Keeping Panic at Bay: Prof. Jared Diamond, author of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Guns, Germs and Steel: the fate of human societies, on what we can learn from ancient terrorist tactics. NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”] And the parallels with the war against piracy of two hundred years ago. Washington Post

Is Camel Pox Coming? Maureen Dowd in the NY Times about the state of modern fear.

Washington is rife with contradictory signals. The White House urges us to

go out while Dick Cheney is under wraps. Congress urges us to stay calm

and go about our business while the entire House takes a powder at the

first sign of powder. We are supposed to shop till we drop, literally, as

the F.B.I. and C.I.A. warn of major attacks at any moment.

The capital is the heart of confusion. The U.S. has been at war with the

Taliban for two weeks so . . . we can reinstate the Taliban? The Post

Office is sending us mail warning us . . . about opening mail?

Nothing seems to track: Gov. George Pataki said he was taking Cipro but

wouldn’t get tested. Senator John Breaux said he got tested but might not

take Cipro. Dan Rather said he hadn’t been tested or taken Cipro. Tom

Brokaw ended the NBC news with “In Cipro we trust.”

I went to the White House, seeking some answers from Tom Ridge at his

briefing on Friday. But he looked a bit like a big Pennsylvania deer in the

headlights. He didn’t even know what CNN had been running — that an

assistant to a New York Post editor had contracted anthrax.

When Mr. Ridge said they didn’t know if the anthrax came from a foreign

or a domestic source, he was slapped around by Helen Thomas, doyenne

of the homeland. “And why are you so slow in finding the actual source?”

she asked tartly. “I mean, is it that difficult really?”

Tommy “Plenty for Everyone” Thompson was still buddying up to the

pharmaceutical industry, refusing to break Bayer’s patent to ensure

generic Cipro for everyone…

Psychological implications of chemical and biological weapons: long term social and psychological effects may be worse than acute ones. The most relevant model may indeed be mass sociogenic illness (the technical term for “mass hysteria”; emphasis added).

The ostensible purpose of chemical and biological weapons is to endanger lives. Biological agents, however, are particularly ineffective as military weapons, while chemical weapons have only limited uses. This may be why armies have generally acquiesced in international treaties to contain these unpredictable weapons and feel capable of waging war without them. Instead, chemical and biological weapons are quintessentially weapons of terror. The now routine journalistic association between chemical and biological weapons and the word terror confirms that the purpose of these weapons is to wreak destruction via psychological means — by inducing fear, confusion, and uncertainty in everyday life. These effects will take two forms, acute and long term. It is customary to expect largescale panic if such weapons are ever effectively deployed or thought to be deployed.

We do not, however, know whether such panic would materialise. Media stories emerging from the United States in the past few days are not encouraging, but we should remember that history teaches us that civilian populations have been able to withstand previous “terror” weapons such as aerial bombing, despite warnings to the contrary. However, one psychological reaction that can be anticipated, because it has already started to materialise, is mass sociogenic illness. On 29 September 2001 paint fumes set off a bioterrorism scare at a middle school in Washington state, sending 16 students and a teacher to the hospital. On 3 October over 1000 students in several schools in Manila, Philippines, deluged local clinics with mundane flu-like symptoms such as cough, cold, and mild fever after rumours spread via short text services that the symptoms were due to bioterrorism. On 9 October a man sprayed an unknown substance into a Maryland subway station, resulting in the sudden appearance of nausea, headache, and sore throat in 35 people. It was later determined that the bottle contained window cleaner.

Examples of mass sociogenic illness remind us of the dangers of inadvertently amplifying psychological responses to chemical and biological weapons and thus adding to their impact. One example is the routine use of investigators clad in space suits to assess possible terrorist attacks. Another is that the United States government is considering placing detectors to identify chemical warfare agents on the Washington DC subway system. It is possible that these alarms will in practice cause greater disruptions to transport systems than the attack itself, given the high probability that such detectors may give false alarms. There were 4500 such alerts in the Gulf war and none was associated with a confirmed attack.

The long term social and psychological effects of an episode of chemical or biological attack, real or suspected, would be as damaging as the acute ones, if not more so. For example, a serious physical impact of the accidental discharge of sarin nerve agent during the destruction of an Iraqi weapons depot after the end of the Gulf war has not been documented, but the psychological, social, and political consequences have been substantial and continuing. Even if the short term consequences of an attack with chemical or biological weapons turn out to be less than some of the apocalyptic scenarios currently being aired by the media, the long term disruptions may be worse than anticipated. Experience from other incidents involving confirmed or alleged incidents of toxic contamination suggests that these might cluster around four major health concerns: chronic injuries and diseases directly caused by the toxic agent; questions about adverse reproductive outcomes; psychological effects; and increased levels of physical symptoms.

The general level of malaise, fear, and anxiety may remain high for years, exacerbating pre-existing psychiatric disorders and further heightening the risk of mass sociogenic illness. The current uncertainty over the chronic health effects of low level exposure to toxic agents will further increase anxiety in the affected communities. Because health officials cannot provide blanket assurances that no harm will result from brief or non-symptom producing exposure to toxic agents, frustration and then a growing distrust of medical experts and government officials may result, robbing state institutions of the trust they need to manage recovery. Lastly, unconfirmed or controversial hypotheses about the health effects of exposure to chemical and biological weapons will probably become contentious scientific and media issues in the years ahead, as has occurred after numerous chemical and radiological incidents, the Gulf war, and the Balkans deployment.

British Medical Journal

Scaring My Readers: Dan Hartung, unbidden, always watches out for my coding problems for me (thanks!). He comments:

‘Regarding the message:

“This page is accessing information that is not under its control. This poses a

security risk. Do you want to continue?”

The reason is that IE6 warns by default on cross-site scripting.

Your javascript “edit if permitted” icons point to blogger.com, so it’s

probably picking up on that and letting surfers know that your site

could be trying to run javascript that tries to access information

on another site (e.g. certain Hotmail exploits: if you’re cookied in to

Hotmail, a script could have messed around with your mail).

Google on XSS for more information.

It also might be because of the base href on gelwan.com, where

my browser at least thinks it’s still looking at std.com — I’m not

certain of the internal mechanisms of this warning.’

[The base href is at world.std.com because the gelwan.com domain is ‘parked’ there… -FmH]

Pentagon Denies GPS to Taliban — ‘ “We have demonstrated the ability to selectively deny GPS signals on a regional basis, particularly … when our national security is threatened,” said Lt. Jeremy Eggers, a spokesman at Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado. That’s home to the 50th Space Wing, which oversees GPS.

That would mean only military GPS receivers — in planes, ships and in the hands of U.S. special forces — would work within the targeted area.

Eggers wouldn’t say if a selective denial would be precise enough to hit just Afghanistan, or if neighboring nations like Pakistan and Uzbekistan would be affected too. He’d only say that the “region can be very well defined.” ‘ Wired

A reader with links to the radical right in the Pacific Northwest writes to say he has seen none of the increased interest in, or recruitment efforts from, militia groups that Reuters reports (below). This is in contrast to the millennial effect the rollover to Y2K had, he observes.

Double blast this weekend: On Friday, twisted magnetic fields above sunspot 9661 erupted powerfully — not once, but twice — at 0105 UT and again at 1640 UT. Both explosions unleashed category X1.6 solar flares and hurled lopsided coronal mass ejections (CMEs) toward Earth. The expanding clouds will likely strike Earth’s magnetosphere on Oct. 21st and possibly ignite Northern Lights during this weekend’s Orionid meteor shower. spaceweather.com

Virus villains: “While the world worries over the threat of viruses being spread by terrorists, strange things seem to be happening in the less real world of computer viruses.

Rob Rosenberger, editor of the V-Myths website and a critic of fire engine-chasing anti-virus companies, claims he was treated to an early morning visit by the FBI last weekend. He says he was forced to pull a column he was planning to run that would have caused embarrassment to one of the anti-virus vendors. Many have been quick to jump on the back of post-September 11 security fears to sell their services.” Guardian UK

A Scramble to Counter Any Threat of Smallpox: “After announcing plans to stockpile

300 million doses of smallpox

vaccine, the government must now

determine where it can quickly get so

much.” NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

Anthony Lewis: The Inescapable World — “After Sept. 11 it was said by many that

our world had irrevocably changed. That

is true in a sense that we have not yet

grasped.

Winning the military struggle against Osama bin Laden and his Taliban

protectors, if and when we do, will not end the threat of terrorism against

the United States. That will require, in the long run, something more

difficult than military action: a profound effort by America and the West

to ease the poverty and misery of the developing world.” NY Times op-ed [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

Maybe Anthony Lewis hasn’t grasped this yet, but not because it hasn’t been said. Every blog I read which comments on the aftermath of 9-11 has said, or linked to, variants of this revelation so many times already in just six weeks that it is mind-numbing in its familiarity and banality, so much so that I’ve pretty much stopped linking to expressions of this sort of sentiment. They’ve become truism, especially to progressives accustomed to thinking this way since… forever? Yet we know that the world at large, and the alarmingly clueless administration they half-voted into office, hasn’t grasped this notion. Pundits have been proclaiming, indeed, that we’ve already lost the real war ahead, essentially because we haven’t grasped this. I agree, the prospects are distressingly grim. The people with this perspective are, unfortunately it appears, largely talking only to one another, a community of already like-minded.

NPR this morning had a piece on the adverse effect 9-11 is having on charitable giving. As people divert their donations to the relief funds, more prosaic but no less urgent social causes feel the pinch. My family and I, reflexively, gave as deeply as we felt we could to 9-11-related efforts. The acceleration of the downturn in the domestic economy partly precipitated by the attacks may add to the downturn in giving. (In Massachusetts, we’ve already been told, for example, that the budgetary impact of 9-11 is going to force the state to put on the back burner any planned expansion of funding for placements for mentally ill children ‘stuck’ in mental hospitals, a problem with which I’ve been preoccupied professionally.)

