Solar Storm Hits Earth

Posted on 29 Oct 03 by FmH

“The most powerful geomagnetic storm possible walloped the Earth early Wednesday, knocking out some airline communications but apparently causing no large power outages or other major problems.

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The storm, the most disruptive to hit Earth since 1989, was unleashed by the fourth-most powerful solar flare ever seen, NASA said.” —New York Times I can’t tell you how disappointed I am at the cloudy, rainy skies over the northeast after hearing that the solar storm might cause auroral displays as far south as the U.S. middle latitudes; seeing the aurora has been one of the most eerie and magical pleasures of my life…

R.I.P. Garrett Hardin

Posted on 29 Oct 03 by FmH

Ecologist Who Warned About Excesses is Dead at 88: “Garrett Hardin, an ecologist and author who warned of the dangers of overpopulation and whose concept of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ brought attention to the damage that innocent actions by individuals can inflict on the environment, died at his home in Santa Barbara, Calif., on Sept. 14. He was 88.

He and his wife, Jane, 81, committed suicide, said their son David.

Dr. Hardin, who suffered from a heart disorder, and his wife, who had Lou Gehrig’s disease, were members of End-of-Life Choices, formerly known as the Hemlock Society.”

Barbie The Hot Pagan Witch

Posted on 29 Oct 03 by FmH

It’s the bimbo blond doll’s latest Wicca-like incarnation, ready to “poison” young girls’ minds: “Listen up, naughty girls.

Do you long to be an ‘ordinary schoolgirl’ by day who ‘transforms at night’ into some sort of scary pink-robed glittery giggly perky blond pseudo-witch ‘magical enchantress’ thing, perusing your ‘book of spells’ with its plethora of ‘mysterious compartments’ that ‘hold your secrets,’ along with recipes for concocting real potions ‘you can actually drink?’

You do? Well Jesus with an orgasmic wolf howl and some heavy goth eyeliner, are you ever in luck.

Because just in time for Halloween and just in time to make a few thousand hyper-Christian parental brows furrow with consternation and spiritual constipation, and just in time to make any true Wiccan roll her eyes and flick this story away like so much bad juju, here comes Secret Spells Barbie.” — Mark Morford, SF Chronicle

A Cultural Scorecard Says West Is Ahead

Posted on 28 Oct 03 by FmH

“As the author of ‘Losing Ground’ (1984), which argued that social programs do more harm than good, and then, with Richard J. Herrnstein, of ‘The Bell Curve’ (1994), which theorized a genetic basis for class and IQ differences between blacks and whites, (Charles) Murray has repeatedly managed what for a scholar is too rare a feat to be entirely accidental: to capture the national spotlight by arousing public ire. Is it any surprise that his latest book seems intended to inflame passions once again?

Published on Oct. 21 by HarperCollins and accompanied by a publicity release optimistically anointing it ‘his most ambitious and controversial work yet,’ ‘Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950’ is well timed to stir debate. At a moment of considerable East-West tension, when the phrase ‘clash of civilizations’ has rarely had greater currency, Mr. Murray has issued what he says is a mathematically precise global assessment of human achievement, a ‘résumé’ of the species in which Europeans like Shakespeare, Beethoven and Einstein predominate and in which Christianity stands out as a crucial spur to excellence. Equally provocative, he maintains that the rate of Western accomplishment is currently in decline.” —New York Times

The Anger Management Industry

Posted on 28 Oct 03 by FmH

Calming Courses on the Rise, But Do They Work? “Anger management is a thriving industry in the United States. It is the subject of hundreds of books, workshops and videos. Across the nation, judges are now sending thousands of people to take anger management programs instead of serving jail time. And yet, as NPR’s Robert Siegel, host of All Things Considered, discovers, there is no national criteria, no oversight and no evaluation of the efficacy of these programs.

Siegel’s radio piece is punctuated by several outbursts of anger from celebrities. Listen to the outbursts and see if you can match the rant with the person below…” —NPR

Gadget may wreak traffic havoc

Posted on 28 Oct 03 by FmH

“In-car device lets drivers change stoplights; officials fear gridlock, seek to block signal:

Tired of sitting at endless red lights? Frustrated by lights that turn from green to red too quickly, trapping you in traffic?

Now anyone can breeze through congested intersections just like the police, thanks to a $300 dashboard device that changes traffic lights from red to green, making nasty commutes a thing of the past and leaving other drivers open-mouthed at your ability to manipulate traffic.

But what if everyone had one?

That’s the fear of traffic control officials, who believe chaos would take over the roads. That’s also the potential facing communities from Troy to Washington Township as Internet-marketed knockoffs of the device — originally intended only for police and fire vehicles — have become available to the public.

The knockoffs have traffic engineers investigating whether lockout measures will work against the copycats and whether hundreds of thousands of dollars in traffic technology investments will become obsolete.

Police are worried about the possibility of intersection chaos if people duel over control for lights. But even more fundamentally, the dashboard device may be impossible to detect even from a police car right next to it, and it may be perfectly legal anyway.”

Drug Test

Posted on 27 Oct 03 by FmH

The author, an amateur endurance athlete with a deep curiosity about the abuse of drugs in sports, explores the issue in a fascinating, in-depth, first-person account of eight months doping interspersed with the history of chemical cheating in athletic competition. Where athletes score, what the drugs feel like, the inconsistent controls on doping in amateur sport, the risks to one’s health, the seamy world of doctors who get rich ‘treating’ where there is no ailment (except normal aging or poor athletic performance)…

Throughout this experiment, I’d been e-mailing people whom I’d encountered on various Web sites, like Extreme-Athlete.com, where steroid users get together and compare notes. That night I went to one of the bodybuilding sites I’d joined and listed what I was taking: the HGH, the testosterone, the EPO, and now the Deca. I thought I was really pushing the limits, but, tellingly, I was immediately mocked for my timidity and puny dosages.

“Dude, why not just take aspirin?” wrote a guy who called himself the Great One. “Try like 600 milligrams of test and 400 to 600 of Deca a week, girlie boy. And what’s with this human growth stuff? My mom takes that. Why not Dianabol?” he wrote, referring to a particularly potent anabolic steroid. “You afraid of getting strong?”

It was standard practice on these sites to close messages with a quote or a quip like “I may die, but they’ll need a big coffin.” —Outside [via boing boing]

Intriguing and scary.

Enabling Historical Revisionism, Abusing the Public Trust:

Posted on 27 Oct 03 by FmH

The DNC’s weblog, Kicking Ass, notes:

Via Atrios, we see that the White House has edited its website to keep search engines from archiving pages on Iraq.

First, a bit of technical background. Most major websites include a text file named robots.txt that tells search engines which directories not to include in search results. (Here’s an example: the Democrats.org robots.txt file lists folders with content — like images — that search engines can’t index.) By adding a directory to robots.txt, you ensure that nothing in that folder will ever show up in a Google search and — more important for this discussion — never be archived by sites like Google.

Sometime between April 2003 and October 2003, someone at the White House added virtually all of the directories with “Iraq” in them to its robots.txt file, meaning that search engines would no longer list those pages in results or archive them.

And Dan Gillmor comments:

Perhaps the White House doesn’t want to make it easy for people to compare its older statements about Iraq with current realities — though that doesn’t explain why the pages are searchable on the White House site itself. Maybe, then, the White House wants to know who’s looking for these things (e.g. by tracking IP addresses of people who query the government site).

Either way, the blocking of search engines is a bad idea, and fundamentally an abuse of the public trust.

What should be done about this? I’d suggest a manual-labor cooperative, of people willing to download the daily feed from the White House, mirror it and ensure that people can search without having their IP addresses logged. If you have a better idea, post a comment.

But Kicking Ass itself has a plausible explanation:

It’s easy enough to understand the reasoning if you look at past White House actions. Earlier this year, the White House revised pages on its website claiming that “combat” was over in Iraq, changing them to say “major combat.”

One of the reasons some alert readers noticed the change — and were able to prove it — was that Google had archived the pages before the change occurred. Now that all of the White House pages about Iraq are no longer archived by Google, such historical revisionism will be harder to catch.

