Is it too late to call off the war? “Conventional thinking (and the higher in a bureaucracy you go the more conventional the thinking gets) says that the United States is now committed to war with Iraq, even if tens of millions of people and most of the world’s governments are against it. You don’t send 200,000 troops to staging areas in the Mediterranean, Kuwait, and Jordan only to call them back without a fight.

I agree. It is a waste of time and money. The question is – What kind of fight?” — Rose Berger, Sojourners

Paul Rogers, Foreign Policy in Focus, suggests that, “contrary to expert predictions, war may still be five weeks

away. The U.N. and antiwar demonstrators still have time to

derail the Bush administrations plans for war.” AlterNet

“There may still be two superpowers on the planet:

the United States and world public opinion.”

“If only Laura Bush could be more like the eponymous heroine of Aristophanes’ antiwar comedy Lysistrata… ” AlterNet

“…Worst Novel Ever Published in the English Language… I am on the phone with Robert Burrows, author of the recently published political novel Great American Parade. This book has sold only 400 copies nationwide, and Burrows seems flabbergasted to be hearing from me. The most prestigious newspaper to have shown any interest so far is the Daily Student at Indiana University.

I tell Burrows that if he is willing to submit to an interview, I am willing to review his book at length in The Washington Post. The only catch, I said, is that I am going to say that it is, in my professional judgment, the worst novel ever published in the English language.”

(…)

Me: It is possible that some people might have found the plot a little improbable. They might find it hard to believe that, in order to garner political support for his tax cuts, George W. Bush would secretly arrange a giant parade in Washington honoring the richest people in America, who would march front to back in order of their net worth. Or that a cadre of earnest, teetotaling college students would get wind of this and, encouraged by Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, rise up to stage a heroic counter-parade honoring basic American values like morality and hard work. Was this perhaps deft satire, a nifty Swiftian touch?

Burrows: No. Washington Post

Researchers in the former Soviet Union spent years fine-tuning virulent bioterror agents, says one expert, and they won’t share samples so other countries can develop vaccines. It’s a problem not easily patched with duct tape. Wired News

creates, collects, and distributes net.art and poetry within the limitations and context of web advertisements.

Most view net advertising as a necessary evil. But creating an effective ad requires a strict adherence to voluntary standards that strictly control both the pixel and file size and limit the interactive behaviors of the ad. Designers must produce work that will be viewed in a variety of contexts on a variety of pages, and they must create an ad that uses its position within the marginalia of a webpage to its advantage. In addition, ad designers must be hyperaware of accessibility issues–an unviewable ad is a dead ad.

By creating and distributing art within the limitations of WWW advertising, net.artists are forced to work under stringent rules. In that regard, banner art follows in a historical tradition of working against and within the limitations of a strict, sometimes arbitrary, form. In exploring this form, they also explore the marginalization of net.art; in banner art, this marginalization is quite literal.

From the heart of the United States, we extend a profound apology to the rest of the world for the serious failure of our political system.

While not receiving a majority of the popular vote and selected by the Supreme Court rather than elected, we nevertheless have ended up with a sociopath as President surrounded by religious fanatics who actively seek war and others who seek to destroy our democracy and impose authoritarian values.

This group is taking the world down the path to an Armageddon that they believe is the necessary and appropriate end to the world as we know it. They hate life, believe themselves to be flawed by sin, and long for a divine intervention that will make them rulers of an Earth transformed by the absence of earthiness.

They care nothing for the environment because there won’t be an environment when they are done.

They do not care about international law and a preemptive U.S. strike as precedent because there will be no such law under the elevated “Christian” rule.

They do not worry that an invasion of Iraq may cause outrage in the Muslim world and spread the conflict because such an expansion is part of the necessary script.

They do not worry about later retaliation by those angered at an invasion of Iraq because all such lesser beings will be under their unbreakable domination after the final battle.

They do not worry about how to govern a post-war Iraq because they will be ruling the entire world and everyone will appear before them on bended knee.

They do not worry about Iraq or the U.S. initiating the use of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction because use of such weapons is part of the Armageddon script.

The only thing they worry about is getting the war started before some force can prevent their usurpation of everyone’s future.

At home, civil liberties are quickly being erased in favor of absolute government to prevent democratic discussion of and opposition to the coming holocaust and to practice for their coming domination of the world.

We lack an appropriate political mechanism for removing these dangerous people from power. We do not have the opportunity to vote no confidence, as the Australian Senate did.

The once proud Democratic Party is coopted and corrupted by corporate contributions and eager to beat the drums of war in hopes of being popular.

The once independent media is now a corporate conglomerate that closes more doors to truth than it opens.

Our people are fed lies big and small and lack access to the information they need to understand what is happening in our country.

Flush with the wealth exploited from the planet they seek to kill, our government and corporations bribe, buy, or otherwise coerce smaller and more fragile governments into ignorantly supporting the coming destruction.

All we can do is appeal to those outside our country to save the world from our government.

Even though we will not hear about it from our media, march in your streets.

Even though we will not hear about it from our media, expose the lies being told by our government and others.

Even though we will not hear about it in our media, talk about Armageddon so people will know where the madness is leading.

Urge your government to vote no on any U.N. resolution furthering the Armageddon agenda.

We will continue to reach out to our fellow citizens within the limitations imposed on our society and do our part to bring sanity back to the human family and protect all life.

Our apology is an expression of our love for and unity with that family and the living Earth.

As it did for the reader who sent it to me, this captures many of my feelings. We may truly be living in the end of days if the madmen in Washington have their way.

is seen moving out from our Sun in this condensed half-hour time-lapse sequence. Ten Earths could easily fit in the “claw” of this seemingly solar monster. This large prominence, though, is significant not only for its size, but its shape. The twisted figure eight shape indicates that a complex magnetic field threads through the emerging solar particles. Recent evidence of differential rotation inside the Sun might help account for the surface explosion. The sequence was taken early in the year 2000 by the Sun-orbiting SOHO satellite. Although large prominences and energetic Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) are relatively rare, they are occurred more frequently near Solar Maximum, the time of peak sunspot and solar activity in the eleven-year solar cycle.” Astronomy Picture of the Day

Skeptical inquirer Michael Shermer: “If the brain mediates all experience, then paranormal phenomena are nothing more than neuronal events… These studies are only the latest to deliver blows against the belief that mind and spirit are separate from brain and body. In reality, all experience is mediated by the brain. Large brain areas such as the cortex coordinate inputs from smaller brain areas such as the temporal lobes, which themselves collate neural events from still smaller brain modules such as the angular gyrus. Of course, we are not aware of the workings of our own electrochemical systems.” Scientific American

On February 26th, every Senate office will receive a call every minute from a constituent, as they receive a simultaneous flood of faxes and e-mail. Hundreds of thousands of people from across the country will send the collective message: Don’t Attack Iraq. Every Senate switchboard will be lit up throughout the day with our message — a powerful reminder of the breadth and depth of opposition to a war in Iraq. And on that day, “antiwar rooms” in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles will highlight the day’s progress for the national media, while local media can visit the “antiwar room” online to monitor this constituent march throughout the day.

