…could transform space travel: “An elaborate matrix of paths scattered throughout the entire solar system can dramatically cut the amount of power needed for spacecraft to explore our celestial neighborhood, NASA announced this week…

Past space wanderers have already tested the space road, including asteroids and comets. Comet Shoemaker-Levy, for example, collided with Jupiter “when it took an off-ramp toward the giant gas planet,” NASA said.

Some scientists theorize that a killer asteroid traveled along the highway when it smacked into Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. ” CNN

Bob Dylan’s road back to Newport: “Bob Dylan returns to the Newport Folk Festival 37 years after his earth-shaking 1965 concert, the first time he performed live with an electric band.” NY Times

Jeb Bush’s daughter fails drug program:

“Gov. Jeb Bush’s 24-year-old daughter Noelle has failed to meet the conditions of a drug treatment plan ordered by a court, the governor said Wednesday.

Noelle Bush was arrested in January at a pharmacy drive-through window for allegedly trying to buy the anti-anxiety drug Xanax with a fraudulent prescription. She was admitted to a drug treatment center in February, with the possibility the charges would be dropped if she completed the program.

It was not immediately clear how she violated the conditions of the program and what the consequences would be.” CNN

Giant squid washes up on beach: “Scientists in Australia are investigating what may be a new species of giant squid, after one of the deep sea creatures washed up on a Tasmanian beach over the weekend.

The squid weighs up to 250 kilograms and, including tentacles, measured almost 18 meters (60 feet), the Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported on Monday.” CNN Still nowhere near It Came From Beneath the Sea sizes, for those who remember the ’50’s monster picture, but getting big enough to account for the legendary battles with whales which sometimes wash up onshore dead with large sucker scars.

Net Users Try to Elude the Google Grasp NY Times

Yale Tells FBI of Rival’s Breach of Web Site:

“Yale University complained to the FBI today that admissions officers from Ivy League rival Princeton University broke into Yale’s online admissions notification system and snooped on student files.

Princeton issued an immediate apology and suspended its associate dean of admission.

Yale accused Princeton of viewing confidential decisions regarding 11 candidates who had applied to both schools — in some cases, doing so before the students had learned whether they were accepted.” Washington Post

Warren Buffett: “For their shareholders’ interest, and for the country’s, C.E.O.’s should tell their accounting departments today to quit recording illusory pension-fund income and start recording all compensation costs. They don’t need studies or new rules to do that. They just need to act.” NY Times op-ed

“Listen up, fellows: Rich, bored teenage girls in New York City are on the prowl for twentysomething (and in some cases, thirtysomething) men. And this time, they’re not just arming themselves with fake ID’s. Young women barely past puberty—and before, ahem, the age of consent—are sashaying onto the Internet, researching adult life, and constructing elaborate alter egos designed to dupe men all too willing to believe their lies.” The New York Observer

‘U.S. Taliban’ Inspires Controversial Ballad: “A new country-rock song that compares American Taliban John Walker Lindh to Jesus Christ is drawing both raves and howls of indignation just days after the 21-year-old pleaded guilty to aiding the former Afghan regime.” Reuters

“The Sun newspaper broke the news on 8 July 2002 that a white couple (Mr and Mrs A) had black twins, following fertility treatment… The stage is being set for a legal moot, over ownership of body fluids.” sp!ked

Where the Upper Crust Crumbled Politely: “The formerly luxurious state-run asylum has fallen on hard times, the standard stay of patients in the era of managed care a mere five days — just long enough to be diagnosed, and stabilized on drugs.” NY Times

“Recession, terrorist threat, clogged arteries, a hole in the ozone the size of France? Fuhgeddaboutit! While lots of conscientious Americans are frantically juggling their finances and questioning their doctors, many are responding by simply not responding.” NY Times

“In the seemingly staid world of physics, time travel is all the rage. Some of the giants of physics like Kip S. Thorne of the California Institute of Technology, John A. Wheeler of Princeton University (who coined the term black hole) and the world’s best-known physicist, Stephen W. Hawking of the University of Cambridge, have written books in the last few years with speculations about time travel.” NY Times

I.R.S. Loophole Allows Wealthy to Avoid Taxes NY Times

They’re free and relatively unscathed.

Bob Dylan’s road back to Newport: “Bob Dylan returns to the Newport Folk Festival 37 years after his earth-shaking 1965 concert, the first time he performed live with an electric band.” NY Times

… this cryptic reference to FmH on a weblog called frytopia:

“Just started looking in–got it off Blogger. So far it’s fascinating and informative. Part of me hopes I’ll find that one thing that will make me less of a shithead.”

I’d love to help, but I don’t have a clue how…

Hollywood hacking bill hits House:

“Copyright owners would be able to legally hack into peer-to-peer networks, according to a bill introduced in the House of Representatives on Thursday.

…(T)he measure would dramatically rewrite federal law to permit nearly unchecked electronic disruptions if a copyright holder has a “reasonable basis” to believe that piracy is occurring.

The bill, sponsored by Reps. Howard Berman, D-Calif., and Howard Coble, R-N.C., would immunize groups such as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) from all state and federal laws if they disable, block or otherwise impair a “publicly accessible peer-to-peer file-trading network.” CNET

DiY cloning is with us at last, and you can buy it on the web. Well, sort of. If you look here, you will find that for the bargain price of $9,199 ex shipping you can buy an RMX2010 Clonaid direct fusion, umm, thingummy.

It is, apparently, a device used for embryonic cell fusion, and we get the impression that it is more efficient than the chamber method, which we confess we hadn’t heard of either. But if you have a ready supply of ovums and cellular scrapings from the individual of your choice, we deduce that this is all you need to produce your very own duplicate person. Well, apart from a womb, that is. We reckon you probably need one of those too.

