“It seems what we think we know about lefties is not right at all.” National Post

US maps out Iraq invasion A document leaked to the New York Times has detailed the logistics of a possible all-out invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. BBC

“If you want to be your own boss and make money working from home while increasing the size of your penis and shopping for cut-rate electronic products from China — you’re in luck.

The quantity of e-mailed advertising pitches for these and other fabulous opportunities is about to increase dramatically, according to research by Bob West, an anti-spam activist.” Wired

Man fires up monster grill: “Neighbors thought Michael Goldman was crazy when they saw the crane lift his 1,800-pound barbecue grill into the air, over his house, around the trees and into his back yard…” Columbus Ledger-Enquirer

Russia proposes manned mission to Mars Miami Herald [via Slashdot]

“Power Nap” Prevents Burnout; Morning Sleep Perfects A Skill:

“Evidence is mounting that sleep – even a nap – appears to enhance information processing and learning. New experiments by NIMH grantee Alan Hobson, M.D., Robert Stickgold, Ph.D., and colleagues at Harvard University show that a midday snooze reverses information overload and that a 20 percent overnight improvement in learning a motor skill is largely traceable to a late stage of sleep that some early risers might be missing.” Science Daily

Woman sues over unsolicited Prozac mailing. In my continuing coverage of the pharmaceutical industry’s lack of scruples, this takes the cake (so far). This Florida woman, who took Prozac briefly seven years ago but not since, and from a different pharmacy (although part of the same national mega-chain; don’t get me started on that aspect of the story!), opened her mailbox to find a free, unsolicited sample box of the new once-a-week formulation of Prozac being pushed by Eli Lilly to hold on to market share as the patent on the original formulation expires. The pharmacy chain that did the mailing — funded by Lilly to the approximate tune of $63 wholesale for the four pills — says it was only responding to doctor’s orders, and indeed Lilly had apparently arranged for an area medical practice to provide prescriptions to the pharmacy. A form letter congratulated recipients of the samples on taking the first step toward their recovery, after instructing them to stop their daily Prozac one day before taking the first of the weekly pills. Obvious problems with this picture include the fact that someone accessed her confidential prescribing record for marketing purposes; the lack of control over who received and opened the mail (children?); the potential public exposure of the fact that she was, or had been, treated for depression if the delivered package was conspicuous; the lack of any medical decision-making about whether a switch to the weekly form was medically indicated, and whether it was safe in conjunction with whatever other medical conditions she had or other medications she was taking; and the scumsucking bottom-feeding behavior of the MDs who Lilly probably hired to sign bunches of these ‘prescriptions’ for their patients and former patients. My question — for every recipient of these samples who protests and/or files suit, how many simply start taking the freebies, with or without stopping their existing Prozac (if they’re on it) as instructed in the form letter? SJ Mercury News

A journey and a book are perfect companions: Alain de Botton explores the pleasures and quirks of summer reading, especially when travelling. He endorses ‘reading against the grain’ — that is, books ‘inappropriate’ to the locale to which we have travelled — which I love to do. He also finds it a ‘cherished illusion’ that we will have scads of time to read while travelling, but I actually do get a far greater density of reading for pure pleasure done while away than at home. [probably because I take a break from weblogging!] And 165 short book reviews from the 9th century, and one man’s view of ten top novels on campus, from a writer who teaches Shakespeare at a Montreal university. [links courtesy of Robot Wisdom]

elgooG

Eight Cities in Patriot Act Revolt: “Over the last three months, the Massachusetts cities of Cambridge, Northampton and Amherst and the township of Leverett, as well as the town of Carrboro, N.C., all passed resolutions that call the USA Patriot Act a threat to the civil rights of the residents of their communities.” ABC

FmH gets a notice in The Guardian‘s collection of weblog links. Thanks to whichever Follower mentioned us to them, and a hearty welcome to any readers coming this way from there.

Heard on Metafilter: ‘Former BBC anchor David Ickes, who claimed he was “the son of god” in 1991 has got a new job at the Sci-Fi channel ranting. In Network, anchor Howard Beale has an on air nervous breakdown. Instead of taking him off the air, the network gives him a weekly show to rant to the nation. Oddly, Icke’s idea about reality is very similar to Philip K. Dick’s Valis, Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles and a recent mefi discussion.’ The Guardian asks, also about Ickes: “Would Canada take seriously his warnings of power-hungry extraterrestrial reptiles or would he be dismissed as an anti-Semitic bigot?”

Bush’s Insider Connections Preceded Huge Profit on Stock Deal: “It has been widely reported that Texas Gov. George W. Bush made money over the years with a little help from his friends. But new details show that he served on an energy corporation’s board and was able to realize a huge profit by selling his stock in the corporation because an accounting sleight-of-hand concealed it was losing large sums of money. Shortly after he sold, the stock price plummeted. That profit helped make him a multimillionaire.” public i What will the Administration do to try to close this barn door after the horse is gone?

I feed RSS now, having just discovered the feature is enabled in Blogger Pro. You’re welcome to it; the file you want is http://gelwan.com/follow_rss.xml.

“…(W)e’ve built a major black-is-white logic reversal into the very nature of the threat: Although we’ve killed countless members of the enemy group, including much of its leadership, disrupted its infrastructure, captured reams of intelligence on its activities, it’s suddenly stronger than ever before. Likewise, we ascribe substantial organizational talents to what we also describe as uniquely disorganized. This new group has become, the Times story implies, a threat not least of all because it is less a group than the former group, which itself was notable for its loose-knitness (although, in comparison with the new group, the former group was apparently a model of central governance). By the logic we are applying to Al Qaeda and its offspring, we can never prevail. Whatever we do to thwart the enemy just makes it stronger. We are always, because of our size and power and resources, necessarily weaker. (Al Qaeda has something similar, perhaps, to the ghostly powers the Vietnam-era guerrillas were credited with having over conventional military forces.)…” New York Magazine [via Adam]

…when it comes to the G spot: “Drugs such as Viagra should work for some women – especially if they have a big G spot. This spot, famed for producing spectacular orgasms, turns out to be awash with the enzymes that these drugs act on.” New Scientist

The new power elite and life after capitalism by

Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist : “The netocracy, say pundits Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist, will be the new

power elite, controlling networks – both social and digital – and displacing

the bourgeoisie as the ruling class. Its members will understand that

equilibria and static positions are boring and artificial approximations, and

dynamic fluxes are neither. And that interesting logical structures are not

tree-like hierarchies, but are interconnected in potentially very complicated

ways – what Deleuze called the “rhizome” – just as Web pages, genes and

friendship networks are.” New Scientist

could be described as a jazz monologist and comic known for retelling biblical and classical tales in beat lingo. He had a profound influence on a whole generation of comedians, including Robin Williams, Tommy Smothers, and Jonathan Winters, but he’s not a household name. Oliver Trager’s just-published biography, Dig Infinity!, 12 years in the making, hopes to remedy that…” Listen to a July 1st feature on Lord Buckley from NPR’s Morning Edition, including audio clips from some of his transcendent monologues.

Lord Buckley’s “The Nazz”

 Now, I look at all you cats and kitties out there 

a whippin' and a wailin' and a jumpin' up and down 

and suckin' up all that juice and pattin' each other on the back 

and a hippin' each other who the greatest cat in the world is. 

Mr. Malenkov, 

Mr. Talenkov, 

Mr. Eisenhower, 

Mr. Whoozerwheezer, 

Mr. Whiserwhooser, 

Mr. Woodhill, 

Mr. Beachhill, 

an' Mr. Churchill, 

and all them other hills gonna get you straight, 

and if they can't get you straight 

they know a cat that knows a cat who'll straighten you... 

If you maintain a weblog with a list of recommended blogs (the term coming into favor seems to be a ‘blogroll’), you might want to consider maintaining that list with the Blogrolling Link manager instead of handcoding it into your template. When I surf to a blog I want to add to my sidebar, I can now do so with a single click, after setting up a ”Blogroll this!” link to my browser toolbar. And the will tell readers which sites have been updated recently (within the last two hours). If a weblog on my list is pinging weblogs.com, a mouseover on the link should pop up the time of the last update.

By the way, if you’re linking to me, I would appreciate it if you would use “http://gelwan.com/followme.html” as the URL. There are so many other ways out there of reaching FmH that it is very hard for me to aggregate data about who is linking to me. In the Touchgraph of links to FmH (see just below), for example, there are actually several distinct nodes for FmH using different URLs.

