What theologian are you?
A creation of Henderson

I have this uncanny experience with the Sunday New York Times Magazine. Invariably, a given Sunday has got either absolutely nothing that interests me in the least or it’s bursting with interesting pieces. This week it’s the latter:

• Bring It All Back Home: “McVeigh, the sniper — the gulf-war vet seems ready to supplant his Vietnam counterpart. But then maybe the postmodern war has made unstable vets of us all.”
• Fierce Entanglements: “For years, prompted by feminists, the strategy for dealing with domestic violence has been to get the men out of the women’s lives. But that’s not what all women want. How is anyone to understand the toughest love?”
• Preschool Meds: “The first clinical trial examining the effects of generic Ritalin on 3- to 5-year-old subjects raises questions not only about the safety of the drug but also about the ethics of testing on ever younger brains.”
• Who Needs the U.N. Security Council?: “1) The Bush administration, seeking international cover to do what it wants, and 2) everybody else, seeking to rein in the United States. Welcome to the New World Order.”

Jefferson Chase, author of Inciting Laughter: The Development of `Jewish Humor’ in 19th Century German Culture: ‘Does the European Left have a humor problem? “The current issue of Merkur, a highbrow German journal devoted to ”European thought,” explores this ticklish subject. Roughly half of the contributors address the topic of humor and 9/11, and along with the inevitable analyses of American humor after the terrorist attacks, there are a number of well-written polemics excoriating what the authors view as a fundamental hostility within the Islamic world toward Western ideas of fun – and the European Left’s tendency to sidestep or blame the West for this hostility. It’s an intriguing idea, for which the Merkur has gotten good reviews. But can fun really be the crux of a clash of civilizations? Is it worth thinking about humor as the largely metaphoric war on terrorism threatens to prompt a decidedly literal one in the Middle East?

(…)

So here, offered in the spirit of H.L. Mencken, as opposed to Jean Baudrillard, is a bit of advice for opponents of the Bush administration’s stance toward Iraq. The next time you stage a protest or write an article, can the anti-imperialism rhetoric and simply ask, ”Is the United States making itself look ridiculous?” That is the question, I think, which would keep the focus squarely where it belongs: on the enemies of laughter and liberal society whom we have every justification to abhor, belittle, and subdue.” Boston Globe

You can trademark words but not meaning.: ‘…(A)s soon as a phrase — especially a heartfelt and serious one — is uttered, it immediately starts morphing into something else, typically a parodic version of itself. When’s the last time anyone uttered “Ich bin ein Berliner,” “I am not a crook,” or “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” as something other than a punch line? “Let’s roll!” is itself taking on an increasingly curious afterlife as the specifics of 9/11 recede from public memory.

Ironically, it’s the phrase’s official guardians who are transforming “Let’s roll!” into a generalized “lifestyle” statement. Earlier this year, the Todd M. Beamer Foundation, a nonprofit founded by Beamer’s widow, raised eyebrows when it trademarked the slogan, both to control its usage and to raise money for programs that “seek…to equip children experiencing family trauma to make heroic choices every day.” But the foundation has done more than just sell its own “Let’s roll!” paraphernalia as a fund raising tool. It’s pursued a series of odd licensing choices that strain the credulity of even the least cynical observers.’ Reason

“President Bush’s top national security advisers have begun discussing the creation of a new, domestic intelligence agency that would take over responsibility for counterterrorism spying and analysis from the FBI, according to U.S. government officials and intelligence experts.

The high-level debate reflects a widespread concern that the FBI has been unable to transform itself from a law enforcement agency into an intelligence-gathering unit able to detect and thwart terrorist plans in the United States. The FBI has admitted it has not yet completed the cultural sea change necessary to turn its agents into spies, but the creation of a new agency is firmly opposed by FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, who has said he believes the bureau can do the job.” Washington Post

Well, whaddya know? Tom Daschle makes the most heavily publicized remarks to date from so senior an official about how the Administration may be failing at TWOT (the War-on-Terrorism®), and quick as a bunny the government announces a “spectacular” threat and the capture of a senior al Qaeda operative. Unfortunately, they can’t give those of us who might be a little, ummm, dubious any details. “Officials declined to identify him or where he was captured, but they did say he was one of the top dozen Qaeda operatives, and so was considered a significant catch.” NY Times [And pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. — FmH] Related: White House Defensive After Terror Warnings Arizona Republic

“From 25 to 30 million healthy, middle-aged Americans are at far higher risk than they and their doctors understand them to be, because we’re not taking inflammatory factors into account.” ‘An inexpensive blood test for a protein linked to artery disease may be better than a cholesterol test at predicting a person’s risk for a heart attack or stroke, researchers are reporting today.

The test, for the substance, C-reactive protein, may help identify people who have an increased risk even though they do not have high cholesterol. About half of the people with heart disease have normal cholesterol levels, a finding that has led many researchers to suspect that other factors must play a role in cardiovascular disease.’ The large study, reported in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine, showed that high CRP levels correlated much better with cardiovascular morbidity and mortality than the lipid studies on which we currently rely.

Many researchers think chronic inflammation plays a major part in artery disease, heart attacks and strokes. Inflammation inside arteries is thought to contribute to heart attacks and strokes by causing cholesterol deposits in the artery walls to rupture and bleed. Blood clots then form, blocking the vessels and cutting off the blood supply to portions of the heart or brain.

C-reactive protein, Dr. Topol said, “is a window into the process of arterial inflammation, a very important insight that we otherwise can’t get.”

Yet, it is unclear yet if lowering a concerning CRP level will decrease cardiovascular risks. NY Times

The show is an only slightly fictionalized version of Mr. David’s real life in Los Angeles. Most of the dialogue is improvised, adding a cinéma vérité flavor to the show.

As on “Seinfeld,” the NBC show Mr. David created with Jerry Seinfeld in 1990, Larry and his sidekicks are mostly idle, self-absorbed and argumentative. But this show is even more uncensored, veined with the pessimism, loony narcissism and political incorrectness that are at the core of Mr. David’s comedy…

Mr. David, 55, a former stand-up comic best known for lashing out at inattentive audiences, is now the critics’ darling, an auteur whose creativity has not yet reached its peak.

His comedy is stripped of all sentimentality, which is part of its subversive appeal. When Larry’s mother is dying, his father does not inform him, saying his mother didn’t want to “bother” him while he was shooting a film in New York with Mr. Scorsese. He is shocked, but quickly realizes he can use his mother’s death as an excuse to avoid bores, cancel a dinner party and persuade his wife to have sex. NY Times

The article suggests that Larry David’s growing popularity may be a coattails phenomenon, as the show follows The Sopranos in HBO’s Sunday evening schedule. I’ve seen this thing a few times and, interestingly, I think it shares something with the latter beyond a timeslot. While most of the critics writing about the attraction of The Sopranos take the obligatory moral stand at the outset that, of course, they don’t find the characters appealing, I think that the more complicated challenge of watching this show is that, for some (or many), Tony Soprano at least is a sympathetic character. [There; I’ve said it. — FmH] One can even relate to his venality. The viewer ‘s dissonant experience of principled abhorrence clashing with likeability makes for interesting viewing, and I have had a similar experience in finding Larry David appealingly, preposterously hilarious while his preoccupations and lifestyle empty and morally vacuous. I wouldn’t take the parallels too far (in case you want to quibble with me), but it struck me suddenly. [Now Seinfeld, on the other hand, which I’ll admit I only watched perhaps twice or three times in total, was empty and meaningless without any appealing characters, IMHO. And it wasn’t funny. — FmH] As a psychiatrist, much of my initial interest in The Sopranos arose from the well-depicted psychotherapy plotline interwoven into it. Wouldn’t it be interesting to be a fly on the wall in Larry David’s shrink’s office too?