Clonaid, you may be aware, is an interesting operation. It was founded by one Raël, also founder of the Raëlian Movement, and although the man himself no longer runs Clonaid he still figures prominently on the front page of the site. This tells us that “life on Earth was created scientifically through DNA and genetic engineering by a human extraterrestrial race whose name, Elohim, is found in the Hebrew Bible and was mistranslated by the word ‘God’. The Raelian Movement also claims that Jesus was resurrected through an advanced cloning technique performed by the Elohim.” The Register

Ron Borges writes for NBC Sports and covers boxing and the NFL for the Boston Globe.The Spike Report pointed me to this piece — Great feat, but not a great athlete — about Lance Armstrong’s Tour de France victory. The reader poll on the page disagrees with him 96% to 4%, and I agree with Spike that this has got to be a deliberate provocation. Even taking into account the fact that he might actually have to like boxing to cover it for a major media outlet, could he possibly really be so dense as to believe that cycling is just “pumping your legs up and down while your feet are strapped to bicycle pedals”, variations on which theme he repeats over and over like a mantra in this piece? And, if “for my money, being the greatest athlete in the world involves strength, speed, agility, hand-eye coordination, mental toughness and the ability to make your body do things that defy description”, which of those are not true of a world-class cyclist? Maybe Borges’ wife was unfaithful to a real man like him with some sissy cyclist or something…

New Rules on Accountants, but Also Questions: “The legislative agreement approved today by a vote of 423 to 3 in the House of Representatives and 99 to 0 in the Senate sets up a new and potentially far-reaching regulatory apparatus for the accounting profession. But it leaves crucial details to the discretion of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is about to undergo a potentially stormy transition.”NY Times

Why is Philip Morris supporting FDA regulation of cigarettes? “Philip Morris’ quest for governmental approval is not masochistic: There are solid business reasons for it…” Slate

Is this the definitive sign of the death of blogging?

From economist and science fiction aficionado Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal:

I have never been a strong believer that there is a single “I”. Those times when you get in the car to go to the grocery store, and find ten minutes later that you are pulling into your office parking lot: who–or what–has been driving the car in the meantime?

There is a story that Neils Bohr’s wife once at the start of a party sent him upstairs to change his tie; an hour later she found him, asleep, in bed; taking off the tie had triggered the going-to-bed subroutine[?] reflex[?] entity[?] and had overwhelmed the express conscious purpose. I remember author David Brin once saying that he could not switch from finger-typing to voice-writing, because the raconteur who spoke through his mouth was vastly inferior at plot, characterization, and structure to the writer who communicated through the hands.

My daimones–as Walter Jon Williams calls them–do boring things like drive to the office. Teresa Nielsen Hayden, however, has a daimon that makes good omelettes… [more]

Joshua Micah Marshall:

“The White House just should not use the terrorism card to muscle through an ideological wish-list that it lacks the courage to push on its own terms.

So why no … outrage at the Bush White House for doing (that)?

The White House is insisting on a Homeland Security bill with virtually all the civil service and collective bargaining rights of federal employees stripped out of it? The excuse of course is that the DHS is just too important to pussyfoot around with the sort of loafers who slide by under the civil service regime. But this argument — though superficially plausible — doesn’t bear much scrutiny, especially since these protections now apply to people doing just the same kinds of work throughout the federal government.” Talking Points Memo

Paul Krugman and Mickey Kaus are in the midst of a pissing contest in print…

Kaus also points to <a href=”http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59362-2002Jul24.html

“>this recent preoccupation of Lloyd Grove in the Washington Post:

Mutually Assured Dysfunction? Only a matter of time: Two like-minded magazines, the liberal-thinking American Prospect and the peace-oriented Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, are paying lawyers to try to resolve a dispute that erupted when the Prospect used an image of the Bulletin‘s copyrighted “Doomsday Clock” on its July 1 cover without permission — and, worse, changed the time. Bulletin publisher Stephen Schwartz, who noted that the Prospect set the clock at 4 minutes to doomsday, while the correct time is 7 minutes to doomsday, told us yesterday that his magazine sent a letter of displeasure, and that he isn’t entirely satisfied with the Prospect‘s correction, which appears in the latest issue. “What were they thinking? Schwartz demanded. “Something there must have broken down.”

You can just hear Kaus’ raspy palms rubbing together in glee at this specter of a dispute among the “liberal-thinking”

and the “peace-oriented”, although he disses TAP with that ultimate insult, “obscure” (which, at least to readers of FmH, it certainly is not…). Kaus really reaches escape velocity over Grove’s final point:

We hear a settlement might involve a favorable article about the Bulletin in a future issue of the Prospect. Our call to Prospect Editor Bob Kuttner was not returned.

Mickey the Rhino chomps at the bit [sorry to mix my metaphors with Krugman’s… — FmH]:

Wouldn’t that be a violation of, you know, journalistic ethics? (Imagine if the NYT or WaPo settled a libel suit by promising to publish a favorable article about a plaintiff.) Surely TAP wouldn’t do anything like that …

Wouldn’t that depend on exactly what Grove meant by “…a settlement might involve…”? Too bad Kuttner has yet, if ever, to weigh in on this one. At one extreme, The Bulletin might have demanded a favorable article as a condition of not bringing suit. At the other, might a conciliatory TAP have cited their preexisting admiration, proffering their intention to profile The Bulletin that may have predated the dispute? Most retractions I’ve seen in the press bend over backwards to compliment the source you might otherwise have been perceived as disparaging; that’s precisely what you are trying to achieve with a retraction in the first place. And it would be reasonable to claim you want to write about The Bulletin long about now. A venerable old slumbering giant of the disarmament movement since concerns about the nuclear arms race dropped off most people’s radar screens (a complacent self-delusion I’ve noted with concern here) after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has been receiving a wave of fresh attention since the warmongering Son of a Bush has taken office, since we abrogated the ABM treaty to restart the nuclear arms race with NMD, since 9-11 and the WoT®, and since the loose cannons have been rolled into position along the Indian-Pakistani line in the sand. If you’re curious, scroll past the references to the Bulletin‘s own pages in this Google search to see some of the ‘net attention they receive these days…

And what’s up with Kaus’ continual references to the Washington Post as “WaPo“? Is it just me, or does it seem he’s enjoying evoking resonances to “wacko” just abit?

Site for a seven-week Kurosawa and Mifune Film Series at New York’s Film Forum this summer with all-new 35 mm prints, many with new translations and subtitles. Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Stray Dog, Red Beard, The Bad Sleep Well, Drunken Angel, Throne of Blood, I Live in Fear, High and Low, Hidden Fortress and of course Rashomon and Seven Samurai. Go see them all…

New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell on the retrospective:

Kurosawa used the action genre more luxuriantly than any other director because he unleashed Mifune as a force of nature — the havoc he wrought was as frightening as we could imagine because the director allowed us to understand what Mifune’s victims were up against. Despite all the derring-do of Hong Kong martial-arts films, none of their directors ever lingered on the deadly physicality of the stars. Kurosawa let Mifune’s oaken arms say as much about his ruined amoral samurai in Sanjuro (Aug. 27-29) as the actor’s murderously swift shifts of facial expression did. NY Times

Ah, to be in New York this summer with time on my hands! In the Good Old Days, Boston’s late lamented Park Square Cinema would have a samurai film festival, oh perhaps on an annual basis, but this beats all… A new print of Yojimbo (which I watch over and over again on an nth-generation copy of a VHS tape)?? [thanks, Abby]

…could cause dyslexia, new research shows. Guardian UK

Pointed to by Rebecca Blood, this entry in Jeff Gates’ Life Outtacontext responds to the recent New Scientist item about eccentricity growing with age (to which I blinked) with a list of his own eccentricities. Nice enough; he sounds like someone I’d love to meet. But scroll down to the end for a worthy discussion of his own random acts of kindness… and be inspired.

