“A vital ingredient of curry prevents alcohol-related liver disease, a study of rats has found.

Curcumin, the substance that gives the spice turmeric its distinctive yellow colour, stopped the changes caused by excessive alcohol consumption that lead to liver damage.

The research adds to the repertoire of benefits already shown by curcumin, which include anti-oxidant properties and anti-cancer activity.” New Scientist

So — epidemiologically — do curry-eating human populations have less alcohol-related liver damage per liter consumed?

If there’s anyone you would want to muzzle during the Oscars to prevent politicizing the banal festivities, it would by Michael Moore. Too bad he won, Mr. Bush.

…to be a human shield for Saddam‘. The human shields appealed to my anti-war stance, but by the time I had left Baghdad five weeks later my views had changed drastically. I wouldn’t say that I was exactly pro-war – no, I am ambivalent – but I have a strong desire to see Saddam removed. Telegraph/UK

“Do some of today’s languages still hold a whisper of the ancient mother tongue spoken by the first modern humans? Many linguists say language changes far too fast for that to be possible. But a new genetic study underlines the extreme antiquity of a special group of languages, raising the possibility that their distinctive feature was part of the ancestral human mother tongue.

They are the click languages of southern Africa. About 30 survive, spoken by peoples like the San, traditional hunters and gatherers, and the Khwe, who include hunters and herders.

Each language has a set of four or five click sounds, which are essentially double consonants made by sucking the tongue down from the roof of the mouth. Outside of Africa, the only language known to use clicks is Damin, an extinct aboriginal language in Australia that was taught only to men for initiation rites.” NY Times Science

An ABC News reporter travelling with the US ground forces into Iraq observes Doubts and Questions:

Slow Aid and Other Concerns Fuel Iraqi Discontent Toward United States. “Traveling unescorted into Safwan today, I got a far different picture. Rather than affection and appreciation, I saw a lot of hostility toward the coalition forces, the United States and President Bush.”

The Iraqis are certainly acting as if they are headless Telegraph/UK

Saddam seriously injured, Cabinet told: Tony Blair’s War Cabinet was told by intelligence chiefs yesterday that Saddam Hussein survived last week’s cruise missile attack on his bunker in Baghdad, but sustained serious injury.

His son, Uday, is also thought to have been injured and may even have been killed. Some American officials also claimed yesterday that another of Saddam’s relatives, Ali Hassan al-Majid – known as “Chemical Ali” for his involvement in the infamous 1988 Halabja chemical weapons attacks – had been killed. Telegraph/UK

“Research at the Salk Institute has identified a gene that may link certain pesticides and chemical weaponry to a number of neurological disorders, including the elusive Gulf War syndrome and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).” EurekAlert!

This scenario strikes fear into the hearts of tacticians. Stalingrad keeps being mentioned. And then there’s Mogadishu. Who knows how well-armed the civilian population is? truthout

Even while US forces prosecute the Iraqi invasion smoothly and on schedule, an anxious person might think there are ominous signs the world may match US arrogant impetuousness in unforseen and cataclysmic ways.

‘Three missiles fired by U.S. jets taking part in attacks in Iraq landed over the border in southwestern Iran, Iran’s official IRNA news agency said on Saturday.

Quoting an unnamed military commander, IRNA also said that U.S. and British military jets violated the Islamic Republic’s airspace several times on Friday and Saturday during operations against targets in southern Iraq.

“In two cases, rockets from American planes hit (southwestern Iran),” the commander said. The rockets fell in the area of Maniuhi, close to the border with Iraq. The commander gave no further details and there were no reports of casualties or damage.

Another rocket hit an oil refinery depot on Friday evening in the city of Abadan, about 30 miles east of the southern Iraqi city of Basra, government officials and witnesses told Reuters. Two guards at the depot were injured in the blast.’ NY Times

If these were US/UK missiles, I can understand the first two landing just over the border but someone who knows more about how these things operate would have to dispel my suspicions that hitting an oil refinery depot 30 miles off-course could not have been accidental. Perhaps some commander got the brilliant idea, after the first two missiles strayed over the line, of making a gratuitous hit on Iran look inadvertent. Iraq, Iran, they sound alike, look alike, they’re both evil® in the commander-in-chief’s assessment, and they stand in our way in the same way in the global War for Peace. To be fair, however, given that US planes strayed over the border, these could have been Iraqi anti-aircraft missiles firing on them, the Times article suggests.

On the other side of Iraq, everyone is watching Turkish troop movements into Iraqi Kurdistan. Could Turkish designs on this region and fears of Kurdish nationalism emboldened by a US defeat of Iraq (more than Turkey’s stated aim of controlling an influx of refugees from the fighting into Turkey) have motivated Turkey all along in preventing US deployment on a northern front? In its arrogance, US strategic planners never counted on Turkey daring to flout our demand for cooperation. This miscalculation could broaden the war immeasurably in a manner we never bargained for, even if we’ve taken Baghdad within the next 48 hours. “Germany’s Foreign Minister Joschka Fisher has warned its crews on NATO planes protecting Turkey will be withdrawn if it becomes involved in the war; and a top Russian official has warned the war could spread if Turkey gets involved.” ABC News [via truthout]

And while we’re on the topic of the threshold,

‘North Korea says the situation on the Korean Peninsula was deteriorating to the “brink of a nuclear war” because of US-South Korean war games.

And in its first official response to the war on Baghdad, North Korea called the military action in Iraq “a grave encroachment upon sovereignty”.

It also accused the US of planning to attack North Korea after Iraq. ‘ Sydney Herald Sun [via truthout]

with devastating shrieks“. Robert Fisk reports from Baghdad on its bombardment, making it real… United for Peace

Nick Bostrom’s home page: “Welcome! This page will tell you something about me and my goals. You will also find a selection of my writings in philosophy of science, ethics, transhumanism, probability theory and more, plus a work of poetry in Swedish which you will be unable to read.” Bostrom is an

Oxford University Research Fellow.

“I got a letter from a general at the Pentagon when the name change went through and he says it was great to have the employ of the commander of the Autobots in the National Guard.”

Christopher Lydon is back.

More on: Is the Baghdad Blogger for real? Paul Boutin comments on the net evidence so far. [via bOing bOing]

Says Ray at Bellona Times:

To a more extreme extent than we’ve ever known before (the bloated Republican puppets of the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties being more openly pulled by the strings of their puppet-masters), the United States is under the power of the consequence-free. Bush went AWOL, and speaks as a patriot; he failed in business, and remains rich; he snorted and drank and raised those who snort and drink, and pushes life imprisonment for dabblers; he lost an election, and became President; he dragged the FBI off his Saudi business associates and some of them attacked our country and Bush hid and bin Laden still hides, and Bush was praised for his bungling; he squanders our national treasury and destroys our tax base and increases government spending on anything that might profit his domestic business associates, and I still don’t see the so-called fiscally responsible turning against him. He keeps inviting disaster, and retribution keeps passing harmlessly through him and onto the nation.

Whether Saddam Hussein is dangerous or not is beside the point. When I want to complain about dangerous leaders, I can see closer examples… [more]

with devastating shrieks“. Robert Fisk reports from Baghdad on its bombardment, making it real… United for Peace

This Ha’Aretz article on the military operations notes that no Scuds have been found so far by US forces in Western Iraq, and Israel is downgrading its alert status.

