It could be a thread that unravels the bureau: “Evidence has surfaced recently that the FBI has been spying on foreign nations for years.

The revelation is so sensitive that in the wake of the secret surfacing, the FBI has embarked on a mad scramble to cover up the evidence. The Bureau has gone as far as to pressure a federal judge into sealing previously public court records that open a window on the FBI’s overseas spying mission.

In addition, with the help of the U.S. Attorney’s Office (John Ashcroft’s Justice Department) the FBI also sought, through a proposed court order, to seize any computer anywhere that the Bureau suspected might have contained the sensitive court pleadings.” —Online Journal

CBS Mulls Canceling Reagan Mini-Series, Sources Say: “Drawing Republican fire over the accuracy of its upcoming mini-series ‘The Reagans,’ CBS appears ready to present a kinder, gentler portrait of the ailing former President Ronald Reagan (news) than originally produced — if the network airs it at all.

Sources close to the production said on Monday CBS is considering canceling the docudrama, slated to air Nov. 16 and 18, under mounting criticism from political conservatives that the two-part series unfairly depicts Reagan and his wife.” —Yahoo! News

“The United States is one of 45 countries that refuses to sign the 1997 Ottawa Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines (APMs) and on their Destruction.” —Online Journal

Clear landmines with one click.

“The mainstream media continues to cooperate with the Bush Administration’s policy of giving short shrift to the Muslim psyche, and especially the Iraqi sense of place.

In the West — where the expressions ‘family, national pride, and friend’ are tossed about like so much salad — we are less likely to recognize the importance of diverse cultural perspectives, above all when they are linked to unassailable and even unwise fidelity.

So sayeth not the irresponsible and sometimes non-curious American news media, where nowhere have we heard a word about stunning Arab loyalties, even between those of contradictory opinion, that might be our ‘enlightenment’ answering the question concerning why exactly Saddam Hussein has not been ‘discovered’ — and may never be.

It is the Arab term ‘Dakhil’ which provides the underpinning for the arrangement in which the hunters, namely the US Military, and the hunted, namely former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti, now find themselves.” — Jeff Koopersmith, —American Political Journal

I asked the other day about the senseless illogic of surrounding an Iraqi town with razor wire because of Saddam Hussein’s supposed role in planning the ongoing insurgency against the American occupying forces. Koopersmith knows why it will not succeed. “Tribal vigor is on the rise in Iraq. Make no mistake about that fact — and, therefore, their ability and propensity to protect and hide their own increases each day…One need only think of a mother and child to come close to understanding this fealty.” I also wrote about mistrusting the academic objections to the similarities drawn between Iraq and Vietnam, that this is a matter “too important to be left to the academics.” The role that American ignorance of the cultural underpinnings of the indigenous struggles of these two peoples will play in our failure is one of those generalities worth paying attention to instead of drawing scholarly distinctions. (As Koopersmith concludes, “It is their, our, and our leaders’ almost complete failure to understand the Iraqi ethos that is indefensible, and that which may come to consume us, far more than today.” Substitute Vietnamese for Iraqi in that sentence, and it reads as true.)

Volusia County Memos Disclose Election 2000 Vote Fraud. Voting machine giant Diebold is trying to suppress the web exposure of these leaked internal memos using a dubious application of copyright law. Cease-and-desist orders are going out to sites which reprint them. (The link points to one which, being in New Zealand, is hopefully out of reach of US court jurisdiction.) If you have the means of and the interest in doing so, spread the link to these memos and help get Diebold caught with their pants down before they help steal the 2004 election too.

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s October 31 remarks at the “New American Strategies for Security and Peace” conference:

“…American power worldwide is at its historic zenith. American global political standing is at its nadir. Why? What is the cause of this? These are facts. They’re measurable facts. They’re also felt facts when one talks to one’s friends abroad who like America, who value what we treasure but do not understand our policies, are troubled by our actions and are perplexed by what they perceive to be either demagogy or mendacity.

Maybe the explanation is that we are rich, and we are, and that we are powerful, and we certainly are. But if anyone thinks that this is the full explanation I think he or she is taking the easy way out and engaging in a self-serving justification. I think we have to take into account two troubling conditions.

Since the tragedy of 9-11 which understandably shook and outraged everyone in this country, we have increasingly embraced at the highest official level what I think fairly can be called a paranoiac view of the world. Summarized in a phrase repeatedly used at the highest level, “he who is not with us is against us.” I say repeatedly because actually some months ago I did a computer check to see how often it’s been used at the very highest level in public statements.

The count then quite literally was ninety-nine. So it’s a phrase which obviously reflects a deeply felt perception. I strongly suspect the person who uses that phrase doesn’t know its historical or intellectual origins. It is a phrase popularized by Lenin (Applause) when he attacked the social democrats on the grounds that they were anti-Bolshevik and therefore he who is not with us is against us and can be handled accordingly.

This phrase in a way is part of what might be considered to be the central defining focus that our policy-makers embrace in determining the American position in the world and is summed up by the words “war on terrorism.” War on terrorism defines the central preoccupation of the United States in the world today, and it does reflect in my view a rather narrow and extremist vision of foreign policy of the world’s first superpower, of a great democracy, with genuinely idealistic traditions. ” [more (read the whole thing)]

Recall the peculiar saga of Freud’s friend Wilhelm Fleiss and his notions of the relationship between nasal pathology and psychopathology, about which I have written previously at FmH. Now here is a new twist:

“A University of Melbourne team examined a group of people deemed to be at ultra high risk of developing psychosis and found those that went on to develop schizophrenia, rather than other forms of psychosis, all displayed the inability to identify smells. This deficit was present before the onset of any significant clinical symptoms of psychosis.

The study, the first of its kind, is published in the October 2003 American Journal of Psychiatry…

It has long been known that people suffering schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis are often unable to correctly identify smells. That is, pizza may be mislabelled as orange, or bubblegum as smoke. Before the current findings, however, it was unknown if this difficulty developed later, as a result of the progression of the disorder, or well before any symptoms of psychosis became obvious…

Their results suggest a promising discovery of the first potential marker for schizophrenia, and possibly for other psychoses.

Brewer and Pantelis’ detective work began with the understanding that a person’s sense of smell is intimately linked to the area of your brain that deals with emotions and related non-language functions.

‘It is the only sense that passes straight to this area of the brain, and so any vulnerability involving these neural circuits can affect our labeling of smell,’ says Brewer.

‘This area of the brain deals with the primary emotions. It is the part that processes such things as threat and emotion before transferring this information into the frontal (language) area of the brain,’ he says.

‘It is either the transfer of emotional information to the frontal lobe, or functioning in the frontal lobe itself that appears to be compromised in those suffering from psychosis.'”

There seems to be a sort of progress in awareness, through the stages of which every man—and especially every psychiatrist and every patient—must move, some persons progressing further through these stages than others. One starts by blaming the identified patient for his idiosyncrasies and symptoms. Then one discovers that these symptoms are a response to—or an effect of—what others have done; and the blame shifts from the identified patient to the etiological figure.

Then, one discovers perhaps that these figures feel a guilt for the pain which they have caused, and one realizes that when they claim this guilt they are identifying themselves with God. After all, they did not, in general, know what they were doing, and to claim guilt for their acts would be to claim omniscience. At this point one reaches a more general anger, that what happens to people should not happen to dogs, and that what people do to each other the lower animals could never devise. Beyond this, there is, I think, a stage which I can only dimly envisage, where pessimism and anger are replaced by something else—perhaps humility. And from this stage onward to whatever other stages there may be, there is loneliness.