TouchGraph GoogleBrowser V1.00: definitely deserves to be played with. Doesn’t work for me in Mozilla, may be IE-specific. And requires the Java runtime environment (JRE) 1.3+.

The official Richard Thompson site is up.

 

"Web site humming

Digit-throbbing

Fibre-strobing

Electron-dancing

Slender pathways

Pulse with fragments

All our little

Mice connected

May we grasp you

Better better

Xml you

Inter-eyebrow

Down the foggy

Chains of network

To your laptop

Stream a dream." 

[via Looka!]

Why the president stopped listening to Powell:

“In the seemingly endless litany of Middle East violence, it was two suicide bombings in two days last week that fractured Yasser Arafat’s tenuous relations with the Bush administration once and for all.

The president’s rose garden address on Monday not only marked a clear break with the past in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it also reflected a decisive shift in the constellation of forces within the administration itself, which have blown US policy back and forth for the past 18 months.” Guardian UK

Essentially — Colin Powell drags Bush kicking and screaming into the realms of statesmanship, only to find that Bush doesn’t have the taste, the grasp, the aptitude, or the henchmen to sustain the effort at diplomacy. Will Powell be marginalized further in the Administration, or extruded totally?

Keeping track” of the war exhortations of the warbloggers.”

Brendan O’Neill writes: “While President Bush and Prime Minister Blair stand shoulder to shoulder, their forces in Afghanistan can barely see eye to eye.” The American Prospect. O’Neill, a London-based journalist and editor at spiked, has his own weblog here, in which he writes more about the Bush-league US-UK fractiousness.

Also: “Senior officials in the Prime Minister’s office have launched an astonishing attack on America’s handling of the hunt for Osama bin Laden and al-Qa’eda fugitives.

They have told The Telegraph that troops carrying out house-to-house searches in the remote tribal areas of Pakistan along the Afghanistan border were “blundering” with a “march-in-shooting” approach.

The US action was “backfiring”, increasing support for terrorism and making it harder for bin Laden and his henchmen to be caught.”

And: John Simpson writes: ‘Arrogant’ Bush shakes British bedrock of Atlantic Alliance

“In 32 years of reporting on international affairs, I have never seen Britain and the United States more separated from each other: not during the terrible last years of the Vietnam War, not during President Reagan’s Iran-Contra dealings or his espousal of the crackpot Star Wars system.

The way George W Bush’s administration deals with the outside world is affecting even the most traditionally pro-American elements in British society.

On two occasions last week I met senior civil servants from government departments in London who would normally be regarded as the natural bedrock of support for the Atlantic Alliance. In both cases I found open contempt for current American policy, especially towards the Middle East.”

Telegraph UK [gratitude for all of these links to the relentless Blowback]

Brooke at Bittershack linked to this essay by mental health attorney Nils Riis with admiration. Now, do I just have a blindspot as a defensive psychiatrist, or is it the kind of overblown us-vs.-them diatribe someone writes just to be politically correct and pitifully self-righteous? Sentiment like this was important, true, necessary and moving to all of us in 1962 when Kesey wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But especially if Riis is a mental health advocate attorney it would be fitting forty years later for him to show some recognition that, although the legal process is adversarial, the psychiatrists and other mental health personnel caring for the psychiatrically distressed are by and large not the enemy but concerned helping professionals. Except as a literary conceit.

The ‘eagle’ character in this piece is in fact a dangerous caricature of the mentally-ill-as-romantic-hero right out of R.D. Laing and the antipsychiatry movement of the ’60’s. I know, I was there, as an ‘antipsychiatric’ psychiatric ward attendant long before I went to medical school and became a psychiatrist, clutching my volume of Laing and doing my best to convince the patients that their peer-to-peer work with me was much more important than cooperating with their psychiatrist. Both phases of my career have been equally passionate commitments to the rights and welfare of the psychiatrically ill; my thinking has just gotten abit more sophisticated and realistic and less misguided along the way. (Isn’t it usually true that there’s no scorn like that of a religious convert for the doctrine from which s/he has converted?)

Laing was a genius in phenomenological description of the inner world of the schizophrenic and humanizing him or her as a distressed-One-of-Us (rather than the Other we often make our mentally ill to be in this society); I still use Laing’s 1959 The Divided Self as an unsurpassed depiction of the disease in my teaching of medical students and residents. Fine to champion resistance to stigmatization and dehumanization… but he lost me when he started to proclaim that the process of the breakdown, the psychotic episode, should not be interrupted by treatment because it represented some sort of heroic struggle to remake oneself by breaking free of the mold of the oppressive socialization paradigm of modern society. He forgot his own phenomenological insights about the unbearable suffering psychotic patients undergo, a torment that caregivers have an obligation to relieve and need considerable specialized training and technique — both psychological and psychopharmacological — to address effectively. Laing descended into irrelevancy and, ultimately, it appears, madness himself.

Riis tries to sound like Laing, or his similarly overboard American counterpart Thomas Szasz, as he goes on,

Outside the hospital, my clients face troubles far more challenging than the ones inside their heads. There is stigma, of course, often compounded by the crippling effects of poverty. There is the growing sense that the public needs protection from people with mental health problems. There are economic policies that brush aside the people who struggle hardest in day-to-day life. There is environmental degradation, the postmodern religion of unsustainable growth, consumption, and production.

Hey buddy, work for peace, social justice, human dignity, basic economic equity, environmental protection all you like. Subvert the dominant paradigm that generation by generation perfects its relentless ability to empty lives of meaning. But do a different kind of good work inside the mental hospital, one that is collaborative rather than polarizing against all those good mental health professionals working for the same ideals. Most of us in the mental health field are passionately committed to the civil rights and human dignity of our patients — unfeeling people primarily motivated in career choice to amass power, glory or riches don’t go into the psychiatric field, believe it or not — and have welcomed the advances in mental health and involuntary commitment statutes that make your diatribe little more than an unreal caricature. The troubles your clients face outside the hospital are emphatically not “far more challenging than the ones inside their heads”, except maybe the challenge of being made figureheads for the ignorant (even if, as I’ll grant you is possible, well-intentioned), misguided and self-serving agendas of people like you, Riis. Among the patient rights for which you should be advocating is their right to relief from the unimaginably tormenting and not at all romantic suffering of their psychiatric conditions.Your patients are not simply people who chose to crow in imitation of a bird of prey in a public place, no matter how loudly. There are all sorts of arbitrary social oppression and intolerance of deviance in modern society, but the mental health field in western society is not a tool of social oppression or even conformity. (There is, by the way, a less histrionic, considerable body of scholarly work within sociology and social psychology which attempts to see ‘madness’ as a result of social labelling or attribution. But, at the risk of making a blanket dismissal, I’ll make a blanket dismissal. It doesn’t work.)

As the superintendent of my psychiatric hospital and a treater of patients with the most severe mental illnesses of psychotic extent, I frequently testify at commitment hearings to keep people in the hospital when they present an imminent risk (to themselves or others around them or are so substantially impaired by their illness as to be incapable of caring for themselves in a less restrictive setting) and no recognition of their need to seek help to avert such harm. Ethically, I buy into this degree of paternalism when it is strictly based on substantial imminent risk; barring potential to harm someone, people have a right to be mentally ill, to refuse treatment, and live their lives unimpeded, and in such cases I facilitate their rapid release from the hospital in accordance with their wishes. Those that need to be committed, however, are represented or assisted at such a hearing by an attorney, usually court-appointed. The best of these attorneys know that their obligation to do what is best for their patients means being a thoughtful, supportive facilitator of their clients’ collaboration with their hospital caregivers. The worst, like Riis would probably be if I ever faced him in a courtroom, would be cutting off their clients’ noses to spite their faces, insisting on their clients’ release at all cost.

This AdBusters “Prozac spotlight” goes on, if you click the arrow down at the bottom and continue to surf, with a disclaimer. The author, he says, is not being critical of the people who work in mental health, who ‘take care of the rejects,’ ‘after all, somebody’s got to’. He boldly proclaims himself to be ‘attacking the theories of psychiatry’ instead. This is either naive or somewhat disingenuous or both, since there is perhaps less separation in psychiatry than any other healthcare discipline between theory and practice. They configure each other in a dialectical relationship shaped by the empirical experiences of thoughtful and responsible practitioners.

