“Labour MPs are planning to tack an amendment onto the Child Protection Bill which would outlaw parental smacking, following warnings that too many abusive parents cover up ill-treatment by insisting that bruises are the result of ‘normal’ discipline. They are optimistic that Ministers will allow a free vote on the issue.” —BBC. Laudable sentiment, but how exactly would this be enforced?

“North Korea has said it is ready to abandon its nuclear programme if the United States drops its ‘hostile policy’ towards the communist state.” —BBC

“George Bush’s meeting with families of British soldiers killed in Iraq was dismissed as a selfish stunt by two angry fathers.

The United States President wants to meet relatives during his visit to the UK to tell them their loved ones died in a ‘noble cause’… Mr Bush said he will offer the families the sympathy ‘of the American people and the prayers of the president’.

…But grieving fathers Robert Kelly and Reg Keys said the meeting would only benefit Mr Bush.

…Mr Keys, 51, said he opposed Mr Bush’s visit, but wanted to meet him to tell him he was responsible for his son’s death.”

Related: US seeks ‘shoot-to-kill’ authorization for snipers in Bush entourage during next week’s visit to the UK: British Home Office demurs.

The issue of immunity is one of a series of extraordinary US demands turned down by Ministers and Downing Street during preparations for the Bush visit.

These included the closure of the Tube network, the use of US air force planes and helicopters and the shipping in of battlefield weaponry to use against rioters. —Guardian.UK

US War Dead in Iraq Exceeds Early Vietnam Years: “A Reuters analysis of Defense Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on Dec. 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces number about 130,000 troops — the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.” —Reuters

“When you first fall in love, you are not experiencing an emotion, but a motivation or drive, new brain scanning studies have shown.

The early stages of a romantic relationship spark activity in dopamine-rich brain regions associated with motivation and reward. The more intense the relationship is, the greater the activity.

The regions associated with emotion, such as the insular cortex and parts of the anterior cingulate cortex, are not activated until the more mature phases of a relationship, says Helen Fisher, an anthropologist from Rutgers University in New Jersey.” —New Scientist This is an absurd finding, only meaningful to those who believe there is a hard-and-fast distinction between ‘motivation and reward’ and ’emotion’ and that these global aspects of experience are localized to small specific brain regions.

“As many as 1,200 students at Wheaton College will gather in the gym Friday night for the first real dance in the Christian school’s 143-year history.

Which explains why students in recent days have been seeking out classmates who know this stuff and looking for places where they can practice. And it explains why on Monday night and Tuesday night, dozens of students packed a room on campus for a quick dance lesson.” —Yahoo! News The college’s most famous graduate is Billy Graham. Many who have matriculated at the school thought they were safe from such secular embarrassments. Now, although they may dance, whether they can is another matter, as one puts it. Now, what about the kissing lessons?

Tragic end for smuggling donkeys: “Smugglers in Algeria have reportedly come up with a novel way to get their contraband into Morocco – donkeys, with tape recorders on their backs.

A taped message is repeated, saying ‘Err’, Arabic for ‘walk’, so that the donkeys do not stop as they follow the smugglers’ tracks unaccompanied.

However, the customs service learnt of the ruse and has killed 200 of the donkeys, says the El Khabar newspaper.” —BBC

“Elaine Davidson of Brazil, who holds the Guinness world record for being the woman with the greatest number of body piercings, 1903 altogether, sticks her tongue out at the Tate Modern art gallery in London, November 11, 2003.”

“In his new book, ‘Tainted Legacy: 9/11 and the Ruin of Human Rights,’ (executive diroeector of Amnesty International USA William) Schulz argues that rising global terrorism requires the left ‘to rethink some of our most sacred assumptions.’ A vigorous defense of human and civil liberties, while essential to spreading democracy worldwide, is not enough to stop terrorists from blowing up airplanes or shopping malls, he says. And that presents the left with a problem, because some of the tools needed to fight terror, such as stricter border controls or beefed up intelligence work — and, perhaps, war against states that support terrorists — chafe against traditional leftist values.” —Salon

“The British P.M. thought he had a deal: He’d support the war and Bush would stand up to Ariel Sharon. But administration neoconservatives, led by Elliott Abrams, killed the deal.” — Sidney Blumenthal, —Salon

The article details the staggering extent to which a cocktail of “drugs, hormones, steroids and personal care products such as soaps and perfumes” is found in almost all ponds, creeks and streams sampled. (CNN) The effects of traces of antidepressants on aquatic and amphibious species, in particular, must be assessed both because of the enormous volume of prescriptions issued for this class of drugs and the wide range of their biological effects on body systems. Laboratory studies of amphibians exposed to fluoxetine (Prozac) confirm cause for concern, although what relationship the experimental conditions bear to either extent of exposure in the wild or what implications it has for unanticipated human effects is unclear.

Some, commenting on this article, have suggested that expectant mothers be careful about taking the drugs for fear of birth defects etc. This is not really the most important thing to worry about, though, since rates of birth defects after in utero exposure to various classes of drugs are well-studied and publicly available — if you are concerned with the obvious, gross defects such as spina bifida, cleft lip and palate, cardiac defects etc. What is more worrisome and more difficult to assess, however, are the longterm, more subtle effects of either in utero or childhood exposure. In my own field of psychiatry, for example, we are beginning to appreciate how subtle, poorly-characterizable early abnormalities in the organization of brain regions and the rates of migration, growth and die-off of neurons are implicated in devastating cognitive-behavioral disturbances such as schizophrenia. In my opinion, also, we need to be concerned not only with in utero exposure but the growing use of psychotherapeutic drugs to treat children and adolescents, often on dubious grounds.

Addendum: Garret Vreeland‘s comment to this post deserves to be brought up front here. He has been concerned about antidepressant use in children for a long time; here is a Google search of links.

US babies geting corporate names: “Children have been named after big brands as diverse as beauty company L’Oreal, car firm Chevrolet and designer clothes company Armani.

There are even two little boys, one in Michigan and one in Texas, called ESPN after the sports channel.

Psychology professor Cleveland Evans discovered the trend after surveying US social security records for 2000.” —BBC

Start reading. Now. Or. Whatever. “All I know is that whenever I read a column or story that’s been broken up by subheads, especially a syndicated story that appeared somewhere else first without any subheads, my inner reader feels violated.” —City Pages

100 celebrated artists choose their favorite musicians and design album covers. Thanks to Cory for pointing me to this fascinating site. Here is a taste, by Gary Burden:

There are some names even anyone who is not a graphic arts aficionado would recognize here. Ralph Steadman does the Stones, Kurt Vonnegut does Phish, and Graham Nash does Crosby-Nash.

Follow Me Here is four today… Thank you for all your affirmation over the past four years. I hope you will be pleased to be able to look forward to more of the same. (It is me who has to say to you, “Many happy returns…”). What would you like to see more of? less of? as FmH moves forward.

Is Mindfulness a Religion? “It is easy to imagine the benefits of a Buddhist police force: wiser, cooler heads to

keep the peace in America’s embattled streets, or perhaps a kinder, gentler traffic

cop. But in Madison, Wisconsin, police captain Cheri Maples argues that the most

compelling reason to teach police officers the Buddhist practice of mindfulness is

to better equip them to deal with the emotional and mental stress that comes with

the job. A nineteen-year police veteran who has participated in several retreats with

famed Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, Maples has experienced for herself the

benefits of mindfulness practice. Determined to bring the practice to her

colleagues, she organized a visit by Thich Nhat Hanh, who led a five-day

nonsectarian retreat for civil servants and their families at Green Lake Conference

Center outside of Madison.

But not all are so pleased with the idea of police officers and other civil servants

attending retreats. Americans United for the Separation Between Church and State

(AU) has expressed its view that offering such a retreat is a violation of the First

Amendment’s proscription against state-sponsored religion. AU claims that it is

unconstitutional for the government to encourage its employees to attend a

religious retreat, and notes that eyebrows would be raised if officers were

encouraged to attend Bible study groups or an Islamic retreat. AU demanded the

retreat’s cancellation.” —Tricycle

The notice buried on the DoD website began to attract alot of attention, at least among webloggers, last month, including here at FmH. Now the notice has disappeared from the site, in typical Bu**sh** administration fashion. Have no fear, it remains echoed at The Memory Hole.

