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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and outrage at government policies. As writers we constantly interact

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

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

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

appearing in public and pretend nothing is happening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

thinking of poetry, would simply cause embarrassment.

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

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

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

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

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

        Ammiel Alcalay               Anne Waldman

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

“Despite mounting anecdotal evidence, conventional scientists still

reject the notion that a person can remain conscious after being

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

wrong.” Wired

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

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

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

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

John Carroll: Lies, Damned Lies and Ongoing Dread

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

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

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

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

Also:

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

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

Carol Wolman MD: Diagnosing Dubya:

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

And finally, as Rafe Colburn describes:

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

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

moment of grief with President Clinton at

Tuesday’s memorial service for Senator

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Conjunctions:36, Spring 2001, Dark Laughter (“featuring a portfolio of fiction that explores gothic comedy”):

“Promise you’ll use a condom,” my mother whispered in the darkness of her Toyota Camry, the lines of her face lit by the glow of the speed gauge and my boyfriend’s parents’ security lights.

“Ma, we don’t do that stuff,” I whined. She pressed a foil packet into my palm and a sheet of disgust flashed through my midsection.

“Don’t die wondering,” she whispered darkly, driving off, a stripe of red taillights across the back of her beige car.

Which was the same thing Forrest Watson told Jono Shoemaker, trying to convince him to huff Pine-Sol off the dashboard of his car. Jono was still high when he was run over in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven by an unidentified driver in a red Camaro.

Reflecting on the magnitude of last weekend’s outcry, most of the commentators in the mainstream media, including NPR, wonder why “these are nothing like the scale of Vietnam-era protests,” to paraphrase an observation I’ve heard time and again. Uhhh, could it be because in this case people are trying to stop a war before it starts and any Americans start coming home in body bags? Besides, the tacit assumption about the size of the protest movement may not be true. As ‘Tom Tomorrow ‘ notes , “…the prowar types would love to play this down, I’m sure, but this is huge. It took years for the Vietnam era protests to reach this level.” This Modern World

Review of Catherine Crier’s The Case Against Lawyers: Down With Bureaucracy!:

“It was a few years ago, sitting in a barber’s chair, that I came face to face with the niggling over-regulation of American life. When it came time to trim my neck hairs with a straight razor, my barber used his fingers to smear a cold, anemic, trickly, machine-made substance on my skin. What, I asked him, happened to shaving brushes and hot, thick lather? New health-code regulations, he replied. Using a brush and shaving soap in a nice porcelain mug had been decreed illegal.

Catherine Crier in The Case Against Lawyers doesn’t cite that example as she makes her main point: that we the people have ceded power to a corps of lawyers and bureaucrats who are not only smothering us in silly regulations, but are also seizing huge profits for themselves, corrupting the political system and generally undermining freedom and the sense of responsibility. But Ms. Crier, the television newscaster who is currently host of “Catherine Crier Live” on Court TV, doesn’t lack for illustrations. Her book is a kind of lament from within the commonsensical heart of the American spirit.” NY Times

…Say Spirit Plumber: “It was a dark and stormy night — well, it was drizzly anyway — and for the Atlantic Paranormal Society, things were taking a sudden dark turn. The group had come to this harbor town near Boston at the request of a young couple named Jeff and Bekka Caruso, who reported strange goings-on in their small, waterfront house. There had been barking noises, the couple said, and a dresser had inexplicably emptied its contents on Ms. Caruso.” NY Times

U.S. military building database of terror suspects’ fingerprints, faces, voices:

“The United States is compiling digital dossiers of the irises, fingerprints, faces and voices of terrorism suspects and using the information to track their movements and screen foreigners trying to enter the country.

Since January, military and intelligence operatives have collected the identifying data on prisoners in Afghanistan (news – web sites) and at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. There are also plans to extend the collection process to Iraq in the event of a U.S. invasion.