No one knows the end of that progress which starts from uniting the perceiver and the perceived—the subject and the object—into a single universe.

I love this ‘reference library on demand’. You install a client on your computer that allows you immediate (with a broadband connection) reference information. Clicking on a word or phrase in any Windows program triggers GuruNet and submits the underlying text, returning facts about the topic. The New York Times called it “the best implementation yet of the information at your fingertips promise.” There is a free client that is plenty powerful but you may want to buy a full license after you try it. If you do, write me for a coupon that will give you $5 off. Yes, I know, this is a blatant advertisement for what is essentially a multilevel marketing scheme — after I sell five people on licensing it using the coupon code I provide them, I get my own registration fee refunded to me. Privacy-oriented readers may be concerned that GuruNet tracks your queries and shares aggregate (but not personally identifiable) usage patterns with third parties such as their corporate clients and third-party content providers. Nevertheless, I think the tradeoff is worthwhile if you are a heavy text-based computer user who ever needs to look up a word or a fact.

“Strong explosions were heard late Monday in central Baghdad, and it appeared the blasts were coming from the western side of the Tigris River.

Five blasts shook the area in quick succession about 9:10 p.m. The U.S. military command had no information on the incident.” —Washington Post. Perhaps they ‘had no information’; if the situation is dire enough, the military may simply repress the news. How would we know? After all, journalists were fiercely excluded by a military cordon from the site of the downed helicopter over the weekend, according to reporters I heard interviewed on NPR.

Freed Iranians accuse US of torture: “Two Iranian journalists with state-run television who were freed by US forces in Iraq after four months of detention have charged they were subjected to ‘severe torture’ while in American custody.

But in Baghdad a coalition military spokesman denied that anyone was mistreated in its custody.” —Agence France Presse

” ‘ She would not have believed London still had so many inhabitants…’ Michael Moorcock has begun a new short story for us. Now it’s up to you to continue it… Moorcock has called the story ‘Crowning the Kitten’. You can read his opening here.

The story will unfold in weekly instalments over the next six weeks, but how it continues depends on you.” —Guardian.UK

Anthony Bourdain’s A Cook’s Tour: “Jayne Margetts on Anthony Bourdain’s quest to eat the most gastronomically dangerous dishes on the planet”. —spike

“This week, washingtonpost.com and The Concord Monitor will host a series of live discussions with each participating Democratic candidate in the presidential race. Bookmark this page for the upcoming full list of scheduled discussions.”

I find much of interest posted to Abyssal Mind.

From game designer and author Greg Costikyan:

“Sometime in the 80s, I was living in Columbia University housing with my then-wife, who was studying for her MBA. A political worker came to the door, and asked us to make a donation to some political organization, I don’t recall which, to help fund the ‘fight against the radical right.’ Louise told him ‘but we are the radical right.’

Today, we have a president whose idea of cutting taxes is cutting them in such a way that the richest few percentage of the population gains almost all of the benefit; who has no compunction about leading the nation into a wholly unnecessary war, with no workable plan for how to manage the victory; whose administration consistently works to increase police powers and erode individual freedom; and whose party has been captured by fundamentalist Christian lunatics whose political agenda consists solely of oppressing women and those who make love in ways they don’t like.

It is patently clear that, today, the Republicans pose a far greater threat to American liberties than the Democrats.

I’m not of the ‘anything but Bush’ school. I could never bring myself to vote for someone who thinks censoring games is a good idea (Lieberman), seems to want to bring back the Smoot-Hawley Tariff (Gephardt), or came to political prominence through irresponsible race baiting (Sharpton–I’m a New Yorker, and I assure you that I remember Tawana Brawley, not to mention Crown Heights).

Still, today, the United States is in the hand of a dim-witted Yalie frat boy who listens only to neocon nutcase advisers and has no clue how close we are to a hundred-year war between the Islamic world and the West–and if he did, might think it was a good idea, since that would resemble some of the predictions for the End Times.

If the Democrats wind up nominating Dean, Clark, Edwards, or Kerry, I will almost certainly wind up voting for someone other than the nominee of the Libertarian Party in the next presidential election–the first time I will have done so since I was old enough to vote.”

He says Iraqi forces will fill the gap —Washington Post.



Really. The rush to remobilize the Iraqi army we disbanded when we invaded is a rush to use the ‘hajjis’ (recall: our expletive for all Muslims) as cannonfodder as soon as possible and to extricate ourselves as fast as we can, before mounting American casualties lose Bush the election. Oops, too late, Dubya. A majority of Americans polled now disapprove of the dysadministration’s handling of the Iraqi quagmire, a majority feel the death toll is unacceptable, and a majority would vote for an unnamed Democratic adversary to Bush (any) in the next election if it were held now. By the way, memo to American public: it’s about time. (Don’t get me started on the idiocy of Congressional calls to send more U.S. troops to Baghdad; if there is anything more out of touch with sane alternatives than the Bush cabal, it appears to be Congress. How about calling for extrication?)

Let’s see, the deadliest day ever in the U.S. occupation (although I would venture to say it will not be the deadliest to come, as all the evidence says the resistance is well-armed, increasingly organized, sophisticated, accurate, more and more assertive, more and more deadly… and more and more cheered by the Iraqi population) is the six-month anniversary of our action figure hero’s photo-op under the “Mission Accomplished” banner (which he now denies was his people’s responsibility… and he is right, it wasn’t their responsibility, it was their fault). Didn’t the smirking chimp say, at one point, “Bring ’em on”, enraging our troops’ families back home by seeming to invite the slaughter we are now seeing? Now we’re several weeks into a dysadministration public relations offensive accusing the media of underplaying the progress in Iraq in favor of reporting on the insurgency (which someone commented is like saying a thunderstorm obscures the sunny day behind it). Oh, and there’s that line about how the attacks on American troops are evidence of our success. What would indicate our failure? Total pacification and jubilant acceptance of occupation by the entire Iraqi populace? The Washington Post article notes that “during a southern swing on Saturday, Bush largely ignored the death toll in Iraq, referring specifically to Iraq only once in four speeches totaling 72 minutes.” Let’s face it, Dubya — there is nothing you can say; you’re a liar and you’re inept. You keep on lying, they keep on dying.

Related: The Brown Paste on Bush’s Shoes

“…first whiff…of the collapse of the Bush maladministration’s credibility and with it its operatives’ dreams of a Thousand Year Right…”:

“Surely, as my numerous detractors on the right-hand end of the speculum will point out, it is wrong to make mock of a president struggling so manfully against such dire evils as are abroad in the world? Surely we, the American people, should get behind him and support our troops? There’s a silly frigging idea. Bush is surrounded by concrete barriers and electric razor wire in Washington, DC. Our troops are sucking dirt in some hellhole on the other side of the world, overworked, underpaid, and going swiftly insane slaughtering the locals. You want to support our troops, get Bush in front of them. They’ll be home on the first transport out of Kuwait. Bush has had all the support he could ever ask for, and six trillion times more support than he ever deserved (I’m rounding the number to the nearest trillion for ease of reading). I for one am well pleased that the noisome brown paste is finally clinging to his shoes and ankles, and Rumsfeld’s, and Condi’s pumps, and on down the line of them, the whole vile, varicose, villainous gang of them embrindled with poo at last. O schadenfreude, O schadenfreude, Du kannst mir sehr gefallen!

