I’m glad to find that this article by Dr Jerome Groopman, which I read in the hardcopy of the latest New Yorker, is online for me to blink to. A Knife in the Back should be read by anyone with chronic back pain before they make a decision about whether to have surgery. This is a blunt and disturbing exploration of the ways in which the comfort of the familiar, the power of paradigms to withstand accumulating counter-evidence, market forces and just plain greed and ignorance conspire to maintain a steady stream of referrals for procedures that are not likely to be of help and can easily make things worse. Except that he is a sufferer from chronic back pain himself, Dr Groopman appears to have no vested interests in writing this beyond alerting the public to a widespread travesty of medical practice.

“The real pro-Israel forces are those willing to push Israel to change its policies.” Violence and Excuses in the Mideast:

Bush and the Saudis would like to set up negotiations, restoring the image of calm while the United States pursues its Iraq adventure, meanwhile allowing Bush to weigh in on the side of peace and rational discourse. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will appear to be making a major concession to his Labor party allies by sitting in negotiations. Meanwhile, he will block any concessions that weaken Israel’s hold over a substantial part of the West Bank. And Bush can then have his war.

Israel has become increasingly polarized, between a large group (now close to 46 percent) who favor ethnic cleansing of Palestinians (the polite word being used is transfer) and a growing minority (now close to 25 percent) who sympathize with the Israeli Defense Force Reservists refusing to serve in the West Bank and Gaza. The peace forces have been betrayed by a Labor Party that remains part of Sharon’s government, so Israelis who seek to restore the moral coherence and spiritual health of the Jewish people are increasingly turning to civil disobedience and direct action.

Many Americans have been intimidated into silence by the forces of Jewish-establishment political correctness. They fear they will be labeled either anti-Semitic Christians or self-hating Jews should they say aloud what they feel privately: that Israel is behaving immorally and at times even savagely.

From interesting writing partners — Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun and Harvard professor of African American Studies, Cornel West. AlterNet

William Saletan, in Slate, explores Tenet to Mitchell to Chance:

Unofficially, Mitchell and Tenet, like Zinni, Oslo, and Madrid, are buzzwords designed to create an impression of progress where none exists.

The theory put forward by Powell, President Bush, the U.N. Security Council, and other peace process exponents is that Zinni will lead to Tenet, which will lead to Mitchell, which will lead to Oslo, which will lead to peace. But the history of the invention of these steps suggests the opposite. Mitchell was created because Oslo failed. Tenet was created because Mitchell failed. Zinni was created because Tenet failed. The peace process is growing ever more complicated not because each stage leads to the next but because it doesn’t.

But back up a minute. Gary Kamiya in Salon derides the Bush foreign policy catastrophe as a whole:

The Bush administration’s foreign policy is in shambles. Each passing day in the Middle East brings new horrors, new bloodshed, new hatred. And it isn’t just the Middle East: The bankruptcy of the Republican administration’s approach, not just to the most explosive and strategically crucial region in the world, but to foreign policy in general, has become impossible to ignore. In a little over a year in office, Bush has allowed the Israeli-Palestinian crisis to explode from a small brush fire to a raging conflagration; squandered the global goodwill toward the United States after Sept. 11; set back the cause of moderates in Iran with a comic-book invocation of “evil”; endangered key allies in South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Egypt; failed to pursue vital peacekeeping and nation-building efforts in Afghanistan; clumsily pushed the Arab world into greater solidarity with Saddam Hussein; put forward a potentially dangerous new first-use nuclear doctrine; and filled our European allies with contempt and rage at our heavy-handed unilateralism. The Bush administration is rapidly staking a claim as one of the most incompetent foreign policy presidencies in the post-World War II era.

As FmH readers know, I’m the first to deride Bush administration ideology, policy, ethics, etc. After all, what can you expect when the President’s main foreign policy analyst has a supertanker named after her by one of her transnational paramours? But, while I agree that the administration’s track record, when you assemble it all together as in the paragraph above, classes it as an incontrovertible flop, I’m not sure I would blame Bush for the Middle East conflagration. The assumption that failure at peacemaking equals responsibility for bloodshed is not a natural one except in a certain narrow subset of the public which accepts a notion of noblesse oblige re: policing foreign conflicts (even though my sentiments lean toward a US obligation, as the sole superpower, to expend its resources around the world in humanitarian crises…). The judgment of history, also, will probably be that there has been a longer-term failure of the US commitment to Middle East peace, at least partially inherited from previous administrations.

No problem with agencies sharing data: “GAO says privacy experts OK with collecting Social Security numbers.” WorldNetDaily

Mobile phones that can lip-read?: “Shouting down your mobile phone may become a thing of the past, thanks to the latest gadget being developed by a Japanese company.

NTT DoCoMo Inc, a subsidiary of NTT Communications Corp, is working on the world’s first lip-reading telephone that could relieve the annoyance of loud mobile phone conversations…” japantoday

Andromeda/Comet conjunction: “Northern sky watchers are in for a treat just after sunset on April 4th. As the sky fades to black, Comet Ikeya-Zhang and the great Andromeda Galaxy will meet about 10 degrees above the western horizon. Less than half a degree (the width of one full Moon) will separate the pair. Dark skies and an unobstructed view of the horizon are essential for observers who wish to watch the encounter. The comet and the galaxy will be only dimly visible to the unaided eye, so binoculars are recommended.” spaceweather.com

CLEVELAND, Tenn. — Bradley County, one of several Tennessee counties to vote recently to post the Ten Commandments, has been <a href=”http://www.tennessean.com/local/archives/02/03/15440830.shtml?Element_ID=15440830

“>asked to extend its endorsement of religious documents in public places to include the Five Pillars of Islam.

Adventures of the Passive-Aggressor

NEWTON, MA—According to sullen teenager Steve Geremek, the 23rd century, a time previously restricted to the fantastical imaginings of science-fiction writers and futurists, “sucks.” [courtesy of, and verbatim from, David]

Can Asians think? ‘If the title of Kishore Mahbubani’s collection of essays seems provocative, a quick look through the book will convince you that the author takes the question Can Asians think? very seriously. In his introduction, Mahbubani, the Singaporean ambassador to the United Nations, writes, “Can Asians think? Judging from the record of Asian societies over the past few centuries, the answer should be no — or, at best, not very well.”  ‘ Salon

Rude Americans Seen Proliferating Yahoo! News

Few Risks Seen to the Children of 1st Cousins: “Contrary to widely held beliefs and longstanding taboos in America, first cousins can have children together without a great risk of birth defects or genetic disease, scientists are reporting today. They say there is no biological reason to discourage cousins from marrying.” NY Times

I heard this feature on a Bush administration proposal for universal health insurance for household pets on Monday’s (hint) All Things Considered and, sputtering and fuming, actually believed it! I tried to figure out why the Administration would be invested in this; would it ingratiate them further to the Right-to-Lifers, for example?? Only the soundbite of angry protest from a representative of an organization called “People Are People Too” nearly, but not quite made me suspicious. This NPR feature, on the other hand, was not an April Fools hoax, believe it or not — a group of activists is trying to get the Pope to declare that sea turtle flesh is meat to prevent large numbers of the creatures from being killed for Lenten food. Neither was this LA Times lament, that it appears to be okay to blow your nose without a tissue these days, in jest. On the other hand, I followed a link to this Times of India April 1 news item reporting that bin Laden had been arrested the night before at the New Delhi rail station, and did recognize it as a joke, especially when the article said that ObL had booked his railway passage under the name of George W. Bush. Clever of me. The Museum of Hoaxes site has a gallery of memorable April Fool’s hoaxes and a link for you to subscribe to a free Museum of Hoaxes newsletter. And finally, this Adequacy for Grownups site opines that it is an irresponsible and unseemly betrayal of the public trust in the media (such as it is…) for journalists to perpetrate April Fool’s hoaxes. However, I can’t figure out if that was an April 1 jest or in earnest… [most of these links courtesy of Spike]

In a review of The Panic Room, the new thriller starring Jodie Foster and Forest Whitaker, I was amused that New York Times critic A.O. Scott sees fit to caution us that it “has many scenes of graphic violence, some of it directed at the walls and windows of a beautiful old house.”

