So the ignoramus says he isn’t aware of substantial opposition to his visit?

Listening to iTunes for Free:

“Nothing puts the stamp on our shrinking musical attention span as much as Apple’s new online song catalog, iTunes Music Store. The store is essentially Napster, with the minor caveat that you have to pay 99 cents for each song you download. But my sources in the preteen world have uncovered an interesting development: The kids aren’t actually paying for the songs. After all, how many kids have a credit card? And even if they did, a buck a song is steep, especially when you can get them for free on LimeWire and Kazaa.

No, instead of buying, they’re listening to the free 30-second previews that are available on the Web site. And they’re listening to them over and over again.

These previews get right to the essence of the songs. They’re usually cut from somewhere in the middle and contain a bit of the verse and a bit of the chorus, or the hook, which is the part that everyone recognizes.

You might ask how anyone could possibly find enjoyment in just 30 seconds of a song? But there’s a lot to suggest that 30 seconds of a song is just about all we need these days. In fact, everything from TV commercials to children’s toys, from radio jingles to cell-phone ringers, from song-form changes to the rise of sampling, has been subtly training us to read and receive our music in increasingly smaller chunks.” —NY Observer [via digitalphono]

Daily weather forecast at the summit. —Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute

“The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration…

The leak, whatever its sources, appears to have worked against the administration. Not only does the intelligence contained in the article fall embarrassingly short of “closing the case” on the Iraq-al Qaeda connection, but by revealing highly classified material, the neo-conservatives, if they were indeed the source, appear willing to sacrifice the country’s secrets to retain power. “It’s obvious that if you cared about the real national security interests of this country, you wouldn’t reveal an asset,” said Goodman. “That shows this is a venal and desperate group who are not considering the real national-security interests of this country.” ” —Jim Lobe, AlterNet

The take-no-prisoners social critic skewers Bush, Ashcroft and the whole damn lot of us for letting despots rule:

“But getting back to Bush. If we use old-fashioned paper ballots and have them counted in the precinct where they are cast, he will be swept from office. He’s made every error you can. He’s wrecked the economy. Unemployment is up. People can’t find jobs. Poverty is up. It’s a total mess. How does he make such a mess? Well, he is plainly very stupid. But the people around him are not. They want to stay in power.

You paint a very dark picture of the current administration and of the American political system in general. But at a deeper, more societal level, isn’t there still a democratic underpinning?

No. There are some memories of what we once were. There are still a few old people around who remember the New Deal, which was the last time we had a government that showed some interest in the welfare of the American people. Now we have governments, in the last 20 to 30 years, that care only about the welfare of the rich.

Is Bush the worst president we’ve ever had?

Well, nobody has ever wrecked the Bill of Rights as he has. Other presidents have dodged around it, but no president before this one has so put the Bill of Rights at risk. No one has proposed preemptive war before. And two countries in a row that have done no harm to us have been bombed.

How do you think the current war in Iraq is going to play out?

I think we will go down the tubes right with it. With each action Bush ever more enrages the Muslims. And there are a billion of them. And sooner or later they will have a Saladin who will pull them together, and they will come after us. And it won’t be pretty. —LAWeekly [via walker]

“Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

— Hermann Goering (1946) [props to tingilinde]

Sharing your musical tastes in chance encounters with total strangers: “‘She listens to techno and trance and things like that,’ he said. ‘Things I’m completely disconnected from. Stuff I’d never listen to unless someone is guiding me…. It’s interesting. I’ve probably bought half a dozen CDs based on what I’ve heard. It’s like finding a new radio station.'” —Wired News

“Two Top-10 Lists of Indicators of a Color-Blind Society” —Connie Rice, NPR [via walker]

Court limits in-car spying by FBI: Bet ya didn’t know they could turn your automobile’s on-board vehicle navigation system into a covert eavesdropping device. —The Register

“When asked why he chose to speak out, Yorke said, ‘To make Blair squirm over his decision to take us into a illegitimate war (in Iraq) and follow this religious lunatic (Bush) toward a dangerous future for the whole planet…both of these men are liars. We have the right to call them such, they are putting our children’s future in jeopardy. They are not controlling the terrorist threat, they are escalating it..’

Yorke said he was enraged that authorities were using ‘the threat of terrorism to suppress whatever they choose, intimidate and arrest whoever they wish.'” —Yahoo! News

“George W. Bush has allegedly offended Queen Elizabeth II by bringing no fewer than five of his personal chefs to Buckingham Palace.

‘Her Majesty greeted the news that Bush was coming with his own chefs in absolute silence,’ a snitch tells London’s Daily Telegraph.

‘That’s her general way of expressing disapproval. She’s not thought to be [thrilled] about the whole visit anyway, but when you consider that she has excellent cooks herself, you can see why this would be taken as a bit of an insult.'” NY Daily News

In the aftermath of the Istanbul bombings, This LA Times piece suggests that since the destruction of its base of operations in Afghanistan al Qaeda has, of necessity and with success, “(mutated) into a more decentralized network relying on local allies to launch more frequent attacks on varied targets.” In a sense, the al Qaeda name has become a brand name indicating a franchise operation seeding violence by perhaps providing training, financing and ideological inspiration to loosely affiliated semiautonomous local “terrorist cells”.

The idea that al Qaeda has become more decentralized, however, is based on a possibly unjustified assumption that there was a central al Qaeda organization to decapitate in the first place, and that this was successfully done by the US-led WoT®. The transparent, pitiful efforts to link al Qaeda to Baghdad in the leadup to the invasion of Iraq were just the most dramatic example of the need to imagine a unified enemy and attribute to it all the malice we find in the anti-American world. (I used to say the same thing about the ‘global Communist conspiracy’ trope during the Cold War.) In a sense, by insisting al Qaeda was behind every hostile act, it may be us who have created al Qaeda as an ideology and a brand name. It may never have been much else, although I will grant you the premise that the Afghani training camps and the command-and-control structure, supposedly under Osama bin Laden, imposed some uniformity before 9-11. We continue to be surprised by the breadth and reach of an organization that is little more than a meme, a name given to and invoked by anyone sharing an increasingly ubiquitous common purpose. As the article notes:

A top French counter-terrorism official cautioned against blaming Al Qaeda for every act of Islamic terrorism. “We have to be prudent,” said Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, the dean of France’s anti-terrorism magistrates. “These attacks are part of a climate, a planetary offensive. Al Qaeda is important. But there is too much of a tendency, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, to personalize the threat. It is not all [Osama] bin Laden, it is not all Al Qaeda.”

“George Bush was last night branded chicken for scrapping his speech to Parliament because he feared being heckled by anti-war MPs.

The US president planned to give a joint address to the Commons and Lords during his state visit to Britain.

But senior White House adviser Dr Harlan Ullman said: ‘They would have loved to do it because it would have been a great photo-opportunity.

‘But they were fearful it would to turn into a spectacle with Labour backbenchers walking out.'” —mirror.co.uk

This is a Michael Jackson-free zone.

<a href=” http://pro.enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=egelwan&commentid=106728380501077470

” title=””>Peggy La Cerra commented on my item on her ‘energetic evolutionary model’ of the mind:

Thanks for your comments. Maybe I can clarify your understanding of my paper’s content (I also wrote a book on these ideas, with Roger Bingham, called The Origin of Minds, Harmony 2002).

The challenge these ideas about the evolution of the human brain/mind poses to ‘Evolutionary Psychology’ is that they lead to a very different evolutionary model of our inherited neurocognitive architecture. Mine suggests that we inherit a complex set of adaptations that construct the neural information processing networks that give rise to the mind, theirs suggests that we inherit programs that solve specific problems (so-called ‘domain-specific/content dependent mechanisms’ as well as ‘a few or more ‘general processors’ and ‘some sort of integrative circuitry’. The ‘energetic model of the mind’ I propose is integrated and designed to assess the costs and benefits — TO AN INDIVIDUAL, based on his or her personal history of experience in the physical

and social environment over time — of one course of action versus another. There are many other implications of this model that differ greatly from those that fall out of the EP model that are expressed in detail in The Origin of Minds.

