, should you go around meditating on a short lifespan? While there have been some studies showing that the X-chromosome-containing sperm which will give rise to a female when they fertilize an ovum are hardier than y-containing sperm, it is not as if your outlook influences which type of sperm has the swimming advantage or anything like that. It is more likely that stress levels act through producing subtle shifts in the hormonal context of the conception and gestation.
On the other hand, in the current study, it may not be that believing you will live longer produces more male offspring at all. Couldn’t it just as well be that having given birth to a boy somehow influences you in the direction of a longer estimated lifespan? In a male-centric society, moght not one unconsciously assess one’s chances of being well taken care of in old age as better if one has a son?
“What can studies of pornography, prostitutes, and seedy truck stops contribute to society?” (Discover)
Museum Director Dies at 56. (New York Times) Everybody has heard of “that museum in Philadelphia where they keep the foetuses in bottles.” The Mutter Museum is, of course, more than that, and its guiding genius for decades has been Gretchen Worden. Working at the Mutter had been virtually her only job; she transformed the place into one where professionals, hoping the museum’s collection of human anomalies would inform their understanding of normal human developmental processes and anatomy, and the lay public who came to be amazed or even ‘grossed out’ could mingle in comfort and wonder. In the process, annual attendance went from several hundred to 60,000. Listen to her passionate exposition of her fascinating work in this interview with Terry Gross from a 2002 Fresh Air.
Authority on Schizophrenia Dies (New York Times. ) I seem to be noting more obituaries of my teachers and mentors here these days. Before he joined the Harvard faculty, I had the privilege of taking a course on psychopathology he offered to Harvard undergraduates as a visiting lecturer. This was the first touchstone of my lifelong fascination with schizophrenic thought processes. His best-known findings and most persistent research obsession, the eye-tracking disorder in schizophrenics, have not turned out to be particularly useful to those of us who treat patients with schizophrenia, nor have they gone very far in elucidating the central pathology of the disorder. But finding an easily testing abnormality that also occurred in the genetic relatives of schizophrenics did more to establish the important notion that there was a ‘schizophrenic spectrum’ from the full-blown disease to those in the family who had a watered-down dose of the genetic substrate of the disorder. Holzman’s other findings about schizophrenic language and memory have been more telling for me, in shaping my understanding of the schizophrenic ‘thought disorder’ in a way which informs a therapeutic approach. He also bravely charted the path I believe most Freudian psychoanalysts had to take, if they were interested in treating more disturbed patients with schizophrenia and other psychotic processes, to bridge the gap between psychology and pathophysiology.
In other schizophrenia-related obituaries, I was saddened to learn that the Schizophrenia Bulletin is phasing itself out. This quarterly journal published by the NIMH since 1969 (ironically, Dr. Holzman was on its advisory board) is unique in combining state-of-the-art review articles on aspects of schizophrenia research and treatment with, in every issue, cover art by a patient with the illness and a first-person account by a person with schizophrenia of the challenges of living with or overcoming aspects of the illness.
The statement from the director of the NIMH explaining the decision to phase out the Bulletin explains that “in this rapidly changing scientific environment it is time to develop communication mechanisms that are equally rapid.” I find this puzzling insofar as the Bulletin is not a vehicle for the latest peer-reviewed and time-sensitive research findings but rather more comprehensive theme-based reviews. Furthermore, it is a conceit to believe one needs to get even the latest research findings as quickly as possible, as opposed to labsorbing them as thoroughly as possible. I do not think it is merely reactionary nostalgia for the way I learned to approach the practice of medicine to lament the obsolescence of the medical journal as a vehicle for medical communication, which is what the authors of this move seems to suggest. When a journal arrives at my doorstep monthly or quarterly, it is a concrete invitation to sit down and get up to date in a way that might not happen with disembodied articles floating out there in the ether. Furthermore, when I read the articles of interest in a journal, I cannot avoid stumbling upon others I would not have suspected would be of interest. This too does not happen as readdily when I read an electronic article. Sad state of affairs…
But then again, readers of FmH will recognize that I have long ranted about the scientific illiteracy of many of my colleagues, so perhaps the medical journal has been obsolete for some time already. Granted, even as a resident I already had a reputation, for which I was both admired and assailed, for keeping up with the literature. I have always distributed articles of significance to my colleagues and students, covertly expecting them to read as well. But most doctors consider themselves “too busy” to keep up with the journals unless they are academics. Unfortunately, that leaves them practicing (in a field where the half-life of knowledge is around — what? — ten years or less) as they did the last time they were up-to-date, which was when they were in their residencies; or updating their knowledge base only by word-of-mouth or with the information provided by the pharmaceutical representatives who visit them. At least in my state, the requirement that a doctor have gotten a certain number of continuing medical education credits in order to renew her/his license is enforced only by the honor system; if you answer “yes” on the renewal application, they believe you. (And if you believe that most doctors who attend medical conferences are there to listen to the lectures, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.)
And let’s not confine this lament merely to the challenge of “keeping up.” How about “getting started”? In my own specialty of psychatry, what proportion of graduating psychiatric residents these days have ever even read any Freud, do you suppose? My guess — less than 10%. (You might argue the irrelevancy of Freudian thinking to modern psychiatric approaches, and I would essentially agree with you; but might not one wish to know one’s lineage, explore the seminal roots of the mysterious field one is in, and reach such a conclusion oneself, perhaps?)
“Here’s how the $144.4 billion for Iraq could have been spent to safeguard Americans.” (New York Timesop-ed)
“A former official in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations and a former British diplomat argue that neo-conservatism is a manifestation of a deeper syndrome that has structural roots in United States history and politics.” (openDemocracy) The core thesis implies that, merely because the Bush administration neo-cons have foundered so badly in orchestrating the invasion of Iraq, we should not assume that their values are finished as a driving force in American foreign policy; indeed, they represent a deep, enduring and recurrent tendency in the American political process. Despite the fact that our Vietnam policy was formulated by the ‘liberal’ Democratic ‘best and brightest’, the authors identify a triad of common features — “the combination of a crusading idealism, an assertion of the universal applicability of American values, and the willingness (indeed eagerness) to use force to back them” — which have in each instance overwhelmed calm and balanced decision-making and allowed special interests to shape the projection of American force without counterbalance. We should take it as a warning sign of recurrent danger of this sort “whenever unchecked special interests within an administration can act on their belief in American exceptionalism, demonise an opponent, and present his position in monolithic terms as a target for destruction”. While the authors’ observation that this pattern transcends partisan ideological differences is a useful one, so is their comment that Republican administrations are more vulnerable to this process because the ‘cosmopolitan globalists’ of the party have given way to ‘America-first populists’ and because of the growing influence of ‘conservative and fundamentalist talk-radio culture.’ I would add that the public’s growing reliance as their primary or sole source of news on broadcast media that inherently do not ask difficult questions of our political leaders makes such hijacking of American policy by jingoist adventurism far easier.
