Declan McCullagh:

“If you’ve ever used a peer-to-peer network and swapped copyrighted files, chances are pretty good you’re guilty of a federal felony.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve forsworn Napster, uninstalled Kazaa and now are eagerly padding the record industry’s bottom line by snapping up $15.99 CDs by the cartload.

Be warned–you’re what prosecutors like to think of as an unindicted federal felon.

I’m not joking. A obscure law called the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act that former U.S. President Bill Clinton signed in 1997 makes peer-to-peer (P2P) pirates liable for $250,000 in fines and subject to prison terms of up to three years. (You may want to read it, since you’ll likely be hearing more about it soon.)” CNET

There are signs that prosecution under the law, of which there have been exactly none since its passage, will soon start after a bipartisan group of congressmen concerned about intellectual property theft on the net asked John Ashcroft to start enforcing it.

“A quick check of Kazaa on Friday afternoon showed that there were 4.1 million users online, sharing some 800 million files. The odds of any specific person getting busted are pretty low, but someone’s going to be a test case. Got your lawyer ready?”

“The crisis between Americans and the Germans and French over war in Iraq only superficially arises from the Bush administration’s determination since 2001 to attack Saddam Hussein. The two West European governments have seen the Iraqi dictator as a minor international problem, and war against him as likely to do more harm than good. But there is also a divergence in long-term perspective.

West Europeans, generally speaking, do not share America’s ambitions of vast global reform or visions of history coming to an end. They had enough of that kind of thinking, and its consequences, with Marxism and Nazism.” International Herald Tribune

‘A bar-code-based tracking system cuts medication errors at Veterans Health Administration hospitals, but it also turns the medical professionals who use it daily into “robo-nurses.” ‘ Wired

“Twelve University of Maryland undergraduates have been accused of using Web-equipped cell phones or handheld organizers to cheat on a business school final exam last month, according to the school’s student-run Honor Council.

Six of them have admitted to misconduct during that same test, the council said.” What amazes me is why, in this day and age, their business school professors persist in giving tests that can be cheated upon in the first place, i.e. that require memorization rather than the effective use of resources and integration of data that a ‘web-enabled open book’ format, if you will, would allow (and which is probably more like the skills the students will need to succeed after graduating, which is what they should be testing…). sunspot

…in new oilfields

The Texas governor, an oil man, was frustrated. A worldwide recession had begun a few months earlier, and it was being made worse by doubts about the world’s oil supply. The governor had threatened, and he had cajoled. But the rogue oil producers, who controlled a huge share of the world’s known oil reserves, wouldn’t cooperate.

So, the governor took the law into his own hands. He declared the producers to be “in a state of insurrection.” Their actions, he said, “openly, flagrantly and rebelliously violate the laws.” With that, the governor sent thousands of armed soldiers to overwhelm the rogues and take control of the oil fields.

The scenario sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Indeed, President Bush’s desire to rush U.S. troops into the deserts and oil fields of Iraq is eerily similar to the decision made seven decades ago by one of his predecessors in Austin… — Robert Bryce, Dallas Morning News

Even in a small world, there’s room for disagreement:

You probably don’t know Judith Kleinfeld. She’s a psychologist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, and you can contact her by calling the university switchboard or finding her e-mail address online. But could you get to her through some extension of your own social network—by mailing a letter for her to a friend who might know someone who knows someone who knows her?

Who cares?

Judith Kleinfeld does, for starters. She’s part of a growing cadre of scientists reviving the so-called small-world problem, a social-cum-mathematical conundrum formulated in the last century to characterize the interwoven webs of acquaintance among friends, neighbors, colleagues, and kin. In the mid-1960s the legendary social psychologist Stanley Milgram asked randomly selected citizens of Kansas and Nebraska to try to connect with social “targets” in Massachusetts by mailing letters to likely intermediaries. The average number of links between strangers turned out to be surprisingly small. Milgram claimed we’re all connected, on average, by half a dozen interpersonal avenues— a numinous network popularized by the phrase “six degrees of separation.” Discover

‘Craig Schaffner, 46, a Fayetteville-area computer consultant, has earned the pity of friends and acquaintances for his tragic reluctance to embrace the unverifiable, sources reported Monday.

“I honestly feel sorry for the guy,” said neighbor Michael Eddy, 54, a born-again Christian. “To live in this world not believing in a higher power, doubting that Christ died for our sins—that’s such a sad, cynical way to live. I don’t know how he gets through his day.” ‘ The Onion [via walker]

Douglas Rushkoff: “So I had the great and unexpected pleasure of sitting down with Al Gore for a couple of hours this week, to talk mostly about some distributed media ideas. He was a much brighter, open-minded, and – if I might add – cosmic thinker than I gave him credit for, before. I felt like he was really one of “us,” if you know what I mean: the kids in college who got those wild thoughts about how everything in the world, and even beyond, is connected somehow. And evolving. Only Gore found this organic view of reality reflected in the Constitution of the United States, and sought to enable the extension of this Enlightenment thinking into practical reality.

But still, I could imagine him back in the dorm room, sitting up all night with the rest of us and dreaming about how things might be – if we were ever in charge. With Gore, much more than Clinton, we almost got one of us in there. This was an inspiring thought to me, until I realized that this might be as close as we ever get. And if we get that close again, would the refs just throw another flag?

Call it awful, but I realized that the judicial decision to give the 2000 election to Bush has left deeper scars on my psyche than watching the WTC fall (from my apartment window). It made me wonder if the ‘system’ is broken, the game is rigged, and no one of conscience will ever be allowed to actualize the Constitution ever again.

Close to the end of the meeting, we got on to the subject of the Showdown in Iraq. Gore said quite plainly, “Well, of “Iourse it’s just a distraction. Nothing more.” [courtesy of walker]

How Big Corporate Campaign Contributors are Buying America…And What the Rest of Us Pay

‘Some people think it’s more important to give a big campaign contribution than to vote…that it’s “the American way” to buy access and influence with big money…that it’s OK if public policy is sold to the highest bidder. Some even think that the only real democracy is in the marketplace, where we all supposedly vote with our dollars.

Well, we at Public Campaign disagree, and we believe so do a lot of other Americans. Which is why we created the “State of the Union” poster. Because we wanted to use one picture to say what a thousand words couldn’t say about the union of big money and Washington.’

Why People Engage in Risky Behavior: “There is risk, and then there is risk. Figuring out what differentiates experimenting teenagers from delinquents and lifelong reckless hearts is not easy; behaviors typically stem from complex social, environmental, and biological interactions. Even defining risky conduct can be difficult.” The Scientist

Even in a small world, there’s room for disagreement:

You probably don’t know Judith Kleinfeld. She’s a psychologist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, and you can contact her by calling the university switchboard or finding her e-mail address online. But could you get to her through some extension of your own social network—by mailing a letter for her to a friend who might know someone who knows someone who knows her?

Who cares?

