“Like cool kids angered that their favorite cult band had signed on with a major label and started churning out pop drivel, some former members of the Draft Clark movement are already charging the onetime general with selling out. His nascent campaign, they say, has been taken over by mainstream political operatives who are minimizing the influence of the draft movement, dismantling the draft sites and slowly destroying the Internet community that, for the past six months, served as an incubator for Clark’s then-hypothetical presidential bid. Even more disturbingly, others charge, the professional operatives may have been planning this all along.” The American Prospect

“The CIA has asked the Justice Department to investigate allegations that the White House broke federal laws by revealing the identity of one of its undercover employees in retaliation against the woman’s husband, a former ambassador who publicly criticized President Bush’s since-discredited claim that Iraq had sought weapons-grade uranium from Africa, NBC News has learned.

The former envoy, Joseph Wilson, who was acting ambassador to Iraq before the first Gulf War, was dispatched to Niger in 2002 to investigate a British intelligence report that Iraq sought to buy uranium there. Although Wilson discredited the report, Bush cited it in his State of the Union address in January among the evidence he said justified military action in Iraq.

The administration has since had to repudiate the claim. CIA Director George Tenet said the 16-word sentence should not have been included in Bush’s Jan. 28 speech and publicly accepted responsibility for allowing it to remain in the president’s text.

Wilson published an article in July alleging, however, that the White House recklessly made the charge knowing it was false.

…The next week, columnist Robert Novak published an article in which he revealed that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a covert CIA operative specializing in weapons of mass destruction. “Two senior administration officials told me Wilson’s wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate,” Novak wrote.

The White House has denied being Novak’s source, whom he has refused to identify. But Wilson has said other reporters have told him White House officials leaked Plame’s identity.” — MSNBC

cite “pattern of deception” in his statements on Iraq and a failure to plan for the postwar period. — MSNBC

The father of a soldier killed in Iraq accused President George Bush yesterday of being responsible for his son’s death. — Guardian.UK

“I have spent a year compiling a database of every suicide bombing and attack around the globe from 1980 to 2001 — 188 in all. It includes any attack in which at least one terrorist killed himself or herself while attempting to kill others, although I excluded attacks authorized by a national government, such as those by North Korea against the South. The data show that there is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any religion for that matter. In fact, the leading instigator of suicide attacks is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist-Leninist group whose members are from Hindu families but who are adamantly opposed to religion (they have have committed 75 of the 188 incidents).

Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist campaigns have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel liberal democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Religion is rarely the root cause, although it is often used as a tool by terrorist organizations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective.” — Robert A. Pape, University of Chicago political scientist, NY Times op-ed

This Time as Peacekeepers:

“In 1258, the Mongol general Hulegu, a grandson of Genghis Khan, sacked Baghdad, killing 800,000 people and ending its primacy as the largest city in the Arab world.

This month, the Mongolians returned to Iraq. Ferried into the country on American military transports, 180 Mongolian Army soldiers — all male, all volunteers — are guarding pipelines and working on construction projects under a Polish command.

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‘This is not like the 13th century,’ Col. B. Erkhenbayar, commander of Mongolia’s Peacekeeping Operation Battalion, said here, smiling so widely his eyes disappeared. ‘Then, we went to invade. This time, we are going to build Iraq.’

In the Bush administration’s roster of 34 nations serving in Iraq in the American-led ‘coalition of the willing’ about half are formerly Communist countries like Mongolia. Like many other normally overlooked nations that have sent soldiers to Iraq, Mongolia did so more out of geopolitics than concern for Iraq. Mongolia’s offer of troops surprised the American government because it had not asked Mongolia for help, said Steven R. Saunders, president of a private, Washington-based group promoting business ties with Mongolia.” — NY Times

“”The risk it poses to humanity is on a par with nuclear weapons,” Katherine Albrecht says.

The deadly new threat Albrecht, the founder of Consumers Against Shopping Privacy Invasion and Numbering, is talking about: the latest development in retail technology, a new generation of bar codes called electronic product codes (EPC). These tiny bar codes send and receive data using radio waves, eliminating manual scanning.