Moving along, we come to a long, yellow-journalism rewarming of the old stories about antidepressant-induced suicide and violence and the wrongful death lawsuits against the pharmaceutical manufacturers which have ensued. It is full of the same half-truths, poorly designed research, and irresponsible unwarranted conclusions about which I have written before. Modern antipsychiatrists have reacted with glee to the discovery of akathisia, the syndrome of agitation and restlessness various psychiatric medications can cause. Not the root of all evil, but a side effect for prescribers to be aware of and manage conscientiously. There are very few free lunches; most therpeutically useful medications, throughout medicine, have costs as well as benefits.

Finally, AdBusters assembles a useful collection of ‘mad movement’ resources that empower, dignify and support ‘survivors’, refuseniks, outsiders… and prideful lunatics.’

Note to Brooke: Whatever the depths of your clearly ambivalent feelings about your own treatment (about which you are quite candid), I fear they color your reading of Riis’ piece, which really has very little if anything to say about antidepressants or the ‘walking wounded’ depressed patients, who are even less victims of psychiatric oppression than hospital-level patients with psychotic illnesses. I agree when you write —

“The truth is, we need the drugs to be available, and they often do work temporary miracles, and that is not a minor truth. But they are not the end, only the means. They are the life-preserver in the moment of near-drowning. They are not a substitute for swimming lessons.”

In fact, I think I said much the same down below in reacting at length to last week’s New York Times piece on new antidepressant developments. And I write often here in disgust about the industrialization of psychiatry and the commodification of prescribing. But Riis, Laing, Szasz, and the otherwise perspicacious AdBusters (to which I’m a subscriber and longtime contributor, admiring and joining in their fight against ‘mental pollution’) should not be your champions on this issue…

Thanks to mark wood, here’s a more realistic view of what you get when you fight to release the patients from the psychiatric hospital — Fighting the Demons on $930 a Month by Ted Schrecker:

Imagine A psychiatric hospital in which accommodation is often unclean and sometimes unsafe; violence against patients by people just passing through is common; patients are left largely on their own to feed (or not feed) themselves; and some cannot afford the medications that enable them to function.

Even in these hardened times, the existence of such a hospital would be considered a scandal. Nevertheless, many Canadians must fight the demons of serious mental illness under precisely such conditions — no longer in hospital, but now in that abstraction called “the community.”… Toronto Star

From Mohammed Dahlan, until last month head of the Palestinian Authority’s security organisation in Gaza, a member of the Fatah leadership and an adviser to Yasser Arafat, and has been regarded as a possible successor to Arafat: “Far from setting out a vision of peace, President Bush’s plan for the Middle East points instead to an American decision to give up on the peace process. What has effectively been done is to transform a series of demands of the international community and international law into a series of demands to be made of Yasser Arafat. It also gives a new meaning to the word democracy, where our leaders are to be chosen by others.” Guardian UK [via Also Not Found… ]

‘The Advantages and Limitations of Calmatives for Use as a Non-Lethal Technique, a 49 page report obtained last week by the Sunshine Project under US information freedom law, has revealed a shocking Pentagon program that is researching psychopharmacological weapons. Based on “extensive review conducted on the medical literature and new developments in the pharmaceutical industry”, the report concludes that “the development and use of [psychopharmacological weapons] is achievable and desirable.” These mind-altering weapons violate international agreements on chemical and biological warfare as well as human rights. Some of the techniques discussed in the report have already been used by the US in the “War on Terrorism”.’

This comes, [via New World Disorder]

from the Sunshine Project, “an international non-profit organization with offices in Hamburg, Germany and Austin, Texas, USA. We work against the hostile use of biotechnology in the post-Cold War era. We research and publish to strengthen the global consensus against biological warfare and to ensure that international treaties effectively prevent development and use of biological weapons.”

Dan Hartung wonders. In asking the question, naturally, the related question of when they realized it was World War II comes up. The answer is, at least to me, surprising. lake effect

Politikblogging and “empty protest”, a soliloquy from garrett vreeland:

i’ve been thinking about the concept of kenosis, as interpreted by james hillman. comparing it to political weblogging styles. he concieves there are three political states: passive on the sidelines, toeing the party line … and kenosis, what hillman defines as “empty protest.” having no answers, not knowing the correct course to follow, but knowing there’s something rotten in the state of denmark. politikblogs are as ineffective as hamlet, worrying his desire for public justice like a dog with his favorite toothsome discard. they rage on impotently, endlessly, simply for the sake of releasing emotions. no utopia at the end of the journey; just neverending protests. today, now, this link is the alpha and omega. when the issue drops from the public eye, the politikblog drops it as well. there are no threads to follow, no connection to a past or a future, no resolution, no responsibility. hillman calls empty protest ‘via negativa’, the negative way. i see no politikblogger achieving public justice for any major issue; what i keep coming across is simply a string of petty private revenges. at the present time, politikbloggers devour each other over the actions of politicians who don’t even know they exist, by reinterpreting carefully selected articles and opinion pieces generated by one of a double-handful of monopolistic media machines, as seen through the rose-colored glasses of their particular political caste. truly, “empty protest” … as is this entire paragraph. politipolitikbloggers are not alone; you see, i do hamlet well too. [wink]

American mujahid describes terror fight: ” Aqil Collins, an American Muslim freedom fighter who fought in Chechnya, Bosnia and Kosovo, says he volunteered to infiltrate bin Laden’s camp.” CNN

Wouldn’t the sentence ‘I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign’ have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?

Andrew Lipson’s Mathematical Lego Sculptures: Klein Bottle, Moebius Strips of various sizes, etc. [via slashdot]

Judge Says Executions Violate Constitution. The assault on the death penalty continues:

‘A U.S. district judge in New York ruled yesterday that the federal death penalty is unconstitutional because it creates “undue risk” of executing innocent defendants, the latest sign that DNA exonerations of death row inmates have begun to affect the way courts and legislatures think about capital punishment.’

This ruling is based not on the usual ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ foundation but due process concerns. Washington Post

Staggering AIDS Report From U.N.:

‘The global AIDS epidemic has only just begun, reaching proportions once considered impossible in the world’s most affected countries, the United Nations says in a devastating report released Tuesday.

HIV is spreading at alarming rates in Eastern Europe and Asia and “now outstrips even the worst-case scenarios” projected by epidemiologists tracking the deadliest disease in human history, the report says.’ Wired

Why Toshiba won’t sell you the coolest laptop around: “I’ll go out on a limb and claim that without advances in speech or handwriting recognition, a laptop’s footprint can’t get substantially smaller than this and still remain usable. You can’t get any smaller without shrinking the keyboard to the point where you can’t touch-type.” Slate

…but at Home in a Britannia All His Own: “The mutability of identity, the way people can slip in and out of personas to fit the occasion and confound and mollify others, is exactly what engages (british novelist Hari) Kunzru in his recently published first novel, The Impressionist. The book tells the story of Pran Nath Razdan, born in early 20th-century India to an English father and an Indian mother, and his cunning efforts to obliterate his past and make a life for himself in a world in which he has no natural place.” NY Times

My place in the Political Compass: Economic Left/Right: -6.75; Authoritarian/Libertarian: -7.54. But, to echo Rebecca, you already knew that about me…

As an inveterate Gaiman fan and a father who enjoys reading odd tales to my children [note to those of you who recommended it — we gave up on Lemony Snicket in disgust…] , I’m thrilled that Neil Gaiman‘s children’s book Coraline is out today. Here is a mini-review from the weblog of Jonathan Strahan, editor of Locus:

This is just nifty. It’s a 30,000 word short novel that tells of a young girl, Coraline, who moves into an odd old apartment with her distracted and much-too-busy parents. There are eccentric neighbours upstairs and downstairs, and a door in the living room that leads to nowhere (it was bricked up when the house was subdivided into apartments). Of course, the door does open, and into a place of threatening strangenesses where Coraline will encounter her “other mother”. Gaiman clearly knows what he’s doing here. His story telling voice is perfect (Gaiman often relates in his online diary how he regularly reads stories to his youngest daughter), and the story of a brave young girl overcoming incredible obstacles is the stuff of classics. I doubt I could be more impressed.

