Released Papers Do Not Document Ala. Service. —Washington Post. Someone quipped this morning that if things continue this way, the record of the entire Bush administration is going to depend on dental records.

David Pescovitz: “Say you walk to the bus stop each morning. A context-aware phone would notice that at around the same time every day you move slowly and steadily for a while, stop completely, and then dramatically speed up. After noticing this pattern, you phone might ask you if you’d like to tie specific preferences to this particular activity. At that point, you could then set the device to ring while you’re walking but switch to silent once you board the bus.

The phone could also be programmed to respond to calls in different ways, depending on what its owner is doing. For instance, Schmandt explains, if a call comes when he’s riding the bus, he’d like the caller to receive a message to the effect of: ‘It’s not a good time for Chris to talk. Would you like to text message him instead?’ The agent would then ask the caller to stay on the line while the message is delivered. That way, Schmandt adds, he can decide whether to break routine and actually take the call.” —The Feature

…has a website.

“Retired National Guard Lt. Col. Bill Burkett said Tuesday that in 1997, then-Gov. Bush’s chief of staff, Joe Allbaugh, told the National Guard chief to get the Bush file and make certain ‘there’s not anything there that will embarrass the governor.’

Col. Burkett said that a few days later at Camp Mabry in Austin, he saw Mr. Bush’s file and documents from it discarded in a trash can. He said he recognized the documents as retirement point summaries and pay forms.” —Dallas Morning News

As someone who has finally transitioned to the iPod generation and carries around my entire CD collection in my vest pocket, I already plug it into my car system whenever I’m not in the mood for NPR during my daily commute. But this certainly takes things to the next level.

The myth and math of Kerry’s electability. William Saletan writes in Slate: “By media consensus, the race for the Democratic presidential nomination is over. Why? Because John Kerry has won 12 of the 14 primaries and caucuses held so far. And why has Kerry won these contests? Not because voters agree with him on the issues. The reason, according to exit polls, is that voters think he’s the candidate most likely to beat President Bush. There’s just one problem: The same polls suggest this may not be true…

By and large, the closer you move to the center and center-right of the electorate, where the presidential race will probably be decided, the worse Kerry does. The opposite is true of Edwards.” And then there’s that Drudge infidelity gossip…

“The Crimson reported Kerry called for U.N. control of troops in 1970″. — Harvard Crimson The content of Kerry’s 1970 views is not as important as the inevitability that both their radicalism and their contradictions with his recent positions will be grist for Karl Rove’s mill (“…a spokesperson for President Bush’s reelection campaign said Kerry’s 1970 remarks signaled the senator’s weakness on defense.”). Robert Reich defends Kerry’s comments as appropriate for the time, when he was a just-returned veteran and the Vietnam war still raged. It goes without saying, but did Dubya even have a coherent thought about a political position in his head in 1970? Here’s a cogent observation from Rafe Coburn:

I kind of feel like people are having trouble seeing the forest for the trees when it comes to President Bush’s service in the National Guard. The issue here is that Bush took the rich man’s way out and went into the National Guard on the wings of a political favor, and then said Sunday in his interview with Tim Russert that he supported the war in Vietnam. Everything after that is window dressing. Even if he showed up and was the most conscientious National Guardsman during his time of service, he still decided he was too good to fight in a war that had his support. Isn’t that the character issue here? The fact that the paperwork is jumbled and they can’t find any actual people who will admit that they saw him doing his duty is a side dish.

It is equally, but not more, important to contrast their positions back then as it is to compare their ‘war records’ and, thanks, Rafe, for thinking through this latest troubling hypocrisy on Bush’s part. But it is taking the easy way out to punt on the AWOL issue. It would be far more than a ‘side dish’ if the commander-in-chief shirked his duty and is trying to cover it up with clumsy half-truths. You cannot blithely dismiss the dearth of evidence supporting Bush’s claim to be up-and-up on his National Guard duty as a paperwork snafu when a far more dire possibility exists.

But if Bush was more of a hypocritical ‘draft dodger’ than a deserter, let us hope the press and the Democrats bulldog him on the issue as the Republicans did to Clinton.

“The Blogger decision to offer Atom only has angered supporters of RSS, who accuse Google of helping to splinter a wide network of RSS-using bloggers.” — Ziff-Davis

“Criticism from Republicans and Democrats that President Bush gave a shaky performance on Sunday on ‘Meet the Press’ did not stop his re-election campaign from incorporating digitally enhanced excerpts from it into a promotional video that it posted on its Web site on Tuesday.

The campaign said it would remove the video from the site after NBC News complained that it was unfairly using the interview to support the re-election effort. The campaign said that it had violated no laws, but that it decided to take the video off after it realized how angry NBC News was over the use.” —New York Times

“February can be a hard month for movie lovers. The studios continue their annual winter clearance sales, dumping dumbed-down damaged goods into the multiplexes to offset their Oscar contenders. A few interesting films usually straggle into view, but it is easy to become dispirited and to succumb to gloomy grumbling about the sad condition of cinema.

Fortunately the Film Society of Lincoln Center is doing its part to help New York audiences dispel their midwinter malaise. The society’s fourth annual Film Comment Selects program, which starts today and runs for two weeks at the Walter Reade Theater, is an eclectic and intriguing minifestival, a collection of overlooked, underappreciated and sometimes just plain odd movies that should satisfy a wide range of tastes.” — New York Times Synchronicity strikes; see the Ripley post below. One of the films in the series is

Liliana Cavani’s Ripley’s Game, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel with John Malkovich in the title role… Though the film plays well on television (where it has turned up recently on cable, never having received a theatrical release), its unnerving, cold-blooded calm would be better experienced on the Walter Reade’s big screen. Ms. Highsmith’s elegant viciousness is brilliantly captured in Mr. Malkovich’s slithering performance, and Ms. Caviani’s chilly sensibility provides a good antidote to Anthony Minghella’s overwrought and over-costumed version of The Talented Mr. Ripley.

“A serial killer may have murdered 12 men, hidden their bodies then assumed their identities, police feared last night.

Detectives believe he struck in the style of The Talented Mr Ripley, the fictional character who murdered a friend and took on his wealth and life.

A major search has been launched for 11 missing men following the discovery of a bloodbath at the home of a 12th, a retired librarian.

The body of the 63-year-old man is believed to have been dismembered there and dumped at a secret location. Then, it is alleged, his killer assumed his identity to steal more than £30,000 from his investments.

Yesterday, it was revealed that the librarian’s name and 11 others were on a list found at the suspect’s home. All the others have disappeared and senior police sources said there were ‘grave fears’ for them.” — femail.co.uk

Certainly, this item fits in my ‘Annals of Depravity’ department, but I was grabbed by the emulation of Patricia Highsmith’s chillingly sociopathic and (dare I say it?) curiously charming character. I have been a longtime fan of the four Ripley novels, which have enjoyed renewed attention given recent film adaptations. While there are endless debates about whether media and cultural violence make for a violent society, we are not talking here about a statistical increase but the ability to galvanize one twisted soul. How much must a serial killer’s story be in the zeitgeist to become an inspiration for real life gruesome acts? and to be familiar enough to the police investigators that they will recognize it as the inspiration? With the society’s infatuation with monsters, are life-imitates-art repellent crimes becoming more common?

“Every President makes foreign policy. Only a select few, over the sweep of history, design what scholars term grand strategy.

Grand strategy is the blueprint from which policy follows. It envisions a country’s mission, defines its interests, and sets its priorities. Part of grand strategy’s grandeur lies in its durability: A single grand strategy can shape decades, even centuries, of policy.

Who, then, have been the great grand strategists among American statesmen? According to a slim forthcoming volume by John Lewis Gaddis, the Yale historian whom many describe as the dean of Cold War studies and one of the nation’s most eminent diplomatic historians, they are John Quincy Adams, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and George W. Bush.” — Boston Globe

‘Homosexual’ is passé in a ‘boi’s’ life: “First, there was the term ‘homosexual,’ then ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian,’ then the once taboo ‘dyke’ and ‘queer.’

Now, all bets are off.” — San Francisco Chronicle

In this interview, Peter Singer argues that evolutionary theory has much to say that the Left ought to listen to. He claims that Leftist utopianism has failed to take account of human nature and blames that naiveté for the corruption and authoritarian failures of socialist regimes; the discipline of evolutionary psychology, Singer feels, is the key to understanding this ‘human nature.’ “I think it would be true generally that anyone who has views about how society should end up will have a better chance to achieve that if they understand the Darwinian framework of human nature.” In particular, because it offers an explanatory framework for understanding the development of human reciprocity, evolutionary theory helps us understand the basis for any ethical theory on which changing society must be based. — The Philosopher’s Magazine [via Butterflies and Wheels]

“I don’t know how many times I’ve heard it, or read it, even in this newspaper: ‘The proof is in the pudding.’ ‘No, it isn’t,’ I want to scream. ‘The proof of the pudding is in the eating.’ Cervantes wrote that four centuries ago. And don’t get me started about having your cake and eating it, too. You have to have your cake in order to eat it. The trick is to eat it and still have it.

