“The first virus to spread from one cell phone to another has been created, the Russian anti-virus software vendor Kaspersky Labs announced on Tuesday.

Cabir has no malicious capabilities and affects only a small slice of ‘smart’ phones that run on both the sophisticated Symbian operating system and have a Bluetooth connection. It has been written by a group called 29a.

The virus is an ‘interesting milestone’, says Graham Cluley, a consultant at the anti-virus software vendor Sophos in Oxford, UK, because it is the first virus to spread through a cell phone network.” (New Scientist)

“The finding casts serious doubt on the reliability of victim testimonies in cases involving psychological trauma.” (New Scientist) While prior research cast doubts on the accuracy of recall of traumatic events, critics felt the studies, necessarily, could not be naturalistic enough and that real trauma might actually focus the memory. But a new study by Yale researchers, partially funded by the Pentagon, studied over 500 military personnel at mock POW camps designed to train subjects to withstand capture. 24 hours after the subjects’ release from the camps, their ability to recognize their interrogators was abysmal.

After more than 80 years without surnames, picking one is as much about personality as it is ancestry: “For more than 80 years, everyone in Mongolia was on a first-name basis. After seizing power in the early 1920s, the Mongolian Communists destroyed all family names in a campaign to eliminate the clan system, the hereditary aristocracy and the class structure.

Within a few decades, most Mongolians had forgotten their ancestral names. They used only a single given name — a system that eventually became confusing when 9,000 women ended up with the same name, Altantsetseg, meaning ‘golden flower.’

By the mid-1990s, Mongolia had become a democracy again, and there were growing worries about the lack of surnames. One name might be enough when most people were nomadic herdsman in remote pastures, but now the country was urbanizing. The one-name system was so confusing that some people were marrying without realizing they were relatives.

In 1997, a new law required everyone to have surnames. The law was largely ignored, but then a system of citizenship cards was introduced. Slowly the country of 2.5 million began to adopt surnames.” (Globe and Mail)

Happy Bloomsday! It was 100 years ago today that Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus circuited Dublin on Everyman’s journey. Millions will be marking the occasion today with a pilgrimmage, a reading, a staged reenactment or simply a pint.

Addendum: Thanks to acm for pointing me to this news which threatens to disrupt the Bloomsday celebration (from comments). Somehow it seems that Joyce’s ‘high-faluttin’ fun’ ought to be immune to litigiousness if anything is:

Copyright row threat to ‘Ulysses’ centenary: “Stephen Joyce, the grandson and last surviving relative of the writer, has caused consternation by declaring that any public reading of what is regarded as the most influential novel of the 20th century will be a breach of copyright and cannot go ahead without permission and payment. Readings in both London and Dublin to launch the first ever unabridged audio CD of the book – the 22 discs last 27 hours – have been cancelled because of fears of litigation.

Much of the difficulty stems from a change in copyright law in 1996 which extended the period of copyright from 50 years to 70 years after an author’s death. This meant Joyce, who died in 1941, was out of copyright for five years – allowing readings – before becoming copyrighted again.” (Independent.UK)

Here is Ulysses online. Dig in.

Dave Winer has abruptly pulled the plug on hosting anyone’s weblog at weblogs.com anymore. Among the homeless is Craig Jensen’s venerable Booknotes. Winer has agreed to send those who request a copy of their site. I hope Craig, and the other ninety or so who have so far asked him to export their sites, will find hosts soon.

“Ashcroft is a scumbag, fire his boss and he goes too.” — Rafe Colburn

US told: charge Saddam or free him: “Saddam Hussein must either be released from custody by June 30 or charged if the US and the new Iraqi government are to conform to international law, the International Committee of the Red Cross said last night.” (Guardian.UK)

Neuroscientific corroboration that we cannot see faults in our partners or children. (Telegraph.UK)

“…(S)ources close to the Bush family say the elder Bush thinks his son has mishandled the war in Iraq.

“They disagree on the war,” says a family confidante. “Former President Bush believes the U.S. should have sought more support before invading Iraq and feels his son did not work hard enough to secure the support of allies.” (Capitol Hill Blue)

“A new book by a prominent Washington psychoanalyst says President George W. Bush is a ‘paranoid meglomaniac’ as well as a sadist and ‘untreated alcoholic.’ The doctor’s analysis appears to confirm earlier reports the President may be emotionally unstable.

Dr. Justin Frank, writing in Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President, also says the President has a ”lifelong streak of sadism, ranging from childhood pranks (using firecrackers to explode frogs) to insulting journalists, gloating over state executions … [and] pumping his fist gleefully before the bombing of Baghdad.’

Even worse, Dr. Frank concludes, the President’s years of heavy drinking ”may have affected his brain function – and his decision to quit drinking without the help of a 12-step program [puts] him at far higher risk of relapse.’

Dr. Frank’s revelations comes on the heels of last week’s Capitol Hill Blue exclusive that revealed increasing concern by White House aides over Bush’s emotional stability.”

As a psychiatrist, I am of two minds about Dr. Frank’s conduct here. On the one hand, it is a central ethical tenet of the profession that we not diagnose people from a distance, outside of a treatment relationship with them. Furthermore, Dr. Frank’s language here is nothing short of sensationalistic. On the other hand, the mental health of the President of the United States is of abiding public concern. In a sense, since his behavior is in the public domain, so too should be observers’ opinions about his psychiatric health. By assuming the role of President, perhaps one can argue that he abdicates a right to immunity from public speculation about his mental health. There have been calls to mandate an annual psychiatric checkup whose conclusions on the President’s emotional fitness and stability would be made public, much as we feel we have a right to know of his physical health. It is arguably especially important for qualified individuals to raise informed concerns about suggestions of grave instability. Apart from the ethical qualms that may be raised, scientific ones arise as well. No one believes psychoanalytic conclusions about a subject’s “character” as much as the psychoanalysts, and character diagnosis is what Frank is doing here. The psychoanalytic situation is specially designed to elicit evidence of the deep character structure and dynamics of the subject; through a delicate balance between empathy and reserve, the analyst creates the unique relationship with the subject that encourages a ‘transference’ of deep unconscious ways of perceiving and relating to others, shaped by earlier experience, to a trained observer skilled at discerning the pattern in them. So character analysis without an analytic treatment alliance and access to Bush’s transference material is on shaky ground indeed. (Not having read Dr. Frank’s book, I hope it includes a lengthy discussion of the merits and limits of the inferences he draws.) Frank is more justified, in my opinion, whem he raises concerns about the impact of Bush’s alcohol abuse on his brain function and cognitive competency. And as to Dr. Frank’s conclusion that

“our sole treatment option — for his benefit and for ours — is to remove President Bush from office . . . before it is too late”,

well, it doesn’t take a shrink to reach such a conclusion — or to agree with it.

“The United States launched many more failed airstrikes on a far broader array of senior Iraqi leaders during the early days of the war last year than has previously been acknowledged, and some caused significant civilian casualties, according to senior military and intelligence officials.

Only a few of the 50 airstrikes have been described in public. All were unsuccessful, and many, including the two well-known raids on Saddam Hussein and his sons, appear to have been undercut by poor intelligence, current and former government officials said.” (New York Times)

Abu Ghraib Used Aggressive Tactics: “Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. military officer in Iraq, borrowed heavily from a list of high-pressure interrogation tactics used at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and approved letting senior officials at a Baghdad jail use military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns, sensory deprivation, and diets of bread and water on detainees whenever they wished, according to newly obtained documents.

The U.S. policy, details of which have not been previously disclosed, was approved in early September, shortly after an Army general sent from Washington completed his inspection of the Abu Ghraib jail and then returned to brief Pentagon officials on his ideas for using military police there to help implement the new high-pressure methods.” (Washington Post)

Bush, Cheney Indictments in Plame Case Looming: “Both resignations, perhaps soon to be followed by resignations from Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage, are about the imminent and extremely messy demise of George W. Bush and his Neocon administration in a coup d’etat being executed by the Central Intelligence Agency. The coup, in the planning for at least two years, has apparently become an urgent priority as a number of deepening crises threaten a global meltdown.

Based upon recent developments, it appears that long-standing plans and preparations leading to indictments and impeachment of Bush, Cheney and even some senior cabinet members have been accelerated, possibly with the intent of removing or replacing the entire Bush regime prior to the Republican National Convention this August.” (From the Wilderness)

“26 ex-diplomats and military leaders say his foreign policy has harmed national security. Several served under Republicans.” (LA Times)

The iRaq iPod advertisement sendups are now being seen around LA too.

NPR Morning Edition: “A new report indicates one in six older teens and young adults lacks the skills to take on adult responsibilities, has little family or community support and is not likely to succeed as an adult. Advocates often call these young people ‘disconnected,’ and some say their situation has taken a back seat to the needs of younger children.”

