Serbia’s anxious mobsters seek out shrinks: “Tony Soprano is not a Serb but he would be at home with in the waiting rooms of Belgrade’s growing army of therapists and psychoanalysts.

There are the depressed and psychologically scarred for whom years of war in the Balkans have proved too much. But Belgrade’s hitmen and mobsters, a legacy of the era of Serbia’s organised crime, are also trying to escape their demons in the psychiatrist’s chair – just like Tony in The Sopranos.Independent UK

Fatal Delusions: “Israel’s own security interests dictate that it should bring its people home to a defensible perimeter (something close to the 1967 borders, but padded here and there for security reasons). Likewise, it’s in the Palestinians’ interest to pipe down about the right of return, for such claims only prevent them from getting a homeland of their own.” — Nicholas Kristof NY Times op-ed

Bush and Sharon Have Similar Views but Distinct Agendas: News analysis in The New York Times

from Serge Schmemann. Bush’s audacity in demanding Israeli withdrawal, his contemptible school-marm tone, and the ludicrousness of banking his personal prestige — of which, as a diplomat, he has none — on it, probably did lead to Sharon’s token withdrawal from two towns in the occupied territory, but only with his impassioned insistence that the Israeli incursions are necessary for Israel’s survival.

…(T)o most experts, this was a tactical dance of two hardheaded men aware of their mutual dependence and not the striving of two close friends to patch up their differences….

Most Israelis view the bonds that developed between Mr. Bush and Mr. Sharon since Sept. 11 as being based on mutual interest rather than friendship, although the two men have known each other for a long time. As governor of Texas, Mr. Bush visited Israel, and Mr. Sharon took him on a tour of the West Bank to bolster his arguments about Israel’s vulnerability.

Both leaders came to office less than two months apart, Mr. Bush in late January 2001 and Mr. Sharon in early March of that year, both intent on reversing the policies of their predecessors in the Middle East.

Mr. Bush believed that Mr. Clinton had created a mess in the Middle East by investing too much of his prestige and time, and so became determined to stay clear of the region. Mr. Sharon viewed the whole Oslo process, in which Washington was a central player, as a mistake, and he came to office on a pledge to crush the Palestinian uprising and to punish Mr. Arafat.

When Mr. Sharon and President Bush intersected, it was not always cordial. At a joint news conference in Washington last June, the two men openly disagreed in their description of the situation in the Middle East. After Sept. 11, when Mr. Sharon felt that the United States was cozying up to the Arabs to garner support against Al Qaeda, the prime minister famously used a word associated with the prelude to World War II, saying, “Do not try to appease the Arabs at our expense.”

The Hindustan Times reports on Sharon’s determination to create permanent security buffers in the West Bank and the Palestinian perception that this effectively means the end of Palestinian self-rule and the death knell to the peace process. Israeli military commanders wanted eight more weeks to smoke out Palestinian terrorists, and tension has developed between them and the Sharon government for acceding at all to Bush’s demand for a pullout.

Reuters notes that Powell’s shuttle diplomacy got off to a ‘frosty start’ as King Mohammed of Morocco kept him waiting for two hours before receiving him, then asked him acerbically why he had not started his trip in Jerusalem instead. Exactly my question. The article observes that, despite the public rhetoric to the contrary, this step might be interpreted as a US green light to Sharon to continue the West Bank operation until Powell gets around to meeting with the Israelis later this week. It should also be seen as showing our true, craven, priorities. Powell gets sent out whenever the illusory War-on-Terrorism® alliance needs shoring up. This little Israeli-Palestinian brouhaha may just interfere annoyingly with US plans to orchestrate a move on Iraq.

Related: Phil Agre points to this interesting (if at times a little incoherent, probably because we’re reading the English instead of the Farsi…) Islamic perspective in The Iranian on the relationship between suicide bombing, martyrdom and jihad.

A Sophisticated Strain of Anthrax: “Last fall FBI profilers announced that the person who sent deadly anthrax-laced letters to news organizations and Capitol Hill was probably a grudge-bearing, sociopathic male laboratory nerd with knowledge of the geography of Trenton, N.J. But a new scientific analysis sent to top government officials suggests the anthrax attacker may be a scientific whiz so smart that he succeeded in making a “weaponized” form of the bacterium more sophisticated than any previously known.” MSNBC

New York Times dominates Pulitzers: “In a year when terrorism dominated the news as no subject since Vietnam, The New York Times captured a record seven Pulitzer Prizes and The Wall Street Journal won one for publishing a comprehensive edition even as the World Trade Center collapsed a block away.” Globe and Mail

Let’s Roll!