Judith Kleinfeld does, for starters. She’s part of a growing cadre of scientists reviving the so-called small-world problem, a social-cum-mathematical conundrum formulated in the last century to characterize the interwoven webs of acquaintance among friends, neighbors, colleagues, and kin. In the mid-1960s the legendary social psychologist Stanley Milgram asked randomly selected citizens of Kansas and Nebraska to try to connect with social “targets” in Massachusetts by mailing letters to likely intermediaries. The average number of links between strangers turned out to be surprisingly small. Milgram claimed we’re all connected, on average, by half a dozen interpersonal avenues— a numinous network popularized by the phrase “six degrees of separation.” Discover

A Republican Web site even Bush-bashers can love:

If you hurry, you can get in on the best giveaway contest since Pepsi Points and that Harrier jet. The Republican National Committee’s “online toolbox for Republican activists,” GOPTeamLeader.com, awards “GOPoints” to members who sign up and perform grass-roots actions for the party. E-mailing a local newspaper garners you five points, for example, and getting the letter published adds two more. The points are redeemable for hats, bags, jackets, and other swag, all emblazoned with the site’s logo. “There is no limit to what you can accomplish, or what you can earn”!

Egged on by prizes ranging from a GOP bumper sticker (75 points) to a leather portfolio (525 points), eager partisans used the site’s automated e-mailer this month to spam just about every newspaper in the country with a letter to the editor that begins: “When it comes to the economy, President Bush is demonstrating genuine leadership …” (Try it yourself by signing on as member “slategop2003@hotmail.com,” password “slate.”) To the thinly masked glee or disdain of bloggers everywhere, nearly 50 papers—including the Boston Globe and the Financial Times—actually ran the thing, each one under the name of a different, and presumably genuine, local author.

Now, here’s the important part:

Instead of getting mad, though, why not get even? An option on the site allows letter-writers to compose and send their own messages in lieu of the canned statements, meaning the technology used to push Bush’s agenda can be used to bash it as well. For an ironic Gen X-er, what better reward for e-mailing 100 anti-war letters to the editor than a GOP Team Leader fleece pullover? Slate

Fred Kaplan: “If we do, then it’s time to come out with it, now. As a last-minute pitch before U.N. Inspector Hans Blix delivers his report to the Security Council on Monday, Bush has been sending war’s most eloquent advocates out on the hustings—National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to the New York Times op-ed page, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to the Council on Foreign Relations, even Secretary of State Colin Powell to perform prodigal-son penance in the wake of betrayal by his new ex-best friends, the French. Yet these addresses leave the reader dizzy in dismay. Is this really, one wonders, the best our leaders can do?” Slate

“Frustrated with the warmongering and arrogance of the Bush White House, Germany and France are making a historic break with the U.S. Relations may never be the same.” Salon Dubya’s most lasting legacy on the foreign policy front may be less the illustrious WoT® than the climactic dismantling of the Atlantic Alliance. Ever heard the dysadministration whistle lin the dark? Listen: “You’re thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don’t. I think that’s old Europe,” says Donald Rumsfeld.

Sex- and death-crazed gays play viral Russian Roulette! “Rolling Stone claims that a full quarter of new HIV infections stem from morbid thrill-seeking. Sean Hannity is swallowing the story — should you?” Salon

Bush Is Losing It

It was a bad week for the Bush administration, and it’s likely to get worse. The American people are beginning to understand the folly and greed that inform its economic policy. And most of the civilized world has turned decisively against the Iraqi adventure. The great coalition that George W. Bush proposes to lead against Saddam Hussein is now a coalition of two, and British prime minister Tony Blair has lost the support of his own people, most especially members of his own Labor Party, who warn of a political revolt if Britain goes to war without a new UN resolution. AlterNet

Related: Joe Conason: Conservative crackup on Iraq: “As public support for unilateral war on Iraq diminishes, conservative discourse on the topic is showing signs of a crackup.” Salon

Michael Kinsley: “What makes Sens. McCain and Lieberman so appealing is also what makes them so annoying” Slate

The Guilt-Free Soldier: “On the eve of a messy 21st-century war, university researchers are probing ways to unlearn fear. Erik Baard dissects the uses of the amygdala.” The Village Voice However speculative, the article’s major assumptions don’t make much sense to me. First of all, while PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) researchers point to the role of amygdaloid fear in encoding certain traumatic memories in a distinct form that cannot be integrated, this doesn’t have much to do with run-of-the-mill guilt or regret. Rather, the sense of self-reproachful responsibility victims of abuse feel for their plight is a mental trick to ward off the sense of uncontrollability of what had happened to them — if only I had done something differently, I could have avoided my pain, it is as if they are telling themselves for some perverse reassurance. But it is merely an artifact of the lumping together of research on traumatic abuse PTSD and combat PTSD to think that the benefits of blocking amygdaloid fear in the former cases would extrapolate to the latter. Not to mention that, if memories of the horrors of combat were encoded rationally and accessibly, rather than traumatically, this might lead soldiers to a more thorough realistic moral assessment that would make them less, rather than more, likely to do their masters’ bidding, more rather than less devastated by the terrible realities of what they have seen and what they have done. Traumatic remorse isn’t, as the author suggests, “a check on our own worst impulses” as more rational remorse is. Fortunately, we cannot block the latter pharmacologically.

This Boston Globe article focuses on speculation about whether children will plow through the estimated 1,000 pages of the forthcoming book. Since it is coming out at the end of the school year, kids will have the entire summer to read it uninterrupted, making it more likely in some cases… But the real question is whether the book needs to be that long, or if Rowling has lost control of parsimony in her ‘creative’ process. We’ll surely see whether it can sustain itself that long or collapse under the weight of its own verbosity. (And what does this steady upward trend in pleonasm foreshadow for the coming volumes of the series, if she ever gets around to any more?)

TV Report Sparks Occult Fears in Germany —

“Just weeks after Germany became exposed to the reality of cannibalism, a television report has whipped up a fresh media storm…

The latest furore was sparked by a report transmitted earlier this week on Germany’s public television station ZDF about cannibalism and cult rituals within the federal borders. The report contains testimony by two women and a young child, who claim to have witnessed horrifying occult rituals, in which people were murdered and sometimes eaten.” Deutsche Welle [via Walker]

Paradoxically, the current case ought to comfort Germans that there is no epidemic of Satanic abuse, if the history of similar US phenomenon — where there was never any evidence of ritualistically slaughtered corpses or even mere missing persons to correlate with hysterical claims that people witnessed bizarre cult rituals rife with murder and sometimes cannibalism — is any indicator. It is likely this case, where evidence appears to confirm the claims, is an isolated incident, although the tide of ‘the madness of the crowd’ will undoubtedly surge in its aftermath.

Judge Decides X-Men Aren’t Human: ‘Marvel subsidiary Toy Biz Inc. pushed Judge Barzilay to declare its heroes nonhuman so it could win a lower duty rate on action figures imported from China in the mid-1990s. At the time, tariffs put higher duties on dolls than toys. According to the U.S. tariff code, human figures are dolls, while figures representing animals or “creatures,” such as monsters and robots, are deemed toys.

