Naming of agent ‘was aimed at discrediting CIA’: “The Bush administration’s exposure of a clandestine Central Intelligence Agency operative was part of a campaign aimed at discrediting US intelligence agencies for not supporting White House claims that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme, former agency officials said yesterday.

In a rare hearing called by Senate Democratic leaders, the officials said the White House engaged in pressure and intimidation aimed at generating intelligence evidence to support the decision to make war on Iraq.” —Financial Times

“Is Postmodernism finally on its deathbed? Roger Caldwell examines the evidence and takes a look at its would-be successor: Critical Realism.” —Philosophy Now

The real reason they’re in trouble: CDs bloated with mediocre: “In Ian Werner’s English class, anger over record industry lawsuits against music downloaders is coalescing into talk of a CD boycott.

The idea, Werner says, is to send out mass e-mails encouraging people not to buy CDs in December, typically the industry’s busiest month. Although Werner stopped downloading songs, the 19-year-old Charlotte college student said he and many of his friends don’t want to pay $18 for a CD with two good songs. ” —Charlotte Observer

A new opera in Dresden features a doll’s house full of Barbies.

This Barbie spends a lot of her time without her clothes on and has a male alter ego (not the trustworthy Ken doll but a mutated Barbie with brutally cropped hair); together they indulge in wildly experimental sex play. In performance, the action is performed by real Barbies in a real Barbie house, with the musicians and singers behind. The dolls are manipulated by two puppeteers and the action is video-projected on to screens on either side of the house. It is a technical challenge.

—Guardian.UK

“Visiting US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has escaped unhurt after a rocket attack on his hotel in Baghdad.

Up to eight rockets were fired at the Hotel al-Rashid, one of the most heavily guarded sites in the Iraqi capital.

A US colonel working for the Coalition Provisional Authority was killed and 15 other people, including 11 Americans and one Briton, were wounded.

But US officials say they believe that Mr Wolfowitz was not a target of the attack, which they suspect was in preparation for ‘a couple of months’.” —BBC

Billmon neatly juxtaposes the US response — abandoning its occupation headquarters and one of the architects for the invasion scurrying for safety with his tail between his legs — with recent dysadministration rhetoric about “taking the fight to the enemy”.

Related: Black Hawk Down: US helicopter brought down by ground fire near Tikrit; resistance grows more determined and sophisticated. —Washington Post

“White House hopefuls rarely talk about toughening gun control.” —Washington Post

In Feeding-Tube Case, Many Neurologists Back Courts: “At the center of the court battle over the immobile body of Terri Schiavo, the 39-year-old Florida woman kept alive by a feeding tube, is a videotape made by her parents. It lasts only minutes but has been played so many times on television and the Internet that it all but defines her.

On the tape, Mrs. Schiavo, propped up in bed, is greeted and kissed by her mother. She is not in the deep, unresponsive sleep of a coma. Her eyes are open, and she blinks rapidly but fairly normally. She seems to follow her mother’s movements, but her mother’s face is too close for that to be clear. Her jaw is slack and her mouth hangs open, but at moments its corners appear to turn up in a faint smile.

To many supporters of Mrs. Schiavo’s parents, who say she should be kept alive on a feeding tube, the tape demonstrates that she can still think and react. But many leading neurologists say that it means no such thing, that the appearances of brain-damaged patients can be very misleading.

Florida courts have ruled, after hearing from several experts who examined her, that Mrs. Schiavo has been in a ‘persistent vegetative state’ — an official diagnosis of the American Academy of Neurology — since her brain was deprived of oxygen when she suffered a heart attack 13 years ago. Her feeding tube was removed on Oct. 15, but it was reinserted six days later after the Florida Legislature gave Gov. Jeb Bush the authority to override the courts.

Patients in vegetative states may have open eyes, periods of waking and sleeping and some reflexes, like gagging, jerking a limb away from pain or reacting to light or noise. They may make noises or faces and even say words.

But they do not, according to academy criteria, show self-awareness, comprehend language or expressions, or interact with others.

A vegetative state “is the ironic combination of wakefulness without awareness,” said Dr. James L. Bernat, a Dartmouth Medical School neurologist and past chairman of the academy’s ethics committee. ” —New York Times

There’s a Sucker Born in Every Medial Prefrontal Cortex: “When he isn’t pondering the inner workings of the mind, Read Montague, a 43-year-old neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, has been known to contemplate the other mysteries of life: for instance, the Pepsi Challenge. In the series of TV commercials from the 70’s and 80’s that pitted Coke against Pepsi in a blind taste test, Pepsi was usually the winner. So why, Montague asked himself not long ago, did Coke appeal so strongly to so many people if it didn’t taste any better?