Addiction to Addition: Bush’s campaign themes included his disdain for public opinion polls and Clinton’s “govern-by-numbers” approach. Nevertheless, members of Bush’s administration — especially Karl Rove — turn out to be avid consumers of polling data. One critic describes them, in contrast to Clinton’s use of polling “to craft popular policies”, as “using polling to spin unpopular ones”. Perhaps more concerning, “…at least the Clintonites were upfront about their addiction to addition. The Bush method is all denial and secrecy, just like its energy plan. The president’s pollsters, Jan van Lohuizen and Fred Steeper, are kept in a secure location — the very distant background.” Maureen Dowd’s commentary concludes, “Aides to Mr. Bush have spent the seven months since the terrorist attacks telling us about his ‘resolute’ grit as a leader. Now we must wonder, every time they reiterate that the president is ‘focused,’ whether the word was focus-grouped.” NY Times

Bioterror Agents Join List of `Emerging’ Ills: The New York Times covers an Atlanta conference on emerging infectious disease sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization. In addition to anthrax and other potential biological warfare agents, (“We learned we were not adequately prepared”) the conference paid attention to West Nile Fever (“It will continue to spread and will be a major public health problem in the next decade”), the “roaring” dengue fever epidemic in Latin America, and the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections such as fluoroquinolone-resistant pneumococcus, resistant gonorrheal infections, and MRSA (multiply-resistant Staph. aureus). An underlying theme is the ill-prepared nature of our public health infrastructure.

Borg Journalism – We are the Blogs. Journalism will be Assimilated:

“As a journalist covering the weblog beat, I officially love weblogs. But sometimes that love can be sorely tested. Weblogs scoop you at every turn, breaking “your” stories before you have a chance to rush your article to press. And even if you do manage to break a story, weblogs take it over, dissecting every point you made and pushing your logic to every inevitable conclusion. Forget that follow-up you had planned – ‘blogs have already anticipated and published every point you might have made.

…(I)f you’re a journalist trying to break news, Blogs are the new Borg. Blogs relentlessly track down every scrap of news, assimilating it into the Blog Collective hive-mind with stunning efficiency. It doesn’t stop there: individual blogs each add a small insight to the story, drawing on their personal experience and contributing to the conversation. Then the conversation takes over, exploring every possible implication and insight with a ferocity that astounds…” — John Hiler Microcontent News

This is, in contrast to the Wood column to which I blinked below, a more level-headed appraisal of the dialectic between hive mind and individualism in the blog world, its relationship to journalism, the emergent aspects of the weblogging network, and the balanced strengths and limitations of ‘the Blog Collective’.

This has helped me think further about my distress about the gap between the peacebloggers and the warbloggers in my What Am I Doing Here? post of several weeks ago. Hiler points out that as a journalist he’s had to deal with his consternation over the fact that the weblog world often ‘scoops’ his insights about a story by the time he gets around to writing and publishing it. In this case as well, some of the responses from readers, especially other webloggers, to my angst about ‘preaching to the converted’ presaged what I read in Hiler’s essay.

Girl Suicide Bombers:

“The message for Israel, and the rest of the world, is clear: Terrorism is not just a fringe phenomenon. Terrorists are not just strange young men whispering in dark rooms. Terrorists are high-school students, terrorists are women—and terrorists are all around you. No one—not the old man on the bicycle or the young girl walking to school—can be discounted. All Palestinians are potential terrorists, and terrorism will never go away. Whether or not all of this is actually true is immaterial: The point is to make the Israelis think it is, and thus give up, withdraw, quit the Middle East—or else undertake a massive and potentially disastrous military operation of the sort that may have begun this week.” — Anne Applebaum Slate

That the Palestinians sponsors of the suicide bombing campaign are branching out from the use of typical malleable, futureless male zealots, I agree with Applebaum, tells us on the most pedestrian level something about the effectiveness of the Israeli border checkpoints in excluding ‘the usual suspects’. But while Applebaum concludes that the ‘girl bombers’ represent the radicalization of more pedestrian, non-fanatic Palestinian discontent, one might just as easily speculate that they are the exception that proves the rule. I don’t think anyone knows how many young women are lining up to detonate themselves for the cause, how plausible the claim of the al Aqsa Brigade that they are training 200 female suicide bombers is — although, as Applebaum points out, it makes perfect sense for al Aqsa to claim they are. The distinction Applebaum tries to draw, between a ‘political’ war and a ‘religious’ one, is too simplistic, especially in the Middle East, to be a basis for answering questions crucial to anyone troubled by events in the Middle East — how inexhaustible a supply of potential suicide bombers the Palestinians have at their disposal and whether any measures to prevent their attacks can be effective.

A Collection of Discards.com Wired

Stealth P2P network hides inside Kazaa

A California company has quietly attached its software to millions of downloads of the popular Kazaa file-trading program and plans to remotely “turn on” people’s PCs, welding them into a new network of its own.

Brilliant Digital Entertainment, a California-based digital advertising technology company, has been distributing its 3D ad technology along with the Kazaa software since late last fall. But in a federal securities filing Monday, the company revealed it also has been installing more ambitious technology that could turn every computer running Kazaa into a node in a new network controlled by Brilliant Digital.

The company plans to wake up the millions of computers that have installed its software in as soon as four weeks. It plans to use the machines–with their owners’ permission–to host and distribute other companies’ content, such as advertising or music. Alternatively, it might borrow people’s unused processing power to help with other companies’ complicated computing tasks. CNET

I noticed that the number of hits FmH received yesterday nearly doubled from my normal weekday count of 400-500 to 899. (It’s probably best left for a different post to marvel — and sigh? — that with everything else changing all around us in this world the number of you who read FmH has been so absolutely unvarying for many many months…) My referrer log tells me that this was probably due to a link I got in Molly Wood’s Net Effect column on CNET about the Google/Scientology flap.Down at the bottom of her seventh paragraph, she points to my speculation that it was a “concerted bombing campaign” (which attempted to rank a site critical of Scientology higher on Google) that was responsible for Google removing that site from its index until public outcry forced them to reverse that decision. Wood is critical of the googlebombing concept, finding it ironic that Google, beloved of geeks everywhere, may fall victim to geekish manipulation no different, she feels, than Scientology’s infowar on its adversaries. Funny thing is, while she seems to take my word as the causal gospel and goes on to base a critique of blogger ethics on it, my speculation that it was the googlebombing campaign that caused Google to cave was probably not accurate, as my post goes on to point out.

