I have always been a lover of netsuke and have a small collection of them (mostly inexpensive resin reproductions) myself, particularly those depicting demons or folk themes.

John Kerry’s 1961 garage-band LP. [Do we really know it’s that John Kerry??]

The occasion of King’s Kingdom Hospital prompts a consideration of whether television is fundamentally inimical to horror. —MSNBC

On-Line Exhibitions from Harvard’s anthropological museum, where I spent much of my undergraduate years:

• The Ethnography of Lewis and Clark:
  
  Native American Objects and the American Quest for Commerce and Science

• Gifting and Feasting in the Northwest Coast Potlatch
• Rainmakers from the Gods:
  
  Hopi Katsinam

• Against the Winds:
  
  American Indian Running Traditions

• Three Generations of Women Anthropologists
• The Children of Changing Woman

“Translated dialog from the hilarious Suntory Time whiskey commercial scene from the film Lost in Translation” [via Incoming Signals]

“‘If we appear to seek the unattainable, as it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.'” Tom Hayden’s reflections on the 40th anniversary of SDS’ mission statement, which has been surprisingly neglected retrospectively but which has defined the shape of progressive struggle since. Hayden does a wonderful job of capturing the complex sociological trends that coalesced in the nascent student Left of the ’60’s. The extent to which he claims John Dewey and C. Wright Mills as its major intellectual forebears and shows how the genuine American leftism that arose distinguished itself from European Marxism is particularly illuminating. —The Nation [thanks to wood s lot]

“Who’s the best nominee for a vice-presidential ticket? The American Prospect‘s editorial staff and contributors weigh in.”

“How nice would it be if our government wasn’t answering to their corporate masters, but to community concerns?”

William Saletan on Kerry should spin his attacks on Bush. Hint: it’s not by calling him a liar. Saletan suggests that Bush believes fully in what he is doing and is not lying to us, and that it would be political suicide with the voters in the general election to try to challenge him on ‘the honesty thing’. —Slate

Dick Morris says that, in choosing Kerry over Edwards, the Democrats have “broken from the pragmatism and moderation that dominated their party’s profile under Bill Clinton and Al Gore” and returned to the liberal extremism that was their downfall under Mondale and Dukakis in the ’80’s. Morris predicts Kerry will be easy prey and, despite the buzzword, that he is unelectable. He suggests Bush “take advantage of this by implementing a three-part strategy in the coming campaign”. The first prong of the strategy is the predictable focus on Kerry’s liberalism; Morris pooh poohs the suggestion that the Bush campaign might avoid negative ads, although it is not clear to me that anyone ever seriously doubted how dirty the campaign is going to be. But, outrageously, the second and third prongs of the Bush ‘campaign’ are actually suggestions for administration policy decisions. First, he should elevate the sense of threat Americans feel to raise the profile of the War-on-Terror® “so that his advantage as a war president begins to count.” Second, he should bring the American troops home from Iraq in time to stop the body counts in advance of the election. Morris authored Off With Their Heads: Traitors, Crooks, and Obstructionists in American Politics, Media, and Business.

“‘After 3,000 people were murdered on his watch, it seems to me that that takes an awful lot of audacity. Honestly, it’s in poor taste.'” —New York Daily News

…presented on the same scale. Boston is in the works; someone send him a map of BART.

A newly-discovered primitive hominid species living in what is now Ethiopia about 5.5 million to 5.8 million years ago was “one of the earliest known human ancestors, perhaps one of the first to emerge after the chimpanzee and human lineages diverged from a common ancestor some six million to eight million years ago.” —New York Times [via dangerousmeta]

By this time next year, for $200, this smart card could replace virtually your entire wallet. —Wired. After you read all your existing cards into its PDA-like ‘Pocket Vault’ holder, it will show an icon on its touch screen representing each of your credit cards, bank cards and (if you use them; I don’t) customer loyalty cards. You tap the one you want to use and it clones the account data into the ‘Chameleon Card’, which you can swipe as you would the original card. The Pocket Vault is biometrically protected by scanning your fingerprint and the Chameleon Card becomes inoperable within ten minutes, so the system cannot be used by anyone else if lost or stolen. It has RFID chip capability built in to replace Exxon-Mobil Speedpass and similar applications as well. Chameleon is reportedly within weeks of getting major credit companies and financial institutions to sign on with them.

Do I sound like I am waxing enthusiastic over this concept? I would probably be interested in one of these things (I’m not sure the $200 price point appeals to me, though), but I have two misgivings — I cannot carry it in my back pocket like my wallet, and it will add another gizmo to my current load of PDA, cellphone, mp3 player and digital camera. Although in general I do not approve of convergent, combination devices, since in general they don’t (yet) do the job as well as the independent devices they replace, I can easily envision this system incorporated into my everyday PDA instead. PalmOne ought to license the technology from them, IMHO…

“North Korea’s state-controlled media are well known for reverential reporting about Kim Jong-il, the country’s dictatorial leader.

But the Dear Leader is not the only one getting deferential treatment from the communist state’s propaganda machine: John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic candidate, is also getting good play in Pyongyang.

In the past few weeks, speeches by the Massachusetts senator have been broadcast on Radio Pyongyang and reported in glowing terms by the Korea Central News Agency (KCNA), the official mouthpiece of Mr Kim’s communist regime.” —Financial Times

Of course, the rabid right is going to have a field day with this story, propagandizing about how Kerry is dangerous to national security, a Commie sympathizer, etc. Of course, what it really indicates is the contemptible utter failure of diplomacy under Bush. After the collapse of the latest round of multilateral talks about the North Korean nuclear issue, it became clear that Pyongyang is waiting for the possibility that Bush will be defeated and they will be able to deal with someone more reasonable than his demonizing hawks.

“Its alleged anti-semitism isn’t the only problem with Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. There’s also the small matter of it being in Aramaic. To help enrich your enjoyment, here is a handy glossary of useful terms.” —Guardian.UK

“‘The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies.

The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association strongly opposes a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to heterosexual couples.'” —[via Arthur Hlavaty]

Ted Rall’s work has been dropped from the New York Times’ online editorial cartoon page. The Times said that, while respecting free speech rights, they had an obligation not to offend the sensibilities of their readers and that Rall’s work did not fit the “tone” they try to set. Rall attributes the decision to Republican pressure and an orchestrated campaign against him since the controversial March, 2002 “Terror Widows” cartoon that placed him on rightwing hit lists.

It is pretty outrageous, indeed, but I thought that defense of free speech means defending content that you don’t like, content that, ummm, offends sensibilities. By that same token, the New York Times has no obligation to run his work, but the assertion that they are responding to the discomfort of their readers cannot be made without acknowledging the rightwing attack dog tactics at work these days. Since 9-11, defense of certain unpleasant free speech has become markedly less popular in the face of risks that it will get one labelled a terrorist sympathizer.

Noting that he derives no income from the Times‘ carrying his cartoons, he asks for the assistance of those concerned with this partisan censorship. You can write to the CEO of New York Times Digital, a letter to the editor of the Times, and New York Times ombudsperson Daniel Okrent.

If you think Bush is a tool of corporate interests already, consider the evidence fora deliberate Republican strategy to bankrupt the government and prompt privatization of most of its functions, says Michael Meurer.

“Visit the websites of any of the major right wing think tanks from which this administration has drawn its highest officials, and you will find entire sections of archived documents and books arguing the case for privatization of nearly the entire public sector.

From the American Enterprise Institute to the Heritage Foundation, from the Hoover Institution to the Cato Institute to the Reason Foundation, privatization has been a prime objective of the right for the past 25 years. The National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) even provides a handy list of potential targets for privatization.” —truthout

Maureen Dowd: “You’ve got to admire the Bush re-election ads being rolled out today. With up to $60 million to spend by convention time, the campaign is plotting the most expensive political advertising seduction in history, and you can see the money on the screen.

In scary/gauzy images, the president does his best to shift the blame, take the credit and transmit concern about regular folks — waitresses, welders, firefighters, black children, black seniors, middle-class families — when he really spends more time helping his fat-cat corporate friends.

Mr. Bush continues to imply that we should be scared because we’re not safe, so we need to keep him to protect our national security. Which seems like a weird contradiction. If he’s so good at protecting us, why aren’t we safe?

The president doesn’t hesitate to exploit 9/11 in his ads, even as he tries to keep 9/11 orphans and widows in the dark about what really happened.

Mr. Bush’s ad flashes a shot of firefighters removing some flag-draped remains of a victim from the wreckage at ground zero even as he prohibits the filming of flag-draped remains of soldiers coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan. You might call the Bush ads, an homage to Ronald Reagan’s famous ads, ‘Mourning in America.’

