One of you yesterday logged the 500,000th page hit to FmH. Relax, the first half-million are the hardest. I look forward to your continuing reading pleasure here, and thank you all for your support. [I know, I know, boing boing posted today that they get almost 400,000 hits a month!]

“A new congressional report is alleging that the Future Combat Systems program is poised for major delays and a financial train wreck. Worst of all, the report claims, the Army knew this was going to happen all along.” —Wired

“Democrats used to thrive on Hollywood endings. Today, liberalism is more like a dark, complicated novel. It’s time to go back to making movies.

This fall’s presidential contest will turn on many things, but one of them will certainly be the parties’ contrasting aesthetics: the comforting bromides of conservative cheerfulness versus the disturbing sobriety of new liberalism’s cold glare. But while it may be foolish and even dangerous to view the world as anything but tragic, doing so isn’t a very promising way to win votes. Twenty-five years ago, conservatives stole liberal optimism, and George W. Bush, currently bumping from one disaster to another, is relying on it to pull him through this election.” —Neal Gabler, American Prospect

“A group of tech celebs gathered on Capitol Hill this week to brief Congressional aides on how Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) can, and probably will, make a complete mess of the Internet in about a year’s time.

At issue are likely revisions to the 1996 Telecommunications Act and FCC regulations, which, thus far, have managed to do scant violence to the Net. Unfortunately, changes now being contemplated, urged by telecomms and media behemoths and their lobbyists, may soon alter that happy state of affairs. Broadband users are particularly at risk, because they enjoy little of the consumer choice available to dialup users.” —The Register [via Interesting People]

Some who work with victims of trauma are defending and developing new techniques for what might be called ‘therapeutic forgetting’ —New York Times. We have the capacity to interfere pharmacologically with the storage or retrieval of painful memories; but should we? Bioethicists and others argue that having had nightmarish experiences is part of what makes us what we are, and that blunting the memory of painful events diminishes us and prevents us from learning from our experiences. I have previously written in horror about the efforts of the military to use immediate interventions, or even prophylaxis, into battlefield trauma to enhance soldiers’ abilities to remain efficient and dehumanized warriors in the face of the horror of what they do and see done in war. One might argue that that is a slightly different issue, as the victims of most trauma have little or no moral responsibility for their victimization as contrasted with the Pentagon’s ‘fighting machines.’ Nevertheless, I share the alarm about the ‘therapeutic forgetting’ research. If I were living in a hopeless, terminal world like that depicted in post-apocalyptic fiction, where these is essentially no future in store, I might feel differently, but the process of recovering from trauma without shortcuts provides for the future. Moreover, the researchers themselves raise the possibility that interfering with the laying down or retrieval of intense memories might not selectively screen for the alarming or painful ones, and emotionally intense pleasant memories might be blocked or dulled in the process. Finally, the use of such techniques could in all likelihood not be restricted to clinically significant traumas. In much the same way that the burgeoning use of antidepressants since Prozac has led to an age of ‘cosmetic psychopharmacology’, we could look forward to the further twisting of the human soul by unrestricted damping of the most trivially or mundanely unpleasant memories.

Mother Who Stoned 2 Sons to Death Acquitted on All Charges: “A woman who claimed God ordered her to kill her sons was acquitted of murder charges by reason of insanity on Saturday, sparing her a life prison sentence and allowing the state to commit her to a psychiatric hospital.

A jury found that the woman, Deanna L. Laney, did not know right from wrong last May 9 when she killed her two older sons, 6-year-old Luke and 8-year-old Joshua, in her front yard by bashing their heads with rocks. She left her youngest son, Aaron, now 2, maimed in his crib…

Her lawyers argued that insanity was the only reason why Ms. Laney, a deeply religious mother who home-schooled her children, would kill her sons without a tear…

All five mental health experts consulted in the case concluded that a severe mental illness caused Ms. Laney to have psychotic delusions. Psychiatrists testified that Ms. Laney believed she was chosen by God to kill her children as a test of faith and then to serve as a witness after the world ended.” —New York Times

My question: should the fundamentalist preachers who filled her head full of the idiocy that could shape her vulnerabilities into such a malignant form be charged as accomplices to murder, even if she was acquitted on grounds of insanity?

Apparently, time-shaving is a rampant management practice at some of your favorite corporate employers. —New York Times It shouldn’t be news; we shouldn’t be surprised. If you are an hourly employee who logs overtime, you should probably start keeping your own records of ‘time served’, if you do not already.

