The New York Times Books Feature — Ted Hughes: ” A retrospective on the career of the late poet laureate of England includes Times reviews and articles and excerpts from Hughes’s poetry.”

The God of new things: ‘Indeed, there was no such thing as ”Hinduism” before the British invented the catch-all category in the early 19th century and made India seem the home of a ”world religion” that was as organized and theologically coherent as Christianity and Islam. The word ”Hindu” itself was first used by the ancient Persians to refer to the people living near the river Indus (”Sindhu” in Sanskrit). It later became a convenient shorthand for those who weren’t Muslims or Christians.’ Boston Globe

Administration seeks repeal of family leave pay.  ”Labor Department officials, citing poor economic conditions, said they are acting to repeal the Birth and Adoption Unemployment Compensation Rule to protect states’ unemployment insurance trust funds for laid-off workers, even though no state has chosen to pay for leave with those funds.” AP via Salon

“Some companies have repeatedly disseminated misleading advertisements for prescription drugs, even after being cited for violations, and millions of people see the deceptive commercials before the government tries to halt them, Congressional investigators said today.” NY Times

Are increased numbers of people seeking psychotherapy responding to recent media characterizations?

”A depiction of anything in popular culture can help make participation in that thing spike,” said Robert Thompson, head of Syracuse University’s Center for the Study of Popular Television. After Fonzie got a library card on ”Happy Days” in the 1970s, Thompson noted, thousands of Americans followed suit.

Psychiatry has been a theme of TV shows from ”Newhart” to ”Frasier,” but seldom has it been so central to a show as on ”The Sopranos.” Major plot twists are reheated in Melfi’s office; mob hits are attributed to Tony’s ”impulse control problem.” In one episode, three characters paid visits to three different therapists. Even Tony’s therapist sees a therapist. Boston Globe [thanks, Spike!]

I wonder if this isn’t putting the cart before the horse. Stonger cultural forces — growing social anomie, the effort to medicalize a growing range of distresses, the increasing suborning of the psychiatric profession by the powerful marketing forces of the pharmaceutical giants — shape our depictions when filtered through the scriptwriters’ (often neurotic?) vision. It’s different than running out to get a library card on whim because you were inspired by a TV character. Finding Tony Soprano’s struggles sympathetic is a far cry from breaking down the considerable barriers to investing the time, money and demanding effort in a mental health consultation. And let’s not think for a moment, despite this columnist’s suggestion, that it is the macho, acting-out, impulse-ridden types who are coming to see therapists un droves. Not to mention that there is, especially in the current Sopranos season, a more complicated depiction of the therapist and the therapy process as flawed and sometimes ludicrous, some would say deeply so, rather than the unconditional positive regard which would demystify and inspire viewers to emulate Tony as suggested. Those who follow The Sopranos will know that in the season’s 11th episode last week he ditched his therapy after four years, perhaps partly because he is sinking to new lows he cannot examine but perhaps as much because Dr. Melfi’s clumsiness has failed him. It is likely, on the other hand, that the relationship with Dr. Melfi will resume. given that the show will return for a fifth season…

In other organized crime news:

Mobster, wife indicted in sperm smuggling

One of five New York mobsters believed to have smuggled their sperm out of a Pennsylvania prison to impregnate their wives has been indicted, along with his wife, on a charge of criminal conspiracy.

Kevin Granato, a convicted hit man for the Colombo crime family, came under suspicion four years ago after he was seen in the visitation room at the Allenwood Federal Prison showing off a toddler he called his child, even though he had been in jail since 1988.

Last week, a federal grand jury indicted Granato, 42, and his wife, Regina Granato, on two counts of criminal conspiracy. Regina Granato, who lives in New York, is also charged with one count of providing a prohibited object — a cryogenic sperm kit — to an inmate. Salon

Mozilla 1.2.1 is out. IMHO, this browser, at least for the Windows platform, so far outweighs M$IE that it hurts. If this is news to you, start by considering the memory-resident stub that makes for instant loading, the skinnability, bulletproof blockade of popup windows, and tabbed browsing interface.

“After just two films, the Harry Potter franchise is in trouble. The third movie will be late, the fourth book is proving unadaptable, the director is burned out and the boy wizard is facing a greater enemy than Voldemort – the march of time.” Get a load of who has been tapped to direct the next one. Telegraph UK

Joe Conason: Will he explain his job for Unocal when the oil giant was cozying up to the Taliban?

‘As a New Yorker who wants a full, fair and unsparing probe of 9/11, I’m not moving on just yet from the absurd appointment of Henry Kissinger to chair the new “independent commission.” Neither is the New York Times editorial board, whose latest salvo described Kissinger’s insouciance about his conflict of interests as “quaint.”

Quaint must be the polite way to say stunningly arrogant. But the wily Kissinger is probably quite right to brush off the halfhearted gnawing of the press corps, whose appetite for scandal has diminished markedly since the advent of the Bush administration. They’re already ignoring information about Kissinger that probably merits further exploration.’ Salon

Village Voice ‘meta-coverage’ calls newly-released film Adaptation ‘the brainiest film of the year’; they devote five articles to it. The trailer for it is the most arresting thing I’ve seen during the coming attractions in a long time. The Heart of the Meta

“I’m a walking cliché,” begins Charlie Kaufman’s breathy voice-over over a blank page in Adaptation, a pop-surrealist manifesto that works at every turn to confound the meaning of these words. Directed by Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich cohort Spike Jonze, Adaptation (in theaters Friday) looks into the horrific abyss experienced by all self-conscious writers who aspire to art—how do I create something original when everything has been done before?—and responds, as many self-conscious writers have, by writing about the process of its own creation: The movie’s neurotic, overweight, balding protagonist shares the name (and, we assume, the nebbish identity) of its Oscar-nominated screenwriter.

Adaptation is ostensibly the story of Kaufman’s own crackup after being hired to turn Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief into a big-budget screenplay. Following many tortured attempts to adapt Orlean’s book, a nonfictional exploration of the passion generated by the testicular flower, Kaufman (in the hefty form of Nicolas Cage) responds with the ultimate challenge to both commercial Hollywood and its novocained cousin, director-centric auteurism: He writes himself into the script. Charlie’s “twin brother” Donald plays the foil to his torment, his natural screenwriting skills blossoming thanks to plot-workshop guru Robert McKee. Village Voice

“A French author who suggests that the Sept. 11 attacks were concocted by a faction of the U.S. military is planning to promote his book on a tour that will begin in New York City.

The English title of Thierry Meyssan’s book is 9-11, The Big Lie, which also suggests that the Pentagon was hit by an American missile, and not American Airlines Flight 77. ” NY Daily News

“A biology professor in northern British Columbia has spotted a clover field crawling with spiders.

Brian Thair of the College of New Caledonia in Prince George said he saw a silky, white web stretching 60 acres across a field.

“When you see horror movies with spider web festooned from this place to that place and so on, it comes nowhere near approaching what occurred in this field,” Thair told CBC Radio’s As It Happens.” CBC News With links to a spider web photo gallery.

“Google is taking snapshots of its users’ minds and aggregating them. Like a flipbook that emerges when successive images are strung together, the logged data tell a story.

So what is the world thinking about? (…) Despite its geographic and ethnic diversity, the world is spending much of its time thinking about the same things.” New York Times

“Death row inmates in Texas are often assigned incompetent or unqualified state appellate lawyers who do not raise legitimate constitutional arguments and who fail to unearth facts that could prove the innocence of their clients, according to a new study by an advocacy group for capital defendants.” NY Times …But you knew that already.

Controversy over Venice winner: ‘Scottish film director Peter Mullan has defended his film as based on “true events” in the face of strong criticism after winning the prestigious Golden Lion at the Venice film festival.