Bottled New Car Smell Does Exist!

Posted on 27 Oct 03 by FmH

New Luxury-Car Specifications: Styling. Performance. Aroma. “For Cadillac, the new-car smell, that ethereal scent of factory freshness, is no longer just a product of chance.

General Motors recently revealed that its Cadillac division had engineered a scent for its vehicles and had been processing it into the leather seats. The scent — sort of sweet, sort of subliminal — was created in a lab, was picked by focus groups and is now the aroma of every new Cadillac put on the road.” —New York Times

Muslim paranoia: Enemies made us impotent!

Posted on 27 Oct 03 by FmH

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Steyn tries to get a chuckle out of the following story. As you’ll see, it turns out remarkably forced, ignorant and culturally insensitive.

“Last month mass hysteria apparently swept the capital city, Khartoum, after reports that foreigners were shaking hands with Sudanese men and causing their penises to disappear. One victim, a fabric merchant, told his story to the London Arabic newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi. A man from West Africa came into the shop and ‘shook the store owner’s hand powerfully until the owner felt his penis melt into his body.'”

Steyn’s interest seems to be primarily to lampoon Islamic ignorance, but the report from Khartoum is a classic description of a poignant ‘culture-bound syndrome’ called koro. First described among the Malay and southern Chinese (where it is known as suk-yeong), it is, according to psychiatrist Heinz Lehmann (1911-99) in his time-honored chapter on ‘Unusual Psychiatric Disorders’ in Kaplan and Sadock’s authoritative Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry,

“an acute anxiety reaction characterized by the male patient’s desperate fear that his penis is shrinking and may disappear into his abdomen. Because this is a fairly widespread belief in those cultures in which the koro syndrome is observed, the patient’s family or friends who rush him to the doctor are usually very disturbe about this danger. Almost invariably the affected person has secured a strong physical hold on his penis, sometimes by tying a ribbon around it or by clamping it into a wooden box.”

It has occasionally been described among Western patients as well. Lehmann, who considered koro to be a “unique example of a depersonalization syndrome affecting the integrity of the body-image,” described an epidemic-like mass outbreak of koro in Thailand in his chapter, although noting that cases are usually sporadic and isolated. Steyn’s description notes that the panic in Sudan has been facilitated by text messaging and cell phone communication, and one might expect culture-bound syndromes to be more readily transmitted in a society where indigenous beliefs coexist with modern mass communications.

As someone who transitioned from cross-cultural anthropology to clinical psychiatry, I was fascinated by the culture-specific psychiatric syndromes and did some of my early writing and teaching on them. FmH seems sometime to be an attempt to grapple with the remarkable barriers to communication across the gulfs between individual ‘cultures’ in an atomized society. Which makes me wonder — in lampooning Steyn’s ignorance, am I being ignorant and culturally insensitive about a culture-bound syndrome — American jingoist journalist arrogant xenophobia? We could call it the AJJAX syndrome for short. Does this poignant thought disorder deserve the same compassion due to the Sudanese men affected by koro? I certainly find it laughable… and scary.

Nominative Determinism?

Posted on 27 Oct 03 by FmH

I first heard of this concept through the wonderful Feedback column in the backmatter of New Scientist, which collects examples of people whose circumstances seem coincidentally appropriate to their names. This is related (emphasis added):

“OAKLAND — A 23-year-old Garrett County woman charged in connection with a fatal drunken driving accident nine days ago was arrested again early Friday for alleged drunken driving.

Julie Marie Jenkins of Accident was arrested at 2:30 a.m. by Garrett County deputies after she was reportedly observed weaving back and forth and crossing the center line of U.S. Route 219 just north of Oakland while operating a 1998 Dodge truck.” —Reuters

‘Smart stamps’ next in war on terrorism

Posted on 27 Oct 03 by FmH

“Sending an anonymous love letter or an angry note to your congressman? The U.S. Postal Service will soon know who you are.

Beginning with bulk or commercial mail, the Postal Service will require ‘enhanced sender identification’ for all discount-rate mailings, according to the notice published in the Oct. 21 Federal Register. The purpose of identifying senders is to provide a more efficient tracking system, but more importantly, to ‘facilitate investigations into the origin of suspicious mail.’ ” —The Washington Times

The First Law of Psychology is the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Posted on 27 Oct 03 by FmH

The Energetic Evolutionary Model of the Mind and the Generation of Human Psychological Phenomena (abstract). Peggy La Cerra, of the Center for Evolutionary Neuroscience in Ojai, CA, mounts an energetic (pun intended) challenge to evolutionary theory and, in particular, evolutionary psychology. She argues that traits cannot be selected for merely by their adaptive value but rather on the more complicated basis of a balance between their adaptive value and their energetic costs. The origin of the mind is largely that of a mechanism to assess the energetic viability of a behavioral strategy. In simple terms, it is sensible not to do everything that would be good for oneself if it is too costly…

The Elusive Butterfly

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

I am indebted to wood s lot for pointing me to this fascinating piece by Brown University anthropologist William Beeman about the significance of the curious fact that the word for “butterfly” is different in nearly every language, even closely related European ones. (The article has a broad lsting of how you say “butterfly” in numerous European and non-European tongues; see for yourself.)

“I later found that the “butterfly problem” is one of those linguistic curiosities that has lurked at the edges of scholarship for some time without much in the way of a full research effort–the linguistic equivalent of the study of yawning by biomedical researchers.”

Beeman finds that the terms for butterfly usually

“involve a degree of repetitious sound symbolism” and “use visual and auditory cultural metaphors to express the concept; …with the many cases of reiterated b’s, p’s, l’s and f’s (in widely separated language families) one can almost hear the gentle rustle of butterfly wings and see their repetitive motion.”

In the absence of a process of inheritance from a mother tongue or borrowing from a neighboring language, Beeman says that

“the linguistic realization for butterfly might be something welling up from the most basic cognitive creative processes.”

What is it about butterflies, however, that makes them worthy of such distinctive linguistic treatment? Beeman quotes sources which suggest that the butterfly is a uniquely powerful archetype of transformation, although he is not convinced, and concludes that the status of the butterfly in human linguistic cognition may well remain elusive and mysterious.

And here, also thanks to wood s lot, is a page with an extensive list of links to phonosemantics and linguistic iconism.

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Wow. In one of those synchronistic moments, soon after writing the above, someone (and I cannot for the moment reconstruct who it was) pointed me to these posters of letters and numbers found in the designs on the wings of butterflies, about which I have marvelled in the past (and occasionally given as presents). Even if it is a little forced — I would say something like, “Not only does the concept ‘butterfly’ enjoy distinctive human linguistic treatment but the butterfly apparently gives us a distinctive visual-linguistic treat” — such juxtapositions in FmH are so aesthetically pleasing to make…

Search Inside the Book

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

“A significant extension of (Amazon’s)… Look Inside the Book feature, Search Inside the Book allows you to search millions of pages to find exactly the book you want to buy. Now instead of just displaying books whose title, author, or publisher-provided keywords match your search terms, your search results will surface titles based on every word inside the book. Using Search Inside the Book is as simple as running an Amazon.com search.” —amazon.com

Why Not to Buy from the iTunes Store

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

“DRM is not designed with the ultimate intention of keeping audio and video and text files out of the hands of pirates and bootleggers. It’s designed with the sole intention of serializing content to owners and eliminating the legitimate business model of asset re-marketing.” —Ape Infinitum [via rc3]

Worms hold ‘eternal life’ secret

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

//newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/39485000/jpg/_39485121_elegans.jpg' cannot be displayed] “A tiny round worm can live six times longer than normal if certain genes and hormones are tweaked, according to a report in the journal Science.

The worms – Caenorhabditis elegans – had a metabolic hormone inhibited and their reproductive systems removed.

They went on to stay healthy and active for a human equivalent of 500 years, which is the longest life-span extension ever achieved by scientists. ” —BBC Are you up for it?

IQ Yo-Yo:

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

Test changes alter retardation diagnoses: “Since average scores on particular IQ tests rise a few points every 3 or 4 years, those tests become obsolete after a couple of decades. In order to reset the average score to 100, harder IQ tests are devised every 15 to 20 years.