A Patriot’s Guide to Debating the War-on-Terror® Salon

Part of the MIT Communications Forum Media in Transition series, Humor on the Web is an April 4th conference in Cambridge, MA:

“Humorists and humor magazines historically have played an important role in American political and social life, focusing attention on hypocrisies and inequalities, helping us to take ourselves a little less seriously, and introducing alternative perspectives into national debates. The Onion and Modern Humorist have emerged as two of the most significant humor magazines on the Web, and they have received heightened attention in the wake of the contested 2000 election and September 11. In this forum, we’ll explore what aspects of digital media have facilitated the rapid growth in the visibility and reach of these online publications. Do these formerly underground publications face pressure to remain in “good taste” as they reach more mainstream audiences, and how is this reconciled with their identity as alternatives to consensus media? How do these publications define their relationship to the grassroots strands of humor that circulate across the Internet? Are new forms of humor emerging as a consequence of the interactive and collaborative potential of digital media, or do these publications simply build on the traditions of print humor? How has of the accelerated communications of the new digital environment affected the consumption of humor? What might these publications tell us about the shifting relationship between news and entertainment?” [thanks, Richard, for alerting me to this…]

An Anthropology of Mental Illness in Euro-America: “Psychiatry conventionally regards spirit possession and dramatic healing

rituals in non-European societies as forms of abnormality if not mental

illness. Roland Littlewood, a psychiatrist and social anthropologist, argues

that it is necessary to take into account both social process and personal

cultural meaning when explaining psychiatric illness and “deviant” behavior.

Littlewood brings anthropological and psychiatric literature to bear on case

studies of self-poisoning, agoraphobia, hysteria, chronic fatigue syndrome,

post-traumatic stress, male sexual violence, and eating disorders. He contends

that Western psychiatric illnesses are themselves “possession states”–patterns

by which individual agency is displaced through an idiom of alien intrusion

whether of a spirit or a disease.” amazon.com

“The Netherlands has become the first country in the world to legalise mercy killing after a controversial law on euthanasia came into force on Monday.

The legislation allows patients experiencing unbearable suffering to request euthanasia, and doctors who carry out such a mercy killing to be free from the threat of prosecution, provided they have followed strict procedures.” BBC

“It will be interesting to see if Into the Buzzsaw gets any play in the outlets it exposes. Don’t count on it.” Michelle Goldberg reviews former CBS producer Kristina Borjesson’s book on the journalist victims of media censorship:

“The majority of the eighteen pieces in Borjesson’s book are about hard-working mainstream journalists, dedicated to the ideals of their profession, who stumble into the buzzsaw and have their careers and reputations eviscerated. Though the subjects and personalities involved are wildly diverse, the stories echo each other in disturbing ways. Journalists are sent by their bosses to do their jobs — in the case of Borjesson, to investigate the crash of TWA Fight 800 as a producer for CBS news. Sometimes what they find is impolitic, other times it brings threats of corporate lawsuits. Suddenly, editors kill the story, or demand changes. In some instances, like that of TV reporter Jane Akre, who was investigating the use of Monsanto’s Bovine Growth Hormone, reporters are ordered to insert outright lies in their pieces or face firing. Other times, like with Gerard Colby’s book about the Du Pont family and Gary Webb’s San Jose Mercury News series about the CIA’s role in the crack epidemic, the bosses are spooked after the fact and withdraw their support from work already published, hanging reporters out to dry.” AlterNet

Review of On the Internet by Berkeley philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, who argues that the belief in the adequacy of interactions on the Internet shares the problems of Cartesian mind-body dualism. He invokes a number of (pre-electronic) philosophers, including Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, to argue for the importance of not leaving the body behind in interactions; he is especially concerned about distance learning over the net. Taking pains, however, to establish that he is no Luddite himself, he notes that he has recorded his lectures on .mp3 and even broadcast one of his courses on the web. Chronicle of Higher Education

Backstabbers — ‘In Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman, pioneering feminist Phyllis Chesler dares to talk about the ways women — including famous feminists — stab each other in the back.’ Salon. As a fan of the work of Carol Gilligan, I’ve always felt the feminist developmental theorists who have made much of the fact that women’s development conspires to accentuate the value of affiliation and embeddedness in relationships go a long way to explain a host of implications for male-female psychological differences. However, this never should have influenced social scientists to have blinders on about female-female aggression, or to discount the possibility of affiliative values in males. Now a veteran of feminist social science takes off her blinders, in a way.

Was this new U.S. postage stamp (the image is of an earlier version of the design) designed by Leni Riefenstahl, or what?

Atomic Apocalypse Barely Averted at the Davis-Besse Reactor CommonDreams

Peter Gabriel’s Passion — music from The Last Temptation of Christ — and his companion compilation, Passion Sources. One of the founts of contemporary worldbeat music and particularly appropriate today, showing how the emergence of Christianity in the Passion was firmly embedded in the timeless rhythms of the crossroads of three continents. Happy Easter, and an ongoing happy Passover.

Peter Gabriel’s Passion — music from The Last Temptation of Christ — and his companion compilation, Passion Sources. One of the founts of contemporary worldbeat music and particularly appropriate today, showing how the emergence of Christianity in the Passion was firmly embedded in the timeless rhythms of the crossroads of three continents. Happy Easter, and an ongoing happy Passover.

Segway auctions close with 6-figure bids. CNET.com

The Push for News Returns. Remember the late lamented PointCast (actually, I thought it was much better as a concept than a reality…)? I’ve been looking at Columbia Newsblaster recently; essentially a natural language summarizer and agggregator of online news sources. This Wired article explains how it does its stuff, as well as pointing to several related concepts:

• Google’s News Search beta
• NewsInEssence from the University of Michigan

Ancestors ‘used drugs to survive’: “Mind-altering drugs may be so popular because they were once used by our ancestors to survive, two leading anthropologists have argued. Dr Roger Sullivan, of the University of Auckland, and Edward Hagen, of the University of California at Santa Barbara, say there is plenty of evidence that humans have sought out so-called psychotropic drugs over millions of years.” BBC

In emphasizing only the adaptive properties of mind-altering drugs, this theory ignores speculation, most prominently that of Andrew Weil (and, as Miguel pointed out in an email, Terence McKenna as well), that humankind’s perennial relationship to psychotropic substances may represent instead a universal and innate affinity for their consciousness-altering properties. Think, for example, of how children love to spin to get dizzy, Weil observes. He argues that drug-taking becomes a problem in society only when pharmaceutical techniques intruded into the process to produce more concentrated and purified psychoactives. In contrast, natural mind-altering substances are full of impurities that act to self-limit the extent and frequency of drug-taking (because you’ll get sick from too much). Think of the difference between chewing coca leaves and freebasing cocaine, or between taking peyote and taking LSD, he notes.

Everyone who has any kind of Yahoo! account has just had your marketing preferences reset by Yahoo! without any input from you, so that you will be receiving promotional notices of all sorts from Yahoo! advertisers if you’re not already. Several bloggers have begun to spread the word, apparently first commented upon at Slashdot, where instructions are posted to reestablish your old privacy settings:

Go to your Account Information screen (for each and every ID you have) and about mid screen you will see “Edit Your Marketing Preferences” link. Click on it and set them back to the way you want them, otherwise get ready for *LOTS* of advertising spam type emails from Yahoo’s advertisers. Note also at the bottom, that you will be marked YES for ‘By US Mail’ and ‘By Phone’ as well.”

