“Nearly three years ago, in number 26, we commented on the promise of the semantic web to convert the Net into a self-navigable and self-understandable space. Where are we today?

The key point of the semantic web is the conversion of the current structure of the web as a data storage (interpretable only by human beings, that are able to put the data into context) into a structure of information storage.

In order to convert data into information we have to put it into context by adding metadata, data that contains the semantics, the explanation of the data it refers to; in the end, the context.” —Inf@Vis

“The new chip is a parallel processor capable of performing 25 billion floating-point operations per second, or 25 gigaflops.

According to the company, the chip has the potential to bring supercomputer performance to the desktop.

An ordinary desktop PC outfitted with six PCI cards, each containing four of the chips, would perform at about 600 gigaflops (or more than half a teraflop).

At this level of performance, the PC would qualify as one of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world.

‘That’s a supercomputer on the desktop,’ said Simon McIntosh-Smith, ClearSpeed’s director of architecture.

The souped-up PC would cost about $25,000, ClearSpeed said. By comparison, most of the supercomputers on the Top 500 list are clusters of hundreds of processors and cost millions of dollars.” —Wired News

“Who did we miss?

So, are you congratulating yourself on having read everything on our list or screwing the newspaper up into a ball and aiming it at the nearest bin?

Are you wondering what happened to all those American writers from Bret Easton Ellis to Jeffrey Eugenides, from Jonathan Franzen to Cormac McCarthy?

Have women been short-changed? Should we have included Pat Barker, Elizabeth Bowen, A.S. Byatt, Penelope Fitzgerald, Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch?

What’s happened to novels in translation such as Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Hesse’s Siddhartha, Mishima’s The Sea of Fertility, Süskind’s Perfume and Zola’s Germinal?

Writers such as J.G. Ballard, Julian Barnes, Anthony Burgess, Bruce Chatwin, Robertson Davies, John Fowles, Nick Hornby, Russell Hoban, Somerset Maugham and V.S. Pritchett narrowly missed the final hundred. Were we wrong to lose them?” —Guardian.Observer

US soldiers bulldoze farmers’ crops:

“US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops.

The stumps of palm trees, some 70 years old, protrude from the brown earth scoured by the bulldozers beside the road at Dhuluaya, a small town 50 miles north of Baghdad. Local women were yesterday busily bundling together the branches of the uprooted orange and lemon trees and carrying then back to their homes for firewood.

Nusayef Jassim, one of 32 farmers who saw their fruit trees destroyed, said: ‘They told us that the resistance fighters hide in our farms, but this is not true. They didn’t capture anything. They didn’t find any weapons.’

Other farmers said that US troops had told them, over a loudspeaker in Arabic, that the fruit groves were being bulldozed to punish the farmers for not informing on the resistance which is very active in this Sunni Muslim district.” —Independent News

“A controversial IVF technique could see babies being born with three parents, scientists have suggested.

Experts in China say they have created embryos using eggs from two women and sperm from one man.” —BBC

Taking your freedom: “Why are so many people and small to medium companies see one of the biggest dangers of this century in TCPA/TCG (Trusted Computing)?

We drafted a small text, after which you shoule be able to answer it for yourself.”

Maureen Dowd appears to agree with my longstanding impression that Dubya is a malleable puppet under the control of ‘handlers’ from his father’s era:

“When Bush the Elder put Bush the Younger in the care of Dick Cheney, he assumed that Mr. Cheney, who had been his defense secretary in Desert Storm, would play the wise, selfless counselor. Poppy thought his old friend Dick would make a great vice president, tutoring a young president green on foreign policy and safeguarding the first Bush administration’s legacy of internationalism, coalition-building and realpolitik.

Instead, Good Daddy has had to watch in alarm as Bad Daddy usurped his son’s presidency, heightened its conservatism and rushed America into war on the mistaken assumption that if we just acted like king of the world, everyone would bow down or run away.”

But Dowd thinks, or hopes, there are grounds for encouragement:

“Last week, for the first time, W. — who tried to pattern his presidency as the mirror opposite of his real father’s — curbed his surrogate father’s hard-line crony Rummy (Mr. Cheney’s mentor in the Ford years).

The incurious George, who has said he prefers to get his information from his inner circle rather than newspapers or TV, may finally be waking up to the downside of such self-censorship. You can end up hearing a lot of bogus, self-serving garbage from Ahmad Chalabi, via Mr. Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, instead of unpleasant reality.

I hope Mr. Bush at least read the news coverage of his vice president’s Iraq speech on Friday, which was a masterpiece of demagogy.” —New York Times

See my comments below about Shiite anti-American demonstrations earlier this week.

“An anti-American cleric, whose forces clashed on Thursday with American soldiers and killed two of them, has proclaimed his own government in Iraq.

The move failed to produce any signs of popular support on Saturday but did appear to notch up his defiance of the American-led occupation.

Mainstream Iraqi leaders roundly condemned the announcement by the cleric, Moktada al-Sadr. The Baghdad City Council denounced it, as did members of the Iraqi Governing Council, the overall leadership body appointed by the United States.

Mr. Sadr, 30, is evidently challenging the authority of the Governing Council while trying to build a following among poor and alienated Iraqis among the Shiites Muslims, who make up a majority of the country’s population.” &mdashNY Times

“A newspaper has noticed that several US media have published identical letters from soldiers based in Iraq but which are signed by different people. And many of the letters have already been published in US newspapers.

The latest case of so-called ‘astroturf’ is reminiscent of a story we broke in January – Google hunts down ‘President Bush is demonstrating genuine leadership’. It transpired then that the Republican Party was behind the ‘astroturf’.

According to The Olympian, it received two identical letters from different soldiers in the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Airborne Infantry Regiment, but on doing a news search discovered identical letters in 11 different newspapers. The letters paint a positive picture about how Iraq is returning to normal. But according to the Olympian, polls show that support for the war is dropping in the USA.

On investigation, the newspaper discovered that the soldiers named in the letters do exist, but the individuals don’t know why the letters were sent under their names to a number of newspapers. One squaddie didn’t find out about the letter until his father read a letter signed by his son in his local West Virginian newspaper.” —The Inquirer [not The Enquirer] [via Dave Farber’s Interesting People mailing list] How high up in the dysadministration or the Republican Party do you think the instigation to do this goes?

“Michelle Thomas is learning to ‘see’, not with her eyes but her ears.

Blind since birth, Ms Thomas is able to recognize the walls and doors of her house, discern whether the lights are on or off and even distinguish a CD from a floppy disk after only a week using a revolutionary new system.

She is ‘seeing with sound’.” BBC

A computer reconstruction of one second of sound as seen by the vOICe system:

Choice words on the significance of the Schwarzenegger phenom from Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Gene Collier:

• “Two-thirds of the people who voted for him believe he will not have to raise taxes to rectify a $10 billion budget deficit. They are psychotic. One academic has called it ‘a rescue fantasy.’

  This is what happens when you get out the vote.

• Millions who rarely, if ever, vote, by a 64-36 percent margin preferred Kindergarten Cop to Cruz Bustamante. Bustamante had labored under the ridiculous notion that as lieutenant governor, he was somehow more qualified than Arnold.
• Forty-four percent of those exit-polled said they’d made up their minds more than a month ago. In other words, when actual issues were put on the table in the past few weeks, they’d already tuned out. This is what passes for citizenship in the 21st century.
• The best case scenario for the Schwarzenegger administration is for Arnold to go down in history as the most important (if nowhere near the most competent) governor in history, important because Arnold was somehow the one pretend politician, in our hour of darkest ignorance, who awakened Americans to what’s become of our civic life, our public discourse, and to where our sprawling national apathy has led us.
• The worst case scenario, and a scenario eminently more plausible, is that elected officials nationwide will become substantially more skittish about making difficult policy decisions for fear of triggering a recall, that they will never really be able to stop campaigning and that the bitter political partisanship that exploded and ruptured the legislative process during the Clinton-Lewinsky affair will continue to steamroll any attempt at reasonable negotiation on and careful resolution of public issues.
• The recall election that brought down Gov. Gray Davis and inserted Arnold was a small-time Republican fantasy until millionaire San Diego legislator Darrell Issa threw a few million dollars at it. Some 48 hours before polls even opened, California Democrat Zoe Lofgren warned of an instant retaliation recall. And, Lofgren told The New York Times, ‘I don’t think there is any way to stop it.’
• Democrats may have no choice. Republicans have gotten so adept at challenging elections, it’s hard to imagine that a close presidential election next November that doesn’t go Bush’s way won’t be thrown into the courts again.
• This is tragic, but while the politicians engage in the most divisive public rhetoric, the public and the media have no moral base for objection because they are both immensely culpable in the enabling climate. In America today, most serious public issues are debated by parties on the extreme opposite edges of those issues. The moderate and often perfectly sensible people in the middle, the vast majority that could enact viable compromise, are instead watching ‘Everybody Loves Raymond.’

  In California, in Pennsylvania, in Washington, D.C., and in so many other places, there simply is no centrist constituency.

• To quote the great social observer and comic George Carlin, ‘You know the one group I never criticize? Politicians. Politicians are put there by the public. Garbage in, garbage out. You get the leadership you deserve.’
• The media are equally bad. The thunder you hear in the distance is from hordes of short-attention-span editors and producers and reporters and columnists fleeing California, lest they be required to illuminate the complex economic issues that brought the Schwarzenegger Phenomenon to the table in the first place, rather than just provide a shameless conduit for celebrity culture.
• Arnold Schwarzenegger cannot become president but only because he wasn’t born in the United States. If he could run, he could win, even if he knows nothin’ about nothin’. We’ve already proven that.”

“A writer who met Capt. James J. Yee at Guantánamo this spring wonders if the atmosphere there is bound to turn chaplains and translators into turncoats.” NY Times Magazine

“In America’s rundown urban neighborhoods, the diseases associated with old age are afflicting the young. And stress could be one reason.” NY Times Magazine

See my comments below about Shiite anti-American demonstrations earlier this week.

“An anti-American cleric, whose forces clashed on Thursday with American soldiers and killed two of them, has proclaimed his own government in Iraq.

The move failed to produce any signs of popular support on Saturday but did appear to notch up his defiance of the American-led occupation.

Mainstream Iraqi leaders roundly condemned the announcement by the cleric, Moktada al-Sadr. The Baghdad City Council denounced it, as did members of the Iraqi Governing Council, the overall leadership body appointed by the United States.