We need your help NOW to make the Virtual March a reality. You can (1) prepare a free fax for transmission on the day of the march, and (2) register to make phone calls to Congress on the day of the march below. We’re lining people up for every minute of the day in every state. Faxes are very easy and phone calls are the most effective. Do both or do whatever you can.

This ‘Virtual March on Washington’ is sponsored by the Win Without War coalition, composed of many credible organizations with impeccable antiwar credentials (in case you worried that you would be used for a secondary agenda by some of the crazies the antiwar movement is starting to attract).

“If you had known about Hiroshima in advance, what would you have done to stop it?”

Cronenberg and ‘Spider’: portentious wedding! NY Times

“Nobody in America makes me feel more insecure than Tom Ridge.” — Maureen Dowd;

My Survival Kit: “While the government does its part in the fight against terrorism, we ought to do ours: learn to live with more and more anxiety.” — Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times op-ed

“The world must stand against the evil that took my son’s life,” writes Danny Pearl’s father on the first anniversary of his murder. WSJ OpinionJournal.

The Memory Hole [thanks, Walker]

says psychiatrist Lauren Slater:

You’ve been in therapy for years.You’ve time-traveled back to your childhood home, to your mother’s makeup mirror with its ring of pearl lights. You’ve uncovered, or recovered, the bad baby sitter, his hands on you, and yet still, you’re no better. You feel foggy and low; you flinch at intimate touch; you startle at even the slightest sounds, and you are impaired. Hundreds of sessions of talk have led you here, back to the place you started, even though you’ve followed all advice. You have self-soothed and dredged up; you have cried and curled up; you have aimed for integration in your fractured, broken brain.

This is common, the fractured, broken brain and the uselessness of talk therapy to make it better. A study done by H.J. Eysenck in 1952, a study that still causes some embarrassment to the field, found that psychotherapy in general helped no more, no less, than the slow passing of time. As for insight, no one has yet demonstrably proved that it is linked to recovery. What actually does help is anyone’s best guess — probably some sort of fire, directly under your behind — and what leads to relief? Maybe love and work, maybe medicine. Maybe repression. Repression? Isn’t that the thing that makes you sick, that splits you off, so demons come dancing back? Doesn’t that cause holes in the stomach and chancres in the colon and a general impoverishment of spirit? Maybe not. New research shows that some traumatized people may be better off repressing the experience than illuminating it in therapy. If you’re stuck and scared, perhaps you should not remember but forget. Avoid. That’s right. Tamp it down. Up you go. NY Times Magazine

The ‘trauma establishment’ in modern mental health care is an enormous edifice which largely arose as a legitimate feminist-driven backlash against at least a century of misogyny in psychiatric care — ever since Freud revised his theory of infantile trauma shortly after the turn of the century with the declaration that the memories of abuse he was seeing in his female patients with ‘hysteria’ were merely fantasies. Yet several crucial mistakes in the use of the trauma concept in modern mental health care have rendered it an overblown, ineffective approach that often does more harm than good (and leave it open to the embarrassing ‘Emperor’s-new-clothes’ findings about the ineffectiveness of post-trauma acute interventions such as those which have been emerging after 9-11).

First, the assumption that trauma underlies much psychiatric distress, at least in female patients, has been unleashed in the hands of inexperienced, unsubtle, polemical mental health practitioners with an irrational, religious zeal. In its most extreme fashion, the fervent and uncritical hunt for a history of abuse in their patients leads therapists to inject the infamous “false memories” of traumatic scenes which, although facile explanations, never happened. While dramatic, however, this is not the greatest harm induced by the uncritical application of the trauma hypothesis. Far more pervasive is the assumption, in cases where a patient did actually undergo some physical or sexual abuse, that it explains any and all mental health distress the patient currently suffers. This has led to the dilution of the concept of trauma and the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder to the point of meaninglessness.

To paraphrase Bateson, a distinction is a difference that makes a difference, and ‘PTSD’ no longer makes a difference in describing symptomatology, suggesting a treatment approach, or predicting outcome, if almost any event seen as a precipitant to distress is ‘traumatic’. What then gets lost is the crucial clinical and research question — why do some people who suffer a trauma go on to develop PTSD or other post-traumatic syndromes, while others are resilient, integrate it and continue to function well? Both from the point of view of salient characteristics of the trauma and salient characteristics of the sufferer, the possibility of answering this question is obscured. Surely Slater is right that some trauma victims under some circumstances should repress and go on, but it is not clear that she zeroes in on which ones. Undertrained mental health practitioners on a mission, convincing their patients that any and all remembering is better under any and all circumstances, and armed with little more than platitudes about “the courage to heal” and “taking back the night”, certainly do not zero in.

Another aspect of therapeutic nieveté which Slater touches upon is one reaction to the suggestion that we bolster, instead of break through, repression. Some therapists feel that encouraging repression of ‘legitimate’ memories sacrifices the chance to help the patient reach the holy grail of the therapeutic process — the authentic, accurate, total truth about their lives. This ignores the fact that the ‘truth’ one helps a client create for her life in the psychotherapeutic process is narrative truth, inherently different from historical truth.

The next shortcoming in thinking about trauma (about which next to nothing is written and about which Slater is spot on) is to ignore the fact that most trauma sufferers probably never present to mental health providers. The selection bias in generalizing from the subset who are seen works to underestimate the capacity for healthy coping strategies to get one past even horrendous trauma. In the emphasis on psychopathology, as elsewhere in the mental health field, resiliency is not given its due.

The third crucial error of the trauma establishment has been to confuse and conflate several different types of ‘trauma”. (Bonanzas in research funding come from having a larger constituency, especially one that can tap directly into federal dollars!). First is the attention to ‘shellshock’ or combat victims paid by the nascent postwar American psychiatric establishment and augmented by the profession’s advocacy for Vietnam veterans, especially within Veterans’ Administration psychiatric departments. Arguably, most combat veterans had undergone a normal course of development prior to their service. Second has been the research and early intervention edifices that have grown up around horrendous but momentary traumatization due to natural disasters (the 1972 Buffalo Creek flood), massive accidents (airplane crashes, fires and building collapses), and terrorizing crimes (the 1976 Chowchilla, CA schoolbus kidnapping; hostage incidents). Again, the majority of those exposed to such events were ‘normally functioning adults’ previously. Finally come the instances (which I am convinced are the vast minority of cases seen in trauma clinics) in which a person has been repeatedly or continuously traumatized, often for a significant portion of their childhood, within a family or pseudo-family situation, essentially kept captive and terrorized. This subjects the person not only to unbearability but inescapability, and betrayal of the beneficence of early caretakers which is essential to normal development, so early and so repetitively that they never have the chance to develop the resources for trusting relationships or coping strategies. In my impression, these people do not so much develop post-traumatic symptoms as a pervasive post-traumatic personality formation. I have been amazed by the lack of perspective by all but a few of the most thoughtful trauma theorists — such as Dr Judith Herman — about the crucial significance of these distinctions. Slater quotes, but largely dismisses, a psychiatrist acquaintance of mine, Dr. Amy Banks, who aptly puts it this way:

Trauma that happens at the hands of another human being has a much greater psychological impact than trauma that happens from a physical illness, accident or even natural disaster. There’s a bigger destruction in trust and relationships. And to further complicate things, sexual abuse usually happens over time, in a situation of secrecy, to what may be a preverbal child. A heart attack is a public event that involves fully verbal adults who have so much more control over their world.’