“Since former White House counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke charged March 24 that the Bush White House reacted slowly to warnings of a terrorist attack, his former colleagues have poked holes in parts of his narration of the early months of 2001 and have found what they say is evidence that Clarke elevated his own importance in those events…

But the broad outline of Clarke’s criticism has been corroborated by a number of other former officials, congressional and commission investigators, and by Bush’s admission in the 2003 Bob Woodward book ‘Bush at War’ that he ‘didn’t feel that sense of urgency’ about Osama bin Laden before the attacks occurred.” —Washington Post

“Iraq was wracked today by its most violent civil disturbances since the occupation started, with a coordinated Shiite uprising spreading across the country, from the slums of Baghdad to several cities in the south.

By day’s end, witnesses said Shiite militiamen controlled the city of Kufa, south of Baghdad, with armed men loyal to a radical cleric occupying the town’s police stations and checkpoints. More than eight people were killed by Spanish forces in a similar uprising in the neighboring town of Najaf.

In Baghdad, American tanks battled militiamen loyal to Moqtada Al Sadr, the radical cleric who has denounced the occupation and has an army of thousands of young followers.

At nightfall today, the Sadr City neighborhood shook with explosions and tank and machine gun fire. Black smoke choked the sky. The streets were lined with armed militiamen, dressed in all black. American tanks surrounded the area. Attack helicopters thundered overhead.

‘The occupation is over!’ people on the streets yelled. ‘We are now controlled by Sadr. The Americans should stay out.'” —New York Times

So: “In post September 11 wars, the US secured rapid battlefield dominance in Afghanistan and Iraq. Do these triumphs mean victory? <a href=”http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0402-13.htm&#8221; title=”

defeat”>Or, could America be defeated?

Four traits fatally obstruct a balance between threats and capacities and make defeat possible and even likely. First, ignorance is a precursor of gross policy errors that enlarge threats and squander capacities. Not knowing other cultures, histories, or socioeconomic environments is a guarantee of commitments that extend well beyond realistic expectations. From here to the horizon is scattered human debris from interventions in places we knew not at all. Vietnam’s long battle against the French was unknown in the U.S. in the early 1960s. Somalia was but an image of state collapse absent detailed on-the-ground knowledge. Iraq’s Ba’athist regime was part of an “axis of evil”. Attempts to alter local and regional political directions and traditions, however, are not the bailiwick of those without detailed preparations.

Moreover, defeat comes through arrogance. Capacity-driven behaviors are preceded by an assumption that power is deserved, and that deserved power embodies one with a mission to use such capacities for a greater goal. Such a missionary vocation is irrevocably intertwined with hubris – the conceit of power. Yet such arrogance conceals fundamental weakness. Every utterance of arrogant power generates fear, alienation and, ultimately, the development of countervailing and often asymmetric force. With each deception or evidently cosmetic spin, the power of trust and the legitimacy of just force wither. America the indispensable power, the salvation of democracies and the righteously vengeful nation after 9/11 has, in Iraq, found that creating post-war peace and reconstruction depends on far more than US Army occupation.

Distrust of friends, and dread of presumed enemy plots, join to produce the self-flagellation of paranoia. Everything is apprehension, and fright lies slightly beneath the surface. “Report suspicious behavior” flashes the sign above the Beltway – and George Orwell nods. Where one can trust no one, isolated strongholds are one plausible approach to world affairs. The alternative path taken by the Bush Administration is a foreign policy of global unilateralism – pre-empting through raw force whenever narrow national interests seem threatened, surrounding oneself with coalitions of the willing in lieu of genuine alliances. A pre-emptive strategy is one adopted by nations, groups or individuals for whom others harbor evil intentions, and whose presumed intentions warrant immediate countermeasures. It is but a short distance between such trepidation and an irrational paranoia.

Greed is also a quick route to self-defeat. Believing in nothing but today’s material interests is another way of believing in nothing. War to end a regime of one leader or party, to capture resources, or to shift a strategic balance, while ignoring justice and other paramount values is a harbinger of defeat. Lie about motives, deceitfully spin information, conceal data or events – do all of these while wars and their aftermath generate huge unaccountable profits for corporate allies of decision-makers and one is sure to lose the normative war and therefore become the victim of peace.