Trickier tests have no practical impact on people who score within the normal IQ range of 90 to 110. But so-called renormed IQ tests create a yo-yo effect in the number of mental retardation placements in U.S. schools, a new study finds.

Rates of mental retardation among children appear to bottom out near the end of a particular test’s run, followed by a sharp rebound with the introduction of a tougher test, say Tomoe Kanaya, a graduate student at Cornell University, and her colleagues. Scores on the new test then increase over time, pulling many children from just below to just above the score of 70, which stands as the rough cutoff for mental retardation. That trend continues until the next test revision comes along.” —Science News

Unsolved Mystery

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

What Controls Variation in Human Skin Color?: “Diversity of human appearance and form has intrigued biologists for centuries, but nearly 100 years after the term genetics was coined by William Bateson in 1906, the genes that underlie this diversity are an unsolved mystery. One of the most obvious phenotypes that distinguish members of our species, differences in skin pigmentation, is also one of the most enigmatic. There is a tremendous range of human skin color in which variation can be correlated with climates, continents, and/or cultures, yet we know very little about the underlying genetic architecture. Is the number of common skin color genes closer to five, 50, or 500? Do gain- and loss-of-function alleles for a small set of genes give rise to phenotypes at opposite ends of the pigmentary spectrum? Has the effect of natural selection on similar pigmentation phenotypes proceeded independently via similar pathways? And, finally, should we care about the genetics of human pigmentation if it is only skin-deep?” —Public Library of Science

Free eBooks from Microsoft

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

Different offerings each week for free, when you download and install Microsoft Reader on a desktop or Pocket PC. The only itch is having to register your device with Microsoft.

Astronomers plan giant telescope

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

“US scientists have drawn up plans to build the largest telescope ever seen.

Its 30-metre-diameter mirror would be almost 10 times as big as those in the Keck telescopes in Hawaii, currently the world’s largest observatories.” —BBC If funded and without engineering glitches, the telescope, to be sited at anas-yet-undetermined location in Hawaii, Chile or Mexico, could see first light by 2012. There is also a more fanciful European Large Telescope Project planning a 100-meter ‘scope for a South American site.

Fishing captain kills shark with bare hands

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

“An Icelandic fishing captain, known as ‘the Iceman’ for his tough character, grabbed a 300 kg shark with his bare hands as it swam in shallow water towards his crew, a witness said today.

The skipper of the trawler ‘Erik the Red’ was on a beach in Kuummiit, east Greenland, watching his crew processing a catch when he saw the shark swimming towards the fish blood and guts – and his men.

Captain Sigurdur Petursson, known to locals as ‘the Iceman’, ran into the shallow water and grabbed the shark by its tail. He dragged it off to dry land and killed it with his knife.” —Sydney Morning Herald

Tibetan boy able to recite world’s longest poem after dream

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

“A 13-year-old Tibetan schoolboy has miraculously memorized large parts of the world’s longest poem after having had a mysterious dream.

Sitar Doje, a fifth-grader from Qamdo prefecture, had his dream two years ago and can now recite ‘The Life of King Gesar’ for up to six hours on end, the Xinhua news agency reported Wednesday.

The agency says Tibet has a long tradition of people waking from sleep inexplicably able to recite the poem from memory.” —Yahoo! News

Utopia theory

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

“Take a look at any issue of a physical-sciences journal in the past five years and you will see one such field staking its claim vigorously. Physics is muscling its way into social science. Not content with explaining the behaviour of atoms and electrons, semiconductors, sand and space-time, physicists are now setting out to understand the behaviour of people.” —PhysicsWeb

Video Games Will Calm Your Fears

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

“Regular, off-the-shelf computer video games are an effective method of treating people’s fears, using a style of therapy that exposes people to what scares them in a controlled setting, according to a new study released on Friday.” —Wired News

Keep on tracking

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

“Frank Kermode enjoys two investigations into the origins of our notion of infinity, Infinity by Brian Clegg and Everything and More by David Foster Wallace… ” —Guardian.UK

The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

John McWhorter, the richly opinionated linguist and controversialist, sets his sights in Doing Our Own Thing on what he (correctly) perceives as the decline of formality in certain aspects of American prose and speech — music, too, though on that subject he has little of interest to say — and the concomitant rise of “casual speech,” a legacy like so much else in our culture of the ’60s and its “mainstreaming of the counterculture.” —Washington Post

For most scholars, bad academic writing, like bad academic sex, doesn’t call for explanation — or argument.

It’s poor chemistry between writer and reader (pontificator and pontificatee, in the academic version), like lack of sizzle between jaded full professor and enthusiastic asst. prof. It’s failure of Interrogator A to make the noises and gestures that work for Hegemonized Reader B. It may be Defamiliarizer A’s clumsy attempt to shake up the ideological/emotional/instrumental reflexes of Overly Essentialized Reader B. It may be sheer incompetence at nouns, verbs, and adjectives….

The publication of Just Being Difficult?: Academic Writing in the Public Arena, edited by Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb (Stanford University Press), lets us address the more pressing pedagogical issue, and leave bad academic sex for the Human Resources Department. An anthology of essays by opponents of the Bad Academic Writing epithet (including two honored as leading darknesses of the notorious practice), this volume poses the question that could stop all “Writing Across the Disciplines” and comp classes in their tracks: When is bad writing not so bad, even if it’s terrible? —The Chronicle of Higher Education

After Theory…what?

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

“As an academic pursuit, cultural theory seems to be more popular today than ever. But according to After Theory, a new book by the prominent left-wing literary theorist Terry Eagleton, ‘the golden age of cultural theory is long past’. While cultural theory has run out of ideas, Eagleton argues that in the wake of 9/11 and the war on Iraq, ‘a new and ominous phase of global politics has now opened, which not even the most cloistered of academics will be able to ignore…

Eagleton is at his strongest when puncturing the pretensions of cultural theory, perhaps because he has spent so much of his career having to wade through this stuff. Complaining about the use of postmodern jargon, he argues that ‘to write in this way as a literary academic, someone who is actually paid for having among other things a certain flair and feel for language, is rather like being a myopic optician or a grossly obese ballet dancer’. Such quips also fill the pages of Eagleton’s Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Žižek and Others, published earlier in 2003 – in which he observes dryly that ‘post-colonial theory makes heavy weather of a respect for the Other, but its most immediate Other, the reader, is apparently dispensed from this sensitivity’.

Eagleton is also capable of mounting more serious arguments for rational and comprehensible thought. Among the highlights of After Theory are his lively defences of the concepts of absolute truth – ‘no idea is more unpopular with cultural theory’; and objectivity – ‘objectivity does not mean judging from nowhere…you can only know how the situation is if you are in a position to know’.” —sp!ked

Are Suicide Bombings Morally Defensible?

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

“At the center of the maelstrom in Germany is a slim volume by the philosopher Ted Honderich, who until his retirement taught at University College London. The book, After the Terror, is an attempt to reassess global politics in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Written in an offhand, chatty style, its main point — unarguable, as far as it goes — is that first-world nations bear responsibility for third-world nations’ impoverishment. Yet the lines of clarity — and reasonability — quickly blur when Honderich attempts to define the nature of that responsibility and its consequences. At issue, in his view, is not just political responsibility for the deleterious economic consequences of American-backed globalization policies on the part of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization, but also a direct moral responsibility allegedly shared by all Westerners. What makes that argument problematic is its blanket refusal to acknowledge any indigenous causes of third-world poverty, be they geographic, climatological, regional, sociological, or political. Rather than promote intelligent reflection on the causes of global social injustice, Honderich is interested in playing a simple blame game. Because Westerners (or at least a good number of them) live affluently, while most third-world denizens languish in squalor, the former are by definition morally culpable exploiters.” —The Chronicle of Higher Education

The power of 1

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

“About one-fourth of Americans now live alone. As their numbers grow, these singles are becoming a significant cultural and economic force.” —Christian Science Monitor

UK hospitals in battle to halt invasion of drug dealers

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

“Sniffer dogs are being used on psychiatric wards across England to root out drug-dealing, which is becoming rife among patients.” An estimated half of British psychiatric institutions have to contend with drug dealers operating in and around their facilities, according to a new study. It is difficult for staff to prevent visitors bringing drugs to patients as they cannot be searched, and staff are reluctant to call law enforcement authorities to deal with infractions for fear of violating patient confidentiality. For ‘cultural reasons’, the article says, staff may turn a blind eye to cannabis use, considering it a patient’s right to relax and enjoy themselves. —Guardian.UK Many schizophrenics, in particular, use cannabis, although it can exacerbate the paranoid feelings and hallucinations they suffer and it antagonizes the therapeutic effects of thier antipsychotic medications. But sniffer dogs??!!