Fred Kaplan: “We’re not pulling out of Iraq, so it’s logical that we’re pushing in deeper. And so it’s official: ‘Postwar Iraq’ is just another term for ‘Iraq War—Phase II.’

In a heavily guarded news conference in Baghdad today, Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, called the state of conflict there a ‘war.’ John Burns, the New York Times correspondent covering the event, quotes Sanchez’s aides noting that the general’s choice of words was deliberate—his way of injecting realism into the debate back in Washington. ‘We are taking the fight into the safe havens of the enemy in the heartland of the country,’ Sanchez stated. That sounds like war, all right.” —Slate

“Why was he allowed to kill, again and again, when so much evidence had already pointed in his direction two decades ago?

The answer, in great part, lies in Ridgway’s own admission of who he preyed upon.” AlterNet

“Spectacular advances in neuroprosthetics await us, but bureaucracy is stifling the field.” Salon

“Today, armed with a growing understanding of how to manipulate the immune system, researchers are offering the glimmer of a hope that cancer vaccines could soon become part of the cancer-fighting arsenal. More than 50 cancer vaccines are being tested in the United States, Canada, and Europe against several types of cancers, including melanoma and kidney, lung, breast, and prostate cancers. Several are in the final stages of human trials, at least two of which are expected to conclude within a year. In some of the trials, a few patients have seen their cancers go into remission, while in other patients, the vaccine slowed the spread of the disease. If all goes well, the first cancer vaccine could be ready for general use in three to five years.” MIT Technology Review

“As if it weren’t hard enough to be cool already, Apple Computer has introduced a new way for people to ruin their social standing.

Thanks to the ability of Apple’s iTunes to share music collections over local networks, it is now possible to judge someone’s taste in music — or lack of it — in a way that previously required a certain level of intimacy.” Wired

While there is no question that Iran covered up a nuclear program and was in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, it is still unclear if it was anywhere near making nuclear weapons. In any case, its candor in cooperating with the recent ultimatum takes the wind out of the sails of an American drive to keelhaul Iran before the UN Security Council, whose members appear to be favorably impressed by its cooperation. After the contempt the Bu**sh** administration demonstrated for the UN process over Iraq, it is not likely member countries will be bullied into enabling Washington’s agenda once more. AP/Salon

Nicholas Kristof: “Considering the savagery with which the Snarling Right excoriated President Clinton as a ‘sociopath,’ blocked judicial appointments, undermined U.S. military operations from Kosovo to Iraq, hounded Vincent Foster and then accused the Clintons of murdering him, it is utterly hypocritical for conservatives to complain about liberal incivility.” New York Times op-ed

“L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Iraq, made a hurried return to Washington on Tuesday as Bush administration officials held an urgent round of meetings to discuss ways of speeding up the transfer of power to Iraqis [i.e. extricate ourselves in hopes of salvaging Bu**sh**’s reelection prospects —FmH].

The meetings reflected dissatisfaction with the pace of progress in Iraq and a growing conviction that Mr. Bremer must abandon his methodical plan to move gradually toward the election of an Iraqi government over a year or two, officials said.” —New York Times

Related: More Iraqis Supporting Resistance, CIA Report Says

“A new, top-secret CIA report from Iraq warns that growing numbers of Iraqis are concluding that the U.S.-led coalition can be defeated and are supporting the resistance.

The report paints a bleak picture of the political and security situation in Iraq and cautions that the U.S.-led drive to rebuild the country as a democracy could collapse unless corrective actions are taken immediately.

L. Paul Bremer, head of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, who arrived unexpectedly in Washington for strategy sessions on Tuesday, essentially endorsed the CIA’s findings, said a senior administration official.

The report’s bleak tone and Bremer’s private endorsement differ sharply with the upbeat public assessments that President Bush, his chief aides and Bremer are giving as part of an aggressive publicity campaign aimed at countering rising anxieties at home over increasing U.S. casualties in Iraq.” Knight-Ridder [via CommonDreams]

“New York Times columnist Paul Krugman tells how he found his voice, why Bush makes him miss Nixon, and why he insults Fox News whenever he can.” AlterNet

This article, originally published in 1997, collects tales from children in Dade’s homeless shelters which amount to the creation of a new mythology, if you believe the reporter. In a prior existence, I studied social anthropology with a particular interest in folklore and mythology. One of the things I learned is that it is not as easy as it might appear for an outside observer to impose coherency on a body of myth that is scattered throughout a population. One is essentially doing cross-cultural fieldwork in looking at this rich, fascinating oral tradition in the making. I wonder if this writer is trained in this way. She certainly has a grasp of concepts like what Claude Lévi-Strauss called bricolage when she writes, “What these determined children do is snatch dark and bright fragments of Halloween fables, TV news, and candy-colored Bible-story leaflets from street-corner preachers, and like birds building a nest from scraps, weave their own myths.” Have a look:

“On Christmas night a year ago, God fled Heaven to escape an audacious demon attack — a celestial Tet Offensive. The demons smashed to dust his palace of beautiful blue-moon marble. TV news kept it secret, but homeless children in shelters across the country report being awakened from troubled sleep and alerted by dead relatives. No one knows why God has never reappeared, leaving his stunned angels to defend his earthly estate against assaults from Hell. “Demons found doors to our world,” adds eight-year-old Miguel, who sits before Andre with the other children at the Salvation Army shelter. The demons’ gateways from Hell include abandoned refrigerators, mirrors, Ghost Town (the nickname shelter children have for a cemetery somewhere in Dade County), and Jeep Cherokees with “black windows.” The demons are nourished by dark human emotions: jealousy, hate, fear.” —Miami New Times [via bOING bOING]

Here is an interesting connection: has anyone read Denis Johnson’s Fiskadoro, which came out in 2000? Set in a post-apocalyptic south Florida, I see some similarities. Could Johnson have been influenced by this article’s original publication?

Reasons Not to Invade Iraq, by George Bush Sr.: “On 21 September 2002, The Memory Hole posted an extract from an essay by George Bush Sr. and Brent Scowcroft, in which they explain why they didn’t have the military push into Iraq and topple Saddam during Gulf War 1. [I posted a damning excerpt here on FmH.] Although there are differences between the Iraq situations in 1991 and 2002-3, Bush’s key points apply to both.

But a funny thing happened. Fairly recently, Time pulled the essay off of their site. It used to be at this link, which now gives a 404 error. If you go to the table of contents for the issue in which the essay appeared (2 March 1998), ‘Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam’ is conspicuously absent.

Because of this erasure, we’re posting the entire essay below the portion we originally excerpted. ” —Memory Hole

“A group of more than two dozen House of Representatives Democrats on Monday said they had introduced a resolution urging President Bush to fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.” Yahoo! News

“An attempt by developing countries to put management of the internet under United Nations auspices is likely to be shelved at next month’s world information summit in Geneva – but the issue is now firmly on the international agenda, summit sources say.” Financial Times

“If only such largesse flowed to all of us. ‘Fair compensation’ is a relative term, yet HR consultants and executive headhunters agree some jobs command excessive pay that can’t be explained by labor supply-and-demand imbalances.” —Chris Pummer, CBS

…When They Were Your Age

Make them think your Windows XP computer is running Longhorn! Be the first on your block!

“Ten British people have put their names forward to become the first in the world to undergo a face transplant…

Teams on both sides of the Atlantic are now confident they have the skills to attempt the operation.

Surgeons insist the procedure, which involves transplanting an entire face from a corpse to a living person, will only be available for patients with the most severe facial disfigurements – and not as a cosmetic vanity treatment.” —This Is London

“A quasi-religious cult is using the Internet to recruit teenagers who are encouraged to act as werewolves, howl at the moon and eat raw meat.