To the degree that ignorance, arrogance, paranoia and greed are all present, those who make decisions about war and peace will pursue a capacity-driven strategy, conflate discourses of war and peace, and incessantly strive for security through strength. Such decision-makers will, thereby, create enemies from friends, replacing mutual trust with endemic suspicion and fear.

This is George W. Bush’s America. With each pre-emptive step towards global unilateralism, enemies multiply, friendships wane, and the imbalance between threats and capacities approaches critical. The smell of defeat hangs in the air.”

—Daniel N. Nelson, Dean, College of Arts & Sciences, University of New Haven, served in the State and Defense departments (1998-2002) and was Richard Gephardt’s foreign policy advisor when he was House Majority Leader, CommonDreams

Well: Let’s Make Enemies:

US occupation chief Paul Bremer hasn’t started wearing a hijab yet, and is instead tackling the rise of anti-Americanism with his usual foresight. Baghdad is blanketed with inept psy-ops organs like Baghdad Now, filled with fawning articles about how Americans are teaching Iraqis about press freedom. “I never thought before that the Coalition could do a great thing for the Iraqi people,” one trainee is quoted saying. “Now I can see it on my eyes what they are doing good things for my country and the accomplishment they made. I wish my people can see that, the way I see it.”

Unfortunately, the Iraqi people recently saw another version of press freedom when Bremer ordered US troops to shut down a newspaper run by supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr. The militant Shiite cleric has been preaching that Americans are behind the attacks on Iraqi civilians and condemning the interim constitution as a “terrorist law.” So far, al-Sadr has refrained from calling on his supporters to join the armed resistance, but many here are predicting that the closing down of the newspaper–a nonviolent means of resisting the occupation–was just the push he needed. But then, recruiting for the resistance has always been a specialty of the Presidential Envoy to Iraq: Bremer’s first act after being tapped by Bush was to fire 400,000 Iraqi soldiers, refuse to give them their rightful pensions but allow them to hold on to their weapons–in case they needed them later.” —Naomi Klein, CommonDreams

“We try our best to avoid it, but boredom has its benefits.” I was curious about whether the article was, as advertised, going to be about the advantages of being bored. Of course, it is really about the advantages that accrue from shaking yourself out of your torpor. As someone who almost never suffers boredom, I was interested in learning if I am missing something. Now I’ll never know…and it is without resorting to most of this culture’s ever more frantic, and self-defeating, efforts to help me be less bored. [I got as far as the prescient paragraph acknowledging that some readers might be bored with the article by the time they reached that paragraph.] —SF Chronicle

“Democrats used to thrive on Hollywood endings. Today, liberalism is more like a dark, complicated novel. It’s time to go back to making movies.

This fall’s presidential contest will turn on many things, but one of them will certainly be the parties’ contrasting aesthetics: the comforting bromides of conservative cheerfulness versus the disturbing sobriety of new liberalism’s cold glare. But while it may be foolish and even dangerous to view the world as anything but tragic, doing so isn’t a very promising way to win votes. Twenty-five years ago, conservatives stole liberal optimism, and George W. Bush, currently bumping from one disaster to another, is relying on it to pull him through this election.” —Neal Gabler, American Prospect

“Few artists attain the same respect in their lifetime as is given to the 81-year-old Freud. Respect not just from fellow artists or lovers of contemporary art, but from museums around the world who treat this violent, deliberately ugly and ungainly portrayer of the naked human body as a titan, securely established in the great tradition of Chardin, Manet and Degas, rather than a contemporary whose reputation has yet to be tried by time.” —Guardian.UK

“So what explains the LSD drought? The best explanation is a bust, a really big bust. The DEA claims it reduced the LSD supply by “95 percent” with two arrests in rural Kansas in November 2000. Clyde Apperson and William Leonard Pickard were charged with and eventually convicted of possession and conspiracy to distribute LSD. According to court testimony, the DEA seized the largest operable LSD laboratory in agency history, as well as 91 pounds of LSD and precursor compounds for the potential manufacture of nearly 27 pounds more. If you define a dose of LSD as 100 micrograms, Apperson and Pickard had around 400 million hits in stock. At the more common dosage level of 20 micrograms, the two were sitting on 2 billion hits. Apperson got 30 years in prison, and Pickard got two life sentences. The Kansas bust marked the third time in four years that the DEA had arrested Apperson and Pickard on LSD lab charges.

