‘…is dedicated to the belief that shyness and social phobia do not have to interfere with achieving professional and interpersonal goals. The pain of shyness can be relieved by challenging negative thoughts and beliefs, and learning new behaviors. Participants at the Clinic have opportunities to learn and to try new behaviors in a safe and supportive environment.

The Shyness Clinic follows a “mental wellness” or “social fitness model” of treatment with a focus on encouraging participants to expand their current capabilities.’

Related: Painful Shyness: Talk to Someone Who Can Help — a brochure from the American Psychological Association. You can download a color .PDF of the pamphlet from the site.

Bob Herbert: “The right has been relentless in its campaign to control the federal courts, and that campaign is getting awfully close to an absolute victory.” NY Times op-ed

Winners of MacArthur Grants Announced. NY Times Here’s the complete list, hyperlinks courtesy of me and Google:

• Bonnie Bassler, a molecular ecobiologist;
  
• Ann Blair, an intellectual historian;
  
• Katherine Boo, 37, a Pulitzer-Prize winning staff writer at The Washington Post.
  
• Paul Ginsparg, an Internet publisher and a physicist;
  
• David B. Goldstein, an energy conservation specialist and physicist
  
• Karen Hesse, a novelist
  
• Janine Jagger, an epidemiologist
  
• Daniel Jurafsky, a computational linguist
  
• Toba Khedoori, an artist
  
• Liz Lerman, a choreographer
  
• George Lewis, a trombonist and composer
  
• Liza Lou, 33, a Californian known for huge installations using thousands of glass beads;
  
• Edgar Meyer, a bassist and composer
  
• Jack Miles, a literary scholar and critic and author of God: The Biography
  
• Erik Mueggler, an anthropologist
  
• Sendhil Mullainathan, 29, who in this era of Wall Street scandals studied the phenomenon of growing executive compensation
  
• Stanley Nelson, a documentary filmmaker
  
• Lee Ann Newsom, a paleoethnobotanist
  
• Daniela Rus, 39, a roboticist and Dartmouth College professor who works on robots that independently change shapes, depending on their task
  
• Charles Steidel, 39, a cosmologist and professor at the California Institute of Technology
  
• Brian Tucker, 56, a seismologist and founder and president of GeoHazards International in Palo Alto, Calif.
  
• Camilo José Vergara, 58, a photographer who captured images of the World Trade Center from its construction more than 30 years ago to the day the towers fell
  
• Paul Wennberg, an atmospheric chemist.
  
• Colson Whitehead, 32, who received critical acclaim for his first two novels, John Henry Days (2001) and The Intuitionist (1998) [You should read this! — FmH]
  

Maureen Dowd: “In their eagerness to apply adolescent torture methods, Bush hawks seem to have forgotten history: Do we really want to punish the Germans for being pacifists?”  NY Times op-ed

The Krugman-Kristof NY Times

op-ed page tag-team continues; is anyone listening? Paul Krugman asks us to recognize that the proposed war is a “diversion from the issues of dysfunctional security agencies, a sinking economy, a devastated budget and a tattered relationship with our allies.“

Nicholas Kristof warnes us that, “(b)efore we rush into Iraq, we need to think through what we will do the morning after

Saddam is toppled.”

Saddam has ‘active’ plans for weapons use – Blair:

“Iraq is actively trying to acquire a nuclear weapons capability, the Prime Minister has told the House of Commons.”

Ananova: News

Main points of dossier

CNN – World

Envoy: Russian, British Views on Iraq ‘Converging’

Reuters World News

Gore Decries Bush’s Iraq War Push:

“Al Gore harshly criticized President Bush’s push for war against Iraq, saying it has hurt the United States’ standing and could dangerously undermine the rule of law around the world.”

Yahoo! News – Most-emailed Content

Democrats Uneasy With Move To War:

“Congressional Democrats uneasy with what they view as a precipitous move toward war are trying to come up with alternatives to President Bush’s request for broad powers to eliminate the threats posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.”

Yahoo! News – Most-emailed Content

Hot Buttons: Talk show topics:

“Congressional lawmakers say President George W. Bush’s proposed resolution to force Iraqi disarmament needs fine-tuning, but will likely receive approval once they understand how much power it gives him.”

