Author Archives: FmH

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About FmH

70-something psychiatrist, counterculturalist, autodidact, and unrepentent contrarian.

The Flag of Earth

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“The flag was designed by James Cadle. Prior to the US landing on the moon, there was hope a flag for humanity, rather than the American flag, would be erected on the moon. Some hoped the UN flag would fly, but that never happened.

Some time later, James Cadle, who lived on a farm in rural Illinois, was inspired by this debate to create the Flag of Earth. It is intended to be used for ANY purpose that is representative of Humankind as a whole, and not connected to any country, organization, or individual. James made it his life’s work to promote and distribute this flag everywhere. He and his wife made the flags on their kitchen table, and sold them for what it cost to make and distribute them.

The Flag of Earth is often flown at locations doing SETI work in order to indicate that the search is the “work of humanity and not a specific country or organization.” Cadle died in 2004, but he left the design in the public domain, bless him.

At the Flag of Earth website there are templates for printing them out or purchasing ready-to-fly sown ones.” (via Kevin Kelly)

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“The Flag of Earth has flown – and is flying – over many observatories. The Flag also hangs in the offices of academics, scientists, ham radio operators, and in homes around the world.

Here are some sites where the Flag has been flown.”

TSA Responds to Schneier’s Airport Security Antics

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Kip Hawley: “Bruce Schneier and others have raised a number of good issues about TSA’s role in aviation security but veer off course when our work is described as ‘security theater…’” (Evolution of Security)

…and Schneier responds back: “Unfortunately, there’s not really anything to his response. It’s obvious he doesn’t want to admit that they’ve been checking ID’s all this time to no purpose whatsoever, so he just emits vague generalities like a frightened squid filling the water with ink. Yes, some of the stunts in article are silly (who cares if people fly with Hezbollah T-shirts?) so that gives him an opportunity to minimize the real issues.” (Schneier on Security)

The original article (The Atlantic) redux.

Rethinking the American Electorate after an Obama Victory

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you have my word“You have my word.”

Lincoln Mitchell: “One of the great things about an Obama victory is that it will force a lot of people to rethink a lot of things. People outside the US who have bought into the appealingly reductive anti-Americanism rhetoric of recent years, will have to rethink some of their basic assumptions about our country. This will be particularly true among those on the European left who may want to stop and ask themselves what it tells them about the US, and their own countries, that somebody like Barack Obama will be our leader. Others in Europe and elsewhere who perhaps pay less attention to the US will have to rethink their view of the US as a conservative country which likes to elect cowboys and bubbas, as we have in recent years.

Right wingers in the US will have to revisit their assumptions about the inherent racism and conservatism of the American people as well as the power of wedge issues to divide people and lead them to vote on their fears. Emphasizing bizarre issues such as Obama’s acquaintance with Bill Ayers, or calling Obama a socialist because of his notion that tax policy should not simply redistribute wealth upwards, failed to influence more than a few voter this time. This should suggest to the operatives of the right wing that they their cynical understanding of America can be trumped by a more affirming and progressive sentiment in the electorate.

It is, however, the American left which will have to do the most intriguing and challenging rethinking of basic assumptions when Obama wins. For years now a central piece of the progressive worldview is that progressives are enlightened Americans in a sea of their ignorant, bigoted and narrow-minded compatriots. If you don’t believe my assertion, see how many times in the comments section of a progressive blog, Americans voters are referred to as ignorant or uninformed, or eavesdrop at any progressive coffee shop or other hangout. Opposition to progressive causes is often explained away by saying that Americans are bigots, or somehow stupid. This demonstrates an ugly contempt for voters, and in fact for democracy, that should have no place in progressive politics.

Nonetheless, this feeling of specialness is a central part of progressive identity for many. For example, the tone often used to express disbelief that Obama could win, particularly early in this campaign, was often a mixture of anger with racism and a sense of self-righteousness from the speaker for being above that racism.

November 4th will almost certainly show these beliefs to be the nonsense that they are.” (HuffPo)

NOW Poll (PBS)

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Is Palin qualified? Links to this poll are being sent around because the rumor is that the right is flooding the site with ‘yes’ votes. The last thing we could use is PBS reporting that its listeners vettedPalin favorably.

Warning: In Case of Terrorist attack, do not discard brain.

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“With Barack Obama so far ahead in the polls some people are getting worried that this election cycle’s October surprise will be a terrorist attack. There was, after all, the 2004 Madrid train bombings and Osama Bin Laden did personally intervene in the last US presidential election.

So this week’s comic is a friendly reminder: keep your brain running at all times. When you switch it off bad things happen.” (Miscellanea via boing boing)

The Undecided

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David Sedaris at a talk in Ontario.

David Sedaris: “To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.” (The New Yorker)

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Wired Magazine Suggests Bloggers Give Up the Fight

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Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...

Amit Agarwal: “The current issue of Wired Magazine carries some provocative advice for bloggers – shut down your blogs and take refuge in places like Twitter, Flickr or YouTube.

The reasoning is that stand-alone bloggers can’t keep up with a team of pro writers, like Engadget or The Huffington Post, who crank out up to 30 posts a day.” (Digital Inspiration)

Yes, but that’s not why we weblog…

Related

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Over to You, Joe

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Lieberman, Palin, and Democrats: “Lieberman’s future is partly a question of math — as in, will Democrats win enough Senate seats to gain a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority, and if they do, will Lieberman represent that 60th vote? But it’s also partly a question of clubby intangibles inside the Senate. The guy may have irritated a lot of liberals in 2008, and even a lot of Democrats in the Senate, but he’s been on Capitol Hill for 20 years, and, although people may wish they could forget it now, he was on the party’s national ticket in 2000. In the end, how far will longtime friends want to push him to hold him accountable for supporting McCain?” (Salon)

Related (Think Progress)

The Big Necessity

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Manure, a field in Randers in DenmarkManure, a field in Randers in Denmark

“The story of civilization has been the story of separating you from your waste. British investigative journalist Rose George’s stunning—and nauseating—new book opens by explaining that a single gram of feces can contain ‘ten million viruses, one million bacteria, one thousand parasite cysts, and one hundred worm eggs.’ Accidentally ingesting this cocktail causes 80 percent of all the sickness on earth.” (Slate)

Happy Birthday, Robert Pinsky

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Robert Pinsky, U.S.Robert PinskyPinsky: “The longer I live, the more I see there’s something about reciting rhythmical words aloud — it’s almost biological — that comforts and enlivens human beings.” (via Garrison Keillor)

First Things to Hand
by Robert Pinsky

In the skull kept on the desk.
In the spider-pod in the dust.

Or nowhere. In milkmaids, in loaves,
Or nowhere. And if Socrates leaves

His house in the morning,
When he returns in the evening

He will find Socrates waiting
On the doorstep. Buddha the stick

You use to clear the path,
And Buddha the dog-doo you flick

Away with it, nowhere or in each
Several thing you touch:

The dollar bill, the button
That works the television.

Even in the joke, the three
Words American men say

After making love. Where’s
The remote? In the tears

In things, proximate, intimate.
In the wired stem with root

And leaf nowhere of this lamp:
Brass base, aura of illumination,

Enlightenment, shade of grief.
Odor of the lamp, brazen.

The mind waiting in the mind
As in the first thing to hand.

