What’s a nice boy like David Rees doing with a cult hit comic strip like “Get Your War On”? The Independent Weekly [thanks, David]

‘“Manuscript Found in Zaragoza,” based on a 200-year-old novel by a Polish count, tells the tragicomic tale of the seduction of an 18th-century Spanish-German soldier by a pair of Muslim princesses. Like so many Romantic adventurers and Western fictional heroes, from Lord Byron to Kit in Paul Bowles’s novel The Sheltering Sky, the protagonist is drawn into a sensuous and illusory dreamscape that ultimately leads to his destruction. Directed by one of Spain’s most renowned playwrights, Francisco Nieva, the play has been adapted by him from a book of the same name written by Jan Potocki, a Polish ethnographer and historian, between 1797 and 1815.’ NY Times Arts & Leisure [via Abby]

I saw the labyrinthine, phantasmagorical The Saragossa Manuscript

, a 1965 Polish film from the same source (of which this article makes no mention) directed by Wojciech Has (1925-2000), in the ’70’s when I was in college. Although abit rococo, its complex structure of dreams inside stories inside reveries inside fables, which left the audience reeling and laughing in confusion, haunted me for several decades during which I had lost track of its title and could find no further information about it. Even posting queries on the internet when it became viable a decade later was without results, until I happened to read in the mid-’90’s

that it was reputed to be Jerry Garcia’s favorite film

and that, along with Coppola and Scorsese, he was funding its restoration to its original 175-min. length — in the process learning its name again. The restored version premiered at the New York Film Festival in the fall of 1997, with a posthumous dedication to Garcia. I finally obtained a video copy around two years ago. Potocki’s book has recently reappeared in print, prompted by the revival of the film.

Probably because both films were most suitable for midnight viewing and, if you weren’t in an altered state of mind going into them you would be upon emerging, I often think of Alexandro Jodorowsky’s 1970 El Topo

(“What it all means isn’t exactly clear, but you won’t forget it. “) — anyone else remember this? — in the same vein. Funny, this Bright Lights Film Journal piece on The Saragossa Manuscript leads off with a reference to the latter.

There are rumors, by the way, that

Jodorowsky is working on a sequel to El Topo

with Johnny Depp annd Marilyn Manson in the cast. Here’s a pre-release flyer. Other Jodorowsky ( “I ask of film what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs”) trivia:

• he studied mime with Marcel Marceau
• he ‘signed on to direct a French-American production of Dune, which was to star his son Brontis, Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí and Gloria Swanson. The screenplay he wrote, by some accounts, could have been made into a 12- to 16-hour film. The financial backers pulled out in 1976.’ Dune was of course, disappointingly, made by David Lynch in 1984…
• he ‘was also reported to have scouted locations in Tangier in the mid-80’s with William S. Burroughs for a film of Naked Lunch that was never made’

‘“Manuscript Found in Zaragoza,” based on a 200-year-old novel by a Polish count, tells the tragicomic tale of the seduction of an 18th-century Spanish-German soldier by a pair of Muslim princesses. Like so many Romantic adventurers and Western fictional heroes, from Lord Byron to Kit in Paul Bowles’s novel The Sheltering Sky, the protagonist is drawn into a sensuous and illusory dreamscape that ultimately leads to his destruction. Directed by one of Spain’s most renowned playwrights, Francisco Nieva, the play has been adapted by him from a book of the same name written by Jan Potocki, a Polish ethnographer and historian, between 1797 and 1815.’ NY Times Arts & Leisure [via Abby]

I saw the labyrinthine, phantasmagorical The Saragossa Manuscript

, a 1965 Polish film from the same source (of which this article makes no mention) directed by Wojciech Has (1925-2000), in the ’70’s when I was in college. Although abit rococo, its complex structure of dreams inside stories inside reveries inside fables, which left the audience reeling and laughing in confusion, haunted me for several decades during which I had lost track of its title and could find no further information about it. Even posting queries on the internet when it became viable a decade later was without results, until I happened to read in the mid-’90’s

that it was reputed to be Jerry Garcia’s favorite film

and that, along with Coppola and Scorsese, he was funding its restoration to its original 175-min. length — in the process learning its name again. The restored version premiered at the New York Film Festival in the fall of 1997, with a posthumous dedication to Garcia. I finally obtained a video copy around two years ago. Potocki’s book has recently reappeared in print, prompted by the revival of the film.

Probably because both films were most suitable for midnight viewing and, if you weren’t in an altered state of mind going into them you would be upon emerging, I often think of Alexandro Jodorowsky’s 1970 El Topo

(“What it all means isn’t exactly clear, but you won’t forget it. “) — anyone else remember this? — in the same vein. Funny, this Bright Lights Film Journal piece on The Saragossa Manuscript leads off with a reference to the latter.

There are rumors, by the way, that

Jodorowsky is working on a sequel to El Topo

with Johnny Depp annd Marilyn Manson in the cast. Here’s a pre-release flyer. Other Jodorowsky ( “I ask of film what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs”) trivia:

• he studied mime with Marcel Marceau
• he ‘signed on to direct a French-American production of Dune, which was to star his son Brontis, Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí and Gloria Swanson. The screenplay he wrote, by some accounts, could have been made into a 12- to 16-hour film. The financial backers pulled out in 1976.’ Dune was of course, disappointingly, made by David Lynch in 1984…
• he ‘was also reported to have scouted locations in Tangier in the mid-80’s with William S. Burroughs for a film of Naked Lunch that was never made’

Madame Jujujive from Everlasting Blort

sent me this, as a backdrop to my post Shaming Young Mothers

last week: Earlier Regier article had same message: ‘Florida’s new child welfare chief, who denied last week writing a controversial 1989 essay that condoned spanking even if it produces bruises or welts, wrote another article for a magazine that encouraged the use of ”manly” discipline, and quoted from the Bible: “Smite him with the rod.” The article, which bears Jerry Regier’s name alone, appeared in the July-August 1988 issue of Pastoral Renewal, a religious magazine no longer published. The article is titled “The Not-So-Disposable Family.” ‘ The Miami Herald

Not to mention this:

White House to push “embryo adoption” plan

: ‘Abortion rights advocates worry that the program lays the legal groundwork for considering embryos human beings with full legal rights. Using the term “adoption” rather than “donation” makes it appear that the program views embryos as children, said Kate Michelman, president of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League.’ Salon [thanks, Julie!]

Online advice columns are not usually something I read, or point to, but this blink

was sent to me — without further explanation — by a reader, responding to my invitation to fill my mailbox with URLs while I was away from my surfing last week. Here’s the crux of the mission statement of the columnists, couched in terms of drawing an interesting distinction [emphasis added — FmH]: The difference between Dear Abby, Ann Landers, and Wayne & Tamara.

Wayne and Tamara realized …how often Abby and Ann Landers dodge the question. Those two columnists, 82-year-old twin sisters, are each in their fifth decade of syndication. When they began writing, “see a counselor” may not have occurred to some people. These days it’s a way of avoiding an answer.

The Mitchells decided they would answer each letter in a way that gives the writer deeper understanding. As they often say, their aim is to help people become students of relationships, so they can answer their own questions.

At the time, Tamara remarked, “We need to give each person a direct answer,” and that is how the column became “Direct Answers from Wayne & Tamara

.”

Let’s examine this a little, because IMHO in setting up on the one hand Abby and Ann and on the other ‘counseling’ as straw men, the Mitchells hoist themselves on their own petard of self-contradiction and self-condemnation. Through the unlikely vehicle of an advice-to-the-lovelorn column mission statement, they unveil some deeply held misconceptions they share with the public about the facilitation of personal change. I know, I know, I may be giving this alot more significance than it deserves, but it’s a vehicle, so bear with me…

The term ‘counseling’ — and I hope I’m qualified to have an opinion on this because I took a master’s degree in counseling psychology before I went on to medical school and my subsequent psychiatric training — denotes an ill-defined wastebasket profession-without-portfolio in a permanent identity crisis. Arising from ‘guidance counseling’, it remains caught betwixt and between the effective change agency techniques to which I would refer as ‘therapy’ or ‘psychotherapy’ and the well-meaning handholding, advice-giving and ‘direct answers’ that have no place in therapy but are suitable to coaching, career or guidance counseling… or advice columns. People hang out ‘counseling’ shingles aspiring to do therapy, but do not necessarily have the experience, qualifications, training, or in some cases the sophistication to do so, and their profession does not provide the gatekeeping, quality control, suypervision or rigorous foundations of any of the pathways to a ‘real’ psychotherapy career. The public at large does not understand this distinction. People increasingly use the terms ‘counseling’ and ‘therapy’ interchangeably and increasingly go to ‘counselors’ rather than ‘therapists’ never knowing their potential to be shortchanged — caveat emptor!. [This is partly due to the progressive erosion of support for psychotherapy — for meaningful change — in the funding of mental health in the modern managed healthcare environment.This, however, is a subject for a different diatribe, and a fit I throw here in FmH fairly frequently at that.] I don’t mean, BTW, to disparage the endeavors of any of you readers who describe your professional activities as ‘counseling’; you are probably very good and very effective at what you do; in some cases, I would say you are good therapists, but note I said “not necessarily” above…