Best regards,

Peggy La Cerra

“WorldChanging.com works from a simple premise: that the tools, models and ideas for building a better future lie all around us. That plenty of people are working on tools for change, but the fields in which they work remain unconnected. That the motive, means and opportunity for profound positive change are already present. That another world is not just possible, it’s here. We only need to put the pieces together.” This new weblog is deep and rich with the sort of things that interest me. I have only begun to explore it. In a way, it seems to be the latest morph and inheritor of the Whole Earth/CoEvolution ethos.

Gary Wolf, who covers the Dean campaign for Wired: “Here, I’ve offered a Retroactive Manifesto of the Dean Campaign. These are the rules that might have been posted on the wall of campaign manager Joe Trippi’s office, if there were such a list of rules. I am looking for examples and counter-examples – confirmation and correction. Are these really the principles that underlay the architecture of the campaign? Are there concrete examples you can suggest? Is something here plainly wrong? Hack away.

(Each of these rules is taken from the work of the writer whose name is parentheses. )

• ALLOW THE ENDS TO CONNECT (David Weinberger)
  
• DON’T BUILD THE SYSTEM – GROW IT (Kevin Kelly)
  
• SWARM AND SELF-ORGANIZE (Steven Johnson)
  
• UNTETHER (Howard Rheingold)
  
• YOU’RE NOT A LEADER – YOU’RE A PLACE (Joi Ito)
  
• MAKE THE NETWORK STUPID (David Isenberg)”
  

Douglas Rushkoff’s new book, Open Source Democracy: how online communications is changing offline politics, is available as a 297K .pdf under an open source license.

Using technology and video to fight for human rights: this organization, founded in 1992 by Peter Gabriel, the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights and the Reebok Foundation, consists of more than 150 ‘partner groups’ in over 50 countries around the world investigating and exposing a wide range of injustices and violations of human rights that otherwise go unnoticed and unreported, often in societies without basic protections and at great risk to themselves. The organization’s fundraising efforts make video and other technology tools available to grassroots human rights groups around the world. Witness’ annual report is online here. Click here to make a donation.

The NEA honors Jim Hall:

“Jim Hall, the greatest living jazz guitarist, has been making records for close to a half-century. He’s worked with everybody from Sonny Rollins to Pat Metheny and played everywhere from the Village Vanguard to the White House. His colleagues view him with something approaching outright awe. But Mr. Hall, like most jazz musicians, is unknown to the public at large–a fact that doesn’t seem to bother him in the least…

To be sure, Mr. Hall, who turns 73 next month, is nobody’s idea of a natural celebrity. Bald, bespectacled and soft-spoken to a fault, he looks less hip than shyly professorial. (A well-read art lover, he has written a thoughtful book called ‘Exploring Jazz Guitar’ in which he suggests that jazz musicians could learn from looking at the seascapes of J.M.W. Turner.) His intensely intimate music gets under your skin rather than grabbing you by the lapels.

Given sufficient time, though, such artists have a way of evening the odds. Today, the National Endowment for the Arts names Mr. Hall an NEA Jazz Master, an honor accompanied by a check for $25,000.” —WSJ Opinion Journal

Dirk Olin, national editor of American Lawyer magazine: The insanity defense is crazy: “The very notion of a teenager crouched in the trunk of a car assassinating people willy-nilly does seem crazed on its face. But Malvo’s courtroom tack has provoked the predictable outrage engendered by every attempt at the insanity plea (with Dennis Miller’s adolescent blather leading the pack.)

Invocations of the insanity defense often pique the public because of a widespread misperception that the plea offers an opportunity to get away with murder. Such fears are almost completely groundless. Yet they’ve already led to the intellectually dishonest construct of ‘guilty but insane’ pleas passed by legislatures in a number of states. These hybrid pleas promote a beguiling oversimplification of how society should apportion blame. Bright lines are often unavoidable in the law, but the precision of modern psychiatry demands that we stop asking juries to make medical determinations of insanity once and for all.” —Slate

“Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new film, ’21 Grams,’ takes its name from the inexplicable loss of weight a body undergoes at the moment of death and focuses on the events leading up to and away from an accident in which several people lose their lives. But don’t suggest to Iñárritu that his film is about death.

‘I think it’s about hope,’ he says — the struggle to find hope in the face of loss.

Stretched taut between those extremes, the film — starring Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Benicio Del Toro and featuring cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto’s unsettling hand-held-camera work — strikes an edgy, unrelenting chord. Its confrontation with death throws life into sharp relief.” — Amy Reiter, Salon

“An ancient play is to be staged for the first time in more than 2050 years after fragments of the text were found stuffed in an Egyptian mummy.

Cyprus’s national theatre company, Thoc, plans a modern-day world premiere of Aeschylus’s Trojan War story Achilles in Cyprus next summer. The play will then be performed in Cyprus and Greece.

Scholars had believed the trilogy to be lost forever when the Library of Alexandria burnt to ashes in 48 BC.

‘But in the last decades archaeologists found mummies in Egypt which were stuffed with papyrus, containing excerpts of the original plays of Aeschylus,’ Thoc director Andy Bargilly told Reuters.

Drawing on references to the trilogy by other ancient playwrights and the recently discovered papyrus texts, Thoc and researchers believe they have the closest possible adaptation of Aeschylus’s masterpiece.” —Sydney Morning Herald

“What’s impressive about psychics is the number of times people go to a reading, or watch one of those ‘hotline to heaven’ shows, and say, ‘He told us things he couldn’t possibly have known.’ Psychics and their fans say it’s evidence of genuine psychic ability. But keep a couple things in mind…” —Straight Dope

“A mysterious sub-atomic particle has been revealed that does not to fit any of the models currently used by physicists.

The discovery either suggests that a new family of molecule-like sub-atomic particles exists, or that theorists must substantially re-think their theory of the masses of sub-atomic particles.

‘If the molecular interpretation is correct, then it would be one of the first compelling cases for a new type of matter – it opens up a whole new realm of study,’ says …one of the team involved in confirming the existence of the new particle. There would also probably be more molecule-like particles to find, he adds.” —New Scientist

“The question before us is whether, consistent with the Massachusetts Constitution, the commonwealth may deny the protections, benefits and obligations conferred by civil marriage to two individuals of the same sex who wish to marry. We conclude that it may not. The Massachusetts Constitution affirms the dignity and equality of all individuals. It forbids the creation of second-class citizens.”

It certainly is a day for heteroxexuals and gays alike to be proud to live in Massachusetts, after the 4-3 Supreme Judicial Court ruling that it is a deprivation of equal protection under the law to deny gay couples the rights and obligations of the institution of marriage. It would have been even nicer if the Court had not imposed a six-month implementation process on the state, of course. That does make it much more likely that the issue will remain alive in the months leading up to the Presidential election, as this New York Times news analysis details. Certainly, if the domestic ‘culture wars’ become as inescapable a part of the national debate as the foreign policy issues, it will further polarize the electorate and spare us from an insipid campaign between ‘Bush and Bush-lite’, as some claim we endured in 2000. As pointed out in this Salon analysis, conservatives have their backs against the wall already with the Vermont same-sex union bill signed into law by then-governor Howard Dean; last year’s Supreme Court ruling in the Texas sodomy case decriminalizing consenting homosexual sex; the recent affirmation of same-sex marriages by an Ontario, Canada, court; and the appointment of an openly gay Episcopal bishop.

Republican strategists who think it will ignite conservative support for Bush and overcome a segment of the population’s misgivings about the invasion of Iraq may try to make gay marriage a hotbutton issue. We can hope that as a result they lose moderate voters who see Bush’s ties to the rabid Right unveiled, and the “compassionate conservative” lie exposed, in the process. On the other hand, pundits predict that if Christian Coalition types become unhappy with a certain reticence on Dubya’s part on the issue, “it will be very dangerous for him…” The delicious irony of one of Bush’s major handlers, VP Cheney, having an openly gay daughter, will be one to savor as the issue heats up.