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Dissecting Cindy McCain’s private world

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Portrait of Glenn Greenwald -creator of Unclai...Glenn GreenwaldGlenn Greenwald writes in Salon about the New York Times gossip-rag-style profile:

“It’s true that the Right — which built a cottage industry of low-life dirt-peddlers that persists to this day out of sleazily digging into every facet of the Clintons’ private lives, and then became voracious amplifiers of National Enquirer during the Edwards scandal — has very little standing to complain here, since they helped spawn these invasions. And none of this has anything to do specifically with Cindy McCain, since the treatment to which she’s subjected here is, by now, anything but unique (though remarkably little interest was displayed when it came to digging into what was, by all accounts, the rich and ample hedonism of George W. Bush’s pre-“born-again” life).

But it seems rather obvious that there are now basically no journalistic standards left for determining when a political figure’s private life (or even that of their spouse) is “relevant” — apparently, it’s all relevant now, down to the last tawdry detail. In partiuclar, adultery (without regard to whether the spouse consents) is, without any further consideration, a legitimate topic to report. That inevitably has to lead to an even further erosion (if that’s possible) of our political class, a further narrowing of the people willing to enter politics. And the vast disparity between the media resources and attention devoted to sleazy gossip like this versus actual investigation of true government corruption and crime seems to be growing by the day, such that behavior like this will further decay our already quite decadent journalistic class as well.”

Colin Powell Endorses Obama

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“Former Secretary of State Colin Powell announced Sunday that he will be voting for Sen. Barack Obama. ‘He has both style and substance. I think he is a transformational figure,’ Powell said on NBC’s Meet the Press.” (HuffPo)

During the Republican convention, I recall, Powell’s name had been leaked as a leading contender for McCain’s vice presidential pick. The buzz is that, while most endorsements don’t mean squat, this one may well be influential. Newt Gingrich, of all people, says that Powell’s comments pretty much put the end to the “experience gap” issue that has been the dilemma of many undecided voters. And what is perhaps even more telling about Powell’s statement on Meet the Press, often not reported in the soundbites, was his criticism of the bankruptcy of the Republican party.

Dissecting Cindy McCain’s private world

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Portrait of Glenn Greenwald -creator of Unclai...Glenn GreenwaldGlenn Greenwald writes in Salon about the New York Times gossip-rag-style profile:

“It’s true that the Right — which built a cottage industry of low-life dirt-peddlers that persists to this day out of sleazily digging into every facet of the Clintons’ private lives, and then became voracious amplifiers of National Enquirer during the Edwards scandal — has very little standing to complain here, since they helped spawn these invasions. And none of this has anything to do specifically with Cindy McCain, since the treatment to which she’s subjected here is, by now, anything but unique (though remarkably little interest was displayed when it came to digging into what was, by all accounts, the rich and ample hedonism of George W. Bush’s pre-“born-again” life).

But it seems rather obvious that there are now basically no journalistic standards left for determining when a political figure’s private life (or even that of their spouse) is “relevant” — apparently, it’s all relevant now, down to the last tawdry detail. In partiuclar, adultery (without regard to whether the spouse consents) is, without any further consideration, a legitimate topic to report. That inevitably has to lead to an even further erosion (if that’s possible) of our political class, a further narrowing of the people willing to enter politics. And the vast disparity between the media resources and attention devoted to sleazy gossip like this versus actual investigation of true government corruption and crime seems to be growing by the day, such that behavior like this will further decay our already quite decadent journalistic class as well.”

Airport security theater Burlesque

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An employee of L3...

Via kottke: “We took our shoes off and placed our laptops in bins. Schneier took from his bag a 12-ounce container labeled ‘saline solution.’

‘It’s allowed,’ he said. Medical supplies, such as saline solution for contact-lens cleaning, don’t fall under the TSA‘s three-ounce rule.

‘What’s allowed?’ I asked. ‘Saline solution, or bottles labeled saline solution?’

‘Bottles labeled saline solution. They won’t check what’s in it, trust me.'”

Read the entire thing; very funny, if it were not so sad… (thanks, walker)

Related

Forget impeachment

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Try Bush for murder: Charlotte Dennett is running for Attorney General of the State of Vermont.

If she wins, she will use her office to indict George Bush for the murder of the citizens of Vermont who were killed in his fraudulent war.

You can support her efforts here.” (Current)

Amazon tribe’s protest shuts down dam site

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“Indians from the Enawene Nawe tribe in the Brazilian Amazon occupied and shut down the site of a huge hydroelectric dam on Saturday, destroying equipment, in an attempt to save the river that runs through their land.

The Enawene Nawe say the 77 dams to be built on the River Juruena will pollute the water and stop the fish reaching their spawning grounds. Fish is crucial to the Enawene Nawe’s diet as they do not eat red meat. It also plays a vital part in their rituals.

‘If the fish get sick and die so will the Enawene Nawe,’ said one member of the tribe.” (Survival International via miguel)

Banjo brain surgery

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“Surely this must be the greatest headline for a BBC News story ever: Banjo Used in Brain Surgery.

Although the banjo wasn’t in the hands of the surgeons it was still an essential part of the operation. It was played by legendary Blue Grass musician Eddie Adcock who was having surgery install a deep brain stimulation device to treat an essential tremor that had been affecting his playing.

The BBC News story has a video of the neurosurgery and the banjo playing, and it is pure genius. Probably the best thing you’ll see all year.” (Mind Hacks)

Out of the Blue

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Seed: Out of the Blue: “Each of its microchips has been programmed to act just like a real neuron in a real brain. The behavior of the computer replicates, with shocking precision, the cellular events unfolding inside a mind. ‘This is the first model of the brain that has been built from the bottom-up,’ says Henry Markram, a neuroscientist at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the director of the Blue Brain project. ‘There are lots of models out there, but this is the only one that is totally biologically accurate. We began with the most basic facts about the brain and just worked from there.'” (Seed)

Mythbusting Dept.

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sleep-deprivation is awesome

“…The apparent desire for more shut-eye, together with oft-repeated assertions that our grandparents slept longer, all too easily leads to the conclusion that we in the west are chronically sleep-deprived. Adding to these concerns are recent claims that inadequate sleep causes obesity and related disorders, such as diabetes.

Plus ca change. Claims of widespread sleep deprivation in western society are nothing new – in 1894, the British Medical Journal ran an editorial warning that the ‘hurry and excitement’ of modern life was leading to an epidemic of insomnia.

Even then it probably wasn’t true. The fact is that most adults get enough sleep, and our collective sleep debt, if it exists at all, has not worsened in recent times. Moreover, claims that sleep deprivation is contributing to obesity and diabetes have been overblown. My assertion is that the vast majority of people sleep perfectly adequately. That’s not to say that sleep deprivation doesn’t exist. But in general we’ve never had it so good.” (New Scientist)

The Lazarus sign

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The Resurrection of Lazarus by Vincent van Gogh (after Rembrandt), 1889-90 (Auvers-sur-Oise, Paris).Image via WikipediaThe Resurrection of Lazarus by Vincent van Gogh

A slight return: “Occasionally, brain-dead patients make movements, owing to the fact that the spinal reflexes are still intact. The most complex, and presumably the most terrifying, is called the Lazarus Sign. It is where the brain-dead patient extends their arms and crosses them over their chest – Egyptian mummy style.” (Mind Hacks)

Berkeley Breathed explains why he is ending his comic strip "Opus"

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“As the country excitedly awaits our great quadrennial political climax, a smaller subset looks toward the first week of November with great anxiety and dread. On Sunday, Nov. 2, the comic “Opus” will end. Worse yet, creator Berkeley Breathed has made it clear that the strip’s namesake will, in that final strip, find his “final paradise.”

