“Manual” — ‘An anthology of new work from seventeen writers with websites. It is available as a downloadable PDF…’

Re-engineering the Drug Business:

Sept. 11 and its new world of heightened border controls has made decentralization doubly important for international smuggling networks, be they Chinese, Colombian, Turkish or Nigerian. Ever since the big Cali and Medellin cartels were wiped out nearly a decade ago, virtually the entire narcotics trade has radically slimmed down. With the added pressure of 9/11 security measures, drug kingpins have adopted the mantra of their more enlightened corporate cousins, that size does not necessarily create efficiency, and that to survive you have to stay nimble.

Heroin is the perfect drug for the new age of small-batch manufacturing and decentralization, a high-value-added commodity where a little goes a very long way. In fact, it’s so well suited to the changing times that many cocaine traffickers are retooling their production lines to include heroin and joining the global trend toward leaner, meaner, terrorist-style operations. NY Times Magazine

Maureen Dowd: Hans, Franz & W.: “Does it ever occur to Mr. Bush and his aides to vacate the gym and nail down a Middle East policy?” NY Times op-ed

The Doctor Won’t See You Now: “Can you save the life of a patient you’ve never met?” NY Times Magazine

With GPS, World Is Your Canvas: “Jeremy Wood and Hugh Pryor are part of a new breed of artists crisscrossing the planet, creating artwork on a par with the ancient Nazca line drawings of Peru. With the help of GPS, these artists have discovered a fish in Wallingford, an elephant in Brighton, not to mention a huge spider lurking in Oxford…” (left). Wired

Even thoughts can turn genes “on” and “off”. San Francisco Chronicle

Within Pilobolus, Working Together and Pulling Away: about the creative tension in my longstanding favorite dance troupe, if you can call them that. NY Times

Within Pilobolus, Working Together and Pulling Away: about the creative tension in my longstanding favorite dance troupe, if you can call them that. NY Times

Within Pilobolus, Working Together and Pulling Away: about the creative tension in my longstanding favorite dance troupe, if you can call them that. NY Times

Starbucks yanks ads mocking 9/11: Could we be overreading this? I think not, especially recalling (as does Brooke Biggs of Bittershack, from whom I cribbed this link) that the Starbucks near the WTC site took it upon itself to charge relief workers for their water in the first days after the attack. This (right) was a window poster appearing at 3000 Starbucks storefronts (including the ones in lower Manhattan near the WTC), depicting twin towering cups of their iced fruit tea drinks being dive bombed by a dragon fly, with the legend “Collapse into Cool.” The posters have been pulled after numerous consumer complaints. NY Post [Awaiting a public response from Starbucks corporate headquarters. On the one hand, it is hard to understand such depraved indifference on the part even of an ad agency, but on the other hand look at how much added press Starbucks gets out of this, even if bad. Just one more reason to refrain from patronizing them, if you needed another reason…  –FmH]

Nat Perry: Bush’s Grim Vision:

“In the nine months since Sept. 11, George W. Bush has put the United States on a course that is so bleak that few analysts have – as the saying goes – connected the dots. If they had, they would see an outline of a future that mixes constant war overseas with abridgment of constitutional freedoms at home, a picture drawn by a politician who once joked, “If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier – so long as I’m the dictator.” The Consortium

While I certainly agree with the sentiment, how well-established is the egregious — stupid even for George W. — quote? Should snopes.com look into it?

Anthrax in Mail Was Newly Made, Investigators Say: “The new finding has concerned investigators, who say it indicates that whoever sent the anthrax could make more and strike again.” NY Times

Within Pilobolus, Working Together and Pulling Away: about the creative tension in my longstanding favorite dance troupe, if you can call them that. NY Times

After an exchange of email, I want to make a public correction. I had previously been appreciative of self-professed ‘neoconservative’ weblogger Joe Katzman for taking notice of a ‘liberal’ blog like FmH in his Winds of Change. In this post, I mischaracterized Katzman as ” believing his brand of weblog is the only counter to the ‘dominant media culture’ ” . Actually, I was deriding Eric Raymond at the time, but I lumped Katzman in with him. However, it was an unfair caricature of his position, for while he finds it indisputable that the weblog world is a hedge against media bias it would be ridiculous to assert that it is the only one. So I hereby retract my use of the word “only” in that context. In our correspondence, we agreed to disagree about some of my other arguments, but the operative word is “agreed”. I still stand by my gratitude and admiration that here is a member of the ‘warblogging’ community who is willing to talk between sometimes warring camps.

Now you know the hole story: “Calls have come from around the country. UFO enthusiasts have visited the hole on 164th Avenue Northeast and come up with their own suspicions. Kaare and other neighborhood children have lined up outside the caution tape, peering over the edge.

And almost everyone has a theory as to how the hole appeared here in the first place.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer [via spike report]

RoboCup: “By the year 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world soccer champion team.” RoboCup 2002 taking place now in Fukuoka, Japan.

“After four months of entertaining humans, Gaak the predator robot yesterday did what all the best robots do in science fiction: he copied his masters’ most basic instinct and made a dash for freedom.

Programmed to sink a metal fang into smaller but more nimble prey robots, to “eat” their electric power, at a science adventure centre, Gaak showed that a two year experiment in maturing robot “thinking” may be proving alarmingly successful.

Left unattended for 15 minutes, the 2ft metal machine crept along a barrier until it found a gap, squeezed through, navigated across a car park and reached the Magna science centre’s exit by the M1 motorway in Rotherham, South Yorkshire.” Guardian UK

Stop Him Before He Lies Again: “Would somebody please notice that Bush is being grossly dishonest about his most important piece of domestic policy? ” The New Republic

Hollywood Wants to Plug the “Analog Hole”:

The people who tried to take away your VCR are at it again. Hollywood has always dreamed of a “well-mannered marketplace” where the only technologies that you can buy are those that do not disrupt its business. Acting through legislators who dance to Hollywood’s tune, the movie studios are racing to lock away the flexible, general-purpose technology that has given us a century of unparalelled prosperity and innovation.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) filed the “Content Protection Status Report” with the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, laying out its plan to remake the technology world to suit its own ends. The report calls for regulation of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), generic computing components found in scientific, medical and entertainment devices. Under its proposal, every ADC will be controlled by a “cop-chip” that will shut it down if it is asked to assist in converting copyrighted material — your cellphone would refuse to transmit your voice if you wandered too close to the copyrighted music coming from your stereo. –Cory Doctorow [via Joe Katzman]

Each year, media coverage of the wildfire season seems more and more fervent about the desperate necessity of controlling the fires and the tragedy of destruction of human property they cause. What is lost is a perspective on the fact that both forest and prairie fires are part of a vast and perennial natural cycle. Without derogating the heroism of the smokejumpers who risk their lives to fight these fires, it strikes me that humans are the interlopers in this ecological interplay. Perhaps the confrontation with such majestic natural forces should strengthen our deermination not to fight them in our hubris, but to get out of their way with humility? Is it worth the cost — in lives, in money, and to our souls — to fight as we do? I react the same way when I hear about the California mudslides each rainy season, flood damage, disastrous hurricanes… Here’s a Google search on wildfire ecology as a starting point.