The Right is certainly scurrying for the so-called ‘marriage amendment’ to the US Constitution, which would define a marital union as being between a man and a woman. Considering that 37 of the 50 states already have laws defining marriage as a union only between a man and a woman on their books, this might win, even based as it is on the inane claim that extending these rights to same-sex couples somehow “redefin(es) marriage to the point of extinction,” in the words of Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, or “(violates) the sanctity of marriage”, to use Bush’s more hackneyed and insipid phrasing. Expect an interesting legal battle about whether a federal constitutional amendment would trump the Massachusetts precedent, especially given Republican lip service to states’ rights and devolution of federal authority in other areas.

Given the closeness of the Supreme Court ruling, is there room for a compromise in which the legislature creates a same-sex union entity that is not called marriage but extends legal rights in areas including property, insurance, child custody and next-of-kin benefits to the partners? Opinion is divided among legal experts about whether the ruling, which has extensive explicit discussion of marriage, leaves room for anything less. It sounds unlikely to my reading.

The Massachusetts ruling cannot be challenged on the federal court level or overturned by the Massachusetts legislature, but since it is based on the Court’s interpretations of the rights afforded under the state constitution, there is a simple solution for its fundamentalist and homophobic opponents — change the constitution. (One of the three dissenting justices in the Massachusetts decision, parenthetically, said that gays are already as free to marry in this state as anyone else — as long as it is someone of the opposite sex! “Whether an individual chooses not to marry because of sexual orientation or any other reason should be of no concern to the court.”) There could be a move for a Massachusetts constitutional amendment , as well as the federal one, to ban gay marriage; our Mormon Republican governor Mitt Romney is on record as favoring such a maneuver. This would take at least three years, though. The nuances of Massachusetts politics make this an interesting battle to watch.

The legislature is majority Democratic, but also largely Catholic, and the Roman Catholic Church is strenuously opposed to gay marriage. On the other hand, the Democrats are rarely aligned with Governor Romney… —New York Times

Apparently, after courts affirmed same-sex marital rights in those states, the constitutions of Alaska and Hawaii were changed in similar fashion.

Another front on which the battle will undoubtedly be fought, if it withstands the backlash in Massachusetts, is whether same-sex marriages from this state would be considered valid by the federal government and other states. Will gay couples come to Massachusetts to marry and then return to other states to challenge the resulting discrimination against them in the courts, state by state? The likelihood is that the uphill battle will in some senses continue — if luck would have it, only in forty-nine of the fifty states. In the meantime, I am raising a toast to at least several couples I know here in Massachusetts who, in the aftermath of this ruling, will be renewing their marriage vows with the recognition and blessing of the state.

b0ing b0ing pointed me to this page, describing it as suggesting you email all your stolen .mp3’s back to the RIAA:

Stealing is never OK. But, it was just too easy. So we told ourselves we were just “sharing” the music, because everyone knows that sharing is a good thing.

But then we learned what we were really doing. We heard our favorite recording artists telling us that our “sharing” is really shoplifting and piracy. We were stealing from the musicians and singers we love!

That was when we looked at each other and said: “No more! It’s time to make it right by giving back what we stole!” And that’s just what we did! We sent back all the MP3’s we’d illegally downloaded. Everyone one of them!

Won’t you join us in sending them back?

Send them back! Right back to the Recording Industry of America Association, the industry association that helps our favorite artists keep on making the music we love.

But you don’t have to be content with merely emailing them the .mp3 files. As the site suggests, you can snail mail or fax them a printout of a hex dump of your files instead. The site was created by Parents and Their Kids against Stealing™, a group “dedicated to helping kids feel better about themselves through File Sharing Abstinence.” And, don’t forget, they remind you that

“Unauthorized use of this page, its contents or the concept of sending back MP3s is forbidden without express written permission from Parents and Their Kids against Stealing™”

Now here’s a version of ‘smart-mobbing’, the fad which FmH readers will know I have considered frivolous, that I can get behind. The Chasing Bush campaign, angry about the stage-managing of Bush’s London visit, are encouraging people to send location reports about the Bush entourage, make protests more visible, and spoil the PR effect the Bushies are trying to create with a “security bubble” around the President. —BBC [via b0ing b0ing] Camera phone images from protesters are being posted at the Chasing Bush website. There are unsubstantiated reports, however, that Bush security people have prevailed on Scotland Yard to have cellular antennas in the vicinity of the President’s perambulations shut down on the pretext that they could be used to trigger remote-control bombs.

Here is a sort of umbrella site linking to various “Bush not welcome” efforts. (“The author of this website does not advocate violence and is not responsible for the actions of individual protesters.”)

Related:

US President George Bush will tonight (Tues 18 Nov) be branded ‘one of the world’s arch environmental villains’ by Friends of the Earth’s Executive Director, Tony Juniper, when he addresses hundreds of environmentalists at the Burning Planet rally in Grosvenor Square, London.

And:

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit yesterday accusing the Secret Service of violating the constitutional rights of protesters at events featuring President Bush and other senior administration officials.

The suit contends that protesters have been forced into designated “free-speech zones” far from TV cameras and the national media, sometimes behind fences or other barriers.

Sign holders sympathetic to the administration and other members of the public are allowed much closer. —SeattlePI

$28 Million to get draft ready by June 15, 2005!!: “Read this official budget carefully and you will see that Bush is gearing up the draft–there is no longer any doubt about it. Selective Service must report to Bush on March 31, 2005, that the system is ready for activation within 75 days. So on June 15, 2005, expect the announcement that the first draft lottery since Vietnam will be held for 20 year-olds.” —Democratic Underground

Tolkien’s reputation founders in a sea of commercialism: “Before 2000, few if any marketing executives were likely to have discussed Rings in Harry Potter terms: as a ‘literary property’ with a ‘market share’ and a ‘saturation point.’ For nearly five decades, Tolkien was untouched by that morass of Rowling-sized sales hysteria of Happy Meals and bubble bath.

Everything has changed since the release of the first two films in director Peter Jackson’s chart-busting Rings film trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001 and The Two Towers in 2002. As Tolkien’s fame and fortune have swollen to unprecedented levels, ranks of movie-driven enthusiasts have multiplied like Saruman’s orcs, trampling any vestiges of that deep-rooted if naive grass-roots movement that once prevented Tolkien’s corporate-driven mass exploitation.” —Boston Globe [via walker]

The National Security Archive at George Washington University audits Freedom of Information Act requests; here it lists the ten oldest unfulfilled FOIA requests. Scroll down to page 5 of the .pdf file. They also use an interesting methodology to rank federal agencies by how promptly they fulfill FOIA requests and to measure their backlog, if you read further.

‘The Greatest Threat to Life on the Planet’ —Independent.UK

Great viewing conditions expected on North American east coast: “The 2003 Leonid meteor shower is set to peak on Wednesday morning, Nov. 19th. Sky watchers on the Atlantic side of North America are favored; they could see as many as 80 meteors per hour between 1:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. local time. Pacific observers (e.g., in Alaska, Hawaii, Japan) will count nearly half that number–still a nice shower–just before local sunrise.”

Ted Rall shows us Iraq from the other side:

“Dear Recruit:

Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.

You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein’s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.” [more] —[thanks, steve]

“The active chemical in marijuana can do more for your head than give you a high — it could protect your brain in emergency situations.

An altered version of cannabis could be the first drug ever to shield the brain from the cascade of injury that follows head trauma.” —Wired News

Thanks to all of you who have sent birthday wishes along to FmH. I am enjoying the “experiment in participatory weblogging” and consider it a success, both in terms of generating lively discussion and illuminating the issue of why there had not been much here. I consider your efforts in commenting on some of my posts a birthday present to me but hope, unlike a birthday present, that they will continue.

The article details the staggering extent to which a cocktail of “drugs, hormones, steroids and personal care products such as soaps and perfumes” is found in almost all ponds, creeks and streams sampled. (CNN) The effects of traces of antidepressants on aquatic and amphibious species, in particular, must be assessed both because of the enormous volume of prescriptions issued for this class of drugs and the wide range of their biological effects on body systems. Laboratory studies of amphibians exposed to fluoxetine (Prozac) confirm cause for concern, although what relationship the experimental conditions bear to either extent of exposure in the wild or what implications it has for unanticipated human effects is unclear.

