“An alternative rock band’s claim that it will feature a “live suicide” onstage during a St. Petersburg gig next month has gotten the attention of the concert hall owners and local police.

The Tampa group, Hell on Earth, said on its Web site that a terminally ill member of a right-to-die group planned to commit suicide on stage during an Oct. 4 performance at the State Theater.

The volunteer, who the Web site said would not be identified until the day of the show, wanted to carry out the suicide onstage to “raise awareness for dying with dignity.” Sun-Sentinel

Dying with dignity? In front of thousands of drunken metalheads and journalists drooling with expectancy of a sensational scoop? As an accompanist to a band whose songs, according to Rolling Stone, ‘include “Toilet Licking Maggot” and “Raped by the Virgin Mary” and whose past stage stunts… include having intercourse with cows and drinking blended rats’?

“The UK has made spam a criminal offence to try to stop the flood of unsolicited messages.

Under the new law, spammers could be fined £5,000 in a magistrates court or an unlimited penalty from a jury.” BBC

“Olivier Assayas’ unclassifiable porn-capitalism thriller is a theory-addled nightmare — but it’s also a profound and troubling movie about contemporary life.” — Charles Taylor, Salon

Underworld

“By any reasonable standard, this dark vampire epic — all massive overacting, cologne-commercial design and sexy cat suits — sucks. But at least it gives a crap.” — Andrew O’Hehir, Salon

The unswoosher: “This is a ground-breaking marketing scheme to uncool Nike. If it succeeds, it will set a precedent that will revolutionize capitalism.” Adbuster’s has been making these cryptic ‘black spot’ references for awhile. It is clear now what they were leading up to. I am a big fan of the No Logo meme; if this is real, blackSpot sneakers will get my brand loyalty, and I’ll revel in the knowledge that I am cooler than you all out there. Oops, that’s not supposed to be the point, you gather? In any case, however, Nike may have beaten the blackSpot campaign to the punch with the recent news that they have acquired Converse and will continue to offer the famed Chuck Taylor All-Stars.

Billmon comments on a ‘classified’ WSJ article (just joking; what I meant is that it requires a WSJ subscription to read it) on a dysadministration plan that is apparently shaping up for US forces to beat a hasty retreat from Iraq. It would be useful to Bush, of course, to bring our boys home well in advance of next November. I myself favor another way of extricating ourselves from the Iraqi morass, as I wrote here last week — let’s invade Iran to disarm them instead, quickly. (Joking, again…)

Cogent predictions from Counterspin about the specious critiques the Right will use to attack Wesley Clark’s record. Rush Limbaugh has apparently got this effort well underway already. Whatever you think of Clark, it helps to be prepared to counter credulous purveyors of ‘toxic waste’.

A daily chronicle of Bush administration distortion from the folks at MoveOn.org. Read it as a weblog or subscribe to a daily email bulletin of the latest Bush lies. Here is a .pdf of the MoveOn full-age New York Times ad announcing the Mislead.

“Sixteen untrue words in the State of the Union message helped push America into war with Iraq. It’s now clear that the remaining 5.397 words in the speech were just as misleading…”

Pico Iyer and the Californication of mystical Islam: “…(I)n his latest novel, Abandon, he has turned inward, ostensibly to an exploration of the Islamic mystical tradition called Sufism in search of an alternative to a globalized world. Strangely, the location for his inward search is California, the capital of ultimate banality. One would like to explain this away as a deep Sufi parable, but, a travel writer, Iyer’s approach to Sufism remains that of a tourist among tourists. His Sufism is a marketable mysticism, reduced to small bites of tranquility and enlightenment.” A review by Stephen Schwartz, author of The Two Faces of Islam, who essentially says Iyer gets it wrong. Weekly Standard

“Disruptive pupils are making it impossible to improve Britain’s secondary schools.” A Prospect Magazine article on the growth of unruliness in school age children, from a British gradeschool teacher’s perspective. It gives short shrift to what for me is the interesting question:

Why do so many schoolchildren behave badly? The broader cultural and family background is clearly a factor, albeit an unquantifiable one. The combination of an “instant gratification” mass culture and more unstable families has led to rising insecurity and aggression in some children. High teacher turnover in key subjects reinforces the emotional instability of many modern families. Moreover, parents themselves have become more aggressive towards teachers and other authority figures; consider the increased assaults on GPs.

Most films and TV shows I’ve seen in recent years reflecting modern British social conditions, it strikes me, indeed show schools as places where the breakdown in decorum is the central fact.

Most of the article is spent arguing what seems to be the gospel in American schools, that the teaching profession has in most contexts become of necessity merely a disciplinary exercise.

…(E)ven in an anti-authoritarian age, schools should be able to offer the security, discipline and stimulation which disaffected young people need. To ensure that this is more often the case, schools need a core of committed teachers with the training to command a class and the freedom to inspire it. Is that too much too ask?

Is this all that education is destined to be in most settings?

Investigating Danny Pearl’s murder, Lévy says he had to die for what he discovered, the shape of the next terrorist attack from the jihadist alliance that killed him, which will “make 9/11 look prehistoric.” The opening paragraphs of Ron Rosenbaum’s New York Observer review of Lévy’s book are surprisingly, incongruously flip (perhaps Rosenbaum is imbued with Bushite anti-French fever?). Despite saying the two books don’t compete, he is far more enamored of the forthcoming memoir by Pearl’s widow Mariane, A Mighty Heart, which he says, perhaps abit boastfully, that he has read in galleys. The comments are gratuitous and tangential to the chilling details he describes in the rest of the article.