Mr. Sadr, 30, is evidently challenging the authority of the Governing Council while trying to build a following among poor and alienated Iraqis among the Shiites Muslims, who make up a majority of the country’s population.” &mdashNY Times

I don’t have the heart to say much about the outrageous Texas redistricting; my contempt for the Californians who think Schwarzenegger is what they need in the governor’s mansion (no, but he is what they deserve), Rush Limbaugh’s admission of his addiction to prescription analgesics; the dysadministration’s pro-war propaganda dog-and-pony show (and how they are only willing, as was the case with Ashcroft’s circuit in defense of the USA PATRIOT Act last month, to speak in front of safe audiences at venues such as conservative thinktanks); the fact that the Valerie Plame scandal is already well on its way off the radar screen of a country with an attention span shorter than a TV commercial; and a myriad of other issues spurring me on to rage fatigue this weekend…

Happy third blogiversary to ::: wood s lot ::: . By his own past admission, Mark found FmH one of his original inspirations and I was flattered by his emulation (and, even if sometimes unacknowledged, his echoing of a number of links from here) early on in his weblogging career. From such humble beginnings, he has grown into a signature voice presence filling a unique niche and appearing on nearly everybody’s blogroll, perhaps in no small measure because his own sidebar is probably the most voluminous of any webpage that does not explicitly call itself a ‘ web portal’ (oops! look at his current epigram). And it appears he does read everything he blogrolls, and he notices everything going on in the weblog world. I would never think of ignoring his anniversary because he appears not to ignore anyone else’s; he is like the distant uncle whom you hardly know but who sends you a birthday card without fail every year with a $5 bill tucked into it. (What are we then to make of the fact that he notes almost nonchalantly that he was late in noticing his own blogiversary this year?)

When I started FmH nearly four years ago and weblogging was so novel that one had to describe what one was doing, I explained, ‘Unlike a list of “cool links”, the links in a blog are “hot”, more timely and dated and, as one commentator put it, of “finer granularity”.’ A weblog reflects one’s use of the web, and Mark uses the web in an entirely different way than most. That he has never timestamped his entries is for me a signifier of his aspiration to be timeless instead of timely, as contrasted with most others in the weblog universe. You could call up many a page from his archive without indication that it was not today’s posting. [The absence of a timestamp also keeps him above the fray of who found a link first and who has to attribute it to whom.]

Thus, wood s lot functions as an extraordinary sort of ‘common book’ or source book of memorable, deep, often abstruse, at times obscure references and quotes. Although some would say that it indicates I don’t understand, I find the solipsism, self-indulgence, and preciousness in some of the postmodern discourse which Mark favors by linking to frustrating and maddening. (Oh well, there goes the sound of FmH being removed from a number of blogrolls…) Yes, yes, I know, the meaning of the text is no longer supposed to reside in the text but in each reader’s experience of it, so it is my problem, not his. The experience of reading wood s lot is often a visceral confrontation with the yearning to know what it all means. Does he intend to deconstruct meaning or convey it? I suppose one of the things it means is that I am hopelessly stuck in the modernist ethic in which meaning is author-centered, intentional and singular. But I suppose that is already clear to readers of FmH. I suppose what we get to ask more directly through the encounter with wood s lot than other weblogs is whether the weblogger can legitimately aspire to be an artist.

Mark rarely sullies his selections with his own voice. Having been a faithful wood s lot reader from the outset (despite my modernist, rather than postmodernist, vantage point) I have grown to feel that that is too bad that we do not know what it means to him. Although it is arguable that one may convey meaning assertively solely through one’s choice of material to post (FmH could also be accused of leaning in that direction at times; perhaps I have more readers who like my selection of links than my commentary), my birthday wish for the fourth year of wood s lot is that Mark might give us more direct glimpses of who he is himself, how he reacts to the world and what he thinks about the things he posts. And what he does when he takes a rest from his mercurial surfing, cutting and pasting. So, happy birthday, uncle, this year I send you a birthday card, but I include a little note letting you know how much the family seeks to know you better, get past your remoteness. Somehow I sense you are not constituted solely by your embrace of others’ sociopolitical commentary and cultural criticism, that there lies a mystery within an enigma waiting to be unwrapped a little.

Unless… do I have him all wrong? I know he still frequents FmH once in awhile; perhaps he will respond. As perhaps will FmH readers who also read his page.

Finally, there is that longstanding issue of the quirky deconstruction of meaning in his naming of his weblog, about which I have had some back-and-forth banter with Mark over the years. Anything but “wood s lot” would convey more meaning: “wood’s lot”; “woodlot”, even “wood slot” could work for me. That “s” dangles vertiginously without bridging, as I have said, like an itch I can’t scratch…

Vatican in HIV condom row: “The Catholic Church has been accused of telling people in countries with high rates of HIV that condoms do not protect against the deadly virus.

The claims are made in a Panorama programme called Sex and the Holy City to be screened on BBC One on Sunday.

It says cardinals, bishops, priests and nuns in four continents are saying HIV can pass through tiny holes in condoms.” —BBC

I caught the tail end of Terry Gross’ interview on Fresh Air with the original man who can dish it out but can’t take it. He spent most of the time beefing about all the people who are critical of him and about Gross for reminding us all, contrasting the treatment he got to the reception she had previously given Al Franken. I have never before heard Gross lose her composure as she did under this onslaught, stammering with a quavering voice and trying to regain her edge. She shouldn’t have gotten so flustered— it is O’Reilly who comes out of the piece sounding like a fool (to start with, for ever agreeing to an NPR interview?). Finally O’Reilly made it easy for her — he walked out on the rest of the interview, leaving her with dead air to fill, which she readily did by reading aloud from one of the press drubbings of O’Reilly’s new book, Who’s Looking Out for You? It was this review that had started O’Reily whining about how unfair it was that the reviewer had reviewed him instead of his book. and how he would never do that… and then proceeded to call the reviewer in question a pinhead and throw insult after innuendo at NPR, Fresh Air and Gross. She missed an ironic opportunity, however. Instead of being so adversarial with O’Reilly, when he complained about how much she was focusing on the media criticism he has been receiving, she should have told him she was bestowing on him the courtesy of an opportunithy to answer his critics. Give ’em enough rope, Terry…

Situation in Iraq ‘better than you probably think,’ Bush says The Star, Toronto

“Lonely hearts have spent millennia trying to capture the pain of rejection in painting, poetry and song. Now neuroscientists have seen it flickering in some remarkable brain images from college students suffering a social snub.

The brain scans reveal that two of the same brain regions that are activated by physical pain are also activated by social exclusion.

‘This doesn’t mean a broken arm hurts exactly the same way that a broken heart does,’ says Matthew Lieberman of the University of California, Los Angeles, who led the research. ‘But it shows that the human brain sounds the same alarm system for emotional and physical distress.'” New Scientist If it is so —that social disconnection is as ‘painful’ as physical injury — we have been so heavily selected to avoid it that it would not be too much of an extrapolation to call the need for connectedness a basic or instinctual ‘drive’. New Scientist

Fanciful DARPA projects to eliminate battlefield evacuation of the wounded near reality: “‘It sounds coldhearted, but a wounded soldier can be more disruptive than a dead one. At minimum, you need a couple of guys to carry him out. And once he’s out, it hurts unit cohesion,’ said Jim Lewis, with the Center for Strategic & International Studies. ‘So the more you can do upfront to stabilize someone — and the more that person can do for themselves — the better.'”

…The technologies, developed under a broad Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency effort called Persistence in Combat (PDF), all sound pretty far-fetched: a painkiller soldiers could take — before they get hurt; a sensor that scans the eye for internal trauma; a bandage that stimulates skin repair with electrical impulses.” Wired News

“At least 35,000 people died as a result of the record heatwave that scorched Europe in August 2003, says an environmental think tank.

The Earth Policy Institute (EPI), based in Washington DC, warns that such deaths are likely to increase, as ‘even more extreme weather events lie ahead’.” New Scientist

…not to hold that cellphone too close to your head. Wired News

He Thinks, Therefore He Sells: “Jonathon Keats, a 32-year-old conceptual artist and novelist, has announced plans to auction off futures contracts on 6 billion neurons in his brain, which he copyrighted this spring. The copyright, like all copyrights, lasts for the life of the creator plus 70 years, thanks to an extension granted by 1998’s controversial Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.” Wired News

Shirin Ebadi, who on Friday was awarded the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize, defies Nobel

history, as the odds for winning the coveted award are heavily stacked in stacked in favor of male US-European notables. The recipient was ‘shocked’ to learn she had been awarded the prize. The Vatican was disappointed (Reuters) that the Prize was not awarded to the Pope; although the Nobel does not officially acknowledge its short list for its prizes. he was rumored to be in the running. Czech President Vaclav Havel and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva were also seen as possibilities (SF Chronicle). Former Polish prime minister Lech Walesa, 1983 peace prize winner, called the decision ‘a big mistake’ because the Pope did not win. The Pope, however, plans to send her a message of congratulations. Sant’ Egidio, a Catholic lay community whose work for peace and human rights, particularly in Africa, had made it one of the leading contenders for the prize, released an approving message.

According to ABC, the Iranian government was ‘happy’ with the award, which however the BBC reports is divisive in Iran. Ebadi is considered a thorn in the side of Iranian hardliners (CNN); the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 saw her removal as the nation’s first woman judge. She is opposed to foreign intervention in Iran, not that this will make her an appreciably thorny problem for the U.S. dysadministration hardliners with designs on the region and a remarkable disdain for world opinion.

Radical new anti-copying strategy: “Illegally copied games protected by the system work properly at first, but start to fall apart after the player has had just enough time to get hooked. As a result, the pirated discs actually encourage people to buy the genuine software, the developers say.” New Scientist

further evidence those inscrutable ingrates just do not appreciate their liberators: “Up to 10,000 Iraqi Shias have taken to the streets of a Baghdad suburb to denounce the US for ‘terrorism’.

The protest came during the funerals of two Shias allegedly killed by US soldiers in Sadr City on Thursday.” BBC The promise of Shiite rage at the US occupation gives new reason for fear among US troops. The government line has been that Saddam loyalists and foreign terrorists are behind the attacks on the occupiers and that the Shiites welcomed American liberation from oppression under Saddam.

“Lawyers for Lee Boyd Malvo revealed yesterday that they will argue he was insane during the Washington area sniper shootings last fall because he had been ‘indoctrinated’ by his co-defendant, John Allen Muhammad.