The Mitchells don’t understand the distinctions either. They appear not to recognize that their stated goals of providing ‘deeper understanding’, ‘ to help people become students of relationships, so they can answer their own questions’ are precisely the aims of any competent psychotherapy relationship. Then they go on in the very next paragraph to contradict these stated ideals with the conceit of concluding they should provide ‘direct answers’. Uhhh, this would seem to be inimical with helping people answer their own questions, wouldn’t it be? It is certainly the case in bad counseling, it may be the case in all counseling, but is not at all the case in a psychotherapy relationship that facilitating change is invalidated by the client’s tendency to ‘avoid an answer’, as the Mitchells ignorantly characterize it. If change were easy, it would be easy. There would be no grace or art to therapy if there were not a universal human tendency to avoid changing. Working with such resistance — usually in ways so subtle they are never noticed — is the constant subtext of the therapy process and the central skill of forming the therapeutic alliance and facilitating change. It involves grappling with one of the central existential paradoxes all good therapists embrace but the Mitchells seemingly do not grasp — that giving a ‘direct answer’ to someone ‘avoiding answers’ prevents, not facilitates, therapeutic progress. Quite simply, an answer that you do not discover for yourself does not stick to the bones.

To amplify on this abit, here’s how psychotherapy works, regardless of theoretical school. You can skip this paragraph if you want; it is not essential for the argument of the rest of this post; if you read it, please forgive me for oversimplifying abit…:

Distress is largely caused by characteristic ways of doing business with the world that are experienced by the client as inevitable and automatic. Therapy is a relationship enough like every other relationship in the client’s life that they enter into it in the same characteristic ways of doing business. Yet it is different from every other relationship in one crucial respect. The therapist is not only a participant in the relationship but a trained observer of it as well, with the aim of enlisting the client to become an observant participant-observer as well, and the skill to do so. The therapist’s finely honed ability to sort out what is the therapist’s own contribution from that of the client, so that the latter can be an object of study unimpeded; and to gently and subtly overcome the client’s instinctual resistance, allows them to gradually begin to experience their ways of doing business as discretionary instead of inevitable. With the freedom to do things differently comes the ability to avoid recreating one’s characteristic ways of creating distress. The therapeutic relationship can be a ‘laboratory’ for empirical trials of doing things differently which, when solidified, can be implemented in the ‘real’ world. Disparate theoretical schools of therapy differ in whether they involve any explicit discussion of what is happening in the therapeutic relationship — ‘analysis’ — and the balance between discussion of what’s happening ‘in the room’ vs. outside ‘in the world’ the rest of the week; in the relative emphasis placed on present- vs. past-centered, or emotional vs. cognitive, paradigms for describing how one does business. Those differences, however, are IMHO just window-dressing — the ‘hooks’ that enlist the client in the essential participant-observation process. If this process happens in untutored ‘counseling’, it happens inadvertently, instinctively, certainly not explicitly. And, of course, it never happens in advice columns…

So should we not have advice columnists? Certainly not those who do not know their own constraints! It is probably a stretch to tout Ann Landers and Dear Abby as paradigmatic change agents — and I have never been a close enough observer of their columns to know — but their ‘dodging the question’, as the Mitchells put it, is in this sense almost surely much closer to effective therapy — and certainly to recognizing their own limits — than the grandiosity of Wayne and Tamara’s ‘direct answers’. Pitiful… [And what’s up with their innuendoes about A. and A.’s five decades each of experience, syndicated or not??]

Okay, enough, I’ll stop here. The reader who sent me the blink was probably recommending these guys anyway…

“If you don’t see it for yourself, you might not believe it.

A grey blob oozes down the side of a laboratory beaker. It’s heading for the table, but before it gets there a low hum fills the air. Someone just switched on an electromagnet. The goop stiffens, quivers, then carries on oozing only after the hum subsides.” NASA

Sight Unchanged: “In an era when best-of lists and expert polls have degenerated into promotional devices, one poll still has a grip on the imaginations of film aficionados the world round. Every 10 years, Sight & Sound, a venerable British film magazine, asks hundreds of prominent critics and directors to list their 10 favorite films of all time. The first Sight & Sound poll was held in 1952, in the midst of the postwar burgeoning of film consciousness; the survey quickly became an institution, eagerly awaited and endlessly handicapped. The 2002 edition

of the Top 10 poll is now online at the Sight & Sound Web site, with 253 individual lists to pore over.

What makes this poll more compelling than others is that it purports to be a snapshot of the evolving film canon. The 10-year interval between surveys is just enough time for taste to change in the world of film criticism, which has undergone several great upheavals in the 50 years since the poll’s inception… [more

] Slate

Review of Sam Jones’ 2002 I Am Trying to Break Your Heart : “Intending to shoot a documentary about the making of critical fave Wilco’s newest album, Sam Jones found himself handed — gift-wrapped with a bow on top — a classic three-act narrative, replete with surprise turns, stunning rejections, and an emblematic clash with Corporate Rock.” PopMatters

[via Pélican

]

Nicholas Kristof: “Perhaps not since a tribal council in Pakistan ordered a woman to be gang-raped in June has a government treated women with such contempt.” NY Times op-ed

“We believe that [the compound] will replace aspirin and similar drugs in most applications primarily because of a lack of toxic side effects…”

‘Researchers are developing a marijuana-derived synthetic compound to relieve pain and inflammation without the mood-altering side effects associated with other marijuana based drugs.

…The compound, called ajulemic acid, has produced encouraging results in animal studies of pain and inflammation. It is undergoing tests in a group of people with chronic pain and could be available by prescription within two to three years, the researchers say.’ EurekAlert!

I thought of adding a flip comment to the effect that removing the ‘mood-altering side effects’ would take all the fun out of it. On reflection, though, that’s a serious objection; the ‘therapeutic dissociation’ caused by marijuana use is surely an important component of its use in clinically challenging distress such as chronic pain or severe nausea. I would be surprised if, barring that effect, any new drug would be a significant enough advance over existing antiinflammatory medications.

Urge “Drug Czar” Walters to End Relationship with Beer Promoter: ‘The Office of the “Drug Czar” is partnering with Anheuser – Busch beer sponsored NASCAR racer Jimmy Spencer on “anti-drug” messages to America’s youth. This sends a confusing message to kids while legitimizing alcohol as a sponsor of sporting events. Tell John Walters, Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, to end this partnership that sends the wrong message “Don’t Do Drugs, But Beer is OK!” ‘ Action Network

Richard Reeves: “Can perp walks save America from itself? Can perp walks save President Bush from himself and his friends?” Yahoo! News

Scientists Find Signs Big Meteor Hit Earth 3.5 Billion Years Ago:

‘The heat would have killed all single-cell microbes, the only life on Earth at the time, on land and in the upper ocean, which would have boiled into steam. The impact appears to have sent giant tsunamis coursing around the world’s oceans, scouring the early continents.

“The only thing that would have survived would have been bacteria in the deep ocean,” said Dr. Gary R. Byerly, a professor of geology at Louisiana State and the lead author of the article.’ NY Times

Nicholas Kristof: “Perhaps not since a tribal council in Pakistan ordered a woman to be gang-raped in June has a government treated women with such contempt.” NY Times op-ed

I’m off on vacation for a week, sans web access (sans electricity, in fact!). FmH won’t be updated until the 24th or 25th. Consider using the time you would have spent reading FmH to discover a new weblog or two; click on something unfamiliar in my ‘blogroll’ in the left sidebar…

And please

<!–

document.write(‘send me any interesting links’);

// –>

“The president has merely been using firefighters and their families for one big photo opportunity… We will work actively to not grant him another photo op with us.”

‘The International Association of Fire Fighters voted unanimously on Wednesday to boycott a national tribute to firefighters who died on Sept. 11, in an angry response to U.S. President George Bush’s rejection of a bill that included $340 million to fund fire departments.

Bush is expected to speak at the Oct. 6 ceremony in Washington D.C., where the National Fallen Fire Fighters Foundation is hosting its annual tribute to those who died in the line of duty during the prior year.

The ceremony will honor 343 firefighters who died responding to the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, as well as about 100 others who also died in the year.

The IAFF, the umbrella organization for the nation’s professional firefighter unions, is enraged by the president’s rejection of a $5.1 billion appropriations bill that included $150 million for equipment and training grants requested by some of the nation’s 18,000 fire departments.

It also include $100 million to improve the communications systems for firefighters, police officers and other emergency personnel as well as $90 million for long-term health monitoring of emergency workers at the Ground Zero site where New York’s World Trade Center towers once stood.’ Reuters [via Paul Randall]

‘Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), the sometime actor who once said that life in Washington made him “long for the sincerity and realism of Hollywood,” is negotiating to join the cast of “Law & Order” this fall, Hollywood sources report.

