Enetation (my commenting system) tells me: “There have been a couple of failures of the comment counter in the last week caused by what appears to be a suspect chunk of code on the user forum which has caused the database sync to stop. We will upgrade the forum software this week.” I receive an email every time you click on “Comments?” and post a comment. I’ve noticed recently that, after someone has commented on a particular post, the counter has not been changing to reflect that. For example, I know there is a comment on the “Black Dots” item from 7/20 below. Until you start to notice that it is fixed (i.e. that you start to see “[1 Comment]” showing beneath this post, since I’ve placed a comment there), if you are curious about whether a particular post has comments, you must investigate by clicking.

This morning Mozilla 1.4 (under WinXP) would only give me a blank page when going to the default URLs for FmH. A friend writes that the same thng has happened intermittently this week with Mozilla for Mac. It seems to be spontaneous, unrelated to any changes I’ve made inthe weblog or in the browser, and it resolves spontaneously too. Sometimes, if a person tries to access the page just when I’m republishing after an update, they’ll get a blank page, but in that case a refresh seconds later will show all the content. This is not that problem.

When I can’t get here in Mozilla, Mozilla Firebird and IE6 still work, so I know the page content is still there. In fact, if I go to alternate URLs for the page, I can get there in Mozilla too, if that is a clue. I’ve turned off Mozilla’s built-in popup blocking to see if that was the problem, without it making a difference. I never find this with any other webpage I visit.

Does anyone more adept than I am with HTML and Mozilla understand why this is happening? Is it my browser, the server, or something about the page? or something else? Has anyone else experienced this with FmH or any other page in Mozilla? Any thoughts appreciated…

William Safire lays out a guerrila war strategy for the Iraqi opposition to the US occupation (and takes a tortured stab at suggesting a US response). He states as a given that Saddam is alive and orchestrating such a strategy now. “The elusive Saddam plots his comeback Countering his strategy will take guts – and faith”. STLtoday With twisted logic, Safire’s strategy to win in Iraq is to press forward blaming the domestic opponents of the war and the ‘liberal media’ for the American failure in Iraq. He advises that the American public keep the faith that the WMD will be found (“Drop the premature conclusion that if we can’t yet find proof of the destructive weapons, they never existed. “) and not question that Saddam Hussein’s regime represented a threat to the world… or still does; he blithely justifies the “loss of one soldier’s life” (uhhh, Bill, you scholar of linguistic artifice, that is one soldier daily) by counterposing the imaginary “loss of thousands of civilian lives caused or abetted by a vengeful dictator”. Pure sophistry. Are BushCo and its lapdog coalition following his advice: (Wolfowitz: ‘Finding WMD is now secondary’ WPXI vs. Blair: ‘WMD will be found’ ExpressIndia)?

Safire’s last suggestion is the most subversive: “This above all: To end guerrilla war in Iraq, find Saddam. Those he terrorized must be assured the tyrant will never come back.” Is he trying to make the dysadministration look more like the bunch of contemptible buffoons they are? An October administration report warned that a defeated Hussein would be a threat (Washington Post) , BTW. Just as with our inability to find bin Laden, what is crucially important is that the American public forget that we are unable to find Saddam, Bill. Don’t remind them.

Do Food Additives Cause Republicans? “If you can’t effect change through the electoral process, try adding a little P & G yellow to the Freedom Fries.” — Dante Langston, Orion

“…(W)hat cheers me are the ways people are learning to read the silent histories of objects and choosing the objects that still sing.” — Rebecca Solnit, AlterNet

“The Bush administration didn’t like the odds of being forthright with us, and so they went another route. Now it’s time to follow that route to the logical conclusion. You can’t start a war based on a premise and then come around after it’s over and say, ‘Who cares if that was bogus? Based on the real reason for the war, things are going great!’ Well, actually, you can. The question is whether or not people are willing to go along with it.” — Rafe Coburn

“A report by internal investigators at the Justice Department has identified dozens of recent cases in which department employees have been accused of serious civil rights and civil liberties violations involving enforcement of the sweeping federal antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act.

The inspector general’s report, which was presented to Congress last week and is awaiting public release, is likely to raise new concern among lawmakers about whether the Justice Department can police itself when its employees are accused of violating the rights of Muslim and Arab immigrants and others swept up in terrorism investigations under the 2001 law.” NY Times

This is ridiculous: Ronald Reagan tied for number 1 with Thomas Jefferson?? Rush Limbaugh on the honorable mention list? No women and only two men of color (MLK and Frederick Douglass) on the top twenty, along with Harriet Tubman on the also-rans. Right Wing News

Dismayed Americans contemplate Canada: “A husband and wife in Minnesota, a college student in Georgia, a young executive in New York. Though each has distinct motives for packing up, they agree the United States is growing too conservative and believe Canada offers a more inclusive, less selfish society.” CNN [Boundless opportunities to Californicate new territory?]

At Party Meeting, Most Rule Out Supporting a Democrat: “The Green Party emerged from a national meeting over the weekend increasingly certain that it will run a presidential candidate in next year’s election, all but settling a debate within the group over how it should approach the 2004 contest.” Washington Post

“Executives at Amazon.com are negotiating with several of the largest book publishers about an ambitious and expensive plan to assemble a searchable online archive with the texts of tens of thousands of books of nonfiction, according to several publishing executives involved.

Amazon plans to limit how much of any given book a user can read, and it is telling publishers that the plan will help sell more books while better serving its own online customers.

Together with little-publicized additions to Amazon’s Web site, like listings of restaurants and movie showings, the plan appears to be part of a strategy to compete with online search services like Google and Yahoo for consumers’ time and attention. ” NY Times

Ed’s Musings from Space: “While he’s living aboard the International Space Station, Expedition 7 NASA ISS Science Officer Ed Lu is writing about his experiences. His letters are listed below, beginning with the most recent addition.

You can also ask Ed or Commander Yuri Malenchenko a question by going to our Ask the Expert Web page.” HSF – International Space Station

“Science lost its way, and women lost out”. Boston Globe

A Plague of Black Dots: “In the coming months a black spot will pop up everywhere . . . on store windows and newspaper boxes, on gas pumps and supermarket shelves. Open a magazine or newspaper – it’s there. It’s on TV. It stains the logos and smears the nerve centers of the world’s biggest, dirtiest corporations.

This is the mark of the people who don’t approve of Bush’s plan to control the world, who don’t want countries ‘liberated’ without UN backing, who can’t stand anymore neo-con bravado shoved down their throats.

This is the mark of the people who want the Kyoto Protocol for the environment, who want the International Criminal Court for greater justice, who want a world where all nations, including the U.S.A., are free of weapons of mass destruction, and who pledge to take their country back.

A bus stops in traffic, a major logo on the back is covered with a funny black spot. Hey, is that supposed to be there? A sultry model leans forward on a billboard; a round, dark blob is stuck on her cleavage. Huh?

Take the pledge and spread the meme.” Adbusters

Call your elected officials!: “A month ago the FCC dramatically relaxed media ownership regulations, stifling the cornerstone of American democracy: a free, fair, and open public debate.

Because one million Americans raised their voices against the FCC decision, the Senate Commerce Committee recently sent a bill to the Senate floor for a vote that would roll back many of the rules. Today the challenge is to get that bill to the floor of the Senate and House for a vote.

Call your Congressional representatives and demand that they support the rollback. Enter your zip code and find out if your elected officials are currently supporting rolling back the FCC. If they are supportive co-sponsors, then thank them for their support and ask that they keep the bill alive. If they are not a co-sponsor, ask them to become one.” Media Reform Network

“The latest signs of ad creep make it clear – advertisers are anxious. Mega-roaster Starbucks sends its copyright goons off to a remote northern island to sue a local coffeehouse. And McDonald’s is also a kids’ literacy champ? Watch out everybody, the giants are getting desperate.” Adbusters

The Booker Prize-winning author of The Light of Day talks: “In the end I produce a novel and it is there for the public, it’s there for the reader and it’s not part of the package that they should know how it was for me as I wrote it…” identity theory

“Now, when one receives a jar of dried kangaroo excrement in the mail what should one do? What’s the protocol?” spark

Gerald Wallace Goode: “Accompanied by the whistle of a freight pulling out of the Phoenix yard, the four of us held a sort of wake for Caleb Weehunt whose remains lay in the ditch separating Ed Collo, Frank Marsh, and Milt Ralls from me.” Troika

“Baghdad has not figured so prominently in the news since the days when the caliph Harun al-Rashid earned his place in the Arabian Nights and Sinbad the Sailor flew to safety on a giant roc. That was 1,200 years ago, and today’s city is no longer a place where Neo-Platonist philosophers lock horns with Islamic theologians and palace ladies eat off jewel-studded golden platters. But Baghdad in the age of the Abbasid caliphs was the greatest of all cities, the political and military heart of the Islamic Empire at its height. Between its founding in A.D.762 and its destruction in 1258, the city was home to a huge advance in the breadth of human knowledge, so that it is remembered today not only as a place of pomp and luxury but as a city of scholarship and philosophy…” The Wilson Quarterly

“What qualities would someone need in order to defeat George W. Bush? An imaginary dialogue”. — Jack Beatty, The Atlantic

“Simon Winchester, the author of Krakatoa, talks about the natural and cultural reverberations of a famous volcanic eruption.” The Atlantic

“The aim of this activity is to tell you something about your moral intuitions. It comprises twelve questions.

