“U.S. pilots patrolling the skies over Iraq are taking a new approach to defending themselves against Iraqi gunners by striking at the command and communications links in Iraq’s air defense system rather than its guns and radar, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday.

The switch, which Rumsfeld said he ordered more than a month ago, is designed to do more long-lasting damage to Iraq’s ability to shoot down the American and British pilots whose fighter jets have been patrolling “no-fly” zones over northern and southern Iraq for 11 years.” Washington Post

Russia demands to see US proof over Saddam Hussein

:

“Russia says it won’t support military action against Iraq unless the US shows enough evidence that Saddam Hussein is a threat.” Ananova

Bush plans first strike against any foreign foe

: ‘U.S. President George W. Bush unrolled a sweeping blueprint for global supremacy yesterday, vowing to wage military, economic and ideological battles around the world to destroy terrorist threats and promote U.S. values.

In a report to Congress, Mr. Bush said the United States is prepared to launch pre-emptive military strikes against security threats even when they are not imminent, and will not shrink from “compelling” others to fall in line.’ Globe and Mail

Bruce Ackerman, professor of law and political science at Yale: ‘As Congress confronts the prospect of war, it should consider some constitutional fundamentals. The Bush administration would have us believe that international law contains only ambiguous or advisory requirements. In fact, the United Nations Charter was ratified as a treaty by the Senate after World War II, and the Constitution explicitly makes all treaties “the supreme law of the land.”

The president has no power to pick and choose among the laws that bind him — unless Congress tells him otherwise. This is what makes the precise terms of any Congressional authorization for war against Iraq so important. According to judicial precedents, treaties like the United Nations Charter can be trumped only by subsequent legislation. The Charter would lose its status as governing domestic law if Congress explicitly authorizes the president to make war in violation of its terms.’ NY Times op-ed

“Physicists working in Europe announced yesterday that they had passed through nature’s looking glass and had created atoms made of antimatter, or antiatoms, opening up the possibility of experiments in a realm once reserved for science fiction writers. Such experiments, theorists say, could test some of the basic tenets of modern physics and light the way to a deeper understanding of nature.” NY Times

Paul Krugman: “This is the way the recovery ends — not with a bang but with a whimper. O.K., I could be wrong. Industrial production is falling and layoffs are rising. But it’s still not a sure thing that the months ahead will be bad enough for the business-cycle referees to declare a renewed recession. And on the other hand, the administration seems determined to have a bang sometime before Nov. 5.But right now it looks as if the economy is stalling, and also as if the people in charge have no idea what to do. In short, it’s feeling a lot like the early 1990’s.” NY Times op-ed

But who’s noticing? G.O.P. Gains From War Talk but Does Not Talk About It: “Republican Party officials say the prospect of weeks of Congressional debate on Iraq is letting them block Democrats from using domestic concerns as campaign issues.” NY Times

“A French parachutist’s attempt at a record jump from a balloon 25 miles above the Canadian Prairies will likely have to wait until spring, organizers say….If eventually successful with his stunt, the 58-year-old former French army parachutist, will set three records — for the highest jump, the fastest and the longest freefall — as well as an unofficial record for the highest balloon ascent.” Yahoo! News

TV show set to select a presidential candidate:

“…Applications will be accepted from naturalized U.S. citizens who will be 35 years old by January 20, 2005. The candidates must produce a petition signed by 50 supporters.

A panel of experts will choose 100 semifinalists, two from each state, who will be introduced to viewers in the series’ first episode.

Episodes will be broadcast live from locations like Mount Rushmore, Gettysburg and the Statue of Liberty, where the candidates will compete with such things as debates and stump speeches. Viewers will gradually eliminate candidates…

The series will begin in early 2004 and culminate around July 4 with a live show at The Mall in Washington, D.C., where viewers will choose their favorite candidate for president.

FX has no idea whether the winner will then actually run for president.” CNN

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder apologized to President Bush yesterday for the offense caused by a report that his justice minister had compared Bush’s methods to Hitler’s.

The election-eve report in a regional daily angered a US administration already upset about the center-left chancellor’s voluble, and highly popular, opposition to a possible US-led war on Iraq.

Justice Minister Herta Daeubler-

Gmelin tried to calm the trans-Atlantic dispute yesterday by denying the report, but reporters pressed her for more than an hour on what appeared to be not only a breach of a German political taboo, but an affront to Germany’s ally. Boston Globe

Letter to the editors: Detaining dangerous people with mental disorders: “A few wisely chosen words in Strasbourg almost a quarter of a century ago have saved British psychiatry from the most serious threat in living memory.” British Medical Journal

‘Washed-up Hollywood stars battle the antichrist, and his smooth-talking liberal minions, in the wacky parallel universe of “end-times” Christian movies.’ Salon

The Best and Most Popular Meta Search Engines: “Meta search engines look pretty much the same up front, but their approach to presenting results varies widely. Here’s a list of Search Engine Watch‘s pick of the best and most popular metas for searching the web.”

Kate Taylor: Why Does Bush Go “Nucular”? Slate

Brain site responsible for “out-of-body experiences” identified:

Swiss scientists think they have pinpointed the area of the brain where so-called “out-of-body experiences” are triggered.

When Dr. Olaf Blanke, from Geneva University Hospital, and colleagues used electrodes to stimulate the brain of a female epilepsy patient during treatment, the woman reported that she felt as though she had left her body and was floating above it.

Dr. Blanke’s group produced the phenomenon by stimulating an area in the right cortex of the angular gyrus. The findings are published in the September 19th issue of Nature.

These findings suggest that “this experience is related to a specific part of the brain,” Dr. Blanke told Reuters. “It seems to be that this area is important for brain processes that could be related to out-of-body experience.”

Scientists believe that about 10% of people brought back from the brink of death experience something similar, but it has been difficult to prove it actually occurs. The phenomenon has also been reported by some migraine, epilepsy and stroke patients. Reuters Health

Weblogger extraordinaire Mark Woods is putting wood s lot on hiatus as he is going computerless. He does not say for exactly how long, but indicates that it will be long enough to hurt. I know I will dearly miss my daily fix and hope Mark will hurry back to the cybersphere, even if he does not decide to add the apostrophe to ‘wood s lot’ for whose absence I have chided him (“like an itch I can’t scratch”), as he suggests he might. It has always been beyond me where he manages to find the riches to which he consistently links. Many webloggers are prolific, but those of us who may sometimes be accused of offending with volume largely use convenient, routine sources — e.g. a few, or a few dozen, tried and true media sites. Mark surfs the deep web instead. I sometimes wish he would put abit more of himself into his posts; I’d like to know better this man whose web presence enlivens and stimulates so much. But what he thinks is clearly between the lines of what he posts. The silver lining, Mark, is that you’ll probably gain back as available time the — oh, what? — forty-five minutes or so daily that you have been devoting to compiling wood s lot. Here’s hoping your mercurial spirit will find other satisfying, productive outlets while you’re computerless…

Muffy E. A. Siegel, Dept of English, Temple University: Like:

the Discourse Particle and Semantics

Using data from interviews with high school students, I first adduce evidence that lends support to Schourup’s (1985) claim that the United States English adolescent hedge like is a discourse particle signalling a possible slight mismatch between words and meaning. Such a particle would generally be included in a grammar in a post-compositional pragmatic component, but, surprisingly, like also affects basic semantic attributes. These include both truth-conditions and the weak/strong distinction-though only in existential there and sluicing sentences. I argue that the differential behaviour of like in various constructions selecting weak NP’s stems from the restricted free variable it introduces, a variable which only there and sluicing require. This variable is available for binding, quantifier interpretation and other syntactic-semantic processes, yet is pragmatically conditioned. Indeed, I show that, due to its formal properties, like can be interpreted only during the assignment of model-theoretic denotations to expressions, along the lines of Lasersohn’s (1999) pragmatic haloes. These results support the idea that weak/strong is not a unitary distinction and suggest that the various components of grammars must be organized to allow information from pragmatic/discourse elements to affect basic compositional semantics. Journal of Semantics [via NPR’s Morning Edition]. [Isn’t it, like, appropriate that a study of the use of like is written by a Muffy?]