With this project, the U.S. government has taken biometrics — the measuring of human features — well beyond its most common use to date: verifying people’s identities before giving them access to computers or secure areas.” Yahoo! News

“From murderous clowns to harrowing modernity, Salon staffers pick a terrifying lineup of spooky movies and TV shows.” As someone who has sought out screen scares for most of my life, many of their choices bring back delicious shivers of recollection.

“Continuous commentary from The American Prospect

“, a weblog.

Tapped, though unsigned, is not, strictly speaking, the editorial voice of the magazine. Tapped frequently takes stances on issues where the magazine has no official stance of its own — and contributors may, from time to time, stray a bit from the magazine’s ideological bearings. Tapped may even, very occassionally, contradict itself. But such is the excitement of life at an intellectually vigorous publication where writers and editors struggle each day to figure out their take on world affairs and then pass those views on to our readers — and the world at large. With Tapped, we are pleased to be able to share our roughest rough draft with you.

“If an online wagering forum is to be believed, the events of the past few days have not altered the ranking of expected outcomes for next week’s congressional election.

Speculators on the Iowa Electronic Markets — a real-money election option exchange run by the University of Iowa — continue to see a Democratic Senate majority and a Republican-controlled House of Representatives as the most likely outcome of the Nov. 5 election.” Wired

ActForChange : Act Now: “It is essential that the U.N. be aware of the extent of domestic American opposition to a unilateral U.S. invasion of Iraq. Right now, President Bush is using the Congressional resolution giving him the right to use military force as evidence that he has the support of the American people.

Urge Secretary-General Kofi Annan to use his influence within the U.N. to block a resolution authorizing military force before the U.N. weapons inspectors have had sufficient time to do their job.” Sign and send an email from the site.

Richard Goldstein: What makes the pro-war progressives run? ‘There’s a real temptation to leave the chronic depression and ample masochism of the left behind. The war on terror can seem like an opening to build a muscular new progressivism with its feet on the ground. And speaking of feet, there’s an undeniable satisfaction in kicking a masochist while he’s down. Among the many rewards for sadism these days is the power it confers—and for progressives power is in terribly short supply. Finally, never underestimate the appeal to a critic of being taken seriously, and that means declaring your independence from left-wing “orthodoxies.” Village Voice Related: Via Rebecca Blood, Stand Down!, “the left-right blog opposing a war in Iraq.”

Kevin Bacon linked to Al-Qaeda [thanks, Walker]

Ellsberg: Still Rabble-Rousing

In the early 1970s, the Nixon administration was staggered when, as a Pentagon insider, (Daniel) Ellsberg leaked thousands of incriminating documents about U.S. lies and deception to the media regarding its foreign policy in Vietnam. The revelations of what came to be called the Pentagon Papers showed that at least four presidents had deliberately encouraged a war of dubious purpose in order to avoid the embarrassment of failure and to further their own agendas.

The parallels between the Vietnam War and the current pursuit of military action against Iraq are not lost on Ellsberg, who has remained on the lecture circuit since those infamous days.

“We were lied into Vietnam, and we’re being lied into a war right now,” he told a packed crowd at the Commonwealth Club Monday night… Wired

“BetaNews on Tuesday reported that in a newsgroup posting for beta testers a Microsoft representative said Office 11 would run only on Windows 2000 with Service Pack 3 and Windows XP.

Limiting the final version of Office 11 to Windows 2000 and XP would potentially encourage users of older operating systems to upgrade, but it could further erode relations between Microsoft and business customers already stung by increases in volume licensing fees, analysts say. Some business customers have indicated that they may explore alternatives to Office, such as Sun Microsystems’ StarOffice and OpenOffice, because of Microsoft’s licensing plan.” c/net. Notably absent from the story is a description of any features of Office 11 that would make anyone want to upgrade…

“This Halloween, Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster seem positively cuddly. To inspire some real fear, try dressing up as one of these current and former chief executives. Click on the images for a full-size, printer-friendly color mask. Now that’s scary.” Forbes [via lifeouttacontext]