A hitch in the guide to Adams

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

Terrible pun, but, “In his official biography of Douglas Adams, Wish You Were Here, Nick Webb fails to fathom his subject’s marvellous mind, says David Smith “

Number portability may spark switching

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

“About one in five U.S. wireless subscribers will change carriers in the next year after a new rule goes into effect allowing them to keep their telephone numbers when switching providers, according to a survey released Thursday.” —CNN

Preparing for SARS

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

“Health authorities are preparing for the possible return of the SARS virus this fall, but with any luck they should be able to prevent a global epidemic. The virus is a nasty germ that can inflict terrible harm on anyone who contracts SARS. But the virus is relatively hard to spread and the conditions that allowed the disease to race from nation to nation last season seem unlikely to repeat themselves.” —New York Times

Annals of Vindictiveness and Contempt:

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

Naming of agent ‘was aimed at discrediting CIA’: “The Bush administration’s exposure of a clandestine Central Intelligence Agency operative was part of a campaign aimed at discrediting US intelligence agencies for not supporting White House claims that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme, former agency officials said yesterday.

In a rare hearing called by Senate Democratic leaders, the officials said the White House engaged in pressure and intimidation aimed at generating intelligence evidence to support the decision to make war on Iraq.” —Financial Times

How to get real?

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

“Is Postmodernism finally on its deathbed? Roger Caldwell examines the evidence and takes a look at its would-be successor: Critical Realism.” —Philosophy Now

Record industry misses the point

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

The real reason they’re in trouble: CDs bloated with mediocre: “In Ian Werner’s English class, anger over record industry lawsuits against music downloaders is coalescing into talk of a CD boycott.

The idea, Werner says, is to send out mass e-mails encouraging people not to buy CDs in December, typically the industry’s busiest month. Although Werner stopped downloading songs, the 19-year-old Charlotte college student said he and many of his friends don’t want to pay $18 for a CD with two good songs. ” —Charlotte Observer

Barbie: the opera

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

A new opera in Dresden features a doll’s house full of Barbies.

This Barbie spends a lot of her time without her clothes on and has a male alter ego (not the trustworthy Ken doll but a mutated Barbie with brutally cropped hair); together they indulge in wildly experimental sex play. In performance, the action is performed by real Barbies in a real Barbie house, with the musicians and singers behind. The dolls are manipulated by two puppeteers and the action is video-projected on to screens on either side of the house. It is a technical challenge.

—Guardian.UK

Baghdad hotel hit by rocket attack

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

“Visiting US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has escaped unhurt after a rocket attack on his hotel in Baghdad.

Up to eight rockets were fired at the Hotel al-Rashid, one of the most heavily guarded sites in the Iraqi capital.

A US colonel working for the Coalition Provisional Authority was killed and 15 other people, including 11 Americans and one Briton, were wounded.

But US officials say they believe that Mr Wolfowitz was not a target of the attack, which they suspect was in preparation for ‘a couple of months’.” —BBC

Billmon neatly juxtaposes the US response — abandoning its occupation headquarters and one of the architects for the invasion scurrying for safety with his tail between his legs — with recent dysadministration rhetoric about “taking the fight to the enemy”.

Related: Black Hawk Down: US helicopter brought down by ground fire near Tikrit; resistance grows more determined and sophisticated. —Washington Post

Democratic Hopefuls Play Down Gun Control

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

“White House hopefuls rarely talk about toughening gun control.” —Washington Post

"…the ironic combination of wakefulness without awareness…"

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

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In Feeding-Tube Case, Many Neurologists Back Courts: “At the center of the court battle over the immobile body of Terri Schiavo, the 39-year-old Florida woman kept alive by a feeding tube, is a videotape made by her parents. It lasts only minutes but has been played so many times on television and the Internet that it all but defines her.

On the tape, Mrs. Schiavo, propped up in bed, is greeted and kissed by her mother. She is not in the deep, unresponsive sleep of a coma. Her eyes are open, and she blinks rapidly but fairly normally. She seems to follow her mother’s movements, but her mother’s face is too close for that to be clear. Her jaw is slack and her mouth hangs open, but at moments its corners appear to turn up in a faint smile.

To many supporters of Mrs. Schiavo’s parents, who say she should be kept alive on a feeding tube, the tape demonstrates that she can still think and react. But many leading neurologists say that it means no such thing, that the appearances of brain-damaged patients can be very misleading.

Florida courts have ruled, after hearing from several experts who examined her, that Mrs. Schiavo has been in a ‘persistent vegetative state’ — an official diagnosis of the American Academy of Neurology — since her brain was deprived of oxygen when she suffered a heart attack 13 years ago. Her feeding tube was removed on Oct. 15, but it was reinserted six days later after the Florida Legislature gave Gov. Jeb Bush the authority to override the courts.

Patients in vegetative states may have open eyes, periods of waking and sleeping and some reflexes, like gagging, jerking a limb away from pain or reacting to light or noise. They may make noises or faces and even say words.

But they do not, according to academy criteria, show self-awareness, comprehend language or expressions, or interact with others.

A vegetative state “is the ironic combination of wakefulness without awareness,” said Dr. James L. Bernat, a Dartmouth Medical School neurologist and past chairman of the academy’s ethics committee. ” —New York Times

The Neurobiology of Brand Loyalty

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

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There’s a Sucker Born in Every Medial Prefrontal Cortex: “When he isn’t pondering the inner workings of the mind, Read Montague, a 43-year-old neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, has been known to contemplate the other mysteries of life: for instance, the Pepsi Challenge. In the series of TV commercials from the 70’s and 80’s that pitted Coke against Pepsi in a blind taste test, Pepsi was usually the winner. So why, Montague asked himself not long ago, did Coke appeal so strongly to so many people if it didn’t taste any better?

Over several months this past summer, Montague set to work looking for a scientifically convincing answer. He assembled a group of test subjects and, while monitoring their brain activity with an M.R.I. machine, recreated the Pepsi Challenge. His results confirmed those of the TV campaign: Pepsi tended to produce a stronger response than Coke in the brain’s ventral putamen, a region thought to process feelings of reward. (Monkeys, for instance, exhibit activity in the ventral putamen when they receive food for completing a task.) Indeed, in people who preferred Pepsi, the ventral putamen was five times as active when drinking Pepsi than that of Coke fans when drinking Coke.

In the real world, of course, taste is not everything. So Montague tried to gauge the appeal of Coke’s image, its ”brand influence,” by repeating the experiment with a small variation: this time, he announced which of the sample tastes were Coke. The outcome was remarkable: almost all the subjects said they preferred Coke. What’s more, the brain activity of the subjects was now different. There was also activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that scientists say governs high-level cognitive powers. Apparently, the subjects were meditating in a more sophisticated way on the taste of Coke, allowing memories and other impressions of the drink — in a word, its brand — to shape their preference.” —New York Times Magazine

Why Are We Back in Vietnam?

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

“However spurious any analogy between the two wars themselves may be, you can tell that the administration itself now fears that Iraq is becoming a Vietnam by the way it has started to fear TV news. When an ABC News reporter, Jeffrey Kofman, did the most stinging major network report on unhappiness among American troops last summer, Matt Drudge announced on his Web site that Mr. Kofman was gay and, more scandalously, a Canadian ” — Frank Rich, New York Times

Expanding Club NATO

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

“NATO needs to add three more members: Iraq, Egypt and Israel. Yes, you read that right.” — Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times

Caveat emptor

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

I’m depressingly traditional as a physician, I realize as I see my distressed reaction to most ‘new trends’ in healthcare, like this one. A Virginia family practice MD scoffs at the idea of seeing the patients in his practice when he can deal with them by phone or email instead. He reportedly feels that ‘the need to physically examine each patient is quickly becoming an anomaly.’