The Economic Costs of an Unjust War

Miriam Pemberton, Foreign Policy in Focus:

“From massive budget deficits to skyrocketing oil prices, the proposed attack on Iraq will have a devastating effect on the lagging U.S. economy.”

Costs of Imperial Adventurism

Geov Parrish, WorkingForChange.com:

‘The Iraqis may have agreed to weapon inspections, but the campaign for “regime change” in Baghdad continues. And most other nations will go along — for a price.’ AlterNet

Katha Pollitt, author of Reasonable

Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism: Join the EC E-mail Campaign: “America’s rate of unwanted pregnancy is a huge public health scandal, but five years after being approved by the FDA, emergency contraception–the use of normal birth control pills to block pregnancy within seventy-two hours of unprotected sex–has yet to fulfill its potential. Part of the problem has to do with the difficulty of getting EC in time; many doctors don’t want the hassle of dealing with walk-in patients, many clinics are closed on weekends and holidays (times of peak demand) and some pharmacies, like Wal-Mart’s, refuse to stock it. That anti-choicers falsely liken EC to abortion and tar it as a dangerous drug doesn’t help.

The main barrier to EC use, though, is that most women don’t know what it is. To spread the word, Jennifer Baumgardner and I have written an open letter explaining how EC works, how to get it and why women should even consider acquiring it in advance. If every Nation reader with access to the Internet forwards it to ten people and one list…” The Nation

Black-Jew Rift Widens After Southern Primaries:

“Participants in this month’s Congressional Black Caucus conference say the defeat of two black House members in bitter primaries not only suggests a widening rift with Jewish Democrats, but trouble within the Democratic Party itself…

The anger is emanating from reports that several outside Jewish special interest groups took a particular interest in defeating Reps. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., and Earl Hilliard, D-Ala., by fueling the campaigns of their respective Democratic primary opponents with thousands of dollars and an interest in seeing the incumbents defeated for their long-standing support of Palestinians.” Fox

Arianna Huffington: The latest Bush hypocrisy: “Gov. Jeb Bush calls for jail time for nonviolent drug offenders as his daughter gets sent to rehab.” Salon

From John Robb’s Radio Weblog: “As I mentioned I would do earlier today: I deleted this story before it got into Google’s cache.

The reason I posted it was that I thought it was really is amazing how quickly people can amplify someone’s stupid mistake via e-mail. This is the dark side of the Internet: mob consciousness facilitated by e-mail.

BTW: I am also deleting the e-mail message from my hard drive. Don’t ask for forwards or reprints. Regardless, given the wide distribution on this e-mail, you will probably see it in your inbox soon: it is going global.” [via blogdex]

Sounds interesting; does anyone have a copy saved that you wouldn’t mind forwarding to me? Thanks in advance…

Nicholas Kristof: “We have a window now, while terrorists still have difficulty obtaining reliable recipes for bio- and chemical weapons. If we continue to allow these cookbooks to improve, buttressed by helpful articles in professional journals, then over the next 10 years we may empower terrorists to kill us on an unimaginable scale.” NY Times op-ed

‘Iraq unconditionally accepted the return of U.N. weapons inspectors late Monday, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said.

“I can confirm to you that I have received a letter from the Iraqi authorities conveying its decision to allow the return of inspectors without conditions to continue their work.” ‘ NY Times The Bush administration rejected Iraq’s move as a “tactic”. but then, as they have already determined to attack Iraq regardless of justification or the world’s opinion, they would dismiss any Iraqi move, would they not?

[thanks, Simon]

New Jersey become the first state to officially limit allowable G-forces on roller coasters.

“The blueprint, uncovered by the Sunday Herald, for the creation of a ‘global Pax Americana’ was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice- president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld’s deputy), George W Bush’s younger brother Jeb and Lewis Libby (Cheney’s chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America’s Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, was written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC).” via disinfo The report is available here as a PDF document, or converted to HTML by Google here.

Badass and ass-backwards find place in the OED: also phat and bogart.

Up next: advertising on your pizza crusts. NCBuy [via Fark]

SLIders and The Streetlight Phenomenon: “Do streetlights suddenly go out when you pass beneath them? Do watches or credit cards stop working in your possession? Perhaps you are a SLIder.” About Network

“Mozilla 1.0 – 1.1 browsers and others based on Mozilla’s technology, such as Netscape 7 and Galeon can be affected by the bug which will report the URL of a site the user is visiting to the last server visited. In order to work around the problem, until a fix is created, everyone is encouraged to turn off Java. Has anyone turned it back on?” Lockergnome

“An enigmatic object spotted in the night sky last week by an amateur astronomer has set experts wondering whether the Earth may have gained a new moon.

Others say the answer could be quite different, but almost as exciting. They believe it to be a piece of space history left over by the Apollo lunar pioneers, and that the Earth has now reclaimed it, saving it from the fiery embrace of the Sun.”

“

Near-Earth objects (NEOs) pose a threat to our global security, and not just from a catastrophic impact. A large meteorite exploding in Earth’s atmosphere could trigger a nuclear war… An NEO warning system could prevent high-strung countries from being jolted into a nuclear conflagration.” astronomy.com

A pediatrician at Brenner Children’s Hospital has developed an efficient way to help educate health care professionals on herbal and dietary supplements via the Internet, according to a study published in the September issue of Academic Medicine.

Kathi Kemper, M.D., a pediatrician at Brenner Children’s Hospital, worked with physicians from the Longwood Herbal Task Force to develop a series of e-mails containing information and questions about various herbal and dietary supplements.

Over 537 healthcare professionals participated in the e-mail series, which took place over 10 weeks. Participants were asked questions twice a week about herbal supplements and were given a link to an Internet site for more information about each topic. The questions focused on the more popular herbal remedies like Saw Palmetto and Gingko Biloba, found in most area supermarkets and drugstores.

Participants were also given a pre and post-test to see if they increased their knowledge base and if they were more confident in their ability to answer their patients’ questions and find the resources they needed. Scores on the post-test showed an improvement in the knowledge scores from 67 percent at baseline to 80 percent following the curriculum. EurekAlert!

“Think you could spot a mobile phone mast near your home or office? Think again.” BBC dot.life

“The cypherpunks are throwing a PGP (pretty good party) this weekend.

The venerable online community is celebrating its 10th anniversary which, in the ephemeral world of the Internet, is remarkable.” Wired

Cronkite Regrets Giving Up Career: More than 20 years after signing off, the 85-year-old Cronkite told a meeting of the American Association of Retired Persons he is still consumed by a longing to return to work, especially when a big story is breaking. AP [What about that famous homily that ‘no one on their deathbed regrets not spending more time at the office’? — FmH]

“Virgin Atlantic Airways is to replace tables in its newest planes because passengers have broken them during illicit trysts, according to the Sun.” Yahoo! News

It is Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, the culmination of the High Holidays. Given Yom Kippur’s emphasis on atonement, the confessional prayers (“Viduy”) appear numerous times in the liturgy. ‘Liberation theology’ rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun magazine offers this supplementary liturgy to help atone for some modern-day sins not mentioned in the traditional confessional. Beliefnet Considering alternate sins, today is aptly the twentieth anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacre

in Lebanon.