The articulation of this ‘exceptionalist’ ethos, however, should not merely be applied to drawing parallels between Vietnam and Iraq. The proper scale on which to see it operating, I think, is more that of both the Cold War and the War on Terror as a whole, of which Vietnam and Iraq are local manifestations. (While many criticize the invasion of Iraq as a diversion from our proper business of the post-9/11 WoT®, from this perspective the administration’s assertion that it is part and parcel of the larger struggle is truer than they know; it is not Iraq which is ill-advised and poorly formulated, but the WoT® as a whole, since it is driven by the same misguided adventurism.) Those of us who live long enough will likely see the growing competition with China become the overarchng context and preoccupation of US foreign policy, which will manifest the same crusading idealism, projection of force and demonization we have applied to the ‘Communist’ and the ‘Islamic fundamentalist’ demons.(Of course, the authors are unwilling to apply this analysis to the central struggle of the 20th century against Nazi fascism and its allies. As the undisputed modern incarnations of pure evil, it would be difficult to suggest that a similar neo-conservative agenda and its concomitant distortion of the perception of the ‘Kraut’ and ‘Nip’ enemy might have been in play. But might it?)
Sasha Abramsky, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, agrees that European loathing for the US is only on the surface about Iraq:
And there’s this:
Ron Reagan may have tried to remain nonpartisan when he spoke at the Democratic Convention (a debatable assertion) but when “…the son of the fortieth president of the United States takes a hard look at the son of the forty-first, (he) does not like what he sees…” (Esquire via Common Dreams)
The study established no added risk from a flu infection in the second half of pregnancy.
A number of researchers are busy looking at links between viral infection in utero and the development of schizophrenia. For some reason, despite schizophrenia being a fairly common disorder, said to consistently affect approximately 1% of populations across the globe, it has been rarer candidates than the ubiquitous influenze virus that researchers have investigated.
Controversy continues about whether schizophrenia is an inherited or acquired brain disorder, probably because it is both. I think the hypothesis that best fits the observed data is that schizophrenic disease consists of
As long as two utterly separate diseases are lumped together, significant differences will get washed out of most research studies trying to compare ‘schizophrenics’ with any non-‘schizophrenic’ population.
This bifurcated concept of schizophrenia is of course not original to me, but rather has been put forth by illustrious psychiatric thinkers. Nevertheless, it is astounding to me how thoroughly it is ignored. The bulk of my colleagues persist in speaking of schizophrenic ‘subtypes’ within a unitary disease even though there is little besides historical tradition supporting such a notion.
And while we’re at it, bulk of year’s virus infections pinned to one man. (CNET News)
I suspect this is the last time I am going to post anything about these absurd terror alerts, although I am sure this is not the last time Ridge will dance this jig between now and the election inauguration day. Like others before it, the timing of this alert is too opportune a diversion from the Democratic limelight to be a coincidence. ‘The lady doth protest too much’ with insistent assertions of how credible the threat assessment is. And, as I commented at the time of Ridge’s last contortion about the ‘credible’ al Qaeda threat to ‘disrupt the democratic process’ sometime between then and the election, there is no purpose for these dramatic announcements except to keep the terror issue on everyone’s mind. Since this pitiful president has nothing with which to lay claim to the American voters but his self-professed toughness-on-terrorism (literally the only area in which the pollsters indicate he commands higher ratings than Kerry), and since he and his handlers are sufficiently contemptuous of the American electorate as to be utterly unconcerned about the level of angst they sow in their quest to steal the White House again, expect this pitiful charade to continue fulltilt. It’s all about commodity brand recognition, and once enough has been invested in a branding and marketing strategy, it doesn’t change. I am getting quite a kick out of listening to the ‘person-on-the-street’ interviews with New Yorkers reacting to the ‘threat’. While the BBC commentator to whom I listened characterized their replies as ‘stoical’, what I heard was plain unmitigated perspicacious cynicism.
Addendum: Of course I wrote the above before the news broke that the administration neglected to tell us that it was more than four years ago that al Qaeda cased these buildings. Q.E.D.
Pundits are saying that this is another intelligence failure in the mold of those to which the 9/11 commission report pointed. Let’s be clear that neither in the current instance or in the lead-up to the war was it so much a question of faulty threat assessment by our intelligence analysts as of the disingenuous use of threat data for political purposes by the Bush Cabal. It was clear from its inception that the 9/11 commission would be a whitewash because it examined the generation of threat assessment without a mandate to explore executive branch misuse of the data. The whitewash continues.
In a reverent nod to Emma Goldman, former Republican John Perry Barlow issues a call to discombobulate the RNC in New York with a smart mob of business-suited post-yippies who stage dance attacks among the staid Republicans and then melt back into the crowd. Positively revolting.
“Either he’s crazy, or we’re selfish.” A reader told me that The New Yorker last week profiled Zell Kravinsky, the Pennsylvania professor of Renaissance literature, real estate entrepreneur and philanthropist embroiled in controversy for donating a kidney to a total stranger… and considering donating his other one as well. I cannot find the New Yorker piece online, but this San Francisco Chronicle article from November is the best of the portraits I found online by googling Kravinsky’s name.
Kravinsky has aroused reactions running the gamut from near-beatification to revulsion. When he proposed to donate a kidney to a stranger, with the sole stipulation being that it be to someone poor and black (“No one should have two houses when people were homeless and no one should have two kidneys while others struggled to live without one”), the transplant surgeon had him examined by a psychiatrist “to ensure that he really wanted to do this”, having never encountered a living donor willing to give an organ to an unrelated individual. Kravinsky literally sneaked out of his house to go to the hospital for the procedure, and at the time of the article he and his wife, (also a psychiatrist) who was reportedly angered that his action would prevent one of his children from receiving his kidney if needed (which Kravinsky considers an implausible scenario and an outlandish objection), were estranged. No less a celebrity than Pat Boone, who makes a cause celebre of organ donation, is publicly exhorting Kravisky’s wife to reconcile with this ‘hero’. Others too consider him to be “turning his back on his …young family to fill a personal need” and one columnist called him a “selfish SOB”. Kravinsky appears to answer such objections with homilies (“They say charity begins in the home. I don’t know why it ends at home.”) and a humility that does appear abit labored. Reading about him, one finds oneself less desirous of being in his presence than, say, Albert Schweitzer, who when I was young was the archetypical object of endless consideration of whether someone could be truly altruistic without deriving an egoistic satisfaction from it (or, if it is unavoidable, whether such pride would be in the sinful category).