The article focuses on the financial rather than the ethical implications of his practice, which is of course cash-only — he could not accept insurance reimbursement since, silly them, the insurance companies expect their patients to be seen for the provision of medical care. Prominent physician groups such as the AMA and the American College of Physicians have recently taken the position that physicians ought to be able to bill for patient communication connected to providing care, but not as an altenative to seeing them! I’m certain that this physician played hookey in medical school on the days they gave the classes on physician-patient interactions and the value of the therapeutic alliance in the healing process. Is he affording added respect to his patients by relying on their perceptions of what is going on with them —

“The notion that you have to see every cough that walks in the door because it may be pulmonary edema or tuberculosis — give me a break,” (he) said.

— or profoundly disrespectful and devaluing? I think the latter. If patients could diagnose themselves and assess all the factors and observations necessary for treatment, why would they hire doctors in the first place? Actually, it is clear from his fee structure that he does not value so much the patient’s perception as his own omniscience. He charges almost as much — $20 — for every five-minute block he spends on the phone with a patient as he does — $25 — if the time is spent face-to-face in the office. In fact, the reason everyone needs to be seen is precisely that sooner or later something of equivalent severity to a cough turning out to be pulmonary edema will, not may, will, happen. You can be sure that, when it does, this guy will not accept that his practice model was to blame. Some fatuous rationalization about the inevitability of adverse outcomes would follow — no cocksure omniscience at that point! The other classes this guy must have skipped out on in medical school were about game theory and risk-benefit analysis, because he fails to grasp a basic fact about how one weighs the importance of medical actions. The value of an intervention to prevent an adverse outcome is not simply a function of the estimated frequency of a disaster but the product of its frequency and its severity.

His other rationalization for this practice model is that it

is no different from what he did for years as part of a large group, when he would cover night and weekend calls for his partners and treat patients whom he had never met over the phone. Even his liability insurance premium is about what it was when he was with his former practice, he said.

To argue that, because medical care has already become impersonal and exploitative, one ought to accelerate the trend, adds insult to the potential injury he may do. The malpractice insurance provider that covers him ought to drastically increase his premiums — or refuse to cover him all together — for his cockiness and recklessness. And the patients who get snookered into believing that the quality of the medical care this guy could provide was comparable to that they would get from any other doctor who would interact with them face-to-face ought to have their heads examined — in person. —American Medical News

Caveat emptor

Posted on 26 Oct 03 by FmH

“The notion that you have to see every cough that walks in the door because it may be pulmonary edema or tuberculosis — give me a break,” (he) said.

His other rationalization for this practice model is that it

is no different from what he did for years as part of a large group, when he would cover night and weekend calls for his partners and treat patients whom he had never met over the phone. Even his liability insurance premium is about what it was when he was with his former practice, he said.

Ex-agents: CIA leak a serious betrayal

Posted on 25 Oct 03 by FmH

“The FBI is interviewing members of the Bush administration as part of its investigation into the leak of a CIA operative’s identity. The officer’s name was revealed after her husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, raised questions about the pre-war intelligence on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Two former CIA operatives, Larry Johnson and Jim Marcinkowski, have asked the Senate to investigate the leak and discussed the situation with CNN’s Bill Hemmer.

The problem with this is a lot of the damage that has occurred is not going to be seen. It can’t be photographed. We can’t bring the bodies out because in some cases it’s going to involve protecting sources and methods. And it’s important to keep this before the American people. This was a betrayal of national security.” —CNN

A Foreign-Policy Emergency

Posted on 25 Oct 03 by FmH

Robert Kuttner: “The hallmark of the Bush foreign policy has been a naive radicalism married to an operational incompetence. A small clique with a preconceived blueprint took advantage of a national emergency and a callow president, blowing a containable threat into war while dismissing more ominous menaces. These people are out to remake the world, with little sense of risk, proportion or history. At this writing, the president’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, has seized some authority over the Iraq policy from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who responded with adolescent pique. The long-abused Secretary of State Colin Powell offered new respect for the UN. President Bush even directly contradicted Vice President Dick Cheney’s discredited claim of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

In a different administration, these shifts would signal that the chief executive, clearly in control, had recognized the misjudgments and costs of a failed policy, demoted those responsible and shifted authority to others. But Bush seems incapable of that kind of decisiveness or discernment. These are mere skirmishes, indicative of the absence of leadership at the top. Bush is as callow as ever. The man even boasts that he never reads the papers.” —The American Prospect

One Reason Not to Like Bush

Posted on 24 Oct 03 by FmH

Michael Kinsley is contemptuous:

“None of this matters if you believe that a microscopic embryo is a human being with the same human rights as you and me. George W. Bush claims to believe that, and you have to believe something like that to justify your opposition to stem cell research. But Bush cannot possibly believe that embryos are full human beings, or he would surely oppose modern fertility procedures that create and destroy many embryos for each baby they bring into the world. Bush does not oppose modern fertility treatments. He even praised them in his anti-stem cell speech.

It’s not a complicated point. If stem cell research is morally questionable, the procedures used in fertility clinics are worse. You cannot logically outlaw the one and praise the other. And surely logical coherence is a measure of moral sincerity.

If he’s got both his facts and his logic wrong — and he has — Bush’s alleged moral anguish on this subject is unimpressive. In fact, it is insulting to the people (including me) whose lives could be saved or redeemed by the medical breakthroughs Bush’s stem cell policy is preventing.

This is not a policy disagreement. Or rather, it is not only a policy disagreement. If the president is not a complete moron — and he probably is not — he is a hardened cynic, staging moral anguish he does not feel, pandering to people he cannot possibly agree with and sacrificing the future of many American citizens for short-term political advantage.” —Washington Post

Television and Hive Mind

Posted on 24 Oct 03 by FmH

“Sixty-four years ago this month, six million Americans became unwitting subjects in an experiment in psychological warfare.

It was the night before Halloween, 1938. At 8 p.m. CST, the Mercury Radio on the Air began broadcasting Orson Welles’ radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. As is now well known, the story was presented as if it were breaking news, with bulletins so realistic that an estimated one million people believed the world was actually under attack by Martians. Of that number, thousands succumbed to outright panic, not waiting to hear Welles’ explanation at the end of the program that it had all been a Halloween prank, but fleeing into the night to escape the alien invaders…

In a sense, those people who fled the Martians that night were right to be afraid. They were indeed under attack. But they were wrong about who was attacking them. It was something far worse than Martians. Had they only known the true nature of the danger facing them, perhaps they would have gone to the nearest radio station with torches in hand like the villagers in those old Frankenstein movies and burned it to the ground, or at least commandeered the new technology and turned it towards another use–the liberation of humanity, instead of its enslavement.” —mackwhite.com

New Quarktet:

Posted on 24 Oct 03 by FmH

Subatomic oddity hints at pentaparticle family: “Physicists at a European particle accelerator say they’ve spotted a never-before-seen elementary particle composed of five of the fundamental constituents known as quarks and antiquarks. In contrast, protons and neutrons contain three quarks, and no particle is known to have four quarks. The new report marks only the second sighting ever of a five-quark particle, the first one having been found last summer by three independent groups working in the United States, Japan, and Russia…

The discovery of a new family of quark-containing particles may help physicists fill in blanks in their understanding of quark interactions, says theorist Frank Wilczek of MIT. For one thing, it could end what had been a puzzling absence of evidence for particles with groupings containing more than three quarks or antiquarks, which theorists for decades have been expecting to show up in accelerators.” —Science News

A tough lesson on medical privacy

Posted on 24 Oct 03 by FmH

Pakistani transcriber threatens UCSF over back pay:

“A woman in Pakistan doing cut-rate clerical work for UCSF Medical Center threatened to post patients’ confidential files on the Internet unless she was paid more money.To show she was serious, the woman sent UCSF an e-mail earlier this month with actual patients’ records attached.

