‘Ladies and gentlemen — I know Jesse Jackson… and you’re no Jesse Jackson: “Sharpton opposed the war on Iraq, the death penalty and Bush’s tax cuts, and he demands universal health care. This appeals to many moderate white Democrats. But his message gets hacked up, lost, distorted or ignored when the messenger is perceived as irresponsible and an opportunist, or both. The majority of black Democratic elected officials, and Jesse Jackson, have endorsed Kerry, Edwards or Dean, or have publicly sung their praises. They have been mostly silent on Sharpton.

Meanwhile, the greatest unease about Sharpton has come from Jackson. Though he is careful not to criticize Sharpton by name, he obliquely chided him before the South Carolina primary when he noted that no Democrat could be effective without a real message, money and a campaign infrastructure. Sharpton has made little apparent effort to develop any of Jackson’s requisites for a successful campaign. He has built his campaign on appearances on TV talk shows, at campaign debates, at showpiece protest rallies, and by tossing out well-timed media barbs.” —AlterNet

An End to Evil: “Before Sept. 11, 2001, it would have been difficult to speak meaningfully about a ”neoconservative foreign policy.” While there was a group of intellectuals and policy experts who were identified — sometimes self-identified — by the neoconservative label, they did not agree on foreign policy. Today a cardinal feature of neoconservative foreign policy is the aggressive use of American power to dislodge dictators and promote democracy. But the founding father of the movement, Irving Kristol, shunned this approach, speaking in the more cautious tones of realpolitik. Throughout the 1990’s, Charles Krauthammer, a leading neoconservative commentator, was deeply suspicious of the use of American power against dictators in the Balkans, Africa and the Caribbean, while others, like Richard Perle and William Kristol, were far more sympathetic. Neoconservative foreign policy during that decade lacked a central theme.

Sept. 11 changed all that. It is now possible to describe a neoconservative foreign policy, and David Frum and Richard Perle’s new book, ”An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror,” is a useful guide to it. There have been many books written by neoconservatives on aspects of the war on terror, but because of the identity of the authors, the scope of the book and the vigor of argumentation, this one deserves special attention.” —New York Times book review

“Let’s begin with what could have been an ending. In October, an editor asked me to prepare Courtney Love’s obituary. Nobody actually believed that Courtney Love had died, but many thought she was heading in that direction. If she had a fatal overdose or sudden heart failure, we needed to be ready. It was the first time, in 10 years of newspaper writing, that I had been asked to write an advance obituary for someone under 40.” —New York Times

The problem isn’t the breast, it’s violence against women: “The real shock was that a man would rip off a woman’s clothes — planned or not — and we would talk only about what was exposed in the process. It doesn’t matter whether her wardrobe malfunctioned. What matters is that he was messing with her wardrobe in the first place.” —Cindy Miller, Chicago Sun-Times

“Was Joy Adamson an angel of mercy… or a tyrant? The man who killed her 24 years ago now speaks out. Her moving account of how she raised a captive lioness before returning her to the wild made Joy Adamson a legend way beyond the African bush. But the author of the bestseller Born Free, which was turned into a hugely successful film, was a tyrannical employer who fired live bullets at her black African staff, according to the man who was convicted of her murder.” —Guardian.UK

In Rare Talk Show Interview, Bush Defends Decision on War —New York Times

“…The tactics, which aim to evade aviation security systems by placing only components of explosive devices on passenger jets, allowing militants to assemble them in the air, have been tried out on planes flying between the Middle East, North Africa and Western Europe, security sources say.

Concerns that militants might assemble a bomb or another weapon on board were a key factor in the series of recent cancellations of transatlantic flights.” ` —Guardian.UK

“Wesley Clark has gravitas and charm but seems like a closet Republican. John Edwards is bright and articulate and really, really youthful. Who’d be the best V.P.?” —Salon

Vice-presidential machinations on the Republican side too? Arianna Huffington: “ GOP inner circles are buzzing with the rumor that President Bush is planning to drop Dick Cheney from his re-election ticket and replace him with 9/11 action hero Rudy Giuliani.

As one firmly committed to making sure Bush doesn’t get another four years in office, all I can say to this is: Please, Mr. President, say it ain’t so!

Cheney is the Democrats’ best—though sorely underutilized—weapon. A loose-lipped loose cannon who threatens to torpedo the Bushie ship of state every time he half-opens his mouth. If only we start paying attention.

Perhaps sensing that Broadway Rudy is warming up in the bullpen, Cheney has begun upping his public profile. After rarely venturing out of his secure, undisclosed location—aka Republican fund-raisers—he has given a rash of high-profile interviews over the past month.

And thank God for that: the Most Powerful Number Two In History just can’t help telling it like he sees it, and the way he sees it is very, very telling. And frightening.” —tompaine.com

“Two years after my husband, Danny Pearl, was kidnapped and murdered, his employers at the Wall Street Journal seem all too willing to forget.” —Mariane Pearl, Salon

Great Taste, Less Privacy “Wonder what information is contained in that barcode on the back of your driver’s license? “Visitors to an art exhibit at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts got more than their martinis when they ordered drinks at a bar inside the gallery’s entrance. Instead of pretzels and peanuts, they were handed a receipt containing the personal data found on their license, plus all the information that could be gleaned from commercial data-mining services and voter registration databases like Aristotle. Some patrons also got receipts listing their phone number, income range, marital status, housing value and profession. For added effect, the receipt included a little map showing the location of their residence.” —Wired

“Over the past three years, President Bush has been plugging away at his faith-based initiative — and it’s doing better than you think.” — Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange [via AlterNet]

Expanding the boundaries of corporate malfeasance to new lows of dirty dealing, these ten companies are the worst offenders in a year that saw a lot of offenses. —AlterNet

“Mel Gibson’s controversial film on the Crucifixion is being hailed by US Catholics as the best recruiting tool for 2,000 years.” —Guardian.UK

Bruce Schneier: How We Are Fighting the War on Terrorism: “In recent years there has been an increased use of identification checks as a security measure. Airlines always demand photo IDs, and hotels increasingly do so. They’re often required for admittance into government buildings, and sometimes even hospitals. Everywhere, it seems, someone is checking IDs. The ostensible reason is that ID checks make us all safer, but that’s just not so. In most cases, identification has very little to do with security.

Let’s debunk the myths…”

Maureen Dowd: “Now, with the White House looking untrustworthy and desperate; with the national security team flapping around and pointing fingers at each other and, of course, Bill Clinton; with even the placid Laura getting testy; and with Newsweek reporting that the Justice Department is reviewing whether Halliburton was involved in paying $180 million in kickbacks to get contracts in Nigeria at a time when Dick Cheney was chairman, anybody else would be sweating.

Not deadeye Dick. His heavy lids didn’t blink when it turned out he’d blown up a half-century of American foreign policy alliances on a high-level hallucination.” —New York Times op-ed

In Rare Talk Show Interview, Bush Defends Decision on War —New York Times

I previously mentioned that Cory Doctorow has put his new novel online. Now he points us to this Speed Reader remix, “based on the research of Xerox PARC researcher Rich Gold, which flashes the book, one word at a time, up on the screen, at a high rate of speed. It is astonishingly readable, and makes you feel like you’ve found a back-door to your brain’s comprehension nodes.” I think I will try to read the book this way.

This is interesting. Billmon wonders if the Massachusetts Supreme Court has not handed Bush the November election by making the gay marriage ruling now, just in time to consign John Kerry irrevocably to the dustbin of history by putting some beef the voters can really take a bite of into the inevitable “Massachusetts liberal” line of attack.

‘James Joyce’ rants on kuro5hin.org:

“You are all pretentious twats, every last one of you. You’re all latte-sipping, iMac-using, suburban-living tertiary-industry-working WASPs who offer absolutely no new insights on anything whatsoever apart from maybe one specialist field if we’re lucky. Most of you think that you’re writing original content and that you’re making a contribution by licensing your spewings under Creative Commons ‘Some Rights Reserved’ licences, just because it’s the hip thing to do. You think you know all there is to say about blogging because you understand the concept of HTML and CSS, but the horrible truth is that 40% of you are all using the same shitty default layout. Then you take pictures of yourselves looking pensive or making vague allusions to mythology.”