Without an appreciation for which trauma sufferers may have the capacity for repression or the ability to keep themselves safe and get to an alliance with a therapist, it is hard to strategize where to apply Slater’s suggestion that we should forsake reexperiencing and leave well enough alone. Certainly, my objections to the ‘trauma establishment’ and the harm it does to patients are largely built on an understanding similar to Slater’s that uncovering and talking-through are overrated and applied indiscriminately. But there is a reprehensible and ignorant attitude attitude toward most sufferers of mental illness abroad; my patients are often reporting to me that family, friends or work associates are telling them to “get over it”, “tough it out”, “try harder”, etc. The danger is that Slater’s argument will be used uncritically as ammunition for this misguided message. As Amy Banks, again, puts it:

…(R)epression is useful for repressors. Is repression useful for those of us with different styles? I doubt it. I think it’s probably harmful.

and good user interfaces: an oxymoron?

A much-blinked article says “Google will likely use Blogger to develop sophisticated searches that utilize the rich metadata inherent in the RSS feeds from weblogs: who wrote what and when, what it linked to, what linked to it and its level of popularity with Web surfers.” Wired Uhhh, it doesn’t strike me that they’d have to buy Blogger for that??

A technology consultant (read: not a journalist) writing on the BBC site takes the occasion of the news of the Google purchase of Blogger having been broken on a weblog to beat a dead horse again: Blogging is not journalism.

Ridiculous comments, such as Dan Gillmor’s claim that “with the advent of weblogging, the readers know more than the journalists” only stoke the fires of hyperbole and do not help us understand this new tool.

Blogging is not journalism.

Often it is as far from journalism as it is possible to get, with unsubstantiated rumour, prejudice and gossip masquerading as informed opinion.

Without editors to correct syntax, tidy up the story structure or check facts, it is generally impossible to rely on anything one finds in a blog without verifying it somewhere else – often the much-maligned mainstream media.

The much-praised reputation mechanism that is supposed to ensure that bloggers remain true, honest and factually-correct is, in fact, just the rule of the mob, where those who shout loudest and get the most links are taken more seriously.

He then goes on to some more cogent comments about the dangers Google’s expansion might represent in the privacy sphere, much as I suggested in my initial reaction to the news of the purchase. He concludes, “Perhaps the time has come to recognise this dominant search engine for what it is – a public utility that must be regulated in the public interest.”

“For many believers in biblical prophecy, the Bush administration’s go-it-alone foreign policy, hands-off attitude toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and proposed war on Iraq are not simply actions in the national self-interest or an extension of the war on terrorism, but part of an unfolding divine plan.” — Paul S. Boyer (professor emeritus of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and currently a visiting professor of history at the College of William and Mary, and author of When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture), AlterNet.

Nobody gives a shit what anti-war or pro-war writers think. Really. So shut up. That goes double for poets. Shut the hell up, poets. Everybody just shut up.” The inimitable Neal Pollack thinks what 9-11, the War-on-Terror ® and the impending Just-Because War have mostly subjected us to is bad writing. Lots of it. theStranger And I still think Pollack is the self-important Dave Eggars trying to be provocative. Shut the hell up if you don’t agree.

Perhaps the only reason to watch the Grammy Awards is to see if this happens. [via Drudge Report] Oh, and to see if they continue to heap adulation on the ignorant misogynist Eminem…

humiliated by US Immigration in Chicago. Is this because INS officers still don’t know the difference between Indians and Muslim Asians? Toronto Star “We have very high-tech technology out there to detect these kinds of tampered documents.” — INS spokesperson.

“The world must stand against the evil that took my son’s life,” writes Danny Pearl’s father on the first anniversary of his murder. WSJ OpinionJournal.

“A corrupt banking employee can guess your PIN in just 15 attempts, researchers say.” New Scientist.

Just as important as electricity and running water, says state’s housing corporation. A US state has decided that a broadband connection is as much a human right as electricity and running water.

The Kentucky Housing Corporation (KHC), which builds low-income housing in the state, has listed broadband internet access among the inalienable rights of its residents. vnunet.com

your rights and remedies when stopped or confronted for photography: “a downloadable guide that is loosely based

on the ACLU’s Bust Card and the Know Your Rights flyer. It may be downloaded

and printed out using Adobe Acrobat Reader. You may make copies and carry

them your wallet, pocket or camera bag to give you quick access to your

rights and obligations concerning confrontations over photography…”

This is big. Stanford researchers have characterized a central mechanism underlying addiction, regardless of which substance a subject is addicted to. It appears to involve dopamine-induced sensitization of neurons in a brain region called the ventral Tegmental area to another neurotransmitter, glutamate. Interestingly, the same process occurs in response to stress. Neuronal sensitization to glutamate is at the core of the biochemical mechanism of learning and memory as well. The investigators appear at a loss to explain the similarities between stress-induced and drug-induced VTA changes, but the link may be the theory, of Bessel van der Kolk in Boston and others, that traumatic stress induces a cascade of endogenous opiate release. van der Kolk has long maintained that, in effect, the trauma victim becomes addicted to stress (explaining the risk-taking behaviors and the so-called compulsion to repeat the trauma often seen in this population), and we may be seeing the neurophysiological evidence for it here. Traumatic memory is different from ordinary memory — walled off, experienced inchoately and nonverbally, perhaps repressed; the elucidation of stress-induced changes in a system that regulates learning and memory may help us to understand why. EurekAlert!

Joe Conason takes off from a Washington Post report this week that Saddam, believing that the anti-war demonstrations last week expressed support for his regime, has been emboldened to stall any cooperation with the inspection process.

That is precisely the opposite of what the peace movement should want.

The Post report is highly credible because this kind of lethal illusion is characteristic of Saddam. Wily but unwise, he mistakenly assumed that the West and the U.N. would do nothing if he invaded Kuwait in 1990, and like many dictators, he is reportedly isolated from the truth about negative world opinion of him. Apparently he also shares the Bush administration’s jaundiced view of the antiwar movement as “defenders of Saddam,” which could well be his fatal error. International ANSWER and other “radical” stooges for fascism may well support Saddam, but the millions who turned out to endorse inspections rather than war don’t share ANSWER’s politics.

Although time is terribly short, there is a real answer to this problem. The Iraqi tyrant must be made to understand that the enormous crowds that turned out to oppose war don’t support him — in fact, despise him — and demand his full, complete, immediate cooperation with U.N. Resolution 1441. Salon

Conason proposes that the next venue for anti-war demonstrations be the Iraqi embassies throughout the world, and that there be a flood of emails to the Iraqi U.N. mission (MissionOfIraq@nyc.rr.com) and the Iraq News Agency (ina@uruklink.net) demanding Iraqi compliance and disarmament. I’m not sure, however, on reading this, whether Conason is making a realistic, if desperate, strategy proposal, or if he is more interested in rehabilitating the credibility of the anti-war movements with its critics.