The LSD market took an earlier blow in 1995, when Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia died and the band stopped touring. For 30 years, Dead tours were essential in keeping many LSD users and dealers connected, a correlation confirmed by the DEA in a divisional field assessment from the mid-’90s. The spring following Garcia’s death (the season the MTF surveys are administered), annual LSD use among 12th-graders peaked at 8.8 percent and began their slide. Phish picked up part of the Dead’s fan base—and presumably vestiges of the LSD delivery system. At the end of 2000, Phish stopped touring as well, and perhaps not coincidentally, the MTF numbers for LSD began to plummet.

Where have all the acid-eaters gone? MTF records a stable interest in “hallucinogens other than LSD”—the hallucinogen usually being psychoactive mushrooms—since the 2000 decline of acid. DAWN shows the same trend under the “miscellaneous hallucinogens” category. (Over the same period, use of both ecstasy and methamphetamine dropped in the MTF survey.) In other words, the decline in LSD use doesn’t look like a demand-side phenomena: The cultural hunger for a substance that lets you hold affordable conversations with God, watch walls melt, breathe colors, and explore your psyche remains unsated. ” —Slate

Related: “Monitoring the Future is an ongoing study of the behaviors, attitudes, and values of American secondary school students, college students, and young adults. Each year, a total of some 50,000 8th, 10th and 12th grade students are surveyed (12th graders since 1975, and 8th and 10th graders since 1991.) In addition, annual follow-up questionnaires are mailed to a sample of each graduating class for a number of years after their initial participation.”

US Casualties Close to 12,000: “Although the number of U.S. soldiers wounded in Iraq is rarely mentioned, previous estimates in the media have ranged between 2,000-3,000. The Pentagon now says that in the first year of war in Iraq, the military made over 18,000 medical evacuations – representing 11,700 casualties.” —Democracy Now!

“The Bush administration should not be thejudge of what information is appropriate for the 9/11 panel to review.” —New York Times editorial

Although Kerry’s friend, James Johnson, coordinating the vetting of Kerry’s vice presidential candidates (hopefully more effectively than hevetted Geraldine Ferraro), is characterized as discreet, there are some tidbits in the article. The first four approaches were reportedly made to Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico and Gov. Thomas J. Vilsack of Iowa. It appears that Edwards has several strikes against him, however; not being a governor and not being from a crucial battleground state, and possibly Kerry’s envy. There is interesting specualtion about John McCain; despite his categorical denials that he would defect from the Republican Party, he is giving out mixed signals. A Kerry-Kerrey ticket has a nice ring to it, though… —New York Times

…and in the Mood for Love: “After more than 16 years underground, periodical cicadas will begin emerging in late May or early June, as soon as the soil warms up. While they tend to be more widespread in, say, Ohio and Indiana, the bugs – up to two inches long, with orange-veined wings and red beady eyes – should also grace yards farther east, including the New York area.

‘Grace’ is somehow not the proper word, however, to describe the onslaught that may greet the family dog as it fetches the morning newspaper next month. According to Gene Kritsky, a biology professor at the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati and an expert on periodical cicadas, during the last emergence of Brood X, in 1987, concentrations of the bugs reached as high as 100 per square yard. ‘I calculated that in the greater Cincinnati area alone there were something like five billion of them,’ he said.” —New York Times

“Pentagon officials view Wednesday’s horror in Fallujah as the Iraq war’s Mogadishu incident: a disaster that may be a turning point for American policy. We will not flee, as we did in Somalia, but Fallujah should teach even the administration’s most die-hard optimists that the mission is deeper and muddier than they’d imagined, that the country they have conquered is far uglier and far less pliant than they hoped, and that a new course of policy is necessary if we want to sustain the occupation.

Many are wondering how President Bush will retaliate for the brutal slayings of the four American contractors who were shot, beaten, dismembered, dragged down the street, and strung up on bridge poles. The universal feeling is that some response is necessary to let the insurgents know they can’t get away with this. The question is what kind of response?” —Fred Kaplan, Slate

Guillermo del Toro’s heavenly Hellboy: “The highest praise I can bestow on Guillermo del Toro, the 39-year-old Mexican-born director and writer, is that he’s in a class with Peter Jackson as a fan-boy who gets it—a brilliant filmmaker who has a kind of metabolic connection to horror and sci-fi that helps him transform secondhand genre material into something deep and nourishing. Del Toro reaches into himself and finds the Wagnerian grandeur in schlock.