I agree with Rafe Colburn’s comments in rc3 about The Great Terror, Jeffrey Goldberg’s long New Yorker article to which I’d been meaning to blink. Largely an investigation of Iraq’s use of chemical and biological warfare against its own Kurdish population, it has attracted much attention for a secondary focus — Goldberg’s interviews in Kurdistan established an ostensible link between Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda. In so doing, the article will surely influence the debate about whether attacking Iraq has any justification relative to the W-o-T®. Goldberg asks over and over in the article why no one else in the European or American press has written about the sequelae of the Iraqi attacks on the Kurds. I would turn that question on its head and ask, why now? Without wanting to create the impression I’m turning a blind eye on genocide, was the timing of this piece influenced perhaps by the Government That Never Lies to Us, which has closed its Disinfo Office because of the public outcry… Addendum: Just as it was taboo after 9-11 to wonder too publicly whether anything in US foreign policy had contributed to terrorist ire at us, as if raising such questions dishonored the memory of those who died that day or blamed the victims, such questions about the possible bias and the timing of the Goldberg piece have been called thoughtless and insensitive. Clearly, I think they are neither…

Think Again offers a selection of original graphics that respond to US military action in Central Asia, violence against Arab and Muslim Americans, and to the Bush administrations “invisible war on terrorism.”

Should We Go To War Against These Children?

These “debates” are framed in such a way that Iraq is neither a country nor a community of 22 million human beings, but one man, Saddam Hussein. A picture of the fiendish tyrant almost always dominates the page. (“Should we go to war against this man?” asked last Sunday’s Observer). To appreciate the power of this, replace the picture with a photograph of stricken Iraqi infants, and the headline with: “Should we go to war against these children?” Propaganda then becomes truth. Any attack on Iraq will be executed, we can rest assured, in the American way, with saturation cluster bombing and depleted uranium, and the victims will be the young, the old, the vulnerable, like the 5,000 civilians who are now reliably estimated to have been bombed to death in Afghanistan. As for the murderous Saddam Hussein, former friend of Bush Sr and Thatcher, his escape route is almost certainly assured. — John Pilcher ZNet

School suspends teen on dog’s say-so.  Ottawa Citizen

The Brave New World of Scalar Electromagnetics. I certainly don’t understand how this might work, but this histrionic site claims that the discovery of new electromagnetic waves filling the void can be tapped to (a) generate endless ‘free’ energy and solve the energy crisis; (b) create weapons of mass destruction that dwarf our present capabilities; (c) heal all current diseases; (d) perfect mindcontrol techniques; (e) alter gravity, time, inertia, and the apparent mass of objects, among other claims. “(This information) needs to become common knowledge as fast as possible, for the sake of the survival of life on earth.” The concepts are here related to Nicola Tesla, to UFO’s, the Russian threat and the ‘secret government’, among other things.

A patent has reportedly just been granted for a MEG (motionless electromagnetic generator) device, promising to be in production, and providing free energy, within the year. “The announcement has significance since the patent office has always been skeptical of devices which seem to ‘get-something-for-nothing.’ But according to the new science of scalar electromagnetics, the MEG does not break the law of conservation of energy. It’s just that the energy is conserved in the fourth dimension, time, and not our 3-space world.”

See if this makes any sense to you.

Dennis Fox, a friend of mine who is a psychology professor turned political columnist in the local newspaper in the town where I live writes about an interesting dilemma of dramatic proportions here — because Brookline is both very politically left and very Jewish — but pertinent to our national political debate. Can Brookline Talk About Israel and Palestine? He also mentions this: “…the website of Visions for Peace with Justice in Israel/Palestine, a Boston-area Jewish group with members active in the Brookline Jewish community, contains links to relevant sources.”

Prozac linked to increased cancer growth: New research suggests that serotonin is a natural growth suppressant for some types of tumors, and that SSRI antidepressants may block that effect. Eli Lilly, the manufacturer of Prozac, of course disputes the relevance of the finding. I agree with the researchers’ caveat that this should not make anyone stop their antidepressant, which probably presents a greater risk than the theoretical research finding, which was established in the test tube and is not supported by any epidemiological findings. New Scientist

[If you know a little pharmacology, this finding may at first seem counterintuitive. SSRIs increase the amount of serotonin around by blocking its reuptake, so if serotonin is good for stopping tumor growth, why wouldn’t SSRIs enhance the effect? The answer is that it is intracellular serotonin that inhibits tumors, and the SSRIs increase extracellular serotonin by blocking its transport into cells (“reuptake”). –FmH]

Armed With Radar, Civilians Take Aim at Speeders: latest style of American vigilantism. NY Times

A hacker’s dreamland: wireless networks

Should you be concerned about wireless security? Yes, at least according to Chris O’Ferrell, chief technology officer of wireless technology company Netsec.

He says you should ask any organization you see using a wireless network–including your bank, the airports you visit, and even your tax preparer–if it uses 802.11b and if it employs security measures. Why? Because it could be broadcasting your personal information to anyone equipped with an 802.11 device and sniffing software such as NetStumbler, both of which are becoming more common among malicious users.

Around this time of year, the privacy of your tax information is particularly relevant. You may have noticed that from January through May, large tax-preparation companies hire extra accountants who set up temporary offices around town.

Instead of going through the hassle of installing LAN lines, many companies equip their employees with the latest 802.11b devices. Then they throw up an access point at the server, and suddenly all their accountants can tap into the company network wirelessly. ZDNet

Eminent neuropsychiatrist Dietrich Blumer ponders the illness of Vincent van Gogh:

Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) had an eccentric personality and unstable moods, suffered from recurrent psychotic episodes during the last 2 years of his extraordinary life, and committed suicide at the age of 37. Despite limited evidence, well over 150 physicians have ventured a perplexing variety of diagnoses of his illness. Henri Gastaut, in a study of the artist’s life and medical history published in 1956, identified van Gogh’s major illness during the last 2 years of his life as temporal lobe epilepsy precipitated by the use of absinthe in the presence of an early limbic lesion. In essence, Gastaut confirmed the diagnosis originally made by the French physicians who had treated van Gogh. However, van Gogh had earlier suffered two distinct episodes of reactive depression, and there are clearly bipolar aspects to his history. Both episodes of depression were followed by sustained periods of increasingly high energy and enthusiasm, first as an evangelist and then as an artist. The highlights of van Gogh’s life and letters are reviewed and discussed in an effort toward better understanding of the complexity of his illness.

Empire Burlesque: Thanks, Adam, for sending this blink from The Moscow Times. I liked it very much too.

As if we didn’t already have enough reason to marvel at the twisted, tortured reason of Ann Coulter’s mind, there’s this commentary on the Oscars: I Like Black People Too, Julia! Not content to share her loathing for the cult of narcissism, vacuity and superficiality that is Hollywood (which I can get behind…), she hoists herself by her own bigoted narrow-minded petard, both with an absurd race-baiting analysis of Julia Roberts’ adulation of Denzel Washington —

” Whenever white liberals are in trouble, they always run to the blacks… Apparently, Oscars night was Hollywood’s shot at patronizing blacks to generate goodwill — perhaps as wartime penance for its long-standing hatred of America…”

— and with her emphatic belief that Halle Berry only won her Oscar because of affirmative action. Oh, sorry, not just her race; Coulter is also obsessed with Berry’s large breasts. And she seems to have trouble with thefact that Berry has light skin, as if she would be a more genuine African American if truly black.