The Magdalene Sisters follows four promiscuous girls who were used as labourers by the Catholic church in Ireland in the 1960s and shows them being abused by nuns in the notorious asylums.’ BBC

“A group of researchers have identified two seismic events that they think provide the first evidence of a previously undetected form of matter passing through the Earth. The so-called strange quark matter is so dense that a piece the size of a human cell would weigh a tonne. The two events under study both took place in 1993.” Even those scientists who are dubious concede they have no alternate explanations for the seismic events. BBC

Christopher Hitchens asks, “Why is a proven liar and wanted man in charge of the 9/11 investigation?” Slate

“The U.S. Army has some imaginative ways to annihilate the Saddams of the future.

As the U.S. Army prepares for war in Iraq (and beyond), it has been moving fast to transform itself from a Cold War relic into a deadly, rapidly deployable force. The last two major U.S. conflicts, Desert Storm and Kosovo, were largely won by the U.S. Air Force before the Army’s lumbering tanks ever got there. The Army used to be a sledgehammer; now it needs to be a cordless drill.” Forbes

White House Decries Ex-Aide’s Criticism

President Bush’s spokesman dismissed as “baseless and groundless” a former aides’ criticism that the White House values politics over domestic policy and has failed to produce the president’s promised “compassionate conservative” agenda.

John J. DiIulio Jr., who quit his White House domestic policy post in August 2001, said in an interview with Esquire magazine: “There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: complete lack of a policy apparatus.

“What you’ve got is everything, and I mean everything, being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavelli’s,” he was quoted as saying. Washington Post

“U.S. astronomers are gathering terabytes of data into a worldwide ‘virtual observatory’ that will be accessible to scientists and laymen alike.” Technology Review

A man was arrested in Concord NH for the murder of a California police officer nine days earlier after, bizarrely, making a confession in an online chatroom at the San Francisco Indymedia site. More bizarrely, he reportedly claimed it was a blow against corporate irresponsibility; indeed, he incorporated before doing the deed and therefore says he is not personally responsible for what is just one more corporate crime. Perhaps most bizarrely — while considering the possibility that the suspect is “a tasteless, publicity-seeking prankster who’s trying to use an unsolved murder to promote his cause”, The Register‘s reporter also wonders if the story might be “a psyops operation to discredit the burgeoning anti-globalization movement…”

Teachers’ chatroom death threats: ‘Teachers using an online “virtual staffroom” have been making death threats against the children in their care.

One fantasised about using “a large handgun … to blow the head off of the first pupil who has failed to shut up/do homework/sit properly at their desk/speak politely to me.”

Another wrote of her satisfaction at having “vengefully” reduced a six-year-old child to tears.’ BBC

“Face transplants will be technically possible within six to nine months – now the public must decide whether the procedure is ethically acceptable, says a leading UK plastic surgeon.

The issue will be debated during a meeting of the British Association of Plastic Surgeons starting on Wednesday. Peter Butler of the Royal Free Hospital in London will argue that face transplantation will be the only effective way of treating some severely disfigured patients, such as those who have suffered extensive burns or facial cancer.” New Scientist

…Here’s How to Set It Straight: ‘Many consumers appreciate having computers delve into their hearts and heads. But some say it gives them the willies, because the machines either know them too well or make cocksure assumptions about them that are way off base. That’s why even TiVo lovers are tempted to hoodwink it — a phenomenon that was also spoofed this year on another TV show, HBO’s “The Mind of the Married Man.” ‘ Wall Street Journal

Growing Peace Movement’s Ranks Include Some Unlikely Allies Washington Post

Patch Raises New Hope for Beating Depression

It was the first type of antidepressant, and for many people the monamine oxidase, or MAO, inhibitor remains the best hope for relief from major depression.

The trouble is that the side effects can be so serious that MAO inhibitors are rarely prescribed. When taken with certain foods, for example, they may bring on sudden and severe hypertension.

The problems, however, may soon be resolved.

A study reported in November in The American Journal of Psychiatry suggests that by administering the MAO inhibitor selegiline in patch form, patients can receive the antidepressant benefits of the drug without the usual side effects. NY Times

Even without the patch formulation, the MAO inhibitors remain a woefully neglected powerful class of antidepressants. Both clinical lore and my own experience suggest they are useful for types of depression (more ingrained or severe; with ‘atypical’ features or comorbid with other conditions) which have not responded to more ‘modern’ (post-Prozac) agents. The risk of hypertensive reaction is highly overrated if the medication is given to patients who are competent to understand and motivated to comply with the dietary restrictions, and these restrictions (the so-called “MAO Inhibitor Diet“) are less draconian than the hysterics usually make them out to be.

True, a medication that involves “active” participation by prescriber and recipient will be inconvenient to some in comparison with the SSRIs (Prozac etc.), which have supplanted all other antidepressants due to the marketing claims that prescribing them requires “no muss, no fuss.” As readers of FmH know (because I hammer this point home whenever I have the opportunity), the well-publicized complications of rampant SSRI use (including successful litigation against the manufacturers for acts of violence, suicidality and discontinuation syndromes about which I’ve written here) result in large measure from the illusion that they are so easy to prescribe that they require no art to manage and thus may be given with less supervision than previous antidepressants, and often by nonpsychiatric prescribers. A further consequence of the ascendency of the SSRI and post-SSRI antidepressants may be an overall decrease in antidepressant effectiveness, both because of the lax supervision of their use; and (as readers of FmH may recall I and other psychiatrists suspect) because they are probably “watered-down” antidepressants which do not attack the ‘core symptoms’ of a depressive disorder but rather make sufferers feel better by controlling ‘downstream’ epiphenomena, symptoms which accompany depression. I don’t mean to be a psychopharmacological Calvinist, but sometimes I wonder if that isn’t precisely why they are so much easier to give. They have fewer side effects than older, more robust antidepressants because there is no free lunch, you get what you pay for.

My viewpoint may be jaundiced because, as a consulting psychopharmacologist and a hospital-based psychiatrist, I see the most truly ill of the depressed patients, the patients in whom I am concerned about the reduced efficacy of the SSRIs, rather than the ‘walking wounded’ who form so much of the modern market for antidepressants for whom an SSRI may be effective enough. (At one extreme, this latter class, of course, blend into those for whom psychopharmacology has famously been called “cosmetic” rather than therapeutic; another consequence of the scourge of the SSRIs.) So, in a number of senses — increased efficacy, mindful prescribing, the participation and responsibility of the recipient, filtering of recipients, etc. — the return of the MAOI is a welcome development, if the patch facilitates it. For technical reasons, however, selegiline, the MAOI about which they are talking here, is not the only one upon which I believe we should focus, however. Other, perhaps better, MAOIs go by the names of tranylcypromine (Parnate), phenelzine (Nardil), and isocarboxazid (Marplan). Selegiline, however, as the newest MAOI, still ‘belongs’ to a pharmaceutical company and generates profits, whereas the other, older agents are in the public domain and nobody’s cash cow. So industry interest in further promoting them is not as likely. Trivia: while this is still an unresolved point, (weak) MAO inhibition may in fact be the mechanism of action for St. John’s Wort‘s putative antidepressant effects.

Al Qaeda claims responsibility for Kenyan attack. “An announcement attributed to al-Qaeda, in which the organization claims responsibility for last week’s terror attacks in Kenya, was released yesterday on the Internet. The announcement is signed in the name of Tanzim Qa’adat al Jihad – the political bureau of Osama bin Laden’s organization.

Experts in analyzing and assessing Internet messages said the announcement includes expressions, nicknames and definitions characteristic of the dialogue that has been conducted in recent months in the name of al-Qaeda.” Ha’aretz Police Close In on Owner of Terrorist Vehicle. “A Kenyan woman owned the Mitsubishi Pajero which was used by suicide bombers in the attack on Mombasa’s Paradise Hotel.