Which brings us to the delightful Hellboy, which is based on a clever comic-book series of the same name by Mike Mignola that fuses superheroics with the sort of mythic religious demonology of H.P. Lovecraft, plus a bit of Men in Black macho cheekiness. ” —David Edelstein, Slate

“According to news reports, the Americans who were killed and mutilated in Fallujah were ‘private contractors.’ This is a euphemism for ‘mercenaries’: ex-military soldiers of fortune who operate outside the rules of combat.” —MemoryBlog

And: Robert Fisk: “Most Of The People Dying In Iraq Are Iraqis”: ‘Veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk reports live from Baghdad. Fisk describes the “grotesque, gruesome, terrible” attacks in Fallujah, the contracted mercenaries that have infiltrated Iraq: “They swagger in and out with heavy weapons, with automatic weapons and pistols as if they’re cowboys” and the deteriorating situation throughout the country: “The violence and the insecurity, the sense of anarchy is greater.” ‘ —Democracy Now!

Where Was the Air Force?: “George W. Bush, writes former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, ‘failed to act prior to September 11 on the threat from Al Qaeda despite repeated warnings and then harvested a political windfall for taking obvious yet insufficient steps after the attacks.’ That incendiary charge, coupled with his apologetic testimony before the commission investigating the attacks, has reignited a long-simmering debate: What did Bush know when and how quickly should he have done something about it?

But both the 9/11 commission and liberal opponents of the Bush Administration are focusing on the wrong question. Nothing has surfaced from the 2001 ‘summer of threat’ beyond a bunch of vague they’re-up-to-something caveats. The specific details intelligence agencies would have needed to stop the attacks before they happened–potential hijackers’ names, dates and times, targets–were maddeningly elusive.

The really big unanswered question of September 11, 2001 is this: Once it became obvious that at least four passenger jets had been hijacked–at one point that Tuesday morning, Clarke says the FAA thought it had as many as ‘eleven aircraft off course or out of communications’–why didn’t our government intercept them?” —Ted Rall, CommonDreams

“Consider this theoretical possibility: if no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, is it also possible that there are no al-Qaida terrorists in Guantánamo? It seems far fetched, put so bluntly. If only by chance, it would seem likely that some of the detainees might be terrorists. The US secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, argues that the inhumane incarceration, the secrecy and the abuse of any principles of justice are all justified by the fact that these prisoners are the hardest of hard cases. But given what we know of those who have been released, the refusal of the US to open the evidence to challenge, and the secrecy that surrounds the prison and all who languish there, the proposition is worth considering. And since none of us have been allowed to know much, it is worth listening to those who know a little more.” —Isabel Hilton, Guardian.UK [via CommonDreams]

A conversation with Martin Seligman: “The third form of happiness, which is meaning, is again knowing what your highest strengths are and deploying those in the service of something you believe is larger than you are. There’s no shortcut to that. That’s what life is about. There will likely be a pharmacology of pleasure, and there may be a pharmacology of positive emotion generally, but it’s unlikely there’ll be an interesting pharmacology of flow. And it’s impossible that there’ll be a pharmacology of meaning.” —The Edge

“To understand what is distinctive about today’s Republican Party, you first need to know about an obscure and very conservative German political philosopher. His name, however, is not Leo Strauss, who has been widely cited as the intellectual guru of the Bush administration. It belongs, instead, to a lesser known, but in many ways more important, thinker named Carl Schmitt.” —The Chronicle

Louis Menand reviews Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism by Dominic Sandbrook, a young British historian:

“In 1970, McCarthy retired from the Senate and embarked on one of the weirder and (to those who had been his admirers) more distressing afterlives in American politics. He entered the 1972 Democratic primaries, intent on defeating Muskie, who was the initial front-runner. McCarthy put most of his money and energy into Illinois, and Muskie trounced him there, sixty-three per cent to thirty-six per cent. In 1973, McCarthy explored the possibility of running for Congress from Minnesota’s Sixth District, the part of the state where he was born, but he was made to understand that the Democrats of the Sixth District did not find the possibility thrilling, and he didn’t run. In 1976, he ran for President in the general election as an independent. In 1980, he endorsed Ronald Reagan, a perversity motivated by his loathing for Jimmy Carter. He ran for the Presidency in 1988, as the candidate of the Consumer Party, and again, as a Democrat, in 1992, when he was seventy-six. He received two hundred and eleven votes in the New Hampshire primary. Some of those who voted for him may have believed they were casting their ballot for Joe McCarthy (a confusion from which McCarthy probably benefitted throughout his career). McCarthy now lives in a retirement home in Washington, D.C…” —The New Yorker