Thompson, the first sitting senator to have a lead role in a TV series, is slated to play a newly named district attorney and boss of Executive Assistant DA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) and Assistant DA Serena Southerlyn (Elisabeth Rohm).’ Washington Post [via Spike]

The things you find out browsing the new improved eatonweb

… Today is the self-proclaimed fourth anniversary of Windowseat Weblog by Laurel Krahn (“…among the first weblogs around”, she professes). Her archives

go back to November 1998

anyway. I started up around a year later, but we claim similar blog parentage (Honeyguide and Robot Wisdom), so eatonweb’s genealogy lists us as sibling blogs. Happy blogiversary, sis…

blivet‘s Hal Rager is 47 year old today, and yesterday was the fourth anniversary of his ordination as a Zen Buddhist priest. Hearty wishes, Hal!

A review from the British Journal of Medicine

. Sent by a trusted reader who says it “looks like a handy reference to have around for

us laypeople.”

Only a minority of cancer patients develop psychiatric illness, but other psychologically and socially determined problems are common. These include unpleasant symptoms such as pain, nausea, and fatigue; problems with finances, employment, housing, and childcare; family worries; and existential and spiritual doubts. Well planned care that fully involves patients and their families can minimise these problems…

Not your usual psychedelic explorer:

With his gray beard, shock of white hair, and wrinkled tribal-patterned shirts, he certainly looks the part of a counterculture icon. But unlike Timothy Leary or Terence McKenna, Shulgin doesn’t proselytize for psychedelic drugs. Instead, he invents new compounds, runs experiments to determine their pharmacological effects, and publishes his recipes. His 1976 synthesis of MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine), aka ecstasy, is the best-known result of his work. But he’s also created dozens of other psychoactive compounds, including DOM (2,5-dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine), more commonly known as the potent ’60s psychedelic STP, and 2C-T-7 (2,5-dimethoxy-4-(n)-propylthiophenethylamine), now sold on the street as “tripstasy”and suspected in the overdose death of a Tennessee teenager last year.

Together with Ann, Shulgin has written two books that have become cult classics: PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story (short for “Phenethylamines I Have Known And Loved”) and TIHKAL: The Continuation (about tryptamines). They have long tested his compounds on themselves, in the tradition of scientists a century ago, then written about them in a style that mixes dispassionate technical detail (“A suspension of 9.5 g LAH in 750 ml well stirred and hydrous Et20 was held at reflux under an inert atmosphere”) with wide-eyed psychedelic utopianism (“I saw the cloud toward the west. THE CLOUDS!!! No visual experience has ever been like this.”). His approach inspired the so-called psychonauts, a small group of scientifically sophisticated young explorers who post chemical syntheses, experimental results, and “Train Wrecks and Trip Disasters” at Erowid.org. “Shulgin has given the scientific approach a role model,” says one psychonaut who, under the pseudonym Murple, self-publishes studies on next-generation psychedelics like 2C-T-7. Wired [thanks, David]

“The number of cases of West Nile fever is expected to rise sharply in the next week and could eventually reach 1,000, federal health officials said yesterday. If the current epidemic reflects experience, about 10 percent of the cases will be fatal.

Yesterday, New York City reported its first case of the year.

This year, 169 cases, including 9 deaths, have been reported from 12 states and the District of Columbia, health officials said.” NY Times

Nicholas Kristof: Bush vs. Women: “The Bush administration is allying the U.S. with the likes of Iran, Sudan and Syria to frustrate international efforts to save the lives of third-world women.” NY Times op-ed

Kill the Corporation: “”Good news! A movement exists to transform corporate culture

so completely that the kind of tinkering Washington politicos

now debate pales in comparison.” AlterNet

Emma Jones: Inflaming Child Sex Sickos:

Like everyone else in Britain today, I feel an increasing sense of despair as the search for Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman continues.

But I can’t help thinking that, in a small way, we all share some responsibility for their plight.

Why? Because we live in a society where paedophilia has been allowed to infiltrate our mainstream culture.

Sexy images of children in pop videos, magazines and adverts now appear perfectly normal, even fashionable.

Confusing messages are being beamed into the warped minds of Britain’s 18,500 registered sex offenders, including the 266 in Holly and Jessica’s home county.

In fashion, pop music and TV, our children are being exploited as sex objects.The Sun [via bloggerheads]

Can Weblogs Reach Ronald Scelson?

“The file-trading network’s developers are discovering that even their wide-open, free-for-all technology might need a little policing“:

Last September, the loose affiliation of programmers who monitor the Gnutella file-trading network noticed something strange. The network, a popular hub for MP3 traders, seemed to be suffering a kind of denial-of-service attack, with some people reporting that their machines were inundated with requests for content. Though the attack seemed small, the particular design of Gnutella — a “decentralized peer-to-peer network,” in which each computer routes network traffic — amplified its effects, causing the whole network to clog.

But when the developers got to the bottom of the problem, it turned out that there was no malicious attack — it was just selfish code. A new Gnutella client called Xolox

had recently come onto the network, and in an effort to give Xolox users faster downloads, its programmers had configured the program to frequently “re-query” the network to check for desired files. Such automated requests aren’t unusual — many programmers use the technique to improve their software’s performance on Gnutella; but Xolox re-queried at dizzying speeds, causing headaches for everyone else, while possibly improving downloads for its own users. Salon

Dissidents ‘injure’ Saddam’s son in Baghdad shooting: “The London-based Iraqi National Congress (INC) said a resistance group had tried to assassinate President Saddam’s younger son, Qusay, while he was in a motorcade in one of Baghdad’s more up-market districts on 1 August. It said he was shot in the arm.” Independent UK

“Woody Norris wants to tell you something—and he can put the words inside your head from 100 yards away. Is his invention sound, or just a pipe dream?” Newsweek

Two critical mutations appeared roughly 200,000 years ago in a gene linked to language, then swept through the population at roughly the same time anatomically modern humans began to dominate the planet, according to new research.

The findings, released online yesterday and due for publication soon in the journal Nature, provide the most compelling evidence to date that the gene, which researchers described in detail only last year, may have played a central role in the development of modern humans’ ability to speak. Researchers said that could have given them a critical advantage that allowed them to supplant more primitive rivals…

The research indicates the genetic mutations may at least partly explain why humans can speak and animals cannot. Researchers are likely to try to introduce the genetic mutations into mice as part of their work, but they said many other genetic changes would likely be necessary to produce a talking animal, and several said they doubted anything of the sort would ever be possible, let alone desirable.

The new research was led by Svante Paabo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. He and his colleagues were careful not to claim in their paper that they had identified the key molecular event in the birth of human culture. But the paper added fresh evidence to the notion that they have identified at least one of the keys. Washington Post

Investigation Casts Light on the Mysterious Flying Black Triangle:

They are big, black, and triangular. In UFO folklore they are proof-positive that planet Earth is a rest stop for joyriding, but road-weary, extraterrestrials.

A just released study by the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), based in Las Vegas, Nevada, sheds new light on the dark and mysterious craft. They offer a more down-to-earth hypothesis.

NIDS researchers contend that these type vehicles are lighter-than-air, blimp-style craft of the U.S. military’s making. Likely powered by “electrokinetic” drive, the lifting body-shaped airships have been skirting the skies from perhaps the early to mid 1980s. space.com

“New York was the first major city in the United States to prohibit driving while talking on a cell phone. Now a city councilman wants cell phones banned in public places throughout the city, including libraries, movie theaters and museums.” Wired

Execution pits Mexico against U.S.:

The unexpected cancellation by the president of Mexico of his visit to President George W. Bush’s Texas ranch – in a blunt objection to the execution of a Mexican national – has given Bush his highest-level indication yet of the breadth and depth of near-global opposition to the death penalty in America.

.

Over strenuous objections from Mexico and the European Union, Javier Suarez Medina was put to death Wednesday in Texas for the murder of an undercover policeman in Dallas in 1988. A few hours after the execution, a spokesman for President Vicente Fox of Mexico said, “It would be inappropriate, in these lamentable circumstances, to go ahead with the visit to Texas.” The cancellation “is an unequivocal signal of rejection of the execution,” said the spokesman, Rodolfo Elizondo. International Herald Tribune

70 South is a weblog from Antarctica:

70South is a (if not the) leading independent news and information resource on Antarctica and other polar related topics. Besides being Interactive and updated daily with the latest news and information on and about Antarctica, the site has an ever increasing amount of reference and educational information. In addition the site contains a dynamic events calendar with exhibit information and links, famous quotations, hundreds of links, art, games, pc wallpapers and graphics.