Over several months this past summer, Montague set to work looking for a scientifically convincing answer. He assembled a group of test subjects and, while monitoring their brain activity with an M.R.I. machine, recreated the Pepsi Challenge. His results confirmed those of the TV campaign: Pepsi tended to produce a stronger response than Coke in the brain’s ventral putamen, a region thought to process feelings of reward. (Monkeys, for instance, exhibit activity in the ventral putamen when they receive food for completing a task.) Indeed, in people who preferred Pepsi, the ventral putamen was five times as active when drinking Pepsi than that of Coke fans when drinking Coke.

In the real world, of course, taste is not everything. So Montague tried to gauge the appeal of Coke’s image, its ”brand influence,” by repeating the experiment with a small variation: this time, he announced which of the sample tastes were Coke. The outcome was remarkable: almost all the subjects said they preferred Coke. What’s more, the brain activity of the subjects was now different. There was also activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that scientists say governs high-level cognitive powers. Apparently, the subjects were meditating in a more sophisticated way on the taste of Coke, allowing memories and other impressions of the drink — in a word, its brand — to shape their preference.” —New York Times Magazine

“However spurious any analogy between the two wars themselves may be, you can tell that the administration itself now fears that Iraq is becoming a Vietnam by the way it has started to fear TV news. When an ABC News reporter, Jeffrey Kofman, did the most stinging major network report on unhappiness among American troops last summer, Matt Drudge announced on his Web site that Mr. Kofman was gay and, more scandalously, a Canadian ” — Frank Rich, New York Times

“NATO needs to add three more members: Iraq, Egypt and Israel. Yes, you read that right.” — Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times

I’m depressingly traditional as a physician, I realize as I see my distressed reaction to most ‘new trends’ in healthcare, like this one. A Virginia family practice MD scoffs at the idea of seeing the patients in his practice when he can deal with them by phone or email instead. He reportedly feels that ‘the need to physically examine each patient is quickly becoming an anomaly.’

The article focuses on the financial rather than the ethical implications of his practice, which is of course cash-only — he could not accept insurance reimbursement since, silly them, the insurance companies expect their patients to be seen for the provision of medical care. Prominent physician groups such as the AMA and the American College of Physicians have recently taken the position that physicians ought to be able to bill for patient communication connected to providing care, but not as an altenative to seeing them! I’m certain that this physician played hookey in medical school on the days they gave the classes on physician-patient interactions and the value of the therapeutic alliance in the healing process. Is he affording added respect to his patients by relying on their perceptions of what is going on with them —

“The notion that you have to see every cough that walks in the door because it may be pulmonary edema or tuberculosis — give me a break,” (he) said.

— or profoundly disrespectful and devaluing? I think the latter. If patients could diagnose themselves and assess all the factors and observations necessary for treatment, why would they hire doctors in the first place? Actually, it is clear from his fee structure that he does not value so much the patient’s perception as his own omniscience. He charges almost as much — $20 — for every five-minute block he spends on the phone with a patient as he does — $25 — if the time is spent face-to-face in the office. In fact, the reason everyone needs to be seen is precisely that sooner or later something of equivalent severity to a cough turning out to be pulmonary edema will, not may, will, happen. You can be sure that, when it does, this guy will not accept that his practice model was to blame. Some fatuous rationalization about the inevitability of adverse outcomes would follow — no cocksure omniscience at that point! The other classes this guy must have skipped out on in medical school were about game theory and risk-benefit analysis, because he fails to grasp a basic fact about how one weighs the importance of medical actions. The value of an intervention to prevent an adverse outcome is not simply a function of the estimated frequency of a disaster but the product of its frequency and its severity.

His other rationalization for this practice model is that it

is no different from what he did for years as part of a large group, when he would cover night and weekend calls for his partners and treat patients whom he had never met over the phone. Even his liability insurance premium is about what it was when he was with his former practice, he said.

To argue that, because medical care has already become impersonal and exploitative, one ought to accelerate the trend, adds insult to the potential injury he may do. The malpractice insurance provider that covers him ought to drastically increase his premiums — or refuse to cover him all together — for his cockiness and recklessness. And the patients who get snookered into believing that the quality of the medical care this guy could provide was comparable to that they would get from any other doctor who would interact with them face-to-face ought to have their heads examined — in person. —American Medical News

I’m depressingly traditional as a physician, I realize as I see my distressed reaction to most ‘new trends’ in healthcare, like this one. A Virginia family practice MD scoffs at the idea of seeing the patients in his practice when he can deal with them by phone or email instead. He reportedly feels that ‘the need to physically examine each patient is quickly becoming an anomaly.’