Earlier yesterday, a Prince William County judge hearing Muhammad’s case barred all mental health testimony from his trial next week because Muhammad refused to be interviewed by a prosecution expert.” Washington Post

No, California Is Not Falling Into the Sea: “Forget what the talking heads tell you: California is not falling into the sea, people. And if this is a sign of the coming Apocalypse, it is only the latest of its type. Or have you forgotten the kind of folks we elect here on the left coast? Ronald Reagan, Jerry Brown, George Deukmejian, Pete Wilson, Gray Davis – those are the governors that have run things here since I was born, and I’m not sure how Arnold could be much worse.” —Christopher Scheer, AlterNet

“I was led to reconsider my reactions to Limbaugh’s troubles by a surprisingly compassionate editorial in the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ is a leading purveyor of brittle condescension and scorn, the first apostle of hard-ass conservatism. But the Journal asked its readers to feel human sympathy.” —William Greider, AlterNet

“Welcome! The Artificial Language Lab is a place where we study invented languages (also known as constructed languages, etc) and discuss language design issues. I hope this laboratory can furnish some of the specimens, tools and materials that you will need for your own experiments.” Languages examined include: Damin,

Glaugnea,

Interglossa,

Lingua Ignota,

‘Plan B’,

Ro,

Sona,

Spocanian,

Suma,

Taneraic,

Universala Lingva Kodo,

UNI,

Volapük Revised,

Vorlin, and

Zengo. [via caterina, who likes Glaugnea]

A review of this book by psychologists Scott Lilienfeld, Steven Jay Lynn, and Jeffrey Lohr, which attempts to alert potential consumers to the distinctions to be found among mental health treatments with respect to their scientific validation. This is an important issue, since nonvalidated therapeutic techniques can be not only useless but dangerous or lethal — e.g. the death of a Colorado girl in 2000 at the hands of “rebirthing” therapists. I am not sure if this is the fault of the book, which I have not read, or of this review in the Skeptical Inquirer, but this approach risks confusion and invalidation of potentially useful approaches by lumping three sorts of controversial therapeutic techniques together — those whose claims are based on scientifically valid reasoning but whose empirical validation is less than robust; those which have empirically proven efficacy which we do not understand in scientific terms (yet?); and those which are most like absurd quackery, preying on the credulity of the desperate and untutored. From among the therapies they touch on, for example, I would place critical incident stress debriefing (for which the lack of efficacy in some careful research studies has hit the media and the profession like a bombshell in the last few years since Sept. 11) in the first category; EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) in the second category; and Thought Field Therapy in the third. Although it is not likely such a book, which is densely written and technically argued, will reach those at the mercy of the third sort of therapies in order to inform and protect them, that is its supposed raison d’etre.

As evidence accumulates that one should not scoff at the placebo effect, which may represent a considerable part of the healing power (or, shall we say, the mobilization of the patient’s intrinsic healing power?) of techniques scientifically understood or not, I am surprised that “unscientific” is essentially used as an epithet and a sole criterion in evaluating these therapies. Psychoanalysis itself is an artful belief system, scientifically unverifiable, which exerts its power by the skill with which the practitioner enlists the patient into sharing the belief system. One might describe psychopharmacological healing in the same way, and not just if one is trying to be a wag. Perhaps what the authors ought to be driving at is a distinction between techniques which appeal to and utilize our intelligence (by which I mean our intuitive and ’emotional intelligence’ as well as our reasoning faculties) rather than insulting it…

“Whales blasted by military sonar appear to die of the bends. The finding suggests the use of sound waves to detect submarines under the sea might need to be restricted.

Scientists from Spain and Britain have uncovered the first evidence that cetaceans suffer from the formation of nitrogen bubbles in their vital organs. This is a classic symptom of the decompression sickness suffered by divers who surface too quickly, and can be fatal.” —New Scientist The association between large-scale naval exercises and large-scale whale beachings has been noted before; this may explain why. Deep-diving whales startled by sonar may surface precipitously, causing the decompression disease which can be fatal; or the sonar’s sound waves may actually hasten nitrogen bubble formation. I had assumed that the sonar was disrupting the whales’ inner ear mechanisms, which actually may not be incompatible with the present explanation.

“Perplexing observations beamed back by a NASA spacecraft are fuelling debates about a mystery of biblical proportions – is our Universe infinite? Scientists have announced tantalising hints that the Universe is actually relatively small, with a hall-of-mirrors illusion tricking us into thinking that space stretches on forever.

However, work by a second team seems to contradict this, and scientists are now busy trying to resolve the conundrum.” —New Scientist The new work is based on analysis of the size of fluctuations or ‘ripples’ in the cosmic microwave background radiation that is an artifact of the conditions of the universe soon after it came into existence. A finite universe would place constraints on the size of the ripples, as scientists think they are now seeing. But if the illusion that space is infinite is a ‘hall of mirrors’ effect, other scientists, remonstrate, there would be some symmetry in the background radiation pattern observed in different directions, which is not seen. ‘Round and ’round we go…

In an interview iwth the Financial Times, Rumsfeld showed how annoyed he was by not being informed in advance of the formation of the Iraq Stabilization Group, a vehicle for national security advisor Condoleeza Rice to oversee the ‘postwar’ occupation and ‘reconstruction’ as well as give more of a say to the Dept of State. Both the military occupation, of course, and the civilian ‘reconstruction’ under Paul Bremer have been under Defense Dept oversight. White House spokesman Scott McClellan scrambled to cover dysadministration embarrassment that Rumsfeld had been left in the dark, and Condoleeza Rice did her usual dissembling, claiming that she had conferred in advance with the Defense Secretary, which he disputes. —NY Times

“The Qatar-based al Jazeera network–often called the CNN of the Arab world–is known for broadcasting images and reports that the Western powers would rather you not see. The news outlet has a reputation for not backing down, but that seems to be changing. With its star reporter under arrest (he’s been accused of being a part of al Qaeda) and the station at least temporarily silenced in Iraq, al Jazeera has apparently caved to US pressure.

According to Arab News, the station yanked two political cartoons from its Arabic and English-language Website when a US official from the State Department complained that they were ‘inflammatory’ [read more].

…(W)e now present both expunged cartoons.” —The Memory Hole

And other revelations from David Kay’s report. : Fred Kaplan in Slate dissects the President’s insupportable propaganda about the Kay Report proving that Saddam Hussein was a threat. Furthermore, the report supports the conclusion that the UN inspection process was what kept any weapons development in Saddam’s Iraq at bay. “Saddam wanted and, in some cases, tried to resurrect the weapons programs that he had built in the 1980s, but that the United Nations sanctions and inspections prevented him from doing so.” In answer to skeptics who wonder why, if he had no weapons, he would not cooperate more fully with the inspection process, it has already been pointed out that he most likely felt he needed to keep up the pretext that he had something to hide in order to keep his neighbors afraid of him and maintain his strength in the regional balance of power, as well as to guard his national pride.

“The Bush administration has run into such stiff opposition at the United Nations Security Council to its plan for the future government of Iraq that it has pulled back from seeking a quick vote endorsing the proposal and may shelve it altogether, administration officials said Tuesday.” —NY Times

“Back when he was among the Republican leaders hot on the scent of Bill Clinton’s adultery, Orrin Hatch, the Utah Senator and writer of gospel music, said Clinton’s only way out was a public confession. The President should apologize and ask forgiveness — from Congress, and from the American people. Only by coming clean in detail could he be fit to stay in office, Hatch said.

Fast-forward a few years, and what do we have? Senator Hatch goes before the National Press Club and, as paraphrased by The Salt Lake Tribune, says ‘Arnold Schwarzenegger should not be judged on past improper advances towards women but as the devoted husband he is today.’ (Gee, why didn’t Clinton think of this brilliant ‘devoted husband I am today’ defense?) Moreover, Hatch already feels strongly enough that Schwarzenegger is of United States presidential caliber that he cites him as an argument for amending the Constitution, so that foreign-born American citizens can run for the Oval Office.” —Matt Bivens, The Nation

“Representative John Conyers, Jr., the Ranking Member, on the House Judiciary Committee sent the following letter to Senior White House Advisor, Karl Rove, asking for his resignation…” —truthout

We are living in monocular times: “the spectacular has become monocular. a narrow band of so-called entertainment pushes its way through the eye of a needle and expects us to accept global monoculture. one culture for all. one culture to bind us. one culture to blind us to lived experience.

we resist its baneful bronze eye. we replace monoculture with palimpsest and revel in its wild, untamed diversity. in place of sameness and seperation we assert difference and participation. where there are walls we desire spaces. and where there are spaces we desire access. and when we have access we can begin to play.

above all, we desire pleasure. and to the monoculture that seeks to commodify all that we desire, we respond that its leisure is not our pleasure.

this shit is.”

“Have you been looking for the 10 best places to throw up? Do you want to know where to to shop like a mermaid or shoot deer while drinking? Do you go in search of the city’s mysteries, good food, or characters? Welcome to “Hidden New York,” the Voice‘s guide to underground vices, subway buskers, peep shows, secrets at the Natural History Museum, and much more. Enjoy your trip to the dark side.” —The Village Voice

…With Chocolate and a Microwave. —What You Need to Know About Physics [via abby]

Most gorgeous photo of the Horsehead Nebula I have ever seen. —Astronomy Picture of the Day

Did the ‘Hell on Earth’ suicide come off as promised? The original plan was for a man with a terminal disease to commmit suicide onstage during the metal rockers’ Saturday evening concert in St. Petersburg. To avoid threatened interference by authorities, that plan was altered several weeks ago with the suicide to take place at a separate, undisclosed location and to be broadcast live on the web in conjunction with the band’s performance. But the website’s host shut it down before show time, supposedly because of the number of hits the site was getting. Now the band’s front man is noncommittal about whether the suicide actually occurred as planned, but a radio host who had been following the band in the leadup to the ‘event’ says he has been given a videotape of ‘something that looked crazy’ and appeared to show a man commmitting suicide. Yet the county’s emergency dispatchers and medical examiner’s office said there had been no calls about a suicide as of Sunday afternoon. —St Petersburg Times

“Just about every aspect of the death penalty provokes acrimonious debate, but this method of killing, by common consensus, is as humane as medicine can make it. People who have witnessed injection executions say the deaths appeared hauntingly serene, more evocative of the operating room than of the gallows.

But a growing number of legal and medical experts are warning that the apparent tranquillity of a lethal injection may be deceptive. They say the standard method of executing people in most states could lead to paralysis that masks intense distress, leaving a wide-awake inmate unable to speak or cry out as he slowly suffocates.” —NY Times

…about the blue Photon Micro-Light being banned in the US because it can be mistaken for a police car??

I haven’t heard Elvis Costello’s new disc, North (“…the only record I’ve ever made that aspired to beauty as the prime objective”) yet and I am less likely to want to after reading this Guardian profile. I am classing myself among those who fail to appreciate the genre-bending for which others lavish admiration upon Costello. Yes, he is delving into every style of music except that at which he excels. I can’t decide whether he has left me far behind or vice versa. No, cancel that; yes I can. Costello’s hauteur about his critics —

“The latest furore is such bollocks. The truth is that every single time I do something different there’s a small – and totally untalented – chorus of people who jump up and down and make a fuss about it: ‘He’s betrayed himself.’

Five years later, the same people are kissing my arse about the same piece of work. My view is that they should go straight to the last page and mail in their apology now.”

— has me decided. Oh, and not only are those who give a critical drubbing to North untalented but they are biased, he insists, by their resentment of his ending his marriage with Cait O’Riordan and embarking on a relationship with Diana Krall (hmmm, from the punk to the torch singer, how fitting). Then there’s the matter of the celebrated 1979 racist slurs about Ray Charles, for which his apology (if that is what it was) was entirely unconvincing.