Religious and Public Stations Battle for Share of Radio Dial:

‘The Rev. Don Wildmon, founding chairman of a mushrooming network of Christian radio stations, does not like National Public Radio.

“He detests the news that the public gets through NPR and believes it is slanted from a distinctly liberal and secular perspective,” said Patrick Vaughn, general counsel for Mr. Wildmon’s American Family Radio.

Here in Lake Charles, American Family Radio has silenced what its boss detests.

It knocked two NPR affiliate stations off the local airwaves last year, transforming this southwest Louisiana community of 95,000 people into the most populous place in the country where “All Things Considered” cannot be heard…

This is happening all over the country. The losers are so-called translator stations, low-budget operations that retransmit the signals of bigger, distant stations. The Federal Communications Commission considers them squatters on the far left side of the FM dial, and anyone who is granted a full-power license can legally run them out of town. ‘ NY Times

“Government agents have recently uncovered numerous calls from hard-to-track prepaid cell phones, Internet-based phone service, prepaid phone cards and public pay phones in the United States to known al-Qaida locations overseas, federal officials said. The calls are one piece of a growing body of evidence pointing to the presence of suspected members of terrorist sleeper cells operating on U.S. soil, and a growing sophistication on their part to keep their communications secret, the officials said.” MSNBC

…if U.N. Backs War NY Times

Ruling Roils Death Penalty Cases: “…(T)rying to untangle the consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision in Ring v. Arizona, which said juries rather than judges must make the crucial factual determinations that support the death penalty, (has made for a busy summer for) courts and legislatures in the nine states where juries do not make such findings, or render only advisory verdicts…” NY Times

How Saddam Happened: “America helped make a monster. What to do with him—and what happens after he’s gone—has haunted us for a quarter century.” MSNBC

City Lights, 1955. Lawrence Ferlinghetti (on the right, with, from left, Bob Donlin, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert LaVigne) recalls, ” When the picture was taken, I was thinking, ‘Are these the best minds of our generation?’ Howl starts with that phrase. I’d say it was a bit of a satirical question. I am the only one in the picture still alive, because I work out all the time. They didn’t work out except raising the elbow or rolling joints. I wasn’t part of the Beat Generation at all. I was really the last bohemian…” NY Times Magazine [Doesn’t it look as if the sign saying “Books” is a thought balloon emanating from LaVigne’s head, by the way? — FmH]

FDA Issues Approvable Letter For Abilify. Another new ‘atypical’ antipsychotic medication reaches the marketplace; ‘Abilify’ is its brand name, and aripiprazole its generic moniker. The new generation of ‘atypical’ antipsychotics represents a revolution in increased tolerability and efficacy as compared to the older, ‘typical’ or first-generation antipsychotics. For psychiatrists like myself who treat psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia, this is as exciting as the explosion in antidepressant development was a decade before. You don’t hear as much about this revolution because there is virtually no public constituency for schizophrenia. However, although you don’t think you have had much contact with the disease because those affected are largely socially shunned and segregated in a manner quite different from depressed patients (no TV ads for antipsychotics forthcoming!), you probably have had at least some indirect contact with its consequences given that it affects 1-3% of the population overall. So I think it’s worth my while wriitng about this development for a general audience of interested souls.

First, there’s its brand name. ‘Abilify’, although mercifully bucking the recent trend for new psychiatric medications to have a ‘z’, a ‘q’ or an ‘x’ in their name, is an extremely silly name, IMHO, and some Bristol-Myers Squibb representatives gearing up to market it to whom I recently spoke agree. [I hope there are no consequences for their disloyalty if any of their corporate superiors read this. — FmH]  We joked about the estimated $1 million fee some agency got to develop a name for this product. I offered the company that, from my vantage point in the psychiatric marketplace [yes, as FmH readers know, you should make no mistake about the fact that it is a marketplace!], I would create advantageous product names for half what they would pay anyone else, but for some reason they haven’t taken me up on my offer.

In any case, from my reading so far, aripiprazole (I try not to use brand names, as a matter of fact) does not seem a massive therapeutic advance over the other ‘atypical’ or ‘second-generation antipsychotics we have available already — clozapine (Clozaril), risperidone (Risperdal), olanzapine (Zyprexa &mdash ahhh, there’s that ‘x’ and that ‘z’!), quetiapine (Seroquel) and ziprasidone (Geodon). Predictably, sales efforts will soon begin to jockey for a share of the antipsychotic ‘market’ by spinning the clinical studies (often funded by Bristol-Myers Squibb money) to claim more rapid onset, better response, or improved tolerability. Even the explanations of mechanisms of action for these new molecules are ‘spins’, since the CNS is largely a black box and the molecular actions of these medications are opaque to us. (For those of you who are curious, what I’ve read so far indicates that while, like other atypical antipsychotics, aripiprazole has combined postsynaptic dopamine and serotonin activity, it is also supposed to be a presynaptic dopamine autoreceptor agonist. It remains to see if it is; if that is as distinct from the other atypicals as it is made out to be; and, if it is, how much of a contributor to its effectiveness that might be…)

How useful it is to me and other psychiatrists treating psychotic illnesses, other than those who accept funding from Bristol-Myers Squibb and have already reached their conclusions [grin], will only be clear over time. I may not begin to prescribe it until its track record is better-defined. As a hospital-based psychiatrist who sees patients who have ‘fallen apart’ in the community, I have the following unique opportunity to gauge its efficacy and tolerability quite rapidly, as a matter of fact. Every time a new antipsychotic medication emerges, there is a rush of psychiatrists who adopt it immediately and even take previously stable patients off their existing stabilizing medications in the interest of using the newest and greatest thing. (Being cynical, I assume these are the practitioners who get most of their current ‘continuing medical education’ from manufacturers’ representatives or drug-company-funded symposia, rather than reading independent refereed medical journals and being able to read betwen the lines…) This phenomenon often prompts an epidemic of fresh relapses among patients with major mental illnesses, and the extent to which I start to see admissions of patients who fell apart after being switched to aripiprazole will be one of my indicators of whether it seems to be a worthwhile medication.

The magnitude of that phenomenon when the previous-but-one new antipsychotic, quetiapine (Seroquel), was introduced several years ago has made me avoid that drug in most instances, much to the chagrin of the hardworking manufacturers’ representatives trying to persuade me to use more of it. (The drug companies these days have detailed databases of exactly how many prescriptions of their products, and their competitors’, I prescribe every month. I’d love to find a way to fight a battle about this fact on the privacy front — mine or my patients’…). Quetiapine was a particularly egregious case in point, because it was marketed largely around how superior it is in reducing side effects. True, true; it is much more tolerable, but it is probably in that class of ‘white elephant’ drugs which don’t produce side effects because… well, because they largely don’t produce any effects at all, including therapeutic ones! Actually, quetiapine is a pretty good sedative, but that’s different from having antipsychotic activity. I’m noticing a small number of psychiatrists are starting to notice that ‘the emperor has no clothes’ and question the consensus by writing about its lack of efficacy in major psychotic conditions. The company’s response is to say that they just haven’t been using high enough doses.