At least it used to be, back when we knew our proverbs and weren’t misusing the word ‘proverbial.’ Not that America is going to fall apart because we butcher a few bromides. But I’m concerned about a country that’s not quite sure what it’s saying and doesn’t seem to care.” — Boston Globe Magazine

“Their goal, the scientists say, is not to clone humans but to advance understanding of the causes and treatment of disease.

But the work makes the birth of a cloned baby suddenly more feasible. For that reason, it is likely to reignite the fierce debate over the ethics of human cloning.

The work was led by Dr. Woo Suk Hwang and Dr. Shin Yong Moon of Seoul National University and will be published tomorrow in the journal Science.” — New York Times

She was one of twenty-five volunteers in a study of larger than therapeutic doses of the investigational antidepressant duloxetine, which Eli Lilly is developing under the trade name Cymbalta. Four days earlier, the apparently non-depressed young woman had been switched from the active drug to the placebo arm of the study. Her death bolsters critics’ claims that antidepressants carry a risk of suicidal tendencies for some, especially younger, people. A federal advisory panel has just recommended that the FDA issue stronger warnings to doctors about the risks of these drugs in children and adolescents. Four other people given duloxetine during earlier trials have also committed suicide, the company revealed. A review panel has told Eli Lilly to stop entering new patients into this study and have all existing subjects receive an evaluation by an independent psychiatrist.

I thought, when I read the news, that the patient’s death was more likely to be an effect of the discontinuation of the drug than of its administration. (The New York Times reporter who wrote this story apparently thinks so too, as I was surprised to find when I scrolled down the article. The reporter is either very psychopharmacologically astute or he has an unattributed advisor in deep background. I was surprised, indeed, that the article includes no comments from psychopharmacologists outside of Eli Lilly spokespeople. Is it possible no one is willing to go on record with comments that will alienate the company?) Antidepressants that are eliminated rapidly from the body after cessation of use, most notably paroxetine, are known to cause a discontinuation syndrome including severe agitation; the investigational drug is another that has rapid elimination and the study design apparently involved high doses of the drug and a so-called ‘crossover design’ in which patients are switched abruptly and unknowingly between the medication and a placebo. You would think Eli Lilly would be aware of the risks of such a practice. My guess is that they were. The profits at stake if Lilly comes up with another blockbuster antidepressant to replace the market share it has lost with the expiration of the patent rights to its cash cow Prozac are worth a few wrongful-death settlements. (My friend Abby points out that human investigation subjects probably indemnify the company against wrongful death during the study anyway; I haven’t looked at a consent form recently and don’t know. This young woman had dropped out of college to participate in the study, for which she was paid $150/day.) Duloxetine is a good candidate for the next big thing; it has a similar mechanism of action to venlafaxine (Effexor) — dual serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibition — which is newer and better than the SSRIs and has supplanted them in terms of prescribing volume and profitability.

As I usually add in covering this ongoing controversy over antidepressant safety, it is not the drug that is dangerous, but the way in which it was administered.

Hip Hop gets rich and rock’n’roll refuses to die trying: the winners of the 30th (or 31st) annual Village Voice Critics’ Pazz and Jop Poll of the best music of 2003. Outkast kast their spell with the Voice critics just as they did with the Grammy judges. I heard Robert Christgau (who runs Pazz and Jop) interviewed this morning; he felt that Coldplay’s taking the Grammies best song award represents a backlash by rap-hating critics against a divided hip hop constituency. He sounds abit relieved, because he hasn’t been sparing in decrying his own poll’s unfairness to black music. Here are the album winners and the song winners.

As an aside — in an iPod and Kazaa universe, are albums more and more irrelevant? As a consumer of music criticism, I usually wanted to know if an artist’s attack could sustain itself before I would want to buy a disc. Not always; I was not infrequently known to buy a CD for a single song. A song-oriented consumer public who no longer buy “albums”, however, might mean artists have less incentive to record throwaway filler. Every song’s gotta be good to make it on its own merits? Still, there might be no more ‘concept’ albums, and no attention being paid to sequencing songs on an album. I can’t help wondering whether this will further erode our collective attention span for artistry down to the four- or five-minute level. When was the last time, perhaps apart from a classical performance if that’s your thing, you actually sat for forty or sixty minutes and listened to an entire album as the artist intended? I do, but that is because I have a fifty-minute commute some days.

For a stroll down memory lane, here are Chart Attack’s summaries of the 2002 and 2003 Pazz and Jop results (from a Canadian perspective, incidentally). Last year at this time Wilco were riding the wave of enthusiasm for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot; Christgau couldn’t claim they stole anybody’s hip hop thunder. I eagerly await some new music from them. And was it last year that Norah Jones’ first album captured Grammy hearts? Why is there no buzz about her second recording, arguably better, this year?

Addendum: Seth Mnookin writes in Slate about why we’re not hearing much about Norah Jones’ second album. He says the first time around the record company used a dicey strategy of heavily promoting her but then downplaying their promotional efforts so she could come off looking like a homegrown sensation whose popularity was made by word of mouth, “the Howard Dean of singer songwriters.” This time around, “Jones and her handlers don’t need to ask for coverage; instead, she’s being carefully parceled out…,” the pretense being that she’s not being marketed at all. Mnookin says Jones is trying to shape herself as an artiste who is not interested in commercial success, and predicts that the second album, which he feels is not in the same mold as the first in important respects, will in fact not be as successful. Although yesterday was its official release date, I’d given many of its songs many listens already before buying the disc today, since they’ve been on the P2P networks for several weeks at least. Different it is, but no less compelling. [thanks, Curt]

“Competing recordings of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 split major classical honors at the 2004 Grammy Awards last night in Los Angeles.” Complete list of the classical winners. — Andante

And the complete list of all the winners (and nominees) in all 105 (105!) categories. — New York Times

“Do endless automated messages make you mad? A program aims to detect that anger and transfer you to a real person before you lose your cool.” — Wired News

“When it comes to fancy medical devices, the heart gets all the attention and the poor brain is neglected. But that’s changing, and stroke patients may benefit.” —Wired News

“Already bored with all the presents you got for the holidays? Hack them into new-and-improved presents.

Got piles of now-outdated gifts from past festive occasions carefully stashed away because you might need the parts someday? Hack them, too.

Don’t know how to hack or need some inspiration? Get yourself a copy of Hardware Hacking: Have Fun While Voiding Your Warranty. It has 576 pages of detailed instructions that will show you how to re-engineer almost every inanimate object in your home or office.” —Wired News

“How Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg responds to flame e-mails [via walker]

Dear Reader:

I received your e-mail message. Sadly, I no longer permit myself the pleasure of personally responding to snide remarks from dissatisfied individuals, as doing so inevitably leads to time-wasting arguments and annoying exchanges of insults. Since such encounters often end with the reader complaining to my boss, it seems that this is what rude writers really want to do all along — to provoke me so they can satisfy some inner schoolyard desire to squeal. You may do so now by e-mailing the editor in chief, Michael Cooke, at mcooke@suntimes.com, though I should point out this is a form letter, so his reaction probably won’t have the sense of fresh outrage you desire.

Otherwise, I would like to point out — since so many fail to grasp this point — that the piece of writing that upset you is a column of opinion, that the opinion being expressed is mine alone, and the fact that you disagree with or were insulted by my opinion really is not important, at least not to me. This is not a dialogue, this is a lecture, and you are supposed to sit in your seat and listen, or leave, not stand up and heckle.

I do not write the column for people who disagree with me, nor am I concerned with trying to convince them of the falsity of their worldview at a one-on-one level. I’ve done that for years, and it’s a waste of time, both mine and theirs, since such readers are not typically open to ideas other than their own, and cannot even entertain the notion that they may be wrong.

Not that I am pleased to have upset you. Believe me, I would have preferred your letter to have been one of praise — most are — but that doesn’t seem to have been the case.

If you have cancelled your subscription, I am sorry for that too, though I am also confident, as you wade through the arid world of the competition and the barren void of television, that you will eventually soften and start reading the Sun-Times again, and would remind you that you can always skip my column; that’s why it always has my name and picture on the top, as a subtle clue.