I’m pretty sure that, if I dropped $18 on the new disc, my reaction would be along the lines of the critic cited in the Guardian article who opined, “… this soporific pseudo-Sondheim sucks.” It is a painful point when you realize that you won’t waste your money on an artist whose every new release you once awaited with uncritical bated breath. I should have learned my lesson, oh, around five years ago already. I got nothing from his Brodsky Quartet collaboration or his Burt Bacharach. Costello’s raucous attack music has given me endless joy, and my kids and I have the Rhino re-releases of his classic discs with all the bonus material loaded into the car audio system as the constant. pumped-up, buoyant soundtrack to long rides. With endless undiminished pleasure from his back catalogue, I don’t have to think about the long slow slide of another cultural icon under the weight of his own pomposity.

Scotch Transparent Duct Tape: “The latest solution for quick, easy home repairs will go unnoticed, and that’s the beauty of it. The most recent addition to the Scotch duct tape family is the development of the first-ever transparent duct tape.

Like all Scotch duct tapes, the new transparent duct tape is strong enough to tackle almost any repair project in or around the home, vehicle, boat or job site. The clear benefit is that this duct tape is transparent when applied, making repairs less noticeable. Scotch transparent duct tape also lasts six times longer than other heavy-duty duct tapes, based on accelerated weathering, providing peace of mind that the repair will last a long time.”

This is the ultimate contradiction in terms. I mean, part of the idea of repairs with duct tape (actually, I am more of a fan of gaffer’s tape) is the insouciance of that silvery utilitarian sheen which boldly proclaims ‘quick fix’. I don’t even use the colored duct tapes…

“PublicRadioFan.com features program listings for hundreds of public radio stations around the world. Follow the audio links to hear your favorite programs and discover new ones.”

‘ cannot be displayed]” title=”No Dubya”>

“Subtle but effective, these 3″ diameter weatherproof stickers will get your message across. Designed to hold up for at least three years, this may be the last anti-Bush bumper sticker you will ever need!”

The lump in the White House thinks he writes poetry. Worse yet, his wife thinks he does.

Roses are red

Violets are blue

Oh my, lump in the bed

How I’ve missed you.

Roses are redder

Bluer am I

Seeing you kissed by that charming French guy.

The dogs and the cat, they missed you too

Barney’s still mad you dropped him, he ate your shoe

The distance, my dear, has been such a barrier

Next time you want an adventure, just land on a carrier.

Now it makes sense why she cancelled a White House poetry event because she was afraid the invited poets might have had something offensive to say.

Faith in FTL:

“‘I still believe in e=mc², but I can’t believe that in all of human history, we’ll never ever be able to go beyond the speed of light to reach where we want to go,’ said Clark. ‘I happen to believe that mankind can do it.

‘I’ve argued with physicists about it, I’ve argued with best friends about it. I just have to believe it. It’s my only faith-based initiative.'” —Wired

Should we have concerns about Clark’s willingness to submit to the rule of law if he becomes president. since he clearly has little reverence for the laws of physics?

art brut : self taught outsider and folk art: ‘art brut connaissance & diffusion was created in 1999. It is a French foundation with international scope, whose main objective is to research, study and make known Art Brut by means of exhibitions, publications and audio visual productions.

Our founding members are art historians, psychoanalysts, writers, collectors but also amateurs with strong interest in Art Brut. The diversity of our members contributes to the original crossing of different points of view.

Jean Dubuffet:

“Art Brut designates works executed by persons unharmed by artistic culture, in which mimesis, in contrast to what happens in the case of intellectuals, has little or no part at all. Consequently, the authors draw their inspiration (themes, materials, the means of transposition, rhythm, different styles of writing, etc.) from their resources and not from the clichés of classical or fashionable art.”

I am gratified to see this group cite Dubuffet and his 1945 definition of ‘outsider art’ as a defining influence. The art brut movement seems to have forsaken him recently to the extent that several listings of exhibits fail to mention the imposing Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne which evolved from Dubuffet’s personal holdings.

People with manic depression are being urged to demand better medical care: “The Manic Depression Fellowship says many doctors fail to provide patients with enough information or choice over which drugs they take.

It says this can cause people to stop taking their medication, increasing their risk of committing suicide.

The charity has now published a document outlining the different treatments available so they can demand a better standard of care.

Manic depression or bipolar disorder affects around two in every 100 people in the UK.

However, that figure is beginning to rise as more and more people are being diagnosed with the condition.” —BBC News

Several factors other than doctors’ failure to adequately inform their patients may contribute to patients’ failure to follow through with treatment for manic depressive disorder, better known these days in the US as bipolar disorder. There has been a drastic increase in the number of patients diagnosed with this condition for several reasons — a new gospel in child psychiatry asserting unconvincingly that mood and behavior instability problems in children and adolsecents that look nothing like bipolar moodswings are a form of bipolar illness; the reluctance in adult psychiatry, for reasons largely of political correctness, to diagnose people with a prevalent cause of mood instability, borderline personality disorder; and the growing carelessness in diagnosis — diagnosis by gut feeling — overall, whereby schizophrenic patients who show some superimposed moodswings are called bipolar instead.

Lithium carbonate, once the mainstay of prevention of moodswings in manic depressives and thought effective for around two-thirds of patients, has suffered a decling reputation as recent research suggests lower success rates. In my impression, this is related to the point I made above about the imprecision of diagnosis. As the category of bipolar illness broadens, research studies will be lumping in a variety of other types of pathology with ‘classical’ bipolar disease, and this will dilute out evidence of efficacy with the core syndrome. This has resulted in a general shift to the use of anticonvulsant (anti-epileptic) drugs, which also have mood-stabilizing properties and of which there is a bewildering and ever-growing variety. These medications may have lesser effectiveness — certainly some of them do — but they are expensive proprietary products of pharmaceutical manufacturers and aggressively marketed to psychiatrists. (Lest you think that psychiatric marketing is mostly carried out by salesmen visiting doctors’ offices, it is much more a matter today of the industry funding most of the psychopharmacological research which makes it to the journals, and much of the continuing medical education offerings at conferences and in various media which psychiatrists consume and which are the main shapers of their practice patterns after they are out of their training.)

In contrast, lithium carbonate is a dirt-cheap generic drug; self-paying for your prescription for lithium will probably cost you less than the co-pay if you got it with your insurance plan.

Another important barrier to treatment of bipolar disorder comes from the nature of the disease itself. While not always the case, it is often true that patients when manic are artificially happy, energetic, confident and blissfully unaware that they are in the midst of an episode of an illness even as they alienate friends and spouses, lose their jobs, drain their bank accounts and develop sundry other legal and financial problems with their impaired judgment. They almost never seek help voluntarily while manic but are brought in against their will by family or authorities because of the trouble they are in, and thus are resistant to treatment. Euphoric mania is virtually unique as a psychiatric illness in that its sufferers feel happy and cannot recognize that they are in trouble and distress (making for an interesting philosophical question of whether they should be treated…). Because the disease is so episodic, they will eventually return to a happy medium, so to speak, with intact judgment and recognition of the need for care.

But there is peril at the other extreme as well; there is often a temptation when they are in the depressed phase to stop their preventative medication on the mistaken belief that getting manic again would be an attractive alternative to the pain. This is a repetitive scenario I see time and again with bipolar patients with otherwise sophisticated understanding and sound judgment, who often have several go-arounds of this devastating disease before they ‘learn their lesson’ and remain on their medications. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that some psychiatrists are leery of giving depressed bipolar patients antidepressant medication, fearing that it might induce mania; this prolongs their misery.

Finally, there is another basis for patient resistance to accepting treatment. The corollary of accepting that you have bipolar disease is never being able to trust your emotions at face value. While normal people have moodswings in the natural course of day-to-day living, once someone has become known to have a bipolar process all mood variability becomes suspect as a harbinger of a fullblown episode. It becomes difficult for the patient and those around her/him to avoid pathologizing all emotional swings. This often sullies the person’s ability to have ‘normal happiness’, in effect, without thinking that instead of something good it is a warning sign of an illness. In essence, bipolar disease is potentially a betrayal of one’s relationship with one’s own emotions. One learns, in a sense, that to trust being happy — which the bipolar patient desperately wants to be able to do — one has to ignore or deny that s/he is bipolar. This becomes a strong impetus for the patient to reject treatment in an effort to make happiness possible and acceptable again.

There are other twists and turns in the skillful treatment of this complicated condition. (I hope I’ve suggested effectively that, even for the psychopharmacology of a ‘biological’ illness, the caregiver must have the ability to create an alliance, understand the dynamics of the patient, and help him/her introspect. This is my style of medication prescribing — inextricably linked with a very psychotherapeutic relationship with my patients. None of this “wham-bam-thank you ma’am, how ya doin’? write your prescription and out ya go” style of psychopharmacological followup that is so common in modern office psychiatry…) Suffice it to say that getting inadequate information about drug choices from your prescriber is just the tip of the iceberg as a contributor to a patient’s not following through with potentially stabilizing treatment for bipolar disorder. It is an urgent issue, both because of the devastating morbidity and, indeed, mortality associated with out-of-control bipolar disease, and because the illness is usually so treatable and the restitution of function between episodes usually so complete that it is especially poignant and frustrating when patients with this illness, among the panoply of psychiatric disease, will not stay engaged.

“Suicide is the second-leading cause of death among college-age Americans, with 1,000 students expected to commit suicide this year, health officials say. With demands for mental health services on campus at record highs and students more wired than ever, school officials now say online support could save those who might otherwise fall through the cracks.

They have turned to the Satows’ new website, Ulifeline, to reassure the ‘worried well’ — the healthy students who needlessly crowd school counseling centers — and to gently nudge those who truly need help to seek it. Since its debut last year, 72 colleges and universities have subscribed to the free service, noting that it centralizes help and information far better than their own sites do. So far, 1.3 million students have used it.” —Wired News

Do readers want to send me some questions you would like to see me answer in print? If enough come in, I would add a FAQ somewhere or other on my site, but only if the questions are truly ‘frequently asked’. Send me as many as you like.

“A man claims a woman wrongly adopted his lost parrot — and he can prove it if given a chance to question the bird in court.” —Salon (It all comes down to whether he can get the bird to whistle the theme from “The Andy Griffith Show” under oath.)

“…why not get rid of the radio, for products like headsets? Not with an infrared headset — we’ve considered that. There’s another option — magnetism.” —Boston Globe

Atmospheric ozone depletion vies with record late-’90s’ severity: “As expected, the ozone hole near Earth’s South Pole is back again this year. This year’s hole, being slightly larger than North America, is larger than last year but short of the record set on 2000 September 10. Ozone is important because it shields us from damaging ultraviolet sunlight. Ozone is vulnerable, though, to CFCs and halons being released into the atmosphere. International efforts to reduce the use of these damaging chemicals appear to be having a positive effect on their atmospheric abundance. The relatively large size of the ozone hole this year, however, is attributed partly to colder than normal air in the surrounding stratosphere.” —Astronomy Picture of the Day

“A half-Jew writes her own Yom Kippur prayer.” —Laurel Snyder, a ‘JewishyIrishy’ poet in Iowa City and editor of Land-Grant College Review, Killing the Buddha [via walker]. Today is the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, the holiest of the High Holy Days in the Jewish calendar, for those who hadn’t had the opportunity to notice.