The violation of medical privacy – apparently the first of its kind – highlights the danger of ‘offshoring’ work that involves sensitive materials, an increasing trend among budget-conscious U.S. companies and institutions.” —SF Chronicle

Toddler scarred all over body

Posted on 24 Oct 03 by FmH

More than a dozen toddlers at a Croatian nursery turned on one of their own, inflicting more than thirty bites on their one-year old victim when their class nanny briefly left the room. Deep wounds covered his body, including his face. “Biting between young children is not uncommon. But I have never seen anything like this,” commented the doctor who treated the boy. Authorities are clueless as to the cause of the biting frenzy. —Sky News

IHT: France takes on plague of sexual ‘rite’

Posted on 24 Oct 03 by FmH

“The phenomenon of gang rape in France has become banal. It occurs – how often is unknown – in the concrete wastelands built as cheap housing for immigrants on the outskirts of France’s big cities. Here, according to sociologists and prosecutors, teenage boys, many of them loosely organized into gangs, prey on neighborhood girls.” —International Herald Tribune

From online to on air

Posted on 24 Oct 03 by FmH

“A weblog is making the leap from the internet to the airwaves today, in the form of a new weekly drama series.

Writer Matt Wake claims that his fictional online journal, The South London diaries, which is being broadcast by London arts station Resonance FM, is the world’s first radio weblog.” —Guardian.UK

Gov. Bush orders feeding tube reinserted in Schiavo case

Posted on 24 Oct 03 by FmH

The Florida legislature empowered Bush to step into the fray. (MSNBC) The move emboldens the Christian fundamentalist right, which campaigned hard for this intervention. (New York Times). Pundits say the Florida law will be found unconstitutional (Dallas News). Terri Schiavo remains a ping pong ball (Reuters). As I have written before, some of the opposition to ending life support for Schiavo arises from a merciless misunderstanding of what a ‘persistent vegetative state’ is. This woman and others like her have no conscious awareness or possibility of regaining such. I have seen press coverage liken this to Nazi eugenics programs or raise the spectre of state-sanctioned killing of ‘defectives’, which is pitifully, contemptibly off the mark. Even if one grasps the PVS concept, mistrust of the medical profession leads to fears that mistakes could be made in diagnosing someone as irretrievable in this way. Finally, some of the opposition revolves around the notion that it is barbaric to starve someone to death, which is probably wrong on two counts. First, there is no sentient experience in PVS. Secondly, as has been recently reported here, death from starvation may not be an uncomfortable way to go, especially if someone is being kept comfortable in other ways. But withdrawing nutrition is the best that a medical profession that cannot take compassionate life-ending measures can do. Perhaps the fundamentalists should start to espouse the death-with-dignity cause?

The Pentagon’s Achilles Heel

Posted on 24 Oct 03 by FmH

The scandalous revelations about the conditions under which GIs wounded in the Iraqi conflict languish for months while awaiting medical care are just the tip of the iceberg in Pentagon malfeasance in meeting the medical needs of those in uniform. —TomPaine

Rumsfeld’s doubts about war on terror

Posted on 24 Oct 03 by FmH

The leaked internal memo:

The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld’s “snowflakes” (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates). —The Guardian

It is in direct counterpoint to the usual dysadministration bluster about how we are winning the WoT®, e.g. statements of Wolfowitz and Cheney in the last few days. David Corn suggests Why it matters in The Nation. Corn finds its major significance in Rumsfeld’s suggestion that hatred of the west has to be fought at its roots by countering the influence of the madrassas. He juxtaposes the task of enticing the radical Islamists to be more moderate with Rumsfeld’s detestable refusal to repudiate the vile slaver coming from ‘Christian jihadist’ Gen. William Boykin.

With these comments, Rumsfeld veered dangerously close to becoming one of those root-cause-symps who routinely are derided by hawks for arguing that the United States and other nations need to address the forces that fuel anti-Americanism overseas–in the Muslim world and elsewhere. The public disclosure of these views also made Rumsfeld’s refusal to criticize Lt. General William Boykin appear all the more curious.

Rumsfeld has recently taken it on the chin in the administration tugs-o’-war, what with the overall Iraq reconstruction oversight being reassigned to Condoleeza Rice. As this New York Times editorial notes, “Mr. Rumsfeld is a canny player who knows exactly what he is doing when he drafts internal memos and makes them public.” It is hard not to see him as the truculent prima donna sulking over feeling slighted. The Times continues,

Mr. Rumsfeld’s big problem is that he seems to want to run almost every aspect of the war on terror but prefers to share the blame when things do not work out. Now he muses about forming a new institution that “seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies” on the problem of terrorism. He helpfully suggested that this new institution might be located within the Defense Department — or maybe elsewhere.

The Times concludes that Bush should resist fueling Rulsfeld’s megalomanic quest by expanding the budget for his ‘bureaucratic empire’ any further.

Slate correspondent Fred Kaplan: “Donald Rumsfeld’s war-on-terror memo—which was leaked to USA Today on Wednesday and picked up by the rest of the media, for the most part with a shrug, on Thursday—may be the most important, even stunning official document yet to come out of this war…Rumsfeld’s memo marks the first unconcealable eruption of a ‘credibility gap’ in the wartime presidency of George W. Bush.”

Have you ever read a more pathetic federal document in your life? What is being stated here can be summed up as follows: We’ll probably win the battle for Afghanistan and Iraq (or, more precisely, it’s “pretty clear” we “can win” it, “in one way or another” after “a long, hard slog”), but we’re losing the struggle for hearts and minds in the broader war against terrorism. Not only that, we don’t know how to measure winning or losing, we don’t have a plan for winning it, we don’t know how to fashion a plan, and the bureaucratic agencies put in charge of waging this war and drawing up these plans may be inherently incapable of doing so.

The last word, however, should be Joe Conason’s. “Actually, the terrorism memo — one among many messages raining down from his office onto the Pentagon brass, who call them “snowflakes” — makes Rummy sound more in tune with reality than some of his colleagues.” —Salon

The Widening Crusade

Posted on 24 Oct 03 by FmH

Bush’s war plan is scarier than he is saying: “Global wars, space control, and projection of U.S. power around the world — all are part of the statement of principles of the Project for the New American Century — signed by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and others more than six years ago. Sydney H. Schanberg gives one of the clearest explanations yet of the Bush administration’s plan for global domination.” —The Village Voice

R.I.P. Ellliott Smith

Posted on 24 Oct 03 by FmH

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The 34-year old singer of moody, anguished songs apparently killed himself with a stab wound to the chest. —Washington Post. “Like so many rock deaths, his was a long time in the making, but no less sad or shocking for all the warnings that preceded it. ‘Give me one reason not to do it,’ Smith sang on his final album, which now remains unfinished.” —Alex Abramovitz eulogizing Smith in Slate .

New York’s Top Dog? It Depends on the ZIP Code

Posted on 24 Oct 03 by FmH

The New York Times did an analysis of dog license data for the city. It is not surprising that it found that New Yorkers own dogs for different reasons depending on their demographics, or that the data shows “a city of neighborhoods” (as the city’s commissioner of health reflects in the article), i.e. continued ghettoization. As the Times points out, the canine census data suffers by only reflecting licensed dogs, by one estimate only one in five of the total dog population of the city. It seems likely to me that the extent of cooperation with the requirement to license your dog would vary by demographic segment of the city’s population as well, and hence vary by dog breed. I would venture to say, for instance, that more of the labrador retrievers are registered than the Dobermans or pit bulls.

Senate Approves Easing of Curbs on Cuba Travel

Posted on 24 Oct 03 by FmH

“In a firm rebuke to President Bush over Cuba policy, the Senate overwhelmingly voted to ease travel restrictions on Americans seeking to visit the island.” —New York Times But…but.. isn’t Bush’s Cuba policy an integral part of his WoT®?? How could the Senate betray the security of the American people in such a way??