This new technology will lower prices, improve selections and supplies, eliminate counterfeits (especially prescription drugs) and reduce theft. Eventually, it will help customers maintain and replace products from a carton of milk to the refrigerator that holds it.

The first generation of bar codes has helped do that for nearly 30 years. But if misguided privacy alarmists have their way, the benefits of the next generation of bar codes may be denied or delayed.

Privacy advocates are concerned that retailers and manufacturers will use EPC (also called radio frequency identification tags) to track our every purchase, monitor products after they leave the store and use that information without our knowledge.” — USA Today

[When USA Today tells us not to be afraid of something, watch your back?]

A quiz:

“Some people have a strong preference for one style of thinking, and find some skills come more naturally than others. Other people tend to adopt different thinking styles in different situations.

This test gives you an idea of what your current thinking style or styles are. But remember – the brain is a very adaptive organ. You should be able to improve your performance in any one of these categories with practice. — BBC/Leonardo [via Arthur Hlavaty]

I turned out to be an “Interpersonal Thinker”:

• Like to think about other people, and try to understand them
  
• Recognise differences between individuals and appreciate that different people have different perspectives
  
• Make an effort to cultivate effective relationships with family, friends and colleagues

[No surprises there, right? Except maybe that part about trying to cultivate effective relationships with collleagues; I am at times too contrarian and inflammatory to be accused of that!]

Can progressives love a military man? “As pundits pounce on Wesley Clark, his presidential campaign is beginning to look like a bubble on the verge of bursting. It remains to be seen whether Clark can connect with anyone who isn’t a political junkie. But one big surprise is how open progressives are to his candidacy. Not that they’re keen on falling for a four-star general, even one who calls himself a liberal. But interviews with black activists, feminists, anti-war activists, and left-wing intellectuals yielded a loose consensus that if it takes a warrior to beat George Bush, bring him on.” — Richard Goldstein, The Village Voice

Fiction book covers sprout appendages: “You can’t walk through a bookstore these days without seeing gams galore. Legs in boots, legs on roller skates and legs ending in bare feet abound, but stroll by the ‘new fiction’ table, and what you’ll see most often is a curvy set of legs in a sassy set of spike heels.” — Maureen Ryan, Chicago Tribune

In a 1994 article from F&SF, Bruce Sterling demystifies broadcast towers: “…what they do, and why they look that way, and how they’ve earned their peculiar right to loom eerily on the skyline of every urban center in America… “

“Within three days of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, university researchers joined emergency personnel at Ground Zero and other locations to begin studying the events’ aftermath and recovery efforts.

The results of their studies were published this week by the Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center based at the University of Colorado at Boulder…

Topics of the 22 individual studies included creativity in emergency response to the World Trade Center disaster, corporate responses and interactions with the public sector, volunteer behavior, implications of the 9-11 events for federal emergency management, impacts on Muslim college students and risk communication and public warning…

Based on findings from these studies, the book includes numerous conclusions and recommendations for how public policy and disaster response can be improved. Some of the recommendations on ways to better cope with terrorist attacks include:

• Law enforcement and investigative personnel need to be integrated into disaster planning, training and exercises because they will have a central role in terrorist disasters.
  
• More media attention to the broader political, social, religious and other aspects of Sept. 11 and similar disasters could help Americans better understand the terrorism risk and the consequences of preventative actions the country might take.
  
• Researchers and practitioners need to communicate information on the best protective actions that people can take in response to terrorism, so that proper warnings and instructions can be formulated.
  
• A consistent policy is needed that balances the public’s and the research community’s need to know versus the need to keep information and databases about critical infrastructure systems secure.” EurekAlert!

“New soccer studies show short and long-term consequences of common practice”.EurekAlert!

It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to recognize that frequent heading might be dangerous to neurocognitive function. I don’t let my soccer-playing kids head the ball and have generally found their coaches sympathetic to not encouraging the practice. However, it is hard for soccer traditionalists to let go of. This should not be surprising; after all, there is a constituency for prizefighting despite the neurological violence that does, even with the prominent case of Muhammed Ali’s Parkinsonism (which has likely been induced by the blows he took to his head over his career) and the well-known condition called dementia pugilistica.