While I cannot sincerely thank you for writing, I do hope that, as your life progresses, you eventually come to realize just how wrong you were in disagreeing with me in such a rude fashion. If there were a shred of politeness or sense in your e-mail you would not be receiving this letter, but as you are, I would urge you to re-examine your life, and suggest that you reach out to all the people you have no doubt hurt with your brusque and offensive manner and beg their forgiveness. Though utterly indifferent to your taunts, I will myself set a good example by forgiving you now. It can be a terrible world, and I’m sure you have reasons for being the way you are.

Best regards,

Neil Steinberg

“The young pilot walked away from his commitment in 1972 — the same year the U.S. military implemented random drug tests.”

One of the persistent riddles surrounding President Bush’s disappearance from the Texas Air National Guard during 1972 and 1973 is the question of why he walked away. Bush was a fully trained pilot who had undergone a rigorous two-year flight training program that cost the Pentagon nearly $1 million. And he has told reporters how important it was to follow in his father’s footsteps and to become a fighter pilot. Yet in April 1972, George W. Bush climbed out of a military cockpit for the last time. He still had two more years to serve, but Bush’s own discharge papers suggest he never served for the Guard again. —Salon

“Lynn A. D’Andrea, a sleep specialist at the University of Michigan Medical School, explains.” —Scientific American [I’ll ignore all the comments I expect about people snoring because my writing is putting them to sleep…]

Do you like classical music? have a broadband connection? understand Finnish Icelandic and French? (at least I think the site is in Finnish, although it’s not really necessary to know to enjoy it). Fun. —hugi.is

Pity the poor Republicans. Up until now, the twentieth century’s most eulogized fallen Presidents were Democratic liberal heroes FDR and JFK. Especially now, they need a deity of their own and by God they’ll have one:

“The nation’s longest-lived president, Ronald Reagan, will celebrate his 93 birthday on February 6. Sadly, this birthday may be his last. He can no longer speak, feed himself, or recognize family and friends. Nine years after he was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, he is in the final stages of the debilitating disease.

When Reagan dies, Americans across the political spectrum will mourn him. But, if his most fervent supporters have their way, his passing will become a factional celebration, not a national commemoration, especially if he dies during the months ahead, while the president who has been hailed as his spiritual son, George W. Bush, is running for re-election. An assortment of former White House staffers, conservative commentators, think tank scholars and direct mail entrepreneurs have been conducting a campaign to make sure that Reagan is remembered in exactly the way that they want: as one of the greatest presidents and also as the prophet of hard-core conservatism.”

The Threatening Record:

So we all know that White House assertions about the Iraqi ‘threat’ were so much smoke and mirrors. This piece is a good compendium of administration assertions of the threat from the public record, just in case they try to backpedal further from those assertions as they appear less and less plausible during the election campaign. Faced with being seen as either gullible dupes of intelligence misinformation or abject liars pursuing a covert agenda by any means, of course the Bush people will try and control the debate by framing its terms as only the former; the current dance about the independent investigation of intelligence failures will clearly have that restricted, defensive scope. We cannot let administration innocence be rammed down our throats. There are encouraging signs of a backlash by the media and, importantly, by the intelligence community. I particularly like the take the State Department’s top intelligence officer, Greg Theilmann, has:

“The main problem [before the war] was that the senior administration officials have what I call faith-based intelligence. They knew what they wanted the intelligence to show…They were really blind and deaf to any kind of countervailing information the intelligence community would produce. I would assign some blame to the intelligence community and most of the blame to the senior administration officials.”

The emphasis is added; ‘faith-based intelligence’ is so apt, even though oxymoronic. I have already waxed enthusiastic several times about Seymour Hersh’s detailed analysis several months ago of the pervasive ways in which the Bush people have willfully marginalized intelligence community analysis because it wasn’t telling them what they wanted to hear. It is easy to mistrust the CIA, almost axiomatic on the Left to do so. It is important to realize, in the current furor, that they are more believable than their dysadministration bosses.

And speaking of contradictions in terms, where is poor George Tenet in this mess? Some responses to his February 5th speech highlight his bold admission that the CIA never told the administration there was an imminent threat and see him as a courageous hero. Yet Bush does not seem embarrassed or threatened enough to find a way to oust him, although I predict we will see Tenet resigning “for personal reasons” “to spend more time with his family” and “go into the private sector” in the not too distant future (before the election, probably, once Karl Rove has thought up a spin on it that would stop Democratic jibes in their tracks). Others, like the former career CIA analyst commenting here (also at tompaine.com), find him (no surprise!) a master of disingenuousness. He points out another way in which the administration framing of the terms of the debate obscures the real issue. Regardless of what intelligence assessments of the Iraqi theret were or were not made, and how the White House did or did not use them, there is ample evidence that the Bush minions had long since decided to invade Iraq.

Steven Rosenfeld’s tompaine.com essay is a depiction of the bitter schism in the 750,000-member Sierra Club, where an insurgent group wants to focus the organization’s efforts on curbing immigration to the U.S. as a means of reducing the nation’s disproportionate use of the globe’s ‘carrying capacity’. The current board of directors election is provoking unprecedented outside attention and advocacy by non-environmental groups with political agendas including, on one hand, the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose Morris Dees is running for the board, he says, to prevent the “greening of hate;” and on the other, groups which the SPLC identifies as right-wing hate groups. A major figure among the insurgents is the former co-founder of Greenpeace, Paul Watson, whose animal rights activism is another source of opposition to the takeover bid from pro-hunting constituencies. Watson denies there is a conspiracy to take over the Club but critics offer documentation that he has bragged about engineering exactly such a coup.

It strikes me that the case is not being made so much for anti-immigration policy as the time-honored environmentalist position of limiting population growth. The stated platforms of the three Sierra Club Directors allied with the controversial candidates speak in terms of population policy instead of immigration policy — probably because there is no question that a racially divisive stand on immigration would attract the American would-be ethnic cleansers and their ilk and is not the only, or even the best, way to reduce the obscene impact of American profligacy on the rest of the world. The insurgents who do speak more directly of immigration curbs, according to past presidents of the Sierra Club, are outsiders who have no prior history of environmental activism but prominent positions with anti-immigration groups and have taken money from right-wing benefactors. Is slippage from concerns with environment and population to activism around immigration reforms — and race — inevitable?

When asked in an e-mail if it was possible to frame population issues so charges of racism did not arise, Gov. Lamm replied, “Every nation in the world that takes immigrants (Canada, Australia, New Zealand) has similar policies and doesn’t get charged with racism. Of course there is no guarantee, because some people can and will say anything. So the charge will be made, but it can be made non-credible. Our family marched in Selma (Alabama) and I believe good-hearted people must raise this issue.

So why do environmental groups have such a hard time with population issues? The former governor replied, “Political correctness reigns.”

Stephen K. Medvic, assistant professor of government at Franklin & Marshall College, writes at tompaine.com that it is time the Democratic contenders start to position themselves for the general election. He argues for a culturally inclusive, reformist populism attentive to the national security concerns that Bush will talk about ad nauseum. He suggests ways the nominee can take the best from each of his Democratic rivals’ campaigns (even Dean’s). To avoid becomeing irrelevant, the Democratic party must be rebuilt on a principled basis and not rely on a cult of personality as the successes under Clinton did in the ’90’s. [Little chance of a cult of personality behind Kerry! — FmH]

‘Ladies and gentlemen — I know Jesse Jackson… and you’re no Jesse Jackson: “Sharpton opposed the war on Iraq, the death penalty and Bush’s tax cuts, and he demands universal health care. This appeals to many moderate white Democrats. But his message gets hacked up, lost, distorted or ignored when the messenger is perceived as irresponsible and an opportunist, or both. The majority of black Democratic elected officials, and Jesse Jackson, have endorsed Kerry, Edwards or Dean, or have publicly sung their praises. They have been mostly silent on Sharpton.

Meanwhile, the greatest unease about Sharpton has come from Jackson. Though he is careful not to criticize Sharpton by name, he obliquely chided him before the South Carolina primary when he noted that no Democrat could be effective without a real message, money and a campaign infrastructure. Sharpton has made little apparent effort to develop any of Jackson’s requisites for a successful campaign. He has built his campaign on appearances on TV talk shows, at campaign debates, at showpiece protest rallies, and by tossing out well-timed media barbs.” —AlterNet

An End to Evil: “Before Sept. 11, 2001, it would have been difficult to speak meaningfully about a ”neoconservative foreign policy.” While there was a group of intellectuals and policy experts who were identified — sometimes self-identified — by the neoconservative label, they did not agree on foreign policy. Today a cardinal feature of neoconservative foreign policy is the aggressive use of American power to dislodge dictators and promote democracy. But the founding father of the movement, Irving Kristol, shunned this approach, speaking in the more cautious tones of realpolitik. Throughout the 1990’s, Charles Krauthammer, a leading neoconservative commentator, was deeply suspicious of the use of American power against dictators in the Balkans, Africa and the Caribbean, while others, like Richard Perle and William Kristol, were far more sympathetic. Neoconservative foreign policy during that decade lacked a central theme.