I have previously written about The World Rock Paper

Scissors Society. Now comes word of the upcoming 2003 Rock Paper Scissors International

World Championships taking place on October 25th. They have a new Championship specific site. The organizers are expecting about 1000 of the World’s best players competing

this year and have athletes registered from the UK, 6 US States and Canada. Winner will receive $5000.00 (CDN) and will be able

to claim the title of RPS Champion of the World (2nd place $1500.00, 3rd

$500). Video clips in Quicktime format are available at the site.

All players note: “Legion of the White Fist” of Toronto, Canada has requested a team name change to “Legion of the Red Fist”. Please update your strategies accordingly.

Know your heroes, heroines — and history. “How well do you really know the famous figures that you love or love to hate?

This little wrap-up quiz offers some important facts that were barely, if ever, reported. It may raise your eyebrows and adjust the pedestals on which you placed some of your favourite icons. The chasm may be greater than you’d imagined.” From the people who brought you The Political Compass.

“Poet, painter, essayist, translator, and anarchist social critic, Kenneth

Rexroth was also a highly experienced camper and mountaineer. In 1939 he

wrote a guidebook, Camping in the Western Mountains,

which was never published. The complete text of this book is now being

reproduced for the first time at the online Rexroth Archive.” —Bureau of Public Secrets

“A majority of Americans have held at least one of three mistaken impressions about the U.S.-led war in Iraq, according to a new study released Thursday, and those misperceptions contributed to much of the popular support for the war.

The three common mistaken impressions are that:

• U.S. forces found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
  
• There’s clear evidence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein worked closely with the Sept. 11 terrorists.
  
• People in foreign countries generally either backed the U.S.-led war or were evenly split between supporting and opposing it.” —San Jose Mercury News
  

Beliefs were correlated with which news sources were people’s primary connection to world events.

Play long enough and you’ll get it [from boing boing‘s ‘web zen’ feature]

Related: The Wikipedia article on pangrams and a wonderful list of numerous pangrams and their relatives.

Has Bob Graham dropped out (Fox News)

of the presidential race or not? (Graham Campaign)

“Bush’s truth-defying crusade for war did not mark a shift for him.” Excerpted from The Nation editor David Corn’s new book, The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception“

“As George Bush’s poll numbers began seriously dwindling, Karl Rove and the White House political strategists decided to reach into their bag of tricks and come up with a good old staple of reactionary politics: homophobia.

The decision to scapegoat gay and lesbian Americans was poll-driven by an antigay backlash that gathered steam in the wake of the Supreme Court’s June 26 decision, in Lawrence v. Texas, striking down laws making gay sex between consenting adults illegal–the so-called sodomy laws. The backlash first surfaced in a July 25-27 Gallup poll…

Just two days after Gallup released its poll showing the backlash, Bush unexpectedly used a Rose Garden press conference to announce that he’d assigned lawyers to come up with a plan to stop gay marriage. Bush and the Republicans had been under enormous pressure from the Christian right and social conservatives–including National Review and The Weekly Standard–to support a Federal Marriage Amendment to the Constitution, which would ban recognition of any form of marriage between two persons of the same gender. (The FMA would also forbid giving same-sex couples the ‘legal incidents’ of marriage, thus vitiating the civil-union law in Vermont and any other state that followed suit.).” —Doug Ireland, The Nation

“Prosecutors will need an appeals court or military tribunal to restore the heart of their case against Zacarias Moussaoui, now that a judge has banned from the al-Qaida loyalist’s trial evidence related to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Exacting punishment for disobeying her orders, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema on Thursday barred the government from introducing any ‘evidence or argument that the defendant was involved in, or had knowledge of’ the suicide hijackings.

She also eliminated the death penalty in the only U.S. case spawned by Sept. 11, thereby knocking out some of the government’s most poignant evidence planned for the trial: photographs of victims and the cockpit voice recordings from United Flight 93, the jetliner that crashed in Shanksville, Pa.” —Salon

The judge’s order prohibiting the death penalty is based on Moussaoui’s inability to defend himself against the charges after government prosecutors defied the judge’s orders and denied Moussaoui access to three al Aqeda suspects in U.S. custody despite his assertion that they could prove his innocence of the charges against him. This would appear to make it more likely that Moussaoui’s trial will be moved to a military tribunal where his rights are not protected in this way.

Suicide show will go on, band leader says: “The leader of a band called Hell on Earth said Saturday he would defy threats of criminal charges and hold an Internet-broadcast concert featuring the suicide of a terminally ill fan.

Billy Tourtelot said in a phone interview that the concert and suicide would take place Saturday night in two separate, undisclosed locations in St. Petersburg. He wouldn’t give any details about the venues but said the band would broadcast the events on its Web page.” —Salon

“Make no mistake, Elia Kazan’s testimony before the HUAC committee was a big deal. Not just because he named names, though that was big enough.

It was a big deal because, if anyone had been in a position to stand up against the Committee and come away triumphant — front page triumphant — it would have been Elia Kazan. That’s why his testimony was on the front page of The New York Times. ” —Jeff Pevere, Toronto Star

“Derren Brown, the ‘psychological illusionist’, is determined to press ahead tomorrow night with a game of Russian roulette using a loaded gun live – more or less – on British television.

Howls of protest from anti-gun activists and senior police have failed to deter the British-born illusionist from a stunt that has proved fatal for magicians in the past.

At about 9.45pm, one of three people, chosen from 12,000 volunteers to assist, will load a live bullet into a handgun and hand it to Brown at a secret location outside the UK.

In the words of his publicity team, ‘he will then use his infamous ability to predict people’s behaviour to determine which of the numbered chambers contains the bullet’.

He will put the gun to his head, and pull the trigger until he comes to the live chamber, when he will fire the gun at the floor. He will shoot only if he is sure he has read the assistant’s mind correctly.” —Independent.UK

Why a Philadelphia hospital gave in to a racist demand: “Supervisors said they sought only to avoid a confrontation.” —Philadelphia Inquirer

Schwarzenegger Admired Hitler, Book Proposal Says: “A film producer who chronicled Arnold Schwarzenegger’s rise to fame as a champion bodybuilder in the 1970’s circulated a book proposal six years ago that quoted the young Mr. Schwarzenegger expressing admiration for Adolf Hitler.

The book proposal by the producer, George Butler, included what were presented as verbatim excerpts from interviews with Mr. Schwarzenegger in the filming of the documentary Pumping Iron. In a part of the interview not used in the film, Mr. Schwarzenegger was asked to name his heroes — ‘who do you admire most.’

‘It depends for what,’ Mr. Schwarzenegger said, according to the transcript in the book proposal. ‘I admired Hitler, for instance, because he came from being a little man with almost no formal education up to power. And I admire him for being such a good public speaker.’

In addition to the transcript, Mr. Butler wrote in his book proposal that in the 1970’s, he considered Mr. Schwarzenegger a ‘flagrant, outspoken admirer of Hitler.’ In the proposal, Mr. Butler also said he had seen Mr. Schwarzenegger playing ‘Nazi marching songs from long-playing records in his collection at home’ and said that the actor ‘frequently clicked his heels and pretended to be an S.S. officer.'” —NY Times

I’m no fan of Arnold’s, of course, but you do have to wonder about the timing of these revelations, which as dramatic as they are would have been newsworthy long before Schwarzenegger had any political ambitions. (Mickey Kaus agrees that it is a smear tactic that would not have had any effect on the election if it had not been raised at the last moment when Arnold did not have enough time to respond effectively, [although do ‘Arnold’ and ‘respond effectively’ in the same sentence amount to an oxymoron?] in contrast to the sexual abuse allegations, which Kaus says should have been brought up much sooner to allow them to snowball.) On the other hand, what was Schwarzenegger thinking when he bought the outtakes from Pumping Iron which contain the damning quotes back in 1991 (for more than $1 million) under an agreement that allows him to destroy the footage? He says he has not looked through the more than 100 hours of film to locate the controversial parts (or otherwise he would make them public now to prove his claim that they have been taken out of context). And Butler will not release the complete transcript of his interviews. (Kaus thinks Schwarzenegger probably has some leverage over him, having made him a small fortune when he bought the outtakes. Kaus also finds it implausible that Arnold, who he calls a “meticulous planner”, would not have screened the footage and identified the damaging parts.)

“The spat was just a sideshow. The shouting match between the liberal satirist Al Franken and the conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly captured on ‘Book TV’ this summer generated lots of headlines. But these days the toughest ideological warfare is playing out off camera, on the New York Times best-seller list.

For the first time in recent memory, The Times‘s list, the nation’s most influential barometer of book sales, is pitting liberals and conservatives against each other in roughly equal numbers, ending what some publishing executives say is nearly a decade of dominance by right-wing authors.

…Publishing executives offer several explanations for the about-face: growing dissatisfaction with the Bush administration, newfound liberal savvy about how to use television and radio for self-promotion, even a sudden loss of inhibition by the left.” —NY Times

A review of Quicksilver, which I’m immersed in now: “Stephenson clearly never intended Quicksilver to be one of those meticulously accurate historical novels that capture ways of thought of times gone by. Instead, it explores the philosophical concerns of today — or at least, the philosophical concerns of Stephenson. At its best, the novel does this through thrillingly clever, suspenseful and amusing plot twists. My favorite example is a section toward the end, when Eliza travels east on a spying mission and writes letters to one ambiguous ally in a many-layered code, knowing they will be intercepted and partly decoded by an ambiguous enemy, then further decoded by someone else.