Kravisky says that, in deference to his family’s objections, he will probably not donate his remaining kidney, having once expressed a hope (again with that somewhat forced modesty) that his death would allow someone who might make an even greater contribution to live. He is looking into donating other organs while he continues to live, which left me with a Buddhist-flavored image of the piece-by-piece dismantling of the self and shedding of the extraneous, melded with the Christian ascetic conceit of the mortification of the flesh. According to the journalist, he seeks to give more and more as a means to a “perfectly moral life” in which he ‘loves everyone’ and is ‘totally good’ and ‘totally self-sacrificing’, which I hope is a caricature of something the writer does not really understand. I look forward to reading the New Yorker piece, which will hopefully have greater psychological depth. (I found myself wihsing I had been the psychiatrist asked to examine him to render an opinion as to his competency to consent to the kidney donation, and grateful I was not the psychiatrist called upon around his hypothetical consent for the second procedure…) Lord help Kravinsky if it is not a caricature; he has much work to do to find an avenue to true humility if so, but the practices of abnegation he is pursuing may be well-suited to getting him there. I wish him well… [thanks, adam]
“Remote hunter-gatherer tribes have issued a plea to the outside world to mark the UN Day of Indigenous Peoples on 9 August, saying, ‘We are not backward, our way of life is as modern as yours’. The appeal comes as isolated tribal people face a wave of persecution and attacks on their way of life…
Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said today, ‘Hunter-gatherers extend from those still uncontacted by anyone else to those who wear watches, listen to the radio and complain to the UN when they are abused. White people have now accepted that black people are not inferior to themselves, it’s high time everyone now realised that hunter-gatherers are not inferior to farmers or bankers.’ ” (Survival International)
I’m back. We made a hasty escape from Boston to avoid the DNC craziness. Some backcountry canoeing in northern Maine was just the ticket. Sorry not to have kept up with posting from our campsites!
I’m back. We made a hasty escape from Boston to avoid the DNC craziness. Some backcountry canoeing in northern Maine was just the ticket. Sorry not to have kept up with posting from our campsites!
I just switched my commenting system from Enetation to Haloscan. Enetation has become pretty unreliable and recently a glitch has prevented me from logging in as administrator to edit or delete users’ comments. (Fortunately, I haven’t been hit by a comment spam attack — grateful that FmH isn’t popular enough to attract that kind of attention — so deletions are rare and mostly used to eliminate duplicates, which has been another problem with Enetation.) Haloscan has been around for awhile now, is stable and quick, and offers trackback as well as commenting.
The Enetation comments you have so graciously entered are for the moment inaccessible, but my discovery of a way to export them all from Enetation was the final goad I needed to switch systems. So I have them archived, and it will probably turn out to be possible to import them into the Haloscan system. I’ll figure that out when I have a little more time.
If, for some reason, Haloscan does not end up being satisfactory, I still have the option of going back to Enetation or forward to a different commenting system. Why not try out the Haloscan system by leaving me comments here about how you find the Haloscan system to be working?
…The album features a pretty amazing line up of artists: Blink-182, Bright Eyes, David Byrne, Laura Cantrell, Clem Snide, Death Cab for Cutie, Mike Doughty, The Flaming Lips, Fountains of Wayne, Jimmy Eat World, Ben Kweller, The Long Winters, Nada Surf, OK Go, Old 97’s, R.E.M., Sleater-Kinney, They Might Be Giants, Tom Waits, will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are all featured. In addition, the family of Elliott Smith contributed a mix of “A Distorted Reality Is Now A Necessity To Be Free,” a song from Smith’s as-yet-unreleased last record, and the first release of new material since his death in late 2003.
Together, the songs present a passionate rallying cry for all of us to take our country back. Mike Doughty’s song “Move On” hones in on the passion that drives all of our activism, singing “I love my country so much, like an exasperating friend.” Tom Waits’ contribution is a heartbreaking song about a letter home from a soldier in Iraq. R.E.M. takes on Bush and the war in Iraq, and They Might Be Giants (whose John Flansburgh pulled the project together) revisit a campaign song from the Presidential campaign of 1840.
…You can order the album right now and help run ads to defeat Bush.”
Even if you are a P2P music trader, this is one for which you ought to pay the purchase price, IMHO.
Writing in the International Herald Tribune, outspoken former UN arms inspector Scott Ritter’s provocative thesis is that the Iraqi resistance is a well-orchestrated affair run by Saddam Hussein’s lieutenants, the culmination of a decade of meticulous planning by Saddam.
“The traditional Baathist ideology, based on Iraq-centric Arab nationalism, was no longer the driving force it had been a decade prior. Creating a new power base required bringing into the fold not only the Shiite majority – which had revolted against him in the spring of 1991 – but also accommodating the growing religious fundamentalism of traditional allies such as key Sunni tribes in western Iraq.
The most visible symbol of Saddam’s decision to embrace Islam was his order to add the words “God Is Great” to the Iraqi flag.
The transformation of the political dynamics inside Iraq, however, went largely unnoticed in the West. It certainly seems to have escaped the attention of the Bush administration. And the recent “transfer of sovereignty” to Allawi’s government reflects this lack of understanding.”
Saddam’s security service melted into the population when the US invaded, waiting to reemerge. And the recent attacks on US forces in Fallujah and Ramadi “were carried out by well-disciplined men fighting in cohesive units, most likely drawn from the ranks of Saddam’s Republican Guard.”
“The truth is that there never was a significant people-based opposition movement inside Iraq for the Bush administration to call on to form a government to replace Saddam. It is why the United States has instead been forced to rely on the services of individuals tainted by their association with foreign intelligence services, or drawn from opposition parties heavily infiltrated by agents of Saddam’s former security services.