Counsellors at the Cult Information Hotline have received several complaints about the group, which has more than 50 members throughout Queensland.” —news.com.au

“Malcolm McLaren, the subculture hacker who created the Sex Pistols, discovers the new underground sound. It’s called chip music. Can you play lead Game Boy?” —Wired

“Israel stands today at an important crossroads, trying to decide which of three roads it will travel.

If it chooses one road, the United States will be able to walk proudly alongside Israel as its friend, ally and, if necessary, its protector against any that threaten its security.

But if Israel chooses either of the remaining two routes, it will repudiate the shared values and strategic interests that have united Israelis and Americans for decades. Those Americans who count themselves as friends of Israel have an obligation to make that danger clear. “

If a two-state, land-for-peace, solution is defunct, Israel is poised to commit either to expulsion or apartheid-like disenfranchisement of the Palestinians. — Jay Bookman, Atlanta Journal-Constitution [via CommonDreams]

“The big papers are taking President Bush’s Middle East speech seriously, so far. They’ve noted his rhetoric seems to challenge 50 years of symbiotic coddling of non-democratic Middle East regimes, justified up to now on the argument of pursuing our national interests. As Robin Wright of The Washington Post notes, there will be no further entertainment of the once-convenient notion of ‘Islamic exceptionalism’—where Islam was assumed to be incompatible with democratic government and therefore excused from otherwise universal human and political rights standards.

Privately, many will point to the surreal moment in the speech, made November 6 at the National Endowment for Democracy, where he described the principles for “successful societies” with a list of everything his administration has done to weaken American democracy at home. Sadly, Bush’s double standards and Animal Farm rhetoric are no longer big news.

But the flaw in his argument—revealing an intentional deception—is.” —Patrick Doherty, TomPaine.com

TB drug plus virtual reality relieves fear of heights. “A common antibacterial drug has helped phobics to overcome their fear of heights. Combined with standard behavioural therapy, D-cycloserine (DCS) speeded recovery fourfold compared with therapy alone.” A report from the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans. —Nature

“Setting the stage for a historic clash between presidential and judicial authority in a time of military conflict, the Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide whether prisoners at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are entitled to access to civilian courts to challenge their open-ended detention.” —azcentral

“She Doesn’t Look Disabled. Some Doctors Believe Her Condition Isn’t Real. But for the Author, Fibromyalgia Makes Every Day a Struggle.” —Washington Post As a psychiatrist who has long had an interest in controversial syndromes on the boundary of mental health and other fields of medicine, I have written on, taught about and treated fibromyalgia and “fibromyalgia” since it first came on the radar screens. There is a “real” syndrome but I believe it is also necessary to put the diagnosis of some, perhaps most, sufferers in quotes; the central triad of symptoms — debilitating chronic muscle pain, fatigue, and sleep disorder — can represent either a physical ailment or somatization, i.e. the physicalization of essentially mental distress.

The credibility of the diagnosis in a particular cse is established by the story and also the examination, in that the pain can be reproduced by palpation by a knowledgable examiner (usually a rheumatologist) of several dozen ‘trigger points’ in the muscle of whose existence or location the patient was unaware. While this is a controversial finding, I believe the research showing chemical and microscopic structural changes in biopsied muscle fibers in affected areas. Given the strong emotional component to the disorder, one way to think about its etiology is that people who are prone to experience stress as muscle tension are somehow chronically damaging their muscles, perhaps because the blood flow to chronically tense muscles is altered. I have also been impressed by the evidence that an added mechanism is in play. Impairment of the normal nighttime phased secretion of growth hormone from the pituitary gland given the altered sleep pattern in emotional distress, especially depression, may be important. GH is crucial to the repair of normal daily wear and tear in muscle fibers throughout the body; sleep deprivation causes muscle aches even in people who do not have fibromyalgia.

But, because I believe this syndrome has its origins in emotional distress and is a condition in which the physical manifestations come to predominate, it is attractive to many other emotionally distressed individuals who prefer to see their problems in physical rather than psychological terms, who are invested in an outmoded dichotomy and not open to a mind-body interactional perspective. Now granted, I work in a psychiatric setting and so my sample is skewed. But, for every legitimate fibromyalgia case I have seen, two or three young women come my way with chronic depression, complications of a trauma history, and/or borderline personality disorder (a triad of overlapping but not synonymous concerns) who are hell-bent on having fibromyalgia as the explanation of their social and occupational dysfunction instead.

Why am I making such an issue of this? Physicians and other clinicians who jump on the bandwagon of a sexy and faddish novel diagnosis ‘enable’ the dysfunction of such patients in a number of ways in which their patients are unconsciously invested, including suppporting disability claims and maintaining these patients (who may be prone to substance abuse as part of their psychiatric disturbance) on narcotic painkillers and addictive muscle relaxants for their supposed “fibromyalgia”. Many physicians are not open to examining their own “enabling”, since patients are uniformly appreciative of this kind of service, and we all like to please our patients. Legitimizing the disorder in such cases is a disservice to such patients, pandering to their unconscious maneuvering to look everywhere but at their own responsibility for their behavior patterns. By displacing them from a focus on their real concerns, such treatment prevents such patients from developing effective coping strategies that would alleviate or control distress in a lasting way and perpetuates their maladaptive way of doing business with the world instead.

Furthermore, fibromyalgia illustrates a more general phenomenon seen with controversial and murkily-defined syndromes. It remains a ‘wastebasket’ diagnosis, a syndrome diagnosed by clinical impression rather than diagnostic tests. If we lump together a heterogeneous cast of characters only a subset of whom have the “true” disorder, research efforts to characterize the processes behind it and clinical efforts to find effective treatments are compromised by the dilution of any relevant results in the mixed sample. In a vicious circle, the harder the condition is to characterize correctly, the harder it will be to characterize correctly. The more it attracts people for maladaptive reasons, the more it will continue to do so.

Paul Krugman: “Yesterday’s absurd conspiracy theory about the Bush administration has a way of turning into today’s conventional wisdom. Remember when people were ridiculed for claiming that Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, eager to fight a war, were hyping the threat from Iraq?

Anyway, many analysts now acknowledge that the administration never had any intention of pursuing a conventionally responsible fiscal policy. Rather, its tax cuts were always intended as a way of implementing the radical strategy known as ‘starve the beast,’ which views budget deficits as a good thing, a way to squeeze government spending. Did I mention that the administration is planning another long-run tax cut next year?

Advocates of the starve-the-beast strategy tend to talk abstractly about ‘big government.’ But in fact, squeezing government spending almost always means cutting back or eliminating services people actually want (though not necessarily programs worth their cost). And since it’s Veterans Day, let’s talk about how the big squeeze on spending may be alienating a surprising group: the nation’s soldiers.” —New York Times op-ed

Doggy cool: “They are the latest must-have accessory for the pampered pet: sunglasses for dogs.

Owners anxious that their pet should be at fashion’s cutting edge will have a choice of frames, lenses and colours to match any outfit that their dog may be wearing. Top of the range is a chrome frame with blue reflective lenses.” —The Age [via walker]

Milt Bearden, a 30-year veteran in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations who served as senior manager for clandestine operations, writes that the Iraqi insurgents could have taken their cues from Chinese military tactician Sun Tzu’s 2500-year old Art of War: “attack their strategy, attack their allies, attack their army…”

Sun Tzu also said “know yourself and know your enemy, and of a hundred battles you will have a hundred victories.”

There were two stark lessons in the history of the 20th century: No nation that launched a war against another sovereign nation ever won. And every nationalist-based insurgency against a foreign occupation ultimately succeeded. This is not to say anything about whether or not the United States should have gone into Iraq or whether the insurgency there is a lasting one. But it indicates how difficult the situation may become. —Seattle Times

Ironically, Sun Tzu was invoked as the inspiration behind the US “Shock and Awe” bombardment (Asia Times) of Baghdad which started the US attack on Iraq.