…The intention is to demonstrate that there are tensions in the way that people reason about morality. One important tension has to do with how central the idea of harm is to many moral frameworks. Previous research suggests that… most people judge the scenarios presented here to involve neither harm to the protagonists nor to anybody else; but that, regardless, plenty of people still think that these scenarios depict acts which are morally wrong… ” The Philosopher’s Magazine

An interview with Kenan Malik: “In his book, Man, Beast and Zombie, Kenan Malik argues that human beings are quite unlike any other organism in the natural world. We have a dual nature. We are evolved, biological creatures, with an evolutionary past, and in this sense we are simply objects in nature. But we also have self-consciousness, agency, and the capacity for rationality, and as a result we alone in the natural world are able to transcend our evolutionary heritage and to transform ourselves and the world in which we live. Science, though, is taking its time in getting to grips with this dual nature of human beings.” The Philosopher’s Magazine

The Branding of Human Culture — Douglas Rushkoff, M/C Journal

The Politics and Play of ®TMark: “®TMark is an online centre that organizes and directs funding for the ‘information alteration’ of corporate products (otherwise known as “sabotage”). In 1993, ®TMark was involved in its first high-profile act of sabotage when it channelled $US 8000 to the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO), a group that switched the voice boxes of 300 GI Joe and Barbie dolls. As befits a project affiliated with ®TMark, the critical content of BLO’s act was an alchemic stroke of humour and commentary. The protest lies within the ˜information alteration” of commodities that usually rely on their supposed virtues. The BLO offensive drew attention to the questionable labour practices of Mattel, manufacturers of Barbie, thereby undermining the perceptions on which Barbie’s popularity rests.” M/C Journal

“…Performers such as Manny and Kali are interesting not simply because they belong to a vast population of sub-celebrity performers people know so little about but because they belong to a far more special category: a distinct subculture that harbors some of the pop-culture entertainment world’s greatest risks and most creative energies. I call this culture the other bohemia.” — Alison Pearlman, Southwest Review

“Conservatives love to impose cost-benefit analysis on regulatory issues. So why not apply it to the Iraq War?” — Joan Claybrook, president of the nonprofit consumer group Public Citizen and former head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; and Alan Morrison, co-founder and director of the Public Citizen Litigation Group, The American Prospect

The Syrian Bet: “Did the Bush Administration burn a useful source on Al Qaeda?” — Seymour Hersh, New Yorker

“When beliefs can change as easily as the weather, so do your chances of hitting the jackpot — or experiencing revelation…” Donald Miller:

I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Baghdad Theatre in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes and he never opened his eyes.

After that I liked jazz music.

Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.

I used to not like God because God didn’t resolve. But that was before any of this happened.” Killing the Buddha

The National Funeral Directors Conference: “Schedule: 2 p.m. — Relieving Rigor Mortis:

City coroner Tak Hirimoto demonstrates the art of relieving

corpse stiffness with either shiatsu, Swedish or deep tissue massages. Say goodbye to broken limbs and difficult dressing forever!” Opium Magazine

“The joke was bad, the refusal to apologize worse. But Berlusconi’s gaffe may be a symptom of a European disease that’s hardly funny at all“. -Daniel Hudson, Telepolis

“Science lost its way, and women lost out”. Boston Globe

“Antidepressant use is not associated with an increased risk of suicide, according to a recent US study.

The findings, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, are in contrast to previous reports suggesting that use of antidepressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) may increase suicidal tendencies.

Dr Arif Khan, from the Northwest Clinic Research Center in Bellevue, Washington, and colleagues reached their conclusions after reviewing suicide data from US Food and Drug Administration summary reports. ”

As you know, I have taken a strong stand against what I have considered the irresponsible attacks on the medications for supposedly promoting suicide (or violence), which have often led to high-profile lawsuits with national press coverage. Among other consequences, patients suffering from antidepressant-responsive conditions become more reluctant to take the most suitable medications for their distress.

The use of the medications is in fact associated with suicide and other adverse outcomes. However, it is not the fault of the drugs but rather the conditions of modern medical treatment, with inadequate supervision of the potentially suicidal patient by prescribers who are often not trained well enough and do not have enough time to sit with their antidepressant patients. As I often rail against, this is partly the fault of pharmaceutical companies’ targeting doctors outside the psychiatric field to do the prescribing themselves without referring their patients to specialized mental health practitioners, persuading them how easy the SSRIs are to use, which is a recipe for disaster. Some patients on antidepressants become suicidal as they improve; others because they do not improve; and still others as a result of the agitating side effect of these medications can sometimes cause, akathisia. Still others are at risk because a psychosis concomitant with the depression goes unrecognized or untreated, and some may have altogether different unrecognized psychiatric or neuropsychiatric disorders mistakenly assumed to be antidepressant-responsive.

The chances of any of these being recognized and addressed appropriately are tremendously diminished if the patient is not under the care of a practitoner who has the time to sit with a patient, the skill to create an alliance that will allow the patient to reveal their inner life with frankness, diagnostic expertise and sophistication in assessing and managing psychiatric medication tolerability and efficacy, as well as the very specific proficiency to assess suicidality.

“Networks that mask the identity of users appear to be becoming more popular since the music industry threatened to sue individuals.” New Scientist

“Two different strains of HIV infecting the same woman swapped genes to form a new virus – it is bad news for vaccine researchers.” New Scientist

“Long-range US strategies to destroy enemy missiles in their vulnerable launch phase are unlikely ever to work, says an expert panel.” New Scientist

A true man of letters.

Keep the Global Ideal Alive, says Todd Gitlin: “Instead of shouting ‘US Out,’ those who opposed Washington’s unilateral war must get serious about creating an international vision of their own.” Mother Jones

“After father objected to possible for-profit use, son’s tissues sent to mortuary in boxes.” Austin American-Statesman [via Daily Rotten]

“UN May Be Asked to Help: Attackers firing guns and rocket-propelled grenades killed a U.S. soldier in Baghdad on Saturday as Washington considered asking the United Nations to help restore order in Iraq and contain a guerrilla insurgency.” Reuters

“British Prime Minister Tony Blair will appear on television on Sunday to face accusations his government hounded an expert on Iraqi weapons to suicide.

Dr David Kelly, a defense ministry biologist and former U.N. arms inspector, was found dead on Friday with his wrist slashed after being sucked reluctantly into a dispute over whether officials hyped intelligence on Iraq to justify war.” Reuters

“Though the Republican Party prides itself on being a champion of state sovereignty, one need only mention phrases like ‘medical marijuana’ or ‘drug law reform’ to see how quickly the Administration of George W. Bush becomes hostile to the notion of the autonomy of states. The latest–and perhaps most egregious–example of this enmity is about to become manifest via a new appointment: that of veteran Justice Department official Karen Tandy, soon to be new chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration.” — Jason Vest, The Nation [via walker]

…And How!

“The sergeant at the 2nd Battle Combat Team Headquarters pulled me aside in the corridor. ‘I’ve got my own ‘Most Wanted’ list,’ he told me.

He was referring to the deck of cards the U.S. government published, featuring Saddam Hussein, his sons and other wanted members of the former Iraqi regime.

‘The aces in my deck are Paul Bremer, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush and Paul Wolfowitz,’ he said.” ABC News

Related: Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV

“It was the end of the world,” said one officer Thursday. “It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers.” San Francisco Chronicle

Fox News hits a new lowest common denominator: Thanks to Adam for sending me this eloquent diatribe by Hal Crowther which, although it starts out being about Fox and Murdoch, ends up about alot more. You should read it all, but I can’t resist bulleting his most quotable rantlets, blithely taking them out of context for you:

• ” It’s the inviolable first rule of democracy that all politicians will praise the wisdom of the people — an effusive flattery that intensifies when they ask “the people” to swallow something exceptionally inedible.”
  