What we really need by way of the next advance in antipsychotic psychopharmacology is a long-acting injectible atypical antipsychotic. Many patients who are too disorganized to take daily medication, or who are so dangerous when they are off medication that they are under court compulsion to take it (unwillingly), benefit from receiving their antipsychotic treatment in the form of a deep intramuscular injection of a “depot” preparation of a medication whose effect last between ten and thirty days before another injection is necessary. So far, however, the only medications available in such depot preparations in North America are haloperidol (Haldol) and fluphenazine (Prolixin), both of which are first-generation antipsychotics with the full gamut of undesireable side effects which one would like to spare one’s patients, particularly the uncomprehending ones who have not consented willingly to such a price for their stability. Several European countries have a depot version of risperidone, but it is probably several years off in the US, and olanzapine or ziprasidone would be more preferable still.

Hoping these dispatches from the war zone are of interest; I certainly enjoy venting my spleen about my own profession! So, if anyone is interested, I’ll keep you posted on aripiprazole.

Year of Struggle and Change:

When the World Trade Center towers fell, they took more with them than human lives. A huge segment of the downtown economy collapsed with the falling steel and concrete, and the disaster encompassed far more than the large financial firms that are most often identified with the Sept. 11 attacks.

The trade center was home to hundreds of diverse companies, a polyglot village spanning everything from Asian food importers to graphic designers to dentists. Many had inhabited the towers for decades.

Those companies, more than half of which had fewer than 20 employees, became refugees on Sept. 11. Some have folded, overwhelmed by the deaths of owners or employees or undone by a lack of cash. Others have eked out a living in kitchens and basements. Some have relocated to Florida or Texas, while others have insisted on staying within a few blocks of ground zero. Some, miraculously, have flourished, growing even as the local economy foundered.

The New York Times set out to chronicle the fate of the complex’s tenants as they struggled to re-establish themselves over the past year. After compiling lists of tenants from several sources, The Times estimates that about 700 companies and organizations occupied the trade center buildings. Defining a more precise number, however, is difficult because so many of the companies were subtenants whose occupancy did not appear on official lists.

A review of Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence by Gerard Jones: ‘In fact, everything in Killing Monsters works, placing it in sharp contrast to the endless sky-is-falling rhetoric of the last few decades, which seems designed for no other purpose than make us fear both the media and our own children. When Bob Dole is on the election stump railing about Quentin Tarentino movies he’s never seen, when school officials are tossing kids for simply expressing themselves, when Steven Spielberg is pixel-editing guns out of the hands of the FBI in his re-release of E.T. so that perhaps children will be unaware that law-enforcement officers use guns, and when lawsuits which contend that students will be turned into slavering terrorists if they even look at the Qu’ran are being taken seriously, it’s high time we stop listening to the “experts” and start paying closer attention to our kids. They seem to be the only ones with a clue.’ PopMatters

New Nessie pictures spark debate: “Instead of the usual fleeting glimpse afforded her followers, Nessie stayed above the surface long enough for retired printer Roy Johnston to take at least four photographs showing the suspiciously snake-like Nessie arching out of the water and returning to it with a splash. The new photographs, printed in yesterday’s Daily Mail, prompted an immediate debate as to whether they are genuine. ” The Scotsman

“Viagra, the popular drug that helps give men erections, could save plants from even more serious cases of droop.

An Israeli scientist, Ya’acov Leshem, of Bar-Ilan University, was looking at how flowers wither and, acting on impulse, put some Viagra into a vase of cut flowers and found they stayed fresh for up to a week longer than usual.” The Age [via new world disorder]

Pagan conference center in rural Ireland: as close as you can get to Hogwarts in the real world? Yahoo!

A personal declaration of deep neutrality by R. U. Sirius. disinfo

“Get your own Chinese name based on your English name… Chinese uses characters rather than an alphabet, so names cannot be directly translated from English to Chinese. However, Chinese characters can be chosen which approximate the English pronounciation, which is what this program does.”

Top 10 Signs Your Neighbor is Brainwashed:

For example —

3) “We have to defend ourselves, and the war on terrorism is the only way to do that.”

Anyone who believes this war is simply a drive to eradicate terrorism must be brainwashed. The U.S. has been building military bases along proposed oil pipeline routes, and has its eye on the oil and gas reserves in the Caspian Sea region. All anyone need do is read Zbigniew Brzezinski’s “The Grand Chessboard” or brush up on the Wolfowitz Doctrine to understand the not-so-hidden agenda behind U.S foreign policy. In a recent appearance on Crossfire, Insight Magazine’s Jamie Dettmer deftly addressed America’s aim to control the oil fields in Iraq. “Nobody has suggested the United States is going into Iraq to control the oil,” Tucker Carlson asserted, leaving some to wonder if Tucker’s bow tie isn’t too tight. “Let’s not be unsophisticated about this,” Dettmer replied, warning that, “in the end, if America doesn’t restrain itself, [it’s] going to provoke groupings of countries which will restrain America instead.” Buzzflash

Warren Ellis writes in DiePunyHumans that Turkish chlamydia sufferers rape dogs, believing it cures their disease. [Ahh, the endless varieties of human ignorance and depravity! — FmH]  However, the report suffers a credibility gap, being from a Kurdish media source. [I’m not casting aspersions on Kurdish journalism, mind you — I don’t know enough about it to do so — but rather suggesting that they have more than enough reason to portray Turks in a depraved light…]

Can’t We Get Along?

“Sometimes it’s hard not to think machines are out to get us. An unusual art installation in Dublin examines people’s relationship with electronic devices.”

Wired News – Culture

Where is the damned beef ? NY Times and Washington Post

U.S. Ready to Go It Alone on Iraq: “President Bush made clear on Saturday he would act against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein with or without world support, and was said to be ready to strike within four or five months.” Yahoo! News – Most-emailed Content

Saddam Hussein Trained Al Qaeda Fighters – Report: “British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s promised dossier on Iraq is to reveal that Saddam Hussein trained some of Osama bin Laden’s key lieutenants, The Sunday Telegraph reported.” Yahoo! News – Most-emailed Content

Arab leaders appeal to Iraq: Let inspectors in: “Arab League nations are appealing to Iraq to allow UN weapons inspectors in, to avert a confrontation that could inflame the Middle East.” Ananova: News

Straw: UN backs Bush on Iraq : “Mr Straw says there is overwhelming support in the UN for President Bush’s stance on Iraq.” Ananova: News

UN fears Iraq anarchy. World Press Review: Breaking News

Arab League Urges Iraqi Inspections: “Under pressure from Arab nations to allow U.N. weapons inspectors back, Iraq’s foreign minister said late Saturday he hoped the crisis could be resolved without a new U.N. resolution that could threaten serious consequences.” AP World News

War Could Unshackle Oil in Iraq: “A U.S.-led ouster of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein could open a bonanza for American oil companies long banished from Iraq, scuttling oil deals between Baghdad and Russia, France and other countries, and reshuffling world petroleum markets, according to industry officials and leaders of the Iraqi opposition.” Washington Post: Front Page

UN Wants Arms Inspectors in Iraq in Weeks – Downer. Reuters World News

War Talk Hits Its First Target: The Pivotal Ally: “After years of antagonizing, criticizing and disdaining the U.S., there are strong signs that France is groping for a more openly cooperative relationship.” New York Times: International News

White House dismisses Iraqi offer. CNN – World

Action Against Iraq Possible in January – Italy. Reuters World News

“It is very irresponsible to think this method could be used for the reproductive cloning of humans.” U.S. Study Says All Clones Genetically Abnormal. The process leads to inevitable genetic flaws, say MIT researchers, with no immediately obvious ways around them. Yahoo! News