A Pulp Novelist’s Dreams Invade a Distressing Reality

Posted on 24 Oct 03 by FmH

Film review: “The Singing Detective, Dennis Potter’s 1986 mini-series, is the kind of television production that justifies the existence of the medium — a gloomy, episodic swirl of old pop music, film noir and psychological subtext that rewards repeated viewing. In the mind of its creator, it also deserved to be made again, as a feature film.

Potter, who died in 1994, wrote a screenplay that, in addition to abridging the original story, moved its action, and its cultural frame of reference, from England to Los Angeles, and from the 1940’s to the 50’s. That “Singing Detective,” directed by Keith Gordon and starring Robert Downey Jr., opens today in New York.

A lot has been lost in translation. On its way to the big screen, Potter’s intricate, fascinating story has shrunk. The ideas that lurked in the mini-series’ shadows and alleyways are now placed squarely in the spotlight, where they look obvious and thin.” —New York Times

Beyond Coffee-Mug Theology

Posted on 24 Oct 03 by FmH

The Serenity Prayer: “Theologians will tell you that Reinhold Niebuhr’s magnum opus was his magisterial two-volume work of theological ethics, ‘The Nature and Destiny of Man’ (1941-43). Intellectual historians will talk about the way Niebuhr shaped his students at Union Seminary in New York; they will speak of the profound influence that Niebuhr, who was always at pains to yoke theology to the social problems of his day, had on Martin Luther King Jr. and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian martyred by the Nazis.

But by far, his best-known work is a short verse that has come to be called the Serenity Prayer. It’s possible you’ve seen it on a T-shirt or a coffee mug or a billboard; if you’re a 12-stepper, its recitation may have become part of your daily discipline. I first encountered it on a poster in the office of Mrs. Bennett, my middle-school guidance counselor. Though different prayers (and different manufacturers) have played variations on the theme, Niebuhr’s original text goes like this: ‘God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.’

In her eloquent new book, Niebuhr’s daughter, Elisabeth Sifton, takes readers through the grim but not unhopeful days of the prayer’s composition. Written in 1943, the Serenity Prayer is not a cute bromide. It is Niebuhr’s pained but unflaggingly faithful response to the horrors of the 20th century – not least the Holocaust – condensed and distilled into one short plea.

The creation of the Serenity Prayer is really the occasion for, rather than the plot of, Sifton’s book. For rather than merely recounting the history of a prayer, Sifton gives us a portrait of American intellectual culture at mid-century. The book opens in Heath, a small Massachusetts farming village where the Neibuhrs summered. (And indeed, Sifton has drawn a cast of characters for whom “summer” is a verb. Sifton herself emerges as the type who can be called, without irony, a Radcliffe woman of a certain generation.) Close family friends included W.H. Auden, Supreme Court Justice and FDR adviser Felix Frankfurter and liberal Protestantism’s most formidable preacher, the Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick. In the Niebuhr home – which was part Algonquin round table and part Hyde Park drawing room – political talk was more than chatter. Sifton grew up fluent in denunciations of fascism, capitalist excess and Jim Crow.” —New York Newsday

Cellphone Call to Prayer

Posted on 23 Oct 03 by FmH

A new ‘cellphone for Muslims’ from LG of Korea, after programmed with the user’s location, uses GPS technology and a built-in compass to point toward Mecca, toward which Muslims must orient when they perform their five ritual daily prayers.

SOS:

Posted on 22 Oct 03 by FmH

Students for an Orwellian Society:

“The mission of SOS is to promote the vision of a society based upon the principles of Ingsoc, first articulated by George Orwell in his prophetic novel, 1984. SOS is active at Columbia, Oberlin, Penn State, NYU, UMass, Minuteman High School, FSC, CalTech, UVA, RIT, Murray, JHU, UC-Berkeley, MSCD, SUNY-Stony Brook, UC-Davis, Bellevue CC, Trinity Chrisitan Academy, and a number of other schools…

As to be expected, SOS has been quite successful. Since the events of 11 September, we have been able to convince a number of figures in national and local politics to help forward our aims. How could they do otherwise?

Our successes can be shown to fit into the three major ideals of Ingsoc as expressed by Orwell:

War is Peace

Freedom is Slavery

Ignorance is Strength”

—[thanks, walker]

IAmAmerican, IAmAshamed

Posted on 22 Oct 03 by FmH

Expats Against Bush

Adding a fresh twist to cans of pop

Posted on 22 Oct 03 by FmH

The “bottle can” – an aluminum can with a screw cap – is the latest product design from Japan likely to take the world by storm: “There hasn’t been much change in the world of beverage cans since the stay-on tab replaced the ring-pull tab in the late 1980s. But now Japan has put a new twist on the old can, and it’s coming your way.

The ‘bottle can,’ an aluminum can with a screw cap, has taken Japan by storm, as consumers show a growing thirst for its novelty value and the ability to re-close it like a bottle. Now the can is set to take on international markets.” —Taipei Times [via girlhacker]

End Daylight Saving Time

Posted on 22 Oct 03 by FmH

A history of the concept and a plea to abolish it:

“Why did daylight saving time (DST) start, and why does it still continue? When asking a random sample of people we heard two answers again and again: ‘To help the farmers’ or ‘Because of World War I … or was it World War II?’

In fact, farmers generally oppose daylight saving time. In Indiana, where part of the state observes DST and part does not, farmers have opposed a move to DST. And the chief adversary of daylight saving time in the United States is the Farm Bureau. Farmers, who must wake with the sun no matter what time their clock says, are greatly inconvenienced by having to change their schedule in order to sell their crops to people who observe daylight saving time.”

The New $20

Posted on 22 Oct 03 by FmH

Have you seen one of the new bills yet? My first one circulated my way yesterday. The U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing has a site to tally sightings by zipcode. [via girlhacker]

In the OR, Nobody Can Hear You Scream…

Posted on 21 Oct 03 by FmH

Study: 100 patients a day in USA wake up during surgery: “Anesthesia failure that allows a patient to wake up during surgery, paralyzed and unable to cry for help, occurs 100 times a day in the USA, a study reports Monday.

The rate is similar to those documented by previous international studies, but many doctors have long questioned the prevalence. This is the first time in more than 30 years that the problem has been quantified in U.S. hospitals.

These findings, and the results of two similar trials also to be released today, led the Food and Drug Administration late Friday to broaden its approval of a device it says has reduced the risk of patients waking up during surgery. The BIS monitor, which is used in one-third of U.S. hospitals, turns the brain’s EEG waves into a number that can tell anesthesiologists at a glance how deeply a patient is sedated.” —USAToday [via blather]

Annals of the Age of Depravity (cont’d.):

Posted on 21 Oct 03 by FmH

While he was patient in local hospital ICU, ex-sheriff’s toenails torn out: “Local authorities are requesting charges against a Three Rivers Healthcare contracted employee for allegedly pulling out the toenails of former Wayne County sheriff Nathan Hale while he was a patient in the intensive care unit.” —Daily American Republic [Missouri] via walker

Three Rivers Healthcare is owned by Tenet, along with HCA and Universal one of the gigantic, ruthless, impersonal for-profit hospital ownership corporations that represent the future of American healthcare (unless you boycott them in favor of either locally-managed community hospitals or nonprofit, often university-affiliated facilities). The alleged culprit in this case was a contract worker, a ‘temp’ in other words, and it is not much of a stretch to relate the likelihood of events like this to the low morale at corporate-owned hospitals, leading to poorer staff complements and staff retention, the hiring of less qualified employees at every level to shave costs, and poorer supervision. I work for a Universal hospital, and have previously written about its irresponsible admissions policies designed to fill all beds without concern for the clinical appropriateness of a given admission. I have also warned readers that if your loved one is admitted to a Universal facility, it is corporate policy that the hospital cannot honor any advanced directives (Do Not Resuscitate [DNR] wishes). I would not be surprised if a similar policy exists at Tenet and HCA hospitals as well.