…U.S. Army General Tommy Franks, commander of the allied forces operation in Iraq, said that it was not known whether Iraq still had the capability of firing Scud missiles at countries in the region.

“One doesn’t know whether the regime has the ability to strike any neighboring country with missiles,” Franks said in response to a reporter’s question on Iraqi strikes against Israel, in his first press briefing since the start of the war on Thursday.

No caches of chemical or biological weaponry have been found yet either. When the evidence is finally brandished triumphantly, probably in the face of serious world attention to their glaring absence, will you believe the timing? Even if you actually believe we did go in there to disarm Iraq?

…and I mean that sincerely, George W. Bush. Far be it for me, a sinful man who has backslid more times than Robert Downey Jr., to personally single you and your murderous cohorts out.

I gladly defer to Bishop Tutu and the Dalai Lama and Jimmy Carter and the Pope, more conversant in things scriptural or theological than I, or any of your unenlightened inner circle, will ever be. I will let them speak the truth, as far as any of us can know it here on this earth. To a person, they condemn your most unholy and unjust of wars in Iraq.” — Alan Bisbort, American Politics Journal

A political system that delivers this disastrous mistake needs reform, says Richard Dawkins: “Osama bin Laden, in his wildest dreams, could hardly have hoped for this. A mere 18 months after he boosted the US to a peak of worldwide sympathy unprecedented since Pearl Harbor, that international goodwill has been squandered to near zero. Bin Laden must be beside himself with glee. And the infidels are now walking right into the Iraq trap.” Guardian/UK

We know Bush Junior is not ready for prime time, but here’s some confirming evidence: We Begin Combing in Five Minutes! (washingtonpost.com) “…(A) technician accidentally flipped a switch that fed the images of a not-ready-for-prime-time Bush — his eyes darting to and fro as a female stylist sprayed, combed and patted down his hair.” Footage was aired on BBC-TV, CBS and another British channel. “A BBC spokeswoman told us that her network promptly realized the video was not for broadcast ‘but they couldn’t pull away because of technical difficulties.’ ” Was this done on purpose? A fuming White House, insisting the footage was “unauthorized”, seemingly thinks so. A senior official observes that ‘…this kind of thing has happened more than once…’ and insists that from now on it will be Presidential staffers rather than network personnel who flick the switch turning on the feed at Bush’s press conferences. Washington Post

Sydney Morning Herald coverage of the ground war makes note of conflicting reports suggesting that US forces are using napalm as they advance into Iraq. Napalm is illegal under a 1980 United Nations convention. But then we don’t have any truck with what the UN wants anymore, do we?

Hundreds of thousands of peace marchers – as many as 700,000, according to organisers as they totted up the numbers mid-afternoon, but police insisted it was under 100,000, and even CND put the numbers just at 150,000 – were swarming past him; and, though the weather may have been markedly warmer than that which greeted the phenomenon that was the 15 February march, hearts were colder.

Britain’s biggest wartime demonstration was a more dour, determined and altogether angrier affair. Gone, it seemed, were the ranks of the well-dressed middle-classes, most of whom had been holding a placard for the first time, who swelled the first event to such historic proportions. Instead, the more bizarre groupings and banners (South London Home Educators; Sex Workers of the World Unite – and, yes, you can bet that heads were craning to see who was holding the poster) were almost lost in the sea of CND, SWP and Socialist Alliance posters, and their messages were not the stuff of musical comedy. ‘Weep with the Widows of Iraq.’ ‘Bomb Texas, they have oil too.’ The Workers’ Revolutionary Party Young Socialists, in particular, built a number of bridges with the rest of the nation by carrying the simple, pithy, ‘Victory to Iraq.’ Guardian/UK

Related: Global Day of Protest Against War on Iraq — A 200K poster in PDF format “listing the 603 cities, on all seven continents, that held protests on F15, along with crowd estimates for many of the largest turnouts.” [via monkeyfist]

And why in the world, in articles like this, does the New York Times keep saying “thousands of protesters” when it is talking about hundreds of thousands… two orders of magnitude greater?

The Heavy Price of Dominance: “Americans — whether they support or oppose war with Iraq — need to realize the consequences of the status we may shortly assume … the beginning of empire.” — Leon Fuerth, formerly national security adviser to vice president Al Gore and now a research professor at George Washington University. TomPaine

In a little-used U.N. legal procedure, any nation can by-pass logjams in the Security Council and take an issue directly to the General Assembly. Has the time come for the GA to vote to condemn the Iraq War as a breach of international peace and security? Globalvision News Network

What are the military options for Iraq? How will the US deploy their firepower? What is the likelihood of street battles in Baghdad? Paul Hirst, the author of War in the Twenty-First Century, assesses the options. open democracy

I was prepared to hear about a grenade attack at a US military camp in Kuwait but floored to hear that an American soldier is the prime may be a suspect. CNN

While of course the suspect may be mentally unstable and not a principled objector, the followng links are offered as Related: Not in a soldier’s name: Interviewed by television crews in the desert, the officers and men on the frontiers of Iraq put a brave face on it all. “We’re here to do a job.” But killing, and being killed, isn’t just a job. At least, some of them know it. Once in the service, it is very, very hard to quit. Comradeship is no mean virtue.

But in the US, it has become an issue. The Quakers, in North Carolina, have established a hotline to counsel disturbed members of the armed services. It is much in demand. Many Americans are devout Christians. Do they listen to church leaders, or do they follow their fundamentalist president, who still believes in crusades? It is tragic and ironic that Christian fundamentalism plays unwittingly into the hands of the Islamic fundamentalism it purports to despise. Guardian/UK

And: “A few in military refuse to fight ‘wrong war’. Activists call stance brave; critics say it’s cowardly.” USAToday

So Are You. Americans are not often afforded the opportunity to witness a war crime live on television. Today’s actions bring to mind a war crime from a generation ago: The shooting of a prisoner by Vietnamese General and American ally Nguyen Ngoc Loan. General Loan put a pistol to the head of this bound prisoner and blew his brains into the street, an image that millions of Americans saw after it had taken place. We are here again today. The poverty of the Iraqi people leaves them bound, unable to escape the wave of steel. We have blown their brains out. We have incinerated them in place. We will continue to do so, and you can watch it from your couch. Today, you are the terrorist. — William Rivers Pitt, truthout

but he was right about Saddam Paul Berman, one of the most provocative thinkers on the left, has a message for the antiwar movement: Stop marching and start fighting to spread liberal values in the Middle East.
(…)
Terror and Liberalism, Berman’s bracing new book, suggests that just as liberal-minded Europeans and Americans doubted the threats of Hitler and Stalin, enlightened Westerners today are in danger of missing the urgency of the violent ideologies coming out of the Muslim world.

The argument put forward by Berman, who is one of the most elegant and provocative thinkers to emerge from America’s New Left, will both infuriate and engage those on all sides of the political spectrum. In a recent interview with Salon, Berman insisted that while he does not support the Bush administration — actually, he detests how President Bush has handled the case for war and warns “we will pay for it” — he thinks it was also dangerous for the antiwar movement to ignore the threat that was posed by a ruthless Iraqi regime that killed a million people and threatened the stability of the world. ”

So you think the way he’s presenting this war to the world is really where he’s gone wrong.