“The evolving science of ‘flushing’ hidden reservoirs of HIV from cells got a encouraging boost today as researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center demonstrated how an experimental intranasal drug can activate the immune system and send HIV viral counts in white blood cells to undetectable levels.” EurekAlert!

Todd Gitlin: “Bobos unimpressed by Paul Krugman’s crusades will relish (David) Brooks’ new appointment as an op-ed columnist at The New York Times. Stationed at column right, he’s likely to outlast William Safire, whose career-long cover-up exercises on behalf of Richard Nixon, Ariel Sharon and various intelligence sources have made no small contribution to Republican morale over his 30 years on the page (though Safire has also broken ranks to display a tender spot for civil liberties). Brooks, despite his Washington years, probably won’t channel insider talk with Safire’s gusto. What besides good fun can he bring to his coveted niche?” The American Prospect

Bioterror Brain Drain: “Infectious-disease specialists are following the big bucks to Washington’s new multibillion-dollar program on bioterrorism research—but at what human cost?” The American Prospect The research is going where the money is; should you KYA goodbye if you have a disease that isn’t of strategic significance?

“To the medical world, …the hundreds of thousands of …Americans who suffer from impaired consciousness present a mystery. Traditionally, there have essentially been only two ways to classify them: as comatose (eyes closed and responses limited to basic reflexes) or vegetative (eyes opening and closing in a cycle of sleeping and waking but without any sign of awareness). In either case, it has been assumed that they have no high-level thought. But Schiff, Hirsch and a small group of like-minded researchers are studying (such patients) and finding that the truth is far more complicated. Their evidence suggests that even after an injury that leaves a brain badly damaged, even after months or years with little sign of consciousness, people may still be capable of complex mental activity. ”If I say, ‘Touch your nose,’ and you touch your nose, and then I say ‘Touch your nose’ six more times, and you don’t do it, how do we account for the one time you did?” asks Joseph T. Giacino, a neuropsychologist who collaborates with Schiff and Hirsch.

Last year in the journal Neurology, Giacino and 10 co-authors accounted for that touch of the nose — and other enigmatic hints of awareness they have observed — by proposing a new category of consciousness: the minimally conscious state. By their reckoning, a vast number of people who might once have been considered vegetative actually have hidden reserves of mental activity. And as the study of Rios suggests, brain scans may be able to help scientists eavesdrop on their inner world. ”It’s free speech for people who have no speech,” Hirsch says.

The implications of this research, both for medical ethics and practical policy, are potentially huge. Traumatic brain injuries are a significant health problem in the United States, but the study and treatment of them are clouded with a sense of hopelessness, a feeling that consciousness is too mysterious to be understood. When faced with patients in a vegetative state, doctors can do little more than wait to see if they wake up. No treatment has ever been definitively shown to help patients recover consciousness, and doctors can’t predict which patients will emerge from a vegetative state and which won’t. If patients don’t show signs of recovery in a few weeks, they usually wind up at home with their families or in nursing homes, and they rarely see a neurologist again. In 1976, in a famous court case, the parents of Karen Ann Quinlan, a woman who had been in a vegetative state for about a year, won the right to take her off a ventilator (after which she lived until 1985). ”There’s a point where people give up” and discontinue aggressive treatment, says Joseph J. Fins, chief of the division of medical ethics at Weill Medical College. ”The question is, Are we giving up too soon on the ones who might become more functional?” Schiff and his colleagues say that the answer, in too many cases, may be yes.” NY Times Magazine

Auto-analysis: “For what could be considered a form of psychotherapy, three New York therapists were shown pictures of the latest crop of speedsters, muscle cars and S.U.V.’s and asked to free-associate. It was a vehicular Rorschach test of sorts. The goal was to learn a bit about the positive and negative desires that motivate people to buy certain types of automobiles — is there a car for every midlife crisis? — and to uncover the tactics car designers use to lure customers. ” NY Times Magazine

