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Update: I wrote below about the ongoing trial of a suspect in the 1977 brutal slaying of the mother of my friend Pam. It has just come across the wires that Eric Anderson has been convicted of 1st degree murder and given a life sentence without chance of parole. —Boston Globe Sleep soundly, Pam.

Addendum: Pam writes:

By the way….Rick Nagle tells us that the Cold Case Unit is no longer…There are still many families out there that have a cold case that still needs work. If anyone has any connections to state law enforcement, now would be the time to put in a good word for your local Cold Case Unit!

“I hadn’t written in my blog for a while. I turned on the computer and wrote a new entry. I clicked the ‘submit’ button, thereby restarting my blog.” [Think of it as an exercise in mindfulness?]

—-networkworldmap.com

Rumsfeld retreats, disclaims earlier rhetoric:

“In the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said U.S. forces would be welcomed by the Iraqi citizenry and that Saddam Hussein had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

Now, after both statements have been shown to be either incorrect or vastly exaggerated, Rumsfeld – with the same trademark confidence that he exuded before the war – is denying that he ever made such assertions.”

This man is either so outrageously arrogant that he believes he can rewrite history at will or his memory so impaired that he has no choice but to live in a fantasy world of his own confabulation. In either case, it is hard to see how he would be seen as anything but an intolerable liability by the Bush White House. It must be considered too great a hit to Bush’s credibility to oust him with even the kindest spin before the election, too easy to impute that it would be an admission of sin (although, surely, the Bush administration does not care to, or is too inept to, operate by any semblance of the old adage about avoiding even the appearance of impropriety!). A conspiracy theorist might wonder if Rumsfeld will be eliminated by an ‘accident’ before he does too much more damage, and revered and mourned as a hero in the WoT®, instead. After all, as Josh Marshall said,

It’s become conventional wisdom that the Pentagon, or rather the civilians at the Pentagon, muscled out the State Department on key issues of planning for Iraq. My recent reporting tells me it’s much more a matter of Cheney and the Office of the Vice President. Much more.

The Senate majority leader is the latest Republican to protest in the aftermath of a leaked memo outlining a strategy by Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee to highlight contradictions between intelligence reports and dysadministration claims about Iraqi weapns programs. No one doubts that the Democrats would be fools if they did not time revelations to affect Bush’s chances of rewinning the White House next year, but to my way of thinking it would not be unpatriotic at all but in the highest service of the nation to expose the irregularities in the Bu**sh** approach. The Republicans of course pull out that tired old horse of accusing the Democrats of undermining the WoT® Ironically, the memo was an uncirculated draft by a staffer and would probably not have been made public but for the Republicans’ desperation. The Republicans accuse the Democrats of politicizing the traditionally nonpartisan intelligence committee and making it impossible to do its crucial job, but again that is the pot calling the kettle black. The most partisan acts these days are those of Republicans refusing to leave the sinking ship of loyalty to the dysadministration..

Freewayblogger.com: “Here’s how it works:

When you put a sign on the freeway

people will read it

until someone takes it down.”

—[via Billmon]

The freewayblogger’s latest exploit is a big ‘Quagmire Accomplished’ sign.

“The Los Angeles Times has ordered its reporters to stop describing anti-American forces in Iraq as ‘resistance fighters,’ saying the term romanticizes them and evokes World War II-era heroism.

The ban was issued by Melissa McCoy, a Times assistant managing editor, who told the staff in an e-mail circulated on Monday night that the phrase conveyed unintended meaning and asked them to instead use the terms ‘insurgents’ or ‘guerrillas.'” —Reuters . Supposedly, the ‘resistance fighters’ term evokes “the French Resistance or Jews who fought against Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto.” The assistant managing editor of the New York Times told Reuters he agreed with the LA Times‘ decision ( “I don’t think it’s the kind of cool, neutral language we like to see.”), but the foreign desk editor of the Washington Post disagrees, on the grounds that the term is a technically accurate description.

On what grounds did McCoy make the call, I wonder, that (a) that is the connotation readers will take from her reporters’ choice of terms; or that (b) the alternative terms suggested will be more neutral or innocuous? I actually find both “guerrilla” and “insurgent” to have heroic connotations, my political sentiments having been shaped by my opposition to the US intervention in Vietnam and support for a number of guerrilla insurgencies since. She claims it is not on the basis of reader complaints, but even if it were, how would that be an accurate gauge of (a) those readers who had not reacted negatively to the connotations of ‘resistance fighter’ and (b) the relative merits of alternative terms to which readers had not been exposed and therefore about which they could not complain? Sorry to spin out my tortured, hairsplitting logic, but I just don’t get it. Hey, at least the LA Times reporters weren’t using the term ‘freedom fighters’ instead…

Website collecting the writing of this prolific, incisive fellow-traveller who has been publishing in Wired recently but whose output I have been following since the days of his associations with the Grateful Dead and Allen Ginsberg. In the past few years, he had the privilege of an extended interview with the reclusive inspired neurologist Oliver Sacks (I linked here to his resulting portrait of Sacks in Wired) his research for which led Silberman, made curious about the comment made by a waggish admirer of FmH who called me ‘the Oliver Sacks of weblogging’, to my site here.

Responding to my link below to a piece about the sculptural works of a profoundly mentally handicapped woman surely unaware she is ‘making art’, Steve wrote to say he is working on a piece about jazz pianist Matt Savage, an 11-year-old ‘musical savant’ with an autistic-spectrum disorder — “an in-depth examination of what the brains of rare prodigies like Savage tell us about the biological nature of intelligence and creativity…” Autistic phenomena have been another of Steve’s interests (as it is one of mine), I glean, dating at least from the acclaimed piece he wrote (again in Wired) in December, 2001 (and, again, to which I linked here at the time) on the ‘geek syndrome’, about the connection between autistic traits and technology. The term ‘geek syndrome’, coined as a headline for his story, has become lingua franca for this association. You FmH’ers are among the ‘relentlessly curious’ for whose benefit he posts a slew of links to some of his older writings; dig in.

Addendum: Ironically, as I finish the above, I am pointed to another piece by Silberman about an experience, again bearing a resonance to something I post here, whose potency leaves him concluding that “talking about things I had or had not written seemed ridiculous, like gossiping in front of a mountain.”

I hadn’t realized, until I saw this linked to at Booknotes, that only six senators were present for the voice vote on the $87b Iraq appropriation. USA Today calls them courageous for sticking around for the vote and says we have ninety-four cowards among these august representatives. More telling, of the six only Sen. Robert Byrd voted no. To my way of thinking, we have ninety-nine cowards, not ninety-four. And among them are several men who are vying for your vote next November, of course.

When I linked a few days ago to the USA Today article about the superiority of the intelligence the insurgents are using in fighting against the US occupation, a reader —[thanks, ezrael] commented that someone must have been asleep at the paper’s editorial desk. This is another piece that might be interpreted as uncharacteristically critical of the powers-that-be.

… that may stretch our conception of art:

• Art for Cockroaches:
  

  monochrom invites artists to design a gallery-space for cockroaches. Each design is exhibited for a month and then replaced. The audience — consisting of 40 individuals — are fed fresh fruit daily (preferably apples or bananas) and are cared for. You can come and visit the audience, every Thursday, when monochrom has its weekly meeting at Museumsquartier/Vienna. monochrom guarantees the well-being of visitors.

  “I think it’s about time to herald the era of a new awareness in the
  
  human-cockroach-relationship.” (Don Pollock)

• jwz receives a gift of a painting…
  

  …by an actor who was Johnny Weissmuller’s costar in the Tarzan movies in the 1930s and 1940s. The artist is now 71 years old and living in Palm Springs, Florida, enjoying his new career as a painter.

  His name is Cheeta, and he’s the world’s oldest living primate.

• Judith Scott (born 1943), a fifty-five year old woman with Down’s Syndrome, has spent the past ten years producing a series of totally non-functional objects which, to us, appear to be works of sculpture…
  

  …except that the notion of sculpture is far beyond Judith’s understanding. As well as being mentally handicapped, Judith cannot hear or speak, and she has little concept of language. There is no way of asking her what she is doing, yet her compulsive involvement with the shaping of abstract forms in space seems to imply that at some level she knows. Judith possesses no concept of art, no understanding of its meaning or function. She does not know that she is an artist, nor does she understand that the objects she creates are perceived by others as works of art. Whatever she is doing she is definitely not concerned with the making of art. What then is she doing? Unmistakably she is working, and working hard. Her formidable concentration surpasses that of most professional artists. Is it possible that she is obsessionally involved in an activity that is without meaning? Does serious mental retardation invariably preclude the creation of true works of art? Is it plausible to imagine an artist of stature emerging in the context of massively impaired intellectual development?

From Atrios:

“At this point, I think we need to not ‘fail miserably.’ I’d like that to be a resounding success, with a liberal democracy, complete with gay marriage and all, flourishing in Iraq, but the plutocratic colony we’re in the process of establishing to the benefit of our war profiteers isn’t exactly moving in that direction. The truth is, as Big Media Matt points out, the Bush administration is in the process of ‘cutting and running’ as much or more as any of the Dem candidates (even Kucinich!) are suggesting. I have a hard time believing that the promises of troop reduction will ever really materialize, but in the end it’ll be a war between Rove and the Neocons. Normally I’d put my money on Rove, but I’m not sure in this case.”

I love how succinctly he puts the dysadministration dilemma — Rove vs. the Neocons. This would imply, however, that Rove’s expertise at selling presidential Bu**sh** is based on less rabid ideological grounds than the Perles, Wolfowitzs, etc. What exactly are Rove’s conservative bona fides?

Bruce Sterling is back in the weblogging business, courtesy of a new blogspace Wired is developing. Sterling’s outlook has always seemed to me to be quite amenable to weblog-consciousness and I was always disappointed with the lack of investment he made in his previous venture in this area. Schism Matrix. He pledges to be prolific this time around (possibly because Wired is paying him for this effort?). IMHO, so far what he has got up at BtB makes up for volume by lacking in depth, however. Not compelling.

I hadn’t realized, until I saw this linked to at Booknotes, that only six senators were present for the voice vote on the $87b Iraq appropriation. USA Today calls them courageous for sticking around for the vote and says we have ninety-four cowards among these august representatives. More telling, of the six only Sen. Robert Byrd voted no. To my way of thinking, we have ninety-nine cowards, not ninety-four. And among them are several men who are vying for your vote next November, of course.