UPI: Life & Mind

Umberto Eco on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion:

Intellectual anti-semitism as we now know it originates from the modern world. In 1797, Abbé Barruel wrote his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme to show that the French revolution was a plot of the Knights Templar and the freemasons. Later it was an Italian, Captain Simonini, who suggested to him that it was above all the perfidious Jews who were acting behind the scenes. It was only after this point that the argument surrounding international Jewry began, and the Jesuits seized on it as an argument against the sects of the Carbonari. The controversy raged throughout Europe, but found its most fertile soil in France, where Jewish finance was now identified as an enemy to defeat. The controversy was certainly fuelled by Catholic legitimism, but it was in secular, political circles that the ill-famed Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion slowly took shape. These were then published in Russian Tsarist circles and were finally used by Hitler. Guardian UK Books

Origin of Specious:

In the heated, often venomous battle over Charles Darwin’s legacy, (Stephen Jay) Gould faced a redoubtable crew from the fields of sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, genetics and philosophy. What’s more, many of these individuals, including E.O. Wilson, Stephen Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Robert Wright, have literary and polemical talents rivaling his own. Science will decide the relative merits of their arguments over topics such as punctuated equilibrium, speciation and the nature of complexity. But the cultural stakes of the dispute are obvious already. Gould’s opponents advocate one form or another of a digital Darwinism. Their grand syntheses are unimaginable without the computer revolution. Their reductionist emphasis — and their hopes for a single, internally coherent theory of everything from mitochondria to the human mind — draws heavily on the tools, methods and examples of digitalization. Gould’s views, on the other hand, owed next to nothing to computers. His Darwinism would have sounded much the same without computer code, artificial intelligence (AI) or the Internet. The American Prospect

Review of The Eagle’s Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World by Mark Hertsgaard, and After the Terror

by Ted Honderich:

A well-researched cultural and ideological history of anti-Americanism, exploring its history, its different strands – Leftist, Rightist, Euro-nationalist, Cold War, Islamic, Third Worldist and so on – and, above all, the strange interactions and cross-fertilisations between them, is a book that I would dearly like to read. But, if one is being written as a response to September 11, do not expect it to appear just yet. Serious research requires more than the six months’ writing time that went into most of the current crop of anniversary publications. Telegraph UK

Never mind the Right; progressives are their own worst enemies since 9/11, says Adam Shatz:

The prowar left and the antiwar left have both tended to view the conflict through ideologically tinted prisms. Reflexive anti-Americanism is one such prism. As Don Guttenplan, a London-based correspondent for The Nation, observes, for a small but vocal section of American radicals, “there is only one imperialism, and if it isn’t American it’s not imperialism.” In the past decade this theology of American evil has assumed increasingly twisted forms, including, in some cases, a creeping sympathy for Serbian nationalism. It has also produced a highly selective solicitude for the oppressed: “Muslim grievances” are to be heeded when they emanate from Palestine, but ignored or even repudiated when they arise in Bosnia or Kosovo. This has damaged the left’s moral standing and widened the chasm with human rights activists, who should be our natural allies. The Nation

And Michael Bérubé wonders why the left can’t get 9/11 right

:

…(Y)ou would think that if the president was having a hard time making his case to the Republican policy elite, let alone the UN, it would be a simple matter for the American left to rally popular opposition to the war as well.

You might think that, but you’d be wrong. Most liberals in Congress are either mumbling under their breath or speaking up only to call for a ”debate” they themselves are unwilling to begin; the progressive left has been noisier, but the progressive left has its own problems, mired as it is in an Afghanistan quagmire of its own making. It would be a positive service to democracy if left-wing public intellectuals would take the lead where elected liberals cannot or will not, urging their fellow Americans that the war on terrorism requires many things – peace in Israel and Palestine, an end to the United States’ long-term addiction to oil – before it requires any regime change in Iraq. But the left is having some trouble providing that service, because one wing of it actually supports military intervention in Iraq, while another wing opposes all military interventions regardless of their objectives. Boston Globe

Orchestras are becoming louder every year. As the argument goes, concert halls grow larger and orchestras have to get louder, especially as a louder and louder world causes earlier and earlier hearing loss. The cost hs been “a drastic degrading oftone colour” and, in particular, the drowning of the strings in a wash of brass. “Today’s musical instruments are like freakishly gigantic vegetables: the volume is prodigious, the flavour insipid. “

Brit Art’s brats get a pasting from Rattle

Less than two weeks before taking up the baton as head of one of the world’s greatest orchestras, conductor Sir Simon Rattle has launched a furious attack on British attitudes to culture and dismissed modern British art as ‘bullshit’.