Sept. 11 changed all that. It is now possible to describe a neoconservative foreign policy, and David Frum and Richard Perle’s new book, ”An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror,” is a useful guide to it. There have been many books written by neoconservatives on aspects of the war on terror, but because of the identity of the authors, the scope of the book and the vigor of argumentation, this one deserves special attention.” —New York Times book review

“Let’s begin with what could have been an ending. In October, an editor asked me to prepare Courtney Love’s obituary. Nobody actually believed that Courtney Love had died, but many thought she was heading in that direction. If she had a fatal overdose or sudden heart failure, we needed to be ready. It was the first time, in 10 years of newspaper writing, that I had been asked to write an advance obituary for someone under 40.” —New York Times

The problem isn’t the breast, it’s violence against women: “The real shock was that a man would rip off a woman’s clothes — planned or not — and we would talk only about what was exposed in the process. It doesn’t matter whether her wardrobe malfunctioned. What matters is that he was messing with her wardrobe in the first place.” —Cindy Miller, Chicago Sun-Times

“Was Joy Adamson an angel of mercy… or a tyrant? The man who killed her 24 years ago now speaks out. Her moving account of how she raised a captive lioness before returning her to the wild made Joy Adamson a legend way beyond the African bush. But the author of the bestseller Born Free, which was turned into a hugely successful film, was a tyrannical employer who fired live bullets at her black African staff, according to the man who was convicted of her murder.” —Guardian.UK

In Rare Talk Show Interview, Bush Defends Decision on War —New York Times

“…The tactics, which aim to evade aviation security systems by placing only components of explosive devices on passenger jets, allowing militants to assemble them in the air, have been tried out on planes flying between the Middle East, North Africa and Western Europe, security sources say.

Concerns that militants might assemble a bomb or another weapon on board were a key factor in the series of recent cancellations of transatlantic flights.” ` —Guardian.UK

“Wesley Clark has gravitas and charm but seems like a closet Republican. John Edwards is bright and articulate and really, really youthful. Who’d be the best V.P.?” —Salon

Vice-presidential machinations on the Republican side too? Arianna Huffington: “ GOP inner circles are buzzing with the rumor that President Bush is planning to drop Dick Cheney from his re-election ticket and replace him with 9/11 action hero Rudy Giuliani.

As one firmly committed to making sure Bush doesn’t get another four years in office, all I can say to this is: Please, Mr. President, say it ain’t so!

Cheney is the Democrats’ best—though sorely underutilized—weapon. A loose-lipped loose cannon who threatens to torpedo the Bushie ship of state every time he half-opens his mouth. If only we start paying attention.

Perhaps sensing that Broadway Rudy is warming up in the bullpen, Cheney has begun upping his public profile. After rarely venturing out of his secure, undisclosed location—aka Republican fund-raisers—he has given a rash of high-profile interviews over the past month.

And thank God for that: the Most Powerful Number Two In History just can’t help telling it like he sees it, and the way he sees it is very, very telling. And frightening.” —tompaine.com

“Two years after my husband, Danny Pearl, was kidnapped and murdered, his employers at the Wall Street Journal seem all too willing to forget.” —Mariane Pearl, Salon

Great Taste, Less Privacy “Wonder what information is contained in that barcode on the back of your driver’s license? “Visitors to an art exhibit at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts got more than their martinis when they ordered drinks at a bar inside the gallery’s entrance. Instead of pretzels and peanuts, they were handed a receipt containing the personal data found on their license, plus all the information that could be gleaned from commercial data-mining services and voter registration databases like Aristotle. Some patrons also got receipts listing their phone number, income range, marital status, housing value and profession. For added effect, the receipt included a little map showing the location of their residence.” —Wired

“Over the past three years, President Bush has been plugging away at his faith-based initiative — and it’s doing better than you think.” — Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange [via AlterNet]

Expanding the boundaries of corporate malfeasance to new lows of dirty dealing, these ten companies are the worst offenders in a year that saw a lot of offenses. —AlterNet

“Mel Gibson’s controversial film on the Crucifixion is being hailed by US Catholics as the best recruiting tool for 2,000 years.” —Guardian.UK

Bruce Schneier: How We Are Fighting the War on Terrorism: “In recent years there has been an increased use of identification checks as a security measure. Airlines always demand photo IDs, and hotels increasingly do so. They’re often required for admittance into government buildings, and sometimes even hospitals. Everywhere, it seems, someone is checking IDs. The ostensible reason is that ID checks make us all safer, but that’s just not so. In most cases, identification has very little to do with security.

Let’s debunk the myths…”

Maureen Dowd: “Now, with the White House looking untrustworthy and desperate; with the national security team flapping around and pointing fingers at each other and, of course, Bill Clinton; with even the placid Laura getting testy; and with Newsweek reporting that the Justice Department is reviewing whether Halliburton was involved in paying $180 million in kickbacks to get contracts in Nigeria at a time when Dick Cheney was chairman, anybody else would be sweating.

Not deadeye Dick. His heavy lids didn’t blink when it turned out he’d blown up a half-century of American foreign policy alliances on a high-level hallucination.” —New York Times op-ed

In Rare Talk Show Interview, Bush Defends Decision on War —New York Times

I previously mentioned that Cory Doctorow has put his new novel online. Now he points us to this Speed Reader remix, “based on the research of Xerox PARC researcher Rich Gold, which flashes the book, one word at a time, up on the screen, at a high rate of speed. It is astonishingly readable, and makes you feel like you’ve found a back-door to your brain’s comprehension nodes.” I think I will try to read the book this way.

This is interesting. Billmon wonders if the Massachusetts Supreme Court has not handed Bush the November election by making the gay marriage ruling now, just in time to consign John Kerry irrevocably to the dustbin of history by putting some beef the voters can really take a bite of into the inevitable “Massachusetts liberal” line of attack.

‘James Joyce’ rants on kuro5hin.org:

“You are all pretentious twats, every last one of you. You’re all latte-sipping, iMac-using, suburban-living tertiary-industry-working WASPs who offer absolutely no new insights on anything whatsoever apart from maybe one specialist field if we’re lucky. Most of you think that you’re writing original content and that you’re making a contribution by licensing your spewings under Creative Commons ‘Some Rights Reserved’ licences, just because it’s the hip thing to do. You think you know all there is to say about blogging because you understand the concept of HTML and CSS, but the horrible truth is that 40% of you are all using the same shitty default layout. Then you take pictures of yourselves looking pensive or making vague allusions to mythology.”

For the record, I don’t use Movable Type, nor an iMac (I’m surprised he singles it out and that anything other than Linux passes muster!). I think lattes have become effete but, when I do drink one (never never at Starbucks) I avoid sipping it. I am not a WASP and do not live in the suburbs. I am not even clear about what a tertiary industry is. Some of my readers feel that I distinguish myself when I write about my one specialist field. I challenge myself to write original content every once in awhile but suspect I am not that good at it. Yes, I plead guilty to carrying the little Creative Commons logo here because I thought the concept was hip. Nope, I created my own layout, I know at least enough HTML and CSS to be proud of that, but more proud of the assistance I received from other generous members of the weblogging community in my efforts. However, alas, no javascript, which would have been really hip, as you put it. Can’t recall the last mythological allusion I made and no pictures of myself, pensive or otherwise. I guess my weblog (I would go further than you do; “blog” is not even barely acceptable, and I apologize for any instances of using the word that have slipped through) might squeak by?

‘Joyce’ ‘s concerns about the rhetorical faux pas‘s and the sheeplike manner in which a single opinion echoes through the weblog universe (yes, I will never use the term ‘blogosphere’ either, although ‘blogroll’ isn’t galling to me at all), on the other hand, make more sense to me, and I do wonder about the impact weblogging has on Google. I (heart) kuro5hin, and think they deserve the increased hits they are getting from this rant. One of the comments on the post refers to this stunt as ‘pulling a Janet Jackson’; will this become the accepted term for offensive attention-getting antics like this? Then, there’s the reader who posts what he calls a ‘serious refutation’, which consists of reposting every paragraph of Joyce’s rant and following it with a one-liner about how he disagrees. I hope he’s being tongue-in-cheek. As I said, I (heart) kuro5hin.