Nothing like hypocrisy with high production values.” —New York Times op-ed

The Bush administration has often vowed not to repeat the Cold War mistake of embracing useful dictators while ignoring their domestic policies, especially in Muslim states such as Uzbekistan. “With …tiny gestures the leader of Central Asia’s most populous country seeks to sway one of the most important decisions the Bush administration will make this year about its alliances in the war on terrorism. Though his tokenism could not be more transparent, the dictator’s chances of succeeding look better than they should.

Since 2001, Uzbekistan, a former Soviet republic bordering Afghanistan, has hosted U.S. planes and troops and received substantial U.S. military and economic aid. Mr. Karimov, a former Soviet Politburo member who proposed and signed a ‘strategic partnership’ agreement with the Bush administration two years ago, hopes for a long-term basing arrangement. The Pentagon is considering just such a deal; Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld visited Tashkent last week and lauded ‘the wonderful cooperation we’ve received from the government of Uzbekistan.’

There’s one hitch: The partnership deal Mr. Karimov signed promised a far-reaching democratic transformation, including multiparty elections, a free press and an independent judiciary. Not only has Uzbekistan implemented none of those reforms, it hasn’t even stopped torturing prisoners. Ms. Mukadirova’s son died after prison guards pulled out his fingernails and plunged his body into boiling water…” —Washington Post editorial

“A war of words is breaking out between the creators of the Netsky, Bagle and MyDoom Windows worms.

The malicious programs’ creators are putting taunts and insults in successive variants of their viruses.

The spat began because Bagle’s creators are jealous of all the media attention that the Netsky virus is getting…

The war of words has being conducted via fresh variants of the viruses which have different messages hidden inside them.

There are now nine versions of Bagle, six versions of Netsky and seven versions of Mydoom circulating online.” —BBC

“There are good reasons why Africans don’t view their fauna with the same sentimentality that Europeans do”. After reviewing the “respect tinged with fear” that characterizes the attitude of Africans toward the wildlife whose destructive incursions they have to live, the essayist draws a parallel with the the way Europeans once regarded the wolf and the bear. The difference is that Africa’s big beasts have not been exterminated by their human co-inhabitants.

“In whatever form it takes – the slaughter of the ‘big five’ by white hunters in the colonial era, or the demand for ivory and rhino horn which continues to drive poaching today – the biggest danger to Africa’s animals has always come from outside the continent. And while in Hollywood’s imagination, it is usually westerners like Joy Adamson or Dian Fossey who are thought to be at the forefront of the conservation struggle, there are many Africans who take a leading role in preserving their wildlife.” —Guardian.UK

Molly Ivins: “Anyone see any reason to think Haiti will be better off without Jean-Bertrand Aristide? Just another little gift from the Bush foreign policy team, straight out of the whacko-right playbook.

Jesse Helms always did think Aristide was another Fidel, not being able to distinguish between a Catholic and a communist. We know the main armed opposition group is a bunch of thugs and that they have been joined by old Duvalierists, including members of the Tonton Macoutes, the infamous torturers.

The Bush administration wanted this to happen – it held up $500 million worth of humanitarian aid from the United States, World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and International Monetary Fund. Without U.S. or multilateral help, the country spiraled downward.

So here we are, reduced to hoping for the best again.” —AlterNet

How a finely tuned pair of nostrils keeps the US space corps from stinking to high heaven.: “Even a little bit of air pollution can turn into a major problem in the cramped quarters of a space vehicle – silent but deadly. At the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, NASA odor-testing panels mount ‘smelling missions’ to determine whether something on board a spacecraft will convey that not-so-fresh feeling. Their method: Stick some guy’s nose in it.” —Wired

The Philadelphia woman’s ten-day old infant had supposedly died in her crib in a house fire six years previously. She was convinced that the little girl at the birthday party was her own daughter, however; on a pretext, she obtained several strands of her hair and confirmed her hunch with DNA testing. The girl had been kidnapped from her crib by a family acquaintance (with a history of a prior arson conviction) who raised her as her own after setting the fire as a cover. — Atlanta Journal Constitution

First redesign of the lowly nickel in 66 years. Jefferson remains on the front but, on the rear, Monticello is gone in favor of a commemoration of the Louisiana Purchase (left). Another new nickel acknowledging the Lewis and Clark expedition (right) debuts this fall. — Chicago Tribune

The anatomy of prion disease: “In the novel Cat’s Cradle, an eccentric scientist develops a substance called Ice-9 that crystallizes every drop of water it touches. Eventually, it freezes the world’s oceans.

Now, 40 years after writer Kurt Vonnegut imagined Ice-9, researchers think his creation is the perfect analogy for the renegade proteins that destroy the brains of people infected by the human form of mad-cow disease.

Once prion diseases infect a body, the proteins change shape and, with a kiss of death, turn their neighbors into clones of themselves. Clumps of misshapen proteins form, overwhelming neurons and poking holes in the brain. Death is inevitable.” — Wired

Bill would let certain companies own facts, and exact a fee to access them: “Ostensibly, the Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act (HR3261) makes it a crime for anyone to copy and redistribute a substantial portion of data collected by commercial database companies and list publishers. But critics say the bill would give the companies ownership of facts — stock quotes, historical health data, sports scores and voter lists. The bill would restrict the kinds of free exchange and shared resources that are essential to an informed citizenry, opponents say.” — Wired

Jimmy Breslin in Newsday on how the hub hub about the proposed marriage amendment and the controversy over the Mel Gibson film obscured notice of two remarkably important news stories — Alan Greenspan’s forecast of the demise of social security and the approval of the first cancer drug that works by inhibiting tumor angiogenesis. [thanks, adam]

“Dressed in black, a 35-year-old Frenchwoman has married her boyfriend.

But Christel Demichel’s wedding needed special permission because her policeman boyfriend, Eric, was killed by a hit-and-run driver 18 months ago.

The bride said she knew some people might be shocked but Eric’s death had not dimmed her feelings for him.

The wedding at Nice city hall, attended by the couple’s close friends and family, took place on what would have been Mr Demichel’s 30th birthday.” [A rarely-invoked law allowing posthumous marriages was introduced by Charles de Gaulle.] —BBC [thanks, Pam]

“Researchers in Austria and Germany measured the smallest time interval recorded, and found it lasted a ten million billionth of a second.

It’s about ten times shorter than the previous shortest measured interval, which lasted about one femtosecond or a million billionth of a second.” —Ananova

“French cinema chains are refusing to distribute or screen Mel Gibson’s controversial film The Passion of the Christ because of fears it will spark a new outbreak of anti-Semitism.” —Chicago Sun-Times

“A disturbing though little publicized movement is afoot in American education to transform the study of art into what is termed Visual Culture Studies. It seeks to broaden the proper sphere of art education–the visual arts–to include every kind of visible artifact. To quote the prospectus of a recently established academic program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison:

Anything visible is a potential object of study for Visual Culture, and the worthiness of any visual object or practice, as an object of study depends not on its inherent qualities, as in the work of art, but on its place within the context of the whole of culture.

In other words, one can henceforth treat the Nike of Samothrace and Michelangelo’s David, say, on a par with Mattel Toys’ Barbie and Ken dolls.” —Aristos

The first arts festival staged by people facing death will feature works from beyond the grave. “Ranging in age from 20 to 80, sufferers from cancer, HIV/Aids, motor neurone disease, multiple sclerosis and other incurable conditions will participate at London’s Riverside Studios, once home to BBC classics such as Dixon of Dock Green, Dr Who and Hancock’s Half Hour and now one of London’s flagship cultural centres.” —Guardian.UK

“Dr. Seuss is getting a United States postage stamp, a statue and, on March 11, a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. It’s all part of a bicoastal celebration of the centennial of Theodor Geisel, best known as Dr. Seuss, the man responsible for the Grinch, the Cat in the Hat and the Lorax, among other unforgettable creatures.” —New York Times. Please, though, don’t let the likes of Jim Carey and Michael Myers be the medium through which Dr. Seuss is filtered to the next generation!

rosebaby says: “go make a tick mark – even though it’s just USA Today, i don’t want those people thinking that a constitutional amendment promoting discrimination is ok.

USA Today is conducting a poll on the proposed constitutional amendment prohibiting same sex marriage. These USA Today polls can influence public debate.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-02-24-gay-marriage-survey.htm

note: um, apparently you can vote as many times as you want.”