In an extraordinary verbal assault, Rattle, the new artistic director of the Berlin Philharmonic, said that Germany was willing to spend money on the arts in a way that Britain never could. He also slammed the ‘anything goes’ attitude of British post-modernism and denounced leading Brit Art bratpack figures… Guardian UK

“I ‘m amazed that Reinhold Niebuhr hasn’t made a comeback since September 11. After all, he was one of America’s most profound writers on war and international conflict. At the start of World War II and then again at the dawn of the Cold War he wrote sweeping books that helped readers to connect their historical situations with broad truths about God and human nature. Yet a Nexis search on Niebuhr turns up only a handful of references to him over the past year. And the few substantive essays that have appeared were written for conservative publications, whereas Niebuhr propounded a hard-nosed liberal view of the world. The situation is depressing: Niebuhr’s arguments were big and ambitious, whereas our debates are small and wonky.” The Atlantic

“…all these scientists dying within months of one another, at the precise moment when tiny organisms loom as a gargantuan threat. The stories of these dozen or so deaths started out as a curiosity and were transformed rumor by rumor into the specter of conspiracy as they circulated first on the Internet and then in the mainstream media. What are the odds, after all?” NY Times Magazine

Joseph Epstein feels that puncturing the bloated balloon that is Harold Bloom is necessary to rejuvenate literary criticism:

Harold Bloom’s success is of a peculiarly American kind and yet not easily fathomed. As a critic, he is not all that accessible and is capable of producing sentences, paragraphs, lengthy stretches that are quite incomprehensible. (“Like Thoreau, Whitman has a touch of the Bhagavad-Gita, but the Hindu vision is mediated by Western hermeticism, with its Neoplatonic and Gnostic elements.” Yeah, sure, as the kids say, right!) He claims to be of the school of aesthetic critics, remarking that, in an ideological age, “I feel quite alone these days in defending the autonomy of the aesthetic.” Yet he himself doesn’t seem to have a clue about how to produce anything approaching the aesthetically pleasing in his own writing. In an interview in the Paris Review, he declared that he never revises his prose, and nothing in his work refutes this impressive claim. Any critic ready to avail himself of such gargoylesque words as “psychokabbalistic” and “pneumognostic,” who can refer to a passage in Montaigne as an “apotropaic talisman,” and can write about the cosmos having been “reperspectivized by Tolstoy,” may be many things, but he ain’t no aesthete. Hudson Review

When Robert P. Crease, a member of the philosophy department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the historian at Brookhaven National Laboratory, recently asked physicists to nominate the most beautiful experiment of all time, the 10 winners were largely solo performances, involving at most a few assistants. Most of the experiments — which are listed in this month’s Physics World — took place on tabletops and none required more computational power than that of a slide rule or calculator.

What they have in common is that they epitomize the elusive quality scientists call beauty. This is beauty in the classical sense: the logical simplicity of the apparatus, like the logical simplicity of the analysis, seems as inevitable and pure as the lines of a Greek monument. Confusion and ambiguity are momentarily swept aside, and something new about nature becomes clear. NY Times: Science

Bob Herbert: High-Altitude Rambos: “On a recent flight, two U.S. air marshals reacted to an erratic passenger as if they were trying out for Hollywood’s latest action extravaganza.” NY Times op-ed

‘Statin drugs can do more than just lower your LDL “bad” cholesterol. In high enough doses, they may be able to reverse the accumulation of artery-clogging plaques that lead to heart attack and stroke.’ WebMD

From the Bear Tribe Newsletter:

‘This year, the Autumn equinox falls on September 23rd. We will spend the early part of the day cooking and preparing for the Harvest Celebration. We will set an Altar of fruits, vegetables and brightly colored leaves and then we will light candles of brown, gold, orange, blue and black. The candles will burn all night in gratitude of all we have received from the season past. The next morning, the bounty of our Harvest Altar will be placed in the woods as our give-away back to the Earth and “all our relations.” ‘