Yes, it has been wretched. He’s presented his arguments for going to war partly mendaciously, which has been a disaster. He’s certainly presented them in a confused way, so that people can’t understand his reasoning. He’s aroused a lot of suspicion. Even when he’s made good arguments, he’s made them in ways that are very difficult to understand and have completely failed to get through to the general public. All in all, his inarticulateness has become something of a national security threat for the United States.

In my interpretation, the basic thing that the United States wants to do — overthrow Saddam and get rid of his weapons — is sharply in the interest of almost everybody all over the world. And although the U.S. is proposing to act in the interest of the world, Bush has managed to terrify the entire world and to turn the world against him and us and to make our situation infinitely more dangerous than it otherwise would have been. It’s a display of diplomatic and political incompetence on a colossal scale. We’re going to pay for this.

Then what is it that the public doesn’t understand? What hasn’t he been able to get across?

One thing he hasn’t gotten across is that there is a positive liberal democratic goal and a humanitarian goal here. Iraq is suffering under one of the most grotesque fascist tyrannies there’s ever been. Hundreds of thousands, maybe a million people, have been killed by this horrible regime. The weapons programs are not a fiction. There’s every reason to think that Saddam, who’s used these weapons in the past, would be happy to use them in the future. The suffering of the Iraqi people is intense. The United States is in the position to bring that suffering to an end. Their liberation, the creating of at least the rudiments of a liberal democratic society there, are in the interests of the Iraqi people and are deeply in the interests of liberal society everywhere. There are reasons to go in which are those of not just self-interest or self-defense, but of solidarity of humanitarianism, of a belief in liberal ideals. And Bush has gotten this across not at all.

Do you believe Bush has such motives?

It’s not right to utterly dismiss these motives. A lot of people look at Bush and sneer a little too easily and think that these motives cannot possibly have anything to do with him or his policies. This is a mistake too.

In Afghanistan, everybody sneers at the achievements of the United States and its allies because we see the warlords in the provinces, we see the extreme suffering, we see all the things that haven’t been done. But what has been done has really been quite magnificent. A hideous tyranny was overthrown, a new government was established in more or less the way that any liberal democrat would advise: Afghans were consulted from around the country, more or less democratic councils led to the forming of a new government with a new leader for Afghanistan who is not a warlord or a corrupt figure or a friendly religious fanatic but who is in fact a man of modern liberal democratic ideals.

Bush announced that the war in Afghanistan was going to be fought on behalf of women’s rights. Everybody deeply laughed at that and for reasons I can understand because in the United States Bush has not been a promoter of women’s rights. Still, the result of the war was in fact that women’s rights in Afghanistan have made a forward leap larger than anywhere in the world in history. From a certain point of view this has been the first feminist war in all of history.

He’s unable to do that partly because the man is fatally inarticulate and he’s also unable to do that, I’m sure, because he’s confused ideologically about whether he’s really in favor of the do-good aspect of his program or indifferent to it.

He hasn’t given us much of an indication that he’s preoccupied with these humanitarian issues. Maybe he simply isn’t.

He hasn’t straightened it out in his mind. His initial instinct was to oppose this sort of thing. He was against nation-building. Events have driven him to engage in nation-building, but he’s done it in a halfhearted way. Although he’s done some of these things which are admirable, he has not been able to enlist the world’s sympathy or support. He’s left people all over the world in a position where they have no way to regard his motives as anything other than the most cynical.

But I should add that although Bush is hugely to blame for this — it’s just tragic that the United States is led by such an inarticulate and intellectually confused and unattractive figure who personally makes me cringe — other people should be standing up and trying to fight for issues of humanitarianism and social solidarity, of women’s rights and liberal freedoms.

One of the scandals is that we’ve had millions of people marching through the streets calling for no war in Iraq, but we haven’t had millions of people marching in the streets calling for freedom in Iraq. Nobody’s marching in the streets on behalf of Kurdish liberties. The interests of the liberal dissidents of Iraq and the Kurdish democrats are in fact also our interests. The more those people prosper, the safer we are. This is a moment in which what should be our ideals — the ideals of liberal democracy and social solidarity — are also materially in our interest. Bush has failed to articulate this, and a large part of the left has failed to see this entirely.

Salon Books

Tomorrow’s New York Times Magazine has a profile by Berman of Sayyid Qutb, whom he dubs <a href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/23/magazine/23GURU.html?pagewanted=all&position=top%20%20

“>The Philosopher of Islamic Terror and ideological hero of al Qaeda. [thanks, walker]

Why a deadly disease might be coming your way soon: this scare story takes off from a “massive report issued this week by the U.S. Institute of Medicine, Microbial Threats to Health: Emergence, Detection, and Response. It might as well have the subtitle: How We’re Blowing It.” Slate

But none of this is new. Investigative journalist Laurie Garrett said it all in another (also massive) tome almost a decade ago, The Coming Plague: newly emerging diseases

in a world out of balance, and I’ll bet with far less turgid prose. [As loyal readers of FmH know, I try to follow this stuff in an occasional department here of ’emerging infectious disease news’.]

The military’s laptop of choice provokes shock and awe: The author drools over the beefy hunk of machinery seen in videos from the front and reportedly widely deployed. This is either tongue-in-cheek or over-the-top; do you suppose the writer drives a Hummer? Slate

Why liberals need an affirmative position on Iraq

With the U.S. invasion of Iraq under way, American liberals seem at a loss for how to respond. In recent months, most lined up against unilateral war; now that war has begun, the only semi-coherent message emerging from progressive ranks is one of rejectionism. But that tack is a mistake. And it is one liberals could pay for dearly — at the ballot box and in the department of intellectual credibility — in future years. When it comes to questions of war, Iraq and reconstruction, liberals need to start thinking constructively, and fast.

Liberals held a wide variety of views on the necessity of war during the months leading up to invasion. We were no exception: One of us fully supported the administration’s war plans while the other was critical of the president’s unilateral course. But that is all in the past. War is now a reality. And it seems to us that the only moral and practical option for liberals is to begin immediately campaigning for a more ambitious, comprehensive and compassionate reconstruction of Iraq than the one the Bush administration is likely to embrace — while supporting the war effort that will lay the groundwork for such plans to be enacted. — Nick Penniman and Richard Just, TomPaine and The American Prospect

The president’s party took an early run this week at shutting down criticism with an all-hands-on-deck attack on Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, a Vietnam-era veteran who had the nerve to criticize the diplomatic failures leading up to this war.

“I’m saddened, saddened that this president failed so miserably at diplomacy that we’re now forced to war,” Daschle said on Monday, “saddened that we have to give up one life because this president couldn’t create the kind of diplomatic effort that was so critical for our country.”

The way the Republicans reacted, you’d have thought Daschle had endorsed Saddam Hussein for reelection. “Those comments may not undermine the president as he leads us into war,” said House Speaker Dennis Hastert. “And they may not give comfort to our adversaries, but they come mighty close.”