Regardless of the number of troops the United States puts on the ground or how long they stay there, Allawi’s government is doomed to fail. The more it fails, the more it will have to rely on the United States to prop it up. The more the United States props up Allawi, the more discredited he will become in the eyes of the Iraqi people – all of which creates yet more opportunities for the Iraqi resistance to exploit.” [via dangerousmeta]
While some of what he says is not surprising — e.g. that lack of constituency the Allawi government has with the Iraqi people — I must say that Ritter’s thesis explains some facts of the resistance, such as the seeming inexhaustability and coordination of the attacks and the utter evaporation of the Republican Guard when the US invaded. It seems quite plausible to me that the crafty Saddam anticipated the rise of fundamentalism and attempted to co-opt it with the modifications to Baathist pan-Arabism Ritter describes in order to maintain his stranglehold. But whether he succeeded is another matter. It seems that al Sadr’s forces, for example, are hardly in league with the reemerging Baathists, and probably neither are the foreign Islamist ‘mujahideen’ coming into Iraq to fight the American devils. While elements of the uprising may be skillfully coordinated, there is certainly a nationalist aspect, a populist uprising against an occupying force already reacting to the illegitimacy of the Allawi government.
Does anyone read the “Now playing in iTunes” window to the left? Is it of any interest? I know that it probably slows down the page loads somewhat (although by the time it is rendering, the content here in the main column is already up). Now that I know I can do it, the questions is, should I?
And she was not booed off the stage by a concert crowd that had erupted in mayhem, she said.
Speaking by phone from San Francisco, Ronstadt said that she left the Aladdin Resort & Casino immediately after the concert and was not aware that the management was irritated by her comments until an hour after she left the show.
Aladdin management declined to comment on the incident yesterday, referring the Citizen to a statement issued Monday.
The statement reads, in part:
‘Ms. Ronstadt was hired to entertain the guests of the Aladdin, not to espouse her political views. In an effort to diffuse the situation, Linda Ronstadt was asked to leave the property immediately following her performance.'” (Tucson Citizen )
And here are links to the weblogs:
So, even though there are supposed to be only five persuadable voters left in America, I’m inclined to think that the next four nights will be worth watching. Can the Democrats re-enact the successful 2000 Republican convention, a parade of moderation and diversity that convinced the nation that George W. Bush was a decent fellow who could be trusted with the levers of power?” — Chris Suellentrop (Slate)
Related? Kerry’s Wife Tells Reporter to ‘Shove It’:
… Asked about Mrs. Heinz Kerry’s comments, the Kerry campaign said in a statement: “It was a moment of extreme frustration aimed at a right wing rag that has consistently and almost purposefully misrepresented the facts when reporting on Mrs. Heinz Kerry.” ” (Yahoo! News)
McGovern, Mondale and Dukakis, all spunkily confident of Kerry’s victory and exultant at the impending rehabilitation of the term ‘liberalism’, gather in Boston on the eve of the convention, even though the DNC is keeping these painful living reminders of its prior trouncings out of the spotlight. (Salon)
I love the lead paragraphs of New York Times Magazine articles.
In a briefing whose candor defies precedent and which was surely prompted by the 9/11 report, the CIA describes its penetration of al Qaeda, which it turns out is not very impressive. (Washington Post)
Jesse Friedman, convicted (and now paroled after serving thirteen years) subject of Capturing the Friedmans, and his older brother have made their own film bearing on the events of the earlier documentary. (New York)
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Note the boy’s clenched fists. What do you think he is going to want to do to US occupying forces when he gets older?
Actually I do not find it odd at all. Art expresses the zeitgeist, and the level of anger and contempt for our current President is unprecedented.
An incumbent has two choices in this situation. He can work to repair strained bonds with crucial voters or he can try to tear down his opponents plausibility as a replacement. Mr. Bush and his campaign are doing both.” (New York Times)
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“Republicans are trying to blame 9/11 on Clinton, but the official report shows that he responded to al-Qaida threats far more effectively than Bush.” — Joe Conason
And: Byrd vs. Bush: “Sen. Robert Byrd blasts fellow senators for believing ‘the garbage that was being spewed out by the administration’ on Iraq, and thanks the airline passengers who ‘died to save this Capitol, my life and my staff” “. (Salon)
“Inkling”? Three full years of drumbeat warnings, topped off by a top-secret daily brief weeks before the attack? You had no “inkling”? Can’t we have a little straight talk here? You were asleep at the switch, Mr. President.’ — Jame Ridgeway (Village Voice)
Janssen Pharmaceutica Products LP sent a two-page letter to health care professionals to clarify the risks of Risperdal, Carol Goodrich, a spokeswoman for the Johnson & Johnson subsidiary, said on Saturday.” (Washington Post)
Risperdal had originally been marketed as an “atypical” antipsychotic, a term used to denote a new generation of antipsychotic medications without the severe side effects of the classical antipsychotic medicines like Haldol and Thorazine. But psychiatrists have been aware since we started using the drug that Risperdal’s freedom from those side effects only occurs at low doses which may be insufficient to control the symptoms for which it is prescribed. At effective doses, it behaves much like Haldol, including causing Haldol-like side effects. Psychiatrists have been lulled by the “atypical” label into preferentially prescribing this medication to the point where it has become the largest-selling antipsychotic medication. Furthermore, “atypicals” as a class have other metabolic and cardiovascular side effects that the classical antipsychotics did not. Partly because of the claims of safety, atypical antipsychotics have been used not only for the severe psychotic conditions such as schizophrenia and psychotic mania for which antipsychotic drugs were intended but also for a far broader variety of more benign indications than those for which psychiatrists would have dared prescribe the older medications. So the pool of patients potentially exposed to the complications of their use is vastly expanded. Finally, they have been indiscriminately used in children as well as adults, despite the lack of specific studies in the very different nervous systems of that age group demonstrating safety or effectiveness.
‘Rogue waves’ have been the anecdotal cause behind scores of sinkings of vessels as large as container ships and supertankers over the past two decades.
But evidence to support this has been sketchy, and many marine scientists have clung to statistical models that say monstrous deviations from the normal sea state only occur once every thousand years.
…Even though the research period was brief, the satellites identified more than 10 individual giant waves around the globe that measured more than 25 metres (81.25 feet) in height, ESA said in a press release.
The waves exist ‘in higher numbers than anyone expected,’ said Wolfgang Rosenthal, senior scientist with the GKSS Research Centre in Geesthacht, Germany, who pored over the data.
‘The next step is to analyse if they can be forecasted,’ he said.” ‘ (Yahoo! News)
The passenger, later identified as Annie Jacobsen, was in danger of panicking other passengers and creating a larger problem on the plane, according to a source close to the secretive federal protective service.