When I linked a few days ago to the USA Today article about the superiority of the intelligence the insurgents are using in fighting against the US occupation, a reader —[thanks, ezrael] commented that someone must have been asleep at the paper’s editorial desk. This is another piece that might be interpreted as uncharacteristically critical of the powers-that-be.

“Not since the Vietnam War has the Army punished a soldier for being too scared to do his duty.

But on Friday, Sgt. Georg Andreas Pogany will appear in front of military court here to face charges he was a coward.

The Army says he is guilty of ‘cowardly conduct as a result of fear’ and not performing his duties as an interrogator for a squad of Green Berets in Samarra, Iraq.

But Sergeant Pogany says he did not run from the enemy or disobey orders. The only thing he is guilty of, he says, is asking for help for a panic attack.

On his second night in Iraq, one month ago, Sergeant Pogany, 32, saw an Iraqi cut in half by a machine gun. The sight disturbed him so much, he said, he threw up and shook for hours. His head pounded and his chest hurt.

‘I couldn’t function,’ Sergeant Pogany said in an interview on Tuesday in his lawyer’s office in Colorado Springs, not far from Fort Carson. ‘I had this overwhelming sense of my own mortality. I kept looking at that body thinking that could be me two seconds from now.’

When he informed his superior that he was having a panic attack and needed to see someone, Sergeant Pogany said he was given two sleeping pills and told to go away. A few days later, Sergeant Pogany was put on a plane and sent home.” —New York Times

It is not precisely true, from a psychiatrist’s perspective (and with the caveat that one does not diagnose sight unseen from a distance) that this soldier had a ‘panic attack.’ It is more likely he is suffering from acute post-traumatic stress, of which panic-like symptoms are a facet. PTSD develops when a person is inescapably exposed to something beyond the pale. This is precisely why the Army had better rush to perfect those drugs to stop soldiers from incorporating traumatic memories about which I wrote several months ago here so they can get back to functioning like the unfeeling automatons they are supposed to be on the battlefield. We are routinely going to expose them to things beyond that which any human nervous system was designed to withstand, and they had better learn to feel nothing in response.

Toddler Lives After Being Declared Dead: ‘A toddler who was revived nearly two hours after she was believed to have drowned — and 40 minutes after doctors had declared her dead — was responding to touch and sound Saturday, hospital officials said.

Mark Langdorf (search), chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of California, Irvine, said it is not uncommon for toddlers to survive drownings after showing little or no signs of life, especially if the water is cold.

What was unusual in Mackayala’s case, he said, was the time involved.

“If you had said she came back to life after 10 minutes I would be surprised, but 40 minutes is just exceptional,” he said.’ —Fox News

“The Bush White House, irritated by pesky questions from congressional Democrats about how the administration is using taxpayer money, has developed an efficient solution: It will not entertain any more questions from opposition lawmakers.” —Dana Milbank, Washington Post. This is, of course, on top of the White House initiative several weeks ago to bypass pesky questions from more critical national news sources, such as the Washington Post and the New York Times, and go directly to the regional press in the heartlands to plead its case. This is one of the most outrageous manipulations this dysadministration has pulled off, but where is the outraged response? More evidence of how easy it is for an anti-democratic cabal to completely and rapidly subvert democratic processes once they hoodwink the complacent and gullible polity to cede them power. The beerhall putsch, 21st-century-style, continues. Will the public awaken in time for November ’04?

“In my attempt to realize ‘death’, I have decided to watch the dead body of a dog continuously at the coast.” Photographs and commentary by Manabu Yamanaka [spelling correction by FmH].

• 1st day

  – I patted him on head wondering if his life was happy one.

• 2nd day

  – His face seemed to be sad. I felt the odor became stronger.

• 5th day

  – Many crows crowded at the spot and were pecking his eyes and
  
  anus.
  

It goes on from there, with a stark unflinching zen-like photograph of the dog’s status each day. —[thanks, gary]

An interesting story surrounds this weblog of a courageous 24-year-old Iraqi woman (“Girl Blog from Iraq… let’s talk war, politics and occupation.”) to which I was pointed by an FmH reader [thanks, gary]. Riverbend offers realtime commentary on events in Baghdad, inside perspective on Western analysis of the situation, and a humane introduction to Iraqi Islamic mores and customs. She is even going to start posting some recipes, she has decided while laboring preparing the evening meals that break each day’s fast during Ramadhan.

But ‘riverbendblog.blogspot.com’ is being spoofed by someone at ‘riversbendblog.blogspot.com’ (note the ‘s‘) who also called his weblog Baghdad Burning but, as she describes in her Oct. 29th post (scroll down) ‘Riverbend and Multiple Personalities’ , is rife with errors of fact about Iraq, an antithetical political philosophy supported by cutting and pasting posts from US government sources, and grammatical errors she speculates are designed to sound like his idea of an ignorant Iraqi ‘hajji’. The spoofer, she discovers, is a retired US Air Force veteran of the Korean War and a ‘GOP Team Leader’, whatever that is. Two other sites (here and here) have been digging into the fraud. Skip the fine print if you are not that interested in the intricate details:

The story begins on Sept. 2, 2003. The retirees on soc.retirement were giving “Solerito” Troy, Korean War vet and GOP Team Leader, a hard time over a blog he suggested. It was called solerito.blogspot.com. He’d recommended it as a welcome antidote to the negative blogging coming out of Iraq. “Here is one that’s not supportive of Saddam and is interested in a better future for Iraq,” he wrote.

“And this one sounds exactly as if you wrote it, Troy,” a poster responds. “C’mon, fess up.”

He doesn’t. The Solerito blog has begun in the thick of things with the death of David Kelly, described as a friend of the blogger — who goes under the name “river.” But she is quick to adapt to our American ways, and before long has already achieved scorn for Hillary. “I long for the day we can watch FoxNews in Iraq,” she pines.

The Solerito blog has sort of run out of steam by then. But Troy/Diego, who has also been accused of being an infamous soc.retirement mischief-maker named Sordo/Bodine , and is also the kind of guy who tells people they are traitorous “basteds” who belong in hell — has moved on to stage two of the Doppleblogger Project, a cheeky new blog called Riversbend.

Except that Troy/Diego accidentally leaves, on the URL of his hit counter page, a reference to his nickname — “Solerito” (as spotted by Claude, a keen Atrios reader).

Many of his Usenet posts end with the nickname, which is Spanish for “saltshaker.” His signature:

El Solerito Troy,

Artist, HAM, Korean War, Reg. Army & USAF Retired, MOPH L38342 Unit 1849, Phi Theta Kappa, RNC 146441197-D186, GOP Team Leader, NRA 040959746 —John Gorenfeld

Interesting discussions on the two sleuthing weblogs arbout the ethics of posting the identity and the email address of the spoofer, of defacing the fake weblog, etc. Under pressure, the spoofer has modified his spot to be less of an infringement on the original, removing fake archives and stolen graphics, no longer claiming to being written by a “girl from Iraq”, no longer calling it Baghdad Burning (for awhile, calling it Baghdad’s Not Burning, duh). The spoofer violates several of the Blogger terms of service, and the author of the original Riverbend complained to them but was brushed off politely. The spoofer has apparently started two other ‘smearblogs’ with varying degrees of similarity to the genuine Riverbend.

…to Bonnie Raitt, Bonnie Bramlett and Rickie Lee Jones today.

‘…(T)here has always been a certain incommensurability between political activities that depend on mass mobilization and the idiosyncratic sensibility of the aesthete—even the public-spirited, politically active aesthete. For every argument that aesthetic concerns are a luxury in the face of political injustice, there is the rebuttal that aesthetic freedom is as necessary for the human spirit as any political right. “It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives,” wrote Theodor Adorno, “but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men’s heads.” —NewMusicBox

Hymn & Fuguing Tune: “Ten contemporary composers and performers, whose work has intersected with their own deeply held political beliefs, talk about what has inspired their music, and what they hope to achieve with it.”

An extensive interview with Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah about his growing career as a songwriter.

Diamanda Galás in conversation with Edward Batchelder; an interview in ten parts, or a complete .pdf transcript of the interview.

EDWARD BATCHELDER: The first thing I’d like to ask you about is the current project that you’re working on. I know that you have two CDs coming out in November, and one of them directly relates to the issue of music and politics. Could you start by talking about it?

DIAMANDA GALÁS: Okay. The project is Defixiones, Will and Testament. Defixiones means “curse.” Defixios were lead tablets that were placed in certain places, let’s say, on the graves of the dead to either warn people that if they touch the grave, their ancestors would come to a very bad end, or to put curses on, let’s say, circus performers, enemies of any kind, and all sorts of things. A person who has done a lot of studying on this is John Gager at Princeton. The purpose that I use it for is to discuss the graves that were decimated and desecrated by the enemies of the Assyrians, the Greeks, and the Armenians living in Asia Minor, Pontus, and Thrace. These enemies were the Turks. I use this as a basic description of the overall intent of the work, which is that we will not die in peace.

“Trying to eliminate Saddam…would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible…. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq…. there was no viable ‘exit strategy’ we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations’ mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.”

— George Herbert Walker Bush,

from his memoir, A World Transformed (1998)

[via wood s lot]

International Trepanation Advocacy Group (ITAG): “for the first time on this planet you are free to have maximum fulfillment… It is no longer necessary to follow a path and search for your true greatness…” [via bOING bOING‘s list of candidates for the week’s weirdest web links]

“President George Bush’s calls for democracy rang hollow in the Middle East, where many said on Friday they were appalled Washington was preaching liberty for Arabs while occupying Iraq.

The war on Iraq and Washington’s support for Israel in its bloody conflict with the Palestinians have antagonized many Arabs and Muslims who were already seething at the United States’ war on terror, seen by many as a battle against Islam.

And Bush’s sweeping foreign policy speech on Thursday, in which he challenged ally Egypt and foes Iran and Syria to adopt democracy, fueled Arab indignation.” Reuters

The BBC has a site devoted to coverage of Cult TV. How kind of them…

“National Public Radio will announce today the largest donation in its history, a cash bequest from the will of the late philanthropist Joan Kroc of about $200 million.