But a different standard seemed to apply after President Clinton launched his 1999 air campaign in Kosovo to protect ethnic Albanians from another dictator. — EJ Dionne, Washington Post

In times of strife, it is good to know who your friends are. So, in the absence of support from traditional allies such as France and Germany, it will come as welcome news to our troops in the Gulf this week that when the going gets tough, Azerbaijan is right behind them. The “coalition of the willing”, as Colin Powell has called it, is the list of 30 countries that responded positively to a phone call from Washington, seeking their support against Iraq. Starting with Afghanistan, ending with Uzbekistan and with 15 countries in between preferring to remain anonymous, it is an imaginative list, eschewing the usual suspects to give those nations not used to playing a role on the world stage a chance to shine. Albania, for example. And Georgia. Guardian/UK

Bush had Iraq in his sights before he became President:

How the American administration moved, after 11 September 2001, from its pledge to hunt down Osama bin Laden “dead or alive” to launching all-out war on Iraq is one of the imponderables of international diplomacy. According to new inside accounts, the rout of the Taliban in Afghanistan was less a prelude to war on Iraq than a temporary distraction from it. Independent/UK

Blair ‘restrained Bush from attacking Iraq after Sept 11’: Tony Blair played a key role in stopping President George W Bush from ordering military action against Iraq immediately after the September 11 attacks, and convincing him to take a longer diplomatic road to war, British sources disclosed yesterday.

But officials said they decided on a spring campaign because of fears that prolonged uncertainty would undermine the global economy and destabilise Arab countries ready to help. Telegraph/UK

Of course, we all know the dysadministration has never been interested in peaceful disarmament of Iraq as anything more than a pretext. They have been sabotaging and stonewalling the U.N. inspection process all along on both the CBW and the nuclear side.

If you spot terrorism, blow your anti-terrorism whistle. If you are Vin Diesel, yell really loud.

“Russian President Vladimir Putin, in fierce criticism of the U.S. attack on Baghdad, has demanded a quick end to hostilities and is challenging Washington’s view that Iraq is a threat to world security.” Yahoo! News

And: China Demands Halt to Attack Washington Post

Montreal Canadiens fans boo U.S. national anthem. Of course, they were just returning the favor.

“We should make the outcome in Iraq seem, as much as possible, like a victory for Iraqis, and we should put them in charge quickly.” — Nicholas Kristof, NY Times op-ed. Admirable sentiments, but if thinks editorial moralizing, especially from the Times, can hold this dysadministration accountable to any standard of fairness in the face of its rapacious illegality, he lives in a fantasy world.

“Four criteria by which the American public can evaluate the progress of the invasion of Iraq.” NY Times editorial

“Is the war making you ill? In San Francisco, a group called Direct Action to Stop the War put out the call to call in sick the day the United States invades Iraq. Most peace demos thus far have been held after work and on weekends in order to guarantee higher turnouts and to avoid interfering with the working day, but the rapidly maturing anti-war movement is looking for ways to dust off the old connections between war and capitalism by monkeywrenching the economy.” Village Voice

letter ‘C’ (‘D’ to follow shortly). Do with these what you will. There might be some direct action planned at some of these bases that you would want to, ummm, go down and watch. E-Journal of Modern Strategy

“the all clear siren just went on.

The bombing aould come and go in waves, nothing too heavy and not yet comparable to what was going on in 91. all radio and TV stations are still on and while the air raid began the Iraqi TV was showing patriotic songs and didn’t even bother to inform viewers that we are under attack. at the moment they are re-airing yesterday’s interview with the minister of interior affairs. THe sounds of the anti-aircarft artillery is still louder than the booms and bangs which means that they are still far from where we live, but the images we saw on Al Arabia news channel showed a building burning near one of my aunts house, hotel pax was a good idea. we have two safe rooms one with “international media” and the other with the Iraqi TV on. every body is waitingwaitingwaiting. phones are still ok, we called around the city a moment ago to check on friends. Information is what they need. Iraqi TV says nothing, shows nothing. what good are patriotic songs when bombs are dropping

around 6:30 my uncle went out to get bread, he said that all the streets going to the main arterial roads are controlled by Ba’ath people. not curfew but you have to have a reason to leave your neighborhood, and the bakeries are, by instruction of the Party, seeling only a limited amount of bread to each customer. he also says that near the main roads all the yet unfinished houses have been taken by party or army people.”

As an aside: Kottke articulates some doubts about where Raed is, really. In the buzz over this weblog, the thought certainly should cross people’s minds…

in the manner of Gil Scott-Heron‘s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, which remains to this day one of the more eloquent powerful poetic rants devised. This one works too, in its own right. Don’t fail to follow up some of the hyperlinks. biplog[thanks, walker]

Dean Allen complains about “the constant grousing about the scourge of ‘political correctness’™;

a complaint that plays as reliably well in the echo chamber as a frontman demanding if the arena is ready to rock.

Such staying power for a term unused outside the realm of parody since, oh, 1991? It’s a drained cliché, malleable, as was its antonym long before Bill Maher smirked into view.

Yet the very same pious humourlessness, the very same shouting down of any opposing view, the very same presumptions of power, the very same claims to a higher purpose, the very same misappropriation of the suffering of strangers, that dogged the very worst of what we came to know as the ‘politically correct’™ is now the breakfast, lunch, dinner and midnight snack of the neocons and pseudolibertarians, the Attack Runts and the designated mourners. Easy enough to laugh at. That is, until its impact hits home.

Look, a new term: Idiotically Correct.”

He’s talking about the amazing saga that starts out with Nashville’s Charlie Daniels’ latest effort to prove he’s a caricature of a redneck yahoo, but watch where it goes. [via walker]

“The backlash against prominent stars opposing any attack on Iraq has impacted on this year’s Oscars, with organisers drawing up a blacklist of people who will not be allowed a platform to air anti-war views.

Meryl Streep, Sean Penn, Vanessa Redgrave, George Clooney, Dustin Hoffman and Spike Lee are among those who will not be speaking, amid fears they could turn the ceremony into an anti-war rally.

In a move denounced by some as a return to McCarthyism, star presenters have been ordered to stick to scripts, while winners, who the producers have no control over, could find their acceptance speeches cut if they say anything much more than a brief thank you.” The Scotsman

“The historian and journalist Richard Brookhiser weighs in on George W. Bush—his management style, his mean streak, his religiosity, and his recovery from alcoholism.”

In the Name of God: ‘Bush’s rhetoric suggests that he feels God has chosen him to lead the U.S. against “Evil.” Is that why Bush is dragging us into an unprovoked war?’ By Jack Beatty (with whom I have a major axe to grind — as mock-erudite resident pundit on that evening NPR talk show On Point at least, he always seems like he’s just crammed for an exam when he comments on the issue of the day.)