The ruination of Bush’s utterly spurious credibility has been a long, slow process, entirely unaided by such old fallbacks as the free press and Congress, two entities that (in the good old days when a bottle of pop cost a nickel and you could purchase cocaine over the counter to alleviate toothache) Americans used to rely upon to moderate the behavior of even the most madcap Executive troupe. For two years no action by the Bush junta, be it ever so perfidious, got the slightest rise out of any of the traditional watchdogs. They were sunk in some kind of narcoleptic trance. Trample the Bill of Rights! Destroy our common weal! Wage unprovoked wars on the wrong moustache! Throw firecrackers at our fission-capable enemies! Capering like maniacs across the national and world stages, not an eyelid could the Bush operatives cause to bat, watchdog-wise. But Bush, or properly the Buffalo Bob types operating the monofilaments attached to his limbs, have finally started to get results. Through constant diligence, Bush and his gaggle of suck-buttock familiars have managed to force the slumbering Chihuahuas to react, however slightly. And it looks like there’s more to come.” — Ben Tripp, —CounterPunch [via wood s lot]

Joshua Micah Marshall on Language in Politics:

“We hear again and again how all the bombings and mayhem are obscuring all the good things that are happening in Iraq. But this is like how the thunderstorm ‘obscures’ the underlying sunny day.

Watching Paul Bremer today on CNN I was struck by his use of language like ‘enemies of freedom’ and terrorists to describe the people we’re fighting in the country (these are from my recollection, the precise phrases may be different.) People who kill soldiers are not, at least not by definition, ‘terrorists’. They’re guerillas or insurgents. This isn’t a matter of cutting them slack, but one of precision. And precision is required to know what we’re doing, what we’re trying to do, and how we can get from clarifying what our goals are to finding effective means to pursue their implementation.

This is part of what Orwell was getting at in “Politics and the English Language” when he lamented that “political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.””

“This week in The New Yorker and here online, Virginia Heffernan profiles the comedian Tina Fey, who is the first woman with the title of head writer for Saturday Night Live. In this article from December, 2002, Malcolm Gladwell examines the creative process behind the show.” While I have never been a fan of SNL humor, I am a great fan of Gladwell and his observations on groupthink.

“A former Pentagon officer turned whistleblower says a group of hawks in the Bush Administration, including the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, is running a shadow foreign policy, contravening Washington’s official line.

‘What these people are doing now makes Iran-Contra [a Reagan administration national security scandal] look like amateur hour. . . it’s worse than Iran-Contra, worse than what happened in Vietnam,’ said Karen Kwiatkowski, a former air force lieutenant-colonel.

‘[President] George Bush isn’t in control . . . the country’s been hijacked,’ she said, describing how ‘key [governmental] areas of neoconservative concern were politically staffed’.” —Sydney Morning Herald

The essential point of this accusation is that foreign policy analysis is now routinely bypassing civil service and military professionals and routed instead through ideologically-chosen political appointees. This neatly fits with Seymour Hersh’s profoundly important examination of the breakdown in cooperation between the CIA and the executive branch around the uraniumgate lies in his recent article for the New Yorker, “The Stovepipe”, which I summarized here several weeks ago. Although one might question the evidence for Kwiatkowski’s assertion that Bush is not in control and that the foreign-policy machinery has been hijacked out from under him, that he is not willingly collaborating or at least acquiescing to this process, I do not doubt it. Readers of FmH know that I have felt since his dysadministration took power (and, let us not mince words, I do mean “took”) that he has largely been a puppet of his senior appointees. The evidence becomes clearer and clearer both on the basis of the ever-mounting indicators of his intellectual dullness, for those who needed convincing, and his track record in office. Discerning observers are fools to hide behind pat confidence that ‘it can’t happen here’; historians will cite numerous precedents for regimes with puppet rulers where the actual authority was vested covertly in their more ruthless and controlling ministers. A courageous press, and a united Democratic opposition, would focus heavily on this between now and the 2004 elections. Those cynical progressives who are fond of dismissing partisan politics with generalizations about how the two parties are no different (I know, I’ve largely been one of them… until the Bush people seized power) would be well-advised to pay more attention to the extraordinary nature of the palace coup these Republican ideologues have pulled off in a manner we would have never seen under President Gore.

“The photographs in this suite are the result of mean averaging every Playboy centerfold foldout for the four decades beginning Jan. 1960 through Dec. 1999. This tracks, en masse, the evolution of this form of portraiture.” —[via boing boing] These are non-lascivious, by the way. Only that of the ’60’s is the slightest bit suggestive, to my viewing, which may indicate something about the evolution of voluptuousness over the past few decades. Tanlines are increasingly in, it would also seem…

“The real lesson of the postwar mess is that while occupying and reconstructing Iraq was bound to be difficult, the fact that it may be turning into a quagmire is not a result of fate, but rather (as quagmires usually are) a result of poor planning and wishful thinking. Both have been in evidence to a troubling degree in American policy almost from the moment the decision was made to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s bestial dictatorship.” — David Rieff, New York Times Magazine. The ever-decorous New York Times reporter may be faulted for his use of “may” in the first sentence of this concluding paragraph, after the portrayal he just finished presenting…

“‘The possibility of scientific annihilation of personal identity, or even worse, its purposeful control, has sometimes been considered a future threat

So wrote Dr Jose Delgado in his 1969 book Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilised Society. Delgado documents the myriad applications of electrical stimulation of the brain, from helping the blind see again to keeping criminals and dissidents under remote control. The Spanish neurologist’s hopes rested on a device he called the ‘stimoceiver’. Once inserted into the required part of the brain, the remotely operated stimoceiver could stimulate it electrically. In a dramatic demonstration in the early 1960s, Delgado entered a bullring and, at the press of a button, stopped a charging bull dead in its tracks. Delgado saw great potential in his creation, but he did note one possible problem: ‘The existence of wires leading from the brain to the stimoceiver outside of the scalp… could be a hindrance to hair grooming.'” This essay explores how the technology has fared in the three-plus decades since Delgado’s controversial pronouncements. —Guardian.UK

A review of a tendentious book by Max R. Bennett and P. M. S. Hacker (Blackwell Publishers, 2003): “What has neuroscience to do with philosophy? Everything and nothing, depending on what the interpreter in question takes the neuroscience to have shown. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience – the result of a collaboration between a distinguished neurobiologist (Bennett) and the leading authority on the philosophy of Wittgenstein (Hacker) – aims to shed a light on how neuroscience has been both influenced by and an influence on philosophy past and present. The overall tone is highly critical and those whose work tries to show that neuroscience can help answer philosophical questions (e.g. about emotion, cognition, volition, consciousness etc.) are likely to be offended by this controversial book which points to the multifarious ways in which scientists display conceptual confusion when interpreting their own work.” —mentalhelp.net

“We showcase videotaped conversations between some of the worlds greatest thinkers, including many Nobel Prize Winners. Please become a member (it’s free) and we will provide you with free transcripts of the discussions! If this is your first visit with us, please go to our help page before you get started.”

“Summary: The evolutionary origins of depression suggest tips for overcoming the blues. An appreciation of the evolutionary perspective on depression can help those who are acutely suffering. ” —Psychology Today A good nontechnical discussion of one — of several — evolutionary theories of depression.

“True gadget gurus alert! (The) Omnifi mobile audio wireless digital transfer system …lets users transfer their music collection to their car wirelessly over an 802.11b connection.

…So a user can transfer their music collection via PC onto the DMP1 hard drive, and then pop it into their car stereo system. Or they could leave the hard drive in the car, and wirelessly stream updates to the car while it’s sitting in the garage. The SimpleWare software includes a scheduling application that lets users download information to the car (such as local weather, news and traffic reports) at specific times. So while you sleep, you can get new content shipped to the car before you leave for work the next morning.”