“The study of feelings, once the province of psychology, is now spreading to history, literature, and other fields.” The Chronicle of Higher Education

“The habits and needs of a little-understood group.” The Atlantic

Homeland Security Site Doesn’t Shoot Straight: “It’s better than a hysterical call for duct tape. But Ready.gov, the Homeland Security Department’s new website to help the public prepare– and deal with the aftereffects of – a biological, chemical or nuclear terrorist attack, still ignores an obvious truth: that such strikes are nearly impossible for al Qaeda-like groups to pull off.” — Noah Schachtman, Defense Tech

And:

The Smart Way to Be Scared:

“Flashing ‘threat level’ warning boxes on newscasts. Police officers with shotguns wandering Times Square, antiaircraft missiles near the Washington Mall. Federal instructions to stockpile water and batteries and obtain plastic and tape for a ‘safe room.’ Yet it’s far from clear that this security rush will help anyone.” — Greg Easterbrook, NY Times

Strange, violent and unwanted, even in hospital: “Man in wretched condition shows up at shelter in a cab.” Victoria Times Colonist [via Pam]

“As the United States readies for a possible conflict in Iraq, many of the star weapons from the Persian Gulf war of 1991 are back and deadlier than ever. The smart bombs are smarter. The stealth planes are sneakier. Even the ground troops are better equipped than they were a dozen years ago.

Yet according to military experts, the biggest technical revelation of another war in the region may not be improvements to old systems but rather a new category of firepower known as directed-energy weapons.” NY Times

The Day the Protest Music Died: “Independent radio stations that once would have played antiwar anthems have been gobbled up by corporations that have no wish to rock the boat.” NY Times

“Yes, HBO’s prison drama is fueled by shower-room shankings, an Aryan cult, and grotesqueries such as the excretion cocktail mixed by one Hole-bound inmate. Most viewers have turned away from the show’s in-your-face imagery in disgust, including the Emmy voters, who consistently ignore stunning acting by Eamonn Walker, Christopher Meloni, Rita Moreno, Dean Winters, Lee Tergesen, and J.K. Simmons. ”Oz,” so feral and explosive, is the black sheep of quality television.” Boston Globe

Signs of water hint at possibility of life on Mars: “A new theory and a revised interpretation of observations have bolstered the idea that Mars has more water than was thought and have encouraged speculation about the possibility of life on the planet.” IHT

‘With perhaps only hours left to live, the 17-year-old girl mistakenly given a heart and lungs with the wrong blood type was miraculously handed a second chance Thursday after doctors — against all odds — located another set of organs.

Surgeons rushed to transplant the new heart and lungs into Jesica Santillan, whose relatives had feared she would be dead by the weekend.

She was in critical condition after the four-hour operation, and doctors warned it was too early to say whether she would pull through.’ Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Shares of U.S. local telephone companies fell Thursday after federal regulators kept in place rules that force carriers to provide rivals with low-priced access to their telephone networks, analysts said.

In a complicated decision, the Federal Communications Commission approved new guidelines that give state regulators the power to decide what parts of local telephone networks must be leased at discounts. That dealt a blow to the dominant local telephone companies–the Baby Bells, which wanted immediate relief from rules they contend cost them money and customers.

The FCC decision, however, did offer the Baby Bells a partial win. The agency ruled that local companies that install new fiber-optic cables for high-speed Internet access won’t have to share those lines with rivals.” CNET News

Happy Birthday to the Future

I mean, what good is a poem by some lowly person against a cruise missile, or an aircraft carrier, or Total Information Awareness?

And this feeling was borne out when I arrived and saw the crowd of mostly oldsters like myself, flying their freak flags the same as ever, only shinier.

I have written poems, especially when I was young, that use war, or have war in them. I typically exploited the horror, the feeling of helplessness, and the landscapes we leave when we give up on one another.

But I couldn’t imagine any of these bad dream poems having a salutary effect on the peace gathering. So I dug up some old World war I poems of Wilfred Owen, “Strange Meeting” and “Dulce et Decorum Est,” both harrowing poems written in his wartime “remission,” when he invalided in England after succumbing to the noise and horror of bombs.

Before they dragged Owen away, he had sat gibbering in a hole for four days with the parts of a comrade splattered all around him.

The thing about Owen’s poems is, they are bitter and sad, like every young man’s poems. Except, he had greater call. I thought, as I looked out at the gathering in the coffee shop, that we had all got so old. I’m twice Owens’ age, and Robert Bly, over there in the corner, is more than three Owens of time.

The war was so terrible, because it took a generation of men educated in genteel ways, and it ground them to puilp. They went off to war like gentlemen, and came back, if they were lucky, with a frankness of expression that was rooted in the greatest grief.

We today owe our freewheeling diction, our realism, to the horrors of the trenches. They gave us e.e. cummings and Hemingway, Robert Graves and Gertrude Stein (she worked as a nurse) … Appolinaire, Cocteau, Eluard and Breton … Isaac Rosenberg, Otto Dix and Eugenio Montale.

They gave us Robert Bridges, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Joyce Kilmer, John Dos Passos, Edith Wharton (likewise a nurse), Archibald Macleish, Giuseppe Ungaretti, W. Somerset Maugham.

These people created a new language of straight talk from the rubble of the empires, which comes so easily to us today. worldgonewrong

“Don’t Be Afraid — Be Ready”. Duck’n’cover for the 21st century. This reads so much like a parody it would be surreally funny if I weren’t so enraged at the peril the dysadministration places the world, and my children, in.

“The leaked preparations for the meeting are the clearest sign yet that the administration is determined to overhaul its nuclear arsenal so that it could be used as part of the new ‘Bush doctrine’ of pre-emption, to strike the stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons of rogue states.” Guardian UK

‘Redmond quietly fields its ASP.Net Community Starter Kit, a freely downloadable Weblog builder.

With Google buying Blogger creator Pyra Labs over the weekend, many are wondering when and if Microsoft will take a similar plunge into the Weblog-tools world.

It will come as a surprise to many that, with little fanfare, Microsoft officially entered the blogging-tool space last week. At the VSLive! developer conference, Microsoft unveiled five new sample applications built on top of its ASP.Net scripting environment. One of these five — the ASP.Net Community Starter Kit — is a blog builder.

“You could use this (Kit) to build a Weblog,” confirms Microsoft developer division product manager Shawn Nandi.’ Microsoft Watch

Euro-occupation plan for Iraq:

So now we know the Franco-German alternative to an Anglo-American war against Iraq. It is a plan for the occupation and carve-up of Iraq without a shot being fired.

The German scheme, which has won French support and tacit approval from the Russians, would mean tripling the number of UN weapons inspectors, extending the no-fly zone over the entire country, and sending in thousands of UN troops in what the UK Guardian calls a ‘peaceful invasion’.

The UN Security Council (UNSC) would have complete control over Iraqi airspace and soil, and Iraq would be reduced to the status of a protectorate, a bit like Kosovo with an oil pipe attached. Perhaps Iraq will be governed by a UN High Representative, in the same way that failed UK politician Paddy Ashdown rules Bosnia, effectively replacing Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship with an absolute monarch appointed by the powers that run the UNSC.