The article focuses on the financial rather than the ethical implications of his practice, which is of course cash-only — he could not accept insurance reimbursement since, silly them, the insurance companies expect their patients to be seen for the provision of medical care. Prominent physician groups such as the AMA and the American College of Physicians have recently taken the position that physicians ought to be able to bill for patient communication connected to providing care, but not as an altenative to seeing them! I’m certain that this physician played hookey in medical school on the days they gave the classes on physician-patient interactions and the value of the therapeutic alliance in the healing process. Is he affording added respect to his patients by relying on their perceptions of what is going on with them —

“The notion that you have to see every cough that walks in the door because it may be pulmonary edema or tuberculosis — give me a break,” (he) said.

— or profoundly disrespectful and devaluing? I think the latter. If patients could diagnose themselves and assess all the factors and observations necessary for treatment, why would they hire doctors in the first place? Actually, it is clear from his fee structure that he does not value so much the patient’s perception as his own omniscience. He charges almost as much — $20 — for every five-minute block he spends on the phone with a patient as he does — $25 — if the time is spent face-to-face in the office. In fact, the reason everyone needs to be seen is precisely that sooner or later something of equivalent severity to a cough turning out to be pulmonary edema will, not may, will, happen. You can be sure that, when it does, this guy will not accept that his practice model was to blame. Some fatuous rationalization about the inevitability of adverse outcomes would follow — no cocksure omniscience at that point! The other classes this guy must have skipped out on in medical school were about game theory and risk-benefit analysis, because he fails to grasp a basic fact about how one weighs the importance of medical actions. The value of an intervention to prevent an adverse outcome is not simply a function of the estimated frequency of a disaster but the product of its frequency and its severity.

His other rationalization for this practice model is that it

is no different from what he did for years as part of a large group, when he would cover night and weekend calls for his partners and treat patients whom he had never met over the phone. Even his liability insurance premium is about what it was when he was with his former practice, he said.

To argue that, because medical care has already become impersonal and exploitative, one ought to accelerate the trend, adds insult to the potential injury he may do. The malpractice insurance provider that covers him ought to drastically increase his premiums — or refuse to cover him all together — for his cockiness and recklessness. And the patients who get snookered into believing that the quality of the medical care this guy could provide was comparable to that they would get from any other doctor who would interact with them face-to-face ought to have their heads examined — in person. —American Medical News

“The FBI is interviewing members of the Bush administration as part of its investigation into the leak of a CIA operative’s identity. The officer’s name was revealed after her husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, raised questions about the pre-war intelligence on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Two former CIA operatives, Larry Johnson and Jim Marcinkowski, have asked the Senate to investigate the leak and discussed the situation with CNN’s Bill Hemmer.

The problem with this is a lot of the damage that has occurred is not going to be seen. It can’t be photographed. We can’t bring the bodies out because in some cases it’s going to involve protecting sources and methods. And it’s important to keep this before the American people. This was a betrayal of national security.” —CNN

Robert Kuttner: “The hallmark of the Bush foreign policy has been a naive radicalism married to an operational incompetence. A small clique with a preconceived blueprint took advantage of a national emergency and a callow president, blowing a containable threat into war while dismissing more ominous menaces. These people are out to remake the world, with little sense of risk, proportion or history. At this writing, the president’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, has seized some authority over the Iraq policy from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who responded with adolescent pique. The long-abused Secretary of State Colin Powell offered new respect for the UN. President Bush even directly contradicted Vice President Dick Cheney’s discredited claim of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

In a different administration, these shifts would signal that the chief executive, clearly in control, had recognized the misjudgments and costs of a failed policy, demoted those responsible and shifted authority to others. But Bush seems incapable of that kind of decisiveness or discernment. These are mere skirmishes, indicative of the absence of leadership at the top. Bush is as callow as ever. The man even boasts that he never reads the papers.” —The American Prospect

Michael Kinsley is contemptuous:

“None of this matters if you believe that a microscopic embryo is a human being with the same human rights as you and me. George W. Bush claims to believe that, and you have to believe something like that to justify your opposition to stem cell research. But Bush cannot possibly believe that embryos are full human beings, or he would surely oppose modern fertility procedures that create and destroy many embryos for each baby they bring into the world. Bush does not oppose modern fertility treatments. He even praised them in his anti-stem cell speech.

