Greg Palast: The Tale of The Brits Who Swiped 800 Jobs From New York, Carted Off $90 Million, Then Tonight, Turned Off Our Lights

Machines accurately infer user intent, remember experiences and allow users to call upon simulated experts

“The massive power failure that struck the Northeast and parts of the Midwest this week also delivered a jolt to Congress, where energy legislation has been stalled amid deep regional differences over how best to upgrade the nation’s aging electric power transmission system.” Washington Post

Competing bills differ on support for a plan that would put electricity transmission under the control of several regional authorities, a step toward a national transmission system opposed by regions like the South and the Northwest which enjoy cheaper power. Bush, as usual, voiced his usual authoritative but empty platitudes about an “antiquated transmission system” and how we’ve got to “figure out what went wrong.” Of course, his energy scheme focuses more on federal handouts to his friends on the supply side — tax incentives for oil and gas drilling (especially in wilderness areas) and nuclear power support. Although analysis of the power failure, whose precise cause remains unknown, does not suggest it was set off simply by a short-term overload in peak demand, almost no one in the national debate pays much attention to the potential value of conservation in reducing demand for power and consequent stress on the transmission system. And participants in the debate draw diametrically opposite lessons about whether it calls for centralization of control over the power grid or enhancing regional autonomy. Along with centralization, of course, comes automated control of transmission traffic, automatically reconfiguring connections across the grid to respond instantaneously to surges in demand somewhere in the system. It strikes me that this is precisely what analysts say caused the cascading series of failures on Thursday, whereas in areas that were spared it was because local power engineers flipped a switch to isolate their localities from the larger process.

While the debate should probably not be shaped by these dramatic failures which so far have happened only three times during my lifetime (1965, 1979 and now), they are probably only the tip of the iceberg in alerting us to potential unintended consequences of automation of electricity flow. The megalomaniacs (literally) who favor centralization, giveaways to the energy industry, and unquestioning responsiveness to the unchecked growth in demand are those who will control the public debate with emotional evocations of the spectre of chaos, anarchy and social breakdown with increasingly frequent massive blackouts if we do not do their bidding.

“The greatest brute an African mother ever brought to life” (according to Milton Obote, whom Amin overthrew but who returned to power in Uganda later to rule with equivalent inhumanity and repression) is dead at 80 in Saudi Arabian exile. The current Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni, through a spokesman, said “Good.” Washington Post

“Iraqis who have suffered for months with little electricity gloated Friday over a blackout in the northeastern United States and southern Canada and offered some tips to help Americans beat the heat.

From frequent showers to rooftop slumber parties, Iraqis have developed advanced techniques to adapt to life without electricity.” CNN. How insensitive of them…to include Canada in their gloating.

[Here is a slightly edited version of an (as yet unpublished) letter I wrote to the editor of the New York Times, for your edification.]

To the editor:

I read with interest the article (“How One Hospital Benefited on Questionable Operations“, August 12) on the enormous fine Tenet Healthcare has just agreed to pay to the government to resolve accusations that doctors at one of its hospitals conducted unnecessary heart procedures and operations on hundreds of healthy patients.

You note that this is the largest penalty ever paid for accusations that a healthcare company billed federal health programs for unnecessary care. Criminal investigations of the doctors involved, although not the hospital or Tenet Healthcare, are underway.

Yet, such egregious cases are the tip of the iceberg of the abuses for-profit healthcare corporations commit in the name of patient care at the expense of those patients and the taxpayers, and they are by no means restricted to the notorious Tenet. ‘Benefiting from questionable practices’ is the name of the game in for-profit healthcare! In an era when community-based hospitals with an investment in quality care for members of their community struggle to remain afloat, the massive healthcare holding companies enjoy respectable growth and continuing returns on their shareholders’ investments. One would be hard-pressed to explain this distinction without suspecting questionable practices.

Mental health services, where the question of whether a patient requires care is more a subjective value judgment unsupported by laboratory or examination data, provide perhaps the greatest opportunity for a hospital’s owners to maximize Medicare reimbursement, and operating behavioral health facilities is the most fiscally healthy facet of for-profit corporate healthcare. As Medicare is the payor for our elderly patients as well as younger patients permanently disabled by major psychiatric illnesses, this results in exploitation of some of the most vulnerable in our population.

As until recently the medical director of a psychiatric hospital owned by a large healthcare corporation, I had a firsthand opportunity to see aspects of how this agenda is translated into operating policy. One example — it became clear to me that a concerted management policy functions to exclude clinical input from the loop when deciding which patients are to be accepted for admission. My name was routinely listed as the “accepting doctor” for cases I had never reviewed and would not have found suitable for inpatient admission (i.e., could the care they require be provided in a less expensive community setting? Could they be expected to benefit from the services of a hospital?).

Despite the perennial complaints of physicians and nurses at their facilities, the admissions offices of hospitals in this chain are staffed, as a matter of policy, with personnel who are not healthcare professionals and have no clinical expertise. Admissions policy amounts to, literally, nothing beyond filling vacant beds with paying patients as rapidly as possible. A similar climate shapes care after admission. Again, because justifying continuing need for inpatient stay is largely subjective in mental health care, utilization review functions to argue with payors for continued stay for as long as possible regardless of the clinical merits. Administrative consideration of the appropriateness of an admission does not occur until a patient’s benefits are exhausted and the hospital is no longer being reimbursed for continued treatment. Because Medicare is not “managed” and there is no prior approval or outside review of the appropriateness of hospital level of care, there is never any pressure for discharge of Medicare patients.

I was faulted for attempting to divert geriatric admissions to specialized geropsychiatry units or to psychiatry units in general hospitals where, as contrasted with a freestanding psychiatric facility, they receive more comprehensive and safer care for the medical and mental health problems which are often intermingled in a behavioral decompensation. A further reason for attempting to divert geriatric admissions from my hospital and other hospitals in its chain is that its corporate owners have a misguided risk management policy of not honoring patients’ advanced directives. Often, a patient and her family are not informed until after admission that the patient’s “Do Not Resuscitate” wishes will not be honored, i.e. that aggressive resuscitation measures will be initiated on all patients who have a cardio-respiratory arrest at that facility regardless of their wishes. But attempting to implement a policy of quality control assuring that the admissions department alerts potential admissions and their families to this policy results in lost admissions opportunities and empty beds.

Concerned about these practices after the corporate takeover of the hospital, the state regulatory agency responsible for its license and oversight placed the hospital under renewed scrutiny for these and other practices. As a result, the hospital was ordered more than a year ago to enhance the role of clinical leadership in making sure that all admissions were clinically appropriate rather than just a matter of managerial convenience. Instead of implementing the required changes, clinical management was replaced with more pliable personnel whose oversight has been pro forma.

This is a process I have seen repeated, with little variation, at a number of behavioral healthcare facilities in the for-profit sector. Those concerned with healthcare costs and any vestiges of ethical responsibility that healthcare providers have for their patients in our increasingly corporate-controlled healthcare industry would do well to look at the mental health sector and the “grey area” of practices which exploit Medicare reimbursement without on the surface of things being overtly fraudulent. Over recent decades, I shared most physicians’ concerns about the increasing intrusiveness of managed care scrutiny over their practices. My recent experiences have persuaded me, to the contrary, that such scrutiny may be the only hedge against the rapacious practices of the for-profit healthcare corporations. Those interested in cost containment would do well to advocate for a managed-care system for Medicare, the nation’s single largest underwriter of healthcare costs, similar to that which has made other insurers less exploitable by healthcare-for-profit. This would be a far more rational measure than focusing solely on fraud prevention and prosecution after the fact.

Sincerely,

Eliot Gelwan MD

Brookline, MA

Nicholas Kristof: “…this day is an opportunity to look at perhaps the most fundamental divide between America and the rest of the industrialized world: faith. Religion remains central to American life, and is getting more so, in a way that is true of no other industrialized country, with the possible exception of South Korea.

Americans believe, 58 percent to 40 percent, that it is necessary to believe in God to be moral. In contrast, other developed countries overwhelmingly believe that it is not necessary…” NY Times op-ed

Pentagon says tough duty bonuses are budget-buster: “The Pentagon wants to cut the pay of its 148,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, who are already contending with guerrilla-style attacks, homesickness and 120- degree-plus heat.

Unless Congress and President Bush take quick action when Congress returns after Labor Day, the uniformed Americans in Iraq and the 9,000 in Afghanistan will lose a pay increase approved last April of $75 a month in ‘imminent danger pay’ and $150 a month in ‘family separation allowances.'” SF Chronicle

Derrick Z. Jackson: The Cold War Queen: “The only nuclear event going on concerning Iraq is a meltdown of the Bush administration.” Boston Globe/CommonDreams

Jonathan Schell: “Events have suddenly and unexpectedly handed the Democratic Party an opportunity to defeat George W. Bush in 2004. His main justifications for his war in Iraq (existence of weapons of mass destruction, connections with Al Qaeda) have collapsed, while the war itself intensifies. At home, his tax cuts have sent deficits out of control and jobs are disappearing at a gallop. Each of these conditions seems likely to be either chronic or permanent: The prospect of finding actual weapons of mass destruction, though conceivable, has dimmed to the vanishing point; the cost in blood and treasure of the occupation seems likely to increase; the deficit is likely to remain high or get higher. On other issues-healthcare, the environment, education-the public trusts Democrats more than it does the President. His poll numbers have fallen, from the high sixties and mid-seventies a month or two ago to the mid-fifties today.

But it’s one thing for Bush to fail, another for the Democrats to succeed.” The Nation/CommonDreams

Haroon Siddiqui: “Americans don’t quite know what they are talking about when it comes to where the reistance is coming from.” Toronto Star/CommonDreams

Tom Turnipseed: “The desperation of the U.S. military plight in Iraq was very clear when General Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S. commander in Iraq, commented on the daily casualties of U.S. soldiers in the guerrilla war. General Sanchez said, ‘Every American needs to believe this: that if we fail here in this environment, the next battlefield will be the streets of America.’