• ” The wondrous blessing God bestowed on (the) great chroniclers of contagious stupidity — (Gustave Flaubert,) Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken — is that they lived and died without imagining a thing like Fox News. It’s easy to laugh at Rupert Murdoch’s outrageous mongrel, the impossible offspring of supermarket tabloids, sitcom news spoofs, police-state propaganda mills and the World Wrestling Federation.”
  
• ” Fox News is an oxymoron and Cheech and Chong would have made a more credible team of war correspondents than Geraldo Rivera and Ollie North.”
  
• “…Fox News could easily be taken as pure entertainment, even as inspired burlesque of the rightwing menagerie. But the problem — in fact, the serious problem – is that Fox isn’t kidding, and brownshirts aren’t funny.”
  
• ” If reports are accurate, these troubled men are neither bad journalists nor even bad actors portraying journalists — they’re mentally unbalanced individuals whose partisan belligerence is pressing them to the brink of psychosis.”
  
• ” But the scariest thing about Fox and Rupert Murdoch, the thing that renders them all fear and no fun in a time of national crisis, is that they channel for the Bush administration as faithfully as if they were on the White House payroll… I swear I hate to stoop to Nazi analogies; but if Joseph Goebbels had run his own cable channel, it would have been indistinguishable from Fox News.”
  
• ” Murdoch’s repulsive formula has proven irresistible from Melbourne to Manhattan, and now, by satellite, he’s softening up Beijing. His great fortune rests on his wager that a huge unevolved minority is stupid, bigoted, prurient, nasty to the core. In America today, it’s hard to say whether Rupert Murdoch is an agent, or merely a beneficiary, of the cultural leprosy that’s consuming us.”
  
• “Is it sheer coincidence that the president’s stage manager, Greg Jenkins — responsible for the notorious flight-suit landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln, and for posing George Bush against Mt. Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty — was recently a producer at Fox News?

  If these elaborate tableaus Jenkins choreographs for President Bush seem clumsy, tasteless, condescending and insulting to your intelligence, you must be some kind of liberal.”
  

• “Fox is not what it seems to be. It’s not a news service, certainly, nor even the sincere voice of low-rent nationalism. It’s a calculated fraud, like the president who ducked the draft during Vietnam, and even welshed on his National Guard commitment, but who puts on a flight suit stenciled “Commander-in-chief” and plays Douglas MacArthur on network TV.”
  
• “On the wall above my bed of pain, two familiar quotations: “The tyranny of the ignoramuses is insurmountable and assured for all time” — Albert Einstein; and “Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.” — George Santayana.

  It violates democratic etiquette to call your fellow citizens “idiots.” (Unless they’re liberals — “We all agree that liberals are stupid,” writes Charles Krauthammer.) Fortunately, the PC wordworks has coined a new euphemism to replace the ugly word “retarded.” It’s “intellectually disabled,” and we have it just in time. How else could we describe a majority that accepts the logic of “supporting the troops”? Protest as I might, a local columnist explained to me, once the soldiers are “locked and cocked” I owe them not only my prayers for their safe deliverance but unqualified endorsement of their mission, no matter how immoral and ill-advised it may seem to me. ”
  

• ” When is it too late to wake the sleeping masses? When a Fox TV show for amateur entertainers turns up more voters than Congressional elections? The marriage of television and propaganda may well have been the funeral of reason.”
  
• ‘There’s a chilling suspicion that major architects of our current foreign policy are insane. Listen to Bush adviser Richard Perle, known since his Reagan years as the Prince of Darkness: “If we let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don’t try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage total war, (my italics) our children will sing great songs about us years from now.” ‘
  
• “…I believe that the split between liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican is inconsequential compared to the real fracture line, between Americans who try to think clearly and those who will not or cannot. What hope, a cynical friend teased me, for a country where 70 percent believe in angels, 60 percent believe in literal, biblical, blazing Armageddon, and more than half reject Charles Darwin? He didn’t need to add that creationists, science-annihilating cretins, have now recruited President Bush, who assures fundamentalists he “has doubts” about evolution. Whether the president is that dumb or merely that dishonest is beside the point. He knows his constituency.”
  
• “Novelist Michael Malone, a notorious optimist, offered a faint ray of hope when he urged me to ignore all the polls — if the government has intimidated most of the media, he argued, what makes you think the polls are credible?”
  

And finally:

• ” Are we so few, or are the numbers we see part of the Bush-Fox disinformation campaign — like Saddam’s missing uranium and his 25,000 liters of anthrax? This faint last hope will be tested in the presidential election of 2004. If the polls are right and Malone is wrong, as I fear, it’s going to be a long, sandy century for the United States of America, for our children and grandchildren and all those sweet singing children yet unborn.”
  

Related: Atlanta freelance writer and columnist Marc Schultz on how reading Crowther’s screed got him into a very contemporary sort of trouble. When Adam pointed me to the Crowther piece, he wondered whether Crowther is going to end up in Guantanamo.

Another take on why this four-year-old story is now suddenly big news. Brendan O’Neill says the Democrats could have ripped apart the uranium story more than six months ago, in time to divert the course of war… but they weren’t potential Presidential candidates then. Furthermore, evenn if the Niger connection hadn’t already been thoroughly discredited at the time of the SotU, experts were vocal about their doubts that Iraq could do anything to enrich uranium even if they obtained any. Given that few of the Democratic opposition (an oxymoron?) took any kind of principled stand against the war, the

…retrospective focus on the uranium claims is a cover for their own cowardice over Iraq, for their failure to take a principled stand against the war. Opposition politicians are grubbing about for something with which to beat the Bushies, as they clearly have no politics or principles with which to do the job. This sorry excuse for political opposition helps to explain why doubts about the uranium are everywhere, months after they first originated – and why someone like Senator John Edwards, who voted for war in the House of Representatives, can now get off on lecturing Bush about the ‘enormous failure’ in Iraq. The antis’ cynical approach – flagging up Bush and Blair’s lies instead of positing a principled alternative – can only harm political life in the long run. sp!ked

O’Neill acknowledges that the cheap shot is so opportune because of the squirrelly defensiveness and blame-shifting the proponents of war are doing on the issue:

Bush blames the CIA, while the CIA blames Britain’s MI6 for starting the story in the first place; MI6 is standing by its intelligence, though Tony Blair is apparently planning to ‘blame France for the uranium row’; and Niger, from where Saddam allegedly tried to buy the uranium in 1999, is said to be deeply upset ‘at suggestions that it would consider selling uranium to Iraq’

and concludes:

Those who launched the war in Iraq are now washing their hands of responsibility, defensively backtracking over the pre-war ‘evidence’.

It wasn’t the uranium story that caused these tensions within and between the Bush and Blair governments. Rather, the uranium spat has further exposed the defensive nature of Bush and Blair’s war, and its failure to unite the American and British elites behind any sense of common purpose.

As postwar Iraq spins further out of control, politicians and journalists in the West squabble over 16 words in Bush’s State of the Union address, and who is responsible for putting them there. This is about much more than a bullshit story about African uranium. The uranium spat is more like a sign of our unprincipled times.

Photo 5: Behind the Scenes: “Working at his desk in the Oval Office, President Bush reviews the State of the Union address line-by-line and word-by-word.” [thanks, walker]

I admit my attention has flagged; I’ve been stuck at a rather reductionist level: “Bush lied, of course, who’s surprised? That’s that”. I have certainly been interested in the public complacency about BushCo’s shameless manipulation and, as my blink to the Timothy Noah meditation below indicates, on the press’ diffidence since Bush took the White House about calling a lie a lie, until this significant departure. Noah is onto something; there was a degree of incompetency in this lie that is atypical of this dysadministration. I have been edified by the bulldogging the President’s new press secretary is getting on this issue, just because it places in high relief the audacity of the usual stonewalling defense; is it too much to hope that the public might begin to notice? This Modern World has just the transcript you need if you are curious about this.

Joshua Micah Marshall is doing a great job keeping up with what turn out to be intricacies of the radioactive lie, the identification of the NSC staffer who seems to have been the one who recommended that the infamous 16 words remain in the SotU, the administration’s apparent preparations to invoke executive privilege to make sure that that staffer never testifies to his role, the vengeful ‘outing’ of a Bush administration critic and, related, the tragic apparent suicide of the British government functionary who was apparently the source of reports on British distortions of the case for war. Seeing this balloon onward and upward, I find myself exhilarated at the possibility that it might mark a real turning point in the credibility of the administration and the credulity of the public. As the Daily Kos points out, the President’s approval rating has dropped a full nine points in the last month. One can only hope that the mounting disapproval has ‘legs’ and the voters whose sentiments the polls reflect have a good memory. We are getting to the point, especially if those in the Democratic primary race are not timid about keeping the issue in front of the voters (in an insistent way that does not backfire by coming off as merely exploitive and opportunistic), when it might persist as a live issue until November 2004.