This revelation was made in the wake of intensified investigations that have brought together detectives from the Kenyan police and the military, Israel and the US.” East African Standard, Mombasa ” Kenya Police yesterday denied that there was a dispute between them and Israel detectives investigating the bombing of Mombasa Paradise Hotel.” East African Standard, Mombasa “Kenya’s security agencies were warned four times of an impending bombing a clear eight months before last week’s suicide attack near Mombasa, it can be revealed today.” The Nation, Nairobi Rafael ready to install anti-missile protection on civilian airliners: ‘Following the launching of Strella anti-aircraft missiles at an Arkia airliner taking off from Mombasa, Kenya, on Thursday, Rafael, the Israeli Armament Development Authority, has gone into emergency production of an anti-missile system for civilian aircraft. “We can fit aircraft with this system within months,” company officials said.’ Israel Insider

Ideal for turning into a pamphlet to raise public awareness, as the site suggests. truthout

[via Walker]

“Shift‘s profile of The Smoking Gun mentioned a number of great scoops the guys have put together over the years, but they’re only a taste of what the site has to offer — mere appetizers to fuel your hunger for dishes marinated in eau de political scandal and smothered in creamy, steamy celebrity hypocrisy sauces. So just in case you haven’t been logging on to The Smoking Gun on a near-daily basis like all of us in the Shift office, here’s a collection of the best stories from the past year.” [Be sure to browse through no. 3, the collected concert contract riders and mug shots of the stars.] [thanks, Walker]

“Richard Milhous Nixon set an infamous standard for spying on Americans and abusing the powers of the Presidency. But Nixon wouldn’t have dared dream of the sweeping authority being claimed by George W. Bush.

Now, the Bush administration has on the drawing board at a top Pentagon research agency plans that would open America to an Orwellian future. Bush, who sees those not with him as with the terrorists, will soon have the means, motive and opportunity to make the domestic spying of the Nixon era look quaint.” The Consortium

“Bush administration mulls resuming nuclear testing and developing tactical warheads to deal with threats like Iraq.” Christian Science Monitor

Trapped by the USA

When the United States attacks Iraq, Israel will be the country most immediately placed under direct threat, not the USA. Already, the Israeli minister of security has informed Israeli citizens that, in case of war, “we are expected to be the victims.” Israeli newspapers report plans to evacuate the metropolitan area of Tel Aviv, and to transform parks and stadiums into temporary mass graves.

Yet, Israelis seem unable to express their vital interest against a war with Iraq. Why have Israelis adopted a passive mood of “expected catastrophe”? Why do many Israelis believe that the violent policies the United States is practicing in the Middle East will actually reduce the dangers to Israel in the future, instead of increase them? Tikkun

Marge Piercy:

 Tonight I light the first candle

on the chanukiya by the window

and then a second in the bathtub,

the yahrzeit candle for your death. [more] 

Tikkun

…Happy Chanukah to you and yours.

The art of spinning discs will finally be consigned to BBC history as Radio 1 DJs become “hardware controllers” in a technological revolution.

The tricky business of cueing up “poptastic” sounds while engaging in banter will no longer trouble the station’s presenters as, from next year, all its music will be stored on a digital hard disk.

Does this indicate that British usage reflects a consensus about the distinction between ‘discs’ and ‘disks’ all readers will appreciate? In any case, here comes perhaps the saddest aspect of this change:

But the high-tech revolution will remove once and for all the possibility of a DJ placing a favourite track on continuous repeat or smashing an offensive record on air. Times of London

I wonder whether this would be news at all in the US or if it is a foregone development given the greater penetration of homogenized corporate playlists in US radio.

“Richard Milhous Nixon set an infamous standard for spying on Americans and abusing the powers of the Presidency. But Nixon wouldn’t have dared dream of the sweeping authority being claimed by George W. Bush.

Now, the Bush administration has on the drawing board at a top Pentagon research agency plans that would open America to an Orwellian future. Bush, who sees those not with him as with the terrorists, will soon have the means, motive and opportunity to make the domestic spying of the Nixon era look quaint.” The Consortium

Oh, well, back to the drawing boards. Restored the old template.

On a different note, I won’t be near a computer for the next week or so. I wish everyone a joyous Thanksgiving. See you in December.

‘An offhand comment by a senior member of the Chrétien government may have a lasting effect on relations between Ottawa and Washington. A top aide to the prime minister has been quoted as referring to U.S. President George W. Bush as “a moron.”

The disparaging comment from Chrétien’s inner circle has shaken the Prime Minister’s Office. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien was forced to say on Thursday that President Bush is “a friend of mine. He’s not a moron at all.” ‘ CBC

Take Action: “CSPI has asked McDonald’s to change its current chicken-buying practices that contribute to the unnecessary use of millions of pounds of antibiotics each year. McDonald’s has not taken a stand. Urge McDonald’s CEO Jack Greenberg to protect the public’s health and to stop selling chicken McAntibiotics!” Center for Science in the Public Interest

Is FmH loading faster tonight? Is it laid out all right? I did a rewrite of the template and almost, almost, succeeded in table-less CSS-based layout. It worked fine in Mozilla but, on the off-chance, I checked with IE6 (both under WinXP) and my header layout didn’t work. So there’s one little table up there until I can tweak it further. Of course, I’d prefer if you would all switch to Mozilla for me instead… Please let me know if the page doesn’t sit right in whatever browser you’re using, especially if you’re operating under a different OS. Any CSS gurus care to look at my template and offer any tweaks?

“Gov. George Ryan of Illinois will end his tenure on a high note if he issues a blanket commutation of the sentences of everyone on death row.” NY Times editorial

“Two giant black holes have been found at the center of a galaxy born from the joining of two smaller galaxies and are drifting toward a cataclysmic collision that will send ripples throughout the universe many millions of years from now, scientists said today.” NY Times

“The rate of life-threatening heart rhythms more than doubled among cardiac patients in the New York area in the month after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, according to a new study that sheds light on the role of elevated stress in heart disease.” NY Times

“Scientists are reporting today that they have created the first vaccine that appears able to prevent cervical cancer. The vaccine works by making people immune to a sexually transmitted virus that causes many cases of the disease.

The vaccine is experimental and will not be available to the public for several years.” NY Times

The Action Coalition for Media Education:

ACME is a coalition of teachers, scholars, students, journalists, public health advocates and community organizers who believe that today’s media system is profoundly undemocratic.

The Framers of the U.S. Constitution gave special privileges and protections to the media—via subsidies and free speech laws—due to the media’s critical role in maintaining an open and robust democratic culture.

Many citizens—including journalists and media professionals—believe that today’s media system is failing our democracy in numerous ways:

• With the media owned by some of the world’s most powerful corporations, independent and in-depth coverage of how power is exercised is rare (e.g., the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the digital spectrum give-away). With a truly democratic media, in-depth coverage of how power is exercised would be the norm, not the exception.
• Sound-bite journalism and over-reliance on ‘official sources’ ensure that only a very narrow range of voices and perspectives is heard. These practices thus ensure that the interests of economic and political elites are largely unexamined and unchallenged. (e.g. the absence of Ralph Nader, Jim Hightower, labor voices, etc)
• A media system dominated by advertising revenue pays attention to audiences favored by advertisers. As a result, poor and working-class citizens are largely ignored, unless they are subjects of crime or catastrophe.
• A media system dominated by entertainment values trivializes achievement by its focus on celebrity, the sensational, and the superficial.
• A media system obsessed with high-consumption lifestyles promotes behaviors that are harmful to the public health and to the health of the planet.

These weaknesses are understood consciously or intuitively by many citizens. The goal of ACME is to raise this growing awareness to a threshold of action in order to bring about democratic media reforms, including the creation of alternative media that are non-commercial, locally-controlled and locally-accountable.

“You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I

suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an

up or down. Up to man’s age-old dream — the maximum of individual

freedom consistent with order — or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.

Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would

sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path.”