With the recent focus on Iraq, we have lost sight of the very real need for concern about the unholy, hypocritical, dangerous alliances the Bush cabal has forged with nations like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, both the provinces of sophisticated, angry and well-endowed radical Islamists with fragile vulnerable governments only tentatively willing to or capable of containing them, not to mention that they receive support from official elements such as Pakistani intelligence. Lévy’s book, and Rosenbaum’s précis, are a horrific reminder of what seeds of our own destruction we may have sown.

The narrative hinges on the moment after Pearl’s kidnapping when his abductors drop their ransom demands and change tack, deciding to kill Pearl. Rosenbaum notes that Lévy’s narrative from here on is speculative, although ackonwledging that it is the speculation of a daring reporter with seasoned instincts.

…Mr. Lévy seeks to convince us that Pearl was on the trail of the nexus that he, Lévy, discovered in his investigation of the crime: the nexus between Pakistani intelligence, Al Qaeda, Pakistani nuclear scientists and rogue states such as North Korea that portends the sum of all fears: a handover of the Islamic bomb—or, at the very least, lethal nuclear materials—to Al Qaeda terrorists. The genesis of the next 9/11. Mr. Lévy not only believes this was the subject of Pearl’s investigation, the reason he sought the ill-fated interview with Sheikh Gilani that led to his kidnapping, but that in the course of his captivity he learned even more from his captors, learned too much to be allowed to live.

Rosenbaum demurs, “All of Mr. Lévy’s speculations may be true, but that doesn’t mean they were Danny Pearl’s.” But why use the vehicle of an exploration of Pearl’s death if one has the scoop of the century to claim as the fruits of one’s own investigations? And why would Lévy’s attribution of this discovery to Pearl prompt such vehement disavowals from his employer (“Paul Steiger, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, said the newspaper had no evidence that Mr. Pearl was investigating any such conspiracy” — NY Times), and his family, which favors the more prosaic theory, essentially that Pearl was killed because his kidnappers had an opportunity to produce a snuff video of a Jewish American?

Rosenbaum speculates that Lévy is “using the notoriety of the Pearl death, using his own fame and his own investigation, as an opportunity to issue a heartfelt warning to the West of the apocalyptic developments brewing in Pakistan…”, but comes to favor instead the possibility that Lévy lovingly identified so thoroughly with Pearl that he was moved to give him a posthumous gift of attributing his own insights to the younger man.

Related? Special Report: Saudis consider the bomb. Guardian.UK

“Why do we wallow in tales of priests and boys, when most targets of unwanted priestly attention are girls?” The Nation

“VeriSign Inc., which oversees the popular ”.com” Internet domain, has ignited a digital firestorm with its new method for dealing with mistyped Internet addresses. Experts say it will lead to a surge in spam, or unwanted e-mail, and that Verisign has no right to impose the system on millions of Internet users.” Boston Globe

In fact, some ISPs say the predicted increase in spam is already being seen. In redirecting mistyped internet addresses ending in ‘.com’ to a search engine (for which hits VeriSign is paid) rather than generating an error message, VeriSign is crippling many spam filters which work by recognizing the error messages associated with spam that originates from nonexistent domains.

”You can actually make a mail connection to nonexistent domains now,” said Lauren Weinstein, cofounder of People for Internet Responsibility. ”This is the kiss of death for ISPs.”

VeriSign says it is “working to address the problem”… as unilaterally as they instituted the new scheme in the first place.

Book review: The Unity of Consciousness: Binding, integration and dissociation ed. by Axel Cleeremans:

“The brain operates like a highly distributed anarchist collective with separate modules each doing their own thing. But we generally perceive, think and act as if ‘we’ were an indissoluble individual. In some as yet only guessed at way, the activity of all the brain modules must be bound together to produce this sense of self.

So is consciousness unitary, and how can we solve the ‘binding problem’? This is the question addressed by the 22-strong ensemble who met at a consciousness conference in Brussels 3 years ago and whose ruminations are brought together in Axel Cleeremans’s collection.” New Scientist

“Mysterious pneumonia-like illnesses and breathing problems appear to be striking U.S. troops in greater numbers than the military has identified in an investigation — including more deaths, according to soldiers and their families.

Some of the soldiers were deployed to Iraq and died but are not part of the Pentagon’s investigation. Others who got ill told United Press International they suffered a pneumonia-like illness after being given vaccines, particularly the anthrax shot.” UPI [via CommonDreams] I have written here before about this plague—sorry to sound Biblical— on the occupying forces. Beyond the anthrax vaccine, exposure to depleted uranium is another suspected etiology. Let’s see—lethal toxic exposure or mandatory fatal and likely needless inoculations, pay cuts, open-ended commitment with no return home in sight, constant targeting by enraged Iraqis and foreign terrorists the occupation is drawing like flypaper, frequent fatal accidents from faulty undermaintained equipment because of fiscal skimping, central betrayal by their commander-in-chief’s lies about the rationale for being there at all. What isn’t a Biblical affliction about the situation?

“What some customers might get from (the) pills is a less-than-sexy dose of bacteria and other contaminants.