The bequest from the widow of the founder of the McDonald’s fast-food chain both shocked and delighted people at NPR’s headquarters in Washington yesterday. It amounts to almost twice NPR’s annual operating budget. ‘No one saw this coming,’ said one person.” Washington Post

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Bill O’Reilly.

This is a poll of BBC readers. Of the ten films on the list, I have seen four. Of those four, three do not belong on any ‘worst film’ list, and the inclusion of one of those makes me embarrassed for BBC readers’ film acumen.

“Why are we attracted not only to the biggest version of almost anything but also to the smallest, the weirdest, the first, the last, or the only? Why does something gain value merely because it is rare and authentic—the odd voyeuristic pleasure that comes from seeing on display the salt and pepper shakers from the mess kit George Washington may have clutched as he crossed the Delaware? Is it mere curiosity, or is it something more?” —Discover

“Gordon Graham challenges practically the whole of reigning orthodoxy in political philosophy in his remarkable book. To the bien pensants of political theory, ‘political participation’ and ‘democratic decision-making’ are all the rage, and theorists such as Amy Guttmann, Benjamin Barber, and Ronald Dahl constantly urge us on to more and more democracy. Like Hans-Hermann Hoppe in his excellent Democracy—The God that Failed, though with rather different arguments, Graham sets himself in firm opposition to this dominant trend.1 Graham is principally a philosopher of religion, and he brings to political theory the fresh perspective of an outsider.” —Mises Review

“The world’s largest iceberg has split in two after being pummelled by a powerful storm, it was reported.

B15, an 11,000-square-kilometre (4,400-square-mile) monster the size of Jamaica, was one of the biggest icebergs ever seen until it broke up last month, said the Antarctic Sun newspaper Tuesday.

The title of world’s largest iceberg now passes to C19A, near a French Antarctic base, which at 5,659 square kilometres (2,264 square miles) is about the size of Brunei.” —Yahoo!

Entrancing photo of creature found at 10,000 feet in the Pacific’s Japan Deep. —Yahoo!

“The (Israeli) court ruled the petition was not receivable.” —Sydney Morning Herald

Three drunken Finns in Nov. 2002 disastrous attempt are jailed. —The Australian

“Odin, Thor, Freya and the other Viking gods of yore will soon be providing divine authority for some marriages in Denmark.

Minister for Ecclesiastic Affairs Tove Fergo said Wednesday Forn Sidr will be allowed to conduct legally-recognized marriages.

The group, whose name mean ‘Old Custom’ in old Norse, worships gods from the Norse pantheon, like their Viking forebears from the 8th, 9th and 10th centuries.” —The Australian

“The nearest galaxy to our own Milky Way has been revealed. It is so close that the Milky Way is gradually consuming it by pulling in its stars. But it will be few billion years before it is entirely swallowed up.

The previously unknown galaxy lies about 25,000 light years from Earth and 42,000 light years from the centre of the Milky Way, beyond the stars in the constellation Canis Major. It is twice as close to the centre of our galaxy than the previous record holder, the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy, which was discovered in 1994.” —New Scientist

48 human volunteers —New Scientist

“There’s sweet news about hot cocoa: Researchers at Cornell University have shown that the popular winter beverage contains more antioxidants per cup than a similar serving of red wine or tea and may be a healthier choice.

The study adds to growing evidence of the health benefits of cocoa and points to a tasty alternative in the quest to maintain a diet rich in healthy antioxidants, chemicals that have been shown to fight cancer, heart disease and aging, the researchers say.” —Science Daily

“This week, a respected biologist was led into a Texas courtroom. He faces no fewer than 68 charges and could end up in jail for the rest of his life. Has the FBI finally caught the anthrax attacker?

No. Thomas Butler merely reported that 30 vials of plague bacteria had gone missing from his laboratory at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. Many of Butler’s colleagues believe the justice authorities are making an example of him as part of a wider effort to ensure that scientists take more care with material terrorists might exploit.

Whatever the outcome of the case, that effort is having repercussions that go far beyond the fate of one scientist. New Scientist has contacted more than 20 prominent figures in the US working in bioterror-related fields.

Some refused to talk, and most who did did not want to be named. Their comments paint a disturbing picture. Some scientists, for instance, are refusing to work on projects involving agents that could be exploited as bioweapons, even though the US government is providing massive funding to boost such research.

Others are considering abandoning existing work. Irreplaceable collections of microbes essential for managing and tracing outbreaks, bioterrorist or natural, are being destroyed simply because labs cannot comply with the new rules.” —New Scientist

Why not to be ‘bright’ —Butterflies and Wheels

“Could a single trip on a piece of African rootbark help a junkie kick the habit? That was the claim in the 1960s, and now iboga is back in the spotlight. But is it a miracle cure? Daniel Pinchbeck decided to give it a go. And life, he says, will never be the same again… ” —Guardian.UK

Related: Peru seeks tribal cure for addiction:

Peru is home to the coca leaf, the main ingredient of cocaine.

In the last few years it has also become home to a new way of confronting drug addiction: by returning to Shamanism and traditional Amazonian medicines. —BBC

Among others, they are talking about the indigenous hallucinogen ayahuasca.

Also: Cannabis can help MS sufferers:

“Claims that cannabis can relieve the symptoms of multiple sclerosis have been reinforced by results from the world’s largest ever trial of the medicinal effects of the drug – but only just.

The main improvements seen were in subjective measures of symptoms, i.e. those reported by the patients, rather than in those measured using standardised tests.” —New Scientist Only subjective symptoms?? What could be more important?

Dinosaur secret revealed: “They lumbered cautiously on land. But when the biggest dinosaurs in history hit the water, they floated like giant inflatable pool toys, new Canadian research has found.

‘They were like colossal corks,’ says Donald Henderson, a University of Calgary researcher who says he may have solved a mystery about the long-necked dinosaurs that were the biggest creatures to ever walk Earth.”

“This controversy (over call centers) recently broke out in an unlikely place, the letters column of the Times Literary Supplement. After Susan Sontag praised Indians for putting their English-language skills to work through call centres, a furious professor in New Delhi denounced her for failing to see that ‘These poor young men and women are indeed the cyber-coolies of our global age.’ In the next issue, another Delhi resident wrote that what the professor considers exploitation looks to workers like a way to acquire skills as well as income. He acknowledged that while ‘it isn’t much fun to persuade someone in Detroit to pay his credit card bill’ (yet another function of call centres), it builds negotiating skills.

It is an iron law of international economics that the Exploitation Police will swoop down and denounce anyone who creates new jobs, particularly in relatively poor areas. The common complaint is that call-centre companies set up shop in places (New Brunswick is a good example) where they can find well-educated workers at relatively low wages. The Exploitation Police make this sound almost criminal. In fact, it’s the way capitalism has always expanded and the way that poor regions have traditionally turned themselves into less poor regions. To consider this sort of change deplorable is to miss the fact that business lives by ingenuity and perishes when it ceases to find new and cheaper ways to get its work done.” —National Post

William Mitchell says that networks should become so important to us, we become part of them. “Shot through with post-dotcom sobriety, Me++ describes the move from virtual reality – the old 90s idea of the net as a separate, alternative realm – to ‘augmented reality’ (AR), in which ubiquitous computing and mobile wireless networks are used to reconnect us to the real world.” —Guardian.UK

The Bush agenda behind the ‘partial birth abortion’ ban. —Alexandra Walker, Tompaine.com

The irony of CBS’ wimpy cancellation of the Reagan biography (Tompaine.com) under conservative pressure, it occurs to me, comes when you juxtapose the story with the Terry Schiavo saga in Florida. It has long stuck in my craw that rightwing reverence for the two-bit actor’s machine-made performance as President (in which he gutted decades of social reform and set an ongoing precedent for American cannibalization of the poor and disadvantaged) has led lawmakers to abandon a longstanding precedent and memorialize Reagan by naming airports, highways, buildings, bridges and whatever after him while he is still alive. One way to think about it is as a covert acknowledgement that Reagan’s advanced Alzheimer’s dementia amounts to a living death, that the man they knew is already long gone, even though his body still breathes and circulates blood. Isn’t there some incongruity, then, with the conservative cause celebre of refusing to let go of illusions about Schiavo and fighting dirty to keep her alive at all costs?

The only real discussion of race in today’s America is in a comic strip. “Of course, the real funnies are on the front pages of most papers these days. That’s where you can see a lot of black faces. The media love to cover black people on the front page. After all, when you live in a society that will lock up about 30 percent of all black men at some time in their lives and send more of them to prison than to college, chances are a fair number of those black faces will end up in the newspaper.

But to be honest, the newspapers don’t just show bad black. They have ‘good’ black people they cover too! Like Clarence Thomas. And Condoleezza Rice. See, they care.

Oops. There I go playing the race card. You see, in America these days, we aren’t supposed to talk about race. We have been told to pretend that things have gotten better, that the old days of segregation and cross-burnings are long gone, and that no one needs to talk about race again because, hey, we fixed that problem.” —AlterNet

Everyone is covering the report in Lynch’s ‘authorized biography’ that she was raped by her Iraqi captors. This is the story that should get more attention from a public with less prurient interest: “Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch has accused the military of using her capture and dramatic nighttime rescue to sway public support for the war in Iraq.

Lynch said she’s bothered by the military’s portrayal of her ordeal in Iraq. She said the U.S. military manipulated the story of her dramatic rescue — and shouldn’t have filmed it in the first place.” —Omaha Channel News

This is bizarre. (BBC) The British press is legally barred from specifying what the allegation against the Prince is, but offers bountiful coverage of his denials. The Guardian did, at least, win a court battle allowing it to say who made the allegations against the Prince, a former royal aide. The fact that the claims cannot be specified has not stopped Royal spokespeople from smearing the witness’ credibility with suggestions he is psychiatrically unstable. The Guardian said:

This newspaper is not publishing the actual allegations. Not only do they differ from the highly coloured rumours about royal affairs which have surfaced recently in the tabloids, but we also have no reason to believe the allegations are true. The saga shows the extraordinary lengths to which both sides are going in the bitter battle between scandal-hungry tabloids and an increasingly bruised royal household.

Six more.