Some, commenting on this article, have suggested that expectant mothers be careful about taking the drugs for fear of birth defects etc. This is not really the most important thing to worry about, though, since rates of birth defects after in utero exposure to various classes of drugs are well-studied and publicly available — if you are concerned with the obvious, gross defects such as spina bifida, cleft lip and palate, cardiac defects etc. What is more worrisome and more difficult to assess, however, are the longterm, more subtle effects of either in utero or childhood exposure. In my own field of psychiatry, for example, we are beginning to appreciate how subtle, poorly-characterizable early abnormalities in the organization of brain regions and the rates of migration, growth and die-off of neurons are implicated in devastating cognitive-behavioral disturbances such as schizophrenia. In my opinion, also, we need to be concerned not only with in utero exposure but the growing use of psychotherapeutic drugs to treat children and adolescents, often on dubious grounds.

Addendum: Garret Vreeland‘s comment to this post deserves to be brought up front here. He has been concerned about antidepressant use in children for a long time; here is a Google search of links.

‘What’s Going to Happen with Feith?’ “If the administration is looking for a scapegoat for the situation it faces in Iraq, Feith is the most likely candidate both because of his relative obscurity compared to other administration hawks and the fact that, of virtually all of them, his ideas—particularly on the Middle East—may be the most radical.” — Jim Lobe (who writes for Inter Press Service, an international newswire, and for Foreign Policy in Focus), tompaine.com

No Exit:

While President George W. Bush insists that “America will never run,” a fierce debate is raging just below the surface of his administration over when and how America should exit from Iraq. The debate pits those who favor a massive effort to turn Iraq into a beacon of democracy for the Middle East against those who want to concentrate the U.S. mission on defeating insurgents so American troops can return home. The wisdom of a war against Iraq had few doubters within the Bush administration. Yet this consensus obscured a deep division over the war’s purpose. We could characterize this as a split between “democratic imperialists” and “assertive nationalists.” — Ivo H. Daalder (Special Adviser on National Security at the Center for American Progress and co-author of America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (Brookings Press, 2003), tompaine.com.

“It is time to set the record straight – Keanu Reeves is more intelligent than he lets on. While most of us were (or still are) scratching our heads over The Architect’s speech at the end of The Matrix Reloaded, Reeves thought it a challenging concept. Ergo, he knew then, it was a crucial scene in the trilogy.

During a 15-minute interview with Reeves in Sydney he tells how he found the three books – Simulcra and Simulation, Out of Control and Evolutionary Psychology (which he was asked to read by the Wachowski brothers before playing Thomas Anderson a.k.a. Neo a.k.a. The One in The Matrix trilogy) to be helpful in different ways.” —The Star (Malaysia)

Studs Terkel: “Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up. That’s what Jessie de la Cruz meant when she said, ‘I feel there’s gonna be a change, but we’re the ones gonna do it, not the government. With us, there’s a saying, ‘La esperanza muere última. Hope dies last.’ You can’t lose hope. If you lose hope, you lose everything…”

As we enter the new millennium, hope appears to be an American attribute that has vanished for many, no matter what their class or condition in life. The official word has never been more arrogantly imposed. Passivity, in the face of such a bold, unabashed show of power from above, appears to be the order of the day. But it ain’t necessarily so.

Letters to the editors of even our more conservative papers indicate something else, something that does not make the six o’clock news: a stirring show of discontent in the fields, a growing disbelief in the official word. ” —tompaine.com

… being sad? “From Adam Ant to Nick Hornby, everyone seems to be opening up about depression. But is the therapy culture actually making us ill? ” A thoughtful essay drawing on a number of critics of ‘therapy culture’, ‘treating angst as if it were anxiety’, and the expectation that we have a right to feel ‘better than good’.

We have gone from being a society that expects life to be a set of struggles and challenges to which we must respond and over which we have a personal sort of challenge to achieve some good, and evolved in to a world where we are born with an entitlement to an unfettered, uncomplicated life, free of angst and anxiety.’ There is, he says, an expectation now ‘that we ought to be able to fix everything’. Gist is particularly well-placed to know how impossible that expectation is to meet. ‘If there’s one thing that the incredible calamities in my work have taught me,’ he says, ‘it’s that we have to start out with a simple understanding in life – not everything can be fixed.’ —Guardian.UK

“On November 24, the FCC is mandating that consumers be allowed the option to retain their phone numbers when switching service providers. For anybody who’s stuck with one carrier solely because they wanted to hang on to their number, this is a big deal–the chains have come off. But unfortunately, you can’t simply take your number and run. There are a lot of unanswered questions and potential pitfalls ahead. So before making the switch, arm yourself with the facts, and be wary of hidden costs.” —CNET

“These days, merely talking on a phone seems almost quaint, kind of like using a party line. No, today’s phones are about having a cyborglike connection to every aspect of your network. It’s like having an extra limb. Your phone collects your e-mail from work; it zaps tiny text messages to friends far or near. It captures exquisitely embarrassing pictures from drunken office parties. It feeds your cat. The mobile phone has become, in essence, a remote control for life. ”We call it ‘the device formerly known as the cellphone,”’ says Geoffrey Frost, the chief brand officer for Motorola, which makes cellphones. ”Now it’s like having E.S.P.” And along the way, the phone is changing the way we relate to one another — in often surprising and subtle ways.” —New York Times Magazine

“Six weeks ago, a courageous hometown paper in rustbelt Ohio – the Toledo Blade – tore the wraps off an officially suppressed story of Vietnam-era exterminism that recapitulates Blood Meridian in the most ghastly and unbearable detail. The reincarnation of Glanton’s scalping party was an elite 45-man unit of the 101 Airborne Division known as “Tiger Force.” The Blade‘s intricate reconstruction of its murderous march through the Central Highlands of Vietnam in summer and fall 1967 needs to be read in full, horrifying detail. Blade reporters interviewed more than 100 American veterans and Vietnamese survivors.

Tiger Force atrocities began with the torture and execution of prisoners in the field, then escalated to the routine slaughter of unarmed farmers, elderly people, and even small children. As one former sergeant told the Blade, “It didn’t matter if they were civilians. If they weren’t supposed to be in an area, we shot them. If they didn’t understand fear, I taught it to them.” “

Scientists create a virus that reproduces: “…(G)enomics pioneer Craig Venter announced that his research group created an artificial virus based on a real one in just two weeks’ time.

When researchers created a synthetic genome (genetic map) of the virus and implanted it into a cell, the virus became ‘biologically active,’ meaning it went to work reproducing itself.” —USA Today

“Labour MPs are planning to tack an amendment onto the Child Protection Bill which would outlaw parental smacking, following warnings that too many abusive parents cover up ill-treatment by insisting that bruises are the result of ‘normal’ discipline. They are optimistic that Ministers will allow a free vote on the issue.” —BBC. Laudable sentiment, but how exactly would this be enforced?

“North Korea has said it is ready to abandon its nuclear programme if the United States drops its ‘hostile policy’ towards the communist state.” —BBC

“George Bush’s meeting with families of British soldiers killed in Iraq was dismissed as a selfish stunt by two angry fathers.

The United States President wants to meet relatives during his visit to the UK to tell them their loved ones died in a ‘noble cause’… Mr Bush said he will offer the families the sympathy ‘of the American people and the prayers of the president’.

…But grieving fathers Robert Kelly and Reg Keys said the meeting would only benefit Mr Bush.

…Mr Keys, 51, said he opposed Mr Bush’s visit, but wanted to meet him to tell him he was responsible for his son’s death.”

Related: US seeks ‘shoot-to-kill’ authorization for snipers in Bush entourage during next week’s visit to the UK: British Home Office demurs.

The issue of immunity is one of a series of extraordinary US demands turned down by Ministers and Downing Street during preparations for the Bush visit.