General Templer’s Capitol Idea The Mighty Organ

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Hilton L. Root: The Political Roots of Poverty:

“This essay has two purposes. The first is to lay out some empirical evidence about the relationship between economic aid and systems of governance. The second is to address the problem of how the U.S. government should deal with difficult partners. On the first task there is a wealth of data that suggests some surprising connections between the length of political tenure, the nature of governance, and the role of aid money. That data and those connections, in turn, can help us to think through the second task.”

Does Western-style development fueled by foreign aid defuse the potential for terrorism embodied in the rage of the dispossessed? “In a world where development is state-driven, what will happen to countries without minimally functioning states? What institutional alternatives should we be thinking about where an effectively functioning state is a distant reality?”The National Interest

“… (W)hat tends to do in the wrongly convicted is the kind of evidence that seems clinching, that often is clinching—namely, eyewitness identifications and confessions. But the human memory is not a video recorder; eyewitness testimony is notoriously flawed. And although most of those who confess are guilty, people can and do confess to crimes they did not commit… Two simple measures could go a long way toward ensuring that findings of criminal guilt are genuine“, says Margaret Talbot, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation

. She suggests that lineups of criminal suspects be conducted sequentially instead of en masse, under the direction of police personnel who do not themselves know which of those in the lineup is the suspect; and that all interrogations be videotaped so that later reexamination can detect how much coercion had been used. The Atlantic

‘Some books are necessary, some are wonderful, few are both. In that select group belongs Joseph Epstein’s Snobbery: The American Version… With Snobbery, Epstein undertakes a book-length essay in a series of interconnected essays, each of two dozen chapters addressing a different type of snobbery. The amazingly alert and perceptive author pursues snobbishness from its spotlighted stages to its hidden breeding grounds and discovers striking varieties in crannies the rest of us would have overlooked.” LA Times Calendar

Reading Cesare Pavese:

“Non scriverò piú.” With these solemn words, which mean “I will not write anymore,” the Italian novelist, short-story writer, and poet Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) concluded his diary, and killed himself nine days later by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.

Of what is a writer’s suicide emblematic? Of writing’s inability to save a life? Ardent lovers of literature may even find it hard to believe that a talent like Pavese’s could not somehow have kept on producing, plunging anew into the toils of composition as a way of resolving perfunctorily (or at least of putting off) the comparatively minor problems of unrequited love and daily living. But of course I am waxing ironic. It is arresting and, I daresay, grimly informative that Pavese’s extraordinarily lucid and pessimistic diary is entitled Il mestiere di vivere (1952), a book translated into English as This Business of Living and all too significantly emphasizing the “métier” or “trade” of living–as in, say, “Mastering the Trade of Living.” Context

“Under the joint auspices of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development a recently published report, Arab Human Development Report 2002 (Creating Opportunities for Future Generations), diagnosed human development in 22 Arab countries in a forthcoming and even blunt manner.

The UNDP has customarily measured the Human Development Index (HDI) in terms of four variables: life expectancy, adult literacy, education enrollment ratios and gross domestic product per capita. This report transcends the UNDP’s traditional criteria and measures human development in terms of three deficits: the freedom deficit, the women’s empowerment deficit, and the human capabilities/knowledge deficit relative to income…” Middle East Media Research Institute

Ishle Yi Park: Sa-I-Gu: “Since I’ve written Sa-I-Gu, I’ve performed it in New York, California, and Minnesota. Reading it is always a visceral experience for me–I try to relive the emotions I felt while writing it, so rage, grief, and hope rise to the surface while performing it. It contains fragments of our story–my story–the story that has been ignored or denied by the media. The point of it is to communicate this experience, so people of all backgrounds feel it, with their minds and hearts.” In the Fray

“A new kind of centipede has been discovered in Central Park, serving as a reminder of nature’s ampleness.” NY Times editorial

The Challenge of Fundamentalist Islam in Western Europe

…Owing partly to different immigration patterns, but partly also to America’s genius for turning immigrants into proudly integrated citizens with realigned loyalties, Muslims in America tend to be more affluent, more assimilated, and more religiously moderate than their co-religionists in Europe…

…For various reasons, Western European Muslims are more likely than their American counterparts to live in tightly knit religious communities, to adhere to a narrow fundamentalist faith, and to resist integration into mainstream society. The distance between mainstream society and the Muslim subculture can be especially striking in the Netherlands and in the countries of Scandinavia, whose relatively small, ethnically homogeneous native populations had, until recent decades, little or no experience with large-scale immigration from outside Europe….

To an American, such a generation-by-generation perpetuation of outsider status can only make one think of the enduring social marginality of many American blacks. Yet at least we Americans have been taught by our bloody history that “separate but equal” is not a viable democratic option, but a cruel delusion… Partisan Review

Even Critics Say Some Designs for Downtown Aren’t So Bad NY Times

Matt Welch: “Critics of sanctions against Iraq undermine their case by exaggerating estimates of the impact of sanctions in infant mortality, for the truth is bad enough“:

There have been no weapons inspectors in Iraq since 1998. As a result it is exceptionally difficult to know with precision what nuclear and biological weapons Saddam actually has on hand or in development. From the beginning, economic sanctions have been tied to what foreign policy analyst Mark Phythian described in World Affairs as ‘the first attempt to disarm a country against its will’. After September 11, the issue of an America-hating tyrant arming himself to the teeth has seemed more pressing than easing an embargo that blocks his access to money.

Yet the basic argument against all economic sanctions remains: namely, that they tend to punish civilians more than governments and to provide dictators with a gift-wrapped propaganda tool. Any visitor to Cuba can see within 24 hours the futility of slapping an embargo on a sheltered population that is otherwise inclined to detest its government and embrace its yanqui neighbours. Sanctions give anti-American enclaves, whether in Cairo or Berkeley or Peshawar, one of their few half-convincing arguments about evil US policy since the end of the Cold War.

