Thomas Pynchon’s introduction to a forthcoming edition of Orwell’s 1984. “George Orwell’s final novel was seen as an anticommunist tract and many have claimed its grim vision of state control proved prophetic. But, argues Pynchon, Orwell – whose centenary is marked this year – had other targets in his sights and drew an unexpectedly optimistic conclusion.” Guardian UK

[props to mousemusings]

about this Honda advertisement, viewable if you have Flash6. “Yes, everything in the ad did happen as shown. There was no computer generation involved.” As this Slate commentary points out, what I’m really doing by blinking to this is helping Honda spread its message ‘virally’ far more efficiently than if it were just a television commercial. It sticks in my craw but, just this once, I’ll tell you this is worth viewing. I won’t make a habit of it.

creates a poem from the content found at a URL. Here’s what feeding it this page gave me:

Follow Me

brûlées and the

rock had entered the

memorabilia you feel alone, afraid and

civil Liberties to

Air Force Counterproliferation

Center. for the presidential committee

on leaving the

family members of proliferating idiosyncratic diagnostic categories The

handwriting nor the biggest drop in less than any president Bush

leagues: He became ill again after

they would

be able to broadband access at charming

and you

are Yahoo! News 8:50 years

in US history;

First president in the story but Syria

until

a great Iraq and in

it, is a profile

from being a Grand

Junction hospital. NY Times

1:17 PM LinktoComments Comment .............. Stalin

to press for granted. The Mississippi

River and netting

to resist the brain during this start

an antispam

law.

Software Bullet Is Sought to Kill Musical Piracy: “Some of the world’s biggest record companies, facing rampant online piracy, are quietly financing the development and testing of software programs that would sabotage the computers and Internet connections of people who download pirated music, according to industry executives.” NY Times

Kurzweil and Meyer: “We’re entering an age of acceleration. The models underlying society at

every level, which are largely based on a linear model of change, are

going to have to be redefined. Because of the explosive power of

exponential growth, the 21st century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of

progress at today’s rate of progress; organizations have to be able to

redefine themselves at a faster and faster pace.”

“(Concord, NH) The Old Man of the Mountain, the enduring symbol of New Hampshire is no more. Sometime between Friday evening and Saturday morning the stone profile that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors each year, collapsed. On Saturday, May 3 at approximately 7:30am, two Franconia Notch State Park employees noticed that the Old Man of the Mountain had collapsed. At this time it appears as though the forehead and the nose are missing.” NH Parks & Recreation

Grieving for the passing of the Old Man is widespread. Concord (NH) Monitor. Some point out, rightly, that we should take it as an object lesson in the mutability of the natural grandeur we too easily take for granted. The rock had been rotten and shored up with cables and netting to hold its familiar profile intact for a long time; while some are surprised it crumbled, it was an accident waiting to happen. There is talk about rebuilding it, which I think would be a profanity. Instead, go deep into the mountains and, if you must, find other ‘rock faces’ with whose visages you can commune as intently. They are out there…

In a related vein, does anyone else know and delight in the “Simulacra Corner” feature of Fortean Times? Readers regularly send in photos of natural features that resemble faces, beings, etc. Spirits surely move across the face of the wild…

And: The Folklorist’s Pareidolia Collection: “I have recently uploaded my collection of hundreds of pareidolic images (pareidolia / simulacra) for everyone to view. The data includes images, articles, bibliographic information and other articles and links that I have found relevant to the study of this phenomena. [ Pareidolia: Misperception of an ambiguous stimulus as something specific (e.g.- seeing Jesus in the burn marks of a tortilla, or the face of Satan in the World Trade Center smoke)].”

Related to pareidolia is the concept of apophenia:

Apophenia is the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena. The term was coined by K. Conrad in 1958 (Brugger).

Peter Brugger of the Department of Neurology, University Hospital, Zurich, gives examples of apophenia from August Strindberg’s Occult Diary, the playwright’s own account of his psychotic break:

He saw “two insignia of witches, the goat’s horn and the besom” in a rock and wondered “what demon it was who had put [them] … just there and in my way on this particular morning.” A building then looked like an oven and he thought of Dante’s Inferno.

He sees sticks on the ground and sees them as forming Greek letters which he interprets to be the abbreviation of a man’s name and feels he now knows that this man is the one who is persecuting him. He sees sticks on the bottom of a chest and is sure they form a pentagram.

He sees tiny hands in prayer when he looks at a walnut under a microscope and it “filled me with horror.”

His crumpled pillow looks “like a marble head in the style of Michaelangelo.” Strindberg comments that “these occurrences could not be regarded as accidental, for on some days the pillow presented the appearance of horrible monsters, of gothic gargoyles, of dragons, and one night … I was greeted by the Evil One himself….”

According to Brugger, “The propensity to see connections between seemingly unrelated objects or ideas most closely links psychosis to creativity … apophenia and creativity may even be seen as two sides of the same coin.” Some of the most creative people in the world, then, must be psychoanalysts and therapists who use projective tests like the Rorschach test or who see patterns of child abuse behind every emotional problem. Brugger notes that one analyst thought he had support for the penis envy theory because more females than males failed to return their pencils after a test. Another spent nine pages in a prestigious journal describing how sidewalk cracks are vaginas and feet are penises, and the old saw about not stepping on cracks is actually a warning to stay away from the female sex organ.

Brugger’s research indicates that high levels of dopamine affect the propensity to find meaning, patterns, and significance where there is none, and that this propensity is related to a tendency to believe in the paranormal. New Scientist

In statistics, apophenia is called a Type I error, seeing patterns where none, in fact, exist. It is highly probable that the apparent significance of many unusual experiences and phenomena are due to apophenia, e.g., EVP, numerology, the Bible code, anomalous cognition, ganzfeld “hits”, most forms of divination, the prophecies of Nostradamus, remote viewing, and a host of other paranormal and supernatural experiences and phenomena. SkepDic

And so to William Gibson:

“…(He) had treated paranoia as though it were something to be domesticated and trained. Like someone who’d learned how best to cope with chronic illness, he never allowed himself to think of his paranoia as an aspect of self. It was there, constantly and intimately, and he relied on it professionally, but he wouldn’t allow it to spread, become jungle. He cultivated it on its own special plot, and checked it daily for news it might bring: hunches, lateralisms, frank anomalies.

Is (this) a frank anomaly?

Only, she decides, if she thinks of herself as the center, the focal point of something she doesn’t, can’t understand. That had always been (his) first line of defense, within himself: to recognize that he was only a part of something larger. Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer.

But he was also fond of saying, at other times, that even paranoid schizophrenics have enemies.

The danger, she supposes, is a species of apophenia…”

— William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

Gibson is fond of the concept, as a Google search reveals.

Related:

Counselling and Help for People with Unusual Experiences, Dr. Martina Belz-Merk, Outpatient Clinic (Ambulanz) of the Psychological Institute at the University of Freiburg

A review: Hauntings and Poltergeists: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, James Houran & Rense Lange, (eds.), Macfarlane & Co, 2001, ISBN 0 7864 0984 3.

In this meaty tome, 19 writers – some accepting the existence of the paranormal, others denying it – approach the subject of hauntings and poltergeists from the points of view of physics, physiology, psychology, sociology, history and cultural studies. John Beloff in his Forword quotes from Gauld and Cornell’s 1979 work, Poltergeists, and the quotation deserves to be repeated here more fully:

“One cannot deny that, logically speaking, undetected trickery, undetected natural causes, undetected malobservation and undetected lying may lie behind all reports of poltergeist phenomena. But to assume without supporting evidence, and despite numerous considerations [..] to the contrary, that they do lie behind them, is to insulate one’s beliefs in this sphere from all possibility of modification from the cold contact of chastening facts. It is to adopt the paranoid stance of the flat-earther or the religious fanatic, who can ‘explain away’ all the awkward facts which threaten his system of delusions.”