Ruling Barring Execution of Retarded May Not Lead to Further Restrictions: “Despite the clarity of the Supreme Court’s decision to abolish the death penalty for mentally retarded offenders, the court’s next move is uncertain and the impact of the ruling on the overall death penalty debate is far from clear.” NY Times news analysis

Porn provocateur: “Lizzy Borden, whose ultraviolent films feature women being beaten, raped and doused in vomit, insists that she is a gender pioneer whose repellent movies are morality tales.” Salon

The Trouble With Frida Kahlo: “…(L)ike a game of telephone, the more Kahlo’s story has been told, the more it has been distorted, omitting uncomfortable details that show her to be a far more complex and flawed figure than the movies and cookbooks suggest. This elevation of the artist over the art diminishes the public understanding of Kahlo’s place in history and overshadows the deeper and more disturbing truths in her work. Even more troubling, though, is that by airbrushing her biography, Kahlo’s promoters have set her up for the inevitable fall so typical of women artists, that time when the contrarians will band together and take sport in shooting down her inflated image, and with it, her art.” Washington Monthly

Supreme Court Bars Executing the Mentally Retarded:

“In one of the most important capital punishment cases in years, the United States Supreme Court ruled today that executing killers who are mentally retarded is unconstitutional.

The 6-to-3 ruling not only spared the life of Daryl R. Atkins, a Virginia inmate, at least for now, but could save scores of other death-row prisoners in the 20 states that still allow the execution of mentally retarded murderers. Thirty-eight states have capital punishment.” NY Times

Although this ruling opens a Pandora’s Box of complications — some of them akin to the ongoing controversy over the ‘insanity defense’ for the mentally ill — the humanity of not executing someone whose developmental level prevents them from appreciating the nature of their crime or the meaning of their death sentence seems manifest. Judging a society by how it treats its least able may still have some currency after all…

Why is this big news? And why is it in the Hindustan Times??

Any longtime net users among you will understand why mentioning the Internet Scout Report invokes a compulsion to precede it with the word ‘venerable.’ Now it has reinvented itself as an honest-to-God Weblog. [thanks, Rebecca]

James Ridgeway: Alleged Dirty Bomber Dead Ringer for Oklahoma City’s John Doe 2: I hadn’t noticed this story until Dan Hartung pointed out in Lake Effect that Ridgeway caught on from the weblogging world, as he says here:

The strange saga of Abdullah al Muhajir, a/k/a Jose Padilla, took yet another turn this morning, when Internet gumshoes Fuckedworld and Junkyardblog spotted his look-a-like . . . guess where?

In the police drawing of a still-missing Oklahoma City bombing suspect, that’s where. Al Muhajir, held since May 8 on accusations that he intended to build and detonate a dirty bomb, is the spitting image of the mysterious John Doe 2, featured in police sketches and long touted by cops as a principal along with Tim McVeigh. Some law enforcement officials have insisted no such suspect ever existed, though witnesses described the second figure getting out of the rental truck with McVeigh seconds before the explosion.

However speculative, this clicks in more ways than one, since McVeigh’s lawyer tried to argue in Federal District Court in Denver that the 1995 plot may have had roots in the Philippines among men known to have been Al Qaeda operatives with direct ties to Osama bin laden. Though the judge rebuffed his argument, attorney Stephen Jones said he found people in the Philippines who claimed accomplice Terry Nichols met with terrorists there in the years before the 1995 attack. Village Voice

Here’s Fuckedworld’s summary of the evidence connecting the dots. Jumping to the punchline, its author John Berger concludes:

We still don’t know that McVeigh and Padilla ever even met. But Padilla worked just minutes from the home of Timothy McVeigh’s sister, during McVeigh’s 1993 visit. At that time, Padilla was actively seeking connections with the world of Islam, possibly including a relationship with the local sponsor of the Benevolent International Foundation, which has been linked to terror operations in the Philippines, specifically to an Abu Sayyef cell which some sources (of uncertain merit)

Unfortunately, the investigation to date still falls far short of “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The Nichols-BIF connection rests almost solely on the word of a very shady character who is now too dead to answer questions or provide leads. And connecting Padilla to BIF still falls short of connecting him directly to Yousef or Wali Khan. The McVeigh-Padilla connection is intriguing but as yet unresolved. The investigation continues. Keep reading.

Berger notes: “Bryan Preston at the Junkyard Blog made one of the earliest observations of the connection, although there is some friendly competition among various sites and message boards that claim to have called it first. My Web site didn’t originate this theory, but I was among the earliest to push it out before the public, and the subsequent research in this story is mine.” I like him better than Preston already, who is falling all over himself about having broken the story. BTW, the photos don’t really look that much alike, methinks.

Enter the Globocourt: William Safire reaches more than abit when he argues against the international criminal court — the Clinton administration’s support for which of course the Bush administration has already rescinded — on the grounds that it will jeopardize journalistic free expression, and endanger the lives of international war reporters, by asserting its authority to summon journalist witnesses to international war crimes to give testimony. Quite a stretch, to suggest that “if dictators see reporters as potential witnesses in prosecutions, tyrants in trouble will be likely to kill those witnesses”; under the modern rules of warfare, they’re already in grave danger just for being there to bear witness bravely. C’mon, Bill, if you want to be behind Rumsfeld on this one, just say so…

A Scholar Recants on His ‘Shakespeare’ Discovery

In 1995 Donald Foster, a professor of English at Vassar College, made a startling case for Shakespeare’s being the author of an obscure 578-line poem called “A Funeral Elegy.” After a front-page article about his methods of computer analysis in The New York Times — and after his reputation was further burnished by unmasking Joe Klein as the author of “Primary Colors” — the poem was added to three major editions of Shakespeare’s works.