For the record, I don’t use Movable Type, nor an iMac (I’m surprised he singles it out and that anything other than Linux passes muster!). I think lattes have become effete but, when I do drink one (never never at Starbucks) I avoid sipping it. I am not a WASP and do not live in the suburbs. I am not even clear about what a tertiary industry is. Some of my readers feel that I distinguish myself when I write about my one specialist field. I challenge myself to write original content every once in awhile but suspect I am not that good at it. Yes, I plead guilty to carrying the little Creative Commons logo here because I thought the concept was hip. Nope, I created my own layout, I know at least enough HTML and CSS to be proud of that, but more proud of the assistance I received from other generous members of the weblogging community in my efforts. However, alas, no javascript, which would have been really hip, as you put it. Can’t recall the last mythological allusion I made and no pictures of myself, pensive or otherwise. I guess my weblog (I would go further than you do; “blog” is not even barely acceptable, and I apologize for any instances of using the word that have slipped through) might squeak by?

‘Joyce’ ‘s concerns about the rhetorical faux pas‘s and the sheeplike manner in which a single opinion echoes through the weblog universe (yes, I will never use the term ‘blogosphere’ either, although ‘blogroll’ isn’t galling to me at all), on the other hand, make more sense to me, and I do wonder about the impact weblogging has on Google. I (heart) kuro5hin, and think they deserve the increased hits they are getting from this rant. One of the comments on the post refers to this stunt as ‘pulling a Janet Jackson’; will this become the accepted term for offensive attention-getting antics like this? Then, there’s the reader who posts what he calls a ‘serious refutation’, which consists of reposting every paragraph of Joyce’s rant and following it with a one-liner about how he disagrees. I hope he’s being tongue-in-cheek. As I said, I (heart) kuro5hin.

Lileks bleats particularly loudly these days; reading his site is better than taking ipecac if you feel the need to be sick. First, he goes on at length (unbelievable length) about actor Patrick Stewart (Jean-Luc Picard)’s statement that space exploration is the height of arrogance before we “get things right” on our own planet. Lileks feels Stewart is foolish to squander the goodwill he earned in his premier role, especially because Lileks admired how he “projected the values of Western Civ into the inky void while confronting the baffling nuances of worlds we have yet to imagine.” Yes, he does love the sound of his own voice. He goes on to suggest that, instead of stopping space exploration, we ban filmmaking and divert the resources to helping the unfortunate. He knows how impeachable an ignorant rant ignoring the value of artistic output is, so descends into some incoherent sputtering in his final paragraphs.

Then, if you still have the stomach to scroll down, you get to this reflection on the Kerry campaign, which seems to distress him because the Democrats are starting to say such cruel cruel things about his beloved President (having gone AWOL from his military obligation etc.) and because they have the temerity to quibble with the new religion of preemptive imperialism and permanent waronterrorism:

I?m waiting for an ad that simply puts the matter plainly: who do you think Al Qaeda wants to win the election? Who do you think will make Syria relax? Who do you think Hezbollah worries about more? Who would Iran want to deal with when it comes to its nuclear program ? Cowboy Bush or ?Send in the bribed French inspectors? Kerry? Which candidate would our enemies prefer?

I take it back. He’s too funny not to read merely because he makes me ill.

I have been predicting for some time that Bush is going to announce the capture of Osama bin Laden just in time to try to clinch the election for himself. Here goes Sen. Charles Grassley (R.-Iowa) priming the pump.

“I think they’re on his trail now in a way they haven’t been all year. It will happen because we will be able to divert more resources [to hunting down bin Laden].”

In a curious turn of phrase, Grassley said, “Obviously, he’ll be caught between now and the election.” Obviously?? What does he know that you and I don’t?

Just as he did with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory Doctorow is making his second novel available for free downloading. You’re welcome, and he explains why.

For you Firebird fans out there (my default browser since ver. 0.5) this MozillaZine discussion thread must be read before you install 0.8. Otherwise you have only yourself to blame.

I have been waiting for news of whether the investigation of the ‘outing’ of Valerie Plame would lead anywhere. It seems so!

“Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer’s identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said.

According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, were the two Cheney employees. ‘We believe that Hannah was the major player in this,’ one federal law-enforcement officer said. Calls to the vice president’s office were not returned, nor did Hannah and Libby return calls.

The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah ‘that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time’ as a way to pressure him to name superiors, one federal law-enforcement official said.” —Insight on the News

It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch o’ guys, if you ask me…

What’s a “Chido”? ‘Chidos are caricaturized sculptures with a claymation style. E-mail us a picture, and we’ll mail you back a Chidomation figure. Does “Chido” mean something? Yes, “chido” is the current word for “cool” among hip Latino kids. If something’s “sweet” in English, it’s “chido” in Spanish.’

“While global warming is being officially ignored by the political arm of the Bush administration, and Al Gore’s recent conference on the topic during one of the coldest days of recent years provided joke fodder for conservative talk show hosts, the citizens of Europe and the Pentagon are taking a new look at the greatest danger such climate change could produce for the northern hemisphere – a sudden shift into a new ice age. What they’re finding is not at all comforting.” —Thom Hartmann, CommonDreams

The Pentagon’s Weather Nightmare: “The climate could change radically, and fast. That would be the mother of all national security issues.” Recent studies of temperature data locked in Arctic ice cores indicate that warming trends push the climate to a ‘tipping point’ with a sudden lurch from one state to another over a timespan of less than a decade. The major impact on the northern hemisphere would, paradoxically, be drastic cooling, not warming; the major mechanism appears to be the disruption of the Gulf Stream (which warms northern latitudes) induced primarily by decreases in the ocean’s salinity caused by icemelt and rainwater runoff. Although not caused in the past by warming induced by greenhouse gases from human activity, research establishes these drastic flip-flops in the past.

The Pentagon’s concerns arise from the fact that dramatic shifts in climate may overwhelm certain societies’ ability to cope and drastically upset geopolitical strategic balance. The focus in climate research is thus shifting from gradual to rapid change. Hollywood is getting the concept too. Next summer’s disaster flick, The Day After Tomorrow, already being advertised at your local cineplex, envisions an ice age caused by global warming. While the climate scientists have far less than the filmmakers to say about the human drama of the coming ice age, the details are what Pentagon planning is all about. Some of the Defense Dept’s visionaries in long-term strategic threat assessment have apparently turned their attention to this scenario. Fortune magazine here summarizes an unclassified Pentagon report from this think tank, which spins an environmental and geopolitical forecast based on a sudden ‘conveyor collapse’ over the decade beginning in 2010. Suffice it to say it is not a pretty picture, and could reduce humanity to a brutal struggle for basic survival resources unlike anything seen in recent centuries but, with the technological capabilities of modern warfare including nuclear weaponry, of unheard-of brutality.

The Pentagon report does not indicate what recommendations its planners are making and it certainly does not indicate how they will be received by the dysadministration, who are the environmental equivalents of Holocaust deniers. Because of the US’s resources, climate diversity, technological superiority and military might, it fares better than other regions in the ‘wargame scenario’, and it is likely that Pentagon planners are focusing on protecting us against the anticipated hordes of starving have-nots. As Fortune‘s essay euphemistically puts it, “we should… identify ‘no regrets’ strategies to ensure reliable access to food and water and to ensure our national security” and “form teams to prepare responses to possible massive migration, and food and water shortages.” Since ecological catastrophe is at our doorstep, and it is too late to do anything to avert it, it’s every man for himself, ‘no regrets’, in other words. And for me it’s too late to regret having brought children into such a world.

As the reader who pointed me to this said, it is a blistering piece on Bush and Iraq by a Baltimore Sun editor: “Imagine how the loved ones of the dead may feel as they watch the spectacle of political jockeying over who should take the blame for a war being started on the basis of flawed intelligence, over whether there will be an investigation, and over the effect the timing of such an investigation may have on Bush’s campaign to get himself re-elected.

If I were such a parent, or spouse, or child, or wounded soldier, I expect my fury would be visceral and overwhelming. I would not let these men forget what they had done to my family. Blood is on their hands.

Beyond those Americans who have lost – and continue to lose – relatives and friends in the war in Iraq, the rest of America should be appalled. For what the architects of the war in Iraq have done to individual families, they also have done to the whole American family, diminishing the nation’s dignity and stature, and its safety.” —Baltimore Sun [thank you, Richard]

Osama’s voice on tape proves that the leader of al Qaeda is still alive. Or does it? “On January 4, Al Jazeera broadcast yet another audio tape purported to be from Osama bin Laden, in which he exhorted his followers to ‘continue the jihad.’ The voice referred to the capture of Saddam Hussein, proving the tape was recent. An anonymous CIA official confided to the New York Times: ‘It is likely the voice of Osama bin Laden.’ In an interview with CBS, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge agreed.

I pronounced bin Laden dead in my May 2002 and September 2002 columns. Am I ready to retract this claim, and to pay off several bets I made back then? No, not yet. I think Osama bin Laden is still dead. And I don’t think I’m just being stubborn. To understand my logic, consider the following three issues: the state of the antiterrorism effort, the technology of voice identification, and the most likely alternative hypothesis that could explain the audio tape.”