Addendum: Not exactly a scientific sample of public opinion, but FWIW voting in this poll is running 4:1 against a constitutional marriage amendment, as of when I am writing this.

Josh Marshall tells us he went skiing for the first time in his 35-year life this weekend and learned about the virtues of controlling your rate of descent. He heartily recommends that philosophy to the president as well…

The US is issuing vociferous denials of deposed Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s claims that he was essentially kidnapped by armed US Marines and taken to the airport for his flight from Haiti. Aristide has insisted on this version of the story in phone conversations with members of the Congressional Black Caucus and an interview with CNN from the Central African Republic. I can see the importance of the US disputing his assertion that he was forced to leave against his will but his accusation seems to come down to the US persuading him that his departure could avoid a bloodbath and was in the best interests of the Haitian people. It is hard for me to understand why Colin Powell would have to deny this essentially humanitarian concern, and it would do no harm to agree that they took steps to protect him and his family by escorting him to the airport, so it is probably not true, although Colin Powell is certainly the dysadministration’s most artful liar-on-command. A spokesperson for the Central African Republic joins the US in insisting that Aristede himself asked for asylum there, while admitting that the US also intervened on his behalf to help find him a safe haven after another country refused to accept him. Colin Powell does admit that Aristede called the US ambassador to Haiti for advice and received support for resigning, and also says that after he decided to step down the US government “made arrangements for his departure”, which included bringing in a leased plane for his exit. Is it kidnapping if a group of armed men comes to your house unannounced and tells you you must accompany them away? How about if they tell you it is to protect you from almost certain death if you do not go along?

It also makes an odd kind of sense why Aristide would be enraged at the US and why that might turn into a clumsy ‘sour grapes’ accusation. There is a broader sense in which even if we did not have him physically kidnapped and spirited out of the country the US bears responsibility for what, of course, does amount to a coup. Haiti is essentially a ‘failed state’ that could not have existed without having been propped up largely by US foreign aid as well as prior military interventions. A veneer of quasi-democracy had been imposed upon a mixture of criminal thuggery, anarchy, class and even race war. The accident waiting to happen in Haiti whenever the US pulled the rug out from under it was a consequence of post-colonialism and misguided American noblesse oblige. It was only better than the alternatives for as long as the US would continue to support it. Whatever the merits and abuses of the Aristide regime, he knew he lived or died at the US State Department’s whim. Of course, the previous administrations that ‘enabled’ Aristide could not have foreseen that the Bush regime would only be invested in fostering ‘democracy’ in oil-laden Middle Eastern states laden with fundamentalist infidels and vital to our permanent WoT® footing.

But the consensus line —

President

Jean-Bertrand Aristide was… an undemocratic leader who

betrayed Haiti’s democratic hopes and thereby lost the support of his

erstwhile backers. He “stole” elections and intransigently refused to

address opposition concerns. As a result he had to leave office, which

he did at the insistence of the US and France.

— is subject to considerable doubt. Another version, exemplified by Jeffrey Sachs’ piece in the Financial Times, has it that the Bush administration’s sights have been set on toppling Aristide since they came to office, seeing him as a ‘Castro-like’ figure who could foment Western Hemisphere anti-Americanism from a populist base.

Such critics fulminated when President Bill

Clinton restored Mr Aristide to power in 1994, and they succeeded in

getting US troops withdrawn soon afterwards, well before the country

could be stabilised. In terms of help to rebuild Haiti, the US Marines

left behind about eight miles of paved roads and essentially nothing

else.

The political opposition that was galvanized by undermining Aristide, and likely to be the benificiaries of his overthrow, is an ‘American construction’, the remnants of dictator ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier’s regime, cronies of the CIA in one of the puppet regimes it was so fond of in our Caribbean and Latin America backyards. This puts a very different spin on the claims that Aristide ignored opposition concerns and that his popular mandate was illegitimate because the opposition boycotted the process. Again, I am not saying that the neo-cons needed to send Marines in to put Aristide on a plane. But their take on Haiti shaped US policy decisions during the last three years that made his overthrow just as sure as if we had.

Alot of what is happening in Haiti can easily be lost in translation, hinging on semantic differences about what constitutes “voluntarily” yielding power and the nuances of the word ‘kidnapping’; but also what in the Haitian context constitutes ‘democracy’, ‘opposition’, ‘legitimacy’ or even ‘nation’. Aristede’s ‘kidnapping’ accusation should be seen as the kind of lyrical symbolism connoting deeper underlying truths that seems to come so much more readily from Francophones but which can only be treated as a concrete black-or-white issue in the more literal English of Washington.

Why Brain Structure Makes Unintended Shootings Inevitable:

“The police killing of an unarmed 19-year-old on a Brooklyn rooftop last month appears to be a tragedy of nanoseconds and eons, a death delivered by a cop firing not because of a conscious decision but an instantaneous neuronal impulse hardwired from the days of our animal ancestors.

And there’s an obvious subtext of race. The shooter, officer Richard S. Neri Jr., is white. The victim, Timothy Stansbury Jr., was black. Scientific research has a say here too, probing whether our rawest reflexes can be primed by modern fears based on race.

Scientists are intensely studying the amygdala, a pair of almond-shaped neuron clusters inside the brain, to understand its role in post-traumatic stress disorder. The amygdala encodes memory with emotional weight, but it also alerts us to sensory information that we associate with danger. It’s the jittery small mammal inside us, always awaiting loud noises, sudden movements, and glints of teeth. The more we expect a threat, the more excitable it becomes.” —Village Voice

“Some parents may think it is undignified or detrimental, but babytalk is essential to the full development of a baby’s brain, says a researcher at the University of Alberta.

Babytalk, the universal cooing that mothers and fathers do to get their babies’ attention, is more important than we may have ever realized, says Dr. David Miall, professor of English at the U of A.

Babytalk helps infants to develop an understanding and appreciation of temporal arts, such as literature, music, and dance, and depriving babies of the alliteration, assonance, and other poetic elements inherent in babytalk could hinder their ability to produce and appreciate these arts when they grow up, says Miall, whose research was published recently in the journal Human Nature–An Interdisciplinary Biosocial Perspective.” EurekAlert!

“The television airwaves have been filled for the last several days with a lot of back-and-forth about Mel Gibson’s new film, ‘The Passion of The Christ.’ A great deal of debate centers around whether Gibson has fashioned a broadside against Jewish people in the manner of the Medieval anti-Semitic passion plays of old… My question is much simpler: Why would Mel Gibson make a movie about people in the ancient Middle East and cast it with so many white people? To look at the central actors in this film, you’d think Jesus did his work near Manchester, New Hampshire instead of the Holy Land..” —William Rivers Pitt, truthout

“On a remote island in Patagonia, the last six speakers of Kawesqar struggle to find the right words. What gets lost when a language dies?” —New York Times Magazine

Do we really want chocolate in every course? Yes. “Used sparingly as a spice or flavoring, chocolate can enhance everything from lobster to foie gras.” —New York Times Magazine

T-Mobile Preparing Multi-Network Service: “At last week’s 3GSM World Congress, T-Mobile announced plans for a new service that will allow users to easily roam between various types of wireless networks.

At the conference in France, T-Mobile CEO Rene Obermann said his company is planning a new service that will let subscribers use either GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), W-CDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access), or Wi-Fi (802.11b), with their hardware device automatically choosing whichever is the better option at the time.” —Brighthand

Just like George Bush, as Dean claimed in the heat of battle? “It is true that Kerry, another Yalie and Skull and Bones alum, has voted in favor of NAFTA and other corporate-friendly trade pacts, that he once raised questions about affirmative action (while still supporting it), that he has, like almost every Democratic senator, accepted contributions from special-interest lobbyists (while being one of the few to eschew political action committee donations), that he voted to grant Bush the authority to invade Iraq. But this hardly makes him Bush lite. There is, as evidence, his nineteen-year Senate record, during which he has voted consistently in favor of abortion rights and environmental policies, opposed Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy, led the effort against drilling in the Alaskan wilderness, pushed for higher fuel economy standards, advocated boosting the minimum wage and pressed for global warming remedies. But what distinguishes Kerry’s career are key moments when he displayed guts and took tough actions that few colleagues would imitate. One rap on Kerry is that he is overly cautious and conventional. He’s no firebrand on the stump, nor does he come across as the most passionate and exciting force for change. But his history in Washington includes episodes in which he demonstrated a willingness to confront hard issues, to challenge power, to pursue values rather than political advantage, to take risks for the public interest.” —David Corn, CommonDreams

A Potful of Problems: “Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn and Councilman Eric Garcetti want to sell off the city.