To Brian Wilkinson, editor of the online site X-Fan (x-mencomics.com/xfan/), Marvel’s argument is appalling. The X-Men — mere creatures? “This is almost unthinkable,” he says. “Marvel’s super heroes are supposed to be as human as you or I. They live in New York. They have families and go to work. And now they’re no longer human?” ‘ WSJ [via Walker]

Judge to Hear Air ID Challenge
“A U.S. District Court judge agreed to hear a challenge to an airline requirement that forces passengers to show identification before boarding a plane, despite a motion by the government and two airlines to dismiss it. John Gilmore, the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has sued United Airlines, Southwest Airlines and Attorney General John Ashcroft, alleging that the ID requirement stems from a “secret law” that violates his right to anonymous travel within the United States.” Wired News

Judge Decides X-Men Aren’t Human: ‘Marvel subsidiary Toy Biz Inc. pushed Judge Barzilay to declare its heroes nonhuman so it could win a lower duty rate on action figures imported from China in the mid-1990s. At the time, tariffs put higher duties on dolls than toys. According to the U.S. tariff code, human figures are dolls, while figures representing animals or “creatures,” such as monsters and robots, are deemed toys.

To Brian Wilkinson, editor of the online site X-Fan (x-mencomics.com/xfan/), Marvel’s argument is appalling. The X-Men — mere creatures? “This is almost unthinkable,” he says. “Marvel’s super heroes are supposed to be as human as you or I. They live in New York. They have families and go to work. And now they’re no longer human?” ‘ WSJ [via Walker]

The ears have it: “Forget what you think you know about ours being a visual culture, in which sight is the privileged sense.

Two thoughtful new discussions of the culture of listening – of what our modern world sounds like, and what we listen for and hear – make a strong case for the primacy of ears. And each further suggests that our experience of our aural environment – in which sound, like light, heat, or water, can be turned on or off with the flick of a switch – is a hallmark of modernity.” Nando Times

The New York Times reviews Gibson’s Pattern Recognition: “Critics of science fiction grouse that Gibson can’t get far while steering the same old postmodern spacecraft, and dismiss his inventiveness as mere bells and whistles. But some die-hard fans lament that he’s deserting the mother ship every time he tries something off the flight path of his first novel, ”Neuromancer” (1984). All of which puts Gibson in the unenviable position of being able to displease many of the people much of the time.

If his elegant, entrancing seventh novel offers an answer to his detractors, it could be roughly translated as: so sue me. Pattern Recognition is almost nose-thumbingly conventional in design. Despite the requisite tech toys, it’s set squarely in the present. But then the dates of Gibson-action have been creeping steadily backward. Predicting the future, Gibson has always maintained, is mostly a matter of managing not to blink as you witness the present.” [more]

Let Kenan Malik introduce himself:

I was born in India, brought up in Manchester and now live in London.

I studied neurobiology (at the University of Sussex) and History and Philosophy of Science (at Imperial College, London). In between I took up a post as a research psychologist at the Centre for Research into Perception and Cognition (CRPC) at the University of Sussex, working on problems of the mental representation of spatial relations.

Since 1990 I have been an independent writer, lecturer and broadcaster. My main areas of academic interest are philosophy of biology and philosophy of mind; scientific method and epistemology; theories of human nature; science policy; bioethics; political philosophy; the history, philosophy and sociology of race; and the history of ideas, particularly in the post-Enlightenment world. I have written and taught extensively in all these areas, both academically and for a more general audience.

I have written two books: The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society (Palgrave / New York University Press, 1996); and Man, Beast and Zombie: What Science Can and Cannot Tell Us About Human Nature (Weidenfeld & Nicolson [2000] / Rutgers University Press, [2002]). The Meaning of Race examines the historical development, and philosophical and political roots, of the idea of race. It also explores the relationship between the idea of race and contemporary theories of multiculturalism and pluralism.

Man, Beast and Zombie investigates the historical roots, philosophical assumptions and methodological problems of contemporary theories of human nature, in particular evolutionary psychology and cognitive science

If this sort of thing is your cup of tea, here’s his new weblog, Work in Progress. Read the troubling essay on Maori rights for a start.

“A French yacht taking part in the Jules Verne round-the-world sailing trophy has been attacked by a giant squid in the mid-Atlantic, its skipper announced by radio link… The giant squid, Architeuthis dux, is the world’s largest invertebrate and can reach 18 metres in length, but it is also highly elusive, with only about 250 sightings officially recorded — most of them of dead animals on beaches.” Sydney Morning Herald

S.F. flock swims round and round in pool

Brainwashed by six newcomers from Ohio, 46 penguins at the San Francisco Zoo have abandoned their burrows and embarked on a great migration —

except their pool is not exactly the coast of South America and there’s really nowhere for them to go.

“We’ve lost complete control,” said Jane Tollini, their mystified keeper. “It’s a free-for-all in here. After 18 years of doing this job, these birds are making mincemeat of me.” San Francisco Chronicle

The top 20 ad campaigns of the last 20 years. AdWeek

Arab leaders hope to head off a war with a plan to facilitate Saddam’s overthrow by his own generals. Time magazine reports that it has exclusive information that the Saudis are trying to arrange a U.N.-brokered amnesty for all but the most upper echelons of the Ba’ath Party to encourage the Republican Guard and other powerful Iraqis to turn on Saddam Hussein and overthrow him, to avert a U.S.-led war and postwar chaos. Cooperating with disarmament in accordance with U.N. resolutions would be a condition of amnesty for coup leaders. But would Bush stand for being diverted from war by a Saudi-engineered coup? Who really believes that the weapons of mass destruction are anything more than the pretext for U.S. warmongering? Time‘s reporter writes:

“Politically, there would be nothing better for President Bush than to remove Saddam and disarm Iraq without firing a shot,” says a Western diplomat. “All along, Washington’s hope has been that as pressure gets high enough, the people around Saddam will take matters into their own hands.”

But this is not likely, on several counts. First, it would prevent a postwar U.S. occupation and seizure of Iraqi oil resources. If the U.S.’s investment in this war relates to any extent to attempting to extricate ourselves from our legacy of dependence on the Saudis, a coup would not be good enough. Moreover, it would fail to satisfy Bush’s goal in making this personal, getting back at the “guy who tried to kill Daddy” and surpassing his father’s shortcomings in not marching on Baghdad a decade ago.

If the Saudis’ goal is to reinforce regional stability, prevent chaos and prop up their own increasingly beleaguered regime, they’d do the minimum necessary to avert war. They’re certainly not going to be seen as supporting a significant opposition challenge to the status quo. Such a more limited “regime change” would probably not address the Ba’athists’ oppression of the minorities in Iraq, and, handy for both themselves and the Saudis, would exclude the opposition from more than token powersharing. An amnesty of many of the oppressors could leave the door open to private vengeance and a bloodbath unless an iron fist continued to restrain the opposition.