“Scathingly attired, this raconteur has been reminiscing about the cancellation of Baywatch as well as pondering the demise of the Dave Clark Five. He has deliberately kept the interview short for several reasons:

1. Most people are short and not tall.

2. Attention deficit disorder is sweeping the nation.” —Outburst, [Journal of Mundane Behavior]

Earlier in the week we read news reports that the dysadministration, frustrated by the Iraqi Coouncil, is mulling doing away with it. But like this? Sorry, no joke — “Iraqis marched in anger through the streets here Monday after the killing of an American-appointed local Iraqi council leader by U.S. military guards under disputed circumstances.” —Washington Post

…for a trivial, somewhat scurrilous experiment in participatory weblogging: I know there are community weblogs, such as MetaFilter, in which thousands of participants create what some would assert is a vibrant cross-fertilizing conversation, while others would say the signal-to-noise ratio just decays from the effort. FmH has an audience far smaller, by, oh, at least several orders of magnitude, who I know are demanding, reflective, erudite readers in breadth and depth. I have always been puzzled, and sometimes solicited feedback, about the fact that other weblogs log many more reader comments, even many more per capita. Unsuccessful, I am tired of trying to figure out why, with rare exceptionsm, it is not happening here. (Is the commenting system too cumbersome? am I cultivating passive consumers despite — or because of — my attempt to be provocative? deadening thought?). Most conversation among the likes of you would likely be breathtaking, so I am going to try to take direct action to goad you into it on at least a trial basis. Not that you have to work for your daily dose of FmH, but I would like to propose that, for the next week, everytime you come here you scroll down, pick one post about which you have something to say, and enter a comment, one thoughtful comment. A couple of extra clicks, thirty seconds’ more time on my page. Begin with a bias toward those posts that do not yet have any comments. Amplify, fertilize, contradict, dispute, synthesize, eviscerate, perseverate, tangentialize, analogize on anything here… Then, as your reflections accumulate, you will inevitably be riffing off the comments of others. You know, of course, you can do it anonymously, if that matters; just not contentlessly. Indulge me, think about it for a moment, you really have no good reason why you would not try this for a week.

Why do I want to do this? [Stop reading here if your bullshit meter is turned on, it probably won’t make a whole lot of sense.] Surely, it is not because I care about the cumulative total of the little numbers in the parentheses at the end of every post per se. I have been interested for a long while in transformative social processes and the power of small communities, you might say on a tribal scale, a participatory scale, how group process works, how organizations think. Information processing constraints place an upper bound on face-to-face interactional possibilities around one to several hundred members; the possibilities for consensus- and confidence-based ‘social contracts’ move into a symbolic and some would say unworkable sphere with larger social groupings. Now, don’t nitpick, I realize that the community of readers of FmH is in no sense like a tribal culture. This is not a participatory democracy; webspace-rooted avatar-to-avatar interactions are in important respects different from face-to-face; cultural ecological niche contingencies as a shared experience are replaced by — what instead? — in a web community. Most of you would recoil from considering that any sort of community at all is manifested or embodied by merely coming to the same webpage from time to time.

Yet there is a coincidence of size. The readership of FmH is around the same order of magnitude as allowed in tribal culture and far different than weblog-communities more on the scale of city-states, nation-states, republics, representative democracies… with different possibilities. I have been far less interested in growing the scale of my readership; something has suggested that what at first appeared to be an uncanny hindrance to growth to which I have had to accommodate might be seen as an opportunity instead. I have always been fascinated by the transitions from quantitatively to qualitatively different states in human interaction; what interactional density at a nexus of people of this size would precipitate a quantum leap or tipping point? If so, how deliberately can the push be made? I am willing to take this wherever it might go… which most likely will be nowhere, right? Comments?

The Windows GUI as the Matrix: “…(Y)ou are asleep, a prisoner of your ignorance. And the only way to escape is by getting to grips with the machines, by learning their language. If you don’t get inside them, they will get inside you. Adapt or die.”

…If your children’s children can’t speak the language of the machines, they will have to get a manual job – if there are any left.

This is yet another reason why Windows is such a dangerous commodity. It lulls us into the pernicious illusion that we can deal with computers without adapting to their logic. By presenting us with colourful screens and buttons for us to click on, Microsoft encourages us to believe that we can force computers to adapt entirely to our preferences for visual images, without having to adapt ourselves to their preference for text.

But not only does this prevent people from getting inside the machine and keep them in a state of blissful ignorance, it also proves to be a deceit, for in the end the user still has to adapt to the machine anyway… — Dylan Evans, co-author of Introducing Evolutionary Psychology [here alleged to have been an inspiration for Matrix Revolutions], Guardian.UK

• “I don’t want to be famous; I don’t want to conquer the world; I don’t want
  
  that kind of life,” says Sarah McArthur Amsbary, who was a theater artist
  
  and teacher and earned her master’s degree in English, then stepped out of
  
  the work force when her daughter was born. ”Maternity provides an escape
  
  hatch that paternity does not. Having a baby provides a graceful and
  
  convenient exit.” —New York Times
  
  

• Lady Boss Busted: ‘Is the “glass ceiling” a matter of choice?’ —Reason
  
  

• Teenage girls just want to get married and stay home —Observer.UK

Salon has gotten hold of the entire script of the cancelled CBS miniseries “The Reagans”. The 213-page ‘shooting script’, which likely matches the version CBS intended to air before it caved (when it is aired on Showtime, which acquired the film from CBS, it will likely be further edited) is presented as a downloadable 8 MB .pdf; you have to be a premium subscriber to Salon or get a day pass.

Native Languages: Legacy and Lifeline:

“The languages of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara tribes are fading into silence, one voice at a time, as fluent elderly speakers die.

Those languages, embedded in a native Plains Indian culture thousands of years old, welcomed Lewis and Clark on their epic trip west.

But most children today on the Fort Berthold Reservation in west-central North Dakota grow up in homes where English is the language of daily life.

The Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara, today jointly known as the Three Affiliated Tribes, are fighting to save their languages — and culture — from extinction.

Choose a tribe from the menu … to learn about their struggles … and hear what is lost when a language dies.” —The Fargo (ND) Forum [via The Media Center]

Ask Newsknife:

“When Google News was launched over a year ago there was mild nervousness amongst journalists. Was this a new kind of news site that might beat them at their own game? …We checked to see how well Google News, compiled “without human intervention”, picked the top two stories chosen by leading US news sites.

…

Google News initially picking the Top 2 stories of the moment around 59% of the time, improving to around 63%. CNN and Yahoo! News hover throughout at around 77%, a remarkably consistent performance.

Over the year Newsknife has probably studied Google News more closely than most people. We are a little surprised at the results. We thought Google News “hit rate” at choosing the popular top two stories might have increased more over the year, especially as Google are still calling Google News a BETA (not final) version. This suggests they’re fine tuning it.

Actually, we’re surprised Google News is still a BETA version after over a year….”

Newsknife has some ideas about how Google News can increase its ‘hit rate’ through automated processes, but tells human editors they don’t have to go back to the job market just yet. I agree with their observation that Google’s strength is pulling together a massive cluster of links to news pieces covering a single story, but that it fails a version of the Turing Test by being unable to appreciate nuance in news coverage. The article gives an example:

For example, if a terrorist bombing has just occurred the first wave of news should give details of the bombing. The second wave might be reaction from around the world. At what point should reactions be introduced? And some reactions are more important than others.

In Newsknife’s opinion this is a challenge for Google News.

“BBC teams in Bristol and London have found a way to send video and sound from mobile phones and put them on TV — and now the BBC is using the technology for undercover reporting. Andrew Harvey looks at this pioneering technology in a fascinating article for Ariel, the staff magazine and daily news online service of the BBC, reprinted here on CyberJournalist.net with permission.”

The following useful exercise comes from Mark Kleiman:

“One idea about drug law enforcement is that by making the illicit traffic more expensive and dangerous for the people who sell drugs, enforcement can push up the prices of drugs and therefore reduce consumption.