Two cases of plague at a New York City hospital turned out not to be bioterrorism, but they provided an opportunity to test how the city health system would handle an intentional attack.

The good news: Doctors say the system worked.

Hospital staff and health officials applied lessons from last year’s anthrax attacks to diagnose and treat the two patients quickly — and to prevent unnecessary public fear over the obscure disease.

The bubonic plague cases, diagnosed in a New Mexico couple who showed up at Beth Israel Medical Center on Nov. 5, were the first in New York City in at least a century.

“This was scary. Even the doctors had never seen a case,” said Dr. Beth Raucher, an epidemiologist at Beth Israel Medical Center, where the two patients were treated. “But everybody did what they had to do.” Reuters Health

“A customer in an international hamburger chain outlet in western Sweden lost his appetite when he discovered the restaurant’s toilet seats were being washed in its dishwasher alongside the kitchen utensils.

The man noticed on a visit to the bathroom in the restaurant in Arvika, Sweden, that all the toilet seats had been removed.

When he asked staff about the missing seats, an employee took them out of a dishwasher where they had been cleaned together with trays and kitchen utensils, the Swedish TT news agency reported on Thursday, quoting the regional newspaper…

The employee tried to reassure the customer by saying that the freshly washed toilet seat would be warm and pleasant to sit on.” Reuters Oddly Enough

Thank you for continuing to afford me the opportunity to enlist your participation in my idiosyncratic version of reality for the past three years. It continues to be its own reward; I hope my kind readers continue to be stimulated, challenged, entertained, edified, outraged here. What do I want for a birthday present? Your suggestions about improvements you would like to see in FmH — either content or performance.

With respect to the latter, I know several people wrote me with pleasure about better loading and less browser choking when I temporarily resorted to a simpler template. You were probably disappointed when I reverted to my original design when Blogger was fixed and I was able to update again. You may recall that someone was kind enough to make an attempt several months ago at rewriting my template with CSS layout control without tables. This made a big difference in how fast FmH loads, but unfortunately we couldn’t iron out the bugs under some browsers. I do intend, sometime I have time, to have another stab at this problem. Hopefully, there’s enough here to continue to put up with the frustrations.

While I’m not looking for fame and fortune in the blogosphere, I do wonder why my referrer count tells me that readership of FmH has been plateaued at around 400 visits a day for the longest time. I know I should find a way to ask this question to the rest of the world which is not reading FmH instead of asking you, but I would welcome any thoughts as to why I seem to have hit such a ‘glass ceiling’ in readership. [And is that more like 400 people checking in once a day; 20 of you looking at FmH twenty times a day; or several thousand of you reading less than a few times a week?]

“A war against Iraq could kill half a million people, warns a new report by medical experts – and most would be civilians.

The report claims as many as 260,000 could die in the conflict and its three-month aftermath, with a further 200,000 at risk in the longer term from famine and disease. A civil war in Iraq could add another 20,000 deaths.

Collateral Damage is being published on Tuesday in 14 countries and has been compiled by Medact, an organisation of British health professionals. It comes as the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, is deciding how to respond to a series of deadlines on weapons inspections imposed by the United Nations.” New Scientist

Ananova

‘PALM BEACH COUNTY, Fla. — A jury awarded the widow of teacher Barry Grunow $1.2 million from a gun distributor Thursday.

Pam Grunow’s lawsuit accused Valor Corp of distributing a gun that was “unsafe, defective and lacked features that would have prevented a minor from using it.” ‘

“The number of organized hacking syndicates targeting financial institutions around the world is growing at a disturbingly fast rate. And so is the number of banks willing to pay these high-tech extortionists hush money to protect their reputations, according to a security expert at The World Bank.” ComputerWorld

William Safire wants you to know that, ‘If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you:

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as “a virtual, centralized grand database.”

To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you — passport application, driver’s license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance — and you have the supersnoop’s dream: a “Total Information Awareness” about every U.S. citizen.

This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks.’ NY Times op-ed

David Edelstein: Sophomore year at Hogwarts —

“As I sat through this sequel — which is more entertaining than the first film but still two hours and 40 minutes — with no bathroom breaks, Mom and Dad — I passed the time wondering if AOL Time Warner had thought to protect its investment with computer simulations of Radcliffe, Emma Watson (Hermione), and Rupert Grint (Ron) over the next decade. What will these tykes look like on the other side of the Great Adolescent Divide? For a lot of child actors, the early teens aren’t pretty: Those marvelous features have a tendency to grow at different rates. (Even the comeliest kids have weird stuff happen to them. Remember when all you could register on the face of Brooke Shields was her new Frankenstein brow?) Given the billions at stake, is someone at the studio monitoring these kids’ hormones? Are there dermatologists on call night and day? We’re talking six sequels, folks. A movie about the care and feeding of the child stars of Harry Potter would be more entertaining than the thing itself. It would have some real life in it.” Slate

Also: Stephanie Zacharek: The Trouble with Harry: “Despite terrific special effects and funnier gags, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets finds a way to make J.K. Rowling’s marvelous series into a deadly bore.” Salon

What Would Jesus Drive? “Transportation choices are one of the great Christian obligations and opportunities in the 21st century…” The New Republic

Just a reminder — you can join the FmH mailing list to get every post, or a daily digest, emailed to you. You can also send comments on FmH content to the mailing list rather than just to me; perhaps start an interchange?

“The 2002 Leonid meteor storm is due on Tuesday, Nov. 19th. A NASA expert

offers practical advice to meteor watchers who wish to observe the

display.”

Anti-MAL — this utility from Thailand reputedly generates a high-pitched sound that will repel insects from your computer. Do you need this? Download at your own risk, of course. [Do any Followers read Thai?]

From a speech given by 92-year-old Doris “Granny D” Haddock, who walked across the U.S. in 1999-2000 for campaign finance reform:

“If we Americans are split into two meaningful camps, it is not conservative versus liberal. The two camps are these: the politically awake and the hypnotized — hypnotized by television and other mass media, whose overpaid Svengalis dangle the swinging medallions of packaged candidates and oft-told lies. It is all done to politically prolong the open season on us — open season indeed, as the billionaire takeover artists bag their catch for the day. And in their bags are our freedoms, our leisure, our health care futures, our old age security, our family time, our village life, our family-owned businesses on Main Street, the middle class itself, and our position of honor and peaceful leadership in the world.” AlterNet [via wood s lot]

George W. Bush, ‘Dry Drunk’? [Katherine van Wormer is a Friend (Quaker), Professor of Social Work at the University of Northern Iowa, and co-author of the recent Addiction Treatment: A Strengths Perspective (2002).]

‘Ordinarily I would not use this term. But when I came across the article ‘ “Dry Drunk” — Is Bush Making a Cry for Help?’ in American Politics Journal by Alan Bisbort, I was ready to concede … in the case of George W. Bush, the phrase may be quite apt.’ Interactivist Info Exchange [via wood s lot]

Weapons Inspectors Leave for Baghdad on Monday NY Times. Since the “weapons of mass destruction” issue, however, is only a pretext for the Bush Administration’s planned prosecution of this war for its broader, insidious geopolitical objectives (Roger Trilling, Village Voice)

(as well as Bush’s emotional needs), Iraq’s efforts will be construed as provocative noncompliance regardless of the situation the weapons inspectors encounter on the ground. Going to the UN and deferring until the return of the inspectors was an inconvenience necessitated by the degree of domestic opposition (notably, that of the uniformed military) and international resistance, but will not make a war any less likely… And, of course, the purported bin Laden tape

(NY Times) serves as a bellwether of and a potential rallying point for the inflamed reaction we are likely to get from the Muslim world when we lay waste to the civilian Iraqi population and the country’s infrastructure.