Now, in a stunning development that has set the world of Shakespeare scholarship abuzz, Professor Foster has admitted he was wrong. In a message dated June 12 and quietly left last Thursday on the Internet discussion group Shaksper (www.shaksper.net), he said that another poet and dramatist was the more likely author of the poem. He was joined in his recantation by Richard Abrams, a professor of English at the University of Southern Maine, who has been his close associate in the Shakespeare attribution. NY Times

US Heard ‘Tomorrow Is Zero Hour’ on Eve of Attacks: “U.S. intelligence intercepted two messages the day before the Sept. 11 attacks that indicated an event was planned the following day, but the communications were not translated until Sept. 12, government sources said on Wednesday.” Reuters

David Brake writes, “It’s been a nervous week for patients.” On the heels of the Annals of Internal Medicine series examining medical mistakes in U.S. practice, which I pointed to below, comes this BBC report. Junior doctors ‘lack knowledge’

Many junior doctors do not know the signs that a patient is critically ill, according to a report…. Its authors recommend an urgent overhaul of the training provided by medical schools…

The researchers found almost a third of doctors failed to answer a question on how to deal with someone who was unconscious.

None of the trainees identified all of the steps involved in using an oxygen mask, and a fifth did not understand how it worked….

I just learned of the death of Leo Marks in January; he was the screenwriter for one of the most disturbing films I’ve ever seen, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. This New York Press obituary is worth reading, to start with for more about the furor around Peeping Tom. Marks was an original:

In 1958, English film director Michael Powell was casting about for a new collaborator, having split two years earlier with his longtime partner, Emeric Pressburger… Powell ran into producer Danny Angel, whose recent World War II espionage picture Carve Her Name with Pride had been well-received. As Powell recounts…, Angel asked him, “Are you still looking for a writer to work with you, like Pressburger did? Because, if you are, you ought to see Leo Marks. He’s as crazy as you are. He’s been working with me [on Carve Her Name]. Apparently, he was a codebreaker during the war, and he tells the tallest stories about it that I’ve ever heard… He can write poetry. He’s weird, I tell you. He lives double or triple lives, he’s difficult to get ahold of, and he’s full of mystery and conundrums.”

All true. Freshly turned 38, Leo Marks–World War II codebreaker (and codemaker), poet, raconteur, mufti of the mysterioso with high-voltage connections in the British Intelligence Service–had enjoyed a smidgen of success in London’s West End as a playwright with The Girl Who Couldn’t Quite! (1947) and The Best Damn Lie (1957), and as a screenwriter with Cloudburst (1951) and Carve Her Name.

“National Public Radio’s linking policy at npr.org has caused a fuss within the blog community that’s hot and getting hotter. The policy’s simply stated in two sentences: ‘Linking to or framing of any material on this site without the prior written consent of NPR is prohibited. If you would like to link to NPR from your Web site, please fill out the link permission request form.’ This is buried, of course, in a page linked to the site’s footer, but somebody noticed and mentioned it to Howard Rheingold, who passed it on to Cory Doctorow of boingboing.net. Cory wrote scathing commentary, calling the policy ‘brutally stupid,’ even ‘fatally stupid.’ The outrage is spreading; this has to be a rough day for the NPR ombudsman who’s deluged with email by now… ~24 hours after Cory’s report.” Slashdot [thanks, Walker]

Segway gets okay for sidewalks: “The high-tech Segway scooter is still months away from being available to the public, and already half the states have speedily cleared a path by changing their laws to allow the electric-powered vehicle on sidewalks.” MSNBC [“Scooter”?!?! –FmH]

Does Poverty Cause Terrorism?

An understanding of the causes of terrorism is essential if an effective strategy is to be crafted to combat it. Drawing a false and unjustified connection between poverty and terrorism is potentially quite dangerous, as the international aid community may lose interest in providing support to developing nations when the imminent threat of terrorism recedes, much as support for development waned in the aftermath of the Cold War; and connecting foreign aid with terrorism risks the possibility of humiliating many people in less developed countries, who are implicitly told that they receive aid only to prevent them from committing acts of terror. Moreover, premising foreign aid on the threat of terrorism could create perverse incentives in which some groups are induced to engage in terrorism to increase their prospects of receiving aid. In our view, alleviating poverty is reason enough to pressure economically advanced countries to provide more aid than they are currently giving. Falsely connecting terrorism to poverty serves only to deflect attention from the real roots of terrorism. ( — Alan B. Krueger, Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University; and Jitka Malecková, associate professor at the Institute for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Charles University in Prague) The New Republic

Fast Search claims Google’s size crown, says its allltheweb.com searches an index that’s 20 million links larger than Google. The Register

[via Walker, thanks]: Telemarketing Tidbit —

I just got off the phone with a telemarketer in record time. I used a new technique – it just occurred to me on the fly – and it not only gets them off really quickly (so to speak) but it also screws up their computer files.

My old technique was a bit more interpersonally brutal. As soon as I could tell it was a telemarketer, I’d simply shout “I’m bleeding!” and then hang up the phone. It guaranteed they would free up the line.

This new one, well, I don’t know why I did it, exactly. The guy called said he was from Verizon online, and congratulated me on the fact that my phone now qualified for broadband/DSL. So I told him I already have verizon dsl. He said, “really?” I said ‘yeah. For a year, now. Great stuff!” He got off right away, and – I assume – entered me in the computer (incorrectly) as someone who already has Verizon DSL.

This should work for everyone. Worst case, tell them that you just signed up for whatever it is ten minutes ago. Then they’ll mark you in the books as someone who already has whatever it is, and not call you again.

Of course the whole thing may backfire. I’ll keep you posted.

And I’ll post something of greater value to the world, here, later today or tomorrow.

[I like the ‘bleeding’ line… -FmH]

There’s a revolution afoot in understanding how antidepressant medications work. Since the brain is largely a black box and an important source of evidence for what’s going on inside the box is what we know about how medications work when they’re fixing dysfunctions, this new and fundamentally different understanding may largely invalidate the “monoamine theory” of depression that has held sway for a half decade and which you certainly learned in school if you took any courses on the biological basis of psychopathology. This paper reviews the new emerging consensus “that depression maybe associated with a disruption of mechanisms that govern cell survival and neural plasticity in the brain. Antidepressants could mediate their effects by increasing neurogenesis and modulating the signaling pathways involved in plasticity and survival.”