Counterpoint: It’s Not Easy Being Mean: “Mark Bowden talks about the strange life of Saddam Hussein and why his downfall is inevitable.” All from: The Atlantic

Martin Walker wonders, “How does America’s global power compare with that of the great empires of the past?” Wilson Quarterly

What we don’t know about the toxic chemicals in our bodies: Scientists call the accumulation of chemical contaminants (such as PCBs, mercury, and pesticides) within a person’s body the “body burden.” Body burden is just a number, a concentration in parts per billion or micrograms per liter. But the term calls forth an image too, of a body bent over and struggling beneath a heavy load. When scientists start taking about body burden, I think about real bodies — my own and my children’s. Grist

Baghdad, Iraq – January 16th, 2003 Logos Journal

Reflections on Lives of the Monster Dogs by Kirsten Bakis – “The writer and the pet owner share a similar neurotic desire to be loved, and it is the pets’ very powerlessness which paradoxically empowers it. Give me your undifferentiated affection. You can trust me, I would only do what’s best for you. Writers want their readers to be obedient, attentive and loyal. They want to see the slobber dripping off the end of a droopy pink tongue.” Between the Lines

An Anecdotal Approach: Since the September Eleventh airplane attacks on the World Trade Center, it is difficult to imagine American readers responding to the opening sentences of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow in quite the same ways as they had previously. “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now” (3). Suddenly these famous words are thrust into new contexts, and yet, I would like to argue that the idea of “comparison” still pervades our ways of understanding. Who can forget the horrifying doubling and déjà vu of the images of the second airplane crashing into the second tower? That scene of doubled impact and destruction at once creates the desire for and, with its sense of radical singularity, denies bases of comparison… Postmodern Culture

I love my fellow creature. Jesus,

how I love him: endways, sideways,

frontways and all the other ways–but

he doesn’t exist! Neither does she. I

do, in a bastardly sort of way.

To whom then am I addressed? To

the imagination. [. . .]

If I could say what is in my mind in

Sanscrit or even Latin I would do so.

But I cannot. I speak for the integrity

of the soul and the greatness of life’s

inanity; the formality of its boredom;

the orthodoxy of its stupidity. Kill!

kill! let there be fresh meat. . . .

The imagination, intoxicated by

prohibitions, rises to drunken heights

to destroy the world. Let it rage, let it

kill. The imagination is supreme.

“William Carlos Williams might have been surprised to find Context reprinting sections of his 1923 prose-poem and poem collage, “Spring and All.” Then again, writing for all of us truly common readers, the pure products of public and state schools as has never before been true in Western history, perhaps he would have simply nodded. And smiled.” — Linda Wagner-Martin, Context

“The bestselling American writer Donna Tartt scooped her first British book prize last night after winning the £5,000 WH Smith literary award. With only her second novel, The Little Friend, she beat plays by the long-established Tom Stoppard and short stories by fellow American Sam Shepard in a contest open to drama as well as fiction…. The new novel beat Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia trilogy, Shepard’s Great Dream of Heaven, Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel Middlesex, The Mulberry Empire by Philip Hensher, and Iain Pears’ Dream of Scipio.” Guardian/UK

Patriot, n. One to whom the interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.

Patriotism, n. Combustible rubbish read to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.

-Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

God help Iraq, the world, our American souls. The antiwar movement faces the beginning, not the end, of domestic outrage and resistance to this abhorrent obscenity. Peace activists persevere as war begins:

• Protests sweep across the world and the United States;
• top
  
  10 ways to protest the war;
  
• “there is a roar of protest around the world that is rising in
  
  volume even now.” AlterNet
  
• 
  “Hours before the bombing began, the founder of Voices in the Wilderness
  
  wrote from Baghdad of the soul-sickness that plagues those forced to fight
  
  wars dreamt up in antiseptic think tanks“. — Kathy Kelly, Alternet.
  

• Peaceful Regime Change in 2004: “Instead of feeling comforted by America’s military posturing, many of us
  
  feel neither safe nor free. It’s time to retake, and remake, American
  
  democracy. — Farai Chideya, AlterNet.
  

• “Though most blacks are against the war, for a variety of reasons you won’t
  
  see many of them taking to the streets in protest.” — Earl Ofari Hutchinson, AlterNet.
  

• 
  “Today I Weep For My Country”, says Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) . From the Senate floor Wednesday, he asks, “Why can this
  
  President not seem to see that America’s true power lies not in its will
  
  to intimidate, but in its ability to inspire?”.

• Although there have been rumors that the Pope has thrown his support behind the US effort (probably spawned by US disinfo sources), I find more credible the reports that he has been making impassioned pleas that the US and its ‘coalition of those who can’t afford to say no’ cease and desist. “The pope lost his temper with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Italian counterpart Silvio Berlusconi in recent discussions at the Vatican on a possible war in Iraq, a newspaper reported. ‘John Paul II used words and gestures bordering on a diplomatic incident,’ in his audience with Blair on Feb. 22, the daily said.” ArabNews.

• Casualties of War — First Truth, Then Conscience: “In the domestic media siege being maintained by top-notch spinners and
  
  shrewd political advisers at the White House, conscience is in the cross
  
  hairs.” — Norman Solomon, AlterNet.
  

• Why We Are Taking to the Streets: “A moral and pragmatic explanation for the mass civil disobedience now
  
  taking place in cities across the country.” — Father Louis Vitale and Sister Bernie Galvin, Direct Action to Stop the War
  

• 
  Face the Nation and Dick Cheney: “US anti-war demonstrators are invisible to the U.S. government.” — Ronda Hauben, Telepolis

Searchers seeking debris from the space shuttle Columbia have found a data recorder that captures information from dozens of sensor locations, a spokeswoman for the investigators said this evening, raising hope that investigators will soon have a new trove of data to aid their work.

The recorder was found near Hemphill, Tex., intact and dry, although it may have suffered some heat damage… NY Times

Will ignoring race impede progress in medicine, or is it a scientifically specious notion?“A view widespread among many social scientists, endorsed in official statements by the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association, is that race is not a valid biological concept. But biologists, particularly the population geneticists who study genetic variation, have found that there is a structure in the human population. The structure is a family tree showing separate branches for Africans, Caucasians (Europe, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent), East Asians, Pacific Islanders and American Indians.

Biologists, too, have often been reluctant to use the term “race.” But this taboo was broken last year by Dr. Neil Risch, a leading population geneticist at Stanford University.

Vexed by an editorial in The New England Journal that declared that race was “biologically meaningless,” Dr. Risch argued in the electronic journal Genome Biology that self-identified race was useful in understanding ethnic differences in disease and in the response to drugs.

Race corresponded broadly to continental ancestry and hence to the branches on the human family tree described by geneticists, he said.” NY Times

“The US government put together <a href=”http://www.ready.gov/

“>a website to prepare people in case of an attack on the country. However, the graphics they use are pretty ambiguous, and don’t really make a lot of sense on their own, so caption some!!” [thanks, Jim!] ROFL, really ROFL!

Asylum for Bush [via wood s lot]

Now it’s official: most Americans are idiots.

So why do these pinheads think such a thing? —Ted Rall, Yahoo! op-ed

Lisa Walsh Thomas: “She’s the nightmare that’s been clawing at your sleep lately, George W, and she’s … coming to get you!

(…)You can stop her for awhile with 800 missiles and a couple of MOABs, and you can stop her again with nuclear weapons that can turn a Garden of Eden into hell, and you can poison her and her family and her neighbors with your own endless and illegal chemical weapons. You can tear out her tongue and rape and pillage and steal everything she holds dear. You can tear her country wide apart and bury thousands in each explosion that rips through her heart.