Sure, it’s been an unnaturally long run for a penguin. Opus, who started with a bit part in Breathed’s Pulitzer-winning “Bloom County” (1980-89), starred in “Outland” (1989-95) and finally took center stage in “Opus” (2003-08). But for those of us accustomed to seeing our own thoughts — and fears, hopes and simmering anger — take flight in the broken-nosed face of a penguin every week, there’s no preparation for his exit, only mourning.

Breathed says it’s the anger that led him to close the book on “Opus,” that the increasingly nasty political climate has made it too difficult to keep his strip from drifting into darkness. Breathed has described his work as a hybrid of “Peanuts” creator Charles Schulz’s gentle humor and Michael Moore’s crusading social justice. Perhaps losing touch with his inner Charlie Brown, Breathed has said that “a mad penguin, like a mad cartoonist, isn’t very lovable,” and wants Opus to take his final bow before bitterness changes him forever.” (Salon)

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The Cognition and Language Laboratory

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Diagram of human brain showing surface gyri an...

“The twin research foci of this lab are cognition and language. That is, our primarily interest is in how language is implemented in the human mind. However, as understanding and using language probably involves many mental activities that aren’t strictly linguistic, many experiments delve into other aspects of thinking or cognition.

The CLL conducts experiments via the Web. You may participate by clicking here, see results from previous experiments by clicking here. The experiments are short — some take as little as 2-3 minutes to complete. All are anonymous.”

Autism in the Presidential debate?

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Karyotype for trisomy Down syndrome.Karyotype for trisomy Down syndromeSome have balked at McCain’s riff on autism in answer to a debate question about his running mate’s qualifications for the Presidency. Without meaning to cast aspersions on the struggles of having a special needs child, I can’t see its bearing on the skills required to be President; others have found that difficult to understand as well. And I share others’ puzzlement over how having a Downs Syndrome child makes her qualified to understand autism. I would go even further. It would not surprise me, after watching McCain’s comments in the debate, if he is confused about the distinction between the two conditions.

And don’t even get me started on her use of her special needs child to make political points…

Emperor-Without-Clothes Dept.

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Charles Ponzi (March 3, 1882–January 18, 1949)...Charles PonziCogent explanation of my sentiments, that the economy is a Ponzi scheme and the bailout only helps the bloodsuckers at the top.

“The worst thing a doctor can do to a critically ill person is gloss over their condition and offer false reassurances. We need to know the realities to make the decisions which will affect our very survival…

…[a] contextual framework for capitalism (markets only allowed to go up variety), globalization, the loss of purchasing power and … the “exponential expansion of debt” which has acted as the worm-ridden foundation of this decade’s bogus “prosperity.” ” (Of Two Minds)

Obesity, Abnormal ‘Reward Circuitry’ In Brain Linked

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Structure of dop...dopamine

“Although recent findings suggested that obese individuals may experience less pleasure when eating, and therefore eat more to compensate, this is the first prospective evidence for this relationship… Using brain imaging and chocolate milkshakes, scientists have found that women with weakened ‘reward circuitry’ in their brains are at increased risk of weight gain over time and potential obesity. The risk increases even more for women who also have a gene associated with compromised dopamine signaling in the brain.” (Science Daily)

The God That Failed

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Elaborate marble facade of NYSE as seen from t...NYSE facade from Broad and Wall StreetsThe 30-Year Lie of the Market Cult:

“Perhaps the most striking fact revealed by the global financial crash — or rather, by the reaction to it — is the staggering, astonishing, gargantuan amount of money that the governments of the world have at their command.

In just a matter of days, we have seen literally trillions of dollars offered to the financial services sector by national treasuries and central banks across the globe. Britain alone has put $1 trillion at the disposal of the bankers, traders, lenders and speculators; and this has been surpassed by the total package of public money that Washington is shoveling into the financial furnaces of Wall Street and the banks. These radical efforts are being replicated on a slightly smaller scale in France, Germany, Italy, Russia and many other countries.

The effectiveness of this unprecedented transfer of wealth from ordinary citizens to the top tiers of the business world remains to be seen. It will certainly insulate the very rich from the consequences of their own greed and folly and fraud; but it is not at all clear how much these measures will shield the vast majority of people from the catastrophe that has been visited upon them by the elite.” (Empire Burlesque)

Will globalization be reversed?

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Anti-globalisation protesters in Edinburgh
at the start of the G8 summitIt had occurred to me that the anti-globalization movement might be strengthened by the current finance crisis. Good to see that someone who might know a little more about macroeconomics has been thinking along the same lines: “Global integration, in large part, has been about the triumph of markets over governments. That process is now being reversed in three important ways.” (Dani Rodrik’s weblog: )

Evolution, why it still happens

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MiscarriageMiscarriageA response to Steve Jones’ contention that human evolution is stopping:

“[M]ost people “know” that evolution is about “survival of the fittest” and that nature is red in tooth and claw. Therefore, it naturally stands to reason that when mortality declines evolution will be a weaker force. I think the problem here is that our conception of evolution is focused too greatly on proximate modes and large scale dynamics. That is, selective high mortality rates are a “common sense” way in which the “weak” can be weeded out from the “strong.” But what about the extremely high human spontaneous abortion rates? Evolutionary biologist Mark Ridley has argued that increased miscarriage rates will “balance” out the fact that more individuals with deleterious mutations are reproducing today than in the past. Selection therefore occurs in utero; we don’t observe it so it is not salient to us. But it is selection nonetheless.” (Gene Expression Blog)

How Rich Are You?

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Theodore Gericault's Portrait of a Kleptomania...Gericault’s Portrait of a KleptomaniacGlobal Rich List: “Every year we gaze enviously at the lists of the richest people in world.
Wondering what it would be like to have that sort of cash. But where
would you sit on one of those lists? Here’s your chance to find out.”

(thanks, miguel)

Noonan, York, Toobin And Others Take Aim At McCain

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US Senator Barack Obama campaigning in New Hampshire“With 22 days left before the voters hit the polls, conservative pundits and media commentators are scratching their heads over the lack of direction – indeed, the near schizophrenic judgment – of the McCain campaign.

Appearing at the Time Warner Summit conference on the 2008 election, a host of prominent electoral observers were all bearish on the Arizona Republican’s presidential ambitions. Not one panelist took the chance to defend the Senator’s choice of Sarah Palin as vice president. Others simply saw death by electoral numbers…

‘Obama seems older in a way,’ said [Peggy Noonan]. ‘McCain has seemed herky-jerky. Obama has seemed like the older, steadier fellow since the economic crisis began.'” (HuffPo)

Paul Krugman’s ‘Baby-sitting the economy’

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Princeton Profess...