On Tuesday, at their instigation, a City Council committee kicked around the idea of creating an official city beverage or setting up some other kind of licensing deal. From there, it’s only a short step to selling off the naming rights to municipal buildings, parks or neighborhoods. Who can doubt that that’s where they’re heading?

Yes, the city faces a $250-million deficit next year. But the idea of granting naming rights to the highest bidder is a recipe for civic humiliation. The city’s participation in any marketing deal will provide an implicit or explicit endorsement of a corporation and its products.

It’s happened elsewhere. Snapple is the official beverage of New York City, with the company paying $166 million over five years for that designation. Coca-Cola has signed marketing deals with Huntington Beach (for $600,000 a year), and East Lansing, Mich. (for $2 million over 10 years), while PepsiCo has agreements with San Diego (up to $23.6 million over 12 years), and Fresno (for $625,000 over five years).” —Gary Ruskin (Commercial Alert), CommonDreams

Apparently Scalia’s hunting trip with Cheney in the lead-up to hearing his case on the Supreme Court is not the first time the Supreme Court Justice whored for the old-boy network.: “Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was the guest of a Kansas law school two years ago and went pheasant hunting on a trip arranged by the school’s dean, all within weeks of hearing two cases in which the dean was a lead attorney.

The cases involved issues of public policy important to Kansas officials. Accompanying Scalia on the November 2001 hunting trip were the Kansas governor and the recently retired state Senate president, who flew with Scalia to the hunting camp aboard a state plane.” —CommonDreams We might want to begin talking about more than recusals here…

“A tiny Scottish village called Lost is to change its name because souvenir hunters keep stealing its road signs…

Seven signs, each costing around 200 pounds ($400) to replace, had been stolen in the last five years, Luffman said. He said signs had been spotted as far away as Montreal and Brazil.” —Tahoo! News

“The television airwaves have been filled for the last several days with a lot of back-and-forth about Mel Gibson’s new film, ‘The Passion of The Christ.’ A great deal of debate centers around whether Gibson has fashioned a broadside against Jewish people in the manner of the Medieval anti-Semitic passion plays of old… My question is much simpler: Why would Mel Gibson make a movie about people in the ancient Middle East and cast it with so many white people? To look at the central actors in this film, you’d think Jesus did his work near Manchester, New Hampshire instead of the Holy Land..” —William Rivers Pitt, truthout

“Humans are hardwired to feel empathy, suggests a new imaging study showing that certain pain-processing regions of the brain light up when a loved-one is hurt.

But no one actually ‘feels’ the physical pain of the ones they love. The UK researchers suggest that empathy is the result of our brain running a virtual simulation that represents only part of the other person’s experience.

‘That’ s probably why empathy doesn’t feel like pain in your hand,’ says Tania Singer, a neuroscientist at the University College London, who led the study. ‘It feels like when you anticipate your own pain. Your heart races, your emotions are engaged. It’s like a smaller copy of the overall experience.'” —New Scientist I have previously written about so-called ‘mirror neurons’ discovered in othe primates and presumably active in humans as well, which activate brain regions mirroring the activity in another individual we are watching. This is more confirmation of what I suspect is a neurological basis for empathy. This New Scientist article states that humans are the only creatures capable of empathy, which has most likely been strongly selected for, given the adaptive advantages that would be provided by such a direct indication of the feelings or intentions of another with whom we are interacting. By extension, this is one of the foundations for social life. I doubt, both on the basis of the ‘mirror neuron’ evidence and the social organization of primate life, that we are the only species capable of empathy in this sense.

Meanwhile, I share the interest many behavioral scientists have in autism, which may provide crucial clues about the neurobiological fundaments of social life. The Boston Globe discusses the approach of Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, whose work I have previously discussed here and who feels that ‘mind-reading capacity’ (which he distinguishes in a not entirely convincing way from ’empathy’ by using a nonintuitive, narrow definition of the latter) is hard-wired. He also feels it is an essential basis for social interaction and ascribes the social deficits of autistic patients to defects in their mind-reading capacity. This may be the foundation for the oft-mentioned impairment in autistics’ capacity for ‘theory of mind’, in short the ability to envision others around one having internal experiences and feelings similar to one’s own. Studies have shown that autistic subjects do not use the specialized person-perception circuitry humans have evolved but rather process their perceptions of people in different brain regions which are involved in the perception of objects. Baron-Cohen feels he can measure ‘mind-reading capacity’ with a test that taps into one’s ability to decipher someone’s internal state by reading subtle clues in their eyes. Baron-Cohen also has another test you can take to measure your AQ, or autistic quotient (abit simplistic but, presumably, the higher your AQ the lower your ‘mind-reading’ ability). I recently heard Fred Volkmar, an autism researcher at Yale, present his fascinating work in this area. Using Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as a source of rich emotional interplay without much ‘action’, he shows with eye-tracking cameras that autistic subjects do not follow the flow of emotion in the characters’ interaction but focus on out-of-context cues. Interestingly, they in particular do not look at the eyes of the characters, often preferring to focus on their mouths.

Medical journal says it regrets publishing Wakefield’s research on MMR. Controversy has raged for years, particularly in the UK, over reports of a link between MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) immunization and the development of autism. Now The Lancet, the British medical journal in which the original findings of Andrew Wakefield were published, finds that his report was compromised by undeclared conflict of interest and other methodological and ethical flaws in his research design which, had the editors known, should have precluded the publication of the findings. Rates of MMR vaccination in the UK have declined significantly in the wake of news of this putative association. —Nature

“A $10,000 reward offered by the “Doonesbury” comic strip for proof that President Bush (news – web sites) served in the Alabama National Guard during the Vietnam War has elicited over 1,300 responses but turned up no credible evidence yet, the cartoonist said on Friday.

With so much controversy surrounding Bush’s National Guard service, a credible witness would have turned up by now if there was one, said Garry Trudeau. ” —Yahoo! News

‘As tonight’s ceremony approaches, the foreign-language category remains Oscar’s annual head-scratcher. Ask anyone in the industry about this year’s nominees — which include one critical hit, “The Barbarian Invasions” from Canada, and four films that barely register — and you’ll find varying levels of bafflement. “For the most part, of the films that are selected, I don’t think anyone understands why,” says Ryan Werner, head of distribution at Wellspring, which releases a number of foreign titles each year. Mark Urman, of ThinkFilm, says, “I can’t tell you how many people were shocked by the nominations this year.” Both were hoping their company’s films would be included, but their sentiments are shared by executives and voters alike.’ —New York Times

A New York Times editorial comes out for not throwing the Hubble Space Telescope on the rubbish heap for Bush’s pie-in-the-sky space exploration scheme.

“Pentagon and Pakistani officials on Saturday denied an Iranian state radio report that Osama bin Laden was captured in Pakistan’s border region with Afghanistan “a long time ago.”

The claim came as Pakistan’s army hunted terror suspects in a remote tribal region along the border, believed to be a possible hiding place for the al-Qaida’s leader.

The director of Iran radio’s Pashtun language service, Asheq Hossein, said the report was based on two sources — one of whom later told The Associated Press he was misquoted.

The report said bin Laden had been in custody for a period of time, but that President Bush was withholding any announcement until closer to November elections.” —Yahoo! News

Funny, at dinner just the other night, I had suggested the same paranoid conspiracy theory. My dinner companions shared the skepticism of the Pentagon and its Pakistani allies . I am not convinced.

In the nursery rhyme, Jack

fell down and broke his crown.

Why was Jack wearing a crown?

If he was a prince, why

was he fetching a pail of water?

Or was he a boy

pretending to be a prince?

Or was it rather the crown

of his head? If so it must

have been quite a fall to pitch

him that headlong. And who

was Jill and why

did she come tumbling after?

What made these two

so accident prone?

Did Jack care?

No. He was an empty boy.

—Ron Padgett

“Only a few short years ago, when the APOD editors were in graduate school, the pervasive, cosmic Dark Energy was not even seriously discussed. Of course, it now appears that this strange energy dominates the cosmos (as well as lectures on cosmology) and provides a repulsive force accelerating the large scale expansion of the Universe. In fact, recent brightness measurements of distant and therefore ancient, stellar explosions or supernovae indicate that the universal expansion began to speed up in earnest four to six billion years ago, when the Dark Energy’s repulse force began to overcome the attractive force of gravity over cosmic distances. The Hubble Space telescope images above show a sample of the distant supernova explosions, billions of light-years away, in before (top) and after (bottom) images of their faint host galaxies. Hubble measured supernovae also hint that the Dark Energy’s repulsive force is constant over cosmic time and so could be consistent with Einstein’s original theory of gravitation. If the force actually changes with time, the Universe could still end in a Big Crunch or a Big Rip … but not for an estimated 30 billion years.” —APOD

“Justices of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled 5-2 Monday in favor of full, equal, and mandatory gay marriages for all citizens. The order nullifies all pre-existing heterosexual marriages and lays the groundwork for the 2.4 million compulsory same-sex marriages that will take place in the state by May 15.