The old criticism of this approach, based on the notion that demand for illicit drugs was highly inelastic, turns out to be incorrect; cocaine and heroin, at least, seem to have greater-than-unit elasticity, so a price increase will actually decrease the total amount consumers spend. So increasing drug prices would seem to be a useful goal.

The bad news is that, in the face of mass distribution, enforcement has a very hard time increasing prices. When I learned about the illicit drug markets around 1980, heroin traded at wholesale for about $250,000 per kilogram and at retail in New York for between $2 and $2.50 per pure milligram, reflecting a kilo-to-street markup of about 10x.

Now, after twenty years of intensified drug law enforcement, the wholesale price is about $70,000 a kilo and the retail price in New York about 20 cents per pure milligram. [*], a factor-of-three reduction at wholesale and a factor-of-ten reduction at retail, reflecting a greatly reduced markup. The general price level, as measured by the CPI, has roughly doubled over that period, so the inflation-adjusted price of a pure milligram of heroin is actually down about 95%.

The price drop for cocaine has been a little bit smaller: from about 80 cents per pure milligram in 1980, the price fell very rapidly until about 1988, and has since stablilized (in nominal-dollar) terms at about 15 cents per pure milligram, which adjusted for inflation is a deline of about 90%.

All of this happened in the face of an enforcement effort that increased the number of drug dealers behind bars from about 30,000 in 1980 to about 450,000 today.

The policy implication would seem to be that enforcement has limited capacity to increase the prices and thus decrease the consumption of mass-market illicit drugs, and ought to focus instead on reducing the violence and neighborhood disruption associated with the illicit trade, by targeting the meanest dealers and the ones whose trafficking is most flagrant, rather than the largest.” [thanks, walker]

We Want Your Soul:

“A fantastic opportunity…No car? No home? No collateral for loan? Bad debt? No problem, no repayments. We want your soul. You can receive a guaranteed CASH SUM for life, in exchange for an agreement that entitles WWYS® the rights to your soul from now until all eternity.

Find out the current value of your soul – click here now for a free, no obligation quotation.

How does WWYS® work?

Medical and operant conditioning science has made huge advances in recent years and due to our various strategic partnerships WWYS® is able to identify the genes and lifestyle choices that make up what is commonly referred to as the soul.

Soul extraction is painless and worry-free. You need never remember your previous soulful existence, and look forward to a “life” of money and security.”

[They tell me that my soul is worth £8023 and that 85% of people have a purer soul than I do. Beat that.]

Update: I wrote below about the ongoing trial of a suspect in the 1977 brutal slaying of the mother of my friend Pam. It has just come across the wires that Eric Anderson has been convicted of 1st degree murder and given a life sentence without chance of parole. —Boston Globe Sleep soundly, Pam.

Addendum: Pam writes:

By the way….Rick Nagle tells us that the Cold Case Unit is no longer…There are still many families out there that have a cold case that still needs work. If anyone has any connections to state law enforcement, now would be the time to put in a good word for your local Cold Case Unit!

“I hadn’t written in my blog for a while. I turned on the computer and wrote a new entry. I clicked the ‘submit’ button, thereby restarting my blog.” [Think of it as an exercise in mindfulness?]

—-networkworldmap.com

Rumsfeld retreats, disclaims earlier rhetoric:

“In the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said U.S. forces would be welcomed by the Iraqi citizenry and that Saddam Hussein had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

Now, after both statements have been shown to be either incorrect or vastly exaggerated, Rumsfeld – with the same trademark confidence that he exuded before the war – is denying that he ever made such assertions.”

This man is either so outrageously arrogant that he believes he can rewrite history at will or his memory so impaired that he has no choice but to live in a fantasy world of his own confabulation. In either case, it is hard to see how he would be seen as anything but an intolerable liability by the Bush White House. It must be considered too great a hit to Bush’s credibility to oust him with even the kindest spin before the election, too easy to impute that it would be an admission of sin (although, surely, the Bush administration does not care to, or is too inept to, operate by any semblance of the old adage about avoiding even the appearance of impropriety!). A conspiracy theorist might wonder if Rumsfeld will be eliminated by an ‘accident’ before he does too much more damage, and revered and mourned as a hero in the WoT®, instead. After all, as Josh Marshall said,

It’s become conventional wisdom that the Pentagon, or rather the civilians at the Pentagon, muscled out the State Department on key issues of planning for Iraq. My recent reporting tells me it’s much more a matter of Cheney and the Office of the Vice President. Much more.

The Senate majority leader is the latest Republican to protest in the aftermath of a leaked memo outlining a strategy by Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee to highlight contradictions between intelligence reports and dysadministration claims about Iraqi weapns programs. No one doubts that the Democrats would be fools if they did not time revelations to affect Bush’s chances of rewinning the White House next year, but to my way of thinking it would not be unpatriotic at all but in the highest service of the nation to expose the irregularities in the Bu**sh** approach. The Republicans of course pull out that tired old horse of accusing the Democrats of undermining the WoT® Ironically, the memo was an uncirculated draft by a staffer and would probably not have been made public but for the Republicans’ desperation. The Republicans accuse the Democrats of politicizing the traditionally nonpartisan intelligence committee and making it impossible to do its crucial job, but again that is the pot calling the kettle black. The most partisan acts these days are those of Republicans refusing to leave the sinking ship of loyalty to the dysadministration..

Freewayblogger.com: “Here’s how it works:

When you put a sign on the freeway

people will read it

until someone takes it down.”

—[via Billmon]

The freewayblogger’s latest exploit is a big ‘Quagmire Accomplished’ sign.

“The Los Angeles Times has ordered its reporters to stop describing anti-American forces in Iraq as ‘resistance fighters,’ saying the term romanticizes them and evokes World War II-era heroism.

The ban was issued by Melissa McCoy, a Times assistant managing editor, who told the staff in an e-mail circulated on Monday night that the phrase conveyed unintended meaning and asked them to instead use the terms ‘insurgents’ or ‘guerrillas.'” —Reuters . Supposedly, the ‘resistance fighters’ term evokes “the French Resistance or Jews who fought against Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto.” The assistant managing editor of the New York Times told Reuters he agreed with the LA Times‘ decision ( “I don’t think it’s the kind of cool, neutral language we like to see.”), but the foreign desk editor of the Washington Post disagrees, on the grounds that the term is a technically accurate description.

On what grounds did McCoy make the call, I wonder, that (a) that is the connotation readers will take from her reporters’ choice of terms; or that (b) the alternative terms suggested will be more neutral or innocuous? I actually find both “guerrilla” and “insurgent” to have heroic connotations, my political sentiments having been shaped by my opposition to the US intervention in Vietnam and support for a number of guerrilla insurgencies since. She claims it is not on the basis of reader complaints, but even if it were, how would that be an accurate gauge of (a) those readers who had not reacted negatively to the connotations of ‘resistance fighter’ and (b) the relative merits of alternative terms to which readers had not been exposed and therefore about which they could not complain? Sorry to spin out my tortured, hairsplitting logic, but I just don’t get it. Hey, at least the LA Times reporters weren’t using the term ‘freedom fighters’ instead…

Website collecting the writing of this prolific, incisive fellow-traveller who has been publishing in Wired recently but whose output I have been following since the days of his associations with the Grateful Dead and Allen Ginsberg. In the past few years, he had the privilege of an extended interview with the reclusive inspired neurologist Oliver Sacks (I linked here to his resulting portrait of Sacks in Wired) his research for which led Silberman, made curious about the comment made by a waggish admirer of FmH who called me ‘the Oliver Sacks of weblogging’, to my site here.

Responding to my link below to a piece about the sculptural works of a profoundly mentally handicapped woman surely unaware she is ‘making art’, Steve wrote to say he is working on a piece about jazz pianist Matt Savage, an 11-year-old ‘musical savant’ with an autistic-spectrum disorder — “an in-depth examination of what the brains of rare prodigies like Savage tell us about the biological nature of intelligence and creativity…” Autistic phenomena have been another of Steve’s interests (as it is one of mine), I glean, dating at least from the acclaimed piece he wrote (again in Wired) in December, 2001 (and, again, to which I linked here at the time) on the ‘geek syndrome’, about the connection between autistic traits and technology. The term ‘geek syndrome’, coined as a headline for his story, has become lingua franca for this association. You FmH’ers are among the ‘relentlessly curious’ for whose benefit he posts a slew of links to some of his older writings; dig in.