How Karl Rove’s ‘winner-take-all’ strategy for the midterm elections did the trick; I lifted this link from boing boing, which liked the following paragraph about Rove’s two-way:

Through it all, Rove wore his war room on his belt’the postcard-size BlackBerry communicator that holds his unmatchable Rolodex as well as his e-mail system, through which he squirted orders and suggestions to campaign workers and lobbyists using only a few words. “It’s like haiku, “says a political operative who has been on the receiving end. During meetings’even ones with the President’Rove would constantly spin the BlackBerry’s dial and punch out text on its tiny keyboard. “Sometimes we’re in a meeting talking to each other and BlackBerrying each other at the same time, “says a colleague. At times Rove’s voltage got too hot even for all his outlets. He became known for breaking into song in midsentence. During games of gin rummy on Air Force One during Bush’s campaign swings, Rove was always the loudest one yelling, “Feed the monkey! “when it was his turn to pick up a card. (Bush played once, Rove says, and “whipped me.’)

But there’s plenty more there. Time

“Having helped spark the file-trading revolution, some stars of the peer-to-peer networking world are swapping their original anarchistic philosophies in favor of capitalism. Napster co-founder Sean Parker–perhaps best known for writing some of the ill-fated company’s most legally damning memos–is launching a new company called Plaxo on Tuesday, focused on helping Microsoft Outlook users keep their address books up to date.” CNET.com

Despite being found guilty of grand theft charges, actress Winona Ryder has vowed to find the real shoplifters.

“I cannot and will not rest until the real perpetrators of this crime are found. Despite the potentially damning video tape and the fact that I was arrested with the items on my person, I will find the people who framed me,” said Ryder, “especially if asked to do so by my director. Perhaps in a role as a girl who finds the real criminals in a film called… uh… Framers!”

“Even if I have to search from a prison cell, I’ll find some of the people who saw Little Women and Girl, Interrupted who believe I’m innocent,” continued Ryder. “And since I’m a celebrity, I will spearhead a campaign ensuring that in the future, celebrities will not be held liable for crimes unless they are felonies or federal offenses.”

E!, the entertainment network, plans on covering the Winona Ryder Search for Truth tour which kicks off after sentencing next month. Kato Kaelin will host the specials.

Police reported riots erupting in Beverly Hills. BBSpot [thanks, Walker, who suggested I include this in my “OJ Still Searching for Wife’s Killer” Dept.]

In another apparent “Alan-Sokal-like” scandal, two French science-fiction-writing twin-brother ‘geniuses’ have managed to get a supposedly meaningless paper purporting to describe the singularity at the moment of the universe’s creation through the peer-review process and published in a physics journal. But the case turns out to be far more complex than a hoax. Chronicle of Higher Education

Theory links slavery, stress disorder:

Mims, Reid, and Larry Higginbottom, another black social worker, recently taught a symposium at the Simmons Graduate School of Social Work and are writing a book about what they call ”post-traumatic slavery disorder” – a derivative of post-traumatic stress disorder. They are holding workshops to propose to fellow professionals that drug abuse, broken families, crime, and low educational attainment in segments of the black community can be directly linked to the trauma of slavery, and that ”black people as a whole are suffering from PTSD,” Mims said.

These Boston clinicians were not the first to note the lingering psychological effects of slavery. Harvard University psychiatrist Alvin F. Poussaint wrote in 2000 about ”posttraumatic slavery syndrome,” calling it ”a physiological risk for black people that is virtually unknown to white Americans.”

In a book Poussaint co-authored on black suicide, ”Lay My Burden Down,” he wrote: ”A culture of oppression, the by-product of this nation’s development, has taken a tremendous toll on the minds and bodies of black people.”

Now, Mims, Reid, and Higginbottom – none with backgrounds in academia – have taken it upon themselves to try to educate other mental health workers about their theory, and promote a curriculum and therapy based on the idea. They would like to see what they call ”PTSlaveryD” entered into diagnostic manuals. Boston Globe

Officials Question FBI Terror Readiness: “With intelligence agencies predicting that Iraq and sympathetic Islamic extremists will attempt to launch terrorist attacks against the United States in the event of war, many government officials are growing concerned that the FBI is dangerously unprepared to detect or thwart strikes on U.S. soil.” Washington Post

”It was a sedan when he parked it and two hours later, it was a convertible.” ‘Firefighters mistakenly ripped off the roof, doors, and steering wheel of a car the department thought was supposed to be used for a rescue drill on Friday morning. The black 1986 Honda Accord, however, was owned by Antonio Rocha…, who parked the car on a grassy lot behind the fire station… Two other cars slated for demolition as part of the Jaws of Life drill already were parked in that lot, where the department has been holding rescue exercises for years, according to (a fire dept. official)… Police and fire officials have been unable to locate Rocha at his… address. Rocha had parked his car, which had about 204,000 miles on the odometer, and walked to his workplace … up the road, according to police…’ Boston Globe

Brian Livingston writes that ‘ millions of Windows users have unwittingly installed “parasites” when setting up music-sharing programs or other free marketing gimmicks. Some parasite programs harvest fake sales commissions from e-commerce sites. They can also make your PC unreliable and crash-prone.’ InfoWorld

He points us to a British website developer named Andrew Clover at whose site you can test your computer for dozens of different parasite programs

. Here’s a Google parasitology search to take you further. Perhaps the most informative and useful site I found is Nasty Secret.

Salon Letters: ‘In his Oct. 30 “Idiocy of the Week,”

Salon columnist Andrew Sullivan scrutinized an article written by Buffalo State College professor Michael I. Niman titled “Was Paul Wellstone Murdered?”

Niman responds.’ After Wellstone’s death, I suggested we’d be hearing from conspiracy theorists. Niman either is or isn’t…

A ‘news log’, updated daily, of Iraq-related news stories and analysis from AlterNet and elsewhere.

Buried deep within the 670-page No Child Left Behind educational act is a provision not only requiring public secondary schools to allow military recruiters access to their facilities but forcing them to provide contact information on every registered student or face a cutoff in federal funding. ‘Recruiters are up-front about their plans to use school lists to aggressively pursue students through mailings, phone calls, and personal visits — even if parents object. “The only thing that will get us to stop contacting the family is if they call their congressman,” says Major Johannes Paraan, head U.S. Army recruiter for Vermont and northeastern New York. “Or maybe if the kid died, we’ll take them off our list.” ‘ Mother Jones

“A cure for wireless gadget overload may not be far off.

It’s called software defined radio; a technology that replaces analog radio circuitry with digitally generated samples of radio waveforms.

This week, wireless technology makers will convene in San Diego to demonstrate SDR, which could hold the key to developing a single standard for a myriad of portable devices.

By replacing the custom-designed, single-purpose transmitter and receiver electronics inside today’s wireless gadgets with software running on a CPU chip, SDR developers hope to unlock new opportunities for wireless communications.” Wired

‘Two California men rebelling against a sea of America Online promotional compact discs have got mail like never before.

People around the world have sent Jim McKenna and John Lieberman more than 80,000 CDs offering trial subscriptions to AOL’s Internet services. They say when they collect a million, they’ll go to the company’s front door in Virginia to say, “You’ve got mail.” ‘ Wired

Patient dies in robot-aided surgery:

“An experienced doctor looking at a three-dimensional computer screen manipulated a robot with three mechanical arms used to cut blood vessels and remove a cancerous kidney from Al Greenway, Plant High School teacher.

The procedure is considered less invasive than traditional surgery and is supposed to decrease a patient’s bleeding, pain and recovery time.

But something went terribly wrong.