“Ten years after Jerry Seinfeld got caught necking during Schindler’s List, reverence for the Holocaust still makes Larry David squirm.” —Nextbook

“For at least three decades universities have struggled with the problem of rising journal prices. Prices have risen faster than inflation since the 1970’s, and four times faster since 1986. Because this rate greatly outpaced the growth of library budgets, it was obvious that it could not continue for much longer. But it was not obvious how it would end. Even though libraries had responded by selectively cancelling subscriptions and cutting into their book budgets, these incremental actions merely postponed the inevitable large-scale responses to reclaim control over their budgets and address the deeper problem. In late 2003 major universities started announcing large-scale cancellations. More, they accompanied these decisions with public statements denouncing publisher pricing practices as unsustainable and inconsistent with the mission of science and scholarship, and calling on all academic stakeholders to join in building sustainable and compatible alternatives.

We’ve all heard about the major actions, at schools like Cornell, Duke, Harvard, and Stanford. But to understand what’s been going on, we need to see a more comprehensive account. I’ve put together this list of actions by U.S. universities since the fall of 2003, with enough links for those who want to read further and enough detail for those who don’t.” —SPARC Open Access Newsletter

“The old adage that people resemble their pet dogs may really be true, suggests a new study by US scientists.

Pure-bred dogs can be matched to their owners by strangers most of the time. But the same does not hold true for mixed breed dogs, say Nicholas Christenfeld and Michael Roy, psychologists at the University of California San Diego.

When judges were shown digital photos of dog owners and given a choice of one of two dogs – they matched the correct pair 64 per cent of the time when the dog was a pure breed, showed Christenfeld and Roy.

However, their study did not pin down what factors were responsible for this resemblance. ‘We can’t tell whether it’s a physical resemblance or a stylistic resemblance…'” —New Scientist

“The anti-impotence drug not only speeds sperm up, researchers found, but it also caused the vital reaction needed to penetrate an egg to occur prematurely…

“Most use it for impotence and aren’t contemplating having a family, so this has no implications for them,” (one of the study’s authors) says. However, younger men are using it recreationally, and they may be trying to start a family. Furthermore, an audit of fertility clinics by the team revealed that 42 per cent use Viagra to help men produce sperm samples on demand.” —New Scientist

“A compound based on a liquorice extract improves memory in older men, shows a new study.

The substance works by blocking the activity of a brain enzyme that boosts levels of the stress hormone cortisol. This hormone is thought to be responsible for eroding memory with age.

The drug, called carbenoxolone, was once used to treat stomach ulcers. But when given to men aged between 55 and 75 it sharpened their verbal memories within weeks.

‘You get subtle but definite improvements,’ says Jonathan Seckl who led the study at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Verbal memory, he explains, is needed for remembering recently received information, and is ‘crucial to normal functioning’ – for example, recalling the time of an appointment.

Seckl believes such compounds may be available for the elderly within five years to help improve memory and possibly even treat dementia.” —New Scientist

“One of Laura Bush’s favourite British authors has been refused entry to the US, a day before he was due to lecture to an audience of 2,500 people.

Ian McEwan was stopped by immigration officials as he left Vancouver airport, in Canada, for an engagement in Seattle.

The man who was last year invited to Downing Street by Cherie Blair to meet American’s first lady – who said she keeps a McEwan novel by her bedside – found himself detained for four hours before being turned back.” —Guardian.UK

McEwan noted he has “been doing this type of thing for 30 years and I have never been refused entry”. The comments from McEwan’s would-be host, CalTech, suggest that his refusal was purely the result of a technicality. I cannot find any record of comments from US officials on the matter. Do any readers know of any positions taken by McEwan on issues that would get him barred? I would be interested in seeing what would happen if John Le Carré tried to tour the US behind his most recent book, Absolute Friends.