Paul Krugman: “What Howard Dean meant by his flag remark was that Democrats must make the case to working Americans of all colors that the right’s elitist agenda isn’t in their interest.” —New York Times op-ed. I agree with Krugman that Dean’s remark could have been better phrased, but that his Democratic rivals should be ashamed of themselves for the way they are going after him. The pundits on the talk shows have focused on Dean’s unusual integrity for not excusing or retracting his statement under fire. I think Dean is proving himself to show grace under fire despite innuendoes about his non-Presidential volatility. But more importantly, he is keeping his ‘eyes on the prize’ — Dubya and the Republican abuses of the worst administration this country has seen int he post-war era — rather than descending to the level of politics as usual of several of his hack rivals.

Review of The Matrix Revolutions: “Everything that has a beginning has an end.’ This sentence appears on the front page of the production notes handed out at press screenings of ‘The Matrix Revolutions,’ which opens worldwide today. It is also uttered by the Oracle (Mary Alice) in response to a question from Neo (Keanu Reeves). ‘Where is this going?’ he wants to know. ‘Where will it end?’ Neo may be the One, but he can hardly be the only One posing such questions. The talk of endings in this, the third and ostensibly final movie in the series, is so insistent that you may wonder whether the Wachowski brothers, who wrote and directed it, felt the need to reassure the audience, and perhaps themselves, that it was really, finally over. There are still a few loose ends that might be spun into future sequels ” —A.O. Scott, New York Times

While the news about the confession in the Green River killings has been prominent, I am (peripherally) involved in another criminal justice story. One of my closest co-workers at the hospital was a 9-year-old girl out for a bicycle ride with her parents in a state forest in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1977 when her mother took a fork in the trail and was brutally murdered. Despite intensive efforts, no leads appeared in the case until the late ’90’s, due to dogged efforts by a detective in the Massachusetts Cold Case Unit who was fascinated by the case since he was a little boy and his father was the police chief of Plymouth when the murder occurred. The stuff of television, and in fact the case was featured in a 1999 CBS 48 Hours (scroll down to the last case). It took nineteen years to identify a suspect, two further years to charge him, and then five more years before the suspect came to trial. Today the prosecution wraps up the presentation of its case and it goes to the jury (the defense is not calling any witnesses). My friend and her family have had to endure reliving the events, confronting the depravity of her mother’s accused murderer, hearing grisly forensic testimony reconstructing the crime and her mother’s injuries, all with the knowledge that they may have to find from this some other closure than a conviction. Here is what she says as she heads to court today:

Please know that I am not expecting a guilty verdict. I am hoping people will keep their hopes and expectations reasonable. The DA and all those involved have certainly shown they have done the absolute best job they could do. There just may not be enough evidence to convict him, but we got this far and mom has had her days in court. For me, the verdict is a formality. It is for society. I know in my heart and mind what I feel and believe. My primary goal from this process was to get information as to what happened and I am getting so much more info than I ever thought I’d get…and so for me the process has worked.

My heart is with you and your family, Pam…

“The Moon slides through the Earth’s shadow this Saturday night / Sunday morning (November 8/9)

giving skygazers in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and western Asia a chance to enjoy a total lunar eclipse. As lunar eclipses go, this will be a brief one though, with the total phase lasting only about 25 minutes. The orientation and relative size of the Earth’s shadow and the Moon’s trajectory are illustrated in this thoughtful animation showing the full Moon moving up from the lower right, entering the penumbra or outer portion of the shadow region, and then passing well below the center of darker inner shadow region or umbra. The total eclipse phase begins at 1:06 Universal Time, November 9 (8:06pm EST Nov. 8) when the Moon is completely within the umbra. While the off-center passage guarantees a short total phase, it also makes it likely that this November’s eclipsed Moon will be dramatically visible and colorful with a brighter rim along the southern edge.” —Astronomy Picture of the Day

“U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement officials say that after six months of intensifying guerrilla warfare, Iraqi insurgents know more about the U.S. and allied forces — their style of operations, convoy routes and vulnerable targets — than the coalition forces know about them. Indeed, U.S. intelligence has had trouble simply identifying the enemy and figuring out how many are Iraqis and how many are foreign fighters.

With local knowledge and the element of surprise on their side, the guerrillas are exploiting their intelligence edge to overcome the coalition’s overwhelming military superiority. Insurgents routinely use inexpensive explosives to destroy multimillion-dollar assets, including tanks and helicopters. Using surveillance and inside information, the guerrillas have assassinated many Iraqis helping the coalition, gunned down a member of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council, killed the top United Nations official in Iraq and blasted the heavily guarded hotel in Baghdad where Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying.” —USAToday

Here is another sense in which this is Vietnam all over again — and a sense in which we have not learned. The insurgents evade detection by blending into the general populace; the conspicuousness and unwieldiness of the lumbering U.S. military beast makes it an easy target; and superior firepower and military technology and prowess confer no advantage over simple weapons craftily used. Of course, the ‘simple weapons’ here include RPGs and portable SAMs that can take out tanks and helicopters, rather than the carbines and sharpened bamboo sticks that defeated the U.S. in Indochina. Moreover, US vulnerability may be due as much to our remarkable cultural insensitivity and bigotry as our reliance on high-tech warfare. And, as if that analogy isn’t telling enough, there’s the Battle of Algiers depiction of the post-conquest Algerian insurgency against the French. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz should rent it and weep — before they pursue their potentially disastrous ‘Iraqification’ strategy.

In a Washington Post op-ed piece, a Democrat and self-professed opponent of the invasion of Iraq, Steven Kelman, from 1993 to 1997 the administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, says “anyone with a working knowledge of how federal contracts are awarded” would find allegations from public watchdog agencies and Democratic critics that political favoritism underlies the decisions about awarding reconstruction contracts for Iraq and Afghanistan to be “somewhere between highly improbable and utterly absurd”. Such decisions, his major point is, are made by career civil servants rather than political appointees. True, heavy campaign contributions from the Halliburtons and the Bechtels do curry favor, but in areas far from contract awards whose outcomes depend on the favor of elected officials, such as “tax, trade and regulatory and economic policy” (as well as appropriations to pay for awarded contracts). He is trying to counter this “whiff of scandal” because it undermines the public trust in public institutions and civil servants and could add needless regulatory complications to an efficient procurement system.

I think blinking to this piece is important to provoke thoughtful opposition and dialogue rather than kneejerkism (kneejerkiness??). However, I have my doubts about Kelman’s thesis on several grounds. First, as a civil servant himself who probably believed in and took pride in his job, the fact that he takes umbrage at the accusations suggests that his counterattack may be too defensive. He points out that in his career, and those of the colleagues he has queried, no one ever tried to lean on him to influence his decisions, and that if they did they would lose rather than gain favor with him. Further influence of his integrity, indeed, but can we take that as evidence of the integrity of the entire process?

Then there is his protestation about the public impression that the government is taken to the cleaners by its contractors. This complaint is rather tangential to his argument about favoritism. Its gratuitousness surely stands as further evidence of his defensiveness.

A blanket assertion that there is a firm distinction between career civil servants and political appointees, and that there is a wall between the two such that the latter’s interests cannot under any circumstances influence the former, is difficult to believe, especially in a conniving and self-serving dysadministration such as Bush’s. There is an increasingly prevalent genre of op-ed analysis of the Bush White House by officials of prior administrations based upon their experiences of how government worked in the past; I find this increasingly irrelevant given the neo-cons’ profound reinvention of government in their own image. Am I being too conspiratorial? Recall the accumulating evidence that senior Bush officials have crafted a shadow civil service in the foreign policy and intelligence-analysis sphere which bypasses the constraints on their agenda that the usual channels confer.

In addition, he focuses too narrowly on what may be a semantic distinction only, that of awarding contracts vs. funding them, etc. He lets us know that the ‘structuring and management’ of contracts are potentially rife with abuse. He concedes that political contributions curry favor in plenty of other aspects of government decision-making, just not his.

In short, a closer reading of his column would suggest that one can conclude, first, that contract awards decisions under Kelman were not corrupt; secondly, that the contract award process may be more impartial than commonly assumed (“When did you stop beating your wife?”). But it certainly should not stand as a blanket refutation of the ‘cronyism’ charge.<p

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Related: Halliburton Contract Extension “Likely” Cancelled Amid Allegations of Overcharging Taxpayers:

“The Army Corps of Engineers is “likely” to cancel the no-bid contract extension granted a week ago to Halliburton for delivery of oil-related services amid allegations that Halliburton is overcharging the federal government to import oil into Iraq. The decision to revisit the contract extension comes in part due to the assertions from inside the Pentagon that Halliburton’s price for imported gasoline was “at least double what it should be.” —The Daily Mislead

“As American soldiers massed on the Iraqi border in March and diplomats argued about war, an influential adviser to the Pentagon received a secret message from a Lebanese-American businessman: Saddam Hussein wanted to make a deal.

Iraqi officials, including the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, had told the businessman that they wanted Washington to know that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction, and they offered to allow American troops and experts to conduct a search. The businessman said in an interview that the Iraqis also offered to hand over a man accused of being involved in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 who was being held in Baghdad…” —New York Times

They also offered to help out in the Middle East peace process and offered the U.S. oil concessions. These clandestine 11th-hour approaches by Iraqi representatives including director of Iraqi intelligence (destined to be no. 16 on the U.S.’s Iraqi most wanted list), with the reported approval of Saddam Hussein and offering “unconditional terms”, prompted a London meeting between Richard Perle and the Lebanese-American intermediary, who conveyed desperate, “begging” Iraqi requests for a direct meeting with Perle or another American representative. In the face of U.S. intransigence about Saddam yielding power, they apparently offered to hold elections within two years.

…(T)he Iraqis appeared intimidated by the American military threat. “The Iraqis were finally taking it seriously,” he said, “and they wanted to talk, and they offered things they never would have offered if the build-up hadn’t occurred.”

Mr. Perle said he found it “puzzling” that the Iraqis would have used such complicated contacts to communicate “a quite astonishing proposal” to the administration.

But former American intelligence officers with extensive experience in the Middle East say many Arab leaders have traditionally placed a high value on secret communications, though such informal arrangements are sometimes considered suspect in Washington.

Perle says he relayed these messages through channels, asking whether he should in fact meet directly with Iraqi representatives, and was told that his superiors were not interested.

…or does it? 25 years after it left the earth, and 13.5 billion kilometres away from the sun (or 90 times farther away from the sun than the Earth), competing papers in this weeks Nature debate whether Voyager 1 has left the solar system and entered interstellar space.