IM giants told to work it out. A consortium of financial services giants, which are getting into instant messaging, wants to force interoperability among ICQ, AIM, Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger. “The call for interoperability comes as corporations are beginning to look more seriously at IM as a communications tool within the office–a trend that has IM providers salivating at the thought of turning what has been mostly a free service into a paid product.” CNET

“How Would The Bush Administration’s Claims Of Self-defense, Used As Justifications For War Against Iraq, Fare Under Domestic Rules Of Self-defense?” Joseph Fletcher, professor of jrusiprudence at Columbia, argues that the administration’s claim of “self-defense” in justifying its coming war against Iraq is “banal”. Most aggressors lay claim to self-defense and broaden the claim to include preemptive actions that do not pass muster with legal standards that require an “imminent unlawful attack”. International law, in fact, is even more extreme; the UN Charter, e.g., requires not just an imminent but an actual attack to invoke the right of self-defense. The US’s threat to Iraq meets neither standard but may be justifiable under other alternative, lesser, legal arguments, e.g. that a danger so great exists that ‘an attack is “immediately necessary” on this “present occasion” ‘. However, the US fails to make international law arguments even when some may be applicable. FindLaw

Iraq war hawks have plans to reshape entire Middle East: “As the Bush administration debates going to war against Iraq, its most hawkish members are pushing a sweeping vision for the Middle East that sees the overthrow of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq as merely a first step in the region’s transformation.

The argument for reshaping the political landscape in the Mideast has been pushed for years by some Washington think tanks and in hawkish circles. It is now being considered as a possible US policy with the ascent of key hard-liners in the administration…” Boston Globe

Year of Struggle and Change:

When the World Trade Center towers fell, they took more with them than human lives. A huge segment of the downtown economy collapsed with the falling steel and concrete, and the disaster encompassed far more than the large financial firms that are most often identified with the Sept. 11 attacks.

The trade center was home to hundreds of diverse companies, a polyglot village spanning everything from Asian food importers to graphic designers to dentists. Many had inhabited the towers for decades.

Those companies, more than half of which had fewer than 20 employees, became refugees on Sept. 11. Some have folded, overwhelmed by the deaths of owners or employees or undone by a lack of cash. Others have eked out a living in kitchens and basements. Some have relocated to Florida or Texas, while others have insisted on staying within a few blocks of ground zero. Some, miraculously, have flourished, growing even as the local economy foundered.

The New York Times set out to chronicle the fate of the complex’s tenants as they struggled to re-establish themselves over the past year. After compiling lists of tenants from several sources, The Times estimates that about 700 companies and organizations occupied the trade center buildings. Defining a more precise number, however, is difficult because so many of the companies were subtenants whose occupancy did not appear on official lists.

‘This week we are finally getting to the core excuse from the Bush administration for attacking Iraq right now. Vice President Dick Cheney, in an interview with CNN’s John King on Sunday, laid it out nice and simple, the way they like it back in Wyoming: “We have to worry about the possible marriage, if you will, of a rogue state like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq with a terrorist organization like Al Qaeda.”

This notion that the Iraqi leader is in cahoots with Osama will be easy to feed the American people. To the American people, one bad Arab is the same as the next, and Osama equals Saddam. People who wonder about the Bush war-urgency only need to think about this: There’s a blind spot that needs to be exploited now, before too many journalists get the idea to go inside Iraq and find out what’s really happening.’ TomPaine.com [via Walker]

…by Nina Burleigh, who has written for The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and New York magazine. As a reporter for TIME, she was among the first American journalists to enter Iraq after the Gulf War.

Fossil find reveals world’s oldest penises: “A perfectly preserved shellfish fossil over 100 million years old has revealed a surprising feature – the oldest penis in the world. The fossil, a one millimetre-wide crustacean called an ostracod, was found in Brazil and examined by David Siveter at the University of Leicester. It was preserved with its shell open displayed another surprise – not one but two penises…” New Scientist

It Turns Out It is a Possible ‘Hoax’:

‘Three men reportedly overheard talking about a terrorist plot were pulled over and detained for 17 hours Friday before authorities said the men were apparently kidding around and released them.

“If this was a hoax, they will be charged,” Collier County Sheriff Don Hunter said angrily after an all-day search of the men’s two cars turned up no sign of explosives.’Yahoo!

So the ‘terrorists’ are damned if they are and damned if they aren’t ; this seems to indicate that the intention to ‘hoax’ comes from them. However, Plastic‘s take on the issue

, unfortunately without much attribution, is that the dissembling comes from the supposed informant:

‘…Several people who went to High School with Eunice Stone, the woman who reported the trio to the FBI, were quoted as saying ‘Oh yeah, Eunice always was a gossipy bitch, trying to start trouble and get attention with her lies.’ Neighbors also reported that Mrs Stone was ‘Overly intrusive into other people’s lives…with a tendency to excite the situation at someone else’s expense.”

“CNN, Fox News, and Yahoo somehow all managed to quote the same person, but not quite with the same quote. After reading several ‘quotes’ carefully I can say with some conviction that there is enough variation in what she ‘heard’ that I would feel safe in saying she didn’t hear it at all. Perhaps even more vindictively filling in information that she thought she heard, and then passing that along without mentioning that maybe she didn’t hear it so well, and maybe didn’t hear it at all but just made it all up in her head.’

I have wondered for a year why we haven’t heard more irresponsible hoaxing and tattletale tales. The boy-who-cries-wolf hysteria of the current administration’s repeated terror alerts certainly guarantees such attention-getting maneuvers will get what their perpetrators’ hearts desire…

Important Note:: “We recently uncovered these classic “Get Your War On” cartoons in the attic. They were made in the 1980s, when we were young and naive. The drawings, grammar, and typography of these early strips are a little crude, but they offer valuable context for recent exciting news developments!”

Sen. Charles Schumer (D.-NY): “Installing devices that could detect nuclear weapons as terrorists attempt to smuggle them into the country would cost far less than an invasion of Iraq.” NY Times op-ed

How we figured out why people walk up staircases but not up escalators. By economist Steven E. Landsburg in Slate

‘Shape Up and Dress Right’:

For several months, the Special Operations Forces soldiers whom the United States sent to Afghanistan have been growing beards and donning local garb in an effort to blend in with the local people and their surroundings.

But last weekend, the story goes here, Pentagon brass were shocked by news photos of scruffy looking Special Operations Forces swinging into action to help abort the assassination attempt here against President Hamid Karzai in which his companion, Gul Agha Shirzai, governor of Kandahar Province, was wounded.

“On Monday,” said a Special Operations Forces officer, leaning against the mud wall of a local bazaar, “we got the word: some general in Washington ordered no more beards.” NY Times [thanks, Abby]

Imagine my delight to find the UK’s Sp!ked covering my hometown’s ‘Big Dig’, the largest public works project in history.

“The construction of tunnels under the old highway, while the traffic flows unimpeded, has required some innovative technology. Sub-zero temperature brine is pumped through pipes to freeze the ground solid. Tunnelling can then take place without disturbing roads, trains, or building foundations, and when this is complete the ground thaws out.”

And here’s The Big Dig’s website.