It’s not a complicated point. If stem cell research is morally questionable, the procedures used in fertility clinics are worse. You cannot logically outlaw the one and praise the other. And surely logical coherence is a measure of moral sincerity.

If he’s got both his facts and his logic wrong — and he has — Bush’s alleged moral anguish on this subject is unimpressive. In fact, it is insulting to the people (including me) whose lives could be saved or redeemed by the medical breakthroughs Bush’s stem cell policy is preventing.

This is not a policy disagreement. Or rather, it is not only a policy disagreement. If the president is not a complete moron — and he probably is not — he is a hardened cynic, staging moral anguish he does not feel, pandering to people he cannot possibly agree with and sacrificing the future of many American citizens for short-term political advantage.” —Washington Post

“Sixty-four years ago this month, six million Americans became unwitting subjects in an experiment in psychological warfare.

It was the night before Halloween, 1938. At 8 p.m. CST, the Mercury Radio on the Air began broadcasting Orson Welles’ radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. As is now well known, the story was presented as if it were breaking news, with bulletins so realistic that an estimated one million people believed the world was actually under attack by Martians. Of that number, thousands succumbed to outright panic, not waiting to hear Welles’ explanation at the end of the program that it had all been a Halloween prank, but fleeing into the night to escape the alien invaders…

In a sense, those people who fled the Martians that night were right to be afraid. They were indeed under attack. But they were wrong about who was attacking them. It was something far worse than Martians. Had they only known the true nature of the danger facing them, perhaps they would have gone to the nearest radio station with torches in hand like the villagers in those old Frankenstein movies and burned it to the ground, or at least commandeered the new technology and turned it towards another use–the liberation of humanity, instead of its enslavement.” —mackwhite.com

Subatomic oddity hints at pentaparticle family: “Physicists at a European particle accelerator say they’ve spotted a never-before-seen elementary particle composed of five of the fundamental constituents known as quarks and antiquarks. In contrast, protons and neutrons contain three quarks, and no particle is known to have four quarks. The new report marks only the second sighting ever of a five-quark particle, the first one having been found last summer by three independent groups working in the United States, Japan, and Russia…

The discovery of a new family of quark-containing particles may help physicists fill in blanks in their understanding of quark interactions, says theorist Frank Wilczek of MIT. For one thing, it could end what had been a puzzling absence of evidence for particles with groupings containing more than three quarks or antiquarks, which theorists for decades have been expecting to show up in accelerators.” —Science News

Pakistani transcriber threatens UCSF over back pay:

“A woman in Pakistan doing cut-rate clerical work for UCSF Medical Center threatened to post patients’ confidential files on the Internet unless she was paid more money.To show she was serious, the woman sent UCSF an e-mail earlier this month with actual patients’ records attached.

The violation of medical privacy – apparently the first of its kind – highlights the danger of ‘offshoring’ work that involves sensitive materials, an increasing trend among budget-conscious U.S. companies and institutions.” —SF Chronicle

More than a dozen toddlers at a Croatian nursery turned on one of their own, inflicting more than thirty bites on their one-year old victim when their class nanny briefly left the room. Deep wounds covered his body, including his face. “Biting between young children is not uncommon. But I have never seen anything like this,” commented the doctor who treated the boy. Authorities are clueless as to the cause of the biting frenzy. —Sky News

“The phenomenon of gang rape in France has become banal. It occurs – how often is unknown – in the concrete wastelands built as cheap housing for immigrants on the outskirts of France’s big cities. Here, according to sociologists and prosecutors, teenage boys, many of them loosely organized into gangs, prey on neighborhood girls.” —International Herald Tribune

“A weblog is making the leap from the internet to the airwaves today, in the form of a new weekly drama series.

Writer Matt Wake claims that his fictional online journal, The South London diaries, which is being broadcast by London arts station Resonance FM, is the world’s first radio weblog.” —Guardian.UK

The Florida legislature empowered Bush to step into the fray. (MSNBC) The move emboldens the Christian fundamentalist right, which campaigned hard for this intervention. (New York Times). Pundits say the Florida law will be found unconstitutional (Dallas News). Terri Schiavo remains a ping pong ball (Reuters). As I have written before, some of the opposition to ending life support for Schiavo arises from a merciless misunderstanding of what a ‘persistent vegetative state’ is. This woman and others like her have no conscious awareness or possibility of regaining such. I have seen press coverage liken this to Nazi eugenics programs or raise the spectre of state-sanctioned killing of ‘defectives’, which is pitifully, contemptibly off the mark. Even if one grasps the PVS concept, mistrust of the medical profession leads to fears that mistakes could be made in diagnosing someone as irretrievable in this way. Finally, some of the opposition revolves around the notion that it is barbaric to starve someone to death, which is probably wrong on two counts. First, there is no sentient experience in PVS. Secondly, as has been recently reported here, death from starvation may not be an uncomfortable way to go, especially if someone is being kept comfortable in other ways. But withdrawing nutrition is the best that a medical profession that cannot take compassionate life-ending measures can do. Perhaps the fundamentalists should start to espouse the death-with-dignity cause?