Fortean Times

Bush’s self-proclaimed adherence to Christianity (during one of the presidential debates he said Jesus Christ was his favorite “philosopher”) and his constant reference to a new international structure bypassing the United Nations system and long-standing international treaties are worrying the top leadership of the Roman Catholic Church. Well-informed sources close to the Vatican report that Pope John Paul II is growing increasingly concerned about Bush’s ultimate intentions. The Pope has had experience with Bush’s death fetish. Bush ignored the Pope’s plea to spare the life of Karla Faye Tucker. To show that he was similarly ignorant of the world’s mainstream religions, Bush also rejected an appeal to spare Tucker from the World Council of Churches – an organization that represents over 350 of the world’s Protestant and Orthodox Churches. It did not matter that Bush’s own Methodist Church and his parents’ Episcopal Church are members of the World Council.

Bush’s blood lust, his repeated commitment to Christian beliefs, and his constant references to “evil doers,” in the eyes of many devout Catholic leaders, bear all the hallmarks of the one warned about in the Book of Revelations – the anti-Christ. People close to the Pope claim that amid these concerns, the Pontiff wishes he was younger and in better health to confront the possibility that Bush may represent the person prophesized in Revelations. John Paul II has always believed the world was on the precipice of the final confrontation between Good and Evil as foretold in the New Testament. Before he became Pope, Karol Cardinal Wojtyla said, “We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has gone through. I do not think that wide circles of the American society or wide circles of the Christian community realize this fully. We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, of the Gospel versus the anti-Gospel.” The Pope, who grew up facing the evils of Hitler and Stalin, knows evil when he sees it. — Wayne Madsen, CounterPunch [via walker]

“The Hartford Courant‘s recent move ordering a reporter to shut down his independent Weblog has stirred up a heated debate over how much control a media organization should have over its employees’ outside activities In a pair of point-counterpoint essays for CyberJournalist.net (springing in part from a discussion on Poynter’s Online-News e-mail list), blogger and online journalism columnist J.D. Lasica argues that The Courant’s decision was unfair, while University of Illinois journalism professor Eric Meyer defends The Courant’s actions.”

Pinned for five days by 1,000-lb. boulder, 48 hrs. after running out of water and determining he would die if he remained where he was, the 27-year-old hiker used a pocket knife to cut his arm off below the elbow, applied a tourniquet, rappelled 60 ft. to the bottom of the canyon, and was discovered while hiking out. He remained in serious condition at a Grand Junction hospital. NY Times One wonders whether the arm was irreparably injured already; whether he was able to feel pain by the time he did it; indeed, whether it was a rational decision or one made in inanition (and whether there is any point in asking these questions). [thanks, abby]

U.S. says Canada cares too much about liberties to successfully assist in the WoT®. canada.com network

Computing in the Real World, i.e. in the loo: visitors to portapotties at the Glastonbury (UK) festival this summer will be treated to broadband access and six-channel surround sound via a wireless waterproof keyboard and adjustable plasma screen, all courtesy of Microsoft. The duration of visits to the WC might be expected to grow, with a proportional expansion of the lengths of the lines for the potties. But never fear, there will be Internet terminals outside as well. PC Pro

“The administration is clearly right that a new arms control cannot rest entirely on the illusory safety of talks and treaties and U.N. resolutions“, says Bill Keller. “The autocrats most likely to be dangerous to us if they get nuclear weapons are the leaders least likely to care about staying in the good graces of the ”international community,” whatever that is. A new arms-control regime should distinguish among threats and offer a menu of options appropriate to the danger, from inspection to coercion. It would draw on military pressure and economic sanctions, along with the softer diplomacy that the counterproliferators scorn. It would not disdain international agreements but would demand smarter treaties, backed by intrusive inspections and rigorous enforcement.

And it would accept the solemn responsibility — a particularly American responsibility — to restore the special stigma of nuclear explosives. The destructive power of these weapons is unique and breathtaking, and almost impossible to confine to military targets. Chemical and biological weapons, horrible as they are, cannot match them as agents of catastrophe. A strategy that focuses exclusively on regimes and not on weapons themselves has several flaws, and the most obvious one is this: when regimes change, weapons remain.” NY Times Magazine. Adorned with three pictures of mushroom clouds from U.S. above-ground nuclear tests (before they were banned) of an obscene beauty that provides a visceral analogue of the seductive appeal these unholy armaments offer.

“This, then, is the promise — and the hype — of nutritional genomics, the second wave of personalized medicine to come rolling out of the Human Genome Project (after pharmacogenomics, or designer drugs). The premise is simple: diet is a big factor in chronic disease, responsible, some say, for a third of most types of cancer. Dietary chemicals change the expression of one’s genes and even the genome itself. And — here’s the key — the influence of diet on health depends on an individual’s genetic makeup.” NY Times

Two researchers, Jerrold M. Post and Amatzia Baram, concluded in a psychological profile of Mr. Hussein that he was more accurately described as a malignant narcissist, a label that has also been applied to Stalin and Hitler. Dr. Post, a psychiatrist at George Washington University, and Dr. Baram, an expert on Iraq at the University of Haifa in Israel, wrote the profile for the United States Air Force Counterproliferation Center. Dr. Post was also the founding director of the Central Intelligence Agency’s political profiling program.

Malignant narcissism, as defined by psychiatrists, is a severe form of narcissistic personality disorder. Like classic narcissists, malignant narcissists are grandiose, self-centered, oversensitive to criticism and unable to feel empathy for others. They cover over deep insecurities with an inflated self-image.

But malignant narcissists also tend to paranoia and aggression, and share some features of the antisocial personality, including the absence of moral or ethical judgment, said Dr. Otto Kernberg, a psychiatry professor at Cornell University and an expert on personality disorders.

Far from being psychotic, malignant narcissists are adept at charming and manipulating those around them. Political leaders with this personality, Dr. Kernberg said, are able to take control “because their inordinate narcissism is expressed in grandiosity, a confidence in themselves and the assurance that they know what the world needs.” NY Times

Pinned for five days by 1,000-lb. boulder, 48 hrs. after running out of water and determining he would die if he remained where he was, the 27-year-old hiker used a pocket knife to cut his arm off below the elbow, applied a tourniquet, rappelled 60 ft. to the bottom of the canyon, and was discovered while hiking out. He remained in serious condition at a Grand Junction hospital. NY Times One wonders whether the arm was irreparably injured already; whether he was able to feel pain by the time he did it; indeed, whether it was a rational decision or one made in inanition (and whether there is any point in asking these questions). [thanks, abby]

Nat Hentoff can scarcely conceal his enthusiasm that Conservatives Rise for the Bill of Rights! “A significant development in the movement to resist the Ashcroft-Bush dismembering of the Bill of Rights is the growing coalition between conservative groups and such organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union and People for the American Way.

This has been going on—with only marginal attention from the media—since the ACLU organized a broad-based, though unsuccessful, fight to defeat the first USA Patriot Act toward the end of 2001. And it was the conservative Republican libertarian, Dick Armey, then majority leader in the House, who stripped the Orwellian “Operation Tips” out of the Department of Homeland Security bill.” Village Voice

Children’s Defense Fund: “Number of black children in extreme poverty hits record high; tax cuts for the rich will erode safety nets for children even further.” Read the .pdf of the full report here.

“During this crisis patriotism as practiced in the United States reached alarming levels of intolerance and violence. The right of the other to dissent was unceremoniously thrown aside. If we take what happened to the Dixie Chicks as an example, one is hard-pressed to justify or even comprehend the incident. One of the ladies said she was ashamed of Bush being from her home state of Texas. She said it while performing on a stage in London. Had the Chicks been living under Saddam, we know a priori what would have happened. But knowing they lived in the United States one thought that the debate would have maintained a semblance of civility.