It seems awfully hard not to conclude that the embargo on Iraq has been ineffective (especially since 1998) and that it has, at the least, contributed to more than 100,000 deaths since 1990. With President Bush set to go to war over Saddam’s noncompliance with the military goals of the sanctions, there has never been a more urgent time to confront the issue with clarity. Policy

‘There are more votes in vulgarity than in the denunciation of it. Does that mean it is destined to be ever victorious?’ Self-Regulation and the Decline of Civility: ‘Theodore Dalrymple is probably best known for his weekly columns in The Spectator and his essays in the American quarterly City Journal. He is a psychiatric doctor working in an inner city area in Britain where he is attached to a large hospital and a prison. His columns report on the lifestyles and ways of thinking of Britain’s growing underclass, and in his latest book, Life at the Bottom, he warns that this underclass culture is spreading through the whole society. Peter Saunders interviewed him for Policy:

… PS: Let me be slightly mischievous. You talk in the book about tattooing and body piercing and studs through the navel. When I was 16 and came home with a pair of Cuban-heel boots my father said ‘I’m not having them in the house, they’re common!’ You’re now saying that navel-piercing is ‘common’. But I wonder if some of what you are picking up on is harmless fads and fashions? Maybe you’re just being a bit crusty?

TD: It would be harmless if people understood that it is just fashion, and that it belongs in its place. But they understand it as a right, so now, for example, in my hospital ward there’s a male nurse, he’s actually a nice chap. But he insists on having his face full of ironmongery, he has 17 earrings in his ear, and it’s probably not very hygienic. Anyway, eventually the hospital administration, which is far from repressive, said ‘Look, you can’t come to work like that’, and his attitude was, ‘If I’ve got a right to do it, I’ve got a right to do it anywhere.’ So there’s no limitation. Neither is there any acceptance that if you’ve got ‘F*** Off’ tattooed on your forehead, that means you can’t really serve in a shop! They say, ‘You can’t discriminate against me.’ So nobody’s prepared to accept the consequences of their eccentricities or of what they do. If we lived in a culture where you accept that, if you have a ring through your nose, you can’t get a job in a merchant bank, that would be fine. But the demand now is that nobody should be allowed to draw any inferences from anything.

PS: The sort of concerns you are expressing are often popularly associated with being ‘right-wing’, or even ‘extreme right-wing’. Do you think of yourself as ‘a man of the right’, and do you think that the right has an exclusive claim over these kinds of concerns?

TD: I don’t think of myself as ‘right’, let alone ‘far right’. I’m culturally conservative in that I do feel cross about people who constantly claim to discover wrong in the past as if there’s nothing good about it. I’m strongly aware of the enormous effort it has taken for people to make the discoveries that we now take for granted, so that is one of the lessons that we should be teaching in history. So I’m conservative in that sense. I don’t think it’s particularly right-wing, or even exclusively right wing, as I think it’s perfectly possible for people to be economically left-wing and culturally conservative. Poor people need social rules much more than rich people. Their life is much worse if they don’t have those rules. So what I object to is the cultural liberal’s view that they are being kind to the poor when actually they are making their lives hell…’ [thanks, David]

From the Cradle to the Street: “Girls as young as 11 are selling themselves in New York. Stopping them may be difficult, but helping them is almost impossible.” Village Voice

“Tanzim, the Palestinian militia connected to Yasir Arafat’s Fatah faction, was preparing to announce a unilateral cease-fire with Israel before an Israeli warplane dropped a one-ton bomb early Tuesday on a Hamas leader’s home in Gaza City, Palestinian officials and Western diplomats said today.

Israeli officials acknowledged that they had known of a possible Palestinian cease-fire proposal before the bomb was dropped, but they dismissed it as a futile attempt by Palestinians without influence over terrorist groups.

Several Palestinian factions, including groups belonging to Tanzim, have vowed retaliation for the bombing…” NY Times

Powell Soldiers On: “A string of internal policy differences and defeats have set off speculation that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell might not last through President Bush’s term… Tensions with the White House and Pentagon hawks that Secretary Powell has long sought to minimize are no longer possible to disguise.” NY Times

Racial profiling, algorithms, and the perils of shopping: “Could the items on your grocery list make the authorities see you as a potential terrorist?” Another argument not to use those frequent-shopper cards [to incentivize your opt-in to which the supermarket chains (and drugstores, and etc. etc.) are so eager to hand out discounts to to you], which have apparently been the source of this information about you.

The final destination of all that data scares Ponemon and other civil libertarians, defenders of the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure. (Larry) Ponemon (CEO of the consulting firm Privacy Council and a former business ethics professor at Babson College and SUNY), for one, suggests federal authorities are plugging the information into algorithms, using the complex formulas to create a picture of general-population trends that can be contrasted with the lifestyles of known terrorists. If your habits match, expect further scrutiny at the least.

“I can’t reveal my source, but a federal agency involved in espionage actually did a rating system of almost every citizen in this country,” Ponemon claims. “It was based on all sorts of information—public sources, private sources. If people are not opted in”—meaning they haven’t chosen to participate—”one can generally assume that information was gathered through an illegal system.” Village Voice

This edition of the NPR talk show The Connection is guest hosted by All Things Considered co-host Robert Siegel while the tiresome Dick Gordon is away. It consists of a conversation between Rohan Gunaratna (author of Inside Al-Qaeda, research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, University of St. Andrews) and Andrew Higgins (Moscow Bureau Chief, Wall Street Journal). Essentially, Gunaratna finds Al-Qaeda to be a scarily disciplined tightly organized organization with worldwide reach and impeccable strategy and resources which has not been diminished but, indeed, strengthened by the dismantling of its Afghan training camps. . Higgins, who analyzed the Al-Qaeda computer which came into the WSJ‘s possession, contends they are an “almost shambolic”, largely ineffectual ragtag movement, if an organization by that name even exists. Uhh, would it be fair to say that the truth certainly lies somewhere in between?? The quality of the listener calls struck me as particularly lame, especially the woman who “greatly appreciate(s) and agree(s) with your experts.” As for the promised “prescription for combatting the first multinational terrorist organization,” Gunaratna suggests that we should promote educational reform and strengthen the political and economic hand of the moderates in Arab countries to counter Islamist influence, which I find a dubious premise. Higgins agrees on the educational reform…

“George W. Bush is shattering records for the worst first 18 months in office for a U.S. president as measured by the benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500. In his first year-and-a-half in the White House, Bush presided over a 36.9 percent decline, almost twice the percentage drop of Herbert Hoover, the president who led the nation into the Depression…

Ironically, given the Republicans’ business-friendly reputation, the four worst performing stock-market presidents in the first 18 months are all Republicans. Ronald Reagan’s 15.3 percent decline joins Hoover, Nixon and Bush at the bottom. The top two performing presidents, as measured by the S&P in their first 18 months, are Democrats, Lyndon Johnson at a plus 27.5 percent and Franklin Roosevelt at 55.1 percent…

Though some presidents reversed the early returns of the stock markets, Bush has so far failed to inspire confidence either with his personal performance or his policies. The stock market has greeted speech after speech by Bush with double-digit declines in the Dow.” The Consortium

Bush Holds U.N. Family Planning Funds

The Bush administration, in a victory for social conservatives who oppose abortion, will withhold $34 million that had been earmarked for U.N. family planning programs overseas. Instead, the money will go to international child survival and health programs of the U.S. Agency for International Development, officials said Monday.