— Richard Muller (a security consultant and Berkeley physicist), MIT Technology Review

“The court effectively shut the door on any legislative or judicial challenge to its historic ruling last November. By the same margin, 4-3, the majority reaffirmed its opinion that gay marriage is constitutional and anything to reverse it is unconstitutional…

That advisory opinion to the Senate, which had been contemplating the passage of a civil union bill that would fall short of recognizing gay marriage, seemingly kills any short range chance of overturning the Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling in November, which declared same sex marriages to be constitutional.

The November decision has been targeted by Catholic bishops and Gov. Mitt Romney for reversal, who responded to Wednesday’s action saying, “While we’ve heard from the court, we haven’t heard yet from the people of Massachusetts.” ” —The Boston Channel. The forces of reaction are planning a constitutional convention to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman; if the court will no longer tolerate unconstitutional practice, then change the constitution, as simple as that.

“Mr. Lebrecht’s evidence for the coming demise of classical recording could be viewed alternatively as proof that for once the free market is working. If some greedy major labels are getting the comeuppance they deserve, let them go under.

Smaller labels like Nonesuch and Naxos, which once just filled in the gaps with records of specialty repertory and adventurous artists ignored by the majors, are proving that it is possible to release important recordings at midrange prices and still pay the bills. And though the financial repercussions from the downloading of CD’s have the recording industry feeling besieged and impotent, some bold orchestras have, like many rock groups, taken matters into their own hands and released self-produced CD’s, recorded live and available on the Internet.” — New York Times

“Roger Stone, the longtime Republican dirty-tricks operative who led the mob that shut down the Miami-Dade County recount and helped make George W. Bush president in 2000, is financing, staffing, and orchestrating the presidential campaign of Reverend Al Sharpton.

Though Stone and Sharpton have tried to reduce their alliance to a curiosity, suggesting that all they do is talk occasionally, a Voice investigation has documented an extraordinary array of connections.” A surprising investigative report by the Village Voice, if it is to be believed in the face of vociferous denials from the Sharpton campaign. I wonder if Stone is still working for the Republicans in this effort, if you catch my meaning.

This New York Times editorial lauds Ariel Sharon’s surprise directive to Jewish settlers to begin preparations to leave Gaza to the Palestinians, noting that the combined population of Israel and the occupied territories approaches parity. Supporters of the two-state solution ought to be encouraged, although the plan obviously does not go far enough in several respects. First, there is no timeline for implementation. Second, the purity of Sharon’s motivations is sullied by speculation that it is timed to deflect attention from the bribery scandal brewing around him. Most importantly, it does not include the West Bank, where the controversial Wall under construction dominates the landscape and where the Jewish “settlers’ ” presence is arguably more inflammatory.

“The Pentagon canceled its so-called LifeLog project, an ambitious effort to build a database tracking a person’s entire existence.

Run by Darpa, the Defense Department’s research arm, LifeLog aimed to gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees or does: the phone calls made, the TV shows watched, the magazines read, the plane tickets bought, the e-mail sent and received. Out of this seemingly endless ocean of information, computer scientists would plot distinctive routes in the data, mapping relationships, memories, events and experiences…

Researchers close to the project say they’re not sure why it was dropped late last month. Darpa hasn’t provided an explanation for LifeLog’s quiet cancellation. “A change in priorities” is the only rationale agency spokeswoman Jan Walker gave to Wired News.”

Robert Kuttner: “After an excruciating delay, chickens are finally coming home to roost for George W. Bush. For over a year, critics have been pointing to the president’s systematic misrepresentations of everything from Iraq to education to budget numbers. But the charge hasn’t really stuck, until very lately. This past week, however, Bush seems to have hit a tipping point.” — Boston Globe op-ed

“Dietary supplements are unregulated, some are unsafe — and Americans can’t get enough of them.” — The New Yorker

The Plot Thickens at The New York Times Book Review: Major changes are apparently afoot and the publishing industry is watching closely. As the editorship of the book review changes, it will emphasize nonfiction over what they claim is the glut of poor novels masquerading as serious literature these days [I have been disappointed for several years in the declining coverage of serious fiction, however.] Reviews will be more contentious and varied in length, and interspersed with author interviews and coverage of the publishing industry… and more reviews of the kind of mass market books once eschewed by ‘serious’ literary critics. — Poynter Online

DRM-free, and the artists get paid: “Imagine a world where music and movies could be freely exchanged online, where artists are recompensed and the labels don’t lose a cent, and where 12-year old girls need not fear harboring an MP3 of their favorite TV show theme tune on their PC.

All that could be yours for less than the price of a subscription to Napster: for less than $6 a month. Harvard University Professor Terry Fisher has completed the first comprehensive examination of various alternative models and the one we outline here offers such tantalizing social benefits, that even the most jaded sceptic ought to pay attention. Professor Fisher belongs to the school of forensic sceptics rather than the school of wide-eyed techno-utopians, and he’s spent three years trying to make the sums add up. We think it’s worth a look, and we think you ought to take a look too. (To make his task even more difficult, Fisher’s license model also takes on the additional onerous task of compensating Hollywood, too). ” — The Register

“The Supreme Court agreed last month to take up Cheney’s appeal in a case that involves his refusal to disclose the identities of members of his energy task force. Three weeks later, Scalia and Cheney went duck hunting together in the marshes of southern Louisiana.

Scalia maintains there was nothing improper about the trip, but it has prompted more than 20 newspaper editorial demands for President Reagan’s conservative appointee to stay out of the Cheney case.” —Fox Scalia retains the right to make his own decision about whether to recuse himself, unless a party with standing in the case asks him to do so and he refuses, in which case — albeit highly unlikely — the entire Court could review the question of his conflict of interest.

Joshua Micah Marshall: “When I look at the federal investigation being launched into the Janet Jackson boob incident, I realize what I like about this administration: they believe in accountability.”

“Never mind the investigation by the Federal Communications Commission into the Super Bowl halftime show that ended with the baring of Janet Jackson’s breast. Where is the inquiry into the crude, crass Super Bowl commercials celebrating a dog trained to bite crotches, a flatulent horse, a monkey pitching woo to a woman, a man tortured with a bikini waxing and an elderly couple fighting over a bag of potato chips?” —New York Times

“CBS announced today plans to enhance its ability to edit out any inappropriate and unexpected events from the Sunday, Feb. 8 broadcast of the “46th Annual Grammy Awards” on CBS.”

“And did no one notice that her tit was adorned with a little silver sun? The sun is a star, and since it’s decorated with a silver star, we can only assume this mammary has seen battle! Her boob is as highly decorated as John Kerry! And John Kerry threw his medals away. Janet (“Miss Jackson” if you’re nasty) wears hers with pride.” —Wonkette

Everyone knows, of course, that Bush fell asleep and missed the incident (after assiduously staying away from pretzels during the first half, I presume).

And, of course, in response to this new media crisis, Michael Powell is doing his part to reduce the record budget deficit, threatening to fine each of the 200 or so CBS affiliates that aired the offending segment up to $27,500 each, although he would personally like the penalty to be ten times higher. However, the Jackson flap is only one of recent celebrity exploits on TV that have the decency freaks howling for blood.

And TiVo reports that the “costume malfunction” was the most-replayed television moment in the history of the DVR. (I knew that the cloud around its silver lining is its amassing data about its users’ viewing habits, but I was not aware TiVo’s datamining is so detailed as to include a log of all rewinds and reviews. )

Will he seek to replace Cheney on the Republican ticket? [joke…]

“Bush’s approval numbers dip.” —CNN [Memo to David Brooks et al: Now do you begin to grasp what ‘electability’ might mean?]

And furthermore:

Support for going to war with Iraq also dipped below 50% for the first time, to 49%. The proportion of Americans who were certain that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to develop them before the war fell dramatically. More than four in 10 said the administration deliberately misled the public about whether Iraq had the banned weapons.

I caught this just before it went off the scroll at Boing Boing: “An anonymous reader sez, ‘The BBC made a unique deal with Real Networks which disposes of their spyware tactics. Basically, if a user clicks on a link to download Real Player from a BBC website, the referrer script sends them to a page where they can download an expiry-free, spyware-free and nuicance-free version of the player. It’s because the BBC have such a stringent public service remit, that it was offensive to charge people a license fee for BBC content, then make them pay all over again for the facility to view/listen to it.'”