Or could this erupt before the Presidential campaign, if the opposition were really courageous? If there are enough people interested in untangling the twisted skein of lies that seems to have been elaborated to cover up the original gaffe, could this blossom into a fullblown crisis worthy of the “-gate” designations we are beginning to see bandied about? Could it be worthy of articles of impeachment? “Clinton lied, Hilary cried; Bush lied; people died.” Ah, be still, my beating heart; almost too much to hope for…

Timothy Noah answers the question he spent Part 1 posing last week (“Why was the yellowcake lie treated like a major news event, when the earlier lies were not?”).

The yellowcake lie landed on Page One solely because it occasioned a brief and fatal departure from the Bush White House’s press strategy of stonewalling. “Bush Claim on Iraq Had Flawed Origin, White House Says” read a New York Times headline on July 8. Glancing through the story, Chatterbox initially puzzled over its Page One placement. Didn’t we know already that Bush’s yellowcake line was a lie? Then Chatterbox realized that the novelty component wasn’t the lie, but the Bush administration’s admission that it had told a lie. In the Bush White House, this simply isn’t done.

Noah implies, but does not explicitly state, that he believes Ari Fleischer got sloppy because he was a war-weary short-timer. Or could Fleischer have been nursing some sort of grudge against his boss? Could it have been a deliberate parting shot? The press’ rules of engagement don’t allow the press to acknowledge a lie when they see it, unless it is an incompetent lie, in other words, unless someone contradicts themself rather than merely contradicting someone else.

Never mind that, in pretending to know that Saddam tried to buy yellowcake from Niger, Bush told a lie. His real sin was not being a pro.

Blind alley in psychopharmacology and classification of disease:

“No new drugs for mood and anxiety disorders have reached the market for over a decade. Why is there so little innovation in a sector that accounts for the largest proportion by far of sales of psychiatric drugs?

The current division between anxiety and depression is increasingly recognised as inadequate. In the community, most mood disorders present as a combination of depression and anxiety. Yet the Food and Drug Administration in the United States, which has become the world bellwether of drug approval, indicates drugs either for major depression or for the various forms of anxiety recognised by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). As a result, the pharmaceutical industry is compelled to develop drugs for diagnoses that are of questionable clinical relevance. This is one reason for the big slowdown in drug discovery in psychiatric drugs. A return to the former unitary classification of mood and anxiety disorders as nervousness or cothymia might represent a way out of this blind alley.” British Medical Journal, Shorter and Tyrer, 327 (7407): 158

This is an exceedingly important article which demands close attention. It in essence fires a shot across the bow of some very important vested interests in psychiatry, both financial and, more significantly, conceptual, and, if it attracts any attention, will surely provoke a backlash. I will be looking in the letters section of the British Medical Journal over the coming weeks for the fallout.

The authors proceed from three principles with which my own clinical experience agrees:

# The concept of “major depression” is far too heterogeneous to be useful

# The subdivision of anxiety into separate micro-diagnoses of panic, social anxiety disorder, etc, is questionable

# The firewall between anxiety and depression ignores the fact that the commonest form of affective disorder is mixed anxiety-depression.

There is a constant tension between the “lumpers” and the “splitters” in psychiatric classification (“nosology”), which readers of FmH know is one of my preoccupations in my field. As you can see from the points the authors make, the answer is not simply coming down on the side of one of those camps; some “lumping” causes problems and some “splitting” causes problems. Then, as the authors point out, if psychiatric drug approval by the FDA is tied to the current scheme of diagnoses, there will be important conceptual failings in new drug development. I have long taught that calling the antidepressants “antidepressants” is a conceptual misnomer, and I have seen the way this language constrains practice. Many other MDs as well as patients are aghast at my claim that the “antidepressants” are better choices for treating anxiety than the “anti-anxiety” medications (diazepam [Valium] and its derivatives).

But as long as drugs vie to win FDA approval as indicated for specific diagnoses, there is market pressure to proliferate diagnoses as, essentially, marketing niches for the pharmaceutical industry. The authors make a good case that the interpenetration of academic psychiatry and the drug industry is the devil’s bargain in this sense. This is not just a problem along the dividing line between depression and anxiety either. Other classes of psychiatric distress, such as psychosis, aggression, irritability, impulsivity, and mood lability, are artificially carved out as separate domains requiring separate diagnoses and different medications — “mood stabilizers”, “antipsychotics.” A welter of diagnoses devolve on our patients, and they arrive at my doorstep with a shopping bag full of medications which interact additively and often destructively, if not merely redundantly.

But it is good business:

Industry has been busy behind the scenes in this handy convergence of eccentric new diagnoses and the market nicheing of compounds. For example, in May 1984, Robert Spitzer, the chief disease designer of DSM-III and DSM-III-R, convoked a meeting of the anxiety working group, cosponsored by “the Psychopharmacology Unit of the Division of Medical Affairs of the Upjohn Company.” At the end of the discussion of the relation between panic and agoraphobia, Spitzer announced, “Consensus favors the Upjohn model.”14 It is now routine for psychopharmacologists, such as Brown University’s Martin Keller, to receive as much as $500 000 (£320 000) in consulting fees from industry in a given year.15 USA Today has calculated that at 55% of the meetings of the various advisory committees of the FDA, “half or more of the FDA advisers had a conflict of interest.”

Sometimes the relation between academic psychiatrists and industry veers over the line of acceptability in the form of ghost writing—academics lending their names to articles drafted by industry hacks. This has been a problem in psychopharmacology since the 1950s.17 But only last year, Vienna psychiatry professor Siegfried Kasper was identified in the Austrian press as signing an industry ghostwritten article about an antidepressant.18 Under normal circumstances, the interpenetration of industry and academe can be fruitful, as talent and ideas wash back and forth. Yet when drugs start earning the kind of money usually associated with the oil industry, there is potential for trouble.

The authors conclude, eloquently and aptly:

We believe that the failure to advance the treatment of anxiety and depression is related to wrong classification. If you don’t have natural disease categories, you can’t develop drugs for them. If the Food and Drug Administration will accept only drugs that are effective for DSM diagnoses, and if the diagnoses are artefacts, the drugs are bound to be less valuable, even if in the short term they increase their market share. Companies must start developing drugs for mixed anxiety and depression and forget about dividing this giant illness segment into salami slices. Doctors could encourage this change by being more cynical about pitches from drug representatives claiming to have “the latest” in anxiolytic medication. Ask instead for the latest in nervousness.

And, I would add, consumers should ask the same of their prescribing doctors.

“It was an ugly ending by any measure, but particularly cruel in this case because the little girl’s life began the same way: wrapped in a plastic bag and discarded on a New York City byway.

In September 1994, days after her birth, Stephanie was discovered near her parents’ home, those who have seen her records say. The lack of oxygen in the bag probably contributed to mental retardation so profound that even when she reached age 8 she had only the awareness of a child younger than 1. She weighed 28 pounds. Although the records are unclear as to blame, the infant’s parents quickly lost their rights to care for her and she became a ward of the state.

The almost unspeakably grim end occurred despite intense intervention from the state practically from the girl’s birth. The eight years of Stephanie’s life, the years between trash bag and trash bag, offer a glimpse into the unevenness and unpredictability of care for perhaps the most vulnerable of New York’s citizens, severely disabled foster children.” NY Times

Want to send email to the President? Good luck. “Those who want to send a message to the president must now navigate as many as nine Web pages and fill out a form that asks if they support White House policy.” NY Times

Matthew Rossi’s book of ‘fantasies, lunacies and entertaining lies’, he of the inestimable “Once I Noticed I Was on Fire…”, will be out in August. And he will sign it for you if you send it to him with a ssae.

From Chuck Taggart I learn about “eMusic, an online MP3 subscription service that, in some ways, beats the living crap out of Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Not that I don’t love iTunes — in fact, I spent about $45 in there over the last few weeks, and there’ll probably always be stuff I want in there. But the kinds of music I’m really interested in — lots of roots, folk, trad, blues and indie rock/pop — are much more prevalent at eMusic than in iTunes.” I’m on it…

“Thousands of people serving in the military and American civilians living abroad will have that option next year in the nation’s most extensive Internet voting experiment, viewed by some as a step toward elections in cyberspace.” The key phrase is “thousands in the military”, as this system is run by the Pentagon. There’s a sidebar with a comment by someone from the Center for Public Integrity, a government watchdog group, which expresses concerns about the ability of the government to assure security in internet voting. “Security remains the top concern for the system’s coordinators and fodder for critics,” the article confirms. CBS News [via mousemusings]

But a more profound concern of mine is that this is a Republican use of Pentagon infrastructure to extend easy voting access preferentially to that segment of the absentee voters who would be most likely to vote Republican. [Or, a segment that BushCo thinks would vote for them, oblivious to the fact that he is demoralizing the military. CNN [via medley]] In any case, I agree with what Dennis Kucinich, also quoted on mousemusings, has to say on the matter:

Can we trust an administration which stole a presidential election, has attacked the bill of rights, and which deliberately misrepresented intelligence to lead this nation into an unjust war to faithfully protect the security of the 2004 election? I repeat my call on all Americans to join in a mighty protest so that we may protect the 2004 election from the kind of theft which deprived the American people of an honest election in the year 2000.