The eatonweb portal has been beefed up: “(W)ith the new additions, i’m keeping track of weblog name, url, description, country, state, region, language, category(s), keywords, birthdates, parent/children/sibling weblogs, author’s sex, author’s birthdate, ratings and reviews.” The 6000 weblogs listed are asked to update their database entries with the new categories of information; mine’s done. I especially like the blogtree-like genealogy concept; if you are a weblogger who was inspired to blog by reading FmH, please build the net of data by entering me as a ‘parent blog’. You can also rate or review me:

J. Cogn. Neurosci. — Abstracts: Lloyd 14 (6): 818

Functional brain imaging offers new opportunities for the study of that most pervasive of cognitive conditions, human consciousness. Since consciousness is attendant to so much of human cognitive life, its study requires secondary analysis of multiple experimental datasets. Here, four preprocessed datasets from the National fMRI Data Center are considered…

This exploratory study thus concludes that the proposed methods for “neurophenomenology” warrant further application, including the exploration of individual differences, multivariate differences between cognitive task conditions, and exploration of specific brain regions possibly contributing to the observations. All of these attractive questions, however, must be reserved for future research. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

Malcolm Gladwell: “Can you read people’s thoughts just by looking at them?”

Many years later, Yarbrough met with a team of psychologists who were conducting training sessions for law enforcement. They sat beside him in a darkened room and showed him a series of videotapes of people who were either lying or telling the truth. He had to say who was doing what. One tape showed people talking about their views on the death penalty and on smoking in public. Another featured a series of nurses who were all talking about a nature film they were supposedly watching, even though some of them were actually watching grisly documentary footage about burn victims and amputees. It may sound as if the tests should have been easy, because we all think we can tell whether someone is lying. But these were not the obvious fibs of a child, or the prevarications of people whose habits and tendencies we know well. These were strangers who were motivated to deceive, and the task of spotting the liars turns out to be fantastically difficult. There is just too much information—words, intonation, gestures, eyes, mouth—and it is impossible to know how the various cues should be weighted, or how to put them all together, and in any case it’s all happening so quickly that you can’t even follow what you think you ought to follow. The tests have been given to policemen, customs officers, judges, trial lawyers, and psychotherapists, as well as to officers from the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the D.E.A., and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms— people one would have thought would be good at spotting lies. On average, they score fifty per cent, which is to say that they would have done just as well if they hadn’t watched the tapes at all and just guessed. But every now and again— roughly one time in a thousand—someone scores off the charts. A Texas Ranger named David Maxwell did extremely well, for example, as did an ex-A.T.F. agent named J.J. Newberry, a few therapists, an arbitrator, a vice cop— and John Yarbrough, which suggests that what happened in Willowbrook may have been more than a fluke or a lucky guess. Something in our faces signals whether we’re going to shoot, say, or whether we’re lying about the film we just saw. Most of us aren’t very good at spotting it. But a handful of people are virtuosos. What do they see that we miss?

[…]

Friesen and Ekman then combed through medical textbooks that outlined each of the facial muscles, and identified every distinct muscular movement that the face could make. There were forty-three such movements. Ekman and Friesen called them “action units.” Then they sat across from each other again, and began manipulating each action unit in turn, first locating the muscle in their mind and then concentrating on isolating it, watching each other closely as they did, checking their movements in a mirror, making notes of how the wrinkle patterns on their faces would change with each muscle movement, and videotaping the movement for their records. On the few occasions when they couldn’t make a particular movement, they went next door to the U.C.S.F. anatomy department, where a surgeon they knew would stick them with a needle and electrically stimulate the recalcitrant muscle. “That wasn’t pleasant at all,” Ekman recalls. When each of those action units had been mastered, Ekman and Friesen began working action units in combination, layering one movement on top of another. The entire process took seven years. “There are three hundred combinations of two muscles,” Ekman says. “If you add in a third, you get over four thousand. We took it up to five muscles, which is over ten thousand visible facial configurations.” Most of those ten thousand facial expressions don’t mean anything, of course. They are the kind of nonsense faces that children make. But, by working through each action-unit combination, Ekman and Friesen identified about three thousand that did seem to mean something, until they had catalogued the essential repertoire of human emotion.[via David Walker]

Global Warmth for U.S. After 9/11 Turns to Frost

:

What happened, many Americans are wondering, to that wave of sympathy and stockpile of global goodwill they encountered after Sept. 11?

“It was squandered,” says Meghnad Desai, director of the Institute for Global Governance at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a member of the House of Lords.

“America dissipated the goodwill out of its arrogance and incompetence. A lot of people who would never ever have considered themselves anti-American are now very distressed with the United States,” he says.

Desai and others blame what seems to be a wave of new U.S. policies that they regard as selfish and unilateral, stretching back to President Bush’s refusal last year to support the international treaty on global warming. USA Today

Michelangelo Signorile: The Gist:

It was pretty perverse to pick up The New York Times last week and read that the Vice President of the United States of America, a still free and open democracy (despite John Ashcroft’s best efforts), had surfaced in “a rare public appearance,” in which he defended his administration’s economic policies and spoke out against corporate misconduct.

A rare public appearance. This is a term that, I recall, was used often when the media would discuss the late film star Greta Garbo and the weird recluse Howard Hughes. But a vice president? With regard to world leaders–and let’s face it, Dick Cheney, who everyone agrees is one of the most powerful vice presidents we’ve had, is a world leader–”rare public appearance” has been applied in the past to, oh, say, the devious, mysterious autocrats who run the People’s Republic of China. More recently it’s been applied to none other than Saddam Hussein. The point is not that Cheney is a communist or a lunatic, but this: Leaders who are afraid of what lies out there in people’s minds live underground. NY Press

Via boing boing, the debut of Gizmodo — the gadgets weblog. And: Bill Barnes (Webhead

) explains why gearheads aren’t buying the latest gadgets. Slate

Go get ’em, Maureen:

President Bush tried to fix the economy before lunch yesterday.

He managed to last for 20 minutes each in four economic seminars at Baylor University. He dutifully scribbled some notes as participants talked, looking as happy as a high school kid in trig class, and bounded out of his chair when Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill told him he could be excused.

“Yes, well,” a visibly relieved Mr. Bush said, jumping up after an exhausting 18 minutes in “Economic Recovery and Job Creation,” “that’s the life of the president. Always has to go.” NY Times

Ludicrous, transparent, contemptible and (one of my favorite adjectives since November, 2000) risible — these come to mind to describe this soundbite “economic summit”. Say what you will about the NY Times; anyone continuing to bring us the public service of Maureen Dowd’s acerbic observations is all right in my book. More, much more, in the same vein collected here on BookNotes

— William Saletan, including William Saletan and Robert Kuttner.

But, Craig, you missed one — Joe Conason: Bush’s TV Show Lacking in Reality

:

The Waco forum was about as authentically significant for economic policy as the President’s “ranch” in nearby Crawford is for his credentials as a cowhand.

George W. Bush has learned from experience that if he emphasizes his Texas drawl, slaps on his cowboy hat and talks as if he’d never set foot in Andover, Yale and Harvard (let alone Kennebunkport and Greenwich), most people will buy the down-home shtick. The ranch is a perfect backdrop for this political persona, as a New York Times reporter observed last weekend in comparing the uses of the Bush ranch with the L.B.J. ranch (although the author neglected to note that Mr. Bush only bought his place in 1999, the year he decided to run for President). Surely George W. loves that Crawford spread, but his appearances there also help everyone forget that his favorite steed is neither a horse nor a pickup. It’s a golf cart.

The “economic forum” TV show performed similar functions of harmless deception and cheap reassurance. It was meant to demonstrate that this frequently vacationing President is actually a diligent executive; that he’s worried about those who have trouble “making ends meet”; that he listens to (and is listened to by) the powerful and the important as well as humble wage earners and shopkeepers. New York Observer

Camps for Citizens: Ashcroft’s Hellish Vision LA Times [via Looka!]

…has temporarily changed its name to Virulent Memezilla “prompted by Toho Ltd’s clueless attack on Davezilla.”

…of Philip K. Dick by his friend science fiction writer and cartoonist Ray Nelson; a whimsical but disquieting evocation.

Here’s some of who Nelson is:

Ray says he became captivated with science fiction at the age of eight at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. “I was just there one day, but that was the most important day of my life because before that I was not a science fiction fan and after that day I was”. After that, he began reading science fiction and fantasy novels voraciously, and became a science fiction fan and cartoonist.

In the 1950s, he moved to Paris, where he met Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs among others of the Beat Generation. He subsequently co-edited Miscellaneous Man, the first “Beatnik” little literary review. In Paris, he worked with Michael Moorcock smuggling Henry Miller books out of France…

In 1967, he published his first novel, The Ganymede Takeover in collaboration with Philip K. Dick.

Numerous books and short stories have followed. His book Blake’s Progress, in which the poet William Blake and his wife are travelers in space and time, has been his greatest critical success. His short story 8 O’Clock in the Morning, was turned into the comic book story Nada, and Nada was made into the paranoid cult classic They Live in 1988. This John Carpenter film has shown remarkable staying power.