Instead, they were attacked, taken off radio stations, and callers to the same stations spewed so much venom that it inevitably culminated in on-the-air death threats. Obviously, democracy is skin deep. I thought it was just foreigners like me who received death threats and viruses through their emails. I was wrong. This raises another issue: Could the Homeland security people tell the world why such people were not apprehended? Those who threaten to kill someone for reasons of ideology or a point of view are terrorists. No argument there. In this time of high security alert, it is amazing that such people get away with it. In all honesty, it is not very different from any petty dictatorship where the party clique and those close to power can do what they like when the rest are robbed of their basic rights.” — Mohammed al-Rasheed, Arab News (Saudi Arabia)

Unicast introduces screen-filling online ad format designed to open between same-site page views. Ad Age

Play it online for endless hours of fun.

Terrible name, intriguing idea — ride your bicycle on the water with an ‘inflatable bicycle boat’ that fits in a backpack, weighs 25 lbs., and installs in 10-15 minutes, allowing you to clock 6 mph in the water. It basiclly consists of two inflatable pontoons and a propeller-rudder assembly operated by the bicycle’s steering and pedals. The floats inflate with pedal power.

It is proposed by a British psychiatrist in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (Maltby J, Houran J, McCutcheon LE.: A clinical interpretation of attitudes and behaviors associated with celebrity worship. J Nerv Ment Dis. 2003 Jan;191(1):25-9) that excessive worship of celebrities be afforded disease status in its own right.AlterNet Unsurprisingly, he attributes this trend to the dominance of media culture and the breakdown of family structure in modern society. I would just point out, hater of proliferating idiosyncratic diagnostic categories that I am, that there are a number of existing psychiatric diagnoses of which this would more properly be considered a subset — in cases where it deserves being called psychopathology rather than a societal problem at all.

Reactor experts around the country hope that there is something unique about Reactor No. 1 at the South Texas Project here. If not, the little crust of white powder that technicians found at the bottom of the reactor vessel, a discovery that has brought operations here to a halt for the indefinite future, could be the beginning of a broad problem for the nuclear power industry. NY Times

Not to mention anyone living in the vicinity of one of these plants.

Flag-O-Rama!:

Before you send me hate mail: I am proud of my country and the freedoms I enjoy. However, ever since the terrorist acts of 9/11, I’m seeing the American Flag being marketed to consumers in every possible way, on every possible item. Bumper stickers, decals, commemorative plates, t-shirts, car antennas, screensavers, e-mails, billboards, grocery bags, toys…the list is endless, and they bear the flag for no other reason than to make money and prey on our patriotic spirit. The Marketing Scum know that consumers are quick to embrace trends, especially if it makes them feel better about themselves, and so it’s no wonder that the flag is being slapped on everything imaginable. (People seem to think that waving a flag makes them better Americans. It doesn’t. Patriotism is more a matter of community than a matter of how many and how high we wave our flags.) So before you send me hate mail for this page, consider sending hate mail instead to those companies who exploit the U.S. Flag to fatten their bank accounts. This site is a satire of this kind of exploitation, and I hope you can appreciate the humor. If not, then there are plenty of other sites out there to look at!

Chad Barlow, in his impassioned support of war [Some War Is Necessary, February 14], repeats the myth that peace activists “SPAT ON our soldiers returning from Vietnam.” It’s a great story, but like many right-wing myths (e.g., the story of feminists burning bras), it is simply not true.

Jerry Lembcke, an associate professor of sociology at Holy Cross College, did an exhaustive search in the process of writing his 1998 book, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam. He found not a single case of a returning Vietnam veteran spat upon by antiwar activists. The relation between Vietnam veterans and the peace movement was generally good, since the antiwar people saw the mostly working class vets as just as much victims of the war machine as the Vietnamese peasants. We should remember that in that war, as many as 550,000 GIs went AWOL or deserted. A Harris Poll in 1971 showed that only 1% of the veterans encountered hostile reactions when they came home, and they did not think the antiwar movement was hostile to them.

The Voice News,

Winsted CT [via Bifurcated Rivets]

“Iranian Sina Motallebi has been held by the authorities on, so far, unspecified charges and now fellow web users are banding together to press for his release.” BBC. Here’s the petition.

“In 1952, a Roundup grocery store closed their doors because of a death in the family and was never opened until a few months ago… Over 50 years have passed! Everything was left, including all the memorabilia you would find in a 50s store… This will be the most interesting collectable auction you may ever attend…” [via boing boing] One of the amazing things about this is how the store ever ended up sealed for so long. Could family members with a long view have figured that they would make a mint on artifactual value one day? Could this start an investment trend if the auction is a success?

Dipping snuff and blowing bubbles in business school: “Of this everyone was certain: George W. Bush would never end up on the East Coast. He was going back to Texas.” Part of a multi-article profile from the Washington Post drawing on the recollections of, among others, his B-school girlfriend.

“France’s leading philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, says that American journalist Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan last year was killed because he knew too much.

In an interview with the BBC, Mr Levy said Mr Pearl had uncovered dangerous secrets about the involvement of Pakistan’s intelligence service with Islamic extremists.”

How does he know? ” Mr Levy, who recently returned from investigating the murder in Pakistan, was French President Jacques Chirac’s special envoy to Afghanistan.” BBC According to the article, Pearl’s captors realized that he recognized how poorly controlled Pakistan’s nuclear armaments were as well.

From Rafe Colburn: “I can say with certainty that I will not vote for John Kerry for the Democratic Presidential nomination because of his pathetic, anti-intellectual hatchet job on Howard Dean. He can feel free to argue with Howard Dean, but to have his flack say that Dean is unfit to serve as Commander in Chief for stating the obvious fact that our position of world primacy is not absolute and eternal is cheap, stupid, and insulting to anyone with half a brain. I realize this is politics we’re talking about here, but in my book, playing for the moron sentiment is a guaranteed vote loser.” rc3

‘To reporters familiar with other documents attributed to Saddam, neither the handwriting nor the signature appeared similar, but Al-Quds Al-Arabi said “sources close to Saddam” confirmed both were genuine.’

“Rise up against the occupier and do not trust those who talk about Sunnis or Shiites,” said the letter dated Monday — Saddam’s 66th birthday. “The only issue for your great Iraq now is occupation.

“There is no priority but to drive the infidel, criminal and cowardly occupier out. No hand has extended to him but those of the traitors and stooges.” NY Times

Chefs no doubt commit many sins, some even in the kitchen. Yet when I spoke recently to Jehangir Mehta, the pastry chef at Aix on the Upper West Side, I was hard pressed to square his easygoing modest manner with the man whose work has been vilified as sadistic and just plain weird.

His crime? Creating challenging desserts. Against the usual multitude of molten chocolate cakes, crème brûlées and apple tarts, Mr. Mehta travels into parts unknown, offering daring couplings that, if nothing else, unleash the Don Rickles fantasies that lurk inside every critic.

One dessert in particular, licorice panna cotta, inspired particular ridicule. “Somebody described it as tasting like tar, and you need to brush your teeth right away,” Mr. Mehta said. “Others have said it tastes like tobacco. NY Times

Nothing Could Have Saved Shuttle. NY Times

“Hong Kong fficials said here tonight that a dozen patients who had seemed to recover from SARS became ill again after leaving the hospital.” NY Times One of the implications is that patients may still be harboring the virus and therefore contagious after they seem to have recorvered and are returned to the community; there is no way of knowing without a diagnostic test for the viral cause. It is widely considered that public health measures such as screening of travellers and quarantine precautions are bringing the outbreak to a halt, but we might be seeing the calm before the storm.

“Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, told Congress today that the economy was poised to grow without further large tax cuts, and that budget deficits resulting from lower taxes without offsetting reductions in spending could be damaging to the economy. Opponents of the large cut favored by President Bush took Mr. Greenspan’s testimony as support for their position.” NY Times

“Ten days before Timothy J. McVeigh was executed for the Oklahoma City bombing, lawyers for F.B.I. laboratory employees sent an urgent letter to the attention of Attorney General John Ashcroft, saying a crucial prosecution witness might have given false testimony about the security of forensic evidence.

The accusations, which involved Steven Burmeister, now the F.B.I. laboratory’s chief of scientific analysis, were never turned over to Mr. McVeigh, though they surfaced as a judge was weighing whether to delay his execution because the government withheld evidence.” NY Times

A Yipster Museum in the Works? “Though it is not the original Yippie outpost in New York — that was on Union Square, where in the Vietnam era Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and others combined outrageous humor, theater and political protest — Mr. Beal’s building has a history. Yipster Times was published on the third floor. Aron Kay, known as Pieman for his preferred manner of greeting political figures, used to live in the basement.” NY Times That’s Saint Abbie, Saint Jerry and Saint Aron to you…

Toll at 12: “I continue to kill people,” he added. “I want to reach the number 20. Then I will feel good that I have completed my duty. Twenty will feel good. But if I kill more it will be even better.” NY Times

Happy May Day.

“The White House is battling to keep a report on the terror attacks secret. Does the 2004 election have anything to do with it?” — Ishkoff & Hosenball, Newsweek

. “Duh?” — FmH.

William Rivers Pitt: “A writer named Kelly Kramer recently compiled a ‘resume’ for George W. Bush. In it, she listed his central accomplishments. Among them are:

• Shattered record for biggest annual deficit in history;
• Set economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in any 12 month period;
• Set all-time record for biggest drop in the history of the stock market;
• First year in office set the all-time record for most days on vacation by any president in US history;
• After taking the entire month of August off for vacation, presided over the worst security failure in US history;
• In his first two years in office over 2 million Americans lost their jobs;
• Cut unemployment benefits for more out of work Americans than any president in US history;
• Appointed more convicted criminals to administration positions than any president in US history;
• Signed more laws and executive orders amending the Constitution than any president in US history;
• Presided over the biggest energy crises in US history and refused to intervene when corruption was revealed;
• Cut healthcare benefits for war veterans;
• Set the all-time record for most people worldwide to simultaneously take to the streets to protest a sitting American President, shattering the record for protest against any person in the history of mankind;
• Dissolved more international treaties than any president in US history;
• First president in US history to have all 50 states of the Union simultaneously go bankrupt;
• Presided over the biggest corporate stock market fraud of any market in any country in the history of the world;
• First president in US history to order a US attack and military occupation of a sovereign nation;
• Created the largest government department bureaucracy in the history of the United States;
• Set the all-time record for biggest annual budget spending increases, more than any president in US history;
• First president in US history to have the United Nations remove the US from the human rights commission;
• First president in US history to have the United Nations remove the US from the elections monitoring board;
• All-time US (and world) record holder for most corporate campaign donations;
• Biggest life-time campaign contributor presided over one of the largest corporate bankruptcy frauds in world history (Kenneth Lay, former CEO of Enron Corporation);
• Spent more money on polls and focus groups than any president in US history;
• First president to run and hide when the US came under attack (and then lied saying the enemy had the code to Air Force 1);
• Took the biggest world sympathy for the US after 911, and in less than a year made the US the most resented country in the world (possibly the biggest diplomatic failure in US and world history);
• With a policy of ‘disengagement’ created the most hostile Israeli-Palestine relations in at least 30 years;
• Fist US president in history to have a majority of the people of Europe (71%) view his presidency as the biggest threat to world peace and stability;
• First US president in history to have the people of South Korea more threatened by the US than their immediate neighbor, North Korea;
• Changed US policy to allow convicted criminals to be awarded government contracts;
• Set all-time record for number of administration appointees who violated US law by not selling huge investments in corporations bidding for government contracts;
• Failed to fulfill his pledge to get Osama Bin Laden ‘dead or alive’;
• Failed to capture the anthrax killer who tried to murder the leaders of our country at the United States Capitol building. After 18 months he has no leads and zero suspects;
• In the 18 months following the 911 attacks he successfully prevented any public investigation into the biggest security failure in the history of the United States;
• Removed more freedoms and civil liberties for Americans than any other president in US history;
• Entered office with the strongest economy in US history and in less than two years turned every single economic category straight down.

(…)

With all of this happening, and with no apparent way to reverse or blunt this course, wouldn’t it just be easier to give up?… The issue here is a simple matter of volume, and of hope. The list above is abridged, and grows exponentially longer by the hour. People of good conscience cannot surrender the struggle against this rising tide with all that is at stake.” truthout

Three weeks on, many in Baghdad feel angry, hopeless

With no law and no government, the people of Baghdad feel alone, afraid and angry.

Three weeks after Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, many parts of the capital still have no water or electricity, there are floods of sewage and only a trickle of convoys have made it through with urgently needed food and medical supplies.

American civilian administrator for Iraq Jay Garner told reporters on Wednesday that the situation was improving every day and that power had been restored to about half of the city. Reuters

“Have we become a country that wears its hypocrisy openly and proudly?” — Robert Steinback, Miami Herald

“So, to figure out why our adversaries are sometimes allies, here is a good rule of thumb. They are members of the axis of evil when they endanger our geopolitical interests. But not when they endanger women’s lives.” — Marie Cocco, Newsday [via walker]

“Congress may vote on the Climate Stewardship Act as early as mid-May when it begins debating energy policy. Introduced by Senate leaders John McCain (AZ) and Joseph Lieberman (CT), this historic bill is one of the most important chances we have to avert dangerous global warming. No environmental goal is more important for the 21st century. Become a Citizen Co-Sponsor.”

“The record industry started another campaign yesterday aimed at making life more uncomfortable for online music-swapping fans.

Thousands of people trading copyrighted music online yesterday saw a message appear unbidden on their computer screens: ‘When you break the law, you risk legal penalties. There is a simple way to avoid that risk: don’t steal music.’

The messages, which seek to turn a chat feature in popular file-trading software to the industry’s benefit, reflect the latest effort among record executives to limit digital copying of their products.

…

The association plans to send at least a million warnings a week to people offering popular songs for others to copy. Operated by a company that industry officials declined to identify, the automated system uses a feature in both KaZaA and Grokster, free software commonly used to share music files, that was designed to let users communicate with one another.” NY Times

“It’s not every day people bet their jobs on the effectiveness of a law–let alone an antispam law. Many U.S. states have already enacted such e-mail laws, and spam keeps flooding in.

But that’s exactly what Larry Lessig, a Stanford University law professor and one of the most prominent liberal voices online, has done. A few months ago, Lessig made an unusual wager: If Congress enacts an antispam law that offers bounties for the reporting of spammers, and the law fails to “substantially reduce the level of spam,” he will resign from his dream job at a top law school.

Lessig is either extremely reckless or incredibly confident. He has asked me to be the judge of whether such a law proves effective in reducing the deluge of unsolicited e-mail that’s clogging our in-boxes, snarling mail servers and driving Internet service providers to distraction. I’ve accepted.” — Declan McCullagh, CNET

If you are into wi-fi, this credit-card size wi-fi detector from iDetect Technology will detect where you have access without turning on your laptop. It should be available this month at $20-25 US.

And: Can you believe it? McDonald’s is starting to offer wireless access at its sites, beginning now in midtown Manhattan but soon to spread nationally.