‘“The British are coming” — again. The launch of a U.S. edition of the unabashedly liberal Guardian may be just what the Bush-whacked U.S. press needs.’

McClellan debuts with dissembling about budget:

“In his first briefing as the President’s press secretary yesterday, Scott McClellan revealed an ability to spin just as ably as his predecessor, Ari Fleischer. Just as Fleischer and others in the administration have done, McClellan incorrectly suggested yesterday that tax cuts played no role or a small role in the the growing federal deficit, which the Office of Management and Budget said yesterday will be over $450 billion this year.

Asked about the new deficit figures, McClellan said the following: ‘Now, we had a recession. We also had declining revenues because of that. And we had a war on terrorism. That’s what led to the deficit that we are in today.'” Spinsanity [props to walker]

essentially in realtime [via b0ing b0ing]

On average, one of them has been raped. women’s enews

New Tarantino Film to Be Released in 2 Parts: “Miramax Films will take the unusual and potentially risky move of releasing Kill Bill, the much-anticipated Quentin Tarantino martial arts action-adventure film, as two movies, the first to open in the fall. Miramax will in effect be taking a three-hour film with a 200-page script and turning it into a serial.” NY Times

Anonymous Blog Cracks Window Into Hasidic Community: “Yeedel, as we’ll call him, writes an anonymous weblog (or ‘blog’), a kind of online diary, under the pen name Hasidic Rebel. His comments, first posted in February, range from musings about the Hasidic lifestyle to stinging indictments of the community.

Anonymous blogs like Yeedel’s are set to become a lot more secure—and maybe a lot more common—with the release in August of a new application called Invisiblog. Fusing existing privacy technologies with a tool for blogging, the software makes it far easier to broadcast in secret.” Village Voice

Related: The Jewsweek Sizzlin’ 60 (actually 52.5) [thanks to walker]

.

It seems FmH provokes strongly divided feelings. To judge, at least, from the, admittedly unscientific, ratings I’ve been receiving at BlogHop and EatonWeb, which for some godforsaken reason I just decided to check in on.

At the former, while 46% of respondents ‘love it’ or rate it ‘good’, an almost equivalent 38% feel it ‘sucks’ or ‘hate it’. And on EatonWeb, it gets an average rating of 2 out of 5. I would have thought there would be a strong selection bias in favor of loyal readers voting. Since I don’t think people with a negative reaction to FmH hang out here very often, the fact that passersby took the time to register their negative opinions suggests to me that their feelings are very vehement and FmH is strong medicine.

One could speculate that it is my in-your-face political sentiments that mightily offend a considerable segment of the reading public. But I suspect there is an element for some of revulsion about:

• my tortured ponderous prose style,
• my self-conscious cocky opinionation about even the nonpolitical topics over which I shoot my mouth off
  

  (I recall a reader comment once several months ago to the effect that “…your narcissism is showing; think I’ll take a month off…”. Other readers have often flamed those who post critical comments here, but that has usually been only when they seriously misunderstand my points and need indelicate correction. No one countered the “narcissism” comment this time, although perhaps it was just that the Enetation commenting system was unreliable around then?? [grin])

• the clumsy lack of sophistication of my web design,
• and, yes, probably even the slow load times

I’ve gleaned from some of the negative ratings that people don’t like ‘linklogs’ anymore. I like the balance of posting links and whipping up commentary that I do, and it is not likely to change much. The height of appreciation for and notice of FmH came during the post-9/11 period, when I was at the height of fevered obsessional linking. Hey, I needed to read alot about what was going on and how people were reacting; I shared the links. Simply that, more than anything else, is what I’m doing here, and it is in the plain, original tradition of the early weblogs — a timely log of one’s websurfing, with more or less elaborate comments.

I have long commented on how static my readership is. It is uncanny; every weekday, I get 350-400 visits according to my counters, no matter what. It jumps briefly to 500-600 when FmH gets linked to in some major medium, such as the recent Le Monde mention; then it returns to the 350-400 of you. Are we in a rut together, or is it devoted and loyal readership? How can we tell? One of the interesting things at the EatonWeb page is a lengthy and growing list of ‘similar’ weblogs, although I’m not sure what the criteria for similarity are. Check them out, most are unfamiliar to me. Although I venture to say I wouldn’t find most of them so ‘similar’, you regular readers might find they exercise the same muscles in you that FmH does. Don’t rest on your laurels with FmH. In a world where everyone “blogs” (as you know, I pronounce that word with some disdain), will FmH remain relevant and viable? FmH’s ecological niche may fill, with co-evolvers or predators. With the explosive growth of weblogging, there’s plenty of room for evolution of your tastes. Take a look. Then, if you will, come back and challenge me with whatever you’ve found out there.

But, not to forget, I’m thankful for all of you who continue to stomach me. I’m a big fan of yours.

And if you’re one of those, masochistic or otherwise, who comes back to FmH again and again because you love to hate me, I would love to hear from you, I really would. I’m thankful you’re here too, although puzzled by it. Post a comment here, or write me. Anonymously if you wish. It’ll be fun.

A Rugged Drink for a Rugged Land: If you are a devotée of Scotch single malt whiskeys (I gravitate to the smoky, peaty Islay malts), you will probably find this elementary. If you are wondering what all the fuss is about, it is a fine introduction. I do quibble with one paragraph:

Most Scots and connoisseurs from other countries drink blends, which are generally less expensive, if they want to mix their whiskey with water or soda in a predinner drink, and take their single malts neat, either before, during or, most commonly, after dinner, like Cognac or Calvados. The addition of ice to a blend is tolerated as an American eccentricity; the addition of ice to a single malt is treated as near-sacrilege. NY Times

At the risk of sounding somewhat scurrilous (but, I might add, totally reverent), I might ask — why dilute at all, predinner or not, if, as I agree, it being a shame to adulterate a single malt, one is obligated to drink a blended whiskey if one is taking it with water or soda? [props to Abby]

“The trouble with American history, NPR-style, is that it unlinks the past from the present.” — Andrew Christie (Sierra Club), AlterNet

“What Team Bush faces in Iraq is more than guerrilla war. It is the first major crack in the larger neo-con fantasy of a forced reorganization of the Mideast. ” — Carol Brightman, AlterNet

“How is the yellowcake lie different? Why is it the first Bush lie to send the media pack into a feeding frenzy? Why did it prompt David Broder of the Washington Post to see ‘the shadow of defeat’ cross Bush’s presidency? Why yellowcake? Why now?” — Timothy Noah, Slate

Studying the mechanisms of religious belief could lead to a better understanding of what goes on in the minds of people with psychiatric delusions.

An international conference in Sydney this week will hear that some religious beliefs – including that a virgin gave birth to the son of God – qualify as delusions.

Macquarie University PhD student Ryan McKay, who has been studying under one of Australia’s leading authorities on delusions, Max Coltheart, said the idea that religion was a delusion dated back to Sigmund Freud about 100 years ago.

To judge from this coverage in The Age, McKay’s take on the matter appears to be burdened by the assumption that there’s something abnormal about delusions which, by contagion, applies to religious beliefs if they are similar. But, in fact, as the headline says, it is religion which might be the model for delusion, not the other way around; we could turn the equation on its head — delusions are similar to religious beliefs, simply because they are both examples of strong, faithful belief. As for invoking Freud, while he did not take religious belief seriously, he was not as pejorative as this article suggests. His essay on the subject was called The Future of an Illusion — illusion, not delusion. There has been perennial debate about which symptoms are the cardinal features of a psychotic disease such as schizophrenia, i.e. direct manifestations of the neurobiological processes which are awry in the disease; and which are secondary, compensatory efforts on the part of the sufferer. I am a strong proponent of the idea that delusions are compensatory. To illustrate with an example, if you are beset by inexplicable and unberable paranoid feelings (primary symptom), you try to comfort yourself by making sense of your feelings, even if the sense you make is a delusional one like believing those people passing by on the street are CIA agents monitoring you because you hold a special key to the survival of the planet.