I Will Survive — How do ex-presidents continue to thrive and exert political influence? First, they are survivors:

Eliminating presidents who died in office, the first 28 ex-presidents — from George Washington through Lyndon Johnson — lived an average of just 11.6 years after leaving the White House. As of July, however, the Nixon-to-Clinton cohort already averages 15.2 years, a figure growing daily because only Nixon is dead. With Clinton’s brief post-presidency excluded, the mean increases to 17.9 years, and the 54-year-old Clinton may eventually raise the group’s mean post-presidential tenure to twice that of its 28 predecessors. Ford and Carter already rank second and fourth, respectively, in post-presidential longevity. Ford will soon pass legendary ex-president John Adams into third place, and both Ford and Carter may pass Herbert Hoover’s 31-year standard.

Then there’s money, the bully pulpit, bipartisanship, institutional memory… The American Prospect

Microsoft to reinstate Java in Windows:

“In an about-face, Microsoft said Tuesday that it will reinstate the ability to run Java programs in Windows XP.

Microsoft said it would include its own Java software in the Service Pack 1 update to Windows XP due late this summer. In the long term, though, the company plans to remove Java from Windows altogether.

The reinstatement is a partial victory for Java inventor and Microsoft rival Sun Microsystems, which in the 1990s had hoped people would use the cross-platform language to write programs capable of running on any computer, regardless of the operating system used by the machine.” CNET

The Power of Love Leaps the Great Divide of Death:

“At first it sounds like a high-concept movie, one of those supernatural heart-tuggers like Ghost or The Sixth Sense: the story of a teenage girl’s rape and murder, and the fallout those events have on her family, as narrated from heaven by the dead girl herself.

As it turns out, however, Alice Sebold’s first novel, The Lovely Bones, is anything but a hokey, Ouija-board mystery. What might play as a sentimental melodrama in the hands of a lesser writer becomes in this volume a keenly observed portrait of familial love and how it endures and changes over time. The novel is an elegy, much like Alice McDermott’s That Night, about a vanished place and time and the loss of childhood innocence. And it is also a deeply affecting meditation on the ways in which terrible pain and loss can be redeemed — slowly, grudgingly and in fragments — through love and acceptance.” NY Times book review

Journal Takes on Medical Mistakes: the first of a projected series of eight articles in which grave medical errors are reviewed and analyzed, with the doctors who committed them protected by anonymity, appears in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The series was inspired in part by a 1999 report by the Institute of Medicine, which found that mistakes in hospitals killed 44,000 to 98,000 patients a year. Departments within hospitals try to analyze their own errors, at regular “morbidity and mortality” conferences, but those sessions are private and are not written up in medical journals. Generally, the conferences are not discussed with patients. In an editorial about the new series, Dr. Wachter and his colleagues wrote that the medical profession — “for reasons that include liability issues and a medical culture that has discouraged open discussion of mistakes” — was not harnessing the full power of errors to teach. NY Times

Conflict of Interest?
However, is the concept of an independent, scholarly analysis of an aspect of medical practice, inspired simply by the lofty ideal of learning as much as we can from it for the betterment of patient care, an endangered species? Consider: Medical Journal Changes Independent Policy:

Is it a case of, ‘If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em?’ The New England Journal of Medicine will announce Thursday that it has given up finding truly independent doctors to write and review articles and editorials for it, as a result of the financial ties physicians have with so many drug companies in the United States The Journal says the drug companies’ reach is just too deep. ABC News

This is truly bad news for the integrity of medical literature. Over the past two decades, as federal funding for medical research has dwindled dramatically, research has been increasingly ‘bought’ by pharmaceutical industry backing. Now the review and commentary end is getting bought too, it’s little stretch to say.

Americans Seized at Afghan Border, Pakistan Asserts: More U.S. passport bearers allied with al Qaeda? “The detentions of Americans would raise troubling questions for the Bush administration, which has already drawn criticism for not granting prisoner-of-war status to suspected Qaeda and Taliban fighters captured in Afghanistan.” NY Times

Silently Shifting Personnel in Sex Abuse Cases: why should we be shocked to learn that school systems do it just like the Church?

Court Strikes Down Curb on Visits by Jehovah’s Witnesses: Nothing surprising about this 8-1 verdict against an idiotic ordinance by an Ohio town requiring a permit to go door-to-door. Oh yes, one surprising thing — that Clarence Thomas didn’t join William Rehnquist in an idiotic dissent to the majority opinion in which he found the law a valid approach to crime prevention.

Woman’s Murder Conviction in Mauling Case Is Overturned: “In a stunning reversal, a judge today threw out the murder conviction of a woman whose dog mauled a neighbor to death, letting stand the lesser convictions of involuntary manslaughter against the woman and her husband.” NY Times

Nicholas Kristof: Women’s Rights: Why Not? “We now have a window into what President Bush and America’s senators think of the world’s women: Not much.” NY Times op-ed

This Guy Still Finds the World Baffling. Blame the World. “Life doesn’t seem to be getting any less baffling for the monotonal comedian Steven Wright.” NY Times

The Soviet Smallpox Accident: “New information about an apparent accident in the former Soviet biological weapons testing program three decades ago has raised some troubling questions about our own nation’s ability to protect its citizens against a potential terrorist attack. The open-air test of a Soviet smallpox weapon in 1971 caused a small outbreak of the disease in a port on the Aral Sea, in what is now Kazakhstan, even among people who had been vaccinated.” NY Times editorial

We have Mary Eberstadt of the Hoover Institution, writing in The Weekly Standard: The Elephant in the Sacristy:

The real problem facing the American Catholic church is that a great many boys have been seduced or forced into homosexual acts by certain priests; that these offenders appear to have been disproportionately represented in certain seminaries; and that their case histories open questions about sexuality that–verboten though they may have become–demand to be reexamined.

Then [thanks to Walker for the link] there’s Eric Raymond, armed & dangerous, with a powerfully worded self-professed determination to go ‘further than Ms. Eberstadt’:

I think this scandal is grounded in the essentials of Catholic doctrines about sex, sin, guilt, and authority. This is not an accidental corruption of the church, any more than Stalin was an accidental corruption of Communism. Bad moral ideas have consequences, and those consequences can be seen most clearly in the human monsters who are both created by those ideas and exploiters of them. There is a causal chain that connects loathsome creatures like the “Reverend” Paul Shanley directly back to the authoritarianism and anti-sexuality of St. Augustine; a chain well-analyzed by psychologists such as Stanley Milgram and Wilhelm Reich. I suggest that any religion that makes obedience to authority a primary virtue and pathologizes sex will produce abuses like these as surely as rot breeds maggots.