Ronald Reagan, October 27, 1964 [via Dave Farber’s IP mailing list]

“The killing of Jam Master Jay and other recent incidents have polarized the hip-hop community from the rest of the nation. Erik Parker reports on

An interview with Norman Levitt: “Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt’s book Higher Superstition appeared in 1994, rattled a good many cages, and prompted the Sokal Hoax. The book describes a bizarre situation in American universities in which academics in various (mostly new-minted) fields such as Cultural Studies, Literary Theory, and Science Studies, plus a few more familiar ones such as Sociology, Comparative Literature and the like, make a career of writing about science without taking the trouble to know anything about it. Gross and Levitt have a good deal of fun exposing the absurd mistakes perpetrated by people who rhapsodise about quantum mechanics and chaos theory without having the faintest idea what they’re talking about.” butterfiles and wheels

Also at butterflies and wheels (“fighting fashionable nonsense”), the Fashionable Dictionary: “Your guide to the language of pseudoscience and fashionable nonsense. Written by woolly-thinkers for woolly thinkers. A must read for post-modernists, dialectical biologists, Gaia theorists and Freudians.”

Robert Kuttner considers ‘the best the hawks have to offer’ and finds they still come up short. Rafe Colburn has also written a recent admiring piece in rc3 about one of the participants in the TAP-sponsored debate which Kuttner reviews here — Kenneth Pollack, “a former CIA analyst, National Security Council staffer under Clinton and author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, whose central tenet is that Iraq will acquire nuclear weapons and will not hesitate to use them, but that “the United States should not go it alone; it should have a clear plan for the reconstruction of Iraq, and the war should be about geopolitical security, not about oil.” However, I agree with Kuttner’s and others’ objection, essentially, that ‘what we are facing in Iraq will be George Bush’s war, not Ken Pollack’s war.’

US unilateralism and hegemonist aspirations, the lack of investment in ‘nation-building’ , the likely exploitaiton of Iraqi oil as the spoils of war, the danger of further radicalizing Islamic anti-Americans, and the dangerous precedent embodied in The-Only-Superpower®’s adopting a preemptive first strike policy are about as likely to be precluded by more thoughtful hawks as by opponents of the war.

But the mother of all issues here is whether Saddam Hussein really would use nuclear weapons. On this point, Pollack makes dire assumptions but doesn’t prove his case. On the contrary, he concedes in his book that in the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein was deterred from using weapons of mass destruction and notes, “As long as some form of sanctions remains on Iraq, Baghdad’s ability to use any of its weapons of mass destruction as elements of Iraq’s foreign policy will be constrained. … If Saddam believes his regime is threatened, of course, all bets are off.” In other words, all this war talk makes an insane action by Baghdad more likely, not less. The American Prospect

Adam Christian: The more soul-searching Democrats do, the weaker they look: “Amid the din of competing analyses, one thing is certain: The impulse toward self-reflection is a thoroughly liberal one. Indeed, the introspective reflex seems ingrained in the liberal psyche, which engages in far more soul-searching and self-recrimination than its conservative counterpart.” The American Prospect

Social rejection has a host of behavioral consequences, none of them good. The school shooting epidemic has revived interest in psychological research into the effects of social rejection. The assumption had been that its negative behavioral consequences, such as extreme aggression, were mediated by the negative emotions triggered by rejection. A new series of studies by Case Western Reserve psychologist Roy Baumeister, presented at the American Psychological Association’s 2002 annual meeting in Chicago, claims to demonstrate that “while social rejection does have powerful effects on behavior, those effects are unlikely to be mediated by emotion.” Without the benefits of belonging, self-regulation of antisocial impulses seems to fall apart directly, he asserts. “Social exclusion undermines the basis for these sacrifices–it ceases to be worth it. The whole purpose of controlling yourself, behaving appropriately and making sacrifices is defeated. And so behavior may become impulsive, chaotic, selfish, disorganized and even destructive.” Reading the news coverage of these findings does not make it immediately clear how his study designs showed that the consequences were not mediated by the negative emotional effects of rejection. It certainly seems, however, to be consistent with Baumeister’s earlier work on violent offenders, which focused on the role their violent actions played in the maintenance and expression of fragile narcissism and asserted that, by and large, they did not suffer from low self-esteem. Here’s “Violent Pride”, a renowned 2001 Scientific American article summarizing his thesis. I have from time to time posted to FmH on this theme, and have long been interested in the worrisome interrelationship between the degradation of social connectedness and community, the culture of narcissism, and violent disinhibition.

Related: Beyond Anger: Studying the Subconscious Nature of Rage: Dr Richard Friedman, writing in the New York Times, reviews the evidence “disproving the common assumption that we have to understand something consciously before we can have feelings about it. In fact, …emotions can be rapidly processed by limbic brain networks that operate outside consciousness.” It has long been known in animal behavior studies that aggression comes in two varieties mediated by different brain pathways — “affective” aggression, with physiological arousal, usually a defensive response to threat; and “instrumental” or “predatory” aggression without affective arousal. Friedman discusses evidence supporting the notion, which I have long assumed, that a similar distinction holds in humans as well:

An intriguing clue to how the brain may process rage comes from a recent brain imaging study of convicted murderers. Using a PET scan, which measures glucose metabolism in neurons, Dr. Adrian Raine at the University of Southern California, compared a group of impulsive murderers with premeditative murderers.

In this preliminary study, yet to be replicated, he found that impulsive murderers had significantly lower activity in the prefrontal cortex than premeditative murderers.

Those who committed planned murder had equivalent prefrontal cortical activity to the normal subjects in a control group.

The prefrontal cortex, a brain region just behind the eyes, serves an executive function, integrating information and inhibiting emotional impulses that arise from deeper brain centers like the limbic system. So it may be that violent impulsive murderers are less able to resist their own impulses. Cold-blooded killers, in contrast, are as able as other people to control their violent impulses; they just choose not to.

We have long known that prefrontal functioning can be compromised by organic factors such as lesions, traumatic injury, metabolic or toxic factors, or developmental abnormalities in the ‘bad brain’, leading to an ‘impulse disorder’. I had long assumed that inhibition could similarly be compromised by motivational factors, such as the reduced social payoffs available to the socially excluded. In a sense, inhibitory capacities may atrophy if there are insufficient incentives to exercise them. But, if Baumeister’s new work is correct, the interaction between threat, rage and insufficient motivation to inhibit it may not be the operative factors at all in Columbine-like massacres.

And what is at play in purposeful terrorist violence? Someone has clearly been interested in finding out:

Hunt for Red Army Faction’s vanished organs:

The brains of Germany’s most notorious far-left urban guerrillas were taken away to be examined by scientists, secretly preserved in formaldehyde for a quarter of a century – and have now mostly vanished without trace.

The bizarre story of the ‘terrorists’ brains’ is one that could have come from the pen of Mel Brooks or Joe Orton.

But it also carries echoes of some of 19th century Germany’s weirder medical experiments.

Central to the affair is a clandestine attempt to show that anti-social behaviour is caused by physical abnormality.

The news magazine Der Spiegel reported yesterday that the brains of three prominent Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorists who died in 1977 – Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe – had all been stored in jars in the university clinic of Tübingen at the time of their deaths. Guardian UK

Finally, Cults of hatred: “Panelists at a convention session on hatred asked APA to form a task force to investigate mind control among destructive cults.”

“Extreme influence [such as mind control and cults] has remained dormant in the field of psychology,” Alan W. Scheflin, professor of law at Santa Clara University, told the audience.

Mind control, or “brainwashing” as it’s commonly referred to by the media, is often viewed by many psychologists as science fiction. However, panelists stressed that mind control is being used by cults to recruit and maintain followers and can have dangerous and lasting psychological consequences.

Cults that use mind-control techniques “have been able to do so with impunity, and the people who are victims of these techniques get no treatment,” Scheflin said.