Fighting in ‘the streets of America ‘ is typical Bush/Cheney fear-mongering hyperbole. It echoes the top down use of the fear factor by the Bushies. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq recently said, ‘I would rather be fighting them here than fighting them in New York’. Such scare tactics are reminiscent of Bush’s false admonitions of Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and his justification of attacking Iraq to ‘prevent another 9/11’. Ironically, although no ‘ties to Al Qaeda’ have ever been proven regarding Saddam Hussein’s regime as alleged by the Bush/Cheney regime, the bumbling U.S. war machine has managed to unite the opposite extremes of Islam against the U.S. in Iraq.” CommonDreams

“Low-level activity reduces risk by 43%” National Post

Killing an 11-year-old boy to restore democracy. Boston Globe

“New findings from a Queen’s behavioural expert in eye/hand movement provide the first direct evidence that our brain patterns are similar whether we are actually doing something or simply watching someone else do it.

It’s an insight that could have significant implications for the assessment of people with various movement disorders such as some stroke victims, says Dr. Randy Flanagan, who conducted the study with Dr. Roland Johansson of Umea University in Sweden. The methods employed in the study could be used to determine whether people with impaired movement control also have problems understanding and perceiving the actions of others. The answer to this question will have implications for both diagnosis and assessment.

‘This helps to explain how we understand the movements of others,’ Dr. Flanagan says. ‘We perceive an action by running it at some covert level in our own system. An example would be when sports fans watch football on TV and move in anticipation of action on the screen.’ Although this theory is supported by previous neuro-physiological and brain imaging studies, until now there has been little direct, behavioural evidence.” EurekAlert!

There has been excitement in the neuroscience field for several years over the implication of the discovery of so-called mirror neurons in primates, about which I have posted before and which react when one is watching behaviors of others as other neurons do when the individual is performing an action. As a potential physiological basis for empathy if they operate in humans as they do in other primates, their development may have been important to making us human. The current study seems to offer parallels and may be empirical evidence that the mirroring circuitry exists in humans.

Dervala daydreams about Elvis.

I’m so glad I subscribe to the WSJ OpinionJournal if only because James Taranto is so much fun to laugh at. In today’s column, he is suspicious of reports that the French heat wave has killed 3,000 because he does not know what to make of the Health Ministry statement that this figure includes deaths “linked directly or indirectly” to the heat. It would seem to me someone who does not understand epidemiological methods is not qualified to comment on an epidemiological finding, but he takes exception to this information:

In a statement, the ministry said its estimate was partly drawn from studying deaths in 23 Paris regional hospitals from July 25-Aug. 12 and from information provided by General Funeral Services.

According to 2002 figures, the Paris regional hospitals that were surveyed could have expected some 39 deaths a day, the ministry said. But Tuesday, they recorded nearly 180, it said.

“We note a clear increase in cases beginning Aug. 7-8, which we can regard as the start of the epidemic of deaths linked to the heat,” the statement said.

Morgues and funeral directors have reported skyrocketing demand for their services since the heat wave took hold. General Funeral Services, France’s largest undertaker, said it handled some 3,230 deaths from Aug. 6-12, compared to 2,300 on an average week in the year–a 37 percent jump.

He says it does not establish a causal link between the heat and the deaths. Uhhh, calculating the “excess mortality” compared to some reference period when, you reason, the factor in question is the sole variable is the closest you can come to causality in epidemiology, and is a well-accepted technique for assessing the impact of a heatwave.

But his contorted reasoning thrusts his foot even deeper into his mouth with his next statement. He thinks the 3,000 figure was chosen to compete with the number of U.S. deaths on Sept. 11th, 2001. “A popular lunatic conspiracy theory on the “European street” has it that George W. Bush is to blame every time the weather is bad.” Oh, and the French Ministry of Health is a prime proponent of this lunatic theory? Sorry, James, there’s only one lunatic in this story, and he’s not in Paris.

By the way, in another story further down the page, Taranto derides Sen. John Kerry for being not only “haughty” but “French-looking.” Yes, that’s what he wrote.

“The specter of the Iran-Contra affair is haunting Washington. Some of the people and countries are the same, and so are the methods – particularly the pursuit by a network of well-placed individuals of a covert, parallel foreign policy that is at odds with official policy.

Boiled down to its essentials, the Iran-Contra affair was about a small group of officials based in the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that ran an “off-the-books” operation to secretly sell arms to Iran in exchange for hostages. The picture being painted by various insider sources in the media suggests a similar but far more ambitious scheme at work.

Taken collectively, what these officials describe and what is already on the public record suggests the existence of a disciplined network of zealous, like-minded individuals. Centered in Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith’s office and around Richard Perle in the Defense Policy Board in the Pentagon, this exclusive group of officials operates under the aegis of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney.” AlterNet

Poindexter quits Pentagon research post AP/Salon

“Few orchestras play the works of contemporary classical composers, and almost no one buys their albums. Is their music uninspired—or do we simply not get it?

…in the world of music, contemporary classical composers inhabit a dissonant ghetto all their own. Few people listen to them, few critics review them and few people understand them. Western classical music as a whole makes up only 3.5 percent of the world’s total music market (contemporary works aren’t broken out separately). In 2002, classical-album sales were down 17 percent. Orchestras rarely feature contemporary works. “If you go to a museum or dance company, the balance between old and new is completely different,” says Nicholas Kenyon, the BBC’s controller of the Proms, live events and television classical music. But is that because new music is uninspired, or just not as familiar to us as Mozart? Are the composers to blame—or are we?” MSNBC

Addendum: As Abby points out in the attached comment, if you are interested in ‘new music’, do not skip the excellent NPR American Mavericks series, to which I have previously blinked. You can listen to a streaming version of the programs over your net connection.

David Brooks: “Maybe it’s time to admit the obvious. We don’t really care about diversity all that much in America, even though we talk about it a great deal. Maybe somewhere in this country there is a truly diverse neighborhood in which a black Pentecostal minister lives next to a white anti-globalization activist, who lives next to an Asian short-order cook, who lives next to a professional golfer, who lives next to a postmodern-literature professor and a cardiovascular surgeon. But I have never been to or heard of that neighborhood. Instead, what I have seen all around the country is people making strenuous efforts to group themselves with people who are basically like themselves.

…

Look around at your daily life. Are you really in touch with the broad diversity of American life? Do you care? ” The Atlantic

“…researchers believe as many as 17 mysteriously dead whales are floating over a 125-mile stretch of ocean in Canada and the United States. In addition, three other dead whales have been spotted much closer to the New England coast, and scientists are attempting to test them for possible connections to what has become the largest mass death in this region involving large whales since 1987.” Boston Globe

Bizarre gruesome postscript on the controversial plan to cryogenically preserve the all-star’s remains. Read it before you go with Alcor Life Extension! “The silver can containing Williams’ head resembles a lobster pot and is marked in black with Williams’ patient I.D. number, A-1949, according to the SI story. Williams’ head has been shaved and drilled with holes. Verducci also reports that, before the head was placed in its present location, it was accidentally cracked as many as 10 times due to fluctuating storage temperatures…Two dime-size holes were drilled into the head to observe the brain condition and, more important, to insert sensors that could detect cracks during the freezing process. But after “a huge crack” occurred in the head in April and nine more cracks were reported in July, Williams’ head was removed from its original container and eventually placed in its current “neuro-can.”” Sports Illustrated [via Daily Rotten]

US Forces Say Believe Saddam Near Tikrit: “A senior U.S. commander said on Thursday he had good reason to believe Saddam Hussein was around his hometown of Tikrit and would be caught ‘sooner rather than later.'” Reuters

When did we start treating children like children? “A good deal of our intellectual life in the past half century has been ruled by the following pattern: First, a French person, with great brilliance and little regard for standards of evidence, promulgates a theory overturning dearly held beliefs. Second, many academics, especially the young, seize on the theory and run with it, in the process loading it with far more emotional and political freight than the French thinkerr—who, after all, was just “doing theory”—had in mind. Meanwhile, other scholars indignantly reaffirm the pre-revisionist view, and everyone calls for more research, to decide the question. In the third stage, the research is produced, and it confuses everybody, because it is too particular, too respectful of variation and complexity, to support either the nice old theory or the naughty new one.

Recent histories of the family have followed this itinerary.” The New Yorker

Jerome Groopman: Can Hypochondria Be Cured?:

“Studies show that at least a quarter of all patients report symptoms that appear to have no physical basis, and that one in ten continues to believe that he has a terminal disease even after the doctor has found him to be healthy. Experts say that between three and six per cent of patients seen by primary-care physicians suffer from hypochondria, the irrational fear of illness. The number is likely growing, thanks to increased medical reporting in the media, which devotes particular attention to scary new diseases like sars, and to the Internet, which provides a wealth of clinical information (and misinformation) that can help turn a concerned patient into a neurotic one. Nevertheless, hypochondria is rarely discussed in the doctor’s office. The ‘‘worried well,’’ as sufferers are sometimes called, typically feel insulted by any suggestion that their symptoms have a psychological basis. Most patients are given a formal diagnosis of hypochondria only after ten or so years of seeing physicians, if they get such a diagnosis at all.” The New Yorker

Groopman writes this wonderful series for the magazine in which he considers area of medical controversy with compassion and insight. I was particularly interested in his take on this topic on the border of psychiatry and ‘real’ medicine. In hypochondriasis, patients are essentially exploiting the phsician’s fallibility and wish to be reassuring for unconscious reasons; a non-psychiatrist grappling comfortably with the problem would have to be penetrating about the limitations of the doctor’s art as well as intuitive about unconscious process — no mean feat. Groopman profiles a primary care physician who is, and then turns to a depiction of the work of neuropsychiatrist Brian Fallon (whom I knew way back when before either of us went to medical school). Because it is anathema to suggest to a hypochondriacal patient that it is psychological at root, this quintessentially psychiatric problem is rarely treated by psychiatrists. Fallon has an interesting take on it, having struggled to get referrals of patients considered hypochondriacal by his non-psychiatric colleagues to study.

Fallon has reconceived hypochondria as a heterogeneous disorder: some sufferers are indeed obsessive-compulsives, whereas others are experiencing a prolonged reaction to a traumatic event, like the death of a loved one. He also believes that people who are labelled hypochondriacs can behave in diametrically opposite ways in terms of seeking medical care. For some, the fear of illness is so great that they avoid all doctors. These patients indulge in the fantasy that if a doctor doesn’t examine them, then the illness won’t appear. Another group needs to see doctors constantly, even when these visits cause more anxiety or humiliation.