Perhaps the message that has to get out, particularly to people moved compassionately to give for the first time in the face of the emergency, is that making the world a place where these things don’t happen requires us to not lose sight of other compassionate needs. I suggest that this is a time for anyone who donates to rethink their limits, to dig deeper, and start their own version of a matching fund. For every dollar, or every hour of time, we have given to help the direct aftermath of this disaster in NY or DC, perhaps we should truly consider giving an equivalent amount to each of these other categories of need, more urgently now rather than less:

• domestic efforts against poverty and social injustice which might otherwise get ignored just now, as NPR’s piece suggests
  

• the effort to assist the Afghani people, within their country and in refugee camps, ravaged by the current war effort
  

• efforts to address the impoverishment, the human rights crisis, and the public health emergency (including AIDS) in the developing world, as Lewis’ column and a myriad of other sources suggests.

I’m under no illusion that charitable giving (of time or money) is the solution. In scope, its impact is limited. More than that, it is not straightforward; giving has a complicated and sometimes paradoxical effect both on the giver and the recipient, in both a practical and a spiritual sense. Certainly, it’s worth reflecting on whether a given relief or social action agenda is actually slapping a ‘bandaid’ on problems that will perpetuate or worsen the underlying inequities of the world. But we can turn 9-11 into an opportunity to consider these issues and make a start at meaningful transformation of the world into a place where, if it is to be judged globally by how we treat our most unfortunate, it is worth living in.

Art Imitates Life, Perhaps Too Closely: “(London) — An installation

that the popular and pricey British

artist Damien Hirst assembled in the

window of a Mayfair gallery on Tuesday

was dismantled and discarded the same

night by a cleaning man who said he

thought it was garbage.

The work — a collection of half-full coffee

cups, ashtrays with cigarette butts, empty

beer bottles, a paint-smeared palette, an

easel, a ladder, paintbrushes, candy

wrappers and newspaper pages strewn

about the floor — was the centerpiece of

an exhibition of limited-edition art that the

Eyestorm Gallery.” NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

A Crucial Question for Tom Ridge: “The frustrating element of the briefing was its failure to clarify whether the

anthrax sent to Senator Daschle was a highly sophisticated preparation,

even weapons-grade material… What alarmed the Senate and sent the House scurrying for cover were

indications that biological warfare analysts were deeply concerned after

analyzing the Daschle material. Yet at yesterday’s briefing an assistant

secretary of defense described it as ‘run of the mill’ anthrax. He said the

suggestion that it had been processed in some way was not yet

confirmed, nor could he comment on whether it had an aerosol-like quality

or was weapons-grade anthrax.” NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

I continue to be interested in how the extreme right might be reacting to current events. Please send any relevant links. Reuters reports that militia appeal is growing since the attacks.

‘ “America’s anti-government militias, on the wane since the Oklahoma City bombing and the Y2K scare, are trying to drum up new interest and

members after the Sept. 11 hijack attacks, experts and militias say.

While people who track militias are skeptical of a sustained revival, militia leaders say the suicide attacks in New York and Washington and the ensuing anthrax scare

have been a “wake-up call” to the public that has left their phones ringing off the hook.

“There’s a general fear now that we may be attacked again or the lights may go out, so people think they should go to the people who know how to handle survival and

weapons,” said Rick Hawkins, commander of the Missouri 51st Militia in Kansas City, Missouri.’

Recall that I blinked below to the detention of an Aryan Nation type with a microbiology degree and a nasty habit of obtaining lethal cultures from low-security labs. Now Australia’s leading antiterrorism expert speculates that the original, media-directed anthrax attacks are more likely due to the US paramilitary movement than ObL, with a spate of copycat episodes by “mentally unbalanced people” following. He was speaking in response to the spread of anthrax panic to Australia. Although such actions readily spread terror, it is difficult to cause mass casualties without the hard-to-obtain “weaponized” preparation of the anthrax spores. Terrorist groups have shown little interest in acquiring and using biological agents for terrorist attacks, he states. Aum Shinrikyo’s biochemists gave up trying to develop biological weapons using anthrax after nine attempts and turned instead to chemical agents. The Times of India

From Hell reviewed: “The Hughes brothers’ portrait of Jack the Ripper and Victorian England misses the intricate

and disturbing nature of the graphic novel on which their film is based.”

The movie is big on fire-red skies and black clouds, wet cobblestones, flickering gaslight, and cloaked figures moving through the fog. In

other words, it revels in exactly the sort of horror-movie clichés that held no interest for Allan Moore or Eddie Campbell. “From Hell”

evokes nothing so much as a pair of small boys given the budget to make their own version of the Hammer horror movies they’ve gorged

on. Which would be fine if the result weren’t such a brain-dead version of a dark and complex work. — Charles Taylor in Salon

On the other hand, Elvis Mitchell in the New York Times, says that “…the Hughes Brothers’ thriller

about the trail of terror left by

Jack the Ripper is one of the most

breathtaking leaps of directing skills in years… (T)he

directors, the twins Allen and Albert

Hughes, find (many ways) to complement, and then top,

the apocalyptic narrative weaving that

Mr. Moore is best at.

…Like Mr. Moore, the Hughes Brothers are interested in large-scale

paranoid fantasies, though they work closer to the real world. Although a

period film set in late-Victorian London might initially seem outside their

purview, what else is the Jack the Ripper tale but a tableau of urban

violence, filled with characters who don’t know where to turn? The tale is

the European antecedent of the Hughes Brothers’ Menace II Society and

Dead Presidents.”

War veterans: Afghan

bloodbath if US troops

invade: “Hard-bitten Russian veterans of the

disastrous Soviet intervention in Afghanistan have

warned of a bloodbath if the United States sends in

ground forces in pursuit of Osama bin Laden, wanted for last

month’s US terror attacks.

Alexei Zelenyov, now a deputy in the Russian parliament but

seen by some as the Soviet Union’s last action hero, predicted

the worst for US troops in the event of a protracted land

campaign.

“The US special forces will be up against people who have

been fighting for 20 years and who have grown up as warriors.

The Afghans have an immeasurable love of freedom. Every

province is a state in itself,” he said. The Times of India

Mark Morford, SF Gate columnist: Evil Evildoers Of Evil — How to feel calmly patriotic and yet not the slightest bit reassured by Bush & Co.

This much is true: It really is possible to

love your country and value your freedoms

and still believe the government is full of

fools and prevaricators and BS artists and

Dick Cheney. Really.

It is still possible to feel warmly patriotic in

personal and important ways and yet believe

the military and the generals and the war

machine do not have your best interests at

heart and really couldn’t care less what

those interests are anyway but thank you for

sharing now please sit down and do as we

tell you and by the way, thanks for all the

flags and the money.

And it is still possible to feel unified and

spiritually connected to all that is good and

righteous about your generally nonviolent

Americanism — you know, wine and sex and

good music, large dogs and literature and

clean water and tongue kissing in the streets

— and still be depressed when our famously

nonintellectual president talks to the

country like we’re all five years old and

heavily dosed on Ritalin.

When Bush employs phrases like “bring the

evildoers to justice” over and over, 17 times

in one speech alone, and he furrows his

brow like a serious Muppet and offers

carefully scripted reassurances deliberately

lacking in polysyllabism and detailed

explanation because that would be, you

know, complicated.

When he delivers very earnest speeches he

had no part in writing, and when he is

forced to speak extemporaneously, sans

script or TelePrompTer, and is reduced to

simplistic good-guy/bad-guy platitudes and

flustered, rapid blinking, and who cannot

for the life of him articulate a complex idea,

some sort of nuanced elucidation of our

nation’s motives and positioning, that

contains more than one possible level of

meaning. [via Looka!]

The Booker Prize for Fiction 2001: goes to The True History of the Kelly Gang by the enthralling Australian novelist Peter Carey, who becomes wih JM Coetzee one of the only two authors to win the Prize twice. Carey won the 1988 Booker Prize for Oscar and Lucinda. Two of his non-Prize-winning novels, Jack Maggs and The Unusual Life of

Tristan Smith , have been more to my taste. Here’s the shortlist.

Neuropsychological Performance in Long-term Cannabis Users: Investigation of the question of residual deficits in cognitive functioning after longterm heavy cannabis use has been inconclusive. A new study by Harrison Pope and associates from McLean Hospital compared active heavy users, abstinent but formerly heavy users, and non-cannabis-using controls on a comprehensive neuropsychological battery including measures of general intellectual function, abstraction

ability, sustained attention, verbal fluency, and ability to learn

and recall new verbal and visuospatial information. Findings: “Some cognitive deficits appear detectable at

least 7 days after heavy cannabis use but appear reversible

and related to recent cannabis exposure rather than irreversible

and related to cumulative lifetime use.” Archives of General Psychiatry

Our first line of defense: Laurie Garrett, the investigative reporter who wrote two excellent (and massive!) books pertinent to current events, The Coming Plague and Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health, is interviewed on responding to the threat of bioterrorism.

“Our government is buying ciprofloxacin, and we’re buying tons of it. We’re buying so much cipro that Bayer in Germany has to reopen a long-shutdown factory to accommodate the American demand. That seems to be the primary thrust of this administration’s commitment at this point.

In my book, purchasing massive quantities of ciprofloxacin is a medical response, not a public health response. The appropriate public health response, it seems to me, would be to look for the most frontline primary antibiotic that appears to be effective. As far as we can tell, the stuff that’s floating around right now in people’s envelopes is completely penicillin-susceptible. It would make a whole lot more sense and it would save hundreds of millions of dollars — not to mention you wouldn’t be breeding broad-spectrum, drug-resistant bacterial disease in millions of Americans — if you use penicillin. Why in the world are we going for the world’s most expensive, broad-spectrum, highly resistance-prone antibiotics?” Salon

“To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.” — George Santayana

A Closer Look At Weblogs from law librarian and legal researcher Cindy Curling. [via Fred]

I idly worried the other day about whether the Freedom of Information Act was going to be gutted in the current climate of ‘giving up freedoms for liberty’ (or is it vice versa??}. Well, lo and behold, Attorney General John Ashcroft is now insisting that a new standard allowing rejection of a FOIA request whenever there is a “sound legal basis” for such DOJ opposition will replace the former, Reno-era standard that noncompliance with a FOIA request would need to be justified by a “forseeable harm” standard.