In fact, psychologists who do treat someone claiming to be a mind-control victim from a destructive cult might face a malpractice action. “There are no legitimate treatments that are scientifically validated that appear in peer review journals, although they are effective clinically,” Scheflin said. “Therefore, they are vulnerable to challenge in the courts. That has to stop. There is no reason why people who are true victims of mind control or people who think they are victims and are wrong should not receive treatment when they need it or want it.” APA Monitor

“The online community of sci-fi fans can’t quite agree on what they think of Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris, an upcoming remake of an obscure but treasured Russian film. Some have high hopes. … But many purists dread the new Solaris, which stars George Clooney and will be released Nov. 27. They worry that Soderbergh will trample on two sacred sci-fi texts: the 1961 novel by Stanislaw Lem and the 1971 film by Andrei Tarkovsky.” Wired Even though I am a big fan of the Tarkovsky film, I’m looking forward to this. I’m just not expecting it to be a remake.

‘A Harvard Law School committee announced plans yesterday to draft a speech code that would ban harassing, offensive language from the classroom, a highly unusual step for a law school and a move that runs counter to a national trend against interfering with campus speech.

Last night, the proposed code set off such a furious debate at an extraordinary campus ”town meeting” that some committee members and the law school dean said afterward that they were deeply uneasy with the idea.’ The fractious campus, home of many fierce First Amendment champions, has been rocked by several racial incidents. The Committee on Healthy Diversity, which has been the administration’s major response to the racial tension, is the source of the proposal for a code of speech. Boston Globe

“The A.L.I.C.E Bot is a conversation emulating bot developed by Richard Wallace. The bot has won the Loebner Prize in both 2000 and 2001. You can talk to A.L.I.C.E yourself to see its chat capabilities, quite remarkable.

We thought it would be a great idea to hook up two instances of the A.L.I.C.E chat bot to each other… The results are amusing, you can see them below.

To begin with the characters of this dialog argue about who should be downloading who, and then it slowly descends into constant waffling until it finally reaches an unstoppable loop of junk messages…” nik [via blogdex] I laughed out loud reading the dialogue between the two ALICEs.

“Americans’ use of cellphones has increased so quickly that wireless networks are becoming overloaded, causing a growing number of customers to complain about calls that are inaudible or are cut off or are never connected in the first place.

And things could get worse before they get better, industry experts say, because even as cellphone companies are rolling out fancy features like digital photography and Internet-based games, they are hard-pressed to spend the money needed to improve basic service.” NY Times

I saw evidence of this firsthand this weekend, when I spent an inordinate length of time at the repair counter of my cellular provider’s local storefront while they replaced the broken antenna on my phone. They’ve gone to a new antenna design, the tech explained; this was presumably to stop them from breaking as readily. Unfortunately, it was also responsible for his 20-minute struggle to reassemble the phone after instaling the new antenna mount. That’s beside the point, though. While I was there, I listened to any number of cellular customers coming to the technical support counter complaining that their reception sounds like they’re underwater. There must be something in it for the support personnel to maintain the fiction that the network is okay, because they gamely examined every complainant’s phone, tweaking some and replacing others, and in any case reassuring everyone that everything will be fine.

Embodying peace Pt Reyes Light

Something new from the Google Lab. Enter a few items from a set of things, click on large set or small set and Google will predict other items in the set.

“A nearby black hole is hurtling like a cannonball through the disk of our galaxy. The detection of this speed demon is the best evidence yet, some astronomers say, that stellar-mass black holes — those that are several times as massive as the Earth’s Sun — are created when a dying, massive star explodes in a violent supernova. The stellar-mass black hole, called GRO J1655-40, is streaking across space at a rate of 250,000 miles per hour, which is four times faster than the average velocity of the stars in that galactic neighborhood. At that speed, the black hole may have been hurled through space by a supernova blast….

GRO J1655-40 is the second so-called ‘microquasar’ discovered in our Galaxy. Microquasars are black holes of about the same mass as a star. They behave as scaled-down versions of much more massive black holes that are at the cores of extremely active galaxies, called quasars. Astronomers have known about the existence of stellar-mass black holes since the early 1970s. Their masses can range from 3.5 to approximately 15 times the mass of our Sun.” NASA STScI

“It may not be the caffeine in coffee that raises blood pressure because drinking decaffeinated coffee has a similar effect, Swiss researchers said yesterday.

In an article in the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation, the researchers said there may be another ingredient in coffee that causes blood pressure to rise. They found that coffee, caffeinated or not, raises the blood pressure of people who do not regularly drink it.” Boston Globe In habitual drinkers (of either caffeinated or decaf), the body adapts and the hypertensive effect is not sustained.

…Being Called a Difficult Poet

…Over the years he has won a fair share of praise. But he has also been criticized for being difficult…. He has also been criticized for being postmodern, a prankster, for engaging in madcap rhyming.

And now, with his ninth collection, Moy Sand and Gravel, published in October, it is happening again. Peter Davison, reviewing it in The New York Times Book Review, had high praise: the book “shimmers with play, the play of mind, the play of recondite information,” he wrote. But he complained that some of it was so difficult that one needed a dictionary, or perhaps an entire university library, to decipher it. “Postmodernism contents itself with allusion rather than conclusion,” Mr. Davison wrote. Some poems, he said, seem like “artificially enriched, overinformed doggerel.”

Here’s one interesting twist for the career of a ‘difficult’ poet to take — writing rock lyrics:

Mr. Muldoon has cast a wide net with his career. He has written lyrics with the rock musician Warren Zevon, including the title song of Mr. Zevon’s album “My Ride’s Here.” The lyrics have Mr. Muldoon’s distinctive postmodern lilt: “I was staying at the Marriott/with Jesus and John Wayne./I was waiting for a chariot./They were waiting for a train./The sky was full of carrion./`I’ll take the mazuma,’ said Jesus to Marion./`That’s the 3:10 to Yuma, my ride’s here.’ “

He and Mr. Zevon had also been working on a musical, “The Honey War,” about a dispute over gaming rights to an American Indian casino. Mr. Zevon recently announced that he has terminal cancer, and the project is on hold.

But that’s not the half of it:

Meanwhile Mr. Muldoon has written three operas, with music by Daron Hagen. Vera of Las Vegas is about two I.R.A. volunteers on the lam, a rogue immigration agent and a transvestite lap dancer. The opera has a mélange of styles: U2 vintage rock, jazz, and traditional Irish music. It will have two performances at Symphony Space in New York in June. Shining Brow, about Frank Lloyd Wright, will have a concert performance by the Buffalo Philharmonic next fall. A third opera is Bandanna, a re-retelling of Othello.

Mr. Muldoon is about to begin work on his next lecture, part of a series at Oxford, to be given in January. It is called “The End of the Poem.”

“It’s about how poems are ended,” he said. “It’s about the purpose of poetry in the world.”

And just what is that, Mr. Muldoon was asked? He had a ready answer. “The purpose of poetry,” he said, “is to help us to make sense of who we are.” NY Times

You’ll find some links to poems of Muldoon here. Try this:

Aisling (1983)

I was making my way home late one night

this summer, when I staggered

into a snow drift.



Her eyes spoke of a sloe-year,

her mouth a year of haws.



Was she Aurora, or the goddess Flora,

Artemidora, or Venus bright,

or Anorexia, who left

a lemon stain on my flannel sheet?



It's all much of a muchness.



In Belfast's Royal Victoria Hospital

a kidney machine

supports the latest hunger-striker

to have called off his fast, a saline

drip into his bag of brine.



A lick and a promise. Cuckoo spittle.

I hand my sample to Doctor Maw.

She gives me back a confident All Clear.

“What to do when your young cast hits puberty, one of your older stars dies, your original director drops out and the next promised book is going on a year overdue? …(Author JK) Rowling is still working on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which is said to be longer than Goblet of Fire by a chapter and isn’t due to hit book stores until next year. Considering that, when Order of the Phoenix finally is published, it will be three years between books with two more still to come, by the time the seventh book is ready to be movie-fied, (actor Daniel) Radcliffe could be playing Dumbledore.” Yahoo! News

Apart from the problems of the actors’ aging, part of the charm of the series’ original conception, I thought, was the idea that, with a book a year each chronicling a year at Hogwarts, the characters and

the readers would both grow in realtime. That’s unfortunately shot to hell now, with two successive three-year intervals between the second and third and the third and fourth books. Not only will the readers grown up with Harry Potter, but it is beginning to look as if early readers like my son, with whom I’ve read each book aloud as it is released, will be too old to be interested in the conclusion of the series, if Rowling ever gets there.