From The Null Device:

“Anti-US T-shirts seem to be all the rage in Canada, with Canadians eschewing peace signs for angrier statements, of the sort that might get one hospitalised south of the border.

Anti-war slogans seemed to be getting increasingly anti-American, with people going to everything from protests to the gym to trendy parties wearing tops that say Bush is a Terrorist or Twin Terrors above pictures of Bush and Osama Bin Laden.

…You know, one could probably make a killing selling shoes with American flag-patterned soles in the Middle East (where stepping on something is considered the most grievious insult).”

Pick up your very own “American Psycho” teeshirt here.

playing in the Bush leagues:

“He cajoles. He coerces. And when all else fails, he punishes.

President Bush came to the White House promising to change the tone of politics in Washington. In one respect, he has.

Scholars and historians say the Bush administration has set a new presidential standard when it comes to playing hardball politics with Congress.” — Michael Collins, Scripps Howard News Service

If you are interested in in-depth coverage of SARS and related public health, epidemiological and emerging-disease news, look at Tim Bishop’s SARS Watch weblog.

“Syria Detains, Frees 2 British Commandos who had entered the country from Iraq, detaining them for five days before releasing them, a British news agency reported Monday.” Guardian/UK

Day-on, day-off diet boosts health: ” Eating double portions one day and nothing the next delivers the same health benefits to mice as seen in animals whose lifespan has been extended by restricting their calorie intake.

No one is suggesting people adopt such a diet. But the study adds to the evidence that caloric restriction works by activating some kind of protective mechanism, rather than simply being a result of eating less and thus suffering less damage as food is metabolised. If this is the case, there may be ways to switch on the protective mechanism without going on a crazy diet.” New Scientist

Making Money. NY Times

Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day, today 12:00-8:00.

The venerable, charismatic, inspiring weblog turned four yesterday. Best wishes for the next four, Rebecca!

The dangers of self-abuse: An illustration from The Sexual System and Its Derangements, a popular medical book published in Buffalo in 1875. (‘Masturbators’ are on the left, ‘abstainers’ on the right.)

From Sin to Symbol

Thomas W. Laqueur is a scholarly gumshoe with a specialty in sex. His last book, Making Sex: Body and Gender From the Greeks to Freud (1990), was a highly original investigation of a tantalizing mystery he had stumbled on in the archives: Why did female orgasm, long considered essential to conception, all but disappear from the historical record during the Enlightenment?

Now, in Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation, Mr. Laqueur, a professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley, tackles another enigma from the annals of sexual history: Why did masturbation, an activity regarded with benign indifference for millennia, provoke sweeping moral and medical panic around 1700?

Mr. Laqueur’s preoccupations are hardly the kind destined to endear him to the cultural right. In particular, his latest tome— which features a floating, naked woman wearing an expression of glazed-eyed ecstasy on its cover and a couple dozen graphic illustrations inside — seems designed to inflame critics convinced that the academy is populated by tenured radicals bent on selling students a morally suspect and intellectually trivial bill of goods. NY Times

UCLA historian Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs and Steel) asks, “Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions? What I’m going to suggest is a road map of factors in failures of group decision making. I’ll divide the answers into a sequence of four somewhat fuzzily delineated categories…” The Edge

Researchers focus minds on mechanics of meditation: “A new study, accepted for publication soon in Psychosomatic Medicine, is a significant first step in understanding what goes on in the brain during meditation. The study was led by Richard Davidson, director of the laboratory for affective neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin, and Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.” Sunspot

And: Religion versus science might be all in the mind: “For years now, one small branch of science has been chipping away at the foundations of religious belief by proposing that “otherworldly” experiences are nothing more than the inner workings of the human brain. Many neuroscientists claim they can locate and explain brain functions that produce everything from religious visions to sensations of bliss, timelessness or union with a higher power.

These claims have been strengthened by the work of the Canadian neuropsychologist Dr Michael Persinger. By stimulating the cerebral region presumed to control notions of self, Persinger has been able to induce in hundreds of subjects a “sensed presence” only the subjects themselves are aware of. This presence, Persinger suggests, may be described as Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Muhammad or the Sky Spirit – depending on the name the subject’s culture has trained him or her to use.” Sydney Morning Herald

Happy 10th birthday, Mosaic. Wired

Lucky discovery uncovers cancer-proof mouse: “The mouse kills implanted cancers and confers the ability to its offspring – human therapies could benefit one day.” New Scientist

until we say we are. Yahoo! News

A NY Times review of the new ‘B’ movie Identity

The second-handness of the situation, and of the characters who inhabit it, is explained — or justified, if you prefer — by an enormous, gold-plated pretzel of a plot twist that I will not divulge, lest my own head end up in someone’s clothes dryer. I should note, however, that the television commercial in which Mr. Cusack is shown in conversation with Alfred Molina comes very close to spoiling the surprise, which is odd since without the surprise the movie would have no reason to exist.

Whether it has much of a reason to exist with the surprise is another question. Once it is clear you are no longer watching the movie you thought you were watching, there doesn’t seem to be much point in going back to the movie that you thought you were watching, which is nonetheless what happens. Still with me? When the revelation comes — the moment that explains why all these panicky people are running around in the rain miles from anywhere — it does administer a pleasurable jolt. You think: “Wow. Cool.”

But the impression of cleverness, and the filmmaking dexterity that created it, fades pretty quickly, and you are left thinking: “What? Wait a minute.”

In similar fashion, once it is clear you are no longer reading the review you thought you were reading, there doesn’t seem to be much point in continuing. Nevertheless the reviewer goes on and on writing, belaboring his point. We get it. It is not even that extraordinary for Hollywood to twist a plot so badly you feel manipulated and cheated, and for the movie to go on and on even after it has exhausted its one trick. Off the top of my head, there was M. Night Shyamalan’s critically acclaimed (largely because he fooled everybody so?) Sixth Sense several years ago, which probably did it much better than this.

The Language Police reviewed: “Diane Ravitch provides an impassioned examination of how right-wing and left-wing pressure groups have succeeded in sanitizing textbooks and tests.” NY Times The book arose from the author’s examination of the content guidelines of the major educational publishing companies as part of a Presidential committee on standardized testing during the Clinton Administration. She was amazed, incredulous, disheartened by the number of topics and terms that were off-limits in educational content (see examples in the article). It all comes down to the educational mega-corporations protecting their profitability. Their investment in developing a given textbook will be down the tubes if one of the larger states such as Florida or California fails to buy it because it offends somebody’s notion of political correctness. Likewise, a standardized test susceptible to challenge and possible invalidation because its content is too disturbing or noninclusive would not get bought.

Bush had better make his rumored proclamation that the hostilities in Iraq are ‘officially’ over soon, before U.S. forces do any more killing like this Yahoo! News or this Christian Science Monitor.

And: Iraqis target Gen. Franks for war crimes trial: “Iraqi civilians are preparing a complaint to present in court in Belgium accusing allied commander Gen. Tommy Franks and other U.S. military officials of war crimes in Iraq, according to the attorney representing the plaintiffs.” Washington Times

One Fearsome Creature: “Dragon images have been found on the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, on scrolls from China, in Egyptian hieroglyphs and Ethiopian sketches, on the prows of Viking ships, in bas relief on Aztec temples, on cliffs above the Mississippi River and even on bones carved by Inuits in climates where no reptile could live.

Now scholars drawing on primitive art, fossilized bones and ancient legends are struggling to explain how cultures that had no contact with one another constructed mythical creatures so remarkably similar. And why did dragons persist so long?” NY Times A fascinating question; an unsatisfying article.