Beliefs we have generated to make sense of alarming and inexplicable experiences often persist long beyond the experiences themselves; belief is very tenacious. We like to believe we can rely on the sense our mind makes of things; it would be far more alarming if we could not even trust that. So even when a psychosis is successfully treated (e.g. with antipsychotic medication), compensatory delusions persist, even though the patient may start to realize others will find their beliefs odd or unacceptable and becomes more canny about divulging them. This fits with my clinical observation that medication never treats delusions directly, and that the disappearance of delusional thinking should not be a criterion for the success of medication treatment while the disappearance of, say, hallucinations or paranoia should be. (understand here, I’m making a distinction between paranoia, which is an experience, and persecutory beliefs, which are delusions. One can be paranoid without having elaborated it into persecutory delusions; and one can believe one is being persecuted without paranoid distress.) There are many other examples in clinical psychiatry of compensatory beliefs which persist after the stabilization of the symptoms they were meant to compensate for. People with panic disorder will do anything to avoid further panic attacks and may come to associate the onset of panic with visiting a specific location or, more generally, with going outside at all. They will often avoid these locations (anticipatory avoidance) or avoid going out at all (agoraphobia) long after medication treatment has successfully prevented further panic attacks. There is no altered neurobiology to a belief, psychotic or not. Belief change can only be effected, if at all, by slow gradual cognitive engagement. You can’t argue about religion…

Back to the article.

Many religious beliefs were triggered by a bizarre or unexplained “religious experience”, often produced by changes in brain activity.

For example, it had been shown that when Buddhist monks went into deep mediation and had a sense of “being at one with the world”, they also had decreased blood flow to the part of the brain responsible for concepts of the “self”.

The crux of delusion lay in the question of why these experiences triggered a religious belief system in some people but not in others, Mr McKay said.

“It’s as if the meditation causes a certain neuropsychological anomaly,” he said. “The idea is that you need some sort of second deficit, which means you’re unable to discard the impossible experience.”

This is in line with my point. Changes in brain activity may indeed produce altered experience but they do not directly cause religious beliefs. Religious belief may be the consequence of such profound experiences just as delusional belief may be the consequence of, but is not identical with, profoundly altered and distressing psychotic alterations of experience. My strong prediction — you’ll get nowhere trying to understand delusions by studying the physiology of devout religious belief, because there is no specific physiological alteration to be found in either phenomenon. The equation, or analogy, between religious devotion and delusional belief says more about the dynamics of belief than it does about psychopathology, psychosis, or neurophysiology.

“Bending a bit to privacy concerns, the Pentagon changes some of the

experiments to be conducted for LifeLog, its effort to record every

tidbit of information and encounter in daily life. No video recording

of unsuspecting people, for example.” Wired

“The controversial Terrorism Information Awareness program, which would troll Americans’ personal records to find terrorists before they strike, may soon face the same fate Congress meted out to John Ashcroft in his attempt to create a corps of volunteer domestic spies: death by legislation.

The Senate’s $368 billion version of the 2004 defense appropriations bill, released from committee to the full Senate on Wednesday, contains a provision that would deny all funds to, and thus would effectively kill, the Terrorism Information Awareness program, formerly known as Total Information Awareness.” Wired

“If Harry Potter’s adventures are joyful skyrockets of the imagination for children who suspect they are somehow more special than the mere mortals around them, then Ryan’s story is a depressing reminder that sometime in childhood most of us put in some years as mere misfits.” NY Times

Reports of HIV ‘Superinfection’ Increase: “Evidence is growing that ‘superinfection’ with more than one strain of HIV may be more common than previously thought, which could complicate efforts to make a vaccine, experts said Monday at an international AIDS conference.

Scientists reported three new cases of HIV-infected people who initially were doing well without drugs but became sick years later after contracting a second strain of the AIDS virus.

‘Superinfection is sobering,’ said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the chief U.S. AIDS research agency. He was not involved in the studies.

‘That means that although you can mount an adequate response against one virus, the body still does not have the capability to protect you against new infection, which tells you that the development of a vaccine is going to be even more of a challenge.'” Dallas Morning News

Eric Alterman wrote, before the State of the Union, considerably before the invasion of Iraq and certainly before any scrutiny of the uranium statements: Bush Lies, Media Swallows:

“Ben Bradlee explains,

‘Even the very best newspapers have never learned how to handle public figures who lie with a straight face. No editor would dare print this version of Nixon’s first comments on Watergate for instance. ‘The Watergate break-in involved matters of national security, President Nixon told a national TV audience last night, and for that reason he would be unable to comment on the bizarre burglary. That is a lie.”

Part of the reason is deference to the office and the belief that the American public will not accept a mere reporter calling the President a liar. Part of the reason is the culture of Washington– where it is somehow worse to call a person a liar in public than to be one. A final reason is political. Some reporters are just political activists with columns who prefer useful lies to the truth. For instance, Robert Novak once told me that he “admired” Elliott Abrams for lying to him in a television interview about illegal U.S. acts of war against Nicaragua because he agreed with the cause.” AlterNet

The flap over the radioactive lie and the general pattern of dissembling about the rationale for invading Iraq has to be placed in the more general context of this President’s lying contempt for the American people, whom he considers an unfortunate impediment to his ability to do whatever he wants. Fortunately, they are a credulous and gullible lot who can easily be deceived with even the sloppiest of fictions and falsehoods, or so he is advised by his handlers. If the man were smarter, he would be embarrassed at the public spectacle of his clumsy, blundering pattern of blatant prevarication on every issue of importance. My thesaurus is open continuously to the right page, but I’m running out of synonyms for “lie” and “liar”. And while the media descend in a feeding frenzy on the fabrications and inconsistencies of the uranium issue, the administration has succeeded in keeping it appearing to be an isolated, unfortunate incident of bad intel rather than part of a general pattern. As per Ben Bradlee’s 1997 comment, it is up to the press to do differently.

again postponing a withdrawal of 3rd Infantry Division soldiers, many of whom the Pentagon says can now expect to remain in Iraq “indefinitely”. The US denies that this has anything to do with India’s decision not to send an army division to augment the occupation — oops, liberation — forces. LA Times It reminds me of an old joke we used to make during the Nixon administration about how the President’s father should have been the one to pull out.

Perry Warns:

Former defense secretary William Perry warned that the United States and North Korea are drifting toward war, perhaps as early as this year, in an increasingly dangerous standoff that also could result in terrorists being able to purchase a North Korean nuclear device and plant it in a U.S. city.

‘I think we are losing control’ of the situation, said Perry, who believes North Korea soon will have enough nuclear warheads to begin exploding them in tests and exporting them to terrorists and other U.S. adversaries. (…)

Only last winter Perry publicly argued that the North Korea problem was controllable. Now, he said, he has grown to doubt that. “It was manageable six months ago if we did the right things,” he said. “But we haven’t done the right things.”

He added: “I have held off public criticism to this point because I had hoped that the administration was going to act on this problem, and that public criticism might be counterproductive. But time is running out, and each month the problem gets more dangerous.” Washington Post

And:

North Korean officials told the Bush administration last week that they had finished producing enough plutonium to make a half-dozen nuclear bombs, and that they intended to move ahead quickly to turn the material into weapons, senior American officials said today.

The new declaration set off a scramble in American intelligence agencies — under fire for their assessment of Iraq’s nuclear capability — to determine if the North Korean government of Kim Jong Il was bluffing or had succeeded in producing the material undetected. NY Times

“Mars is heading for its closest encounter with Earth in over 50,000 years. Although Mars and Earth continue in their normal orbits around the Sun, about every two years Earth and Mars are on the same part of their orbit as seen from the Sun. When this happens again in late August, Mars will be almost as near to the Sun as it ever gets, while simultaneously Earth will be almost as far from the Sun as it ever gets. This means that now is a great time to launch your space probe to Mars. Alternatively, these next few months are a great time to see a bright red Mars from your backyard. Mars is so close that global features should be visible even through a small telescope. Look for Mars to rise about 11 pm and to remain the brightest red object in the sky until sunrise. Mars will rise increasingly earlier until its closest approach in late August. Mars was captured above rising through Arch Rock in California, USA.” Astronomy Picture of the Day

Woman charged with poisoning 5-week-old granddaughter with salt: “A woman has been charged with poisoning her 5-week-old granddaughter by pouring salt into the infant’s formula, authorities said.

Police said that Merry Long, 43, poured about two cups of salt into a can of powdered baby formula because she was angry at her son and his girlfriend, who is the child’s mother.” San Francisco Chronicle [This could instead have been a part of the ‘Annals of Depravity’ Dept., of course. The ‘Hell Readies a Room’ designation, by the way, is courtesy of Mark Morford, who writes the hilarious ‘Morning Fix’ e-column at SF Gate. I find nothing hilarious about this item, however, in case you wondering.]