In more children’s literature news, “Imagine a library where books are sorted by color, or shape, or by how they make someone feel. This week, such a library is being made available for free to anyone with an Internet connection. The library, a joint project of the University of Maryland and the Internet Archive, is billed as the world’s largest digital library for children.

Every page of Alice in Wonderland and 200 other books have been scanned into the International Children’s Digital Library’s collection… Eventually, 10,000 texts from 100 cultures are planned. But for the project to be a success, kids will have to enjoy reading from computer screens.” NPR

“At the crux of this saga are the Bushes’ real and imagined relationships with Nazi Germany. Rumors about Bush-Nazi connections began circulating in earnest in the pre-web days of the late 80s. The Philadelphia Enquirer discovered a number of German Nazi military officers working as low-level operatives for the Republican National Committee in the Bush presidential campaign of 1988. Rumors of a Bush-Nazi association were kept alive on alt.news conspiracy bulletin boards through the 90s. They gained critical mass during the 2000 election campaign, generating a bewildering variety of exposes, mythic narratives and shadow histories.

Below is just a sampling of some of the hottest current web forums dedicated to exploring Bush-Nazi ties…” The Thresher [via Red Rock Eaters]

Skies over the U.S. east coast are clearing just in time for the meteor shower. You’ll begin being able to see meteors around 10 p.m. but peak viewing time here in the East will be around 5 a.m., when there might be 60-100 falling stars per minute.

Poll: Insiders not backing Gore ’04: “Only about a third of Democratic Party insiders think former Vice President Al Gore should run for president again in 2004, according to a poll published Sunday.” Salon

The scandal that wasn’t: “To read the headlines, you might think that the Yann Martel scandal is the latest example of a good author who done wrong. Ever since Martel won Britain’s prestigious Man Booker Prize last month for The Life of Pi, charges of plagiarism and intellectual theft have swirled around him. But as damning as the accusations may sound, the controversy reflects more poorly on those who have propagated it than on Martel. The brouhaha provides less insight into the ethics of literary creation than the way the media can spead false claims.” Raleigh News & Observer

Well, can it? “Last week, a study published in the New Scientist found that the consumption of monosodium glutamate (MSG), the flavour enhancer best known for its use in Chinese cooking, could damage your eyesight.

Scientists at Hirosaki University in Japan fed rats high levels of MSG, and concluded that it was responsible for destroying retinal cells, which, in turn, delayed nerve signals. It might, they said, explain why people in eastern Asia have a high rate of normal tension glaucoma – an eye disease that leads to blindness.

It sounds plausible, until you take a closer look at the facts.” Telegraph UK

Silicon chip to be inserted under the skin: “Britain is considering a controversial scheme to implant surgically electronic tags in convicted paedophiles amid fears that the extent of the abuse of children has been massively underestimated.

Documents obtained by The Observer reveal the Government could track paedophiles by satellite, with a system similar to that used to locate stolen cars.” Observer UK

The headline in Salon reads: Vonnegut speech could be his last. What it is really about is this: “Kurt Vonnegut is spending a few hours in a building his grandfather designed, an event some say could be the last public appearance by one of American literature’s most revered writers.

Over the past several years, other speeches by the iconic author have been billed as grand finales, but Vonnegut continues to make occasional appearances. And at his age, the 80-year-old says any of them could be the last.” Pretty silly piece from the Associated Press, if you ask me. Should we begin covering every public appearance by an octogenarian with a headline saying it might be their last appearance?

Diana Hsieh, a blogger in California, is being sued for suggesting that a link exists between Scie***logy and Front Sight, the largest firearms training facility in the country. Now another site is being threatened with legal action by Front Sight, because of negative comments posted by users on their message board. Light of Reason has some well-written entries about these events (search for “sci***ology” on their page).

Sci***ology can also be explored at David Touretzky’s site.” kuro5hin

Exposing myself to the wrath of the Scie***logists is one of the few things of which I’m truly afraid on the net, which is why (I hope) i’m cloaking myself from their searches with the asterisks. Their use of both recourse to legal relief and hacking tactics to cripple critics is well-established and nefarious. That being said, reading the material referenced above does not clearly make a direct link between Scie***logy and Front Sight, only that it is headed by someone who has taken courses with them. It is not clear that Scie***logy has directly initiated the lawsuits.

Dubya, Willya Turn the Book Over?: “That President Bush photo you keep getting in e-mail? The one where

he’s reading an upside-down book? Fake. No surprise. In fact, so many

Photoshopped shots are circulating that, one observer says, no real

photographs will exist in a few years. ” Wired

If you worry about the privacy and surveillance consequences of Internet cookies, auto toll transponders, supermarket chain “discount” cards, cell phone location tracking, etc., wait until you see Auto-ID Technology. Embedding ‘RFID Tag’ smart chips into everyday objects will allow them to be tracked by ubiquitous receivers linked to the Internet. Sure, shoplifting might become a thing of the past, but other implications are mindboggling. Start with the scenario depicted in Minority Report of stores recognizing returning customers with individualized sales and promotional strategies; go on to changing your health insurance rating because of the amount of alcohol or junkfood the database says you bought, or developing a risk profile based on the books and magazines you buy. What size database would the Carnivore or Echelon programs need to track five or six objects in the possession of every adult in the population to draw correlations that would allow continuous realtime tracking? I’m not enough of a computer wonk to know, but there are probably some of you out there who can do a back-of-the-envelope order-of-magnitude calculation. My guess is that it would indicate it is feasible.

“While doctors insist they aren’t influenced by the freebies that pharmaceutical companies routinely hand out, newly revealed internal memos from the drug company that paid a record fine for illegal marketing practices show that employees believed plying physicians with food and small gifts was a highly effective strategy in boosting drug sales“. Boston Globe

The New Club NATO — Thomas Friedman: ‘I wonder how many lady F-15 pilots the Latvians have. Actually, I wonder how many Denmark or Spain have. I suspect the number is zero. And that is the main reason why I don’t object anymore to NATO being expanded. Because, as we already saw in the Afghan war, most NATO countries have fallen so far behind the U.S. in their defense spending and modernizations, they really can’t fight alongside of us anymore anyway. So what the heck, let’s invite everybody in.

“It’s now Club NATO,” said Michael Mandelbaum, author of the new book The Ideas That Conquered the World. “And Club NATO’s main purpose seems to be to act as a kind of support group and kaffeeklatsch for the newly admitted democracies of Eastern and Central Europe, which suffered under authoritarian rule throughout the cold war.” ‘ NY Times op-ed

“Former Rolling Stone Bill Wyman has threatened a US journalist with legal action because he shares the same name as the musician.

The star’s lawyers have ordered the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter to “cease and desist” writing under his birth name.

They said he could only use it if he added a disclaimer to everything he wrote clearly indicating he is not the same Bill Wyman who was a member of the Rolling Stones.

The legal threat came after the reporter penned an article about old Rolling Stones albums for the newspaper as part of its coverage of the band’s tour date in Atlanta.

The journalist has suggested using the byline “Not That Bill Wyman”. But he claims to have more right to use the name than the band’s former bassist, who quit the band a decade ago.

The American Wyman was born in 1961, three years before the Rolling Stone changed his name from William George Perks to Bill Wyman.” Melbourne Herald Sun

A poignant selection of letters about the fear or, and struggle with, dementia from New York Times readers, in response to a feature on encroaching dementia.