Visited countries: “Select in the table below the countries you’ve visited and produce a map of the world with those countries in red. You can even put the map on your website or blog by simply pasting the code you’ll get!” —World66

“Our fourth annual review of the most shameful, dishonest, and just plain stupid moments of the past year. —” Business 2.0

Thirty years ago, one of the most significant papers in the history of psychiatry, psychologist David Rosenhan’s “On Being Sane in Insane Places”, was published in Science and rocked the psychiatric establishment. Rosenhan and eight other volunteers faked their way into psychiatric hospitals with the single complaint that they had hallucinated a voice; they feigned no other symptoms, spoke honestly about their lives after admission, and reported that the voice had stopped once they were in the hospital. One and all were diagnosed as schizophrenics and their subsequent behaviors — for example, Rosenhan’s note-taking during his hospitalization — were pathologized in light of that diagnosis.

Rosenhan and his confederates were given some therapy, and when they told of the joys, satisfactions and disappointments of an ordinary life – remember, they were making nothing up save the original complaint – all found that their pasts were reconfigured to fit the diagnosis: “This white 39-year-old male … manifests a long history of considerable ambivalence in close relationships … affective stability is absent … and while he says he has several good friends, one senses considerable ambivalence in those relationships.”

The other patients sensed that the volunteers were not truly psychotic, he reports.

Rosenhan drew the conclusion that, in an important sense, diagnosis resides not within the person but in the context, and that a diagnostic system so vulnerable to error should not be considered reliable. The backlash was immense, and included some of the most prominent psychiatrists in the field criticizing his findings by observing that diagnosticians do not expect to be deliberately lied to and that the volunteers had not acted ‘sane’ after their admission —

Had their behaviour been normal, they would have walked to the nurses’ station and said, “Look, I am a normal person who tried to see if I could get into the hospital by behaving in a crazy way or saying crazy things. It worked and I was admitted to the hospital, but now I would like to be discharged from the hospital.”

Furthermore, although Rosenhan’s intentions in not identifying the facilities in which the deceptions had taken place were honest, critics at those hospitals could not challenge his accounts of how the pseudopatients were perceived or treated.

Thoughtful psychologist Lauren Slater (who is ‘out of the closet’ about having a psychiatric history herself), to whose work I have admiringly linked here in the past, reviews Rosenhan’s study and its critics’ counterclaims —Guardian.UK. Robert Spitzer, the brilliant but conceited guardian of the diagnostic system as embodied in its bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, (who mounted one of the fiercest counterattacks on the original paper and did not have a kind word to say for the misfurtunes that happen to have befallen Rosenhan in the intervening decades) said that with the current refinement of diagnostic criteria, Rosenhan’s findings “could never happen today” …So Slater decided to replicate the experiment again. Her experience departs from the Rosenhan experiment, both in its outcome and the kindness with which she was treated, but is at least as dramatic an indictment of the way psychiatry is done today as Rosenhan’s was thirty years ago (…and she puts it back in Spitzer’s face). I share her unspoken disdain for his cockiness, and as well her veneration and affection for Rosenhan (who was as she wrote, ironically, institutionalized and mute with a mysterious paralytic illness; he has since recovered, equally mysteriously), whose study albeit flawed should be considered heroic and whose crucial lessons we in the mental health field ignore at our peril.

The shoddy (although well-intentioned) way in which clinicians drew their conclusions about Slater’s feigned distress is, unfortunately, the norm rather than the exception throughout the mental health field today. Patients are referred into my psychiatric hospital bearing labels determined by sloppy, uninformed, arbitrary guesswork bearing no similarity to the elaborate process of applying criteria which should be used to diagnose them accurately. Once stuck on, a diagnostic label follows a patient around immutably. This ‘conceptual abuse’ would not be so provocative to watch if it did not dictate the patient’s medication treatment and to a large extent the interpersonal attitude toward them by many in the mental health field.

Slater’s article on Rosenhan’s work is adapted from her just-released book, Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments Of The 20th Century. According to the publisher’s website, some of the other chapters cover “Harlow’s wire monkeys, Moniz?s lobotomy, Skinner?s pecking pigeons, Milgram?s horrific ?shock? machine, Kandel?s surprisingly illuminating sea slugs and the light they cast on the molecular workings of memory.” I know she also covers the controversial work of Elizabeth Loftus on “false memory”, and I wonder if she covers Milgram’s other seminal work, the famous “six degrees of separation” study.

Gary Trudeau had John Kerry’s number in October, 1971. —Slate

I am amazed at the number of people who post entries in their weblogs that would get them in trouble if the wrong people read them… and then are astonished when they do, and the weblogger gets fired, has a family blowout, loses a friend, or a relationship, or gets an unexpected visit from The Authorities. To complement the Darwin Awards (which “honor those who improve our gene pool…by removing themselves from it”), we ought to have a set of Social Darwins (for those who do society a favor by removing themselves from the social running in some way), and I would nominate some of these ‘kiss ‘n’ tell’ webloggers. I am confident that any trouble into which I get as a result of my posts here will have been deliberate, not inadvertent. Oh, wait just a minute, I’ll be right back, there’s a knock at the front door…

The scream that may not have been; a reporter makes a cogent case that it was an artifact of the sound equipment used that night. —ABC [via Interesting People]

“Breathing new fire into the old cliches that war is hell and love of money is the root of all evil, American soldiers have found a way to wrest Western capitalism out of the Iraqi sands where part of Hollywood’s most popular devil movie was filmed…

Last month, Capt. Nik Guran of the 2-320 Field Artillery Regiment, a ‘major unit’ of the 101st Airborne Division stationed in the small Iraqi town of Hatra, inserted a copy of The Exorcist in a portable DVD player. As the film began, Guran had the weird realization he was sitting at the location where director William Friedkin shot the opening sequence of his 1973 horror classic.

‘He recognized the sun temples,’ Friedkin recently said by phone from Hollywood.

‘And then the Army hatched this idea,’ Friedkin continued, ‘to turn the whole area into a tourist attraction and call it ‘The Exorcist Experience.”” —Houston Chronicle [via walker]

This site keeps track of the dead and wounded among the occupying forces, slicing and dicing the statistics in various ways as well as keeping a running narrative account.

“A German cannibal was convicted of manslaughter but not murder Friday for killing and eating a man who had asked to die, and he was sentenced to eight and a half years in jail.

The court rejected the prosecution’s plea for a murder conviction and life sentence because the victim had instructed Armin Meiwes, 42, to kill him. ” —Yahoo! News

“How is it that the dog, alone among Earth’s species, comes in so many shapes and sizes?” —PBS Nova

Genetically engineered plants turn red when growing over a mine. “A genetically engineered plant that detects landmines in soil by changing colour could prevent thousands of deaths and injuries by signalling where explosives are concealed.” —Nature

Twins born to woman who acted as surrogate for her infertile daughter, to the dismay of reproductive ethics campaigners. —ITV

Found in a garage in Oxfordshire, England —Sydney Morning Herald

“The African-American vote could make all the difference in South Carolina. But given the way three local Democratic activists are feeling, the party might be in big trouble… The Democratic Party is the party that talks about the black vote and attaining it by any means necessary,” Aiken said. ”Now, that does not equate with ‘We value the black vote’ as much as ‘We have to attain it in order to get what we want.”’ The routine currency in this exchange is emotion — for white candidates a little soul power soaked up from a gospel choir and shed just as easily. Candidates parade through church, Aiken noted, but, she said: ”Has anyone done a follow-up visit after a campaign? You know, ‘I came to your church, asked for your vote, the preacher gave me the pat and we prayed. Now I’m in; I’m going to make one more trip back, at least to thank you.”'” —New York Times Magazine

Claims of the discovery of superheavy elements 113 and 115, opening intriguing vistas. “The discoveries fill a gap at the furthest edge of the periodic table and hint strongly at a weird landscape of undiscovered elements beyond…Rather than being round, nuclei in that region and beyond could contain bubbles and have strange doughnut-like shapes…” —New York Times

Mos Def as Ford Prefect in the Hitchhiker’s Guide feature film. —Reuters

Bowing to pressure from lawmakers, the White House reverses its opposition to an independent investigation of intelligence failures. —Washington Post. Right now, administration strategy is all about damage control; Bush’s team appears divided over whether it would be worse to acknowledge that the data on which it based its decision was wrong, or to remain ‘publicly agnostic’ about the quality of the intelligence. The thing to watch will be how the administration limits both the scope (will the inquiry address not only generation but administration consumption of intelligence data?) and duration of the investigation. Rather than making this go away quickly, an effort that the White House reversal seems to acknowledge has failed, they may try to draw this out so any damaging allegations do not come out until after November. Expect the White House to drag its feet mightily in cooperating with requests for crucial data from an independent commission.