Raymond approaches his topic with the same misguided zeal I referred to in the comments I made several days ago about Joe Katzman’s Winds of Change, not only grappling with his topic but believing his brand of weblog is the only counter to the ‘dominant media culture’ (he uses this term repeatedly) which keeps homosexuality a ‘journalistically protected class.’ This, he thinks, allows him to get away with trotting out the same old tired homophobic stereotyping about the supposed ‘homosexuality/pederasty/pedophilia connection in gay culture.’ Pity, it seemed for a moment he might have kept to some useful angles on the Church scandal and the media. Instead, there is ridiculous rhetoric about things like (to take one phrase admittedly out of context) ‘the sort of university-educated gay men who wind up determining what’s on the front page of the New York Times.’

Study finds notable difference in musicians’ brains: “Musical experience was strongly related to larger amounts of grey matter in the region called the Heschl’s gyrus, which is part of the auditory cortex. The structure contained 536 to 983 cubic millimetres of grey matter in professionals, 189 to 798 cubic millimetres in amateurs, and 172 to 450 cubic millimetres in non-musicians.” Ananova

The Baby Boy Payoff:

More evidence that men are squealing little chauvinist piggies: It seems daddies not only shower their sons with more attention but also work harder and earn more money after the birth of a boy than they do after the birth of a girl.

At the same time, the sex of a child has no impact on the hours that women work outside the home or the wages they earn, reported economists Shelly Lundberg and Elaina Rose of the University of Washington. Washington Post

Next in the floodtide of books on weblogging, from O’Reilly Press, is Essential Blogging: Selecting and Using Weblog Tools by Cory Doctorow, Rael Dornfest, J. Scott Johnson, Shelley Powers, Mena G. Trott, Benjamin Trott. Cory, of course, is boing boing, and Rael Domfest does raelity bytes.

With weblogs-or “blogs”-exploding all over the Web, the only thing lacking for power users and developers is detailed advice on how choose, install, and run blogging software. Written by leading bloggers, Essential Blogging includes practical advice and insider tips on the features, requirements, and limitations of applications such as Blogger, Radio Userland, Movable Type, and Blosxom. This book will get you up and blogging in no time.

Bush’s Police state shifts into gear: “The treatment of U.S. citizen Jose Padilla is turning into a

Kafkaesque spectacle that should make all Americans nervous.” And:

A Watcher for the watchers: “Sen. Maria Cantwell makes a bold proposal to create a director

of privacy and civil liberties accountability, in the wake of new

FBI domestic spying guidelines.” AlterNet

Israel Has Sub-Based Atomic Arms Capability

Israel has acquired three diesel submarines that it is arming with newly designed cruise missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads, according to former Pentagon and State Department officials, potentially giving Israel a triad of land-, sea- and air-based nuclear weapons for the first time. Washington Post

Cheer for bush or get arrested, at OSU

West’s pollution ‘led to African droughts’ BBC

Nuclear Waste Route Atlas: how close to your home will the trucks be coming?  Environmental Working Group

“We won’t deny our consciences”: Prominent Americans have issued this statement on the war on terror. Guardian UK

Can a PC think for itself?

Day after day since 1984, teams of programmers, linguists, theologians, mathematicians and philosophers have plugged away at a $60 million project they hope will transform human existence: teaching a computer common sense.

They have been feeding a database named Cyc 1.4 million truths and generalities about daily life so it can automatically make assumptions humans make: Creatures that die stay dead. Dogs have spines. Scaling a cliff requires intense physical effort. CNN

Declan McCullagh writes a Farewell to a Net Freedom Fighter – Ironically, in this column about Stanton McCandlish’s retirement from the Electronic Frontier Foundation , he bids farewell himself to his Wired readers:

This is my last weekly notebook for Wired News.

It’s been a long run: I started writing for Wired News in 1998, and began this Saturday update from the nation’s capital soon afterward.

During that time, I’ve chronicled the growing intersection between politics and technology, writing about how the law has struggled to keep abreast of developments — often with disappointing results…

He’s going to CNET News as chief political correspondent, he explains in his Politech mailing list:

Besides our own network, News.com articles also appear on the New York Times, MSNBC, and Yahoo News sites. We have an agreement with the Boston Globe and San Francisco Chronicle to run our articles on their websites and in print — all of which means you’ll be able to find my articles in more places than before.

How to fight the terror networks:

‘John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt codified the strategy that helped the United States overthrow the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. They believe that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida could still prevail if they got hold of weapons of mass destruction, and the US and its allies must prevent that acquisition. To do so, the US will have to change the nature of warfare.

(…)

That prompts the question of whether the US won the wrong war in Afghanistan, crushing the Taliban nation state, but allowing the al-Qaida network to slip through its grasp. It would be all the more serious for Washington if it turned out that by destroying one of al-Qaida’s main sanctuaries, it had in fact created more problems for itself. “When I think of an all-channel network operating in a sanctuary I want to leave it right there,” says Arquilla. “If I take the sanctuary, then it is going to hide in places I may never find. Simply, we must be looking around the world.” ‘ Le Monde Diplomatique

‘Modern art made me blue’. ‘Modern art has often been accused of being meaningless but could this mean it can bring on mental illness? A man who studied art theory and postmodernism at university says feelings of disengagement and alienation as a result of his studies caused him to suffer serious depression after graduation’:

“I felt that no activity had any more meaning than any other. I became seriously depressed. What was the point of concentrating on any activity if it had no real point? If you believed what we had been taught at university, everything had equal meaning. If you took this to its logical conclusion, everything meant nothing.”

BBC

[I would say that the disengaged, postmodern anomie of living in contemporary society may play a part in provoking existential depression, and of course that modern art reflects those conditions of living. However, it strikes me as unlikely that explicitly studying that art was as important a factor as the conditions of modern consciousness under which this man labored … as well as the likely biological vulnerability that also contributed to there being ‘an accident waiting to happen’. -FmH]

The Future of “History”: It is no longer possible to find it as controversial as when it appeared several short years ago, many argue, and it even appears self-evident at the moment, but is Samuel Huntington’s “culture clash” formulation unquestionably the more likely future than Francis Fukuyama’s incompatible notion of “pax democratia” ? Policy Review

Brendan O’Neill: “…(T)here is a vast difference between a handful of fascists and fascism as a social movement with real power…” The Myth of the Far Right: “Is Europe really heading for a new Dark Age, with its Nazi past coming back to haunt it? Are fascistic far-right parties really ‘on the march again’ everywhere from Greece to France, from Italy to Holland? In a word, no. The current obsession with the rise of the far right tells us far more about the European elites’ crisis of confidence and legitimacy than it does about any Nazi reality.”