Commissioned by The Wall Street Journal, Flora Research, San Juan Capistrano, Calif., conducted an independent laboratory analysis of a composite sample of 10 (so-called ‘penile enlargement’) pills and turned up significant levels of E. coli, yeast, mold, lead and pesticide residues.” Chicago Daily Herald

“Could earthly religions survive the discovery of life elsewhere in the universe?” — Paul Davies (professor of natural philosophy at the Australian Center for Astrobiology, at Macquarie University, in Sydney), The Atlantic Monthly

“Some members of the coalition forces in Iraq, under steady attack by anonymous snipers and suicide bombers, have expressed fear that they are targets of an increasing number of assailants – from Saddam Hussein’s loyalists, to foreign insurgents, to members of Al Qaeda. Now there is concern that ordinary Iraqis, and possibly even Westerners, could be added to the list.” Christian Science Monitor

Related: Iraqis’ Bitterness Is Called Bigger Threat Than Terror NY Times [via CommonDreams]

“The Dalai Lama, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and one of the world’s most prominent advocates of nonviolence, said in an interview yesterday that it might be necessary to fight terrorists with violence, and that it was ‘too early to say’ whether the war in Iraq was a mistake.

‘I feel only history will tell,’ he said. ‘Terrorism is the worst kind of violence, so we have to check it, we have to take countermeasures.'” NY Times

“President Bush said Wednesday there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — disputing an impression that critics say the administration tried to foster to justify the war against Iraq.” Salon

When the president distances himself from the statements of the vice president, you know the administration is in a desperate scramble. Related: Wolfowitz contradicts Cheney: Iraq not involved in 9-11 attacks. CommonDreams

Maybe Cheney ought to begin looking for a new job. Oops! He’s already got one. Arizona Daily Star All in all, though, I would rather see Rumsfeld take the fall for the Iraq morass than Cheney, if it had to be one or t’other.

“Margaret Atwood and newcomer Monica Ali head up the shortlist for this year’s Booker Prize. Martin Amis and JM Coetzee didn’t make the cut, but Zoe Heller, Damon Galgut and debut writers Clare Morrall and DBC Pierre did. Three of the nominations are for first novels. The winner is announced October 14.” BBC News

James Q. Wilson & Karlyn Bowman: “About one-fifth of Americans strongly opposed the war in Iraq. Surveys taken in December 2002 showed that 15 to 20 percent of the public resolutely opposed the war three months before it began, and the numbers remained about as high in April 2003 after the war had been underway for a couple of weeks. While the level of support increased after the war began, the onset of fighting did not budge the war’s strongest opponents. This ‘peace party’ became known to the American public through antiwar protests and demonstrations, but media coverage of these events did not tell us much about the composition of this group. Who makes up the peace party? How many Americans have joined its ranks? And how do their numbers compare with antiwar groups from past military conflicts?” The Public Interest

“The hypocrisy of the Burning Man Organization pisses me off. …But the thing that yanks my chain is that they do all this — they give you a straight-up totally one sided work-for-hire contract that essentially says, ‘if you are a photographer, and you are at the Burning Man event, then you are our employee and we own all your work’ — and they try to soften the blow by accompanying it with a smarmy press kit that re-states the terms of the contract in this totally weaselly way: they go on at length about how they are viciously protecting their brand for your own good. And every other paragraph says stuff like ‘Larry Harvey — dare we say it — a Genius…’

It is to gag.

They’re taking a totally standard, normal, corporate line toward their theme park — but that idea embarrasses them (they don’t like to think of it as a theme park.) So they cloak it in bullshit and hope that everyone will buy the lie that it’s actually some spontaneous group-hug, and not a theme park.” Jamie Zawinski [via walker]

Now don’t get defensive if you’re an enthusiast for hip, scene-making events like Burning Man. I’m in one of my equal-opportunity misanthropic moods. We expect there to be less potential for exploitation, hypocrisy, inequity, at an alternative event than a mainstream one, so it hurts more when the inevitable letdown comes, but come it does. Pockets of resistance and counterculturalism (if there is such a word) exist; I happen upon them in my peregrinations, but they are certainly not the events with the media buzzword visibility like Burning Man. Oh, I don’t know, I’ve never been, probably because I got fed up wtih hipper-than-thou long ago, not long after I felt so self-important for making the scene at Woodstock. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose…

‘Each “meal” was accompanied by massive eruptions, making the star briefly the brightest in the Milky Way.’ New Scientist

“Experts are at odds on the number of beluga sturgeon left in the Caspian Sea – some warn that continued fishing will hasten their demise.” New Scientist

‘Researchers recreating the atmosphere of the early Earth have made “cells” that reproduce and communicate – but they are made of gas.’ New Scientist

New study reveals that the root cause of crime may be biological, not social:

“Feeding children a diet rich in fish could prevent violent and anti-social behaviour in their teens, according to research to be announced this week which suggests the root causes of crime may be biological rather than social.

The study raises major questions over the extent to which criminals exercise free will, as well as fuelling fresh debate over whether simple childhood interventions might be more use in preventing crime than blaming parents or organising draconian crackdowns on crime.

Professor Adrian Raine, a leading psychologist at the University of California, will outline a growing body of evidence showing that violent offenders have physical defects in a part of the brain linked to decision-making and self-control – which may make them more likely to lash out.