The image is by Andrew Baio, doing what comes naturally in the public domain. He has more to say about it here at waxy.org. And, for our final word on Eldred, we turn to Brooke Biggs. As she puts it at the Bitter Shack, “Supreme Court Gives Disney a Blow Job.”

Has the dysadministration found its pretext? Increasingly desperate at U.N. inspectors’ not coming up with evidence of “material breaches” of U.N. disarmament resolutions, the U.S. continues to emphasize discrepancies in Baghdad’s December weapons declaration. The eleven 122-mm. warheads appear to be left over from the Iran-Iraq war and, it bears repeating, were empty. NY Times They just weren’t listed. There will, of course, be endless debates about whether the Iraqis are merely clerically negligent or deliberately deceptive. If the latter, it would hardly pay for them to be concealing a mere eleven empty warheads, and not concealing them very well at that, would it? [Can’t wait for the Hollywood blockbuster with the inside story about the arms inspectors!] But of course Rumsfeld thinks it is precisely the fact that the inspectors haven’t found anything damning that proved that the Iraqis are concealing something…

Silenced at AMA?: ‘Did ABC censor a crowd’s disapproval of George H. Bush? The former president — and father of the current president — delivered a taped message at the American Music Awards on Monday night, and sources who were there tell The Scoop that the crowd booed him… The boos from the crowd, however, were not audible in the broadcast, leading some to believe that they were deleted by censors.

“To be honest, I can’t tell you,” a spokesman for ABC told The Scoop, who referred the question to a spokesman for the production company.

“I don’t know and I can’t tell you,” said a spokesman for the production company, who referred questions back to ABC.’ MSNBC

Much, much linkage to this polemic by John Le Carré, from the Times of London. I would sit up and listen if for no other reason than that I still await each new Le Carré novel with bated breath and consider him one of the most discerning observers of human nature (and human deception) on the planet. For me, the head-turning observation in this essay is his report that, in a recent poll, one in two Americans has been hoodwinked enough by the dysadministration’s bait-and-switch to believe that the Saddam at hand, rather than the bin Laden in the bush, is responsible for the terrorist attacks on the US. We really live in a nation of contemptible gullibility, don’t we? I wouldn’t care so much if they weren’t going to impose their vicious stupidity in a rain of death and destruction on the innocents of the third world, and make my children and their children pay for it.

Of course Le Carré (and those of us who point to his message too?) is going to get savaged by the warblogger set; here’s Lileks bleating about him. It’s the usual bottomfeeding quest for inconsistencies, mixed with name-calling and kneejerk abhorrence for any challenges to one’s all-enfolding and self-justifying security blanket of bellicosity. But read his rant carefully, with your eye to the forest for the trees, and see if strikes you as anything more than trying to besmirch the person whose opinions challenge and offend you.

Then there’s this: Moon Shadow — on the Washington influence of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and the World Unification Church, which is reputed to be responsible for including North Korea in the Axis of Evil®. By Wayne Madsen, a Washington-based investigative journalist.

Al Sharpton Gears Up to Take On the Dems

Sharpton’s combination of black-power politics and personal sensitivity to insult means he rarely distinguishes between a personal attack, a legitimate political criticism of his politics and a racist insult to all black people. Already he has shown that he’s planning to play the race card as a way of rebuffing normal questioning during the 2004 campaign.

“To even question why I’m running is insulting,” he writes in Al on America. “Pundits ask me why not run for Congress or a local office, an office they say I might have a better chance of winning. That question, too, is insulting. If I’m good enough for Congress, why aren’t I good enough for the highest office? It shows me the question is more about assigning me to a place rather than whether or not I represent a segment of this nation and am worthy of leading. What they’re really saying is, ‘Why don’t you stay in your place?’ Why didn’t Jackie Robinson stay in the Negro League? Why doesn’t Tiger Woods only play in Harlem?” The American Prospect

And: Conservative but straight-shooting Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby wrote today of Democrats’ hypocrisy in cozying up to Sharpton, although he muddied his point by trying to contrast it with his notion that Republicans appropriately repudiated Trent Lott’s racism. The Jacoby column is not online but you can track his interest in the issue, and his vituperation about Sharpton and the Dems, in this Google Search.

If you don’t run a weblog or similar site yourself, ignore this site. If you do run one, ignore it at your peril. I’m sure there’s something here for you.

“Babies have been killed, sliced up and eaten by a German Satanist group, according to media reports yesterday, stirring fears that last month’s arrest of a self-confessed cannibal was not an isolated incident.

The prosecutor’s office in Trier, near the border with Luxembourg, said that it had been investigating alleged cases of cannibalism and rape by Satanists since the middle of last year. That is six months before another case of cannibalism — the eating of a software designer by a former soldier — came to light.” Times of London [thanks, Walker]

“When it comes to snooping on Americans, Big Brother has a lot more gadgets at his disposal.

In its new study, Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains: The Growth of an American Surveillance Society, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) blames the unchecked use of technological tracking features for an increase in surveillance by both the government and the private sector.” CNET

‘Bubble Boy’ Gene Therapy Halted

A second European toddler apparently suffered a leukemia-like side effect from gene therapy that cured him of the rare but deadly “bubble boy disease,” prompting the government on Tuesday to suspend 27 more gene therapy studies while they investigate the risk.

Bubble boy disease — an immune disorder formally called severe combined immunodeficiency, or SCID — is the only disease ever to be cured with gene therapy.

But three months ago, a boy whose life was saved by a SCID gene therapy experiment in France when he was a baby came down with a leukemia-like syndrome at age 3. Wired

Since we are increasingly discovering that various malignancies are tied to activation of dormant genes, this is a theoretical risk of gene therapy. The theory is that the insertion of the gene that corrects the immunodeficiency in this disease turns on a nearby gene that stimulates leukemic transformation. Is this bad luck in the location of the specific locus of therapy for this disease, or an inherent, unforseen generic problem of gene therapy?

By the way, it appears that the two children with gene-therapy-induced leukemias are responding to chemotherapy…

Eldred v. Ashcroft: We lose. Lawrence Lessig’s reaction. Justice Ginsburg’s majority opinion. Justice Breyer’s dissent. Justice Stevens’ dissent. Rebecca Blood, aptly, reminds us that “challenging the constitutionality of law is only one avenue for changing it.”

The town of Soap Lake, in eastern Washington State, is building a giant lavalamp to act as a tourist attration to revitalize the town.

“You have the right to remain silent … and so do you, and you, and you.”. Supposedly, supposedly, a judge in a Montana county has ruled that police must issue a separate Miranda warning to each of a suspect’s emergent multiple personalities. Although WorldNet Daily isn’t exactly yer most reliable source… [via Zed]

Update: A reader informs me that the Helena, MT Independent Record also covered the story [thanks, stephen]

Paul Krugman himself responds, at length, to a query someone posted at Google Questions, trying to find out as much as they could about his private life in an apparent attempt to discredit him.