And: Mick Hume: Who’s afraid of the far right? “It is hard to say which is more pathetic: the notion that the British National Party (BNP) winning three council seats in Burnley, Lancashire, marks a breakthrough for fascism, or the claim that the failure of the far-right BNP to win seats elsewhere represents an important victory for democracy.” sp!ked

The Man Who Predicted The Race Riots

One man was not at all surprised at this outbreak of inchoate racial fury. He was Ray Honeyford, the headmaster of a middle school in an immigrant area of Bradford in the early 1980s. He knew that the official multiculturalist educational policies that he was expected to implement would sooner or later lead to social disaster such as these riots: and when he repeatedly exposed the folly of these policies in print, the advocates of “diversity”—who maintain that all cultures are equal but that opinions other than their own are forbidden—mounted a vicious and vituperative campaign against him. For at least two years, the Honeyford Affair, as it was known, was a national preoccupation, calling forth endless newspaper and broadcast commentary, the man himself often branded a near-murderous racist and ultimately drummed out of his job. Hell, it seems, hath no fury like a multiculturalist contradicted.

Of course, the events of September 11 have concentrated at least some British minds a little harder on questions of cultural diversity and group loyalties. A disturbingly large number of British Muslims, from a variety of backgrounds, supported al-Qaida. Three of the captives now held at Guantanamo were from Britain, all of them products of the kind of homes that now exist in Bradford and elsewhere by the thousands. Two chemistry Ph.D.s of Bangladeshi origin are on trial in Birmingham, accused (not for the first time) of conspiracy to manufacture explosives for terrorist ends, and they are unlikely to have been acting merely as individuals. Several British Islamic charities were found to have been channeling money to terrorists. Richard Reid, who tried to blow up a transatlantic airliner with Semtex in his sneakers, had converted to Islam in a British jail. The newly alert intelligence service in the prison in which I work now believes that fully half of the Muslim prisoners there sympathize with the World Trade Center attacks: and since Muslim prisoners are by far the fastest-growing group of prisoners in Britain, already far overrepresented in the prison population, this is enough to disturb even the most complacent. The British elites, it appears, would have done far better to have heeded rather than vilified Honeyford almost two decades ago.

[From New York’s City Journal, which describes itself as ‘the nation’s premier urban-policy magazine, “the Bible of the new urbanism”…’ (via Walker)]

Here Are Your Pills. Do You Want the Seminar? “…among a small but growing number of drugstores across the country trying to expand the definition of “pharmacy” to include a range of health management services. In this new guise, the pharmacist is no longer just a figure in a white lab coat behind the counter. Many pharmacists believe that the new role is a natural for them, and consumer groups like the idea, too, because it expands patients’ access to health care.” This New York Times article doesn’t mention that this role is common among pharmacists in Europe as well.

The Best Jazz Player You’ve Never Heard NY Times

“Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o’er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably. I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the ends of his legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a’.

Won’t you come to Sandymount,

Madeline the mare?

Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. Acatalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the mare.

Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see.

See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.”

A persuasive and soulsearching (and long) letter from Menachem Kellner, Professor of Jewish Thought at the University of Haifa, responding to a colleague’s support for British scientist Steven Rose’s April 6 call for a European intellectual boycott against Israeli universities and scholars. The manifesto, originally published as an open letter to The Guardian, has been signed by over 300 European academics, mostly British. Prof. Kellner’s response is very much worth reading. Posted on Israeli doctoral student Linda Montag’s weblog, Thunder and Lightning [thanks to Deborah Weisman].

The recipient responded:

Dear Professor Kellner:

I am moved that you should write me such a long and heartfelt letter. You have certainly succeeded in your aim to shake my confidence in the rightness of the letter that I signed. I am not saying I now think you are right. I am saying that I no longer know what to think, and I obviously need to learn more of the history. I shall not be signing any more letters on the subject, one way or the other. Thank you very much again for your letter. I wish you well.

Yours sincerely

RD

Related: Coverage of the boycott call from Ha’aretz — The Intifada reaches the ivory tower; a collection of letters from academics decrying the boycott call, including an expression of skepticism from Noam Chomsky; and support for the boycott from an Israeli academic (Tanya Reinhart, professor of linguistics at Tel Aviv University). Indymedia Israel

‘Homicide’ isn’t dead, it’s just moved to cable TV

You can kill a good TV show but not what it stands for. Not in the cable era you can’t. There are way too many networks and too many hours to fill; you can’t send guts and creativity on a 10-year holiday, the way network TV could 25 years ago.

“Homicide” took us deeper into the marshes of guilt and innocence than TV cop shows had ever done. Its death signified that when you’re talking about major-league prime time, we want law and order and lots of it. But on cable, we want things to delve deeper, to shine a flashlight into the basement of the soul and the sewers of bureaucracy.

Welcome to the New Cop Shows – “The Wire” and “The Shield.” The Buffalo News

30,000 Years of Modern Art: “Monet and Picasso get the credit for ending art’s obsession with realism and classical beauty. But they had some powerful allies – the cave painters of the stone age.” Guardian UK

Pot Planet by Brian Preston: ‘…Preston is part journalist, part missionary and all viper. He likes to get “baked” on pot. He also enjoys the vagabond life. So, one day, perhaps while under the influence, what should pop into his head but an idea for a book: travel around the world, check out the marijuana scene in different countries (getting baked whenever possible), then write it all up and get it published. Dude! Such notions often float past while the bong bubbles, but in Preston’s case he actually grabbed on, stayed with it and cranked out Pot Planet: Adventures in Global Marijuana Culture. ‘ Salon review

Noah’s Flood Hypothesis May Not Hold Water:

“In 1996, marine geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman published a scientifically popular hypothesis, titled Noah’s Flood Hypothesis. The researchers presented evidence of a bursting flood about 7,500 years ago in what is now the Black Sea. This, some say, supports the biblical story of Noah and the flood.