The article about Bellesisles’ research and the gun ownership controversy generated alot of comments from Followers. It seems Bellesisles’ work has been seriously called into question, to judge from these links I’ve been sent. However, let me make it clear that I found the issue noteworthy not so much because of my belief in his work as due to the degree of ongoing controversy, and the apparent conversion of some former gun control advocates by the new legal commentary. Thus, these responses are less corrections than corroborations of my point.

• “People who have checked Bellesiles’ claims against the probate records that he says he consulted have found that he drastically under
  
  > states the number of guns they show.” Fox News

• “The government steadfastly maintains that the Supreme Court’s decision in
  
  United States v. Miller, 59 S.Ct. 816 (1939), mandated acceptance of the
  
  collective rights or sophisticated collective rights model, and rejection of
  
  the individual rights or standard model, as a basis for construction of the
  
  Second Amendment. We disagree.” [Decision text], [news reports], [more].

• “Today, at Harvard Law School, Bellesiles’s most adamant critic, Northwestern
  
  University law professor James Lindgren, plans to detail evidence that
  
  Bellesiles may have stretched or distorted the historical record in trying
  
  to prove his claim.

  The Boston Globe has reviewed substantial portions of records Lindgren will
  
  cite: 18th-century probate records in Vermont and Rhode Island. The Globe
  
  has also checked into Bellesiles’s claim to have studied certain records in
  
  San Francisco, records county officials say were destroyed by fire in 1906.
  
  In each case, the records appear to support Lindgren’s accusation and
  
  suggest a disturbing pattern of misuse of data by Bellesiles in his book and
  
  in an article defending his thesis which he published on his Web site.” Boston Globe, 9-11-01

• “I thought that you might be interested
  
  in a recent report of some critiques of Bellesiles’ study, done by Glenn
  
  Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee. You can find the
  
  piece at:

  http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,36122,00.html.”

• 
  site_name=GunCite

  site_url=http://http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_bellesiles.html

  comments=”This is a pro-gun site, but refreshingly free of paranoia, as these sites generally go. The URL points to a long article which attempts to demonstrate how Michael Bellesiles is more of a propagandist than a historian. I don’t know how much of it is true, but I always find it interesting to see how much disagreement a single issue can generate.”

Thanks to everyone who wrote in. Yes, FmH can be a conversation.

Mail Delivery Shows Limitations of Anthrax Attack — “The delivery method of the anthrax spores — via the postal system — offers some insight into the capabilities and motives of the perpetrators. At the same time, it reveals technical and perhaps even political limitations constraining broader, more indiscriminate attacks.”

Large-scale anthrax attacks on the United States would only serve to further weaken bin Laden’s position among Muslim nations. Even Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi has condemned anthrax attacks, calling anthrax a “weapon of mass destruction,” according to Reuters*.

Political leaders and their mouthpieces in the media, however, could be considered more legitimate military targets. This would allow a continuation of the terror war in America without driving Islamic nations closer to the United States. Given these political restraints and the technical difficulties of deploying anthrax, a widespread anthrax attack on a major metropolitan area remains unlikely. For the average American, the chances of getting anthrax remain extremely low.

StratFor

______________________________________

*(Coverage of Gadhafi’s remarks is here. However, I can never seem to get into Yahoo! anymore.)

Empowering or Cowering?: “Years ago, in a justifiably famous essay titled ‘Politics and the English Language,’ George Orwell pointed out that the way politicians use language tends to confuse the public and destroy the clear communication that is the basis of a true democratic politics. His novel 1984 shows how a totalitarian state can destroy people’s understanding of the meaning of words in order to keep those people in a state of oppression… For some reason, academic writers on the left, who, like Orwell, used to be champions of the plain style, today have hidden themselves in the thick jungle of some of the most impenetrable prose on the planet.” The Vocabula Review

“War and destruction cannot stop us from playing – our job is to play cricket.” Afghans pad up for peace. A link sent by a bemused reader who cited the incongruity of mentioning Afghanis and cricket in the same breath. BBC When I was in Afghanistan a quarter century ago, the national sport was buzkashi. I wonder if it’s still played…

Text of a U.S. propaganda radio broadcast into Afghanistan:

“Attention Taliban! You are condemned. Did you know that? The instant the terrorists you support took over our planes, you sentenced yourselves to death. The Armed Forces of the United States are here to seek justice for our dead. Highly trained soldiers are coming to shut down once and for all Osama bin Laden’s ring of terrorism, and the Taliban that supports them and their actions.

“Our forces are armed with state of the art military equipment. What are you using, obsolete and ineffective weaponry? Our helicopters will rain fire down upon your camps before you detect them on your radar. Our bombs are so accurate we can drop them right through your windows. Our infantry is trained for any climate and terrain on earth. United States soldiers fire with superior marksmanship and are armed with superior weapons.

“You have only one choice … Surrender now and we will give you a second chance. We will let you live. If you surrender no harm will come to you. When you decide to surrender, approach United States forces with your hands in the air. Sling your weapon across your back muzzle towards the ground. Remove your magazine and expel any rounds. Doing this is your only chance of survival.”

Mark Halpern: Two Bad Papers on Language Usage: “They are both, in very different ways, bad papers. Wallace’s makes some sound points in support of traditional good English, but is itself so badly written as to make the thought cross one’s mind, at least for a moment, that it was written by a clever enemy of good English in order to discredit the notion. Winchester’s is a little ? not much ? better written, but makes no sound points at all; its thesis is so nonsensical as to suggest that it was written by his bitterest enemy, out to ruin him professionally. The Vocabula Review

A Journal of Academic Life Halts Publication. Disappointing news in todays New York Times that Lingua Franca is out of business. I have always found something rich and deep whenever I have read it. On the one hand, I think that if anything I have linked to it too little, but perhaps we should’ve been buying subscriptions to the print edition instead of reading it online. Thank heavens, at least, that the related site Arts and Letters Online will continue.[via R.H.]

Wired is running two articles about yer drugs of abuse today, first the illicit and then the licit. In How Safe Are Your Illegal Drugs?:

“Terrorists could poison drug supplies and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration probably can’t do anything about it.

Politicos have warned that dirt-cheap, high-potency heroin will soon flood world markets and cause an epidemic of overdoses in the wake of the Taliban evacuating opium supplies before the first bombs hit Afghan soil. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Because the drugs are illegal, health officials are not authorized to monitor the purity of such substances — not just heroin, but marijuana and ecstasy and other illicit drugs. This coming at a time when authorities are on high alert against bio and chemical attacks.”

Not to mention that a number of DEA personnel have been transferred to FAA duties after the hijackings.

In Pushing pills to the anxious? concern is raised about whether manufacturers of psychopharmaceuticals useful for the treatment of anxiety are trying to profit from the climate of fear in New York and elsewhere with their current marketing strategies.

“With fears of anthrax in the mail running high, postal inspectors in St. Paul have given their colleagues a heads-up that Publishers Clearinghouse is sending out packages of powdered detergent.” ABC

“Although September 11 was horrible, it didn’t threaten the survival of the human race.” Colonies in space may be only hope, says Hawking: ‘The human race is likely to be wiped out by a doomsday virus before the Millennium is out, unless we set up colonies in space, Prof Stephen Hawking warns today.

In an interview with The Telegraph, Prof Hawking, the world’s best known cosmologist, says that biology, rather than physics, presents the biggest challenge to human survival. “In the long term, I am more worried about biology. Nuclear weapons need large facilities, but genetic engineering can be done in a small lab. You can’t regulate every lab in the world. The danger is that either by accident or design, we create a virus that destroys us.

” ‘

King’s Ransom. Seymour Hersh writes: “Since 1994 or earlier, the National Security Agency has been collecting electronic intercepts of conversations between members of the Saudi Arabian royal family, which is headed by King Fahd. The intercepts depict a regime increasingly corrupt, alienated from the country’s religious rank and file, and so weakened and frightened that it has brokered its future by channelling hundreds of millions of dollars in what amounts to protection money to fundamentalist groups that wish to overthrow it.” The New Yorker

Thanks to Fred Lapides for this, which relates to the photos we’re being shown of the target sites in Afghanistan.‘The US Government has bought all rights to all the pictures of Afghanistan

and surrounding areas taken by the privately operated Ikonos high-resolution imaging satellite… Under the terms of the contract, Space Imaging, the company that operates Ikonos, will not “sell, distribute, share or provide the imagery to any other entity”.

Although Ikonos images can be sold commercially, the US Government has the right to impose such restrictions, which are known as “shutter control”.

The objective is for the US Government to obtain an additional pair of eyes over Afghanistan to supplement its own spy satellites and, more importantly, to deny others the use of the images.

Space Imaging’s two-year-old Ikonos satellite provides black-and-white images capable of seeing objects one metre (3.2 feet) across. It also takes colour pictures with 4-m (13.1-ft) resolution. The detail in the Ikonos images already taken show a line of trainees from the al-Qaeda network marching between camps in Jalalabad.’ BBC

Scaring some readers? An FmH reader writes:

‘Whenever I visit your page now I get the following message box:

“This page is accessing information that is not under its control. This poses a

security risk. Do you want to continue?”

I assume it’s some security setting on my computer (Win2K PC, IE6), but I thought I’d let you know just the same. You might be scaring some readers.’