The scandalous revelations about the conditions under which GIs wounded in the Iraqi conflict languish for months while awaiting medical care are just the tip of the iceberg in Pentagon malfeasance in meeting the medical needs of those in uniform. —TomPaine

The leaked internal memo:

The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld’s “snowflakes” (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates). —The Guardian

It is in direct counterpoint to the usual dysadministration bluster about how we are winning the WoT®, e.g. statements of Wolfowitz and Cheney in the last few days. David Corn suggests Why it matters in The Nation. Corn finds its major significance in Rumsfeld’s suggestion that hatred of the west has to be fought at its roots by countering the influence of the madrassas. He juxtaposes the task of enticing the radical Islamists to be more moderate with Rumsfeld’s detestable refusal to repudiate the vile slaver coming from ‘Christian jihadist’ Gen. William Boykin.

With these comments, Rumsfeld veered dangerously close to becoming one of those root-cause-symps who routinely are derided by hawks for arguing that the United States and other nations need to address the forces that fuel anti-Americanism overseas–in the Muslim world and elsewhere. The public disclosure of these views also made Rumsfeld’s refusal to criticize Lt. General William Boykin appear all the more curious.

Rumsfeld has recently taken it on the chin in the administration tugs-o’-war, what with the overall Iraq reconstruction oversight being reassigned to Condoleeza Rice. As this New York Times editorial notes, “Mr. Rumsfeld is a canny player who knows exactly what he is doing when he drafts internal memos and makes them public.” It is hard not to see him as the truculent prima donna sulking over feeling slighted. The Times continues,

Mr. Rumsfeld’s big problem is that he seems to want to run almost every aspect of the war on terror but prefers to share the blame when things do not work out. Now he muses about forming a new institution that “seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies” on the problem of terrorism. He helpfully suggested that this new institution might be located within the Defense Department — or maybe elsewhere.

The Times concludes that Bush should resist fueling Rulsfeld’s megalomanic quest by expanding the budget for his ‘bureaucratic empire’ any further.

Slate correspondent Fred Kaplan: “Donald Rumsfeld’s war-on-terror memo—which was leaked to USA Today on Wednesday and picked up by the rest of the media, for the most part with a shrug, on Thursday—may be the most important, even stunning official document yet to come out of this war…Rumsfeld’s memo marks the first unconcealable eruption of a ‘credibility gap’ in the wartime presidency of George W. Bush.”

Have you ever read a more pathetic federal document in your life? What is being stated here can be summed up as follows: We’ll probably win the battle for Afghanistan and Iraq (or, more precisely, it’s “pretty clear” we “can win” it, “in one way or another” after “a long, hard slog”), but we’re losing the struggle for hearts and minds in the broader war against terrorism. Not only that, we don’t know how to measure winning or losing, we don’t have a plan for winning it, we don’t know how to fashion a plan, and the bureaucratic agencies put in charge of waging this war and drawing up these plans may be inherently incapable of doing so.

The last word, however, should be Joe Conason’s. “Actually, the terrorism memo — one among many messages raining down from his office onto the Pentagon brass, who call them “snowflakes” — makes Rummy sound more in tune with reality than some of his colleagues.” —Salon

Bush’s war plan is scarier than he is saying: “Global wars, space control, and projection of U.S. power around the world — all are part of the statement of principles of the Project for the New American Century — signed by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and others more than six years ago. Sydney H. Schanberg gives one of the clearest explanations yet of the Bush administration’s plan for global domination.” —The Village Voice

The 34-year old singer of moody, anguished songs apparently killed himself with a stab wound to the chest. —Washington Post. “Like so many rock deaths, his was a long time in the making, but no less sad or shocking for all the warnings that preceded it. ‘Give me one reason not to do it,’ Smith sang on his final album, which now remains unfinished.” —Alex Abramovitz eulogizing Smith in Slate .