“Voyager 1 was launched 26 years ago and has nearly reached – or has already penetrated – the edge of the bubble surrounding the solar system.

The bubble is formed when highly charged particles from the sun, called the solar wind, collide with particles emanating from other stars in the galaxy.

The edge of the bubble, called the heliopause, is an ever-shifting boundary and it’s unclear whether Voyager 1 has passed through it.Scientists theorize that a barrier, called a termination shock, exists where the hot solar wind hits the cold, thin gas of interstellar space.

As particles of solar wind pile up on the barrier, they get hotter and skip back and forth across the boundary. ” —CBC

Scientists race against the exhaustion of its onboard power source in hopes it will find something interesting in the endless expanse of interstellar space it now enters on ithe final (but interminable) leg of its voyage.

“A list of nearly 200 scientific researchers has been compiled and given to federal officials by the Traditional Values Coalition, a conservative group that goes wild over gay issues and federal funding of research related to human sexuality.

The list, which has sent a chill through some researchers, is being used by the coalition and its government allies in attempts to discredit the researchers and challenge or revoke their federal grants. It’s a sloppy, dangerous and wildly inaccurate list, put together by people who are freaked out by the content of the studies, and unconcerned about their value.

The targeted studies cover a wide range of topics related to health and sexuality, including H.I.V. and AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases and adolescent sexual behavior…

For a right-wing coalition to be hung up on these matters is one thing. But the coalition’s list, which includes some of the most respected scientists and institutions in the country, is circulating among members of Congress and was forwarded to the National Institutes of Health, which is responsible for awarding the crucially important grants.” —Bob Herbert, New York Times op-ed

“Already tarnished by questions surrounding the huge no-bid reconstruction contracts won by his former company, Halliburton, in which he retains a financial interest, as well as his refusal to disclose to Congress what meetings he held during his formulation of Bush’s energy policy, Cheney is increasingly seen as a serious rightwing extremist and ideologue, and by far the most powerful number two in US history.

As much as Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and his neo-conservative advisors have become the lightning rod for criticism over the Iraq war and the administration’s hubris, Cheney appears to have acted as their principal patron and advocate with Bush himself, and more than any other official except perhaps Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the driving force within the administration for war with Iraq. ” —Asia Times

“Iraq, everyone agrees, is not Vietnam. In Vietnam the United States lost dozens of troops for every one it is losing in Iraq. The Viet Cong guerrillas had broad popular support. They were being supplied by great powers. And so on. But there is one sense in which the analogy might hold. Frustrated by the lack of quick progress on the ground and fading political support at home, Washington is now latching on to the idea that a quick transfer of power to local troops and politicians would make things better. Or at any rate, it would lower American casualties. It was called Vietnamization; today it’s called Iraqification. And then as now, it is less a winning strategy than an exit strategy.” — Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post

Join the NRA blacklist, sponsored by stoptheNRA.com.

Ribbit! is back!

“For literature now is in a dangerous zone where there seems to be little separation between the private act of writing and the public performance demanded of writers. Books are judged today as successful or not depending on sales and jury short lists. Meanwhile the critical climate, for all the media coverage of writers, is random and manic. Writers are either flung onto centre stage or ignored completely. New talents are discovered (this being the main and perhaps only virtue of any award system) but many significant artists such as Robin Blaser or Roy Kiyooka or Al Pittman can go through their whole careers being barely mentioned in the national newspapers. The best critics of our time, who are less obsessed with the frantic picking of a season’s winner, are published quietly and almost invisibly. Critical works such as George Bowering’s Errata or The Mask In Place, Robert Kroetsch’s The Lovely Treachery Of Words, Dennis Lee’s Body Music, or Don McKay’s Vis à Vis prove there are writers who can calmly separate the wheat from the chaff, who can write about what is truly valuable in our literature.” — Michael Ondaatje, The Star

This is the publicly-accessible author conference at the WELL (the almost two-decades-old online discussion center originally founded by Stewart Brand and the other CoEvolution/Whole Earth Review geeks and now part of Salon), currently featuring a discussion with prolific and iconoclastic science fiction (and more) writer Charlie Stross, hosted by Cory Doctorow. Here’s a list of past guests over the course of inkwell.vue’s five years. I’m going off to dip into the Kelly Link and Jeff Tamarkin (Jefferson Airplane) discussions, for starters…

“The community draft boards that became notorious for sending reluctant young men off to Vietnam have languished sinced the early 1970s, their membership ebbing and their purpose all but lost when the draft was ended. But a few weeks ago, on an obscure federal Web site devoted to the war on terrorism, the Bush administration quietly began a public campaign to bring the draft boards back to life. Especially for those who were of age to fight in the Vietnam, it is an ominous flashback of a message. Even floating the idea of a draft in the months before an election would be politically explosive, and the Pentagon last week was adamant that the push to staff up the draft boards is not a portent of things to come. Increasingly, however, military experts and even some influential members of Congress are suggesting that if Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s prediction of a ‘long, hard slog’ in Iraq and Afghanistan proves accurate, the U.S. may have no choice but to consider a draft to fully staff the nation’s military in a time of global instability.” —Salon [via wood s lot]

The ‘quiet public campaign’ consists of floating an invitation to become a selective service local board member on defendamerica.com, from the Dept. of Defense. The last time there was a push for full occupancy of the more than 20,000 slots in the selective service machinery was during the Reagan administration more than 20 years ago. As one of those who was ‘of age to fight in Vietnam’ and who has a son who I will never send to be cannonfodder for neo-con criminal dreams of empire, this is a hotbutton issue for me. It is hard to believe the dysadministration is foolish enough to go on record about resurrecting the draft just when the enthusiasm of the American people for mounting military casualties is at its ebb, and that it can try to ‘spin’ its way out of the resultant criticism by telling us that black is white, this is not a portent of things to come, when it has been caught in recent months in so many portentious lies around its military campaign. Almost certainly, this is too big a liability to go further in public before the elections, but people interested in seeing Bush dumped next year should make sure the public knows how far it has gone already.

According to some experts, basic math might compel the Pentagon to reconsider the draft: Of a total U.S. military force of 1.4 million people around the globe (many of them in non-combat support positions and in services like the Air Force and Navy), there are currently about 140,000 active-duty, reserve and National Guard soldiers currently deployed in Iraq — and though Rumsfeld has been an advocate of a lean, nimble military apparatus, history suggests he needs more muscle.

“The closest parallel to the Iraq situation is the British in Northern Ireland, where you also had some people supporting the occupying army and some opposing them, and where the opponents were willing to resort to terror tactics,” says Charles Peña, director of defense studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “There the British needed a ratio of 10 soldiers per 1,000 population to restore order, and at their height, it was 20 soldiers per 1,000 population. If you transfer that to Iraq, it would mean you’d need at least 240,000 troops and maybe as many as 480,000.

“The only reason you aren’t hearing these kinds of numbers discussed by the White House and the Defense Department right now,” Peña adds, “is that you couldn’t come up with them without a return to the draft, and they don’t want to talk about that.

The Pentagon has already had to double the deployment periods of some units, call up more reserves and extend tours of duty by a year — all highly unpopular moves. Meanwhile, the recent spate of deadly bombings in Baghdad, Falluja and other cities, and increasing attacks on U.S. forces throughout Iraq have forced the U.S. to reconsider its plans to reduce troop deployments…

“The government is in a bit of a box,” Ned Lebow (a military manpower expert and professor of government at Dartmouth College) says. “They can hold reservists on active duty longer, and risk antagonizing that whole section of America that has family members who join the Reserves. They can try to pay soldiers more, but it’s not clear that works — and besides, there’s already an enormous budget deficit. They can try to bribe other countries to contribute more troops, which they’re trying to do now, but not with much success. Or they can try Iraqization of the war — though we saw what happened to Vietnamization, and Afghanization of the war in Afghanistan isn’t working, so Iraqization doesn’t seem likely to work either.

“So,” Lebow concludes, “that leaves the draft.” ”

Time to dust off the old arguments against the selective service system — such as the inequitable burden on the poor and Americans of color and the fact that along with the draft inevitably comes the remarkablly inequitable system of draft deferments (which is likely to persist even if they claim the loopholes are being closed; after all, look at the tax code, for example!). Time to resurrect the public scrutiny of the war records evasive tactics of dysadministration figures. And time to re-alert the public to that provision of the ‘Leave No Child Behind’ education act of last year that quietly mandated that school boards provide a database of all their enrolled students to the selective service (even before the draft is resurrected, which would require an act of Congress, young men [not women] of draft age are required to register with selective service) unless they opt out.

Parenthetically, after we invaded Iraq and I began to publicize the cases of members of the armed forces who wanted out of our misbegotten enterprise, I had a public exchange with Rebecca Blood about whether there could technically be conscientious objection in a draftless volunteer military. I was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam draft era; I felt that, yes, keeping to the literal text, one can have ‘objections’ as a matter of ‘conscience’ to serving in the military even in peacetime. Rumsfeld may be making this a moot point. It is time to reeducate the American people about the mechanism for this ‘faith-based initiative’. The crucial hoop through which one has to jump to be a CO is to persuade your local draft board — your Republican draft board — that you are opposed to all military action rather than just the particular flavor of the moment. It is not too soon to work to introduce an ethically-based peace education curriculum to our children’s schools (and to our homes) if it is not already there, to help them shape their conscientious thinking.

And what if peace-minded individuals responded to the call to volunteer for the selective service local boards, to make sure that the ‘draft machine’ works exactly as it should, i.e. not at all. Come wearing your wooden shoes…

Thanks to Rafe Coburn for pointing me to this Village Voice piece by Nat Hentoff, causing me, like Rafe, to reconsider my oppositoon to the Bush nomination of Charles Pickering to a federal judgeship on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Hentoff: “…in some 50 years as a reporter, I have seldom seen such reckless, unfair, and repeated attacks on a person—not only by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee but also by organizations that gather financial contributions because of their proclaimed dedication to civil rights, civil liberties, and honest research. (People for the American Way, Alliance for Justice, et al.)” The arena of judicial nominations is the fiercest seat of partisan politics, where the noun “opposition” can always be prefaced by the adjective “kneejerk.” Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee feel they have alot of payback to do for how the Republicans treated Clinton’s nominees. Hentoff essentially says Schumer, Leahy and the like ought to be ashamed of themselves, and that their reputation hangs in the balance as much as does Pickering’s career. One person whose integrity has always gone unquestioned for me has been Hentoff and, by his rendition, Pickering sounds not only like the best one could expect from the Bush dysadministration but a conscientious nomination under any circumstances. What do you think?