“Paul Krugman, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences today for his work on international trade patterns, was the lead economics columnist for Slate from the magazine’s launch in 1996 to 1999, when he became a columnist for the New York Times. His ‘Dismal Science’ column covered everything from puzzling economics of ticket scalping to the tenacity of supply-side economics in presidential campaigns. One particular favorite, which was included in Slate‘s 10th-anniversary anthology, is ‘Baby-Sitting the Economy,’ a column about what a failed baby-sitting cooperative in Washington, D.C., can teach us about a global economic crisis. The article is reprinted below.”
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Christopher Hitchens Endorses Obama

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McCain lacks the character and temperament to be president. And Palin is simply a disgrace.

“I used to nod wisely when people said: “Let’s discuss issues rather than personalities.” It seemed so obvious that in politics an issue was an issue and a personality was a personality, and that the more one could separate the two, the more serious one was. After all, in a debate on serious issues, any mention of the opponent’s personality would be ad hominem at best and at worst would stoop as low as ad feminam.

…I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that “issue” I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity. Obama is greatly overrated in my opinion, but the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction, and it does show some signs of being able and willing to profit from experience. With McCain, the “experience” is subject to sharply diminishing returns, as is the rest of him, and with Palin the very word itself is a sick joke. One only wishes that the election could be over now and a proper and dignified verdict rendered, so as to spare democracy and civility the degradation to which they look like being subjected in the remaining days of a low, dishonest campaign.” (Slate)

Mysterious New ‘Dark Flow’ Discovered in Space

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The highest quality resolution version of this...

“As if the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy weren’t vexing enough, another baffling cosmic puzzle has been discovered.

Patches of matter in the universe seem to be moving at very high speeds and in a uniform direction that can’t be explained by any of the known gravitational forces in the observable universe. Astronomers are calling the phenomenon ‘dark flow.’

The stuff that’s pulling this matter must be outside the observable universe, researchers conclude.” (space.com)

How McCain Will Steal the Election from Obama (Sort Of)

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Members of the Associa...

Tom Matzzie: “Imagine an election where one of the participants calls foul. Investigations are launched or at least called for. Prosecutors raise the specter of charges, the U.S. attorney and FBI get involved. No voter fraud is ever actually found. But by the time that conclusion is reached, the myth has been solidified both to soothe the loser’s supporters and condemn the winner.”(HuffPo)

Mazzie shows the specious reasoning in the allegation that ACORN committed voter fraud… but why the appearance of impropriety, fueled by the McCain campaign, may make the truth irrelevant:

“The stunning con of this whole thing is the assumption that bad voter registration cards being submitted will lead to vote fraud. If somebody submits a card for Mickey Mouse it isn’t like Mr. Mouse is going to show up to vote. There is no voter fraud if nobody votes.

But the big story here is what the Right is doing. Their attacks on ACORN open up the door for two things.

First, the ACORN myth allows the Republicans to do more purging of the voter rolls–the process of removing people from the voter rolls because of arbitrary anomalies in the voter registration databases…

Second, in the event that campaigning, purging and intimidating voters doesn’t work, the Right is creating a myth like they did in 1960. They are creating the myth of a stolen election…”

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StupidFilter

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Yahoo! Widgets - Waste Basket

“In the beginning, the internet was a place where one could communicate intelligently with similarly erudite people. Then, Eternal September hit and we were lost in the noise. The advent of user-driven web content has compounded the matter yet further, straining our tolerance to the breaking point.

It’s time to fight back.

The solution we’re creating is simple: an open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in written English. This will be accomplished with weighted Bayesian or similar analysis and some rules-based processing, similar to spam detection engines. The primary challenge inherent in our task is that stupidity is not a binary distinction, but rather a matter of degree. To this end, we’re collecting a ranked corpus of stupid text, gleaned from user comments on public websites and ranked on a five-point scale.

Eventually, once the research is completed, we plan to release core engine source code for incorporation into content management systems, blogs, wikis and the like. Additionally, we plan to develop a fully implemented Firefox plugin and a WordPress plugin.”

Desperate McCain gives beat to the dark heart of conservatism

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John McCain and Sarah Palin

Michael Tomasky: “We are seeing, from (happily, at least for the time being) the majority of the country, much of what is good and decent about America in this election. But we are also seeing in smaller proportion what is chilling. The people in those videos have no proof to back up their beliefs, because of course no such proof exists. They just feel it, and that’s enough. But that isn’t what’s most disturbing. There will always be such people in all societies. What’s most disturbing is that McCain and Palin are egging them on.” (Guardian.UK)

Hi Ho Honda!

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2006-2007 Honda Civic photographed in USA.

Civic Musical Road Plays Rossini’s William Tell Overture: “From Autopia‘s ‘Most Annoying Promotion Ever’ department comes this dispatch from Lancaster, California, where Honda’s marketing team joined forces with the city to turn a stretch of road on the edge of town into a giant LP that plays ‘The William Tell Overture,’ which you might more readily recognize as the theme to The Lone Ranger.

The quarter-mile stretch of Avenue K renamed ‘Civic Musical Road’ features grooves cut into the pavement in such a way as to make the tires resonate to the tune of Gioachino Rossini‘s classic symphony. The road, which Honda claimed sounded best when ‘played’ on a new Civic going exactly 55 miles per hour, was just one of four ‘melody roads’ in the world and the first in America. ‘I think it’s kind of cool,’ Peggy Llano told the L.A. Daily News. ‘When you are driving out on Avenue K. you’re going out to the middle of nowhere. It’s kind of a nice surprise to come across this thing.’

A lot of Lancaster residents disagreed, which is why we’re writing about this in the past tense. The ‘musical road’ is being paved over today, leaving only the YouTube video after the jump to remember it by.” (Wired)

O death, when is thy sting?

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Gerrymandering the boundary: “In August… Robert Truog of the Harvard Medical School and Franklin Miller of America’s National Institutes of Health, bioethicists both, published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine describing a recent trend to revert to using cardiac death as the critical marker. But that is not good news for Dr Scaraffia and her followers for, according to Dr Truog and Dr Miller, the definition of cardiac death has changed over the years in just the sort of way that Dr Scaraffia predicted that it might.

Dr Truog and Dr Miller posit the example of a patient who has given informed consent to the withdrawal of life support in the case of his suffering devastating brain injury. The doctors respect his wishes and his heart stops beating. So far, so ethical. But instead of waiting a few minutes for his brain to die as well, they anticipate this inevitability and declare him dead immediately, so that they can hurry along with the business of removing his organs.

Death in such cases is therefore based on a decision not to resuscitate, not the impossibility of resuscitation. And their hypothetical case does seem to be happening more frequently in reality. In America, data from the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, an organisation that matches donors to recipients, show that those classified as cardiac-dead but not brain-dead represent the fastest growing proportion of donors, having risen from zero ten years ago to 7% in 2006.

Dr Truog and Dr Miller reckon this gerrymandering of the division between life and death will continue as long as doctors have to abide by the dead-donor rule—that although a living person can consent to have a non-vital organ removed for transplant (a single kidney, for example) vital organs can be removed only from dead bodies. Instead, they propose that someone whose brain is devastatingly and irreversibly damaged, and who has previously given his informed consent, should be able to donate vital organs while still alive.