Is Mick Hume, writing in sp!ked, a classic British Francophobe/Germanophobe or an unflinching political realist? I had preferred to see the Franco-German postiion as a principled one, but:

This scheme confirms that Germany and France, supposedly the leading anti-war nations, are not really anti-war or anti-intervention at all. They are perfectly happy to support military intervention if it suits their purposes. The Franco-German plan is simply the latest move in the strategic chess game that these governments are playing with President Bush and Prime Minister Blair, designed to boost their international status and their standing at home…

Meanwhile, the allegedly anti-war French step up their political and military intervention in the Ivory Coast, their former African colony, cajoling the government into sharing power with rebels, while protesters call on the USA to intervene and save their democracy from being ‘assassinated’ by French president Jacques Chirac.

a new, specialized and free

Windows tips search engine which indexes more than a dozen Web sites packed with “extensive and reliable Windows

guidance”. From ‘Secrets’ guru and InfoWorld columnist Brian Livingston.

“L3 takes place in virtual space, while the Go Game unfolds on actual city streets. But they share a common denominator: the widening of the game environment. Most forms of entertainment are defined by their edges: the outline of the Monopoly board or the dimensions of a movie screen. To enter the world of the game or the story, you enter a confined space, set off from the real world. Play-space doesn’t overlap with ordinary space. But Go and L3 don’t play by those rules. Go colonizes an entire city for its playing field; L3 colonizes the entire Web. These are games without frontiers.” Slate

‘A tiny mutation in a gene common to mammals may have changed the destiny of humanity. The gene, foxp2 – identified by British researchers two years ago – could have been the switch that lit up art, culture and social behaviour in Homo sapiens 50,000 years ago.

Richard Klein, an anthropologist at Stanford University in California, told the AAAS that early modern humans 100,000 years ago were confined to Africa and seemed no different from their now-extinct cousins Homo neanderthalensis and Homo erectus in Europe and Asia. Then, 50,000 years ago, behaviour altered dramatically: “There was a biological change, a genetic mutation of some kind that promoted the fully modern ability to create and innovate.’ Guardian UK

“Bush has it backwards–abortion is surgical; bombing is murder.”

Then there’s this one: “Send Jenna.”

Or: “Blame Florida.”

“But if you want make your own, here is a list of slogans that were used in previous antiwar demonstrations…”

Some will say that all antiwar activism is empty-headed sloganeering; if so I’m just playing into my critics’ hands with this post. But even thoughtful antiwar indignation has use for catchphrases, it seems. I love ’em. For example:

• “Hans Blix — look over here.”
• “Let Exxon send their own troops.”
• “War is so 20th century! “
• “9-11-01: 15 Saudis, 0 Iraqis. “
• “Don’t waive your rights while waving your flag. “
• “Drop Bush not bombs. “
• “Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity. “
• “I asked for universal health care and all I got was this lousy stealth bomber.”
• “How many Lives per Gallon?”

[more] AlterNet

Radio Thrift Shop: I’m not a big fan of twangy stuff, but this sounds interesting. “Host Laura Cantrell scours the bargain bins, church bazaars and yard sales for those forgotten rekkids of all RPM. Often scratchy, swingy and stringy.”

“She has the sort of east Tennessee accent that seems to keep your coffee warm. Her decidedly uncatchy signature line — ‘Well, there you have it folks’ — has become a lazy weekend mantra for her fans. And over the last six years, her noon-to-3-P.M. show, ‘The Radio Thrift Shop’ on WFMU, the famously eclectic New Jersey radio station, has made her one of the city’s best-known deejays among music lovers with a country-and-western bent.” — The New York Times [via Outside Counsel]

Is Hussein Owner of Crashed UFO? ‘ “An (sic) UFO-related incident that occurred four years ago poses a troubling question whether any kind of cooperation is possible between Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and extraterrestrials,” UFOlogist Joseph Trainor declared in his review UFO Roundup (issue 51 of December 17, 2002). “On December 16, 1998, during Operation Desert Fox against Iraq, a video clip aired on CNN showed a UFO hovering over Baghdad; it moved away to avoid a stream of tracer anti-aircraft fire. At that time we all thought it was another UFO sighting, although captured on videotape. But now, ufologists think it was much more than a mere incident.” ‘ Pravda [via Confederacy of Dunces] Could the rush to war with Iraq be a race to prevent Iraq from reverse-engineering the crashed spacecraft and becoming a truly unstoppable world power? Arab journalists are non-committal, except:

Mohammed Hajj al-Amdar said on the basis of strange stories coming out of that valley: “Saddam gave the aliens sanctuary, so that they couldn’t be captured by Americans. Nobody can reach the citadel Qalaat-e-Julundi at night. They say that the aliens created “watchdogs” for Saddam. The aliens took ordinary desert scorpions and used their bio-engineering to grow the scorpions to giant size. Scorpions of a cow-size! They are wonderful watchdogs: they blend in with the desert, swiftly and silently move on their warm-blooded prey for a decisive attack. Luckless intruders hear just some strange sound from behind stones, then a pincer crushes their necks, another pincer crushes their legs; then the victims is slammed to the ground and beaten with a barbed tail six or seven times. Death comes almost immediately.”

“Searching for sudden “bursts” in the usage of particular words could be used to rapidly identify new trends and sort information more efficiently, says a US computer scientist.

Jon Kleinberg, at Cornell University in New York, has developed computer algorithms that identify bursts of word use in documents.

While other popular search techniques simply count the number of words or phrases in documents, Kleinberg’s approach also takes into account the rate at which the word usage increases.

Kleinberg suggests that the method could be applied to weblogs to track new social trends. For example, identifying word bursts in the hundreds of thousands of personal diaries now on the web could help advertisers quickly spot an emerging craze.” New Scientist [via bOing bOing]

The scientists applied the algorithm to State of the Union addresses and, lo and behold, saw evidence of the emergence of the depression, the atomic age, the Communist ‘menace’, etc. At first blush, my response was, “How different is this from the word frequency analysis of Dubya’s 2003 SotU I did in my weblog last month?” Next question: “How different in import is this analysis than, for example, Wired magazine’s ‘wired, tired, expired’ feature?” The authors would respond that watching not so much frequencies as their first derivative, the rate of growth in a word’s frequency, is the significant measure, but is it really a boon? Is this going to identify any trends before we already notice them? I mean really?

“A little-known company called EagleCheck is hoping to

provide a standardized identity check technique that governments and

corporations will use to verify that you are who you claim to be.

EagleCheck, a privately held firm in Cleveland proposes that whenever

someone uses a driver’s license or a passport for identity

verification, the ID’s authenticity will be checked through

EagleCheck’s network that is tied to state motor vehicle and federal

databases. The databases will respond by saying whether the ID is

valid.” — Declan McCullagh, CNET News

from over 110 Feb. 15 protests around the world. Download them all as an 8-megabyte archive if you like.

“America is to punish Germany for leading international opposition to a war against Iraq. The US will withdraw all its troops and bases from there and end military and industrial co-operation between the two countries – moves that could cost the Germans billions of euros.

The plan – discussed by Pentagon officials and military chiefs last week on the orders of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld – is designed ‘to harm’ the German economy to make an example of the country for what US hawks see as Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s ‘treachery’.Guardian UK

blow-by-blow account of Chirac backed into a corner by hawkish cohort at European Council summit. The Herald

And: ‘Listen to the voices of Iraqi exiles’;



Defiant Blair answers the concerns of the protesters: “The timing of Tony Blair’s monthly press conference, entirely dominated by questions on Iraq, was no coincidence.