Lileks bleats particularly loudly these days; reading his site is better than taking ipecac if you feel the need to be sick. First, he goes on at length (unbelievable length) about actor Patrick Stewart (Jean-Luc Picard)’s statement that space exploration is the height of arrogance before we “get things right” on our own planet. Lileks feels Stewart is foolish to squander the goodwill he earned in his premier role, especially because Lileks admired how he “projected the values of Western Civ into the inky void while confronting the baffling nuances of worlds we have yet to imagine.” Yes, he does love the sound of his own voice. He goes on to suggest that, instead of stopping space exploration, we ban filmmaking and divert the resources to helping the unfortunate. He knows how impeachable an ignorant rant ignoring the value of artistic output is, so descends into some incoherent sputtering in his final paragraphs.

Then, if you still have the stomach to scroll down, you get to this reflection on the Kerry campaign, which seems to distress him because the Democrats are starting to say such cruel cruel things about his beloved President (having gone AWOL from his military obligation etc.) and because they have the temerity to quibble with the new religion of preemptive imperialism and permanent waronterrorism:

I?m waiting for an ad that simply puts the matter plainly: who do you think Al Qaeda wants to win the election? Who do you think will make Syria relax? Who do you think Hezbollah worries about more? Who would Iran want to deal with when it comes to its nuclear program ? Cowboy Bush or ?Send in the bribed French inspectors? Kerry? Which candidate would our enemies prefer?

I take it back. He’s too funny not to read merely because he makes me ill.

I have been predicting for some time that Bush is going to announce the capture of Osama bin Laden just in time to try to clinch the election for himself. Here goes Sen. Charles Grassley (R.-Iowa) priming the pump.

“I think they’re on his trail now in a way they haven’t been all year. It will happen because we will be able to divert more resources [to hunting down bin Laden].”

In a curious turn of phrase, Grassley said, “Obviously, he’ll be caught between now and the election.” Obviously?? What does he know that you and I don’t?

Just as he did with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory Doctorow is making his second novel available for free downloading. You’re welcome, and he explains why.

For you Firebird fans out there (my default browser since ver. 0.5) this MozillaZine discussion thread must be read before you install 0.8. Otherwise you have only yourself to blame.

I have been waiting for news of whether the investigation of the ‘outing’ of Valerie Plame would lead anywhere. It seems so!

“Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer’s identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said.

According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, were the two Cheney employees. ‘We believe that Hannah was the major player in this,’ one federal law-enforcement officer said. Calls to the vice president’s office were not returned, nor did Hannah and Libby return calls.

The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah ‘that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time’ as a way to pressure him to name superiors, one federal law-enforcement official said.” —Insight on the News

It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch o’ guys, if you ask me…

What’s a “Chido”? ‘Chidos are caricaturized sculptures with a claymation style. E-mail us a picture, and we’ll mail you back a Chidomation figure. Does “Chido” mean something? Yes, “chido” is the current word for “cool” among hip Latino kids. If something’s “sweet” in English, it’s “chido” in Spanish.’

“While global warming is being officially ignored by the political arm of the Bush administration, and Al Gore’s recent conference on the topic during one of the coldest days of recent years provided joke fodder for conservative talk show hosts, the citizens of Europe and the Pentagon are taking a new look at the greatest danger such climate change could produce for the northern hemisphere – a sudden shift into a new ice age. What they’re finding is not at all comforting.” —Thom Hartmann, CommonDreams

The Pentagon’s Weather Nightmare: “The climate could change radically, and fast. That would be the mother of all national security issues.” Recent studies of temperature data locked in Arctic ice cores indicate that warming trends push the climate to a ‘tipping point’ with a sudden lurch from one state to another over a timespan of less than a decade. The major impact on the northern hemisphere would, paradoxically, be drastic cooling, not warming; the major mechanism appears to be the disruption of the Gulf Stream (which warms northern latitudes) induced primarily by decreases in the ocean’s salinity caused by icemelt and rainwater runoff. Although not caused in the past by warming induced by greenhouse gases from human activity, research establishes these drastic flip-flops in the past.

The Pentagon’s concerns arise from the fact that dramatic shifts in climate may overwhelm certain societies’ ability to cope and drastically upset geopolitical strategic balance. The focus in climate research is thus shifting from gradual to rapid change. Hollywood is getting the concept too. Next summer’s disaster flick, The Day After Tomorrow, already being advertised at your local cineplex, envisions an ice age caused by global warming. While the climate scientists have far less than the filmmakers to say about the human drama of the coming ice age, the details are what Pentagon planning is all about. Some of the Defense Dept’s visionaries in long-term strategic threat assessment have apparently turned their attention to this scenario. Fortune magazine here summarizes an unclassified Pentagon report from this think tank, which spins an environmental and geopolitical forecast based on a sudden ‘conveyor collapse’ over the decade beginning in 2010. Suffice it to say it is not a pretty picture, and could reduce humanity to a brutal struggle for basic survival resources unlike anything seen in recent centuries but, with the technological capabilities of modern warfare including nuclear weaponry, of unheard-of brutality.

The Pentagon report does not indicate what recommendations its planners are making and it certainly does not indicate how they will be received by the dysadministration, who are the environmental equivalents of Holocaust deniers. Because of the US’s resources, climate diversity, technological superiority and military might, it fares better than other regions in the ‘wargame scenario’, and it is likely that Pentagon planners are focusing on protecting us against the anticipated hordes of starving have-nots. As Fortune‘s essay euphemistically puts it, “we should… identify ‘no regrets’ strategies to ensure reliable access to food and water and to ensure our national security” and “form teams to prepare responses to possible massive migration, and food and water shortages.” Since ecological catastrophe is at our doorstep, and it is too late to do anything to avert it, it’s every man for himself, ‘no regrets’, in other words. And for me it’s too late to regret having brought children into such a world.

As the reader who pointed me to this said, it is a blistering piece on Bush and Iraq by a Baltimore Sun editor: “Imagine how the loved ones of the dead may feel as they watch the spectacle of political jockeying over who should take the blame for a war being started on the basis of flawed intelligence, over whether there will be an investigation, and over the effect the timing of such an investigation may have on Bush’s campaign to get himself re-elected.

If I were such a parent, or spouse, or child, or wounded soldier, I expect my fury would be visceral and overwhelming. I would not let these men forget what they had done to my family. Blood is on their hands.

Beyond those Americans who have lost – and continue to lose – relatives and friends in the war in Iraq, the rest of America should be appalled. For what the architects of the war in Iraq have done to individual families, they also have done to the whole American family, diminishing the nation’s dignity and stature, and its safety.” —Baltimore Sun [thank you, Richard]

Osama’s voice on tape proves that the leader of al Qaeda is still alive. Or does it? “On January 4, Al Jazeera broadcast yet another audio tape purported to be from Osama bin Laden, in which he exhorted his followers to ‘continue the jihad.’ The voice referred to the capture of Saddam Hussein, proving the tape was recent. An anonymous CIA official confided to the New York Times: ‘It is likely the voice of Osama bin Laden.’ In an interview with CBS, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge agreed.

I pronounced bin Laden dead in my May 2002 and September 2002 columns. Am I ready to retract this claim, and to pay off several bets I made back then? No, not yet. I think Osama bin Laden is still dead. And I don’t think I’m just being stubborn. To understand my logic, consider the following three issues: the state of the antiterrorism effort, the technology of voice identification, and the most likely alternative hypothesis that could explain the audio tape.”

— Richard Muller (a security consultant and Berkeley physicist), MIT Technology Review

“The court effectively shut the door on any legislative or judicial challenge to its historic ruling last November. By the same margin, 4-3, the majority reaffirmed its opinion that gay marriage is constitutional and anything to reverse it is unconstitutional…

That advisory opinion to the Senate, which had been contemplating the passage of a civil union bill that would fall short of recognizing gay marriage, seemingly kills any short range chance of overturning the Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling in November, which declared same sex marriages to be constitutional.

The November decision has been targeted by Catholic bishops and Gov. Mitt Romney for reversal, who responded to Wednesday’s action saying, “While we’ve heard from the court, we haven’t heard yet from the people of Massachusetts.” ” —The Boston Channel. The forces of reaction are planning a constitutional convention to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman; if the court will no longer tolerate unconstitutional practice, then change the constitution, as simple as that.