His greatest claim to fame, however, he says, is as inventor of the propeller beanie

while still in high school. Says Ray, “Centuries after all my writings have been forgotten, in some far corner of the galaxy, a beaniecopter will still be spinning.”

Also: Nelson’s Checklist of Fiction Faults and what to do about them.

Speaking of PKD:

• a gallery of more than 500 cover scans of his books
  
  .
• theses and dissertions on PKD
  
  
• a collection of poems by Anne Dick, PKD’s ex-wife (with a fair degree of preoccupation about her divorced and later deceased ex-husband)
• review of the 2000 documentary by fans Andy Massagli and Mark Steensland, The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick
  
  , which interviews Ray Nelson, Jay Kinney, Robert Anton Wilson, D. Scott Apel and Paul Williams, among others, about Dick’s last days, his paranoid and mystical experiences, anamnesis and exegesis etc. Disinformation
  

‘In-N-Out, founded on the West Coast in 1948, is that rarest of chain restaurants: one with a cult following. Exalted both by hamburger fans and those who normally shun fast food, it has built its reputation on the rock of two beliefs: fast food should be made from scratch, and the whims of the customer should be entertained.

Even Eric Schlosser, author of the muckraking book Fast Food Nation, is a fan.’ NY Times

Related: the In-n-Out website.

Sushi Cooks Are Rolling Their Own:

“When takeout sushi, mostly in the form of tuna maki, the classic rice and fish roll wrapped in seaweed and sliced into disks, started turning up at supermarkets in Atlanta and Nashville several years ago, it was a sign that the sushi landscape in the United States was becoming more . . . well, Japanese. In Japan, sushi can be found in the finest restaurants, in subway kiosks and in most places in between. About the only place sushi isn’t prepared in Japan, in fact, is in the home.

Here, though, that’s not the case. If home cooks from New York to Iowa to Los Angeles are any indication, Americans are embracing sushi-making with abandon and, like the generations that introduced pizza and lo mein to home kitchens, are tinkering with the original recipes and creating a hybrid food that is a lesson in technique, flavor and — most important — freshness.” NY Times

FBI probing ‘war chalking’? This is from Dave Farber’s IP mailing list; a reprint of a leaked memo from a Pittsburgh FBI agent suggesting that the FBI is watching ‘war chalking’:

Identifying the presence of a wireless network may not be a criminal

violation, however, there may be criminal violations if the network is

actually accessed including theft of services, interception of

communications, misuse of computing resources, up to and including

violations of the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Statute, Theft of

Trade Secrets, and other federal violations. At this point, I am not

aware of any malicious activity that has been reported to the FBI here

in Pittsburgh, however, you are cautioned regarding this activity if you

have implemented a wireless network in your business.

It goes on to point readers to the now-famous .pdf of war chalking symbols, warning that “if you notice these symbols at your place of business”, your network has likely been compromised.

‘A misconfiguration in the bureau’s domain name setup meant that many visitors to FBI.gov could not get through. As of 11 a.m. PT, the FBI’s configuration problem had been fixed.

The apparent error also wiped out the online presence of the FBI’s high-tech crime unit, the National Infrastructure Protection Center, at NIPC.gov.’ CNET

Why George Bush is scared of Ron Kirk:

“This is our Colin Powell,” says Rufus Shaw, who worried that Kirk was too conservative as mayor of Dallas. “This is as close as a black politician can come to being inoffensive to the Anglo community, without becoming a Republican. If Texas doesn’t vote for him, it’s going to say something about Texas, and it will not be very good.” The New Yorker

Seasonal Depression Can Accompany Summer Sun: “No one looks forward to spring more than people with seasonal affective disorder, who grow depressed in the waning light of winter. A smaller group of people, however, suffer on the opposite side of the calendar.” NY Times

‘Tired of Playing those same old boring Board Games? Well, the folks at Underground Games, Inc., a black owned game company, have come up with the most fun and interesting board game concept too ever hit the Market. Life As A BlackMan the Game is the first and only board game to depict life from the perspective of a minority. “This is the party game for the next millennium,” says Chuck Sawyer, C.E.O. Underground Games, Inc. ‘

“A sinister cabal of the web’s best writers on music, books and popular culture miscellanea.”

Incredible speculation found at kuro5hin.org:

According to DEBKAfile :

“Tuesday August 6, at 0800 hours Middle East time, US and British air bombers went into action and destroyed the Iraqi air command and control center at al-Nukhaib in the desert between Iraq and Saudi Arabia.”

If that was all, I wouldn’t have given it a second glance, as stuff like that has been going on for a few years now. But the following is what caught my eye:

“Turkey Seizes Critical Bamerni Airport in North Iraq – Hurriyet. Strategic Airfield Now Occupied by Turkish 5,000-Strong Force With US Special Forces Troops”

Now, admittedly DEBKAfile is far from being impartial or unbiased, so read it with ‘a pinch of salt’, or a handful if you like. But their military analyses have proved to be mostly correct on a number of occasions in the past – they seem to have several excellect sources in the international intelligence community. Also their layout is rather counter-intuitive, but that’s besides the point.

Meg Hourihan: Giving Rise to the Professional Blogger:

“During that weekend, I came to a realization that I’ve been mulling over ever since: a lack of money is hindering the growth and potential of blogging. Free–or personal–blogging can only take us so far.

Most financial discussions focus on blog content and explore donations, advertising, or some type of sponsorship/patronage model as the means to compensate bloggers. Very little progress has been made towards finding viable economic models because people still think of Weblogs as personal sites. If you aren’t Andrew Sullivan (who purportedly makes $6,000 per month on his site through donations), it’s hard to imagine how you’d get the traffic and donations to generate such revenue…

What I propose is slightly different: make it a commercial endeavor and hire an experienced blogger. Engage someone who’s already proven they can filter, condense, and write. Work with someone who can blog day in and day out for more than a month or two. The idea here is to find an enthusiast, empower them, and fund them, not to dump blogging onto someone’s day job, or it’s not likely to succeed.

Think of what some of the best bloggers could do if they were financially able to do focused, full-time blogging? Pick a topic you’re interested in, now imagine someone had 40 hours per week to cover everything related to that topic, and you get the idea. ” O’Reilly Network

From David Brake:

“I suppose in retrospect it was inevitable – a little Windows program

that claims to always keep you up to date with the latest state of anti-terrorism alert in the US.

If you are interested, the place to find that information on the web is here

.”

Godzilla Getting Ready to Stomp Mozilla?

AlterSlash

The husband, technology writer Simson Garfinkel: “2-way pagers keep folks close at hand“; the wife, free-lance editor, novelist and homemaker Elisabeth Rosenberg: “Family demands put technology to shame

“. Seattle Times

‘Scattered around our planet are hundreds of creatures that have been to the Moon and back again. None of them are human. They outnumber active astronauts 3:1. And most are missing.

They’re trees. “Moon Trees.”

NASA scientist Dave Williams has found 40 of them and he’s looking for more. “They were just seeds when they left Earth in 1971 onboard Apollo 14,” explains Williams. “Now they’re fully grown. They look like ordinary trees–but they’re special because they’ve been to the Moon.” ‘ NASA

Reproductive Freedom:

“In June 2001, The Nation reported on the case of Dr. James Scott Pendergraft, an African-American abortion provider in Florida who had been convicted on federal charges of attempted extortion. A hero of reproductive rights advocates, who ran five clinics in the state, Pendergraft felt his case had clearly been about abortion, not extortion. The Nation fully agreed.

To recap: After Pendergraft threatened to sue the city of Ocala for inadequate protection of his clinic during a meeting with local officials, the feds accused him of trying to squeeze money out of the county commission, and stuck him with the extortion charge. Facing a predominately white, conservative jury and tricky prosecution, Pendergraft was found guilty and sentenced to forty-six months in a federal penitentiary in January 2001.” [thanks to David Walker]

‘For all the violence, the story will not end on a low note. “Our first inclination was that he die,” Mr. Winick said. “Then within 24 hours Bob and I both came back and said: I don’t think we can kill him off. That’s the cliché in all mediums. Who dies in movies? Gay people, people of color. Killing him seemed like too much. We wanted a little bit of hope.” ‘ NY Times

The Cheney Factor: “Mr. Cheney says his service as vice president is the most rewarding experience of his professional life and he would be happy to run for a second term if Mr. Bush wishes. But Mr. Cheney does not serve Mr. Bush well by dodging questions about Halliburton, or repeatedly declining to identify the people who were consulted by his energy task force last year. At a moment when Americans are looking to the government to help remedy the nation’s economic ills, Mr. Cheney looks more like part of the problem than the solution.” NY Times editorial

‘ “We need to have a country all our own,” Rocco decides. “It would be like this, all the time.” ‘ On the rails with the new freedom riders:

We’re heading to Dunsmuir to explore this curiously American phenomenon, which, despite rumors of its death dating back at least a half-century, seems to be catching on again. Men (and until recently, it has been largely men) began riding freight trains after the Civil War, when enough track had been laid to make it worthwhile, and enough dislocated veterans had become averse to staying still. Since then every major war and economic downturn has seen a return to the rails, providing a sort of shadow history of America, a constantly mobile underground of migrant workers, radicals, dreamers and thieves, misfits of all kinds who didn’t mesh with the societal weave. During the depressions of the 1890s and 1930s, it was a common if not entirely acceptable way for working-class men to get around in search of wages. In the ’30s, Frank Czerwanka, one of Studs Terkel’s sources in Hard Times, recalled, “When a train would stop in a small town and the bums got off, the population tripled.”