“A ‘no holds barred’ expose of the subtle, sometimes deceptive techniques employed by ‘sneaky snake’ salespeople to separate you from your money. Forewarned is forearmed; after reading this, you’ll at least have a fighting chance to avoid being ‘bit’.”

Related: 1-800-Annoy me now: “12 ways to get out of recorded-message hell and get a live customer service rep.” —CNN Money This not only saves frying the callers’ nerves, but may preserve jobs for otherwise increasingly redundant telephone answering personnel. Many of these company-specific solutions involve hitting ‘0’ one or more times, which is what I do anyway whenever I get a voicemail system (and, believe me, I jump through hoops trying to connect to real people at healthcare facilities in my professional communications). If reaching a live individual is difficult, be sure to make a properly routed customer complaint about the company’s voicemail system as part of your interaction, if you have the time.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s Singular Crusade: “On July 9, the Raleigh News & Observer printed a full-page advertisement representing the views of a coalition of conservative students and state legislators. The ad — billed as an “open letter” to state residents — lashed top officials of the University of North Carolina, who preside over a summer reading program for incoming freshmen. UNC-CHAPEL HILL DOES IT AGAIN, the ad proclaimed. INCOMING UNC CHAPEL HILL FRESHMEN ‘EXPECTED’ TO READ BOOK BY RADICAL SOCIALIST. The “radical socialist” was the writer Barbara Ehrenreich, and the book — “a classic Marxist rant” that “mounts an all-out assault on Christians, conservatives and capitalism,” according to the ad — was Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.” —Columbia Journalism Review

“Attention Win users — hassle-free Linux for everyone here. Download the image (free of charge), burn it to a CD, and run Linux, straight from the CD, without installation, disk partitioning and other hassles that usually prevent people from giving Linux a try. This kind of CD makes a wonderful Linux-to-go solution: you might carry your favorite desktop configuration in your pocket, sit in front of a non-Linux box, boot from the CD and be in front of your preferred environment in minutes. DemoLinux 2.0 includes the GNOME and KDE environments, Enlightenment, StarOffice, lots of games, development tools, and a full load of utilities.”

FCC: You Can Say That on Television —FoxNews

“It may even mark the beginning of the end of the dominance of television in American life.” —ABC News

Contrast this news with the smirking Bush crowing about the Commerce Dept’s figures on the third quarter ‘recovery’ in the economy. “About 12 million American families last year worried that they couldn’t afford to buy food, and 32 percent of them actually experienced someone going hungry at one time or another, the Agriculture Department said Friday.

It was the third year in a row that the department has seen an increase in the number of households experiencing hunger and those worried about having enough money to pay for food.” —Salon News

This is the Guardian‘s perspective. In my opinion, they should ahve flip-flopped the top 20 with nos. 21-40, essentially!

FCC: You Can Say That on Television —FoxNews

Won’t You?

We hold this truth to be self-evident:

Having George W. Bush as President has been and will continue to be a disaster.

We will not let our partisanship towards any particular candidate for President cause us to lose sight of this basic truth. As such, we pledge ourselves not to become enablers of any campaign designed to divide us in our struggle to remove Bush from power. We pledge that no more will we be:

Tools of those who would disrupt the Anybody-But-Bush movement.

Partisans who would rather bring down the other guy’s candidate than find reason to elevate our own.

Dupes who will automatically assume that anything negative about the other guy’s candidate is more likely to be true than the negative things said about our guy.

Fools who lose sight of the ultimate goal: the defeat of George W. Bush on November 2nd, 2004.

We will uphold this pledge to the best of our ability.

We will encourage others to do the same.

This we do solemnly swear.

The racial achievement gap in education is the major civil rights issue of our time. “…The glaring racial gap… between whites and Asians on the one hand, and blacks and Hispanics on the other… is an American tragedy and a national emergency for which there are no good excuses. It is the main source of ongoing racial inequality, and racial inequality is America’s great unfinished business, the wound that remains unhealed. Our failure to provide first-class education for black and Hispanic students is both an educational catastrophe and the central civil rights issue of our time.. . .True, the black high-school graduation rate has more than doubled since 1960, and blacks today attend college at a higher rate than whites did just two decades ago. But the good news ends there. Equal years warming a seat in school do not mean equal skills and knowledge, and the hard fact is that non-Asian minorities are leaving high school without the training that will enable them to do well in a society whose doors are finally wide open. This is not a story about lower IQs. It is a story of kids who have the ability to learn, but who have been tragically — and needlessly — left behind.” —Abigail Thernstrom (a member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute) and Stephan Thernstrom (professor of history at Harvard University), coauthors of the recently published No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, Boston Globe

Why Not? How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small This is the name of a new book, by Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff (who were interviewed this morning on NPR’s Weekend Edition), respectively professors of law and business at Yale. It is also, apparently, the name of a movement of sorts. They are ‘open sourcing’ their notion and inviting contributors to share design and innovation concepts in the public domain. See the website.

Think twice before calling Iraq “Another Vietnam” : “It’s commonplace in the US media and in some policy circles to hear the conflict in Iraq described as ‘Another Vietnam.’ As an academic who has done extensive research on Vietnam, including its wars, I recoil from the phrase. Popular as a polemical device, it flunks as an analytical tool. Comparison of different cases is sometimes helpful; glossing over complex differences with a label never is.” — William S. Turley, professor of political science at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and the author of The Second Indochina War, writing in —Yale Global. However, this is one of those issues that may be too important to be left to the academics, it strikes me. His level of detailed analysis ends up finding that the details are significant and the generalities are, well, just generalities, with the word used as an epithet. It is a no-brainer to expect that academic analysis will reveal a myriad of differences between Iraqi and Vietnamese history and context. But the similarities — oops, the generalities — are instructive, illuminating the uncanny American capacity for arrogant unilateral imperialist bullying in the guise of omnipotent do-goodism. How about some detailed academic analysis of why this is such a perennial defining characteristic of American foreign policy across decades and party lines?

Sidney Blumenthal: “How can Bush feign shock at the carnage in Baghdad when he signed off on reports that predicted it?” —Salon

Fred Kaplan: Err War: “Back in Soviet times, there was a Russian army general who liked to bellow, ‘Analysis is for lieutenants and women.’ This brute-force approach to military matters didn’t serve the Soviet Union well in the long run. Unfortunately, the same attitude seems to be creeping into the U.S. Army today.” —Slate

“It’s the case that doesn’t exist. Even though two different federal courts have conducted hearings and issued rulings, there has been no public record of any action. No documents are available. No files. No lawyer is allowed to speak about it. Period.

Yet this seemingly phantom case does exist – and is now headed to the US Supreme Court in what could produce a significant test of a question as old as the Star Chamber, abolished in 17th-century England: How far should a policy of total secrecy extend into a system of justice?…

The case is significant because it could force a close examination of secret tactics that are apparently becoming increasingly common under Attorney General Ashcroft. In September 2001, he ordered that all deportation hearings with links to the Sept. 11 investigation be conducted secretly. In addition, the Justice Department has acknowledged that at least nine criminal cases related to the Sept. 11 investigation were being cloaked in total secrecy.” —Christian Science Monitor

U.S. Soldiers Seal Saddam’s Home Village:

“Soldiers stretched concertina wire around the perimeter of the village and established checkpoints. Residents over the age of 18 will be required to have registration cards to move in and out of the village, U.S. officers said.

The New York Times reported Friday that senior U.S. officials believe the former Iraqi leader, who is believed to have been on the run since U.S. forces took over Baghdad in April, is playing a major role in coordinating and directing attacks against American troops.”