<a href=”http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/301/living/Danger_is_his_business+.shtml

“>Risk: A Practical Guide for Deciding What’s Really Safe and What’s Really Dangerous in the World Around You (Houghton Mifflin) by David Ropeik and George Gray of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis:

Risk touches upon the stuff of contemporary nightmares, such as biological weapons, but it is mainly a compendium of the data behind, and the safeguards against, scores of everyday risks, real and perceived: air pollution, medical errors, nuclear power, artificial sweeteners, solar radiation, cellphones, foodborne illness, pesticides. Ropeik, a former reporter for WCVB-TV (Channel 5) who now handles communications at the Harvard center, and Gray, the center’s acting director, maintain that in many cases ”our fears may not match the facts. We may be too afraid of lesser risks and not concerned enough about bigger ones.” What follows is an abridged conversation with Ropeik… [more] Boston Globe

One Charger to Juice Many Gizmos Wired

“The mysterious gas Russian forces pumped into a theater to end a hostage crisis was an opiate, a chemical related to morphine, Pentagon officials said Monday.

The Bush administration, meanwhile, refused to criticize Russian special forces for using the gas, which killed 116 of the hostages as well as the hostage takers.” Wired

Toys expected to be the hottest this holiday season: “A list of what are expected to be the top 10 selling toys overall this holiday, according to … an independent marketing company.

The product expected to be the top seller, Barbie as Rapunzel, leads the list; all others are in alphabetical order.” Boston Globe

Why do dogs get blue, not red, eyes in flash photos? Scientific American

…by the Wind:

The British Army appealed on Monday for anyone hiding one if its borrowed inflatable tanks — which blew away in a weekend gale — to kindly return it.

“If anyone has seen a flying tank please contact us. We would like it back,” Army spokesman David Webb told Reuters from breezy Wales.

“We borrowed six of the inflatable tanks from the Royal Air Force and would very much like to give six back to them. At the moment we only have five.”

The dummy tank, which takes three men to handle, was being used in an exercise involving troops from Britain, the United States, Canada, Belgium and Poland high in the Brecon Beacon mountains.

The annual exercise is supposed to give troops a feel of what it is like to operate patrols deep behind enemy lines.

Inflatable tanks and artillery pieces are staked out in various locations for the patrols to find. Yahoo!

“I’m going to miss Dick Armey, the crusty Texas Republican and House majority leader who is retiring after 17 years in Congress.” c/net news

“The Washington Post has announced a special seven-day opportunity to view newspaper articles written between October 22 and October 29, 1962 — the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

You can get to the newspaper sections here. Every day a new edition of the newspaper will be added [currently October 22 through 31 are available — FmH]

The papers are in PDF format. Click on a date and the paper will load. The paper is presented as it originally appeared — ads, comics, and all. The October 22 paper was 45 pages long. A pull-down menu at the top of the page allows you to choose the page you want to view (there are also forward and

back arrows next to the pull-down menu.) A zoom of 100% allowed me to read anything I wanted to read, though you can zoom in closer if you like just in case you didn’t quite get everything in the Peanuts cartoon.” Legal Research Buzz [via Dave Farber’s Interesting People mailing list]

“Tim Berners-Lee is best known for inventing the world wide web. He reveals its future to Owen Gibson.” Guardian UK

Dear Saddam, How Can I Help? “People from all over the world — including the United States — e-mail Saddam Hussein with advice on how Iraq can defeat America in a

war, offer moral support and even broker business deals.” Wired

Much of what you might want to know about Malvo and Muhammed’s backgrounds. Surprising detail: the FBI in Washington state were alerted to irregularities in Muhammed’s behavior in October, 2001 by the suspicious director of a homeless shelter where he stayed. Washington Post

Jeff Gates has been posting heartfelt reactions to the sniper crisis, and its resolution, at the ever-edifying Life Outtacontext.