What this heterogeneity hints at is that the hypochondriacal ‘label’ may have something, or as much, or more, to do with the distasteful reaction her physicians have to such a patient as it does to the underlying process in the patient herself. (This is a familiar problem in psychiatry as well, which I refer to as ‘diagnosis by countertransference’, usuallly seen when a disagreeable or difficult patient is labelled with borderline personality disorder. In my teaching and supervision with regard to both hypochondriasis/somatization and borderline personality dynamics, it is one of the most difficult issues for trainees to dea with.) Groopman’s article ends with a patient’s summation of perhaps the best approach to treating such difficult cases:

‘‘Hypochondria is not at all funny, like people think,’’ she said. ‘‘It’s not a ‘Seinfeld’ episode. It’s a horrible, horrible way to live.”

“Concerns over transatlantic relations, American attitudes toward the United Nations Security Council, and the future of multilateralism stem from a single, overarching issue of the post–Cold War era: the issue of international legitimacy. When the United States wields its power, especially its military power, will world opinion and, more importantly its fellow liberal democracies, especially in Europe, regard its actions as broadly legitimate? Or will the United States appear, as it did to many during the crisis in Iraq, as a kind of rogue superpower?” — Robert Kagan, The Carnegie Endowment, Foreign Policy Ultimately a wimpy article, the main point is that the ‘legitimacy’ of our foreign policy will be judged by (drumroll) how things turn out on the ground (stability, democracy) in Iraq and the region. In the broadest terms, if the US is not invested in ‘legitimacy’, the points are moot. [Raise your hand if you think BushCo care about the stability and democracy of Iraq. I thought so.] There is no discussion of the consequences of pursuing rogue foreign policy in the modern world or how to enforce international accountability on a state like the US acting in illegitimate ways.

Maureen Dowd: “Is the internet over? …The most telling sign that the Internet is no longer the cool American frontier? Blogs, which sprang up to sass the establishment, have been overrun by the establishment.” NY Times op-ed

“With a publicly available search engine, a few well-chosen e-mail addresses, and off-the-shelf viral code, anyone can commit an act of cyberterrorism–or so says Roelof Temmingh, technical director of SensePost, a South African computer security company.

Speaking at the recent Black Hat Briefings and Defcon 11 conferences, Temmingh explained that the current methods of assailing computer networks–denial-of-service attacks (DoS) or remote break-ins–inconvenience too few people to really impact a nation’s information infrastructure. The sort of exploit that could really hurt a country, Temmingh suggests, would more likely be based on e-mail viruses, a concept he outlined in a recent paper.” ZDNet

Answer: not really:

“Bjorn3D has put together an article that answers the age old question: Will customizing your Windows PC slow down your computer?

To find out, he loaded up Object Desktop components such as WindowBlinds, ObjectBar, IconPackager, and WinStyles and then put on CursorXP to top it off.

He then ran it thorugha host of benchmarks comparing it to his clean setup. Benchmarks included 3DMark, PCMark, UT2K3, and others.

The result? No discernable performance hit.” WinCustomize

Gamma-ray weapons could trigger next arms race: “An exotic explosive that blurs the distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons could shift the global balance of power.” New Scientist

The critic is appalled by a survey of Monet’s middle years that cheapens his reputation: “Monet was a virtuoso, like the composer Rossini. Both were prolific with their enormous talents. Ravishing though it is, their work needs to be taken in small doses so that you don’t notice how formulaic and repetitive it can be.” Telegraph/UK

“The chromatic scale — the musical scale that follows the notes of the piano and of which the Western seven-tone do-re-mi scale is a subset — may not be based on number ratios, as many physicists and mathematicians have proposed, but rather on human speech, according to a study published Wednesday in the Journal of Neuroscience.” LA Times

“Blender magazine has named the ’50 Worst Artists in Music History’ – and the list is bound to infuriate pop fans, because along with expected names like Celine Dion and Vanilla Ice are legends like The Doors and Mick Jagger.

Even current top-selling acts, such as the Goo Goo Dolls, Creed and the Gipsy Kings, get savaged.” New York Post

“I used the CTX 5500 to keep bombs off your plane. I also go elbows deep in your underwear.” Wired

“The Arctic ice cap will melt completely within the next century if carbon dioxide emissions continue to heat the Earth’s atmosphere at current rates, according to an international study.” ABC News

“A study funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in ‘fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity’.

As if that was not enough to get Republican blood boiling, the report’s four authors linked Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and the rightwing talkshow host, Rush Limbaugh, arguing they all suffered from the same affliction.

All of them ‘preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality’.

Republicans are demanding to know why the psychologists behind the report, Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition [link is to a .pdf of the paper], received $1.2m in public funds for their research from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

The authors also peer into the psyche of President George Bush, who turns out to be a textbook case. The telltale signs are his preference for moral certainty and frequently expressed dislike of nuance.” Guardian/UK [via CommonDreams]

Thousands of doctors back proposal in JAMA: “Thousands of US physicians have endorsed a broad proposal that would abolish for-profit hospitals and insurers and transfer all Americans into an expanded and improved Medicare program for all ages, reigniting the debate over universal health care a decade after President Clinton’s failed plan.

While the four physicians who wrote the plan — three of whom are affiliated with Harvard Medical School — are members of a nonprofit organization that has long pushed for universal health coverage, the new proposal is important for two reasons: It was published today in one of the country’s most prestigious and its most widely circulated medical journal, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and because of the large number of doctors — nearly 8,000, including two former surgeons general — who endorsed it.” Boston Globe

“Climate Change Threatens the Future of Humanity, but we Refuse to Respond Rationally” — George Monbiot, CommonDreams

“For over a decade, the military has been shifting its supply and support personnel into combat jobs and hiring defense contractors to do the rest. And the process has accelerated under Defense Secretary Rumsfeld.

And despite the alleged wonders of private enterprise, those companies have left soldiers in filth, heat, and garbage.” CommonDreams

Not considering for the moment the fact that they were sent into the lions’s den on false pretenses and are paying for it daily with their life and limb; see their lives flashing in front of their eyes in the form of an open-ended occupation; have bounties placed on their heads by the people they have ‘liberated’; are succumbing to a mysterious multi-organ failure disease that may be a result of toxic exposure; etc. etc.,

The Progressive Case for Howard Dean: “Yes, I’ve read the unfavorable commentaries on Howard Dean by writers whose opinions I greatly respect, like Norman Solomon and Alexander Cockburn. And yes, I know that I disagree with some critical components of Dean’s platform. Progressives should be well aware that they’re going to disagree on a range of issues with every individual who has a chance at being in the White House two years from now. Our choice is not between Howard Dean and the-even-better-candidate who-has-a-shot-at-winning the-Democratic-nomination and-defeating-George-Bush; that other candidate doesn’t exist. Neither Kucinich nor Al Sharpton nor Carol Moseley Braun nor any Green will be President. Progressives should incorporate these realities into their electoral strategy, however disappointing they may be.” AlterNet

Until I realized it was Hitchcock‘s (August 13, 1899, Leytonstone, England — April 28, 1980) birthday today, I puzzled over this change in the Google logo:

Here is a Hitchcock filmography; find your favorite(s). [Do you prefer the British or the American period?] Here’s a list of all his cameos in his films.

From Destiny-land:

“Al Franken committed a brilliant publicity stunt.

He renamed his new book ‘Fair and Balanced‘ — prompting Fox News to sue him.

Of course, they’re angry because the book is partly about Fox News. But this means they’re suing him to get the book’s title changed back to ‘Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.’

Update: In an apparent show of solidarity, the liberal blog Atrios has changed its tagline to ‘Fair and Balanced.’ If you look at the top of this page, you’ll see Destiny-land is following suit…”

Will this become a new webloggers’ meme?

“Michael A Ledeen, resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he works closely with the better-known former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle, has been a fixture of Washington’s neo-conservative community for more than 20 years. But he is now out front, in a public campaign for the United States to confront Iran, warning that Tehran will cause Washington problems in both Iraq and Afghanistan and that ‘the mullahs are determined to obliterate Israel’. ” Asia Times [props to walker] Ledeen is apparently the international affairs analyst Karl Rove consults when he wants a ‘fresh idea’, and he increasingly sees his fax transmittals to Rove turned into official policy statements.

Of course, the American authorities regret this ‘serious’ mistake. But, of course, no one will be held culpable for this war crime [and I will be flamed for even calling it so.]

““I wish Saddam (Hussein) would return and kill all Americans,” Anwaar Kawaz said. Under Saddam, “we used to go out at one in the morning. We went out at 9 now and they killed us.” Guardian/UK

Related: Saddam’s Followers Raise Bounty for Dead Americans ABC News

Texas ANG George W Bush Action Figure: “Why wait until the redesign of Mount Rushmore?

Now you can own a piece of American history; the Texas Air National Guard George W Bush Action Figure.

This figure probably stands 14′ in height, and is exactly as the future Leader of the Western World(tm) appeared during his service defending our Nation’s borders from Mexicans and Bahamians.

Comes with detailed uniform (as imagined by base commander), sealed discharge papers, Coors Light keg, and ‘licensed to chug’ bumper sticker.

Now you can have George in your home every day, even after November 2004!

This fully pose-able action figure of the Commander in Chief is likely correct down to the slightest detail. Our highly skilled Chinese craftspeople have been in the action figure industry for years, and trained under a generous re-education program. They make the best, most desirable action figures in the Free Market, or die tryin’!

Winning bidder will be notified of upcoming GWBANG accessories; pile of dried branches, action pretzel, overstuffed bags with ‘$’ printed on them, blindfold, bible with real, highlighted passages, and earplugs.

The winning bidder will also receive TWO bonus gifts: the George W. Bush ‘Afternoon of September 11th 2001’ tennis ensemble, and a genuine “First Lady Laura Bush Serving Sandwiches at a VA Hospital” action figure!

Supplies are limited; don’t let yours disappear!”

Click on the link to view (or, if I am sadly mistaken about my readers, to bid on) the item; it is not what you think. [thanks, Adam]

GIs flood US with war-weary emails: “An unprecedented internet campaign waged on the frontline and in the US is exposing the real risks for troops in Iraq… (amidst) rising fears that the conflict is now a desert Vietnam.” Guardian/UK

Rebecca Blood points with obvious distress to this story about an eight-year-old sex symbol. Her parents approve; her father is — shall we say? — ‘pimping’ her in the sense that she works for his modelling agency in Brisbane. Rebecca reminds us of the furor over Brooke Shields’ suggestive prepubescent modelling, but forgets to draw the parallels to Jon-Benet Ramsay, rest her soul.