‘As we are all aware, it’s simply not possible for gay marriage and heterosexual marriage to co-exist,’ Massachusetts Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall said. ‘Our ruling in November was just the first step toward creating an all-gay Massachusetts.'” —The Onion

Andrew Sullivan on Bush’s bigotry amendment proposal. “Those of us who supported this president in 2000, who have backed him whole-heartedly during the war, who have endured scorn from our peers as a result, who trusted that this president was indeed a uniter rather than a divider, now know the truth.” He nails it elegantly — Bush is dragging the Constitution into the culture wars, and all for narrow re-election purposes. Unfortunately, abit of schadenfreude is in order here; too bad Sullivan didn’t see sooner how antithetical Bush is to his lifestyle and human dignity.

“More than 300 Web sites and blogs staged a 24-hour online protest yesterday over a record company’s efforts to stop them from offering downloadable copies of ‘The Grey Album.’ A popular underground collection of music, ‘The Grey Album’ mixes tracks from the Beatles’ classic White Album with raps from Jay-Z’s latest release, ‘The Black Album.’

The protesters billed the event as ‘Grey Tuesday,’ calling it ‘a day of coordinated civil disobedience,’ during which more than 150 sites offered the album for download. Recording industry lawyers saw it as 24 hours of mass copyright infringement and sent letters to the Web sites demanding that they not follow through on the protest.” —New York Times

From a toilet. “Visitors to Britain will find a new stop on London’s site-seeing route this spring: a usable public toilet enclosed in one-way mirrored glass situated on a sidewalk near the River Thames. The contemporary art exhibit, which allows the user to see out while passers-by cannot peep in, toys with the concepts of privacy and voyeurism.”

Karen Armstrong starts with an observation about the popularity of children’s literature dealing with misery and sorrow (she mentions Jacqueline Wilson, with whom I am not familiar, but that darned Lemony Snicket series comes to mind) and ends up extolling the value of an unflinching look at the misery and sorrow that surrounds us in the real world.

“Increasingly it is becoming unacceptable to voice legitimate distress. If you lose your job, become chronically ill, or fall prey to loneliness or depression, you are likely to be told – often abrasively – to look on the bright side. With unseemly haste, people rush to put an optimistic gloss on a disaster or to suggest a patently unworkable solution. We seem to be cultivating an intolerance of pain – even our own. An acquaintance once told me that quite the most difficult aspect of her cancer was her friends’ strident insistence that she develop a positive attitude, and her guilt at being unable to do so.” —Guardian.UK

One of Armstrong’s corollaries is the danger of fundamentalist religion, with its ‘anaesthetic approach’ both in personal and political life. Although it is a sweeping generalization, this arguably predisposes fundamentalism against an all-embracing compassionate approach to others’ suffering. [I have previously aroused the ire of at least one FmH reader by endorsing another weblogger’s observation about the impaired capacity for empathy that underlies neo-conservatism.] Armstrong ends with where she must have begun, with the Buddhist outlook which is integral to her message; the centrality of suffering (rooted in impermanence) is embodied in the first of its Four Noble Truths. In a modern psychiatric context too, I have long been intrigued by the adaptive advantages that probably underlie the persistence of the depressive outlook in the modern psyche.

“This time around, the Democratic establishment has been hyperventilating about Ralph. They should pass out a few brown paper bags at party headquarters and tell the elders to breathe into them until they calm down.” —Guardian.UK [thanks, miguel]

And: Ralph Nader Requests Secret Service Protection: “The two leading Democratic presidential hopefuls will soon have something else in common with Ralph Nader.

Immediately after announcing his intention to run for President as an Independent candidate, Nader put in a formal request for the same Secret Service protection that John Kerry and John Edwards receive.

By law, a candidate is eligible for Federal protection if a series of standards are met, including public prominence as measured by polls and fund raising. Or, as in Nader’s case, if 63 million registered Democrats want to kill him.” —The Specious Report (“spreading rumors, half-truths and misinformation since 1789”) [thanks, walker]

“Activists in two states launched campaigns to urge voters to cast paper absentee ballots in their March primaries, warning that the electronic, paperless voting machines used in those states are open to fraud and may not count votes accurately.

The California Voter Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan voter education organization, and the Campaign for Verifiable Voting, a Maryland citizens group, cited concerns about insecurities of the electronic voting systems and the lack of paper audit trails to assure voters that their ballots are cast and counted correctly.” —Wired News

At least intermittently throughout the existence of FmH, I have shared the confusion about the point of weblogging that is one of the hallmarks of any weblogger trying to do anything more serious than an online ‘dear diary.’ One of the forms it took once upon a time during the buildup to the invasion of Iraq (and, indeed, the bombing of Afghanistan) was consternation about the lack of civil exchanges with the ‘warbloggers’. But eventually I became comfortable with my dismissal of both their ideas and their rhetorical tactics, and that was when the trouble began. Of course people continue to take offense at my relentless condemnation of the dysadministration and the fact that I demonstrate no intention to respect their feelings on the matter. [That others may find it boring in its relentlessness is another matter, and is of concern to me…]. It’s not just that I have my opinion, it’s as if I am saying, but it’s that my opinion is better. [That is what I am saying, and I would contend that that is what everyone feels about their beliefs; it is just that I am more explicit about saying so.] Months ago, there were several exchanges here about whether my opinionation represents closed-mindedness. It was the first time I noticed, in Rebecca Blood’s usage, the term “echo chamber” connoting people only echoing like-minded ideas around and around the net and never engaging in constructive dialogue with people whose opinions differ from theirs. Now it is apparently the newest darling meme. Since the Dean campaign, largely net-based, collapsed, folk wisdom has it that the insular “echo chamber” nature of the online Dean community contributed to the downfall by somehow impairing participants’ abilities to respond to realities instead of lulling themselves with out-of-touch colllective beliefs.

This Salon essay by David Weinburger dismantles both this notion of what went wrong with Dean and, more importantly, the concept of the net as echo chamber. My response to critics was along the lines that “my mind isn’t so open that any ol’ thing can wander in”, that not all opinions are inherently equal and automatically worthy of the same respect, that the idea that polite conversation with one’s ideological adversaries is the route toward reconciliation and accord is naive and unrealistic, that I am comfortable with my opinionation and entitled to be confident about my beliefs. If I didn’t say so, I meant to say that that does not automatically make me utterly inflexible or exclusionary, but that I enjoy (not so much preaching to the converted but) helping build a like-minded community on the web. Despite the name of this weblog, I am not looking for fanatical adherents [which is why I quickly dropped the conceit of referring to my readers as ‘Followers’!]. On the other hand it strikes me as a rather pitiful reflection on a person, who disagrees with me so much that they become apoplectic at my remarks, that they would continue to come to FmH for too long just to vent their spleen. Although I have sometimes enjoyed tapping into my reservoir of rage, it becomes old very quickly if I am not among good company.

Weinberger agrees that it is not necessarily cause for concern that people congregate with like-minded souls on the internet. “The fact that conversations start from a base agreement is not a weakness of conversations. In fact, it’s a requirement.” Certainly, if the large-scale agreement is all that happens, the conversation will not be very useful and the appeal of the website will not sustain itself, but fortunately “conversations iterate differences within agreement.” Too much explicit repetition of the ‘founding argument’ is probably what is responsible for the ‘echo chamber’ metaphor, but, Weinberger reflects, “so what?”

The underlying question — does the web inherently cause people to solidify or diversify their beliefs? — is a thornier one, probably best answered “yes” (g). Seriously, though, it is deserving of closer examination than the overly simplistic take on it the critics of the echo chamber phenomenon evince. First of all, Weinberger rightly calls into question the assumption that it is necessarily bad to solidify beliefs. Secondly, even if one spends most of one’s time on the net among like-minded ideas, that does not mean one spends all of one’s time in the echo chamber. Thirdly, “being grounded in some beliefs is a condition for having any beliefs. And that has nothing to do with echo chambers.”