Thank you, Microsoft; I’m looking forward to continuing to provide you with information that is not under my control. Hope you don’t find that too scary…

Little Big Man — Jim Holt, Wall Street Journal science and philosophy book reviewer and author of the forthcoming Worlds Within Worlds: How the Infitesimal Revolutionized Thought asks, “Which, from the point of view of the universe, is more contemptible–our minuteness or our brevity? Cosmically speaking, do we last a long time for our size or a short time? Or, put the other way, are we big or small for our life span?” Lingua Franca

Showdown! There’s a struggle raging over interpretation of the Second Amendment’s “right to bear arms” message. Recent legal scholarship has won over a number of prominent liberal former gun control proponents. Michael Bellesisles’ historical examination showing that only a small proportion of Colonials owned guns contributes by turning the romantic image of the Minutemen on its head. Here’s an overview of the dispute. What’s at stake is enormous — the entire right-to-rebel principle embodied in the individual liberties reading of the Bill of Rights (not that the extreme right cares about historical or constitutional law scholarship!).

Nor, says Michael Bellesiles, a historian at Emory University, should the American romance of the militia and minutemen blind scholars to the truth about early-American gun culture. It is a common assumption that both gun ownership and militia membership were near universal at the time of the nation’s founding, as suggested by these words of the Declaration of Independence signatory and Anti-Federalist Richard Henry Lee: “To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms.” This notion of universality is crucial to Standard Modelers, who object that the National Guard cannot be the militia meant by the Second Amendment because its membership is selective, like that of the hated standing army. But Bellesiles, who… has extensively researched antebellum gun ownership and regulation, argues that only a small percentage of the colonial elite possessed firearms in the first place.

In fact, Bellesiles says he has surveyed more than eleven thousand highly detailed probate records (inheritance lists for white males) from the years 1765 to 1850 from New England and Pennsylvania. His results, which will be published in this spring’s The Origins of America’s Gun Culture (Knopf), were astonishing: “Roughly 14% of all adult, white, Protestant males owned firearms. Fourteen percent. That translates to about 3% of the total population of the United States at the time of the Revolution. This percentage holds fairly constant up through 1840. So that in other words, all this talk about universal gun ownership is entirely a myth that I can find no evidence of.”

Lingua Franca

I’m going into far more detail about this article than simply posting a blink because I think it’s urgently important to understanding the basis for current U.S. policy in the conflict. Blind Faith: Dubya’s official advisor on Islam, David Forte, is not Muslim, does not speak Arabic, and describes himself as a “student and not an expert”, but Dubya has adopted his line whole hog. He’s also a conservative Catholic who serves on a Vatican committee to strengthen the family and whose scholarship is in Catholic legal theory, although he has reportedly become passionate about Islamic persecution of Christians. His insistence that al Qaeda are theological heretics who take their inspiration from a “seventh-century sect of puritan thugs called the Kharijites” may be motivated by the ulterior desire to

“redeem religious orthodoxy… or, at least, cleanse it of the extremist stain. ‘Nothing this evil could be religious,’ he is fond of saying. It’s a bromide that jibes perfectly with Bush’s own unabashed fondness for religiosity of all stripes. Unfortunately, it may be wrong,”

writes political commentator Franklin Foer in The New Republic. Serious scholars of Islam scoff at his analysis as mistaken and oversimplified, and he ignores the influence of

“Wahhabism, one of modern Islam’s central movements. Emerging in eighteenth-century Arabia, Wahhabism called for a new asceticism, violently opposing decorations in Mosques and celebrations of the prophet’s birthday. And it has at times sanctioned violence against “infidels,” both outside the religion and within.

For decades the Saudi royal family has aggressively promoted Wahhabism by, among other things, financing Wahhabi religious schools throughout the Muslim world. Bin Laden was born Wahhabi, and the Taliban–who graduated from some of those Saudi-funded Wahhabi schools–have undergone a period of what Olivier Roy, an Islamologist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, calls “Wahhabisation.” (Witness their destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha, in keeping with Wahhabi prohibitions against graven images.) You can even see traces of the sect’s influence in hijacker Mohammed Atta’s will, which requests Wahhabi burial rites. But you wouldn’t pick up any of this from Forte, who never mentions Wahhabism in his analyses. As Deeb told me, “He misses the real story.”

Perhaps that’s because, unlike the Kharijites, Wahhabis aren’t marginal. Within the United States, according to Hisham al-Kabbani, head of the Washington-based Islamic Supreme Counsel, almost 80 percent of mosques are presided over by Wahhabi Imams. The vast majority of them, of course, don’t support bin Laden. But understanding Al Qaeda’s Wahhabi roots exposes the simplicity of Forte’s distinctions between good and bad, or real and fake, fundamentalist Islam.

Understanding that bin Laden and al Qaeda are not as demonic and marginalized in the Muslim sphere as we would prefer to see them will help us understand what to expect from the Islamic world.

Contrast the trouble we’re getting ourselves into from the mistaken appeal — and influence — of a rigid failure of imagination unable to embrace relativism (if you believe the signs and symptoms and the diagnosis) with this important apologia for postmodernism by Stanley Fish, from this New York Times op-ed piece: Condemnation Without Absolutes:

During the interval between the terrorist attacks and the United States response, a reporter called to ask me if the events of Sept. 11 meant the end of postmodernist relativism. It seemed bizarre that events so serious would be linked causally with a rarefied form of academic talk. But in the days that followed, a growing number of commentators played serious variations on the same theme: that the ideas foisted upon us by postmodern intellectuals have weakened the country’s resolve. The problem, according to the critics, is that since postmodernists deny the possibility of describing matters of fact objectively, they leave us with no firm basis for either condemning the terrorist attacks or fighting back.

Not so. Postmodernism maintains only that there can be no independent standard for determining which of many rival interpretations of an event is the true one. The only thing postmodern thought argues against is the hope of justifying our response to the attacks in universal terms that would be persuasive to everyone, including our enemies. Invoking the abstract notions of justice and truth to support our cause wouldn’t be effective anyway because our adversaries lay claim to the same language. (No one declares himself to be an apostle of injustice.).

Later, he adds:

But of course it’s not really postmodernism that people are bothered by. It’s the idea that our adversaries have emerged not from some primordial darkness, but from a history that has equipped them with reasons and motives and even with a perverted version of some virtues. Bill Maher, Dinesh D’Souza and Susan Sontag have gotten into trouble by pointing out that “cowardly” is not the word to describe men who sacrifice themselves for a cause they believe in.

A BBC reporter who travelled with Taliban militia reports that they “secretly loathe their leaders and bin Laden.” ‘He’s mad, you know…’: “I spent two months in Afghanistan. I left with an overwhelming sense of humanity surviving in hardship beyond our imagination. The Taliban, although feared and loathed in equal measure, are in some ways a natural outcome of the chaos that existed in Afghanistan. But just as they have preyed on the plight of the Afghans to impose order they, too, have become easy prey for Bin Laden. He has used their homeland as a launching pad and now, like so many times before, Afghanistan is once again to become a battleground for other people’s war.” The Sunday Times of London

If war is not the answer, what is? Here’s what the Quakers (the Friends’ Committee on National Legislation, in particular) propose, with which I largely agree:

• mobilize law enforcement means of pursuing the perpetrators;
• empower the UN to intervene in states that harbor and encourage terrorists;
• preserve domestic civil liberties;
• enhance compassionate aid to the people even of offending states, and to refugees from war zones;
• resume efforts toward a just lasting peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict;
• lead a worldwide effort to reduce CBNW stockpiles and prevent their unauthorized dissemination and use;
• robust economic assistance to those who have lost jobs or income in the aftermath of the attacks.

Here’s their “grassroots toolkit” for encouraging non-military alternatives and supporting those in the US government who might take a similar stand. Here’s the FCNL’s official position paper on the U.S bombing of Afghanistan.

President Bush has said that the attacks of September 11 changed everything. Perhaps, but the thinking of our government officials and their response to violence remains unchanged. The U.S.-led military campaign is merely a high tech and more destructive version of a 19th century military strategy, and promotes the law of force over the force of law. By leading a military campaign in Afghanistan, the U.S. has fallen from its internationally recognized moral high ground to a much more morally ambiguous position in the eyes of many around the world. This response is inadequate to the demands of the 21st century and is unbecoming to America.

Noemie Emery: Look Who’s Waving the Flag Now: one of the more childish, name-calling tantrums about progressive dissent I’ve seen on an op-ed page; e.g. : “A healthy skepticism about the uses of power is always in order, but a smartass contempt for one’s country and one’s fellow citizens is something quite different. Most Democrats now get this; some students are learning. And one day, it may dawn on the chattering class.” Entitled to her opinion as she certainly is, is there any excuse for taking up column inches with such poor writing?? The Weekly Standard

“The photographs released by the Pentagon this week depicting pockmarked runways and shattered aircraft portray a successful U.S. bombing campaign in Afghanistan, but military experts warn that the carefully selected images reveal far less than meets the eye. Los Angeles Times

Private Ryan, Amnesiac: How apt are the analogies to World War II? Don’t they just act to shut off discussion and dissent? ‘The case for avoiding depth was made best, however, by Dan Rather, who was asked by David Letterman to comment on the sources of Islamic rage. The dean of American journalism dismissed the idea summarily. “Hate is hate,” he said, and then followed that up by saying, “George Bush is the president. He makes the decisions…Wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where. And he’ll make the call.” There was no need, in other words, for journalism, for skepticism, or even for thought. The situation was that simple. Like World War II.’ Freezerbox

Thomas Friedman: Saudi Royals and Reality — ‘Attention, Prince Alwaleed: These young men came from your country, and while the Palestinian issue no doubt angers them, it does not compare to their hatred of what Mr. bin Laden called the corrupt, “hypocritical,” “hereditary” Arab regimes, starting with Saudi Arabia.’ NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

Cyanide threat reportedly foiled in Europe: “Secretly recorded tapes have revealed plans by followers of Osama Bin Laden for a chemical weapon attack in Europe using a poisonous invisible gas that security sources say was cyanide.