But the novel is so swollen and overloaded that these delightful Stephensonian offerings are hard to follow — and even hard to identify. And ”Quicksilver” suffers from a problem common in parts of trilogies: it feels unresolved. Will it turn out to be the first third of a carefully constructed meta-novel, or a messy chunk of a bigger mess? Is it complex, or merely random? Only the next couple of thousand pages will say for sure.” — Polly Shulman, a freelance writer in New York, NY Times

The grantees are: Nawal Nour, a physician and director of the African Women’s Health Practice at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, whid treats conditions related to female circumcision; Angela Johnson, a children’s novelist and poet; Erik Demaine, a computer scientist; Pedro A. Sanchez, an agronomist who is the director of tropical agriculture at the Earth Institute at Columbia University; Peter Sis, an illustrator and author for children and adults; Tom Joyce, a blacksmith who lives in Santa Fe, N.M.; Loren Rieseberg, 42, a botanist at Indiana University at Bloomington; Guillermo Algaze, an archaeologist; James J. Collins, a biomedical engineer; Lydia Davis, a writer; Corrine Dufka, a human rights advocate; Peter Gleick, a conservation analyst; Osvaldo Golijov, a composer; Deborah Jin, a physicist; Sarah H. Kagan, a gerontological nurse; Ned Kahn, a science exhibit artist; Jim Yong Kim, a public health physician; Amy Rosenzweig, a biochemist; Lateefah Simon, a young women’s advocate; Sarah Sze, a sculptor; Eve Troutt Powell, a historian; Anders Winroth, a medieval historian; Daisy Youngblood, a ceramicist; and Xiaowei Zhuang, a biophysicist. —NY Times

“The Bush administration’s optimistic statements earlier this year that Iraq’s oil wealth, not American taxpayers, would cover most of the cost of rebuilding Iraq were at odds with a bleaker assessment of a government task force secretly established last fall to study Iraq’s oil industry, according to public records and government officials.” —NY Times

I am still looking for more on what I consider the most intriguing aspect of the Plame affair — what is behind the C.I.A. rebellion? This New York Times news analysis suggests the CIA was primed by its outrage over Condoleeza Rice’s unsuccessful attempt to shift the blame for the ’16 words’ in the State of the Union Address to Tenet. More important, having served under Bill Clinton, Tenet has a particular investment in the appearance of impartiality and nonpartisanship. Reading between the lines, it appears he has little concern over losing his job over this incident, already one of the longest-tenured CIA directors and having publicly ackonwledged that he is hankering to leave already. Ironically, the leak inquiry will probably extend his time here, as the White House will not want to be seen as dismissing its CIA director because of his agency’s accusations. The article skirts the issue of what elements at the CIA pushed the inquiry and what relationship they have to Tenet. Of course, internal CIA politics is opaque…

Related: Leak of Agent’s Name Causes Exposure of CIA Front Firm: “The leak of a CIA operative’s name has also exposed the identity of a CIA front company, potentially expanding the damage caused by the original disclosure, Bush administration officials said yesterday.” —Washington Post

Schwarzenegger Admired Hitler, Book Proposal Says: “A film producer who chronicled Arnold Schwarzenegger’s rise to fame as a champion bodybuilder in the 1970’s circulated a book proposal six years ago that quoted the young Mr. Schwarzenegger expressing admiration for Adolf Hitler.

The book proposal by the producer, George Butler, included what were presented as verbatim excerpts from interviews with Mr. Schwarzenegger in the filming of the documentary Pumping Iron. In a part of the interview not used in the film, Mr. Schwarzenegger was asked to name his heroes — ‘who do you admire most.’

‘It depends for what,’ Mr. Schwarzenegger said, according to the transcript in the book proposal. ‘I admired Hitler, for instance, because he came from being a little man with almost no formal education up to power. And I admire him for being such a good public speaker.’

In addition to the transcript, Mr. Butler wrote in his book proposal that in the 1970’s, he considered Mr. Schwarzenegger a ‘flagrant, outspoken admirer of Hitler.’ In the proposal, Mr. Butler also said he had seen Mr. Schwarzenegger playing ‘Nazi marching songs from long-playing records in his collection at home’ and said that the actor ‘frequently clicked his heels and pretended to be an S.S. officer.'” —NY Times

I’m no fan of Arnold’s, of course, but you do have to wonder about the timing of these revelations, which as dramatic as they are would have been newsworthy long before Schwarzenegger had any political ambitions. (Mickey Kaus agrees that it is a smear tactic that would not have had any effect on the election if it had not been raised at the last moment when Arnold did not have enough time to respond effectively, [although do ‘Arnold’ and ‘respond effectively’ in the same sentence amount to an oxymoron?] in contrast to the sexual abuse allegations, which Kaus says should have been brought up much sooner to allow them to snowball.) On the other hand, what was Schwarzenegger thinking when he bought the outtakes from Pumping Iron which contain the damning quotes back in 1991 (for more than $1 million) under an agreement that allows him to destroy the footage? He says he has not looked through the more than 100 hours of film to locate the controversial parts (or otherwise he would make them public now to prove his claim that they have been taken out of context). And Butler will not release the complete transcript of his interviews. (Kaus thinks Schwarzenegger probably has some leverage over him, having made him a small fortune when he bought the outtakes. Kaus also finds it implausible that Arnold, who he calls a “meticulous planner”, would not have screened the footage and identified the damaging parts.)

“A LifeGem is a certified, high quality diamond created from the carbon of your loved one [i.e. cremated remains — FmH] as a memorial to their unique and wonderful life.

The LifeGem diamond is more than a memorial to visit on the weekends… it is a way to embrace your loved one’s memory day by day. The LifeGem is the most unique and timeless memorial available for creating a testimony to their unique life.” There is another company out there sending out spam mail which supposedly sells you diamonds into whose natural flaws your loved one’s cremated remains have been injected.

These people are partnering with funeral service directors to offer their diamonds as part of their memorial services to grieving vulnerable easy marks.

As someone approaching the thirtieth anniversary of hanging up my razor for good, this is close to my heart (no, in reality closer to my neck, I guess; my beard is not that long these days).

“The World Beard and Moustache Championships will take place in Carson City, Nevada, on November 1, 2003. A panel of distinguished judges will determine which beards and moustaches in seventeen separate categories merit their owners the championship trophies and the coveted world champion titles. Special prizes will also be awarded to the youngest contestant, the contestant who traveled the farthest to attend, and the people’s favorite. ” The site has a number of photos of stupendous facial hair (the Germans seem to have us covered) and links to the winners of past competitions.

“For the past year, more than 140 New York City firefighters, some ailing from their work in the ruins of the World Trade Center, have walked into a seventh-floor medical clinic just two blocks from the former disaster site. Once inside, some have abandoned the medical care and emotional counseling provided to them by their own department’s doctors, and all have taken up a treatment regimen devised by L*. R*o*n H*u*b*b*a*r*d, the late science fiction writer and founder of the Church of S*c*i*e*n*t*o*l*o*g*y.

The firefighters take saunas, engage in physical workouts and swallow pills— all of which together constitute what for years has been known, amid considerable dispute*, as Mr. H*u*b*b*a*r*d’s detoxification program, one meant to wash the body of poisons or toxins. The firefighters are not charged for their trips to the clinic, called Downtown Medical.”—NY Times

*There is not really ‘considerable dispute’ about the merits of H*u*b*b*a*r*d’s program. The consensus is that it is quackery, plain and simple. If it works, it works as faith healing does, and at considerable expense to the patient in the sense that they must give up conventional medical treatments such as antidepressants or asthma inhalers. The paradigm of “sweating out toxins”, or otherwise purging them, has often been used in alternative healing regimens, with no believable basis. I watched a friend of mine, a medical student with two young children and what would have been a curable cancer if treated with a conventional oncological approach, die slowly and horribly because he would accept no treatment other than coffee enemas to purify himself and remove the toxins causing the tumor growth. Sheesh, a medical student! That wasn’t a S*c*i*e*n*t*o*l*o*g*y treatment but it might just as well have been. [thanks. abby]

…and they don’t even know how to spell it: “World War II had its ‘krauts,’ Vietnam had its ‘gooks,’ and now, the war on terrorism has its own dehumanizing name: ‘hajji.’

That’s what many U.S. troops across Iraq and in coalition bases in Kuwait now call anyone from the Middle East or South Asia. Soldiers who served in Afghanistan say it also is used there.

Among Muslims, the word is used mainly as a title of respect. It means ‘one who has made the hajj,’ the pilgrimage to Mecca.

But that’s not how soldiers use it.

Some talk about ‘killing some hajjis’ or ‘mowing down some hajjis.’ One soldier in Iraq inked ‘Hodgie Killer’ onto his footlocker.” —Raleigh News & Observer [via walker]

Poll Findings Come As White House Softens Denials: “Nearly seven in 10 Americans believe a special prosecutor should be named to investigate allegations that Bush administration officials illegally leaked the name of an undercover CIA agent, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll released yesterday.

The poll, taken after the Justice Department announced that it had opened a criminal probe into the matter, pointed to several troubling signs for the White House as Bush aides decide how to contain the damage. The survey found that 81 percent of Americans considered the matter serious, while 72 percent thought it likely that someone in the White House leaked the agent’s name.” —Washington Post As Lyn Millett suggested in comments below, there seems to be serious Pulitzer-stalking activity going on here at the Post. As she also suggested, perhaps I was underestimating the potential for a public outcry: “This is a very simple story for the general public, which consumes millions of Tom Clancy novels, to understand: White House outs spy, harms national security, for political reasons. ”

John Dean says the Bush team’s leaks are even viler than his former boss’s — and that Plame and Wilson should file a civil suit. —Salon

Why in the world has this story from my town apprently broken online first in the SF Chronicle? Radio host suspended for comparing gorilla to students in inner-city program:

“The co-host of a popular radio sports show was suspended Thursday for two days without pay for on-air comments comparing a zoo’s escaped gorilla to inner-city students who use a voluntary busing program known as Metco.

John Dennis of WEEI-AM apologized to listeners Wednesday for the remark he made two days earlier after seeing a newspaper photograph of the gorilla standing by a bus stop. He said the animal was ‘probably a Metco gorilla waiting for a bus.’

The state-run busing program lets minority children from the inner city attend schools in nearby suburbs.”

I saw Dennis’ ‘apology’ on local television news. To say the least, it was less than heartfelt. He gets several days’ suspension for comments that are more egregious than those which caused Rush Limbaugh’s resignation (San Jose Mercury)

from his ESPN football commentary position (although Limbaugh did not make any moves in the direction of offering his regret for his actions). The horrible sidebar to this story of the escaped gorilla (CNN)

is that he grabbed a toddler from its mother’s arms, threw her to the ground and trampled her. [I heard from a colleague at work that the little girl had died of her injuries, but words to that effect do not appear in the papers online.] This was the gorilla’s second escape from its enclosure at the notoriously mismanaged Franklin Park Zoo here in Boston.

And then there’s Arnold. I will just follow Craig in pointing you here for his apology (Washington Post) and here for an account of what he is (or isn’t) apologetic for (LA Times). Does he sound as if he is contrite or more as if he is dispatching a small nuisance issue that might interfere with his margin of victory?

It is hard to understand why it took a month for the ‘Plame Game’ to develop legs. David Corn deserves credit for breaking the story in mid-July in The Nation, and it has been doing the weblog scene ever since. This is much as it was with Bush’s uranium lie. The facts are put out there long, long before the mainstream press reaches a tipping point and starts bleating, sheeplike, about the ‘scoop’.

How big is this? Novak claims that his leak did little harm because Plame was merely an ‘analyst’, and not an ‘operative’. He says that CIA requests to journalists not to divulge covert data come in differing levels of insistence based on the danger of the security leaks, and that they were not very insistent in this case. But, as Eric Boehlert discusses in Salon, Novak’s attempts to softpedal the seriousness of the leak don’t quite hold water. First of all, analysts work undercover. In his Slate ‘Explainer’ column, Ed Finn lays out the levels of CIA cover (Flame was deeply burrowed in there) and why it is such a big deal that she was ‘outed’ — it is a felony and, as an analyst with years of experience on WMD, her discovery may compromise intelligence operations she has been involved in around the globe.

“Hard target” countries like China and North Korea often keep records of every known meeting between Americans and their scientists and officials. Almost certainly, those lists would have been frantically reviewed when Plame’s identity was revealed, and any sources she recruited could have been exposed.