William F. Buckley, Jr. reviews Joseph Epstein’s Snobbery:

Joseph Epstein’s new book about snobbery ends up being a book about Joseph Ep- stein, which is perfectly okay—provided one is Joseph Epstein. Another’s book about snobbery, displaying the author’s biography, his likes and dislikes, suspicions, affections, affectations, crotchets, would not guarantee against a reader’s strayed attention. There isn’t the slightest risk of this happening upon reading Epstein’s book, because he is perhaps the wittiest writer (working in his genre) alive, the funniest since Randall Jarrell. The New Criterion [via Walker]

Forbidden thoughts about 9/11: The readers respond. Six pages that read like this:

In the days and weeks that followed the attacks I found myself worrying about the rescue dogs that were working the site. There were reports in the media almost daily about injuries to the dogs (and in some cases deaths) and I found myself wondering if it was really that important to recover things like concrete splashed with the victim’s DNA. Salon [via Spike]

Mark Crispin Miller, author of The Bush Dyslexicon, opines that, In the Wake of 9-11, the American Press Has Embraced a ‘Demented Caesarism’:

Just after 9/11, I was one of those who thought, and said out loud, that the catastrophe might knock some sense into the gibbering “culture” of the US media. Now there would be no more prime-time seminars about the likely cruising style of Gary Condit, no more shark watches, and quite a lot more coverage of, and talk about, the wider world. (The term “Afghanistan” had long been used inside the TV news biz as a handy term for all those faraway and over-complicated stories that the advertisers didn’t want to see.) And I believed that there would be a lot less dumbbell irony, a lot less potty comedy, and a lot less homicidal stand-up from the right. In short, I thought that Adam Sandler was all through, and that Ann Coulter would soon be forgotten, if not gone, and that the news would finally try to tell us some things that a free and democratic people needs to know.

Boy, was I wrong. Everywhere you look, Ann Coulter’s up there on her broomstick, cracking manic jokes about mass murder, and Adam Sandler’s said to be involved in seven movies soon to flood the multiplexes. Now I am old and wise enough to know that such bad acts are always with us, so I’m only disappointed – and, on cool reflection, not surprised – that there isn’t more stuff out there like “The Simpsons,” “The Sopranos,” “Lovely & Amazing,” Wilco. On the other hand, I find that I am absolutely flabbergasted at the many jumbo helpings of outright crapola that our “free press” has been laying out for us day after day since 9/11. While foreign journalists routinely tell their readers and/or viewers what’s going on – inside Afghanistan, Iraq, DC and all throughout this land of ours – our journalists don’t tell us anything. democrats.com [via Walker]

[Oh my God, another Wilco reference! (see “Shoddy Bookkeeping”

below) — FmH]

Rent a Rapist:

“Crimebusters in Japan’s major cities are currently being plagued by a new type of criminal… — the rachiya. Literally translated into English as kidnappers, the rachiya are believed to be male members of secret associations that engage in simulated rapes. But there’s nothing simulated about what they’re apparently prepared to do for a price, picking up women off the streets and violating them for a yen.” Mainichi Daily News

[via the null device; thanks, Walker]

Observation found on Seb’s Open Mind

The main professions that are represented in the weblogging community are:

• (open source) software developers
  
• journalists
  
• librarians
  
• educators
  
• lawyers
  
• web designers and information architects
  
• knowledge management types
  
• consultants
  
• researchers

Each item in the above list of professions links to a list of weblogs by members of that profession. He goes on:

Is there a pattern here?

Those are mainly kinds of people who:

• must interface to ordinary people.
  
• are pattern explainers.
  
• have little to hide and more to share.
  
• are not afraid of writing.

Hey, Seb, what about psychiatrists?? (Well, at least the part about interfacing to ordinary people and explaining patterns…) [via wood s lot]

A Salon interview with Dr. Charles Grob:

Last week, an essay in the Psychologist, a magazine published by the British Psychological Society, called into question the validity of recent research on the effects of Ecstasy. Its publication drew loud and immediate reaction from the British press, which printed stories under headlines like “Ecstasy Not Dangerous, Say Scientists.” The study’s authors demanded, and received, a retraction from at least one newspaper (the Guardian); but the question the researchers had hoped to raise — whether MDMA may have medical benefits — was lost in the din. And not for the first time, according to Dr. Charles Grob, a longtime researcher of MDMA and hallucinogenic drugs and one of the study’s three authors.

Grob, the head of adolescent and child psychiatry at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Southern California, is also the editor of a newly published collection of essays, Hallucinogens: A Reader

, which explores the social and psychological worth of such drugs. Speaking from his office, Grob spoke about the essay he coauthored, the current war on drugs, and the history of Ecstasy, which he believes has therapeutic benefit — not to mention potential as a facilitator of peace in the Middle East.

Anna, from annatopia

, wrote this piece

about Grob and MDMA and emailed me, pointing me to it and curious about my reactions. Among other things, she asked me if I had ever used it (in my work, she hastened to add). Here’s an (edited) version of my response:

— I haven’t gven MDMA in my work, but that’s mostly because I specialize in treating severely ill, nonfunctional, hospitalized, and often psychotic patients. I’ve known some of the researchers and clinicians who have used it clinically. I support entheogens/empathogens in general but think my patient population doesn’t have the ego strength, as the “walking wounded” do, to benefit from them. More than that, it takes a lot of thoughtful courage to buck the dominant cultural norms about illegal, hallucinogenic drugs being dangerous and degenerate. Although I ask that of myself, I wouldn’t ask that courage of my patients in their current suffering.

— I agree absolutely about distinguishing therapeutic and recreational use. Except for one thing; you have to tolerate the bad with the good. This is a longer-standing issue, as Grob’s reader about hallucinogens indicates. Leary and Alpert were Harvard psychologists; LSD was/is a valuable tool for psychic exploration too, as other hallucinogens, if taken with reverence and intellectual curiosity, but if you give people the freedom to do so you also give them the freedom to trivialize its use as a means of just “getting high”. (Funny, I never thought of what LSD gives you as a “high”!)

If one of the dangers of MDMA is how often the ravers take it, the thing about an exploratory/therapeutic approach is that it will result in limiting one’s exposure, as Anna and Dr Grob rightly point out, and taking it in the context of a psychotherapeutic relationship. You want to assimilate the information it gives you about yourself and the world, which takes time. You grow from it, which means there might be diminishing returns from dropping it over and over. And if you’re interested in taking an exploratory/therapeutic approach, you’re usually a person who is committed to taking good care of yourself, which means you’ll limit the adverse impact of frequent, repeated dosing. That’s one of the things that bothers me about the ravers’ use — that with no limits on the magnitude of their indulgence, they’re really really at risk of health complications and ‘suicide Tuesdays’. The self-destructive image of recreational use is deserved, but there isn’t going to be a substantial risk of cardiac or neurotoxic complications from judicious, intermittent, informed use.

However, when you’re talking about recreational Ecstasy users, one issue is that they are often taking a lot of different drugs — it’s kind of a poly-drug-use scene. They often take high dosages. They’re up all night, they’re sleep deprived, they’re nutritionally deprived, they’re basically taking the drug in the most adverse environment you could possibly imagine: Hot, stuffy, crowded clubs, not replacing fluids, exercising all night. That will accentuate the likelihood of an adverse response.

The only environment I can think of that’s worse would be taking it in a hot tub.

But make no mistake about it — and probably even moreso if you try to regulate it into a controlled drug available only under a health practitioner’s prescription — you’ll get the recreational use fist-in-glove with the serious, therapeutic/exploratory. However, I don’t *blame* the ravers for the war against MDMA. As much as those who wage war on recreational drugs point to specific adverse outcomes, sudden deaths, bad behavior, etc., of users, these are not the *causes* of their convictions; they are after-the-fact justifications. Deeper-seated cultural norms — uhhh, prejudices — determine that! IMHO, don’t vent your spleen against the ravers, they are not the ones who ruin it for you. They’re just caught in the crossfire.