Arranged before the European Union swung behind the prime minister to toughen its stance against Saddam Hussein, Mr Blair was determined to address the concerns of the thousands who turned out on Saturday to protest at the prospect of war against Iraq.” The Herald

“President Bush dismissed antiwar protests today as a factor in his plans for confronting Iraq and pressed ahead with a strategy to persuade reluctant allies that United Nations weapons inspections would not secure the disarmament of Saddam Hussein.” NY Times Does this surprise you? I thought not. Have you started to feel hopeless yet about preventing this crime against humanity? Can you say “nonviolent direct action”?

“What brought thousands to London on Saturday was a

shared sense of anxiety and powerlessness — and

that is not a healthy basis on which to build an

anti-war movement.” — Mick Hume, sp!ked

Paul Krugman: “There has been much speculation why Europe and the U.S. are suddenly at such odds…”

Many Americans now blame France for the chill in U.S.-European relations. There is even talk of boycotting French products.

But France’s attitude isn’t exceptional. Last Saturday’s huge demonstrations confirmed polls that show deep distrust of the Bush administration and skepticism about an Iraq war in all major European nations, whatever position their governments may take. In fact, the biggest demonstrations were in countries whose governments are supporting the Bush administration.

There were big demonstrations in America too. But distrust of the U.S. overseas has reached such a level, even among our British allies, that a recent British poll ranked the U.S. as the world’s most dangerous nation— ahead of North Korea and Iraq.

So why don’t other countries see the world the way we do? News coverage is a large part of the answer. NY Times

these weapons of mass destruction cannot be displayed.

“Computer games are good for you, say researchers who studied the complex social interactions in the popular shoot-em-up Counter-Strike. BBC

“A personal video service that promised to revolutionise TV by remembering to record viewers’ favourite programmes has been accused of Big Brother tactics after it programmed viewers’ video recorders to automatically tape shows on the Discovery Channel…

US subscribers have discovered that their box is automatically switched to the Discovery Channel two nights a week to download commercials and trailers and when they switch their TV on the following morning, it is tuned to Discovery.” Guardian UK

“A 17-year-old girl is in critical condition after mistakenly being given a heart and lung transplant from a donor with the wrong blood type at Duke University Hospital in Durham, N.C.

The patient, Jésica Santillán, has rejected the organs and is unconscious and on life support. Doctors say she is unlikely to survive more than a few days without another transplant. But she has little chance of getting one, because donors are scarce. In 2001, doctors performed only 27 heart-lung transplants in the United States.” NY Times

‘Best kept a secret’. “A scientific adviser to the United States government has suggested that secrecy might be the best option if scientists were ever to discover that a giant asteroid was on course to collide with Earth.

In certain circumstances, nothing could be done to avoid such a collision and ensuing destruction, and it would be best not to tell the public anything, said Geoffrey Sommer, of the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California.” Independent UK

Visa: ‘No accounts have been used fraudulently’. “The hacker who breached a security system to get into credit card information had access to about 5.6 million Visa and Mastercard accounts, far more than originally announced, the two card associations told CNN Tuesday.

Monday, Visa and Mastercard said the hacker could look at as many as 2.2 million accounts after breaching the security system of a company that processes credit card transactions on behalf of merchants.” CNN

Sorry I discovered this blink too late to celebrate Lincoln’s

Birthday with it. Perhaps because construction feats with Lego’s are becoming passé, someone took it upon themselves to build a PC out of Lincoln Logs. Extensiontech.net

Ebola Suspected: “A catastrophic die-off of lowland gorillas and chimpanzees at the very heart of their range in central Africa has been reported by scientists.”

The epidemic appears be spreading from west to east. Scientists from the World Wildlife Fund working in Minkebe National Park in northern Gabon documented the disappearance of great apes from an estimated area of 20,000 square kilometers (7,700 square miles) sometime between 1990 and 2000, and suspected that the Ebola virus might have been the cause. Three Ebola epidemics were recorded in villages in the Minkebe area between 1994 and 1996.

Between November 2001 and June 2002 at least 80 people died during an outbreak of the disease in the cross border area of northeastern Gabon and northwestern Congo (Mekambo-Ekata-Mbomo-Kelle). During this epidemic, scientists from ECOFAC, CIRMF, and WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society) also documented deaths of great apes in the same area and the Ebola virus was confirmed from one carcass. In several cases it was established that handling fresh ape carcasses that they had found in the forest had contaminated humans.

No one knows how the disease entered the first human or ape, said William Karesh, head of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Field Veterinary Program. “But we do know that the virus is subsequently spread from infected animals to other animals and from infected people to other people.”

Karesh said that there was no known way to contain the epidemic among animals. “When people are infected we can educate them about the risk of touching or consuming dead or sick animals, and if they are sick, to immediately let authorities know so they can be isolated before they infect other people.” National Geographic News

More on Wired‘s claims that Symantec identified the Slammer threat and failed to share the information widely. “(D)id Symantec really sit on the problem? The company’s claims are inconsistent: a Silicon Defence analysis shows that Slammer infected more than 90 per cent of vulnerable hosts within 10 minutes. This analysis is supported by first-person accounts of telecom security experts contacted by us, as well as security consultant Robert Graham’s excellent review of the spread of the worm.

So we think this is more a case of Symantec shooting itself in the foot with inflated marketing claims for its early warning service rather than anything more sinister. If it knew about Slammer before everyone else (which is questionable) then we doubt it knew it was anything like as vicious as it turned out to be.” The Register [thanks, Michael]

Two Arrested for Posting Pictures of Iraqis in NYC: “Artist Emilie Clark and writer Lytle Shaw were arrested for posting pictures of people from Baghdad in Soho late Thursday night. Both have been released. A court date has been set to prosecute the two for showing New York City the people who will die in a possible war against Iraq.

Clark and Shaw were members of the Baghdad Snapshot Action Crew. Based in New York City, the crew of 75 artists and activists began posting simple flyers with pictures of ordinary Iraqi citizens around New York City, in anticipation and solidarity of the February 15th anti-war rally. The pictures were taken by artist Paul Chan, who recently returned from Baghdad as a member of the Iraq Peace Team, a project of the Chicago based, Nobel Peace Prize nominated activist group, Voices in the Wilderness.” National Philistine [thanks to John Maas] The police who detained Clark and Shaw justified their actions by concerns about the threat of a terrorist attack on the anti-war rally, and probably believed it. The twisted logic of justifying all sorts of repressive measures as protection is a keystone of the Ashcroft cosmos as it has been in every oppressive regime.

I can’t find any coverage of this in the ‘official’ press; please send me the URL if you see a news source.

The Baghdad Snapshot Action website has full-size .pdfs of the thirty posters in black and white here. I’m sure the artists wouldn’t mind if you printed them out and began posting them around your communities…

Little Friends

(For Ween and Levon)

The little friend might be a scientific partner, helping you with your

experiments, head turned up in clean appreciation. Little friends mass in

thrift stores. You adopt on hair color and compatibility. Kung Fu

aesthetics are not the aesthetics of the little friend, but those of the

dense competition among equals.