Anthropologist suggests survival of the nicest prevails: “The prevailing view in popular and scientific literature is that humans and animals are genetically driven to compete for survival, thus making all social interaction inherently selfish. According to this line of reasoning, known as sociobiology, even seemingly unselfish acts of altruism merely represent a species’ strategy to survive and preserve its genes.

But Robert W. Sussman, Ph.D., a professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, argues that this is a narrow and simplistic view of evolutionary theory that fails to explain many aspects of sociality among mammals in general and primates in particular.”

“The torture scandal continues to grow, and with it the outrage of the Arab world. As our leaders continue to blame a few rogue soldiers, a cycle of mutual suspicion and dehumanization between the Arab world and the United States deepens.

We need to send a message directly from the people of the United States , to the people of Iraq and the Arab world, telling them that, as Americans, we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them in demanding justice for these sinful abuses committed in our name.

To do this, we’ve filmed a television ad with Christian, Jewish and Muslim faith leaders to be broadcast on Arabic-language television in the Middle East. You can view the ad using the link below. If you feel the message expresses what is in your heart, let the world know by endorsing the ad. You can even donate to help put it on the air.”

www.faithfulamerica.org/AdClip.htm (True Majority)

(Astronomy Picture of the Day)

The names that parents give their children illuminate cultural evolution. “Had Apple Blythe Alison Martin—the offspring of a celebrity couple, Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin—been born a boy, it is quite possible she would have had been given something of a more normal name. This suggestion arises from research into changing fashions in children’s names, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Alexander Bentley, of University College, London, and his colleagues are studying the mathematics of cultural transmission. For this sort of work, birth records—which contain every instance in a country of one sort of cultural object, namely people’s first names—are a particularly good source of data.” (The Economist )

“We talk sometimes as if democracy were the natural human condition, as if any deviation from it is a crime to be punished or a disease to be cured. That is not true. Democracy, or what we call democracy nowadays, is the parochial custom of the English-speaking peoples for the conduct of their public affairs, which may or may not be suitable for others,”

cautions Bernard Lewis.

Ian Buruma reviews a new collection of a half-century of Lewis’ essays. (The New Yorker)

A 10-page special Infoporn on the global battle between liberty and control: “Wired offers an atlas of the intellectual property world. The maps and charts on the following pages show how IP enforcers are manning the ramparts while IP antagonists are challenging the protection regime. We focus on four industries: media, medicine, agriculture, and software. And while the battle rages, here and there a few pioneers are redrawing the map, marking a third way that respects patent protections and copyright controls while trying to foster more opportunities for broader access. The beginnings can be found in Linux and The Grey Album, generics and the Creative Commons. Use this atlas as a guide to two worlds in collision – and an outline of a new frontier.”

A Chilling AMA Resolution: The physician who proposed this resolution to the AMA ought to be brought before his state medical licensing authority on ethics charges. (This column by Ralph Nader illustrates why Nader should remain a muckraker and keep his nose out of the Presidential campaign, by the way.) (CommonDreams)

U.S. subsidies ensure low gas prices in Iraq: “Before the war, forecasters predicted that by invading Iraq and ousting Saddam Hussein, America would benefit from increased exports of oil from Iraq, which has the world?9s second-largest petroleum reserves.

That would mean cheap gas for American motorists and a boost for the oil-dependent American economy.

More than a year after the invasion, that logic has been flipped on its head. Now the average price for gasoline in the United States is $2.05 a gallon – 50 cents more than the pre-invasion price.

Instead, the only people getting cheap gas as a result of the invasion are the Iraqis.

Filling a 22-gallon tank in Baghdad with low-grade fuel costs just $1.10, plus a 50-cent tip for the attendant. A tankful of high-test costs $2.75.

In Britain, by contrast, gasoline prices hit $5.79 per gallon last week – $127 for a tankful.

Although Iraq is a major petroleum producer, the country has little capacity to refine its own gasoline. So the U.S. government pays about $1.50 a gallon to buy fuel in neighboring countries and deliver it to Iraqi stations. A three-month supply costs American taxpayers more than $500 million, not including the cost of military escorts to fend off attacks by Iraqi insurgents.

‘We thank the Americans. They risked their lives to liberate us, and now they are improving our lives,’ said Baghdad taxi driver Osama Hashim, 26, while filling the tank on his beat-up 1983 Volkswagen.

Iraq?9s fuel subsidies, which are intended to mollify drivers used to low-priced fuel under Saddam, have coupled with the opening of the borders to create an anarchic car culture in Baghdad.

Cheap used cars shipped from Europe and Asia are flooding into Iraq. A 10-year-old BMW in good condition costs just $5,000. Since gas is so cheap, anyone with a car can become a taxi driver. Drivers jam the streets, offering rides for as little as 250 dinars – about 17 cents.

Iraq has no sales tax, no registration, no license plates and no auto insurance. Some would argue there are no rules of the road. Cars barrel the wrong way on the highway. They swoop into surprise U-turns. They ignore traffic signals.” (Columbia Tribune [via walker])

David Aronovitch: “The Reagan years were the years, perhaps, in which the cold war was won, and that is obviously good. He wasn’t the missile-mad cowboy of cartoons, and those of us who thought otherwise were wrong. But the Reagan presidency of 1981-89 was also when the dragon’s teeth of the present were sown. Reagan’s legacy to the world may be the fallen wall, but it is also the third-world landmine.” (Guardian.UK [thanks, Roger])

Also: a remarkable collection of progressive columnists share my revulsion, or at least querulousness, about the orgy of myopic praise for Reagan this week. (I am tempted to take back my contribution from NPR for joining in the almost universal hushed tones of reverence with no counterbalancing viewpoints. All Things Considered indeed! Some would invoke the cliché about not speaking ill of the dead, but I would counterpose with that the one about living your life so that no one can speak ill of you when you die.) Here is a collection of links from the Common Dreams Media Center:

• Norman Solomon:
  
  Media: Mourning in America…
• Derrick Jackson:
  
  Reagan Brought Back Black and White…
• Alison Ninio:
  
  Growing Up Reagan…
• Jonathan Steele:
  
  He Lied and Cheated in the Name of Anti-communism: From Iraq, Reagan Didn’t Look So Freedom-Loving…
• Roberto Rodriguez & Patrisia Gonzales:
  
  Morning and Mourning in America…
• Mokhiber/Weissman:
  
  Remembering Reagan…
• Sheldon Rampton/John Stauber:
  
  Wrapping Reagan in the Flag One Last Time…
• Walter Williams:
  
  Reagan’s Destructive Revolution…
• Stephen Zunes:
  
  Don’t Credit Reagan for Ending the Cold War…
• Marty Jezer:
  
  Two American Lives: Ronald Reagan & Dave Dellinger…
• William Greider:
  
  The Gipper’s Economy…
• Antonia Zerbisias:
  
  Media has Reagan Myopia…
• Harvey Wasserman:
  
  Rock & Radiation, not Ronald Reagan, Brought down the Soviet Union…
• Zeynep Toufe:
  
  Ronald Reagan, Neo-Cons and the ‘Intelligence Failures’ of the Cold War: Déjà vu All Over Again…
• Lawrence Martin:
  
  Gorby Had the Lead Role, Not Gipper…
• Sidney Blumenthal:
  
  The U-turn That Saved the Gipper: After Iran-contra, Reagan Ditched the Right and Embraced Gorbachev…
• Peter Dreier:
  
  Urban Suffering Grew Under Reagan…
• Derrick Jackson:
  
  Reagan’s Heart of Darkness…
• Matthew Rothschild:
  
  No Praise for Reagan…
• Arianna Huffington
  
  Ronald Reagan, Hedgehogs And The November Election…
• Ted Rall:
  
  Reagan’s Shameful Legacy: Mourn for Us, Not the Proto-Bush…
• Tony Horwitz:
  
  Let’s Bury Reaganomics With Its Founder…
• Matt Foreman:
  
  A Letter to My Best Friend, Steven Powsner On the Death of Former President Ronald Reagan…
• John Moyers:
  
  ‘American Idol’ Faceoff: Reagan vs FDR…
• Godfrey Hodgson:
  
  Reagan’s Legacy? Look at the Closed Minds and Hard Hearts of the Conservatives who Staff the Bush Administration…
• Geov Parrish:
  
  The Reaction from Those of Us Who Came of Age During the Reagan Presidency — and Found It Inexplicably Horrific…
• Robert Scheer:
  
  Reagan: A Nice Guy’s Nasty Policies…
• Paul Krugman:
  
  Reagan: The Great Taxer…

“The torture scandal continues to grow, and with it the outrage of the Arab world. As our leaders continue to blame a few rogue soldiers, a cycle of mutual suspicion and dehumanization between the Arab world and the United States deepens.

We need to send a message directly from the people of the United States , to the people of Iraq and the Arab world, telling them that, as Americans, we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them in demanding justice for these sinful abuses committed in our name.