The irony of ‘becoming what we detest’ is, I’m sure, lost on no one. It is easy to say this is no way to ‘liberate’ anyone, but the rejoinder from the powers-that-be is also an easy one, about security and protecting ourselves so we can get the job done, etc. etc. But there is a deeper irrationality here. Look at the two paragraphs I excerpted from the Guardian news story; these two facts get juxtaposed in all reportage on this action, with no greater connection than their proximity. Here it is again, further down in the story:

Lt. Col. Steve Russell, commander of the 1st Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division, said he did not know whether Saddam was directing parts of the insurgency, but the village is the family home of many former Baathist regime members. “There are ties leading to this village, to the funding and planning of attacks against U.S. soldiers,” Russell said.

I have looked in vain for any evidence of what those ties might be.

“Three websites that spotlighted a Massachusetts spammer’s bizarre quest for time-travel technology have been hit with an avalanche of what appear to be retaliatory messages. …While spammers commonly forge bogus ‘from’ lines in their ads to avoid detection, the choice of the victim sites appears to be malicious. All three recently published hyperlinks to an August report by Wired News that revealed Robert ‘Robby’ Todino of Woburn as the source of millions of bulk e-mails since 2001 seeking far-fetched devices such as a dimensional warp generator.

The spam that generated all the recent trouble appears to be connected to Todino. The messages, which bore subject lines such as ‘Stop Spam in Its Tracks’ or ‘Say Goodbye to Junk Email,’ advertised a website, Quickeasysolution.com, as the source of an antispam software program.

According to domain-registration records (registration required), John Miller of 4 Oak Street in Woburn, Massachusetts, registered Quickeasysolution.com on Oct. 12. Messages left on the voicemail of the mobile-phone number listed in the record were not returned.

Domain registrations for several sites previously operated by Todino listed the same fictitious street address.” —Wired News

Customer-Service Cluelessness: “Until a few years ago, my wife was a plastic surgeon. She quit for a lot of reasons, but one was the frustration of getting reimbursement from the HMOs.

(…)

And on it would go, until her career felt as though it were half surgery, and half paperwork.

From my outsider’s perspective, it looked like she had stumbled onto a new American business model: passive-aggressive robbery.

Unfortunately, now, in the age of high-tech services, it looks as though the practice has spread to other industries.” —David Pogue, New York Times [via walker]

“The new director’s cut of ‘Alien’ reminds us the film is a powerful purveyor of existential dread, not just haunted-house thrills.

Unlike its increasingly baroque series of sequels, Ridley Scott’s original 1979 Alien is a film about human loneliness amid the emptiness and amorality of creation. It’s a cynical ’70s-leftist vision of the future in which none of the problems plaguing 20th century Earth — class divisions, capitalist exploitation, the subjugation of humanity to technology — have been improved in the slightest by mankind’s forays into outer space. Although it has often been described as being a haunted-house movie set in space, Alien also has a profoundly existentialist undertow that makes it feel like a film noir — the other genre to feature a slithery, sexualized monster as its classic villain.” — Andrew O’Hehir, Salon

“Just in time for Halloween, a vampire-killing kit complete with a wooden stake and 10 silver bullets sold for $12,000 US at auction Thursday.

The kit, a walnut box that also contained a crucifix, a pistol, a rosary and vessels for garlic powder and various serums, was bought by an anonymous phone bidder.

According to Sotheby’s, some experts believe that such kits were commonly available to travellers in Eastern Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, while others think the kits were made in the early 20th century, possibly to cash in on interest in vampires sparked by the 1897 publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” —CNEWS Weird News

Images of Space Get Second Look: “Much like paintings of America’s Wild West commissioned by government surveyors became icons that redefined American culture in the 19th century, photographs of alien landscapes taken by the Voyager spacecraft have shaken our sense of self today.

The photographs of that second awakening, and other images from robotic space probes, were the subject of a panel discussion at the American Museum of Natural History titled ‘Far Out: Space Probes as Landscape Photographers.'” —Wired News

“It is becoming fashionable to question Darwinism, but few people understand either the arguments for evolution or the arguments against it. Mary Wakefield explains the thinking on both sides.” —Spectator

Do post-9/11 realities signal the death of Po-Mo? “No matter which side one takes in these post 9/11 conflicts — which could make the culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s look like child’s play — the rantings of late 20th-century postmodern relativists seem as quaint and distant today as the prattlings of Victorian sentimentalists.

The absence of a seductive replacement for postmodernism has left public intellectuals — can we use that word in a daily newspaper these days without smirking? — with a renewed respect and affection for the paramount movement of the 20th century: modernism.” —Statesman

“Race has become such a rare topic in Hollywood movies that The Human Stain – which deals with the even more rare subject of racial passing – seems to be the work of trailblazing radicals. Director Robert Benton, best known for Kramer vs. Kramer, has filmed an adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2000 novel to make a thoughtful, bold exploration of American values. It’s also one of the bravest – and strangest – Hollywood movies in recent years.” — Armond White, —Africana.com [via AlterNet]

Doctors turn on each other: “The long-running controversy over the MMR vaccination turned unexpectedly into an extraordinary public battle of words yesterday between two doctors responsible for the research paper which began the scare five years ago.

Andrew Wakefield and Simon Murch, both gastroenterologists at the Royal Free medical school in London, have taken very different paths since their paper was published in the Lancet in February 1998.

Dr Wakefield continued public backing for his hypothesis that the MMR triple jab could be responsible for rising rates of autism among children has made him a hero to many parents seeking a reason for their children’s distressing condition, but rendered him virtually a pariah to most of the medical establishment.

In contrast, Dr Murch and his team have kept a low profile.

All that changed yesterday, however, when Dr Murch published a strongly worded letter in the Lancet stating that there was no evidence of a link and warning of the likelihood of a measles epidemic because of the low rate of vaccination, which is down to 61% in some parts of London.” —Guardian.UK

Microsoft and Google: “Wall Street is not the only one wooing Google. Microsoft is as well.

Google, the highflying Silicon Valley Web search company, recently began holding meetings with bankers in preparation for its highly anticipated initial public offering as it was still engaged in meetings of another kind: exploring a partnership or even a merger with Microsoft.” —New York Times. Just what I need; for Blogger to be owned by M$.

“Franklin D. Roosevelt may not have had polio at all, but a paralyzing disease called Guillain-Barre syndrome, Texas researchers say.

‘We feel from the clinical evidence, which is all that exists, that it’s more likely that he had Guillain-Barre syndrome,’ said Dr. Armond S. Goldman, emeritus professor of pediatrics at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.

But Dr. Goldman added that polio could not be ruled out. ‘We felt it was unlikely, but we weren’t there,’ he said. He admitted that a different diagnosis ‘would not have changed a thing’ since there was no treatment at the time for Guillain-Barre.” —New York Times

“Across Europe and the Middle East, young militant Muslim men are answering a call issued by Osama bin Laden and other extremists, and leaving home to join the fight against the American-led occupation in Iraq, according to senior counterterrorism officials based in six countries.” —New York Times

Bush has not attended the funeral of a single U.S. soldier killed in Iraq. And veterans are starting to notice. —AlterNet

It is that time of year again. What has become a time of disinhibitd hijinx and mayhem, and a growing marketing bonanza for the kitsch-manufacturers and -importers, has primeval origins as the Celtic New Year’s Eve, Samhain (pronounced “sow-en”). The harvest is over, summer ends and winter begins, the Old God dies and returns to the Land of the Dead to await his rebirth at Yule, and the land is cast into darkness. The veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead becomes frayed and thin, and dispossessed dead mingle with the living, perhaps seeking a body to possess for the next year as their only chance to remain connected with the living, who hope to scare them away with ghoulish costumes and behavior, escape their menace by masquerading as one of them, or placate them with offerings of food, in hopes that they will go away before the new year comes. For those prepared, a journey to the other side could be made at this time. It is fortunate that Hallowe’en falls on a Friday this year, as there is evidence that the pagan festival was celebrated for three days.