Little friends are dirty; you’ve seen their expressions in phonics

textbooks. A number of little friends might be arranged in a choir and big

voices could lead, guide the chimes of little friends.

In the morning, mist rising above the castle and hill, The Dwarf leaves his

den under the tree roots, eyes adjusting to the scene around the river:

endless little friends there in respect and confidence. He is their

protector, and of course their leader.

— Lytle Shaw

“A new study by researchers at San Diego State University and the University of Georgia reveals that people with narcissistic personalities who experience social rejection are more aggressive than those who are not so self-absorbed, a finding that may help explain why some teens resort to violence while others do not.” EurekAlert!. One in a series of blinks at FmH about the dangers of inflated self-esteem.

Within months of his death in 1990, the reputation of Bruno Bettelheim — the revered survivor of the camps, head of the famous Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School for troubled children at the University of Chicago, formidable educator, and author of the acclaimed The Informed Heart, The Empty Fortress, Love Is Not Enough, The Children of the Dream, and The Uses of Enchantment — appeared to be in shreds. Certain former students from the school and several of his former associates were accusing him of everything from plagiarism and lying about his past to brutality and child abuse. He was even bitterly condemned for having taken his own life. So radical and abrupt a shift in perception about a famous and admired man suggests an overpowering personality whom others had feared and resented and only now felt safe to attack.

Indeed, Bettelheim was such a personality—inspiring, seductive, aggressive, irascible, dismissive of fools or perceived enemies, and capable of both great kindness and great unkindness. Like other remarkable men who have been leaders, even gurus, within small, intense, contained institutions —Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, William Shawn at The New Yorker— he attracted passionate loyalty and affection but also built up suppressed (or open) resentment in certain of his disciples. New York Review of Books

“The following is a large collection of stories and anecdotes about clueless computer users. It’s a baffling phenomenon that in today’s society an individual, who might in other circumstances be considered smart and wise, can sit down in front of a computer screen and instantly lose every last shred of common sense he ever possessed. Complicate this phenomenon with a case of “computerphobia,” and you end up with tech support personnel having phone conversations that are funny in retrospect but seem like perfectly valid motives for wild machine gun shooting sprees at the time. You will read stories in this file that will convince you that among the human race are human-shaped artichokes futilely attempting to break the highly regarded social convention that vegetables should not operate electronic equipment. And yet, amidst the vast, surging quantities of stupidity are perfectly excusable technological mishaps — but that are amusing nonetheless. After all, even the best of us engages in a little brainless folly every once in a while.

Most of these stories are true. Some happened to me personally. Some happened to friends of mine. Some are considered urban legends, but even most of these are more likely to have happened in some form or another than not. Skeptics look at such stories and doubt their truth. But reason, common sense, and experience tell me that if you sit someone who isn’t computer literate (even a smart someone) down in front of a computer, you’re bound to accrue anecdotes no less outrageous than these. You’d be surprised.”

Adding to earlier concerns about TurboTax using digital rights management is the icing on the cake: the program gains unauthorized access to sectors of your hard disk outside the operating system to write special licensing data.

Clearly, the data in Sector 33 is a special “signature” that SafeCast uses to decide whether a program installation is legitimate. If you copy TurboTax to another hard drive , or restore to a new drive from a backup, this signature will not be included. And without that signature, SafeCast may deny you access to the software even if you’ve legally purchased and registered it.

Reserved Sectors Can Be Unsafe: Unfortunately, these “reserved” sectors of the hard drive aren’t necessarily a safe place for data. And they’re an especially dicey place to keep licensing information. According to Frank Van Gilluwe — whose company, V Communications, publishes System Commander and Partition Commander — viruses have been known to hide in this portion of the disk.

Data compression utilities, “multiboot” utilities, password protection and encryption software, and sector translation software (which allows older computer systems to accept today’s huge hard drives) may also reside in this area. Sometimes these applications can interfere with each other, in effect fighting for use of the space. extremetech.com

Alert Partly Based on Lies:

‘A key piece of the information leading to recent terror alerts was

fabricated, according to two senior law enforcement officials in Washington

and New York.

The officials said that a claim made by a captured al Qaeda member that

Washington, New York or Florida would be hit by a “dirty bomb” sometime this

week had proven to be a product of his imagination.’ ABC News

“Human rights watchdog Privacy International has launched a quest to find the World’s Most Stupid Security Measure.

The global competition will identify what the group describes as the most “pointless, intrusive, annoying and self-serving” security measures. The Register

Looking at the reactions to Google’s big-time push into weblogging (see item below), I was led to Matt Webb‘s comment that “Google is building the Memex” and thence to this 1945 Atlantic essay by Vannevar Bush which so amazingly prefigures the internet not so much technologically — it’s quaintly limited in that respect — but in discussing what such a development would do for the relationship between thought and the sum of knowledge.

“Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.

In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely.”

Blogging Goes Big-Time:

Weblogs are going Googling.

Google, which runs the Web’s premier search site, has purchased Pyra Labs, a San Francisco company that created some of the earliest technology for writing weblogs, the increasingly popular personal and opinion journals.

The buyout is a huge boost to an enormously diverse genre of online publishing that has begun to change the equations of online news and information. Weblogs are frequently updated, with items appearing in reverse chronological order (the most recent postings appear first). Typically they include links to other pages on the Internet, and the topics range from technology to politics to just about anything you can name. Many weblogs invite feedback through discussion postings, and weblogs often point to other weblogs in an ecosystem of news, opinions and ideas.

“I couldn’t be more excited about this,” said Evan Williams, founder of Pyra, a company that has had its share of struggles. He wouldn’t discuss terms of the deal, which he said was signed on Thursday, when we spoke Saturday. But he did say it gives Pyra the “resources to build on the vision I’ve been working on for years.” — Dan Gillmor, siliconvalley.com

Gillmor has a nice set of blinks to commentary on this development from the weblogging community. It may give more credibility to weblog content, and users of Blogger like myself may get better technical support from the bevy of Google web engineers, and certainly Evan Williams will be sitting pretty getting one of those dotcom buyout windfalls that seem to have become a thing of the past. But I worry about the smell of oligopoly here, and how the little independent weblogger will fare in the corporate blogging environment. Certanly more immediacy to the need to study Google’s threat to privacy now…

Pentagon Perverts Pharma with New Weapons: Liability and Public Image in the Pentagon’s Drug Weapons Research. “The conventional view is that pharmaceutical research develops new ways to treat disease and reduce human suffering; but the Pentagon disagrees. Military weapons developers see the pharmaceutical industry as central to a new generation of anti-personnel weapons. Although it denied such research as recently as the aftermath of the October theater tragedy in Moscow, a Pentagon program has recently released more information that confirms that it wants to make pharmaceutical weapons. And on February 5th, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld went a big step further. Rumsfeld, himself a former pharmaceutical industry CEO, announced that the US is making plans for the use of such incapacitating biochemical weapons in an invasion of Iraq.” Sunshine Project

How Bush lies and what to do when a President lies you into a war. mediawatch.co.nz

Harriet McBryde Johnson meets influential philosopher Peter Singer.