But, such a forceful flood could not have taken place, says Jun Abrajano, professor of earth and environmental sciences at Rensselaer. He is part of an international team of scientists who refute the so-called Noah’s Flood Hypothesis.

Abrajano cites evidence of a much more gradual rising of the Black Sea that began to occur 10,000 years ago and continued for 2,000 years.”

“Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o’er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably. I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the ends of his legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a’.

Won’t you come to Sandymount,

Madeline the mare?

Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. Acatalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the mare.

Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see.

See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.”

Now, in Alaska, Even the Permafrost Is Melting: “The effects of a seven-degree rise in Alaska’s average temperature include the largest loss of trees to insects ever recorded in North America.” NY Times

Qaeda’s New Links Increase Threats From Global Sites: “A group of midlevel operatives has assumed a more prominent role in Al Qaeda and is working in tandem with Middle Eastern extremists across the Islamic world, senior government officials say. They say the alliance, which extends from North Africa to Southeast Asia, now poses the most serious terrorist threat to the United States.” NY Times

Dogs: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior, and Evolution

There are dog lovers, and then there are dog lovers. Behavioral scientists Raymond Coppinger and Lorna Coppinger have raised hundreds of dogs of various breeds, raced sled teams, and published professional and popular works on canine behavior. Dogs is their manifesto of canine evolution and treatment by humans, and it offers deep insight, provocative theories, and controversial ideas regarding our relationship with them. Though some of the material is most appropriate for readers with some zoological background, much of it is written for a general audience–one that cares about dogs not just for what they offer humans, but for their own sake.

Arguing that much of current thinking about dogs’ evolutionary history is misguided, the authors share their own complex story of wolflike animals coevolving with permanent human settlements and only recently being subject to directed breeding and artificial selection. This is interesting enough, but they go on to take issue with the use and treatment of dogs, some of which they claim is bad for dog and human alike. Pure breeding, making companion animals of inappropriate breeds, and even some uses of disability assistance are assailed for neglecting genetic and other hardwired aspects of canine life. Surprisingly little is known for sure about dogs’ lives and behavior, so the Coppingers’ contribution is a welcome, if occasionally unsettling, eye-opener. –Rob Lightner amazon.com

long pity poem 3-16-01



I'm borken

So I guess I'm lucky

strangers will fix me.

First my heart

then my coc k

someday my eyes.

Maybe they can make me taller wiser

Happier

without drugs.

Rub my brain

soak it all night rusty bathtup boken sink

extra special chemicals.

Ah, throw the whole fuckin mess out!

I'm becoming a 1987 Volvo station wagon

one thing fixed another breaks.

Everyone is so helpful

their parents grandparents great-grandparents

had what I'm having

like breakfast at Denny's.

Arthur Bites the Dust

Why you should watch the Daniel Pearl video. The New Republic

‘It is a sad story, in the end, this “taming of the Net.” In Ruling the Root, (Milton L.) Mueller, with all the precision and economy of a masterful prosecuting attorney, demolishes the techno-libertarian myth of the Internet as a new space for human interaction that is uncontrollable and inherently independent. Despite the widespread belief that the Net is so decentralized and distributed as to be able to elude governments and even nuclear devastation, there is a central point of control — the so-called “root.” ‘ Salon (via Walker)

McAfee Manufactures Virus Threat: Backlash by thoughtful people against the (thoughtless) news I propagated here, that we should be afraid of .jpegs bearing viruses. Little more than fearmongering by the “group of 20 or so companies whose profits are directly linked to creating fear in their customers, who have to keep discovering new sources of fear to improve their bottom line – or in the absence of new discoveries, keep inventing new sources of fear” — the anti-virus companies?

Now, if you know much about computing, you may be a little suspicious of this. JPEGs are compressed image files that only contain data representing an image to be displayed, not code to be executed. A modification of that data might screw up the picture of your cat dangling from the edge of the kitchen table you like so much, but it won’t turn the image into a potential virus transmitter, because the programs that display JPEGs don’t read them with an eye toward executing the code. An image file is just data to be displayed. The line between “data” and “code” is a little bit fuzzy – often particular characters or a particular file can be both data and code, depending on the context of how other code handles it. Or a particular file can include both data and code separately, like a Microsoft Word file that includes data (your text) and code (some macro designed to be executed by Word when the document is opened).

But for JPEGs there’s a well-designed standard, and it doesn’t include executing code of any sort. If a JPEG-handling program doesn’t like the data it sees, it should just stop trying to display the image, not decide to start executing code from the image. JPEGs are mostly harmless. Slashdot

Thanks to Walker for pointing me to this. Barr alleges defamation in lawsuit against Clinton, Carville and Flynt

Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., is suing former President Clinton, Democratic analyst James Carville and Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt, contending they harmed his reputation and caused him emotional distress during the Clinton impeachment.

Barr, a vigorous Clinton critic who called for the president to resign, is seeking at least $30 million, along with attorney’s fees and other costs.

He filed the lawsuit March 7 in U.S. District Court. Flynt, who says he was notified last week, made it public this week.

“It’s ridiculous,” Flynt said Thursday in a phone interview from his Los Angeles home. “He’s been out of the limelight for a while so maybe he’s looking for some attention.”

The lawsuit, filed along with various news articles and television transcripts, alleges the three defendants took part in a “common scheme and ongoing conspiracy to attempt to intimidate, impede and/or retaliate” against Barr and other House impeachment managers.

Specifically, it accuses Carville of providing Flynt with FBI files and other classified information on Barr’s private life for use in a smear campaign. It alleges Clinton approved of the actions.

“I don’t know if it’s more silly or more frivolous,” Carville said. “It’s just a political stunt. I think the best thing to do is let the courts handle it.” Yahoo! News

Rafe Coburn, in rc3, points out that “the news of the case was released at the same time Barr’s House committee is holding hearings on a bill that would put limits on ‘frivolous lawsuits,’ by putting a cap on damages awarded for pain and suffering.”

Simson Garfinkel on NPR’s Talk of the Nation ‘Science Friday’ about online privacy issues Real Audio .ram streaming audio

Aberdeen rocks: review of 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess by Stewart Home.