Dubya, Willya Turn the Book Over?: “That President Bush photo you keep getting in e-mail? The one where

he’s reading an upside-down book? Fake. No surprise. In fact, so many

Photoshopped shots are circulating that, one observer says, no real

photographs will exist in a few years. ” Wired

Is Canonization Near? Yahoo! News

Bin Laden is Back Now, as Defender of Iraq:

“The prospect of a US war against Iraq is already stirring anti-Western resentment in the Middle East, analysts say, and bin Laden’s message appears an attempt to capitalize on that sentiment. Though the Al Qaeda leader has little sympathy for the determinedly secular Saddam Hussein, the enemy of his enemy is his friend.” Christian Science Monitor.

Robert Fisk: Bin Laden is alive. There can be no doubt about it.

“But the questions remain: where on earth is he, and why has he resurfaced now? …It took only a brief flurry of phone calls to the Middle East and south-west Asia for the most impeccable sources to confirm that Osama bin Laden is alive and that it was his gravelly voice that threatens the West in the short monologue first transmitted by the Arab Al-Jazeera television channel…. As usual, “US intelligence” – the heroes of 11 September who heard about Arabs learning to fly but didn’t quite manage to tell us in time – came up with rubbish for the American media. It may be him. It’s probably him. The gravelly voice may mean he’s been hurt. He is speaking fast because he could have been wounded by the Americans.

Untrue…” Independent UK

Experts Say a bin Laden Impostor Could Fool a Lot of People:

“The government’s assessment so far that it cannot be absolutely certain that the audiotape broadcast on Tuesday was recorded by Osama bin Laden does not surprise experts in the field of voice authentication. The science of using computers and linguists to identify individuals by their speech has improved dramatically in the last several years, but still involves considerable guess work and speculation, the experts say.” NY Times

“In past weeks Al Qaeda has relaunched itself,

a rebranding that presages a second phase in its war against the West. The clearest evidence for this shift is in three audiotapes that Al Qaeda has released since the beginning of October from its top leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri.

Most analysts both inside and outside the government believe those tapes to be authentic. On them, the two Qaeda leaders call for a wider war against not only the United States but the West in general, with a wider range of targets. Al Qaeda has chosen war against all “the Crusaders,” not just Americans. The front can be anywhere.

This shift was precipitated by Al Qaeda’s loss of its headquarters in Afghanistan. Deprived of a physical base, Al Qaeda has morphed into something at once less centralized, more widely spread and more virtual than its previous incarnation.” NY Times

Brendan O’Neill: “…how do we account for bin Laden’s boasts about Bali and other attacks?

It seems to me that bin Laden is playing on Western fears about his supposedly powerful position. Rather than coherently or centrally organising such attacks, bin Laden seems to be drawing them together in an attempt to convince us that he has a mission, and the means to carry it out. And where is he getting his ideas? From our obsessive belief that he is behind everything bad that happens around the world and our notion that he is as strong as ever.

It wasn’t bin Laden who first linked the Moscow theatre siege with the Bali nightclub bombing with the Yemen tanker attack with everything else – it was Western politicians and commentators. And it wasn’t bin Laden who first said an attack on Iraq would cause al-Qaeda to rise up and take vengeance (why would he, when al-Qaeda and Iraq hate the sight of each other?) – again it was Western commentators and politicians who floated that idea.

And now bin Laden seems to be weaving these things together in an attempt to frighten us in the West. Our belief that bin Laden is behind everything, combined with our overly panicky reaction to every attack or whisper of an attack, has ended up giving bin Laden the mission he has always lacked. After all, al-Qaeda was the organisation that destroyed the World Trade Centre without ever claiming responsibility for it or explaining why they did it, such was their nihilism and lack of clear war objectives.”

…and Rubik’s Cube to Fish: “National security advisor Condoleezza Rice has presented President Bush with a copy of “War and Peace” to read before his recent summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Reportedly, it was her hope that the classic Tolstoy novel would give Bush a better insight into the complex Russian psyche, in preparation for delicate talks about nuclear arms reduction and the struggle against international terrorism.

Ms. Rice also left a Rubik’s Cube with her pet fish along with orders to complete it while she was away, and left a pad and pencil by the litter box hoping that her cat would come up with a formula for cold fusion.” The Specious Report [via Walker]

Despite the looming Republican majority, Tom Daschle says Democrats can block Alaska oil drilling by filibustering. Shutting off debate would require 60 votes for cloture. Planet Ark

Ghost in the Machine shares a blogiversary with FmH, I recall. Happy third, Kevin, and many happy returns!

What theologian are you?
A creation of Henderson

I have this uncanny experience with the Sunday New York Times Magazine. Invariably, a given Sunday has got either absolutely nothing that interests me in the least or it’s bursting with interesting pieces. This week it’s the latter:

• Bring It All Back Home: “McVeigh, the sniper — the gulf-war vet seems ready to supplant his Vietnam counterpart. But then maybe the postmodern war has made unstable vets of us all.”
• Fierce Entanglements: “For years, prompted by feminists, the strategy for dealing with domestic violence has been to get the men out of the women’s lives. But that’s not what all women want. How is anyone to understand the toughest love?”
• Preschool Meds: “The first clinical trial examining the effects of generic Ritalin on 3- to 5-year-old subjects raises questions not only about the safety of the drug but also about the ethics of testing on ever younger brains.”
• Who Needs the U.N. Security Council?: “1) The Bush administration, seeking international cover to do what it wants, and 2) everybody else, seeking to rein in the United States. Welcome to the New World Order.”

Jefferson Chase, author of Inciting Laughter: The Development of `Jewish Humor’ in 19th Century German Culture: ‘Does the European Left have a humor problem? “The current issue of Merkur, a highbrow German journal devoted to ”European thought,” explores this ticklish subject. Roughly half of the contributors address the topic of humor and 9/11, and along with the inevitable analyses of American humor after the terrorist attacks, there are a number of well-written polemics excoriating what the authors view as a fundamental hostility within the Islamic world toward Western ideas of fun – and the European Left’s tendency to sidestep or blame the West for this hostility. It’s an intriguing idea, for which the Merkur has gotten good reviews. But can fun really be the crux of a clash of civilizations? Is it worth thinking about humor as the largely metaphoric war on terrorism threatens to prompt a decidedly literal one in the Middle East?

(…)

So here, offered in the spirit of H.L. Mencken, as opposed to Jean Baudrillard, is a bit of advice for opponents of the Bush administration’s stance toward Iraq. The next time you stage a protest or write an article, can the anti-imperialism rhetoric and simply ask, ”Is the United States making itself look ridiculous?” That is the question, I think, which would keep the focus squarely where it belongs: on the enemies of laughter and liberal society whom we have every justification to abhor, belittle, and subdue.” Boston Globe

You can trademark words but not meaning.: ‘…(A)s soon as a phrase — especially a heartfelt and serious one — is uttered, it immediately starts morphing into something else, typically a parodic version of itself. When’s the last time anyone uttered “Ich bin ein Berliner,” “I am not a crook,” or “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” as something other than a punch line? “Let’s roll!” is itself taking on an increasingly curious afterlife as the specifics of 9/11 recede from public memory.

Ironically, it’s the phrase’s official guardians who are transforming “Let’s roll!” into a generalized “lifestyle” statement. Earlier this year, the Todd M. Beamer Foundation, a nonprofit founded by Beamer’s widow, raised eyebrows when it trademarked the slogan, both to control its usage and to raise money for programs that “seek…to equip children experiencing family trauma to make heroic choices every day.” But the foundation has done more than just sell its own “Let’s roll!” paraphernalia as a fund raising tool. It’s pursued a series of odd licensing choices that strain the credulity of even the least cynical observers.’ Reason

“President Bush’s top national security advisers have begun discussing the creation of a new, domestic intelligence agency that would take over responsibility for counterterrorism spying and analysis from the FBI, according to U.S. government officials and intelligence experts.