During the surgery, Greenway’s aorta and another blood vessel supplying the kidney were accidentally cut. No one noticed for about 90 minutes. Two days later, on Oct. 13, Greenway died of complications from the surgery.” St Petersburg Times

Action’s Legality, Effectiveness Questioned:

“Hijazi’s citizenship highlights the different approaches pursued simultaneously by the administration as it wages its war on terror. In some cases since Sept. 11, American citizens have been arrested and afforded traditional legal rights in the criminal justice system. In others, they have been captured and held indefinitely in military brigs as “enemy combatants.” Now, at least in Hijazi’s case, a citizen has been killed in a covert military action.

What’s more, Hijazi was killed in a country considered at peace with the United States, although U.S. officials say the strike was carried out with the approval and cooperation of Yemen’s government.

It was unclear whether the CIA operatives who fired the missile knew that an American citizen was among their targets. It also was unclear whether that would have made any difference.” CommonDreams

“There are seven sins in the world: wealth without work, pleasure without

conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science

without humanity, worship without sacrifice and politics without

principle.” – Mahatma Gandhi

Eric Blair, at Warblogger Watch, notes that

“Bill Quick is running a most bloodthirsty warblog contest. When I first started up WBW I would have been all over it, but now it just kind of seems desperate and sad. Here are a few highlights, my last word, unless one of these nuts goes postal and starts picking off brown people with a Bushmaster.”

Desperate and sad it may be, but I’m afraid it increasingly represents the mainstream. Reading some of the venom these pathetic ignorants are spouting serves to help us remember what kind of country we live in, if waking up painted blue all over last Wednesday morning hasn’t already done it for you.

Actually, I’m of two minds what significance to place on all this. As FmH readers know, it is a longstanding preoccupation of mine to worry about exactly what influence thoughtful webloggers opposed to the madness can have. Usually it seems to me we fill a universe with discourse, but that the universe is one of likeminded souls only preaching to the converted. This often discourages me (and inspires a shower of supportive comments in my mailbox). But, on the other hand, one of my responses to the fact that I live in a country whose denizens are over and over anally raped, played for fools and convinced to love it enough to beg for more from our elected despots — and then go on in braindead support of the export of our hypocritical tyranny and pillage on the rest of the world — has been to dissociate myself. When people tell me my words can have an influence in the broader field of public discourse, not only am I often dubious but, usually, I’m not sure I want that. You can’t argue about political persuasion any more than you can about religion —indeed, it is usually faith- rather than fact-based! It takes so much energy to debate with deluded ranters; is it worth it?

Why not just live in a different country? In a way, ever since the moral bankruptcy of the Vietnam War, I’ve taken seriously the jeering jingoist yahoos who taunted us to “love it or leave it.” I left. Not literally, not geographically, but I have never felt I lived in America as constituted, not their America. This was apolitical whenever possible, politically involved when an issue of peace, justice or survival made it morally impossible to ignore it. Actually, maybe I live elsewhere geographically too; I’ve always settled in places which are pockets of resistance, university towns, for most of my adult life The Republic of Cambridge or its environs (I’m across the river from there now, but I still have my office there), and could not see relocating anywhere in the Vast Wasteland which still seems painful whenever it is necessary to venture out into it. At least, unlike my aloof beleaguered isolationism of the Reagan-Bush era, the pockets of self-imposed exile in these days of renewed tyranny and permanent war have expanded into cyberspace to assume a continuity and community. It’s a little bit easier to inhabit this America. Let’s hope, with the coming storm, it remains a place of refuge.

Addendum: Two thoughtful responses from FmH readers ensued. One wrote that we must truly contend with a consistently conservative electorate:

The disheartening thing, for those of us on the Left, is how little has changed. Plus ca change, indeed. But while knowledge of the past is key to understanding the future, it is true too that the future is not the past. There is a new reality, a reality that threatens not just Democrats, but democracy.

Florida in 2000 was the paradigm, for our new unpleasant political reality. Florida, and America, is divided right down the middle, between two groups, neither of which care to listen to, much less respect, the other. Democracy has little to say about this state of affairs. It is difficult to see how the rights of the minority are to be respected in this new world, and the truth is, then, that our democracy itself has broken down. The New America is a place where Republicans and Democrats have become the Hatfields and the McCoys, sniping at each other from entrenched positions. Both feeling, with some justification, that they represent the real America, and the others are merely usurpers. This sense of ownership, and the disdain for those who disagree with us that stems from it, that we can hear any day on Fox or talk radio, is going to get worse, before it gets better. It already has. It just did.

Another reader (and Cambridge resident) worries that:

The problem with abandoning the country, especially intellectually, is that you are, in effect, surrendering. …(T)o fail to assert your patriotism, your love of the freedoms that this country gives you, is to allow the right wing to assert that they, and only they, are patriots.

…When the principled left gives up on patriotism, it makes patriotism seem ever more not just the last refuge of the scoundrel, but his natural habitat. This is just not so! America can be many things, and it can be good things, and if you want to have any influence at all, you’ll have to start by reminding yourself that our flag represents “liberty and justice for all” at least as much as it represents military might and manifest destiny.

And, finally, there’s this, that just begs to be posted in its entirety, from the comments to a similar post I put up on Warblogger Watch:

Eliot, that preening little tirade was a classic case-study in the shakey, pretended contempt of the ineffectual left for the big, confusing and scary world outside it’s stale little Trotskist horizon.

It was all there, good lord, like ticking off a list, the self-righteous withdrawal from debate with the excuse of being too good for the heathen mob, the ignorant refusal to aknowledge the validity of other people’s opinions, the timid refusal to engage masquerading as world-weary intellectual superiority, mixed in with childish accusations and insults. Yep, that’s the lot.

Oh and what do you know, you’re some kind of academic? Didn’t see that coming.

You know, the only thing that tempers my disgust with you mental insects is the deep personal satisfaction I derive at the roadkill the real world has made of all your retarded theories and movements. Seen Che Guevara lately, dipshits? Haha!

I’m sorry but you need to learn some new tunes, we had to kill all your widdle commie fwends, now worker’s paradise go bye bye.

You might end up having to actually work for a living, though the ambitious, talented people are going to kick your ass. Maybe better to withdraw into some taxpayer funded academic backwater, retreat from the marketplace of ideas that has so bruised and humiliated your kind. Then you can pontificate from on high while the rest of us ignore you and get on with our lives.

I’m pretty sure you’ll find a way to suck blood from the public purse, just keep telling yourself how much better you are than your productive fellow citizens. Those poor sheep don’t know what they got coming… any day now… goddamn them.. make em all sorry…

Hey Elliot, has it ever crossed your mind we might actually be right?

Oh nevermind. Off you go.

It’s amazing how wrong he gets it — how he concludes that I’m essentially a welfare cheat is a breathtaking leap of faith that is utterly beyond me. And amazing how self-referential his post is. Pretty well hoist on his own petard, ay? [And, no, thankfully, it never crossed my mind that you might be right. Who was it who said that the contempt of the contemptible is a compliment? I don’t make my living as an academic but, forced to choose between them and the anti-intellectualism of this fellow and his cronies, it is no contest…]

“President Bush has settled on a war plan for Iraq that would begin with an air campaign shorter than the one for the Persian Gulf war, senior administration officials say. It would feature swift ground actions to seize footholds in the country and strikes to cut off the leadership in Baghdad.” NY Times

British artist Susanne Pitt, who has just won a New York copyright infringement suit against Mattel for the right to do so, “plac(es) Barbie in a modern erotic context” with these £120 ‘dungeon dolls’. Metro

Pelosi seems to have effectively jockeyed for position against her contenders, and her most formidable opponent Rep. Martin Frost (D.-TX) has just bowed out and endorsed her. CBS Although Frost contended in his campaign that Pelosi’s politics are too far to the left and she would not have any appeal with the middle-of-the-road majority whose attention he feels the Democrats have to win, the converse is more likely; the only hope for the party may be in an effective differentiation in platform from the Republicans that they have been unable to achieve in recent years. Perhaps, emboldened by the unprecedented midterm setbacks her party’s namby-pambyism has just engendered, Pelosi might steer her minority caucus toward an effective — dare we say principled? — opposition position. (Since the end of WWII, the Democrats have arguably been far more effective in the opposition than when in power.) In any case, she’s got to be an improvement on Dick Gephardt. But, we also have to get beyond platitudes about Democratic failure and contend with the fact that Dubya seems genuinely increasingly popular, although the most disingenuous President since Richard Nixon.