Raine’s latest research, to be unveiled this week in Sheffield, looked at whether brain deficits could be avoided by action in the early years when the tissue is still developing.” Guardian/UK

“In the spring of 1992, out of the blue, the fax machine in Richard Davidson’s office at the department of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison spit out a letter from Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. Davidson, a Harvard-trained neuroscientist, was making a name for himself studying the nature of positive emotion, and word of his accomplishments had made it to northern India. The exiled spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists was writing to offer the minds of his monks — in particular, their meditative prowess — for scientific research.” NY Times

“Joseph Wilson, former deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad from 1988 to 1991, has called into question the Bush administration’s assertions about Iraq seeking uranium from Africa by revealing that he had been asked by the U.S. government to look into such claims — and had reported in early 2002 that they were unfounded. He is an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C.” Wilson writes that Alice in Wonderland is the most apt metaphor for the Iraq situation, “where nothing is as it seems” (see also the LA Times editorial, Cheney in Wonderland, incidentally) and the administration has “dragged us down a rabbit hole.” Wilson likens the Iraq situation to the mujaheddin insurgency (see below*) against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the ’80’s, an apt simile which is not in my opinion mentioned often enough, with full appreciation for the fact that that situation was the breeding ground for a generation of Islamic loyalist rebels including al Qaeda. Wilson finds administration distortions on Iraq unsurprising because we have accomplished so little of our original objectives there and are unlikely to do so. Wilson suggests that the administration was deluded in its intention to impose democracy on the region or, more cynically, that the anarchic Balkanization of Iraq was an acceptable or even desireable outcome. Wilson feels it is feasible to see Iraq as on the brink of fragmentation and factional civil war. The situation requires multilateralism, reconstruction, and a reasonable approach to the Israeli-Palestinian situation. “But before we can hope to win back international trust or start down a truly new path in Iraq, the administration has to start playing it straight, with the American people and with the world. Recent administration statements, including the president’s speech, suggest that it still prefers to live in a fantasy world.” San Jose Mercury News op-ed

*Related: Iraqi police ready to turn guns on US troops:

“Iraqi policemen declared themselves holy warriors yesterday and vowed to take revenge for the deaths of their comrades in the town where ten police and a security guard were killed on Friday in the worst ‘friendly fire’ incident of the Iraq conflict. ‘I am full of hatred for the Americans and I am ready to kill them,’ said Arkan Adanan, who was injured in the shoulder early on Friday morning when US troops poured rifle and machinegun fire into three police vehicles that were chasing suspected bandits.

‘All Fallujah people are Mujahidin and they care only about killing Americans. We don’t care about their powerful weapons, because we know that if we die we will become martyrs.'” Times of London

“Film buffs have compiled a list of the 50 sexiest movie moments of all time that do not actually feature sex” as well as the biggest dud sex scenes on celluloid. Herald Sun

As the groundswell of concern about the USA PATRIOT Act (UPA) continues to mount and Ashcroft bullies and ridicules anyone who dares to criticize it, even staunch opponents of the UPA may have only a vague understanding of its provisions. (Some have said that understanding it requires you to be a constitutional law expert.) I have found it useful, and others might, to go back to this cogent analysis of USA PATRIOT Act from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), dating from Halloween, 2001, in the immediate aftermath of the bill’s enactment. Essentially, the EFF gives you a primer on electronic surveillance under U.S. law and how it is expanded, with corresponding abatement of protections for the public, under the UPA.

Turning a blind eye to proposed political assassination. Guardian/UK

“You probably think you know Paul Krugman, the liberal New York Times columnist with never a kind word for George Bush. Think again.

Is Krugman merely someone who dislikes Bush and thinks his policies are horribly misguided? Oh no. In fact, in his most recent book, The Great Unraveling, he makes it clear that he thinks it’s much, much worse than that.” CalPundit

“Jupiter or Mars-like planets beyond our Solar System may be serious contenders for harbouring life, says a British astrophysicist.

According to Professor Tim Naylor, of Exeter University, planets that do not resemble home should not be ruled out in the search for primitive lifeforms.

If we can find life at the extremes of Earth where thermophiles are, then it could be that life could get a foot hold on the giant exoplanets that we’ve discovered

Tim Naylor, Exeter University

He is calling on biologists to draw up new parameters for extra-terrestrial life using their knowledge of the toughest organisms on Earth.

Microbes which thrive in boiling hot springs or in volcanic vents are stretching the limits of conditions that can support life.” BBC

Everybody has heard by now that he is apparently in the race as the tenth announced Democratic contender. This is making the rounds as well — Michael Moore’s enumeration of the reasons he thinks Clark is just the guy to beat Bush:

In addition to being first in your class at West Point, a four star general from Arkansas, and the former Supreme Commander of NATO — enough right there that should give pause to any peace-loving person — I have discovered that…

1. You oppose the Patriot Act and would fight the expansion of its powers.

2. You are firmly pro-choice.

3. You filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in support of the University of Michigan’s affirmative action case.

4. You would get rid of the Bush tax “cut” and make the rich pay their fair share.

5. You respect the views of our allies and want to work with them and with the rest of the international community.

6. And you oppose war. You have said that war should always be the “last resort” and that it is military men such as yourself who are the most for peace because it is YOU and your soldiers who have to do the dying. You find something unsettling about a commander-in-chief who dons a flight suit and pretends to be Top Gun, a stunt that dishonored those who have died in that flight suit in the service of their country.