But she does attempt to ingratiate herself to us with the opinion that Washington, at least deserved his award. Town Hall [Might she even, one day, tell us that “some of my best friends are African American?” –FmH] Others have commented as well that the Oscars did not seem colorblind and that the dual awards, as well as Poitier’s honorary one, seemed tokenizing. I don’t know, I didn’t watch and don’t really find the Academy Awards significant enough to think much about.

Here’s a headline we could see in the papers every day for the next what? ten? twenty? years: U.S. Military Still Hunting Terror Suspects.

The Spike Report pointed me to this ABC news coverage of a sculptor gaining notoriety, and unapologetic about it, making Serial Killer Action Figures. When I was young, I built the complete set of the plastic scale models of the Famous Monsters of Filmland — Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, the Wolfman, the Bride of Frankenstein (who was really the bride of Frankenstein’s monster…), the Mummy, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, King Kong, Godzilla… — but of course back then there was “no such thing as monsters” in real life. Now that there are — and even more on the way, according to the article — I would suggest that those prone to collect figurines of real monsters insert an action figure of themselves into the tableau as a ritual enactment of the potential for good to vanquish evil.

Stanford sleep experts treat medical condition behind violent ‘sleep sex’

In a new study, Stanford researchers describe a treatable medical condition which causes people to commit violent sexual acts in their sleep. Referred to as “sleep sex,” the nocturnal activities cited in the study range from disruptive moaning to rape-like behavior toward bed partners.

The researchers believe this condition stems from glitches in brain waves during sleep. By bringing attention to the disorder, they hope the health-care community will recognize the problem as medical in origin rather than psychological. “Now doctors might know to ask patients about how they’re sleeping,” said Christian Guilleminault, MD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Stanford School of Medicine.

Guilleminault’s study, released in the March/April issue of the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, outlined 11 patients with symptoms that included loud, disruptive moaning on one end of the scale and sexual assault on the other. Regardless of how unusual or violent the behavior, patients had no memory of the events the next morning. EurekAlert!

More than one hour of TV a day may lead to violence: “Watching more than one hour of television per day may make adolescents more prone to violence in adulthood, according to new research. The study, appearing in the journal Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is believed to be the first to investigate the long-term effects of television viewing on aggressive behavior.” EurekAlert!

Jed Perl decries the cult of manic American adulation of pretentious modern European painters as he views the Gerhard Richter retrospective at MOMA. The New Republic

Brain scans draw a dark image of the violent mind Boston Globe

Presidential Health Picks: “President Bush has finally chosen his nominees for two of the nation’s top health positions, the director of the National Institutes of Health and the surgeon general. Both have compelling personal biographies — rising from obscurity and hardship to great prominence — but are relatively unknown outside their fields. Their views on social and ethical issues are a mystery, but the White House seems certain that neither is likely to challenge Mr. Bush’s policies on hot-button issues like embryonic stem cells, cloning and sex education.” NY Times editorial

Bush Diplomacy Yields Few Promising Signs: ‘The administration is sensitive to any suggestion it has not done enough, or been inconsistent. When a reporter at the daily State Department briefing began a question by noting that “It looks like you pretty well failed to persuade the Israelis,” the even-tempered spokesman, Richard A. Boucher, interrupted him, saying, “Just had to get that word in the first sentence, didn’t you?” ‘ NY Times

Why another Gore campaign would be good for the Democrats:

Despite winning a bare majority of the popular vote, he was a dreadful candidate in 2000, who somehow managed to turn eight years of peace and prosperity into an electoral burden. He is a smug, stubborn, and aloof human being. He will clutter the race in 2004, suck money from other candidates, force some interesting possibilities from the field, run another awkward, tired faux-populist campaign and, if nominated, he will lose, more decisively this time, to George W. Bush. This critique seems reasonable enough in many of its particulars, but not in its conclusion—that life would be a lot simpler if Gore would just go away. Quite the contrary, Democrats should nurture his ambition and cherish his ineptitude. –Joe Klein Slate

Klein’s idea is that the voting public find Gore so craven and contemptible that any Democratic candidate who defeats him in the primaries — in contradiction to the received wisdom that a primary battle is divisive, wasteful and injurious — will be a hero; this may be the only option to defeat an incumbent President riding the crest of War-on-Terrorism® popularity.

Did Early Interest in Eating Meat

Spur Organized Societies?: “Ever wonder why humans evolved into social animals with rules and regulations covering just about everything we do? Meat, most likely.” ABC News Related: Hunter-gatherers ate lean cuts: “Wild meats gnawed by ancient hunters contain healthier fats than modern farmed cattle. This finding backs the idea that a palaeolithic diet is the key to good health.” Nature

Discussing the Nature of Reality, Between Buffets: ‘ “I haven’t been to a meeting before where speaker after speaker says what they think,” said Dr. Fotini Markopoulou Kalamara of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, commenting on the boldness, philosophically and scientifically, of the discussions.’ NY Times

Saudi, in Emotional Plea to Israel, Offers ‘Land for Peace’ Proposal. The impassioned speech at the Arab summit — disturbed by the dispute over Arafat’s nonpresence and, most recently, what has been described as Lebanon’s blockage of a planned Arafat speech by satellite television from the occupied territories — met with even grudging support from hardliner Assad of Syria. The Bush Administration, by the way, was roundly condemned for its inability to exert more influence on Sharon around permitting Arafat to attend. However, privately, moderate Arab states in favor of a straightforward peace initiative may well have welcomed a conference without the risk of unscripted theatrics from the Palestinian leader, analysts speculate. The absence of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and representatives from approximately half of the Arab League, however, may compromise the unanimity of the offer. NY Times No reaction from Israel is reported. Certainly, Sharon’s dilemma is that he is called upon to make a tangible, almost irrevocable move – giving up land — for the promise of a revocable intangible, ‘recognition of Israel’s right to exist.’ On the other hand, does he have another choice? Suicide Bomber Kills 15 in Israeli Hotel; Hamas Makes Claim Reuters via Yahoo!

Selling the Jitters: “The market for energy drinks loaded with caffeine and other additives has exploded, leaving researchers worried about the potential health effects of the potent beverages.” Spectator. On the other hand: FDA Issues Warning on Kava-Containing Supplements:

“Following in the footsteps of Australia, Canada and several European nations, the US Food and Drug Administration (news – web sites) (FDA) warned American consumers on Monday against the use of products containing kava, a herbal ingredient most often promoted for relaxation and the alleviation of sleeplessness.

The FDA said it was issuing the warning because kava has been associated with liver-related injuries in the US and several other countries, including Germany, Switzerland, France, Canada and the United Kingdom.” Yahoo! News [thanks, Nancy!]

Many are painting current events as the enactment of a grand struggle between the opposing forces of Light and Darkness. Of course, the archetypical such conflict, paleontologists are learning, was staged at the dawn of civilization between the Neanderthals and their eventual successors, the Cro-Magnon who would turn out to be forebears of modern humankind. Scientists have recently begun to appreciate that the two humanoid races coexisted in time and space across the European continent, and may have even intermarried to some extent, while vying for the supremacy of their respective ways of being sometimes by geopolitical positioning, sometimes frank combat. We may be considered to be in an analogous situation today. This Reuters wire photo, however, raises serious doubts about whether we’re the Neanderthals or the Cro-Magnon of the day. [thanks,Ted!]