In my work as a trainer and supervisor of psychiatric residents and other mental health trainees, I ask them to look at why clinicians, as a rule, dislike treating drug abusers. I think it has something to do with the fact that we are people whose personality structure involves an investment in deferring gratification for goals we find more valuable in the long term. As such, we are rubbed the wrong way most by the classes of patients who, for hedonistic or other reasons which seem diametrically opposed to our mindset (I don’t actually think most of the drug abusers we treat in the mental health field are motivated by uncomplicated pleasure-seeking, but that’s the first assumption about them), appear unwilling to defer indulging or gratifying themselves. (Of course, that’s not the whole story; we are also dissed by our well-intentioned efforts to help being rebuffed.) Mental health professionals are generally similarly distressed by happy manic patients. (Some manics can be irritable or dysphoric instead of euphoric, and we have considerably less difficulty with those.) There is a similar anti-hedonistic streak in the work- and productivity-ethic-driven culture at large, for similar reasons.

While the ravers don’t deserve our resentment,

I mean, if we follow to the letter this “Just Say No” mandate, and then if the kid isn’t wise enough to follow the “Just Say No” edict, are we saying he deserves whatever adverse effects he experiences?

they do probably deserve our empathy. It saddens me that so many people have no idea that their own minds can be an object of contemplation and study for themselves, like holding a jewel up to the light and marvelling at its scintillations. Instead they treat themselves as trivial playtoys. Their loss.

Oregon weblogger Don Wakefield writes that he’s loving the new Wilco recording Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Since he gets most of his music referrals from his websurfing, he’s curious who recommended it to him but, through his “shoddy bookkeeping” he is frustrated that he cannot recall. A source whose tastes are similar to his is slipping through his fingers! Finally (courtesy of Google??) he ascertains that it was my two recent references on FmH. Actually, I’ve mentioned Wilco three times around the current attention the band is getting — here

, here

, and here

. But Wakefield laments that, while I point to rave reviews, I do not make my own reactions known. Can he trust my taste?

The answer, Don, is yes and no. As it happens, I’m wild about YHF too, and it has had an honored place on my CD turntable in recent months (actually, right now it is in my car deck). I loved the Mermaid Avenue stuff as well, although that was at least at first because I’m a fierce Billy Bragg fan and reverent about Woody Guthrie. But I think Tweedy has reached a pinnacle with the new material.

I would, however, have probably blinked to the Wilco stuff even if I didn’t like the music so much. I tend to post what interests me — and what I think will interest or edify FmH’s readers [which may be tautologous, because you wouldn’t keep reading if it didn’t keep interesting you…] — and I was struck by Wilco’s giving the album to their fans for free download before its commercial release; by the fact of a rave in the NYT, especially by critic Jon Pareles; and by how an attempt to make a film about the band turned into “a classic three-act narrative, replete with surprise turns, stunning rejections, and an emblematic clash with Corporate Rock.” The documentary is on my list, although I probably won’t get to see it until I can rent the DVD, because I could never get my wife to go along with spending one of our hard-won opportunities for time together, when we have managed to score a babysitter, in that way. And therein hangs a tale…

Coming of age in the ’60’s and early ’70’s, I wore my artistic sensibilities like a bumper sticker of political correctness (I could easily be embarrassed by someone associated with me being seen to like the ‘wrong’ thing), but what I enjoy now is much more a matter of what moves me, in an interior and unfathomably individual way, rather than what social clique I participate in by liking something. So I no longer have to proclaim my tastes and no longer have any expectation that anyone I love or appreciate will have similar tastes. And, indeed, my closest friends are incredibly diverse in what moves them aesthetically. I once chuckled in print

about how at one time I could never have imagined spending my life with someone who didn’t love the Grateful Dead as much as I did, and I ended up marrying someone who was only barely aware of their existence. On the other hand, I could never conceive of being married to a Bush Republican (or even a card-carrying Democrat!). My wife and I would consider it a failure to convey our entire set of values to our children if they turned out to support some of the oppressive, life-denying, heinous standards of our elected leaders (or most corporate officials, for that matter). Yet I have nothing invested in them grooving to the same Garcia licks or, for that matter, transported by the same moments in St. Matthew’s Passion, that I enjoy. Our children’s musical and literary tastes are, already, quite distinctive,but they understand about Bush…

In my weblogging, while I am unabashed about my political opinions (I’m edified, for example, that Rebecca Blood

cited me in her list of “webloggers with strong voice” in her new book

, and I seem to get noticed by Le Blogeur

more when I’m most “out there”), Don’s post helped me realize that, indeed, I have been much less committal about my taste in music, film or books here and, yes, you cannot necessarily conclude that I am endorsing a particular creative work if I mention it. Nor should you conclude that, because we like something in common, you will like other things that I like. Nor, I hope, should you think anything less of me if you don’t, for example, care for Wilco… Even if you find my musical tastes totally uncool, I’m still a cool guy…

Only peripherally related: Chuck Palahniuk’s forthcoming novel

appears to be about the dangers of excessive congruence of musical taste [grin]:

In his last novel, Choke (1999), Palahniuk proved he could write a best-seller without sacrificing his trademark biting satire. And in Lullaby, he manages an even more impressive feat by showing himself capable of tenderness as well as outrage. The story, of course, is plenty outrageous. Middle-aged journalist Carl Streator discovers that all children who die of SIDS are read the same poem the night before their deaths, an African “culling song” traditionally sung to sick animals and people to ease their pain and hasten death. Once he discovers that simply reciting the poem in someone’s direction is invariably fatal, Streator can’t stop murdering. Then he finds out that Helen Hoover Boyle, a real-estate agent who sells the same haunted houses over and over again, knows the secret, too. They set out on a grand literary road trip to destroy all extant copies of the song. The narrative itself becomes a sort of lullaby, hypnotically repeating its anti-advertising, anti-everything catchphrases, lulling the reader into a false sense of security just as it launches all-out attacks on America’s “It’s a Small World after All” culture. It’s a fun ride, but what separates this novel from Palahniuk’s previous work (Fight Club, 2001) is its emotional depth, its ability to explore the unbearable pain of losing a child just as richly as it laments our consume-or-die worldview. amazon.com

“Researchers have made a significant discovery involving breast cancer that will have no impact on the treatment of the disease, yet it’s being heralded as profound work and a watershed discovery.” Wired

Just about everything I want to say about Bush’s speech before the UN today was said, prophetically, in this piece from The Onion:

‘Vice-President Dick Cheney issued a stern admonishment to President Bush Tuesday, telling the overeager chief executive that he didn’t want to hear “so much as the word ‘Iraq'” for the rest of the day.

“I told him, ‘Listen, George, I promise we’re going to invade Iraq, but you have to be patient,'” Cheney said. “‘We need a halfway plausible casus belli. You know that, George. Now, stop bugging me about it.'” ‘

Ten Reasons Why Many Gulf War Veterans Oppose Re-Invading Iraq: “With all the war fever about re-invading Iraq, the press and politicians are ignoring the opinion of the veterans of our last war in the Gulf. But we veterans were there, and we have unique and critical first-hand knowledge of the course and consequences of warfare in Iraq. Our opinions should be solicited and heard before troops deploy for battle, not after they have returned wounded, ill or in body bags.” Anonymous in AlterNet

His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s Message:

…Human conflicts do not arise out of the blue. They occur as a result of causes and conditions, many of which are within the protagonists’ control. This is where leadership is important. It is the responsibility of leaders to decide when to act and when to practise restraint. In the case of a conflict it is important to take necessary preventive measures before the situation gets out of hand. Once the causes and conditions that lead to violent clashes have fully ripened and erupted, it is very difficult to control them and restore peace. Violence undoubtedly breeds more violence. If we instinctively retaliate when violence is done to us, what can we expect other than that our opponent to also feel justified retaliating. This is how violence escalates. Preventive measures and restraint must be observed at an earlier stage. Clearly leaders need to be alert, far-sighted and decisive…

Anis Shivani:

“The left thinks of Bush as an idiot. He is, but only in the sense of not being intellectual. He is the smartest fascist to come down the pike in a long while, and has completely outwitted the opposition.