“Whether he really was there or not for the president’s speech, the young yawner has caused quite a flap between David Letterman and CNN.” —Washington Post

It is of course an April Fool’s piece, but the question Maureen Dowd poses is a real concern: Will Dick Cheney’s lips move when George W. Bush gives his testimony? —New York Times op-ed

Happy blogiversary, Craig!

I quite agree with this observation by Ed Fitzgerald:

I think this is own major difference between George W. Bush and his father. Both obviously value loyalty to an extreme degree, but Bush Senior, being a more accomplished man himself, also has an awareness of, and respect for, competency and the abilities needed to get a job done. Bush Junior, never having had the need to complete anything himself, always having been rescued from the jams he gets into by his Poppy and Poppy’s friends and connections, clearly has no way of making an independent judgement of competency and capability, and therefore seems to rely almost totally on loyalty as his primary indication of worth. If true, this explains why we’re hearing that Bush himself is running the anti-Clarke campaign, since Clarke’s disloyalty must be punished.

Ed is riffing off an excellent piece by Steve Gilliard considering Condoleeza Rice’s competency. It is pretty clear to me that Bush has no means of evaluating competency and would thus tend to depend on narrow judgments of loyalty. He is sounding more and more Nixonian. Policymaking shaped by personal vendetta? Chilling. Not only does it explain running the campaign against Clarke personally but for me it resurrects the speculation that it was personal for him against Saddam Hussein.

“President Bill Clinton’s administration knew Rwanda was being engulfed by genocide in April 1994 but buried the information to justify its inaction, according to classified documents made available for the first time.

Senior officials privately used the word genocide within 16 days of the start of the killings, but chose not to do so publicly because the president had already decided not to intervene.” —Guardian.UK It was not only public opinion that demanded the genocide be concealed but the fact that the US was obligated under international covenants to act in response to genocide. But, on the other hand, it is doubtful an international response could have been mounted rapidly enough to stop the bulk of the killings, which started the very night the moderate Hutu president of Rwanda was killed n a mysterious plane crash and which tallied 800,000 within three months. State Dept. briefings during that period resorted to the most obscene sophistry to avoid saying the ‘g’ word. How many ‘acts of genocide’ dancing on the head of a pin does it take to make a genocide?

Polls show that the Republican ad blitzkrieg has largely been successful. American voters who know nothing about Kerry have their opinion shaped primarily by the negative ads the Bush campaign has put out since the Democratic primaries ended. Expect the ugliest of campaigns… —Washington Post

“Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Alex Acosta said government lawyers would support 11-year-old Nashala Hearn, a sixth-grade student who has sued the Muskogee, Oklahoma, Public School District for ordering her to remove her head scarf, or hijab, because it violated the dress code of the Benjamin Franklin Science Academy, which she attended.” —CNN

Dick Morris: “If voters are focused on terrorism on Election Day, Bush will win. If their gaze is on economic issues, Kerry is likely to prevail. The struggle between the two candidates is, at its core, a competition between these two issues for domination of the national agenda.

In this context, what happened last week?

Superficially, Bush was on the defensive as Richard Clarke testified that he was not sufficiently focused on al Qaeda, had failed to respond appropriately to the 9/11 attacks and was preoccupied with Iraq. The daily tracking polls of Scott Rasmussen indicated that Kerry went from two points behind Bush when the flap started to three ahead at its peak. Rasmussen shows, however, that Kerry has since lost his lead and the race is now, again, even.

But what really happened was that the nation’s focus was further diverted from the economy onto the issue of terrorism. Kerry is not about to close the huge gap Bush has opened up on this issue. No matter what negatives emerge on Bush’s conduct in dealing with terrorism, it will still be the president’s issue.” —NY Post op-ed

“Did you hear the one about the guy at Starbucks? No? Okay…” —Al Kamen, Washington Post

Richard Goldstein on the crimes of Courtney Love; he likens her to Janis and frets: “If you step back a bit from this vaudeville, it’s hard to ignore the evidence that Courtney is a woman in crisis. She faces drug possession charges. Her daughter has been removed from her custody. The 10th anniversary of her husband’s suicide is coming up. Sure she markets her madness, but the primal currents that course through her act are real. That’s what makes her a hunger artist. And she doesn’t just put her personal pain in your face. In the tradition of Joplin and Finley, her art answers Sojourner Truth’s fearsome, if rhetorical, question: Ain’t I a woman?