BTW, esteemed sci-fi writer John Shirley reviews Minority Report in Locus:

It must be both heaven and hell to master something this big, and it must happen all too rarely — yet Spielberg has done it. Oh there are flaws in the film, but not fatal ones…

And the enticing part:

The metaphysical hints and suggestions in Minority Report — rather like certain episodes of the The X-Files — are tantalizing, hinting of a spiritual, or at least a more psychically inclusive reality. Rightly, they are not deeply explored; they are a kind of background luminosity, only slightly more sharply seen here than in the real world.

Crates full of emeralds, $15.95! ebay

Ford loses 2600 suit: “Online hacker magazine 2600 has emerged victorious in its campaign to retain ownership of the controversial FuckGeneralMotors.com domain…At one time FuckGeneralMotors.com (one of a series of sites 2600 registered to take shots at American corporate bigwigs, racism and the mass media in 1999) pointed at Ford. The motor company expressed concerns that the non-tech savvy would think Ford had created the site itself. ” The Register

More Philip Whalen:

 



THE EXPENSIVE LIFE



Tying up my plastic shoes

I realize I'm outside, this is the park & I am free

From whatever pack of nonsense & old tape loops

Play with the Ayer's dogs, Barney & Daphne

They don't ask me why I shave my head

"Cut the word lines," Burroughs recommends

Daphne & Barney fatter than ever & only I am dieting

(Crease along the dotted lines)

Loops of tacky thinking fall unloosed. The sun

Getting hotter than my flannel shirt requires

What about THE BUDDHIST REVIVAL IN CHINA?

Won't read it now... too blind to see it

Almost too blind to write this, in my room no flowers

The service station wants four bits for compresssed air

At only 16 pounds per square inch

I can see the farthest mountain.





                              29:VIII:87







TO THE MEMORY OF



      Mr J who had been poor for years

      Inherited all the money in the world

      Bought a gun to blow a hole in his head

      To let in air and light he said

      To let me out



      Today, I have my head to shave

      There are lights and shadows in it

      All too soon empty open ashes

      Join mirthfully to earth



                              19:V:77

More Philip Whalen:

 



THE EXPENSIVE LIFE



Tying up my plastic shoes

I realize I'm outside, this is the park & I am free

From whatever pack of nonsense & old tape loops

Play with the Ayer's dogs, Barney & Daphne

They don't ask me why I shave my head

"Cut the word lines," Burroughs recommends

Daphne & Barney fatter than ever & only I am dieting

(Crease along the dotted lines)

Loops of tacky thinking fall unloosed. The sun

Getting hotter than my flannel shirt requires

What about THE BUDDHIST REVIVAL IN CHINA?

Won't read it now... too blind to see it

Almost too blind to write this, in my room no flowers

The service station wants four bits for compresssed air

At only 16 pounds per square inch

I can see the farthest mountain.





                              29:VIII:87







TO THE MEMORY OF



      Mr J who had been poor for years

      Inherited all the money in the world

      Bought a gun to blow a hole in his head

      To let in air and light he said

      To let me out



      Today, I have my head to shave

      There are lights and shadows in it

      All too soon empty open ashes

      Join mirthfully to earth



                              19:V:77

More Philip Whalen:

 



THE EXPENSIVE LIFE



Tying up my plastic shoes

I realize I'm outside, this is the park & I am free

From whatever pack of nonsense & old tape loops

Play with the Ayer's dogs, Barney & Daphne

They don't ask me why I shave my head

"Cut the word lines," Burroughs recommends

Daphne & Barney fatter than ever & only I am dieting

(Crease along the dotted lines)

Loops of tacky thinking fall unloosed. The sun

Getting hotter than my flannel shirt requires

What about THE BUDDHIST REVIVAL IN CHINA?

Won't read it now... too blind to see it

Almost too blind to write this, in my room no flowers

The service station wants four bits for compresssed air

At only 16 pounds per square inch

I can see the farthest mountain.





                              29:VIII:87







TO THE MEMORY OF



      Mr J who had been poor for years

      Inherited all the money in the world

      Bought a gun to blow a hole in his head

      To let in air and light he said

      To let me out



      Today, I have my head to shave

      There are lights and shadows in it

      All too soon empty open ashes

      Join mirthfully to earth



                              19:V:77

The Who Live at Leeds

(1995 digital remaster). Arguably the greatest live rock ‘n’ roll album ever (although Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense and the Band’s Last Waltz are right up there as all-time greats). Caught at the height of their protopunk (yes) power, before Daltry totally became a buffoon on stage and Townshend flamed out, unable to realize his grandiose vision. [Buying hint: don’t go for the deluxe edition with a second disc of a live Tommy performance unless rarities for rarities’ sake are your thing. Stick with the one-disc Leeds set and just go back to the studio version of Tommy instead.]

Political Posters from the United States, Viet Nam and Cuba, 1965-1975: “A virtual catalog of the exhibition held at Track 16 Gallery, January 19-March 9, 1996. Exhibition and catalogue organized with the Center for the Study of Political Graphics. This catalog is reproduced by permission of Susan Martin, who edited the Smart Art Press publication.” [thanks to BookNotes for the blink]

And, on the topic of Amerika devouring its young, read The Apocalypse of Adolescence, a harrowing Atlantic Monthly meditation on the epidemic of adolescent murdering sprees by Ron Powers, a Vermont writer trying to come to terms with the Zantop killings at Dartmouth.

Liberal Arts Mafia

Are we all Palestinians now?:

“On the surface, the desire to feel Palestinian seems utterly bizarre. But for the anti-globalisation movement, it makes a certain sense. The Palestinians live out the state that anti-globalists can only talk about. Anti-globalists claim that they are controlled by sinister outside forces, that the odds are stacked against them. Palestinians really are controlled, they really are occupied. For the human shields, the experience lends their sentiments authenticity and substance.” sp!ked

NPR Retreats, Link Stink Lingers: ” NPR.org no longer requires permission to link, but its insistence that

it will go after those who use its content ‘inappropriately’ tells

critics it still hasn’t learned its lesson.” Wired

More Philip Whalen:

 



THE EXPENSIVE LIFE



Tying up my plastic shoes

I realize I'm outside, this is the park & I am free

From whatever pack of nonsense & old tape loops

Play with the Ayer's dogs, Barney & Daphne

They don't ask me why I shave my head

"Cut the word lines," Burroughs recommends

Daphne & Barney fatter than ever & only I am dieting

(Crease along the dotted lines)

Loops of tacky thinking fall unloosed. The sun

Getting hotter than my flannel shirt requires

What about THE BUDDHIST REVIVAL IN CHINA?

Won't read it now... too blind to see it

Almost too blind to write this, in my room no flowers

The service station wants four bits for compresssed air

At only 16 pounds per square inch

I can see the farthest mountain.





                              29:VIII:87







TO THE MEMORY OF



      Mr J who had been poor for years

      Inherited all the money in the world

      Bought a gun to blow a hole in his head

      To let in air and light he said

      To let me out



      Today, I have my head to shave

      There are lights and shadows in it

      All too soon empty open ashes

      Join mirthfully to earth



                              19:V:77

Semen acts as an antidepressant: “Women whose partners regularly wear condoms are more depressed – mood-altering hormones in semen could be the reason.” New Scientist

Eccentric people more extreme as they age, although flamboyant behavior declines, says a new study, which explains increasng eccentricity neurocentrically: “The tendency to be a little odd or eccentric can often be kept under control in younger people, as they modify their behaviour to social norms. But as people get older there is evidence of reduced plasticity of the nervous system, which makes them less adaptable and increases expression of their odd personality traits.” Perhaps, however, it is just that as people age they care less about conforming themselves to social norms? New Scientist

The Evolutionary Neuroethology of Paul MacLean: Convergences and Frontiers (Human Evolution, Behavior, and Intelligence) edited by Gerald Cory and Russell Gardner: “In the mid-20th century, integrative efforts began concerning the brain and its

social and humanistic functions. These efforts were led by Paul D. MacLean’s

integrative research and thought. As the century ended, however, such efforts

were lost in the surge of new effort in brain and genome research. Nobel Prizes

were awarded on biochemical and cellular findings relevant to psychiatry.