“Mr. Lebrecht’s evidence for the coming demise of classical recording could be viewed alternatively as proof that for once the free market is working. If some greedy major labels are getting the comeuppance they deserve, let them go under.

Smaller labels like Nonesuch and Naxos, which once just filled in the gaps with records of specialty repertory and adventurous artists ignored by the majors, are proving that it is possible to release important recordings at midrange prices and still pay the bills. And though the financial repercussions from the downloading of CD’s have the recording industry feeling besieged and impotent, some bold orchestras have, like many rock groups, taken matters into their own hands and released self-produced CD’s, recorded live and available on the Internet.” — New York Times

“Roger Stone, the longtime Republican dirty-tricks operative who led the mob that shut down the Miami-Dade County recount and helped make George W. Bush president in 2000, is financing, staffing, and orchestrating the presidential campaign of Reverend Al Sharpton.

Though Stone and Sharpton have tried to reduce their alliance to a curiosity, suggesting that all they do is talk occasionally, a Voice investigation has documented an extraordinary array of connections.” A surprising investigative report by the Village Voice, if it is to be believed in the face of vociferous denials from the Sharpton campaign. I wonder if Stone is still working for the Republicans in this effort, if you catch my meaning.

This New York Times editorial lauds Ariel Sharon’s surprise directive to Jewish settlers to begin preparations to leave Gaza to the Palestinians, noting that the combined population of Israel and the occupied territories approaches parity. Supporters of the two-state solution ought to be encouraged, although the plan obviously does not go far enough in several respects. First, there is no timeline for implementation. Second, the purity of Sharon’s motivations is sullied by speculation that it is timed to deflect attention from the bribery scandal brewing around him. Most importantly, it does not include the West Bank, where the controversial Wall under construction dominates the landscape and where the Jewish “settlers’ ” presence is arguably more inflammatory.

“The Pentagon canceled its so-called LifeLog project, an ambitious effort to build a database tracking a person’s entire existence.

Run by Darpa, the Defense Department’s research arm, LifeLog aimed to gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees or does: the phone calls made, the TV shows watched, the magazines read, the plane tickets bought, the e-mail sent and received. Out of this seemingly endless ocean of information, computer scientists would plot distinctive routes in the data, mapping relationships, memories, events and experiences…

Researchers close to the project say they’re not sure why it was dropped late last month. Darpa hasn’t provided an explanation for LifeLog’s quiet cancellation. “A change in priorities” is the only rationale agency spokeswoman Jan Walker gave to Wired News.”

Robert Kuttner: “After an excruciating delay, chickens are finally coming home to roost for George W. Bush. For over a year, critics have been pointing to the president’s systematic misrepresentations of everything from Iraq to education to budget numbers. But the charge hasn’t really stuck, until very lately. This past week, however, Bush seems to have hit a tipping point.” — Boston Globe op-ed

“Dietary supplements are unregulated, some are unsafe — and Americans can’t get enough of them.” — The New Yorker

The Plot Thickens at The New York Times Book Review: Major changes are apparently afoot and the publishing industry is watching closely. As the editorship of the book review changes, it will emphasize nonfiction over what they claim is the glut of poor novels masquerading as serious literature these days [I have been disappointed for several years in the declining coverage of serious fiction, however.] Reviews will be more contentious and varied in length, and interspersed with author interviews and coverage of the publishing industry… and more reviews of the kind of mass market books once eschewed by ‘serious’ literary critics. — Poynter Online

DRM-free, and the artists get paid: “Imagine a world where music and movies could be freely exchanged online, where artists are recompensed and the labels don’t lose a cent, and where 12-year old girls need not fear harboring an MP3 of their favorite TV show theme tune on their PC.

All that could be yours for less than the price of a subscription to Napster: for less than $6 a month. Harvard University Professor Terry Fisher has completed the first comprehensive examination of various alternative models and the one we outline here offers such tantalizing social benefits, that even the most jaded sceptic ought to pay attention. Professor Fisher belongs to the school of forensic sceptics rather than the school of wide-eyed techno-utopians, and he’s spent three years trying to make the sums add up. We think it’s worth a look, and we think you ought to take a look too. (To make his task even more difficult, Fisher’s license model also takes on the additional onerous task of compensating Hollywood, too). ” — The Register

“The Supreme Court agreed last month to take up Cheney’s appeal in a case that involves his refusal to disclose the identities of members of his energy task force. Three weeks later, Scalia and Cheney went duck hunting together in the marshes of southern Louisiana.

Scalia maintains there was nothing improper about the trip, but it has prompted more than 20 newspaper editorial demands for President Reagan’s conservative appointee to stay out of the Cheney case.” —Fox Scalia retains the right to make his own decision about whether to recuse himself, unless a party with standing in the case asks him to do so and he refuses, in which case — albeit highly unlikely — the entire Court could review the question of his conflict of interest.

Joshua Micah Marshall: “When I look at the federal investigation being launched into the Janet Jackson boob incident, I realize what I like about this administration: they believe in accountability.”

“Never mind the investigation by the Federal Communications Commission into the Super Bowl halftime show that ended with the baring of Janet Jackson’s breast. Where is the inquiry into the crude, crass Super Bowl commercials celebrating a dog trained to bite crotches, a flatulent horse, a monkey pitching woo to a woman, a man tortured with a bikini waxing and an elderly couple fighting over a bag of potato chips?” —New York Times

“CBS announced today plans to enhance its ability to edit out any inappropriate and unexpected events from the Sunday, Feb. 8 broadcast of the “46th Annual Grammy Awards” on CBS.”

“And did no one notice that her tit was adorned with a little silver sun? The sun is a star, and since it’s decorated with a silver star, we can only assume this mammary has seen battle! Her boob is as highly decorated as John Kerry! And John Kerry threw his medals away. Janet (“Miss Jackson” if you’re nasty) wears hers with pride.” —Wonkette

Everyone knows, of course, that Bush fell asleep and missed the incident (after assiduously staying away from pretzels during the first half, I presume).

And, of course, in response to this new media crisis, Michael Powell is doing his part to reduce the record budget deficit, threatening to fine each of the 200 or so CBS affiliates that aired the offending segment up to $27,500 each, although he would personally like the penalty to be ten times higher. However, the Jackson flap is only one of recent celebrity exploits on TV that have the decency freaks howling for blood.

And TiVo reports that the “costume malfunction” was the most-replayed television moment in the history of the DVR. (I knew that the cloud around its silver lining is its amassing data about its users’ viewing habits, but I was not aware TiVo’s datamining is so detailed as to include a log of all rewinds and reviews. )

Will he seek to replace Cheney on the Republican ticket? [joke…]

“Bush’s approval numbers dip.” —CNN [Memo to David Brooks et al: Now do you begin to grasp what ‘electability’ might mean?]

And furthermore:

Support for going to war with Iraq also dipped below 50% for the first time, to 49%. The proportion of Americans who were certain that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to develop them before the war fell dramatically. More than four in 10 said the administration deliberately misled the public about whether Iraq had the banned weapons.

I caught this just before it went off the scroll at Boing Boing: “An anonymous reader sez, ‘The BBC made a unique deal with Real Networks which disposes of their spyware tactics. Basically, if a user clicks on a link to download Real Player from a BBC website, the referrer script sends them to a page where they can download an expiry-free, spyware-free and nuicance-free version of the player. It’s because the BBC have such a stringent public service remit, that it was offensive to charge people a license fee for BBC content, then make them pay all over again for the facility to view/listen to it.'”

Visited countries: “Select in the table below the countries you’ve visited and produce a map of the world with those countries in red. You can even put the map on your website or blog by simply pasting the code you’ll get!” —World66

“Our fourth annual review of the most shameful, dishonest, and just plain stupid moments of the past year. —” Business 2.0

Thirty years ago, one of the most significant papers in the history of psychiatry, psychologist David Rosenhan’s “On Being Sane in Insane Places”, was published in Science and rocked the psychiatric establishment. Rosenhan and eight other volunteers faked their way into psychiatric hospitals with the single complaint that they had hallucinated a voice; they feigned no other symptoms, spoke honestly about their lives after admission, and reported that the voice had stopped once they were in the hospital. One and all were diagnosed as schizophrenics and their subsequent behaviors — for example, Rosenhan’s note-taking during his hospitalization — were pathologized in light of that diagnosis.

Rosenhan and his confederates were given some therapy, and when they told of the joys, satisfactions and disappointments of an ordinary life – remember, they were making nothing up save the original complaint – all found that their pasts were reconfigured to fit the diagnosis: “This white 39-year-old male … manifests a long history of considerable ambivalence in close relationships … affective stability is absent … and while he says he has several good friends, one senses considerable ambivalence in those relationships.”