In practice, says Dr Truog, this would not differ much from what happens now, except that doctors would be released from the temptation to fudge the definition of death, or to accelerate it by, for example, withdrawing life-sustaining treatment. Indeed, the British government is considering changing the regulations in a way that would allow just that to happen.” (The Economist)

After Flying, Grounding

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Book cover of Walking when and where most people wouldn’t: “British novelist Will Self came to New York not long ago to promote his latest published work, a nonfiction book on walking called Psychogeography. When Self arrived at LaGuardia Airport, he was met for a radio interview by Pejk (pronounced ‘Pike’] Malinovski, a reporter for the WNYC show, “Studio 360.”

Malinovski taped a walk with Self. That was the interview. The first place the pair walked to was the airport’s Ground Transportation desk. There, Self asked the woman at the counter for the best route to take in order to reach Manhattan on foot.

“You want to . . . walk . . . out of the airport?” It was as much a statement as a question–or as much a question as a statement.

“Yes,” Self replied.

“You want to walk,” she repeated, just to make sure she’d heard right. “You mean, like . . . walk.”

“Yes,” Self repeated.

After she recovered, the Ground Transportation representative pointed Self and Malinovski in the right direction. And soon, after some highway-hopping–and an impromptu cemetery tour–they were walking the streets of residential Queens, Manhattan-bound.

For Self, this airport-walking is nothing new. He has walked from his home in London all the way to Heathrow; and trekked the 18 miles from O’Hare to Chicago’s Loop. “Walking after flying grounds one, literally,” says Self. “It reconnects you with the earth.”

Self began walking for fitness, but he has come to see it as much more, as “an insurgency against the contemporary world, an act of refusal, of dissent.”” (Walking Is Transportation)

Is the Crisis Real?

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British pounds, Danish kroner, Euros, and Cana...

“At a Harvard panel discussion…, Gregory Mankiw–Harvard economist and Chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers 2003-2005, made an interesting point: The liquidity crisis isn’t real. Or, to restate it: Any liquidity crisis is caused by the promise of a government bailout. Greg said that his many friends in investment banking said that there is plenty of money to invest in financial services, but right now it is ‘sitting on the sidelines.’ Why? Because the financial services industry does not want to pay the terms required to get that money back in circulation (e.g., give up equity). As he put it, why do business with Warren Buffett who will negotiate a tough deal, if you believe that the government will ride in soon with cheaper cash?” (Credit Slips)

What if it’s a Wealth Shock?

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Air mail envelope

Arnold Kling: “For a different and important perspective on the financial crisis, I want to draw your attention to Robert Merton’s remarks at Thursday’s Harvard forum, linked to here. The Nobel Laureate begins with a back-of-the-envelope calculation. Data suggest that between June of 2007 and June of 2008, average home prices in the U.S. fell by 16 to 18 percent. Near the peak of the housing market, total housing wealth was between $20 and $23 trillion.

Simple multiplication says that we have lost somewhere around $3.5 to $4 trillion. As Merton says,

When you have this wealth loss, nothing that’s done here will resurrect it.

On top of that, not mentioned by Merton but alluded to by Rogoff, there is the drop in wealth represented by the decline in the dollar. Marking our assets to world prices, a lower dollar lowers our wealth. Furthermore, Rogoff and other economists believe that the dollar decline has further to go.” (econlib)

David Maisel

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The Nikon D1, the first DSLR to truly compete ...“Jaw-dropping aerial photography by David Maisel. Taken from his website:

“For more than twenty years, David Maisel has chronicled the tensions between nature and culture in his large-scaled photographs of environmentally impacted landscapes.” Enjoy some collisions of natural and man-made beauty abstracted by a master.”

(BOOOOOOOM!)

Bird populations in crisis throughout the world

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Double-crested Cormorant -- Humber Bay Park (T...Catastrophic fall in numbers: 45 per cent of common European birds are declining; resident Australian wading birds have seen population losses of 81 per cent in the same period; twenty common North American birds have more than halved in number in the last four decades…

“The report, released today with an accompanying website at the BirdLife World Conservation Conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina, identifies many key global threats, including the intensification of industrial-scale agriculture and fishing, the spread of invasive species, logging, and the replacement of natural forest with monocultural plantations. It goes on to suggest that in the long term, human-induced climate change may be the most serious stress.”

(Independent.UK)

The centuries-long controversy over Yom Kippur’s Kol Nidre. – By Michael Weiss – Slate Magazine

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Public domain.

Antisemites’ Favorite Jewish Prayer: “For observant Jews, Kol Nidre represents the liturgical kickoff for Yom Kippur (opening services are named for the prayer, which means “All vows”), a repetitive and crescendoing piece of Aramaic recited before sunset on the Day of Atonement. For anti-Semites, it’s evidence that Jews are duplicitous and two-faced.” (Slate)

False Apology Syndrome

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Theodore Dalrymple: “There is a fashion these days for apologies: not apologies for the things that one has actually done oneself (that kind of apology is as difficult to make and as unfashionable as ever), but for public apologies by politicians for the crimes and misdemeanours of their ancestors, or at least of their predecessors. I think it is reasonable to call this pattern of political breast-beating the False Apology Syndrome.” (InCharacter)

On Being Certain:

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Book cover of

Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not by Robert Burton — “What do we do when we recognize that a false certainty feels the same as certainty about the sky being blue?

…In his brilliant new book, Burton systematically and convincingly shows that certainty is a mental state, a feeling like anger or pride that can help guide us, but that doesn’t dependably reflect objective truth… In the polarizing atmosphere of the 2008 election, On Being Certain ought to be required reading for every candidate — and for every citizen.” — ForbesLife (Amazon)

Not My Friend

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The Tic Code

McCain’s Tic Is Back: “McCain’s ‘my friends’ tic kicked in with a vengeance and he said it not three or four times but a total of 22 times. Several of those times he said ‘my friend,’ referring to a questioner in the audience. Moderator Tom Brokaw said ‘my friend’ once, when he announced next week’s moderator, CBS’s Bob Schieffer. (Obama said ‘my friends’ – not once.)” (Washington Post op-ed)

"That One…"

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…as McCain Calls Obama In Debate: ‘”During a discussion about energy, McCain punctuates a contrast with Obama by referring to him as “that one,” while once again not looking in his opponent’s direction (merely jabbing a finger across his chest). That’s not going to win McCain any Miss Congeniality points. Nor will it reassure any voters who believe McCain is improperly trying to capitalize on Obama’s “otherness.”

This goes beyond refusing to look at Obama in the first debate. With this slightly dehumanizing phrase, McCain may have just played into the emerging narrative of Obama-hate that has been sprouting at McCain-Palin rallies.

Darren Davis, a professor at Notre Dame who specializes in the role of race in politics, sent a comment to the Huffington Post about McCain’s “that one” remark. “It speaks volumes about how McCain feels personally about Obama. Whomever said the town hall format helps McCain is dead wrong,” Davis wrote.’

Obama Hatred At McCain-Palin Rallies: “Terrorist!” “Kill Him!”

Arianna Huffington: McCain’s Desperate Claim: Obama is Dangerous. Vote for Me If You Want to Live!

Jeffrey Feldman: Is Palin Trying To Incite Violence Against Obama?

…(All from Huffington Post)

I have never had more fear that the level of rancor in the population being tapped into against a presidential candidate will get him assassinated.