Addendum: Ironically, as I finish the above, I am pointed to another piece by Silberman about an experience, again bearing a resonance to something I post here, whose potency leaves him concluding that “talking about things I had or had not written seemed ridiculous, like gossiping in front of a mountain.”

I hadn’t realized, until I saw this linked to at Booknotes, that only six senators were present for the voice vote on the $87b Iraq appropriation. USA Today calls them courageous for sticking around for the vote and says we have ninety-four cowards among these august representatives. More telling, of the six only Sen. Robert Byrd voted no. To my way of thinking, we have ninety-nine cowards, not ninety-four. And among them are several men who are vying for your vote next November, of course.

When I linked a few days ago to the USA Today article about the superiority of the intelligence the insurgents are using in fighting against the US occupation, a reader —[thanks, ezrael] commented that someone must have been asleep at the paper’s editorial desk. This is another piece that might be interpreted as uncharacteristically critical of the powers-that-be.

… that may stretch our conception of art:

• Art for Cockroaches:
  

  monochrom invites artists to design a gallery-space for cockroaches. Each design is exhibited for a month and then replaced. The audience — consisting of 40 individuals — are fed fresh fruit daily (preferably apples or bananas) and are cared for. You can come and visit the audience, every Thursday, when monochrom has its weekly meeting at Museumsquartier/Vienna. monochrom guarantees the well-being of visitors.

  “I think it’s about time to herald the era of a new awareness in the
  
  human-cockroach-relationship.” (Don Pollock)

• jwz receives a gift of a painting…
  

  …by an actor who was Johnny Weissmuller’s costar in the Tarzan movies in the 1930s and 1940s. The artist is now 71 years old and living in Palm Springs, Florida, enjoying his new career as a painter.

  His name is Cheeta, and he’s the world’s oldest living primate.

• Judith Scott (born 1943), a fifty-five year old woman with Down’s Syndrome, has spent the past ten years producing a series of totally non-functional objects which, to us, appear to be works of sculpture…
  

  …except that the notion of sculpture is far beyond Judith’s understanding. As well as being mentally handicapped, Judith cannot hear or speak, and she has little concept of language. There is no way of asking her what she is doing, yet her compulsive involvement with the shaping of abstract forms in space seems to imply that at some level she knows. Judith possesses no concept of art, no understanding of its meaning or function. She does not know that she is an artist, nor does she understand that the objects she creates are perceived by others as works of art. Whatever she is doing she is definitely not concerned with the making of art. What then is she doing? Unmistakably she is working, and working hard. Her formidable concentration surpasses that of most professional artists. Is it possible that she is obsessionally involved in an activity that is without meaning? Does serious mental retardation invariably preclude the creation of true works of art? Is it plausible to imagine an artist of stature emerging in the context of massively impaired intellectual development?

From Atrios:

“At this point, I think we need to not ‘fail miserably.’ I’d like that to be a resounding success, with a liberal democracy, complete with gay marriage and all, flourishing in Iraq, but the plutocratic colony we’re in the process of establishing to the benefit of our war profiteers isn’t exactly moving in that direction. The truth is, as Big Media Matt points out, the Bush administration is in the process of ‘cutting and running’ as much or more as any of the Dem candidates (even Kucinich!) are suggesting. I have a hard time believing that the promises of troop reduction will ever really materialize, but in the end it’ll be a war between Rove and the Neocons. Normally I’d put my money on Rove, but I’m not sure in this case.”

I love how succinctly he puts the dysadministration dilemma — Rove vs. the Neocons. This would imply, however, that Rove’s expertise at selling presidential Bu**sh** is based on less rabid ideological grounds than the Perles, Wolfowitzs, etc. What exactly are Rove’s conservative bona fides?

Bruce Sterling is back in the weblogging business, courtesy of a new blogspace Wired is developing. Sterling’s outlook has always seemed to me to be quite amenable to weblog-consciousness and I was always disappointed with the lack of investment he made in his previous venture in this area. Schism Matrix. He pledges to be prolific this time around (possibly because Wired is paying him for this effort?). IMHO, so far what he has got up at BtB makes up for volume by lacking in depth, however. Not compelling.

I hadn’t realized, until I saw this linked to at Booknotes, that only six senators were present for the voice vote on the $87b Iraq appropriation. USA Today calls them courageous for sticking around for the vote and says we have ninety-four cowards among these august representatives. More telling, of the six only Sen. Robert Byrd voted no. To my way of thinking, we have ninety-nine cowards, not ninety-four. And among them are several men who are vying for your vote next November, of course.

When I linked a few days ago to the USA Today article about the superiority of the intelligence the insurgents are using in fighting against the US occupation, a reader —[thanks, ezrael] commented that someone must have been asleep at the paper’s editorial desk. This is another piece that might be interpreted as uncharacteristically critical of the powers-that-be.

“Not since the Vietnam War has the Army punished a soldier for being too scared to do his duty.

But on Friday, Sgt. Georg Andreas Pogany will appear in front of military court here to face charges he was a coward.

The Army says he is guilty of ‘cowardly conduct as a result of fear’ and not performing his duties as an interrogator for a squad of Green Berets in Samarra, Iraq.

But Sergeant Pogany says he did not run from the enemy or disobey orders. The only thing he is guilty of, he says, is asking for help for a panic attack.

On his second night in Iraq, one month ago, Sergeant Pogany, 32, saw an Iraqi cut in half by a machine gun. The sight disturbed him so much, he said, he threw up and shook for hours. His head pounded and his chest hurt.

‘I couldn’t function,’ Sergeant Pogany said in an interview on Tuesday in his lawyer’s office in Colorado Springs, not far from Fort Carson. ‘I had this overwhelming sense of my own mortality. I kept looking at that body thinking that could be me two seconds from now.’

When he informed his superior that he was having a panic attack and needed to see someone, Sergeant Pogany said he was given two sleeping pills and told to go away. A few days later, Sergeant Pogany was put on a plane and sent home.” —New York Times

It is not precisely true, from a psychiatrist’s perspective (and with the caveat that one does not diagnose sight unseen from a distance) that this soldier had a ‘panic attack.’ It is more likely he is suffering from acute post-traumatic stress, of which panic-like symptoms are a facet. PTSD develops when a person is inescapably exposed to something beyond the pale. This is precisely why the Army had better rush to perfect those drugs to stop soldiers from incorporating traumatic memories about which I wrote several months ago here so they can get back to functioning like the unfeeling automatons they are supposed to be on the battlefield. We are routinely going to expose them to things beyond that which any human nervous system was designed to withstand, and they had better learn to feel nothing in response.

Toddler Lives After Being Declared Dead: ‘A toddler who was revived nearly two hours after she was believed to have drowned — and 40 minutes after doctors had declared her dead — was responding to touch and sound Saturday, hospital officials said.

Mark Langdorf (search), chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of California, Irvine, said it is not uncommon for toddlers to survive drownings after showing little or no signs of life, especially if the water is cold.

What was unusual in Mackayala’s case, he said, was the time involved.

“If you had said she came back to life after 10 minutes I would be surprised, but 40 minutes is just exceptional,” he said.’ —Fox News

“The Bush White House, irritated by pesky questions from congressional Democrats about how the administration is using taxpayer money, has developed an efficient solution: It will not entertain any more questions from opposition lawmakers.” —Dana Milbank, Washington Post. This is, of course, on top of the White House initiative several weeks ago to bypass pesky questions from more critical national news sources, such as the Washington Post and the New York Times, and go directly to the regional press in the heartlands to plead its case. This is one of the most outrageous manipulations this dysadministration has pulled off, but where is the outraged response? More evidence of how easy it is for an anti-democratic cabal to completely and rapidly subvert democratic processes once they hoodwink the complacent and gullible polity to cede them power. The beerhall putsch, 21st-century-style, continues. Will the public awaken in time for November ’04?