He (she?) doesn’t realize that friends of the administration must have already looked into all of this. Read Lou Dubose’s new book Boy Genius, about Karl Rove, and you’ll realize that if there was something there they would have used it. In fact, they would have invented something if they thought it would stick. But to save drstrangelove additional trouble and money, here are the answers:

[Zed again; he’s finding the darndest things recently…]

Pete Townshend’s ‘Bomb’: Recently arrested for viewing child pornography online, Pete Townshend says he is an outraged anti-porn crusader and was “doing research”. At least one Blogcritic believes him.

And: ” Iraqi President Saddam Hussein today told investigators he is not developing nuclear or biological weapons, but instead has been doing research for a book on weapons of mass destruction he hopes to see published next year.” BBspot News [via Walker]

Have you submitted your claim for a refund from the RIAA under the class action suit In re: Compact Disc Minimum Advertised Price Antitrust Litigation? You are entitled to a piece of the $67m action if you purchased any prerecorded music from a retail store during 1995-2000, a period during which the music industry was colluding to fix prices and defraud you. As pointed out on bOing bOing, there’s a move afoot for claimants to donate their share — expected to be between $5 and $20 — to the EFF.

Why the EFF?

They’ve earned it. This settlement is a direct result of media corporations taking advantage of consumers. It stands to reason that a non-profit which serves the interest of media consumers and artists should be a beneficiary. If there is any organization that tussles with the recording industry on a regular basis, it’s the EFF. …The EFF fights constantly to protect and broaden consumers’ and artists’ rights, or in some cases just trying to maintain what little rights we have. Let’s try to do something that will help prevent the media industry from manipulating the market again.

Sounds fair to me.

Dissension in the ranks:

Republican senators gathering last Wednesday for their session-opening ”retreat” should have been happy, blessed with a regained majority and a popular president. They were not. Instead, they complained bitterly of arrogance by the Bush administration, especially the Pentagon, in treatment of Congress along the road to war. — Robert Novak, Chicago Sun-Times

I share Craig’s delight.

according to twenty epicures and culinary experts interviewed by The Guardian. I’m about halfway there, give or take. [via looka!]

Joe Lieberman vs. Dubya? Now that would be the devil’s choice, and TomPaine.com agrees. Not that the other Democratic contenders, as a bunch, are anything to swoon over, but what diid you expect? But Joe Lieberman? All you had to do was to listen to the soundbite of his announcement that he is in the race to find the words “lame” and “stiff”, if not something far less polite, welling up to your lips…

Mental health experts bring fight to Capitol: This is a story from the Houston Chronicle. Emboldened by New Mexico’s permission to psychologists to prescribe psychiatric medications, Texas psychologists go for the same rights. I’ve already covered in detail why I think this is a very bad idea. This article sums it up in a sentence (in the words of an American Psychiatric Ass’n. spokesperson): “Psychologists have always had a clear path to prescribing privileges: medical school.” [thanks,lisa]

‘This set of resources draws together work from a variety of disciplines on the concept(s) of place and space. The term “place” does not necessarily have the same implications or meanings in the different disciplines. Furthermore, other terms are sometimes used in place of place, such as home, dwelling, milieu, territory, and of course, space. None of these, though, are necessarily equivalent to the notion of place.

The purpose of this set of resources is to try to cross-pollinate the notion of place across disciplines. Philosophy, for example, …has much to learn from the way that other disciplines conceive of place, even as those disciplines have drawn on the resources of philosophy in order to reflect on place. There is no real attempt at a definition here, except perhaps by extension.’

Britain urges US to delay war until autumn, since, as is the common knowledge, there is no “smoking gun.” Telegraph UK And: Bush steps back from early strike on Iraq:

After weeks of expectation that the publication of the UN weapons inspectors’ report on 27 January would effectively trigger a confrontation, officials now admit this is unlikely. They say that President Bush now accepts that the inspectors require further time and that this should be granted. Independent UK

How to disappear in America without a trace. This is largely the stuff of fantasy, but there are some useful tidbits there.

“Influential body says last chances must be seized.” Guardian UK

Neutralizing and Resisting the New Surveillance — “Eleven behavioral techniques of neutralization intended to subvert the collection of personal information are discussed: discovery moves, avoidance moves, piggy backing moves, switching moves, distorting moves, blocking moves, masking moves, breaking moves, refusal moves, cooperative moves and counter-surveillance moves. In Western liberal democracies the advantages of technological and other strategic surveillance developments are often short-lived and contain ironic vulnerabilities. The logistical and economic limits on total monitoring, the interpretive and contextual nature of many human situations, system complexity and interconnectedness, and the vulnerability of those engaged in surveillance to be compromised, provide ample room for resistance. Neutralization is a dynamic adversarial social dance involving strategic moves and counter-moves and should be studied as a conflict interaction process.” — Gary T. Marx, professor emeritus at MIT, Journal fo Social Issues

“A serious literary magazine published by a hospital? Sounds unlikely. But the Bellevue Literary Review, published by the New York University department of medicine at Bellevue Hospital, is drawing on a long literary heritage. Bellevue has nursed William Burroughs, Eugene O’Neill and many other close-to-the-edge writers and artists. Danielle Ofri, the review’s editor-in-chief and a doctor at Bellevue, believes scientists and doctors too often dismiss the power of language. Words, she tells Michael Bond, are a vital part of the healing process.” New Scientist

‘On this day in 1986 Beat poet Bob Kaufman died at the age of sixty-one. Kaufman was a legendary figure in the San Francisco poetry revival of the 1950s, and although not as productive or famous as some of his contemporaries, he seems to be widely-recognized as “the most under-recognized poet of the Beat Generation.” ‘Today in Literature A victim of heroin abuse, incarceration and forced electroshock treatment, apocryphal stories about Kaufman abound. He reputedly invented the word ‘beatnik’. With an avowed aim of being completely obscure, most of his poems appear to have been improvised on the spot or recited from memory and were rarely written. He supposedly took a vow of silence on the day JFK was killed, not to be broken for ten years until the day the Vietnam war ended. ‘(H)e seems to have out-Beat Kerouac and many others in Buddhism, in travel (around the world nine times as a seaman), and in arrests (39 in ’59 alone, mostly for being seen as a nuisance).’ He was known as “the original bebop man” and, in France where he was quite popular, “the black American Rimbaud.”

‘I Have Folded My Sorrows’

I have folded my sorrows into the mantle of summer night,

Assigning each brief storm its alloted space in time,

Quietly pursuing catastrophic histories buried in my eyes.

And yes, the world is not some unplayed Cosmic Game,

And the sun is still ninety-three million miles from me,

And in the imaginary forest, the shingles hippo becomes the gay unicorn.

No, my traffic is not addled keepers of yesterday’s disasters,

Seekers of manifest disewbowelment on shafts of yesterday’s pains.

Blues come dressed like introspective echoes of a journey.

And yes, I have searched the rooms of the moon on cold summer nights.

And yes, I have refought those unfinished encounters. Still, they remain unfinished.

And yes, I have at times wished myself something different.

The tragedies are sung nightly at the funerals of the poet;

The revisited soul is wrapped in the aura of familiarity.