What’s so bad about Kim’s latest offer?: “It would be worth Bush’s while to consider the possibility that Kim’s desire for a non-aggression pact is sincere and his desire for nuclear weapons, short of such a pact, might be rational. Bush, after all, listed North Korea, along with Iraq and Iran, as a member of the ‘axis of evil’. He pointedly refuses to exclude military force as a possible way to deal with North Korea’s threat. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a few months ago, sent F-117s to the U.S. base in South Korea and B-1s to Guam as an explicit counterthreat.” — Fred Kaplan, Slate.

Nicholas Kristof makes a similar argument in his op-ed piece in today’s New York Times. Both point out that Kim may indeed be blackmailing the U.S, but that he may have us over a barrel. Even if armed with 1950’s-vintage Soviet weaponry, taking on the North Korean army on the ground would be formidable. Pushing them to use their nuclear ace-in-the-hole would be, of course, devastating, and easy to do. Destroying North Korea’s nuclear capabilities with our ordnance would shower fallout all over the peninsula.

“Writing novels is pretty solitary, and blogging is very social…” “I think it’s in its last couple of weeks. I do know from doing it that it’s not something I can do when I’m actually working. Somehow the ecology of writing novels wouldn’t be able to exist if I’m in daily contact. The watched pot never boils.” Wired.

Pattern Recognition was a brilliant distillation of the zeitgeist. I actually didn’t find the weblog that compelling.. So if it’s a shooting match between that and his next novel, you know where I stand.

“There has been a lot of talk in Washington about refashioning Iraq into a prosperous, tolerant democracy that can serve as a model for the Middle East. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been much plain speaking about how much that is going to cost. That’s because the honest answer isn’t something American taxpayers want to hear. The hard numbers just don’t support the White House’s rosy claim that once this year’s American aid package of $2.5 billion is paid out, Iraq’s oil sales will pay all the bills.” NY Times editorial

America was at the centre of a new human rights row last night after four alleged Iraqi thieves were paraded naked in a Baghdad park by US troops.

The degraded prisoners had the words “Ali Baba, Haram” – “Thief, Unclean” – scrawled in Arabic on their chests.

The humiliating spectacle of young men running to hide their shame was captured by a photographer for Norway’s Dagbladet newspaper, which quoted a US officer as saying the deterrent was effective.

Last night Amnesty International in London criticised the inhumane treatment and promised to raise the matter urgently with the United Nations next week. Mirror/UK

George W. Bush, properly understood, represents the third and most powerful wave in the right’s long-running assault on the governing order created by twentieth-century liberalism. The first wave was Ronald Reagan, whose election in 1980 allowed movement conservatives finally to attain governing power … Reagan unfurled many bold ideological banners for right-wing reform and established the political viability of enacting regressive tax cuts, but he accomplished very little reordering of government, much less shrinking of it. The second wave was Newt Gingrich, whose capture of the House majority in 1994 gave Republicans control of Congress for the first time in two generations. Despite some landmark victories like welfare reform, Gingrich flamed out quickly, a zealous revolutionary ineffective as legislative leader.

George Bush II may be as shallow as he appears, but his presidency represents a far more formidable challenge than either Reagan or Gingrich. His potential does not emanate from an amiable personality (Al Gore, remember, outpolled him in 2000) or even the sky-high ratings generated by 9/11 and war. Bush’s governing strength is anchored in the long, hard-driving movement of the right that now owns all three branches of the federal government. Its unified ranks allow him to govern aggressively, despite slender GOP majorities in the House and Senate and the public’s general indifference to the right’s domestic program.

The movement’s grand ambition–one can no longer say grandiose–is to roll back the twentieth century, quite literally. That is, defenestrate the federal government and reduce its scale and powers to a level well below what it was before the New Deal’s centralization… — William Greider, The Nation

Greider goes on to analyze the appeal and the danger of this wacky, simplistic but insidious grand agenda, the failure of the left-liberal camp to take it seriously or mount a reasonable response, and what might be done in answer.

Related: A War on Enlightenment:

“After more than a century of expansion of the concept that everybody deserves human rights, we now seem to be — temporarily, at least — slipping backwards.” — Adam Hochschild, AlterNet

“…The global arms race is over, with the United States the undisputed heavyweight champion. Other nations are not even trying to match American armed force, because they are so far behind they have no chance of catching up.The great-powers arms race, in progress for centuries, has ended with the rest of the world conceding triumph to the United States.

Now only a nuclear state, like, perhaps, North Korea, has any military leverage against the winner.

Paradoxically, the runaway American victory in the conventional arms race might inspire a new round of proliferation of atomic weapons. With no hope of matching the United States plane for plane, more countries may seek atomic weapons to gain deterrence.” — Gregg Easterbrook, senior editor of The New Republic and a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, NY Times

Seek Out the Old Geezers:

The industry line has been that file-sharing caused these declines. Others point to the fact that boomers may have finally bought, on CD, copies of all the music they had already purchased on vinyl. And Andreas Schmidt, of the music giant Bertlesmann, said the unsayable: “We didn’t put that much good stuff out.”

Nobody, let’s remember, twisted the arms of the record and movie industries into focusing their product and their marketing muscle almost single-mindedly (if that’s not being too generous) on people in their teens and early 20’s.

They seemed like a great market: easily persuaded, with the free time and the free-floating enthusiasm to see films repeatedly and line up at midnight for sneak releases of “hot” new recordings.

As events have proved, there is one crucial problem with this demographic cohort: it has much more time than money. And, if these music lovers are enrolled at a university, they probably also have access to a superfast Internet connection, which makes the usually cumbersome process of downloading music files as easy as checking your e-mail.

Many people over the age of 25 have been moaning for years, correctly, that nobody is putting out records for them. These people have families, church and community meetings to attend, golf to play and cooking to do. They have careers and disposable incomes. All this makes them far more likely to opt for the convenience of stopping by the record store than trying to figure out how to work Kazaa or Gnutella or any of the other strangely named avenues of Internet commerce avoidance. — Harry Shearer, NY Times

Happy birthday, Mark.

Forest Service Blocks E-Mail Comments: “In a move criticized by both environmentalists and business groups, the U.S. Forest Service is rejecting public comments on proposed rule changes when they come from certain e-mail servers or on preprinted post cards.” ABC News I’m of two minds about this. While one-click opinionation certainly indicates some interest or passion, taking the trouble to formulate and articulate your own position leads to a more meaningful public discourse. Of course, such filtering would have to be applied fairly…

Paul Hoffman with a useful terminological suggestion: “Now that even the Bush administration agree that this is an occupation, not a liberation, we need to change our vocabulary a bit. From here on out, blogging about the US and British occupation of Iraq is occublogging, not warblogging. It is likely that occublogging will last much, much longer that warblogging did…” Lookit

“From phrenology to polygraphs, criminal investigators have long been obsessed

with the idea of ‘reading’ an individual’s expression or character. Paul Ekman,

described by Oliver Sacks as the most astute analyst of emotions since Darwin,

tracks the history of uncovering truth in gestures, and suggests some methods

of his own.” Guardian-Observer

The Empire Slinks Back: “Why Americans don’t really have what it takes to rule the world.” — Niall Ferguson, professor of financial history at the Stern School of Business, New York University, senior research fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and author of Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, NY Times Magazine Ferguson ends:

So long as the American empire dare not speak its own name — so long as it continues this tradition of organized hypocrisy — today’s ambitious young men and women will take one look at the prospects for postwar Iraq and say with one voice, ”Don’t even go there.”

Americans need to go there. If the best and brightest insist on staying home, today’s unspoken imperial project may end — unspeakably — tomorrow.

For him, this appears to be an exhortation that we accept our manifest destiny and go forward boldly to build the American empire. Could he still be reeling from the collapse of enlightened, superior, civilized and civilizing British empire?

What’s Wrong With It?