Eric Blair, at Warblogger Watch, notes that

“Bill Quick is running a most bloodthirsty warblog contest. When I first started up WBW I would have been all over it, but now it just kind of seems desperate and sad. Here are a few highlights, my last word, unless one of these nuts goes postal and starts picking off brown people with a Bushmaster.”

Desperate and sad it may be, but I’m afraid it increasingly represents the mainstream. Reading some of the venom these pathetic ignorants are spouting serves to help us remember what kind of country we live in, if waking up painted blue all over last Wednesday morning hasn’t already done it for you.

Actually, I’m of two minds what significance to place on all this. As FmH readers know, it is a longstanding preoccupation of mine to worry about exactly what influence thoughtful webloggers opposed to the madness can have. Usually it seems to me we fill a universe with discourse, but that the universe is one of likeminded souls only preaching to the converted. This often discourages me (and inspires a shower of supportive comments in my mailbox). But, on the other hand, one of my responses to the fact that I live in a country whose denizens are over and over anally raped, played for fools and convinced to love it enough to beg for more from our elected despots — and then go on in braindead support of the export of our hypocritical tyranny and pillage on the rest of the world — has been to dissociate myself. When people tell me my words can have an influence in the broader field of public discourse, not only am I often dubious but, usually, I’m not sure I want that. You can’t argue about political persuasion any more than you can about religion —indeed, it is usually faith- rather than fact-based! It takes so much energy to debate with deluded ranters; is it worth it?

Why not just live in a different country? In a way, ever since the moral bankruptcy of the Vietnam War, I’ve taken seriously the jeering jingoist yahoos who taunted us to “love it or leave it.” I left. Not literally, not geographically, but I have never felt I lived in America as constituted, not their America. This was apolitical whenever possible, politically involved when an issue of peace, justice or survival made it morally impossible to ignore it. Actually, maybe I live elsewhere geographically too; I’ve always settled in places which are pockets of resistance, university towns, for most of my adult life The Republic of Cambridge or its environs (I’m across the river from there now, but I still have my office there), and could not see relocating anywhere in the Vast Wasteland which still seems painful whenever it is necessary to venture out into it. At least, unlike my aloof beleaguered isolationism of the Reagan-Bush era, the pockets of self-imposed exile in these days of renewed tyranny and permanent war have expanded into cyberspace to assume a continuity and community. It’s a little bit easier to inhabit this America. Let’s hope, with the coming storm, it remains a place of refuge.

Addendum: Two thoughtful responses from FmH readers ensued. One wrote that we must truly contend with a consistently conservative electorate:

The disheartening thing, for those of us on the Left, is how little has changed. Plus ca change, indeed. But while knowledge of the past is key to understanding the future, it is true too that the future is not the past. There is a new reality, a reality that threatens not just Democrats, but democracy.

Florida in 2000 was the paradigm, for our new unpleasant political reality. Florida, and America, is divided right down the middle, between two groups, neither of which care to listen to, much less respect, the other. Democracy has little to say about this state of affairs. It is difficult to see how the rights of the minority are to be respected in this new world, and the truth is, then, that our democracy itself has broken down. The New America is a place where Republicans and Democrats have become the Hatfields and the McCoys, sniping at each other from entrenched positions. Both feeling, with some justification, that they represent the real America, and the others are merely usurpers. This sense of ownership, and the disdain for those who disagree with us that stems from it, that we can hear any day on Fox or talk radio, is going to get worse, before it gets better. It already has. It just did.

Another reader (and Cambridge resident) worries that:

The problem with abandoning the country, especially intellectually, is that you are, in effect, surrendering. …(T)o fail to assert your patriotism, your love of the freedoms that this country gives you, is to allow the right wing to assert that they, and only they, are patriots.

…When the principled left gives up on patriotism, it makes patriotism seem ever more not just the last refuge of the scoundrel, but his natural habitat. This is just not so! America can be many things, and it can be good things, and if you want to have any influence at all, you’ll have to start by reminding yourself that our flag represents “liberty and justice for all” at least as much as it represents military might and manifest destiny.

And, finally, there’s this, that just begs to be posted in its entirety, from the comments to a similar post I put up on Warblogger Watch:

Eliot, that preening little tirade was a classic case-study in the shakey, pretended contempt of the ineffectual left for the big, confusing and scary world outside it’s stale little Trotskist horizon.

It was all there, good lord, like ticking off a list, the self-righteous withdrawal from debate with the excuse of being too good for the heathen mob, the ignorant refusal to aknowledge the validity of other people’s opinions, the timid refusal to engage masquerading as world-weary intellectual superiority, mixed in with childish accusations and insults. Yep, that’s the lot.

Oh and what do you know, you’re some kind of academic? Didn’t see that coming.

You know, the only thing that tempers my disgust with you mental insects is the deep personal satisfaction I derive at the roadkill the real world has made of all your retarded theories and movements. Seen Che Guevara lately, dipshits? Haha!

I’m sorry but you need to learn some new tunes, we had to kill all your widdle commie fwends, now worker’s paradise go bye bye.

You might end up having to actually work for a living, though the ambitious, talented people are going to kick your ass. Maybe better to withdraw into some taxpayer funded academic backwater, retreat from the marketplace of ideas that has so bruised and humiliated your kind. Then you can pontificate from on high while the rest of us ignore you and get on with our lives.

I’m pretty sure you’ll find a way to suck blood from the public purse, just keep telling yourself how much better you are than your productive fellow citizens. Those poor sheep don’t know what they got coming… any day now… goddamn them.. make em all sorry…

Hey Elliot, has it ever crossed your mind we might actually be right?

Oh nevermind. Off you go.

It’s amazing how wrong he gets it — how he concludes that I’m essentially a welfare cheat is a breathtaking leap of faith that is utterly beyond me. And amazing how self-referential his post is. Pretty well hoist on his own petard, ay? [And, no, thankfully, it never crossed my mind that you might be right. Who was it who said that the contempt of the contemptible is a compliment? I don’t make my living as an academic but, forced to choose between them and the anti-intellectualism of this fellow and his cronies, it is no contest…]

“Motherhood may make women smarter and may help prevent dementia in old age by bathing the brain in protective hormones, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday.” azcentral.com

‘Toyota Motor Corp., the world’s third-largest automaker, plans to use gasoline-electric hybrid engines in all vehicles by 2012 to increase fuel efficiency and reduce tailpipe emissions, an executive said.’ auto.com

Mobile car ban drives Bluetooth BBC; Cars To Get In-Dash Bluetooth Elgan Report

“A new £7.5m Prison Service computer system may have to be axed – over fears an IRA mole has had access to it.

The upgraded system was launched earlier this year, and provides precise details of each prison officer’s shifts at Ulster’s two main jails – Maghaberry and Magilligan – for each day of the next year.

It allows prison service officers to access what days they are scheduled to work, and what times they are due to start and finish.

Now it is understood concerned prison bosses are considering scrapping the computer system, over fears that the Provisional IRA may know the work routines of every prison officer employed by the under-fire service.” Belfast Telegraph

Sam Parry:

“The Washington press corps has come grudgingly to the recognition that George W. Bush is “malleable” with the truth, as the Washington Post delicately put it. Pressing for war with Iraq, Bush has been exaggerating his case so much that even CIA analysts are complaining, as a number of newspapers have now reported.