A gang of terrorists active in Britain, Germany and Italy plotted to use tins of tomatoes to transport ‘a liquid that suffocates people’. The plan was foiled after a Libyan at the centre of the plot was arrested in Munich on Wednesday.” The Sunday Times of London

Burning question: Are Russian troops fighting in Afghanistan? “Moscow denies rumors that Russia has gone beyond intelligence, logistics support.” Christian Science Monitor

Oxfam emergencies – Crisis in Afghanistan

“They are just covering their ass…” The war on terrorism is being run by lawyers — “The United States has for some time been prepared for a war where achieving moral superiority is as important as military victory. The aim is to conduct an “ethical” war. But not quite up to programming a “smart” bomb with the appropriate theological dimension, they have settled for a very American solution: lawyers.

Every time a commander at headquarters selects a target there is a judge advocate general by his side to assess the ethical merits of the strike. This is a development in practice since the Gulf war.” Guardian UK

U.S. to Target Elite Taliban Assault Force In Next Phase: Running out of bombing targets, the U.S. will bring in helicopter gunships and special forces. Part of strategy is to “signal that the U.S. military is engaged on the ground in pursuing terrorists” Washington Post so that Dubya’s grandiose war pronouncements are not seen as the fatuous empty promises they are. Even our allies are cautious on what is being called the ‘Bush Doctrine’, whose essence is “that the United States will be the unilateral judge of whether a country is supporting terrorism, and will determine the appropriate methods, including the use of military force, to impose behavioral change.” Washington Post

“Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn’t even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. . . . In the empty immensity of earth, sky, water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.”

–Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

The Puzzling Watts Towers, Restored but Not Revealed, “… like

the exclamation points at the end of an only half

articulated sentence.” NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

Anthrax News:

• In Shift, Officials Look Into Possibility Anthrax Cases Have bin Laden Ties
  

  “Federal
  
  authorities say they are now investigating
  
  the possibility that followers of Osama bin Laden
  
  were behind the anthrax cases around the nation.

  This represents a significant shift in the thinking of
  
  investigators, who had earlier speculated that the
  
  initial case in Florida was an isolated criminal act
  
  unconnected with the Sept. 11 attacks.

  The shift of the investigation is based not on
  
  definitive proof but on circumstantial information drawn from cases diagnosed in recent days, like the
  
  postmarks on the letters known to contain anthrax. Each one was sent from places near where some of the
  
  terrorists involved in the Sept. 11 attacks lived or visited.” NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

• On the other hand, Anthrax is reportedly easy to grow and distribute by mail.
  

  “Growing this organism is no problem,” said Norman Cheville, dean of Iowa State University’s School of Veterinary Medicine. “It grows readily. It grows overnight.”

  Until last week, the threat of anthrax had been couched largely in terms of its use as a weapon of mass destruction–and how difficult that would be…

  
  Bioterrorism experts said the use of the U.S. Postal Service to transmit lethal bacteria is significant and should trigger changes in how mail is handled. Los Angeles Times

• “The bacterium that causes anthrax is a hearty, fast-growing microbe that is relatively easy to isolate and identify from the blood and tissues of people who have fallen ill with the disease. But the bacterium can be difficult to detect at the earliest stages of exposure or infection. And some of the tests that have been drafted into use to offer speedy diagnoses during the current spate of apparent acts of bioterror were not designed for the purposes to which they are being put.” Washington Post
• 
  Here’s an official Centers for Disease Control (CDC) advisory on how to handle anthrax and other biological agent threats. And Experts Offer Advice on Handling Potentially Dangerous Mail NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

• Here’s March, 2000 COngressional testimony by Dr. Stephen M. Ostroff, Associate Director for Epidemiologic Science, NCID-CDC, about the “plans for and management of the National Pharmaceutical Stockpile Program (NPSP), one component of CDC’s overall public health response to the threat of bioterrorism.” Although I’m under no illusions that the isolated psychiatric hospital south of Boston where I’m the medical director is a prime terrorist target, I’m currently investigating with my pharmacy staff what stockpiling of antibiotics we ought to do there.
• CNN reports (toward the bottom of this roundup of anthrax-related news) that “ninety offices of Planned Parenthood and at least 80 clinics of the National Abortion Federation across the United States have received envelopes containing unidentified powdery substances and letters with threatening language, according to spokesmen for the groups. Both groups support abortion rights and provide abortions in at least some of their offices.” Although it’s not exactly what I was looking for in asking the other day for links to anything about the reactions of the right wing paramilitary movement to 9-11, one would wonder if this is the response of another faction of the rabid right.
• I missed this one. A 46-year-old Ohio Aryan Nations member with a degree in microbiology who pleaded guilty last year to having fraudulently obtained cultures of bubonic plague via mail order (interestingly, from the same laboratory from which Saddam Hussein had reportedly ordered biological agents!) is one of two men detained by the FBI. Larry Wayne Harris has self-published a 131-page book that The Southern Poverty Law Center has called ‘a do-it-yourself manual for mass destruction through biological terrorism’. Although Harris says he is merely alerting the US to the Iraqi threat,
  

  in an interview with U.S. News & World Report last November, Harris said his associates in the white supremacist movement would strike at government officials with biochemical weapons, if provoked. ‘If they arrest a bunch of our guys, they get a test tube in the mail,’ he told the magazine.
  
  And he suggested that worse could come if the separatists? dreams are denied. ‘How many cities are you willing to lose before you back off? At what point do you say: “If these guys want to go off to the Northwest and have five states declared to be their own free and independent country, let them do it.” ‘ ABC

• And, not surprisingly, the Boston Globe‘s investigations reveal that lax security eases access to lethal strains. “Scores of low-security labs store the deadly bacteria with little oversight.

  For decades, anthrax lab samples moved freely among researchers and universities, from Georgia to California and around the world. Hundreds of samples were traded, copied, and mailed on. Authorities kept few tabs on the transactions, and remain unable to account for many.”

• The above is part of the answer to my curiosity about why investigators weren’t rushing to identify what strain of anthrax was used in the various attacks, whether the strains were identical, etc. Identifying the particular strain of an anthrax culture is difficult and unreliable, and doing so may not aid in a criminal investigation of the origins of an anthrax attack, as cultures of anthrax have been passed around the world freely from lab to lab.

New book says Hitler was gay and killed to hide it. “Eyewitness accounts from Hitler’s former lovers, and historical documents that for the first time illuminate rumours that have circulated for over half a century, are disclosed in Hitler’s Secret: The Double Life of a Dictator .

The respected German historian Lothar Machtan even claims in his book that Hitler ordered the deaths of several high-ranking Nazis to prevent the secret of his homosexuality from surfacing.” Guardian UK

Feds Enlist Hollywood for Theories — “In a reversal of roles, government intelligence specialists have been secretly soliciting terrorist scenarios from top Hollywood filmmakers and writers.

An ad hoc working group convened at the University of Southern California just last week at the behest of the U.S. Army. The goal was to brainstorm about possible terrorist targets and schemes in America and to offer solutions to those threats, in light of the aerial assaults on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.” Washington Post Do you want the US ‘war on terrorism’ to be scripted by the people responsible for Die Hard, Delta Force One, or Missing in Action??

FCC may OK selling ads on some public TV stations: ‘Under the plan, the Federal Communications Commission would let PBS affiliates and other public TV stations show ads on data or subscription services they offer as they roll out digital TV, say people familiar with the matter.

…the FCC also apparently believes that the law’s ban on public TV stations “broadcasting” ads need not apply to subscription or certain other services.’ As if the corporate sponsorship spots on PBS now haven’t already travelled a great distance down the slippery slope toward being ads… USA Today

Loincloth Maestro: ‘A strolling violinist in a gold loincloth and very little else would cause the denizens of most cities to call the police, or at least cross the street. But in New York, such a man can become a minor celebrity, especially when he gains a reputation as the most talented street musician in the city. “In his soloperas, Thoth, a classically trained musician, is the composer, orchestra, singers and dancers. His music has elements of classical, overlayed with primal rhythms, but it defies categorization.” ‘ NY Post Reminds me on first reading of Moondog [more],

a statuesque blind bearded streetcorner presence on the Midtown Manhattan street corners when I was growing up in New York who turned out to be a maverick but classically trained composer, Louis Hardin. A musician friend I made years later (when I was in medical school with his wife), it turned out, was responsible for getting Hardin’s compositions and performances recorded before his death in 1999.

When Writers Attack. The controversy swirls around “previously unknown critic” B.R. Myers’ skewering of much contemporary fiction in the summer Atlantic. Here, Dennis Loy Johnson at Moby Lives takes on highly visible New York Times Book Review columnist Judith Shulevitz for her response to Myers.

The 2001 National Book Award Finalists in children’s literature, poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections makes the list, as expected, and Andrew Solomon’s Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression.

Collateral Damage (cont’d.):

Robert Fisk comments that Slaughter of the innocent bolsters view that this is war against Islam.

It’s always the same story. We start shooting with “smart” weapons after our journalists and generals have told us of their sophistication. Their press conferences produce monochrome snapshots of bloodless airbase runways with little holes sprinkled across the apron. “A successful night,” they used to say, after bombing Serbia.

They said that again last week and no one ? until of course we splatter civilians ? suggests going to war involves killing innocent people. It does. That is why the military invented that repulsive and morally shameful phrase “collateral damage”. And they are always ready to smear the reporters on the ground. Independent UK

And not only a war against Islam, but Andrew Rawnsley says it is a war they’re winning. Guardian UK

Cellphones spook British ghosts

Systray.org : Post Your Systray Here. “All your systray are belong to us.”