“Monsanto, the world’s largest genetically modified seed company, has been awarded patents on the wheat used for making chapati – the flat bread staple of northern India.

The patents give the US multinational exclusive ownership over Nap Hal, a strain of wheat whose gene sequence makes it particularly suited to producing crisp breads.

Another patent, filed in Europe, gives Monsanto rights over the use of Nap Hal wheat to make chapatis, which consist of flour, water and salt.

Environmentalists say Nap Hal’s qualities are the result of generations of farmers in India who spent years crossbreeding crops and collective, not corporate, efforts should be recognised.” —Guardian.UK This would be like patenting the use of flour to make pizza dough in the US.

In examining the insidious marketing strategies Big Pharma uses to put profits ahead of people’s health, I have often noted the lack of a constituency for patients with the devastating disease on which I focus most, chronic schizophrenia. This article focuses on the challenges the drug companies face in marketing newly-developed (and monumentally expensive) antipsychotic drugs for this population.

Since the mid-1990’s, a group of drug companies, led by Johnson & Johnson, has campaigned to convince state officials that a new generation of drugs – with names like Risperdal, Zyprexa and Seroquel – is superior to older and much cheaper antipsychotics like Haldol. The campaign has led a dozen states to adopt guidelines for treating schizophrenia that make it hard for doctors to prescribe anything but the new drugs. That, in turn, has helped transform the new medicines into blockbusters.

Ten drug companies chipped in to help underwrite the initial effort by Texas state officials to develop the guidelines. Then, to spread the word, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and possibly other companies paid for meetings around the country at which officials from various states were urged to follow the lead of Texas, according to documents and interviews that are part of a lawsuit and an investigation in Pennsylvania. —New York Times

The marketing pressure the manufacturers exerted allegedly includes payoffs and other illegal or marginally legal practices. In comparative studies, these drugs have comparable efficacy to the older antipsychotics. Early claims that they are more effective have gone by the boards. Pitching them to prescribers has largely relied on claims that they are better tolerated and safer than the older drugs in terms of side effects. While this is true (patients on them develop the devastating neurological effects of the older drugs far less often), they turn out to have important metabolic complications (effects on glucose and lipid metabolism, weight gain and in some cases cardiac risks). Psychiatrists like myself and other physicians are the objects of a relentless full court press from the manufacturers to diffuse prescribers’ concerns about such liabilities to their patients. Suffice it to say that physicians should be collectively ashamed of how they have handed control over what they learn about prescribing new medications to the pharmaceutical companies that profit from those drugs.

This site keeps track of the dead and wounded among the occupying forces, slicing and dicing the statistics in various ways as well as keeping a running narrative account.

I share Josh Marshall’s take on the issue of administration stonewalling on calls for an independent investigaiton of claims of intelligence failures in the pre-invasion assessment of the Iraqi threat. While most commentators are content to explain administration resistance to an investigation in terms of a wish to get the issue off the minds of the voters sooner (for example, Daniel Schorr’s commentary this morning on NPR; do you share my sense that his acumen is fading?), it is more likely that inquiries would go beyond what intelligence was provided to examine how it was consumed by the White House, which is where I think the real intelligence failures and abuses lie. Testimony by representatives of the intelligence community to an independent inquiry board would reveal the profound and unprecedented breakdown in relations between their establishment and the administration, much along the lines that Seymour Hersh described several months ago in his important New Yorkerpiece on the uraniumgate scandal. Recall that Hersh suggested that the offices of the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense have virtually built their own parallel intelligence infrastructures because of the recalcitrance of the CIA to feed them exactly the interpretations their selection biases required.

And lest you point out that Kay said the misinformation was the CIA’s problem, Marshall concludes as I have that Kay was in no position to know whether the CIA was pressured to reach erroneous conclusions or its analysis distorted by the very selective attention of administration ideologues. ” ‘Tis a poor workman who blames his tools…”

Similarly, does administration stonewalling on the 9/11 commission suggest that the truth of what was known of the impending threat is more complicated than intelligence failure at Foggy Bottom?

I have been troubled by the transparency of the administration and its apologists falling back increasingly on the ‘humanitarian’ justifications for the invasion of Iraq as the justification of averting an imminent threat has evaporated. Here, Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch, which has the credibility of having documented and remonstrated about Saddam Hussein’s abuses for decades, writes in the Human Rights Watch World Report 2004 that the humanitarian argument does not bear up under examination. The human rights emergency in Iraq was no more dire than in many other parts of the world where we do not choose to intervenq; “the Iraq war was not mainly about saving the Iraqi people from mass slaughter, and …no such slaughter was then ongoing or imminent”. Why have standards? A lesser emergency is still an emergency, right? Roth points out that the capacity for military intervention is finite, and if it is used in lesser emergencies (even in cases, unlike Iraq, where the moral urgency is unambiguous) the capacity to face greater atrocities may be lacking. Undermining the international legal order by violating another soverign country’s borders, especially without the support fo the world community, further impairs international protection of human rights. In short, the intervention fails Human Rights Watch’s standards for a humanitarian response — it was not a last resort, was not intended or structured to be for the benefit of the Iraqi people, departed in multiple respects from interventions acknowledged by the world community as legitimately humanitarian, had no endorsement by multilateral aothorities, and was not structured effectively to prevent doing more harm than good. I share Roth’s concern that there be an international multilateral consensus on criteria (hopefully, similar to those he outlines in this manifesto) for humanitarian interventions, preferably with the force of treaty law. It is unlikey the U.S. under its present administration would be a party to such an accord, given our repeated insistence that we will brook no interference in our right to defend ourselves and the unreasoned fluidity among the various pretexts offered for our unilateral adventurism abroad. But it would make the US’s renegade status more unambiguous and serve as a legitimate basis for international penalties for our arrogance and defiance.

Despite the Hutton Report’s bringing down the leadership of the BBC and supposedly exonerating the Blair government of having distorted the evidence for invading Iraq, reports suggest that the British public retain more confidence in the BBC than in Her Majesty’s government. Here is Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke‘s take on it. Meanwhile, despair in the newsroom has turned to anger. A ‘bring back Dyke’ ad appeared today in the Daily Telegraph, funded and signed by hundreds of BBC staffers and stating, in part,

Greg Dyke stood for brave, independent and rigorous BBC journalism that was fearless in its search for the truth. We are resolute that the BBC should not step back from its determination to investigate the facts in pursuit of the truth. Through his passion and integrity, Greg Dyke inspired us to make programmes of the highest quality and creativity. We are dismayed by Greg’s departure, but we are determined to maintain his achievements and his vision for an independent organisation that serves the public above all else.

—Guardian.UK [with links at the bottom to dozens of articles they have run on aspects of the crisis].

I can’t tell you how often I am hearing critics ridicule the Democrats for wanting to elect someone ‘electable.’ Now it is David Brooks. It is fashionable for them to call this focus on “electability” postmodern too, “an election about itself, with voters voting on the basis of who could win votes later on. It’s the tautology, stupid.” Well, Brooks, the contempt of the contemptible is a compliment, IMHO. First of all, it is a well-known longstanding and, yes, perhaps pitiful, voting phenomenon that the electorate is pulled toward joining the winning team; nothing new there. But, in the current race, it is ludicrous to talk about the Democratic voters’ focus on electability without acknowledging how desperate they are at this juncture to find someone who can beat Bush (beat Bush again, that is). It is no accident that it is Republican handmaidens who lampoon the phenomenon now. You did not hear them derogating the intelligence of the electorate in 2000. Ridiculing “electability” is a testimony to the pundit’s lack of intelligence, not that of the electorate. But if you think this is ridiculous, you can bet this is just a preview of the battle for the hearts and, especially, the minds, of the voters you’ll see this fall in the general election campaign, as it will be scripted by Republican strategists. Of course, the President himself won’t use the ‘s-word’ for fear of alienating voters, but his machine will get its mouthpieces in the conservative press to insinuate how stupid those who do not back administration policy are. Conservatives like Kevin Phillips are turning against the Bush dynasty because of the extent to which it represents an elitist patrician sentiment very different from the Republican populism that propelled REagan, for better or worse, into captivating the nation int he ’80’s. Let us hope the populace sees the contempt in which Bush’s organization holds them.