To do this, we’ve filmed a television ad with Christian, Jewish and Muslim faith leaders to be broadcast on Arabic-language television in the Middle East. You can view the ad using the link below. If you feel the message expresses what is in your heart, let the world know by endorsing the ad. You can even donate to help put it on the air.”

www.faithfulamerica.org/AdClip.htm (True Majority)

Who Says? “If you’ve been following the election coverage, you know how angry you’re supposed to be. This has been called the Armageddon election in the 50-50 nation, a civil war between the Blue and the Red states, a clash between churchgoers and secularists hopelessly separated by a values chasm and a culture gap.

But do Americans really despise the beliefs of half of their fellow citizens? Have Americans really changed so much since the day when a candidate with Ronald Reagan’s soothing message could carry 49 of 50 states?

To some scholars, the answer is no. They say that our basic differences have actually been shrinking over the past two decades, and that the polarized nation is largely a myth created by people inside the Beltway talking to each another or, more precisely, shouting at each other.” (New York Times)

“On May 10 Steven Kurtz went to bed a married art professor. On May 11 he woke up a widower. By the afternoon he was under federal investigation for bioterrorism.

What began as a personal tragedy for Mr Kurtz has turned into what many believe is, at best, an overreaction prompted by 9/11 paranoia and, at worst, a politically motivated attempt to silence a radical artist.” (Guardian.UK)

“A clever border collie that can fetch at least 200 objects by name may be living proof that dogs truly understand human language, German scientists reported on Thursday.

Rico can figure out which object his master wants even if he has never heard the word before, the researchers say.

The findings, reported in the journal Science, may not surprise many dog owners. But they are certain to re-ignite a debate over what language is and whether it is unique to humans.

Rico’s abilities seem to follow a process called ‘fast mapping,’ seen when young children start to learn to speak and understand language, they report.” (Wired)

from POE News [via Dennis]

I have previously written about the arms race between Apple and those who seek fair use of the tunes they buy from the iTunes Store. Ver. 4.5 of iTunes defeated Playfair’s de-DRM strategy; Hymn renovated it. Now Apple’s up to ver. 4.6 and, if you really need to upgrade (?perhaps to avail yourself of AirTunes’ functionality?) you will find that Hymn’ed songs won’t play. Hymn embeds the user’s name and email address in the unprotected .mp4 file it makes as a sign of good faith, as if to insure that the unprotected files are not redistributed. Well, iTunes 4.6 looks for the embedded identification information and simply refuses to play those files. Here is a method of getting past that in iTunes 4.6 by taking a hex editor to your unprotected songs.

Paul Boutin: Virus-proof your PC in 20 minutes, for free:

“So I whittled the world of options down to three steps that, on most PCs, can be done in less than 20 minutes. (Once you’re done, you’ll need to run some programs that take longer than that, but there’s no need to sit and watch.) Just as important, they’re all free, thanks to a mix of promotional offers and hacker idealism. Some of these instructions might seem obvious, even dumb, but I was surprised to find that many of my friends’ PCs had missed one or another of them. Any computer user who got hit by the Sasser worm hadn’t bothered to do the second step. Do all three, and you’ll be protected against the most common infections and still be left with time and money for lunch.” (Slate)

Four adult epilepsy patients who had had a grid of electrodes implanted on the surfaces of their brains (for the purpose of accurately localizing their seizure focus) learned to move a computer cursor on screen with their mental processes alone and, with only hours of practice, play a simple computer game with their minds. As boing boing, which pointed me to this item, suggested, I wonder how long it will be before the Pentagon starts implanting these grids into their clientele.

This observance of the 35th anniversary of the 1969 release of David Bowie’s Space Oddity made me recall the Pan Am “First Moon Flights Club”. If you remember, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) put Pan Am’s name on the shuttle the protagonists ride to the moon. When the airline announced in late 1968, during a break in ABC-TV’s coverage of the Apollo 8 mission, that it would begin accepting reservations for the first commercial flight to the moon, it was deluged with requests and quickly established the club, which was essentially a waitiing list dignified by a wallet card. I was one of the charter members of the First Moon Flights Club and showed off my increasingly dog-eared membership card, with a number somewhere in the low 1000’s, to anyone who did not believe my boast that I was on the waiting list for a moonflight. I swore that I would do anything to raise the airfare by the time my name rose to the top of the list. By the time Pan Am stopped taking reservations in 1971, club membership stood at over 93,000 strong, and rival TWA had a similar arrangement. I don’t know what ever happened to my card, although I doubt the waiting list was transferred anywhere else when Pan Am went out of business in 1991. And although some opine that space activities will never be profitable until tourism services begin, I don’t suppose I am going to break my terrestrial bonds in this lifetime.

“Live Bonnaroo offers downloads of high fidelity, mastered, soundboard recordings of entire sets from many artists performing at this year’s Bonnaroo Music Festival. Sets are available in both MP3 and CD-quality lossless formats (FLAC), powered by nugs.net’s state-of-the-art delivery system.” [via largehearted boy]

“Reversing itself, the Army said Tuesday that a G.I. was discharged partly because of a head injury he suffered while posing as an uncooperative detainee during a training exercise at Guant?namo Bay, Cuba.

The Army had previously said Specialist Sean Baker’s medical discharge in April was unrelated to the injury he received last year at the detention center, where the United States holds suspected terrorists.

Mr. Baker, 37, a former member of the 438th Military Police Company, said he played the role of an uncooperative prisoner and was beaten so badly by four American soldiers that he suffered a traumatic brain injury and seizures. He said the soldiers only stopped beating him when they realized he might be American..” (New York Times)

Riemann hypothesis may have been solved… for a cool $1 million:

“A mathematician at Purdue University claims to have come up with a proof for the Riemann hypothesis, often called the greatest unsolved math problem, though the work has yet to be peer-reviewed.” (CNET)

“What tricks will BushCo pull to attempt to win the election in November? Well, he’ll probably try something around or before October to swing or steal the vote. Welcome to October Surprise, where you can predict what will happen before the November 2004 election. Take the poll here.” Announcing the capture of Osama bin Laden is currently the leading contender, with around twice the votes as the next most popular alternative. My only question to the poll originator(s) — why are we only allowed to choose one??

Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right: “Christopher Ricks, the newly elected professor of poetry at Oxford, is also the Warren Professor of Humanities at Boston University, where he has a large and elegantly furnished office overlooking Storrow Drive, and he bikes to it every day from his house in Cambridge. The bookshelves contain a complete vellum-bound set of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets and copies of the many books Mr. Ricks has himself written or edited — books about Keats, Milton, Beckett and T. S. Eliot; editions of Tennyson, Housman and Eliot’s early poems; anthologies of Victorian verse and of English poetry from the anonymous author of “Sumer is icumen in” to Seamus Heaney. In a corner by the desk there is also a boom box. Mr. Ricks brings this to lectures when he wants to talk about another of his favorite poets: Bob Dylan.

Mr. Ricks, who is 70 and was born in Britain and educated at Oxford, is a professor’s professor, a don’s don. He is courtly, charming and fond of wicked anecdotes about academic backbiting. He is also immensely learned. It’s a tossup whether he or Harold Bloom knows more English verse by heart, but Mr. Ricks surely knows more Led Zeppelin lyrics than Mr. Bloom does, and can recite them on request. His love of Mr. Dylan’s work is not an affectation, though — the pathetic impersonation of an old prof trying to prove how cool he is — but a genuine passion. He has just added to the not inconsiderable body of Dylan scholarship with a book of his own, his longest to date, Dylan’s Visions of Sin (Ecco Press), which devotes some 500 pages to a close analysis, line by line sometimes, of the master’s greatest hits.” (New York Times )

“Although it won’t ship until July, the Express has already lured many gadget fiends into placing early orders. Apple won’t talk numbers, but according to one of the leading online Mac retailers, CDW MacWarehouse, advance orders for Express base stations have been lighting up their Web site.

Clearly, Express’ primary allure is moving digital music off the desktop and into the living room, the office, or wherever a user happens to be. A plethora of consumer-electronics and PC vendors have introduced products trying to do more or less what Apple seeks to do with the AirPort. But, in most cases, configuration remains tricky and a stumbling block for Joe Public.

That usability gap is where the Express truly shines. Rather than reinvent the wheel, Apple has just added some new twists to make the router an extension of the already popular iTunes and iPod famly. A new piece of software, AirTunes, promises seamless synching between a computer — PC or Mac — and any Wi-Fi-ready speakers within range via the Express router.” (BusinessWeek)

“It appears that what they were contemplating was the commission of war crimes and looking for ways to avoid accountability.” — Tom Malinowski, Human Rights Watch (Washington Post)

Said to Be ‘Victim of Ancient Albanian Jinx’: “While heavyweight pundits ponder the ‘real reasons’ behind CIA director George Tenet’s sudden resignation, a Tirana newspaper on Friday offered a typically whimsical explanation; he fell victim to an ancient Albanian curse.