Gore Vidal claims ‘Bush junta’ complicit in 9/11: “America’s most controversial novelist calls for an investigation into whether the Bush administration deliberately allowed the terrorist attacks to happen

…Vidal’s highly controversial 7000 word polemic titled ‘The Enemy Within’ – published in the print edition of The Observer today – argues that what he calls a ‘Bush junta’ used the terrorist attacks as a pretext to enact a pre-existing agenda to invade Afghanistan and crack down on civil liberties at home.” Guardian UK

Michael Kazin, co-author of America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s, seeks A Patriotic Left —

There’s no need to mouth the Pledge of Allegiance or affix a flag pin to your lapel or handbag. But to rail against patriotic symbols is to wage a losing battle-and one that demeans us and sets us against the overwhelming majority of Americans for no worthwhile moral or political purpose.

Instead, leftists should again claim, without pretense or apology, an honorable place in the long narrative of those who demanded that American ideals apply to all and opposed the efforts of those who tried to reserve them for favored groups. When John Ashcroft denies the right of counsel to a citizen accused of terrorism or a CEO cooks the books to impress Wall Street, they are soiling the flag and ought to be put on the patriotic defensive. Liberals and radicals are the only people in politics who can insist on closing the gap between America as the apotheosis of democratic strivings and the sordid realities of greed and arrogance that often betray it.

There is really no alternative. In daily life, cultural cosmopolitanism is mostly reserved to the rich and famous. Radical environmentalists and anti-IMF crusaders seek to revive the old dream of internationalism in a version indebted more to John Lennon’s “Imagine” than to V. I. Lenin’s Comintern. But three years after bursting into the headlines from the streets of Seattle, that project seems stalled indefinitely in the Sargasso Sea that lies between rhetorical desire and political exigency. Dissent

Siege survivors ‘suffer poisoning’. CNN: Freed hostages were carried out of the theatre ‘inert and unmoving,’ and have all been hospitalized. Footage of the hostage-takers slain by Russian special forces showed them slumped in their seats in the theatre with bullet holes in their heads, apparently executed after they were rendered unconscious. Russian authorities have so far refused to reveal what gas was pumped into the theatre, even to doctors treating survivors. It is not clear how many of the more than one hundred hostages who died were killed by the Chechen guerrillas and how many succumbed to the gas. WBUR

Pictures from the siege’s end. BBC

“The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued new hand hygiene guidelines here Friday that recommend that healthcare facilities across the nation begin to use alcohol-based hand rubs to cut the risk of spreading germs to patients. Related: “So-called antibacterial soaps are no better at killing germs than ordinary soaps, according to a study presented here Thursday at the Infectious Disease Society of America’s annual meeting.” Reuters Health

The spread of germs from hospitalized patient to patient on the hands of caregivers has been deemed the greatest single contribution to the contemporary epidemic of hospital-borne infections.

… to spend more time in public toilets Yahoo! News

… to spend more time in condoms

Yahoo! News

In other Potter news, the second film in the series opens next month. Director Chris Columbus lauds the lack of “starry nonsense” from cast members BBC

. Leading actor Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry, envies the wizard’s invisibility cloak his character uses in the film — it would be great for slipping free into roock concerts. Reuters

Doubts Grow About Post-Menopausal Hormone Use

Although the hormones have both good and bad effects — raising the risk for heart attack, breast cancer and blood clots while lowering it for osteoporosis and colon cancer — their net effect is harmful in terms of disease prevention. They still have a role in the treatment of symptoms of menopause. But how large a role is a matter of dispute.

Those were among the conclusions that emerged from a two-day meeting held this week at the National Institutes of Health. The gathering was called to assess the immediate consequences of the hormone study results and talk about what new research may be needed. Washington Post

U.S. Failing to Persuade Allies: “Bush is frustrated by lack of support for action against Iraq and N. Korea.” Washington Post

“The engraving could be the earliest archaeological evidence of the existence of the Biblical Jesus, say scholars.” New Scientist

[via liberal arts mafia]

(Remember: regime change starts at home.)

I’ve always wondered how to do this.