These included the closure of the Tube network, the use of US air force planes and helicopters and the shipping in of battlefield weaponry to use against rioters. —Guardian.UK

US War Dead in Iraq Exceeds Early Vietnam Years: “A Reuters analysis of Defense Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on Dec. 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces number about 130,000 troops — the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.” —Reuters

“When you first fall in love, you are not experiencing an emotion, but a motivation or drive, new brain scanning studies have shown.

The early stages of a romantic relationship spark activity in dopamine-rich brain regions associated with motivation and reward. The more intense the relationship is, the greater the activity.

The regions associated with emotion, such as the insular cortex and parts of the anterior cingulate cortex, are not activated until the more mature phases of a relationship, says Helen Fisher, an anthropologist from Rutgers University in New Jersey.” —New Scientist This is an absurd finding, only meaningful to those who believe there is a hard-and-fast distinction between ‘motivation and reward’ and ’emotion’ and that these global aspects of experience are localized to small specific brain regions.

“As many as 1,200 students at Wheaton College will gather in the gym Friday night for the first real dance in the Christian school’s 143-year history.

Which explains why students in recent days have been seeking out classmates who know this stuff and looking for places where they can practice. And it explains why on Monday night and Tuesday night, dozens of students packed a room on campus for a quick dance lesson.” —Yahoo! News The college’s most famous graduate is Billy Graham. Many who have matriculated at the school thought they were safe from such secular embarrassments. Now, although they may dance, whether they can is another matter, as one puts it. Now, what about the kissing lessons?

Tragic end for smuggling donkeys: “Smugglers in Algeria have reportedly come up with a novel way to get their contraband into Morocco – donkeys, with tape recorders on their backs.

A taped message is repeated, saying ‘Err’, Arabic for ‘walk’, so that the donkeys do not stop as they follow the smugglers’ tracks unaccompanied.

However, the customs service learnt of the ruse and has killed 200 of the donkeys, says the El Khabar newspaper.” —BBC

“Elaine Davidson of Brazil, who holds the Guinness world record for being the woman with the greatest number of body piercings, 1903 altogether, sticks her tongue out at the Tate Modern art gallery in London, November 11, 2003.”

“In his new book, ‘Tainted Legacy: 9/11 and the Ruin of Human Rights,’ (executive diroeector of Amnesty International USA William) Schulz argues that rising global terrorism requires the left ‘to rethink some of our most sacred assumptions.’ A vigorous defense of human and civil liberties, while essential to spreading democracy worldwide, is not enough to stop terrorists from blowing up airplanes or shopping malls, he says. And that presents the left with a problem, because some of the tools needed to fight terror, such as stricter border controls or beefed up intelligence work — and, perhaps, war against states that support terrorists — chafe against traditional leftist values.” —Salon

“The British P.M. thought he had a deal: He’d support the war and Bush would stand up to Ariel Sharon. But administration neoconservatives, led by Elliott Abrams, killed the deal.” — Sidney Blumenthal, —Salon

The article details the staggering extent to which a cocktail of “drugs, hormones, steroids and personal care products such as soaps and perfumes” is found in almost all ponds, creeks and streams sampled. (CNN) The effects of traces of antidepressants on aquatic and amphibious species, in particular, must be assessed both because of the enormous volume of prescriptions issued for this class of drugs and the wide range of their biological effects on body systems. Laboratory studies of amphibians exposed to fluoxetine (Prozac) confirm cause for concern, although what relationship the experimental conditions bear to either extent of exposure in the wild or what implications it has for unanticipated human effects is unclear.

Some, commenting on this article, have suggested that expectant mothers be careful about taking the drugs for fear of birth defects etc. This is not really the most important thing to worry about, though, since rates of birth defects after in utero exposure to various classes of drugs are well-studied and publicly available — if you are concerned with the obvious, gross defects such as spina bifida, cleft lip and palate, cardiac defects etc. What is more worrisome and more difficult to assess, however, are the longterm, more subtle effects of either in utero or childhood exposure. In my own field of psychiatry, for example, we are beginning to appreciate how subtle, poorly-characterizable early abnormalities in the organization of brain regions and the rates of migration, growth and die-off of neurons are implicated in devastating cognitive-behavioral disturbances such as schizophrenia. In my opinion, also, we need to be concerned not only with in utero exposure but the growing use of psychotherapeutic drugs to treat children and adolescents, often on dubious grounds.

Addendum: Garret Vreeland‘s comment to this post deserves to be brought up front here. He has been concerned about antidepressant use in children for a long time; here is a Google search of links.

US babies geting corporate names: “Children have been named after big brands as diverse as beauty company L’Oreal, car firm Chevrolet and designer clothes company Armani.

There are even two little boys, one in Michigan and one in Texas, called ESPN after the sports channel.

Psychology professor Cleveland Evans discovered the trend after surveying US social security records for 2000.” —BBC

Start reading. Now. Or. Whatever. “All I know is that whenever I read a column or story that’s been broken up by subheads, especially a syndicated story that appeared somewhere else first without any subheads, my inner reader feels violated.” —City Pages

100 celebrated artists choose their favorite musicians and design album covers. Thanks to Cory for pointing me to this fascinating site. Here is a taste, by Gary Burden:

There are some names even anyone who is not a graphic arts aficionado would recognize here. Ralph Steadman does the Stones, Kurt Vonnegut does Phish, and Graham Nash does Crosby-Nash.

Follow Me Here is four today… Thank you for all your affirmation over the past four years. I hope you will be pleased to be able to look forward to more of the same. (It is me who has to say to you, “Many happy returns…”). What would you like to see more of? less of? as FmH moves forward.

Is Mindfulness a Religion? “It is easy to imagine the benefits of a Buddhist police force: wiser, cooler heads to

keep the peace in America’s embattled streets, or perhaps a kinder, gentler traffic

cop. But in Madison, Wisconsin, police captain Cheri Maples argues that the most

compelling reason to teach police officers the Buddhist practice of mindfulness is

to better equip them to deal with the emotional and mental stress that comes with

the job. A nineteen-year police veteran who has participated in several retreats with

famed Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, Maples has experienced for herself the

benefits of mindfulness practice. Determined to bring the practice to her

colleagues, she organized a visit by Thich Nhat Hanh, who led a five-day

nonsectarian retreat for civil servants and their families at Green Lake Conference

Center outside of Madison.

But not all are so pleased with the idea of police officers and other civil servants

attending retreats. Americans United for the Separation Between Church and State

(AU) has expressed its view that offering such a retreat is a violation of the First

Amendment’s proscription against state-sponsored religion. AU claims that it is

unconstitutional for the government to encourage its employees to attend a

religious retreat, and notes that eyebrows would be raised if officers were

encouraged to attend Bible study groups or an Islamic retreat. AU demanded the

retreat’s cancellation.” —Tricycle

The notice buried on the DoD website began to attract alot of attention, at least among webloggers, last month, including here at FmH. Now the notice has disappeared from the site, in typical Bu**sh** administration fashion. Have no fear, it remains echoed at The Memory Hole.

Fred Kaplan: “We’re not pulling out of Iraq, so it’s logical that we’re pushing in deeper. And so it’s official: ‘Postwar Iraq’ is just another term for ‘Iraq War—Phase II.’

In a heavily guarded news conference in Baghdad today, Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, called the state of conflict there a ‘war.’ John Burns, the New York Times correspondent covering the event, quotes Sanchez’s aides noting that the general’s choice of words was deliberate—his way of injecting realism into the debate back in Washington. ‘We are taking the fight into the safe havens of the enemy in the heartland of the country,’ Sanchez stated. That sounds like war, all right.” —Slate

“Why was he allowed to kill, again and again, when so much evidence had already pointed in his direction two decades ago?

The answer, in great part, lies in Ridgway’s own admission of who he preyed upon.” AlterNet

“As if it weren’t hard enough to be cool already, Apple Computer has introduced a new way for people to ruin their social standing.