How About a Conspiracy Theory? – A BuzzFlash reader wonders, could the Court be helping Bush look more centrist to win the 2004 election? Is that why Rehnquist and O’Connor might be postponing their rumored retirements from this year until Bush’s second term?

“Daniil Kharms (1905-42)

mainly made a living writing children’s books in Leningrad. He also wrote poems and absurd short stories, often published in underground magazines, after the avant-garde literary societies that Kharms was associated with were banned by the Stalin regime.

In 1931 Kharms was convicted of anti-Soviet activity and spent a year in prison and exile in Kursk. In 1937 his children’s books were confiscated by the authorities, and deprived of his main source of income Kharms was often on the brink of starvation in the following years. He continued to write short, grotesque stories, which weren’t published, but merely stored in Kharms’ desk drawer.

In August 1941, shortly before the terrible siege of Leningrad, Kharms was arrested a second time, accused of ‘spreading defeatist propaganda’. During the trial Kharms was declared non compos mentis and was incarcerated in a military prison. In February 1942, while Leningrad was ravaged by famine, Kharms starved to death in prison.”

The site links to a collection of Kharms’ absurd short stories; here’s a sample:

Blue notebook no. 2

Once there was a redheaded man without eyes and without ears. He had no hair either, so that he was a redhead was just something they said.

He could not speak, for he had no mouth. He had no nose either.

He didn’t even have arms or legs. He had no stomach either, and he had no back, and he had no spine, and no intestines of any kind. He didn’t have anything at all. So it is hard to understand whom we are really talking about.

So it is probably best not to talk about him any more.

“a-gelwan: To stupefy, astonish; stupefacere, consternare: ‘-Ðá wearþ ic agelwed’, ‘then I was astonished’, Bt. 34, 5; Fox 140, 9.” Online Anglo-Saxon Dictionary – Bosworth and Toller

Teen is sentenced in “bum stomping”:

“A teenager has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for the beating death of a homeless man in an attack he and his friends called ‘bum stomping.’

Daniel Ennis, 18, who was sentenced Friday, pleaded guilty in May to second-degree murder in the death of Gerald Joseph Holle, a 55-year-old transient living under a bridge.

Prosecutors said the attack was an effort by Ennis and his friends to ‘clean up’ their neighborhood by beating homeless men until they died or left the area.

(…)

The deaths were among a series of attacks on homeless men in 2001 in which three were killed and five others were hospitalized.” CNN

Try Bananaslug: “BananaSlug was designed to promote serendipitous surfing: finding the unexpected in the 3,083,324,652 web pages indexed by Google. Directed Google searches return pages most relevant to your search term, based on the pages’ popularity on the Web. You may never see some of the pages way down the list that are relevant or interesting, but off the beaten path.

So we give you a little boost. We ‘seed’ your search with another word, chosen at random, and this accidental encounter results in pages you may have overlooked. What, if anything, do all the results have in common? You tell me!” [via b0ing b0ing]

by Gary Snyder. Why? Just because we were overdue for some Snyder on FmH, and this is particularly apt for these times. It was composed in 1969 as a handout for attendees of a Wilderness Conference in San Francisco and released with a ‘copyleft’ license stating “may be reproduced free forever”:

Once in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago, the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infanite Void gave a discourse to all the assembled elements and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings, the flying beings, and the sitting beings – even the grasses, to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from a seed, assembled there: a Discourse concerning Enlightenment on the planet Earth

‘In some future time, there will be a continent called America. It will have great centers of power called such as Pyramid Lake, Walden Pond, Mt. Rainier, Big Sur, Everglades, and so forth; and powerful nerves and channels such as Columbia River, Mississippi River, and Grand Canyon. The human race in that era will get into troubles all over its head, and practically wreck everything in spite of its own strong intelligent Buddha-nature.’

‘The twisting strata of the great mountains and the pulsings of volcanoes are my love burning deep in the earth. My obstinate compassion is schist and basalt and granite, to be mountains, to bring down the rain. In that future American Era I shall enter a new form; to cure the world of loveless knowledge that seeks with blind hunger: and mindless rage eating food that will not fill it.’

And he showed himself in his true form of

SMOKEY THE BEAR

A handsome smokey-colored brown bear standing on his hind legs, showing that he is aroused and watchful.

Bearing in his right paw the Shovel that digs to the truth beneath appearances; cuts the roots of useless attach- ments, and flings damp sand on the fires of greed and war;

His left paw in the mudra of Comradly Display-indicating that all creatures have the full right to live to their limits and that of deer, rabbits, chipmunks, snakes, dandelions, and lizards all grow in the realm of the Dharma;

Wearing the blue work overalls symbolic of slaves and laborers, the countless men oppressed by a civilization that claims to save but often destroys;

Wearing the broad-brimmed hat of the west, symbolic of the forces that guard the wilderness, which is the Natural State of the Dharma and the true path of man on Earth:

all true paths lead through mountains-

With a halo of smoke and flame behind, the forest fires of the kali-yuga, fires caused by the stupidity of those who think things can be gained and lost whereas in truth all is contained vast and free in the Blue Sky and Green Earth of One Mind;

Round-bellied to show his kind nature and that the great earth has food enough for evryone who loves her and trusts her;

Trampling underfoot wasteful freeways and needless suburbs, smashing the worms of capitalism and totalitarianism;

Indicating the task: his followers, becoming free of cars, houses, canned foods, universities, and shoes, master the Three Mysteries of their own Body, Speech, and Mind; and fearlessly chop down the rotten trees and prune out the sick limbs of this country America and then burn the leftover trash.

Wrathful but calm. Austere but Comic. Smokey the Bear will Illuminate those who would help him; but for those who would hinder or slander him…

HE WILL PUT THEM OUT.

Thus his great Mantra:

Namah samanta vajranam chanda maharoshana Sphataya hum traks ham mam

‘I DEDICATE MYSELF TO THE UNIVERSAL DIAMOND BE THIS RAGING FURY BE DESTROYED’

And he will protect those who love the woods and rivers, Gods and animals, hobos and madmen, prisoners and sick people, musicians, playful women, and hopeful children:

And if anyone is threatened by advertising, air pollution, television, or the police, they should chant SMOKEY THE BEAR’S WAR SPELL:

DROWN THEIR BUTTS

CRUSH THEIR BUTTS

DROWN THEIR BUTTS

CRUSH THEIR BUTTS

And SMOKEY THE BEAR will surly appear to put the enemy out with his vajra-shovel.

Now those who recite this Sutra and then try to put it in practice will accumulate merit as countless as the sands of Arizona and Nevada.

Will help save the planet Earth from total oil slick. Will enter the age of harmony of man and nature. Will win the tender love and caresses of men, women, and beasts. Will always have ripened blackberries to eat and a sunny spot under a pine tree to sit at.

AND IN THE END WILL WIN HIGHEST PERFECT ENLIGHTENMENT

…thus we have heard…”

“Melancholic depressed patients who are 40 years or older, especially men, appear to show a superior response to the tricyclic antidepressant drug (TCA) nortriptyline, whereas younger patients, especially women, show a superior response to the serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) fluoxetine.

SSRIs and TCAs appear to be equally effective in adults with major depression, however, some studies suggest that TCAs may be superior to SSRIs in depressed patients with melancholic features.”

I am among a subset of psychiatrists who have suspected that the SSRIs are less robust for the most severe forms of depression and that we have lost something from our therapeutic armamentarium in the last decade’s almost total shelving of the tricyclics. In meeting the pharmaceutical companies’ goal of broadening the market for antidepressants, we have lost depth of efficacy in the most serious cases. The study’s finding of the superiority of SSRIs in younger patients, especially women, is a reflection of the fact that depression in the latter demographic is more often the smouldering, chronic atypical kind associated with personality disorders than the acute melancholic episode of devastating severity.

“The downside of a cleaner environment is found in the empty palms of tourists on the long stretches of Cape Cod beaches: There is hardly any sea glass, those muted shards rubbed smooth by endless waves.” Boston Globe Having spent time already this summer on the Cape with two beachcombing children, I had noticed this and wondered if my perception was accurate.

While P2P filesharers locked in an ongoing PR battle against the RIAA are making much of the finding that they are among the heaviest CD buyers in the market, it doesn’t follow that downloading boosts sales of recordings. It strikes me that there’s an easy rejoinder from the music industry. ‘Of course you buy alot, we know you’re interested in music, duh, but you don’t buy as much as you used to or as much as you would if you couldn’t download,’ they might say. Music swappers are more credible, IMHO, when they justify what they’re doing by anti-profit (the record industry appropriates the fruits of artists’ labor; information wants to be free, the rapacious pricing policy of the industry is what is responsible for declining music sales, not us, etc.) rather than disingenuous pro-profit arguments, whatever you think of the merits of the arguments.