Democratic Presidential hopeful Howard Dean is getting the treatment. The acerbic physician and former governor of Vermont has raised more money and gained more popularity than expected. As a result, the pundits who examine political candidates’ viability have turned their gaze on him. In June, Tim Russert and a clique of Washington pundits and reporters who follow Russert’s lead pronounced Dean unfit. According to a flurry of news stories and columns, Dean’s appearance on Meet the Press with Russert on June 22 was an embarrassment for the candidate and a disaster for his campaign.

People who saw the show or read the transcript might well ask: What was the big deal? — Ruth Conniff, The Progressive [via Alternet]

Screenwriter/director Frank Pierson’s commencement address to the 2003 USC film school graduating class; “What has happened in Hollywood has happened to us all. In life as in movies, we are seeing the disappeance of the odd, the old, the personal, the traditional and the idiosyncratic…” Alternet

Big beast extinction blamed on prehistoric fire starters: “Analysis of ancient eggshells suggests giant Australian animals suddenly became extinct because people burned their habitat.” New Scientist

Dial the world: “The Web and E-mail are second nature to PC owners. Jeff Pulver hopes the same will soon apply for Internet phone calls. A 40-year-old pioneer in the field, Pulver is a passionate, fast-talking crusader trying to sell a skeptical public on the future of Net telephony. His latest venture is a no-charge service called Free World Dialup.” US News

“An electronic glove that can turn American Sign Language gestures into spoken words or text, designed to help the deaf communicate more easily with the hearing world, is under development.

Researcher Jose Hernandez-Rebollar of George Washington University has demonstrated that his ‘AcceleGlove’ can translate the rapid hand movements used to make the alphabet and some of the words and phrases of sign language.” Houston Chronicle

Paris heat wave ‘kills 100’: “At least 100 people have died from heat-related causes in the last eight days in the Paris area as scorching temperatures continue to bake much of Europe, according to a French medical official.” CNN

One of the most alarming aspects of the heatwave, showing what a thin veneer our most ‘advanced’ technological achievements place over environmental disaster, is embodied in this story: France Frets Over Nuke Plants and Heatwave Toll: “Temperatures have hit around 104 degrees Fahrenheit in the past few days, spelling trouble for France’s nuclear reactors, many of which are cooled by river water. The plants pour water back into the rivers but only once it has been cooled to a certain temperature to protect the environment. With river levels falling and the mercury rising, authorities face the choice of spewing out hotter water, risking ecological damage, or cutting output, potentially leading to blackouts.” UN-Cast News Wire

Herbs for Hot Flashes: “Stunned by the string of negative studies about hormone replacement, including research released last week that emphasized the risk of heart attacks and breast cancer, millions of menopausal women are searching for safe substitutes. Their quest for relief from hot flashes, night sweats and other symptoms has coincided with the first wave of results from studies begun over the last several years of popular herbs and other nonpharmaceutical treatments.

But to the dismay of enthusiasts of alternative medicines, the evidence of the benefits has been limited and mixed. As a result, experts are urging caution in using products that are just beginning to be understood, are of inconsistent quality and are sold in nontraditional ways.” NY Times

“To the growing numbers of medical experts who preach evidence-based medicine — the discipline that insists on proof that time-honored medical practices and procedures are actually effective — there is no more inviting target than the annual physical.

Checkups for people with no medical complaint remain the single most common reason for visiting a doctor, according to surveys by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…

Yet in a series of reports that began in 1989 and is still continuing, an expert committee sponsored by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, an arm of the Department of Health and Human Services, found little support for many of the tests commonly included in a typical physical exam for symptomless people.

It found no evidence, for example, that routine pelvic, rectal and testicular exams made any difference in overall survival rates for those with no symptoms of illness.

It warned that such tests can lead to false alarms, necessitating a round of expensive and sometimes risky follow-up tests. And even many tests that are useful, like cholesterol and blood pressure checks, need not be done every year, it said in reports to doctors, policy makers and the public.” NY Times

‘Evidence-based’ is ominously synonymous with ‘cost-effective’, of course, and its findings cannot measure intangible mutual benefits of an annual physical such as deepening the rapport between a patient and her/his physician, continuity of care, etc., unless they have a measurable impact on a statistic being studied. There is a branch of medicine which attempts to quantify the value of “quality-of-life” changes from medical interventions, but I doubt their data bearing on the annual physical checkup, if there is any, would be included in this purview.

“Not too long ago, it was easy for an armchair astronomer to keep up to speed on the moons of the solar system. There was the Moon, of course, and the four Jovian satellites spotted by Galileo, those two around Mars, and some odd ones here and there — that weird fractured cue ball orbiting Uranus, for instance.

These days, though, it is tough to tell the moons without a scorecard. In the past six years, dozens of satellites have been discovered around the giant planets, more than doubling the total in the solar system. Jupiter is the current leader, with 61, followed by Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The tally for these four planets is 124 (the other five planets have only four among them), but that number is sure to change in the next year or two.

…

(S)cientists say these moons offer some of the only clues to the early years of the solar system. They are a window into the past, some 4.5 billion years ago, when the planets formed from a swirling nebular disk of gas and dust.”

“A drug given to Parkinson’s patients may have an unexpected side-effect — compulsive gambling, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

An unusually large number of patients taking Mirapex gambled themselves into debt, while patients taking other drugs did not, the team at the Muhammad Ali Parkinson Research Center in Phoenix, Arizona reported.” Reuters

Some Doubt the Value And Safety of the Latest Pill, Crestor: “For patients who have tried and failed to lower their level sufficiently with lifestyle changes — diet and exercise — physicians generally recommend a statin, says Pasternak. However, with five such drugs already on the market, ‘I don’t think we desperately need an additional statin,’ he says.

Judging by the hundreds of millions the company spent developing Crestor and the effort it has put into winning approval, AstraZeneca disagrees. The company had to delay the drug’s introduction by a year when alarming toxicity was discovered at the highest dose of Crestor — 80 milligrams a day. People taking that dose were more likely than people on lower doses to have serious side effects such as muscle and kidney damage.” Washington Post

Audio of high court cases is ready for download: “Getting audio recordings of landmark legal arguments is becoming as easy as downloading the latest Snoop Dogg single. For the first time, Internet users can download, edit, and swap many of the US Supreme Court’s greatest hits.

Oral arguments available include those for the Roe v. Wade abortion rights case and the disputed 2000 presidential election.

The audio files come from the OYEZ Project, a multimedia archive that gets its name from the phrase used to open a session of court.” Boston Globe

“Forced to cut spending to balance state budgets, legislatures are coming down hardest on higher education, an odd move for a nation that believes its special advantage in global competition is its ‘knowledge workers,’ who are billed as so well educated that they are capable of turning out products and services other nations cannot match.” NY Times

This, about the mental basis of the physical, harmonizes nicely with my piece below about the physical basis of the mental.

The Patient’s Knowledge About a Therapy Affects the Therapy Outcome. This is essentially an empirical demonstration that the placebo effect plays an important role in the effectiveness of medical treatment. Most studies are “placebo-controlled”, that is they hold constant the impact of the subject’s knowledge that they are receiving a treatment and compare the ‘objective’ differences between treatments. This study does the opposite, holding the ‘objective’ effects constant and comparing their effects on two groups of subjects. Those in one group knew they were receiving a treatment and from those in the other group that fact was hidden. To put it succinctly, this overwhelmingly significant finding is that “the hidden administrations of pharmacological and nonpharmacological therapies are less effective than the open ones.”

I am not at all surprised. I have long maintained that the placebo response should not be dismissed as a null hypothesis (‘That treatment only works because the patient believes it does’), but rather that enlisting the patient’s intrinsic healing abilities by enrolling them in a shared belief system is a core element of the healer’s work. This is true whether we are talking about a tribal shaman or a lab-coated modern physician-scientist. And it is true whether we are talking about supposedly ‘physical’ ailments or psychological ones. This is another, important, nail in the coffin of the outmoded notion of mind-body distinctions. I’m going to beg the question of whether we are necessarily talking about some kind of mind-over-matter effects when appreciating the importance of belief to healing, or whether it is a meaningful question to ask. I personally get enough mileage out of my conviction that the material interactions of the CNS with the rest of bodily processes are infinitely more complicated and interwoven than we can conceive of.

It is not a new notion emerging out of recent research findings only, of course — mind-body unity is a core conceptual fundament of the abiding and ubiquitous human practices we refer to as mystical or spiritual pursuits across cultures — and this paper will not be revolutionary, in a very important sense. This is such a recondite provocation to conventional, paradigmatic ways of thinking about things that I predict you will see very little mention of it anywhere. The whole premise of mind-body unity challenges the conceptual framework under which most people operate (and have operated, perhaps, ever since the origins of consciousness and the development of the essentially human capacity for a ‘theory of mind’) so profoundly that it can only be ignored, resisted, marginalized or trivialized wherever it rears its ugly head to threaten the mainstream.

Related:

“Arnold, what the heck are you doing? You’re getting out of Hollywood to go into politics? Well, then forget agents and studio bosses—now you’re dealing with real predators. But since your mind is made up, I hope you won’t mind a little advice from someone who’s been there.

…(B)e yourself. Be Arnold. Be the guy who can sit and have a cigar with the crew. Be honest. Don’t worry if you don’t know the answer to every question asked. Just say, “I don’t know,” if you don’t know. When I did this during my campaign in Minnesota, people were amazed. How revolutionary—a politician who stands in front of the people and doesn’t feed them pre-canned answers!” — Jesse Ventura, Time Magazine

Robert Burke’s Photo Album on the Web:

“It would only take one group of flash mob organizers to abuse the ample trust of their participants for this whole phenomenon to come crashing to a halt. But I suspect that so long as the flash mob objectives remain innocuous and clever, these events will continue to be a good laugh. I’d attend again if I can; I mean, what do I have to lose? If I decide at the last minute I don’t want to take part — surely I can still enjoy my pint!” [via Interesting People]

Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, ‘prequel’ to The Cryptonomicon and vol. 1 of the projected ‘Baroque Cycle’, arrives on September 23. The first chapter is online for you to preview.