The Korrieri daily said the CIA chief’s resignation on Thursday fell a day before he had been due to visit Albania.

‘If he had not planned a visit to Albania, probably he would have not been struck by the curse of the Pojan jinx,’ editor Alfred Peza said in his column, citing a supposed evil spirit that jinxed the villagers of Pojan back in the mists of time.

Tenet was clearly felled by the jinx, wrote Peza, as were the late Soviet Army Marshal Georgy Zhukov, former West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and others who were demoted or quit after becoming involved with Albania.” (Yahoo! News)

New Service by TiVo Will Build Bridges From Internet to the TV: “TiVo, the maker of a popular digital video recorder, plans to announce a new set of Internet-based services today that will further blur the line between programming delivered over traditional cable and satellite channels and content from the Internet. It is just one of a growing group of large and small companies that are looking at high-speed Internet to deliver video content to the living room.

The new TiVo technology, which will become a standard feature in its video recorders, will allow users to download movies and music from the Internet to the hard drive on their video recorder. Although the current TiVo service allows users to watch broadcast, cable or satellite programs at any time, the new technology will make it possible for them to mix content from the Internet with those programs.” (New York Times)

Indoor toxins may be worse for you than outdoor smog (SF Chronicle)

““Port out, starboard home” is the origin of the word posh. Right? Wrong – as are so many of those etymology tales we love to believe… Launching a new series on myths about our language, Michael Quinion examines the outlandish stories that surround English words and phrases – and explains the truth behind them” (Telegraph.UK)

“This isn’t a problem that started in this Bush administration, though the combination of ignorance and arrogance in President George W. Bush’s foreign policy has proved especially lethal.” — Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University (International Herald Tribune via CommonDreams)

today’s transit of the sun by Venus? (Astronomy Picture of the Day)

Christopher Hitchens almost manages to redeem himself with a devastating piece on The stupidity of Ronald Reagan (“…nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like…”) until he loses it in an almost incoherent final paragraph. (Slate)

“Forget drug-free and nuclear-free zones. A growing grassroots movement seeks to make the United States a Patriot Act-free zone, one city at a time.

Or, at the very least, the people behind the movement hope to make their cities constitutional safe zones.

In the past two years, more than 300 cities and four states have passed resolutions calling on Congress to repeal or change parts of the USA Patriot Act that, activists say, violate constitutional rights such as free speech and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure.

Barring that, the resolutions declare that their communities will uphold the constitutional rights of their residents should federal law enforcement agents come knocking on the door of local authorities for assistance in tracking residents. This means local authorities will insist on complying with federal orders only in ways that do not violate constitutional rights. The resolutions are not binding, however, and do not affect the federal government’s actions.” (Wired)

Declan McCullagh:

“It’s time to abolish the Federal Communications Commission. The reason is simple. The venerable FCC, created in 1934, is no longer necessary. Its justification for existence was weak 70 years ago, but advances in technology since then have eliminated whatever arguments remained. Central planning didn’t work for the Soviet Union, and it’s not working for us. The FCC is now an agency that does more harm than good…” (CNET)

Simplistic headline belies more provocative content:

Causes of violence traced to human nature: “Artistic cruelty is hardly a thing of the past,’ writes Steven Pinker, Harvard psychologist and author of The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.

In explaining human thought and behavior, Pinker, whose courses include ‘The Human Mind,’ ‘Cognitive and Behavioral Genetics’ and ‘Evolutionary Psychology,’ argues that to refuse to acknowledge our evolutionary human nature distorts both the science and scholarship of today. Contrary to the title of his recent book, Pinker believes and argues with clarity, human beings are not born with a blank slate on which parents, environment, culture and society write. [This does not contradict the title, IMHO. The title makes it clear that Pinker thinks the ‘blank slate’ concept is misguided. — FmH]

Although the book covers a variety of topics including nature versus nurture, it is the chapter on violence I turned to upon learning of the recent revelations of human abuse once more against humans.”

As a clinical psychiatrist, this finding is of professional interest in terms of adjusting the assumptions I bring to bear when assessing and treating hoarders. But the more crucial impact is the questions the researchers raise about the basis for diagnostic classification. Lumping disorders by symptomatic appearance makes sense if you are trying to talk to your patients about the pattern and sources of their distress. If, however, it is biological adjustment that is your main concern, it has to be done differently.

: “New research into the brain patterns of compulsive hoarders shows the disorder may have been misclassified and victims could be getting the wrong treatment, U.S. scientists reported on Tuesday.

Brain scans show the biology of America’s estimated 1 million compulsive hoarders is significantly different to that of other people diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, the team at the University of California Los Angeles found.

Hoarding is usually classified as obsessive-compulsive disorder, a catch-all term for a range of symptoms such as constantly repeating actions like handwashing or checking to make sure a stove is turned off.

‘Our work shows that hoarding and saving compulsions long associated with OCD may spring from unique, previously unrecognized neurobiological malfunctions that standard treatments do not necessarily address,’ Dr. Sanjaya Saxena, who led the study, said in a statement.

“In addition, the results emphasize the need to rethink how we categorize psychiatric disorders. Diagnosis and treatment should be driven by biology rather than symptoms,” Saxena added. ” (Yahoo! )

“The IQ test is 100 years old – but do its multiple-choice sums and sequences really measure anything, or is it just a way to make money? Matthew Sweet examines the bizarre world of cleverness, and attempts to join Mensa, the club for smart alecs” (Independent.UK)

Book Review: Forever Young: A cultural history of longevity by Lucian Boia:

“Where did we go wrong? Adam lived to the age of 930 and his grandson Methuselah to 969. The first generations of Chinese and Indian people are said to have lived for thousands of years. In our time, however, Jeanne Calment only clocked up a measly 122 years.

Historian Lucian Boia of the University of Bucharest, Romania, is as much concerned with the mythology of longevity as the reality. In Forever Young, he demonstrates how little our obsession with cheating death has changed.” (New Scientist)

Does Anil Dash deserve an iPod more than some other link spammer? Can he make it to the top?

“The Bush campaign is seeking to enlist thousands of religious congregations around the country in distributing campaign information and registering voters, according to an e-mail message sent to many members of the clergy and others in Pennsylvania.

Liberal groups charged that the effort invited violations of the separation of church and state and jeopardized the tax-exempt status of churches that cooperated. Some socially conservative church leaders also said they would advise pastors against participating in such a partisan effort.” (New York Times)

Several people have pointed me to this weblogger’s account of another curious intersection in Nicholas Berg’s life. He was apparently interviewed by Michael Moore for Fahrenheit 9/11, although the footage did not end up getting used in the film.

“Berg seemed to live quite a life of adventure with very marginal means of support. You have to wonder whether he had a secret sponsor. His propensity for ‘running into’ certain people is beginning to look like a pattern.” (xymphora )