With Christianity, perhaps because with calendar reform it was no longer the last day of the year, All Hallows’ Eve became decathected, a day for innocent masquerading and fun, taking its name Hallowe’en as a contraction and corruption of All Hallows’ Eve. All Saints’ Day may have originated in its modern form with the 8th century Pope Gregory III. Hallowe’en customs reputedly came to the New World with the Irish immigrants of the 1840’s. The prominence of trick-or-treating has a slightly different origin, however.

The custom of trick-or-treating is thought to have originated not with the Irish Celts, but with a ninth-century European custom called souling. On November 2, All Souls Day, early Christians would walk from village to village begging for “soul cakes,” made out of square pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes the beggars would receive, the more prayers they would promise to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors. At the time, it was believed that the dead remained in limbo for a time after death, and that prayer, even by strangers, could expedite a soul’s passage to heaven.

Jack-o’-lanterns were reportedly originally turnips; the Irish began using pumpkins after they immigrated to North AMerica, given how plentiful they were here.

The Jack-o-lantern custom probably comes from Irish folklore. As the tale is told, a man named Jack, who was notorious as a drunkard and trickster, tricked Satan into climbing a tree. Jack then carved an image of a cross in the tree’s trunk, trapping the devil up the tree. Jack made a deal with the devil that, if he would never tempt him again, he would promise to let him down the tree.

According to the folk tale, after Jack died, he was denied entrance to Heaven because of his evil ways, but he was also denied access to Hell because he had tricked the devil. Instead, the devil gave him a single ember to light his way through the frigid darkness. The ember was placed inside a hollowed-out turnip to keep it glowing longer.

Folk traditions that were in the past associated wtih All Hallows’ Eve took much of their power, as with the New Year’s customs about which I write here every Dec. 31st, from the magic of boundary states, transition and liminality.

The idea behind ducking, dooking or bobbing for apples seems to have been that snatching a bite from the apple enables the person to grasp good fortune. Samhain is a time for getting rid of weakness, as pagans once slaughtered weak animals which were unlikely to survive the winter. A common ritual calls for writing down weaknesses on a piece of paper or parchment, and tossing it into the fire. There used to be a custom of placing a stone in the hot ashes of the bonfire. If in the morning a person found that the stone had been removed or had cracked, it was a sign of bad fortune. Nuts have been used for divination: whether they burned quietly or exploded indicated good or bad luck. Peeling an apple and throwing the peel over one’s shoulder was supposed to reveal the initial of one’s future spouse. One way of looking for omens of death was for peope to visit churchyards

The Witches’ Sabbath aspect of Hallowe’en seems to result from Germanic influence, and fusion with the notion of Walpurgisnacht. (Who knows the magnificent musical evocation of this, Mussorgsky’s Night on Bare Mountain?) Although probably not yet in a position to shape mainstream American Hallowe’en traditions, Mexican Dia de los Muertos observances have started to contribute some delightful and whimsical iconography to our encounter with the eerie and unearthly as well.

What was Hallowe’en like forty or fifty years ago in the U.S. when, bastardized as it has become with respect to its pagan origins, it retained a much more traditional flair? For my purposes, suffice it to say that it was before the era of the pay-per-view ‘spooky-world’ type haunted attractions and its Martha Stewart yuppification with, as this irreverent Salon article from last year [via walker] puts it, mnogrammed jack-o’-lanterns and the like. Related, an essay by Richard Seltzer, frequently referenced in other sources, entitled “Why Bother to Save Halloween?”, seems to have disappeared from the web. If anyone can find it, I would appreciate it if you would send me the link. I suspect that his message is similar to mine — that reverence for Halowe’en is good for the soul.

That would be anathema to certain segments of society, however. Halloween certainly inspires a backlash by fundamentalists who consider it a blasphemous abomination. ‘Amateur scholar’ Isaac Bonewits details academically the Halloween errors and lies he feels contribute to its being reviled. Some of the panic over Hallowe’en is akin to the hysteria, fortunately now debunked, over the supposed epidemic of ‘ritual Satanic abuse’ that swept the Western world in the ’90’s.

The horror film has become inextricably linked to Hallowe’en tradition, although the holiday itself did not figure in the movies until John Carpenter took the slasher genre singlehandedly by storm. Googling “scariest films”, you will, grimly, reap a mother lode of opinions about how to pierce the veil to journey to the netherworld and reconnect with that magical, eerie creepiness in the dark (if not the over-the-top blood and gore that has largely replaced the subtlety of earlier horror films).

“A scientist funded by the US government has deliberately created an extremely deadly form of mousepox, a relative of the smallpox virus, through genetic engineering.

The new virus kills all mice even if they have been given antiviral drugs as well as a vaccine that would normally protect them.

The work has not stopped there. The cowpox virus, which infects a range of animals including humans, has been genetically altered in a similar way.

The new virus, which is about to be tested on animals, should be lethal only to mice, Mark Buller of the University of St Louis told New Scientist. He says his work is necessary to explore what bioterrorists might do.” —New Scientist

Solar Tempest of 1859 Revealed: “A pair of strong solar storms that hit Earth late last week were squalls compared to the torrent of electrons that rained down in the ‘perfect space storm’ of 1859. And sooner or later, experts warn, the Sun will again conspire again send earthlings a truly destructive bout of space weather.

If it happens anytime soon, we won’t know exactly what to expect until it’s over, and by then some modern communication systems could be like beachfront houses after a hurricane.

In early September in 1859, telegraph wires suddenly shorted out in the United States and Europe, igniting widespread fires. Colorful aurora, normally visible only in polar regions, were seen as far south as Rome and Hawaii.” —space.com

I hadn’t checked in on the Kausfiles in awhile and was interested to find him raving about the Terry Schiavo case at length — largely in the service of his chronic desire to skewer NPR. Kaus frequently prefaces his most juiced-up rants with a statement that he had almost made up his mind the other way (” I was just growing more sympathetic to the cause of those who want to pull the plug on Terri Schiavo…”) until he heard such-and-such. Then he’s off and running.

In this case, he seems to be upset that the neurologist on whom an NPR report depended for a definition of persistent vegetative state had been an expert witness for Michael Schiavo, the husband who favors pulling the feeding tube and around whom, if you haven’t been following the issue, swirls innuendo about possible unsavory aspects to his motives. That he supports Schiavo’s right to die does not mean that his definition of PVS is biased, as Kaus suggests without coming right out and saying it (although he makes more egregious use of italics than I do); if it happens that scientific opinion is on your side of a case, it makes sense to hire an authoritative expert to say so, wouldn’t it? Kaus does have a point, that NPR’s coverage was not counterbalanced by interviews with anyone representing the ‘parents’ side’, although that may be because it is mostly Rabid Right right-to-lifers who are on that bandwagon.