Aurora Season Begins:

“Autumn is special in part because lengthening nights and crisp pleasant evenings tempt stargazers outside; they see things they ordinarily wouldn’t. But there’s more to it than that: autumn really does produce a surplus of geomagnetic storms–almost twice the annual average.

see captionIn fact, both spring and autumn are good aurora seasons. Winter and summer are poor. This is a puzzle for researchers because auroras are triggered by solar activity. The Sun doesn’t know what season it is on Earth–so how could one season yield more auroras than another?” NASA

by Lloyd deMause:

“Because so much of the world outside the West has for historical reasons fallen far behind in the evolution of their childrearing practices, the resulting vast differences between psychoclasses have recently turned into a global battle by terrorists against liberal Western values. In order to understand this new battle, it would be useful to know what makes a terrorist – what developmental life histories they share that can help us see why they want to kill “American infidels” and themselves – so we can apply our efforts to removing the sources of their violence and preventing terrorism in the future.

The roots of terrorism lie not in this or that American foreign policy error, but in the extremely abusive families of the terrorists. Children who grow up to be Islamic terrorists are products of a misogynist, fundamentalist system that often segregates the family into two separate areas: the men’s area and the women’s area, where the children are brought up and which the father rarely visits.”

wood s lot comes back out of forced retirement after four days, thanks to the kindness of strangers.

“Joss Whedon knows how to sneak complex ideas into pop packages. Having created an alternate feminist universe with ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer,’ he is exploring existentialism with his new sci-fi series, ‘Firefly.’ ” NY Times Magazine

U.S. Taking Steps to Ready Forces for Iraq Fighting: “Mobilizing for a possible attack on Iraq, American commanders have taken many steps to prepare and deploy their forces, Defense Department and military officials say. But the early steps have been calculated not to interfere with the Bush administration’s campaign to build diplomatic and political support for taking action.” NY Times

U.S. Will Not Go to War with Iraqi People -Rumsfeld

“Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld suggested on Sunday that any American invasion of Iraq would directly target Baghdad’s “dictatorial, repressive” government while attempting to spare the Iraqi people.”

Yahoo! News – Most-emailed Content

U.S. Senators Warn of Possible ‘Arab-Israeli’ War

“Prominent members of the U.S. Congress warned on Sunday that a unilateral U.S. attack on Iraq could draw in Israel and lead to a wider Middle East war.”

Yahoo! News – Most-emailed Content

Iraq proves test of US-Russia ties

“In a half-hour phone call Friday, Bush failed to persuade Putin to follow Washington’s lead on Iraq.”

Christian Science Monitor: World News

Even Kuwait’s Islamists welcome US

“An additional 4,000 US Marines are due in Kuwait next week as part of joint military exercises.”

Christian Science Monitor: World News

Blueprint for Iraq: tight, intense attack

“As the Bush administration moves aggressively at the United Nations and in Congress to win support for a possible military strike against Iraq, a consensus has begun to emerge among Pentagon war planners that the United States should conduct a narrowly focused but extremely intense attack that would be radically different from the 1991 Gulf War.”

International Herald Tribune

Punch First as a Last Resort

Christian Science Monitor

Maureen Dowd: Culture War With B-2’s: “The administration isn’t targeting Iraq because of 9/11. It’s exploiting 9/11 to target Iraq.” NY Times op-ed

“The nature v nurture debate has never been so fierce. Robin McKie and Vanessa Thorpe report on the bitter row between two leading scientists:

One is a boor, a scientific dinosaur and ‘a hardline left-winger’ whose ideas have long since ceased to matter. The other is a ‘wicked’ individual whose ideas could lead more children to be assaulted by abusive parents.

That is how two leading scientists have denounced each other over their claims to know the causes of human aggression. Violence is in the air and, it appears, at its roots.

In his book They F*** You Up British psychologist Oliver James argues family influences are critical. Neuroscientist Steven Pinker says nothing matters more than our genes. Both are openly abusive about each other’s stance. Hence, the accusation of one of Pinker’s allies that James is ‘fucked-up’ while he has retorted in turn that his opponent is telling lies.