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Welcome to everyone sent here by the linkage at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan website. I am grateful to be pointed to, and to be in such great link company.

“It may be the book that got a new generation reading, but the huge Harry Potter tomes are giving some children headaches, a US doctor says.

Dr Howard J Bennett, of George Washington University Medical Centre, has recently diagnosed ‘Hogwarts headaches’ in three young patients…

The children did not have a history of such symptoms and the only connection appeared to be that all were reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix at the time.” —The Age

This is part of a longstanding tradition in the letters section of the New England Journal of Medicine of tongue-in-cheek case series designating whimsically-named syndromes reflecting the medical consequences of contemporary cultural trends. The lay press often picks up these stories and reports on them in earnest, but, hey, this is medical humor for ya, although sometimes the cases are poignant. It can be read, more profoundly, as a somewhat ironic comment on the human propensity, which reaches its greatest and most tortured fruition with the medical field’s ‘designer diseases’, for endless classification and subdivision of categories.

“Famous clinical psychologists used the Rorschach Inkblot Test to arrive at incredible insights. But were the astounding performances of these Rorschach Wizards merely a variation on astrology and palm reading?” —Skeptical Inquirer

I have previously written about the incredible value of intuitive psychological testing, including the Rorschach, in psychodiagnostics, and the perils of skeptical debunkers lumping it in with paranomal phenomena.

Psychological testing is only a problem if you expect it to conform to scientific standards. Here’s the secret — interpersonal perception and interactive skills do not conform in that way. It is not that the Rorschach is similar to vaudeville performance based on ‘cold reading’; turn it on its head — cold reading is based on the same intuitive depth perception about people, although usually unrefined by clinical training of course. The same parallel exists with hypnosis, where the same skills may be used as stage entertainment or valuable clinical tools. Calling it ‘mere entertainment’ and calling it ‘unscientific’ are two time-honored debunking tools often uttered, as here, in the same breath.

The ability to read others is both revered and reviled, in an unbroken thread from the peculiar marginal position of the shaman through the psychiatrist cartoons that perennially adorn the pages of the New Yorker, revealing the literatis’ fearful fascination. (There’s also that predictable reaction when someone at a dinner party asks me what I do and I decide to reveal to them that I am a psychiatrist. All of a sudden their demeanor changes and they are reviewing their prior banter with me to figure out what they might have revealed inadvertently to my supposedly penetrating gaze. Yet they are too fascinated to simply avoid me thereafter, so what follows are all manner of ‘curbside consult’ and friend-of-a-friend query in displacement.) And most people think of psychics as parlor trick performers or hucksters on late night television. The human propensity to detoxify potent magic by turning it into mere entertainment, protecting ourselves against its impact by putting it up on stage and therefore inside a frame distinguishing it from ‘reality’, is primeval, and reaches its apotheosis in a society that has lost its capacity to experience the sacred and the mysterious.

And the psychotherapist’s role is always performance art, in an important sense — it exists to induce the willing suspension of disbelief in the listener/analysand, to enlist them in building a shared, compelling, but fictive, belief system, spinning yarns which heal by making more usefully coherent and sensible meaning of their life. The lack of falsifiability (the empirical scientific standard) of some of the claims about a person’s life that come from psychotherapy is only a problem if you have not been enlisted in believing, or if the resulting ‘truths’ are put to nefarious uses as they are in ‘recovered memory’ cases, where the level of ‘reality’ they signify is confused. (“The map is not the territory,” as Korzybski said.) CSICOP doesn’t seem to understand that, in which case there is ‘no use arguing about religion’.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging: The Perfect Imperfect Instrument: “Spatially, it is the gold standard, but poor temporal resolution has researchers looking for something better”:

“According to legend, functional neuroimaging can trace its roots to the stroke of noon on a day in the late 19th century, when Italian physiologist Angelo Mosso observed a sudden increase in brain pulsation in his test subject, Bertino the peasant. Using an elaborate contraption, Mosso had been measuring the pulsations coming from a soft spot in Bertino’s skull, the result of a head injury. Intrigued by the sudden pulsing, Mosso asked Bertino if the chiming of the local church bell had reminded him of his forgotten midday prayers. When Bertino said yes, his brain pulsated again. Then Mosso asked Bertino to multiply 8 by 12. Again, Bertino’s brain pulsated. Thus was borne the notion that blood flow in the brain is related to cognition.

That notion remains the basis of what some neuroscientists consider the most powerful in vivo brain imaging technology in use today, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Since its emergence in 1992, fMRI has dominated the field of human brain mapping and has been featured in thousands of published papers–nearly an order of magnitude more than for any other functional imaging technique.” —The Scientist

FmH readers know of my love affair with this technology, given the psychiatrist’s voyeuristic romance with structure-function correlations in the brain — although more than one observer has referred to this, with all due irreverence, as neo-phrenology. I often point to dramatic fMRI findings here. This article is a good nontechnical overview of the technology, its strengths and limitations. There remains debate about what is actually being measured by fMRI scans, although the consensus is strong that it is an accurate reflection of brain activity during specific tasks.

The temporal resolution problem is not a technical limitation of the scanning methodology but a biological one — the changes in blood flow and metabolism that it visualizes in activated brain regions occur slowly, over 1-2 seconds, in response to task demands (far slower than the speed of thought, if you will). So it becomes impossible to segregate different stages in the brain’s response to a task demand. In many ways, the CNS remains a ‘black box’ with regard to the subtleties of mental events. Yet some think we are not nearing the limitations of the power of fMRI technology but rather near the beginning.

It may take a different kind of analysis of the data, the article suggests. One limitation of fMRI conclusions is that they depend heavily on the assumption that the brain is modular and that the activity of different regions during a mental event may be considered independently. In experimental studies using much more complex multivariate analysis to correlate changes between the voxels of scans, a crude kind of ‘mind reading’ even emerges:

…(T)rained observers first scanned volunteer subjects for several sessions while the volunteers looked at certain objects such as baskets, garden gnomes, and teapots. Cox and Savoy used a multivariate statistical approach–one designed to detect interactions among voxels–to identify brain patterns that corresponded to each object. When the volunteers’ brains were scanned again later, the observers used the patterns, which covered a large region of the cortex, to guess which objects the volunteers were looking at. Their guesses were up to 85% to 90% accurate. The study highlights the significance of coarse-grained neuronal patterns that extend over large areas, patterns that Cox and Savoy would not have found if they had relied on conventional fMRI statistical methodology.

Multivariate approaches to fMRI data are growing; they probably represent around 5% of the data analysis of current studies but will grow to predominate, some observers suggest, and with it will come a fundamental enhancement of our understanding of the interactions between various brain regions in mental activity.

Yet I have always worried about another assumption on which interpretation of the significance of fMRI data depends heavily. If you will allow me an apparent digression, this is a concern that first arose as I began to think about our romance with another technology, television, several decades ago, heavily influenced by Jerry Mander’s* estimable 1977 book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. Along with examinations of the way t.v. mediates experience, colonizes experience, and affects viewers’ physiology, one of Mander’s arguments, perhaps the most compelling for me as a student of human emotion and interaction, is how its inherent biases as a medium (despite anyone’s best intentions about what content it carries or what programming you choose to watch) shape our assumptions about human experience. Television is inherently better at conveying the coarse-grained aspects of emotion and interaction than the subtle; it delineates the exterior at the utter expense of the interior. As an example, because the histrionic outburst or the ugly grimace is resolved much more readily than the flicker of recognition or the momentary tightening of the corner of the mouth, it shapes the depiction of emotion at all levels including the scripting, direction and acting portrayal. More importantly, it directs the attention of consumers of the medium toward the dramatic and external aspects of experience and behavior and shapes their assumptions about what is most significant in human reality. Now you see where I am going; I worry that fMRI has a similar, inherent ‘flair for the dramatic’, and that the understanding of mental events derived from its data will always implicate regions with extensive, easily visualized changes rather than subtle flickers of difference. Gregory Bateson once defined information as a “difference that makes a difference.” We must be careful that the differences we see using fMRI are truly informative; our assumption that a region which undergoes a dramatic change in activation level during a mental event figures more centrally as a mental substrate of that event than another region with a more transient or subtle change in metabolic activity (perhaps because it was already highly active?) may be a questionable one.

*Mander, although less well known, deserves a place in the pantheon of cultural critics alongside, for example, the recently deceased, celebrated, Neil Postman. More recently, Curtis White in his crucial 2002 book The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves, has done Mander one better. While Four Arguments showed why and how the medium of television stops people from the thinking that would interfere with their political obedience and consumption, White argues that this is the effect of both high- and lowbrow popular culture as a whole.

Philosophical scrutiny of paranormal claims by Paul MacDonald, a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia. —Philosophy Now [via Abyssal Mind]

“A plague of locusts is being blamed for an epidemic of allergic attacks in central Sudan. At least 11 people have died and thousands are reported to have been hospitalised, suffering from what Sudanese officials are calling ‘lung eczema’.

The outbreak centres around Sudan’s second largest city of Medani, 180 kilometres south of the capital Khartoum. The annual locust swarm has been particularly ferocious in 2003 and experts believe it has triggered an allergic reaction in the local population, aggravating asthma.” —New Scientist

• from Hawaii
  
• from NYC
  

both from today’s New York Times.

The BBC renders Jakob Nielson’s take on freeing yourselves.

“From: the Peacewatchers at USAF’s Fairford and Welford bases in the UK

Since Saturday, people in the Highlands of Scotland have been witnessing large movements of US warplanes overhead. Experienced observers say the large numbers are reminiscent of those that preceded the bombing of Iraq in 1998 and military strikes on Libya in the1980’s as well as the first Gulf War.

At the weekend warplanes were flying over at a rate of roughly one every 15 minutes. As well as watching them from the ground the plane spotters have also been able to overhear pilots talking by listening to their radio frequencies.

At this rate some 288 warplanes would have passed over Scotland in three days.

It is thought that the planes have flown on a route from the US over the North Pole to bases in Europe and the Mediterranean. The size and scale of the movement suggests that the US may be preparing to strike at a country in the Middle East in the next week to ten days.