Weinberger shares my dismissal of the naive belief in the possibility of engaging in “deep, meaningful and truly open conversation with people who fundamentally disagree with us.” This concept is perhaps the most difficult and unpalatable for slavish adherents of an unsophisticated version of the democratic ideal to grapple with. But it is why the ‘melting pot’ notion of democratic society has been replaced by a more nuanced notion of a pluralistic multicultural society. Even the Founding Fathers engineered a system based on majority rule [not that I am a fan of the utter dismissal of the minority position that the Founding Fathers’ paradigm promotes, however] rather than consensus, which the activist circles in which I have travelled have often attempted on principle to use as a basis for collective decision-making but which only works, if ever, when the base of agreement on the ‘founding argument’ is very firm and only the details are left to haggle over. Face it — the US is a deeply divided society, far less cohesive than most others in the Western world from my experience, or at least with fewer viable mechanisms for enfranchising the disenfranchised. Don’t try too hard to look for what unites us beneath our differences; despite all the flag-waving, it isn’t there. Our closest approach to it seems to be the destructive bellicose jingoism that emerges at times of threat like 9-11, and even that doesn’t work for me and many others. But placing us on permanent WoT® footing by manipulating our fear makes sense as the dysadministration’s best opportunity at a common denominator they can continue to use as a control handle.

Weinberger concludes:

We are at a dangerous time in the Internet’s history. There are forces that want to turn it into a place where ideas, images and thoughts can be as carefully screened as callers to a radio talk show. The “echo chamber” meme is not only ill-formed, but it also plays into the hands of those who are ready to misconstrue the Net in order to control it. We’d all be better off if we stopped repeating it and let its sound fade.

Sorry, David, to merely be ‘echoing’ you. I usually like to have a more complicated reaction to a piece, finding the differences within the agreement indeed. And I agree that, usually, posting a piece in order merely to comment that, yes, you agree, is pretty insipid. But, yes, I agree. I am pointing to your piece because you reiterate my take on the issue more eloquently and authoritatively than I have been able to do.

“I have on my desk right now a copy of the new Rhode Island’homeland security’ bill proposed by Governor Carcieri. It’s an 18 page document, and right on the first page, before talking about weapons of mass destruction or poisoning the water system or anything else that a rational person might consider ‘terrorism’, it says ‘any person who shall teach or advocate anarchy’ will go to prison for ten years.

Let me make this clear. I am an anarchist. I write an anarchist blog. Don’t be fooled by the pop-culture references and the fact that I maybe don’t fit whatever rock-throwing stereotype is the current popular view of anarchism. I am facing ten years in prison for writing if this bill passes, because I am not going to stop being an anarchist just because some dumbass politician wants to tell me what I’m allowed to believe.” —David Grenier, CounterPunch [via wood s lot]

A subtext to this year’s presidential campaign is the intense anger that many Democrats are directing toward Bush, an attitude that has been growing in recent months.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Ted Jelen, a political science professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. “There are people who just really, really hate this person.”

Fully a quarter of Americans – mostly Democrats – tell pollsters they have a very unfavorable opinion of the president, more than double the number from last April. When only Democrats are polled, more than half report they feel that way. —Washington Post

Maybe this, rather than Nader’s entry into the race, represents the real danger for the Democratic campaign, in several senses. First, because anger provokes a backlash, and there are none better at lashing back than the current crop of Republican dirty-tricksters.

Anger is not necessarily a productive emotion when it comes to politics. The anger against Bill Clinton was so fierce and over the top that it helped him in 1996 and then again during the impeachment in 1998. People got more angry at those yelling at the president than at the president himself.

— Republican Pollster Frank Luntz

Second, this apparent gift the Democrats are being handed can derail the focus of the campaign. The common wisdom is that a growing base of disaffection with Bush might make the campaign complacent, when what they ought to be doing is reaching out for the moderate swing voters. This position is amply argued today over at BillMon’s. I see that suggestion, however, as possibly even more dangerous. I have long argued that the best way to defeat Bush is not with an insipid least-common-denominator platform but a bold and well-defined progressive and populist one. It is arguable that Gore lost alot of votes in 2000 because he reinvented himself every week in response to the pollsters’ latest advice on what the public wanted. A chameleonic moving target of a candidate may be the last thing the swing voters potentially fed up with Bush need. Especially if the candidate turns out to be Kerry and the Republican innuendo is all about him being a weirdo Massachusetts liberal, the Democratic campaign ought to be in no small part about the reclamation of that L-word and, as Joseph Duemer points out, who gets to control the meaning of the Vietnam myth.

Josh Marshall does a great job giving the lie to Bush campaign chairman Marc Racicot’s statement the other day to NPR interviewer Juan Williams that Bush had tried to volunteer to go to Vietnam but had not been chosen. As Marshall shows, this is handily contradicted by Bush’s own recent statements. Let us hope the mainstream press does not accept the falsifications unchallenged. If you are an NPR listener and particularly if you happened to hear Racicot’s statement, perhaps you should start with a letter or an email to NPR about your concern that they are being lied to and suggesting they investigate further in directions similar to those in which Marshall goes?

lie (n.): (1) A false statement deliberately presented as being true; a falsehood. (2) Something meant to deceive or give a wrong impression. Syn: canard, cock-and-bull story, falsehood, falsity, fib, fiction, inveracity, misrepresentation, misstatement, prevarication, story, tale, untruth. Informal: fish story, tall tale. Slang: whopper.

“In his new book, Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory, (Long Island lawyer Michael) Carroll raises a disturbing question: Is there a connection between outbreaks of Lyme disease and West Nile virus and Plum Island research? Old Lyme, Conn., the location of the disease’s initial 1975 outbreak, is close to Plum Island. While the case for the lab being the source isn’t cut and dry, many scientists have had a hard time finding a conventional explanation for the sudden emergence of the debilitating disease in Connecticut, which is spread though ticks. Carroll makes a strong case that the lab is the only logical source. The story of the West Nile virus, which also suddenly appeared in close proximity to Plum Island, is not as clear. But Carroll proves how the connection between the lab and disease outbreaks cannot be ignored, though most journalists and activists who have touched the story have been labeled ‘conspiracy theorists.'” —Guerrilla News Network

It’s My Right to Run: “(Ralph Nader’s decision) marks a fundamental shift from an ethic of responsibility to one of damn the consequences, no matter how much populist precedent he tries to dress it up with.” —Paul Loeb, author of Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. AlterNet Nader’s assertion, as I heard in an interview with NPR yesterday, that he will draw more heavily from disaffected Republicans is self-serving and fatuous if not frankly delusional! In any case, some disenchanted Republicans are considering crossing over to defeat Bush this time.

Nader may, as his supporters claimed in 2000, not steal as many votes from the Democrats as claimed if he mostly draws on people who would othewise have boycotted the big-party contest. But that may be a vanishingly small number this time around, given the difficulty of getting on the ballot in a significant number of states and especially if the Green Party does not support his run, as indications suggest. I suspect (and hope) that, after four years of W, most of those who would “otherwise have stayed home in 2000” may have long since decided they have to hold their noses and go for Kerry or whomever the Democrats front this time. Although they may consider the two-party system an obscenity, it is the reality in the 2004 election. As I have said here before, I used to be holier-than-thou, proclaiming that the outcome of the Presidential contest could not make enough of a difference to justify the quadrennial passion it provokes. I was somewhat surprised and ashamed at the energy I spent thinking about the 2000 election. In 2004, while I am not sure the country can be governed well, it is desperately clear after the first Bush dysadministration how poorly it can be governed, to our collective detriment and jeopardy.

“George W. Bush is different, very different. Other presidents have misled, deceived, even lied. When Ike was asked his worst mistake, he candidly said, ‘The lie we told [about the U-2].’ LBJ and the Gulf of Tonkin were examples of both deception and self-deception.

The problem today is not simply that ‘Bush is a liar.’ While only he knows whether he’s intentionally saying untrue things, it is a provable fact that he says untrue things, again and again, on issues large and small, day in and day out. The problem is not ’16 words’ in last year’s State of the Union but 160,000 words on stem cells, global warming, the ‘death tax,’ the Iraq-9/11 connection and the Saddam-al Qaeda connection, the rise of deficits, cuts to Americorps, the air in downtown Manhattan after 9/11. On and on. It is beyond controversy that W ‘has such a high regard for the truth,’ as Lincoln said of a rival, ‘that he uses it sparingly.’