Jacobsen, a self-described freelance writer, has published two stories about her experience at womenswallstreet.com, a business advice web site designed for women.
“The lady was overreacting,” said the source. “A flight attendant was told to tell the passenger to calm down; that there were air marshals on the plane.”
The middle eastern men were identified by federal agents as a group of touring musicians travelling to a concert date at a casino, said Air Marshals spokesman Dave Adams.”
They want us to come. And we must oblige. But in the time we have before the Republican Convention we must develop tactics that will leave them in the dust of their own mediocre confusion. We must resuscitate the great laughing spirit of Yippie.
Intense harsh but shockingly clever and hilarious protest against the Emperor Bush that will make America laugh at him and see him in an unprogrammed state of his actual evil. Attack us then, you humorless Elephants of the GOP. And America will see you and him, in the unforgiving light of harsh truth. New York needs a cosmic joke. So does America. So let’s start asking just what trick the Yippies have up their sleeves”
Now both men and women — professionals, nonprofessionals and air guitarists alike — are being given a chance to put their best swoon-inducing faces on display. As a way to promote a video-on-demand guitar instruction show on cable television called “Guitar Xpress,” the company that owns the service, Rainbow Media Holdings, recently came up with the idea of holding a national “guitar face” contest.” (New York Times)
Stopping short of setting a deadline for international intervention, the United Nations secretary general and his special representative in Darfur, Jan Pronk, made clear they want to see a speedy restoration of security in the vast region.” (The Scotsman)
Despite a heavy commitment of British armed forces in Iraq and other troublespots, the prime minister has had discussions with advisers for on-the-ground involvement of troops.” (Guardian.UK)
The incident marked the latest backlash against liberal US entertainers who criticise Bush and follows comedienne’s Whoopi Goldberg’s sacking last week by a diet products company following her raunchy rant at the conservative president at a Democratic fundraising concert.” (Yahoo! News)
Every once in a while we are horrified by a beheading (albeit one seen only on videotape) and human culture remembers that it is not much more than a vulnerable collection of flesh, bone and nerve endings. ‘This is what wars are; it’s not Hollywood,’ Moore cautions. But ultimately we return to the womblike safety of our media universe with its push-button wars and Internet porn, where sex and death are hidden behind splashy corporate graphics.” Salon
From Underreported I learned about Pfc. Jeremy Hinzman, now seeking asylum in Toronto after deserting his Iraq-bound unit. He had reportedly applied for conscientious objector status but was told by officials they had ‘lost’ his application. [It is a good thing we did not put them in charge of Dubya’s military service records, or they might have been ‘lost’ as well. Oops; they were.] As you might surmise, Underreported is focusing on the scant notice taken of this “watershed event in forming a parallel to the Vietnam War” in the press (Hinzman has been in Canada at least since March). I am not sure I can go along with the speculation that the New York Times and the Washington Post are purposely not covering this phenomenon so as not to encourage a flood of desertions to Canada; it seems more like one of the myriad ways in which they have just dropped the ball in covering the post-9/11 climate altogether and give short shrift to all things ‘unpatriotic.’
I don’t precisely recall the tenor of press coverage of war resisters early in the Vietnam War (before the phenomenon was of a magnitude when it could no longer be ignored) either. As a conscientious objector applicant involved with organizing efforts to resist the draft, I was among those who found it important to spread awareness of the possibilities (avoiding the draft by going to Canada; desertion; c.o. status; or ‘just saying no’ and going to prison on grounds of conscience) to those facing induction who might, despite nascent objections to the immorality of the war, not know what options they had or how much support might be out there for them (“Women say yes to men who say no.”). In the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, I posted some material here about options for resistance that I hoped might find its way to enlistees. There was some back and forth with other webloggers, particularly Rebecca Blood, about whether you could actually call it conscientious objection in a volunteer army. Whatever the semantics, Hinzman is right; we again face an immoral and illegal war in which the US is committing war crimes on a scale that I am certain remains untold. My hopes of spreading awareness of resistance options to those enlisted or considering enlistment are undiminished. Bravo to Hinzman; spread the word.
In fact, we don’t know that Hinzman is the only soldier to opt out to Canada, but he is the first to ‘come out’ about his principled opposition to the war. (It doesn’t exactly fit with administration spin-mongering to publicize desertions and other acts of war resistance. That is probably why they describe Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun as being in an ‘extended repatriation process’ or some other similar jargon rather than what may really be going on, that he is in custody and being investigated for possibly deserting and staging his own Iraqi captivity.) Here is Hinzman’s website; among other things, he needs financial support to pursue legal maneuvers toward securing refugee status in Canada. (I wonder if Canada is going to need encouragement to take a stand similar to that it took during Vietnam, that it would not extradite draft resisters back to the US.) Perhaps more than finances, however, he needs a movement, and a community of expatriate resisters similar to that which arose in major Canadian cities during the ’60’s.* In fact, perhaps some of those who went to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam are still there?
Will the US military prevent the GIs serving in Iraq from reading about enlistees who have fled the war, as they prevented soldiers access to the details of the Abu Ghraib atrocities (e.g. issuing an order forbidding them from reading Gen. Taguba’s report on the Internet)?
*Is anyone familiar with any historical or sociological studies of the Vietnam-era Canadian draft resisters? any compelling novels about them? There is Tim O’Brien’s Going Aftter Cacciato and the short story “On the Rainy River” from The Things They Carried; others?
No postponement, just bedlam at the polls and a low turnout on the West Coast is Bush’s plan for ‘victory’. This Online Journal piece by the wonderful Wayne Madsen suggests a provocative scenario. I have previously written about my puzzlement over why Ridge would publicize that the government is making election postponement plans even if they are. Many have noted the implausibility of a postponement even in the midst of a national emergency. So okay, the point of such a dramatic announcement at this time wasn’t that the Republicans really plan to pull off a postponement, I concluded, but merely to sow terror. This article suggests that they are setting the stage for a particular strategy. The Republicans will wait for the polls to close in the East to see how they did in the contested states in the early time zones. If they need to, he suggests, a properly-timed announcement of an imminent threat of an attack in California would allow them to win the state even without closing down the polls there, because the pandemonium it would precipitate would disproportionately disrupt working-class voters’ ability to get to the polls at the end of their work day. Low voter turnout is Republican turnout. If they needed to, they could do the same to Washington State as well. Can’t happen here, you say? The illegal disenfranchisement of thousands of predominantly African American voters in Florida won Bush the White House in 2000, so why not? Madsen doesn’t want to be in the position of saying ‘I told you so’; he suggests steps that democratic-minded (with a small ‘d’) people can take now to stop a plan of this sort. There’s no harm in being prepared. Since it is unlikely that too many California or Washington legislative or gubernatorial staff read Online Journal, readers there ought to bring this to their attention….