But Courtney’s ‘tude also evokes a much less salutary tradition. Entertainers like her are often rewarded for being out of control, and the reinforcement accelerates their downward spiral. That’s what happened to Janis, and for that matter, Judy Garland. Baring the breast can represent a rebellion against this sacrificial rite. It’s a gesture of agency. Check out the manual of psychological disorders and you’ll see that exhibitionism is regarded as a quintessentially male pathology. When women do it, they lay claim to the phallus.

There’s something about a rampageous woman flashing men that resonates with power. You expect guys to rear back in horror, as they did before Sojourner Truth, or to throw lit matches, as they did at Finley. That was then and this is now. David Letterman was anything but fazed by Courtney’s desk dance. In his insouciance, you can glimpse the liberal man’s defense against the phallic potential of women. Don’t try to repress it—that’s for Republicans. Just sit back and enjoy the show.

If I have to choose between The Stepford Wives and MTV Spring Break, I’ll definitely opt for the latter. But at least conservatives take sexual transgression seriously. The liberal solution is to tame it by trivializing it. That way, male distance is maintained. The classic gesture of female incursion is neutralized. And ultimately the joke is on desire.” —Village Voice

Will New Caution Shift Old Views?: “Since the ascendancy of the biological approach to psychiatry in the 1980’s, Americans have tended to view psychiatric illness as something that should always be treated with drugs and to believe that medication is the only intervention needed. But the real story of 20th-century psychiatry is how complex mental illness is and how difficult it is to treat.

If there is are lessons to be learned from this controversy, they are that antidepressants should not be dispensed like candy, that depression is a serious problem and treating it a serious enterprise, that therapy should always be considered as an option and that, at the least, patients who are given medication should be carefully followed by people who ask them how they feel.”

—Tanya Luhrmann, professor at the University of Chicago and the author of Of Two Minds: An Anthropologist Looks at Modern Psychiatry, in New York Times

The Age profiles Art Spiegelman’s new work and its reception: “Spiegelman’s role as a staffer at (The New Yorker) became decidedly precarious when the editors saw the working drawings for his new book, In The Shadow of No Towers, which illustrates his emotional and political confusion since September 11.

‘The work is on my feelings towards the hijacking and then the hijacking of the hijacking by the Government. I’m not so sure The New Yorker is being complacent. I’m sure I’d be welcomed back once I had found the right medication.’

Spiegelman’s new book is sure to cause as much, if not more, ruckus as MAUS. It depicts a government out of control, or, more chillingly, totally in control. ‘They had an agenda already on their mind before September 11,’ he says. ‘Drying up funds for health and education and moving the funds upward to the rich, all made more implementable by the war in Iraq.’

Works in progress from The Shadow of No Towers were roundly rejected when he first showed them to publications in New York. They finally found a home in a Jewish newspaper in Manhattan, The Forward.

‘They are a peculiar format,’ he says. ‘They’re broadsheet, colour works.’ MAUS was black and white in paperback format. ‘I’ve finally got them placed in The London Review of Books, Liberation in France, Die Zeit in Germany and La Republica in Italy. So I’ve found my own coalition of the willing.'” [via walker]

These Days, Consumers May as Well Keep Their Complaint To Themselves: “But wait a minute. Wasn’t it only a few years ago that Americans were seeing in practically every ad, every TV commercial that the customer was number one, that ‘service is our middle name?’ Didn’t Nordstrom, the upscale department store with a mythic service reputation, have every retailer quaking in his Ferragamos?

That was then, and this is now, say those whose job it is to pay attention to the passing parade. Service was a fine buzzword when the economy was soaring; came the downturn and customer service came close to getting squeezed out of the corporate budget. ‘It’s a frustration,’ said customer service consultant Tschohl, ‘because corporate America is not spending any money to train its staff.'” —Washington Post

Pioneer of Surf Music Sound, Dies: Jan was half of ‘Jan and Dean’ along with Dean Torrance. I think Jan and Dean’s “Little Old Lady from Pasadena” may have been the first single I saved up my $.50/week allowance to buy. In a life-imitates-art tragedy, Jan suffered a head injury in 1966 when he crashed his speeding Corvette that largely ended his (and Dean’s?) career. By that time my tastes were migrating further north to a preoccupation with Bay Area psychedelia but I never ceased to get a thrill from the falsetto trill of “two girls for every boy…” [Surf music hasn’t really stood the test of time, but should I be embarrassed to say?] —New York Times