Findings on these levels seemed to provide ultimate answers… This text extends MacLean’s findings and integrative theory.” amazon.com

Fire Wars: transcript of a NOVA broadcast aired May 7, 2002 on PBS about wildfire issues, for those who want to think further about the firestorm I started with my remarks below. [Thanks to Jennifer Joy]

I just received the following email, which, from a Google search on the search terms they suggest at the bottom, appears to be making the rounds. Leuschke, for example, has commented on it as well. Here, in its agonizing entirety:

There is something extremely wrong with every single

person in this world. They seem to be part of a

pointless simulation.

“The Matrix” has portrayed this idea somewhat, yet we

watch it and go back to our daily lives. Yet in this

very life, underneath the seeming diversity in

people’s opinions, values, talents, and interests,

there is something that makes everyone the same. It

is as though this planet is populated only by mindless

fakes, objects that provide the appearance of

intellect on the surface but are based on only

mechanical reflexes and primitive thought patterns.

I don’t really care if anything I say has been said

before, if it was portrayed in movies, in books, or in

the lyrics of some useless song. With 6 billion people

covering the globe at any given time, thousands and

thousands of years of written literature, probability

dictates almost any combination of words has occurred

numerous times. Yet there is clear evidence there was

no action, so those words, just like the people who

spoke them, must have been just more fakes. I am

forced to use this language (also created by the

fakes) because there is no alternative, so everything

I write here could be misunderstood to make me sound

like one of them, but it will be the action that I

take and the dedication that will separate me from

them.

In my estimation the fakes that occupy this planet

don’t make up 99%, but more like 99.9999999% of the

population. I know this because I’ve searched, and in

my search have so far only found one true ally (I have

found him via the internet as well). But even with

those numbers we would not give up because there is no

logic in giving up.

The people on this planet are all fakes because the

societies have made them this way. Ideas that populate

people’s minds have no logic or purpose. Concepts such

as religion, god, morality, individualism, freedom,

identity, happiness, love and billions of others are

all just memes. Like parasites they infect the minds

and spread from one person to the next. They have no

point or purpose; they exist without any logical basis

or foundation. The fakes are completely controlled by

them, and they will never see beyond them. To not be

controlled by them one must do more then just realize

that they exist. One must resist any ideas that have

no point, endlessly question, and never accept

imperfection or compromise in any answer.

We (myself and my ally) are different though. While we

have had the limitation of existing only in these

societies, something has made it possible for us to

resist being indoctrinated into becoming one of those

fakes. We have no arbitrary wants, needs, desires, or

preferences.

If this world continues to exist the way it is then

nothing in it will ever have a point. It will always

be just a product of random evolution, one with no

importance or relevance. The only logical goal is to

dedicate our lives to increasing our numbers, those

that aren’t fakes, so that in thousands of years our

numbers may be such that the fakes would no longer be

a threat to progress.

Those that join us must see every other person

occupying this planet as the enemy, and us as their

only allies. Like us they must have dedication only to

taking the most logical action, and to nothing else.

To tell you more about us, we’ve posted some personal

information about ourselves on a website. You’ll also

find past responses to us on that webpage.

Obviously anyone reading this email is most likely

just another fake. Do not simply reply to this email,

if you do your message will almost certainly be

ignored. If you do wish to communicate, first

demonstrate your interest by taking the effort to

find us online, one of the ways to do that is

described below.

Use a major search engine to search for every

combination of any two words from the list below.

The order of the words shouldn’t matter as long as

you do not search for them in quotes. Also when you

pick the right combination you shouldn’t need to

look at more then (sic) the first matches.

There is no trick to this and this isn’t meant to be

quick, it should, however, be fairly clear if/when you

find the right site. The following search engines were

verified by us, please use any of them as other search

engines may simply not list us correctly: MSN, Lycos,

InfoSeek, LookSmart, HotBot, InfoSpace, Google,

Ask.com, AllTheWeb, Teoma, WebCrawler, AltaVista,

AOL Search, Netscape Search.

perfect,

theory,

endless,

desire,

eternal,

logic,

driving,

perpetual,

vision,

logical,

infinite,

dream,

final,

best,

escape,

objective,

thought,

only,

ambition,

clue,

perfection

If this can’t be solved, or if you never reach us,

there should be no reason for you to give up as

we will never give up and thus there will always

be some way to find us.

Ryan and Jacob

I feel their pain, I really do. But what I want to know is: Why me, obviously one of the 99.9999999% of the world’s population who are evidently fakes? BTW, the email was said to be from one “Ithacensian Elatinaceae”. ‘Ithacensian’ means ‘from Ithaca’, as in The Oddysey‘s ‘Ithacensian Suitors’ of Penelope, wife of Ulysses. The ‘Elatinacea’ appear to be a family of vascular plants. Any other significance to anyone?

Chemical in Starchy Foods Baffles Health Groups: “Two international health and safety organizations said yesterday that they were still a long way from solving the riddle of why a potential carcinogen appears in staples like French fries, bread and potato chips, and how much of a risk, if any, its presence may pose… (U)nexpectedly high levels of acrylamide, a known carcinogen in rats, appears in certain carbohydrates after frying or baking them at high temperatures, though none of the agencies seemed to know why. ” NY Times

Looking for X in the Algebra of Leadership:

Dr. Arnold M. Ludwig, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Kentucky, has come along with his “Political Greatness Scale” — the latest in a long line of scholarly attempts to measure political leadership with the cool objectivity of science…

On this scale, Yasir Arafat scores 17 out of a possible 37 points, placing him a couple notches above Bill Clinton and on a par with Dwight D. Eisenhower and François Mitterrand. The scale’s real overachievers, however, are for the most part a motley crew of despots and tyrants, including Hitler (25), Mussolini (26), Stalin (29), Mao (30) and Kemal Ataturk of Turkey (31), as well as a lone American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt (30).

Dr. Ludwig says the numbers reflect a leader’s impact on the world, not his personal virtue. On this scale, for example, warmongering turns out to be critical to one’s long-term historical standing. “No American president can be regarded as great unless they’ve been involved in war and been responsible for the death of many,” Dr. Ludwig said. NY Times

An Invitation Ruffles Philosophical Feathers — prominent conservative “philosophers” withdraw from a conference on American philosopher Sidney Hook when they learn that Cornel West (who has written on Hook) will also be attending. And The New York Times makes hay with it.

Trend Should Also Be a Warning:

I’m all for progress and evolution, but this talk about a European explosion in the N.B.A. and that Europe has supplanted the United States as the hotbed of pro basketball is specious at best and devious in its darkest inferences.

The European influence may be on the rise but not because players in the United States can’t hit an outside shot. There seems to be a taste for a new flavor. This season, sportswriters heralded the success of the Mavericks and Kings as models of the rise of European basketball.Fifteen of the 17 foreign-born players drafted on Wednesday are from Europe.

All of a sudden critics say that young, elite players in the United States — the majority of whom are black — can’t hit the outside shot. Suddenly our kids are not fundamentally sound.

NY Times

Antidepressants Lift Clouds, But Lose ‘Miracle Drug’ Label: “The euphoria that accompanied the first antidepressant drugs has faded, forcing drug manufacturers to strive to create a new class of drugs.” The article explores the premise that, while millions are helped by these medications, often to the point of complete symptom relief, millions of others are not helped enough or “sexual dysfunction, emotional numbing, insomnia, weight gain, restlessness and memory lapses make the drugs unusable — or simply not worth the trouble.” But the author doesn’t grasp the central significance of that fact, leaving the reader with the impression that it it simply a scientific problem calling for the discovery of new and better drugs. The reality is much more complicated, and is much more a problem with the attitudes and assumptions toward antidepressants among the prescribers, the manufacturers and the consumers.