Related:

This blow-by-blow account was created for all the Neal Stephenson readers who, in anticipation of his upcoming book, Quicksilver, took it upon themselves to try to solve the cryptographic puzzle they encountered at the Baroque Cycle Web site. If you had difficulty making heads or tails of it or are simply curious as to what it all means, what follows is an explanation of how one person arrived at the solution. Bear in mind that this narrative will reveal the translation of the code written in Wilkins’s script, so if you are still interested in solving it for yourself, you may want to reconsider reading further. — Stephenson fan Todd Garrison

As Stephenson explains, the cryptographic “… inscription on the splash page is written in Real Character, a system of writing invented in the 1660’s by John Wilkins—an English bishop, natural philosopher, and SF writer who appears as a character in The Baroque Cycle.” What is perhaps most remarkable about Garrison’s cracking the code is that he was totally unfamiliar with the existence of Real Character.

Poet Aram Saroyan reflected in 1999 on his early publishing history:

“Over thirty years ago, in the dark, violence-riddled spring of 1968, Random House brought out my first book of poems. Actually, that’s not quite the case; I should say that they published my first mainstream book of poems, since, like many New York poets of my generation, I was active in the small press scene chronicled recently in the New York Public Library’s exhibit and book, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side. What was distinctively different about that April publication was that now I could walk Manhattan with my typewriter-page-size book, printed in typewriter facsimile, in virtually every bookstore that I passed. The book, called only Aram Saroyan, comprises thirty minimal poems, also without titles, and can be read easily from cover-to-cover [here on the web — FmH] in a minute or two.

Soon after it appeared, in fact, the book was read from cover-to-cover, on the local Six O’Clock NBC News, by Edwin Newman wearing his cultural commentator hat. My editor at Random House, Christopher Cerf, alerted me to this unprecedented phenomonon—which I had missed*—with a certain astonishment but with his perennial good cheer. In the Art News Annual of that year, John Ashbery noted his surprise at catching the event, and then remarked ruefully that, since the media was wont to pass from ‘put down to panegyric without an interval of straight reportage,’ he expected that I might soon be appearing on the Johnny Carson Show with Andy Warhol and the rest of the avant-garde.

That was not to be, needless to say. I was 24 years old, just wading into the deeper waters of a relationship that would lead to my marriage that fall, regularly seeing a psychoanalyst, and more than a little troubled by the phenomonon of my book. For one thing, in stalwart sixties fashion, I wasn’t certain whether it was correct to be published by a mainstream publisher at all. Simultaneously, and in seeming contradiction, I was troubled by the fact that while the book was selling well for a book of poems, the ratio of copies sold to the numbers of readers who read the volume cover-to-cover while in the bookstore, as evidenced by the increasingly soiled condition of many of the unbought copies, was easily ten to one. While one might congratulate oneself on thereby undercutting corporate profits, at the same time one was a near-penniless young poet who could have used a royalty check. The longest poem, the first, goes:

a man stands

on his

head one

minute–

then he

sit

down all

different

This fourteen-word opener is followed by 29 more poems, scarcely any of which exceed a dozen words, and a number of which are only one word. Of the latter, the most notorious is probably this one:

lighght

Awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Award of $750 after its appearance in The Chicago Review, this poem seems to have induced in Jesse Helms, among others, a state of apoplexy that has yet to abate in, lo, these thirty years hence. In my own defense, one wonders if Mr. Helms and other members of Congress who haven’t taken kindly to my minimalist exposition of light in the sixties, are more warmly disposed in the universally celebrated artistic precincts of, say, Picasso.”

*More recently, on a small poetry mailing list to which I subscribe, he revealed more about the circumstances around his missing that reading of his first book of poems:

In a room at UCLA’s Special Collections Library, I’m set up with an old

fashioned spool-to-spool tape recorder in order to listen to a radio

interview I did one night in Morningside Heights thirty five years ago when

I was a sixties poet. I hear the voice that once was my own: the slow,

irritating, callow voice of my budding self.

Why am I doing this? I wonder. I’m 57, happily married, three times a

father, my children grown up, my father long gone to the hereafter, my

mother recently gone. Something must be sadly amiss for it to come to this

pointless self-scrutiny. Who was I? Or rather, who cares? Walking out of

the building into the evening chill of a warm November day in Los Angeles, I

feel belatedly apologetic toward the interviewer–a decent, stolid sort

saddled with this weirdo of post-modern manners. I owe him, and I haven’t

seen or heard from him since that fateful night.

I walk to my car parked on LeConte in the darkening twilight. The night the

radio program was broadcast in New York City, I took an all-night acid trip

with some friends in a cold-water flat on the Lower East Side. I’d eagerly

anticipated hearing my voice over the airwaves, and the opportunity, in my

altered state, to discover in it nuances that would otherwise be

unascertainable. As it turned out, my friend Derek had not been able to

find the station that broadcast the interview–a lame excuse, yet another

signature of his passive aggressive jealousy, an old wearying story by now,

but not one I’d allow to interfere with the psychedelic main event of the

evening.

What a great favor poor Derek had done me. I find 12 minutes left on the

two hour meter where I parked. I would have hated myself, perhaps for the

entire intervening 35 years, had I listened to the interview that night.

Instead I focused on the grain of the parquet floor, and saw slowly emerge

from it, a tiny, stately procession–on floats–of Semite kings bedecked

with crowns and scepters.

I wake up in the middle of the night, still roiling with inner torment.

With my head cushioned against my upper arm, lying full-length on the floor

of that third-floor apartment on the corner of Avenue A and Sixth Street,

how I had scrutinized the extraordinary detail of those Semite kings. A Jew

on acid, I think, and the words “camp concentration” come to me. In the

dark, I reach out for my notebook and pen by the bed.

Even the Pentagon admits the program is in trouble. “If the generals in charge of the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency followed the wispiest trail of logic, they would have slashed the program and moved on to more promising pursuits long ago. This month brings yet another bit of news indicating not only that the program has scant chance of producing a workable missile-defense system, but that its managers know of its dim prospects.” — Fred Kaplan, Slate You should be following the missile defense debate as if your life depended on it. It does. NMD is the single factor that would most profoundly destabilize the balance of weapons terror and plunge us into a new nuclear arms race. Dubya’s legacy may well be written in ashes blowing in a contaminated wind if he and his henchmen push this through despite all reason.

Experts Say Juvenile Justice System is Now Tougher on Females: “More and more girls under 18 are being arrested for violent crimes. They’re still far less likely than boys to get picked up for things like robbery and assault. But the gap is narrowing. That’s led to the perception that girls have become much more violent in recent decades. But as NPR’s Jonathan Hamilton reports in Part Three of the series Girls and the Juvenile Justice System, experts on juvenile crime have another theory.” NPR

Review of The Illusion of Conscious Will

by Daniel M. Wegner: “Conscious will plays a special role in Western moral thinking. Although we may blame each other for negligence and other sins of omission, acts stemming from conscious decisions are considered to be paradigmatically subject to moral evaluation. In his latest book, Harvard psychologist Daniel M. Wegner tries to undermine the very notion that what we experience as conscious will has any real control over our behavior.

Wegner’s approach is stalwartly empirical. Some reviewers have celebrated him for snatching the issue of conscious will from the hands of benighted philosophers, and for bringing the cool light of experimental research to bear on issues that have traditionally been the subject of futile speculation. Actually, Wegner’s relationship to the philosophical tradition is more complicated. On the one hand, he is fully aware that his ideas hearken back to the thought of the great 18th century Scottish philosopher, David Hume. On the other hand, as I will argue below, Wegner does not fully develop the ethical consequences of his theory.” Human Nature Review 2003 3:360-362 This philosophical trend to reconceptualize consciousness as an outgrowth of mechanistic processes and, as here, an illusion, goes fist-in-glove with the changes in psychiatric paradigm I discuss below.

“The complex of problems falling under the ‘levels of selection’

rubric includes an intriguing mix of empirical, conceptual and

philosophical issues. Roughly speaking, the key question concerns the

level of the biological hierarchy at which natural selection occurs.

Does selection act on organisms, genes, groups, colonies, demes,

species, or some combination of these? Evolutionary biologists and

philosophers of biology have devoted considerable attention to this

question over the last forty years, so much so that in some quarters

the debate is now regarded as stale. Despite this perception, recent

years have in fact seen interesting and important new work on the

levels of selection, some of which has significantly re-defined the

terms of the traditional debate. This paper aims to introduce the

reader to these new developments.” — Samir Okasha, Human Nature Review 2003 3:349-356

by Jeffrie Murphy: “We have all been victims of wrongdoing. Forgiving that wrongdoing is one of the staples of current pop psychology dogma; it is seen as a universal prescription for moral and mental health in the self-help and recovery section of bookstores. At the same time, personal vindictiveness as a rule is seen as irrational and immoral. In many ways, our thinking on these issues is deeply inconsistent; we value forgiveness yet at the same time now use victim-impact statements to argue for harsher penalties for criminals. Do we have a right to hate others for what they have done to us? The distinguished philosopher and law professor Jeffrie Murphy is a skeptic when it comes to our views on both emotions. In this short and accessible book, he proposes that vindictive emotions (anger, resentment, and the desire for revenge) actually deserve a more legitimate place in our emotional, social, and legal lives than we currently recognize, while forgiveness deserves to be more selectively granted. Murphy grounds his views on careful analysis of the nature of forgiveness, a subtle understanding of the psychology of anger and resentment, and a fine appreciation of the ethical issues of self-respect and self-defense. He also uses accessible examples from law, literature, and religion to make his points. Providing a nuanced approach to a proper understanding of the place of our strongest emotions in moral, political, and personal life, and using lucid, easily understood prose, this volume is a classic example of philosophical thinking applied to a thorny, everyday problem. ” amazon.com

“How many stories are there to tell in the world?

One school of thought holds that there are just 10 archetypal tales around which novelists spin more or less elegant variations. I remember being persuaded, years ago, that there were as few as seven basic plots at the heart of our literature, or was it three?