Thanks to the ability of Apple’s iTunes to share music collections over local networks, it is now possible to judge someone’s taste in music — or lack of it — in a way that previously required a certain level of intimacy.” Wired

“Today, armed with a growing understanding of how to manipulate the immune system, researchers are offering the glimmer of a hope that cancer vaccines could soon become part of the cancer-fighting arsenal. More than 50 cancer vaccines are being tested in the United States, Canada, and Europe against several types of cancers, including melanoma and kidney, lung, breast, and prostate cancers. Several are in the final stages of human trials, at least two of which are expected to conclude within a year. In some of the trials, a few patients have seen their cancers go into remission, while in other patients, the vaccine slowed the spread of the disease. If all goes well, the first cancer vaccine could be ready for general use in three to five years.” MIT Technology Review

“Spectacular advances in neuroprosthetics await us, but bureaucracy is stifling the field.” Salon

While there is no question that Iran covered up a nuclear program and was in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, it is still unclear if it was anywhere near making nuclear weapons. In any case, its candor in cooperating with the recent ultimatum takes the wind out of the sails of an American drive to keelhaul Iran before the UN Security Council, whose members appear to be favorably impressed by its cooperation. After the contempt the Bu**sh** administration demonstrated for the UN process over Iraq, it is not likely member countries will be bullied into enabling Washington’s agenda once more. AP/Salon

Nicholas Kristof: “Considering the savagery with which the Snarling Right excoriated President Clinton as a ‘sociopath,’ blocked judicial appointments, undermined U.S. military operations from Kosovo to Iraq, hounded Vincent Foster and then accused the Clintons of murdering him, it is utterly hypocritical for conservatives to complain about liberal incivility.” New York Times op-ed

“L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Iraq, made a hurried return to Washington on Tuesday as Bush administration officials held an urgent round of meetings to discuss ways of speeding up the transfer of power to Iraqis [i.e. extricate ourselves in hopes of salvaging Bu**sh**’s reelection prospects —FmH].

The meetings reflected dissatisfaction with the pace of progress in Iraq and a growing conviction that Mr. Bremer must abandon his methodical plan to move gradually toward the election of an Iraqi government over a year or two, officials said.” —New York Times

Related: More Iraqis Supporting Resistance, CIA Report Says

“A new, top-secret CIA report from Iraq warns that growing numbers of Iraqis are concluding that the U.S.-led coalition can be defeated and are supporting the resistance.

The report paints a bleak picture of the political and security situation in Iraq and cautions that the U.S.-led drive to rebuild the country as a democracy could collapse unless corrective actions are taken immediately.

L. Paul Bremer, head of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, who arrived unexpectedly in Washington for strategy sessions on Tuesday, essentially endorsed the CIA’s findings, said a senior administration official.

The report’s bleak tone and Bremer’s private endorsement differ sharply with the upbeat public assessments that President Bush, his chief aides and Bremer are giving as part of an aggressive publicity campaign aimed at countering rising anxieties at home over increasing U.S. casualties in Iraq.” Knight-Ridder [via CommonDreams]

“New York Times columnist Paul Krugman tells how he found his voice, why Bush makes him miss Nixon, and why he insults Fox News whenever he can.” AlterNet

This article, originally published in 1997, collects tales from children in Dade’s homeless shelters which amount to the creation of a new mythology, if you believe the reporter. In a prior existence, I studied social anthropology with a particular interest in folklore and mythology. One of the things I learned is that it is not as easy as it might appear for an outside observer to impose coherency on a body of myth that is scattered throughout a population. One is essentially doing cross-cultural fieldwork in looking at this rich, fascinating oral tradition in the making. I wonder if this writer is trained in this way. She certainly has a grasp of concepts like what Claude Lévi-Strauss called bricolage when she writes, “What these determined children do is snatch dark and bright fragments of Halloween fables, TV news, and candy-colored Bible-story leaflets from street-corner preachers, and like birds building a nest from scraps, weave their own myths.” Have a look:

“On Christmas night a year ago, God fled Heaven to escape an audacious demon attack — a celestial Tet Offensive. The demons smashed to dust his palace of beautiful blue-moon marble. TV news kept it secret, but homeless children in shelters across the country report being awakened from troubled sleep and alerted by dead relatives. No one knows why God has never reappeared, leaving his stunned angels to defend his earthly estate against assaults from Hell. “Demons found doors to our world,” adds eight-year-old Miguel, who sits before Andre with the other children at the Salvation Army shelter. The demons’ gateways from Hell include abandoned refrigerators, mirrors, Ghost Town (the nickname shelter children have for a cemetery somewhere in Dade County), and Jeep Cherokees with “black windows.” The demons are nourished by dark human emotions: jealousy, hate, fear.” —Miami New Times [via bOING bOING]

Here is an interesting connection: has anyone read Denis Johnson’s Fiskadoro, which came out in 2000? Set in a post-apocalyptic south Florida, I see some similarities. Could Johnson have been influenced by this article’s original publication?

Reasons Not to Invade Iraq, by George Bush Sr.: “On 21 September 2002, The Memory Hole posted an extract from an essay by George Bush Sr. and Brent Scowcroft, in which they explain why they didn’t have the military push into Iraq and topple Saddam during Gulf War 1. [I posted a damning excerpt here on FmH.] Although there are differences between the Iraq situations in 1991 and 2002-3, Bush’s key points apply to both.

But a funny thing happened. Fairly recently, Time pulled the essay off of their site. It used to be at this link, which now gives a 404 error. If you go to the table of contents for the issue in which the essay appeared (2 March 1998), ‘Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam’ is conspicuously absent.

Because of this erasure, we’re posting the entire essay below the portion we originally excerpted. ” —Memory Hole

“A group of more than two dozen House of Representatives Democrats on Monday said they had introduced a resolution urging President Bush to fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.” Yahoo! News

“An attempt by developing countries to put management of the internet under United Nations auspices is likely to be shelved at next month’s world information summit in Geneva – but the issue is now firmly on the international agenda, summit sources say.” Financial Times

“If only such largesse flowed to all of us. ‘Fair compensation’ is a relative term, yet HR consultants and executive headhunters agree some jobs command excessive pay that can’t be explained by labor supply-and-demand imbalances.” —Chris Pummer, CBS

…When They Were Your Age

Make them think your Windows XP computer is running Longhorn! Be the first on your block!

“Ten British people have put their names forward to become the first in the world to undergo a face transplant…

Teams on both sides of the Atlantic are now confident they have the skills to attempt the operation.

Surgeons insist the procedure, which involves transplanting an entire face from a corpse to a living person, will only be available for patients with the most severe facial disfigurements – and not as a cosmetic vanity treatment.” —This Is London

“A quasi-religious cult is using the Internet to recruit teenagers who are encouraged to act as werewolves, howl at the moon and eat raw meat.

Counsellors at the Cult Information Hotline have received several complaints about the group, which has more than 50 members throughout Queensland.” —news.com.au

“Israel stands today at an important crossroads, trying to decide which of three roads it will travel.

If it chooses one road, the United States will be able to walk proudly alongside Israel as its friend, ally and, if necessary, its protector against any that threaten its security.

But if Israel chooses either of the remaining two routes, it will repudiate the shared values and strategic interests that have united Israelis and Americans for decades. Those Americans who count themselves as friends of Israel have an obligation to make that danger clear. “

If a two-state, land-for-peace, solution is defunct, Israel is poised to commit either to expulsion or apartheid-like disenfranchisement of the Palestinians. — Jay Bookman, Atlanta Journal-Constitution [via CommonDreams]

“Malcolm McLaren, the subculture hacker who created the Sex Pistols, discovers the new underground sound. It’s called chip music. Can you play lead Game Boy?” —Wired

“The big papers are taking President Bush’s Middle East speech seriously, so far. They’ve noted his rhetoric seems to challenge 50 years of symbiotic coddling of non-democratic Middle East regimes, justified up to now on the argument of pursuing our national interests. As Robin Wright of The Washington Post notes, there will be no further entertainment of the once-convenient notion of ‘Islamic exceptionalism’—where Islam was assumed to be incompatible with democratic government and therefore excused from otherwise universal human and political rights standards.