Terrorism Fear Could Create Psychosomatic Epidemic, Feds Warn

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A chemical agent protective suit and a protect...

“Americans’ fear of a terrorism could create a mass outbreak of a psychosomatic illness — even in the absence of any real attack — — creating a fake epidemic that could overwhelm hospitals attempting to treat real victims.

…feds warned hospitals in a nonpublic 2006 communique recently published by the government sunshine site Wikileaks.

…In fact, the feds suggest (.pdf) that there’s already been a totally terrorism-fear-created illness in California where no one was actually sick from an attack.

In that case, a man walked into a California bank in October 2003, sprayed an aerosol can into the air and then left. Employees and customers became ill, though investigators found there were no biological or chemical agents in the air. (Note proof of this incident is attributed to a November 2003 FBI report that is also considered too sensitive for the public’s eyes.)” (Wired)

Receptor Could Halt Blinding Diseases, Stop Tumor Growth, Preserve Neurons After Trauma

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“An international team of researchers has discovered what promises to be the on-off switch behind several major diseases.

In the advance online edition of Nature Medicine, scientists from Sainte-Justine Hospital Research Center, the Université de Montréal and the Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale (INSERM) in France report how the GPR91 receptor contributes to activate unchecked vascular growth that causes vision loss in common blinding diseases. These findings could also have wide-ranging and positive implications for brain tissue regeneration.” (Science Daily)

What Happens When We Ask Autistic Persons What Is Wrong With Them?

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Quinn, an ~18 month old boy with auti...

“The most striking observations were that all of them pointed out that unusual perceptions and information processing, as well as impairments in emotional regulation, were the core symptoms of autism, whereas the current classifications do not mention them.

The results of this study suggest that what has been selected as major signs by psychiatric nosography is regarded as manifestations induced by perceptive peculiarities and strong emotional reactions by the autistic persons who expressed themselves.” (Science Daily)

Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception

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Book cover of Book cover via Amazon

Jennifer A. Whitson and Adam D. Galinsky, Abstract: “”We present six experiments that tested whether lacking control increases illusory pattern perception, which we define as the identification of a coherent and meaningful interrelationship among a set of random or unrelated stimuli. Participants who lacked control were more likely to perceive a variety of illusory patterns, including seeing images in noise, forming illusory correlations in stock market information, perceiving conspiracies, and developing superstitions. Additionally, we demonstrated that increased pattern perception has a motivational basis by measuring the need for structure directly and showing that the causal link between lack of control and illusory pattern perception is reduced by affirming the self. Although these many disparate forms of pattern perception are typically discussed as separate phenomena, the current results suggest that there is a common motive underlying them. (Science, 3 October 2008, Vol. 322. no. 5898, pp. 115 – 117)

.

Years ago, there was a psychiatric paper I can no longer dig up proposing that belief in ESP was correlated with a history of sexual abuse and other trauma, the link being the experience of the lack of control in abuse. It is more comforting to believe that the skill to foresee, and potentially avoid, disastrous events exists (even if one failed dismally at foreseeing events in the abuse situation; one can believe in the possibility one may not fail the next time…) than to believe that no foresight is possible and that disastrous things defy our abilities to control them.

And on a cultural level, I recall being fascinated by attempts to explain ritual and religion as efforts to exert an illusory control over contingent events. (If we perform our rituals perfectly, the gods won’t send that famine. When it comes, it is because we were imperfect in our observance.)

So some distorted, “magical thinking” can come from experience, but it can also come from neurochemical imbalances or abnormalities of neural network formation, as in schizophrenia and other psychoses, especially of the paranoid type, in which too much credence is given to coincidence and patterns are found where there are none. And this amped-up ability to see patterns may not, of course, always work against one. A gifted few seem to have an enhanced ability to make order out of chaos, as per an article from New Scientist to which I blinked in March of 2002.

I have also written further about this on FmH in a discussion of pareidolia and apophenia which touched, among other things, upon William Gibson‘s preoccupations in the aptly-titled Pattern Recognition (2003).

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Worse Than Cheney… And a Better Shot

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Sinking like a stone

“That’s what one resident from Sarah Palin‘s hometown of Wasilla, Alaska had to say when asked about her positions on LGBT equality. In fact, just last night in an interview with Katie Couric, Sarah Palin trotted out the old right-wing code word: she said being gay is “a choice”.

Watch this video to get the firsthand accounts of LBGT people from Palin’s hometown and find out why they fear a Palin Vice Presidency.” (Tell-A-Friend)

Teenage Children into the ‘Dumpster’

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Parents Give Up Youths Under Law Meant for Babies: “In total last month, 15 older children in Nebraska were dropped off by a beleaguered parent or custodial aunt or grandmother who said the children were unmanageable.

Officials have called the abandonments a misuse of a new law that was mainly intended to prevent so-called Dumpster babies — the abandonment of newborns by young, terrified mothers — but instead has been used to hand off out-of-control teenagers or, in the case of the father of 10, to escape financial and personal despair.

The spate of abandonments has prompted an outcry about parental irresponsibility and pledges to change the state law. But it has also cast a spotlight on the hidden extent of family turmoil around the country and what many experts say is a shortage of respite care, counseling and especially psychiatric services to help parents in dire need.” (New York Times)

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It’s not much of a choice for Americans come November 4

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Thalia Mendoza has h...

Shaun Carney: “Every political contest is a question of relativities — as in, which candidate do I dislike least? — and when John McCain and Barack Obama went mano a mano for the first time in the presidential debate on Saturday morning our time, it gradually became clear that American voters will face a genuine dilemma on November 4. Both candidates are a substantial risk and a further sign that the political system of the world’s most powerful nation is not functioning very well.” (age.com.au)

MY HOLIDAY WITH JOHN McCAIN

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This is being circulated by email:

U.S. Republican pre...

It was just before John McCain’s last run at the presidential nomination in 2000 that my husband and I vacationed in Turtle Island in Fiji with John McCain, Cindy, and their children, including Bridget (their adopted Bangladeshi child).
It was not our intention, but it was our misfortune to be in close quarters with John McCain for almost a week, since Turtle Island has a small number of bungalows and their focus on communal meals force all vacationers who are there at the same time to get to know each other intimately.

He arrived at our first group meal and started reading quotes from a pile of William Faulkner books with a forest of Post-Its sticking out of them. As an English Literature major myself, my first thought was “if he likes this so much, why hasn’t he memorized any of this yet?” I soon realized that McCain actually thought we had come on vacation to be a volunteer audience for his “readings” which then became a regular part of each meal. Out of politeness, none of the vacationers initially protested at this intrusion into their blissful holiday, but people’s buttons definitely got pushed as the readings continued day after day.

Unfortunately this was not his only contribution to our mealtime entertainment. He waxed on during one meal about how Indo-Chine women had the best figures and that our American corn-fed women just couldn’t meet up to this standard. He also made it a point that all of us should stop Cindy from having dessert as her weight was too high and made a few comments to Amy, the 25 year old wife of the honeymooning couple from Nebraska that she should eat less as she needed to lose weight.
McCain’s appreciation of the beauty of Asian women was so great that David the American economist had to move his Thai wife to the other side of the table from McCain as McCain kept aggressively flirting with and touching her.