The other patients sensed that the volunteers were not truly psychotic, he reports.

Rosenhan drew the conclusion that, in an important sense, diagnosis resides not within the person but in the context, and that a diagnostic system so vulnerable to error should not be considered reliable. The backlash was immense, and included some of the most prominent psychiatrists in the field criticizing his findings by observing that diagnosticians do not expect to be deliberately lied to and that the volunteers had not acted ‘sane’ after their admission —

Had their behaviour been normal, they would have walked to the nurses’ station and said, “Look, I am a normal person who tried to see if I could get into the hospital by behaving in a crazy way or saying crazy things. It worked and I was admitted to the hospital, but now I would like to be discharged from the hospital.”

Furthermore, although Rosenhan’s intentions in not identifying the facilities in which the deceptions had taken place were honest, critics at those hospitals could not challenge his accounts of how the pseudopatients were perceived or treated.

Thoughtful psychologist Lauren Slater (who is ‘out of the closet’ about having a psychiatric history herself), to whose work I have admiringly linked here in the past, reviews Rosenhan’s study and its critics’ counterclaims —Guardian.UK. Robert Spitzer, the brilliant but conceited guardian of the diagnostic system as embodied in its bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, (who mounted one of the fiercest counterattacks on the original paper and did not have a kind word to say for the misfurtunes that happen to have befallen Rosenhan in the intervening decades) said that with the current refinement of diagnostic criteria, Rosenhan’s findings “could never happen today” …So Slater decided to replicate the experiment again. Her experience departs from the Rosenhan experiment, both in its outcome and the kindness with which she was treated, but is at least as dramatic an indictment of the way psychiatry is done today as Rosenhan’s was thirty years ago (…and she puts it back in Spitzer’s face). I share her unspoken disdain for his cockiness, and as well her veneration and affection for Rosenhan (who was as she wrote, ironically, institutionalized and mute with a mysterious paralytic illness; he has since recovered, equally mysteriously), whose study albeit flawed should be considered heroic and whose crucial lessons we in the mental health field ignore at our peril.

The shoddy (although well-intentioned) way in which clinicians drew their conclusions about Slater’s feigned distress is, unfortunately, the norm rather than the exception throughout the mental health field today. Patients are referred into my psychiatric hospital bearing labels determined by sloppy, uninformed, arbitrary guesswork bearing no similarity to the elaborate process of applying criteria which should be used to diagnose them accurately. Once stuck on, a diagnostic label follows a patient around immutably. This ‘conceptual abuse’ would not be so provocative to watch if it did not dictate the patient’s medication treatment and to a large extent the interpersonal attitude toward them by many in the mental health field.

Slater’s article on Rosenhan’s work is adapted from her just-released book, Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments Of The 20th Century. According to the publisher’s website, some of the other chapters cover “Harlow’s wire monkeys, Moniz?s lobotomy, Skinner?s pecking pigeons, Milgram?s horrific ?shock? machine, Kandel?s surprisingly illuminating sea slugs and the light they cast on the molecular workings of memory.” I know she also covers the controversial work of Elizabeth Loftus on “false memory”, and I wonder if she covers Milgram’s other seminal work, the famous “six degrees of separation” study.

Gary Trudeau had John Kerry’s number in October, 1971. —Slate

I am amazed at the number of people who post entries in their weblogs that would get them in trouble if the wrong people read them… and then are astonished when they do, and the weblogger gets fired, has a family blowout, loses a friend, or a relationship, or gets an unexpected visit from The Authorities. To complement the Darwin Awards (which “honor those who improve our gene pool…by removing themselves from it”), we ought to have a set of Social Darwins (for those who do society a favor by removing themselves from the social running in some way), and I would nominate some of these ‘kiss ‘n’ tell’ webloggers. I am confident that any trouble into which I get as a result of my posts here will have been deliberate, not inadvertent. Oh, wait just a minute, I’ll be right back, there’s a knock at the front door…

The scream that may not have been; a reporter makes a cogent case that it was an artifact of the sound equipment used that night. —ABC [via Interesting People]

“Breathing new fire into the old cliches that war is hell and love of money is the root of all evil, American soldiers have found a way to wrest Western capitalism out of the Iraqi sands where part of Hollywood’s most popular devil movie was filmed…

Last month, Capt. Nik Guran of the 2-320 Field Artillery Regiment, a ‘major unit’ of the 101st Airborne Division stationed in the small Iraqi town of Hatra, inserted a copy of The Exorcist in a portable DVD player. As the film began, Guran had the weird realization he was sitting at the location where director William Friedkin shot the opening sequence of his 1973 horror classic.

‘He recognized the sun temples,’ Friedkin recently said by phone from Hollywood.

‘And then the Army hatched this idea,’ Friedkin continued, ‘to turn the whole area into a tourist attraction and call it ‘The Exorcist Experience.”” —Houston Chronicle [via walker]

This site keeps track of the dead and wounded among the occupying forces, slicing and dicing the statistics in various ways as well as keeping a running narrative account.

“A German cannibal was convicted of manslaughter but not murder Friday for killing and eating a man who had asked to die, and he was sentenced to eight and a half years in jail.

The court rejected the prosecution’s plea for a murder conviction and life sentence because the victim had instructed Armin Meiwes, 42, to kill him. ” —Yahoo! News

“How is it that the dog, alone among Earth’s species, comes in so many shapes and sizes?” —PBS Nova

Genetically engineered plants turn red when growing over a mine. “A genetically engineered plant that detects landmines in soil by changing colour could prevent thousands of deaths and injuries by signalling where explosives are concealed.” —Nature

Twins born to woman who acted as surrogate for her infertile daughter, to the dismay of reproductive ethics campaigners. —ITV

Found in a garage in Oxfordshire, England —Sydney Morning Herald

“The African-American vote could make all the difference in South Carolina. But given the way three local Democratic activists are feeling, the party might be in big trouble… The Democratic Party is the party that talks about the black vote and attaining it by any means necessary,” Aiken said. ”Now, that does not equate with ‘We value the black vote’ as much as ‘We have to attain it in order to get what we want.”’ The routine currency in this exchange is emotion — for white candidates a little soul power soaked up from a gospel choir and shed just as easily. Candidates parade through church, Aiken noted, but, she said: ”Has anyone done a follow-up visit after a campaign? You know, ‘I came to your church, asked for your vote, the preacher gave me the pat and we prayed. Now I’m in; I’m going to make one more trip back, at least to thank you.”'” —New York Times Magazine

Claims of the discovery of superheavy elements 113 and 115, opening intriguing vistas. “The discoveries fill a gap at the furthest edge of the periodic table and hint strongly at a weird landscape of undiscovered elements beyond…Rather than being round, nuclei in that region and beyond could contain bubbles and have strange doughnut-like shapes…” —New York Times

Mos Def as Ford Prefect in the Hitchhiker’s Guide feature film. —Reuters

Bowing to pressure from lawmakers, the White House reverses its opposition to an independent investigation of intelligence failures. —Washington Post. Right now, administration strategy is all about damage control; Bush’s team appears divided over whether it would be worse to acknowledge that the data on which it based its decision was wrong, or to remain ‘publicly agnostic’ about the quality of the intelligence. The thing to watch will be how the administration limits both the scope (will the inquiry address not only generation but administration consumption of intelligence data?) and duration of the investigation. Rather than making this go away quickly, an effort that the White House reversal seems to acknowledge has failed, they may try to draw this out so any damaging allegations do not come out until after November. Expect the White House to drag its feet mightily in cooperating with requests for crucial data from an independent commission.

“Monsanto, the world’s largest genetically modified seed company, has been awarded patents on the wheat used for making chapati – the flat bread staple of northern India.

The patents give the US multinational exclusive ownership over Nap Hal, a strain of wheat whose gene sequence makes it particularly suited to producing crisp breads.

Another patent, filed in Europe, gives Monsanto rights over the use of Nap Hal wheat to make chapatis, which consist of flour, water and salt.

Environmentalists say Nap Hal’s qualities are the result of generations of farmers in India who spent years crossbreeding crops and collective, not corporate, efforts should be recognised.” —Guardian.UK This would be like patenting the use of flour to make pizza dough in the US.

In examining the insidious marketing strategies Big Pharma uses to put profits ahead of people’s health, I have often noted the lack of a constituency for patients with the devastating disease on which I focus most, chronic schizophrenia. This article focuses on the challenges the drug companies face in marketing newly-developed (and monumentally expensive) antipsychotic drugs for this population.