Telling people they are HIV-positive is a terrible thing to do for a living, and it just got much worse. NY Times Magazine

I’m a genre reader and I didn’t know it! Bruce Sterling surveys the modern literary scene and proposes to define a new genre of fiction: “(T)his is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility.” Scanning the list of ‘slipstream’ works he attaches to the column, I find many of the most memorable novels I’ve read in the last, oh, twenty years or so. Catscan

“Replacing Michael Kinsley would have been a daunting task for anyone, but the online magazine’s veteran political correspondent has led it up the mountain to profitability and greater recognition…” OJR Among other things. Weisberg talks in this interview about the controversial deal to bring Slate to NPR in the form of the co-produced show Day to Day, about which I just became aware (and which is not carried by either of my two local NPR stations).

I think there are a certain number of people who listen to NPR who are going to hear that a magazine owned by Microsoft is involved with NPR and then think, “My god, NPR is being tainted.” But if NPR is tainted, it’s tainted by all the funding sources it has to have, from foundations that have an agenda to various corporations that sponsor, including Microsoft. But the idea that partnering with an independent-minded magazine that happens to be owned by Microsoft somehow taints them in a way other things they do don’t doesn’t make any sense to me.

And, for those to whom this makes a difference, Doonesbury is now also on Slate.

“Like cool kids angered that their favorite cult band had signed on with a major label and started churning out pop drivel, some former members of the Draft Clark movement are already charging the onetime general with selling out. His nascent campaign, they say, has been taken over by mainstream political operatives who are minimizing the influence of the draft movement, dismantling the draft sites and slowly destroying the Internet community that, for the past six months, served as an incubator for Clark’s then-hypothetical presidential bid. Even more disturbingly, others charge, the professional operatives may have been planning this all along.” The American Prospect

Explaining the ‘Any’ Key

“Verisign’s controversial new SiteFinder service replaces ‘Cannot find server or DNS error’ for missing domain names with results that may point to Verisign partners and now it has spawned a lawsuit by a competitor who alleges that the results could give Verisign and its partners an unfair advantage.

So while the litigation gets going is there no way for you to return your system to its former self. Will every ‘domain not found’ now result in a SiteFinder page? Maybe not. PC Magazine editors sat down this morning and hashed out an interim ‘fix’. All that’s required is a few simple adjustments to your system.”

“For years, health insurers have occasionally demanded a look at psychotherapists’ notes of their sessions with patients, to ensure that the care they were paying for was appropriate, or that it actually took place.

But now one insurer, Oxford Health Plans, is saying that in many cases, the notes are not enough evidence that the patients received what Oxford paid for. Oxford has audited hundreds of psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers in the New York metropolitan area, deemed their notes inadequate documentation of the sessions, and demanded repayment of thousands of dollars from each provider — in some cases, more than $100,000.

The therapists and their professional associations paint Oxford’s actions as another skirmish in a decade-long campaign by insurers to save money by denying coverage — but one that sets a new standard for aggressiveness. They say that no other insurance company has denied payment because session notes were not detailed enough or long enough…” NY Times

Let’s face facts: health insurers will do anything they can to deny coverage and save money. The only thing surprising about this maneuver is that it hasn’t been tried until now. You know that the rest of the industry will follow suit if this works. While psychiatry visit notes relating to the patient’s use of medications have to be detailed enough to show a thorough evaluation of medical factors, it is customary for a ‘talk therapist’s’ session notes to go no further than documenting that the patient was there, which billing category the visit fell under, and what diagnosis the patient carries (for insurance purposes; don’t get me started on the problems with this ‘pigeonholing’…). Anything more will have a chilling effect on the patient’s candor in the psychotherapy and set the therapist up in an open-ended fashion for an ethical violation of thier client’s privilege.

The modafinil saga continues: “An advisory panel to the Food and Drug Administration endorsed yesterday new uses for a stimulant that keeps people awake with fewer side effects than caffeine or amphetamines.