Last month, a quartet of academics published ”What’s Wrong With the Rorschach?” — attacking a test administered to more than a million people worldwide each year. According to recent surveys by the American Psychological Association, 82 percent of its members ”occasionally” and 43 percent ”frequently” use the test, in which subjects speculate about five colored and five black-and-white inkblots. Test-givers in turn interpret the answers to diagnose mental illness, predict violent behavior and reveal suppressed trauma. Their conclusions are applied to everything from child-custody disputes to parole reviews. According to James M. Wood, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at El Paso and one author of the book, tarot cards would work almost as well.

Wood and his colleagues level basic criticisms against the inkblot test’s foundations. They say it lacks accurate norms to serve as benchmarks for comparing healthy and sick patients. Reliability is also at issue, because many scores are determined by test-givers’ subjective interpretations. And last, they contend that virtually none of the scores are scientifically valid, because they neither measure what they claim nor can be consistently correlated with other tests or diagnoses. The Rorschachers simply harbor a ”romantic” devotion to the test’s efficacy, Wood says, one based on ”an uncritical, even gullible, acceptance of ridiculous claims that the Rorschach is like a medical test, a sort of brain scan.” NY Times Magazine

As a psychiatrist, I am sometimes considered old-fashioned for my appreciation for, and frequent recourse to, “projective tests” such as the Rorschach which, by asking the patient to interpret ambiguous stimuli, bypass the usual censorship they apply when explicitly questioned about their mental contents to reveal unconscious content. Since I usually deal with severe, often psychotically, distressed patients, one might question whether one need use a test to get at subtle underlying unconscious processes at all when the dramatic findings are right out front. And one might wonder if my appreciation for the Rorschach is biased by the fact that psychotic thought disorder shows the most consistent relationship with Rorschach findings. The answers — yes and no, respectively. First, psychosis is not a yes/no question but a matter of degree and quality of “reality-testing” . It has urgent diagnostic and treatment implications but may be a subtle finding, not necessarily evident. Secondly, even in dramatic psychosis, the data derived from testing not about the presence or absence of a psychotic thought disturbance but about underlying character structure, personality patterns, and characteristic ways of doing business with the world (coping strategies, dynamics and defense mechanisms) is equally important, if not more.

To dismiss the methodology of projective testing because its interpretation is subjective is emblematic of the reductionism that castrates the field of psychiatry and the realignment of expectations of its practitioners in the eyes of its payors, corporate clients and to some extent, the public — that they be something more akin to technicians than artists or artisans. Throughout medicine, most so-called objective measures such as radiological findings or blood test results require subjective interpretation by someone who is clinically astute and familiar with the individual’s condition, unless the diagnostic question at hand is answered by a simple yes/no finding. Psychological testing can be good or bad depending on the training, experience and thoughtfulness of the testing psychologist. I’ve seen both insightfully good and uselessly bad test reports. My challenge has been to know how to be an intelligent consumer of these tests, weighing them in the balance. I would venture to say that most critics of the Rorschach are not challenged daily to care for desperately ill patients, needing to draw inferences from inherently faulty and partial data, and can safely criticize from a theoretical vantage point.

Indeed, despite its name, psychological testing is less like laboratory testing than it is like another time-honored aspect of medical treatment — that of the second opinion or consultation with a specialist. One hardly expects that to be “objective”; in fact, trusted consultants are sought precisely for their subjectivity. Moreover, since in psychiatry in particular the bodily systems in question are precisely those of thinking, feeling and relating, only a subjective relationship can get at the clinically pertinent parameters of the patient’s function and dysfunction. Let us hope I can remain old-fashioned, having skilled psychological test consultants to rely upon, as long as I continue to practice…

uggabugga puts together a deck of Bush regime playing cards. Four aces would be a scary hand to hold in this deck…

Poet Charles Simic reviews Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others: “I suspect Susan Sontag has written a book others thought of writing but chickened out of.” The New York Review of Books

“If you were a White House hardliner and you wanted to make life intolerable for a moderate Secretary of State who’s been semi-miserably soldiering on in a sad attempt to wait out a foreign incursion until it’s politic to resign, who would you bring back from the dead to sic on his ass? That’s right, it’s disgraced far-right poster boy and zombie hatchetman Newt Gingrich. Let the good times roll!” — Bill Barol

“Although only a handful of them have gone public, several hundred U.S. soldiers have applied for conscientious objector (CO) status since January, says …The Center on Conscience and War (CCW), which advises military personnel on CO discharges…

The military granted 111 soldiers CO status in the first Gulf War before putting a stop to the practice, resulting in 2,500 soldiers being sent to prison, says Bill Gavlin from the Center on Conscience and War, quoting a report from the Boston Globe newspaper.

During that war, a number of U.S. COs at the U.S. Marine Camp LeJeune in North Carolina were “beaten, harassed and treated horribly,” Gavlin says. In some cases, COs were put on planes bound for Kuwait, told that they could not apply for CO status or that they could only apply after they’d already gone to war. ” AlterNet [via Brooke, who shares my sense of the importance of tracking this underreported trend]

Administration moves ahead on nuclear ‘bunker busters’: “Demonstrating a significant shift in America’s nuclear strategy, the Bush administration intends to produce — not just research — a thermonuclear bunker-busting bomb to destroy hardened, deeply buried targets, the Pentagon has acknowledged for the first time.

The weapon — known as the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator — would be a full-power hydrogen bomb that would throw up enormous clouds of radioactive dust while wreaking large-scale damage and death if used in an urban area. It would be thousands of times more powerful than the conventional ‘bunker busters’ dropped on Baghdad in an attempt to kill former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.” San Jose Mercury

“National and statewide Republican officials willing to comment are supporting U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., as he defends comments equating gay relationships with bestiality and with priests molesting teens.

His remarks stirred a public furor. Some Democrats, liberals and gay rights groups have called for Santorum’s ouster as third-ranking Republican in the U.S. Senate leadership. Critics also said his remarks were inappropriate, coming from the state’s most powerful Republican.

But Santorum’s defenders are under a gag order. Officials at the White House and Republican National Committee told GOP insiders yesterday, by conference call, voice mail and e-mail not to comment about Santorum’s comments, letting him speak for himself.” pennlive.com

I ‘m sure many GOP fellow travellers believe much the same as Santorum, but are starting to realize how unclever it is to let on in public until you’ve assured yourself none of the infamous, reviled ‘liberal press’ are there to hear.

Addendum: It would seem Dubya is not so smart, in case you were wondering. Yahoo! News

On the other hand, my analysis may not be so astute. GOP officials may not feel that Santorum is in the same kind of trouble Lott was. They may be telling supporters to stay mum so they don’t cross a line that he stayed shy of. He’s safe, they should take care that they remain so too. That’s essentially what editor Dan Savage suggests in an op-ed piece in the New York Times the other day. Outrage about Santorum may be impotent rage.

“Tony Blair took repeated secret advice from the former American president Bill Clinton on how to unlock the diplomatic impasse between Europe and the US in the build-up to the war on Iraq, the Guardian can reveal.

In the crucial weekend before to the final breakdown of diplomacy in March, Mr Clinton was a guest of Mr Blair’s at Chequers where the pair discussed the crisis.

Mr Blair was battling to persuade the Chilean president Ricardo Lagos – a key figure on the security council – to back a second UN resolution setting a new deadline for Saddam to cooperate fully with the UN or face military action.

Three days after his Chequers meeting, Mr Clinton made a rare public appeal to his successor, George Bush, to give the UN weapons inspectors more time.