Trudeau attended Yale University with Bush in the late 1960s and served with him on a dormitory social committee.
‘Even then he had clearly awesome social skills,’ Trudeau said. ‘He could also make you feel extremely uncomfortable … He was extremely skilled at controlling people and outcomes in that way. Little bits of perfectly placed humiliation.’
Trudeau said he penned his very first cartoon to illustrate an article in the Yale Daily News on Bush and allegations that his fraternity, DKE, had hazed incoming pledges by branding them with an iron.
The article in the campus paper prompted The New York Times to interview Bush, who was a senior that year. Trudeau recalled that Bush told the Times ‘it was just a coat hanger, and … it didn’t hurt any more than a cigarette burn.’
‘It does put one in mind of what his views on torture might be today,’ Trudeau said.
Having mocked presidents of both parties in the ‘Doonesbury’ strip since 1971, Trudeau said Bush has been, ‘tragically, the best target’ he’s worked with yet.
‘Bush has created more harm to this country’s standing and security than any president in history,’ Trudeau said. ‘What a shame the world has to suffer the consequences of Dubya not getting enough approval from Dad.'” (Seattle Post-Intelligencer via Looka!)
“I’m sure you will think me hyperbolic, shrill, and hysterical when I suggest that that we should be preparing ourselves to communicate in a political environment where a fellow who writes a blog post like this one might find himself indefinitely interred without access to counsel or due process.”
The stories are not ones that have never been reported, but are often second-rung issues that need more thorough, balanced and regular attention. The list itself is a snapshot of the most compelling stories that, at this point in time, the Department of Public Information believes are in need of more media attention. And the top story is merely the first among equals.” (UN News Centre)
U.S. continues to ‘liberate’ Iraqis; doing a bang-up job. (Yahoo!)
Over at boing boing, Cory Doctorow exerts some consumer clout I wish I had. This post tells a simple story of being treated rudely in an overpriced café in Brighton, UK. He may reach enough readers who have occasion to go looking for a place to sit and sip in Brighton that his recommendation of a friendlier more considerate place just steps down the street could have a discernable effect on the P&L statements of these two establishment.
In an era when the expectations customers could once have of considerate service from businesses are rapidly vanishing, I often find myself wishing I had an effective way of letting others who might vote with their wallets know when I have been outraged or, to the contrary, delighted by the service I’ve received from a store or an eatery.
As the weblogging phenomenon has grown, it has usually seemed appealing to me to have a disembodied presence building a community unfettered by geographic limitations. But, while someone like Cory is a globetrotter with worldwide readership, I am at the moment more thinking about the web being a vehicle for the extension of local community. It would seem to be a natural medium for collaborative, community-based exchange of civic views, organizing around community issues and local politics, and, yes, simple consumer recommendations.
I am not talking about the online presence of the local community newspaper, like the Brookline TAB we have here where I live. Just as weblogging has created a populist, grassroots-based track parallel to the mainstream media in the discussion of matters of national and international importance, it would appear to be an effective parallel medium on a community scale. The way I read weblogs, at least, they are an efficient medium for sifting through an enormous amount of opinion and information to drill down and explore the details of areas that grab my attention or interest me. Why hasn’t this developed as a component of the penetration of the WWW into everyone’s lives over the past decade? Or am I missing something? Do other communities have “community bulletin board” types of public weblogs that mine doesn’t appear to?
[Are there any Brookline readers of FmH? Would you be interested in exploring this further? If so, drop me a line.]
Isn’t it overwhelmingly likely that we would have had a major press
conference with unrestrained crowing from Ashcroft and Ridge if they
had found that the Arab men detained at the end of this flight had been
involved in midair bomb-making? So we can safely say that this piece is
about the writer’s in-flight terror but has nothing to do with
in-flight terrorism; I am confident the men described in the
article were a bunch of Syrian musicians and nothing more. The real
issue is whether the fact that she was supposedly terrorized by her
experience has anything to say objectively about our security. Her
observation that
strikes me as likely a preconception that shaped her perception of what happened to her that day rather than the conclusion she presents it as. In any case, it is precisely that which a government
interested in the absurd prosecution of a neverending WoT® hopes people
will reach. For this reason, my bet is that no government agency will
ever reply reassuringly to her persistent requests for followup with
the information that the “Middle Eastern men” were innocent of the
suspicions against them.
Right-wing bloggers like Reynolds are linking to this piece admiringly (and Lileks does a typical bleat on the issue), but there are obvious questions about the writer’s
judgment and agenda. In defiance of the likely truth, she makes the
implausible assertion that these suspicious passengers’ carry-on items
were not searched and, furthermore, that it was because of fears of
‘racial profiling’. She draws some outlandish conclusions about
how an interest in preserving civil liberties will inevitably defeat
any efforts at airline security. One frequently-flying weblogger proclaims this a hoax (scroll down to July 15; I couldn’t find a permalink)
simply on the basis of the description of the behavior of the flight
crew. I realized what we were up against, if not before, when she
offered a quotation from Ann Coulter in support of her argument. (Good
for Reynolds; wondering if it is a law enforcement training exercise
rather than a de facto threat
at least betrays some doubt.) Another weblogger who identifies
himself as involved with law enforcement investigations on both
federal and local levels is skeptical of the level of detail Jacobsen puts into her account. As a psychiatrist experienced in the evaluation of traumatic memories, I agree with his assertion that the amount of adrenaline flowing in a terrorized observer usually obliterates their eye for detail, even if they are a trained writer.
Indeed, the WWS editor’s description of ‘long and hard’ editorial deliberations
about ‘how to handle this information’ sounds like code for questioning its veracity, which would not be out of the question. Although she is identified as a writer for WWS, a Google search on the (somewhat common) name
comes up with numerous references to the ‘Terror’ article but nothing
else that I could clearly associate with this particular Annie
Jacobsen, certainly nothing else she has published for WWS before. In
what I find an ironic comment, a link to her ‘last ten articles’ on FrontPagemag.com,
where she is listed in the company of other right-wing poster children
like Coulter and David Horowitz, shows nothing but the ‘Terror’ piece.