Ex-CIA personnel are coming out of the woodwork left and right to confirm that Valerie Plame in particular was undercover for decades.

In publicly asking for an investigation of the ‘outing’, of course, the CIA is confirming that Plame was undercover. Although we cannot know how much damage has been done, we can assume that, for this to happen, they must have suffered some compromise.

As Jack Shafer points out in Slate, prosecuting the leakers is not going to happen. The CIA files complaints about leaks with the Justice Dept. every week (they are required to by law) and the investigations go nowhere even when the identity of the leaker is known. As CIA director Tenet said in his confirmation hearing in 1997, the effective thing to do when leakers are discovered is to fire them, not prosecute them.

Why did the administration leak Plame’s identity, and why in the world did the CIA go public with plans to have the leak investigated? As to the first of those questions, the back-and-forth banter is whether revenge was driving the White House sources. As an absurdist aside, Timothy Noah, in Slate, has a harebrained notion that the leakers intended to humiliate Wilson around the fact that he got a job through his wife. His argument is incoherent and seems to be designed merely to show us how clever he is in recalling neocon Adam Bellow’s recent book in praise of nepotism.

It does not seem to me that revenge works as an explanation. To be that petty when you would have to know you were violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (which, by the way, was prompted by George Bush’s father when he was CIA chief) and compromising national security seems more, umm, Nixonian than Shrubbish, regardless of what a cad I think Bush is. Ambassador Wilson himself feels the point was rather to intimidate future potential Bush administration critics.

Rafe Coburn, among others, suggests a more sensible explanation:

Those two people spread the word of Plame’s CIA employment so that they could allege that it was she, and not the White House, that suggested sending Wilson to look into the Niger mess. If, as was asserted originally, Wilson was sent to Africa in direct response to questions by Dick Cheney’s office, then the administration would have no excuse whatsoever for dismissing the findings that Wilson brought back (and thus putting the uranium line in the State of the Union address). So they told reporters that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA (which was classified) and that it was she who suggested sending him to Africa. The purpose was not to discredit Wilson nor was it revenge against him, rather it was a way of substantiating White House claims that they hadn’t seen Wilson’s report.

What is more difficult to understand is how the White House has lost its grip on the CIA enough that the latter could make a fuss about this matter. Has someone at the CIA gone rogue? Is this, as Bush defenders claim, a plot to discredit the administration? Or, perhaps, is the CIA’s public call for an investigation in some insidious way being orchestrated by the White House as part of their damage control efforts?

Will this become the next big Washington scandal, possibly the one that brings down the administration? I doubt it. Novak is not likely to give up his sources, like any good journalist, and it would be a political liability for the Democrats to push him too hard to violate the freedom of the press. What did Bush know and when did he know it? He is probably so insulated, particularly because the leakers knew their action was illegal, that it could never be established that he was a party to the ‘outing’. No White House tapes will emerge here. So this is not going to turn out to be an impeachable offense. Will it have an effect on the President’s polls or reelectability? Not unless the public understands enough about the intricacies of the situation — how deep was Plame’s cover? how damaging is outing her? — to get really bent out of shape. Outside of the pundits’ and webloggers’ universe, that is not going to happen.

So will the White House be planning just to hunker down and ride this one out, figuring the furor will dissipate long before the election season? Or is someone going to be a fall guy (which is not necessarily the same thing as asking who was actually responsible for the leak)? Before this broke, we watched the extraordinary scenario of the White House distancing itself from Dick Cheney’s remarks on the relationship between Saddam Hussein and Sept. 11th. Perhaps Cheney would be a good choice to stop the buck here as well? If there is a real candidate for mastermind here, my vote is for Rove, but he is made of teflon. It is generally acknowledged that the reason the IIPA was passed was to stop rogue CIA agent Philip Agee from naming names of covert operatives. Shouldn’t Rove, or whomever, be considered as traitorous and felonious as Bush’s father and his cronies thought Agee to be?

Turning back again to the question of the media’s conduct in this affair, Shafer, by the way, makes much of the fact that six other reporters apparently turned down the offered leak before Novak ran with it:

The hidden good news in the Wilson-Novak-Plame melodrama is that it disproves a thesis that jaundiced readers, myself included, have about the weakness Washington reporters have for anonymous sources bearing scoops. Any of the six journalists who were offered the Plame story and declined to run with it could have gotten some sort of career-enhancing bump out of it. That they ignored the calculated leak, and the story ended up with an opinion journalist who used it to make his political point, indicates a level of discipline I didn’t know existed in the press corps.

• Are they falling out of love? —Timothy Noah, Slate
• Rank and bile: “G.I.’s speaking out, angry vets signing petitions, generals attacking him. George Bush’s once-rosy relationship with the military is turning sour.” —Eric Boehlert, Salon

Glad tidings from Rafe Colburn? “I honestly have no idea whether George W Bush is going to be elected to another term, but I have some extremely anecdotal evidence that tells me that he may not. You may or may not know that I grew up in a small, ordinary town in Texas. I’ve been working on my parents for about three and a half years now to see Bush as I see him, the obstacle being that they are pretty dyed in the wool Republicans who voted for Bush twice for governor. About 6 or 8 months ago, they got fed up with this mad rush to war with Iraq and said flat out that they wouldn’t vote for him again…

Last night my mom told me that one of my aunts asked her flat out, ‘What are we going to do about Bush.’ This is a person who I could never in my wildest dreams imagine voting against Bush. She’s a social conservative and lifelong Republican from a family of lifelong Republicans who loves America in the ‘God Bless America’ sense. President Bush has lost her vote and support on the virtues of his behavior as President. If Bush is driving away people like my aunt, he’s done.”

“After six years of self-imposed exile, Tarantino is re-emerging with a movie that’s going to sell a mountain of popcorn, one so over-the-top it might bring Bill Bennett out of his self-imposed exile. Tarantino’s new Kill Bill, in theaters next Friday, is probably the most violent movie ever made by an American studio. It’s definitely the first one to merge the talents of Uma Thurman, David Carradine, and Zamfir the Master of the Pan Flute, precariously balancing them all on a sword’s edge.” —Village Voice

“A US electronic voting system which sparked alarm in July when experts suggested it could subvert an election outcome, has been given the go-ahead.

Faulty software underpinning a touch-screen voting system used in past US elections has been revamped substantially and will be used by Maryland voters in the next US elections, says a report published by the Governor’s Office of Maryland on Wednesday.

But the lead researcher on the original study showing that serious bugs in the software might allow one person to cast many votes, was sceptical.” —New Scientist [thanks, abby]

…Not a Moral Lapse: “For all that has been written and spoken about addiction as a medical disease, most people, including most physicians, understand little about what draws people to drugs and keeps them hooked, often despite severe consequences and repeated attempts to quit.” —NY Times

An Internal Dialogue:

“Why would master do this? Why he tricks us, and betrays us?

No, it couldn’t have been master! Master is good and kind, and gives us wriggly fishes from his table, so juicy sweet! No, no, never master!

But why would the names of lady spiesies be in the newspapers? It’s so confusing, it makes our brainses feel all swirly and bad!

No, master never said those nassty things! Never! It was the lady spysy herself who did it, never master! Gollum! Gollum!

It must have been … libruhlss!! Yes, libruhs, all conspirings and scheme-ings! Tricksy, sneaksy, and false! Libruhls have always hated the precious! They want to destroy the precious! But we won’t them, will we, precious! We will wring their necks!” —The Poor Man [thanks to walker]

I am really going to enjoy the dysadministration’s twists and turns on this one, and those of the warbloggers.

William Rivers Pitt: “The White House has denied the allegation, and promises a full investigation. A great many people find it laughable to believe this White House is capable of investigating itself, and are demanding an independent investigation. A quick look at the White House telephone logs will reveal who called whom, and when. It may well be the case that Rove was not involved; there are several administration officials – Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rice, Card – along with a constellation of administration associates and media mouthpieces, who had a vested interest in shutting Ambassador Wilson’s mouth. The White House phone logs will be revelatory. If this administration fails to hand those logs over, they will stand in taint of high treason.

J’accuse.” —truthout

“…(W)e may well be on the brink of the biggest catastrophe the modern world has ever witnessed“, according to this (alarmist?) report. Increased geothermal activity beneath Yallowstone National Park, which at first blush appears to be of concern only to potential visitors to the park, may herald the impending eruption of “one of the most destructive natural phenomena in the world: a massive supervolcano“, one of only a handful known to exist in the world. Listen to this scenario:

…(W)hen one erupts the explosion will be heard around the globe. The sky will darken, black acid rain will fall, and the Earth will be plunged into the equivalent of a nuclear winter. It could push humanity to the brink of extinction….

Bill McGuire, professor of geohazards at the Benfield Greig Hazard Research Centre at University College London, says that America’s Yellowstone Park is one of the largest and most dangerous supervolcanoes in the world. “The Yellowstone volcano can be likened to a sleeping dragon,” says Professor McGuire, “whose slow breathing brings repeated swelling and sinking of the Earth’s crust in northern Wyoming and southern Montana.”

Professor McGuire went on to explain that: “Many supervolcanoes are not typical hill-shaped structures but huge, collapsed craters called “calderas” that are filled with hot magma and are harder to detect. The Yellowstone supervolcano was detected in the Sixties when infra-red satellite photographs revealed a magma-filled caldera 85km long and 45km wide. It has been on a regular eruption cycle of 600,000 years. The last eruption was 640,000 years ago, so the next is long overdue.”

Volcanologists have been tracking the movement of magma under the park and have calculated that in parts of Yellowstone the ground has risen over seventy centimetres, almost two and a half feet, since 1923, indicating a massive swelling underneath the park.

“The impact of a Yellowstone eruption is terrifying to comprehend.” says Professor McGuire. “Magma would be flung 50 kilometres into the atmosphere. Within a thousand kilometres virtually all life would be killed by falling ash, lava flows and the sheer explosive force of the eruption. One thousand cubic kilometres of lava would pour out of the volcano, enough to coat the whole of the USA with a layer 5 inches thick. The explosion would be the loudest noise heard by man for 75,000 years.”

The long-term effects would be even more devastating. The thousands of cubic kilometres of ash that would shoot into the atmosphere would block out light from the sun, making global temperatures collapse. This is called a nuclear winter. A large percentage of the world’s plant life would be killed by the ash and the drop in temperature. The resulting change in the world’s climate would devastate the planet, and scientists know that another eruption is due – they just don’t know when.

Michael Rampino, a geologist at New York University, quoted in a BBC Horizon documentary on Supervolcanoes three years ago explained: “It’s difficult to conceive of an eruption this big. It’s really not a question of if it’ll go off, it’s a question of when, because sooner or later one of these large super eruptions will happen.” —Online Journal [via Medley]

“The quintessential new warrior scans for confirmation of the president’s villainy, avoiding facts that might complicate his hatred.” —David Brooks, NY Times. [I posted a blink to Todd Gitlin’s appraisal of Brooks here.]