Critics of the decision said it was driven by politics and vowed to fight to ensure funding for the U.N. program. NY Times

The Puzzling Red Wine Headache NY Times

“A number of misconceptions surround many of the most common childhood ailments and how or whether they should be treated with over-the-counter remedies. The following are common maladies and experts’ recommendations for treating them.” NY Times

In the Beginning …: ‘In the last few years… a funny thing has happened. Cosmologists are beginning to agree with one another. Blessed with new instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope and other space-based observatories, a new generation of their giant cousins on the ground and ever-faster computer networks, cosmology is entering “a golden age” in which data are finally outrunning speculation.’ NY Times

Band of roving chief executives spotted miles from Mexican border: “Unwilling to wait for their eventual indictments, the 10,000 remaining CEOs of public U.S. companies made a break for it yesterday, heading for the Mexican border, plundering towns and villages along the way, and writing the entire rampage off as a marketing expense.”

“CEOnista Martha Stewart (Martha Stewart Omnimedia) was one of the few executives captured. Her mask is made from recycled Christmas paper wrapping.” SatireWire [thanks to David]

In related news, ‘the U.S. Supreme Court today ruled that corporate earnings statements should be protected as works of art, as they “create something from nothing.” ‘ also SatireWire

“There is a definite hierarchy in residency programs, and the more you suffer, the higher you stand.” A ‘diary’ entry by a graduating medical resident:

Residency is generally considered an unpleasant time of life, but there are varying degrees of unpleasantness, depending on the specialty you’ve chosen and where you do your training. There are “cush” programs where call is once a week, from home, even for surgeons, and there are “malignant” programs, where call is every other night for the interns and you never sleep and you are treated like dirt. In New York City, the programs have had to go a little easier on the residents since the famous Libby Zion case, where a young girl died. It was a complicated case, and whether or not the fatigue of the resident caring for the patient contributed to her death is still controversial. Nevertheless, it did call attention to the long hours residents work. New York passed a law limiting residents’ work hours, and recently an advisory committee to the American Medical Association recommended revising resident work schedules to shifts of no more than 12 hours straight. This would be a radical change. The word “resident” comes from the fact that medical trainees used to actually live in the hospital. For years, the misery of residency was perpetuated, whether because of tradition — ”the old “I suffered, you should suffer, too” philosophy — ”or, as some people say, because it allows for the most amount of training in the least amount of time. Slate

And let’s not forget perhaps the strongest incentive for the ‘training’ system — that it gives the lucky teaching hospitals the most work possible from the cheapest pool of physician labor. It has often been said that medical training does not prepare emerging doctors for the economic realities of modern healthcare. To consider the issue, as this graduating resident does, only from the perspectives of ‘tradition’ or ‘training needs’ is a graphic illustration of the ways in which alienated labor doesn’t even see that it is alienated!

Letters to the Editor: ‘The main reason men don’t come to doctors is because doctors do not know how to interact with patients as equals…

I can multiply examples, but suffice it to say our medical training is so imbued with learning through endless one-upmanship that it is second nature for doctors to try to be winners all the time. Starting from a disdain for the patient’s time, making them wait as if we were as high and mighty as judges, doctors never deal with patients on a level field, the way barbers or bartenders do with their clientele.’ AMA News

The quartet butchers Mexican music: “With the recently released Nuevo, a collection of mainly Mexican and Latin American tunes, the Kronos Quartet is no longer the same group of pioneers who warranted attention for their commitment to contemporary music and for their on-stage fire. They’re a group of sonic clowns. And a hapless one at that.” Slate

Psychoanalysts back the option: “Pediatricians recently released a position statement in favor of adoption by same-sex couples. Now the psychoanalysts have done the same…” Psychiatric News

The Relevance of Sex in a City That’s Changed: “Tonight Sex and the City begins its fifth season on HBO in a world solemnized by terrorism and, apparently, newly appreciative of the joys of marriage. What does this mean for a show that has relied on an unending sense of youth and blitheness? Has Sex become irrelevant?” Who cares? Was it ever anything but an icon of frivolous decadence? This NY Times puffpiece describes a pitiful effort to exploit the new opportunities for poignancy in the post-9/11 City.

A Historical and Cross-Cultural Perspective: Hinton, Nathan, Bird and Park. Abstract:

“This article reviews the historical development of the category of panic disorder in the United States, particularly the shifting perspectives on both what causes panic and how the presence of panic should be determined. The notion that panic attacks of a panic-disorder type must be “out of the blue” and “unexpected,” except in the case of triggering by a particular place (i.e., agoraphobia), is critiqued. The authors illustrate that a meaningful epidemiological determination of panic rates in other cultural groups must be preceded by a detailed ethnography that ascertains the catastrophic cognitions, core symptoms, and typical cues of panic attacks in that particular context.”

Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry

The Seven Bodies of a Medical Anthropology of Panic: Devon Hinton and Susan Hinton. Abstract:

“This article aims to adduce a framework that will allow for the cross-cultural study of panic disorder. The authors take sensation as the key unit of analysis, aiming to contribute to a medical anthropology of sensation. The seven analytic perspectives that are suggested in the article are the following: the full spectrum of panic attack sensations (the sensation body), the biological generation of panic sensations (the biological body), sensation as invoking an ethnophysiology (the ethnophysiological body), sensation as metaphor (the metaphoric body), sensation as invoking the landscape (the landscape body), sensation as invoking catastrophic cognitions (the catastrophic cognitions body), and sensation as invoking memory (the memory-associational body).”

Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry

Shape Memory Alloy May Be Ready for Market. Nickel-titanium alloy (nitinol) materials remember two different shape states formed at different temperatures; the conformation change can be induced by electrical currents as well. Although the effect has been known since the 1930’s, it has been frustratingly difficult to engineer uses and has become, in general, an orphan technology. However, medical applications, replacements for solenoids and motors in miniaturized contexts and, perhaps driving the demand most of all, toys, using shape memory alloys may soon start to appear. The article, however, sounds like a press release for one particular company. Are they the only game in town or is the principla of the company a friend of the Times writer?