Why this penchant for falsehoods?” —Mark Green, co-author (with Eric Alterman) of The Book On Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America (Viking 2004), AlterNet

“In his new book, Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory, (Long Island lawyer Michael) Carroll raises a disturbing question: Is there a connection between outbreaks of Lyme disease and West Nile virus and Plum Island research? Old Lyme, Conn., the location of the disease’s initial 1975 outbreak, is close to Plum Island. While the case for the lab being the source isn’t cut and dry, many scientists have had a hard time finding a conventional explanation for the sudden emergence of the debilitating disease in Connecticut, which is spread though ticks. Carroll makes a strong case that the lab is the only logical source. The story of the West Nile virus, which also suddenly appeared in close proximity to Plum Island, is not as clear. But Carroll proves how the connection between the lab and disease outbreaks cannot be ignored, though most journalists and activists who have touched the story have been labeled ‘conspiracy theorists.'” —Guerrilla News Network

“Imagine how different politics would be if debates were conducted in Tariana, an Amazonian language in which it is a grammatical error to report something without saying how you found it out – as Alexandra Aikhenvald tells us its speakers tell her. Tariana is in danger of dying. With each such disappearance we risk losing insights into different ways of thinking. Aikhenvald told Adrian Barnett about the race to record languages.” —New Scientist [thanks, jude]

How to tell if you cat has seen you naked.

“Skepticism about Bigfoot’s existence was in short supply at this conference. Speakers took it as a given that America’s version of the abominable snowman does exist, though they differed on what exactly the creature might be.

Bigfoot enthusiasts these days tend to fall into two camps: those convinced that the creature is merely a flesh-and-blood animal yet unknown to science, and those who believe it is a paranormal entity. Both camps were represented at the conference, although a certain amount of tension between the two was apparent.” — CSICOP

George Monbiot writes in The Guardian: “Walt Disney’s characters are sinister because they encourage us, like those marchers, to promote the hegemony of the corporations even when we have no intention of doing so. He captured a deep stream of human consciousness, branded it and, when we were too young to understand the implications, sold it back to us. Comcast’s hostile takeover bid suggests that the power of his company to seize our imaginations is declining. A giant media corporation may be about to become even bigger, but if the attack means that Disney is losing its ability to shape the minds of the world’s children, this is something we should celebrate.”

As a parent, I largely agree with Monbiot about Disney iconography’s insidious grip. American children and, increasingly, those of the rest of the world, are supposed to march in lockstep to the beat of the latest Disney formulaic blockbuster, devotion to whose characters is then cemented by the latest premiums with MacDonald’s Happy Meals, clothing and action figure product lines and, most beguiling to my way of thinking, insipid books that fill the children’s sections of the bookstores and choke out legitimate children’s picture books. (If you don’t have children and don’t believe me, take a stroll through the children’s section the next time you visit your local bookstore. You do remember bookstores, don’t you? They are still a large part of my village’s life…) I have been nauseated by the stultifying influence of this Disnifornication on the interior landscapes of the children I see, and attempt to steer my children to less mental chainstore junkfood in their entertainment choices. Just today a thoughtful co-worker asked me if our family had “done Disney” yet and had a difficult time with my indications that this was, to say the least, not a priority for us anytime in this life…

I am dubious about Monbiot’s anticipation of a loosening of the grip, however, over and above the fact that the Comcast bid appears to have failed for now. The Pixar features Disney distributed were the only creative stimulating breaths of fresh air in their panoply. Now that Pixar has dropped Disney, look for more stultification.

New Scientist: “Exposure to lead while in the womb may double a child’s risk of developing schizophrenia later in life, new research suggests.

While larger studies are needed to confirm the link, the researchers say this is the first time an environmental toxin has been linked to the disorder.” —New Scientist The study analyzed frozen blood specimens fortuitously left by a cohort of pregnant mothers during the period before gasoline was unleaded. A robust correlation was found between lead levels and a schizophrenic outcome of the pregnancy. Many many studies establish some correlation between risk of schizophrenia and some perinatal insult. It is not that any of these specific noxious influences are the “cause” of schizophrenia; the effect is nonspecific. Some schizophrenia involves disturbed neuronal architecture in certain anatomical regions of the brain, notably the hippocampal formation. Any crucial ‘hit’ during essential developmental periods might disrupt cell migration and the development of normal connections. But schizophrenia is a heterogeneous disease (I should rather say, “the schizophrenias”) and, in some affected patients, what lies at the core is disruption of the neurochemical communication between these neurons rather than their physical connectivity. This too may result from an environmental insult, I suppose, but probably more often involves a genetically transmitted gene lesion or lesions affecting neurotransmitter or neuroreceptor function.

“Half of all human languages will have disappeared by the end of the century, as smaller societies are assimilated into national and global cultures, scientists have warned.

Losing this linguistic diversity will be a blow not only for cultural studies but also for cognitive science, they say.” —New Scientist

I have long suspected that the human prion disease (Creutzfeldt-Jakob) and the varieties found in at least some other mammals are related. It is strongly suspected that so-called variant CJD (vCJD) is what happens to a human who contracts the agent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or mad cow disease). Now, “two cows have been discovered with a form of BSE that looks very different from the usual kind, Italian scientists have reported.

It resembles one form of the human prion disease, sporadic CJD, raising the possibility that this human disease is acquired from cattle.” —New Scientist

“To satisfy the hallowed journalistic tradition that there must be two sources for almost anything, I offer you Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) and Candy Crowley of CNN. They both are on record as having George Bush say that he doesn’t do nuance. ‘Joe, I don’t do nuance,’ the president supposedly told the senator. As for Crowley, she heard it this way: ‘In Texas, we don’t do nuance.’ If these two sources don’t suffice, I offer you the 7,932 words that make up the text of the president’s interview with Tim Russert. There ain’t a nuance anywhere in the whole mess.” —Washington Post

Laura Flanders: “Some of John Kerry’s foreign policy advisers should give pause to progressives”. —tompaine.com

“The application for the $250 award requires an essay on ‘why you are proud of your white heritage‘ and a recent picture to ‘confirm whiteness.'” The ostensible purpose of the scholarship at Rhode Island’s Roger Williams College is to protest against affirmative action. —CNN

CBS apologizes for OutKast performance: “CBS television issued a new round of apologies, this time for any offense taken at the American Indian-motif Grammy Awards performance by the hip-hop group OutKast that some Native Americans have condemned as racist.

The San Francisco-based Native American Cultural Center posted a notice on its Web site last week calling for a boycott of CBS, OutKast’s label Arista Records, and the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which sponsors the Grammys.” —CNN

This list of approved and disapproved TV shows for US Dept. of Education closed captioning support is being broadly discussed, particularly the criterion that excludes shows with any reference to witchcraft, such as Scooby Doo and Bewitched. While this example is pretty egregious, it strikes me that the ruling is not so much simply frivolous or ignorantly bigoted as it is an insidious attempt to legislate cultural tastes and interests to a segment of the population within the unfortunate grasp of dependency on federal funding. Children’s shows are the real victims of Administration judgmentalism, it appears. At least they haven’t taken their battle for decency out on NPR by denying support for closed captioning of public television news and public affairs programming.

“The government is considering a plan to break up the BBC and remove its independent status in the wake of a bitter row with the state-funded broadcaster over the Iraq war, a report said.

Government papers detailing possible changes to the BBC’s structure proposed breaking it into separate regional entities for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, The Sunday Times said.” —Yahoo! News

A former military officer, now a journalist covering military affairs, writes on why Bush’s military record matters (pdf) —Chicago Tribune op-ed

And Jimmy Breslin writes in Newsday, Bush Goal Was Dodging War: “What matters to all our senses is that he is a president who struts around as a war hero, who dodged Vietnam and most of the National Guard drills and who with less shame than anybody we have had maybe ever, sends your kids to a war that he ducked as if he was allowed to do it by birth.

The picture of him playing soldier suit on an aircraft carrier, the helmet under his arm like he just got back from a run over Baghdad, marks him as exceedingly dangerous. He believes he is a warrior president. He is not. He is a war dodger. Therefore, it is preposterous for George Bush to be a commander of anything. He doesn’t have the right to send people to war and yet he orders them off, and almost cheerfully. “

Dan Gillmor comments on the Cingular acquisition of AT&T Wireless and tells us the consolidation might be good for consumers because of the marginal service both companies have provided to date. It is not clear to me why two companies that don’t know how to do good wireless will combine into one that does. Gillmor also argues that consolidation won’t go too far because “there’s only room for a couple of mergers before the market gets too cozy for real competition. While expecting serious antitrust scrutiny from the Bush administration is probably futile, there’s probably enough angst in Congress to keep consolidation from being rampant.” The other obvious reason consolidation won’t go too far is that there are only several companies that use each of the several incompatible cellular protocols. Wouldn’t it be a daunting proposition, for example, for one of the GSM carriers left (T-Mobile and Cingular) to acquire CDMA-based Verizon, if they meant to consolidate their systems and user base?