“In my attempt to realize ‘death’, I have decided to watch the dead body of a dog continuously at the coast.” Photographs and commentary by Manabu Yamanaka [spelling correction by FmH].

• 1st day

  – I patted him on head wondering if his life was happy one.

• 2nd day

  – His face seemed to be sad. I felt the odor became stronger.

• 5th day

  – Many crows crowded at the spot and were pecking his eyes and
  
  anus.
  

It goes on from there, with a stark unflinching zen-like photograph of the dog’s status each day. —[thanks, gary]

An interesting story surrounds this weblog of a courageous 24-year-old Iraqi woman (“Girl Blog from Iraq… let’s talk war, politics and occupation.”) to which I was pointed by an FmH reader [thanks, gary]. Riverbend offers realtime commentary on events in Baghdad, inside perspective on Western analysis of the situation, and a humane introduction to Iraqi Islamic mores and customs. She is even going to start posting some recipes, she has decided while laboring preparing the evening meals that break each day’s fast during Ramadhan.

But ‘riverbendblog.blogspot.com’ is being spoofed by someone at ‘riversbendblog.blogspot.com’ (note the ‘s‘) who also called his weblog Baghdad Burning but, as she describes in her Oct. 29th post (scroll down) ‘Riverbend and Multiple Personalities’ , is rife with errors of fact about Iraq, an antithetical political philosophy supported by cutting and pasting posts from US government sources, and grammatical errors she speculates are designed to sound like his idea of an ignorant Iraqi ‘hajji’. The spoofer, she discovers, is a retired US Air Force veteran of the Korean War and a ‘GOP Team Leader’, whatever that is. Two other sites (here and here) have been digging into the fraud. Skip the fine print if you are not that interested in the intricate details:

The story begins on Sept. 2, 2003. The retirees on soc.retirement were giving “Solerito” Troy, Korean War vet and GOP Team Leader, a hard time over a blog he suggested. It was called solerito.blogspot.com. He’d recommended it as a welcome antidote to the negative blogging coming out of Iraq. “Here is one that’s not supportive of Saddam and is interested in a better future for Iraq,” he wrote.

“And this one sounds exactly as if you wrote it, Troy,” a poster responds. “C’mon, fess up.”

He doesn’t. The Solerito blog has begun in the thick of things with the death of David Kelly, described as a friend of the blogger — who goes under the name “river.” But she is quick to adapt to our American ways, and before long has already achieved scorn for Hillary. “I long for the day we can watch FoxNews in Iraq,” she pines.

The Solerito blog has sort of run out of steam by then. But Troy/Diego, who has also been accused of being an infamous soc.retirement mischief-maker named Sordo/Bodine , and is also the kind of guy who tells people they are traitorous “basteds” who belong in hell — has moved on to stage two of the Doppleblogger Project, a cheeky new blog called Riversbend.

Except that Troy/Diego accidentally leaves, on the URL of his hit counter page, a reference to his nickname — “Solerito” (as spotted by Claude, a keen Atrios reader).

Many of his Usenet posts end with the nickname, which is Spanish for “saltshaker.” His signature:

El Solerito Troy,

Artist, HAM, Korean War, Reg. Army & USAF Retired, MOPH L38342 Unit 1849, Phi Theta Kappa, RNC 146441197-D186, GOP Team Leader, NRA 040959746 —John Gorenfeld

Interesting discussions on the two sleuthing weblogs arbout the ethics of posting the identity and the email address of the spoofer, of defacing the fake weblog, etc. Under pressure, the spoofer has modified his spot to be less of an infringement on the original, removing fake archives and stolen graphics, no longer claiming to being written by a “girl from Iraq”, no longer calling it Baghdad Burning (for awhile, calling it Baghdad’s Not Burning, duh). The spoofer violates several of the Blogger terms of service, and the author of the original Riverbend complained to them but was brushed off politely. The spoofer has apparently started two other ‘smearblogs’ with varying degrees of similarity to the genuine Riverbend.

…to Bonnie Raitt, Bonnie Bramlett and Rickie Lee Jones today.

‘…(T)here has always been a certain incommensurability between political activities that depend on mass mobilization and the idiosyncratic sensibility of the aesthete—even the public-spirited, politically active aesthete. For every argument that aesthetic concerns are a luxury in the face of political injustice, there is the rebuttal that aesthetic freedom is as necessary for the human spirit as any political right. “It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives,” wrote Theodor Adorno, “but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men’s heads.” —NewMusicBox

Hymn & Fuguing Tune: “Ten contemporary composers and performers, whose work has intersected with their own deeply held political beliefs, talk about what has inspired their music, and what they hope to achieve with it.”

An extensive interview with Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah about his growing career as a songwriter.

Diamanda Galás in conversation with Edward Batchelder; an interview in ten parts, or a complete .pdf transcript of the interview.

EDWARD BATCHELDER: The first thing I’d like to ask you about is the current project that you’re working on. I know that you have two CDs coming out in November, and one of them directly relates to the issue of music and politics. Could you start by talking about it?

DIAMANDA GALÁS: Okay. The project is Defixiones, Will and Testament. Defixiones means “curse.” Defixios were lead tablets that were placed in certain places, let’s say, on the graves of the dead to either warn people that if they touch the grave, their ancestors would come to a very bad end, or to put curses on, let’s say, circus performers, enemies of any kind, and all sorts of things. A person who has done a lot of studying on this is John Gager at Princeton. The purpose that I use it for is to discuss the graves that were decimated and desecrated by the enemies of the Assyrians, the Greeks, and the Armenians living in Asia Minor, Pontus, and Thrace. These enemies were the Turks. I use this as a basic description of the overall intent of the work, which is that we will not die in peace.

“Trying to eliminate Saddam…would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible…. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq…. there was no viable ‘exit strategy’ we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations’ mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.”

— George Herbert Walker Bush,

from his memoir, A World Transformed (1998)

[via wood s lot]

International Trepanation Advocacy Group (ITAG): “for the first time on this planet you are free to have maximum fulfillment… It is no longer necessary to follow a path and search for your true greatness…” [via bOING bOING‘s list of candidates for the week’s weirdest web links]

“President George Bush’s calls for democracy rang hollow in the Middle East, where many said on Friday they were appalled Washington was preaching liberty for Arabs while occupying Iraq.

The war on Iraq and Washington’s support for Israel in its bloody conflict with the Palestinians have antagonized many Arabs and Muslims who were already seething at the United States’ war on terror, seen by many as a battle against Islam.

And Bush’s sweeping foreign policy speech on Thursday, in which he challenged ally Egypt and foes Iran and Syria to adopt democracy, fueled Arab indignation.” Reuters

The BBC has a site devoted to coverage of Cult TV. How kind of them…

“National Public Radio will announce today the largest donation in its history, a cash bequest from the will of the late philanthropist Joan Kroc of about $200 million.

The bequest from the widow of the founder of the McDonald’s fast-food chain both shocked and delighted people at NPR’s headquarters in Washington yesterday. It amounts to almost twice NPR’s annual operating budget. ‘No one saw this coming,’ said one person.” Washington Post

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Bill O’Reilly.

This is a poll of BBC readers. Of the ten films on the list, I have seen four. Of those four, three do not belong on any ‘worst film’ list, and the inclusion of one of those makes me embarrassed for BBC readers’ film acumen.

“Why are we attracted not only to the biggest version of almost anything but also to the smallest, the weirdest, the first, the last, or the only? Why does something gain value merely because it is rare and authentic—the odd voyeuristic pleasure that comes from seeing on display the salt and pepper shakers from the mess kit George Washington may have clutched as he crossed the Delaware? Is it mere curiosity, or is it something more?” —Discover

“Gordon Graham challenges practically the whole of reigning orthodoxy in political philosophy in his remarkable book. To the bien pensants of political theory, ‘political participation’ and ‘democratic decision-making’ are all the rage, and theorists such as Amy Guttmann, Benjamin Barber, and Ronald Dahl constantly urge us on to more and more democracy. Like Hans-Hermann Hoppe in his excellent Democracy—The God that Failed, though with rather different arguments, Graham sets himself in firm opposition to this dominant trend.1 Graham is principally a philosopher of religion, and he brings to political theory the fresh perspective of an outsider.” —Mises Review

“The world’s largest iceberg has split in two after being pummelled by a powerful storm, it was reported.