“FBI counterterrorism chief Dale Watson is the first ranking administration official to publicly express an opinion on Osama bin Laden’s fate.” USAToday

Related:

[found by Adam; thanks!]

“FBI counterterrorism chief Dale Watson is the first ranking administration official to publicly express an opinion on Osama bin Laden’s fate.” USAToday

Related:

[found by Adam; thanks!]

How to distinguish a phony grin from the real thing: “You’ve probably seen driver’s license photos in which the subjects looked anything but happy, even though they were smiling. Apparently, a smile by itself is not enough to convey genuine joy. But what distinguishes a real grin from a fake one? And what goes on in the brain to produce genuine versus ersatz expressions in the first place?” Discover Magazine

Brain imaging studies reveal biological basis for human cooperation: ‘Functional MRI scans have revealed a “biologically embedded” basis for altruistic behavior, with several characteristic regions of the brain being activated when players of a game called “Prisoner’s Dilemma” decide to trust each other and cooperate, rather than betray each other for immediate gain, say researchers from Emory University. They report on their study in the July 18 issue of the journal Neuron…’ EurekAlert!

How your tax dollars are helping the President’s brother: “When Bill Clinton did favors for Hillary’s Senate campaign in New York, the press howled. But that pales next to what George W. is doing for Jeb in Florida. A guide to how your tax dollars are helping reelect the president’s brother.” The New Republic

Ebola virus could be synthesised: “The technique used to create the first synthetic polio virus, revealed last week, could be also used to recreate Ebola or the 1918 flu strain that killed up to 40 million people, experts have told New Scientist.

What is even more worrying is that there are easier ways of recreating microbes. You can simply add key genes to a close relative. The key in all cases is knowing the genetic sequence. That raises fundamental questions about the wisdom of publishing the genomes of deadly pathogens on the internet.”

Secret rule demanding “Your papers please” is challenged: ‘Civil libertarian John Gilmore today challenged as unconstitutional a secret federal rule that requires domestic US travelers to identify themselves.

“United States courts have recognized for more than a century that honest citizens have the right to travel throughout America without government restrictions. Some people say that everything changed on 9/11, but patriots have stood by our Constitution through centuries of conflict and uncertainty. Any government that tracks its citizens’ movements and associations, or restricts their travel using secret decrees, is violating that Constitution,” said Gilmore. “With this case, I hope to redirect government anti-terrorism efforts away from intrusive yet useless measures such as ID checks, confiscation of tweezers, and database surveillance of every traveler’s life.” ‘ cryptome

Pollutants mature sperm prematurely:

“Hormone-like chemicals in food and pesticides may stop adult sperm fertilizing eggs, suggests a new study. Some think that the findings may partly explain falling fertility rates.

Scientists have long speculated that chemicals similar to female hormone oestrogen in food and pesticides could cut sperm counts. Most of the debate has centred on whether such compounds stunt the growing testicles in babies.

Now comes some of the first evidence that environmental oestrogens can stop sperm from adult men fertilizing eggs. Researchers at Kings College London have found that mouse sperm bathed in low levels of the chemicals mature too fast.”

Nature

“The World Health Organisation predicts that depression will soon be the second largest public health problem. Has the world become more depressing, or has the pharmaceutical industry simply become better at marketing antidepressants? In the latest exclusive essay from the London Review of Books, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen examines the new ‘epidemic’.”

The strength of the new biomedical psychiatry doesn’t come, therefore, from the discovery of organic causes, but from placebo-controlled trials in which the effects of molecules are measured and compared. These trials don’t tell us how the medication works, but only if it works, what works best, and on whom. Biomedical psychiatry is a form of rhetoric: it knows how to produce effects without knowing how to treat causes. Pignarre proposes calling it a ‘petite biologie’ to differentiate it from the larger biology that it mimics. When all is said and done, nothing distinguishes it from dynamic psychiatry and the various brands of psychotherapy, which also base themselves in the end on the effects (the changes) observed among patients. The only difference is that the rhetoric of the ‘petite biologie’ is incomparably more persuasive: how, faced with the accumulation of double-blind, randomised trials, could one possibly deny that antidepressants do indeed produce an effect?

The question is, however, on what? It’s a mistake to say they produce an effect on depression, as if the illness existed independently of antidepressants; depression is nothing other than that on which antidepressants act. The reason so many of us are depressed is not because depression is spreading, but because we’ve been persuaded that ‘depression’ exists and can be treated…

Guardian UK

Study ranks the top 20th century psychologists: “The rankings were based on the frequency of three variables: journal citation, introductory psychology textbook citation and survey response. Surveys were sent to 1,725 members of the American Psychological Society, asking them to list the top psychologists of the century.

Researchers also took into account whether the psychologists had a National Academy of Sciences membership, were elected as APA president or received the APA Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award, and whether their surname was used as an eponym.” American Psychological Association Monitor

“Nineteenth-century farmers suffered very different fates, depending on which month they were born in, new research suggests.

Women born in northern Quebec in June left on average seven more grandchildren than those born in April. “That’s a huge effect,” says ecologist Virpi Lummaa of the University of Cambridge, UK.

The result suggests that the earliest stages of life affect future reproduction. Birthweight and early growth are known to have many affects on adult health, including the risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes and schizophrenia….

Nature

Dances With Daffodils: ‘A fanciful form of wordplay known as “N plus 7” can be surprisingly effective at exposing literary pretense.’ The Atlantic

This is just utterly delightful!

Koba the Dread, by Martin Amis reviewed: “Martin Amis calls out Christopher Hitchens and other friends on the left for not giving full weight to the 20 million victims of Stalin’s terror.” Salon

Boston Globe Editorial: “Operation TIPS — the Terrorism Information and Prevention System — – is a scheme that Joseph Stalin would have appreciated….” [thanks, Julie!]

Incidentalism is not a discovery, an invention or a style of art. Incidentalism is an attitude towards art, expression and enlightenment. It is a practice based upon observations and it’s aims are to maximize the enlightenment of it’s practitioners and to maximize the resonance of human expressions. It is our hope that in doing these things that our greater understanding of our lives will alow us to live more satisfied and authentic lives in a more satisfactory, just, and authentic environment.