In recent months anyone who surfs the news programs has been subjected to Lisa Beamer’s teary face on every outlet worth mentioning. …

…All right, one might say, but what exactly is so terrible about that? It may be unseemly, but at worst the only sin of Lisa Beamer and her media patrons is banality. That’s entirely too facile and too generous. There is an irreducibly private dimension to real grief, a point at which one’s own words and the kind intentions of others all run to ground and we can only bear what follows in silence. And that silence is not a bad thing; it’s a measure of respect, for oneself and for what is lost, as well as an acknowledgment of the hard things we all must bear on our own eventually. The media’s incessant flogging of Beamer’s story, and her eager collaboration in it, amount to a grotesque comment on the very idea of grief and loss. They take catastrophic personal tragedy and cheapen it by making it feel like a publicity stunt — a set of gestures repeatedly enacted for the cameras. AlterNet

IPod: Music to Hackers’ Ears

“Apple’s iPod is the hottest digital music player on the market. And

thanks to a small army of hackers, it’s being transformed into a

general-purpose device that makes the Palm seem quaint.” Wired

Brace for pop-up downloads: ‘Web surfers who thought online advertisements were becoming increasingly obtrusive may be dismayed by a new tactic: pop-up downloads.

In recent weeks, some software makers have enlisted Web site operators to entice their visitors to download software rather than simply to view some advertising. For example, when visiting a site a person may receive a pop-up box that appears as a security warning with the message: “Do you accept this download?” If the consumer clicks “Yes,” an application is automatically installed.’ CNET

“Companies are allowed to market computer ID chips which

can be embedded under a person’s skin in the US, after the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave the technology its qualified approval.

The FDA said yesterday it would not block use of such devices as long as they contain no medical data – paving the way for the sale of devices such as the VeriChip, from Applied Digital Solutions.

VeriChip, an implantable, radio frequency identification biochip slightly larger than the size of a grain of rice, can be scanned (using equipment expected to cost between $1,000 and $3,000) to give a unique ID number. Its use is touted for security and emergency, as well as for medical applications. In South America, the chip has been bundled with a GPS-unit and sold to potential kidnap victims, Wired reports.

ADS intends to sell the chip for about $200, with an annual service charge of $40 for maintaining a user database.” The Register

Review: Complications: An Uncompromising Look at Medical Fallibility: ‘By his own admission, Gawande purported to tell us unambiguously what is right with medicine and what is wrong with it. This he has done admirably well. At a time when a hospital advertises with the phrase ”where miracles happen”; when physicians claim, without blushing, to perform ”cardiac resuscitation,” letting people believe that they bring back Lazarus every day, candor like Gawande’s deserves unreserved praise.’ NY Times

Cloned-Fetus Rumor Stirs Talk: “Scientists, ethicists and politicians around the world became caught up in a flurry of electronic chatter yesterday triggered by an unconfirmed report that an Italian fertility doctor had helped a woman become pregnant with the world’s first human clone.” Washington Post And: Cloning pregnancy claim prompts outrage: ‘A woman taking part in a controversial human cloning programme is eight

weeks pregnant, claims Severino Antinori, one of the two controversial

fertility specialists leading the effort. “One woman among thousands of infertile couples in the programme is eight

weeks pregnant,” Antinori is reported as saying at a meeting in the United

Arab Emirates. If true, this would represent the first human cloning

pregnancy.’ New Scientist

The Band Is Gone, the Waltz Plays On

Whatever its flaws, “The Last Waltz” returns at a moment in which it can be received far more generously than it was in the mid-70’s. However self-serving “The Last Waltz” might have seemed back then, no one familiar with the meretricious spectacle that the music industry has become in the last two decades can seriously criticize the film and album for glitziness. And at a time when audiences both young and old are discovering music with a connection to something more meaningful than a record company’s bottom line, as shown in the success of the soundtrack album “O Brother, Where Art Thou,” the artists in “The Last Waltz” represent a rare integrity. NY Times

Zbigniew Brzezinski: Moral Duty, National Interest

President Bush’s statement on the crisis on Thursday took an important step toward shedding the administration’s ambiguous and, of late, somewhat incoherent posture. But it falters on three points.

First, by noting that an imminent agreement on a cease-fire was aborted by the bombing of March 27, Mr. Bush risks making the peace process again a hostage to any future terrorist act. Israel would be justified in retaliating against further Palestinian acts of terrorism, but reprisals should be aimed at actual perpetrators and not at destroying the Palestinian political structure. Second, Mr. Bush’s highly personal condemnation of Yasir Arafat implies that the Palestinians should select their leader in keeping with American or even Israeli preferences. Third, the president’s statement should have made clear that Secretary of State Colin Powell’s mission to the Middle East is not to restart a process that focuses more on procedure than on substance. Secretary Powell should seek an Arab statement that categorically condemns suicide bombing even if it reserves the right of the Palestinians to resist the occupation and the settlements. Mr. Arafat could then issue such a statement without seeming to be bowing to American and Israeli dictates. NY Times op-ed

Zbigniew Brzezinski: Moral Duty, National Interest

President Bush’s statement on the crisis on Thursday took an important step toward shedding the administration’s ambiguous and, of late, somewhat incoherent posture. But it falters on three points.