The extraordinarily angry row reveals the depth of the scientific battle that is emerging over the soul of mankind. On one side stand the followers of the fledgling science of evolutionary psychology, led by Pinker. They say studies of human evolution show that parents have little impact on their children’s behaviour. Only their genes, and a person’s interaction with peers and friends, matter in the shaping of violent personalities. Road rage and murder are in our DNA.

On the other side are traditional psychologists and psychoanalysts who say that children’s aggressive behaviour is picked up from violent parents. The family is the root of all troubles. Genes have only a limited role in the birth of of criminal, violent behaviour. Learning from parents is key.

Pinker, head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s centre of cognitive neuroscience, outlines his views in The Blank Slate. His and James’s books were published last week and sparked an exchange of vitriol between the authors. Guardian-Observer

“Electric signals can be transmitted at least four times faster than the speed of light using only basic equipment that would be found in virtually any college science department.

Scientists have sent light signals at faster-than-light speeds over the distances of a few metres for the last two decades – but only with the aid of complicated, expensive equipment. Now physicists at Middle Tennessee State University have broken that speed limit over distances of nearly 120 metres, using off-the-shelf equipment costing just $500.” New Scientist

“Translations of hieroglyphs on the staircase of a pyramid in Guatemala reveal details of a superpower struggle between two city-states at the peak of the Mayan civilisation.

The 1300-year old hieroglyphs support theories that the Mayan world was riven by battles between two major powers, rather than smaller-scale clashes between multiple rival dynasties.” New Scientist

“Males suffer more parasitic infections than females, which could help explain why they die earlier, say Scottish researchers.” New Scientist

“ Alexandra Morton is about as independent a scientist as you’re likely to find. For the past two decades she has been living in remote Echo Bay in British Columbia studying the intricate patterns of sounds killer whales use to communicate. She has had no graduate training, yet has become an authority on orcas. On her boat, she talked to Bob Holmes about her unusual career, her passion for the wild and the curse of salmon farming.” New Scientist

“The suicide rate increases under Conservative governments, research suggests.

Australian scientists found the suicide rate in the country increased significantly when a Conservative government was in power.

And an analysis of figures in the UK seems to suggest a similar trend… The UK Conservative Party refused to comment on the research.” BBC

From uggabugga:

‘There has been some commentary following Bush’s apparent failure to recall the familiar expression: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

This brings to mind the whole set of malapropisms by the President – commonly referred to as Bushisms. These Bushisms haven’t been analyzed in any thorough manner, so we decided to take a look at the current set, and see if there was a pattern. There is…’

Jon Udell, who runs Radio UserLand, is big on RSS aggregators, as he explains in this Byte magazine piece. And, for your newsreading edification, this list of RSS aggregators is cribbed from his weblog:

• Carmen’s Headline Viewer
• Peerkat
• Blagg
• AmphetaDesk
• Aggie
• FeedReader
• Newzcrawler
• the blogspace list of readers
• parss
• Tinderbox

Here are a few more I’ve found in my travels:

• Blagg
• Figby

• ForumZilla

• Headline Viewer

• HotSheet

• Meerkat

• News Is Free

• Novobot

• SOAPClient.com RSS News Reader

A chart comparing the attributes of several of these can be found here. Very useful information about RSS, reading and creating feeds, etc. is compiled here.

This chart exploring the possible scenarios proceeding from the coming invasion of Iraq, from uggabugga, is being broadly linked to (and stressing out ugga’s server to no end, apparently..). It pretty much says it all, with tongue strongly restrained by cheekwall.

From uggabugga:

‘There has been some commentary following Bush’s apparent failure to recall the familiar expression: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

This brings to mind the whole set of malapropisms by the President – commonly referred to as Bushisms. These Bushisms haven’t been analyzed in any thorough manner, so we decided to take a look at the current set, and see if there was a pattern. There is…’

Bach: Goldberg Variations (recorded 1955 and 1981) by Glenn Gould have bee re-released in a gorgeous and essential 3-CD set to mark this month’s 70th anniversary of his birth and 20th anniversary of his death —

Glenn Gould’s extraordinary career was bracketed by the Goldberg Variations. It was his first recording of the work, in 1955, that established Gould as a pianistic force of exceptional gifts, while the second studio version he made in 1981 (there is also a Salzburg festival performance from 1957) proved to be his last visit to the recording studio; it was released in September the following year, just days before his sudden death at the age of 50. In the subsequent 20 years, Gould’s reputation and stature as one of the most important pianists of the 20th century have been maintained, and these two recordings especially have achieved near legendary status.