… The world looks different from a freight train. There’s no heat and no a/c. No meals are served. The restroom is wherever you find it. There are no buttons to push or cords to pull when you want off. The train goes where it wants when it wants to, and sometimes doesn’t go at all. It doesn’t care about your wishes. It doesn’t like or want you, doesn’t even know you’re there. It can kill you without a thought, can leave you behind, maimed and bleeding, without a moment of remorse. There’s no getting around it — it’s ridiculously romantic.LA Weekly

Related: Here is an online gallery by Virginia Lee Hunter, a trainhopping photographer.

How to make a friend



How to make a friend:

Go into any bar and get stinking drunk.

Loudly announce you are

A sailor on leave.

Mutter that the end of the world

Is coming soon::::but you don't

Know exactly when.

Say out loud to no one

In particular that

'Citizen Kane' is the greatest

movie ever made::::

'Anna Karenina' the greatest

novel ever written::::

Duchamp's  broken glass

Was illuminating::::

Say 'Rocky and Bullwinkle'

Vomits all over

'Beavis and Butthead.'

Once again loudly announce

You are a sailor on leave.

Pay your bill::::leave a tip,

And leave.

Everyone in the joint

Will be very happy.



On your swaying journey

Bump into at least

Three lamp-posts::::

Excusing yourself profusely.

Think of jumping into

The river::::but there is

No river::::so forget about it.



Find a payphone and call

A random number and tell

Them they've been specially

Chosen::::that you are the president

Of Lithuania, and need advice.

Ask the first stray dog

You see for a dance,

Then wait patiently

Together for the music

To begin.  Sit at a bus-stop

Wait for someone to sit

Beside you and strike up

A pleasant conversation,

And when they finally ask

You what you do for a living,

Say you're a phenomenologist::::

But right now you're

In between jobs.

Go into a convenience

Store and ask the cashier

What they think the time is,

And when they point

To the clock on the wall

Say, yes, but what do you

Think the time is.

Chase a few birds.

Pick up a feather or two.

Go into McDonald's

And request a job

Application.  Go to the

Library, challenge the

Librarian to a game of

'hide.and-seek':  You are it::::

and when she runs

to hide::::quietly slip out

the front door.  Return

to the street::::enter a

restaurant::::sit down::::

order an egg sandwich.

After it arrives, place

A feather or two in it,

Take a bite::::open the

Sandwich, hail the waitress

Over and point to the

Feather(s)::::"There are

Feathers in my egg"

Become indignant, get up::::

Mumble about not paying::::

Go out.  If you are bitten

By a snake, catch

the snake (recommended)

to take to the emergency room::::

otherwise you must

make a drawing of the

snake, or grab a camera and take

its picture, or rush headlong

to the library to find

a book to check out

with a picture of the

snake in it (Where is she!)::::

or, you can simply describe

the snake to the doctor

in hopes that your description

is accurate enough::::otherwise

you just might receive

the wrong anti-venom.

When in the emergency room

Be sure to whine.

Walking down the street again

Smile to everyone who is the

Exact same height as you,

Snarl to those who are

Taller, and stick your tongue

Out to those who are

Shorter.  Return to the

Stray dog, who is of course

Still sitting there waiting

Patiently for the music to begin.

Take his forepaws in your

Hands, and begin humming

A melody, then begin dancing

With the dog.  This is your friend.

— William Fairbrother

Graffiti is metastasizing again throughout New York City. “The guys out here now are destroying us,” says Bruce Pienkny, who makes a living removing graffiti from factories and retail stores from Riverdale to the Rockaways. “Every other day, new tags are popping up. The cops got no chance against it.”

But if the New York Times’s culture editors are to be believed, New Yorkers should be thrilled. Every few months, the paper of record disgorges itself of an article breathlessly celebrating graffiti vandalism as a vital urban art form. Among the bad ideas that the New York Times has floated over the years, few compare to the newspaper’s glorification of graffiti for sheer destructive stupidity. City Journal

“Improvements in emergency care over the past 40 years have helped to dramatically lower the death rate among assault victims by nearly 70 percent and, in the process, decrease the nation’s murder rate, according to a new study.” Nando Times

Bill Thompson: “There is, at last, some evidence that the main commercial sites are realising that this aggressive advertising does not work.“ BBC WebWise

New Orchid Species Leaves Admirers Amazed:

“Described as the most spectacular orchid find in the last 100 years, the new species has led to jaw-dropping effects throughout the world of orchid fanciers.”

New York Times

The Ad Council : Campaign for Freedom:

‘Developed following the tragedies of September 11th, the Ad Council’s Campaign for Freedom is an unprecedented volunteer effort from the advertising industry. The initiative is designed to assist Americans during the war on terrorism through the development and distribution of timely and relevant public service messages. This first round of PSAs for the campaign has been created to celebrate our nation’s freedom and remind Americans about the importance of freedom and the need to protect it for future generations.

According to research, Americans are looking for messages that will inform, involve and inspire them during the war on terrorism. This inspirational campaign is advertising’s gift to America on the occasion of its birthday, Independence Day. All of the ads conclude with the powerful tagline, “Freedom. Appreciate it. Cherish it. Protect it.” ‘

‘Main Street USA’, the weakest of the bunch, is pure flag-waving (literally…). ‘Church’, ‘Library’, and ‘Diner’ revolve around a “What if America weren’t America?” theme, wryly acknowledging that the threat to the country since 9-11 comes not just from the terrorists but the Justice Dept. as well. [Requires a broadband connection].

Sam Smith writes:

A study by the Progressive Review of national and Florida polls during the 2000 election indicates that Ralph Nader’s influence on the final results was minimal to non-existent.

The Review tested the widely held Democratic assumption that Nader caused Gore’s loss by checking changes in poll results. Presumably, if Nader was actually responsible for Gore’s troubles, his tallies would change inversely to those of Gore: if Gore did better, Nader would do worse and vice versa.

In fact, the only time any correlation could be found was when the changes were so small – 1 or 2 percentage points – that they were statistically insignificant…

Democrats tend to think of Greens as wayward members of their party, which is why they try to browbeat them rather than convincing them. In fact, the Greens have less and less in common with the Democratic Party – especially since the latter refuses to stand up against the Bush war, greedy globalization, and the disintegration of constitutional government. Progressive Review

Brendan O’Neill: “If there was a strong opposition to Western intervention, then it might well be discussed in terms of competing rights – the right of the West to do as they please versus the sovereign rights of smaller nations. Instead, at a time when pretty much everyone accepts that Western powers should ‘do something, anything!’ about corrupt, victimised and poor states, all we hear is the word ‘responsibility’. “

“Can hallucinogenic drugs lead to profound spiritual experiences? In an article published for the first time in the UK, the Nobel prizewinner Octavio Paz reflects on experiments with mescaline undertaken in the 1950s by the French poet and artist Henri Michaux

“:

Miserable Miracle opens with this phrase: “This book is an exploration. By means of words, signs, drawings. Mescaline, the subject explored.” When I had read the last page, I asked myself whether the result of the experiment had not been precisely the opposite: the poet Michaux explored by mescaline. An exploration or an encounter? An encounter with mescaline: an encounter with our own selves, with the known-unknown. A great gift of the gods, mescaline is a window through which we look out upon endless distances where nothing ever meets our eye but our own gaze. There is no I: there is space, vibration, perpetual animation. Battles, terrors, elation, panic, delight: is it Michaux or mescaline? It was all already there in Michaux, in his previous books. Mescaline was a confirmation. Michaux can say: I left my life behind to catch a glimpse of life. Guardian UK

excerpts from i am writing to you from a far-off country

i.

We have here, she said, only one sun in the month, and for only a little while. We rub our eyes days ahead. But to no purpose. Inexorable weather. Sunlight arrives only at its proper hour.

Then we have a world of things to do, so long as there is light, in fact we hardly have time to look at one another a bit.

The trouble is that nighttime is when we must work, and we really must: dwarfs are born constantly.

ii.

When you walk in the country, she further confided to him, you may chance to meet with substantial mases on your road. These are mountains and sooner or later you must bend the knee to them. resisting will do no good, you could go no farther, even by hurting yourself.

I do not say this in order to wound. I could say other things if i really wanted to wound.

iv.

I add one further word to you, a question rather. Does water flow in your country too? (I do not remember whether you have told me so) and it gives chills too, if it is the real thing.