Mr Blair and Mr Clinton met at least three times to discuss the war, underlining the extent to which Mr Blair rates Mr Clinton’s analytical powers, despite the bond of trust he has also formed with the Republican White House.” Guardian/UK

“A federal judge in Los Angeles has handed a stunning court victory to file-swapping services Streamcast Networks and Grokster, dismissing much of the record industry and movie studios’ lawsuit against the two companies.” CNET

“In the old days, the good guys wore white. Now Hollywood’s villains are turning pale, and real-life albinos are crying foul as movies like The Matrix: Reloaded arrive with a fresh supply of pigment-challenged bad guys.

The silver-clad, dreadlocked Matrix villains known as The Twins are the latest Hollywood incarnations of pale-skinned people as evil incarnate, said Dr. Vail Reese, a San Francisco dermatologist and creator of skinema.com, a cheeky website that examines skin disorders in film.” Wired

uggabugga puts together a deck of Bush regime playing cards. Four aces would be a scary hand to hold in this deck…

“The number of civilians killed or wounded since the war ended in northern Iraq is higher than it was during the conflict, Human Rights Watch said today.

Extensive research at five hospitals and morgues in Kirkuk and Mosul suggests that the high civilian tolls can be attributed to general lawlessness after the collapse of local authorities; the ready availability of weapons and ammunition; and the vast stores of ammunition and ammunition components left behind by the Iraqi military, including landmines, rocket-propelled grenades, and other explosives.

Many of the victims have been children who play with explosives or pick up unexploded ordinance (UXO) as toys and sustain serious injuries as a result.” Human Rights Watch press release

Peer-to-peer Outlook competitor released: “The embryonic software uses the information-sharing power of distributed networks to challenge Microsoft’s popular program.” New Scientist.

Here’s a link to Chandler, ver. 0.1, via the Open Software Foundation. “The 0.1 release is a very early, partial implementation of parts of Chandler… Release 0.1 is not intended to demonstrate a complete feature set, a final UI, security mechanisms, a final database or schema, or be ready for end-user deployment.”

Dog stroking can transmit debilitating parasite: “People can become infected with a worm that causes blindness simply by stroking dogs whose coats are infested with the worm’s sticky eggs.” New Scientist

1-Hour Arrest: “Jacqueline Mercado, a 33-year-old Peruvian immigrant, took a few photos of her young children at bath time. A week later, Richardson police were rummaging through her house for kiddie porn, and a state child welfare worker came to take her kids away.” Dallas Observer [via walker]

“It is telling…that no one in that administration has made an effort to put 9/11 into the historical context to which it belongs. Why such an oversight? Perhaps the folks in the administration believe Americans too dull-witted to comprehend the complex Cold War motivations that gave birth to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. Perhaps they are afraid to speak of such things, because it suggests that we inadvertently bought the trouble that came two Septembers ago to find us.

Then again, perhaps the administration was engaged in similar gamesmanship before 9/11. Perhaps they are afraid to address the issue at all. The nomination of Kissinger to the 9/11 committee certainly suggests a desire on the administration’s part to never, ever, ever have the facts of that attack come fully to light. They do not want people to know that Brzezinski’s actions in 1979, and the naiveté regarding the potential blowback from his decisions he displayed in 1998, was compounded by the actions of the Bush administration in 2001. Brzezinski asked in his interview what was more important in 1979: Ending the Cold War or creating the Taliban? In the early days of the Bush administration, a similar question was certainly asked – what is more important in 2001: Gaining access to an incredibly lucrative energy supply, or the dangers of threatening the Taliban?” — William Rivers Pitt, truthout

by Matthijs van Boxsel, trans. Arnold & Erica Pomerans,

Review:

“Since the foolish outnumber the wise, the dominion of the dumb is assured. (the reviewer) would have enjoyed this inventory of idiocy even more were it not for some stupid oversights…” Independent/UK

The career of Jacques Lacan is one of the most remarkable phenomena in twentieth century intellectual history. Until 1966, when, at the age of 65, he published his Ecrits, very few people outside a small group of Parisian intellectuals were aware of his existence. Even within the psychoanalytic movement he was very much a minor figure, an eccentric psychiatrist with a taste for surrealism who had made no significant contribution to psychoanalytic theory and who was known, if he was known at all, for his stubborn refusal to conform to the therapeutic guidelines laid down by Freud.

During the 1960s, however, Lacan emerged from obscurity and began to be lionised by a number of French literary intellectuals. Although he remained virtually unrecognised by analysts outside France, his theories became immensely fashionable in university literature departments. By the 1980s Lacanian theory had become all but synonymous with psychoanalysis in countless humanities departments throughout Europe and America. In such academic departments Freud was studied, if he was studied at all, not so much because he was the originator of psychoanalysis but because he was the precursor of Lacan. Lacanian theory was regarded as the only modern and ideologically correct form of psychoanalysis and Freud was treated either as the inventor of a crude prototype or as a God who was to be revered in principle but ignored in practice. So massive was the prestige which Lacan had achieved outside the psychoanalytic movement by the time of his death in 1981 that psychoanalysts, who for a long time had continued to treat him as a marginal figure, were all but compelled to recognise his importance. For many literary intellectuals Lacan remains one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. By some others the rise of Lacan is regarded as a shameful indictment of the intellectual standards which prevail in American and European universities and an affront both to science and reason.

I’ve always loved someone who can proclaim loudly how naked the emperor is, especially when I agree. I studied Lacan’s works as part of my training and thought I was simple because I could only grasp a few concepts in his whole body of theory — and found them trivial. As the essayist points out, this was often the experience of those who did not come under his electrifying spell by seeing him lecture ‘live.’ Should his ideas be coherent as they stand on their own in writing? Ultimately, I came to see most adherents as tragically misled or ridiculously pompous for the depths they imagine they saw in Lacanian theory. Freudian theory works this way too — or, I should say, works or does not work. Its value is not its truth but its nonfalsifiability. If the Freudian or the Lacanian can bring someone under their spell and enlist them in sharing their reality, the beliefs become self-fulfilling. Often this depends on the charisma of the theoretician. The beauty of this is that it turns the searching, doubting distress of the seeker into utter certainty that they have made, and will continue to make, coherent sense of their world. I suppose, when it does not work, there is a certain appeal to the idea that the theory may succeed in making utter nonsense of the world…

Book Review: “In Women Who Think Too Much (Henry Holt and Co., $24), author Susan Nolen-Hoeksema contends that overthinking — a psychological dysfunction residing somewhere between normal worry and obessive-compulsive disorder — wreaks havoc in the lives of many women (and more than a few men).” Dallas-Ft Worth Star Telegram

Talk is cheap, but it can tax your memory: “Law-enforcement officials typically solicit descriptions of criminals from eyewitnesses, often just after an offense has occurred. It stands to reason that thorough accounts by those who saw what happened will help investigators round up the likeliest suspects. Eyewitnesses can then pick the criminals out of a lineup. When crime-scene interviewing had its first brush with memory research in 1990, however, the results proved disturbing. A series of laboratory studies found that memories for a mock criminal’s face were much poorer among eyewitnesses who had described what the perpetrator looked like shortly after seeing him, compared with those who hadn’t.” Science News

“Testicles might be outside the body because temperature influences the sex of human children.

A temperature-sensitive gender switch that makes hot sperm male could be a relic from our evolutionary past, argue John McLachlan and Helen Storey, citing evidence that more males are born in hot climates.” Nature

‘Women, as a rule, smile more than men, but the difference between the sexes disappears depending on the circumstances.

For women, smiling is the default option. For men, the default is not smiling.

“If you don’t know what to do and you’re a female you smile because you know you’re not making a mistake. If you’re a man, you don’t smile,” says Marianne LaFrance, a psychology professor at Yale University.

In the largest analysis of smile studies ever done, LaFrance and her colleagues evaluated research involving nearly 110,000 people, finding many variations in smiling behavior.’