Needless to say I was irritated at his large ego and his rude behavior towards his wife and other women, but decided he must have some redeeming qualities as he had adopted a handicapped child from Bangladesh. I asked him about this one day, and his response was shocking: “Oh, that was Cindy’s idea – I didn’t have anything to do with it. She just went and adopted this thing without even asking me. You can’t imagine how people stare when I wheel this ugly, black thing around in a shopping cart in Arizona . No, it wasn’t my idea at all.”

I actively avoided McCain after that, but unfortunately one day he engaged me in a political discussion which soon got us on the topic of the active US bombing of Iraq at that time. I was shocked when he said, “If I was in charge, I would nuke Iraq to teach them a lesson”. Given McCain’s personal experience with the horrors of war, I had expected a more balanced point of view. I commented on the tragic consequences of the nuclear attacks on Japan during WWII –- but no, he was not to be dissuaded. He went on to say that if it was up to him he would have dropped many more nuclear bombs on Japan. I rapidly extricated myself from this conversation as I could tell that his experience being tortured as a POW didn’t seem to have mellowed out his perspective, but rather had made him more aggressive and vengeful towards the world.

My final encounter with McCain was on the morning that he was leaving Turtle Island. Amy and I were happily eating pancakes when McCain arrived and told Amy that she shouldn’t be having pancakes because she needed to lose weight. Amy burst into tears at this abusive comment. I felt fiercely protective of Amy and immediately turned to McCain and told him to leave her alone. He became very angry and abusive towards me, and said, “Don’t you know who I am.” I looked him in the face and said, “Yes, you are the biggest asshole I have ever met” and headed back to my cabin. I am happy to say that later that day when I arrived at lunch I was given a standing ovation by all the guests for having stood up to McCain’s bullying.
Although I have shared my McCain story informally with friends, this is the first time I am making this public. I almost did so in 2000, when McCain first announced his bid for the Republican nomination, but it soon became apparent that George Bush was the shoo-in candidate and so I did not act then. However, now that there is a very real possibility that McCain could be elected as our next president, I feel it is my duty as an American citizen to share this story. I can’t imagine a more scary outcome for America than that this abusive, aggressive man should lead our nation. I have observed him in intimate surroundings as he really is, not how the media portrays him to be. If his attitudes toward women and his treatment of his own family are even a small indicator of his real personality, then I shudder to think what will happen to America were he to be elected as our President.

—
Mary-Kay Gamel
Professor of Classics, Comparative Literature, and Theater Arts
Cowell College
University of California, Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz, California 95064
831-459-2381 (office); 831-429-8803 (home)
mkgamel@ucsc.edu

Important to circulate if true, but it sounded abit over-the-top and stereotyped (e.g. the comment about their adopted child) so I wrote to Dr. Gamel for verification. She denies writing the piece but knows who does and, curiously, doesn’t address directly why her name was attached to it:

Friends: Little did I think when I forwarded this story to four or five friends on 16 September that I would be identified as the author or receive so many questions. Some of you have clearly received the email without the preface attached. Most simply ask whether the story is true, some praise “my” courage, some angrily accuse me of distortion and lies.

I’m sorry that I did not check the story more carefully before forwarding it. I am paying for my mistake by sending this clarification to every person who contacts me. Here’s as much of the truth as I know:

First of all, I did not write this story. Here is the preface to the story as I received and forwarded it:

To: Mary-Kay Gamel
Subject: Fwd: MY HOLIDAY WITH JOHN McCAIN
Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2008 11:13:22 -0400
—– Forwarded Message —-
From: Kate Marianchild <katem@mcn.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 14, 2008
Subject: My Holiday with John McCain: a first-hand account
(Note from Kate: This shocking account was written by Ana Dubey, a friend of my cousin and her husband, who have known Ana for many years. Ana has a PhD in psychology and has a private practice in San Francisco . My cousin’s husband went to business school with Ana’s husband, who has since started and sold a number of successful companies. Ana’s husband is currently a Managing Director of a private equity firm in the Bay Area. Ana and her husband are not political activists and don’t have any personal ax to grind. In fact, in writing this account of her experience with John McCain, Ana is acting outside of her own economic self-interest as she and her husband are among the top 3-5% of our population who would benefit from the McCain tax/economic policies. Please pass this on to anyone you know who might vote for John McCain. Also please post it on blogs and send it to newspapers and radio stations.)

I am not Ana Dubey (whose full name, I believe, is Anasuya Dubey, apparently the daughter of a former Indian Consul in San Francisco). I gather that Turtle Island costs $2000/day–I could never afford such a holiday. After the email was further forwarded and people wrote with questions, I wrote to Kate Marianchild. Here is our exchange:

Dear Ms. Marianchild: I got your email with the shocking story and forwarded it. Some recipients are questioning it. I googled Ana Dubey and got a husband/wife team who run a bakery in Honolulu. Can you assure me that Ana Dubey really is a psychologist in San Francisco?

thanks
MKG

Yes, I can assure you of that. She is a private person and psychologist. And perhaps you can send this on to your friends:

Dear Friends,

Everyone is asking to talk to Ana Dubey or receive a direct email from her validating the “Holiday with John McCain” story. I emailed Ana and asked her how to handle all the correspondence I was receiving. She didn’t reply to me, which is understandable as we have never met and I am sure she is totally besieged with emails right now. I don’t feel comfortable forwarding lots of emails to her or giving out her email address.

However, I did forward one email – one I received from Frances Moore Lappe (author of Diet for a Small Planet, Food First, Democracy’s Edge, Hope’s Edge, Getting a Grip, and etc, and founder of the Small Planet Institute – http://www.smallplanet.org). Frances (aka Frankie), said she would like to pursue the story by talking to Ana, and that she would distribute it if she were convinced it was authentic.

Here’s what I just received from Frankie (Frances) Lappe. If you still have doubts perhaps you can contact Frankie, as she is a more public person than I believe Ana to be.

Kate Marianchild

Kate,
I just spoke with Ana, who was wonderful.
Sounds like NBC is on it. Sure hope an interview gets aired.
Thank you so much for asking her to call me. I admire Ana very much.
Frankie

Frances Moore Lappé
Small Planet Institute
25 Mt Auburn St., Suite 203
Cambridge MA 02138
617.441.6300 x 115

I have not contacted Ms. Lappe, and the story is still quite uncertain. As a reader of texts I think it has the ring of truth (especially given McCain’s well-documented temper). Some have questioned the idea of McCain shopping and pushing his then no longer infant adopted daughter in a shopping cart, but those could have been references to earlier times. Presumably the holiday took place in December 1999, and some have pointed out that the US was not at war with Iraq then, but bombing raids based on the sanctions were being carried out. The NEW YORKER portrait of Cindy McCain attests that the adoption of Bridget was indeed her idea. And so forth.

There are various sites where the story is being discussed. There is a lot of corroborating information at http://thebruceblog.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/my-holiday-with-mccain-oh-lord-i-cant-wait-till-this-gets-verified/.

There is much discussion on the web about the veracity of this meme, e.g. here. And here is what a Google search on “Ana Dubey OR Anasuya Dubey” will reveal. In summary, it seems too farfetched to believe, but just barely. As my friend Julia, who originally forwarded the email to me, observed, we’ve all had conversations with idiots like the man McCain is made out to be here. I’m saddened by this; McCain will hoist himself by his own petard easily enough without such scurrilousness.