Since the mid-1990’s, a group of drug companies, led by Johnson & Johnson, has campaigned to convince state officials that a new generation of drugs – with names like Risperdal, Zyprexa and Seroquel – is superior to older and much cheaper antipsychotics like Haldol. The campaign has led a dozen states to adopt guidelines for treating schizophrenia that make it hard for doctors to prescribe anything but the new drugs. That, in turn, has helped transform the new medicines into blockbusters.

Ten drug companies chipped in to help underwrite the initial effort by Texas state officials to develop the guidelines. Then, to spread the word, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and possibly other companies paid for meetings around the country at which officials from various states were urged to follow the lead of Texas, according to documents and interviews that are part of a lawsuit and an investigation in Pennsylvania. —New York Times

The marketing pressure the manufacturers exerted allegedly includes payoffs and other illegal or marginally legal practices. In comparative studies, these drugs have comparable efficacy to the older antipsychotics. Early claims that they are more effective have gone by the boards. Pitching them to prescribers has largely relied on claims that they are better tolerated and safer than the older drugs in terms of side effects. While this is true (patients on them develop the devastating neurological effects of the older drugs far less often), they turn out to have important metabolic complications (effects on glucose and lipid metabolism, weight gain and in some cases cardiac risks). Psychiatrists like myself and other physicians are the objects of a relentless full court press from the manufacturers to diffuse prescribers’ concerns about such liabilities to their patients. Suffice it to say that physicians should be collectively ashamed of how they have handed control over what they learn about prescribing new medications to the pharmaceutical companies that profit from those drugs.

This site keeps track of the dead and wounded among the occupying forces, slicing and dicing the statistics in various ways as well as keeping a running narrative account.

I share Josh Marshall’s take on the issue of administration stonewalling on calls for an independent investigaiton of claims of intelligence failures in the pre-invasion assessment of the Iraqi threat. While most commentators are content to explain administration resistance to an investigation in terms of a wish to get the issue off the minds of the voters sooner (for example, Daniel Schorr’s commentary this morning on NPR; do you share my sense that his acumen is fading?), it is more likely that inquiries would go beyond what intelligence was provided to examine how it was consumed by the White House, which is where I think the real intelligence failures and abuses lie. Testimony by representatives of the intelligence community to an independent inquiry board would reveal the profound and unprecedented breakdown in relations between their establishment and the administration, much along the lines that Seymour Hersh described several months ago in his important New Yorkerpiece on the uraniumgate scandal. Recall that Hersh suggested that the offices of the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense have virtually built their own parallel intelligence infrastructures because of the recalcitrance of the CIA to feed them exactly the interpretations their selection biases required.

And lest you point out that Kay said the misinformation was the CIA’s problem, Marshall concludes as I have that Kay was in no position to know whether the CIA was pressured to reach erroneous conclusions or its analysis distorted by the very selective attention of administration ideologues. ” ‘Tis a poor workman who blames his tools…”

Similarly, does administration stonewalling on the 9/11 commission suggest that the truth of what was known of the impending threat is more complicated than intelligence failure at Foggy Bottom?

I have been troubled by the transparency of the administration and its apologists falling back increasingly on the ‘humanitarian’ justifications for the invasion of Iraq as the justification of averting an imminent threat has evaporated. Here, Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch, which has the credibility of having documented and remonstrated about Saddam Hussein’s abuses for decades, writes in the Human Rights Watch World Report 2004 that the humanitarian argument does not bear up under examination. The human rights emergency in Iraq was no more dire than in many other parts of the world where we do not choose to intervenq; “the Iraq war was not mainly about saving the Iraqi people from mass slaughter, and …no such slaughter was then ongoing or imminent”. Why have standards? A lesser emergency is still an emergency, right? Roth points out that the capacity for military intervention is finite, and if it is used in lesser emergencies (even in cases, unlike Iraq, where the moral urgency is unambiguous) the capacity to face greater atrocities may be lacking. Undermining the international legal order by violating another soverign country’s borders, especially without the support fo the world community, further impairs international protection of human rights. In short, the intervention fails Human Rights Watch’s standards for a humanitarian response — it was not a last resort, was not intended or structured to be for the benefit of the Iraqi people, departed in multiple respects from interventions acknowledged by the world community as legitimately humanitarian, had no endorsement by multilateral aothorities, and was not structured effectively to prevent doing more harm than good. I share Roth’s concern that there be an international multilateral consensus on criteria (hopefully, similar to those he outlines in this manifesto) for humanitarian interventions, preferably with the force of treaty law. It is unlikey the U.S. under its present administration would be a party to such an accord, given our repeated insistence that we will brook no interference in our right to defend ourselves and the unreasoned fluidity among the various pretexts offered for our unilateral adventurism abroad. But it would make the US’s renegade status more unambiguous and serve as a legitimate basis for international penalties for our arrogance and defiance.

Despite the Hutton Report’s bringing down the leadership of the BBC and supposedly exonerating the Blair government of having distorted the evidence for invading Iraq, reports suggest that the British public retain more confidence in the BBC than in Her Majesty’s government. Here is Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke‘s take on it. Meanwhile, despair in the newsroom has turned to anger. A ‘bring back Dyke’ ad appeared today in the Daily Telegraph, funded and signed by hundreds of BBC staffers and stating, in part,

Greg Dyke stood for brave, independent and rigorous BBC journalism that was fearless in its search for the truth. We are resolute that the BBC should not step back from its determination to investigate the facts in pursuit of the truth. Through his passion and integrity, Greg Dyke inspired us to make programmes of the highest quality and creativity. We are dismayed by Greg’s departure, but we are determined to maintain his achievements and his vision for an independent organisation that serves the public above all else.

—Guardian.UK [with links at the bottom to dozens of articles they have run on aspects of the crisis].

I can’t tell you how often I am hearing critics ridicule the Democrats for wanting to elect someone ‘electable.’ Now it is David Brooks. It is fashionable for them to call this focus on “electability” postmodern too, “an election about itself, with voters voting on the basis of who could win votes later on. It’s the tautology, stupid.” Well, Brooks, the contempt of the contemptible is a compliment, IMHO. First of all, it is a well-known longstanding and, yes, perhaps pitiful, voting phenomenon that the electorate is pulled toward joining the winning team; nothing new there. But, in the current race, it is ludicrous to talk about the Democratic voters’ focus on electability without acknowledging how desperate they are at this juncture to find someone who can beat Bush (beat Bush again, that is). It is no accident that it is Republican handmaidens who lampoon the phenomenon now. You did not hear them derogating the intelligence of the electorate in 2000. Ridiculing “electability” is a testimony to the pundit’s lack of intelligence, not that of the electorate. But if you think this is ridiculous, you can bet this is just a preview of the battle for the hearts and, especially, the minds, of the voters you’ll see this fall in the general election campaign, as it will be scripted by Republican strategists. Of course, the President himself won’t use the ‘s-word’ for fear of alienating voters, but his machine will get its mouthpieces in the conservative press to insinuate how stupid those who do not back administration policy are. Conservatives like Kevin Phillips are turning against the Bush dynasty because of the extent to which it represents an elitist patrician sentiment very different from the Republican populism that propelled REagan, for better or worse, into captivating the nation int he ’80’s. Let us hope the populace sees the contempt in which Bush’s organization holds them.

Another problem with the arguments of Brooks and those of his ilk about the folly of going for an electable Democrat is that this is not necessarily what the Democrats are doing. The primary campaign is not yet over and conclusions about Kerry’s victory are greatly exaggerated, it appears to me. While many are whitewashing his flaws in flush of bandwagon effect, it is not lost on other Democrats what a mistake going with Kerry would be. (Jack Beatty: “Listening to him, I saw a long line of Democratic bores—Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Bradley, Gore—who lost because people could not bear listening to them. John Kerry belongs in their dreary company. I fear he could talk his way out of victory…” —The Atlantic)

Seeking intelligent life among the newsreaders, television producers and yoghurt advertisers who label things as ‘science’ : “…(H)ow… are we to save the world from scenes like the one I witnessed on TV the other night? A BBC science correspondent was reporting on the breakdown of communications with the Martian rover, which he described as ‘either a hardware problem or a software problem’. ‘Could you put that into terms that laymen like me would understand?’ asked the newsreader. I assume the look on the reporter’s face was meant to reflect sympathy rather than disgust, but what could he say to that? ‘Basically it’s fucked, mate.’ Who on earth would be interested in the fate of a planetary probe and yet not be able to cope with the idea that it’s either a hardware or a software problem? The world’s gone mad.” —Guardian.UK