‘Jazz, Don’t Listen to it at Your Own Risk’

In the beginning, in the wet

Warm dark place,

Straining to break out, clawing at strange cables

Hearing her screams, laughing

“Later we forgot ourselves, we didn’t know”

Some secret jazz

Shouted, wait, don’t go.

Impatient, we came running, innocent

Laughing blobs

of blood and faith.

To this mother, father world

Where laughter seems out of place

So we learned to cry, pleased

They pronounced human.

The secret jazz blew a sigh

Some familiar sound shouted wait

Some are evil, some will hate.

“Just Jazz, blowing its top again”

So we rushed and laughed.

As we pushed and grabbed

While Jazz blew in the night

Suddenly we were too busy to hear a sound

We were busy shoving mud in men’s mouths,

Who were busy dying on living ground

Busy earning medals, for killing children on deserted

…..streetcorners

Occupying their fathers, raping their mothers, busy humans

…..were

busy burning Japanese in atomicolorcinescope

With stereophonic screams,

What one-hundred-percent red-blooded savage would waste

…..precious time

Listening to Jazz, with so many important things going on

But even the fittest murderers must rest

So we sat down on our blood-soaked garments,

And listened to Jazz

…………………….lost, steeped in all our dreams

We were shocked at the sound of life, long gone from our own

We were indignant at the whistling, thinking, singing, beating,

…..swinging

Living sound, which mocked us, but let us feel sweet life again

We wept for it, hugged it, kissed it, loved it, joined it, we

…..drank it.

Smoked it, ate with it, slept with it

We made our girls wear it for lovemaking

Instead of silly lace gowns,

Now in those terrible moments, when the dark memories come

The secret moments to which we admit no one

When guiltily we crawl back in time, reaching away from

…..ourselves

We hear a familiar sound,

Jazz, scratching, digging, bluing, swinging jazz,

And we listen

And we feel

And live.

‘“The World’s Most Decadent Hamburger” has come to New York. Served at the Old Homestead in – where else? – the Meatpacking District, the $41 sandwich is made of “hand-massaged, beer-fed” kobe beef, “lobster mushrooms” and micro greens on a parmesan twist roll.’ PageSix

“A serious literary magazine published by a hospital? Sounds unlikely. But the Bellevue Literary Review, published by the New York University department of medicine at Bellevue Hospital, is drawing on a long literary heritage. Bellevue has nursed William Burroughs, Eugene O’Neill and many other close-to-the-edge writers and artists. Danielle Ofri, the review’s editor-in-chief and a doctor at Bellevue, believes scientists and doctors too often dismiss the power of language. Words, she tells Michael Bond, are a vital part of the healing process.” New Scientist

Hamas urges Iraq to use suicide bombers: “(Hamas leader Abdul Aziz) Rantisi’s remarks were unusual for Hamas, which has focused on fighting Israel since taking up arms in 1987 at the start of the first Palestinian uprising.” AP [via Salon]

Australian spiders to be sent into space Salon

Sex improves your sense of smell. It is known that levels of the hormone prolactin surge after orgasm, and frequent sex boosts the overall levels of this hormone. Now a study of mice shows that elevated prolactin causes the number of neurons in the brain’s olfactory bulb to proliferate, presumably heightening the sense of smell. Researchers suggest that the evolutionary significance of this finding is that increased “scents-itivity” adds to recognition of mates and offspring, cementing family bonds. Telegraph UK

In a move of unusual political courage and integrity, ‘Gov. George Ryan will commute the death sentences of all 156 inmates on Illinois’s death row, and he has sent letters to victims’ families warning them of the move, his spokesman said Saturday… Ryan halted the state’s executions nearly three years ago after courts found that 13 death row inmates had been wrongly convicted since the state resumed capital punishment in 1977 – a period during which only 12 other inmates were executed… Ryan spread the blame in his hour-long speech, calling the state’s criminal justice system “inaccurate, unjust and unable to separate the innocent from the guilty, and at times very racist.” ‘ The Nando Times If anyone can point me to any press about any behind-the-scenes political machinations involved in this decision, I would be grateful.

“Police appear to have recovered about 500 original Beatles tapes that were stolen in the 1970s, including some never-released tracks, during raids Friday on members of a piracy racket in England and the Netherlands.” AP [via Salon]

The scourge of the Greens accused of dishonesty:

The Bjorn Lomborg saga took a decidedly Orwellian turn this week. Readers will recall that Mr Lomborg, a statistician and director of Denmark’s Environmental Assessment Institute, is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, which attacks the environmental lobby for systematically exaggerated pessimism. Environmentalists have risen as one in furious condemnation of Mr Lomborg’s presumption in challenging their claims, partly no doubt because he did it so tellingly. This week, to the delight of greens everywhere, Denmark’s Committees on Scientific Dishonesty ruled on the book as follows: “Objectively speaking, the publication of the work under consideration is deemed to fall within the concept of scientific dishonesty.”

How odd. Why, in the first place, is a panel with a name such as this investigating complaints against a book which makes no claim to be a scientific treatise? The Skeptical Environmentalist is explicitly not concerned with conducting scientific research. Rather, it measures the “litany” of environmental alarm that is constantly fed to the public against a range of largely uncontested data about the state of the planet. The litany comes off very badly from the comparison. The environmental movement was right to find the book a severe embarrassment. But since the book was not conducting scientific research, what business is it of a panel concerned with scientific dishonesty? The Economist

Group decision-making in animals: “Groups of animals often need to make communal decisions, for example about which activities to perform, when to perform them and which direction to travel in; however, little is known about how they do so. Here, we model the fitness consequences of two possible decision-making mechanisms: ‘despotism’ and ‘democracy’. We show that under most conditions, the costs to subordinate group members, and to the group as a whole, are considerably higher for despotic than for democratic decisions. Even when the despot is the most experienced group member, it only pays other members to accept its decision when group size is small and the difference in information is large. Democratic decisions are more beneficial primarily because they tend to produce less extreme decisions, rather than because each individual has an influence on the decision per se. Our model suggests that democracy should be widespread and makes quantitative, testable predictions about group decision-making in non-humans.” Nature [requires free registration]

The Neanderthal’s Necklace by Juan Luis Arsuaga. Review:

Suppose a remnant population of Neanderthals were discovered today. What would we do with them? Would we welcome them into the human family and try to set them up in suburban semis, send California Man to high school with our teenagers, or corral them in a reservation in Siberia?

The Neanderthals are an interesting test case of what it means to be human. As Juan Luis Arsuaga asks: “Apart from us, has there ever been another life form on Earth that was conscious of its own existence and of its place in the world?” The Neanderthal’s Necklace is his attempt to convince us that the Neanderthals fit the bill. And in this endeavour he is very successful. New Scientist

after finding traces in London flat

Ricin was used to assassinate the Bulgarian defector Georgi Markov in London in 1978. He was injected using the point of an umbrella and died within four days. The symptoms of ricin poisoning are similar to flu, including a high temperature and loss of appetite. Hospitals and doctors across the UK have been put on alert for signs of ricin poisoning.