But you cannot kill her.” America Held Hostile

The constitutional challenge to the Texas “homosexual conduct” law that the Supreme Court will take up next week has galvanized not only traditional gay rights and civil rights organizations, but also libertarian groups that see the case as a chance to deliver their own message to the justices.

The message is one of freedom from government control over private choices, economic as well as sexual. NY Times

Although planning is better than it was a year ago, when few crisis managers even realized that children had different needs, the experts said, actual preparedness is hardly better than it was before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Pediatric doses of medicines to counter nerve gas, anthrax or a dirty bomb’s radiation are not even standardized yet, much less distributed. Paramedics who could be called to a gassed school or a bombed bus do not routinely receive specialized training in things like finding smaller veins or using smaller tracheotomy tubes in children thrashing around in fear or in steeling themselves against the shock of having to treat a room full of dying children. NY Times

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning

to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door”…
…And I throw away the key.

Human rights and immigrant advocates Tuesday condemned a new policy from the Department of Homeland Security that calls for extended detention of individuals from mainly Muslim countries who are seeking political asylum in the United States.

Amnesty International called the policy “Orwellian.”

The detention order is part of Operation Liberty Shield, a series of domestic security measures announced Monday by the Department of Homeland Security intended to make it harder for terrorists to strike here in reprisal for any U.S. attack on Iraq. LA Times

Thinking about the terror that Bush Jr. is about to unleash on the world tonight and the doomsday scenarios that may follow, I wondered — don’t laugh — whether the cautionary capacity to envision a radically different world, either post-apocalyptic or at least post-American, that seems so lacking in current strategic planning might bear some relationship to early exposure to speculative fiction. A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter Miller, Neville Shute’s On the Beach, Brave New World and 1984 of course, Asimov’s Foundation and, decades later, Delaney, Brunner, Zelazny are some of the formative things that come to mind for me. I’m sure you have your own list…

I’m pretty sure that Bush, since his intellectual limitations begin with — although are probably not limited to — dyslexia, never read any science fiction, but might we correlate the nature of the global vision of other U.S. Presidents or world leaders to their embrace of literature considering alternative futures? Does any reader have a clue about which 20th century Presidents might have read science fiction and related genres, if any? (It might be broadly inimical to choosing a career in politics and, arguably, American foreign policy decision making is largely not shaped by global vision at all…) Who might have had a close relationship with a science fiction writer, if any? (I know the reactionary Jerry Pournelle fancies himself a Presidential advisor, I mean other than him…)

For that matter, which American presidents or world leaders were shaped by serious literary pursuits, which might be expected to bear some relationship with ‘thinking outisde the box’, at all? Which did more than lip service to the influence of poetry?

Window Lights for Peace: “Around the world, thousands of us are putting lights in our windows to keep the light of reason and hope burning, to let others know that they are not alone, and to show the way home to the young men and women who are on their way to Iraq. Join us in sending this message of hope and peace by signing below…”

“The Bush administration and lawmakers have not followed through on their own concerns that terrorists could turn the nation’s chemical plants into weapons of mass destruction, congressional auditors said Tuesday.

Congress and the administration concluded after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that the plants were vulnerable, and the CIA warned a year ago of the potential for an al-Qaida attack on U.S. chemical facilities.” Nando Times

“International aid groups urged the United States and Britain on Tuesday to put the well-being of Iraqi civilians at the center of war plans, calling on them to avoid attacks on key civilian facilities like power plants.

Amnesty International and Oxfam also said the United Nations should enter Iraq as quickly as possible after a war to administer humanitarian aid and run a post-Saddam Hussein government.” Nando Times

The Iraq Body Count Project –  “This is a Human Security project to establish an independent and comprehensive public database of civilian deaths in Iraq resulting directly from military actions by the USA and its allies in 2003. Results and totals are continually updated and made immediately available on this page and on various IBC counters which may be freely displayed on any website, where they will be automatically updated without further intervention. Casualty figures are derived from a comprehensive survey of online media reports. Where these sources report differing figures, the range (a minimum and a maximum) are given. All results are independently reviewed and error-checked by at least three members of the Iraq Body Count project team before publication.” [more]

Act Now As If The Future Depended On It: “In response to Bush’s ultimatum, Not in Our Name calls on everyone to begin massive opposition now to this war. We cannot go about our daily business as usual while bombs designed to flatten Baghdad and “shock and awe” the world into submission to U.S. might are loaded into planes. This war will be an outrageous crime against the people of Iraq and a blow to the very humanity of people the world over. We can’t wait for the bombs to fall.”

No Business As Usual When They Start Their War: “When we hear of massive bombing of Iraq, we must respond to this with massive resistance. There can be no business as usual that day. Don’t go to work, or to school. Don’t stay at home in your living room, watching this massacre unfold on TV. Plan convergence points in every city and community for that day now and spread the word. Gather in the day and manifest your resistance into the night. Hook up now with others in your city and make plans. Keep checking www.notinourname.net for updates.”

From Dave Farber’s IP mailing list:

If you have RealPlayer [and a broadband connection, I might add — FmH], this is worth a listen. It’s Robin Cook’s 11 1/2

minute speech today resigning from the government over the Iraq War. It is

measured, and eloquent, and reminds us again of why England’s is “the Mother

of Parliaments.”

In all the hours we have watched C-Span over the last two years it would be

comforting if one person, either for or against this war, had spoken so

eloquently. Regardless of how you feel about the coming conflict, this is

A-1 political theater.

“

A host of recent actions by government agencies, school boards and other

institutions attempts to limit what we read, see and hear — sometimes

with

debilitating effects.” — Kari Lydersen, AlterNet

My rant about Camille Paglia’s take on the Sixties (below) reminded a reader of the following, buried in a New Yorker review of To the Finland Station:

“When you undertake historical research, two truths that sounded banal come to seem profound. The first is that your knowledge of the past—apart from, occasionally, a limited visual record and the odd unreliable survivor—comes entirely from written documents. You are almost completely cut off, by a wall of print, from the life you have set out to represent. You can’t observe historical events; you can’t question historical actors; you can’t even know most of what has not been written about. What has been written about therefore takes on an importance that may be spurious. A few lines in a memoir, a snatch of recorded conversation, a letter fortuitously preserved, an event noted in a diary: all become luminous with significance—even though they are merely the bits that have floated to the surface. The historian clings to them, while, somewhere below, the huge submerged wreck of the past sinks silently out of sight.

The second realization that strikes you is, in a way, the opposite of the first: the more material you dredge up, the more elusive the subject becomes.” [thanks, walker]

A passel of interesting and/or important items in recent days:

Camille Paglia: Religious Vision in the American 1960s —

“Commentary on the 1960s has been massive. Law and politics in that turbulent decade are well documented but remain controversial, and the same thing can be said of contemporary innovations in mass media and the arts. One major area remains ambiguous or poorly assimilated, however—the new religious vision, which for a tantalizing moment in the American sixties brought East and West together in a progressive cultural synthesis. Its promise was never completely fulfilled, for reasons I will try to sketch here. But the depth and authenticity of that spiritual shift need to be more widely acknowledged.