Cinderella (rags to riches) is certainly one. The Odyssey (the hero’s return home) is another. That was recently the inspiration for Charles Frazier’s bestselling Cold Mountain. And the plot of Beowulf is the same as the plot of Jaws (a monster terrorises a seaside community and is eventually overcome by a local hero). I could go on: no doubt well-informed Observer readers will think of others. Did somebody mention Jung?” Guardian/UK

Colorado Attorney’s Motion Gives the Definitive History: “Yes, five months remain in the year, but we’re ready to announce the winner of the prestigious 2003 Legal Document of the Year award. The below motion was filed earlier this month in connection with a criminal charge filed against a Colorado teenager. The boy’s troubles started when he was confronted at school by a vice principal who suspected that he had been smoking in the boys bathroom. When presented to the principal, the kid exploded, cursing the administrator with some variants of the ‘F’ word. For his outburst, the boy was hit with a disorderly conduct rap, which was eventually amended to interfering with the staff, faculty, or students of an educational institutional. Faced with what he thought was a speech crime, Eric Vanatta, the teen’s public defender, drafted the below motion to dismiss the misdemeanor charge. The District Court document is an amusing and profane look at the world’s favorite four-letter word, from its origins in 1500 to today’s frequent use of the term by Eminem, Chris Rock, and Lenny Kravitz. The criminal charge, Vanatta argued in the motion, was not warranted since the use of the popular curse is protected by the First Amendment. TSG’s favorite part of the motion is the chart comparing Google results for the ‘F’ word and other all-American terms like mom, baseball, and apple pie.” The Smoking Gun

“Does this sound like ‘the Next Reagan,’ as some people are calling Arnold? Hardly. This guy may be the next actor elected governor of California, but that’s where the similarity between him and Ronaldus Magnus end.” Rush Limbaugh is disturbed, in a much-linked-to piece, that Arnold idn’t really a conservative. Now I feel much better.

“Excessive Internet use that harms personal relationships or affects work performance could be classified as a new psychiatric disorder that could effect businesses, researchers at University of Florida said.” This is, simply, ridiculous. Internet addiction is real, surely, but there is no need for a separate category of illness; it fits somewhere in the already well-elaborated constellation of impulsive, addictive and compulsive behaviors. The five proposed diagnostic criteria — excessive involvement in the activity, inability to cut down despite trying, neglect of other obligations, significant relationship discord as a result of the activity, and excessive thoughts or anxiety about it when not involved in the activity — are a strong parallel of the screening criteria many psychiatrists use for alcoholism, for example.

And while we’re at it, here’s another gripe about their criteria. They propose the acronym MOUSE to represent the five factors, as follows — “More than intended time spent online; Other responsibilities neglected; Unsuccessful attempts to cut down; Significant relationships discord; Excessive thoughts or anxiety when not online.” Cute, media-friendly, but the most useless acronym I have ever heard (as someone who loves to invent and impart to my students acronyms for things like diagnostic criteria or treatment approaches…), since the words represented by the letters of the acronym (in bold above) are utterly uninformative. More what? Unsuccessful at what? Significant what? You get the picture. Contrast, for example, one of the most famous acronyms in psychiatric teaching. SIGECAPS, whcih every student learns and remembers, represents the diagnostic criteria for major depression, and each letter stands for something unique, specific and memorable — sleep, interest, guilt, energy, concentration, appetite, psychomotor disturbance, and suicidality.

Garret Vreeland points to this Los Angeles Magazine portrait of Mickey Kaus. Garret focuses largely on one aspect of the piece, which portrays Kaus as loving the fact, now he’s transformed himself into a ‘blogger’ for Slate, that he can go back and correct a mistake before most of his readers have ever noticed that he made it. I agree with Garret’s position on this one, that our credibility depends on the open acknowledgement of our fallibility. While I’ll go back and correct a spelling error or some awkward phraseology in a post after I read it later, or add to it, if I want to correct an error of fact or a clumsy opinion I owe it to my readers to say that is what I’m doing.

This issue was really only a miniscule part of the article on Kaus, though. The writer focuses with the most awe on Kaus’ ‘liberal iconoclasm’, and this is what troubles me more than his creation of an armor of infallibility. Robert Scheer, who loves to snipe at Kaus, is quoted as saying,

“The problem with Kaus is, I don’t know what real-life experience he’s got. He’s someone wet behind the ears, who doesn’t get into the streets too often to see how things play out. I think neoliberals have ruined the Democratic party. What is neoliberalism but the urge to ape neoconservatism? Why not join the other side?”

and Kaus himself admits it is more fun to lambast the Democrats than the Republicans. He justifies this by saying that the Republicans are beyond reforming, so he is going after the party — “trying to perfect it”, as he puts it in his hauteur — that has a chance of “accomplishing what you want.” He does it so well that his progressivism isn’t often much in evidence in his column. “I want to say something nobody else is saying yet is also true,” he says, creating the impression that he’ll thus be a contrarian for controversy’s sake alone. The infallibility issue that Garret raises thus begins to look like the tip of the iceberg when considering whether you can trust Kaus.

Colorado Attorney’s Motion Gives the Definitive History: “Yes, five months remain in the year, but we’re ready to announce the winner of the prestigious 2003 Legal Document of the Year award. The below motion was filed earlier this month in connection with a criminal charge filed against a Colorado teenager. The boy’s troubles started when he was confronted at school by a vice principal who suspected that he had been smoking in the boys bathroom. When presented to the principal, the kid exploded, cursing the administrator with some variants of the ‘F’ word. For his outburst, the boy was hit with a disorderly conduct rap, which was eventually amended to interfering with the staff, faculty, or students of an educational institutional. Faced with what he thought was a speech crime, Eric Vanatta, the teen’s public defender, drafted the below motion to dismiss the misdemeanor charge. The District Court document is an amusing and profane look at the world’s favorite four-letter word, from its origins in 1500 to today’s frequent use of the term by Eminem, Chris Rock, and Lenny Kravitz. The criminal charge, Vanatta argued in the motion, was not warranted since the use of the popular curse is protected by the First Amendment. TSG’s favorite part of the motion is the chart comparing Google results for the ‘F’ word and other all-American terms like mom, baseball, and apple pie.” The Smoking Gun

Sean at Inert Ramblings wrote to point out that lots of people have been receiving the stranded time traveller’s lament for years. Sean, within striking distance, actually went to the dropoff point in Woburn, MA as stipulated and found alot of odd behavior going on.

Lost his head for a moment; and so did I.

Abstract: “Wellness and justice have attracted recent attention in psychology. Both within our discipline and within society at large, more needs to be done to elucidate the link between the two while taking into account the role of power and context. We suggest that wellness is achieved by the balanced and synergistic satisfaction of personal, relational, and collective needs, which, in turn, are dependent on how much justice people experience in each domain. We explore how affective, polarized, acquired, situated and invested cultural distortions misrepresent the two realms as isolated from each other. To help counter these negative outcomes, we propose psychopolitical literacy and psychopolitical validity. The more youth are exposed to these antidotes, the better equipped they will be to resist cultural distortions and enhance both wellness and justice.” — Isaac Prilleltensky and Dennis R. Fox, Journal of Community Psychology (in press)

The story I’ve posted below about the disappearance of the Boeing 727 from Angola prompted the following comment, which I thought should be brought forward to the main page here. I hasten to add that I make no claims for its veracity:

Yes, I am Joseph B. Padilla, SR. I live in Pensacola, Florida – U.S.A. I am the Brother of Ben Charles Padilla Jr. He is suspected to be the Pilot of the Missing Boeing 727 Plane that left the Airport in Angola on May 25 2003. I am trying to reach news organizations to help me locate anyone that has seen or heard anything about this missing plane or my brother.

I appeared on ABC’s , Good Morning America alone with my Sister Benita Padilla-Kirkland on June 19 2003 in hopes to get the story out and to Locate my brother. We both also appeared on CNN’s Morning show, American Morning on June 24 2003. Can you please help me by broadcasting a story or by your website news or newspaper? I have alot of information about the disapearance of the plane and my brother. You can contact me at : 850-944-9688 or either by e-mail – padilla1956@cox.net. I hope that you will give me your help in hopes that someone seeing the story will either know something about the dissappearance of the plane and my brother or know someone that does.

Here is what I have so far about the story. As in the begining as I told ABC News on The Good Morning America Show that I appeared on in New York, I thought that the Boeing 727 Plane had been sitting there in Angola for 14 months unattended to and not maintained. Now, I have found out that My Brother, Ben Charles Padilla, Jr. had been in Angola for 2 months overseeing a crew of aircraft mechanics re-working the plane from one end to the other. A B-Check was done and it was found to be fine. I talked to the owner of the plane, Mr. Maury Joseph, which is also the owner of Aerospace Sales And Leasing in South Florida. I too live in florida, Pensacola, Fl. and my brother too was born and raised here. Maury Joseph told me that he was there in Angola two weeks before the disappearance to see how things were going with the re-build of the 727 and also talked to my brother 2 days before the plane became missing and he had sent my brother $43,000.00 for him to pay the fees to the airport there in Angola. My brother paid the airport and faxed Maury Joseph the reciept, This is what Maury Joseph told me this past friday night during our two and a half hour phone conversation.

My brother was also incharge of the hiring of a pilot and co-pilot. He was to be the Flight Engineer for the flight out of Angola for the repossession of the Boeing 727 plane. My brother is not licensed to fly a 727 and never has flown an aircraft this large. He is a Licensed Aircraft Mechanic, Flight Engineer, and Pilot of smaller airplanes. I was told that he had took the plane out to the end of the runway and ran the engines up to check to see how they performed. I feel that when my brother was checking the engines, someone was on the plane and hijacked him. My brother isn’t a criminal nor has never done any wrong doings. Maury Joseph told me that he trusts my brother and doesn’t believe the reports of my brother stealing the plane. Maury Joseph also told me that he had talked to the Airport there in Angola and had found out that the control tower had radioed the 727 and told them as they were headed out to the runway to take off, that they didn’t have clearance nor permission to take off and the tower never recieved a response from the 727.

I talked to my brother Ben Padilla, Jr. back in either Jan. or Feb. and we talked about the Sept. 11 2001 ordeal and he himself told me that if this sort of thing ever happend to him, that he would down the plane in a New York Second. So, with that said I really believe my brother was hijacked and taken prisonier and held against his will and possibly was killed. My mother had a heart attack on Mothers day and my brother was e-mailed about this and he responded to the e-mail he recieved from another brother of ours and told him that he would contact us as soon as he could and we haven’t heard anything from him. So, that tells me that something isn’t right since he would of contacted the family about our mother.