The toxin must be inhaled, ingested or injected to take effect. But it is thought that it would be more difficult to mount a mass attack with ricin than with anthrax or botulinum toxin, for example. New Scientist

I love sp!ked‘s Don’t Panic column (“An antidote to panics based on dodgy statistics and dubious arguments.”). Scroll down to the second item to explore the hysteria over ricin in the UK, for example. ” ‘The primary aim of these [terrorists] is to cause fear’, said a British military expert last night. Right now, we seem to be doing a good job of that ourselves.”

Dubious Rape Accusations?
Girls behaving badly: “The UK government and the public prosecution service are currently struggling to increase the numbers of rape convictions. But the dubious cases already reaching court should cast doubt on official aims.” — Barbara Hewson in sp!ked. This is one of those things a woman but not a man can write…

Making it up as you go along: “America is either sending a relatively small number of troops with infrared goggles to defeat Saddam at night, or it’s planning a full-on 100,000-strong invasion. Officials claim that war isn’t inevitable, while others reckon it’s already underway. And while British politicians talk up their united stance with the US, their troops on the ground fear America’s misguided missiles. What’s going on – and what’s not going on?

The confused and uncertain coverage of the Gulf reflects the confusion and uncertainty at the heart of American and British policy on Iraq. It is the incoherence of Bush and Blair’s plans for Iraq that creates the space for so much out-loud speculation about their intentions. The lack of direction among British and American officials creates a kind of canvas on to which we can all project our own interpretation of events, and our preferred course of action over Saddam.” — Brendan O’Neill in sp!ked

“Doctors nationwide are reporting a surge in silver poisoning cases. The growing popularity of bogus silver-based remedies on the Internet appears to be the culprit.” Wired

“Family conversations have deteriorated into a “daily grunt” that leaves young children unable to talk properly, according to the man in charge of maintaining educational standards in Britain.

Alan Wells blames television and long working hours and fears that thousands of families are becoming like the Royle family, the monosyllabic layabouts in the BBC sitcom, who live in the shadow of the television. ” Times of London

“A neural understanding of human nature broadens rather than constricts our sense of who we are…”, says neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux:

Recently, there has been a growing interest in a more partitioned view of the self. One partition is between the minimum and the narrative self. The former is an immediate consciousness of one’s self; the latter a coherent self-consciousness that extends into the past and future. But these conscious partitions, which themselves may be based on different mechanisms, are, as Freud noted, only the tip of the iceberg. Terms such as the primitive, core, ecological and non-conceptual self, refer to unconscious aspects of personal identity that define who we are. The study of implicit or unconscious aspects of the self are now major themes in social psychology. In contrast to the narrative and minimal self notions, which depend on language to encode our awareness of who we are in consciousness, these implicit aspects of the self are not accessible for verbal self-reflection.

Although the self has not been a major research interest for neuroscientists, some have ventured into the territory. Michael Gazzaniga and Antonio Damasio, for example, emphasise – as I do – the importance of understanding the conscious self in the context of the unconscious workings of the brain. But unlike Damasio and Gazzaniga, whose ideas are about the organisation of the mind and experience, I have been attempting to develop a theory that links the self to the detailed understanding of the cellular basis of brain function that is emerging in neuroscience. Before I can explain this, though, I need to discuss the relation of the self to consciousness in more detail.

“A federal plan to stop many unwanted telemarketing calls this year with a national “do-not-call” list may be delayed because of opposition from key lawmakers.” AP [via Salon]

“Some of the newly discovered objects are probably twice as faint as those seen on the famous Hubble Deep Field from the mid-1990s and lie a staggering 13 billion light years away. Although more analysis is needed, they are possibly some of the first galaxies, caught in the process of forming.” New Scientist

The hunting of the ‘snark’:
Warblogger Jeff Jarvis, at whose self-professed genius in developing “vlogs” (video blogs) I recently scoffed, now reminds us (although he won’t link to the post; probably a wise idea if he wants to keep self-promoting so assiduously) that I’d scoffed at him before:

“When I started this blog, the first snarky anti-me post online came from Follow Me Here. And now he’s snarking at vlogging. I must be onto something.”

The lesson for me is to remember at whom I’ve snarked (thanks Jeff, I’m flattered you apply the term to me, and that you delegate to me a role as an arbiter of fatuity) before. Now the inanity of his vlogging concept makes more sense, and I get a boost of renewed confidence in my own consistency.

But I agree with him on one thing. As I’ve written in my sidebar from the beginning (except that I credited its source and used quotation marks),

As Steve Baum says at Ethel, “If anyone’s offended by anything on this site then please do notify me immediately. I like to keep track of those times when I get something right.”

So even Jarvis’ smarmy comment is less brilliant than derivative, n’est-ce pas? If the snark’s shoe fits, wear it…

But take heart, Jeff, recall what la Rochefoucauld (1613-80) said:

“He who lives without folly isn’t so wise as he thinks.”

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, the new novel by the esteemed Directory of Wonderful Things‘ Cory Doctorow, is out, in a variety of senses. Doctorow has released the entire text under a Creative Commons license for you to do as you see fit. If you like it, it would be seemly to go out and plunk down the dollars for a hard copy. I will.

Brooke, at The Bitter Shack, comments:

Ploughshares Into Swords: “…Turning the girders from the World Trade Center into raw materials for a warship — the USS New York — is obscene, and an affront to the memory of the people who died Sept. 11. Did anyone consider if the people who died there would like the scene of their murders turned into an instrument of war? How about the families? Again, a tragedy is being cynically coopted by an administration with a preexisting agenda which is handily advanced by the global spread of war around the world. They are militarizing our grief.”

This would be a righteous move. Go, Chuck. Newsday.com

Bar Raids Irritate Owners, Drinkers:
While I think driving under the influence is an irresponsible scourge for which we as a society should have zero tolerance, police incursions into bars for sobriety testing are a very ominous phenomenon. Washington Post

“Ink-jet printing technology that prints fully assembled electric and electronic gadgets in one go could signal the end of assembly lines.” New Scientist

When self-image takes a blow, many turn to television as a distraction

‘Whether you fancy yourself a jet-setting sophisticate or a down-to-earth outdoorsy type, a fast-track corporate star or an all-around nice guy, new research indicates that you probably tune out information that challenges your self-image by tuning in to television…

“We each have ways in which we like to perceive ourselves,” said Moskalenko, a doctoral student in psychology at Penn. “In many cases self-image is carefully constructed and zealously guarded, and it’s difficult to experience a conflict between who we are and who we would like to be. Television appears to be an effective means of reducing awareness of how we are falling short of our own standards.” In a study of undergraduates’ viewing habits after receiving either positive or negative results on an intelligence test, subjects who received poor scores watched television longer and waited longer before averting their eyes from the screen.’ EurekAlert

Me? I turn to FmH at those times… [grin].