Moore may be getting carried away by his wishfulness about beating the Bushes. I think it is a reach on Moore’s part to call Clark an antiwar candidate. Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve known antiwar candidates, and Wesley Clark isn’t one. The line about military men being inherently for peace is an easy bit of rhetoric for them to spout as they go about their business, and Clark has hardly been a vocal. visible opponent of the Iraqi intervention from its inception. The domestic policy points he scores with Moore, likewise, may be politically opportunistic. In choosing to enter the race as a Democrat at the point where Bush has his lowest poll ratings since 9-11, one would want to ‘assume the positions’ that best differentiate oneself from the failing president, wouldn’t one? I will give him one point for internationalism, which represents a credible commitment on his part forged in the fires of his NATO commandership and Kosovo. He gets a half each for his affirmative action and pro-choice stands, which are abit overdetermined and less courageous for a modern Democratic wannabe to take.

Turning to perhaps a more sober appraisal of the significance of Clark’s entrance into the race, Josh Marshall points out that political outsiders and late entrants usually don’t win, but that this is anything but business as usual. He thinks Dean’s frontrunner status won’t cut the mustard for long because his folksy social liberalism and unwavering antiwar stance won’t appeal to the swing voters the Democrats will need. Marshall says there is a large void no one has managed to fill to the right of Dean, and he will be watching how Clark does with fundraising, dealing with the temperamental and capricious press, assembling a team around him, and dealing with whatever the other nine candidates dish out. By the way, the word is that Clark has “prior commitments” that will keep him out of at least one of the upcoming Democratic candidate debates. One might argue that these are useless exercises until the field thins somewhat, but his absence might be interpreted as reinforcing the impression that Clark does not have well-formulated positions on domestic issues yet (if ever…). On the other hand, he did study economics, philosophy and politics at Oxford, and later teach economic policy at West Point, so he is not likely to be pig-ignorant on domestic issues…

After watching the debut of K Street the other night on HBO, at this point I would almost rather know what political consultants Clark is hiring. A joke, but if you believe everything you see on TV, the docufictional version of James Carville was responsible for the single best line of the campaign so far, when Dean quipped during the second debate last week that “(i)f the percent of minorities that’s in your state had anything to do with how you can connect with African- American voters, then Trent Lott would be Martin Luther King,”

Here’s an informative interview with Clark by NPR’s The Connection host Dick Gordon from last week [thanks, miguel] Clark defends his lack of political experience to Gordon by arguing that his command was like governing a small city. Let us hope that we should not take that to mean that his only template for governing a larger constituency would be military command. Former Pentagon associates have been known to characterize Clark as imperious and arrogant, not exactly Presidential material (although all bets are off when you look at the character attributes of the current occupant of the White House, of course).

For my own part, I’m desperately hoping that Clark’s entry into the race is as much about having heard Dean’s reported offer to join his ticket as the vice presidential candidate (although Dean is just the guy to have a woman as a running mate) as it is a spoiler presidential run. Having Clark as a v-p candidate would cetainly broaden the spectrum of Dean’s appeal, although that tactic in ticket-building may be out of favor in recent presidential races. In any case, one can wish that both of them, as well as the other eight, keep their eyes on the prize, which is saving the country from Junior and his henchmen. This will take civility and consensus above and beyond business as usual in primary season; probably too much to wish, I think it would require the Ten subordinating their grandiose personal ambitions to the establishment of an authentic robust meaningful opposition party in this country. I was hopeful at the time of the first debate but the true, carping, backstabbing, Senatorial characters particularly of Kerry and Lieberman began to emerge even by the time of the second outing last week. I cling to the hope that the Democrats, unlike Marshall’s prediction, have the courage and integrity to present themselves as a truely distinct progressive opposition rather than trying to attract the ‘swing voters’ with a kinder-gentler-Republican-clone pitch. And, while we’re on the topic of the crucial significance of the swing vote, consider for a moment the spoiler role of the Green vote in the 2000 election. With the possible exception of Kucinich, Dean is the only candidate who stands a chance of melding the Green vote into a facet of a Democratic majority voting bloc. Can you seen the Greens under any circumstances going Democratic on behalf of a Wesley Clark candidacy? Not likely, no matter how passionate the Michael Moores become…

Top 10 Signs Your Neighbor is Brainwashed. — Maureen Farrell, buzzflash

Uh oh, Judith Miller is at it again, describing administration allegations that Syria has an ambitious program to develop ‘unconventional weapons’, supports terrorism, and is behind at least some of the attacks on US troops occupying Iraq. NY Times Miller, of course, came under fire for her amazingly credulous reporting on Iraqi WMD, using dubious sources in the Iraqi exile community and the State Dept., as Josh Marshall reminds us here.

Specify an emotional and stylistic tone and you’ll be offered a list of novels which match your stipulations.

“CNN’s top war correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, says that the press muzzled itself during the Iraq war. And, she says CNN ‘was intimidated’ by the Bush administration and Fox News, which ‘put a climate of fear and self-censorship.’

As criticism of the war and its aftermath intensifies, Amanpour joins a chorus of journalists and pundits who charge that the media largely toed the Bush administrationline in covering the war and, by doing so, failed to aggressively question the motives behind the invasion.

On last week’s Topic A With Tina Brown on CNBC, Brown, the former Talk magazine editor, asked comedian Al Franken, former Pentagon spokeswoman Torie Clarke and Amanpour if ‘we in the media, as much as in the administration, drank the Kool-Aid when it came to the war.’