The high-level debate reflects a widespread concern that the FBI has been unable to transform itself from a law enforcement agency into an intelligence-gathering unit able to detect and thwart terrorist plans in the United States. The FBI has admitted it has not yet completed the cultural sea change necessary to turn its agents into spies, but the creation of a new agency is firmly opposed by FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, who has said he believes the bureau can do the job.” Washington Post

Well, whaddya know? Tom Daschle makes the most heavily publicized remarks to date from so senior an official about how the Administration may be failing at TWOT (the War-on-Terrorism®), and quick as a bunny the government announces a “spectacular” threat and the capture of a senior al Qaeda operative. Unfortunately, they can’t give those of us who might be a little, ummm, dubious any details. “Officials declined to identify him or where he was captured, but they did say he was one of the top dozen Qaeda operatives, and so was considered a significant catch.” NY Times [And pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. — FmH] Related: White House Defensive After Terror Warnings Arizona Republic

“From 25 to 30 million healthy, middle-aged Americans are at far higher risk than they and their doctors understand them to be, because we’re not taking inflammatory factors into account.” ‘An inexpensive blood test for a protein linked to artery disease may be better than a cholesterol test at predicting a person’s risk for a heart attack or stroke, researchers are reporting today.

The test, for the substance, C-reactive protein, may help identify people who have an increased risk even though they do not have high cholesterol. About half of the people with heart disease have normal cholesterol levels, a finding that has led many researchers to suspect that other factors must play a role in cardiovascular disease.’ The large study, reported in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine, showed that high CRP levels correlated much better with cardiovascular morbidity and mortality than the lipid studies on which we currently rely.

Many researchers think chronic inflammation plays a major part in artery disease, heart attacks and strokes. Inflammation inside arteries is thought to contribute to heart attacks and strokes by causing cholesterol deposits in the artery walls to rupture and bleed. Blood clots then form, blocking the vessels and cutting off the blood supply to portions of the heart or brain.

C-reactive protein, Dr. Topol said, “is a window into the process of arterial inflammation, a very important insight that we otherwise can’t get.”

Yet, it is unclear yet if lowering a concerning CRP level will decrease cardiovascular risks. NY Times

The show is an only slightly fictionalized version of Mr. David’s real life in Los Angeles. Most of the dialogue is improvised, adding a cinéma vérité flavor to the show.

As on “Seinfeld,” the NBC show Mr. David created with Jerry Seinfeld in 1990, Larry and his sidekicks are mostly idle, self-absorbed and argumentative. But this show is even more uncensored, veined with the pessimism, loony narcissism and political incorrectness that are at the core of Mr. David’s comedy…

Mr. David, 55, a former stand-up comic best known for lashing out at inattentive audiences, is now the critics’ darling, an auteur whose creativity has not yet reached its peak.

His comedy is stripped of all sentimentality, which is part of its subversive appeal. When Larry’s mother is dying, his father does not inform him, saying his mother didn’t want to “bother” him while he was shooting a film in New York with Mr. Scorsese. He is shocked, but quickly realizes he can use his mother’s death as an excuse to avoid bores, cancel a dinner party and persuade his wife to have sex. NY Times

The article suggests that Larry David’s growing popularity may be a coattails phenomenon, as the show follows The Sopranos in HBO’s Sunday evening schedule. I’ve seen this thing a few times and, interestingly, I think it shares something with the latter beyond a timeslot. While most of the critics writing about the attraction of The Sopranos take the obligatory moral stand at the outset that, of course, they don’t find the characters appealing, I think that the more complicated challenge of watching this show is that, for some (or many), Tony Soprano at least is a sympathetic character. [There; I’ve said it. — FmH] One can even relate to his venality. The viewer ‘s dissonant experience of principled abhorrence clashing with likeability makes for interesting viewing, and I have had a similar experience in finding Larry David appealingly, preposterously hilarious while his preoccupations and lifestyle empty and morally vacuous. I wouldn’t take the parallels too far (in case you want to quibble with me), but it struck me suddenly. [Now Seinfeld, on the other hand, which I’ll admit I only watched perhaps twice or three times in total, was empty and meaningless without any appealing characters, IMHO. And it wasn’t funny. — FmH] As a psychiatrist, much of my initial interest in The Sopranos arose from the well-depicted psychotherapy plotline interwoven into it. Wouldn’t it be interesting to be a fly on the wall in Larry David’s shrink’s office too?

Two cases of plague at a New York City hospital turned out not to be bioterrorism, but they provided an opportunity to test how the city health system would handle an intentional attack.

The good news: Doctors say the system worked.

Hospital staff and health officials applied lessons from last year’s anthrax attacks to diagnose and treat the two patients quickly — and to prevent unnecessary public fear over the obscure disease.

The bubonic plague cases, diagnosed in a New Mexico couple who showed up at Beth Israel Medical Center on Nov. 5, were the first in New York City in at least a century.

“This was scary. Even the doctors had never seen a case,” said Dr. Beth Raucher, an epidemiologist at Beth Israel Medical Center, where the two patients were treated. “But everybody did what they had to do.” Reuters Health

“A customer in an international hamburger chain outlet in western Sweden lost his appetite when he discovered the restaurant’s toilet seats were being washed in its dishwasher alongside the kitchen utensils.

The man noticed on a visit to the bathroom in the restaurant in Arvika, Sweden, that all the toilet seats had been removed.

When he asked staff about the missing seats, an employee took them out of a dishwasher where they had been cleaned together with trays and kitchen utensils, the Swedish TT news agency reported on Thursday, quoting the regional newspaper…

The employee tried to reassure the customer by saying that the freshly washed toilet seat would be warm and pleasant to sit on.” Reuters Oddly Enough

Thank you for continuing to afford me the opportunity to enlist your participation in my idiosyncratic version of reality for the past three years. It continues to be its own reward; I hope my kind readers continue to be stimulated, challenged, entertained, edified, outraged here. What do I want for a birthday present? Your suggestions about improvements you would like to see in FmH — either content or performance.

With respect to the latter, I know several people wrote me with pleasure about better loading and less browser choking when I temporarily resorted to a simpler template. You were probably disappointed when I reverted to my original design when Blogger was fixed and I was able to update again. You may recall that someone was kind enough to make an attempt several months ago at rewriting my template with CSS layout control without tables. This made a big difference in how fast FmH loads, but unfortunately we couldn’t iron out the bugs under some browsers. I do intend, sometime I have time, to have another stab at this problem. Hopefully, there’s enough here to continue to put up with the frustrations.

While I’m not looking for fame and fortune in the blogosphere, I do wonder why my referrer count tells me that readership of FmH has been plateaued at around 400 visits a day for the longest time. I know I should find a way to ask this question to the rest of the world which is not reading FmH instead of asking you, but I would welcome any thoughts as to why I seem to have hit such a ‘glass ceiling’ in readership. [And is that more like 400 people checking in once a day; 20 of you looking at FmH twenty times a day; or several thousand of you reading less than a few times a week?]

“A war against Iraq could kill half a million people, warns a new report by medical experts – and most would be civilians.

The report claims as many as 260,000 could die in the conflict and its three-month aftermath, with a further 200,000 at risk in the longer term from famine and disease. A civil war in Iraq could add another 20,000 deaths.

Collateral Damage is being published on Tuesday in 14 countries and has been compiled by Medact, an organisation of British health professionals. It comes as the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, is deciding how to respond to a series of deadlines on weapons inspections imposed by the United Nations.” New Scientist

Ananova

‘PALM BEACH COUNTY, Fla. — A jury awarded the widow of teacher Barry Grunow $1.2 million from a gun distributor Thursday.

Pam Grunow’s lawsuit accused Valor Corp of distributing a gun that was “unsafe, defective and lacked features that would have prevented a minor from using it.” ‘

“The number of organized hacking syndicates targeting financial institutions around the world is growing at a disturbingly fast rate. And so is the number of banks willing to pay these high-tech extortionists hush money to protect their reputations, according to a security expert at The World Bank.” ComputerWorld

William Safire wants you to know that, ‘If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you:

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as “a virtual, centralized grand database.”

To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you — passport application, driver’s license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance — and you have the supersnoop’s dream: a “Total Information Awareness” about every U.S. citizen.

This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks.’ NY Times op-ed