Another problem with the arguments of Brooks and those of his ilk about the folly of going for an electable Democrat is that this is not necessarily what the Democrats are doing. The primary campaign is not yet over and conclusions about Kerry’s victory are greatly exaggerated, it appears to me. While many are whitewashing his flaws in flush of bandwagon effect, it is not lost on other Democrats what a mistake going with Kerry would be. (Jack Beatty: “Listening to him, I saw a long line of Democratic bores—Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Bradley, Gore—who lost because people could not bear listening to them. John Kerry belongs in their dreary company. I fear he could talk his way out of victory…” —The Atlantic)

Seeking intelligent life among the newsreaders, television producers and yoghurt advertisers who label things as ‘science’ : “…(H)ow… are we to save the world from scenes like the one I witnessed on TV the other night? A BBC science correspondent was reporting on the breakdown of communications with the Martian rover, which he described as ‘either a hardware problem or a software problem’. ‘Could you put that into terms that laymen like me would understand?’ asked the newsreader. I assume the look on the reporter’s face was meant to reflect sympathy rather than disgust, but what could he say to that? ‘Basically it’s fucked, mate.’ Who on earth would be interested in the fate of a planetary probe and yet not be able to cope with the idea that it’s either a hardware or a software problem? The world’s gone mad.” —Guardian.UK

“When 50 million red-blooded American men sit down to watch the Superbowl, they’ll see more than the Patriots and the Panthers facing off. This year’s game is also a showdown for dominance in the billion dollar battle among companies selling erectile dysfunction drugs.

But some are asking if these drugs are solely a cure for dysfunction, and whether they might not also be a new cause of sexual insecurity for couples.” NPR’s The Connection; listen to the show.

Thanks to Steve for sending me a pointer to this column by Jon Carroll in yesterday’s SF Chronicle. I am sure it is because Steve recognized that I would feel Carroll had nailed right on the head the big picture of what Bush and co. are up to. It is not that hard to follow, makes perfect sense and is, in fact, inarguable from my vantage point. As Carroll ends the piece, “A small speculative fantasy about an alternative universe. Nothing to see here, really. Move along.”

Pixar (left) is abandoning talks about continuing its partnership with Disney (right) and will seek a new studio to distribute its films.

“Dear Ralph,

According to the latest news reports, you’ve pushed up your self-imposed deadline for announcing your decision about an independent 2004 presidential campaign from the end of January to mid-February. We’re glad to hear that, because maybe it means you’re still not sure about the best path to follow. For the good of the country, the many causes you’ve championed and for your own good name–don’t run for President this year.”

Hostility grows over US stance: “If Europeans realize that American primacy is something they have to live with, the reality of Iraq is forcing the Bush administration to climb down from its disdain of the United Nations and international cooperation. Thus sending the administration’s archduke of anti-United Nations sentiment, Vice President Cheney, into the lions’ den of Davos was a bold move. He put his best foot forward, but little in his speech to the forum convinced doubters that the Bush administration’s doctrine of preemptive force would end anytime soon, even as the Bush administration begged for UN help with Iraqi elections.

Nor did Cheney leave much hope that the United States was going to step up its efforts to secure a settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian problem.” —H.D.S. Greenway, Boston Globe op-ed

“Postmodern literary theory is now transforming itself so rapidly that Marxist, feminist, deconstructionist, and psychoanalytic critics (and others) are flocking back to the drawing board in droves as they search for new approaches to writing and teaching.

Indeed, some academics say that postmodern theory is on the way out altogether and that the heady ideas that once changed the way literature is taught and read will soon be as extinct as the dodo and the buggy whip.” —Christian Science Monitor It is becoming fashionable to say that postmodernism has lost its relevancy outside the ivory tower. Ironically, that might be seen in some circles as a very postmodern thing to say. No, actually, old-school humanists who find plenty ‘there’ in literature have been ‘anti-theoretical’ for decades. How did literary theory gain sway, then?

Postmodern literary theory is rooted in mid-century European philosophy, though it didn’t begin to catch on in America until the late ’60s; the Johns Hopkins University conference on “The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” which featured Jacques Derrida and other master theoreticians took place in 1966 and is generally regarded as the theoretical equivalent of the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth Rock.

These were, of course, revolutionary times: The initial phase of the civil rights struggle was peaking, and serious opposition to the Vietnam war was getting underway. College students were chucking out their parents’ ideas about race, class, patriotism, sex, music, and recreational drugs the way they might toss a faulty toaster oven out an open dorm window: If it doesn’t work, ditch it.

Theory played right into this mind- set; it challenged lazy notions about what’s right and what isn’t and brought fresh air into a classroom full of mildewed literary practices.

The problem is that by the time theory’s anticapitalist, antibourgeois assumptions became standard fare in colleges and universities, the consumer revolution was in high gear…

A second problem for theory is theorists themselves. Fundamentalism is always ugly, and many of the secondgeneration professors who followed famed theoreticians like Derrida merely applied their ideas dogmatically, thus guaranteeing that theory would became static and stale. Eventually, theory’s freewheeling skepticism became as one-dimensional as the celebrations of objective truth it sought to replace.

Perhaps it was inevitable, it strikes me, that literary theory itself would have to become an object of study and deconstruction by the theoreticians. Although this article bandies about the term, it does not own up to the central role that Marxist ideology had in laying the groundwork for ‘literary theory’, IMHO. It would seem to me that subsuming the products of culture to the conditions of production in a modern society, as a dialectical materialist analysis prescribes, was a necessary and perhaps sufficient precursor to challenging the idea of an unambiguous and unimpeachable truth in a literary work.

New Scientist: “A grassroots campaign to save the Hubble Space Telescope, started after NASA cancelled a crucial servicing mission, is gaining momentum.

NASA announced on 16 January that the space shuttle mission scheduled for 2006 would no longer take place. It would have extended Hubble’s life until about 2010 by installing replacement gyroscopes. These are needed to point and stabilise the telescope. At the moment only three of the original six are working well, and with three being the minimum number, Hubble’s life expectancy is just a few years at best.” —New Scientist An online petition is here.

“A newly discovered neurodegenerative disease could be affecting tens of thousands of men around the world, say researchers.

The disease closely resembles Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and senile dementia, but appears to be caused by a genetic defect linked to fragile X syndrome. Until now carrying the defect was not thought to be harmful.

Researchers believe the new disease, named FXTAS (fragile X-associated tremor/ataxia syndrome), may affect up to one in 3000 men, with most sufferers being over 50 years old.

‘FXTAS may be one of the most common causes of tremor and balance problems in the adult population and yet it is being misdiagnosed,’ says Paul Hagerman, a biochemist at the University of California, Davis and one of the research team. ‘Thankfully it can now be identified with a standard DNA test.'” —New Scientist One in my continuing “where-was-a-disease-before-it-was-found?” series of stories [which is similar to my “if-a-tree-falls-in-the-forest” series?].

“The catastrophic decline of griffon vultures in south Asia is being caused not by a mysterious disease, as had been thought, but a common painkiller given to sick cattle.

If the treated animal dies and is eaten by vultures, a single meal can be enough to kill the bird. The scientists who made the discovery now want the drug banned from veterinary use and are holding a meeting next week with officials from Nepal, India and Pakistan.” —New Scientist

“Hundreds of thousands of strokes could be prevented each year by a simple mesh cylinder that diverts blood clots away from the brain, claims the company that developed the device.

It was implanted in a patient for the first time late in 2003. Strokes are the second most common cause of death in the western world, and those who survive are often left disabled.” —New Scientist

“The findings of the first World Internet Project report present an image of the average net user that contrasts with the stereotype of loner ‘geeks’ who spends hours of free time on the internet and rarely engage with the real world.

Instead, the typical internet user is an avid reader of books and spends more time engaged in social activities than the nonuser, it says. And, television viewing is down among some internet users by as much as five hours per week compared with net abstainers, the study added.”

Joe Trippi, the iconic architect of Howard Dean’s Internet-driven campaign, is gone. And so are the millions of dollars that Dean raised from legions of grass-roots supporters over the last year. Pessimism is reportedly consuming Dean’s campaign volunteers, known for their idealism and infectious optimism until recently. Trippi was indeed inspirational, but a shakeup per se does not necessarily put the kiss of death on a campaign; it was only several weeks ago that Kerry changed campaign managers, with all sorts of pundits’ comments about how he couldn’t run a country if he couldn’t keep a campaign in order. What is more worrisome, and what comes as a surprise to me, are the reports that the Dean campaign’s coffers are empty. It must be a surprise to the media as well, since in the aftermath of his Iowa and New Hampshire defeats, considerations of Dean’s continued viability have usually involved citing the continuing size of his war chest. What will happen to Dean’s ability to raise additional campaign contributions is another matter. It could be argued that raising small contributions from the idealistic grassroots may make him less vulnerable to defections among funding sources.

And: The Death of the Doctor: “Dean is inevitably doomed. —Doug Ireland, TomPaine.com So what happens now to the ‘Democratic wing of the Democratic Party’?? Can Dean’s internet constituency become a permanent grassroots underbelly with any clout?