As long as progressives continue to grant the basic premises of the “war on terrorism–that it is a “war” and that we’re fighting “terror” – it will wage a losing struggle. If voices who question the basic reality of events remain isolated–voices like those of the ousted Cynthia McKinney–we are doomed to an era of complete silence. The dictators in Washington are in a great hurry to do away with this country’s freedoms and numb us to a new American militarism. If progressives treat them as political actors who will go along with the normal rules of liberal contest, it’ll continue to be blindsided by the next shocks in the works. ” OutLookIndia [via allaboutgeorge]

Thank you, Lewis H. Lapham, for these thoughts, and thank you, Mark Woods, for pointing me to them.

On historic day, U.S. turns away from eloquence:

Between dawn and dusk on Sept. 11 the mindless coverage of everything and nothing will sit every demographic division of the audience in the warm bath of its own tears, and if the media are themselves the message, then by filling up the dome with enough of the stuff … surely we can go back to sleep. Toronto Star

‘From gloating about getting off work to enjoying the “country road” ambience of lower Manhattan to hating on-the-make firemen: A spectrum of improper responses to the terror attacks.’ Salon

shinybluegrasshopper

“There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.”

And now for something completely different — glad tidings and hopeful signs in place of the wash of self-righteous, self-indulgent trivialization and political spin that is the Victims’ Day remembrance.

‘An experiment to store large quantities of carbon dioxide emissions under the floor of the North Sea has been highly successful, according to seismic imaging data.

Over five million tonnes of CO2have been pumped into sandstone under the Sleipner Field since 1996. The greenhouse gas had been separated from extracted natural gas and would normally have been released into the atmosphere…

“This method of carbon dioxide sequestration is probably one of the most powerful techniques we have for the next 50 years for reducing CO2 emissions,” says Chadwick. “We believe it is safe, technically feasible and certainly has very little environmental downside.” ‘ New Scientist

“Clever calculations and a lucky conjunction of quasars and planets means this key prediction of general relativity will get its first test.” New Scientist

‘The Universe might yet collapse in a devastating “big crunch”. Physicists have shown that even though its growth is speeding up, it could still start to implode by the time it is only twice its current age.’ New Scientist

Nicholas Kristof and Paul Krugman in tagteam match against Ashcroft and minions on today’s New York Times op-ed page: “When we look back at how our country has handled the last year, we have much to be hugely proud of — and, perhaps, one thing to be just a bit embarrassed about“, according to Kristof. And for The Long Haul, “the challenge now is to find a way to cope with the threat of terrorism without losing the freedom and prosperity that make America the great nation it is, ” says Krugman. NY Times

…but the Worrying Never Will. NY Times

‘There are Buddhas and Buddhas-to-be all over New York City. That man asleep on the sidewalk is a candidate. Likewise that working mother with the three irrepressible kids on the subway. Even guys in business suits have potential. Why not? It makes sense that a great city of immigrants is also a city of transmigrant souls.

The new art season will offer lots of opportunities for Buddha-spotting with a multi-institutional collaboration called “The Buddhism Project,” designed to explore links between Buddhism and the arts in contemporary American culture. Exhibitions and installations will pop up in all five boroughs; artists, curators and scholars will join monks, nuns and lamas to share work and ideas.’ NY Times

“Skeletons have come out of the closets and are creeping along Cincinnati’s streets. People say that Jim Cissell released them.

Four years ago, Mr. Cissell decided that it was time to move the county’s court records onto the Web. The documents were already public. They were already electronic. Where else to put public electronic documents but on the Internet?” NY Times

Sam Parry: “Many Republican strategists saw the American people’s anger over Sept. 11 and George W. Bush’s “united-we-stand” poll numbers as a way to lock down a second term in 2004. But recent poll numbers suggest a less certain future…” The Consortium

Do you know your classical composers?: “A recent survey found that 65% of children under 14 cannot name a classical composer, while only 14% knew that Mozart and Beethoven wrote music. Can you do better than that?” Guardian UK I got 11:11 and by no stretch of the imagination should I be considered well-versed in classical music. The bar is set pretty low if this is ‘cultural literacy’!

The Skinny on “Weight Loss” Supplements: The bottom line is, “Forget it.” Yahoo! Health [via Eaton]

“Sears, Roebuck & Co., the fourth largest U.S. retailer, has stopped selling a line of T-shirts after an outcry from mental health advocates who said the slogans on them make fun of the mentally ill.” Reuters

“An attack on Iraq would so radicalise Arabs it could bring on what al-Qaeda sought to do“, writes Salman Rushdie in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Writer Will Self puts head on the block: ‘Novelist Will Self is to lock himself in a one-bedroom flat on the 20th floor of a Liverpool tower block and allow the public to observe him while he writes a short novel…Self’s planned 12,000 word novel is part of a “reality art” project, sponsored by the Liverpool Housing Action Trust, to mark the passing of high-rise housing in the port city… The public will only be able to see the back of Self as he writes, but they will not be allowed to talk to him. As the story develops the author will post pages in an adjoining room to allow visitors to see how the novella is taking shape.’ Reuters

This has gotten alot of notice in the weblog universe. Scientists Develop Atomic-Scale Memory. Using silicon atoms to represent data 1’s and 0’s has provided data density 10^6 times that of a CD-ROM.

The new memory was constructed on a silicon surface that automatically forms furrows within which rows of silicon atoms are aligned and rest like tennis balls in a gutter. By lifting out single silicon atoms with the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope, the Wisconsin team created gaps that represent the 0s of data storage while atoms left in place represent the 1s. Technology Review

Here

‘s some more detail, with pictures. The problem with this memory? It’s really slow, of course! So far…

Thanks to boing boing for making sure we’d all know about this. CrashBonsai, a site from Boston artist John Rooney, sells smashed model cars with which you can adorn your bonsai trees to make “little living car crash sculptures”

“No passengers have been injured in CrashBonsai accidents, although some drivers have reported a brief, even euphoric loss of consciousness.”

Could they have had a falling-out? Leuschke throws out an Irish swear and Mark Woods mumbles back an insult from the Renaissance. Then Leuschke actually scoffs at him, scoffs!

I can’t say it better than Brooke at the bitter shackzilla has already done, responding to W’s proclaiming September 11th Patriot Day:

“The people who died in the World Trade Center did not die for their country. If anything, they died because of their country. They did not willingly lay down their lives for a cause, for God and a nation. They did not die chanting America the Beautiful. They died not knowing what the hell was going on. They died eating doughnuts and drinking coffee and shuffling papers and counting up profits and cleaning bathrooms and making meals. Some died thinking it was all just a terrible accident. Nothing about how these people died makes them patriots. But that does not make their deaths any less significant.

And, I would argue, nothing about my grief for their loss makes me a patriot, certainly not in the sense Bush is implying: That I am sad, and therefore I want open-ended revenge and I will call this reflex “patriotism” to make it sound better than what it is.

Just when you think Bush can’t stoop lower in exploiting tragedy for his own ends …

Besides, we in Massachusetts already have a ‘Patriot’s Day’.