Trading Cards: American Crusade 2001+: “President Bush tried his bestest to simplify the picture as Good vs. Evil, but it’s still a jumble! Who knew all those crazy Dorkistan countries even existed?! Now The Infinite Jest rides to the rescue with a set of educational trading cards.Fun to collect! Fun to trade! Fun to drain a box of inkjet cartridges!” Infinite Jest

Psychologists Get Prescription Pads and Furor Erupts

Psychologists are adept at diagnosing and treating mental illness. But unlike psychiatrists, who are medically trained, they have never been able to prescribe drugs for their suffering patients. As of July 1, however, psychologists in one state, New Mexico, will be authorized to pull out the prescription pad. A new law will grant prescribing privileges to licensed, doctoral-level psychologists who have completed an additional training and certification program. And though the specifics of the plan remain to be worked out, the law is already the focus of a bitter national debate. Proponents argue that the law will provide greater access to quality care at lower cost. Opponents contend that psychology should remain distinct from its medical cousin and they worry that the legislation may place vulnerable patients in danger. Most vehement in their objections are the representatives of organized psychiatry. “Most of the patients we see as psychiatrists have many other medical problems,” said Dr. Richard K. Harding, president of the American Psychiatric Association. “They have hypertension, diabetes, migraine headaches. And the interactions of the medicines we give for these other conditions are often extremely difficult and scary.” NY Times

This is a very very bad idea, in my opinion both as a psychiatrist and a consumer advocate for my patients. First off, let’s remember that most members of the public have only a hazy notion of the difference betwen a psychologist and a psychiatrist. “Are you a medical doctor too?”, I’m constantly asked. This makes me suspect that the quality of the public debate on the New Mexico law was sorely lacking. Moreover, the law requires far less training and supervision of the prescribing psychologists than the pilot study on whose successful results it is predicated. In the time-honored tradition of not even knowing enough to know how little you know, one of the psychologists first trained to prescribe says that the amount of knowledge necessary to prescribe has been overrated. Eminent psychiatrist Joel Yeager comments, “People are going to learn psychopharmacology for dummies. They will learn how to pass tests but will not really have a decent immersion in this material because they won’t have the background for it.”

On the other hand, the argument (above) by the psychiatrist president of the American Psychiatric Association — that most psychiatrically ill patients who require medication are also medically ill and require someone skilled in avoiding drug interactions to prevent disaster — is no more than the typical scare-tactic spin of a professional lobbyist. Far more pertinent than drug interactions or recognizing covert medical illness is the ease with mind-body integration and the familiarity with the rhythm of prescribing, assessing, adjusting that psychiatrists have come by over years of medical training, as Dr Yeager’s comment suggests. And since more of healing, even psychopharmacological, than we ever acknowledge depends on the patient’s unconsciously entering into the shared premise of the healing (a.k.a. the placebo response), treatment success depends too on ineffable qualities of charisma and directiveness that are the unspoken subtext learned in medical training. Needless to say this cannot be galvanized in this shortcut correspondence school approach to getting psychologists up to speed to prescribe. Not to mention that, whereas medical training is a clinical field from the get-go, although there is “clinical psychology” psychology is an academic and research-oriented field — quite a different mindset, and selecting for quite a different personality.

I know this diatribe may offend psychologist FmH readers, but I don’t mean to suggest their ability is lesser — only different. The obvious twin dangers inherent in psychiatrists, MDs, responding in this debate are that they will be tarred with the usual brush of being seen as arrogant and that they will be seen as trying to protect their eroding market share — which is the usual approach of the APA and the reason I no longer belong to that ol’ dinosaur of a lobbying group. Instead, I’m trying to suggest there’s an argument from quality of care as well, a Hippocratic one (“first, do no harm”) if you will. If you see MDs only as overpriced functionaries whose sole distinction is that they have prescribing privileges, then of course it makes sense to try to develop lower-priced alternatives. But you get what you pay for. Caveat emptor, not that the consumer is going to have any say in the matter, or even necessarily know what they are missing, the way modern healthcare is going.

I already find that most of my poor, disenfranchised patients with major mental illnesses, on public assistance, get second-rate prescribing from the nurse practitioners who are allowed to write prescriptions in my state. And, yes, I know that will unleash another firestorm of reproach from any readers who are RNs or sympathetic to them. But, from more than a decade of consulting to, supervising, hiring (and firing), and treating patients referred from nurse clinical specialists, I am comfortable with my conclusion that their lack of global preparation and experience for prescribing results in a job less well done by most of them than most physicians in equivalent clinical roles. And the same will be true with the new law (even more, since psychologists have no experience treating medically very ill patients in general). Of course there are anecdotal exceptions, if you compare a particularly gifted non-MD prescriber with a particularly clumsy MD prescriber — there are NPs to whom I would send a family member for psychopharmacological treatment, and there are MDs I would not, needless to say — but public policy should be based on aggregates, not anecdotes. Okay, I’ve got my asbestos suit on, let the flamewar begin. Actually looking forward to thoughtful disagreement on this issue, so close to my heart and passion…

Senator Helms as an AIDS Savior: ‘Writing in Sunday’s Washington Post, Senator Jesse Helms, long deemed public enemy No. 1 by AIDS advocates, said that he would ask for an extra $500 million to prevent mother-to-child transmission of AIDS overseas, contingent on matching funds from the private sector.

“Some may say that this initiative is not consistent with some of my earlier positions,” wrote Mr. Helms. But he continued, “in the end our conscience is answerable to God. Perhaps, in my 81st year, I am too mindful of soon meeting Him, but I know that, like the Samaritan traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho, we cannot turn away when we see our fellow man in need.” There are many in Congress who have talked about adding money to President Bush’s shamefully tight-fisted budget for combating AIDS overseas, but nothing can match the impact of these words from Senator Helms.’ New York Times editorial

Adminimizer Toolbar— if you’re weblogging with Blogger and IE6, you need this free tool! [If you’re not a weblogger yourself, you can probably stop reading here to prevent boredom; and if you’re a weblogger but not using IE6, to prevent envy…]

“So here is the deal. You see your blog in the browser. You want to add to or edit it so… You go to some other app or site to do your blogging. Does this make sense? No. You should be able to edit and save right there, in your browser, on your blog page, WYSIWYG style. No fuss, no muss, no fooling around.

How? Internet Explorer 6 has fabulous XML and text editing capabilities that are grossly underutilized by most people. The Adminimizer Toolbar makes it easy for you to take advantage of them when using your Blogger blog. All you need to do is install the Toolbar in your browser, add 2 lines of code and 2 span tags to your blogger template, and copy an XML file onto your site. You’ll be ready to edit in no time.”

Ever since Blogger’s “remote editing” capacity broke (a long time ago), I’ve been looking for a way to edit posts directly from the browser window without going to my “edit your blog” page at blogger.com. When you install the toolbar in your browser and click on it while you’re displaying your weblog, green lines surround all the editable posts; you just do WYSIWYG editing in situ! Drag-and-drop works too. Watch for the imminent disappearance of the little pencil icon at the end of every post, the old way I was doing it (imperfectly), as soon as the Adminimizer’s shakedown cruise is done..

It would be a perfect world, though, if Evan Williams would hurry up and write a Blogger Pro interface for Mozilla, and the Adminimizer programmers would do the same. I’m feeling abit guilty about my wholesale sellout to M$, but IE is just so much more functional right now.