(…)Not since early nineteenth-century Romanticism had there been such a strange mix of revolutionary politics with ecstatic nature-worship and sex-charged self-transformation. It is precisely this phantasmagoric religious vision that distinguishes the New Left of the American 1960s from the Old Left of the American 1930s and from France’s failed leftist insurgency of 1968, both of which were conventionally Marxist in their indifference or antagonism to religion.” Arion

Paglia has a noble intent here which quickly turns misguided in some shockingly conventional, and insufficiently examined, assumptions in her next paragraphs —

• “Despite their ambivalence toward authority, however, they often sought gurus;”
  
• “One problem was that the more the mind was opened to what was commonly called ‘cosmic consciousness’, the less meaningful politics or social structure became;”
  
• “Drugs remade the Western world-view by shattering conventions of time, space, and personal identity. Unfortunately, revelation was sometimes indistinguishable from delusion;”
  
• “The neurological risks of long-term drug use were denied or underestimated: the most daring sixties questers lost the ability to articulate and transmit their spiritual legacy to posterity.”
  

What she misses in these jabs is that the ideal (even if it fell short in the reality in many instances) of the spiritual authority to which ’60’s seekers submitted themselves is different in essential fashions from the conventional moral and political authority being rejected; part of the difference being, of course, the discipline of voluntary submission and part the spiritual and moral accomplishment of the spiritual leader. Reams have been written by elegant thinkers — in the ’60’s, before, and since — reconciling social activism and spiritual striving, even —especially — in the Eastern traditions supposedly fatalistic about the inevitability of suffering. Someone blithely dismissing revelation and delusion as indistinguishable knows nothing about either, and someone blithely positing the inevitability of neurological damage from “long-term drug use” knows nothing about the distinctions among approaches to mind-altering drugs. There’s an old saying that anyone who remembers the ’60’s couldn’t have been there. Paglia clearly wasn’t there, and clearly misremembers, smugly and badly.

Typically, her vision deteriorates further into a smear campaign with the obligatory references to Charlie Manson, the fact that Leary and Alpert were dismissed from the Harvard faculty, the People’s Temple, the SLA’s kidnapping of Patty Hearst, Altamont, and Weatherman bombings, as if these were the only legacies of the era. And, of course, because ‘cults’ were a feature of the ’60’s, the ‘cult’-based tragedies of the ’90’s, like that of the Branch Davidians, are attributable to ’60’s values as well. Oh, and the “free love” ethos is responsible for the AIDS epidemic.

Paglia also makes the amazing assertion that “(t)he major Asian cult of the sixties was Transcendental Meditation, founded in India as the Spiritual Regeneration Movement by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi,” again proving she wasn’t there. TM was the Starbucks of meditation organizations, then and now.

I could go on. Paglia’s interests are erudite namedropping — she certainly mentions most of the pertinent trends and phenomena — and pseudo-profound analysis placing them in historical context — more namedropping. Making sense of it? That’s another matter. From her pitifully limited academic perch, she criticizes Sixties thinkers for not making contributions to academic cultural criticism, never considering the legitimacy of their position that that endeavor might be morally and spiritually bankrupt. Thinking of all Sixties seekers as cut from whole cloth, she is able to pontificate that “(t)he gap in the sixties’ artistic and intellectual legacy partly occurred because too many young people followed their elementary understanding of Asian religion by making sensory experience primary.” Every historical movement has produced a popularized, intellectually lightweight version for the masses emphasizing the superficial and appealing to the hedonistic urges, but that does not characterize the entire movement. Paglia, who should know better than to enact the fallacy of taking the part for the whole, just doesn’t know where to find the serious seekers and their legacy.

“Health experts believe a deadly flu-like illness that has killed nine people is likely a virus. They’re also encouraged that some victims seem to be recovering.” Wired News

SARS does not respond to antibiotics, and white blood cell counts drop in infected individuals, rather than rising as is typically seen in a bacterial infection.

A New York Times overview of where we stand on the threshold of the war, and how we got here.

“Victory in Iraq won’t end the world’s distrust of the United States, because the Bush administration has made it clear that it doesn’t play by the rules.” — Paul Krugman, NY Times op-ed

Related: War in the Ruins of Diplomacy: “This war crowns a period of terrible diplomatic failure, Washington’s worst in at least a generation.” NY Times editorial

Joe Conason: “Dick Cheney performs right off a John Birch Society script.”

Today’s lead story in the Wall Street Journal confirms what many observers have suspected for months now: The Bush administration has never taken the diplomatic alternative seriously, and the pretense of doing so has been scripted by the vice president from the beginning. The former Wyoming congressman is an unreconstructed, old-fashioned right-winger with about as little respect for multilateral organizations and alliances as that old John Birch Society bumper sticker, circa 1962: “Get the U.S. Out of the U.N.”

Cheney articulated this viewpoint with startling candor yesterday to NBC News’ Tim Russert, who asked about former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft’s publicly articulated concern about the costs of perceived U.S. unilateralism and arrogance.

Salon

from Peace Action

One click urges your member of Congress to cosponsor and support Reps. DeFazio and Paul’s legislation to revoke the unilateral grant of war making powers to the President. ActforChange

By David Plotz, Julia Turner, and Avi Zenilman: “You’ve seen them pontificate gravely on Meet the Press, explain military strategy to Oprah, denounce France on The O’Reilly Factor, and solve the war’s aftermath in 30 seconds on The NewsHour. But face it, it’s impossible to tell them apart.”

“Why stop with Evian, Total gasoline, and the Concorde (just only the Air France flights)? Let’s get to the heart of the matter thing: A huge big percentage of the words in modern today’s English are of – gasp! – French origin beginnings. What if, as a result of the current diplomatic dispute today’s falling out between lands, the French demand ask for their words back? We could all be linguistic hostages captives…” Christian Science Monitor commentary [via walker]

…of haiku. iSciFiStory

Review: Consciousness: A User’s Guide by Adam Zeman: “Every morning, we wake up. How do we do it? What is happening when awareness dawns? Why do we need to be conscious? Where are we when we sleep or – the immemorial root of religion – when we die?” Telegraph/UK

“It is the open-ended war to dominate the Middle East and not the impending encounter with Iraq that is likely to prove truly costly and dangerous.” AlterNet

Related: Why the U.S. Inspires Scorn: “Other nations, and especially the Arab world, fear the start of an American empire.” LA Times news analysis [requires free registration; or read it at truthout]

The Left’s Nightmare Scenario: “What will be the antiwar movement’s response be if a quick victory and the

illusion of instant democracy play well on TV? Better start thinking about

it now.” AlterNet

“Elizabeth Smart is back home. Her parents are happy, the world is happy. But is she happy?”

Certainly, I’ll never know for sure. But it is an interesting question, whose possible answer is being muddied by all the talk of “brainwashing” and “mind control” being tossed around.

Those concepts, which one might have thought a nostalgic relic of the days of Charlie Manson and Patty Hearst, are being called into service to address a question obvious to anyone who thought twice about the resolution of this public drama: Why didn’t Elizabeth make any attempt to run away, at any point? Why, even upon being found by her saviors, the police, did she refuse to admit she was Elizabeth Smart? In my favorite touch, her response to police insistence that, come off it, she was Elizabeth Smart, was a coyly Biblical “thou sayest.”