Said Amanpour: ‘I think the press was muzzled, and I think the press self-muzzled. I’m sorry to say, but certainly television and, perhaps, to a certain extent, my station was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News. And it did, in fact, put a climate of fear and self-censorship, in my view, in terms of the kind of broadcast work we did.'” USA Today [via truthout]

Phrases, sayings, quotes and cliches, with their meanings and origins.:

“Looking for the meaning or origin of a phrase or saying? Here’s free access to:

• A list of the meanings and origins of over 1,000 phrases, sayings, quotes and cliches in English. You can either browse via our A-Z Index or scan with our search engine. Whether you want to resolve a friendly argument over how a phrase originated or whether you just enjoy words, you’ll probably find something here to interest you.
  
• A Discussion Forum where you can discuss the meanings and origins of phrases or sayings with the people who know. Use the current forum to ask a question or post a reply. There’s also an archive of more than 22,000 postings that you can browse or search.”

Spy on anyone just by sending them an e-Greeting Card. “Receive email reports of their e-mails, ACTUAL passwords, Outlook Passwords, Chats, Web Sites Visited, Key strokes, Files, Webcam, More… Through our service, you compose and send your lover a normal-looking “Greeting Card” saying “I Love you” or a similar message. Because the e-mail appears to be a regular greeting card, the recipient will open the e-card and LoverSpy will be automatically and silently installed!”

On this day in 1672 Anne Bradstreet, the first published poet of

the American colonies, died. Many of her poems are conventional,

but others have personality and a New World edge: “I am obnoxious

to each carping tongue, / Who sayes, my hand a needle better

fits….” Such lines inspired John Berryman to “Homage to

Mistress Bradstreet,” the collection that brought his first fame. Today in Literature

Dream Song 1
John Berryman

Huffy Henry hid the day,

unappeasable Henry sulked.

I see his point,–a trying to put things over.

It was the thought that they thought

they could do it made Henry wicked & away.

But he should have come out and talked.

All the world like a woolen lover

once did seem on Henry’s side.

Then came a departure.

Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.

I don’t see how Henry, pried

open for all the world to see, survived.

What he has now to say is a long

wonder the world can bear & be.

Once in a sycamore I was glad

all at the top, and I sang.

Hard on the land wears the strong sea

and empty grows every bed.

Report: Defense to Get $23.2 Billion: ‘ “Black,” or classified, programs requested in President Bush’s 2004 defense budget are at the highest level since 1988, according to a report prepared by the independent Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

(…)

“It’s puzzling. It sets the mind to wondering where the money’s going and what sort of politically controversial things the administration is doing because they’re not telling anybody,” said John E. Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a research group in Alexandria that has been critical of the administration’s defense priorities.

Pike said part of the surge in the classified budget probably can be explained by increases for the Central Intelligence Agency’s covert action programs, which are central to the war on terrorism. Traditionally, Pike said, much of the funding for the CIA is hidden in Air Force weapons procurement accounts.

But unlike the 1980s, when it was widely known that the “black” budget was going to the development of stealth aircraft such as the B-2 bomber and F-117 fighter, the uses of the classified accounts today are far murkier, Pike said.’ Washington Post

Sorry, Dr. Rice, postwar Germany was nothing like Iraq. The administration rewrites history to excuse the Iraq debacle. I have nothing else to say about this incredible story except that it is a wonder they think they can get away with such baldfaced lies. They insult either their own intelligence or, more likely, that of the American public. Slate

Report: Defense to Get $23.2 Billion: ‘ “Black,” or classified, programs requested in President Bush’s 2004 defense budget are at the highest level since 1988, according to a report prepared by the independent Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

(…)

“It’s puzzling. It sets the mind to wondering where the money’s going and what sort of politically controversial things the administration is doing because they’re not telling anybody,” said John E. Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a research group in Alexandria that has been critical of the administration’s defense priorities.

Pike said part of the surge in the classified budget probably can be explained by increases for the Central Intelligence Agency’s covert action programs, which are central to the war on terrorism. Traditionally, Pike said, much of the funding for the CIA is hidden in Air Force weapons procurement accounts.

But unlike the 1980s, when it was widely known that the “black” budget was going to the development of stealth aircraft such as the B-2 bomber and F-117 fighter, the uses of the classified accounts today are far murkier, Pike said.’ Washington Post

“Research into how people recognize emotion has identified a brain region that seems to be involved in the perception of anger. It could be part of an extended circuit of specialized emotion-response areas, suggest the investigators.

There are a limited number of emotional facial expressions that are recognized by cultures throughout the world – the so-called universal emotions of sadness, disgust, fear, anger and happiness.

‘The fact that they are universally recognized suggests some element of ‘genetic homogeneity’,’ said Andy Calder, research scientist at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK. That is, all human brains may have an innate ability to recognize these emotions laid down by the genes.” BioMedNet The region, the ventral striatum, was identified by noting that patients who had suffered strokes particularly affecting that region had difficulty recognizing angry facial expressions in others. While the article does not discuss this, other brain regions in nondominant temporo-parietal areas relate to recognition of an angry tone of voice in spoken communication.