…and people who fight back: A 59-year old Nevada rancher is taking his fight against having to produce identification on demand to the US Supreme Court.

‘ “Bush is already out there campaigning for re-election virtually unchallenged because the Democrats haven’t decided yet who will oppose him,” Cohen said. “In polite society you don’t go up to a guy, stare into his face and say: ‘You are a liar.’ It’s more polite to tap him on the shoulder and suggest gently that maybe his pants are getting a little warm, and that’s what we are trying to achieve with this.” ‘ —Scotsman.com

“Senior Defense Department officials said Thursday that they were planning to keep a large portion of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, there for many years, perhaps indefinitely.

The officials said they would soon set up a panel to review those long-term prisoners’ cases annually to determine whether the men remained a threat to the United States or could be released.” —New York Times

“Every now and again you read a book that shatters assumptions you have held for a long time. This is one of them. Academic Ellie Lee looks at discussions around post-abortion syndrome (PAS) and post-natal depression (PND). Her conclusions are like a stone dropped in the pool of complacency of most pro-choice feminist thinking. Abortion, Motherhood and Mental Health has the potential to make waves – if those outside the academic community can be persuaded to shrug off philistinism and grapple with a book that refuses to simplify complex ideas.” —Ann Furedi, sp!ked. The reviewer and perhaps the author, however, are reacting to a straw man. They interpret the controversial syndromes to represent an assumption that “once a pregnancy has begun a woman can’t end it without suffering a degree of mental illness – even if the mental illness is so suppressed that she doesn’t recognise it.” This rendition of big, bad medical science is easy to refute because it is simply not what researchers and clinicians into postpartum depression and psychosis, which is how these syndromes are known in the US, are saying.

The unspeakable is here to stay: “When the Sex Pistols let loose a few expletives on Bill Grundy’s show back in 1976, there was all sorts of huffing and puffing. The nation went into what is referred to as a ‘moral panic’. Almost 30 years on, old fashioned Anglo-Saxon expletives appear to have lost the capacity to shock. When, last week, former Pistol frontman John Lydon uttered the word ‘cunt’ on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, the reaction was decidedly pianissimo. Out of an audience of 12million for the show, Lydon’s c-word outburst solicited merely 88 complaints.” —Patrick West, sp!ked

“Senior Defense Department officials said Thursday that they were planning to keep a large portion of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, there for many years, perhaps indefinitely.

The officials said they would soon set up a panel to review those long-term prisoners’ cases annually to determine whether the men remained a threat to the United States or could be released.” —New York Times

“In the first installment of her series on Virtue, Margaret Berry introduces you to 10 charities that know the value of 10 bucks.” —The Morning News Five of these organizations are already on my list for giving. At least some should probably be on yours too, whether it is only ten dollars or many times that.

“Every February, across the country, candy, flowers, and gifts are exchanged between loved ones, all in the name of St. Valentine. But who is this mysterious saint and why do we celebrate this holiday?”

Today, the Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or Valentinus, all of whom were martyred. One legend contends that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men — his crop of potential soldiers. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine’s actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death.

If St. Valentine’s heroism lay in standing against unreasonable state interference in marriage, gay couples may be in particular need of his succor today, as the ignorant backlash — state-sponsored terrorism — against non-heterosexual marriages proceeds. I know I have been celebrating the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision saying nothing short of extending the right to marry to gay couples will be consistent with equal rights under the current constitution. My elation was, of course, premature. If you are not following the news from my state, our (Mormon) governor Mitt Romney and other social reactionaries have just convened a constitutional convention (actually, it had been planned for months before the Supreme Court decision, but the issue moved to the top of the agenda) to try to amend the constitution to take the legs out from under gay marriage. Successive versions of the proposed amendment have been shot down and the convention adjourned without success. But the battle is not over yet, they will reconvene in March, two months before the scheduled May implementation of extending marriage licenses to gay couples.

Some of the maneuvering around this issue seems as illegal as it is outrageous to me. For example, the favored version of the amendment would retroactively make gay marriages (since the earliest the amendment could be adopted, if successful, would not be until mid-2006) revert to civil unions. Now, I’m no legal scholar, but isn’t this tantamount to making something retroactively illegal? And isn’t the principle that ex post facto laws are unacceptable one of the cornerstones of our legal system? Also, Romney is contemplating issuing an executive order forbidding state officials to grant marriage licenses to gay couples no matter that they are entitled to them. My guess is that he hopes that the litigation to force him to reverse this blatantly defiant and illegal order would take long enough that he could prevent all the marriages that would otherwise ensue until the longed-for amendment. What, is he bucking for a cabinet appointment in the second Bush administration or something? And isn’t the idea of the constitution, state or federal, ‘defining marriage’ an obscene perversion of its scope and purpose?

Listening to all the public debate on this issue, the argument that strikes me as the most sensible says that, instead of extending the right of marriage to gays, we should take it away from heterosexuals as well. The State should be in the business of extending certain rights and duties to spousal unions, so it should regulate civil unions for everyone, and forget about marriages. It has no place in the business of regulating what is essentially a religious sacrament, which homophobic couples should be welcome to seek in their homophobic churches if the idea of a loving union between same-sex partners somehow threatens the security of their marital vows. I cannot speak for gay couples but it strikes me that, instead of seeking to be able to proudly state they are ‘married’, they ought to join us heterosexual couples who are becoming ashamed to say we are ‘married’, ashamed at what a vehicle for bigotry and irrationality ‘marriage’ has become.

Firefox is the latest name under by which we refer to the Browser Formerly Known as Firebird Which Was The Browser Formerly Known as Phoenix. Try it once, if you haven’t already, and you won’t need persuading. These arguments apply to the Mozilla browser as well, BTW.

It would have been fine if it had happened, actually. But, snopes.com concludes, the photo is a fake, a cut ‘n’ paste job. They display the original, without Fonda in the picture, and it cannot even be established that she was at the antiwar rally in question at all. But the Fonda controversy misses the point. The Right should certainly be threatened simply that Kerry was a Vietnam veteran against the war, Fonda or not.

“If anyone’s ever promised you the sun, the moon and the stars, tell ’em you’ll settle for BPM 37093.

The heart of that burned-out star with the no-nonsense name is a sparkling diamond that weighs a staggering 10 billion trillion trillion carats. That’s one followed by 34 zeros.

The hunk of celestial bling is an estimated 2,500 miles across, said Travis Metcalfe, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

‘You would need a jeweler’s loupe the size of the sun to grade this diamond,’ said Metcalfe, who led the team that discovered the gem.

The diamond is a massive chunk of crystallized carbon that lies about 300 trillion miles from Earth, in the constellation Centaurus.” —Sacramento Bee

Michael Massing, an editor of the Columbia Journalism Review who writes frequently on the press and foreign policy, on the prewar failures of the press to show any skepticism about the Administration’s WMD line:

In recent months, US news organizations have rushed to expose the Bush administration’s pre-war failings on Iraq. “Iraq’s Arsenal Was Only on Paper,” declared a recent headline in The Washington Post. “Pressure Rises for Probe of Prewar-Intelligence,” said The Wall Street Journal. “So, What Went Wrong?” asked Time. In The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh described how the Pentagon set up its own intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans, to sift for data to support the administration’s claims about Iraq. And on “Truth, War and Consequences,” a Frontline documentary that aired last October, a procession of intelligence analysts testified to the administration’s use of what one of them called “faith-based intelligence.”

Watching and reading all this, one is tempted to ask, where were you all before the war? Why didn’t we learn more about these deceptions and concealments in the months when the administration was pressing its case for regime change?when, in short, it might have made a difference? Some maintain that the many analysts who’ve spoken out since the end of the war were mute before it. But that’s not true. Beginning in the summer of 2002, the “intelligence community” was rent by bitter disputes over how Bush officials were using the data on Iraq. Many journalists knew about this, yet few chose to write about it.

New York Times reporter Judith Miller, about whose credulous parroting of Iraqi opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi’s propaganda about the Saddam threat much has already been said here and elsewhere, comes in for particular scorn from Massing. Miller blames her credulity on poor intelligence, about as credible as Dubya’s use of that excuse is. She pleads with Massing, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” But think about it for a moment; that is an essential perversion of the meaning of that maxim. —New York Review of Books