Internet Sacred Text Archive — “This is a quiet place in cyberspace devoted to religious tolerance and scholarship…”

This week’s parlour game is to count up how many of these books you’ve read; needless to say, the movie adaptations don’t count. For extra credit, who would you promote and demote? I would have ranked several of the characters higher: Gulley Jimson, Molly Bloom, Geoffrey Firmin, Tom Ripley and George Smiley, off the top of my head. Oh yes, and Eeyore.

Volume Control Knob Turns Heads — This Wired item leads with, “Who but a jewelry designer could create a computer product that seems useless but is fast becoming a hit based on its good looks?” Read on, though, and it appears the PowerMate’s appeal is not, by a longshot, limited to its appearance.

“When elephants dance, it’s best to get out of the way. That’s exactly what’s happening now as the entertainment industry—the recording, publishing, and motion picture industries, mainly—attempts a worldwide intellectual property power grab with two distinct targets. Think of it: a coup and a lock on all published content in the same year, amazing isn’t it?” Proposes a simple fix — recognition of artists’ moral rights to their intellectual property; reversion of the term of copyright to fourteen years, immediately and retroactively; and prohibiting corporations from owning copyrights:

The basis of the problem is found in a single court ruling: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. In this 1886 dispute, the U.S. Supreme Court found that a private corporation was a “natural person” under the Constitution and enjoyed the same protections as a citizen under the Bill of Rights. Corporations from that point forward were granted all of the rights and freedoms of a private citizen, yet none of the responsibilities. We made a mistake; hey, shit happens. It’s not too late to fix it.

Can it be done? The author points out how little it took in contributions for the media industry to ‘buy’ the Senate sponsors (Hollings et al) of the pending copy protection bill ( the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act, or CBDTPA) and predicts, knowing who is most awash in entertainment industry money in the House, who myght soinsor a companion bill there; could we buy back our rights? Ironically, he notes, since the bill would still have to be signed nto law, “installed President Bush just may be the fly in this particular ointment. Like most conservatives, he sees the entertainment industry as a liberal bastion, remember, and a political force that’s not necessarily aligned with his larger agenda.” Arts & Farces

Tests show no screening improvements post-Sept. 11: “In the months after Sept. 11, airport screeners confiscated record numbers of nail clippers and scissors. But nearly half the time, they failed to stop the guns, knives or simulated explosives carried past checkpoints by undercover investigators with the Transportation Department’s inspector general.

In fact, even as the Federal Aviation Administration evacuated terminals and pulled passengers from more than 600 planes because of security breaches, a confidential memo obtained by USA TODAY shows investigators noticed no discernable improvements by screeners in the period from November through early February, when the tests were conducted. “

‘Friendly Fire’ Deaths Traced to Dead Battery: “…the Air Force combat controller was using a Precision Lightweight GPS Receiver, known to soldiers as a plugger, to calculate the Taliban’s coordinates for a B-52 attack. The controller did not realize that after he changed the device’s battery, the machine was programmed to automatically come back on displaying coordinates for its own location, the official said.” Washington Post [And we want to start using battlefield nukes??!! –FmH]

Painter David Hockney’s new book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters suggests it was not just better brush technique that created the photorealistic precision of Renaissance European painting. American Scientist

The Social Psychology of Modern Slavery: “Contrary to conventional wisdom, slavery has not disappeared from the world. Social scientists are trying to explain its persistence.” Scientific American

Veterinary:

‘I was with him once when he was called in to see a deeply demented patient, God knows for what reason. He repeatedly tried to start his examination, but the patient warded him off with piercing cries.

“This is getting rather too veterinarian,” muttered D., putting his reflex hammer back into his white coat and marching with some pomp back to his own ward.’ Threepenny Review

Surrealist Views From a Real Live One: ‘During the two hours it takes to see (the monumental Surrealist show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Desire Unbound”), Ms. Tanning will prove to be both Surrealism’s poet and its scourge, beginning with Salvador Dali’s “Venus With Drawers,” a modified plaster bust of the love goddess as a cabinet, with grungy white pompon pulls attached to the drawers incorporated into its torso.’ NY Times

Four Secular Questions: “Here are four secular questions that could be asked and answered after the Passover ceremony concludes.” –William Safire NY Times

Extending Life, Defibrillators Can Prolong Misery: “The devices can fundamentally change the end stages of heart disease, giving years of life to people who would otherwise die. Some experts are asking whether the devices are going to create a new generation of patients who die slow and painful deaths.” NY Times

Limit copying and we may end up copying the USSR –John Naughton Guardian Unlimited

Leaders Say Poverty Breeds Terrorism: The developing countries have always had difficulty persuading the industrial powers that it is in their best interest to offer extensive development assistance and other foreign aid. 9-11 may turn out to be a goldmine for them, literally, as they band together with the assertion that poverty breeds terrorism and it behooves the First World to protect themselves by eliminating it. Lycos News It may be true, but does it also smack of crass opportunism if not frank blackmail?

Bleak future looms if you don’t take a stand: “Media conglomerates are in a merger frenzy. Telecommunications monopolies are creating a cozy cartel, dividing up access to the online world. The entertainment industry is pushing for Draconian controls on the use and dissemination of digital information.

If you’re not infuriated by these related trends, you should at least be worried. If you’re neither, stop reading this column. You’re a sheep, content to be herded wherever these giants wish.

But if you want to retain some fundamental rights over the information you use and create, please take a stand. Do it soon, because a great deal is at stake.” –Dan Gillmor San Jose Mercury

Why The Hague is not Nuremberg: “As Slobodan Milosevic makes legal history by becoming the first former head of state to be prosecuted by an international war crimes tribunal, some legal experts and commentators have criticised the tribunal’s procedures.

They point to the admission of hearsay evidence, the use of anonymous witnesses and the absence of a jury as evidence that the tribunal falls far short of Western standards of justice. They attack the alleged cosy relationship between prosecutors and judges, the fact that appeal judges are trial judges with a temporary promotion, and the claim that Milosevic hasn’t been allowed to consult lawyers in private.” spiked

The strange battle of Shah-i-Kot: “Since it kicked off at the start of March 2002, Operation Anaconda has been a minefield of contradictory statements and unanswered questions. Was it an ‘absolute success’ , or a ‘big mistake’? Did it wipe out the last ‘pockets of al-Qaeda and Taliban resistance’, or did al-Qaeda fighters ‘escape’ to fight again? Did America’s first combined ground-and-air offensive of the war kill 800 of the enemy, or about 20? One US commentator says, ‘We don’t know, the Afghans don’t know – and the US military doesn’t seem to know’.” spiked

There’s been much thoughtful response to my “What am I doing here?” post the other day, for which I’m grateful. Among the responses, Ray Davis of the eloquent Bellona Times reminded me, worth repeating:

“Dialogue doesn’t have to be debate to be useful, by the way. (And it’s become horrifyingly clear since the 2000 election that conflating the two is one way we’ve gotten into this mess.) Sharing of information and analysis and rhetorical tools and errors among those-in-agreement seems absolutely necessary if any progress is to be made.”

I’m up for that…

Another reader commented:

“I’m more sanguine (or utopian) than you about the lack of cross-talk among blogs of different stripes. These are early days and we have a long way to go before we can guess the ultimate sociology of blogs (or blogology of society.)… I think our social organism is being completely rewired, as it has been by previous tech revolutions. This rewiring means we will have more synapses, more nerves, more thinking, more engagement. The change, as the Marxists put it, won’t be just quantitative but qualititative.”