Please pass this information on as widely as possible- the US may be planning to use the pretext of “foreign” terrorist attacks on US personnel in Iraq to attack Iran or Syria. Please alert any sympathetic elected representatives, media representatives and other sympathetic organizations.” —Portland Indymedia

Tens of thousands to mobilize for Nov 9th protest: “The day declared by the Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign in Palestine is gathering major momentum as cities across Europe, Canada, the US, Latin America, and Australia are joining in solidarity with the popular Palestinian mobilization that is to take place on November 9, the date of the fall of the Berlin Wall.” —Electronic Intifada Interesting spread of a new meme — Although Israeli treatment of the Palestinians has for a long time been likened to apartheid, it it my sense that there has been a vast increase in this ‘meme’ in the last week or so. Does anyone share that perception?

It could be a thread that unravels the bureau: “Evidence has surfaced recently that the FBI has been spying on foreign nations for years.

The revelation is so sensitive that in the wake of the secret surfacing, the FBI has embarked on a mad scramble to cover up the evidence. The Bureau has gone as far as to pressure a federal judge into sealing previously public court records that open a window on the FBI’s overseas spying mission.

In addition, with the help of the U.S. Attorney’s Office (John Ashcroft’s Justice Department) the FBI also sought, through a proposed court order, to seize any computer anywhere that the Bureau suspected might have contained the sensitive court pleadings.” —Online Journal

CBS Mulls Canceling Reagan Mini-Series, Sources Say: “Drawing Republican fire over the accuracy of its upcoming mini-series ‘The Reagans,’ CBS appears ready to present a kinder, gentler portrait of the ailing former President Ronald Reagan (news) than originally produced — if the network airs it at all.

Sources close to the production said on Monday CBS is considering canceling the docudrama, slated to air Nov. 16 and 18, under mounting criticism from political conservatives that the two-part series unfairly depicts Reagan and his wife.” —Yahoo! News

“The United States is one of 45 countries that refuses to sign the 1997 Ottawa Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines (APMs) and on their Destruction.” —Online Journal

Clear landmines with one click.

“The mainstream media continues to cooperate with the Bush Administration’s policy of giving short shrift to the Muslim psyche, and especially the Iraqi sense of place.

In the West — where the expressions ‘family, national pride, and friend’ are tossed about like so much salad — we are less likely to recognize the importance of diverse cultural perspectives, above all when they are linked to unassailable and even unwise fidelity.

So sayeth not the irresponsible and sometimes non-curious American news media, where nowhere have we heard a word about stunning Arab loyalties, even between those of contradictory opinion, that might be our ‘enlightenment’ answering the question concerning why exactly Saddam Hussein has not been ‘discovered’ — and may never be.

It is the Arab term ‘Dakhil’ which provides the underpinning for the arrangement in which the hunters, namely the US Military, and the hunted, namely former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti, now find themselves.” — Jeff Koopersmith, —American Political Journal

I asked the other day about the senseless illogic of surrounding an Iraqi town with razor wire because of Saddam Hussein’s supposed role in planning the ongoing insurgency against the American occupying forces. Koopersmith knows why it will not succeed. “Tribal vigor is on the rise in Iraq. Make no mistake about that fact — and, therefore, their ability and propensity to protect and hide their own increases each day…One need only think of a mother and child to come close to understanding this fealty.” I also wrote about mistrusting the academic objections to the similarities drawn between Iraq and Vietnam, that this is a matter “too important to be left to the academics.” The role that American ignorance of the cultural underpinnings of the indigenous struggles of these two peoples will play in our failure is one of those generalities worth paying attention to instead of drawing scholarly distinctions. (As Koopersmith concludes, “It is their, our, and our leaders’ almost complete failure to understand the Iraqi ethos that is indefensible, and that which may come to consume us, far more than today.” Substitute Vietnamese for Iraqi in that sentence, and it reads as true.)

Volusia County Memos Disclose Election 2000 Vote Fraud. Voting machine giant Diebold is trying to suppress the web exposure of these leaked internal memos using a dubious application of copyright law. Cease-and-desist orders are going out to sites which reprint them. (The link points to one which, being in New Zealand, is hopefully out of reach of US court jurisdiction.) If you have the means of and the interest in doing so, spread the link to these memos and help get Diebold caught with their pants down before they help steal the 2004 election too.

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s October 31 remarks at the “New American Strategies for Security and Peace” conference:

“…American power worldwide is at its historic zenith. American global political standing is at its nadir. Why? What is the cause of this? These are facts. They’re measurable facts. They’re also felt facts when one talks to one’s friends abroad who like America, who value what we treasure but do not understand our policies, are troubled by our actions and are perplexed by what they perceive to be either demagogy or mendacity.

Maybe the explanation is that we are rich, and we are, and that we are powerful, and we certainly are. But if anyone thinks that this is the full explanation I think he or she is taking the easy way out and engaging in a self-serving justification. I think we have to take into account two troubling conditions.

Since the tragedy of 9-11 which understandably shook and outraged everyone in this country, we have increasingly embraced at the highest official level what I think fairly can be called a paranoiac view of the world. Summarized in a phrase repeatedly used at the highest level, “he who is not with us is against us.” I say repeatedly because actually some months ago I did a computer check to see how often it’s been used at the very highest level in public statements.

The count then quite literally was ninety-nine. So it’s a phrase which obviously reflects a deeply felt perception. I strongly suspect the person who uses that phrase doesn’t know its historical or intellectual origins. It is a phrase popularized by Lenin (Applause) when he attacked the social democrats on the grounds that they were anti-Bolshevik and therefore he who is not with us is against us and can be handled accordingly.

This phrase in a way is part of what might be considered to be the central defining focus that our policy-makers embrace in determining the American position in the world and is summed up by the words “war on terrorism.” War on terrorism defines the central preoccupation of the United States in the world today, and it does reflect in my view a rather narrow and extremist vision of foreign policy of the world’s first superpower, of a great democracy, with genuinely idealistic traditions. ” [more (read the whole thing)]

Recall the peculiar saga of Freud’s friend Wilhelm Fleiss and his notions of the relationship between nasal pathology and psychopathology, about which I have written previously at FmH. Now here is a new twist:

“A University of Melbourne team examined a group of people deemed to be at ultra high risk of developing psychosis and found those that went on to develop schizophrenia, rather than other forms of psychosis, all displayed the inability to identify smells. This deficit was present before the onset of any significant clinical symptoms of psychosis.

The study, the first of its kind, is published in the October 2003 American Journal of Psychiatry…

It has long been known that people suffering schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis are often unable to correctly identify smells. That is, pizza may be mislabelled as orange, or bubblegum as smoke. Before the current findings, however, it was unknown if this difficulty developed later, as a result of the progression of the disorder, or well before any symptoms of psychosis became obvious…

Their results suggest a promising discovery of the first potential marker for schizophrenia, and possibly for other psychoses.

Brewer and Pantelis’ detective work began with the understanding that a person’s sense of smell is intimately linked to the area of your brain that deals with emotions and related non-language functions.

‘It is the only sense that passes straight to this area of the brain, and so any vulnerability involving these neural circuits can affect our labeling of smell,’ says Brewer.

‘This area of the brain deals with the primary emotions. It is the part that processes such things as threat and emotion before transferring this information into the frontal (language) area of the brain,’ he says.

‘It is either the transfer of emotional information to the frontal lobe, or functioning in the frontal lobe itself that appears to be compromised in those suffering from psychosis.'”

There seems to be a sort of progress in awareness, through the stages of which every man—and especially every psychiatrist and every patient—must move, some persons progressing further through these stages than others. One starts by blaming the identified patient for his idiosyncrasies and symptoms. Then one discovers that these symptoms are a response to—or an effect of—what others have done; and the blame shifts from the identified patient to the etiological figure.

Then, one discovers perhaps that these figures feel a guilt for the pain which they have caused, and one realizes that when they claim this guilt they are identifying themselves with God. After all, they did not, in general, know what they were doing, and to claim guilt for their acts would be to claim omniscience. At this point one reaches a more general anger, that what happens to people should not happen to dogs, and that what people do to each other the lower animals could never devise. Beyond this, there is, I think, a stage which I can only dimly envisage, where pessimism and anger are replaced by something else—perhaps humility. And from this stage onward to whatever other stages there may be, there is loneliness.

No one knows the end of that progress which starts from uniting the perceiver and the perceived—the subject and the object—into a single universe.

I love this ‘reference library on demand’. You install a client on your computer that allows you immediate (with a broadband connection) reference information. Clicking on a word or phrase in any Windows program triggers GuruNet and submits the underlying text, returning facts about the topic. The New York Times called it “the best implementation yet of the information at your fingertips promise.” There is a free client that is plenty powerful but you may want to buy a full license after you try it. If you do, write me for a coupon that will give you $5 off. Yes, I know, this is a blatant advertisement for what is essentially a multilevel marketing scheme — after I sell five people on licensing it using the coupon code I provide them, I get my own registration fee refunded to me. Privacy-oriented readers may be concerned that GuruNet tracks your queries and shares aggregate (but not personally identifiable) usage patterns with third parties such as their corporate clients and third-party content providers. Nevertheless, I think the tradeoff is worthwhile if you are a heavy text-based computer user who ever needs to look up a word or a fact.

“Strong explosions were heard late Monday in central Baghdad, and it appeared the blasts were coming from the western side of the Tigris River.

Five blasts shook the area in quick succession about 9:10 p.m. The U.S. military command had no information on the incident.” —Washington Post. Perhaps they ‘had no information’; if the situation is dire enough, the military may simply repress the news. How would we know? After all, journalists were fiercely excluded by a military cordon from the site of the downed helicopter over the weekend, according to reporters I heard interviewed on NPR.

Freed Iranians accuse US of torture: “Two Iranian journalists with state-run television who were freed by US forces in Iraq after four months of detention have charged they were subjected to ‘severe torture’ while in American custody.

But in Baghdad a coalition military spokesman denied that anyone was mistreated in its custody.” —Agence France Presse

” ‘ She would not have believed London still had so many inhabitants…’ Michael Moorcock has begun a new short story for us. Now it’s up to you to continue it… Moorcock has called the story ‘Crowning the Kitten’. You can read his opening here.