Christopher Hitchens: Prevention and Pre-Emption – When is starting a war not aggression?: “In the present case of Iraq, a pre-emptive war is justified by its advocates on the grounds of past Iraqi aggressions and the logical presumption of future ones—which would make it partly retaliatory and partly preventive. This is fraught with the danger of casuistry since if no sinister weaponry is found before the war begins, then the war is re-justified on the grounds that it prevented such weapons from being developed. (And if the weapons are found, as one suspects they will be, after the intervention has taken place, then they could be retrospectively justified as needful for defense against an attack that was obviously coming.)” Slate

Thomas Friedman: “Here’s a prediction: In the end, 9/11 will have a much bigger impact on the Arab and Muslim worlds than it does on America… For Arabs and Muslims, the shock has been that this act was perpetrated by 19 of their sons in the name of their faith. As a result their religious texts, political systems, schoolbooks, chronic unemployment, media and even their right to visit America have all been spotlighted and questioned – sometimes fairly and sometimes unfairly.” NY Times op-ed

“Three men, three different instruments, music of poetic beauty — and lives often overshadowed by tragedy.

Recent months have brought forth three very different biographies. They document with varying degrees of success the lives of trumpeter Chet Baker and tenor saxophonist Stan Getz, both of whom have left this world, and singer Jimmy Scott, who enjoys a splendid career revival after decades of humiliation, misunderstanding — and obscurity.” UPI Arts & Entertainment

Study: Speed of Gravity, Light Match
“Einstein was right. The speed of gravity matches the speed of light, according to astronomers who took advantage of a rare planetary alignment to measure one of the fundamental forces of nature.” Yahoo! News

“He’s got a big problem. Her name is Linda“, says Timothy Noah. Slate.

What Bush dares not say about North Korea. Fred Kaplan: “…(T)here are reasons for favoring military confrontation with Iraq but not with North Korea—some of them are even good reasons—but most of them can’t easily be discussed in public, not by officials anyway, without setting off further contradictions and alarm bells.” Kaplan’s argument is essentially that “we’re going to war against Iraq because we can; we’re not going to war against North Korea because we can’t.” To acknowledge that is to acknowledge that Kim Jong Il has effectively deterred us (which once having been said would encourage other nations to develop nuclear weapons as quickly as possible) and also that Saddam Hussein does not have enough WMD to do much damage, giving the lie to Bush’s assertions that we are seeking to topple Saddam because he has already developed WMD. This illogic is, in fact, broadly noted in media discussions of the issue. Kaplan, however, makes another interesting point.

His thought is that we don’t mention the 800-lb. gorilla who is in the room om the Middle East but is not in play in the Korean peninsula — oil — but not for the reasons we usually hear in what Kaplan dismisses this as the “crudely Marxist” argument. . These usually amount to little more than “Of course it’s the oil, stupid.” Of course, Kaplan says, the US does not want to appear “overly pecuniary.” But a more important reason is that it would be unsafe for the entire region while Saddam Hussein is still in power for the US to pull out of Saudi Arabia, although increasingly apparent that it is strategically advantageous to do so, both because “*(o)ur military presence provides a handy target for terrorists (rhetorically, if not physically) and aligns us too tightly with a corrupt kingdom from which we might wisely begin to seek distance.” Slate

Kaplan thus neatly tries to explain why the obvious sham of couching the necessity for war with Iraq in moral terms is maintained in the face of charges of the incoherency, inconsistency and hypocrisy of US policy. Interesting — if North Korean analysts are as sophisticated as Kaplan in realizing why the US might not be able to explicitly explain why it inttends to handle open defiance so differently in the two regions, it is plausible that their timing in precipitating this crisis just now may have something to do with capitalizing on the resultant moral humiliation the US suffers.

Related: “The Bush administration said yesterday that it would agree to direct talks with North Korea on how the isolated state could meet its nuclear obligations, a subtle shift in position designed to give both sides a face-saving way to resolve the standoff over North Korea’s weapons programs.” Washington Post

Large Racial Disparity Found By Study of Md. Death Penalty
“Maryland prosecutors are far more likely to seek the death penalty for black suspects charged with killing white victims, a racial disparity that mirrors national trends and raises questions about whether capital punishment is being administered fairly, University of Maryland researchers said yesterday.” Washington Post: Front Page

Dead Man’s Switch, inspired by the locomotive hardware of the same name, is a piece of hardware which, if you ever fail to do the periodic reset it demands of you, will embark on a series of tasks you have decided upon in the event of your demise, such as sending out emails or posting to internet newsgroups the news of your passing, and password-encrypting sensitive files on your computer (to which you’ve presumably left the password with those you intend to see those files). The New York Times wrote about it in May, 2002, and Wired in June:

” The man in charge of archiving and maintaining electronic copies of Norway’s most important historical documents is dead and so is access to those archives.

So the director of the Norwegian cultural center is pleading for hackers to help him crack the center’s password-protected database. “

Anyone know if the Norwegians ever got their database decrypted? [Of course, the Dead Man’s Switch developer wouldn’t publicize it if it had…] Update: Yes

. [thanks Walker]

Related? Those Norwegians are just showing themselves to be world-class-threat hackers, aren’t they? Yahoo! News

Few Takers for CD Settlement Cash: “Who’d refuse free money? Lots of compact disc buyers, apparently, who are staying away in droves rather than receive up to $20 in compensation as part of a price-fixing settlement between 41 states and a handful of record companies.” Wired

“The exhibition ‘Illegal Art’ (and its accompanying CD and Web site) asserts that American copyright laws are overly restrictive and outdated…

It sounds like a plan for drawing hordes of screaming lawyers to your door: create compilation CD’s with sampled music from the likes of the Beatles, James Brown and Johnny Cash, not to mention the voice of Dan Rather; include as many songs as possible that have already sparked legal battles; do it all without getting permission from the copyright owners; and distribute the CD’s at a nationally touring art exhibition.

Oh yeah, and give the music away online for the millions of people around the globe who can’t make it to the show.” NY Times

“Hot on the scent of a suspected terrorist? Darpa— the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — hopes to give literal meaning to the phrase. It wants someone to develop a sniffing machine that can detect individuals by their body odor.” NY Times

“The doctor who says she has produced two cloned babies in the past weeks has told the BBC three more cloned children will be born by February.

Dr Brigitte Boisselier, who is chief executive of the US-based Clonaid organisation, told the Breakfast with Frost programme that she had implanted five cloned embryos, two of which she says have already been born.” BBC

This week markes the fiftieth anniversary of the stage debut of Beckett’s watershed play, reviled at its first appearance. The New York Times tells the tale. The text of the play is online [act 1] [act 2].

VLADIMIR:

    Well? Shall we go? 

ESTRAGON:

    Yes, let's go. 

    They do not move.

Mafia is a parlour game that seems to be taking New York, at least certain literati circles, by storm, to judge by this New York Observer article, which finds it a reflection of the zeitgeist. Sounds like fun. Here are the rules in more detail. [via David Brake

]

Leuschke calls it quits, at least for now. I’ll miss ‘im… 

William Gibson now has a weblog. [via kottke]