• ABC: Tenet’s Resignation, ‘Strictly Personal,’ Says Brother
• Reuters: Bush Says He (sic) Sorry Tenet Left CIA
• Defenselink.mil: Rumsfeld Says Tenet’s Work Helped Save Lives on Battlefield
• The Australian, Australia: Bush ‘didn’t ask Tenet to resign’: “US President George W Bush did not ask CIA director George Tenet to resign and had no advance notice he would do so, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said …”
• Seattle Post Intelligencer: Bush: Tenet leaving shouldn’t hurt morale
• E-Commerce Times: No Shock at Tenet Departure: “… Tenet’s departure was the worst-kept Washington secret this side of John Kerry’s political vacillations — his fate sealed when Bob Woodward outed him as …
• New York Post: Tenet Exit Has Spooks Spooked: “The stage has been set by CIA Director George Tenet’s resignation for major reforms in the nation’s intelligence networks that …”
• International Herald Tribune, France: CIA after Tenet: Terror warnings are not enough: “Some critics of America’s intelligence services will mistakenly see George Tenet’s resignation as director of central intelligence as a reaction to …”
• East Valley Tribune, AZ: Scuttlebutt about Tenet: “The scuttlebutt in Washington is that George Tenet is resigning as director of the CIA because several harsh reports were about to descend on his head like …”
• Pacific News Service, CA: Tenet or Not, CIA Must Learn Mideast’s ‘Secret Language’: “The resignation of George Tenet as CIA director, following a string of disastrous failures at the agency, underscores the greater failure of the US …”
• Common Dreams: Bush’s Erratic Behavior Worries White House Aides: “… The President’s abrupt dismissal of CIA Directory George Tenet Wednesday night is, aides say, an example of how he works.”
• Providence Journal, RI: RI delegation surprised by timing of Tenet resignation
• Peoria Journal Star, IL: LaHood shocked at Tenet’s timing
• Bloomington Pantagraph, IA: Durbin, LaHood say Tenet not the problem
• Pacifica Radio: Fall Guy for the Bush Regime? “Geoge Tenet resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency for “personal reasons,” but many analysts say that Tenet is a fall guy for an …”
• NewsMax, FL: Report May Have Hastened Tenet’s Resignation: “…Tenet’s resignation comes just as a critical, 400-page report from the Senate intelligence committee was readied for public …”
• GOPUSA: Pelosi: Tenet Only first of Many Who Should Go
• SunHerald.com, MS: Tenet out; CIA debate rages: “George Tenet’s resignation as CIA director does little to solve the many inherent problems plaguing US intelligence, say former spies, lawmakers …”
• Dallas Morning News: Did Tenet jump or was he pushed?
• NDTV.com, India: Chalabi slams Tenet: “Former Iraqi governing council member Ahmed Chalabi has launched a bitter attack on Tenet saying the former CIA chief is to blame for false information on …”
• CNN: Chalabi blames Tenet for feud with US
• NewsMax.com, FL: Hillary Clinton: ‘Pro-Chalabi Supporters’ Forced Tenet Out
• Miami Herald: Text of Tenet’s Letter of Resignation
• Duluth Weekly, GA: Collins Surprised at CIA Director George Tenet’s Resignation: “… Georgia Republican Congressman Mac Collins, a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence was surprised Thursday that Tenet decided to …”
• Council Bluffs Daily Nonpareil, IA: Harkin: No sorrow for loss of Tenet: “Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, doesn’t feel sorry for George Tenet, who resigned Thursday as CIA director. … He (Tenet) misled the president and everybody,” Harkin said. …”
• The Spoof (satire): Tenet Starts Avalanche of Resignations: “Within hours of throwing in the towel, newly resigned CIA chief George Tenet has unwittingly started a domino effect in the Bush cabinet. …”
• Town Hall, DC: “Tenet stacked up an impressive number of failures during his tenure, but pinning America’s atrophied intelligence capabilities on him is a little like blaming …”
• Capitol Hill Blue, VA: With Tenet Out, FBI Chief Tries a Power Grab: “… Mueller on Thursday proposed the creation of an intelligence service within the FBI, a move that came on the heels of the ouster of CIA Director George Tenet. …”
• NewsMax.com, FL: Daschle Wants Real Reason for Tenet Resignation: “Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle told interviewers that he was taken by surprise when he heard of George Tenet’s resignation, but that he looks “forward to …”
• Providence Journal, RI: “… No great insight is needed to figure out why George J. Tenet resigned Thursday as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. His …”
• The Rolling Head, Chattanoogan, TN: “George Tenet got Washington-ed. George Tenet got Bush-whacked. George Tenet got fed to the angry volcano gods. … Tenet was a high paid bellboy. … ”
  

“Mike Epstein is not a terrorist, but if a proposed ban on photography on New York trains and buses goes into effect, he might very well find himself treated like one.

‘How can they ban photographing unusual sights aboard trains and in stations?’ wonders Epstein, who operates Satan’s Laundromat, a website dedicated to ‘urban decay, strange signage, and general weirdness.’ …

You bet. The MTA’s move to stop the shooting of unauthorized pictures or video has pissed-off everyone from photobloggers to subway advocates and free-speech activists. To show their opposition to the ban, a group of photographers plan to gather at the main information kiosk in Grand Central station this Sunday, June 6, at 1 p.m. They’ll fan out across several train lines, shooting photos throughout the system in a peaceful demonstration.” (Village Voice)

Only good Catholics are entitled to be self-centered (SF Chronicle)

A Guide To the Most Efficient Things in the World: “The information presented here will be of interest to those who wish to live more simply and self-sufficiently.

Incorporating the tools and techniques outlined here can dramatically decrease your dependence on petroleum, electricity, gas for heating and cooling, municipal water and sewage utilities. Once implemented these sources will be available to you perpetually.”

Capitol Hill Blue: Bush Knew About Leak of CIA Operative’s Name: “Witnesses told a federal grand jury President George W. Bush knew about, and took no action to stop, the release of a covert CIA operative’s name to a journalist in an attempt to discredit her husband, a critic of administration policy in Iraq.” (Capitol Hill Blue) It was this testimony that led the worried Bu**sh** to seek private counsel earlier this week, God love ‘im. (You can tell how much I am enjoying this; if the Democrats have it in them to act with alacrity, could this be the scandal that brings the dysadministration down?)

“Web logs, or blogs, which started out as a labor of love, are becoming a moneymaker for writers who are selling advertising on their sites.” (SF Chronicle) It probably goes without saying, but there will never be advertisements on Follow Me Here.

Or Mass Distraction?: “From the moment this office opened for business last December, I felt I could not write about what had been published in the paper before my arrival. Once I stepped into the past, I reasoned, I might never find my way back to the present.

Early this month, though, convinced that my territory includes what doesn’t appear in the paper as well as what does, I began to look into a question arising from the past that weighs heavily on the present: Why had The Times failed to revisit its own coverage of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? To anyone who read the paper between September 2002 and June 2003, the impression that Saddam Hussein possessed, or was acquiring, a frightening arsenal of W.M.D. seemed unmistakable. Except, of course, it appears to have been mistaken.” — Daniel Okrent, New York Times ombudsperson

An evocative portrait of the music of The Mountain Goats, a.k.a former psychiatric nurse and elliptical poet John Darnielle, the discovery of whom has been just about the best thing (along with John Vanderslice, the Fiery Furnaces and Broken Social Scene) about my personal indie rock awakening:

“Songs begin with acts of God: ‘First thing that happened was a river overflowed’; ‘Let the stars come out, and the moon shine bright / We’re sleeping on the porch tonight / Wind blew all the power lines down / Watch where you step if you go walking around.’ Characters are summoned up in a matter of seconds: ‘That fifteen thousand dollars / That turned up in your purse / You’ve done something awful / I’ve done something worse.’ Questions are raised about just what sort of species is being addressed: ‘I get letters telling me since I moved away / You’ve taken to hanging out on that rock about a mile from shore.’ Doomed relationships are summed up in two lines: ‘I know you hate it when I get my headaches / Well I’ve got a real prize tonight.’

We don’t always follow characters, however; sometimes we follow the lyric itself as it metamorphoses into animals, shimmies up trees, or heads north toward Alaska ‘where there’s snow to suck the sound out from the air.’ We hear it describe the continent eroding, or the rising flames of burning ships 73 years before the start of the Christian era. We hear the singer’s heart become an onion rising up in his throat with the first spring thaws. We are warmed by a western sun that always seems to be sending out ‘signals’ as it sets; we hear the old songs of Bacchus crackle through transistor radio static. Above all, we hear the strumming and that unmistakable nasal tenor, and we are made aware of every word that is sung.” — Jim Fisher (Salon)

Elijah

streak the windows.

smear the walls with coconut oil, yeah.

fill a cast iron kettle with water and magnolia blossom.

let it boil.

let the water roll.

let the fire take its toll.

i’m coming home.

i’m coming home.

dust off the idols.

give them something to eat.

i think they’re hungry.

i know i’m starving half to death.

i know you’re waiting.

i know you’ve been waiting for a long long time.

and i’m coming home.

i’m coming home.

set the table.

those three extra places —

one for me,

one for your doubts,

and one for god.

let the incense burn in every room.

feel the fullness of time in the empty tomb.

feel the future kicking in your womb.

i’m coming home.

i’m coming home.

— John Darnielle

“Joe Previtera, a twenty one year old student at Boston College, was arrested Wednesday and charged with felonies after dressing as a hooded Iraqi prisoner in front of a military recruitment center on Tremont St. in downtown Boston…

Previtera faces misdemeanor charges of disturbing the peace and felony charges of making a false bomb threat and using a hoax device. The charges apparently reflect the District Attorney’s concern that Mr. Previtera might have been mistaken for a terrorist.” (Boston.Indymedia)

With all due props to Ed Fitzgerald, I just had to appropriate this joke from his site and post it in full:

“One sunny day in 2005 an old man approached the White House from across Pennsylvania Avenue, where he’d been sitting on a park bench. He spoke to the Marine standing guard and said, ‘I would like to go in and meet with President Bush.’

The Marine looked at the man and said, ‘Sir, Mr. Bush is no longer president and no longer resides here.’

The old man said, ‘Okay’ and walked away.

The following day, the same man approached the White House and said to the same Marine, ‘I would like to go in and meet with President Bush.’ The Marine again told the man, ‘Sir, Mr. Bush is no longer president and no longer resides here.’

The man thanked him and, again, just walked away.

The third day, the same man approached the White House and spoke to the very same Marine, saying ‘I would like to go in and meet with President Bush.’

The Marine, understandably annoyed at this point, looked at the man and said, ‘Sir, this is the third day in a row you have been here asking to speak to Mr. Bush. I’ve told you already that Mr. Bush is no longer the president and no longer resides here. Don’t you understand?’

The old man looked at the Marine and said, ‘Oh, I understand. I just love hearing it.’

The Marine snapped to attention, saluted, and said, ‘See you tomorrow.'”