The panel said the drug, Provigil, now approved only for narcolepsy, could also be used to fight sleepiness in workers who cannot adjust to night shift jobs and in people who do not sleep well because of a breathing disorder known as obstructive sleep apnea.

But with some members expressing concern that the drug might be overprescribed, the committee did not endorse the request by the drug’s manufacturer, Cephalon, that it be approved for all sleep disorders.” NY Times

A Calculus of Violence: “…(O)ver the last decade and a half, Mr. Vollmann, 44, has pumped out thousands of pages of dark, difficult, scatological prose rife with all manner of violence and degradation. Thanks to books like Whores for Gloria, The Rainbow Stories and nearly a dozen other titles, he has earned a cult following and comparisons to both Thomas Pynchon and Céline.

His fascination with prostitutes, pimps, drug addicts and skinheads is legendary. As are his research methods. His quest for authenticity has led him to prowl war zones and bad neighborhoods, to sleep with streetwalkers, to smoke crack with junkies and to endure grueling physical ordeals. …(H)is enthusiasm for guns, it turns out, owes more to moral conviction than literary curiosity. It is a direct result, Mr. Vollmann says, of the research he undertook for his latest work: Rising Up and Rising Down, a 3,000-page meditation on the ethics of violence.

The book, which will be published in seven volumes by McSweeney’s in October (and in abridged form by Ecco next year), took him 23 years to write. A dense, meandering, amalgam of historical analysis, contemporary case studies, anecdotes, essays, theory, charts, graphs, photographs and drawings, it is Mr. Vollmann’s attempt to bring definitive resolution to a conundrum that has preoccupied generations of thinkers: under what conditions can violence be justified?

As he writes on page 291, when he finally gets around to explaining his intentions: ‘My own aim in beginning this book was to create a simple and practical moral calculus which would make it clear when it was acceptable to kill, how many could be killed and so forth.'” NY Times

French card deck names ‘most dangerous’ U.S. leaders: “The ace of spades? Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gets the honor in a new French deck of cards. President Bush is the king of diamonds and Osama bin Laden the joker.” CNN

“Head of a baseball club and director of Salem bin Laden’s oil company (brother of Osama). Designated President of the United States by friends of his father at the Supreme Court before the vote count showed that he lost the elections.”

“Despite high gasoline prices and social pressure to drive more efficient cars, the best-selling vehicles in the United States this year are trucks by Ford, Chevy, and Dodge, all of which are being made larger, often with four doors, and marketed to families as lifestyle vehicles.” Boston Globe

And: The Pickup, A Love Story:

“If you sit behind the wheel of a 2004 pickup, it’s pretty hard to find the way back to that truck of yesteryear — with the plywood floors, the two-piece windshield and the hand-crank windows — the one that America first fell in love with. Dealer lots all over the country twinkle with full-size pickups that taunt us with awesome power that we will, very likely, never need and assuage us with deep pile carpet, countless cup holders, GPS guidance systems and power sunroofs. Truth be told, we would all find a long ride in the ancestral pickup less than enjoyable. But that doesn’t mean the roots of the pickup aren’t important. In fact, the history is essential to understanding how the pickup has come to represent a perfect marriage of our desire for frontier-style freedom and suburban-style comfort.” NY Times

Polymath Scholar Dies at 67: “He was an exemplar of American multiculturalism, at home both in Arabic and English, but, as he once put it, ‘a man who lived two quite separate lives,’ one as an American university professor, the other as a fierce critic of American and Israeli policies and an equally fierce proponent of the Palestinian cause.

Though a defender of Islamic civilization, Dr. Said (pronounced sah-EED) was an Episcopalian married to a Quaker. He was also an excellent pianist who for several years wrote music criticism for The Nation. From 1977 to 1991 he was an unaffiliated member of the Palestine National Council, a parliament in exile. Most of the council’s members belong to one of the main Palestinian organizations, most importantly to Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, but some belonged to smaller organizations believed responsible for terrorist operations against Israelis and Americans, such as George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.” NY Times