An Empirical Analysis for Social Scientists by Imants Baruss: Book review: “In Alterations of Consciousness, ImantsBaruss, a psychology professor, examines consciousness, an intriguing and controversial subject in cognitive science. He discusses eight different states of consciousness: wakefulness, sleep, dreaming, hypnosis, trance, chemically induced alterations, transcendent states, and experiences associated with death. His approach is multifaceted, and it features three perspectives (physiological, cognitive and experiential) as frameworks for understanding the study of consciousness. Even though the narrative is slanted towards the experiential viewpoint, Baruss manages to organize these different perspectives into an appealing mosaic of research findings and related commentaries…” mentalhelp.net

Book review: Psi Wars by James Alcock, Jean Burns and Anthony Freeman:

“It’s late in the evening, the drink has been flowing, and the conversation veers towards the weird. Is telepathy possible? Does astrology work? You know the kind of stuff. Cue the ritual slanging match between the wide-eyed credulist (‘Well, it works for me’) and the sceptic (‘There’s not a shred of scientific evidence’).

Those who loathe such exchanges because of their sterile predictability now have a powerful antidote in this authoritative and accessible review of the state of scientific research into paranormal phenomena, based on a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies. Almost all of the pieces are written by university academics with a track record of peer-reviewed research, and they cover paranormal phenomena thought by some to cast light on human consciousness, primarily telepathy (communication between minds), psychokinesis (affecting objects with the mind) and astrology (celestial effects on the mind).” New Scientist

A user’s guide to thought-sampling: “The investigation of daydreaming provides a unique set of challenges to the would be researcher, but also is an invaluable source of novel evidence on existing psychological problems. This article will provide a summary of the problems that face an experimenter when attempting to sample inner experience and the different methods that people have used to overcome them. In the second half, this article will describe how in the future, the investigation of daydreams may help address important issues, both practical and theoretical, in the attempt to understand how the brain generates conscious awareness.” Science And Consciousness Review

“UK psychologists are to advise the Portuguese police on how best to handle England’s football fans during Euro 2004…” BBC News

Self-harm is increasing among adolescents and the age of onset is dropping to the point where children as young as six are cutting or burning themselves. ER staffs believe they are seeing a drastic increase in the frequency of adolescents and pre-adolescents presenting with self-harm. A recent study by the Samaritans concluded that 1:10 adolescents had deliberately cut themselves at one time or another; girls are almost four times as likely as boys to do so; and that less than 1:7 self-harm victims present for medical care.

As much as envisioning this epidemic of self-inflicted injury makes most people cringe, some mental health professionals suggest that it is not as abnormal as it sounds and not necessarily a sign of mental illness. Self-inflicted injury, one psychiatrist interviewed suggests, may serve to:

• release tension to cope with an unpleasant situation, e.g. because physical pain is more bearable than emotional
  
• impose the illusion of control over uncontrollable externally-imposed pain
  
• validate or demonstrate internal suffering with external evidence
  

Images of self-harm are all around us, particularly in religious iconography. Christianity is founded on the notion that Christ suffered for the world’s sins and there have been sects which practised self-flagellation and mutilation throughout history. Pain and the spilling of our own blood are seen as ways of cleansing ourselves. Likewise, when teenagers cut themselves they often say it is a release, a way of punishing themselves or others.

As a psychiatrist, I agree with the notion of self-harm as a culturally-conditioned coping strategy rather than necessarily a manifestation of a mental illness. Although it occurs in the setting of mental distress, it often should not be a focus of treatment in itself. The mental health field as a whole, however, has not been thoughtful about this distinction. Because it seems to many such a crazy, abhorrent thing to do, those who do it must necessarily be crazy. The adolescent psychiatric units are full of girls who have been hospitalized after an assessment from some ER that has gone no deeper than establishing that they have cut themselves superficially; the rationale for locking them up is, broadly, that they are ‘a danger to themselves’. No distinction is drawn between self-cutters and those who truly need hospitalization because of dangerousness to self, i.e. those with suicidal intent. To be fair, self-harm without intent to end one’s life can, of course, result in severe injury or death by miscalculating or overzealous efforts, especially while intoxicated, but self-cutting is usually quite superficial. It is easy to draw blood or induce pain without doing severe or lasting damage…

But when I suggest to crisis teams, parents or other inpatient mental health professionals that self-harm does not necessarily threaten the perpetrator’s life, that it is probably the best way of coping the person can manage for the moment (although, of course, we would like to help them develop better coping strategies in the long run), that in and of itself does not warrant hospitalization, and that we would need to formulate the continued need for hospitalization, if there is any, in terms of targeting underlying distress which the self-harm is addressing, rather than the self-harm itself, I get blank uncomprehending stares in return. Hospitalizing and diagnosing girls who cut themselves is often not doing them any favors, for a number of reasons including pathologizing them in their own and their families’ eyes, teaching them maladaptive coping strategies, reinforcing pathological dependency, allowing regression, etc., as well as reinforcing the impression that it is the self-injury, rather than another more far-reaching way of conceptualizing their difficulty, that should be the focus of ongoing therapy. With the epidemic presentation of self-harm, a further factor is that the ERs (which are motivated to hospitalize all potentially self-injurious patients rather than accept the liability of doing a possibly inaccurate assessment of actual risk) and the hospitals (which often accept all referrals in order to keep bed occupancy rates up for fiscal reasons)

Self-harm may be increasing in incidence, or we may just be becoming more aware of it. I suspect the former, and that it has something to do with the failure of more robust coping skills as the social fabric erodes and young people attempt to deal with their distress in more solitary ways. Peer pressure may play a role as well; research has established that people who self-cut are more likely to have friends or family members who do so as well, although that might not necessarily reflect social contagion as the possibility that self-injury clusters in communities because of shared sociocultural conditions.