Privately, many will point to the surreal moment in the speech, made November 6 at the National Endowment for Democracy, where he described the principles for “successful societies” with a list of everything his administration has done to weaken American democracy at home. Sadly, Bush’s double standards and Animal Farm rhetoric are no longer big news.

But the flaw in his argument—revealing an intentional deception—is.” —Patrick Doherty, TomPaine.com

TB drug plus virtual reality relieves fear of heights. “A common antibacterial drug has helped phobics to overcome their fear of heights. Combined with standard behavioural therapy, D-cycloserine (DCS) speeded recovery fourfold compared with therapy alone.” A report from the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans. —Nature

“Setting the stage for a historic clash between presidential and judicial authority in a time of military conflict, the Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide whether prisoners at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are entitled to access to civilian courts to challenge their open-ended detention.” —azcentral

“She Doesn’t Look Disabled. Some Doctors Believe Her Condition Isn’t Real. But for the Author, Fibromyalgia Makes Every Day a Struggle.” —Washington Post As a psychiatrist who has long had an interest in controversial syndromes on the boundary of mental health and other fields of medicine, I have written on, taught about and treated fibromyalgia and “fibromyalgia” since it first came on the radar screens. There is a “real” syndrome but I believe it is also necessary to put the diagnosis of some, perhaps most, sufferers in quotes; the central triad of symptoms — debilitating chronic muscle pain, fatigue, and sleep disorder — can represent either a physical ailment or somatization, i.e. the physicalization of essentially mental distress.

The credibility of the diagnosis in a particular cse is established by the story and also the examination, in that the pain can be reproduced by palpation by a knowledgable examiner (usually a rheumatologist) of several dozen ‘trigger points’ in the muscle of whose existence or location the patient was unaware. While this is a controversial finding, I believe the research showing chemical and microscopic structural changes in biopsied muscle fibers in affected areas. Given the strong emotional component to the disorder, one way to think about its etiology is that people who are prone to experience stress as muscle tension are somehow chronically damaging their muscles, perhaps because the blood flow to chronically tense muscles is altered. I have also been impressed by the evidence that an added mechanism is in play. Impairment of the normal nighttime phased secretion of growth hormone from the pituitary gland given the altered sleep pattern in emotional distress, especially depression, may be important. GH is crucial to the repair of normal daily wear and tear in muscle fibers throughout the body; sleep deprivation causes muscle aches even in people who do not have fibromyalgia.

But, because I believe this syndrome has its origins in emotional distress and is a condition in which the physical manifestations come to predominate, it is attractive to many other emotionally distressed individuals who prefer to see their problems in physical rather than psychological terms, who are invested in an outmoded dichotomy and not open to a mind-body interactional perspective. Now granted, I work in a psychiatric setting and so my sample is skewed. But, for every legitimate fibromyalgia case I have seen, two or three young women come my way with chronic depression, complications of a trauma history, and/or borderline personality disorder (a triad of overlapping but not synonymous concerns) who are hell-bent on having fibromyalgia as the explanation of their social and occupational dysfunction instead.

Why am I making such an issue of this? Physicians and other clinicians who jump on the bandwagon of a sexy and faddish novel diagnosis ‘enable’ the dysfunction of such patients in a number of ways in which their patients are unconsciously invested, including suppporting disability claims and maintaining these patients (who may be prone to substance abuse as part of their psychiatric disturbance) on narcotic painkillers and addictive muscle relaxants for their supposed “fibromyalgia”. Many physicians are not open to examining their own “enabling”, since patients are uniformly appreciative of this kind of service, and we all like to please our patients. Legitimizing the disorder in such cases is a disservice to such patients, pandering to their unconscious maneuvering to look everywhere but at their own responsibility for their behavior patterns. By displacing them from a focus on their real concerns, such treatment prevents such patients from developing effective coping strategies that would alleviate or control distress in a lasting way and perpetuates their maladaptive way of doing business with the world instead.

Furthermore, fibromyalgia illustrates a more general phenomenon seen with controversial and murkily-defined syndromes. It remains a ‘wastebasket’ diagnosis, a syndrome diagnosed by clinical impression rather than diagnostic tests. If we lump together a heterogeneous cast of characters only a subset of whom have the “true” disorder, research efforts to characterize the processes behind it and clinical efforts to find effective treatments are compromised by the dilution of any relevant results in the mixed sample. In a vicious circle, the harder the condition is to characterize correctly, the harder it will be to characterize correctly. The more it attracts people for maladaptive reasons, the more it will continue to do so.

Paul Krugman: “Yesterday’s absurd conspiracy theory about the Bush administration has a way of turning into today’s conventional wisdom. Remember when people were ridiculed for claiming that Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, eager to fight a war, were hyping the threat from Iraq?

Anyway, many analysts now acknowledge that the administration never had any intention of pursuing a conventionally responsible fiscal policy. Rather, its tax cuts were always intended as a way of implementing the radical strategy known as ‘starve the beast,’ which views budget deficits as a good thing, a way to squeeze government spending. Did I mention that the administration is planning another long-run tax cut next year?

Advocates of the starve-the-beast strategy tend to talk abstractly about ‘big government.’ But in fact, squeezing government spending almost always means cutting back or eliminating services people actually want (though not necessarily programs worth their cost). And since it’s Veterans Day, let’s talk about how the big squeeze on spending may be alienating a surprising group: the nation’s soldiers.” —New York Times op-ed

Doggy cool: “They are the latest must-have accessory for the pampered pet: sunglasses for dogs.

Owners anxious that their pet should be at fashion’s cutting edge will have a choice of frames, lenses and colours to match any outfit that their dog may be wearing. Top of the range is a chrome frame with blue reflective lenses.” —The Age [via walker]

Milt Bearden, a 30-year veteran in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations who served as senior manager for clandestine operations, writes that the Iraqi insurgents could have taken their cues from Chinese military tactician Sun Tzu’s 2500-year old Art of War: “attack their strategy, attack their allies, attack their army…”

Sun Tzu also said “know yourself and know your enemy, and of a hundred battles you will have a hundred victories.”

There were two stark lessons in the history of the 20th century: No nation that launched a war against another sovereign nation ever won. And every nationalist-based insurgency against a foreign occupation ultimately succeeded. This is not to say anything about whether or not the United States should have gone into Iraq or whether the insurgency there is a lasting one. But it indicates how difficult the situation may become. —Seattle Times

Ironically, Sun Tzu was invoked as the inspiration behind the US “Shock and Awe” bombardment (Asia Times) of Baghdad which started the US attack on Iraq.

“Scathingly attired, this raconteur has been reminiscing about the cancellation of Baywatch as well as pondering the demise of the Dave Clark Five. He has deliberately kept the interview short for several reasons:

1. Most people are short and not tall.

2. Attention deficit disorder is sweeping the nation.” —Outburst, [Journal of Mundane Behavior]

Earlier in the week we read news reports that the dysadministration, frustrated by the Iraqi Coouncil, is mulling doing away with it. But like this? Sorry, no joke — “Iraqis marched in anger through the streets here Monday after the killing of an American-appointed local Iraqi council leader by U.S. military guards under disputed circumstances.” —Washington Post

…for a trivial, somewhat scurrilous experiment in participatory weblogging: I know there are community weblogs, such as MetaFilter, in which thousands of participants create what some would assert is a vibrant cross-fertilizing conversation, while others would say the signal-to-noise ratio just decays from the effort. FmH has an audience far smaller, by, oh, at least several orders of magnitude, who I know are demanding, reflective, erudite readers in breadth and depth. I have always been puzzled, and sometimes solicited feedback, about the fact that other weblogs log many more reader comments, even many more per capita. Unsuccessful, I am tired of trying to figure out why, with rare exceptionsm, it is not happening here. (Is the commenting system too cumbersome? am I cultivating passive consumers despite — or because of — my attempt to be provocative? deadening thought?). Most conversation among the likes of you would likely be breathtaking, so I am going to try to take direct action to goad you into it on at least a trial basis. Not that you have to work for your daily dose of FmH, but I would like to propose that, for the next week, everytime you come here you scroll down, pick one post about which you have something to say, and enter a comment, one thoughtful comment. A couple of extra clicks, thirty seconds’ more time on my page. Begin with a bias toward those posts that do not yet have any comments. Amplify, fertilize, contradict, dispute, synthesize, eviscerate, perseverate, tangentialize, analogize on anything here… Then, as your reflections accumulate, you will inevitably be riffing off the comments of others. You know, of course, you can do it anonymously, if that matters; just not contentlessly. Indulge me, think about it for a moment, you really have no good reason why you would not try this for a week.