I have talked to the FBI and State Department in Washington, D.C. and all they are willing to tell me is that they have not found my brother nor the plane. So, I am tring to search for any information that I can get thru news organizations. I find alot of stories on the internet and try to get any of the news organizations to run this story. I also include a couple of pictures of my brother so incase anyone knows anything or has seen him before, to please contact me. I am including in this e-mail 2 pictures of him incase you run this story inwhich I hope you do. I would like to include my e-mail address and phone number incase some one reads or sees this that they can contact me.

My phone number is, 850-944-9688 and my e-mail address is, padilla1956@cox.netOur family has already lost 2 siblings and can not bear to lose another one. I would appreciate any help you can give me. If you need any additional information, Please don’t hesitate to contact me. Thank you so much for your time.

Joseph B. Padilla, SR.

Mr. Padilla’s brother has posted a similar message elsewhere on the net, and the way it is worded is somewhat suggestive of boilerplate. I certainly hope his brother shows up safe and sound somewhere. If you are interested, have the means and think it would be useful, consider helping this family out by reposting or pointing to this post. Is it getting much coverage in the conventional press, has anyone noticed?

A Google search reveals that there is an FBI Most Wanted poster seeking information about the whereabouts of Ben Charles Padilla here:

“Law enforcement officials believe that Ben Charles Padilla may have been on board the plane at the time it disappeared. The FBI is interested in locating Padilla, as he may have information as to the whereabouts of the plane.”

(This is the real FBI site, isn’t it?)

“Making a major foray into partisan politics, multibillionaire George Soros is committing $10 million to a new Democratic-leaning group aimed at defeating President Bush next year.

Soros, who in the past has donated on a smaller scale to Democratic candidates and the party, pledged the money to a political action committee called America Coming Together, spokesman Michael Vachon said Friday.

The group plans a $75 million effort to defeat Bush and ‘elect progressive officials at every level in 2004,’ targeting 17 key states: Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

‘The fate of the world depends on the United States, and President Bush is leading us in the wrong direction,’ Soros said in a written statement. ‘ACT is an effective way to mobilize civil society, to convince people to go to the polls and vote for candidates who will reassert the values of the greatest open society in the world.'” ABC [thank you, Richard]

A federal judge sentenced a man to a year in prison Monday for creating an anarchist Web site with links to sites on how to build bombs. CNN

While a recent legal ruling to which I blinked here promised some protection to webloggers against libel actions arising simply from their linking to defamatory material, the implications of this ruling for webloggers and, in general, for freedom of expression may go a long way in the other direction. Do webloggers have to take care not to link to advocates of subversion on the web at all?

Digital Cameras Go Disposable, and for $11 a pop. PC World

“Harvard Law School is planning to put more than a million documents from the Nuremberg trials on the Internet, allowing ready access to records of hearings into the war crimes of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.” Newsday

This is, believe it not, billed as part VII of a series. It is a post-poem itself, a string of word-things sparyed at us: “…(T)he post-post poets write the real stuff, the basics, the poem without the baggage of meaning and connection, the liberated poem itself, stripped and streaking down the freeway, no claim on your time or attention longer than the time it takes to watch one run by. Was it human? Was it naked? Did it wave? Was it a prank? What college is it from? What were those word-things it sprayed at us?” Web Del Sol

The whys and wherefores of ‘releasing a salty, protein-rich fluid from the lacrimal apparatus, improvising adjustments in the muscles of facial expression, adding a few non-specific and incomprehensible vocalisations, and convulsively inhaling and exhaling air with spasms of the respiratory and truncal muscle groups.’ FT Magazine

Feds: Hijackers Crashed Flt. 93 on 9/11: “A Sept. 11 hijacker in the cockpit of United Airlines Flight 93 instructed terrorist-pilot Ziad Jarrah to crash the jetliner moments before it slammed into a Pennsylvania field because of a fierce passenger uprising in the cabin, recently disclosed testimony by the FBI (news – web sites) director shows.

The theory described by FBI Director Robert Mueller, based on the government’s analysis of cockpit recordings, discounts the popular perception of insurgent passengers grappling with terrorists inside the cockpit, trying to seize the plane’s controls, immediately before the crash.” Yahoo! News

Schwarzenegger’s much-touted candidacy to replace embattled Gray Davis seems at first nothing so much as unbelievable, even after Reagan. It is ludicrous and contemptible that, recalling a governor for his supposed failings at complex budgetary management, the people of California would put an actor (if you can call him that) with absolutely no fiscal experience into the role, for no reason other than his hyped-up celebrity. But actors have long been in bed with politicians — in Schwarzenegger’s case, literally. And in a media-driven political landscape where voters have an MTV depth-of-attention and passively pliable hero worship, it makes a strange kind of sense. An actor’s skills — playing a role, making the unbelievable believable, banking on charisma that has nothing to do with real human worth — are increasingly indistinct from those of a political leader. The lines are divorced from reality and their only goal is to spin a yarn convincingly out of whole cloth. Political campaigns have long since stopped being run as anything other than media events. Fitting that his candidacy was announced on late-night TV. But then I knew what a turn for the worst we had taken when Clinton showed up as a saxophone-toting guest on one or the other of them.

It is no wonder Reagan is revered, in the circles of his constituents, as a great, heroic and successful President; he was the perfect blank screen on which to project their hopes and agendas and, as is Dubya by reason of his dim-wittedness, a perfect front man for the scriptwriters behind the scenes, especially by the beginning of his second term when he already suffered the early manifestations of Alzheimer’s dementia. It remains to be seen if Schwarzenegger is as much of an infinitely malleable cipher. Fortunately, governator or not, he cannot become President on Constitutional grounds because he is not native-born… or will a rising cachophonous chorus of American celebrity-worship demand that that be changed as well?

As Gray Davis sits stunned by how likely it is now looking that he will lose the governor’s mansion, public discussion suggests that the recall process may set a wonderful populist precedent. Politicians may start to fear, the argument goes, that if they do not do their job well, they may lose their position. The ideal of serving at the people’s pleasure will have some teeth to it. I fear the opposite consequence; that the last vestiges of potentially responsible governanace are dropping to the need to pander to least-common-denominator popularity polls. The only saving grace may be, I hope against hope, that the ludicrousness of giving the governor’s mansion to the Terminator may become so emblematic of the decline of American politics that it catalyzes a backlash.

I’m noticing the inflammatory Right starting to relish rubbing our noses in the Schwarzenegger candidacy. James Taranto’s obsequious Opinion Journal piece from the WSJ has him offending European sensibilities because he is a flamboyant macho American and, to boot, an American by choice. And Lileks bleats (he takes pleasure in calling it that himself; nothing like disarming the critics who would shut you up by shoving your own foot as deep as you can down your own throat) about how it will revitalize politics by enlightening the celebrity worshippers to some new possibilities. Lileks is not opposed to admitting that the appearance of likeability and trustworthiness in an otherwise unqualified candidate are the only things Arnold has going for him, but then I suppose that should be no surprise from people who worship George W. Bush.

Addendum: Although so far emanating from people who know enough to be embarrassed, and therefore couched as tongue-in-cheek, the cries to amend the Constitution to allow a Predator presidency have begun:

It drove the Angry Left nuts when Dubya baited the US military’s honey-trap by telling would-be terrorists in Iraq to “bring ’em on” — Dubya’s Texas drawl simply ruled when delivering that line. But The Terminator can deliver not only an ominous accent but a physical presence that bodes major mayhem. Certainly Dubya, Arnold, and Clint Eastwood-as-Dirty-Harry collectively comprise the “Axis of Righteous Über-Taunters,” or at least the “Masters of Super-Menacing Sound-Bites.” I very much want our President to be someone who can, when appropriate, take a blunt, pithy, and aggressive phrase, and then deliver it into the CNN microphones in just the utterly convincing way that will turn it into the shrieking, bed-wetting #1 cause of recurring nightmares for even non-English speakers like Osama bin Ladin.

This is consistent with my longstanding claim that Bush’s inarticulateness has been a major part of his appeal to the idiot fringe of the Right.

The new 15th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style is out this month, making heads swoon in some circles. I think it an equally important gauge of the evolution of living English — the written side in this case — as the more-often-discussed changes in successive editions of the OED are for the spoken side. The tension between de facto usage patterns and prescriptive rules is such fun to watch if you don’t take either one as your ultimate touchstone.

“Blocking the formation of neurons in the hippocampus blocks the behavioral effects of antidepressants in mice, say researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Their finding lends new credence to the proposed role of such neurogenesis in lifting mood. It also helps to explain why antidepressants typically take a few weeks to work, note Rene Hen, Ph.D., Columbia University, and colleagues, who report on their study in the August 8th Science.” EurekAlert!

You heard it here first; we are in the midst of a fundamental paradigm shift reconceptualizing how psychiatric medications work and, by extension, the nature of psychiatric disease. For more than fifty years, since the advent of the modern psychopharmaceutical age, mechanisms of action of these drugs have been conceived of in terms of their effects on neurotransmitters at the synapses between neurons. This filtered down to the lay public as the “chemical imbalance” notion of psychiatric illness. As my diatribe here about Peter Breggin’s diatribe against biological psychiatry last week suggests, this model for psychiatric illness and drug action has not lent itself readily to empirical validation and the CNS remained a black box. As far as it has gone and as far as it has been believed, the neurotransmitter theories of mental illneess have functioned in the same way that mythology does. I don’t mean that this is useless, but it has no ready answers to the agnostics’ challenges.

But I suggested that Breggin’s critique was a straw man agrument, railing against a reductionist and outmoded version of psychiatric knowledge without much relationship to contemporary findings. Findings like the one discussed in this news item take us into a realm where we understand that structural, as well as functional, changes in numbers, connectivity and vitality of neurons in specfic brain regions underpin psychaitric conditions, and that the medications known to be effective against those diseases can be demonstrated to protect against or reverse those neuronal-structural changes. Even Breggin suggested that he might be persuaded by pretty pictures demonstrating the reality of psychiatric illness.