Reissued together now to mark the 20th anniversary of his death, the two recordings of the Goldberg Variations provide a fascinating comparison. The earlier one has been scrupulously remastered for the new album, and sounds more lifelike and immediate than ever before. The set also includes a disc of outtakes from the 1955 sessions as well as an interview Gould gave in 1982, in which he discussed the differences between the two performances. The most startling contrast is in the sheer length of the performances. In 1955 Gould got through the work in 38 minutes, while in 1981 he took 51; in the later account he does observe some repeats (there were none in 1955), but there is also a broadness, a sense of contemplation in a work that clearly meant more to him than any other. Guardian UK

Travelers would trade privacy for shorter lines:

In a poll of frequent business fliers, the overwhelming majority said they would welcome more intrusive personal identification technology if it streamlined airport security check-in. The poll was commissioned by Johnson Controls.

About three-fourths of the frequent air travelers polled said they would be “extremely” or “very” willing to undergo a fingerprint scan at the airport if it helped streamline and shorten flight check-in time. Nearly two-thirds were just as willing to undergo an iris or facial recognition scan. And 61 percent said they were extremely or very willing to use a national ID card with thumbprint.

The poll’s release follows recent relevant testimony from James Loy, acting head of the Transportation Security Administration. Before a Senate committee last week, Loy voiced support for the creation of a “trusted traveler” program to reduce airport security waits for frequent business fliers. The proposed program would involve voluntary, in-depth background checks for frequent travelers who would then receive a badge embedded with some type of personal identification technology and become part of a registered traveler database.

Johnson Controls, of course, has a vested interest

in the broad adoption of such technologies…

Five books about The Sopranos considered:

“Maybe higher education isn’t such a good idea after all. The fourth season of The Sopranos is finally here, and professors of various stripes are having a go at explicating the first three seasons. Literary critics and historians, neo-Marxists and theoretical feminists, postmodernists and pre-post-post-structuralists are scrambling to stake their claims to David Chase’s series. The name-dropping in these books borders on the felonious — why stop at Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese when Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin are available? — but unfortunately the RICO statute doesn’t yet apply to the academic racket.” NY Times

Recall last week’s discussion here of whether readers should take my multiple postings about Wilco as an indication of my own tastes? Well, I’ll short-circuit any similar speculation about my fondness for Sopranos blinks by making it explicit that, yes, they signify my fondness for the show. One of the reasons, of course, is my endless fascination with the pivotal role a psychotherapeutic relationship plays in a popular TV show. While I do think it is about the most responsible portrayal of psychiatric treatment I’ve seen in the popular media, that doesn’t make it problem-free… There’s also that giddy, somewhat delectable dissonant experience of feeling empathetic toward and invested in a mobster as an audience member, which of course parallels the supportive and empathetic stance one struggles to maintain toward whomever one is treating as a psychotherapist.

Of course, self-described ‘conservative’ columnists such as Suzanne Fields would have a different take on my appreciation of the show:

It has been widely remarked that the Sopranos are a 1950s family with a ’50s family sensibilities, reflecting a traditional reference point for right and wrong. But if the microcosm resides in hearth and home, the macrocosm is hell on earth. The Mob follows a vicious immoral code and the lead characters resemble Satan, Moloch and Belial, the fallen angels in Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” who seek ways to attempt to wreak vengeance against God.

William F. Buckley argues that the popularity of “The Sopranos” depends on the degeneration of its audience, but this, I think, ignores the way the series raises legitimate questions about the nature of evil and its seductive qualities. If we sometimes find ourselves in sympathy with vile criminals, we’re confronted with our own gullibility and susceptibility to behavior we know is wrong. These gangsters aren’t “role models.” Nobody in his right mind would want to be in Tony Soprano’s shoes.

[Does anyone, by the way, have a reference for the Buckley observation? FmH]

Addendum: Here

it is

“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