Democracy on the Wane?

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//...In country after country, democratic reforms are in retreat. The surprising culprit: the middle class. This Boston Globe article is quite shabbily argued. Beginning from the recent massive populist uprising against the government in Bangkok, the author opines:

“The events unfolding in Thailand are part of a gathering global revolt against democracy. In 2007, the number of countries with declining freedoms exceeded those with advancing freedoms by nearly four to one, according to a recent report by Freedom House, an organization that monitors global democracy trends.

And the villains, surprisingly enough, are the same people who supposedly make democracy possible: the middle class. Traditional theories of democratization, such as those of Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, predict a story of middle class heroics: As a country develops a true middle class, these urban, educated citizens insist on more rights in order to protect their economic and social interests. Eventually, as the size of the middle class grows, those demands become so overwhelming that democracy is inevitable. But now, it appears, the middle class in some nations has turned into an antidemocratic force. Young democracy, with weak institutions, often brings to power, at first, elected leaders who actually don’t care that much about upholding democracy. As these demagogues tear down the very reforms the middle classes built, those same middle classes turn against the leaders, and then against the system itself, bringing democracy to collapse.”

An alternate way to read these events is that the protests are not antidemocratic at all, but rather protests against the sort of pseudo-democracy that has been foisted off as an excuse for the real thing for a long time… at least since the West “won” the Cold War. These forces are antidemocratic in the same sense that Bush says the terrorists hate us because we are free. Our smugness about our “freedom” lulls us into a false complacency; Americans should be taking to the streets over the sham that passes for democracy here as well. It has long been evident that the US is at the pinnacle of perfection of authoritarian social control, so subtle that its victims do not even know they are being controlled. Maybe, in places like Thailand, it is just done more clumsily, so that the remaining capacity for outrage in the middle classes can be mobilized as it cannot here?

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Auto Anthropomorphism

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//www.sciencedaily.com/images/2008/09/080922100156.jpg' cannot be displayed]

Human Or Animal Faces Associated With At Least 90 Percent Of Cars By One-third Of Population: “Do people attribute certain personality traits or emotions to car fronts? If so, could this have implications for driving and pedestrian behavior? Truls Thorstensen (EFS Consulting Vienna), Karl Grammer (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Urban Ethology) and other researchers at the University of Vienna joined economic interest with evolutionary psychology to answer these questions.

The research project investigates our perception of automotive designs, and whether and how these findings correspond to the perception of human faces.

Throughout evolution, humans have developed an ability to collect information on people’s sex, age, emotions, and intentions by looking at their faces. The authors suggest that this ability is probably widely used on other living beings and maybe even on inanimate objects, such as cars. Although this theory has been proposed by other authors, it has not yet been investigated systematically. The researchers therefore asked people to report the characteristics, emotions, personality traits, and attitudes that they ascribed to car fronts and then used geometric morphometrics to calculate the corresponding shape information.

One-third of the subjects associated a human or animal face with at least 90 percent of the cars. All subjects marked eyes (headlights), a mouth (air intake/grille), and a nose in more than 50 percent of the cars. Overall, people agreed which type of car possesses certain traits. The authors found that people liked cars most which had a wide stance, a narrow windshield, and/or widely spaced, narrow headlights. The better the subjects liked a car, the more it bore shape characteristics corresponding to high values of what the authors termed “power”, indicating that both men and women like mature, dominant, masculine, arrogant, angry-looking cars.” (Science Daily)

I’m glad that’s settled. I have always, since I was a child, seen facial expressions on the fronts of cars and ascribed an emotional valence to each one. I always wondered how common that was. Up to now, my only clue was that my daughter once commented that she saw cars that way as well. It makes evolutionary sense, given the importance of figuring out what stance to take vis a vis an approaching stranger. The machinery of facial recognition takes up a disproportionate volume of the cortex. In fact, I have previously written here about the accumulating evidence that those with autism process human faces with their object-recognition circuitry, not the facial-recognition areas. This anthropomorphism is in a way the flip side of the coin. (I wonder if people with autism see facial expressions in cars…)

How to Land a 747

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Kottke pointed me to this checklist, presumably if you are the civilian closest to the cockpit when the captain suddenly keels over. But also, probably, useful to the would-be hijackers among you. I’m going to store this with the other electronic memos I carry around with me for ready access at any time.

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Timothy Garton Ash:

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The time has come for a final report on the 43rd president of the US: “The man who set out to reinforce unbridled American power has weakened it in all three essential dimensions…

As the two men who would succeed him train like Olympic athletes for tomorrow’s foreign policy debate, pause for a moment to complete your final report on the 43rd president of the United States. What would you say?

I would sum up his two terms in four words: hubris followed by nemesis.” (Guardian.UK)

Timothy Garton Asch:

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The time has come for a final report on the 43rd president of the US: “The man who set out to reinforce unbridled American power has weakened it in all three essential dimensions…

As the two men who would succeed him train like Olympic athletes for tomorrow’s foreign policy debate, pause for a moment to complete your final report on the 43rd president of the United States. What would you say?

I would sum up his two terms in four words: hubris followed by nemesis.” (Guardian.UK)

Related?

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Popularity of a Hallucinogen May Thwart Its Medical Uses

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“Until a decade ago, the use of salvia was largely limited to those seeking revelation under the tutelage of Mazatec shamans in its native Oaxaca, Mexico. Today, this mind-altering member of the mint family is broadly available for lawful sale online and in head shops across the United States.

Though older Americans typically have never heard of salvia, the psychoactive sage has become something of a phenomenon among this country’s thrill-seeking youth. More than 5,000 YouTube videos — equal parts “Jackass” and “Up in Smoke” — document their journeys into rubber-legged incoherence. Some of the videos have been viewed half a million times.

Yet these very images that have helped popularize salvia may also hasten its demise and undermine the promising research into its possible medical uses.

Pharmacologists who believe salvia could open new frontiers for the treatment of addiction, depression and pain fear that its criminalization would make it burdensome to obtain and store the plant, and difficult to gain government permission for tests on human subjects. In state after state, however, including here in Texas, the YouTube videos have become Exhibit A in legislative efforts to regulate salvia. ” (New York Times)

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Vertical Bed

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Many homeless keep all their possessions with ...

“Vertical Bed is a sort of static prostheses that allows a person to fall asleep in a standing position. By bolting into cracks between the sidewalks, subway grates, or other rigid contact points, the suit will support it’s wearer with a minimum of visible hardware or occupied space, holding the sleeper’s weight with concealed harnesses. One-sided privacy will be achieved through noise canceling headphones and double-mirrored sunglasses. Additionally, an umbrella will clip in the rigid infrastructure for shelter. The project is designed for the visual performance of an alternate way of occupying urban space, born partly out of fantasies of minimal need and elegant futurism, and partly out of fears of the dehumanization of space. Occupants will absorb the vertical structure of urban architecture into their bodies. The vertical sleeper is in a constant state of readiness, never succumbing to collapse. Homelessness is most often marked by the forbidden act of lying down on the sidewalk, an act that the vertical bed circumvents. The vertical bed will imply a streamlined, rather than failed, infrastructure.” (Conflux Festival)