Some of the attackers did not know they were to die, an FBI investigation concludes. Unlike the eight ‘lead’ attackers who were the trained pilots who undoubtedly knew they were on a suicide mission, the other eleven hijackers “expected to take part in ‘conventional’ hijackings – with the planes flown to distant airports, and the passengers and crew taken hostage while the hijackers presented demands. Items found among the 11 men’s possessions suggest they had been preparing themselves for incarceration. One source said: ‘It looks as if they expected they might be going to prison, not paradise.’

The FBI analysis concludes the 11 may have believed the purpose of the hijackings was to free the perpetrators of previous extremist terrorist attacks on the United States, such as the first World Trade Centre bombing in 1993.” On the other hand, could this be FBI disinformation to counter any glorification of the purity of purpose and sacrifice of their actions and, by suggesting that most of the team was kept in the dark about the true plan, rationalize the American intelligence failure to detect the plot? Guardian UK

Patrick Cockburn: The Phoney War Will Get Real Very Soon; options for the Northern Alliance in the coming ground war. CounterPunch

Ethel considers the Office of Homeland Security: “What they’re saying is that since this is a super-agency, which is immune from congressional oversight or judicial review, there has to be some regulatory body above it. That will make this Council extra-legal, extra-constitutional, extra-judicial, and extra-legislative. And it’s even extra-executive. Bush then is essentially assuming supreme power as Chairman of the Supreme National Security Council.” [Now, as everyone else is saying in weblogland, go read the rest of Ethel the Blog as well.]

More on the coming police state. Here in my own backyard, the Worcester Telegram reports on peace demonstrators being photographed by the local police; turns out it was at the FBI’s instructions. Want your five minutes of media fame? It’s off to a peace vigil; time’s a’wastin’! I’ve already had my moments in the limelight, several times in fact. While a high school student in 1969, I refused to shake Gen. William Westmoreland’s hand on nationwide television while in Washington receiving a young scientist award. I was on the front page of the New York Post, I think it was that year too, as an unidentified rain-drenched hitchhiker holding up a sign in New York seeking a ride to the March on Washington against the war. A human die-in in Central Park designed to simulate some body count showed my body in the foreground, in one of the New York papers. And several years later I made the Boston Globe as the “unidentified protester” being attacked on the front page by police dogs let loose against us during a Cambridge civil disobedience action. I wrote a letter to the editor identifying myself on that occasion as well. A string of arrests for civil disobedience got my name in the papers several more times, related to both antiwar activities and the Clamshell Alliance’s efforts to stop the Seabrook nuclear plant on our seacoast. I’ve still got the yellowing clips of all of these somewhere. Funny, Freedom of Information Act inquiries I made years later failed to come up with a dossier about me from those days. Disappointing, actually. Hey, I wonder if the FOIA is still going to be enforceable in the new regime… [Now that I’ve come out of the closet about my sordid and criminal past, you’re forgiven if you get squeamish about continuing to read FmH.]

After complaints from gay organizations, the AP withdrew a photo taken on the USS Enterprise that shows a Navy officer scrawling a misspelled message — “high jack this fags” — on a bomb bound for Afghanistan. [via Cursor]

Security Keeps Dylan From Own Concert. “The security was so good at Bob Dylan’s concert in Medford, Oregon, even Bob Dylan couldn’t get in.

Dylan showed up for the concert last Tuesday and was refused admittance backstage. The guards had strict orders from Dylan’s own security director not to let anyone backstage without an official credential.” The three guards, in their 30’s, were promptly “relocated”. Speculation is that they did not recognize Mr. Zimmerman.

Viewing the brain in whole new light: describes a laser-based brain imaging technique which compares favorably with MRI scanning, the ‘gold standard of noninvasive imaging”, is cheaper, easier to use, more portable, and reportedly “non-damaging.” As you know, I’m a big fan of functional MRI’s ability to elucidate structure/function correlations in the brain in realtime, but certain mental activities just cannot easily be performed inside its stationary massive enclosure.

Hawks try to implicate Iraq by hunting for evidence in UK

“A row has broken out in the Bush administration after it was revealed that hawks in the Pentagon had sent an ex-CIA director, James Woolsey, to Britain, behind the backs of the state department and the current CIA leadership.

News of Mr Woolsey’s travels, have exposed a deep fissure inside the administration over whether to extend the war against terrorism to Iraq.

Last month, the state department, led by Colin Powell, convinced President Bush that there was no clear involvement in the attacks and that Iraq should not be included on the target list as such action might destroy the fragile coalition.

However, hawks in the administration grouped around the deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, are determined to ensure military action to topple Saddam Hussein.

According to several sources in the U.S., Mr Wolfowitz paid for Mr Woolsey to travel to Britain last month to look for evidence of prior Iraqi involvement in terrorism.”

From Dawn, which describes itself as Pakistan’s largest-circulation English-language daily newspaper. Look at its light, breezy, thoroughly modern weekly review feature; you’d never know it originates from a deeply divided military dictatorship at the margin of the world’s newest, hottest conflagration. On the other hand, its front page is nothing but war news.

On the topic of efforts to implicate Iraq, some are suggesting that the capability to obtain and disseminate anthrax, if a part of terrorist actions, would not be within al Qaeda’s capabilities, and fits neatly with the assumed Iraqi bioweapons capability.

America, oil and Afghanistan: “Once the initial shock and hysteria gave way to reason, it became clear that the U.S. was using, in a diabolic way, this human tragedy to further its imperialist hegemony worldwide and to invoke a more draconian domestic rule by curtailing democratic rights and freedom in the name of combating terrorism. The crucial element in this strategy of zeroing in on Osama bin Laden, however, goes largely unnoticed.

Afghanistan occupies the central position in the U.S. strategy for the economic control of the oil and gas resources in the entire Middle East.” opinion piece in The Hindu

Spy agency halts flow of information: “The United States is becoming increasingly frustrated with the paucity of intelligence provided by Pakistan on Osama bin Laden?s whereabouts and his al-Qaeda terrorist camps.

Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan?s premier spy agency, which was involved in training and arming the Taleban militia, has reportedly told Washington that it has little information about bin Laden and the Arab fighters under his command in Afghanistan.” The Times of London

Melanie Phillips comments in this Sunday Times of London commentary about the relationship between the Middle East conflict and the ‘war on terrorism’:

…(T)he belief that a (in principle, desirable) two-state solution to the Israel crisis would secure Arab support for the coalition is extraordinarily facile. The essence of the Muslim grievance here is the existence of Israel itself. That is why Yasser Arafat rejected Israel’s offer of a fledgling state and launched the intifada in response.

But Blair, along with some advisers to President George W Bush, doesn’t seem to see it that way. He thinks solving the Middle East crisis will end terror. But this is an upside-down argument. It is only by ending terror that the Middle East crisis will be solved. Yet how can this be done if America and Britain actually ally themselves with states sponsoring terror in the Middle East, such as Syria, Iran or Saudi Arabia?

There is now a real danger, as Israel’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon, has warned, that Israel will be seen as expendable and a terrorist state will be imposed on its border – as the price for keeping together the coalition against terror. But even if the Middle East crisis were solved tomorrow, the threat would remain. For the issue is the hegemony of the West.

Her solution, unfortunately, is that ‘the West should end its “liberal” imperialism and stop telling other cultures how to behave. Instead, it must vigorously defend and reassert liberal values on its home ground,’ by which she means giving up the illusion of multicultural and remaking ourselves as a ‘Christian’ civilization, albeit one with respect for and support of the Jews and Israel. Moderate Muslims in the West must choose to live as a minority in such a liberal society, and may be the seeds of an Islamic reformation.

Meanwhile, Blair backs creation of Palestinian state: “The prime minister, Tony Blair, today gave his public backing to the creation of a Palestinian state following a meeting at 10 Downing Street with Yasser Arafat.

The Palestinian leader called on the Israeli government to come “immediately” to the negotiating table to thrash out a negotiated settlement for the Middle East.

Mr Blair said that the creation of a Palestinian state was central to his vision for peace. “A viable Palestinian state, as part of a negotiated and agreed settlement, which guarantees peace and security for Israel is the objective,” Mr Blair said after an hour of talks with Mr Arafat.” Guardian UK As Phillips (above) asks, however, does Blair put the cart before the horse?

Exposed Florida Man Falls Ill With Anthrax An American Media Inc. mailroom employee who was exposed to anthrax has fallen ill, state officials confirm. Ernesto Blanco, 73, has been diagnosed with the inhaled form of anthrax, state health officials said Monday.Florida health officials say Blanco is improving, and that they’re encouraged by his progress. And: the anthrax-bearing NBC letter and the letter that arrived today at Tom Daschle’s office were both postmarked Sept. 18th in Trenton, NJ. Two postal workers who have fallen ill (although one of them has “poison-ivy-like” symptoms) are being tested for anthrax exposure.

The Peacemakers Speak: seventeen of the world’s living Nobel Peace Prize laureates react to 9-11 and the U.S.’s response. Some, particularly the politicians, speak in somewhat predictable terms of living together and condemning terrorism, of extending sympathy to those who lost a loved one. Other messages, particularly those of the non-governmental figures among them — Rigoberta Menchu, Mairead Maguire, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Jody Williams — are more fervent, anguished and resonant.

Now that war is upon us, I feel it is imperative that the present conflict not be inflamed and extended into a “clash of civilizations,” nor that it be painted as a jihad or a crusade–two concepts that have been sorely abused over the course of history. There is truly nothing more disturbing than killing in the name of God and religion. Today I send my plea to those in the Muslim world, in Indonesia and Saudi Arabia, in Bangladesh and Iran, and in all places where the name of Allah is worshipped, to reject the false call to holy war against the West that is being put out by extremist leaders. At the same time, I call upon the leaders and the people of the West, in societies based upon the Judeo-Christian tradition, to recall that Christianity provides no basis for an assumption of superiority and dominance, quite the contrary. The holy writings of the Torah, the Bible, and the Koran have been twisted so often that it has become difficult for ordinary, good, and compassionate people of all faiths to discern the principles that are primary in all the holy books: peace and justice, fair treatment of our neighbors, and the primacy of love as the supreme value.