To Be Young and Homeless:

“Because these children are not sleeping in parks or begging on subways, the fact of their homelessness is largely invisible — outside the context of a homeless shelter, they just look like children. And while I did meet families in New York who said they’d ridden subways overnight with their very young kids or slept outdoors with teenagers, these parents were taking a big risk — failing to provide adequate shelter for one’s children can result in having them removed from one’s care by the Administration for Children’s Services, New York City’s child welfare agency. Yet because we don’t see homeless kids asleep in our streets — and because the shelters and residences they shuttle in and out of tend to be in the city’s poorer neighborhoods — their plight has not provoked the outcry that the rise in homelessness did in the 1980’s. Nevertheless, these children make up 40 percent of the nation’s homeless population, and for the time they remain without homes, and for who knows how long after, homelessness is the defining fact of their lives.” New York Times Magazine

Life Inside Tall Tin Can in Utah Is All Mars: “The not-so-deadly pretense of living on Mars while hanging out in a tall tin can in southern Utah is the latest wrinkle in a private plan to persuade the federal government to send humans to Mars sooner and for less money than envisioned by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.” NY Times

Cost of Laughing Rises 2.9 Percent in Last Year: “Was scarcity a factor? Did the demand for laughs outstrip supply in a time of war?” Yahoo! News

Comet Ikeya-Zhang Streaks Across Northern Sky

Comet Ikeya-Zhang, discovered by two amateur astronomers in February, can be seen streaking across skies over the Northern Hemisphere for the next several weeks, scientists said on Thursday.

No telescope is needed, but binoculars are recommended to see the comet, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said in a statement.

To find Comet Ikeya-Zhang, look in the western sky shortly after sunset and locate the planet Mars — that will be a red point of light about 18 degrees up from the horizon. (An outspread hand at arm’s length covers about 15 degrees, so Mars is a bit higher than one hand-span.) To the right of Mars are two bright stars in a nearly vertical line. The comet is at the same height as Mars, to the right of the two bright stars about as far again as the distance from Mars to the stars. Observers should be able to see the comet’s bright, star-like nucleus surrounded by a fuzzy cloud of dust and gas called the coma. The comet’s tail streaks points nearly straight up from the horizon.

“Students may be learning more about avoidance strategies than arithmetic in math class.” A new study surveyed more than a thousand sixth-grade students across the demographic spectrum and showed what teacher factors encourage and discourage student avoidance skills. Journal of Educational Psychology

How to be a philosopher: “Technique 1: Begin by making a spurious distinction. Befuddle the reader with your analytic wizardry. The reader will enter a logical trance, from which she will be unable to recall the initial spurious distinction and will feel strangely compelled to accept your conclusions…” The Philosophers’ Magazine

Defense Department Agency Severs Its Ties to an Elite Panel of Scientists

The Pentagon has countless in-house scientists and engineers to assess its security strategy. But since the days of the hydrogen bomb and the “missile gap,” Jason has been one of the few — and certainly the most prestigious — sources of advice outside the defense establishment, looking for developing threats and assessing futuristic weaponry. Its 40 to 50 members include Nobel laureates and some of the brightest young scientists in the nation…

According to members of Jason, the Defense Department agency wanted the panel to accept two Silicon Valley executives and another Washington insider with an engineering degree into its ranks. When the panel refused, the agency, called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, ended the contract.

Though Darpa refused yesterday to confirm the dispute over the nominees, a spokeswoman said the move was in fact a reflection of Jason’s inability to adjust its priorities to a post-cold-war world, where the physical sciences are no longer as important as information and computer sciences to the nation’s security… But Dr. Steven Block, a Jason member who is a professor of biological sciences at Stanford, said those contentions were a smoke screen in front of an attempt to place political appointees to a scientific advisory panel. “Darpa’s attempt to turn Jason into a political patronage job challenges the very independence that makes Jason so useful,” Dr. Block said. Citing what is now regarded as a prescient 1999 study by Jason on bioterrorism, and others on nanotechnology and information, Dr. Block denied that the panel focused too exclusively on physics. The events of Sept. 11, he said, made the group’s blue-sky strategizing even more critical. NY Times [thanks, Abby!]

Mobiles ‘worse than drink-driving’

Talking on a mobile phone while driving is more dangerous than being over the legal alcohol limit, according to research.

Tests by scientists at the Transport Research Laboratory said drivers on mobiles had slower reaction times and stopping times than those under the influence of alcohol.

And it said hands-free kits were almost as dangerous as hand-held phones. BBC News

Mobiles ‘worse than drink-driving’

Talking on a mobile phone while driving is more dangerous than being over the legal alcohol limit, according to research.

Tests by scientists at the Transport Research Laboratory said drivers on mobiles had slower reaction times and stopping times than those under the influence of alcohol.

And it said hands-free kits were almost as dangerous as hand-held phones. BBC News

Google restores Scientology links: Remember the flap several weeks back about Scientology’s manipulation of its web page content to place its own pages higher than those of detractors in search engines? The enduser response, including mine, was to “bomb” Google with links to xenu.net, a major site critical of Scientology, to get it ranked higher when searching on that term. Well, as of Tuesday, Google removed links to xenu.net from its index. Kuro5hin and others speculated the self-censorship might have been a response to the “googlebombing”, but ZDnet reports that Scientology’s lawyers directly intervened with Google to remove xenu.net from its listings, threatening Google with action under the DMCA for xenu.net’s alleged “copyright infringement”. It does appear that it has been the resultant public outcry that has gotten Google to reverse that decision.I just did the search; the critical site is back in at fourth place again. Care to try to get it higher? Here again is another link to this site critical of Scientology.

Taliban bargaining on 18 US soldiers: According to this Pakistani news source, written with stilted English, the Taliban took 18 American soldiers prisoner during Operation Anaconda. They want to trade them for the Guantanamo Bay detainees. Does the notion of safe passage for the hostage-bearing Taliban and al Qaeda forces explain why Anaconda didn’t kill as many foes as it was billed to do? Reader comments on this news item are largely of the incredulous variety…

Four Pakistanis Missing After INS Wrongly Let Them Enter U.S.:

‘Federal officials are on the lookout for four Pakistani nationals who are in the United States illegally after leaving a freighter that had been docked in Virginia sometime last weekend.

Immigration and Naturalization Service district directors and border patrol chiefs from across the country met on a “crisis management” conference call Thursday afternoon in which it was reportedly revealed that one of the four missing Pakistanis showed up on a “lookout list.” Since then, however, checks run on the Pakistanis suggest that they are on no such lists.’ Fox News

although I’m not sure how much it is to be trusted, given that it is from WorldNetDaily: Suicide-bomber unit shown off in Egypt

The Muslim Brotherhood movement has presented eight of its suicide-bombers-in-training to hundreds of demonstrators at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, according to the Lebanese daily Al-Mustaqbal, which is owned by Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Al-Hariri.

The story reports that Muslim Brotherhood, which is banned in Egypt, presented the eight as members of the new “Martyrdom Organization” on Monday. The Middle East Media Research Institute, or MEMRI, translated the article into English.

According to the paper, the group of “young people” has been secretly training for some time, preparing for the “struggle against Israel.”

Taunted by new U.N. classmates, Switzerland already wants to go home SatireWire After all, says the Washington Post (on a more serious note), Switzerland sent some people home too.