“Pop music, Broadway and even opera have succumbed to over-amplification. Listeners are fleeing into the night.” Los Angeles Times

“Creative genius and crime express themselves early in men but both are turned off almost like a tap if a man gets married and has children, a study says.

Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, compiled a database of the biographies of 280 great scientists, noting their age at the time when they made their greatest work.

The data remarkably concur with the brutal observation made by Albert Einstein, who wrote in 1942: ‘A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so.’

‘Scientific productivity indeed fades with age,’ Dr Kanazawa says.

‘Two-thirds (of all scientists) will have made their most significant contributions before their mid-30s.’

But, regardless of age, the great minds who married virtually kissed goodbye to making any further glorious additions to their CV.

Within five years of making their nuptial vows, nearly a quarter of married scientists had made their last significant contribution to history’s hall of fame.

‘Scientists rather quickly desist (from their careers) after their marriage, while unmarried scientists continue to make great scientific contributions later in their lives,’ says Dr Kanazawa.

The energy of youth and the dampening effect of marriage, he adds, are also remarkably similar among geniuses in music, painting and writing, as well as in criminal activity.”

This methodology is unable to determine causality, of course. The conclusion that marriage dampens creativity is unwarranted. It is equally plausible that ‘geniuses’ don’t contemplate settling down until they are slowing their pace, if ever.

Previous studies have documented that delinquents are overwhelmingly male, and usually start out on the road to crime in their teens.

But those who marry well, subsequently stop committing crime, whereas criminals at the same age who remain unmarried tend to continue their unlawful careers.

Should we say, “…criminals at the same age who tend to continue their unlawful careers remain unmarried”?

Warning; severe reductionism follows:

Dr Kanazawa suggests “a single psychological mechanism” is responsible for this: the competitive edge among young men to fight for glory and gain the attention of women.

That craving drives the all-important male hormone, testosterone.

Dr Kanazawa theorises after a man settles down, the testosterone level falls, as does his creative output. ABC News

Hypertags, small electronic tags using infrared signals, can be discreetly attached to information display surfaces such as billboards or walls, to enable mobile-phone or PDA users to receive small amounts of data by pointing and clicking. Wired News Promoters of the technology envision sending URLs where the user could access digital content such as background nformation on an art exhibit, further information on an advertised product, local sightseeing information, further information on an advertised product, direct access to a film’s webpage, further information on an advertised product, get the drift? If this catches on, I predict that the almost endless interesting, innovative and really useful applications (off the top of my head, how about sites to find further information on health conditions or prescription drugs? hypertags on buses or trains sending you someplace to get updated schedule information? directions from central directories to particular locations in large complexes such as university campuses?) will be swamped by the crass pedestrian ones even much more quickly than they came to be on the Internet. On the other hand, I don’t ever foresee wanting to do much surfing on my cellphone or even my PDA. No matter how gorgeous the color, the form factor is inimical to web-browsing and only slightly more useful with “clipped” content. While it wouldn’t be realtime, about the best use I imagine for hypertags would be to dump the collected URLs from my phone or my PDA onto a desktop system later on, for further investigation on a reasonable display.

“A new film by Mel Gibson, to be released next year, depicts Jesus’ last few hours. Jews and Catholics are raising concerns about its potential for stoking anti-Semitism.” Christian Science Monitor

“The downside of a cleaner environment is found in the empty palms of tourists on the long stretches of Cape Cod beaches: There is hardly any sea glass, those muted shards rubbed smooth by endless waves.” Boston Globe Having spent time already this summer on the Cape with two beachcombing children, I had noticed this and wondered if my perception was accurate.

It is a perennial complaint about FmH that it loads very slowly. It has been suggested that I put fewer days’ worth of items on my front page. What do you think? Please take a short readers’ poll. I’d like to see all potential responses by Sunday, July 27, and thank you in advance for your input. You can view the results to date here.

“He’s known as the anti-war candidate whose appeal is to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and some Republicans say if Howard Dean gets the nomination, President Bush will be a sure bet to win a second term.

Not so fast, say some moderate congressional Democrats who would be affected if Dean is at the top of the ticket. He also supports gun rights, the death penalty and a balanced budget.

Republicans and even some moderate Democrats have portrayed Dean as the next George McGovern, who won the 1972 Democratic nomination by appealing to anti-war liberals only to get trounced by a sitting Republican president, Richard Nixon. But behind Dean’s liberal image is his record as Vermont governor of reforming welfare, slashing state spending and cutting taxes for businesses.” Salon

to log onto nearest computer: “Computer scientists at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, wanted to make it easier for staff to log onto networked computers. So they came up with SoundHunters, a program that recognises someone’s voice or laughter and works out which computer is nearest to them. It could then be used to automatically log them on to the computer.” New Scientist

“Human brains are wired to underestimate the amount of force exerted on other people, a study of ‘tit-for-tat’ experiments has revealed.

As well as qualifying the teary ‘she hit me harder’ playground argument and explaining why we can’t tickle ourselves, the discovery may provide insight into some self-delusional symptoms of schizophrenia.” New Scientist

“Criminal charges were dropped against a man whose defense lawyer claimed that drinking jasmine tea made him temporarily insane before he smashed his way into a neighbor’s house and chased the woman with a dagger.” Salon

“Germaine Greer deliberately provokes controversy with the cheapest trick. If there’s a taboo left, she’ll break it, and since one of the few remaining taboos in Western liberal democracies is pedophilia, that’s the arena she’s most recently entered.

Her upcoming glossy book, The Boy, full of pictures of ‘ravishing’ pre-adult boys with hairless chests, wide-apart legs and slim waists, is an ‘art book’, Greer, 64, told this newspaper last week.” Sydney Morning Herald

“In recent weeks, the search for Hussein and dozens of his senior associates and mid-level loyalists has intensified here in his home province of Salahuddin, northwest of Baghdad. Spurred by reports from local informants and intercepted telephone conversations, some U.S. officials say they now believe that the fugitive former president and his closest henchmen may be filtering back here for the protection afforded by a vast network of tribal and family connections.

Almost every raid, officers say, turns up new scraps of evidence — photos, documents with satellite telephone numbers, fake identity cards. Informants — ranging from powerful sheiks to poor farmers — whisper tips, often risking lives and livelihoods. U.S. intelligence units glean tidbits from telephone intercepts, aerial surveillance and gumshoe detective work.” Washington Post

Santa Rosa teacher gave assignment: “A political science instructor at Santa Rosa Junior College is being investigated by the Secret Service for telling his students to compose an e- mail to an elected official that included the words ‘kill the president, kill the president,’ a school administrator said Wednesday.” San Francisco Chronicle The teacher could not be reached for comment, but an administrator at the school explained it had been intended as an “experiential exercise that would instill a sense of fear so they would have a better sense of why more people don’t participate in the political process,” an explanation that does not make much sense to me.

I wonder, if widely blinked to in weblogs, if this item might swamp the Carnivore system (if that’s the one that’s watching all our internet traffic for naughty buzzwords).

Related:

“White House officials discovered a stowaway on a chartered plane for reporters covering President Bush’s Africa trip, and the man was detained by Ugandan authorities.

The Secret Service was notified by a White House aide that the man, who was not identified, had joined the reporters on Friday and flew with them to a compound in Entebbe where the president had several events, said deputy Secret Service director Mark Sullivan.

The United Airlines Boeing 747 carried reporters, photographers, camera crews, White House staff and Secret Service agents. The man, who carried no weapons and had no passport or other identification, boarded in Pretoria, South Africa, and flew to Bush’s next stop, in Entebbe, where he was detained.

The man was shouting as he was led away. ” Salon

Iraq war may have made terror threat worse:

“One of the world’s leading terrorism experts Wednesday told the panel investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that the U.S. invasion of Iraq may have worsened the threat of terrorism.

Prof. Rohan Gunaratna, giving evidence at a public hearing of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also criticized the failures of intelligence and policy he said had turned Afghanistan into a ‘terrorist Disneyland,’ and allowed al-Qaida and other terror groups ‘a free reign.’

Asked by panel member Max Cleland, the war-wounded Vietnam veteran and former Democratic Georgia senator, to comment on the impact of the U.S. military campaign in Iraq, Gunaratna said that deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein — on the run with nothing to lose but with money and possible biological or chemical weapons — might be a bigger threat now than before.” UPI

or a Cultural Collage?: “The Wall Street Journal reported the probable borrowings on Tuesday as front-page news. After recent uproars over historians and journalists who used other researchers’ material without attribution, could it be that the great songwriter was now exposed as one more plagiarist?” NY Times