–Oscar Arias

Powers of 10. We’ve apparently missed International Powers of Ten Day (10/10), but it’s not too late to take this journey that has long been one of the best ways to contemplate the grandeur and scale of existence — the film at the Smithsonian, the book, the walk-through exhibit at the remodeled Hayden Planetarium in New York, and now this site.

From Windows guru Brian Livingston: There’ll be no XP for me; reasons why Windows XP is a downgrade instead of an upgrade include the Passport authentication system; your vulnerability to unlimited amounts of Microsoft spam and arbitrary changes in the Passport agreement at Microsoft’s whim after you sign on; weak Java support and no support for browser plug-ins; and the brain-dead product activation scheme. InfoWorld

Can you believe the people with whom Mick Jagger is going to take to the stage, even for a cause like this?

These are agencies to which you can contribute for children’s aid and relief efforts in Afghanistan:

• Catholic Relief Services: http://www.catholicrelief.org
  

• Christian Aid: http://www.christian-aid.org.uk
  

• Church World Service: http://www.churchworldservice.org
  

• Lutheran World Relief: http://www.lwr.org/
  

• Mennonite Central Committee: http://www.mcc.org/afghancrisis
  

• World Vision: http://www.worldvision.org

[courtesy of Progressive Review]

Your cholesterol can be too low: Here are the results of a Google search on “low cholesterol” and “suicide”, the association between which was recently brought to my attention. Does low cholesterol or some aspect of a cholesterol-lowering lifestyle (rigidity? self-discipline? preoccupation with one’s cardiac risk factors? anxiety about one’s physical health in general? lower body weight? some effect of cholesterol-lowering drugs? some metabolic effect e.g. on brain chemistry of low cholesterol?) contribute to depression, or perhaps to poorer treatment response to antidepressants, somehow? Does a depressive biochemistry or personality somehow contribute to low cholesterol? Or are both correlated, without a causal link, with some other factor?

Dialogue in the Mountains

You ask me why I lodge in these emerald hills;

I laugh, don’t answer — my heart is at peace.

Peach blossoms and flowing waters

go off to mysterious dark,

And there is another world,

not of mortal men.

—Li Po (701-762 AD)           

wood s lot reminded us to beware of aibohphobia, the fear of palindromes. This Metafilter thread on the occasion of the palindromic date 10-02-2001 has some good ones to be afraid of. My favorite new discovery there: “Rettebs iflahd noces, eh? Ttu, but the second half is better.” Speaking of palindromes and nonsense, 9-11 is palindromic in Roman numerals. Many have noted that there is no natural monicker for the new Day of Infamy coming to mind. We’ve fallen back on referring to the ‘unfortunate events’, the ‘disaster’, the ‘terrorist attacks’, the ‘attacks on America,’ by their date. Should we call it “IXXIMMI”, “ixximmi“? It rhymes with “infamy” too, sort of…

Don’t shoot the messenger, says al Jazeera. “A senior journalist from groundbreaking Arab television channel al Jazeera has urged the White House not to try to stifle media coverage of comments by Saudi-born fugitive Osama bin Laden.

“We should not shoot the messenger just because we hate the message,” said Hafiz al Mirazi, Jazeera’s Washington bureau chief.

The Bush administration appealed to newspapers on Thursday not to publish in their entirety statements issued by bin Laden and his top aides, asserting they may contain coded messages to followers to carry out fresh attacks on U.S. targets.’ Yahoo! The administration appears disingenuous about this; the concern about coded messages is probably largely a pretext for not wanting bin Laden’s inflammatory message spread. The major news outlets, to their credit, acknowledge this distinction but, to their shame, have acceded to the “patriotic” request unquestioningly. This is effrontery to the public’s right to know. Many commentators, certainly not just this Arab critic, have noted that of course the best way for the American people to evaluate propaganda claims is to hear them, and that goes for propaganda from both sides.

The Pacifist Weblog. Nevertheless, from Sam Smith’s Progressive Review, “…just a few reasons a non-pacifist might oppose the war:

• It will just lead to worse problems including increased guerilla actions.
  

• It is a war we can’t win.
  

• It is not a just war.
  

• It is unconstitutional.
  

• It violates international law including the UN Charter.
  

• It is wrecking our constitutional system.
  

• It is a high risk act of mindless machismo
  

• It is poorly planned by incompetent and corrupt leaders.
  

• It is giving the nation a mass case of agoraphobia, making us prisoners of our own fears.
  

• It is a war without defined objectives, a defined enemy, or a definition of victory.
  

• It is a war we can’t win without simultaneously ending our imperial role in the Muslim world.
  

• It will badly hurt the American economy.
  

• It is a war premised on the assumption that 6,000 innocent Americans’ lives are worth more than the 500,000 innocent Iraqi children’s lives lost during the Iraqi embargo.
  

• It is a war for unstated corrupt ends, including the interests of multinational oil companies.
  

Those who are labeling as pacifists all critics of the war don’t want to deal with such issues. Instead writers for major papers — such as Michael Kelly in the Washington Post and Scott Simon in the Wall Street Journal — create a deceitful dichotomy with some of the most intellectually dishonest arguments of recent times.” [via wood s lot]

MIT makes available on the web course materials for all its undergrad and graduate courses. The MIT press release makes it clear this is neither a distance learning initiative or a way to get an MIT degree remotely, but that “Institutions around the world could make direct use of the MIT OpenCourseWare materials as references and sources for curriculum development. These materials might be of particular value in developing countries that are trying to expand their higher education systems rapidly.”

Susan and Jay Love Each Other, and Their Dog, and Their Pharmacologist. ‘(A)ccording

to Dr. Amy Banks, a psychiatrist at the

Stone Center for the Study of Relationships

at Wellesley College: ”There are two categories of medicated couples.

There are those in which the medication allows the rightful relationship to

emerge, and then there are those in which medication serves as a screen

to cover up real issues. How can you tell them apart?” It’s a good

question. But let’s put that aside for a moment and just consider the

phenomenon. For now, maybe we should not be asking whether our

relationships are more or less true under these pharmacological conditions

but, simply, what does love look like in such a strange state of union?’ (by Lauren Slater, a psychologist who runs a mental health and substance-abuse clinic in Boston. Her most recent book is Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir.) NY Times Magazine [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

Collateral Damage (cont’d.): Death From Above Devastates Simple Afghan Village: “There aren’t many witnesses to say

what happened to Khorum village in eastern Afghanistan last

Wednesday night.

There aren’t many survivors.” And: Pentagon Says Error Led to

Bombing of Houses in Kabul: “A Navy jet

mistakenly dropped a 2,000-pound bomb

today into a residential neighborhood of Kabul, the

Pentagon said. Initial reports from the Afghan

capital said four people had been killed and eight

others wounded in the attack, which occurred as the

bombing of Afghanistan resumed after a pause for

the Muslim holy day on Friday.” NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

Bush Is Said to Scale Back His Religion-Based Initiative NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

Susan and Jay Love Each Other, and Their Dog, and Their Pharmacologist. ‘(A)ccording

to Dr. Amy Banks, a psychiatrist at the

Stone Center for the Study of Relationships

at Wellesley College: ”There are two categories of medicated couples.

There are those in which the medication allows the rightful relationship to

emerge, and then there are those in which medication serves as a screen

to cover up real issues. How can you tell them apart?” It’s a good

question. But let’s put that aside for a moment and just consider the

phenomenon. For now, maybe we should not be asking whether our

relationships are more or less true under these pharmacological conditions

but, simply, what does love look like in such a strange state of union?’ (by Lauren Slater, a psychologist who runs a mental health and substance-abuse clinic in Boston. Her most recent book is Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir.) NY Times Magazine [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

Outcry over ‘Pinky’ and ‘Yellowy’ (right).

Battle of Kabul delayed by US row with Pakistan: “A deepening diplomatic rift between Washington and Islamabad has threatened to weaken the American-led campaign against Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. American use of Pakistani military bases and airspace is in jeopardy after President Pervez Musharraf objected to any decisive US military support for the Northern Alliance, the rebel group preparing to strike at Kabul.”

And: Taliban troops prepare for underground fight : “Afghanistan’s leading cave-fighting veteran from its 1980s war with the Soviet Union has been appointed head of the Taliban army. The move raises the prospect of British and American soldiers having to fight in the country’s labyrinth of tunnels and mountain caverns if they mount an invasion to find Osama Bin Laden… Allied forces, however, are likely to be far better equipped than the Russians were to beat Haqani’s veterans.” Sunday Times of London

The making of a master criminal “An anguished John le Carré says we wasted our cold war victory and are now assisting our enemy.” I’ve been following le Carré for twenty years, reading everything of his I could get my hands on, ever since one of my psychiatric mentors, Leston Havens, mentioned that le Carré had the best characterizations he had ever read in fiction. Here’s how he nails bin Laden:

The stylised television footage and photographs of Bin Laden suggest a man of homoerotic narcissism, and maybe we can draw a grain of hope from that. Posing with a Kalashnikov, attending a wedding or consulting a sacred text, he radiates with every self-adoring gesture an actor’s awareness of the lens. He has height, beauty, grace, intelligence and magnetism, all great attributes unless you’re the world’s hottest fugitive and on the run, in which case they’re liabilities hard to disguise. But greater than all of them, to my jaded eye, is his barely containable male vanity, his appetite for self-drama and his closet passion for the limelight. And just possibly this trait will be his downfall, seducing him into a final dramatic act of self-destruction, produced, directed, scripted and acted to death by Osama Bin Laden himself.

Read the entire essay, both for his tortured message and his eloquence. He concludes:

…please, Mr Bush – on my knees, Mr Blair – keep God out of this. To imagine God fights wars is to credit Him with the worst follies of mankind. God, if we know anything about Him, which I don’t profess to, prefers effective food drops, dedicated medical teams, comfort and good tents for the homeless and bereaved, and, without strings, a decent acceptance of our past sins and a readiness to put them right. He prefers us less greedy, less arrogant, less evangelical, and less dismissive of life’s losers.