This sounds suspiciously like a right-wing echo of the ‘echo chamber’ conversation I had several weeks ago with Rebecca Blood and Lyn Millett, both on FmH and continuing over on Lyn’s Medley. Brooks makes the fundamentally flawed argument that, just because there is another side to the argument, harebrained as it might be (in this case, to suggest that Bush is anything less than inept and craven), one can be impeached for having some confidence in a firmly held conviction (in this case, that Bush is nothing but inept and craven). It is a tactic of the right to suggest that criticism is merely ideological bias (or, to Brooks, worse than passionate ideological difference: “The culture wars produced some intellectually serious books because there were principles involved. The presidency wars produce mostly terrible ones because the hatreds have left the animating ideas far behind and now romp about on their own.”); look for it and you’ll see this rhetorical argument throughout their discourse. Me, I still prefer dismissing and excluding the harebrained.

Brooks casts this as an extension of the ‘culture wars’ of the ’80’s, in which ideological and ethical gaps were unbridgeable. They remain so (sorry, Rebecca) no matter how much we style ourselves a pluralistic democratic society in which people are entitled to their opinions. But Brooks, aspiring to be the clever new kid on the op-ed block, has to take it further, suggesting that the ‘presidency wars’ are a new phenomenon beyond culture differences. He is wrong on two counts.

First is the newly fashionable observation (how many times have you read or heard it in just the last two weeks?) that the left’s Bush-loathing is ‘just like’ the right’s Clinton-loathing during the last administration. On the surface of it, this is an appealing tack. I heard a poignant piece from some NPR commentator last week who used her contempt for Bush as a vehicle to a new empathic connection to her mother, whose Clinton-bashing she had endured through the second half of the ’90’s. We all do it, its one of our cherished little foibles, Brooks says. Only consider the asymmetry.

Clinton-bashing from the right was not met with uncritical kneejerk contravention from the left. Clinton often offended the left mightily. Progressives did not so much like the man or support him as much as they argued the irrelevancy of the right’s attack on a deeply morally flawed man to his fitness to govern. As much as I agree that I would probably hate Bush if I got to know him personally, I would probably hate the smarmy Clinton as well. In contrast, have you ever heard an apologist for the current administration, an ideological conservative, acknowledge Bush’s personal flaws? This may be firmly embedded in, rather than transcending in any way as Brooks attempts to suggest, the ‘culture wars’ (rigid and moralistic thinkers with an inherent bias toward respecting authority and a difficulty distniguishing the man from his privilege and title vs. moral relativists whose belief in the corrpution of politics and government makes them nonplussed by the idea of a moral failure as President).

In a second sense, the ‘presidency wars’ are a perfect reflection of the ‘culture wars’ rather than something different. Bush-hating is merely the latest, greatest fruition of anti-elitist progressive bitterness at the failure of the meritocratic ideals on whose promise they were raised.

Jonathan Chait’s New Republic piece Mad About You, the case for Bush hatred, which takes some jibes at David Brooks and to which Brooks’ piece seemes to be a reply, does an excellent job establishing the significant differences between Bush hatred and Clinton hatred; in comparison, Brooks’ column is empty handwaving in feeble response. Chait finds Bush hatred entirely justified on ideological grounds alone, although he warns of the rabid fringe of Bush haters whose rage gives voice to ill-thought-out conspiracy theories (we invaded Iraq just to boost Halliburton’s profits; oh, that’s Cheney’s motivation, not Bush’s [joke…]) and worries that Democrats blinded by their hatred will choose a Presidential candidate merely on the basis of his ability to vent their rage for them (a vast misintepretation of what Dean’s appeal is all about, IMO) rather than one who can beat Bush. (Dean may not be able to appeal to the vast heartlands who would have to vote Democratic, but it is not so much because they are on the other side of the ‘presidency war’ as that they are across the ‘culture war’ gulf…). By the way, the companion New Republic piece by Ramesh Ponnuru, Hate Crimes: the case against Bush hatred, also does little more than agree with Chait that Bush hatred may lead Democrats to strategic mistakes.

But in a sense Brooks is right that Bush-hating transcends mere principled ideological dispute, as did Clinton-hating. It is no mistake that observers discern ‘presidency wars’ in the furor over the past two presidents. It is not, however, so much because of any essential change in the tenor or nature of political discourse, but because of a run of inappropriate choices we have faced for the presidency. Brooks does not seem to have noticed, but I would cite the beginnings of this landscape of contempt when a two-bit actor ascended to the throne more than twenty years ago. No, let me go even further back, to the worst 20th-century president, Richard Nixon, who inspired visceral rage and contempt quite apart from his dirty campaign tricks and his despicable conduct of the war in Indochina. I recall my terrifying introduction to Nixon and a new dimension of political rage in a piece profiling him, long before his election, in the first issue of Ralph Ginsburg’s short-lived (1968-71) “post pyrotechnic, futuristic bimonthly of intellectual pleasure” Avant Garde — the article, whose author I no longer recall, was responsible for my taking out a charter subscription. [With the input of the likes of Herb Lubalin and Milton Glaser, Avant Garde is remembered these days, when it is, for its graphic and typographic design, rather than its content…] Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, Shrub, were in their own ways mediocre men who by rights should have been recognized as unfit to govern (although of course I am reminded of the maxim that a nation gets the leader it deserves). If the tenor of the criticism has become more shrill, it is because the unfitness is more evident and the stakes higher. Here is Chait again, on:

… the oft-posed question of why liberals detest Bush more than Reagan. It’s not just that Bush has been more ideologically radical; it’s that Bush’s success represents a breakdown of the political process. Reagan didn’t pretend to be anything other than what he was; his election came at the crest of a twelve-year-long popular rebellion against liberalism. Bush, on the other hand, assumed office at a time when most Americans approved of Clinton’s policies. He triumphed largely because a number of democratic safeguards failed. The media overwhelmingly bought into Bush’s compassionate-conservative facade and downplayed his radical economic conservatism.

Chait shares my vehemence about Bush’s intellectual unfitness to govern, which longtime FmH readers know has been one of my trademark rants since Bush’s early public appearances during the 2000 presidential campaign. As Chait points out, however, it has become taboo as a subject:

Just as mainstream Democrats and liberals ceased to question Bush’s right to hold office, so too did they cease to question his intelligence. If you search a journalistic database for articles discussing Bush’s brainpower, you will find something curious. The idea of Bush as a dullard comes up frequently–but nearly always in the context of knocking it down. While it’s described as a widely held view, one can find very few people who will admit to holding it. Conservatives use the theme as a taunt–if Bush is so dumb, how come he keeps winning? Liberals, spooked, have concluded that calling Bush dumb is a strategic mistake.

Yes, it took me awhile, but I realized eventually that it was not just that the idea of the president-as-dullard did not seem to concen the voting public; it was downright appealing.

Knee-jerk loyalty to the current president is so out of touch with reality that it would be laughable if it hadn’t turned the country over to Bush’s authoritarian handlers, corporate rapists and world hegemonists, behind the smokescreen of apologistics.

Brooks tries to disarm his critics with facile suggestions that he is ecumenical about his concerns and above the ideological fray:

And for those who are going to make the obvious point: Yes, I did say some of these things during the Clinton years, when it was conservatives bashing a Democrat, but not loudly enough, which I regret, because the weeds that were once on the edge of public life now threaten to choke off the whole thing.

Indeed; but you supported Clinton’s impeachment wholeheartedly. Nice try, David, but no go. Your slip is showing…

Related: What is David Brooks talking about?

We couldn’t help but be a little confused by David Brooks’s New York Times column this morning. The premise of the piece is that the culture wars of the 1980s and early ’90s have evolved into the “presidency wars” of the late ’90s and the present–by which Brooks means that we’ve stopped debating large principles and started acting out our visceral dislike of the other side.

This much we get. But Brooks loses us when he cites a quote from a recent piece by our colleague Jonathan Chait–and, by implication, holds Chait up as the epitome of the presidential warrior. —The New Republic

Addendum: Here, Chait responds to Brooks and others. “A recent article of mine in TNR defending Bush hatred seems to have worked like some kind of conservative dog whistle, silently summoning drooling right-wingers out of their lairs to bay at the moon…Wait. Did I just lump David Brooks together with a bunch of incoherent right-wing knuckle-draggers? I suppose I did. That’s probably not fair, given that Brooks is intelligent and an excellent writer. But of course that’s precisely what he does to me in his column.”

Chait goes on:

Brooks has every right to disagree with me about the relative merits of Presidents Bush and Clinton, but he has no right to distort my argument or the nature of my writing. As a matter of fact, I spend far more time reading the conservative media–in addition to National Review Online, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal editorial page, and Andrew Sullivan’s website are all part of my daily fare–than I do reading liberal commentary. My piece on Bush hatred explicitly addressed the arguments of conservatives and mustered facts in rebuttal. And it explicitly compared Clinton–whom I have criticized in print many times before–with Bush. Moreover, I’ve also argued in that piece and elsewhere (a Washington Post op-ed entitled, “Blinded by Bush Hatred”) that liberals shouldn’t allow their distrust of Bush to lead to reflexive opposition to his policies–my primary example being the Iraq war, which I supported. After confessing my personal dislike for Bush, I proceeded to carefully explain why liberal hatred for Bush is understandable given the way he attained his office and has governed since.

The irony is that the exertions of the anti Bush-haters lack even an attempt at analytical rigor. Brooks does not even mention, let alone try to refute, my argument. Novak and Hewitt’s responses are on the level of discourse you’d find at a Howard Dean rally. Brooks’s sadness over the simplicity of the Bush-haters therefore rings a bit hollow.

Chait concludes by placing Brooks’ piece in context: “The timing of Brooks’s plea for civility is a tad suspicious. After Republican culture wars softened up Clinton, and tainted Al Gore, paving the way for Bush’s election, suddenly it’s time to declare president-hating out of bounds.” …as conservatives face the spectre of their new-found arrogant ascendency slipping through their one-term fingers because of the actions of their eminently hate-able man in the White House, too inept to keep pulling the wool over our eyes.

An inside look at Brown & Root, the kingpin of America’s new military-industrial complex:

“…The military police pried its driver, Fred Bryant Jr., from the wreckage and raced him to a military field hospital. Bryant, 39, died en route, the first KBR combat casualty since the Texas contractor was founded in 1919.

Bryant’s death underscores the U.S. military’s heavy reliance on private military companies, or PMCs, to wage war in Iraq. By most estimates, civilian contractors are handling as much as 20% to 30% of essential military support services in Iraq. Scores of PMCs are active all across the country, but KBR in particular has become indispensable to the global projection of American military might in this unsettled age. ‘It is no exaggeration to say that wherever the U.S. military goes, so goes Brown & Root,’ says P.W. Singer, a Brookings Institution fellow and author of Corporate Warriors. Widely known as Brown & Root, KBR is a unit of oil-services giant Halliburton Co. (HAL ) — Dick Cheney’s old company.” —BusinessWeek [via Interesting People mailing list]

“Is there anything so deadening to the soul as a PowerPoint presentation?” —NY Times