Incidentalism is rooted in the idea that art is not an object, but rather art happens in the incident. Art happens when the actions of artists bring expressions into a state where they can be perceived and thereby can enlighten, art is in the moment of expression. It is not our purpose to use art as a tool to demonstrate our own skill and/or knowledge, rather to use art as an apparatus to provoke the incident to incite expressions that are beyond our own preconceptions. The incidentalist’s goal is to express that which is beyond their skill and or knowledge, not to educate through their work but be enlightened by it and allow these enlightening expressions to resonate unhindered.

“We” are The Incidentalists. We do not include or exclude anyone from being such. It is up to you whether or not to include yourself in our open ended “We” as is convenient for your experience, change your mind whenever you like.

Paul Krugman — Steps to Wealth: “George W. Bush’s business dealings foreshadow many characteristics of his administration, such as its obsession with secrecy and its intermingling of public policy with private interest.”

And:

Nicholas Kristof — Bush and the Texas Land Grab: “The point in President Bush’s business career where he took outrageous shortcuts was not at Harken Energy, but rather when he was grabbing land for a new baseball stadium in Arlington for his Texas Rangers baseball team.” both barrels from today’s NY Times op-ed page

New York Times

news analysis: “For all the buildup, the case of John Walker Lindh, who pleaded guilty on Monday to felony charges, was too insignificant to be worth a protracted courtroom battle.”

“Unarmed village women holding 700 ChevronTexaco workers at an oil terminal in southeastern Nigeria let 200 of them go but threatened a traditional and powerful shaming gesture if the others tried to leave–removing their own clothes.” LA Times [free registration required, or login using username “fmhreader”, password “fmhreader”]

“The Bush administration’s broad new proposal for domestic security, to be made public on Tuesday, calls for sweeping changes that include the creation of a top-secret plan to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure and a review of the law that could allow the military to operate more aggressively within the United States.” NY Times

Joseph Duemer’s comments in response to something from onepotmeal:

“… I have dogs, the terrier is barking downstairs at this moment & the others are stretched out in cool places around the house. Here’s my thought: Nick, don’t get a dog until you must have one. A dog is different from a child–it’s not really yours, but its own being. You can’t drown a child when you’re bored with it & you can’t drown a dog when you’re done with it, but for different reasons. It’s hard to explain, but you never really own a dog the way you own a child of your own species. You have less moral claim over a being who happens to be a member of another species because you do not share its universe. In the face of our ignorance of the the universes of other species, we ought to act with circumspection. You do not see the world the way a dog does. As for going to monasteries & all that Western crapola, I have spent my share of time in Vietnamese Buddhist monasteries & most of them have dogs. Your spiritual quest is nonsense in the face of a dog’s willingness to abide your presence. In the temples I visited, the dogs ate before the monks. Make that your practice, if you can. Or maybe, if you get a dog & then want to go off on a spiritual quest, you should drown yourself.” reading & writing

Rafe Coburn at rc3 confided that he had toyed with the idea of seeing The Powerpuff Girls Movie until he read this. rc3

Sopranos mob ready to return: “…Sopranos devotees are probably … miserable considering the nearly 16-month wait they will have had to endure for new episodes of their favorite show. The down time between Sopranos seasons typically has been lengthier than the TV norm, but this one was extended even longer by HBO bigwigs who sought to avoid summer scheduling conflicts with its other popular Sunday-night series, Sex and the City. The show is scheduled to resume Sept. 15.” Offering only the most meager of hints about the direction the show will take, they’ve wrapped up shooting the season, the show’s fifth and, quite possibly its last. David Chase, Sopranos creator, is calling it quits, although he cautions that HBO owns the show and can continue it without him, a prospect none of the cast find palatable however. Contra Costa Times [via randomWalks] [Oh darn; after five years of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, Dr Melfi would just be beginning to get somewhere with Tony Soprano! — FmH]

blog.meetup.com is a means of organizing ‘meetups’ of local webloggers in an area; they’ve designated venues in your region (search for the closest by entering your zipcode) and pinned down a time, then local webloggers who are interested have voted on where their local meetup will occur. Currently, “meetups are ready to happen in 540 cities in 22 countries”; 1642 webloggers have enrolled; an RSVP system lets others in your areas know if anyone has confirmed that they’ll be coming to the local meetup so that you won’t be the only one who shows up.

Pfizer to Buy Large Drug Rival in $60 Billion Deal:

“The drug giant Pfizer Inc. has agreed to acquire the Pharmacia Corporation for stock that it valued at about $60 billion, in a deal that would make it by far the most dominant drug maker in the world, the companies announced today….

Drug companies, under intense pressure from politicians, employers and managed care companies to limit price increases, are having a hard time finding breakthrough products that would assure the robust earnings growth investors demand. Pfizer’s acquisition of Pharmacia, resulting in a company that would still control only 11 percent of the global market, is likely to hasten the industry’s continued consolidation.” NY Times

Related: This analysis of pharmaceutical industry research and development woes from The Economist [blink courtesy of David Brake] delves more deeply into one of the strong pressures behind acquisition and merger in the industry, as the New York Times story above suggests.

Essentially: pharmaceutical company shares are falling faster than the Dow. Several drug giants are among the companies whose ‘creative accounting practices’ and anti-competitive behaviors are taking them dangerously close to regulatory discipline if not grand jury scrutiny. As the industry is more concentrated and the profit-and-loss statement relies more and more heavily on one or just a few big-earning medications in a company’s stable, it becomes disastrous to face expiring patents and generic equivalents — as with the ongoing desperation of Eli Lilly to cushion itself over the loss of Prozac profits — or product glitches — such as the recent sea change around HRT or unacceptable side effects found late in a drug’s R&D cycle or even not until post-marketing surveillance. There is thus more and more pressure on drug companies to develop the next new blockbuster, while development costs, especially the costs of necessary clinical trials, are climbing. “(I)t is not that (the pharmaceutical companies) have become much worse at delivering new drugs, but rather that they have not become much better.” One estimate is that each company has to develop roughly three new drugs per year for the balance sheets to remain healthy; current R&D performance is around half that level.

Under such circumstances, I keep saying, prescribing physicians and the drug-consumer public should be alert to the ways in which drug company profitability requires that they shove questionable advances down our throats… literally. Although I would be the first to resist a cost-containment effort that would reduce patient access to a truly superior pharmaceutical, one should always question one’s doctor on the advantages the Next Great Thing s/he’s prescribing has over the tried and true, gold-standard medication with the same purpose.

Eat right to stay bright:

“Elderly rats that eat certain fruits and vegetables stay smarter than rats that don’t, according to two new University of South Florida studies.

While the jury is still out on humans, the studies, to be published today in the Journal of Neuroscience, offer evidence that eating foods high in antioxidants may reverse the cognitive effects of aging.”