It’s not a new world order, not yet, and it’s not God’s war. It’s a horrible, necessary, humiliating police action to redress the failure of our intelligence services and our blind political stupidity in arming and exploiting Islamic fanatics to fight the Soviet invader, then abandoning them to a devastated, leaderless country. As a result, it’s our miserable duty to seek out and punish a bunch of modern-medieval religious zealots who will gain mythic stature from the very death we propose to dish out to them.

And when it’s over, it won’t be over. The shadowy armies of Bin Laden, in the emotional aftermath of his destruction, will gather numbers rather than wither away. So will the hinterland of silent sympathisers who provide them with logistical support. Cautiously, between the lines, we are being invited to believe that the conscience of the West has been reawakened to the dilemma of the poor and homeless of the earth. And possibly, out of fear, necessity and rhetoric, a new sort of political morality has indeed been born.

But when the shooting dies and a seeming peace is achieved, will the United States and its allies stay at their posts or, as happened at the end of the cold war, hang up their boots and go home to their own back yards? Even if those back yards will never again be the safe havens they once were. Sunday Times of London

5 More at Florida Office Test Positive for Anthrax, company officials said today, raising to eight the number of workers for the South Florida publishing company who have been exposed to the deadly bacteria.” NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

An esteemed reader fired back at me:

“Not a shred of supporting evidence for the Goff allegations. You truly believe that we allowed 4 planes to be hijacked and sent into the WTC and the Pentagon to get some oil and knew they were doing this and said nothing? Wow.”

My response:

“You have at times reacted to things I’ve posted in my blog as if you think I’m endorsing them. Please understand that the only thing I’m endorsing is that they’re interesting to read and think about. Although I clearly have my selective biases, I don’t want to be construed as trying to tell people 100% of the time what to believe. FmH is far from having a party line; I hope that’s clear. Please continue your skeptical barbs if you ever think otherwise.”

I knew the Goff piece would provoke some querulous responses; in some ways, he sounds like the zealous conspiracy theorist he doth protest too much that he is not. But read his message; I too have been troubled by the lack of accounting for the amount of time during which the authorities probably knew they were tracking four improbably simultaneous hijackings that morning, by Dubya’s apparent non-plussed response to learning of the attacks, and by the shifting halftruths the administration has been feeding us since. What do other readers think, either about Goff, or about the ‘party line’ at Follow Me Here? [I don’t agree with Fukuyama (below) either, by the way…His argument seemed little better than gussied-up jingoism in 1989, and nothing I’ve seen or heard since including this update changes that….]

Francis Fukuyama: ‘We remain at the end of history.’ ‘I remain right: modernity is a very powerful freight train that will not be derailed by recent events, however painful’.

A stream of commentators has been asserting that the tragedy of 11 September proves that I was utterly wrong to have said more than a decade ago that we had reached the end of history. The chorus began almost immediately, with George Will asserting that history had returned from vacation, and Fareed Zakaria declaring the end of the end of history.

It is, on the face of it, nonsensical and insulting to the memory of those who died on 11 September ? as well as to those who are now participating in military raids over Afghanistan ? to declare that this unprecedented attack did not rise to the level of a historical event. But the way in which I used the word “history” was different. It referred to the progress of mankind over the centuries toward modernity, which is characterised by institutions like liberal democracy and capitalism.

Independent UK

A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues: A Philosopher Counts 18: “A Martian who knew some of our literature and religion but nothing about our bodies might be forgiven for thinking that people have seven fingers. Why else would they be so puzzlingly keen to make lists of seven items? We have — or had — seven deadly sins, Seven Wonders of the World, seven liberal arts, seven sages of Greece, seven virtues, seven sacraments and (if we are highly effective people) seven habits. The list of lists could go on and on, and most of the collections would be as arbitrary as these, er, seven.

The virtues, to be sure, almost didn’t make it. In Plato’s day, there were just four cardinal ones: justice, courage, prudence and temperance. But luckily Christianity came along and brought the total up to quota with a convenient trio of theological virtues: faith, hope and charity. Today, it seems, we are more demanding or ambitious. André Comte-Sponville counts no fewer than 18 in A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues: the four cardinal virtues, one theological one (namely love, of which charity, in its Christian sense, is a variant), plus politeness, fidelity, generosity, compassion, mercy, gratitude, humility, simplicity, tolerance, purity, gentleness, good faith (by which he means respect for truth) and humor. Humor? For the author, this important virtue is the capacity that prevents us from taking ourselves too seriously — an unusual sentiment to find in a philosophy book.” NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

More Executions, Fewer Deaths? “A new study suggests that the death penalty deters many more murders than most people thought plausible. A death-penalty opponent analyzes the evidence.” Controversial findings of recent studies using a new “econometric” methodology have included not only that executions save, on average, eighteen lives apiece by their deterrent effect, but also the salubrious effects on the crime rate from carrying concealed weapons and from legalizing abortions. The researchers, the essay’s author explains, went through contortions to explain some counterintuitive findings of the study which, although I’m not qualified to assess econometric analysis, make me dubious overall about this methodology; has it been seized upon because its findings serve conservative purposes? (Do I doubt it because it does not serve my purposes [grin]?) Many compelling studies have established the lack of a deterrent effect by demonstrating that the presence or absence of capital punishment in a constituency fails to correlate with the murder rate, and that the rates of change of the murder rate fail to correlate with changes in death penalty status. It’s probably worth noting that, while the author is advertised as a death penalty opponent, it is on religious grounds which have little relationship to one’s attitude about deterrence. From American Outlook, magazine of the conservative Hudson Institute think tank.

The roots of conflict: “Is western culture better than any other? Umberto Eco argues that what is important is not superiority but pluralism and toleration.” Guardian UK

A thread on kuro5hin discusses what is deemed The Utter Failure of Weblogs as Journalism. I entirely agree. Weblogging is not journalism, and should not pretend to be. It utilizes some of the presentation skills but none of the information-gathering and -verification ones. Adding personal commentary, or ‘spin’ to the items noted, or even just the act of selection, juxtaposition (and selective omission!) without explicit comment, makes weblogging much more akin to personalized editorializing rather than reportage. Please, please, no one should use FmH as their primary news source!

Not in my name: Anti-war protesters rally in London 20,000 in a CND-led march against the military air strikes on Afghanistan. BBC

Someone on a mailing list I’m on mentioned Dr. Michael Osterholm, former state epidemiologist for Minnesota until Jesse Ventura arrived on the scene. Osterholm has written a well-received and terrifying book, Living Terrors: What America Needs to Know to Survive the Coming Bioterrorist Catastrophe, (the link points to a Nov. 2001 capsule review in The American Scientist; here’s a Google search to further references to the book) filled with scenarios which

“show how just one person, with a little training in microbiology, could bring on immense suffering. Chilling revelations from former Russian bioweapons researchers illustrate, all too clearly, the accessibility of anthrax, botulinum toxin and, most frightening of all, smallpox. These organisms can be stored in modified fountain pens, brought without incident through high-security checkpoints and cultivated into weapons of mass destruction with only mail-order lab equipment.”

Here‘s more on Osterholm, also from Google, for those who wish to pursue this further. He now heads a consulting group called ican Inc. (Infection Control Advisory Network), and although his medical politics seem to be progressive (from what I’ve read; his resignation from the Ventura administration reportedly revolved around his opposition to privatization of public health services), he appears to be connected — at least in that he is featured as one of their notable quotes — to the Journal of Homeland Security, which is published by a retired US Air Force colonel and seems to have a strong rightwing bias in the direction of military involvement in domestic civil control. [Might it even have been an influence in Dubya’s nomenclature for his new cabinet post?] The webpage of the Journal’s parent agency, the ANSER Institute for Homeland Security, run by the same retired USAF colonel, has links to suggested readings, federal organizations connected with domestic security issues, a virtual library, and outside links, among others.

Here‘s a link to a description of Dark Winter, a wargame exercise they co-led recently whose scenario involves a smallpox attack on the U.S.

One dimension of the public health response to a bioterrorist attack would be the question of who would be in charge. Writing in one of a series of articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) by members of the Working Group for Civilian Biodefense, a group of experts representing research, government, military, public health, and emergency management institutions and agencies (which includes Osterholm), Dr Thomas Cole warns:

Until recently… lawmakers never examined the legal authority for a response to bioterrorism. When the authors of the US Constitution were reserving public health powers to the states, all epidemics were local. Today, he said, “laws are so antiquated and unclear that no one even knows what our powers and duties are.” For example, said Gostin, it isn’t clear whether any legal authority has the power to force people to be vaccinated, treated, quarantined, or isolated. It isn’t clear whether hospitals can be confiscated, or doctors can be compelled to triage and treat patients.

I was pointed by Also Not Found in Nature to this discussion by Stan Goff, a former Special Forces operative and instructor in military science and tactics, of why we should not believe the official version of the events of Sept. 11th and their aftermath. “…the official line only works if they can get everyone to accept its

underlying premises… Those premises are twofold. One, there is the premise that what

this de facto administration is doing now is a ?response? to September

11th. Two, there is the premise that this attack on the World Trade Center

and the Pentagon was done by people based in Afghanistan. In my opinion,

neither of these is sound.” It’s the oil, stupid, he says, and suggests that the Bush cabinet, which looks to him like a “military general staff”, has had designs on Afghanistan for a long time. bin Laden is a trumped-up villain. The gov’t had foreknowlege of the attack that was criminally covered up. The administration was facing a confluence of crises from which they were temporarily rescued by this event. The increased domestic repression that will arise from the crisis serve the powers-that-be well as they face “the beginning of a

permanent and precipitous decline in worldwide oil production, the

beginning of a deep and protracted worldwide recession, and the unraveling of the empire.”