…I really don’t think anyone who is at all interested in the study of literature has any business not knowing the work of Stewart Home. No one and nothing, least of all the work itself, is saying you have to like it: if Home wanted his work to be likeable, he could just set about copying Nick Hornby, same as everybody else. But Home is using writing for a different purpose. Writing is power, ideology, an instrument of domination; it’s a huge, filthy, stinking machine. Yes, it’s possible – and can be rewarding in all sorts of ways – to use this machine for writing amiable, authentic, sincere-seeming prose. But that is only a tiny part of what writing is about, whether or not one chooses to acknowledge the power relation head on.

In his work, Home avoids all the nice bits of writing to focus in tightly on what is difficult, ugly, ambivalent about the process. So pulp gets in, and pornography, and violence; philosophy is allowed, so long as it is not being consoling; and political theory is fundamentally what the whole thing is about – Home sometimes calls his method ‘proletarian Postmodernism’, and he doesn’t mean that entirely as a joke. Much of Home’s work is extremely funny, if you are comfortable enough with the tradition it comes out of to be able to see the humour. But it isn’t warm, it isn’t compassionate, it doesn’t make you feel good as you read it. The irony is almost total. It’s satire, unsweetened and unadorned.

London Review of Books

3am Interview: A Cunning Linguist – 69 Things To Do With Stewart Home —

“It’s not a problem in the States for people to understand that there is more than one style of English language writing that can be worked at, but here it’s a problem. The critics think that if you’re not making these failed attempts at metaphor then you’re not trying. They appear incapable of imagining that I choose to write as I do. The critics here seem to think I can’t control my writing. But actually writing in a stripped-down way is a discipline, because you’ve got to make sure it’s not baggy and you’ re not repeating yourself too much within a sentence. And with every sentence you’re paring it down. You’re thinking – I want 20 to 30 word sentences. So there’s a certain discipline in there. With this Dead Princess it’s like Come Before Christ and Murder Love, it hasn’t got that pulp narrative and basically it’s written from the perspective of a disintegrating personality” 3am Magazine

“The Stewart Home Society exists to promote the works of Stewart Home and document the many aspects of his work. Also the Stewart Home Society will make preparations for Stewart Home’s death on which it will step into the role of defending the great man’s works and reputation against bourgeois / imperialist / revisionist slander and distortion.”

Rolling Stone, Struggling for Readers, Names Briton as Editor: “Rolling Stone, a magazine that all but defined the American countercultural epoch, yesterday named a British managing editor schooled in the racy ways of contemporary English men’s magazines. The appointment signals the end of Rolling Stone‘s history as a publisher of epic narratives and literary journalism, in part because the owner, Jann Wenner, believes that today’s young reader has little patience for long articles.” NY Times [thanks, Spike Report]

I was looking forward both to the intriguing premise of this war movie and to seeing John Woo’s direction. From Slate‘s “Summary Judgment”:

Windtalkers (MGM). Critics are disappointed by action maestro John Woo’s first war movie. The film is based on the United States’ use of the Navajo language as a code during World War II. It’s fascinating history, but “the filmmakers have buried it beneath battlefield clichés, while centering the story on a white character played by Nicolas Cage” (Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times). The combat scenes are “as kinetic (and as splattery) as any ever filmed” (David Edelstein, Slate), but they may not serve the movie: [Windtalkers‘] style keeps getting in the way of the action and the emotion” (Stephen Hunter, the Washington Post).

Man pleads guilty to faking his death in Sept. 11 attacks; had sought to avoid prosecution on an earlier fraud charge. San Jose Mercury

“West Nile virus, the mosquito-borne illness that has killed at least 18 people in the United States since 1999, has established itself in the eastern half of the country and threatens to spread to other parts of the Americas, U.S. health experts said on Thursday.” Reuters Health

Castration ‘Doctor’ Committed No Crime? Shades of my coverage awhile back of apotemnophilia, this 29 year-old unlicensed surgeon may be satisfying men’s sexual fetishes by voluntarily castrating them. Yahoo! News

Bush Set to Offer Plan for Palestinian State: “…designed to help quell violence and hold Palestinian leaders to a high standard of accountability…” NY Times

Paul Krugman: Plutocracy and Politics: “The Gilded Age looked positively egalitarian compared with the concentration of wealth now emerging in America. Pretty soon denial will no longer be possible. What will the apologists say next? ” NY Times op-ed

New computer virus can infect picture files: ‘The malicious program is the first ever to infect picture files, though it is not currently attacking computers. Called “Perrun,” it worries researchers because it is the first to be able to cross from infecting a program to infecting data files, long considered safe from such threats.’ digitalMASS [via walker]

YahooPOPs!: “an open-source initiative to provide free POP3 access to your Yahoo! Mail account. YahooPOPs! is available on the Windows and Unix platforms.

This application emulates a POP3 server and enables popular email clients like Outlook, Netscape, Eudora, Mozilla, Calypso, etc., to download email from Yahoo! accounts…

Yahoo! Mail disabled free access to its POP3 service in April 2002. This resulted in many people (including myself) to look for alternative free POP3 services. But this exercise can be very difficult because of the fact that your Yahoo! Mail address could be with several people and informing all of them about your new email address could prove to be a nightmare.

And then one day, I stumbled across a Perl script called FetchYahoo, which almost did what I wanted! It downloaded emails from Yahoo’s website and presented them in a format such that email clients like Netscape and Pine could read them. But, the format in which it saved the emails is not supported by all email clients, including the one that I use. Also, making a layman install Perl and to get a Perl script to work could be a nightmare.

So, YahooPOPs! was born.”

Beauty in the Eye of Hubble:

‘The Hubble telescope reveals a rainbow of colors in this dying star, called IC 4406. Like many other so-called planetary nebulae, IC 4406 exhibits a high degree of symmetry. The nebula’s left and right halves are nearly mirror images of the other. If we could fly around IC 4406 in a spaceship, we would see that the gas and dust form a vast donut of material streaming outward from the dying star. We don’t see the donut shape in this photograph because we are viewing IC 4406 from the Earth-orbiting Hubble telescope. From this vantage point, we are seeing the side of the donut. This side view allows us to see the intricate tendrils of material that have been compared to the eye’s retina. In fact, IC 4406 is dubbed the “Retina Nebula.” ‘STScI

Extraterrestrial Jupiter:

“After 15 years of looking, a top planet-hunting team has finally found a distant planetary system that reminds them of home.

Geoffrey Marcy, astronomy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and astronomer Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington today announced their discovery of a Jupiter-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star at nearly the same distance as the real Jupiter orbits our own Sun.” NASA

Dispatcher Says She Was Told Not to Report Shoe-Bomb Incident NY Times