Michelle Malkin, a credulous conservative weblogger lauding Jacobsen’s story, is dismayed by the news that the Washington Post
did not deem it fit to print. She did a phone interview with Jacobsen,
who is puzzled by the mainstream media’s ignoring her story. Jacobsen
claims to have received ‘thousands’ of corroborating emails from
airline passengers and flight crews who have had similar experiences on
other flights. To reiterate, this clearly speaks to the danger we are
in, but not the danger from bearded Middle Eastern men (regardless of
whether they do suspicious things like going to the bathroom, reading
the Koran, or eating their fast food onboard); rather the dangers of
insistently implanted irrational memes poisoning credulous people’s
minds with hatred and fear. And the pitiful victims do not realize they
are the dupes of a beleaguered lying administration terrorizing them to
win reelection and further its megalomanic agenda.
The funny thing is that Jacobsen’s argument that we cannot simultaneously
protect civil liberties and prevent terrorist attacks on the US is
probably true. But we cannot prevent such attacks with draconian
restrictions on our civil liberties either. Regardless of whether
airline security is becoming more lax (which though I am not a frequent
traveller I would dispute, although arguably it is becoming somewhat
more reasonable), all the
airline security in the world is not going to prevent some group of
enraged, dedicated and resourceful men from their next attempt at mass
devastation by a different, non-airborne means. And we are of course
making the next attack far more likely by the discord our grandiose and
bigoted international adventurism is sowing in its wake.
The about-turn might cost Hawking, a physicist at the University of Cambridge, an encyclopaedia because of a bet he made in 1997. More importantly, it might solve one of the long-standing puzzles in modern physics, known as the black hole information paradox.” (New Scientist )
But two years ago they realized something was missing when a friend told them about the concept of an ethical will – a love letter, many would say – in which people pass down the experiences and values that have infused their lives with meaning.
Within a few months, the couple had created a 20-page ‘living legacy,’ as Ms. Peterson-Arnzen calls it. They plan to update it every five years or so, but its value to the family was immediate. Instead of tucking it away until after they’re gone, they shared it with their children, then 7 to 14 years old.” (Christian Science Monitor)
Seymour
Hersh, who reported on the torture of the prisoners in New Yorker
magazine in May, told an audience in San Francisco that ‘it’s worse’.
But he added that he would reveal the extent of the abuses: ‘I’m not
done reporting on all this,’ he told a meeting of the American Civil
Liberties Union.
He said: ‘The boys were sodomised with
the cameras rolling, and the worst part is the soundtrack, of the boys
shrieking. And this is your government at war.’
He
accused the US administration, and all but accused President George
Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney of complicity in covering up what
he called ‘war crimes’.” (Independent.UK)
Also: Here is one weblogger’s transcription of Hersh’s remarks.
Related:
Red Cross Suspects U.S. Is Hiding Detainees Worldwide:
“These people are, as far as we can tell, detained in locations that are undisclosed not only to us but also to the rest of the world,” said ICRC spokeswoman Antonella Notari.
Some individuals whose arrests have been reported in the media and whom the FBI announced it has arrested have not been seen in ICRC prison visits, Notari said. Some media reports have said detainees are being held at the British-controlled Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, where the United States has a military base, but the ICRC has not been notified of prisoners there, she said.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said yesterday he is looking into the allegation. “We do work closely with the Red Cross on all detainee issues,” he said.” (UN Wire)
![//www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2004/07/16/allawi_narrowweb__200x266.jpg' cannot be displayed]](https://i0.wp.com/www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2004/07/16/allawi_narrowweb__200x266.jpg "Iyad Allawi")
Allawi shot prisoners in cold blood: witnesses: “Iyad Allawi, the new Prime Minister of Iraq, pulled a pistol and executed as many as six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station, just days before Washington handed control of the country to his interim government, according to two people who allege they witnessed the killings.
They say the prisoners – handcuffed and blindfolded – were lined up against a wall in a courtyard adjacent to the maximum-security cell block in which they were held at the Al-Amariyah security centre, in the city’s south-western suburbs.
They say Dr Allawi told onlookers the victims had each killed as many as 50 Iraqis and they ‘deserved worse than death’.” (Sydney Morning Herald)
And nine reasons why Kerry won’t be much better:
Yet I find myself hoping the guy wins. Not because I’m sure he’ll be better than the current executive, but because the incumbent so richly deserves to be punished at the polls. Making me root for a sanctimonious statist blowhard like Kerry isn’t the worst thing Bush has done to the country. But it’s the offense that I take most personally.” — Jesse Walker, Managing Editor (Reason)
uncovers
an explosive document buried at the end of the recent SenateIntelligence report. It shows that before Colin Powell’s
now-discredited U.N. speech justifying war in Iraq, State Department
analysts told Powell and top administration officials about “dozens of
factual problems” in the address (which was written by Vice President
Cheney’s staff). According to the Jan. 31, 2003 memo, there were
problems with 38 of the claims made in the speech draft, which was
crafted at the behest of the White House. (It was “intended to be the
Bush administration’s most compelling case” for war in Iraq.) In
response, 28 were either “removed from the draft or altered” – but the
others were left in. Powell was reportedly irate when first given the
speech: According to the 9/3/03 U.S. News & World Report,
Powell threw the speech in the air, yelling, “I’m not reading this.
This is bulls–t.” This past May, he reiterated his displeasure with
the speech, saying, “It turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and
wrong, and in some cases deliberately misleading.”” (Center for American Progress)
And some are suggesting that Powell might even consider running with
Bush if he dumps Cheney?? If he were so craven an opportunist as to
ditch that many of his principles, he would have done so long ago…
“Here’s a fun game… First, look up the most popular and critically-acclaimed books, movies, and music on Amazon. Click on ‘Customer Reviews,’ and sort them by ‘Lowest Rating First.’ Hilarity ensues! It’s the Amazon.com Knee-Jerk Contrarian Game!” (waxy via boing boing) F’rinstance:
Miles Davis, “Kind of Blue”
- “This is one of the worst albums I’ve ever bought. It’s so boring and lifeless. Good to fall asleep to.”
- “its boredom,nostalgia and scarcely concealed contempt make it the perfect background music for this narcissistic age of ours.”
- “I found Mr. Davis’ playing to be laughable at best. Finally, it’s irritating; and confusing that so many people laud it.”