Kaus’ greatest error, and one he publishes an erratum for further down in the column after he reads some legal sources, is one I suspect is a common and quite prejudicial confusion. He bandies about the term “surrogate” to refer to his assumption that Michael Schiavo has decision-making power with respect to his wife’s affairs. (He says, at one point, “Notice to All Potential Mickey Kaus “Surrogates”– If I’m ever in Terri Schiavo’s situation, and not in any pain, please follow these simple steps: Keep the feeding tube in, and keep Dr. Nuland out”, referring to prominent death-and-dying author physician Sherwin Nuland, who supports stopping life support in this case. Does Kaus leave himself open to the obvious rejoinder, that this might already be the case?) In fact, as Kaus’ correction notes, the standard for making decisions on the behalf of someone who cannot make decisions for themselves is not what anyone else wants for them, but what they would have told us they would have wanted themselves if they had been able to articulate it, so-called ‘substituted judgment’. (Of course, I am not a lawyer, although I have been involved in many incompetency cases as a clinical psychiatrist, usually involving determining whether a currently psychotic patient refusing treatment would have, when of sound mind, consented to medical care for a life-threatening condition. If what I am saying needs correcting fro a legal standpoint, please do not hesitate to do so.) It is the courts that make decisions in such case based on evidence about what the person would have wanted from those who know/knew her. I would be a fool to assert that the evidence presented by ‘loved ones’ would not be tainted at times by their own hidden agendas. But one would be a fool to think that courts are blind to such covert intentions. A guardian in such a case where a court has made treatment decisions based on ‘substituted judgment’ is really just monitoring adherence to the court-ordered treatment plan. There are far more safeguards against a malevolent or conspiratorial hijacking of decision-making authority over you when you are debilitated than the pop-culture horror stories animating your worst nightmares would lead you to believe.

Kaus also falls prey to the misunderstanding about PVS that animates most of the emotion surrounding this case. It is very unlikely that medical professionals will rush to judgment and make a hasty diagnosis that soemone is not sentient and that the condition is irreversible, and it is less and less likely as more sophisticated tools to identify and recognize the pattersn of brain activity (or lack of it) in a vegetative patient have come into play. As Kaus raises the spectre that “just occasionally a Susie (might arrive) from Dubuque to find exhausted relatives and cost-conscious doctors ready to give up on a PVS or coma victim who still has a chance to snap out of it,” he commits the quadruple sin of lumping coma and PVS together irresponsibly; letting wishful thinking get the better of him; and derogating the motives of both family members (who if they are hanging in there at the bedside by and large need to be persuaded to give up their last hopes for their lvoed one; the ‘exhausted’ ones aren’t there) and caregivers (who invariably fight a pitched battle against the ‘cost-conscious’ bean counters in hospital administration to give ongoing care to their patients).

She’s been gone from Salon for several years now, but they contacted Camille Paglia for her comments on current events. Here she goes:

• On the Democrats:
  

  “The emptiness at the heart of the Democratic Party is absolutely clear in the current campaign for the 2004 presidential nomination. The Democratic senators never take a stand without consulting a pollster. They’re all trimmers — they put their finger in the wind and frantically trim their sails. They were so twisted up about political fallout before last fall’s election that they gave Bush a rubber stamp for war. Sen. Robert Byrd was the only strong, eloquent voice denouncing this dangerous expansion of presidential power and misuse of our military.”

• On Bush:
  

  “I don’t personally hate Bush. I think he’s sincere and well-meaning. But I feel very sorry for him. Every time I watch him, I feel his suffering, and I suffer with him. But he’s out of his depth in this job. His view of the world is painfully simplistic — like a Wild West video game where the good guys wear white hats and always win. But he’s surrounded by manipulators — like Vice President Dick Cheney, the invisible man, the shadowy puppeteer.”

• On Rumsfeld:
  

  “The person I do hate is Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who is out of control and who has trashed what should be the professional cooperation between the State Department and the Pentagon. Rumsfeld is lost in some delusional state. He’s like Newt Gingrich in the grandstanding narcissism department. Both Rumsfeld and Gingrich show how narrow-bore thinking can turn high I.Q. into colossal stupidity.”

• On blowback:
  

  “Oh, yes, that’s the great accomplishment of the Bush administration! They’ve turned Iraq into a Hollywood studio for terrorism. Al-Qaida was on the run, we were after them in Afghanistan, and now there’s been a massive reinvigoration of al-Qaida. They’ve become heroic role models to Islamic youth. And there’s been a poisoning of world opinion against us — after the sympathy we got after 9/11.”

• On Dean:
  

  “Unless there’s some huge change, I’ll be voting for Dean in the Democratic primary, simply as a gesture for the antiwar side. But I’m not thrilled. I don’t think Dean is remotely presidential in manner. He hasn’t thought any of this through — the style of presidential authority. You can’t just run around wildly with this dour, dyspeptic, sanctimonious persona. Dean’s ability to galvanize a wide-ranging electorate is very limited. I don’t see how he’s going to inspire or attract African-American or Latino voters, or anyone outside white upper-middle-class professionals and the media elite.”

• On Kerry:
  

  “For years, I was looking forward to voting for John Kerry. He is deeply knowledgeable about military and world affairs and is truly authoritative in presence, with a natural gravitas. I once talked in Salon about seeing him on C-SPAN and thinking, wow, he’s so articulate and low-key — how wonderful to have a president like that! This was in the early Bush period when Bush could barely get a complete sentence out. But I’ve been shocked by Kerry’s performance on the stump. His manner is so strained, dead and aloof. One problem is that he’s spent way too much time with rich people and fellow thinkers — that burden of being a Massachusetts liberal that sank Dukakis. And the hair! All that faux-Kennedy stuff that Democrats like Kerry and John Edwards can’t get rid of. They’re so out of it! Don’t they see that hair styles have changed and that flowing locks don’t signal authority? Look at Bush’s short cut — it’s a Roman general’s style. Rush Limbaugh hilariously refers to John Edwards as “the Breck Girl” — perfect! And Edwards’ whole chirpy, boyish manner — who thinks that’s going to fly in the age of terrorism?
  

  
  But Kerry seems to be a prisoner of his handlers — that whole venal machinery of political consultants that has taken over the Democratic Party, all in the Terry McAuliffe mold. I loathe McAuliffe — a cheap buffoon and parasite. Consultants lobotomize the candidates, whose energy then gets sucked dry by fundraising. Kerry’s advisors have made him seem prissy. It’s a real tragedy because it’s Kerry who has the military record and knowledge of the federal government to be president — he’s an insider in the best sense.”

• On Clark:
  

  “What a phony! What a bunch of crap this Clark boom is. Clark reminds me of Keir Dullea in “2001: A Space Odyssey” — a blank, vacant expression, detached and affectless. There’s something sexually neutered about Dullea in that film — a physical passivity necessitated by cramped space travel — that I also find in Clark. And the astronaut Dullea plays is sometimes indistinguishable from the crazed computer, HAL — which I find in Clark’s smug, computerized vocal delivery.
  

  
  Doesn’t anyone know how to “read” TV? The guy’s an android! He gives me the creeps. And don’t they realize how short he is? He’s a slick, boudoir, salon military type who rubbed plenty of colleagues the wrong way. Clark is not a natural man’s man. And he’s no Eisenhower, who was a genial, charismatic leader with a genius for collaboration and organization. This is just another hysterical boomlet, as when the nerdy Northeast media went gaga for John McCain — “Finally, a soldier we like!” Well, McCain was another big hot dog with little natural rapport with regular guys. Clark made a major strategic error in going for the presidency. He’s been stumbling all over the place and exposing his lack of general knowledge as well as experience with practical politics.
  