Why do I want to do this? [Stop reading here if your bullshit meter is turned on, it probably won’t make a whole lot of sense.] Surely, it is not because I care about the cumulative total of the little numbers in the parentheses at the end of every post per se. I have been interested for a long while in transformative social processes and the power of small communities, you might say on a tribal scale, a participatory scale, how group process works, how organizations think. Information processing constraints place an upper bound on face-to-face interactional possibilities around one to several hundred members; the possibilities for consensus- and confidence-based ‘social contracts’ move into a symbolic and some would say unworkable sphere with larger social groupings. Now, don’t nitpick, I realize that the community of readers of FmH is in no sense like a tribal culture. This is not a participatory democracy; webspace-rooted avatar-to-avatar interactions are in important respects different from face-to-face; cultural ecological niche contingencies as a shared experience are replaced by — what instead? — in a web community. Most of you would recoil from considering that any sort of community at all is manifested or embodied by merely coming to the same webpage from time to time.

Yet there is a coincidence of size. The readership of FmH is around the same order of magnitude as allowed in tribal culture and far different than weblog-communities more on the scale of city-states, nation-states, republics, representative democracies… with different possibilities. I have been far less interested in growing the scale of my readership; something has suggested that what at first appeared to be an uncanny hindrance to growth to which I have had to accommodate might be seen as an opportunity instead. I have always been fascinated by the transitions from quantitatively to qualitatively different states in human interaction; what interactional density at a nexus of people of this size would precipitate a quantum leap or tipping point? If so, how deliberately can the push be made? I am willing to take this wherever it might go… which most likely will be nowhere, right? Comments?

The Windows GUI as the Matrix: “…(Y)ou are asleep, a prisoner of your ignorance. And the only way to escape is by getting to grips with the machines, by learning their language. If you don’t get inside them, they will get inside you. Adapt or die.”

…If your children’s children can’t speak the language of the machines, they will have to get a manual job – if there are any left.

This is yet another reason why Windows is such a dangerous commodity. It lulls us into the pernicious illusion that we can deal with computers without adapting to their logic. By presenting us with colourful screens and buttons for us to click on, Microsoft encourages us to believe that we can force computers to adapt entirely to our preferences for visual images, without having to adapt ourselves to their preference for text.

But not only does this prevent people from getting inside the machine and keep them in a state of blissful ignorance, it also proves to be a deceit, for in the end the user still has to adapt to the machine anyway… — Dylan Evans, co-author of Introducing Evolutionary Psychology [here alleged to have been an inspiration for Matrix Revolutions], Guardian.UK

• “I don’t want to be famous; I don’t want to conquer the world; I don’t want
  
  that kind of life,” says Sarah McArthur Amsbary, who was a theater artist
  
  and teacher and earned her master’s degree in English, then stepped out of
  
  the work force when her daughter was born. ”Maternity provides an escape
  
  hatch that paternity does not. Having a baby provides a graceful and
  
  convenient exit.” —New York Times
  
  

• Lady Boss Busted: ‘Is the “glass ceiling” a matter of choice?’ —Reason
  
  

• Teenage girls just want to get married and stay home —Observer.UK

Salon has gotten hold of the entire script of the cancelled CBS miniseries “The Reagans”. The 213-page ‘shooting script’, which likely matches the version CBS intended to air before it caved (when it is aired on Showtime, which acquired the film from CBS, it will likely be further edited) is presented as a downloadable 8 MB .pdf; you have to be a premium subscriber to Salon or get a day pass.

Native Languages: Legacy and Lifeline:

“The languages of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara tribes are fading into silence, one voice at a time, as fluent elderly speakers die.

Those languages, embedded in a native Plains Indian culture thousands of years old, welcomed Lewis and Clark on their epic trip west.

But most children today on the Fort Berthold Reservation in west-central North Dakota grow up in homes where English is the language of daily life.

The Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara, today jointly known as the Three Affiliated Tribes, are fighting to save their languages — and culture — from extinction.

Choose a tribe from the menu … to learn about their struggles … and hear what is lost when a language dies.” —The Fargo (ND) Forum [via The Media Center]

Ask Newsknife:

“When Google News was launched over a year ago there was mild nervousness amongst journalists. Was this a new kind of news site that might beat them at their own game? …We checked to see how well Google News, compiled “without human intervention”, picked the top two stories chosen by leading US news sites.

…

Google News initially picking the Top 2 stories of the moment around 59% of the time, improving to around 63%. CNN and Yahoo! News hover throughout at around 77%, a remarkably consistent performance.

Over the year Newsknife has probably studied Google News more closely than most people. We are a little surprised at the results. We thought Google News “hit rate” at choosing the popular top two stories might have increased more over the year, especially as Google are still calling Google News a BETA (not final) version. This suggests they’re fine tuning it.

Actually, we’re surprised Google News is still a BETA version after over a year….”

Newsknife has some ideas about how Google News can increase its ‘hit rate’ through automated processes, but tells human editors they don’t have to go back to the job market just yet. I agree with their observation that Google’s strength is pulling together a massive cluster of links to news pieces covering a single story, but that it fails a version of the Turing Test by being unable to appreciate nuance in news coverage. The article gives an example:

For example, if a terrorist bombing has just occurred the first wave of news should give details of the bombing. The second wave might be reaction from around the world. At what point should reactions be introduced? And some reactions are more important than others.

In Newsknife’s opinion this is a challenge for Google News.

“BBC teams in Bristol and London have found a way to send video and sound from mobile phones and put them on TV — and now the BBC is using the technology for undercover reporting. Andrew Harvey looks at this pioneering technology in a fascinating article for Ariel, the staff magazine and daily news online service of the BBC, reprinted here on CyberJournalist.net with permission.”

The following useful exercise comes from Mark Kleiman:

“One idea about drug law enforcement is that by making the illicit traffic more expensive and dangerous for the people who sell drugs, enforcement can push up the prices of drugs and therefore reduce consumption.

The old criticism of this approach, based on the notion that demand for illicit drugs was highly inelastic, turns out to be incorrect; cocaine and heroin, at least, seem to have greater-than-unit elasticity, so a price increase will actually decrease the total amount consumers spend. So increasing drug prices would seem to be a useful goal.

The bad news is that, in the face of mass distribution, enforcement has a very hard time increasing prices. When I learned about the illicit drug markets around 1980, heroin traded at wholesale for about $250,000 per kilogram and at retail in New York for between $2 and $2.50 per pure milligram, reflecting a kilo-to-street markup of about 10x.

Now, after twenty years of intensified drug law enforcement, the wholesale price is about $70,000 a kilo and the retail price in New York about 20 cents per pure milligram. [*], a factor-of-three reduction at wholesale and a factor-of-ten reduction at retail, reflecting a greatly reduced markup. The general price level, as measured by the CPI, has roughly doubled over that period, so the inflation-adjusted price of a pure milligram of heroin is actually down about 95%.

The price drop for cocaine has been a little bit smaller: from about 80 cents per pure milligram in 1980, the price fell very rapidly until about 1988, and has since stablilized (in nominal-dollar) terms at about 15 cents per pure milligram, which adjusted for inflation is a deline of about 90%.

All of this happened in the face of an enforcement effort that increased the number of drug dealers behind bars from about 30,000 in 1980 to about 450,000 today.

The policy implication would seem to be that enforcement has limited capacity to increase the prices and thus decrease the consumption of mass-market illicit drugs, and ought to focus instead on reducing the violence and neighborhood disruption associated with the illicit trade, by targeting the meanest dealers and the ones whose trafficking is most flagrant, rather than the largest.” [thanks, walker]