The greatest factor in the blush being off the rose is that the newer antidepressants have been applied to a broader and broader segment of the population, many of whose conditions are not really suitable to such medication treatment and therefore will not succeed, and many of whose conditions do not trouble them to an extent that they’d be willing to put up with inconvenient side effects.  This is occurring for several interlocking reasons, about which I often talk here on FmH —

• because the newer drugs have been easier and less dangerous to use;
• because doctors (especially non-psychiatrists) have been subjected to an unprecedented onslaught of marketing pressure to prescribe them broadly;
• because psychiatrists are unconsciously under pressure to expand their notion of the size of their potential clientele, to compensate for losing market share to nonprescribing competitive mental health professions;
• because of discoveries, or mythology, suggesting that antidepressants are applicable to a much broader range of mental health problems all mediated by the same neurochemicals;
• and because managed care has relentlessly pressed mental health practitioners to find rapidly expedient alternatives to interminable courses of therapy

So both the intolerance and ineffectiveness of many of these drugs comes first and foremost from the broadening definition of the depressive conditions for which they are considered applicable, far beyond the major depressive episodes of the greatest severity which were the major target of antidepressants before Prozac. Paradoxically, complete symptom remission happens most often in the more severe conditions, as compared with the smouldering, chronic, low-level depressive syndromes that appear to be more a part of sufferers’ personality or constitution which have been the last decade’s greatest area of market expansion in antidepressant use.  The market is fairly tapped out because just about everybody who might be benefit from an antidepressant has already received them, and then some.

Peter Kramer’s seminal Listening to Prozac broke some of this ground, asking us to consider the social impact of using antidepressants in this way. He called it “cosmetic psychopharmacology,” a term that is precise and economical in summarizing what’s wrong in the seduction of modern American psychiatry into this largely pharmaceutical-industry-manufactured dream. From an ethical as well as a macroeconomic viewpoint, even if SSRIs and newer agents can help a given temperament problem, should  they be used in that way? And selling medication by creating demand through advertising to the public compounds the problem by fostering massive misconceptions. The smiling faces of recovered patients in the ads are false promises that these are ‘happy pills’ that can take away our troubles. Instead, as I explain to my patients, what the medications do is more akin to Freud’s famous dictum about the goal of psychoanalysis being to turn neurotic unhappiness into ordinary, everyday unhappiness. If someone has something to be distressed about, they’ll usually still be distressed about it after antidepressant therapy. In fact, they may be more distressed about it, i.e. more able to feel  their distress, and certainly more able to function in the face of such distress. I often analogize medication to a bicycle — it’ll get you where you need to get faster and more efficiently than walking, but you still need to do the peddling.

Prozac arrived on the scene just as psychiatry and neuroscience were getting sophisticated about the biological underpinnings of major mental illnesses such as depression, and the SSRI antidepressants became inextricably woven into the fabric of the discoveries of the Decade of the Brain, as the ’90’s were called by the American Psychiatric Association. While, as a neuropsychiatrist and psychopharmacologist, I’ll be among the first to support that paradigm, I’m also among the first to say we have overdone it, both because of the above-mentioned catalogue of pharmaceutical industry- and managed care industry-driven pressures, and because of an intellectual laziness among overworked overextended workaholic psychiatrists that takes the form of biological reductionism. This will be neatly illustrated by a single unpalatable statistic I recently encountered — that the recent average per-patient cost for medication for all patients hospitalized at my 85-bed psychiatric hospital is nearly $15 per day. Not only are medications given without proper regard to diagnostic precision and likelihood of benefit, but multiple medications are usually given together, making it impossible to tell which — if any — are the effective agent if the patient does respond. Each medication is thrown at a different target symptom without regard for the notion that a single medication-responsive disease process going on within the patient’s CNS might cause several or many symptoms which might co-correct with the prescription of a single proper, judiciously chosen medication.

The article goes on to explore in more detail some of the pitfalls of taking Prozac and similar medications. Emotional flatness and apathy are indeed side effects — these medications mute the intensity of acute and intrusive emootion. That is how they work in severe distress, turning down the volume knob, so to speak, to allow the symptoms to be livable. And that is why the medications are often not as suitable to “cosmetic psychopharmacology” as patients would wish. There is one dramatic exception. Even when they are not effective with depressed mood, some patients to whom I have prescribe SSRIs do not want to come off them because of how effective they are against irritability and temper outbursts. In fact, I sometimes think they may be far better against this target symptom than as antidepressants. You can see how this would be a benefit of ‘turning down the volume knob.’ The loss of libido and impaired orgasmic ability often caused by SSRIs may be a form of turning down the volume as well, and some people — sexual abuse victims and men with premature ejaculation problems — sometimes welcome this side effect.

Other reported side effects (some of which have led to lawsuits about which you’ve read my vituperations here) are either entirely specious — the reported link between antidepressant treatment and propensity to violence — or exaggerated — the complaints of a withdrawal syndrome when SSRIs are stopped too suddenly (which they should not be…)

While several novel trends in drug design or mechanism of action are in the works, the quest for the Golden Calf in an antidepressant psychopharmacology industry dying to recapitulate the phenomenal success of Prozac has largely taken the form of new formulations of the same drugs — timed-release versions that can supposedly be taken less frequently (claiming better response, convenience, compliance and tolerability); the condemnably deceptive practice of marketing the same substance under a different brand name for a new indication (Serafem né Prozac; Zyban né Wellbutrin); and purifying out the active subingredient, such as one stereoisomer out of the two, in a current antidepressant. (If only one of the two stereoisomers is active, you can get the same benefit from half the number of milligrams of only the active moiety, but of course they’ll be able to price the drug at twice the cost of its mixed counterpart.) These are of negligible if any pharmaceutical advantage and should be seen as attempts by the manufacturer to extend their proprietary rights beyond the expiration of their patent.

Responsible psychopharmacology demands collaborative responsibility among the consumer, the prescriber and the manufacturer, with prominent failings in each domain. Since most of you are in the former camp, potentially at least, I’ll finish with a caveat emptor. If you’re prescribed the newest, best (most expensive) agent, you should grill your physician about the basis for their choice. Even if you have a prescription drug plan so it doesn’t end up costing you more than the older alternatives, the trend is driving up health care costs for all of us, and justifying the ever-deeper penetration [that’s right; they’re screwing us all…] of managed care bean counters into the practice of medicine..

Nuclear Stockpiling: “In the event of an attack, there will be no rules of engagement. So I’m going door to door talking up potassium iodide. ” NY Times Magazine

Here are some of my results for the newest Google-based net parlor game suggested to me by mark woods:

Eliot is a master of the mind

Eliot is an interactive animation environment

Eliot is excited about our “vision for the future”

Eliot is a name that refers to an individual human being who can be anyone…

Eliot is a very cerebral and weighty social critic

Eliot is a leading consultant and expert in peak performance…

Eliot is as famous as you.

Eliot is so intentionally, even perversely, difficult.

Eliot is likable and intelligent…

Eliot is easy to fault.

Eliot is very client facing, good at following a situation through to resolution and he gets things done.

Eliot is propositioned by another hot chickie

Eliot is a little more impulsive than his real-life counter-part.

Eliot is more than just an artifact;

Eliot is sitting there twenty or so years later

Eliot is slated for destruction sometime

Eliot is being not entirely serious…

Eliot is always conscious of his own efforts,

Eliot is a civilized man.

Eliot is very different than he was as a baby.

Eliot is very warm and loving. He plays well with his sister.

Eliot is too indulgent to Ladislaw.

Eliot is one way the wrong way

Eliot is being cryptic

Eliot is a true “character,” believable for all his insecurities, lovable for all his eccentricities, and memorable because he holds a part of all of us in his …

Who Am I This Time?

Like an anthropologist or a method actor, (photographer Nikki S.) Lee “identifies a particular group in society and infiltrates it over a period of weeks or months. She will drastically alter her hair, her weight, her clothes… More subtly, she will take on the mannerisms, the gestures, the way of carrying oneself characteristic of the group she has chosen. After entering into her new identity, she will hand her point-and-shoot camera to someone and ask to have a snapshot taken of her in the chosen milieu.” Baltimore City Paper [via ghost rocket]

Shaken or stirred: “Stanley Zlotkin got his first look at the ravages of malnutrition as a young medical student visiting a remote hospital in northeastern Nigeria. Now, almost 30 years later, his innovative ideas could hold the key to eradicating childhood iron deficiency in the developing world.

Zlotkin, a professor of pediatrics and nutritional sciences at U of T and chief of gastroenterology and nutrition at the Hospital for Sick Children, is the creator of Supplefer Sprinkles, a powdered form of iron and other essential micronutrients that can be sprinkled on a child’s meal without altering its taste. That’s no small feat considering that other treatments – syrup or drops – have been around for 150 years without solving the problem on a global level.” [via David Brake… thanks!]