- “If pretension, tedium, and self-indulgence are your idea of what should animate music, then this is the album and Miles Davis is the ‘artist’ for you.”
Make July 6th President Bush’s last birthday in the White House. “Being a well-read man of leisure, you know he must be a fan of the ancient art of haiku. Flex your creative muscle and write George a haiku… The best and worst haiku will be featured on this site, and they will all be delivered to Bush/Cheney HQ.”
Maximalism, to use this genre’s most reactionary name, turns out to be a lot less uniform than minimalism. If minimalism’s paterfamilias is indisputably Raymond Carver, maximalism’s is Don DeLillo — unless it’s Thomas Pynchon. (DeLillo is the star that some younger maximalists claim to steer by, but the less solemn Pynchon seems the better fit.) The novelists usually rounded up in this group include Rick Moody, Jonathan Franzen (who wrote a famous 1996 essay on the ‘social novel’ for Harper’s Magazine), Colson Whitehead, Jeffrey Eugenides, Dave Eggers, Richard Powers, Jonathan Lethem, Zadie Smith and, especially, David Foster Wallace. But the books these writers produce don’t always have much in common. Some of them (Eugenides’ ‘The Virgin Suicides,’ for one) aren’t even especially long — which seems like the minimum you’d expect from a maximalist novel.” (Salon)
“Combining the two hits of the summer to create one mega-blockbuster…Spider-Man 9/11!” (Tom the Dancing Bug @ Salon)
Related:
He spent three years as the Counterterrorist Center’s Osama Bin Laden station chief. In Imperial Hubris, Scheuer argues that Americans misunderstand Bin Laden and al-Qaida and have little sense that we’re losing the terror war.” (Slate)
“George W. Bush loves dressing up in uniform and being called commander-in-chief. You have to look to Saddam or Fidel for another head of state who spends as much media time before military backdrops.” (mediachannel) But he could not do it without the media’s collaboration.
U.S. Under Pressure to Sustain Coalition in Iraq: “Four nations have left while four more prepare to leave international force; others quietly planning to depart.” (Washington Post)
And The Nation‘s Tom Englehardt describes how the US is increasingly scraping the bottom of the barrel to get international contributions to the ‘multinational’ effort (TomDispatch)
And among other recent observations of note in his column, Englehardt remarks that US troop deaths in Afghanistan/Iraq recently passed the one thousand milestone with almost no media notice. He also comments, “In the thirteen days before the surprise early “transition” non-ceremonies, there were 19 American military deaths in Iraq. In the thirteen days since, there have been 31.” And he notes that, in all the talk about possible ‘July-‘ or ‘October-surprises’ (and the most recent conspiracy theories about Republicans scenarios for a government-of-national-unity type refusal to hand over power by postponing the elections citing a terrorist threat), no one seems to be thinking about what Bush-Cheney might do in the period between an election defeat in November and Kerry’s inauguration in Jan., ’05.
Capital Buzzes, Denials Aside: “The Washington summer clamor about Vice President Dick Cheney’s future on the Republican ticket has greatly intensified.” (New York Times) Of course it has, in the run-up to the conventions. Not a joke candidate like Dan Quayle was, Cheney is nevertheless increasingly seen as a liability to the reelection effort, even in Republican circles. For the Democrats, he is a convenient way to get to the President, so much so that many relish the prospect of his remaining on the Republican ticket. I do; I pray Bush doesn’t choose this issue as the one on which to get over his constitutional inability to admit he made a mistake or rethink a decision. Part of Bush’s problem maybe that it is difficult to see whom he might tap for the job — who would be willing to take it, is a prominent enough Republican but sufficiently devoid of polarizing baggage. That lets out the most-commonly discussed possibilities such as McCain, Powell or other cabinet members. My God, what could be worse than Bush-Cheney ’04… Bush-Ashcroft! But a more important reason Bush wouldn’t dump Cheney is that… it is Cheney who has always made such important decisions for Bush.
The broad rejection may signal that American society has simply progressed too far to concretize discrimination against queer couples among the nation’s guiding principles. But another, perhaps more crucial, test to that progress looms just around the corner.
In Massachusetts — the only state so far where same-sex couples may legally marry — legislators are gearing up for a constitutional battle of their own…” [more] (Village Voice)
Signs of migration underscore the sometimes evanescent success of media rebels facing attacks from record labels and movie studios. Not only has Sharman itself been hit with lawsuits seeking to shut it down; thousands of its customers have been charged with civil copyright infringement violations, and media companies have flooded its network with fake files to interfere with file-swapping activities.” (CNET News)
Nationwide Day of Action July 13, 2004: “Across the U.S., awareness is rising about the dangers of paperless electronic voting and the need for election integrity. Rallies nationwide on July 13 will deliver petitions to top election officials in each state and ask state election officials to sign a pledge.”
Study says gene encourages monogamy. A single gene, which controls the expression of a receptor for the neuropeptide vasopressin in the ventral pallidum region of the prairie vole, apparently makes all the difference between the monogamous mating behavior of this species and the promiscuousness of the closely related meadow vole species. Inserting the vasopressin receptor gene in the proper brain area in meadow voles makes them strongly prefer their current mate just as the prairie voles do, and blocking the effects of vasopressin at the newly expressed receptors makes them revert to their noncommittal behavior. The implicated region is involved in mediating the brain’s reward system, and it is hypothesized that prairie voles feel a sort of reinforcing pleasure with their mates that is absent in the meadow vole. (Boston Globe)
‘I think it’s excessive based on what we know,’ said Rep. Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, in a interview on CNN’s ‘Late Edition.’
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge warned last week that Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network want to attack within the United States to try to disrupt the election.
Harman said Ridge’s threat warning ‘was a bust’ because it was based on old information.” (Reuters)
When conspiracy buffs talk sinister scenarios, creating a state of emergency to postpone the lawful succession of power is always a big part of it. Given how much this dysadministration has done without giving a damn about the will of the people or the rule of law, with a philosophical position that they and only they can best make decisions for the country and that their ends justify any means, this is the first time I can believe in this possibility.
U.S. News obtains all classified annexes to the Taguba report on Abu Ghraib:
Daily life at Abu Ghraib, the documents show, included riots, prisoner escapes, shootings, corrupt Iraqi guards, filthy conditions, sexual misbehavior, bug-infested food, prisoner beatings and humiliations, and almost-daily mortar shellings from Iraqi insurgents. Troubles inside the prison were made worse still by a military command structure that was hopelessly broken.”