Do I love it? I do not know. One feels so alone when it is cold. But quite otherwise when it is warm. Well then? How can I decide? How do you others decide, tell me, when you speak of it without disguise, with open heart?

v.

I am writing to you from the end of the world. You must realize this. The trees often tremble. We collect the leaves. They have a ridiculous number of veins. But what for? There is nothing between them and the tree any more, and we go off troubled.

Could not life continue on earth without wind? Or must everything tremble, always, always?

There are subterranean disturbances, too, in the house as well, like angers which might come to face you, like stern beings who would like to wrest confessions.

We see nothing, except what is so unimportant to see. Nothing, and yet we tremble. why?

Nothing, and yet we tremble. Why?

xi.

She writes to him again:

You cannot imagine all that there is in the sky, you would have to see it to believe it. So now, the… but I am not going to tell you their name at once.

In spite of their air of weighing a great deal and of occupying almost all the sky, they do not weigh, huge though they are, as much as a newborn baby.

We call them clouds.

It is true that water comes out of them, but not by compressing them, or by pounding them. It would be useless, they have so little.

But, by reason of their occupying lengths and lengthsm widths and widths, deeps also and deeps, and of puffing themselves up, they succeed in the long run in making a few droplets of water fall, yes, of water. And we are good and wet. We run off furious at having been trapped; for nobody knows the moment when they are going to release their drops; sometimes they rest for days without releasing them. And one would stay home waiting for them in vain.

— Henri Michaux (5/24/1899 — 10/17/1984)

Is It Good to be Clean? “Although these results have no immediate clinical applicability, the hygiene hypothesis has emerged as a possible explanation for the increase in allergic disease. Increasingly, parents are becoming aware of this hypothesis and are asking pediatricians about it. If this provocative hypothesis is proven to be true, the implications for hygiene practices in developed countries are enormous.” Journal Watch: Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine

French Village Declares Itself Hub of the Universe: “Pougne-Hérisson, which last made history, briefly, in the 13th century when the English besieged the chateau in Hérisson (or maybe it was Pougne), declared itself 12 years ago to be a magical site on a footing with the Pyramids and Stonehenge. All the stories in the world, all the literature, all the jokes, all the fairy-tales, originated in Pougne-Hérisson, the village announced. What justification did it have for such a claim? None whatsoever.” Independent UK [via New World Disorder]

‘In the universe of marketing tools for charitable causes, the ”adoption” concept has seen wild success. Since excess litter sparked the first Adopt-A-Highway program along a stretch of Texas highway 18 years ago, ”adopted” roads have sprung up in nearly every state, and people have adopted everything from killer whales to greyhounds to sewer pipes.

But a group of Massachusetts adoptees and their parents say the word adoption should be reserved for humans. Joining what some say is a growing national movement against the language of ”adopt-a-cause,” they have launched a drive to change the signs planted at frequent intervals along many roads.

”Adoption means something very different than what you do with a highway. It’s not about temporarily fixing something up…” ‘ Boston Globe

“Raptor electrocution is a particularly tenacious problem in the West and Southwest, where open landscapes make powerlines the most dominant and attractive feature on which birds choose to alight. It is tough to quantify the exact number of birds killed this way every year; many are scavenged immediately by other predators, and while U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents are able to investigate some of the cases that occur, they can’t possibly count them all due to the sheer magnitude….

The good news is that cost-effective technology is now available to make electrical equipment bird-friendly. Beginning in the mid 1970s, law enforcement agents in the Mountain-Prairie Region began an effort to work in partnership with power companies to identify and repair equipment that killed raptors.

There is no boilerplate solution. Increasing the distance between lines, installing insulation on wires and transponders, and providing perches away from wires are only three in an options cornucopia developed by private-sector engineers.”

Mark Fiore explains Why we should invade — right now! Salon; on the other hand, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorializes that there is No way for Bush to justify unprovoked war with Iraq:

…President Bush has yet to offer a concrete, convincing explanation why the United States should launch a major war against Iraq without any clear provocation, without any significant international support, and over the objections and even pleadings of those in the Arab world who have otherwise been our allies.

Nor has the president accepted the reality that he needs congressional approval before launching such a war…

We have …an administration trying to sell a pre-emptive war on the basis of weapons that Iraq might have, and whether it might give those weapons to terrorists. There is no evidence that Hussein has even contemplated such a step, and considerable history to the contrary. For at least 20 years, Hussein has had access to chemical weapons and has never once let them out of his control.

Furthermore, endorsing the concept of pre-emptive war as a legitimate use of power is extremely risky. It is essentially the rationale imperial Japan used to justify its attack on Pearl Harbor more than 60 years ago.

Meanwhile, The Washington Times (not exactly your most reliable source, however), reports the Administration as saying

that the Joint Chiefs of Staff are, finally, all behind the invasion of Iraq concept. Next, For Bush, a New Vulnerability:

“Late last week, the Republican National Committee distributed a memo that unintentionally spoke volumes about how the political ground has shifted for President Bush. The memo’s headline trumpeted four areas of accomplishment for the president, but it did not include the war on terrorism or homeland security.”

Washington Post

Finally

Joshua Micah Marshall expounds on “Why the myth of Republican competence persists,

despite all the evidence to the contrary” Washington Monthly

Bush drops protection on medical files “The Bush administration on Friday officially eliminated many protections for the privacy of medical records by issuing final rules that allow doctors and hospitals to distribute patients’ health information without the patients’ written approval.” Chicago Tribune

A reader asked me to comment on this move. I started getting incensed, and wrote about it, when these changes were first proposed several months ago. This is, simply, a travesty and a giveaway to Bush’s friends in the healthcare and insurance industries. Just as they did with the estate tax reform, Administration arguments about the benefits to the little guy (under the restrictive Clinton regulations, what would a pharmacist do for written consent for a prescription that had been phoned in and was being picked up by a relative?) serve to obscure the corporate giveaway at the heart of this plan. Don’t listen to any arguments about making clinical communication more efficient; this is all about making fiscal communication about a patient’s history more efficient and less controlled by the true owner of your health information, you. Patients with fewer safeguards will probably be less willing to speak in candor to their physicians and physicians less likely to record sensitive facts.

Case puts focus on the role of drug firm representatives: “When embattled doctor David C. Arndt walked out of a surgical procedure to run to the bank, he was allegedly driven there not by a medical colleague but by a sales representative for a medical device company who was visiting his operating room.” Boston Globe

‘In the universe of marketing tools for charitable causes, the ”adoption” concept has seen wild success. Since excess litter sparked the first Adopt-A-Highway program along a stretch of Texas highway 18 years ago, ”adopted” roads have sprung up in nearly every state, and people have adopted everything from killer whales to greyhounds to sewer pipes.

But a group of Massachusetts adoptees and their parents say the word adoption should be reserved for humans. Joining what some say is a growing national movement against the language of ”adopt-a-cause,” they have launched a drive to change the signs planted at frequent intervals along many roads.

”Adoption means something very different than what you do with a highway. It’s not about temporarily fixing something up…” ‘ Boston Globe

Ex-Army Scientist Denies Role in Anthrax Attacks: “(Steven) Hatfill was once a highly respected researcher and teacher of biological warfare. Now he is doing neither. Since February, he has lost one job and been suspended from another. He had seemingly dedicated his life to combating biological terrorism, but his has become the leading name in the investigation into the most dramatic act of bioterrorism that America has ever seen.” This Washington Post story catalogues alot of suspicious circumstantial evidence against Hatfield, including the fact that the fictitious return address on the anthrax letters is in Zimbabwe where he went to medical school, that he lied about his credentials; that he removed several cabinets suitable for working on anthrax from the lab he worked in at Fort Detrick. Yet it is all circumstantial; the FBI’s tosses of his home have revealed nothing incriminating. Looks like we’re starting to see a pattern at The New FBI® of leaking suspicions about high-profile suspects, regardless of what it does to their lives if they ultimately are exonerated, to deflect criticism about lack of progress in their investigations.

“The Tate Modern Museum has launched a new online resource for visually impaired users to access the works of Picasso and Matisse.”

Wired

“A growing number of young black musicians are turning to rock ‘n’ roll because it allows for a greater range of subjects and emotions than hip-hop.”

Perseid Meteor Shower Peaks Sunday & Monday:

“Every August, just when many people go vacationing in the country where skies are dark, the best-known meteor shower makes its appearance. As with many celestial phenomena, there’s some curious lore surrounding the shooting stars of the annual Perseid meteor shower.” Yahoo! News

Jerry would have been sixty last week; today is the seventh anniversary of his death.

Brainwaves Differ in Troubled Youngsters; Researchers Pinpoint Frontal Brain:

Parts of the brain involved in judgment, planning and decision-making are different among teenagers with conduct problems, according to researchers Lance Bauer, Ph.D., and Victor Hesselbrock, Ph.D., professors in the Department of Psychiatry at the UConn Health Center.