All on the menu for nobles of medieval England: “Chopped sparrow, roast swan, poached pike, conger eel, porpoise and lamprey: if it walked, swam or flew, the English medieval nobility ate it — usually with a dash of cinnamon, ginger or cloves — according to an ancient cookbook just released to the public.

Dating from 1500, A noble bok of festes ryalle and cokery, A bok for a Prynces housholde is the earliest copy of a printed cookbook in English, according to the British Library.” SF Chronicle

New 7 Wonders: “Much time has passed since the 7 Wonders of the World were last selected. Now on the threshold of the third millennium, our view of the world is characterised by a global consciousness. It is, therefore, an appropriate time to determine the new seven symbols of the most important human accomplishments of the last 2000 years. During the initial phase of the project we have received well over 5.5 million votes from over 200 countries. This global acceptance and the great success expressed in the number of votes received has been overwhelming and has strengthened our belief that we are on the verge of bringing about a meaningful dialogue between the citizens of the world.”

The Buddhas of Bamiyan – Reconstruction — The Afghanistan Institute & Museum, Bubendorf (Switzerland) and the New7Wonders Society & Foundation, Zurich (Switzerland) have launched a campaign to reconstruct the Buddhas at original shape, size and place with computer reconstructin, serving as the basis for the physical recreation, by ETH, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Three data sets — low resolution images of the Great Buddha from the internet; a 1970 set of Austrian high resolution metric photographs; and some tourist images from the late ’60’s — are being used in parallel.

The reconstruction process for all data sets consists of:

• image calibration and orientation;
  

• image matching to extract the 3D points;
  

• point cloud editing and surface triangulation;
  

• texture mapping and visualization.

…

The computer model generated with the manual measurements on the metric images will be used for the physical reconstruction of the Great Buddha of Bamiyan. First a small statue will be constructed (scale 1:200) to reproduce the original figure. Then a 1/10 size model of the Buddha will be created and set in the museum of Bubendorf. This model is necessary to study (1)the materials to be used, (2)the construction methods to be applied and (3)the implementation of the necessary infrastuctures for the final rebuilding of the full size Buddha in Afghanistan.

Currently the fundraising efforts are underway to support the physical reconstruction of the Great Buddha of Bamiyan.

A number of you complained (but not more loudly than I did to myself!) that this page had stopped wrapping to pagewidth as of this morning. I don’t know how it happened but some text (the awful Scottish poem snippet below) which I had entered between “preformatted” tags, had alluvasudden lost its linefeeds somehow and was one long line whose width now had to be accommodated. Should be fixed now, please let me know if it isn’t.

In working on this I played around with my template a little. It works fine for me in Mozilla 1.0 and IE6, but let me know if it messes up in your browser. The experiment I tried several months ago with David Gagne’s CSS-based (table-less) redesign loaded much faster and worked fine for me in Mozilla and IE6 but had so many inexplicable layout problems for some readers that I gave up and went back to a table-based layout.

The other thing that happened in fixing the formatting was that I deleted this morning’s post about the Pledge of Allegiance ruling. No loss — I thought better of my “free speech” argument, in which I said something like, ‘What’s the fuss? If you don’t like “one nation under God”, you’ve always been free to omit the words or skip the Pledge entirely; I’ve boycotted it since the Vietnam war…’. The Court ruling, of course, was in the spirit of the Establishment clause (‘Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion…’) instead, since the First Amendment guarantee of free speech doesn’t really work in a coercive environment (as we are quickly to learn under the Ashcroft Regime). But I still wonder what’s different about our national currency subjecting us to “In God we trust” in that case. Was Bush giving the nod to this when he took time out of his busy day at the G8 summit to splutter that the country “values our relationship with the Almighty”? That’s the Almighty Dollar, right? And I was certainly entertained by the furious, defiant recitation of the (unredacted) Pledge by Our Elected Representatives® in response to the ruling. On the other hand, a friend of mine wrote, finding the Congressional rebellion more ominous:

And bipartisan disrespect for a federal court ruling? Am I wrong, or are the legislators and the executives ganging up on the judiciary (at least one of whom caved pretty readily). Though, I guess that this administration will find the Supreme Court handily in its pocket, if necessary. I don’t recall any bipartisan mockery of the court-sanctioned (Presidential) election…

Let’s WARCHALK! “Collaboratively creating a hobo-language for free wireless networking.” {A link on the page downloads a .pdf of the wallet card.)

Puncturing Web Ads Before They Pop Up … and the burgeoning arms race between the popup-makers and the popup-blockers. NY Times

Hard-Boiled and Still Hot:

“Live authors promoting the work of dead authors is not exactly a new way of making a publisher’s backlist snap to attention yet again. But we are talking here about Philip Marlowe, private detective, one of the most astonishingly enduring characters in American fiction. So it’s not surprising that a group of authors are going out of their way to promote a new edition of the major works of Marlowe’s creator, Raymond Chandler. And doing it with gusto.” NY Times

Lifting Veil for Photo ID Goes Too Far, Driver Says: “A Muslim woman who says the state is violating her religious rights in demanding that she remove her veil for a driver’s license photograph will be in court this week to try to regain her driving privileges.” NY Times

The Age of Acquiescence: “The passionate activists from the Age of Aquarius have grown up to be the new Silent Majority.” NY Times Sorry, Maureen, I know what you’re trying to do. You usually make such eminent sense. But the convenient media appeal of the hypocrisy of ’60’s survivors turned middle aged petty bourgeois or nouveau riche is the only way they cover that generation, and it just isn’t so. The earnest members of the counterculture have not lost their cynical mistrust of the government, their commitment to subversion of the dominant paradigm, and their interest in finding new and better ways to be kind in the face of the advancing oligopoly. To argue that, because “the new boss” is “same as the old boss”, nothing was achieved only criticizes an immature caricature of ‘Movement ideology which thought it would be easy. And certainly admirable, principled people still believe after Sept. 11th, and live the belief, that there’s “nothing to kill or die for”, if by quoting Lennon she meant the principled thoughtful stance that the Bush henchmen’s WoT® has been misguided, deceptive, self-serving, immoral and fruitless.

US dismisses al-Qaida claim that network is ‘98% intact’ Guardian UK  [There’s a fine line to walk in this WoT®, between claiming sufficient success to maintain public confidence and projecting enough ongoing threat to maintain public fear. –FmH]

‘World’s Worst Poet’ Wins Immortality —

“A Scottish poet so bad he was often asked to perform just so the audience could laugh at him will have his verse etched in stone in the city where he worked. William Topaz McGonagall, who died in 1902, has gained posthumous recognition in the Scottish city of Dundee, which plans to mark the centenary of his death by engraving part of one his poems on a walkway by the river Tay.” Yahoo! News

An example:

“Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay !

With your numerous arches and pillars in so grand array

And your central girders, which seem to the eye

To be almost towering to the sky…”

“Satellites will shortly swing into action to track sheep grazing habits as part of a project to design farms that make animals happier. The Food Animal Initiative combines scientists from Oxford University and farmers funded by British food industry giants supermarket Tesco and burger chain McDonalds UK..” That tells you how little more than window-dressing the project is to be. I’d venture to say most of the animals destined to end up as a patty or slab at one of the food industry giants’ venues never roamed free in a pasture or had their choice of what to graze upon… Reuters

Why Reality is a Gray Area in Astronomy: more on the ‘color of the universe’ and why Hubble astronomers color their photos. space.com

WHO: Ebola Outbreak Spreads to Gabon Yahoo! News

Seeking love on the dotted line: “Epstein, a Harvard-trained psychologist who lives part time in Cambridge, insists this is no personal ad. He intends to test a possibility that is both novel and ancient: That love for an appropriate person can be systematically induced.” Boston Globe

When Navajos Fought Japanese for Ne-He-Mah: a delightful feature on the real ‘windtalkers’ and the fascinating, poetic, complexities of the Navajo language. NY Times

Pinpointing a Pivotal Processor:

“Every known drug of abuse, a wide variety of neurotransmitters and therapeutic agents, all channel into a single protein that “integrates information from all over the brain and provides a meaningful physiological readout,” according to Nobel Laureate Paul Greengard.

Greengard, professor of neuroscience at Rockefeller University in New York, has shown that a 32-kilodalton protein, dopamine- and cAMP-regulated phosphoprotein (DARPP-32), is a pivotal molecule in virtually all dopamine-related activities.” BioMedNet [free registration required] [thanks, Brian!]