“An extensive survey of baby foods has found they contain worrying levels of disease-causing microbes. Of most concern was the presence of a bacterium called Enterobacter sakazakii, which has been linked to a handful of fatal outbreaks of meningitis at children’s hospitals in the US and Europe.” (New Scientist)

No way, say medical experts: “American businessman Nicholas Berg’s body was found on May 8 near a Baghdad overpass; a video of his supposed decapitation death by knife appeared on an alleged al-Qaeda-linked website (www.al-ansar.biz) on May 11. But according to what both a leading surgical authority and a noted forensic death expert separately told Asia Times Online, the video depicting the decapitation appears to have been staged.” (Asia Times)

A compiled list of doubts raised by dubious webloggers did the rounds several weeks ago; now these medical experts echo many of the same suspicions.

“Microsoft Word contains a security flaw that allows ‘web bugs’ to be included in documents. The fault lies with a Word feature called the INCLUDEPICTURE field, which references an image outside the document, either from a local file or a URL. A malicious person could secretly track who is reading a document by inserting a reference to an image from a server under his control. Every time Word loads the document, it will make a connection to the server to retrieve the image, revealing the local user’s IP address and other information.

This vulnerability was initially discovered in 2000 by Richard M. Smith. It received some press coverage at the time, but the threat was downplayed because nobody was known to be exploiting it at the time. In the four years since then, Microsoft has released two new versions of Office but has yet to correct the problem . Meanwhile, at least one commercial service has sprung up to help users exploit the flaw for surreptitious tracking.

I have written a program (available below) to scan for these bugs in Word documents and remove them. Unfortunately, the vulnerability in Word can be extended to any application that supports OLE, including Excel and PowerPoint, by embedding the tracking bugs as Word OLE objects. Since each application uses a different format for writing OLE data to disk, it would be very difficult to write a general-purpose scanner.” (via Freedom to Tinker)

This morning, a friend and I, reflecting on Bush’s free-falling poll figures, were musing about whether there might be a cut-and-run move at the Republican Convention. Could the party dump Bush and nominate someone else? The sensationalism of the news might propel a candidate over the top, and a September nomination would not leave much time for an effective Democratic counter-attack. Especially with the convention being in New York and timed to capitalize on the 3rd anniversary of the WTC attack, our speculation turned to the darling of 9-11, Rudy Giuliani. Could he pull it off? Not if this damning indictment of Giuliani gains any currency.

If confirmed, the leak would represent one of the most serious US intelligence breaches in recent years.: “According to the New York Times, the INC leader told an Iranian intelligence official six weeks ago in Baghdad that he had been informed by a ‘drunk’ American official that the US had broken the Iranian code and was reading the internal communications of Tehran’s ministry of intelligence and security.

The US discovered the breach when the Iranian agent – the ministry’s station chief in Baghdad, according to the New York Times – sent a message back to Tehran using the compromised code, apparently not believing the tip-off. According to the report, Tehran then tested the code by sending a bogus message mentioning a cache of weapons inside Iraq, presumably thinking that US forces would be immediately sent to the site. But no such action was taken, possibly because US intelligence suspected it was a trap.” (Guardian.UK)

Not only did Chalabi hoodwink the neo-cons, Patrick Nielson Hayden reminds us, but he made a fool of The Paper of Record.

But, as Josh Marshall points out, it is not just a question of a leak but where the CIA concludes it had to come from:

“If it’s possible to imagine anything more damaging to DOD [than the Iran/Chalabi revelations], and perhaps also to White House staff, it is the CIA’s conclusion that some information Chalabi turned over to Iran was available to only “a handful” of senior U.S. officials. That would be Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Cheney, and Cheney’s consigleiri, Scooter Libby, our sources helpfully explain.

— perhaps not entirely by coincidence, the Vice President’s office is already on extra orders of TUMS, as it awaits the promised Grand Jury indictments of those responsible for leaking the name of a secret CIA officer to newspaper columnist Bob Novak, allegedly to “punish” the agent’s husband, Amb. Joe Wilson, for revealing that President Bush used faulty intelligence about Iraq and Niger in the State of the Union Address two years ago. From our own days as a police and court reporter, we can tell you that Grand Juries often grind exceeding slow, but that if they report, not much gets left out.”

Bush, of course, is trying to distance himself from Chalabi. Atrios catches him in the lie.

And now comes the delightful news that Bush has engaged a private attorney in connection with the probe into the ‘outing’ of Valerie Plame. (Reuters)

‘I Was Never Angry with the French,’ Says Bush. ‘President Bush said he was never angry with France over its refusal to back the U.S.-led war in Iraq, as both countries sought to play down past tensions ahead of the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings.

“I was never angry with the French. France is a long-term ally,” Bush told the weekly Paris Match in an interview due to be published on Thursday.’ (Reuters). Via Daily Kos, with whom I wonder whether this should be categorized as a flip-flop or a lie?

and all this while I have been playing with toys

a toy superhighway a toy automobile a house of blocks



and all this while far off in other lands

thousands and thousands, millions and millions



you know — you see the pictures

women carrying bony infants



men sobbing over graves

buildings sculpted by explosion —



earth wasted bare and rotten

and all this while I have been shopping, I have



been let us say free

and do they hate me for it



do they hate me



                        alicia ostriker

I lived in the first century of world wars.

Most mornings I would be more or less insane.

The news would pour out of various devices

The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,

Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.

I would call my friends on other devices;

They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.

Slowly I would get to pen and paper,

Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.

In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,

Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,

considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.

As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,

We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,

To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile

Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,

Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means

To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,

To let go the means, to wake.



I lived in the first century of these wars.



                        Muriel Rukeyser

Unusually high number of suicides and psychological evacuations among US troops in Iraq invasion:

“Twenty-five soldiers have taken their lives during the past year in the Iraq war. In addition, there have been seven suicides among newly State-sided troops, including two soldiers who killed themselves while patients at Walter Reed Army Hospital, the Toronto Star recently reported.

The suicide rate for army troops in Iraq has been 17.3 per 100,000 soldiers, compared to the overall Army rate of 11.9 per 100,000 between 1995 and 2002. According to StrategyPage.com, this rate is higher than the rate for all branches of the military during the Vietnam War, which was 15.6, and higher than during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, which had a 3.6 rate for all branches.” — Bill Berkowitz, (Guerrilla News Network)

Compared to prior wars, Iraq is being manned by a higher proportion of older married GIs and reservists. There has been reduced pre-deployment mental health screening and, in some cases, the inappropriate mobilization of soldiers with preexisting mental health problems. Rumsfeld’s recent decision to extend the tours of units in Iraq, the general sense among the troops that the administration is ‘shorting’ them on resources and support, the feeling of having been lied to about the rationale for the action, the prospect of urban guerrilla warfare as well as being mired down and on the defensive are likely to exacerbate the problem. One can only wonder at the impact of the Abu Ghraib scandal in which any number of their colleagues so thoroughly dishonored themselves and the military edifice in general.

The military response is to use combat stress control teams and front-line recuperation centers to shore up GIs suffering psychological symptoms. It is clear to me as a mental health practitioner how inadequate this approach is on several grounds. First, it relies on the dubious assumption that the suicides are related to ‘combat stress’ (PTSD) syndromes and the discredited notion that early intervention can abort the progression of the syndrome. Furthermore, soldiers who come forward to seek services often suffer the consequences; this will discourage adequate evaluation and stabilization. For this reason, the actual incidence of psychiatric distress among the troops is surely being underestimated.

Given recent revelations of the shameful neglect of the medical needs of the wounded GIs returning stateside, it is no surprise that the psychological casualties are treated no less shabbily. Rumsfeld and his cronies are dramatically gutting the Veterans’ Administration’s ability to meet the treatment needs of military veterans. And given the likely failure of the Iraqi adventure, we can expect a host of reintegration problems among returning veterans on even a greater scale than the infamous abandonment of the Vietnam veterans once they returned from their tours of duty.

“A group of hunting enthusiasts is setting up its own ‘church’ in an attempt to stop the Government from banning their favourite field sport.

The founders of the Free Church of Country Sports, whose supporters include a barrister, a publisher and several businessmen, claim that fox hunting is part of their religion and that legislation to ban it would be an infringement of their rights as a religious minority.” (Telegraph.UK via Neil Gaiman)

The “listening to” box at the top of the left sidebar is now working in recent versions of browsers (Mozilla, Firefox, and IE6) operating under Windows, but I have no idea what you’re seeing in Linux etc. and I understand the effects are variable in MacOS. A friend sent me screen shots of this page rendered in Camino, Safari, Mozilla and IE for Mac, which are all quite different [thanks, abby.].