B15, an 11,000-square-kilometre (4,400-square-mile) monster the size of Jamaica, was one of the biggest icebergs ever seen until it broke up last month, said the Antarctic Sun newspaper Tuesday.

The title of world’s largest iceberg now passes to C19A, near a French Antarctic base, which at 5,659 square kilometres (2,264 square miles) is about the size of Brunei.” —Yahoo!

Entrancing photo of creature found at 10,000 feet in the Pacific’s Japan Deep. —Yahoo!

“The (Israeli) court ruled the petition was not receivable.” —Sydney Morning Herald

Three drunken Finns in Nov. 2002 disastrous attempt are jailed. —The Australian

“Odin, Thor, Freya and the other Viking gods of yore will soon be providing divine authority for some marriages in Denmark.

Minister for Ecclesiastic Affairs Tove Fergo said Wednesday Forn Sidr will be allowed to conduct legally-recognized marriages.

The group, whose name mean ‘Old Custom’ in old Norse, worships gods from the Norse pantheon, like their Viking forebears from the 8th, 9th and 10th centuries.” —The Australian

“The nearest galaxy to our own Milky Way has been revealed. It is so close that the Milky Way is gradually consuming it by pulling in its stars. But it will be few billion years before it is entirely swallowed up.

The previously unknown galaxy lies about 25,000 light years from Earth and 42,000 light years from the centre of the Milky Way, beyond the stars in the constellation Canis Major. It is twice as close to the centre of our galaxy than the previous record holder, the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy, which was discovered in 1994.” —New Scientist

48 human volunteers —New Scientist

“There’s sweet news about hot cocoa: Researchers at Cornell University have shown that the popular winter beverage contains more antioxidants per cup than a similar serving of red wine or tea and may be a healthier choice.

The study adds to growing evidence of the health benefits of cocoa and points to a tasty alternative in the quest to maintain a diet rich in healthy antioxidants, chemicals that have been shown to fight cancer, heart disease and aging, the researchers say.” —Science Daily

“This week, a respected biologist was led into a Texas courtroom. He faces no fewer than 68 charges and could end up in jail for the rest of his life. Has the FBI finally caught the anthrax attacker?

No. Thomas Butler merely reported that 30 vials of plague bacteria had gone missing from his laboratory at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. Many of Butler’s colleagues believe the justice authorities are making an example of him as part of a wider effort to ensure that scientists take more care with material terrorists might exploit.

Whatever the outcome of the case, that effort is having repercussions that go far beyond the fate of one scientist. New Scientist has contacted more than 20 prominent figures in the US working in bioterror-related fields.

Some refused to talk, and most who did did not want to be named. Their comments paint a disturbing picture. Some scientists, for instance, are refusing to work on projects involving agents that could be exploited as bioweapons, even though the US government is providing massive funding to boost such research.

Others are considering abandoning existing work. Irreplaceable collections of microbes essential for managing and tracing outbreaks, bioterrorist or natural, are being destroyed simply because labs cannot comply with the new rules.” —New Scientist

Why not to be ‘bright’ —Butterflies and Wheels

“Could a single trip on a piece of African rootbark help a junkie kick the habit? That was the claim in the 1960s, and now iboga is back in the spotlight. But is it a miracle cure? Daniel Pinchbeck decided to give it a go. And life, he says, will never be the same again… ” —Guardian.UK

Related: Peru seeks tribal cure for addiction:

Peru is home to the coca leaf, the main ingredient of cocaine.

In the last few years it has also become home to a new way of confronting drug addiction: by returning to Shamanism and traditional Amazonian medicines. —BBC

Among others, they are talking about the indigenous hallucinogen ayahuasca.

Also: Cannabis can help MS sufferers:

“Claims that cannabis can relieve the symptoms of multiple sclerosis have been reinforced by results from the world’s largest ever trial of the medicinal effects of the drug – but only just.

The main improvements seen were in subjective measures of symptoms, i.e. those reported by the patients, rather than in those measured using standardised tests.” —New Scientist Only subjective symptoms?? What could be more important?

Dinosaur secret revealed: “They lumbered cautiously on land. But when the biggest dinosaurs in history hit the water, they floated like giant inflatable pool toys, new Canadian research has found.

‘They were like colossal corks,’ says Donald Henderson, a University of Calgary researcher who says he may have solved a mystery about the long-necked dinosaurs that were the biggest creatures to ever walk Earth.”

“This controversy (over call centers) recently broke out in an unlikely place, the letters column of the Times Literary Supplement. After Susan Sontag praised Indians for putting their English-language skills to work through call centres, a furious professor in New Delhi denounced her for failing to see that ‘These poor young men and women are indeed the cyber-coolies of our global age.’ In the next issue, another Delhi resident wrote that what the professor considers exploitation looks to workers like a way to acquire skills as well as income. He acknowledged that while ‘it isn’t much fun to persuade someone in Detroit to pay his credit card bill’ (yet another function of call centres), it builds negotiating skills.

It is an iron law of international economics that the Exploitation Police will swoop down and denounce anyone who creates new jobs, particularly in relatively poor areas. The common complaint is that call-centre companies set up shop in places (New Brunswick is a good example) where they can find well-educated workers at relatively low wages. The Exploitation Police make this sound almost criminal. In fact, it’s the way capitalism has always expanded and the way that poor regions have traditionally turned themselves into less poor regions. To consider this sort of change deplorable is to miss the fact that business lives by ingenuity and perishes when it ceases to find new and cheaper ways to get its work done.” —National Post

William Mitchell says that networks should become so important to us, we become part of them. “Shot through with post-dotcom sobriety, Me++ describes the move from virtual reality – the old 90s idea of the net as a separate, alternative realm – to ‘augmented reality’ (AR), in which ubiquitous computing and mobile wireless networks are used to reconnect us to the real world.” —Guardian.UK

The Bush agenda behind the ‘partial birth abortion’ ban. —Alexandra Walker, Tompaine.com

The irony of CBS’ wimpy cancellation of the Reagan biography (Tompaine.com) under conservative pressure, it occurs to me, comes when you juxtapose the story with the Terry Schiavo saga in Florida. It has long stuck in my craw that rightwing reverence for the two-bit actor’s machine-made performance as President (in which he gutted decades of social reform and set an ongoing precedent for American cannibalization of the poor and disadvantaged) has led lawmakers to abandon a longstanding precedent and memorialize Reagan by naming airports, highways, buildings, bridges and whatever after him while he is still alive. One way to think about it is as a covert acknowledgement that Reagan’s advanced Alzheimer’s dementia amounts to a living death, that the man they knew is already long gone, even though his body still breathes and circulates blood. Isn’t there some incongruity, then, with the conservative cause celebre of refusing to let go of illusions about Schiavo and fighting dirty to keep her alive at all costs?

The only real discussion of race in today’s America is in a comic strip. “Of course, the real funnies are on the front pages of most papers these days. That’s where you can see a lot of black faces. The media love to cover black people on the front page. After all, when you live in a society that will lock up about 30 percent of all black men at some time in their lives and send more of them to prison than to college, chances are a fair number of those black faces will end up in the newspaper.

But to be honest, the newspapers don’t just show bad black. They have ‘good’ black people they cover too! Like Clarence Thomas. And Condoleezza Rice. See, they care.

Oops. There I go playing the race card. You see, in America these days, we aren’t supposed to talk about race. We have been told to pretend that things have gotten better, that the old days of segregation and cross-burnings are long gone, and that no one needs to talk about race again because, hey, we fixed that problem.” —AlterNet