But the underlying reality about Bush’s honesty is far worse. Throughout his adult life, Bush has dodged the truth along with personal responsibility for his actions. Indeed, a remarkable feature of his presidency is the gap between Bush’s public image as a straight-talking everyman and the behind-the-curtain Bush whose imperial impulse sometimes flashes into public view.” The Consortium

Eric Alterman:

Bush Lies, Media Swallows: ‘President Bush is a liar. There, I said it, but most of the mainstream media won’t. Liberal pundits Michael Kinsley, Paul Krugman and Richard Cohen have addressed the issue on the Op-Ed pages, but almost all news pages and network broadcasts pretend not to notice. In the one significant effort by a national daily to deal with Bush’s consistent pattern of mendacity, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank could not bring himself (or was not allowed) to utter the crucial words. Instead, readers were treated to such complicated linguistic circumlocutions as: Bush’s statements represented “embroidering key assertions” and were clearly “dubious, if not wrong.” The President’s “rhetoric has taken some flights of fancy,” he has “taken some liberties,” “omitted qualifiers” and “simply outpace[d] the facts.” But “Bush lied”? Never.’ The Nation [via Walker]

I’d heard rumors of the famous Pringles can antenna for 802.11b wireless; now a friend has send me a blink to the details. For less than $15, you can build a pair of these that ought to carry an 11 Mbps link “well over ten miles”, according to the geeks from the O’Reilly Network. [thanks, Abby]

For those of you wondering about the new look at FmH, it’s a mistake! My template got corrupted and Blogger is not letting me save a corrected version over the corrupted one. However, Blogger does let me choose one of its different, pre-canned templates instead. So this is temporary, until I can, with repeated attempts, succeed in saving my corrected template… Bear with me, all will be well again, I know….

Review: Consciousness and the Novel by David Lodge: “The dilemma is that phenomenal experience is a first person matter, and this seems, at first glance, to prevent the formulation of a completely objective or causal account.” Science, of course, is a third-person discourse. The first-person pronoun is not used in scientific papers. If there were any hint of qualia in a scientific paper, Edelman says, it would be edited out. But a scientific study of consciousness cannot ignore qualia. His proposed solution is to accept that other people as well as oneself do experience qualia, to collect their first-person accounts, and correlate them to establish what they have in common, bearing in mind that these reports are inevitably “partial, imprecise and relative to… personal context.”

Pentagon to test digital audio device to `play’ taps at military funerals

The Pentagon, chronically short of musicians to play taps at military funerals, is going to test the use of a new “push button” bugle that can be operated by an honor guard member.

A small digital audio device inserted into the bell of the bugle plays a rendition of taps that the Pentagon says is “virtually indistinguishable” from a live bugler. The person using the bugle merely pushes a button and holds the bugle to his or her lips.

“In addition to the very high quality sound, it provides a dignified `visual’ of a bugler playing taps, something families tell us they want,” said John M. Molino, a deputy assistant secretary of defense who announced the innovation Thursday. SF Chronicle [via Spike]

…At Least in Sheep: “A study of gay sheep appears to confirm the controversial suggestion that there is a biological basis for sexual preference.

The work shows that rams that prefer male sexual partners had small but distinct differences in a part of the brain called the hypothalamus, when compared with rams that preferred to mate with ewes.” New Scientist

Scientists go beyond physical causes: “Brain researchers revealed some surprising new clues about the nature of chronic pain Sunday, suggesting that subtle changes in nerve endings, early life experiences and social factors — even the mere presence of an overly solicitous spouse — can make the problem worse.” SF Chronicle

“Increased aggression is commonly associated with many neurological and psychiatric disorders. Current treatments are largely empirical and are often accompanied by severe side effects, underscoring the need for a better understanding of the neural bases of aggression. Vasopressin, acting through its 1a receptor subtype, is known to affect aggressive behaviors. The vasopressin 1b receptor (V1bR) is also expressed in the brain, but has received much less attention due to a lack of specific drugs. Here we report that mice without the V1bR exhibit markedly reduced aggression and modestly impaired social recognition. By contrast, they perform normally in all the other behaviors that we have examined, such as sexual behavior, suggesting that reduced aggression and social memory are not simply the result of a global deficit in sensorimotor function or motivation.” EurekAlert!

President’s Risks Are Rewarded at Polls: “Two years after the most bizarre presidential election in American history was decided by the Supreme Court, 14 months after the unspeakable horror of terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the nation voted in a mood of evident disenchantment and curious disconnection from the political system.

The American public is faced with a series of potentially life-altering issues, including the prospect of war with Iraq, the possibility of further assaults on national security at home, the reality of a prolonged slump in the stock market and the uncertainty of the economic outlook.” NY Times news analysis

“There have been too many cases in recent years of whales coming to grief in areas where Navy ships have been operating loud sonars to detect submarines.” NY Times editorial

Neuroscientists challenge tenets of intelligence testing. “Many people underscore on IQ tests because the benchmark memory test is inaccurate, a US researcher told the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Orlando, Florida yesterday. Another announced that women’s brain size could affect IQ.

In standard intelligence tests, subjects are asked to remember a string of random numbers. The widely quoted average before stumbling – seven, give or take two – is thought to reveal the capacity of our short-term memory.

This ‘magic number’ is a huge overestimate, claims Mrim Boutla of the University of Rochester in New York. She puts the real size of short-term memory at four digits, plus or minus one – so too do several other studies challenging the gold standard.” Nature

Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America edited by Peter Knight: “Paranoia and conspiracy, as most of the writers in this collection of essays seem to agree, finds it wellspring in two primary sources: the uncertainties inherent in the postmodern condition and the increasingly diffuse nature of late capitalism. In other words, the culturally destabilizing force known as globalization, and all it represents, is the main culprit.”

Daniel Pipes describes the publication by The Arab Voice, an Arabic-language daily in Paterson NJ, of a serialization of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an infamous late-19th century forgery by the Tsarist secret service purporting to document a boastful Jewish plan for world domination. The Protocols has an enduring legacy of being used to bolster and fuel anti-Semitism throughout the 20th century Western world, including its embrace by Hitler as a centerpiece justifying the Final Solution. While I do agree that moderate Arab-Americans, like the rest of us, ought to dissociate themselves from the anti-Semitism the Protocols embodies, I’d like to know more from The Arab Voice about why they are publishing this and how it is being framed before it is used as confirmation, as Pipes does, that “Arab and Muslim institutional life in the United States remains as radicalized after 9/11 as it was before” and that “Arab and Muslim institutions are now the primary advocates of anti-Semitism worldwide, including in the West.” This seems kneejerk inflammatory neocon rhetoric and — dare I say? — could be considered as irresponsible as publishing the Protocols. Do any FmH readers, perchance, read the print version of The Arab Voice (the offending piece is not in the online version)? How is the publication prefaced?

Plane Spotters: Hobbyist or Spy? “British and Dutch aviation enthusiasts are on trial in Greece on

espionage-related charges for cataloging the movements of Greek

warplanes. Defense lawyers are struggling to explain the hobby to

baffled Greek judges.” Wired

Vince K wasn’t able to vote today. He had made a deal with himself that he wouldn’t pull the lever for any candidate whose supporters blocked the subway entrance to hand him propaganda on his way to work. That left no one.

I voted. I drive to work, and I managed to avoid the entire corps of campaign workers handing out all the wasted paper for the duration. I do share his cosmic gratitude that the whoring is over for awhile, though.

The Museum of Online Museums: “Here, you will find links from our archives to online collections and exhibits covering a vast array of interests and obsessions: Start with a review of classic art and architecture, and graduate to the study of mundane (and sometimes bizarre) objects elevated to art by their numbers, juxtaposition, or passion of the collector.”