  
  Two weeks ago, NPR ran a scathing series of taped quotes from leading military figures clearly implying they know more about Clark’s career failures than they can tell. A lot of people don’t trust him. Last summer, I thought Clark would be a good vice presidential partner for Dean. But Clark’s hubris undid him — he’s tainted meat now. The Democratic Party should stay away from this guy — who wasn’t even a registered Democrat until recently.”

• On the fall of Rush:
  

  
  ‘When the McNabb flap broke, Rush could have caught himself and demonstrated his genuine erudition in football — which he’s shared with his audience for years. But suddenly his isolation became dramatically clear. Where was his staff? Callers to his show challenged him, asking who exactly in the media had ever overrated McNabb? Rush kept saying vaguely, “the Philadelphia media,” and I winced. The Philadelphia media have fried McNabb! For heaven’s sake, a radio star here even took a mob up to New York to boo McNabb on the day he was drafted! McNabb is personally very popular, but his uneven skills as a quarterback are constantly being hashed over here.
  

  
  Days passed when Rush should have been getting research data from his staff — chapter and verse to support his position. His inability to manage basic crisis control amazed me. But through all of that public abuse and exposure, he emerged not diminished but with the dimension of a major Hollywood star, like Judy Garland, who attained semi-divinity through her drug overdoses and suicide attempts. It’s as if Rush stepped over from pugilistic political commentator to mysterious, tortured myth in just a few days.
  

  
  When Democratic candidates like Dean attack Rush, they don’t realize how they are alienating millions of people. By blaming the messenger, all they’re doing is showing that the Democrats have no answer to the policy dilemmas of our day. And that Newsweek cover story hatchet job on Rush was a total disgrace! After two years of intense debate about whether the American media is biased toward liberals, for Newsweek to produce such a pathetically underreported piece of crap is mind-boggling. Rumor has it that Newsweek stringers had gathered more positive comments about Rush’s career that were junked by the top editors.”

• On replacing Rush:
  

  “O’Reilly is a crass sliver of Limbaugh. He doesn’t have Limbaugh’s homespun Midwestern common sense or his broad sense of the nation. But O’Reilly and Hannity are thorns in liberals’ side, so there’s all this talk right now about getting liberal voices on the radio to counteract them. Well, Al Franken isn’t it, let me tell you right now — or Michael Moore either. Look at them! They’re like big, drooling babies — is this the face of the Democratic Party? Big, squalling babies — “wah wah wah!”

• On Letterman etc.:
  

  “The great switch — and I’m not sure how it happened — was into juvenile, white-boy David Letterman style, smirky, cynical, callow, smarmy and jejune. I wonder how many black fans Letterman has. I can’t stand him and never watch him. But those late-night shows became a vehicle for politicians — the Democrats started it, and conservatives have followed. And that media marriage between liberal figures and the smirky Letterman style has perverted the entire process. The authentic voice of talk radio is raw, rude and hot, hot, hot! — not that cool Letterman style (to use Marshall McLuhan’s media terminology).”

• On the kiss:
  

  “I do feel there’s something wrong with that kiss. Great stars have to learn to age gracefully. I loved it when Stevie Nicks — who’s a true artist — zinged Madonna for “kissing girls half her age.” She was right. Madonna was trying not only to compete with these figures she spawned but to overshadow and upstage them and suck them dry. It was very unfair to Britney Spears, even though she looked spectacular in white lace — as nubile as a real bride. Jennifer Lopez was smarter and opted out.”

• On blogging:
  

  “Blog reading for me is like going down to the cellar amid shelves and shelves of musty books that you’re condemned to turn the pages of. Bad prose, endless reams of bad prose! There’s a lack of discipline, a feeling that anything that crosses one’s mind is important or interesting to others. People say that the best part about writing a blog is that there’s no editing — it’s free speech without institutional control. Well, sure, but writing isn’t masturbation — you’ve got to self-edit.
  

  
  Now and then one sees the claim that Kausfiles was the first blog. I beg to differ: I happen to feel that my Salon column was the first true blog. My columns had punch and on-rushing velocity. They weren’t this dreary meta-commentary, where there’s a blizzard of fussy, detached sections nattering on obscurely about other bloggers or media moguls and Washington bureaucrats. I took hits at media excesses, but I directly commented on major issues and personalities in politics and pop culture.”

• The last word:
  

  “Most bloggers aren’t culture critics but political or media junkies preoccupied with pedestrian minutiae and a sophomoric “gotcha” mentality. I find it depressing and claustrophobic. The Web is a wide open space — voices on it should have energy and vision.”

…’Nuff said.

“Bush’s latest lie, blaming the USS Lincoln crew for that embarrassing “Mission Accomplished” banner that was stage-managed by his aides, isn’t surprising. The entitled always blame the enlisted.” —Joe Conason, Salon

The Banner stops Here: “Within hours after Bush pointed at those boastful sailors, his own spokesman admitted that the White House had, in fact, designed and purchased the gigantic banner. But it was all the sailors’ idea (perhaps like those letters “sent” by the soldiers in Kirkuk to their hometown papers, at the behest of their commanding officer). “We took care of the production of it,” Scott McClellan told CNN. “We have people to do those things. But the Navy actually put it up.” So the Navy is responsible for the presidential photo-op triumphalism, right?” Salon

“Powell succeeded in his donor drive, but only up to a point. Few if any of the assembled donors were prepared to put any of their cash into the so- called Iraqi Development Fund into which the residual money from the Oil For Food program, future oil revenues, and any other cash assets of the Iraqi regime are supposed to go. They will instead be channeling their money directly through the ‘UN window’ into funds under international rather than coalition control.

There are good reasons for the reluctance to trust Uncle Sam with their money. To begin with, it has taken six months for the U.S. to allow the establishment of the International Advisory and Monitoring Board. The organization is supposed to supervise the allocations made by the Development Fund, which increasingly resembles a Halliburton/Bechtel moneybox.” —AlterNet

“Climate, ecology, and stupid urbanization have conspired to create the ingredients for one of the most devastating wildfires in California history.” —AlterNet

Turn Off the Television And Help Kids Learn: “Researchers at the Kaiser Family Foundation and Children’s Digital Media Centers on Tuesday announced results of a study on children and television. Youngsters from 6 months to 6 years of age spend about two hours a day, on average, watching television, playing video games or using computers, they said. That’s about three times as much time as the same children spent reading or being read to, according to the researchers.

Perhaps most startling thing about the study was the revelation that as many as one-third of children 6 and younger have television sets in their rooms. What, other than a cheap babysitter, was on their parents’ minds?” —The Intelligencer/Wheeling News-Register

“The most powerful geomagnetic storm possible walloped the Earth early Wednesday, knocking out some airline communications but apparently causing no large power outages or other major problems.

The storm, the most disruptive to hit Earth since 1989, was unleashed by the fourth-most powerful solar flare ever seen, NASA said.” —New York Times I can’t tell you how disappointed I am at the cloudy, rainy skies over the northeast after hearing that the solar storm might cause auroral displays as far south as the U.S. middle latitudes; seeing the aurora has been one of the most eerie and magical pleasures of my life…

Ecologist Who Warned About Excesses is Dead at 88: “Garrett Hardin, an ecologist and author who warned of the dangers of overpopulation and whose concept of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ brought attention to the damage that innocent actions by individuals can inflict on the environment, died at his home in Santa Barbara, Calif., on Sept. 14. He was 88.

He and his wife, Jane, 81, committed suicide, said their son David.

Dr. Hardin, who suffered from a heart disorder, and his wife, who had Lou Gehrig’s disease, were members of End-of-Life Choices, formerly known as the Hemlock Society.”