He is the man who wants me dead. No, that’s not at all fair. He wants to legalize the killing of certain babies who might come to be like me if allowed to live. He also says he believes that it should be lawful under some circumstances to kill, at any age, individuals with cognitive impairments so severe that he doesn’t consider them ”persons.” What does it take to be a person? Awareness of your own existence in time. The capacity to harbor preferences as to the future, including the preference for continuing to live.

At this stage of my life, he says, I am a person. However, as an infant, I wasn’t. I, like all humans, was born without self-awareness. And eventually, assuming my brain finally gets so fried that I fall into that wonderland where self and other and present and past and future blur into one boundless, formless all or nothing, then I’ll lose my personhood and therefore my right to life. Then, he says, my family and doctors might put me out of my misery, or out of my bliss or oblivion, and no one count it murder.

I have agreed to two speaking engagements. In the morning, I talk to 150 undergraduates on selective infanticide. In the evening, it is a convivial discussion, over dinner, of assisted suicide. I am the token cripple with an opposing view. NY Times

“gives you a glimpse into a world that most have never seen. It is a window into a universe that can only be seen through the lens of a microscope.

For the past 28 years, Nikon has sponsored the Small World Competition, the world’s foremost forum for recognizing excellence in photomicrography. Listed below are links to image galleries featuring photomicrographs from the winners of previous contests.” [via MetaFilter]

Online magazine publisher Salon Media Group Inc. on Friday warned that it may not survive beyond this month if it can’t raise more money to pay its rent and other bills.

The San Francisco-based company painted a grim financial picture in a quarterly report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Things are so bad, Salon said, it stopped paying rent for its San Francisco headquarters in December, prompting the landlord to issue a Jan. 29 demand for a $200,000 payment.

To raise money, the company said it may sell its rights to $5.6 million worth of advertising on a Cablevision Systems Corp. subsidiary for as little as $1 million. Miami Herald

The Decline and Fall (cont’d.): As Man Lay Dying, Witnesses Turned Away

D.C. police released a startling surveillance tape yesterday that shows a daylight killing at a Northeast Washington gas station and witnesses doing nothing to report the crime or tend to the victim as he lay bleeding on the concrete. The videotape, from the Hess station in the 500 block of Florida Avenue, shows in gruesome detail the Jan. 31 slaying of Allen E. Price, 43, of the 2100 block of Fourth Street NW. Police said they were shocked by the apathy of those who were there, including one man who continued pumping kerosene after looking briefly at Price’s body. Washington Post

Counterpose this to the same days’ turnout of millions for peace. [Growing up, I lived in the Queens, NY neighborhood which, similarly, turned its deaf ears in 1964 to the murder of Kitty Genovese in the streets below its windows. It is useful to point out that, while I detect in the coverage of the current episode an innuendo that such callous disregard is associated with the lower class minority locale, the Genovese murder took place in a white-collar white neighborhood and the disregard was laid down to middle class complacency. Plus ca change… ]

Pentagon Perverts Pharma with New Weapons: Liability and Public Image in the Pentagon’s Drug Weapons Research. “The conventional view is that pharmaceutical research develops new ways to treat disease and reduce human suffering; but the Pentagon disagrees. Military weapons developers see the pharmaceutical industry as central to a new generation of anti-personnel weapons. Although it denied such research as recently as the aftermath of the October theater tragedy in Moscow, a Pentagon program has recently released more information that confirms that it wants to make pharmaceutical weapons. And on February 5th, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld went a big step further. Rumsfeld, himself a former pharmaceutical industry CEO, announced that the US is making plans for the use of such incapacitating biochemical weapons in an invasion of Iraq.” Sunshine Project

Google as Big Brother; The top ten Google privacy problems, e.g.:

6. Google’s toolbar is spyware:
With the advanced features enabled, Google’s free toolbar for Explorer phones home with every page you surf. Yes, it reads your cookie too, and sends along the last search terms you used in the toolbar. Their privacy policy confesses this, but that’s only because Alexa lost a class-action lawsuit when their toolbar did the same thing, and their privacy policy failed to explain this. Worse yet, Google’s toolbar updates to new versions quietly, and without asking. This means that if you have the toolbar installed, Google essentially has complete access to your hard disk every time you phone home. Most software vendors, and even Microsoft, ask if you’d like an updated version. But not Google.

“I need to chew a bit more on Distribution of Choice and Ecosystem of Networks …but it feels to me like there’s something useful in Ross’ discussion of “the strength of 12”, the average number of people with whom you can have a strong relationship (or, that you are willing to be alerted by IM of their every weblog post), and “the magic number 150”, the number of people with whom you can manage a social relationship (or, the number of RSS feeds that you can keep up with).

I’ve been wondering for quite a while now how to rethink how I do a blogroll, and what feels best to me sounds a lot like that: a fairly short list of my tribe, people whose every word I read as soon as I know it’s published, and I’ll assume you’ve read too, and then a longer (much much longer, probably) but less prominent list of “barbarians with whom we can sometimes trade,” people whose feed I read, or whose page I visit fairly regularly, and whom I need to post about more often, because I know damn well you aren’t clicking on them in my blogroll…”

writes Jim Romenesko: “Have a columnist hang out at divorce court on Valentine’s Day.” The Obscure Store

From noted Israeli pacifist and ‘Peace Now!’ leader Uri Avnery: “No wonder that Germany and France oppose the war. It is directed against them…” [from Hanan Levin]

Millions Join World Protests Against Iraq War: In what Alexander Cockburn referred to as “the largest outcry in history”, “More than six million demonstrators turned out across the world on Saturday in a wave of protest supporting international leaders in urging the United States not to rush into a war against Iraq.

From Canberra to Cape Town, from Karachi to Chicago, people from all walks of life took to the streets to pillory President Bush as a bloodthirsty warmonger in the biggest demonstration of ‘people power’ since the Vietnam War.” Yahoo! News

Related:

“There’s a curious group of Americans demonstrating their opposition to a U.S.-led attack on Iraq.

They don’t fit the stereotypes of the 20-something who shuns a privileged home for piercings and tattoos, or the Birkenstock-wearing vegan who hangs out with anti-globalization activists and environmentalists.

Whether they are pacifists or former military commanders, poets or high-powered executives, Psychologists for Social Responsibility or Mothers Acting Up, today’s anti-war movement appears to run through mainstream America.” Sign On San Diego

And — lo and behold — CNN covers the day of anti-war protest in detail.

Tense? On alert? Imagine how you would be feeling if you were living in Baghdad. Salon

Kissing the ‘right’ way begins in the womb: “Two thirds of us instinctively tilt our heads to the right when we kiss, reveals a new study timed to coincide with Valentine’s Day. The 2:1 ratio matches our preference for using the right foot, eye and ear. The bias probably has its origins in our tendency to turn our heads to the right in the womb and for up to six months after birth, says the study’s author, Onur Güntürkün.” New Scientist

Investigators now believe super-hot ionised air leaked in through a puncture in the shuttle, melting it from the inside.” New Scientist

“Dolly’s birth six-and-a-half years’ ago caused a sensation around the world. But as many sheep live to twice this age, her death will refuel the intense debate over the health and life expectancy of cloned animals.

The type of lung disease Dolly developed is most common in older sheep. And in January 2002, it was revealed that Dolly had developed arthritis prematurely…” New Scientist