A problem that marred the 2000 ballot is back:

One of the most intriguing mysteries of the whole Election 2000 debacle is this: How many Florida voters improperly lost their voting rights because of a statewide effort to scrub felons from voter rolls? This question was at the heart of a post-election lawsuit filed against the Department of State and others. The lead plaintiff, the NAACP, brought the class-action suit because more than half of those on the scrub list were black.

The good news is, all of those lawsuits are now settled. The private company contracted to perform the purge, Atlanta-based ChoicePoint (which in 2001 merged with the original contractor, West Palm Beach’s Database Technologies, or DBT) has agreed to more closely scrutinize the names on the lists it sent out before November 2000 and identify those voters who should never have been removed in the first place. The supervisors of elections who wrongfully removed these voters from the rolls will then reinstate them.

The bad news? This unknown number of nonfelons (dozens? hundreds? thousands?) won’t be back on the rolls in time to vote Tuesday. Some of them might already have been reinstated, and those who show up at the polls can cast a provisional ballot. But the original wrong — the improper removal of their franchise — has yet to be righted. New Times Broward-Palm Beach

FBI has bugged our public libraries: “Some reports say the FBI is snooping in the libraries. Is that really happening?

Yes. I have uncovered information that persuades me that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has bugged the computers at the Hartford Public Library. And it’s probable that other libraries around the state have also been bugged. It’s an effort by the FBI to obtain leads that it believes may lead them to terrorists.” Hartford Courant

Violent threat from South African white right: Recent bombings give the lie to the view that violence by right-wing extremists is a thing of the past, just on the heels of the court appearance of a group of elite Afrikaner right-wingers accused of plotting to carry out armed attacks against the South African government to set up a secessionist Afrikaner homeland. Events indicate a high level of planning and organization, probably by people with military training. Fears of a pro-apartheid military insurrrection haunted the 1994 election that brought black rule to South Africa but it had been generally agreed that the extremists had lost momentum thereafter. It is not clear if these new secessionists have links to the pre-1994 right-wing groups, although some commentators believe there is evidence that they do. Personally, I have always found it naive to feel reassured that the virulence of apartheid-think had appeared to melt away in the afterglow of post-1994 “truth and reconciliation”.

Tim du Plessis, editor of the Afrikaans newspaper Rapport, told BBC News Online that they are part “of a lunatic right-wing fringe” which included serving and former defence force officers.

Their ideas are “very weird”, he said, and some have been known to call themselves Israel Vision and to have their own version of the Bible, which depicts black people as sub-humans.

They do not seriously threaten the government or the security of South Africa, but Mr du Plessis believes that they could cause serious loss of life and damage and sow distrust in what is still a fragile society. BBC

Some blacks have reportedly threatened reprisals against whites, especially farmers, for the recent bombings.

“An American missile fired from an unmanned CIA drone killed six al-Qaeda suspects in Yemen, U.S. officials said yesterday.

The missile strike, which killed a top associate of Osama bin Laden and five underlings, expands U.S. President George W. Bush’s war on terror and is the first overt strike outside Afghanistan.” canada.com

Sultan of skiffle dies at 71: ‘Lonnie Donegan, father of skiffle, first global superstar of British pop and the first to popularise black music, has died on tour aged 71, it was announced yesterday.

His out-of-the blue hits in 1955 with versions of John Henry and Leadbelly’s Rock Island Line at the age of 24 began a revolution in the charts and in the taste of the young.

He remains admired by generations of younger artists, including Mark Knopfler, Brian May and Van Morrison. A spokeswoman for Donegan said: “In a career that covered over 50 years, he inspired nearly every major musician alive today.” ‘ Guardian UK

See if you can beg, borrow or steal a copy of The Skiffle Sessions — Van Morrison, Donegan, and Chris Barber recorded live in Belfast some years ago. It defines joyful and infectious…

“Vivato, a startup company packed with industry veterans including Wi-Fi Forum founder Phil Belanger, will announce new base station technology that can provide wide area coverage for existing Wi-Fi laptops and other computers.

Using a computer-controlled antenna array, Vivato’s prototype bases can reach large groups of users on existing laptops and other computers, with an operating range up to 7 kilometers outdoors, the company claims.” Wired

“While Bush shouts to the world about America’s war against ‘evil’, his statements are being deconstructed in classrooms and lecture halls.” sp!ked

“Developing safe, specific, powerful memory-improving drugs raises many ethical issues about the implications of cognitive enhancement.” The Scientist (requires free registration)

‘Scientists have found that men are more likely than women to be telling the truth if they say: “Not tonight darling, I’ve got a headache”.’ BBC

“(A) new study, published in the November issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, has identified an apparent ‘depression trait marker’ in the brain that may explain why recovered patients remain vulnerable to another depressive episode. The finding could have important implications for developing more targeted treatments that help patients stay well longer AND identifying family members at risk before they have even experienced a major depression.” EurekAlert!

What’s the longest word in the English language? Is it floccinaucinihilipilification (which is one letter longer, and IMHO much more useful, than antidisestablishmentarianism)? Wikipedia

…but his new email begs readers to trust him and click on the attachment! BBSpot [thanks, Walker!]

“The past two weeks have seen several examples of what has become a trend: making comparisons and references to terrorists and Saddam Hussein in order to smear political foes. While such attacks are far from the direct attempts to suppress dissent we have witnessed in the wake of September 11, 2001, the way in which such comparisons have settled into everyday politics is troubling.” Spinsanity

“Intelligent life might be more likely in a Universe in flux. Ever since Copernicus put the Sun, rather than Earth, at the centre of the Universe, scientists and philosophers have suspected that there’s nothing special about our cosmic time and place. But two physicists now suggest otherwise.

Only galaxies about the age of our Milky Way have the right conditions for intelligent life to develop, argue Jaume Garriga of the University of Barcelona, Spain, and Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts1. And that age, they say, might coincide with a fundamental change in the Universe.

What’s more, the search for other planetary systems could tell us whether they’re right or not.” Nature

…but his new email begs readers to trust him and click on the attachment! BBSpot [thanks, Walker!]

Review: Tim Blake Nelson’s The Grey Zone (2002): “This crepuscular work offers the most realistic depiction of the infernal workings of a Nazi death camp ever seen in a fiction film. ” PopMatters

“Navy pilots are conducting mock strikes against airfields, towers and other military sites in Iraq, acquainting themselves with targets they may be called on to strike as the Bush administration prepares for a possible military campaign to topple Saddam Hussein.” NY Times

“…(M)ourning has moved from a private and family matter to an increasingly public concern, with the widely televised memorial service for Senator Paul Wellstone, a national day of mourning for the victims of Sept. 11 and avid debates about the appropriate World Trade Center memorial.” NY Times

Kuwait has cordoned off a large area of the country near the Iraqi border for the duration of joint US-Kuwait military exercises [otherwise known as “mobilization for war” — FmH].

The closed areas in the northern and western parts of the country make up about one third of its territory.” BBC

“Astronomers may have detected the oldest star in the Milky Way galaxy, which could date back to the beginning of the Universe more than 12 billion years ago.” Independent UK

Nothing. But He Was Right. “Eighty years before 20th-century cosmologists hammered out the math, Edgar Allan Poe came up with a rudimentary version of contemporary science’s best guess for explaining how the universe began.” NY Times

‘The saying itself is not new. Use it and you might draw a dismissive glance from members of the hip-speak elite, the select group that quits a phrase as soon as it lands on prime time. But the reach of ”It’s all good” is hard to deny. For the average American, it’s the goatee of the language game: so all over the place that it’s on the verge of becoming unfashionable.’ Boston Globe

“Disgruntled net veterans are considering a challenge to the power of the internet’s co-ordinating body.