Sidney Blumenthal:

“For the first time the country is hearing sustained criticism of President Bush — and though the Democratic presidential primaries have been going less than two weeks, the effect has been immediate. Bush was already rattled and preoccupied with his suddenly full-throated opposition even before the Iowa vote. He scheduled his State of the Union address to follow it by a day. The speech was crafted as a sharply partisan, argumentative reply. Rather than projecting a vision of America as a radiant ‘city on a hill,’ he depicted a city in a bunker. It was as though he were countering Franklin Roosevelt’s appeal to confidence, ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself,’ with nothing but fear itself.

Bush’s State of the Union was the most poorly rated in modern times. By the weekend, his approval had fallen below 50 percent in a Newsweek poll and he was three points behind Sen. John Kerry, the new Democratic front-runner.

In New Hampshire, the turnout for the Democratic primary was the greatest in history, reflecting the party’s determination to oust Bush. Of especial importance was the enormous influx of independents, whose participation constituted 48 percent of all voters, showing the turn of the moderates. Intensity against Bush has combined with the felt need for an electable candidate.” —Salon

I am not sure I share Blumenthal’s ebullience nor his perception that the anti-Bush focus and coalescence that has been needed all along is finally in the offing. The temporary truce on negativity may be just that. Let’s see what the morning light shows after tonight’s next Democratic debate, for starters.

Joe Conason warns Kerry of the dangers of frontrunner status. To remain “electable”, he might get insipid instead of continuing to appeal on the basis of a willingness to stand alone and fight for what he believes in. As the dreaded Northeastern liberal who is anathema to the South, he should not give in to the temptation, at which he has already hinted, to find the South irrelevant to the Democratic effort. Conason feels he can appeal as the decorated veteran, and that it is especially opportune now when the South (and the West) might be on the verge of disaffection with the Bush White House. In a similar vein, Conason counsels Kerry to ignore the centrist press’ disdain for populist themes, which have legs in the popularity polls. Finally, Kerry has to do some work on his speaking style. [But we already have a Northeastern liberal maverick outsider who is not afraid to say what he believes, espouses populist themes, and is indubitably a far less stiff pedantic speaker…]

“President Bush’s re-election campaign is quietly shifting gears, preparing for the possibility it will confront a war hero and current senator.

But the line of attack is the same: Whether Howard Dean or Kerry, the Democrats’ nominee would be a left-leaning New Englander who wants to ‘raise taxes’ and reverse course on Iraq, campaign officials and Bush advisers say.” — Salon

“If you have Caller ID you’ll now know when a telemarketer is trying to reach you.” New rules in effect today require them to send the name of the company making the pitch to you and a phone number you can call during regular business hours to request to be taken off their list. — Salon

New York Times: Some Big Films Ignored. I am rooting for the powerful Lost in Translation to win something for Sofia Coppola, and for young Keisha Castle-Hughes to be recognized for her magical role in the exquisite Whale Rider. Johnny Depp’s performance in Pirates ought not to go unnoticed either. It would be deserving if the Academy recognized Capturing the Friedmans, but its isssues, I fear, are not ready for prime time feelgood acclaim. Errol Morris’ Fog of War will probably get the documentary nod instead, although I think it should be recognized that MacNamara took Morris for a ride throughout.

“Can we now talk impeachment?

The rueful admission by the chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction or the means to create them raises the prospect that the Bush administration is complicit in the greatest scandal in U.S. history. Yet, we hear no calls for a broad-ranging investigation of the type that led to the discovery of Monica Lewinsky’s infamous blue dress.” — Robert Scheer

Please hand cancel this art: ‘The Post Office is generally not considered a federal agency to be trifled with. But Chicago artists Michael Thompson and Michael Hernandez de Luna just couldn’t resist, after reading about Doonesbury readers who had been trying to mail letters with fake stamps published in the famous comic strip attached, and frequently succeeding. Thompson began cranking out his own satirical stamps a decade ago, and his works have included such classics as a May Day stamp with a picture of an airline crash, and a portrait of Abraham Lincoln with a gun visible behind him. But the game turned serious two years ago, when Hernandez de Luna tried to use a stamp emblazoned with a skull and crossbones and a single word: “anthrax.” ‘ —Reason

Concerns about assassination attempts on President Musharraf’s life, the likelihood that bin Laden is in Pakistan and that resurgent Taliban and al Qaeda forces strike from across the border are the supposed pretexts for a secret U.S. plan for a spring invasion of Pakistan involving thousands of forces, many of them already in Afghanistan. US sources refuse to comment on the story and Musharraf’s government denied to Reuters that it would support such a plan, rejecting the need for US forces to cross into Pakistan to find bin Laden. Of course, this “spring offensive”, as it is reportedly called in internal Defense Dept. documents, is timed very conveniently for the spring Republican offensive against the Democratic Presidential aspirant, it goes without saying.

This follows the age-old pattern of the U.S. propping up an unpopular dictator who serves our strategic interests in the face of popular opposition. In so doing, as always, we will further inflame that opposition. (The irony is that, as the WMD argument in Iraq evaporated, the dysadministration fell back on the mroal righteousness of toppling a tyrannical dictator there.) The Pakistani fundamentalist oppositon, by all indications, have their finger on the trigger of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. This makes it likely that a U.S. invasion force would not be wise stopping short of seizing control of Pakistani A-bombs once these events are set in motion, either with covert commando action or an overwhelming commitment of conventional force, or both. It seems clear that the US would not even try to obtain any international support before launching such a bullheaded scenario, although it might easily grow to involve nternational forces. Would India be drawn into the armed conflict — for example, finally deciding to seize Kashmir on the excuse that it is an Islamist haven? Would other Islamist forces rush to Pakistan’s defense against the US incursion?

“From David Kay we now have an amazing image of two tough guys, Saddam Hussein and George Bush, both misled by their underlings.” —Maureen Dowd, New York Times

And: Will Dubya Dump Dick? “Moderate Republicans have started a secret campaign to take the vice president off the Republican ticket in 2004.” —Jim Lobe, Inter Press Service [via AlterNet]

Marriage is slowly dying in Scandinavia. “A majority of children in Sweden and Norway are born out of wedlock. Sixty percent of first-born children in Denmark have unmarried parents. Not coincidentally, these countries have had something close to full gay marriage for a decade or more. Same-sex marriage has locked in and reinforced an existing Scandinavian trend toward the separation of marriage and parenthood. The Nordic family pattern–including gay marriage–is spreading across Europe. And by looking closely at it we can answer the key empirical question underlying the gay marriage debate. Will same-sex marriage undermine the institution of marriage? It already has.

More precisely, it has further undermined the institution. The separation of marriage from parenthood was increasing; gay marriage has widened the separation. Out-of-wedlock birthrates were rising; gay marriage has added to the factors pushing those rates higher. Instead of encouraging a society-wide return to marriage, Scandinavian gay marriage has driven home the message that marriage itself is outdated, and that virtually any family form, including out-of-wedlock parenthood, is acceptable.” —The Weekly Standard

If you believe this story, an African grey parrot has a vocabulary of 950 words; the ability to coin phrases; use the past, present and future tenses appropriately; and express humorous concepts; and everything you ever heard about ‘bird communication being just ‘parroting’ is wrong. —BBC

“Britain is likely to be plunged into an ice age within our lifetime by global warming, new research suggests.

A study, which is being taken seriously by top government scientists, has uncovered a change ‘of remarkable amplitude’ in the circulation of the waters of the North Atlantic.” —Independent.UK

Kevin Phillips, turncoat. —Salon Books

“The reward mechanism involved in addiction appears to regulate lifelong social or pair bonds between monogamous mating animals, according to a Center for Behavioral Neuroscience (CBN) study of prairie voles published in the January 19 edition of the Journal of Comparative Neurology. The finding could have implications for understanding the basis of romantic love and disorders of the ability to form social attachments, such as autism and schizophrenia.” EurekAlerts!

The ‘skeptical inquirer’ of modern medicine, Dr. Jerome Groopman, investigates how much crisis counseling after a trauma helps… or hurts in The New Yorker. (As usual, I advise anyone interested in this article to read it soon, as it is my experience that New Yorker articles go into the bit bucket in relatively short order…) He gives a good overview and history of the prevailing paradigm, ‘critical incident stress debriefing (CISD),’ in which I am trained and have practiced. He rightly points out the ways in which the process was misused in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks — among them mandatory rather than voluntary debriefing, the inclusion of people with little or no direct traumatization, and corporate (public relations, do-goodism, preventing absenteeism and avoiding liability) rather than compassionate motives. Recently, the first systematic research has shown that rapid crisis interventions are ‘inert’ in terms of preventing the development of PTSD in those exposed to massive traumas. Indeed, by encouraging sufferers to open up instead of seal over, it may promote PTSD sxs. The question is whether, as the paramedic-turned–psychologist developer of CISD suggests, these botched results arise only from misapplication of his paradigm.