I have also heard several other explanations of their self-harm from patients who perform it. Some feel self-injury satisfies a need to punish themselves for guilt over imagined transgressions. Some feel numb or dead and inflicting pain or seeing blood is a way to feel alive, better than feeling nothing at all. Some have an obverse motivation; they feel too much and inflicting injury is numbing. Self-abuse is intimately associated with a history of abuse and the psychiatric conditions that abuse engenders, including PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and borderline personality disorder. If the incidence of self-abuse is increasing, or if we are becoming more aware of it, that may have soemthing to do wtih the commensurate increase in sexual abuse of girls or in societal awareness of it.

Boston psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, who has made his career of the study of victims of extensive psychological trauma (sexually abused children as well as combat trauma veterans), has integrated a sophisticated neurobiological explanation with the coping strategy model. He says that, at the times of their exposure to extreme stress, the brains of trauma sufferers were bathed in high levels of endogenous opiates (“endorphins”) released as part of the body’s acute coping mechanism (this is the well-known reason for the oft-cited observation that people don’t feel pain from even extensive injuries until later). With repeated trauma, their brains get used to such high levels of endorphins and are, in effect, addicted to their own endogenous opiates. Soem of the post-traumatic manifestations may be interpretable as a perennial state of withdrawal from that addiction, and some of the patients’ actions as attempts to restimulate such bursts of endorphin release to deal with the dysphoria from that withdrawal state. Risk-taking activity and self-abuse, both common in patients with PTSD, are both ways to stimulate such endorphin release. PTSD sufferers also have a proclivity for the abuse of (external) substances as well, which may function in a similar way.

Consistent with this model, I and other psychiatrists have had some success blocking self-harm, in patients who are motivated to stop doing so, by giving opiate-blocking agents that stop the satisfaction from the putative endorphin release, as part of a more comprehensive thearpy program to deal with the sequelae of traumatic experiences. If the self-harm is a strategy to stress conditioned by the reinforcement of the endorphin release, the opiate blockers stop any further reinforcement of this effect and gradually allow the motivated patient to give up the strategy. Consistent with this model, it only works if the patient wants to give up the strategy, usually at a point in their treatment that they are able to mobilize other stress coping techniques and can give up their reliance on one that their families, friends, treaters and society at large finds so alien, disturbing and abhorrent.

“The test can objectively gauge how much pain someone is feeling, claims its UK inventor, but others are sceptical.” New Scientist

“Learning disabilities result from general problems in the brain rather than specific genetic or neurological defects, the British Association Festival of Science in Salford was told on Tuesday.

A large but unidentified group of genes, each with very small effects on overall brain function, work together to determine most of mental ability, says Robert Plomin, at the Institute of Psychiatry in London.

If Plomin’s theory proves correct, common learning disabilities such as dyslexia will need a dramatic redefinition. Dyslexia is commonly defined as a reading problem in someone who has otherwise normal intelligence.

In fact, Plomin disputes the idea of learning disabilities at all, saying instead that these people simply fall at the lower end of the spectrum of cognitive ability.” New Scientist

“The number of those wounded in action, which totals 1,124 since the war began in March, has grown so large, and attacks have become so commonplace, that U.S. Central Command usually issues news releases listing injuries only when the attacks kill one or more troops. The result is that many injuries go unreported.” Washington Post

I’m dubious about the stated extent of the evacuation in this World Socialist Web Site article, but it is a useful update on the mysterious pneumonia felling Iraqi GIs about which I posted items here several months ago. Soldiers continue to die, and speculation is centering on inhalation of depleted uranium particles and complications of the anthrax vaccine.

“Did the government let bin Laden’s trail go cold?” — Jane Mayer, The New Yorker

Mr. President, Meet the Press — Al Hunt, Wall Street Journal

“The forthcoming President Bush aviator doll is a satirist’s dream. But are Americans still too frightened to laugh at their leader?” — David Hyde, Salon

“A source close to Wesley Clark rates the probability that Clark will run for president at ’90 percent.’” — Joe Conason, Salon

“A tiny cloud of sodium atoms has been chilled to within half a billionth of a degree of absolute zero.” New Scientist

“A lot of the bad things that happen online are preventable. Intelligent use of the Internet is the answer. But there are plenty of dopes out there who don’t have a clue. Should we require Internet users to be licensed?” Wired News

Richard Forno: “Dostoevsky once wrote that ‘in the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, ‘Make us your slaves, but feed us.’ His prophecy is relevant when examining the modern Information Age — a dark, corporate-controlled society predicted by such artistic legends as Bruce Sterling, George Lucas, Ridley Scott, and William Gibson – and is the focus of this article.”

Also abit belated, I wanted to note (with a sigh of relief?) ‘father of the H-bomb’ Edward Teller’s death at 95. The physicist was a Hungarian whose flight from Hitler may have shaped him into an incessant proponent of an endless destabilizing arms race; he was considered a dangerous hawk even by most of his nuclear-weapons-development cronies. His star remained prominent with rightwing American administrations; most recently, he helped to persuade Reagan to commit to the harebrained Starwars scheme that lives on as the current administration’s National Missile Defense strategy. To be fair, he regretted the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, favoring inviting the Japanese to a cautionary demonstration explosion first.