This is true not only for depression and antidepressants, as discussed in this study, but for other major mental illnesses as well. In schizophrenia research, for example, a new focus has emerged in the last decade or so on the neurotransmitter NMDA, now considered a widespread and crucial excitatory agent in the brain but virtually unstudied just several decades before when I went to medical school. NMDA is important not only in the classical neurotransmitter sense (of its level of activity underlying the functional state of various neuronal circuits in the brain) but because it is an “excitotoxin”, causing neuronal injury. There are ways in which life stresses injure or destroy neurons, and there are ways in which health-promoting activities (medications but also exercise, stress reduction, nutrition, rest, etc.) protect against or reverse such damage, visibly, demonstrably. The perennial tortured efforts to bridge the longstanding gulf between the physiological and the psychological in psychiatry by suggesting pie-in-the-sky models of how experience might be transduced into brain changes are finally bearing empirical fruit, and with that advance will fall the last vestiges of the artificial distinctions betwen brain and mind.

Better Ebola Vaccine for Monkeys Offers Hope for Humans:”Federal scientists have developed a fast-acting, single-shot vaccine that makes monkeys immune to the Ebola virus six times as fast as an earlier version.

If the same approach works in humans, it could control or prevent outbreaks of the rare infection that causes high fever, severe pain, bleeding from the eyes and usually death within a few days.” NY Times

“This website features a series of drawings made by children who were abducted by aliens for the alien purpose of creating a new race of alien/human hybrids. The drawings show different aspects of the alien abduction phenomenon and include cruel medical procedures performed on children, children boarding alien spacecraft with other aliens, children playing with alien/hybrid children so the alien/hybrids can learn how to be human, and children being taken by aliens against their will, and the types of aliens encountered by the abducted children.

The pictures were drawn by children who successfully resisted the aliens by using a ‘thought screen helmet’ which blocks the telepathic control aliens have over humans. The helmet is a leather hat lined with eight sheets of Velostat, an electrically conductive plastic used to prevent static electricity damage to electronic components. The girl in this photo has two other cloth hats lined with Velostat which she wears to school. ” — Mike Menkin

“The missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have embarrassed the Bush administration, which had assured the world they would be about as hard to find as moisture in Seattle. But the controversy has had one clear benefit to the president: distracting the American people from an even bigger fraud.” Chicago Tribune Chapman reminds us that not only were there no WMD but there was no connection to the WoT®.

Don’t listen to me condemning Bush for bequeathing to my children a legacy of renewed nuclear terror we were, hearteningly, just getting out from underneath. Listen to someone who knows. “Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba said the United States worshipped nuclear weapons as ‘God’ and blamed it for jeopardizing the global nuclear non-proliferation regime.” CommonDreams

Related: Nicholas Kristof: ‘Blood on Our Hands’:

Tomorrow will mark the anniversary of one of the most morally contentious events of the 20th century, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. And after 58 years, there’s an emerging consensus: we Americans have blood on our hands.

There has been a chorus here and abroad that the U.S. has little moral standing on the issue of weapons of mass destruction because we were the first to use the atomic bomb. NY Times op-ed

And while we’re on the topic of the Bush regime’s crimes against humanity (no, it is not me who is being incendiary; read on): Military — Officials confirm dropping firebombs on Iraqi troops; results are ‘remarkably similar’ to using napalm.

“American jets killed Iraqi troops with firebombs – similar to the controversial napalm used in the Vietnam War – in March and April as Marines battled toward Baghdad.

Marine Corps fighter pilots and commanders who have returned from the war zone have confirmed dropping dozens of incendiary bombs near bridges over the Saddam Canal and the Tigris River. The explosions created massive fireballs.” Sign On San Diego

During the military action against Iraq, I posted an item about the suspicion that this was happening and of official denials.

”

Don’t want the government to know where you are? Throw away your cell, stop taking the subway, and pay the toll in cash.”

What your salesman probably failed to tell you—and may not even realize—is that an E911-capable phone can give your wireless carrier continual updates on your location. The phone is embedded with a Global Positioning System chip, which can calculate your coordinates to within a few yards by receiving signals from satellites. GPS technology gave U.S. military commanders a vital edge during Gulf War II, and sailors and pilots depend on it as well. In the E911-capable phone, the GPS chip does not wait until it senses danger, springing to life when catastrophe strikes; it’s switched on whenever your handset is powered up and is always ready to transmit your location data back to a wireless carrier’s computers. Verizon or T-Mobile can figure out which manicurist you visit just as easily as they can pinpoint a stranded motorist on Highway 59.

So what’s preventing them from doing so, at the behest of either direct marketers or, perhaps more chillingly, the police? Not the law, which is essentially mum on the subject of location-data privacy. As often happens with emergent technology, the law has struggled to keep pace with the gizmo. No federal statute is keeping your wireless provider from informing Dunkin’ Donuts that your visits to Starbucks have been dropping off and you may be ripe for a special coupon offer. Nor are cops explicitly required to obtain a judicial warrant before compiling a record of where you sneaked off to last Thursday night. Despite such obvious potential for abuse, the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, the American consumer’s ostensible protectors, show little enthusiasm for stepping into the breach. As things stand now, the only real barrier to the dissemination of your daily movements is the benevolence of the telecommunications industry. A show of hands from those who find this a comforting thought? Anyone?

— Brendan Koerner, Legal Affairs [via Politech]

Plane in terrorism scare turns up sporting a respray: For some reason, this ongoing story has captivated the attention of myself and several friends. Thanks, A., for sending me the link to this update.

“A Boeing 727 cargo plane which caused panic among US intelligence agencies after mysteriously disappearing from Angola’s main airport turned up last week in Guinea, the Guardian can reveal.

The plane, which was feared to be in the hands of international terrorists, was spotted on June 28 in Conakry, Guinea’s capital, by Bob Strother, a Canadian pilot. It had been resprayed and given the Guinean registration 3XGOM. But at least the last two letters of its former tail-number, N844AA, were still showing.

The plane, which was recently converted into a fuel tanker, was said to be owned by a member of West Africa’s Lebanese business community, and was being used to shuttle goods between Beirut and Conakry, according to Mr Strother.

‘There’s absolutely no doubt it’s the same aircraft, the old registration is clearly visible,’ said Mr Strother by phone from Conakry. ‘Whoever owns it must have some important friends to get it re-registered in two days: going by the book, the whole process usually takes a couple of months.’

Western intelligence agencies were said to be scouring Africa’s clear skies and mouldering runways for the missing tanker, fearing that it could easily be aimed at an American or British embassy on the continent. Yet an American official in the region said this was the first he had heard of the plane since its disappearance from Angola’s capital, Luanda, on May 25.” Guardian/UK

Hello,

I’m a time traveler stuck here in 2003. Upon arriving here my dimensional warp generator stopped working. I trusted a company here by the name of LLC Lasers to repair my Generation 3 52 4350A watch unit, and they fled on me. I am going to need a new DWG unit, prefereably the rechargeable AMD wrist watch model with the GRC79 induction motor, four I80200 warp stabilizers, 512GB of SRAM and the menu driven GUI with front panel XID display.

I will take whatever model you have in stock, as long as its received certification for being safe on carbon based life forms.

In terms of payment:

I dont have any Galactic Credits left. Payment can be made in platinum gold or 2003 currency upon safe delivery of unit.

INSTRUCTIONS MUST BE FOLLOWED EXACTLY:

Please transport unit in either a brown paper bag or box to below coordinates on Wednesday August 6th at (exactly 5:00pm) Eastern Standard Time on the dot. A few minutes prior will be ok, but it cannot be after. If you miss this timeframe please email me. I will not be there prior to 4:45pm EST, so do not transport before then.

Item is to be delivered at (out of service tennis court) located at: Latitude N 42.47935 & Longitude W 071.17355 and the Elevation is 119.

WARNING: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO TRANSPORT ITEM BY REGULAR MEANS OF TELEPORTATION. THEY ARE MONITORING AND WILL REDIRECT THE SIGNAL!!

I DO NOT CARE HOW YOU HAVE TO GET IT HERE, JUST DO IT IN A WAY THAT NO SPYING EYES WILL POSSIBLY BE ABLE TO REDIRECT THE TRANSFERENCE. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOU BE ABLE TO MONITOR THE TRANSFER.

HOW ARE YOU GOING TO SEND IT SO THAT THEY CANNOT REDIRECT IT??? If in doubt do not transport actual unit until your method of transfer can be confirmed as a success. You just might need to send a intergalactic courier to deliver item safely to me. If so be VERY careful at how they approach me IN MY WHITE CAR.

After unit has been delivered please email me at: info@federalfundingprogram.com

with payment instructions. Do not reply directly back to this email.

Thank You

Anyone out there who might help this unfortunate individual out? Who knows to what location the specified latitude and longitude point? [Is this a troll for whatever is at federalfundingprogram.com?]

How George W. Bush Won the 2004 Presidential Election:“Purging voter lists is just the beginning: the U.S. has embraced a form of electronic voting that is unreliable, unverifiable and funded by the radical Christian right.” — Sandeep Atwal, infernalpress.com (“No Smoking Gun, But Plenty of Bullets on the Floor”).

One of those (obviously the best informed, and putting me right in my unlettered place) who wrote back to comment on my post about tortured Indian English [making me thankful I read FmH’s comments section] was Nancy Gandhi, a weblogger who characterizes herself as “an outsider in Chennai”, in Tamil Nadu, southern India [I didn’t know mapquest did India! — FmH]. Under the Fire Star is her exotic, rich and enriching weblog, largely observing Indian culture. I gather she is an expat westerner; she does not directly tell much about herself. You get to know her through her exquisite eye, but are left longing for an “about me” page, something (anything) of a narrative about what she is doing in Chennai and how she came to be there. Would love to learn the significance of the weblog’s title as well. I speculate as to whether she is married to Ramesh Gandhi, to whose web page she offers a link. In any case, drink deeply, and drift back through her several months’ archives. And here is a catalogue of Indian webloggers, if you wish to drink more broadly.

Postscript: Nancy Gandhi writes back to say, in part:

“Under the Fire Star refers to Agni Nakshetram, ‘fire

star’, the astrological period ruled by the fire-god

Agni, which is traditionally the hottest time of the

year here. It’s always hot — I feel that Agni should

by rights rule the entire year.”