Earlier research has shown that most people diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder begin to display significant behavioral problems in childhood, which often leads to substance abuse and dependence, and may led to criminal behavior. According to the researchers, this study attempted to identify differences in brain activity that might explain this risk factor.

Their study involved 158 youngsters aged 14 to 20 years, half of whom had demonstrated conduct disorder and half had not…. After comparing the responses in the two groups, Drs. Bauer and Hesselbrock found a significant difference. “The brainwaves from the prefrontal cortex of the youngsters with conduct problems showed reduced activity,” said Dr. Bauer. “There was no significant difference between the groups in other areas of the brain. It appears that conduct problems are associated with a specific dysfunction of the frontal brain,” he said.

“Identifying these troubled youths is a step toward helping these youngsters avoid a future of substance abuse and criminal behavior,” said Dr. Hesselbrock.

I’m hardpressed to see the import of this study. I think it was in Moliere’s Le Malade Imaginaire that the doctor, asked to explain why opium poppies put users to sleep, replied with a self-important fluorish that it was (paraphrasing) “of course, my esteemed colleagues, that they contain a dormative principle“, as if that explained anything.[Oops; I used that one already

last year. — FmH] Bauer and Hesselbrock are hardly less tautologous, once one accepts that behavior is brain-based. It has long been known, particularly from time-honored studies of the behavioral changes caused by brain lesions and injuries in various regions, that the prefrontal cortex mediates inhibition of impulses, planful activity, and (see below*; it is only a small stretch to say) appreciation of social norms and the ability to conform one’s behavior to them. So it is a trivial finding that conduct-disordered youths differ from controls in prefrontal activity.

Perhaps what troubles me is the ‘granularity’ of the study, if you will. Using EEG, rather than PET scanning, SPECT scanning, functional MRI, or some newer imaging technologies, allows nothing better than the large-scale regional conclusions (“It’s the prefrontal area”) that we already recognize. Further quibbles: this press release from AScribe does not indicate, but let us hope that the journal article makes it clear, whether the study was blind, i.e. whether the the EEG readers knew whether the tracing they were interpreting came from a conduct-disordered subject or a control before they rated its prefrontal activity. Finally, the neuropsychology of impulse control, aggression and antisociality is quite poorly understood and there are few resources to treat disorders in this sphere, so I wonder, from a practical standpoint as well as a social policy one, exactly how Dr Hesselbrock, in the final quotation above, would plan to “identify” or “help” these youths. [Perhaps he’s just seen Minority Report?]

*Coincidentally, the latest issue of the journal Brain has this very pertinent editorial by Antoine Bechara from Iowa, making my *above point — The Neurology of Social Cognition:

“Impairments of emotion and social behaviour are often observed after damage to the ventromedial (VM) region of the prefrontal cortex Previously well-adapted individuals become unable to observe social conventions and decide advantageously on personal matters. Their ability to express emotion and to experience feelings in appropriate social situations becomes compromised. Studies aimed at understanding the nature of these deficits revealed that impaired ‘judgement and decision-making’ is at the heart of the problem…’ “

Severyn T. Bruyn: Studies of the Mundane by Participant Observation:

Participant observation is a method that can be used to study the mundane as a paradox. A paradox is created in the tension of human differences and in the pressure of opposing beliefs. We shall see shortly how the mundane is a paradox and studied in the midst of conflicting views, but let me first note how the method of observation is a paradox. This method stands with two opposite standpoints, both of which are true. The question is how that opposition gets resolved in a study of the mundane.

The method is based on the idea that truth is found inside one’s self and outside at the same time. It is a tension between two very different sources of truth.

We are personally involved inside a mundane world and simultaneously outside it. We are participants in the mundane, but equally separated from it as observers. We live in this tension of difference between involvement and detachment, constantly. We are between our identity with the world and our non-identity with it. The answer to what is mundane stands in the tension of such opposite standpoints. The question is how we can get to the truth about our subject. Journal of Mundane Behavior

Daniel P. Mears: The Ubiquity, Functions, And Contexts Of Bullshitting “Abstract: Bullshitting is an essentially social phenomenon worthy of investigation. In support of this view, I provide a definition that provides the basis for suggesting the ubiquity and diverse functions of bullshitting, and how it occurs in and is structured by a wide range of interpersonal and social contexts. Drawing upon illustrations from research, everyday life, and classical and contemporary theories, I argue that the study of bullshitting can inform and be informed by social theory. In so doing, an illustration is provided of (Robert) Merton’s (The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, 1973) observation that investigation of seemingly trivial social phenomena can yield insight not only into these phenomena but also into basic dynamics of social behavior.”

Journal of Mundane Behavior

Emotional Selection in Memes: The Case of Urban Legends: “This article explores how much memes like urban legends succeed on the basis of informational selection (i.e., truth or a moral lesson) and emotional selection (i.e., the ability to evoke emotions like anger, fear, or disgust). The article focuses on disgust because its elicitors have been precisely described….(L)egends that contained more disgust motifs were distributed more widely on urban legend Web sites…” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Annual Perseid meteor shower underway: “Early-rising sky watchers this week have spotted 10 to 25 meteors per hour in the pre-dawn sky. Even more will appear on August 12th and 13th when the shower peaks.” SpaceWeather.com

Donald Dutton PhD: “A new theory is proposed to account for individual differences in the tendency to be abusive, assaultive, or homicidal in intimate relationships. The focus of this theory is on men whose abuse is specific to intimate relationships and is manifested through cyclical mood swings. This group, which appears to comprise about 40% of all men who present for treatment for wife assault, appears to have a borderline personality structure. For these men, abusiveness is triggered by internal mood states rather than by external events. Several studies are cited indicating that intimate attachment generates rage in wife assaulters. The origins of this attachment-rage are traced to early development. This template generates a complex of perceptions (attributions and projections) and behaviors (abusiveness) specific to intimate relationships.” Journal of Psychiatric Practice 2002 July;8(4):216-228.

Malcolm Gladwell reviews Eric Klinenberg’s Heat Wave: The great Chicago heat wave, and other unnatural disasters

The United States has cities that are often humid—like Houston and New Orleans—without being tremendously hot. And it has very hot cities—like Las Vegas and Phoenix—that are almost never humid. But for one long week, beginning on Thursday, July 13, 1995, Chicago was both. Meteorologists measure humidity with what is called the dew point—the point at which the air is so saturated with moisture that it cannot cool without forming dew. On a typical Chicago summer day, the dew point is in the low sixties, and on a very warm, humid day it is in the low seventies. At Chicago’s Midway Airport, during the heat wave of 1995, the dew point hit the low eighties—a figure reached regularly only in places like the coastal regions of the Middle East. In July of 1995, Chicago effectively turned into Dubai. The New Yorker [thanks, Adam; thanks, David]

“Suburban assault vehicle not coming to a dealer near you…

The sport utility vehicle that rolls out of the Ibis Tek shop looks just like those driven by millions of soccer moms.

But with a flip of the switch, out of the sunroof pops weaponry ranging from a .50-caliber M2 machine gun to an MK-19 40 mm grenade launcher…” CNN

Zappa Fest Descends on German Town: “…(T)he little town of Bad Doberan, in an economically depressed area near the Baltic Sea, has become the unlikely site of an annual Zappa festival. This week, the town also dedicated a bronze bust of the late American musician in its central square.” Yahoo! News

Has Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD, or BSE) entered the Canadian food supply? Authorities insist the man must have contracted the disease in Britain, where he lived and worked in the ’90’s. The cattle industry fears that a North American case will impact beef sales as has been the European and Japanese case after BSE scares. Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), a spongiform encephalopathy (or prion disease) similar to BSE that affects ungulants, has been known in Canadian elk and deer populations since 1996, and three deer near where the victim lived in Saskatchewan have recently died of CWD, but he apparently did not eat venison or elk. Although CJD was suspected in the man’s case since April, the definitive CJD diagnosis was not made until a brain biopsy after he died, and now fears have arisen of “possible transmission to 71 other patients at a Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, hospital who came into contact with medical equipment previously used on the vCJD victim.” Reuters AlertNet Shares of McDonald’s and Wendy’s stock fell sharply on the news; Taco Bell and Outback Steakhouse as well…. Reuters

New Method Said to Solve Key Problem in Math:

“Three Indian computer scientists have solved a longstanding mathematics problem by devising a way for a computer to tell quickly and definitively whether a number is prime…

Prime numbers play a crucial role in cryptography, so devising fast ways to identify them is important. Current computer recipes, or algorithms, are fast, but have a small chance of giving either a wrong answer or no answer at all.

The new algorithm — by Manindra Agrawal, Neeraj Kayal and Nitin Saxena of the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur — guarantees a correct and timely answer. Though their paper has not been published yet, they have distributed it to leading mathematicians, who expressed excitement at the finding.” NY Times

You can download a .pdf file of the paper itself from here

Joan Houlihan: How contemporary American poets are denaturing the poem (part V) Web Del Sol