I personally think, and the data supports this notion, that most people exposed to trauma are resilient and recover over time with their own strengths, and that misguided attempts to keep their wounds open and raw can indeed do harm rather than good. A smaller percentage of people do not recover and will eventually need extended psychological support because they develop the post-traumatic stress syndrome. It is doubtful whether these people can be identified in advance and singled out for early intervention, and even more doubtful whether preemptive intervention works.

To understand this issue, one has to understand the current concept of ‘trauma’ and the psychiatric politics behind it. (Groopman does not, or chooses not to discuss any insights he may have in this area, perhaps because of their ‘political incorrectness’. Groopman is a hematologist/oncologist; I have considered writing to him suggesting that he collaborate with a well-versed psychiatrist if his medical musings turn to issues in mental health treatment in the future…) The modern notion of trauma is much obliged to the historical coalescence of the women’s movement and the exposure of the ugly secret of rampant sexual abuse with the interests of a small number of psychiatrists working with the mental health issues of returning Vietnam veterans. Because treatment and study of these two populations is of necessity retrospective (the trauma has long since passed by the time the suffer annoounces her/himself), a third stream of data was fused into this notion of trauma, the prospective study of the course of post-traumatic reactions in those exposed to overwhelming solitary traumatic events such as natural disasters, plane crashes and crimes ranging from rapes to genocide. (One of the most famous trauma researchers made her name by getting in only months after they were freed to study a group of 23 schoolchildren in Chowchilla, California, who had been the victims of a 1976 hijacking, kidnapping and imprisonment.) Although, by and large, the research has supported the notion that trauma symptoms and resiliency depend on one’s prior constitution and resources, this has been obscured by lumping so many heterogeneous types of experience together as trauma. It has further been obscured by the feminist-inspired political correctness of insisting that all inappropriate sexual contact is victimization and that victimization explains mental health symptoms in many women. The idea that sexual victimization is not the fault of the victim turns inexorably (and wrongly) into the notion that the sufferer’s personal characteristics are irrelevant to the development of the post-traumatic symptoms.

Thus, in some clinical circles, patients are diagnosed as trauma victims (or ‘survivors’) at the drop of a hat, all trauma victims are said to have PTSD (regardless of whether they demonstrate the symptoms which define the syndrome or not), and careers of victimhood and chronicity are rationalized and excused zealously. And this is without even even talking about the induction of ‘false memories’, in which so-called ‘suppressed memories of trauma’ which may never have happened are ‘uncovered’ enthusiastically by mental health practitioners on the trauma bandwagon, shaping and explaining everything.

So two of the covert, probably erroneous foundations on which the CISD gospel has rested is are a vague, imprecise notion of what constitutes traumatic exposure and the politically correct notion that all those exposed to trauma will go on to develop symptoms. Thus relatively little attention has been paid until very recently to the notion that it may only be the particularly vulnerable who will succumb to their traumatic stress.

The wastebasket notion of trauma is so maddeningly imprecise that it obscures many clinically crucial distinctions among ‘trauma sufferers’. Let me highlight just a few:

• There are probably profound physiological as well as cognitive differences between the reactions to sudden, acute trauma and chronic or repetitive traumatization; think of a single rape by a stranger vs. being kept imprisoned and regularly sexually abused. This is related as well to whether it is expectable or unexpected.
  
• Human-perpetrated abuses cause a disturbance in ability for basic trust in others that exposure to an accident or natural disaster does not.
  
• Different ‘traumas’ are perceived as more or less avoidable or inevitable. How escapable a trauma seems in retrospect has effects on one’s sense of responsibility for one’s victimhood and sense of efficacy for the future.
  
• Socially-shaped expectations of what is within the realm of expectable human experience vs. outside cultural norms of human experience have an effect. Think about the impact different attitudes about the acceptability of warfare and combat will have on shaping combat trauma or ‘shellshock’.
  
• Sexual abuse, physical brutality, and psychological/emotional abuse cause different reactions. Likewise undergoing victimization as opposed to merely observing it, even at close range.
  

Despite the influx of counselors into New York after Sept. 11th (from personal experience, I know that many of them were employed ministering to so-called “secondary victimization” suffered by the first wave of helping professionals!), most New Yorkers received no psychological attention. And, contrary to predictions, there really was no phenomenon of massive psychological distress, Groopman observes and, as I have above, concludes “that the debriefing industry is predicated on a false notion: that we are all at high risk for P.T.S.D. after exposure to a traumatic event.” More useful is immediate “psychological first aid”, Groopman says. A number of my CISD-trained colleagues, in fact, went to New York as part of the ‘post-trauma industry’. Those who found themselves most useful, according to discussions I have had with them, did not however do CISD, but rather other kinds of mental health intervention such as grief counseling for those who had lost family members, and assisting and empowering those entitled to relief benefits to navigate through the red tape of securing these entitlements. Similarly, Groopman cites examples of proponents of CISD who, in the wake of their experiences after Sept. 11th, have turned away from that paradigm.

The psychotherapy of those who have complicated PTSD in earnest (with a legitimate traumatic antecedent, usually a protracted period of exposure to inescapable brutalization by others; and the scientifically described symptom complex) is painstaking, complicated and protracted. An early stage is giving the sufferer a name and a description for what they are undergoing. I do believe that counseling those exposed, truly exposed (and participating of their own accord), to traumatic events to recognize the symptoms of PTSD they might develop or may already have developed — by which time they would have declared their vulnerability, and it would be too late to depend on preemption — is a more useful model for early intervention, predicated neither on the notion that we are all vulnerable nor on the mistaken belief in its preventive efficacy.

Groopman turns later in the article to the very important and often-neglected topic of the neuroscience of the trauma reaction. In vulnerable individuals, evidence suggests that the physiology of their stress causes the memories of the trauma to actually be encoded differently in the brain, so that they are both less accessible and cause more enduring distress. Classical ‘talking therapy’, especially long after the fact, is not very useful in undoing these neurally encoded trauma residues. Groopman describes work being done in very different, promising, neuroscientifically informed trauma treatment.

“After Howard Dean’s unexpected defeat last week in Iowa, public attention

has focused on his temper, his character, and that guttural Tyrannosaurus

bellow of his not-quite-a-concession speech. But Dean’s views on Americans’

privacy rights may be a superior test of his fitness to be president.” —Declan McCullagh, CNET News

A very small part, to be sure, but an encouraging step: “A federal judge has declared unconstitutional a portion of the USA Patriot Act that bars giving expert advice or assistance to groups designated foreign terrorist organizations.

The ruling marks the first court decision to declare a part of the post-Sept. 11 anti-terrorism statute unconstitutional, said David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor who argued the case on behalf of the Humanitarian Law Project.” —My Way News

“John Kerry has surged into first place here, proving his oft-repeated contention that he is a “good closer.” Kerry has long said that he is a great fighter. If he completes his miraculous comeback to win the Democratic nomination, he will indeed have the fight of his life on his hands — against his own legislative record.” Everyone talks about his flip-flop on the invasion of Iraq but it goes much deeper than that.

Today’s Kerry excoriates Attorney General John Ashcroft for violating American civil liberties with his evil tool, the Patriot Act. “We are a nation of laws and liberties, not of a knock in the night,” Kerry huffs. “So it is time to end the era of John Ashcroft. That starts with replacing the Patriot Act with a new law that protects our people and our liberties at the same time.” Maybe Kerry should have thought about that before voting for the Patriot Act in 2001 — since laws and liberties are pretty important and all.

Back before he had to worry about competing with one Howard Brush Dean, Kerry was positively delighted by the Patriot Act. “It reflects,” he said on the Senate floor, “an enormous amount of hard work by the members of the Senate Banking Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee. I congratulate them and thank them for that work.” While supportive of “sunset” provisions in the bill, Kerry pronounced himself “pleased at the compromise we have reached on the anti-terrorism legislation.” These are not the words of a man about to help inaugurate an era of brown-shirt law enforcement. —Rich Lowry, National Review

Since we are so obsessed with “electability”, let us recall that Kerry as Democratic Presidential candidate would be going up against the most ruthless and deep-pocketed Republican election machine (otherwise know as “the administration”) of the last century. Bush, at least, is a consistent liar.