St Petersburg Times

And: Crime and Nourishment:

“I was very interested to read the recent British research showing that giving basic nutrients to young offenders significantly reduced their criminal tendencies. The idea that the answer to the youth crime epidemic in the UK may be found on the shelves of our local health food store might seem a little far-fetched, but there is good reason to believe there is some truth in this. It is a plain and simple fact that our mood and behaviour are, to a degree, dependent on the nutrients the brain gets from the diet. No wonder then that more and more research is stacking up to suggest that altering this organ’s fuel supply can take the edge off a tendency towards delinquency.” Guardian UK

Also: His-and-Her Hunger Pangs: Gender affects the brain’s response to food: “Women have higher rates of obesity and eating disorders than men do, but scientists don’t know why. New findings offer clues to the root of sex differences in eating behaviors. The study showed that men’s and women’s brains react differently to hunger, as well as to satiation.” Science News

[thanks to David Walker]

Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics

The use of psychedelic drugs is that dark little secret behind the popular origins of Eastern spirituality in America, but if they really open the mind in the same ways meditative experiences do, why shouldn’t they be legitimated and brought out into the open? In Allan Hunt Badiner and Alex Grey’s Zig Zag Zen authors, artists, priests, and scientists are brought together to discuss this question. Opinions fall on all sides. Ram Dass, for instance, discusses the benefits as well as the limitations. Rick Strassman outlines his work in the first federally funded psychedelic study in two-and-a-half decades. Rick Fields sets the historical scene. China Galland offers a wrenching personal experience. Robert Jesse introduces the varieties of entheogens, drugs that engender mystical states. Lama Surya Das tells of his early drug years. And a roundtable discussion with Ram Dass, Robert Aitken, Richard Baker, and Joan Halifax caps it all.

Interspersed throughout are stunning full-page, full-color images of spiritual art by the likes of Robert Beer, Bernard Maisner, and, of course, Alex Gray. A fascinating look at a complex topic, Zig Zag Zen is worth appreciating and pondering. amazon.com

“Sixty- to 70-story office buildings, stores, cultural centers and a memorial to the dead are included in six alternative proposals for the World Trade Center site that will be released on Tuesday.

Officials familiar with the proposals said that all six would replace the 11 million square feet of office and retail space lost in the Sept. 11 attack with a cluster of buildings much shorter than the 110-story twin towers.” Nando Times

Woman sentenced to 4 years in dog mauling case: “A judge sentenced Marjorie Knoller to the maximum four years in prison Monday for the dog mauling death of her neighbor in their apartment building last year.” Nando Times

D.C. police say 9 motorists hurt, possibly by blowgun darts: “Several drivers in the nation’s capital were hit with sharp projectiles, perhaps darts fired from a blowgun…In three cases, the six-inch long, razor-sharp projectiles had to be surgically removed.” Nando Times

Coulter’s critics descend to her level: ” Ann Coulter’s new book, Slander, is full of egregious jargon and outrageous attempts at deception. Unfortunately, rather than claiming the high ground, several critics on television and in print have descended to her level, attacking Coulter in a manner that only supports some of her most outrageous claims about liberals.” Spinsanity

Justice Dept readies national informant system: “Everywhere in America, a concerned worker can call a toll-free number and be connected directly to a hotline routing calls to the proper law enforcement agency or other responder organizations when appropriate.” When this operation is up and running, the US will have more potential informants than East Germany’s Stasi did at the height of its power.

Israeli military releases another baby photo: I missed my chance to blink to the first one, but I won’t repeat the same mistake twice! Of course, that one was “just a joke”, acording to the family of the infant. CNN

Beware Bush’s summer charm offensive: ‘The American administration has rethought missile defence and plans a fresh drive to sell a new system to “protect friends and allies”. Will this win the critics over?’ Guardian UK

“Humans possess a gene which acts as a defence against infection by HIV, scientists have found.” The gene, CEM15, can stop the HIV virus from replicating if it is not interfered with by a protein, Vif, produced by the virus. This suggests new strategies — either finding the gene product of CEM15, which the article does not hint at, and replicating its function, or finding a way to inactivate Vif’s inactivation of the CEM15 gene — to fight HIV infection.

BBC

Christopher Hitchens writes:

‘…(T)he existence of a vast pedophile ring in the United States in the twenty-first century is something more than an affront to “family values.” And the fact that this ring is operated by named and senior churchmen, who continue to hold high office and to officiate at Sunday ceremonies, is something more than an outrage. Alleged “cultists” in Waco, Texas, who were only suspected of maltreating children inside their compound, were immolated by a bombardment of federal fire. The admitted and confessed enablers and protectors of rapists and child abusers are invited, at the most, only to resign their high offices.’ Free Inquiry

A teetotaler’s guide to social drinking: ‘Giving up alcohol can be addictive. It starts in the most innocuous way. You merely want to lose some weight, or perhaps to gain some health, and you decide to stop drinking, just for a week or so. Before you know it, you are hooked on the regular rushes of well-being brought on by abstinence. You are seduced by your improved appearance, or you crave yet another full night’s sleep, uninterrupted by the nonspecific anxiety that used to wake you at four in the morning. Above all, there is the novelty of having mental clarity by day. You cannot imagine life without it.

The only trouble is that you remember all too well how irritating you used to find it during your own drinking days when some killjoy said, “Not for me, thanks—I’m on mineral water.” Drinkers mind if one among them is not drinking. Like death, drink is a great leveler. Sobriety immediately introduces a hierarchy. ‘ The Atlantic

“A crop of new books assesses why our collective hopes for marital bliss have soured and what might be done about it. Viewed together, they reflect a surprising consensus that has emerged of late between liberals and conservatives over the virtues of, if not the road to, holy matrimony. It’s a consensus that’s been largely overshadowed by recent partisan debates over whether the government should be getting involved in such private decisions as to whether poor people ought to get married. But this new development represents something of a détente in the 30-year culture war over gender roles, family values, and the meaning of tying the knot.” Washington Monthly

“The gene and the quantum were conceived at the same time as Freud conceived the unconscious; yet, although they have led to sophisticated technologies, psychology and psychiatry, by most standards, are failures. More people than ever are on anti-depressants; drug abuse is rampant; psychotherapies don’t work; our jails are fuller than ever.

What happened? Where did it all go wrong? Jerome Kagan, a professor of psychology at Harvard, thinks he has an answer. In his newly published book, Surprise, Uncertainty and Mental Structures, he argues that we have been ignoring what goes on inside our heads.” New Statesman