Canada Preps for G8 Summit, which is being held at a remote mountain retreat in the Canadian Rockies. Canada is spenign half a billion dollars on the summit, mostly on security, but they’ve also bought off the local First Nations tribe to withdraw their permission to allow protesters to camp on their reservation land. A no-fly zone over the summit site will be enforced by fighter jets and surface-to-air missiles. Canada is adeptly using anti-terrorist sentiment to preempt the anti-globalisation movement’s making this its first muscle-flexing exercise in the post-Sept 11 world. Alternet

Danish Deep-Link Decision Due. Wired

President Bush Calls for New Palestinian Leadership: ‘President Bush Monday said the United States supports creation of a provisional Palestinian state but only if a “new and different Palestinian leadership” is found other than Yasser Arafat.’ Reuters

Court Rules That Only Juries Can Impose Death Sentences: The decision was based on the sixth amendment guarantee of a trial by one’s peers.

“Joining Justice (Ruth Bader) Ginsburg in the majority were Justices John Paul Stevens, Anthony M. Kennedy, David H. Souter, Stephen G. Breyer and — somewhat surprisingly — the conservative Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist dissented…

The decision in Ring v. Arizona, 01-488, invalidated the death-sentencing procedures in five states, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana and Nebraska, which have 168 people under death sentences and where a judge or panel of judges decides sentence. It could also affect the capital punishment statutes in four other states, Alabama, Delaware, Florida and Indiana, which have 529 people under death sentences. Those states have a hybrid system under which juries advise a judge on the sentence…

(I)t was not clear whether the condemned prisoners would automatically get life sentences or could be sentenced to death again under new procedures. Some previous landmark opinions on capital punishment have meant reprieves for whole death-row populations.”

This is the second monumental death sentence restriction handed down by the Suporeme Court this week, of course, after the ruling that mentally retarded prisoners cannot be executed. I worked as a psychiatric consultant on three death row cases, in two of which (in Alabama) the death sentence had been imposed by the presiding judge’s override of a jury’s “recommendation” of a lesser sentence; the third defendant was mentally retarded…

First honest-to-God software adaptation of D&D.” Wired

Britney Spears: Not Yet a Woman, Already a Restaurateur NY Times

A Deadly Disease Destroys Families as Well as Patients: “To those who love someone with Huntington’s disease, the despair of Carol Carr, who killed two of her sons suffering from the disease, is not incomprehensible.” NY Times

Several FmH’ers found my comments about the wildfires naive, suggesting that it would take turning back the clocks a century to a period of vast tracts of wilderness unpenetrated by human presence before we can let fires burn. Garret Vreeland, who knows whereof he speaks — and wherefrom, Santa Fe, unlike my effete, removed New England vantage point — points out that today’s forest fires are far more severe than they are supposed to be — in a sense, he says, not ‘natural’ at all, as I had asserted — because we have had a policy of preventing lesser fires and “preserving (the forests) to death.” Here’s the essence of Vreeland’s argument, which I don’t feel hesitant about making public because he’s just written essentially the same thing at dangerousmeta:

“there are no empty, pristine forests that are safe to let burn. that’s the old ‘wild west’ myth. if it’s not homes, it’s an ecosystem that feeds and cleans water supplies for hundreds of miles. or a precious ecosystem for wildlife and animals. ‘wilderness’ only exists in narrow swaths between human habitations.”

He goes on to mention the health effects of smoke over populated areas if we “let it burn.” And he reminds me that the abandoned mines and mine tailings put toxic heavy metals into the ecosystem when volatilized (does this happen in a forest fire?). Dramatic case in point: the Cerro Grande fire at Los Alamos several years ago,. At the time I wrote here about the fears that this fire would release substantial radioactivity from all that the National Laboratory had been dumping in surrounding areas.

My friend Abby also wrote that humans are part of the ecosystem and that it is too impossible for us to get out of the way of nature.

The thrust of my comments was not intended to be the suggestion that we simply let the fires burn and get out of their way, although on rereading it is obvious why it came across that way. Both Garret and Abby seem in fact to reinforce the point I was trying to make — that we are in the fix we are because of a mindset of not seeing ourselves as embedded in the ecosystem but ranged against it. This is where the hubris of viewing the fires solely from the p.o.v. of their threatening and dangerous impact on humans, my peevishness about which was the precipitant for my post, arises from.

The unfortunate people who found their worldly possessions in the path of these wildfires, I meant to say, are not at fault; they are tragic victims of an inadequate worldview in the policy sphere. Garret suggests we read Era of the Big Fire is Kindled at West’s Doors from today’s New York Times. “Ten times as many homes are now in areas prone to wildfire as there were 25 years ago…” Snuffing out all fires only delays the super-devastating, inevitable big ones, it seems. Without a change in forest and fire management policy, allowing controlled burning and aggressive thinning, we’re in for much more of this, it seems. But if the government were interested in changing policy, it has severely hampered itself with some missteps in the last decade. And fires have become — forgive me — a hot topic, highly politicized. Net effect — the Bush administration appears to have no plans for a change.

And, finally, falling water tables and drought conditions, which set the west up for megafires, may be a consequence of global warming, calling for more pervasive policy change. But the Bush administration is philosophically averse to even considering the reality of the greenhouse effect.

So, for the moment at least,  it would seem prudent for people to be more attentive to whether they’re situating their ‘dream house’ in a fire zone…

Hum Haunts Indiana City; Its Source Is a Mystery NY Times [via dangerousmeta]

Al Qaeda Says Bin Laden Is Well, and It Was Behind Tunis Blast NY Times

Urgent Call is a new initiative to engage and educate a broad public about the growing danger that nuclear weapons will be used, and about practical steps to reduce that danger.

Sign the petition.

Make a donation.

Please.

(Via the Betty Fnord Clinic, where you can also buy the teeshirt):

The Skeptic’s Dictionary: “A Critical Survey of Questionable Therapies, Eccentric Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions and Dangerous Delusions” by Robert T. Carroll, Professor of Philosophy, Sacramento City College. [via vampagan]

“Four disruptive technologies are emerging that promise to render not only the next wave of so-called 3G wireless networks irrelevant, but possibly even their 4G successors.”

: “…(T)he parlous state of the wireless-telecoms industry, and the difficulties surrounding the deployment of “third generation” (3G) networks in particular, could be taken as evidence that existing ways of doing things are reaching their limits, and that some radical new ideas are needed.

Here, then, are four emerging technologies that show much promise: smart antennas, mesh networks, ad hoc architectures, and ultra-wideband transmission. Smart antennas are already in use and mesh networks are starting to appear, while ad hoc architectures and ultra-wideband are still largely restricted to the laboratory. But each challenges existing ways of doing things; each, on its own, or in combination with others, could shake up the wireless world. The Economist

Tooth phone provides covert chat:

A prototype radio device designed to fit inside a human tooth and provide covert mobile phone communications has been created by two UK students. The device currently consists of a digital radio receiver that converts radio signals into sound and a tiny vibrating component, which conveys sound to the wearer’s inner ear through bone vibrations. New Scientist

Psychiatric reactions: this will not sit well with a number of paranoid schizophrenic patients. For decades, it has been a fairly common delusion, on the transmitter side, that their dental fillings are bugs. On the receiver side, some explain the auditory hallucinations that are a prominent part of the illness by invoking the small receivers that have been implanted in their heads, and sometimes their teeth. And I have heard tales of people being able to hear actual radio broadcasts, supposedly because their dental fillings are resonating with the broadcast frequency. This Google search on ‘ “dental fillings” and “radio” ‘ will take you further, you hear?

Solving the Case of the Missing Comets. Comets that get kicked into the inner solar system from the Oort Cloud and loop around the sun ought to enter elongated elliptical orbits that will bring them back, yet in the five decades that astronomers have figured this out, they have wondered why far too few ever make a return pass. Now, a new computer model suggests that 99% of them simply disintegrate. space.com

First picture of secretive carnivore: “An African carnivore that has not been spotted for 70 years has been captured on film for the first time, in the Udzungwa Mountains National Park in Tanzania. Known as Lowe’s servaline genet, the three-foot long animal is a relative of the mongoose. It was previously known only from descriptions and a single skin collected by hunters in 1932.” New Scientist