The story will unfold in weekly instalments over the next six weeks, but how it continues depends on you.” —Guardian.UK

Anthony Bourdain’s A Cook’s Tour: “Jayne Margetts on Anthony Bourdain’s quest to eat the most gastronomically dangerous dishes on the planet”. —spike

“This week, washingtonpost.com and The Concord Monitor will host a series of live discussions with each participating Democratic candidate in the presidential race. Bookmark this page for the upcoming full list of scheduled discussions.”

I find much of interest posted to Abyssal Mind.

From game designer and author Greg Costikyan:

“Sometime in the 80s, I was living in Columbia University housing with my then-wife, who was studying for her MBA. A political worker came to the door, and asked us to make a donation to some political organization, I don’t recall which, to help fund the ‘fight against the radical right.’ Louise told him ‘but we are the radical right.’

Today, we have a president whose idea of cutting taxes is cutting them in such a way that the richest few percentage of the population gains almost all of the benefit; who has no compunction about leading the nation into a wholly unnecessary war, with no workable plan for how to manage the victory; whose administration consistently works to increase police powers and erode individual freedom; and whose party has been captured by fundamentalist Christian lunatics whose political agenda consists solely of oppressing women and those who make love in ways they don’t like.

It is patently clear that, today, the Republicans pose a far greater threat to American liberties than the Democrats.

I’m not of the ‘anything but Bush’ school. I could never bring myself to vote for someone who thinks censoring games is a good idea (Lieberman), seems to want to bring back the Smoot-Hawley Tariff (Gephardt), or came to political prominence through irresponsible race baiting (Sharpton–I’m a New Yorker, and I assure you that I remember Tawana Brawley, not to mention Crown Heights).

Still, today, the United States is in the hand of a dim-witted Yalie frat boy who listens only to neocon nutcase advisers and has no clue how close we are to a hundred-year war between the Islamic world and the West–and if he did, might think it was a good idea, since that would resemble some of the predictions for the End Times.

If the Democrats wind up nominating Dean, Clark, Edwards, or Kerry, I will almost certainly wind up voting for someone other than the nominee of the Libertarian Party in the next presidential election–the first time I will have done so since I was old enough to vote.”

He says Iraqi forces will fill the gap —Washington Post.



Really. The rush to remobilize the Iraqi army we disbanded when we invaded is a rush to use the ‘hajjis’ (recall: our expletive for all Muslims) as cannonfodder as soon as possible and to extricate ourselves as fast as we can, before mounting American casualties lose Bush the election. Oops, too late, Dubya. A majority of Americans polled now disapprove of the dysadministration’s handling of the Iraqi quagmire, a majority feel the death toll is unacceptable, and a majority would vote for an unnamed Democratic adversary to Bush (any) in the next election if it were held now. By the way, memo to American public: it’s about time. (Don’t get me started on the idiocy of Congressional calls to send more U.S. troops to Baghdad; if there is anything more out of touch with sane alternatives than the Bush cabal, it appears to be Congress. How about calling for extrication?)

Let’s see, the deadliest day ever in the U.S. occupation (although I would venture to say it will not be the deadliest to come, as all the evidence says the resistance is well-armed, increasingly organized, sophisticated, accurate, more and more assertive, more and more deadly… and more and more cheered by the Iraqi population) is the six-month anniversary of our action figure hero’s photo-op under the “Mission Accomplished” banner (which he now denies was his people’s responsibility… and he is right, it wasn’t their responsibility, it was their fault). Didn’t the smirking chimp say, at one point, “Bring ’em on”, enraging our troops’ families back home by seeming to invite the slaughter we are now seeing? Now we’re several weeks into a dysadministration public relations offensive accusing the media of underplaying the progress in Iraq in favor of reporting on the insurgency (which someone commented is like saying a thunderstorm obscures the sunny day behind it). Oh, and there’s that line about how the attacks on American troops are evidence of our success. What would indicate our failure? Total pacification and jubilant acceptance of occupation by the entire Iraqi populace? The Washington Post article notes that “during a southern swing on Saturday, Bush largely ignored the death toll in Iraq, referring specifically to Iraq only once in four speeches totaling 72 minutes.” Let’s face it, Dubya — there is nothing you can say; you’re a liar and you’re inept. You keep on lying, they keep on dying.

Related: The Brown Paste on Bush’s Shoes

“…first whiff…of the collapse of the Bush maladministration’s credibility and with it its operatives’ dreams of a Thousand Year Right…”:

“Surely, as my numerous detractors on the right-hand end of the speculum will point out, it is wrong to make mock of a president struggling so manfully against such dire evils as are abroad in the world? Surely we, the American people, should get behind him and support our troops? There’s a silly frigging idea. Bush is surrounded by concrete barriers and electric razor wire in Washington, DC. Our troops are sucking dirt in some hellhole on the other side of the world, overworked, underpaid, and going swiftly insane slaughtering the locals. You want to support our troops, get Bush in front of them. They’ll be home on the first transport out of Kuwait. Bush has had all the support he could ever ask for, and six trillion times more support than he ever deserved (I’m rounding the number to the nearest trillion for ease of reading). I for one am well pleased that the noisome brown paste is finally clinging to his shoes and ankles, and Rumsfeld’s, and Condi’s pumps, and on down the line of them, the whole vile, varicose, villainous gang of them embrindled with poo at last. O schadenfreude, O schadenfreude, Du kannst mir sehr gefallen!

The ruination of Bush’s utterly spurious credibility has been a long, slow process, entirely unaided by such old fallbacks as the free press and Congress, two entities that (in the good old days when a bottle of pop cost a nickel and you could purchase cocaine over the counter to alleviate toothache) Americans used to rely upon to moderate the behavior of even the most madcap Executive troupe. For two years no action by the Bush junta, be it ever so perfidious, got the slightest rise out of any of the traditional watchdogs. They were sunk in some kind of narcoleptic trance. Trample the Bill of Rights! Destroy our common weal! Wage unprovoked wars on the wrong moustache! Throw firecrackers at our fission-capable enemies! Capering like maniacs across the national and world stages, not an eyelid could the Bush operatives cause to bat, watchdog-wise. But Bush, or properly the Buffalo Bob types operating the monofilaments attached to his limbs, have finally started to get results. Through constant diligence, Bush and his gaggle of suck-buttock familiars have managed to force the slumbering Chihuahuas to react, however slightly. And it looks like there’s more to come.” — Ben Tripp, —CounterPunch [via wood s lot]

Joshua Micah Marshall on Language in Politics:

“We hear again and again how all the bombings and mayhem are obscuring all the good things that are happening in Iraq. But this is like how the thunderstorm ‘obscures’ the underlying sunny day.

Watching Paul Bremer today on CNN I was struck by his use of language like ‘enemies of freedom’ and terrorists to describe the people we’re fighting in the country (these are from my recollection, the precise phrases may be different.) People who kill soldiers are not, at least not by definition, ‘terrorists’. They’re guerillas or insurgents. This isn’t a matter of cutting them slack, but one of precision. And precision is required to know what we’re doing, what we’re trying to do, and how we can get from clarifying what our goals are to finding effective means to pursue their implementation.

This is part of what Orwell was getting at in “Politics and the English Language” when he lamented that “political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.””

“This week in The New Yorker and here online, Virginia Heffernan profiles the comedian Tina Fey, who is the first woman with the title of head writer for Saturday Night Live. In this article from December, 2002, Malcolm Gladwell examines the creative process behind the show.” While I have never been a fan of SNL humor, I am a great fan of Gladwell and his observations on groupthink.

“A former Pentagon officer turned whistleblower says a group of hawks in the Bush Administration, including the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, is running a shadow foreign policy, contravening Washington’s official line.

‘What these people are doing now makes Iran-Contra [a Reagan administration national security scandal] look like amateur hour. . . it’s worse than Iran-Contra, worse than what happened in Vietnam,’ said Karen Kwiatkowski, a former air force lieutenant-colonel.

‘[President] George Bush isn’t in control . . . the country’s been hijacked,’ she said, describing how ‘key [governmental] areas of neoconservative concern were politically staffed’.” —Sydney Morning Herald

The essential point of this accusation is that foreign policy analysis is now routinely bypassing civil service and military professionals and routed instead through ideologically-chosen political appointees. This neatly fits with Seymour Hersh’s profoundly important examination of the breakdown in cooperation between the CIA and the executive branch around the uraniumgate lies in his recent article for the New Yorker, “The Stovepipe”, which I summarized here several weeks ago. Although one might question the evidence for Kwiatkowski’s assertion that Bush is not in control and that the foreign-policy machinery has been hijacked out from under him, that he is not willingly collaborating or at least acquiescing to this process, I do not doubt it. Readers of FmH know that I have felt since his dysadministration took power (and, let us not mince words, I do mean “took”) that he has largely been a puppet of his senior appointees. The evidence becomes clearer and clearer both on the basis of the ever-mounting indicators of his intellectual dullness, for those who needed convincing, and his track record in office. Discerning observers are fools to hide behind pat confidence that ‘it can’t happen here’; historians will cite numerous precedents for regimes with puppet rulers where the actual authority was vested covertly in their more ruthless and controlling ministers. A courageous press, and a united Democratic opposition, would focus heavily on this between now and the 2004 elections. Those cynical progressives who are fond of dismissing partisan politics with generalizations about how the two parties are no different (I know, I’ve largely been one of them… until the Bush people seized power) would be well-advised to pay more attention to the extraordinary nature of the palace coup these Republican ideologues have pulled off in a manner we would have never seen under President Gore.

“The photographs in this suite are the result of mean averaging every Playboy centerfold foldout for the four decades beginning Jan. 1960 through Dec. 1999. This tracks, en masse, the evolution of this form of portraiture.” —[via boing boing] These are non-lascivious, by the way. Only that of the ’60’s is the slightest bit suggestive, to my viewing, which may indicate something about the evolution of voluptuousness over the past few decades. Tanlines are increasingly in, it would also seem…

“The real lesson of the postwar mess is that while occupying and reconstructing Iraq was bound to be difficult, the fact that it may be turning into a quagmire is not a result of fate, but rather (as quagmires usually are) a result of poor planning and wishful thinking. Both have been in evidence to a troubling degree in American policy almost from the moment the decision was made to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s bestial dictatorship.” — David Rieff, New York Times Magazine. The ever-decorous New York Times reporter may be faulted for his use of “may” in the first sentence of this concluding paragraph, after the portrayal he just finished presenting…