Of course, if someone takes control of someone else’s very survival and controls all the information that person receives—which seems to be what happened to Elizabeth vis à vis the strangely charismatic street freak “Emmanuel” (and is not unlike what happens in any strict religious family)—it becomes easier to implant certain ideas and make them stick. In other contexts, this is called “socialization,” but when we don’t like the ideas and thoughts thus influenced, it becomes mind control. Reason

Unlike this essayist, it is not simply because it offends my notion of free will that I question the ‘mind control’ assertions in the Smart case. While brainwashing exists, it simply may not be an applicable notion in this case, where Smart may have just chosen to be with her ‘captor’, period. Don’t I recall from news coverage of her disappearance that questions of her cooperation with her ‘abductor’ arose from the start?

I agree; it bears repeating that ‘brainwashing’ or ‘mind control’ are merely socialization where we don’t hold with the outcome. In a similar fashion, ‘sects’ or ‘cults’ are arguably merely groups sharing a common belief, perhaps with a charismatic leader, which we find objectionable. Sociologically, for example, is the U.S. Army distinguishable from a cult? Induction is sui generis to indoctrination. I have yet to see a good definition of these terms that is not relative or value-laden. Perhaps we can reach a consensus on the social dangerousness of various groups — do they use manipulative or misleading tactics to proselytize or recruit? do they prey on the weak? exploit recruits’ resources or labor? have a double standard of values for the leader(s) as contrasted with the rank and file? prevent members unsupervised freedom of expression? Perhaps we should be very careful not to call a group a ‘cult’ unless all or most of these criteria are met, and then to acknowledge that it is just a matter of social consensus in labelling a particular group offensive or undesireable.

It also bears noting that the kidnapping of members back from ‘cults’ to be ‘deprogrammed’ by their families may, arguably, do similar harm to that we claim the ‘cult’ did. At the start of my psychiatric career, I was a close observer of a case in which an adult child of professional, affluent Boston parents was kidnapped back from the Hare Krishnas when he was about to sign his trust fund over to the group as a donation. The parents had him committed involuntarily to a local psychiatric hospital, claiming he was unable as a result of mental illness (what mental illness?) to care for himself. They had hired a famous deprogrammer, so much in demand that there would be a delay before he could take on the care of their son, and they were hoping to keep the young man hospitalized pending that outcome. The psychiatric assessment he received at the hospital suggested he was not suffering from a mental illness although he had some deficiencies in social skills that probably made the structure of a religious discipleship useful to him! He successfully fought his commitment and planned to bring countersuit against his parents for kidnapping him. No one is suggesting it is easy, and I am not sure what I would do as a parent in a similar position, but, yes indeed, it does appear all relative.

Passenger finds ‘chilling’ note from bag handler: An airline passenger who had two “No War with Iraq” signs in his suitcase says the federal security agent who opened his luggage inserted a note criticizing his “anti-American attitude.” Perhaps the baggage handler should be forgiven as one of those 2:5 Americans who believe Saddam Hussein was behind the WTC bombing. I’ve wondered if it was only a coincidence that my car was towed on the day several months ago after I applied an antiwar bumper sticker (I restrained myself; nothing obscene or threatening). There would be a precedent. I was once, around twenty-five or thirty years ago, severely hassled during a routine traffic stop for a bumper sticker reading “Subvert the Dominant Paradigm.” The police officer in a suburb of Boston told me he thought he understood what I meant by it and, if so, he didn’t like it. Is my current bumper sticker abit obtuse as well: “Blame Florida, Not Iraq” ? Now I can understand extending the right of free expression in the direction of considered violation of the law in the service of higher principles, intentionally inviting arrest — it will come to that, it probably will — but this is far short of that. Freedom of opinion with moral clarity in Ashcroft’s America takes courage and defiance…

Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal. Adopted by the International Law Commission of the United Nations, 1950:

Principle II

The fact that internal law does not impose a penalty for an act which constitutes a crime under international law does not relieve the person who committed the act from responsibility under international law.

Principle III

The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible Government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.

Principle IV

The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.

Principle V

Any person charged with a crime under international law has the right to a fair trial on the facts and law.

Principle VI

The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:

Crimes against peace:

Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of

aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;

Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).

War crimes:

Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave-labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or illtreatment of prisoners of war, of persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.

Crimes against humanity:

Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhuman acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds, when such acts are done or such persecutions are carried on in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime.

Principle VII

Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity as set forth in Principles VI is a crime under international law.

[via Warblogging.com]

Robin Cook has resigned from Tony Blair’s cabinet as the build-up to war with Iraq gathers pace.

BBC International Development Secretary Clare Short may follow Mr Cook’s lead and submit her resignation as well. How much precedent is there for the courageous resignation of cabinet-level officials faced with the immorality of their country’s course? Bravo, Mr. Cook!

Memo to George Bush: consider an offer of political asylum to Tony Blair. You are probably the only one who has any sympathy for him, and he is devoted to you like a pitiful puppy constantly kicked by its master and never realizing enough not to keep crawling back for more.

Four stories of the price the victims pay for the fallibility of modern medical practice. Malpractice awards and reportable errors are the tip of the iceberg. NY Times Magazine

Does everyone know already about former AP and New York Daily News reporter Christopher Albritton and his weblog? He’s planning on becoming the first independent war correspondent, posting war news from Iraq directly to his weblog. He’s attempting to obtain independent funding to defray the cost of returning to Iraq, so far logging $5000 in donations. Looking at his weblog, it is clear that, although he is an ndependent journalist, he is not an impartial one; as he reviews the ramp up to the war, he raises editorial questions about its wisdom and necessity. He should be careful in Iraq, especially if he uses a satellite uplink or otherwise allows his precise location to be ascertained; he sounds like just the type of journalist the US has warned of their safety. Here’s Wired‘s coverage.

Who Loves Ya, Baby? In his classic novel Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut explains how the world is divided into two types of social organizations: the karass and the granfalloon. A karass is a spontaneously forming group, joined by unpredictable links, that actually gets stuff done— as Vonnegut describes it, “a team that do[es] God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing.” A granfalloon, on the other hand, is a “false karass,” a bureaucratic structure that looks like a team but is “meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done.”

(,,,)

For most of the past 50 years, computers have been on the side of the granfalloons, good at maintaining bureaucratic structures and blind to more nuanced social interactions. But a new kind of software called social-network mapping promises to change all that. Instead of polishing up the org chart, the new social maps are designed to locate karasses wherever they emerge. Mapping social networks turns out to be one of those computational problems— like factoring pi out to a hundred decimal points or rendering complex light patterns on a 3-D shape— that computers can do effortlessly if you give them the right data. Discover

The article concludes by pointing out that mapping social networks may be useful in detecting antisocial behavior as well — a premise far more ntriguing and far more dubious.

“In the run-up to war, art matters more than ever…” Guardian/UK

‘One of the least defensible and intellectually questionable concepts raised in the often vitriolic debates surrounding art restoration practice over the past few decades is that of “readability.” … ‘ ArtWatch International

“A faith-by-faith guide to where the major religious denominations stand on war with Iraq.

Click on the group’s name or the check mark for more information about its Iraq position and related statements and articles.” BeliefNet [via Walker]