Essentially, what is going on here is that a small plug-in to iTunes under Windows creates an XML file with a listing of the last ten tunes iTunes has played; this is updated and FTP’ed to my server every time the song changes. An XSLT stylesheet attached to the XML file renders it in HTML, which gets displayed in a small frame on this page. By tweaking the stylesheet, I have gotten Windows browsers to metabolize and display the file properly, but in one or another Mac browser you could be seeing any of the following:

• a good-looking formatted list of artist, song title and album
  
• an unformatted text dump of the data, plus the other data the plug-in is writing on each song that I opted not to display, such as year, timing, bitrate etc.
  
• a text dump of the XML file, tags included
  
• a null display

Have I forgotten any? Does anyone have a clue how to make this work across all platforms and browsers? (keeping in mind that, on my web host, I cannot use any tools like PHP to extract the data from the XML file…. As an aside, when I have the time, I want to figure out how to massage the XSLT transform to prevent the display of the empty parentheses ‘()’ in entries that do not have an album name.

I’m justifying this rigamarole because I am enjoying the challenge of this non-programmer’s little foray into XML, but maybe this whole endeavor is frivolous and you need to learn about my musical tastes about as much as you need a hole in the head. But, if this display is not working in your browser and you are for some reason really desperate to see what I am listening to, clicking on the word “listening” ‘s hyperlink takes you to the same information derived in an entirely different manner and displayed in my page on Autoscrobbler, a neat free open-source system that rices and dices my listening data in useful ways and has the added benefit of compiling listening data across all its users (from iTunes, Winamp, and sundry other music clients). (If you happen to have an Autoscrobbler page set up for yourself, drop me a note pointing to it if you’d care to, I would love to see what you are listening to. I feel a little hesitant about publicizing this, however, because the system seems overloaded and slow to crunch my data. In fact, they have temporarily closed to new sign-ups while they figure out how to cope with the volume they are experiencing.)

This is one of that genre of application that I am sure you have encountered through the years which, among other things, let you easily — without having to do any ratings — find out what else others who share some of your tastes are listening to, the idea being of course that you might discover on that basis other artists who would appeal to you but with whom you were not acquainted. However, I have to admit that, so far, this has not resulted in any earthshattering surprises for me, and I prefer to discover new artists serendipitously than deliberately, to jump grooves rather than remain in the same one…

Whenever Jeff Jarvis gets to the top of blogdex again, I know I am going to have something to write about. Doesn’t anyone stop to see through this guy before starting to murmur appreciatively? Recently, the buzz has been about his impassioned plea in support of Spirit of America, a program which organizes donations of supplies from the American people to the Iraqis ‘to help them rebuild.’ (Ominously, though, the donations are not, it seems, really to the Iraqis. See below.) Jarvis feels that, whatever one’s position on the war, this serves both our human obligation and enlightened self-interest. When he mentioned self-interest, for a moment there I expected he would confide in all candor that he hoped our good will would somehow buy us some leniency in the face of the Islamic fundamentalist rage likely heading for us innocent Americans for our government’s imperialist hauteur in the Middle East. Instead he’s just trotting out those tired old chestnuts about

“creating a foothold for democracy, freedom, modernity, civilization, and just friendship in the Middle East”

(Tired chestnuts is what you might expect given the hokey name of this organization…). As it turns out, paying protection seems closer to what this is all about; more on that later.

I’m stronger on the moral obligation side of this than the self-interest side, I must admit. Although I find it extremely naive to hope that individual efforts like this can compensate for the impact of the barbarian rape and pillaging of Iraq done in our names by our unelected government, I believe in asserting the moral distinction that it wasn’t me doing it. On second thought, maybe that is self-interest, since it is so much more to comfort me in my moral superiority than to do anything real…

Moreover, Jarvis seems to be caught up in a puzzling agenda of making this a special cause for webloggers, despite the fact that all the mission statements from SoA principals he quotes have a grander vision of signing up “a million Americans”. Jarvis’ reach exceeds his grasp — he does not seem to recall that only around 4% of those Americans who are even online read weblogs. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Jarvis hopes that his contribution to rebuilding Iraq will be — hold your breath — to bring weblogging to the Iraqi masses with “blogging tools translated into Arabic and free blog hosting, for example.” I’ll break it to you gently, Jeff — most of us recognize that it is far more urgent to rebuild the material infrastructure destroyed by the serial tyrannies of the Saddam Hussein regime and the US invasion than to implement any pie-in-the-sky notion of getting thousands of Iraqi Jarvis-clones mouthing tired clichés about democracy mostly for the consumption of the Western Internet audiences. But trust a TV Guide executive all puffed up about his influence on the “blogosphere” to think outside the box. Get a life. Here comes a controversial assertion — weblogging is more an effect than a cause of participatory democracy during nation-building, and it is a rather late effect at that. It is just on the cusp of having an impact on the political process in ‘mature’ democracies such as the US and Western Europe. (Oh, I forgot for a moment; Iraq will be springing full-blown into that mature stage of democracy under US tutelage, right after the June 30th reversion of ‘sovereignty’, right?)

Next, let us consider for a moment that philanthropic efforts end up all across the map in terms of efficiency, administrative costs and overhead in delivering aid, vulnerability to misappropriation or diversion of funds or goods along the way, etc. For any given charitable contribution, how many cents on your contributed dollar actually end up doing direct good at the target end can vary wildly. Picking your charities responsibly, much less starting and administering an effective and efficient relief organization, is far from a no-brainer, no matter what instant pundits and erudite commentators we webloggers of the world fancy ourselves to have become. So, until proven otherwise, SoA sounds much more like a feel-good than a do-good organization.

And that was before I got a look at the SoA website and figured out what is really going on. It appears that most of the goods your donations to SoA would be buying are to be distributed by the US military

• the Marines and SeaBees are giving tools to Iraqi tradesmen they train
• the Marines are giving school supplies, balls and frisbees to Iraqi children “to improve relations with Iraqis and reduce conflict”
• Air Force chaplains are seeking supplies for orphanages and schools

Take a look at this quote from their website, for instance:

“Americans in uniform delivering supplies to schools and orphanages demonstrates that Americans care about helping Iraqis move toward a brighter future. Let’s give our servicemen the supplies that are most needed for them to help Iraqi children…”

In other words, it appears that your donations would not go so much to rebuild Iraq as to attempt to placate the restless heathen masses with small bribes. It sounds abit like the 21st century equivalent of giving firewater to the Injuns…or blood money. Cynical me, but I wonder if the goodwill and humanitarian urges of the Children’s Crusade of webloggers Jarvis hopes to recruit aren’t being blatantly co-opted. Is it a stretch to suggest that the Bush administration is trying to privatize the reparations it ought to be paying for its war crimes?

And please don’t tell me that this assistance has to be distributed by the US military because NGO’s from the UN on downward are too skittish to risk functioning in Iraq yet. That only proves my point about the ill-advised haste in luminaries like Jarvis backing a hare-brained scheme like this when the experts we ought to trust know that development aid is premature. The US has dismantled a nation with no compensatory planning, is reaping the consequences of what it has sown, and this effort is nothing but a blatant propaganda attempt to unmire us from a morass of our own making. Youa re being suckered, Jarvis.

A humble suggestion — the moral imperative is all on the side of dissociating oneself from this essentially immoral effort, not acquitting one’s obligation by enthusiastically buying in. It seems to me that it would be more useful, if one is interested in avoiding wasted effort in rebuilding Iraq, to do something much more difficult — get the stars out of your eyes and catalogue and compare the existing humanitarian NGO’s doing this sort of work, run by professionals who have charity- and nation-building experience. Can anyone point me to any resources they have come across along those lines?

Jarvis points to (but does not deign to respond to) a dissent by Dave Winer here. Even though I am quite skeptical about this whole SoA venture and Jarvis’ boosterism, neither do I find Winer’s position well thought out. In saying,

“I think the best thing the US can do for the world is get our own house in order and stop trying to fix the world, something we’re exceedingly bad at,”

he shows he has no ability to maintain the crucial distinction between the American people and the American government under Bu**sh**. If Jarvis’ position is naive feel-good boosterism, Winer’s throws out the baby with the bathwater.

“In ‘The Way the Music Died,’ Frontline follows the trajectory of the recording industry from its post-Woodstock heyday in the 1970s and 1980s to what one observer describes as a ‘hysteria’ of mass layoffs and bankruptcy in 2004. The documentary tells its story through the aspirations and experiences of four artists: veteran musician David Crosby, who has seen it all in a career spanning 35 years; songwriter/producer Mark Hudson, a former member of the Hudson Brothers band; Hudson’s daughter, Sarah, who is about to release her first single and album; and a new rock band, Velvet Revolver, composed of former members of the rock groups Guns N’ Roses and Stone Temple Pilots, whose first album will be released in June.

But how will these artists fare at a time when the record industry is clearly hurting?”

“Falsely accused of having an affair with John Kerry, the “intern” sifts through the mud and the people who threw it. ” Polier, both a political junkie and a journalist herself, writes an account combining her very personal suffering as a victim of vicious political rumormongering, her detailed public denial, and an investigation of the sources of the rumor.