The veterans are thought likely to put in a bid for the contract to run key parts of the net’s addressing system which is due for renewal in 2003.

The potential challenge emerged during the meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) currently being held in Shanghai. [Shanghai?? — FmH]

ICANN is coming under close scrutiny by the US Government and in the past year has faced criticism from some regional net workers for exceeding its powers.” BBC

the electric sheep screen-saver: “This software owes its name to Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. It realizes the collective dream of sleeping computers from all over the internet. The Interpretation of Dreams contains an artistic, conceptual, and technical explanation. Below are example animations and software to download.

When the screen-saver is activated, the screen goes black and an animated ‘sheep’ appears. Behind the scenes, the screen-saver contacts an internet server and joins the parallel computation of new sheep.

Every fifteen minutes 24/7 a new sheep is produced and distributed to all clients for display. Each sheep is an animated fractal flame. The coordinates are chosen by the server with some simple heuristics.” The screensaver exists for Linux and MacOs X; there is no Windows version.

Cheney delivers new Iraq warning: “US Vice-President Dick Cheney has issued a new warning to Saddam Hussein, insisting that either he will give up his weapons of mass destruction or, as Mr Cheney put it, for the sake of peace, the US will disarm him.” BBC

Killer flu ‘on the way’: “Experts say governments across Europe need to plan for a virulent flu outbreak that could claim hundreds of thousands of lives.

Although the last two winters have brought only mild strains of flu to the UK, the viruses are constantly mutating and scientists say it is only a matter of time before a powerful strain emerges.” BBC

As citizens we demonstrate, write letters, and make known our discontent

and outrage at government policies. As writers we constantly interact

with different audiences in various contexts. We perform, read, teach,

get interviewed, and curate public programs. But as more and more people

are ready to commit acts of civil disobedience, we cannot continue

appearing in public and pretend nothing is happening.

POETRY IS NEWS, a forming coalition of poets, proposes to disrupt

business as usual, at least within the spheres we have some control

over. Some of us have been long active in various forms of political

work, some of us are inexperienced but eager to find ways to make our

voices heard. The mass public word has been corrupted past constructive

use for political change. As word workers, we are calling an initial

public meeting to find ways to exert our influence and expand our roles

in taking back the word and making it part of public change.

Whether we think of our mandate as a poll tax on poets or a bulletin

board for agitation, our public activities as poets must first break

down the boundaries we set for ourselves. Our goal is to create a body,

a presence, and a point of reference that, if not considered when

thinking of poetry, would simply cause embarrassment.

Is this a good idea? Are there concrete proposals that we can begin

implementing quickly, at readings, performances, in classrooms or public

spaces? Can we form working relationships with each other in order to

transmit different types of expertise, in dealing with the media, in

looking for resources, in organizing events? Let us know what you think.

        Ammiel Alcalay               Anne Waldman

        aaka@earthlink.net           a.waldman@mindspring.com

“Despite mounting anecdotal evidence, conventional scientists still

reject the notion that a person can remain conscious after being

clinically deceased. Now a pair of researchers want to prove them

wrong.” Wired

IMHO, it’s abit misleading to talk of this as consciouness after death. Near-death experiences (NDEs) should just force us to rethink when we define someone as dead.

“Respected scientists on both sides of the Atlantic warned yesterday that the US is developing a new generation of weapons that undermine and possibly violate international treaties on biological and chemical warfare.

The scientists, specialists in bio-warfare and chemical weapons, say the Pentagon, with the help of the British military, is also working on “non-lethal” weapons similar to the narcotic gas used by Russian forces to end last week’s siege in Moscow.” Guardian UK

Now that, I trust, you’ve safely survived Hallowe’en ‘tricks’ (and safely survived Hallowe’en ‘treats’ as well?), it is time to content with — no, not Election Day (for you U.S. readers) — November 4th, Mischief Night, as remembered in this BBC piece about autumn festivals in one of those hallowed places of the world, West Yorkshire. [via plep] Shall we observe it as another annual outbreak of holy foolery along with April 1st?

John Carroll: Lies, Damned Lies and Ongoing Dread

IT’S A COMIC opera, in some ways. We are planning to invade Iraq because it might have nukes one day, and North Korea jumps up and down and says, “We have nukes right now, yes oh yes,” and the United States says, “Well, no more oil for you guys. Where were we?”

Australia experiences something that had almost the psychological force that Sept. 11 had for us, the bombing of a nightclub in Kuta Beach (the Fort Lauderdale of Australia, although technically in another nation), and we say, “Terribly sorry, old things, but how about that Saddam fellow?”

Chechen terrorists hold Russians hostage in a Moscow theater, and administration wonks stay up all night trying to figure out a way to blame it on Iraq.

It’s like, hello, the war is over here. Worldwide Islamic fundamentalist uprising. Saddam Hussein: not an Islamic fundamentalist. I really think Dick Cheney needs to learn to use Google. Commondreams [via wood s lot]

Also:

Robert Jensen: Bush’s Leaps of Illogic Don’t Answer People’s Questions About War:

Bush’s argument reduces to this: No one can prove that Saddam Hussein is not planning to attack us. And if he had a nuclear weapon, no one can prove he wouldn’t use it. And if he used it, it is possible he could destroy us. So, to stop this unknown, unproven, unquantifiable, logic-defying “threat gathering against us,” we must go to war or risk seeing a mushroom cloud rise over the United States. CounterPunch

Carol Wolman MD: Diagnosing Dubya:

Many people, inside and especially outside this country, believe that the American president is nuts, and is taking the world on a suicidal path. As a board-certified psychiatrist, I feel it’s my duty to share my understanding of his psychopathology. He’s a complicated man, under tremendous pressure from both his family/junta, and from the world at large. So the following is offered with humility and questioning, in the form of a differential diagnosis. CounterPunch

And finally, as Rafe Colburn describes:

Slate has an article on Donald Rumsfeld’s private team of intelligence analysts who are trying to come up with evidence that Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein are somehow linked, mainly because the CIA and DIA have not found evidence of such a connection. It’s obvious that producing a clear link between Saddam and Osama would provide the easiest justification for war that there is, so Rumsfeld and his cronies won’t be satisfied until such a connection is produced. The article takes a historical perspective and shows how Cold War hawks basically took the same approach — twisting the available evidence to produce bogus reports about Soviet capabilities in order to argue against arms control. Ironically, several of the Cold War players who distorted the facts about the Soviets are now on the job making a case for war in Iraq based on fiction. rc3

As Media Whores Online put it, ” An inconsolable Trent Lott shares a somber

moment of grief with President Clinton at

Tuesday’s memorial service for Senator

Paul Wellstone.” [I was only being partially tongue-in-cheek the other day in speculating that the Rabid Right were secretly rejoicing over his death… — FmH]

Peter Straub guest-edits the new issue of literary magazine Conjunctions, full of what he dubs ‘post-genre cult writers’.

The result, New Wave Fabulists ($15), will be published next week. It is a collection of stories and essays by 18 writers who began their careers in a genre but, as Straub says, “drifted away, created their own voices and are completely uncompartmentizable.”

Straub warns readers of Conjunctions, which published writers such as Rick Moody and David Foster Wallace early in their careers, that “should you have a reflexive disdain for anything connected to genre fiction, as you may well may,” this issue “is going to represent, at least initially, something of an unwelcome aberration in the history of an otherwise honorable literary journal.” But he hopes they’ll discover something new. USA Today

Authors collected in the volume include Neil Gaiman, from whose website I learned about it. Good news for fans of Coraline— he divulges that his story, ‘ “October in the Chair”, … was a sort of a test run for some of the themes in The Graveyard Book, the next childrens’ novel.’

There’s more about New Wave Fabulists on the Conjunctions website, including some of the Gahan Wilson artwork.