Day of the Spoiler

Posted on 21 Oct 03 by FmH

If I can’t win, nobody will: “It could be considered comic, this abyss at the Lieberman grassroots. It could be, that is, if Lieberman showed any signs of going away. Instead, he’s been ramping up: launching a splashy new tax plan; publishing a dowloadable campaign book, Leading With Integrity: A Fresh Start for America, and an accompanying website; kicking off a campaign tour—all just this past week. And that’s not funny. Because it’s not too early to predict that if the Democrats lose the presidential election next November, Lieberman will be the one to blame. That will certainly be so if he ends up becoming the nominee—in which case the Democratic Party will be left without an activist base. …Perversely, it might even be worse for the Democratic Party if he fails.” —Village Voice

US elections 2004

Posted on 21 Oct 03 by FmH

“Welcome to the brand new Guardian Unlimited weblog, US Vote 2004. I know, it is not a particularly original name. If you can do better, suggest another name. There might even be a small prize for anyone who comes up with a name we choose to adopt.

This blog will be devoted to discussing the US elections 2004, with a particular focus on the presidential race. As the campaign progresses you will be hearing from the Guardian‘s correspondents in the US, its London-based commentators, and various members of the Guardian Unlimited news team.

We also want to hear from you.”

Bush Sr.’s ‘message’ to Bush Jr.:

Posted on 21 Oct 03 by FmH

“When it was announced (with amazingly little fanfare) that the pugnaciously anti-Iraq war Democrat Kennedy had been awarded the 2003 George Bush Award for Excellence in Public Service, so many jaws dropped all over Washington that usually voluble politicians were only heard swallowing their real thoughts.” Boston Globe

moving memes

Posted on 21 Oct 03 by FmH

Belated best wishes to Tony as he leaves the Yukon and settles somewhere south of the border in this vast ‘Rogue State’.

R.I.P. Sek Yi

Posted on 21 Oct 03 by FmH

Cambodian Tiger Hunter, Said to Be 122, Dies: “A Cambodian tiger hunter and martial arts exponent believed to be the world’s oldest person has died peacefully in his sleep after a brief illness, his relatives said on Monday.

Having survived the horrors of the “Killing Fields” genocide in the 1970s, Sek Yi, whose relatives believe he was 122 years old, was revered across the deeply impoverished southeast Asian nation on account of his unusually advanced years.” — Washington Post

We would like to thank you for the submission of your untitled poem (“Roses are red/Violets are blue”) to The Missouri Review. We assure you that it received the utmost attention of our editorial staff. Though we regret that we are unable to accept your poem for publication, we would like to share a few observations and to offer suggestions towards a revision. It is our belief that another draft or two might strengthen the chances of the poem’s later publication—if not in the pages of our own humble journal, then perhaps in another of greater merit.

We might consider this poem a reunion poem in which two lovers come back together following the woman’s recent dalliance with another. Though on the surface the reunion seems innocent enough, given the poem’s traditional “roses are red” structure and meter, the apparent joy of the man at her return, his willingness to forgive and move forward, a closer reading reveals a more ambiguous, potentially darker interpretation of the lovers’ reunion.

We first observe this ambiguity in the third line of the poem: “Oh my, lump in the bed.” The placement of the comma forces the reader to hesitate. In the context of the opening couplet (“Roses are red/Violets are blue”), we expect the comma to follow the interjection—as follows: “Oh, my lump in the bed,/How I’ve missed you.” Note how this would allow the lines to fit the traditional rhythm of a “rose poem.” Had the line been punctuated in this manner, we might be able to read “my” as a possessive adjective, the speaker laying claim to (or reclaiming) his lover, which would be in keeping with the dramatic situation. But given the punctuation and awkward placement of the comma, we must ask, does this instability in the phrase signal instability in the relationship? His lover recently returned from the arms of another, is the speaker himself uncertain now of his claim to her love? Or does it indicate a healthy obsession with the morning salute of a “little Commander-in-Chief” (as one staff member suggested)?

Our sense that the placement of the comma may in fact be merely editorial carelessness is reinforced by the subsequent unveiling of the speaker’s attitude toward his lover. While we realize that the phrase “lump in the bed” has a personal meaning that is meant to be endearing (please give the First Lady our regards), we fear that it portrays a, shall we say say, less than progressive attitude toward women. Or is the description of the lover as merely a “lump in the bed” a reflection of her unresponsiveness as a lover? Is her lumphood a response to her dalliance with “that charming French guy”?

We also worry as well that a French guy might come across as too clichéd, too Henry Jamesian, too Rumsfeldian in its presentation of Europe vs. America, Old World v. New World, etc. What if he were “that charming Jakartan guy”? Or “that charming Kuwaiti guy”? Just a thought.

Lines 8 and 9 are perhaps the most fully realized moments in the poem and we commend you for them. Though the speaker states that he misses his lover, he seems unable to accept responsibility for his true feelings. Rather he transfers these emotions to the family pets, going so far as to project his own difficulties upon poor Barney. Obviously the shoe that the speaker claims was consumed by the dog reflects the speaker’s resentment of his lover’s sense of self-empowerment, embodied in her freedom to choose another lover. The shoe, of course, has been a symbol of feminist emancipation throughout the 20th Century, em(body)ing the new “mobility” brought about in part by the entrance of masses of women into the workforce and into jobs and careers traditionally held exclusively by men (see P. Schroeder, G. Ferraro, H.R. Clinton); by the development of modern forms of birth control (“the pill”); and by an economy fueled by mass consumption (perhaps best illustrated by malls, of which shoe stores are an integral part). We see this dynamic in such every day phrases as “walk out of your life” or to “walk all over him,” as well as in popular culture. See Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Were Made for Walking.”

In line 9, the rhythm of the line is broken, again subverting our expectations. We applaud the risk that the poet takes here. Again, we do admit that there was much disagreement among our staff as to whether or not this shift in the rhythm was an authorial intention or mere editorial oversight. We chose to grant you “presidential” license, attributing it to the often unique syntactical structures that you bring to the English language in the course of your daily speech.

Though the final word seems literally to imply an aircraft carrier, we couldn’t help but wonder—in this age of HIV and AIDS—if the author was bitterly implying that he, in fact, was a carrier of some venereal disease, or if he was placing a sort of curse upon her: “the next time you cheat on me may you ‘land’ on a ‘carrier’ of some horrible infectious disease.” It lends the poem a disturbing quality that leaves us uncertain if we are to take joy in the reunion of these two lovers, or if we are to understand some barely repressed hostility on the part of the speaker.

In this context, we return to the end of the penultimate line and the word “barrier,” which, if we are to understand the final line as interpreted above, may be re-read as “bury her.” Again, we note the repressed rage of the jilted lover erupting through the surface of the poem, revealing itself in the phonetically articulated desire of the speaker to avenge his emasculation. Unable to win clearly and convincingly a war that would avenge his father’s greatest tormentor, he has sought solace in the familiar arms of his lover and in the form of a traditional poetry—only to discover that she has been finding a solace of her own devising, in the arms of his tormentor. Of course, we must be careful to distinguish between the author and the speaker of the poem.

Certainly, the poem is your poem and it is not our intention to “write your poem for you.” We merely wished to provide you with some “outside the beltway” perspective on your poem. While we are aware that the demands of your present occupation may not leave you with much time to devote to your poetry, we would urge you to consider participation in a poetry workshop. Public libraries, community colleges, bookstores and arts organizations often offer such programs free of charge. [We’re not certain about the United Nations, but you might check with Mr. Powell.] These organizations can provide a wonderful opportunity for lovers of freedom, democracy, and poetry around the world to come together to share and exchange work in an atmosphere of mutual respect and mutual interest. We understand that rejection can be difficult for any poet, especially one just starting out, but we’d encourage you to be persistent.

We hope we have been helpful and look forward to further correspondence.

Scott Kaukonen

Senior Advisor

The Missouri Review

P.S. Enclosed please find a flier for our annual contest—for poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction (note: yes, we distinguish between fiction and creative nonfiction). First prize is $2000—but the postmark deadline for submissions is Oct. 15! So hurry!

P.P.S. May we take this moment to encourage a fellow poet to affirm his support for the NEA? To consider restoration of its budget to its former levels? Again, just a thought. —a Missouri Review Website exclusive [via walker]

[Too good not to be reprinted in full. — FmH.]

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