“It was becoming clearer: No single person had to have engineered this. First came a rumor about Kerry, then a small-time blogger wrote about it, and his posting was read by journalists. They started looking into it, a detail that was picked up by Drudge—who, post-Monica, is taken seriously by other sites like Wonkette, which no political reporter can ignore. I was getting a better education in 21st-century reporting than I had gotten at Columbia J-school.”

In this case, she (and I) was surprised to find that the baseless rumors that she had slept with Kerry (she was actually dating his campaign finance manager for awhile) apparently arose not from the Bush team as she had expected but were at least partly attributable to the Wesley Clark campaign organization, such as it was. Of course, the Right made hay with the rumors, but neo-con zealot and former Bush speechwriter David Frum actually apologized publicly when he learned they were not true. Bottom-feeder Matt Drudge, to whose rumors the media are now indentured servants, too nervous not to listen for fear they will miss another scoop like Lewinsky, also gets quoted by Polier as regretful for his role… a little regretful at least. A good friend of Polier’s in Washington, who works inside the Republican machine, was instrumental in embellishing on Polier’s acquaintance with Kerry to further the Republican cause as well. I hope Polier has learned to choose her friends more wisely; loyalty is a cheap commodity in the political world. (New York Magazine via Richard; thanks!)

‘When National Public Radio was launched in 1971, it promised to be an alternative to commercial media that would “promote personal growth rather than corporate gain” and “speak with many voices, many dialects.”

In 1993, when FAIR published a study of NPR’s guestlist that challenged the network’s alternative credentials (Extra!, 5/93), incoming NPR president Delano Lewis was still boasting about being a place where the unheard get heard (The Humanist, 9/93): “Our job is to be a public radio station. So therefore the alternative points of view, the various viewpoints, should be aired.”

Today, current NPR president Kevin Klose insists that diversity and inclusivity are among NPR’s top priorities (Syracuse Post-Standard, 7/31/02): “All of us believe our goal is to serve the entire democracy, the entire country.”

NPR, which now reaches 22 million listeners weekly on 750 affiliated stations, does frequently provide more than the nine-second-soundbite culture of mainstream news broadcasts. But is the public really heard on public radio? And is NPR truly an alternative to its commercial competition? A new FAIR study of NPR’s guestlist shows the radio service relies on the same elite and influential sources that dominate mainstream commercial news, and falls short of reflecting the diversity of the American public.’ (FAIR)

“Dating is hard enough, but when you’ve got kids, the stakes go through the roof.

The danger of ‘lethal child abuse’ rises dramatically, especially for the youngest children, when there’s an unrelated man in the household, according to recent studies. Academics call this the ‘Cinderella effect’ – the propensity of stepparents, whether married or just live-in partners, to hurt offspring who aren’t blood relations.” (azcentral.com)

“A handgun that Saddam Hussein was clutching when U.S. forces captured him in a hole in Iraq last December is now kept by President Bush at the White House, a spokesman confirmed on Sunday.” (Yahoo! News)

Do you suppose Bush is captivated by the spam email ads promising enlargement of his private parts as well?

I wrote about the controversy over Ted Rall’s cynical take on Tillman’s death when it happened. Here’s the crowning blow on Tillman’s tragic misguided patriotism:

“Pat Tillman, the former Arizona Cardinals football player who died in April while a U.S. soldier fighting in Afghanistan, likely was killed by friendly fire, an Army investigation has concluded.” (azcentral.com)

The St. Petersburg Times continues to rake up the muck in its backyard about the Co$:

“A 7-year-old wrongful death lawsuit filed by the estate of Lisa McPherson against the Church of Scientology reached a surprise settlement this week, ending one of the most fiercely contested and enduring legal battles in Pinellas County history.

The out-of-court agreement ends the last remaining legal threat facing the church after the widely publicized 1995 death of McPherson, a Scientologist who died after 17 days in the care of church members in Clearwater.”

“Ashcroft cites al-Qaida plan, but how credible

is the information?” (MSNBC)

Bob Herbert: “The treatment of the detainees in Iraq was far from an aberration. We routinely treat prisoners in the U.S. like animals.” (The New York Times Op-Ed)

16 Reasons to Find God: “People are not drawn to religion just because of a fear of death or any other single reason, according to a new comprehensive, psychological theory of religion.

There are actually 16 basic human psychological needs that motivate people to seek meaning through religion, said Steven Reiss, author of the new theory and professor of psychology and psychiatry at Ohio State University.”

16 Reasons to Find God: “People are not drawn to religion just because of a fear of death or any other single reason, according to a new comprehensive, psychological theory of religion.

There are actually 16 basic human psychological needs that motivate people to seek meaning through religion, said Steven Reiss, author of the new theory and professor of psychology and psychiatry at Ohio State University.”

Jack Beatty comments in The Atlantic: In the wake of Iraq, the term “neo-conservative” may come to mean “dangerous innocence about world realities:

“Paul Wolfowitz could not come up with the right number when he testified on Capitol Hill recently—he was off by about 30% in his estimate of the number of Americans killed in Iraq, which at this writing is 786. He’s a busy man. You can’t expect him to remember how many young Americans have died for the ambition of his adult life. Had he been asked what they died for, he would not have repeated what he told Vanity Fair last year. He would not have said, “For oil.” By now, on message with the rest of the administration, he’d have said, “For democracy.”

Tragically, any good the US could have obtained from bringing democracy to Iraq has been vitiated by the mayhem Wolfowitz’s obsession with toppling Saddam Hussein has inflicted on the Iraqi people—the 7,000 to 10,000 civilians killed, the torture victims, the populace so brutalized and humiliated by an occupation to which Wolfowitz appears not to have given a thought that over 80% want us out now. And those are just the short-term, intra-Iraq harms. Long-term, according to the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph Biden, US interests in the Middle East have been set back a decade by Abu Ghraib. “

The Bush orthodoxy is in shreds, writes

Sidney Blumenthal in The Guardian. A series of investigations has shattered neocon self-belief:

“At a conservative thinktank in downtown Washington, and across the Potomac at the Pentagon, FBI agents have begun paying quiet calls on prominent neoconservatives, who are being interviewed in an investigation of potential espionage, according to intelligence sources. Who gave Ahmed Chalabi classified information about the plans of the US government and military?”

Giant mushroom baffles experts: “A giant three-tiered mushroom which measures a metre across and was found in the tropical forests of the Republic of Congo has left experts in the capital Brazzaville scratching their heads.

‘It’s the first time we’ve ever seen a mushroom like this so it’s difficult for us to classify … but we are going to determine what it is scientifically,’ Pierre Botaba, head of Congo’s veterinary and zoology centre, told reporters on Thursday.

The giant fungus stands 45 centimetres high and has three tiered caps on top of a broad stem. The bottom cap measures one metre across, the second one 60 centimetres and the top one is 24 centimetres wide, Mr Botaba said.

The bizarre-looking mushroom was found in the village of Mvoula about 60 kilometres from Brazzaville and transported carefully to the capital by the local chief.” (ABC News)

“The final internet chatroom exchange took place on 28 June last year. ‘U want me 2 take him 2 trafford centre and kill him in the middle of trafford centre??’ said one message. ‘Yes,’ came the reply.

Less than 24 hours later, a 14-year-old boy was critically ill in hospital with stab wounds in the chest and stomach. At first it seemed as though a brutal, but straightforward, robbery had gone wrong. But yesterday the young ‘victim’ became the first person in this country to be convicted of inciting their own murder.” (Guardian.UK)

Government computer surveillance rings alarm bells: “Nine months after Congress shut down a controversial Pentagon computer-surveillance program, the U.S. government continues to comb private records to sniff out suspicious activity, according to a congressional report obtained by Reuters.

Privacy concerns prompted Congress to kill the Pentagon’s $54 million Total Information Awareness (TIA) program last September, but government computers are still scanning a vast array of databases for clues about criminal or terrorist activity, the General Accounting Office (GAO) has found.” (Computerworld)

“The newest NASA space telescope, with its ability to see past obscuring clouds of cosmic dust, has spotted what astronomers believe is evidence of the youngest planet observed so far, a gaseous body that could be less than a million years old.

Announcing the first major findings of the Spitzer Space Telescope on Thursday, scientists said the observations could indicate that planet formation around stars is more common and more rapid than previously suspected.” (New York Times)

LBV 1806-20: “A University of Florida-led team of astronomers may have discovered the brightest star yet observed in the universe, a fiery behemoth that could be as much as much as seven times brighter than the current record holder.

But don’t expect to find the star — which is at least 5 million times brighter than the sun — in the night sky. Dust particles between Earth and the star block out all of its visible light. Whereas the sun is located only 8.3 light minutes from Earth, the bright star is 45,000 light years away, on the other side of the galaxy. It is detectable only with instruments that measure infrared light, which has longer wavelengths that can better penetrate the dust.”