First, by noting that an imminent agreement on a cease-fire was aborted by the bombing of March 27, Mr. Bush risks making the peace process again a hostage to any future terrorist act. Israel would be justified in retaliating against further Palestinian acts of terrorism, but reprisals should be aimed at actual perpetrators and not at destroying the Palestinian political structure. Second, Mr. Bush’s highly personal condemnation of Yasir Arafat implies that the Palestinians should select their leader in keeping with American or even Israeli preferences. Third, the president’s statement should have made clear that Secretary of State Colin Powell’s mission to the Middle East is not to restart a process that focuses more on procedure than on substance. Secretary Powell should seek an Arab statement that categorically condemns suicide bombing even if it reserves the right of the Palestinians to resist the occupation and the settlements. Mr. Arafat could then issue such a statement without seeming to be bowing to American and Israeli dictates. NY Times op-ed

Boy Becomes Ill After Airport Security Check — he was forced to drink stream water from a one-gallon bottle he had in his backpack, because of new airline flight security regulations requiring passengers to take a drink of any beverage they are carrying as they board. He was taking the Rocky Mountain stream water back to Pennsylvania for a biology project. The Denver Channel

Bombers Gloating in Gaza as They See Goal Within Reach: “Hamas believes that the Palestinian Authority has given up on negotiating with Israel, negotiations that Hamas virulently opposed. That has led to a budding alliance between Hamas and Fatah, the organization headed by Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, despite years of bitter and sometimes violent feuding.” NY Times

“Laughter No Longer the Best Medicine: Bumped From The Top Spot By Red-Hot Antidepressants.” Andy Borowitz

Church Out of Time: “Deep in Mexico’s rebel heartland stands a centuries-old Catholic church that has heard no mass for 30 years.” Fortean Times Interesting to me because thirty years ago, as a college undergraduate, I lived in this remote Highland Maya village conducting ethnographic research on aspects of the grafting of Catholic iconography on pre-Columbian indigenous shamanic ritual practice, as described here. The author of this article has got some of the details wrong, but not many. Of course, San Cristobal has since become both a hip ecotravel stop and a nidus of rebellion against Mexican oppression of indigenous populations, neither of would be true until long after I lived there.

Mother of all pickpockets: “…a 67-year-old wheelchair-bound grandmother with arthritis pleaded guilty to running an elaborate pickpocketing ring targeting elderly shoppers in Florida and Georgia.” ABC News

Chocolate linked to nightmares BBC

Talking Plants: “Plants have more than thorns and thistles to protect themselves—they can cry for help.” Discover

Where are the Mahirs of yesteryear?: ‘Last week, in what was surely the strangest obituary for the Web yet, the New York Times published a feature complaining that the Web is now officially washed up because it no longer provides a sufficiently diverting stream of trivial amusements.

“What attracted many people to the Web in the mid-1990’s,” read the lead article in the Times‘ Circuits section, “were the bizarre and idiosyncratic sites that began as private obsessions and swiftly grew into popular attractions” — bagatelles like the Cambridge Coffee Cam, the Fish Tank Cam, the Jennicam, the Telegarden or the ill-fated Web soap opera “The Spot.” (The latter, hardly a “private obsession,” was a thoroughly commercial undertaking from day one, but never mind.)’ I agree with this response from Salon‘s managing editor Scott Rosenberg, essentially that there’s still plenty of frivolity on the Web. Rosenberg turns to the Daypop top links list to show that what’s hot at the moment is still pretty zany. For example, right now he cites a list of Google misspellings of “Britney’ and the “weirdest computer you’ve ever seen” link. But I wonder if the purveyors of triviality may be starting to feel a little disenfranchised. An immature medium will tolerate any content as early adopters explore and play with the potentials of the medium. That’s part of what geek culture was about. But as the novelty of the Web has worn off and the mom-‘n’-pop Web-using public has become familiar with its sensibility as a medium, the urgency is to satisfy a desire for content. Ummm, how else to explain the ascendency of shopping and porn sites (as well as the increasing articulateness of the weblog culture)? Although: “A survey of internet browsing habits has seen people’s interest in online sex fall as business, travel and job searches supplant the search for smut.” silicon.com

A Master Terrorist Is Nabbed: “It is hard to overstate the significance of the capture late last week in central Pakistan of Abu Zubaydah, a top Al Qaeda terrorist trainer and operative. His seizure demonstrates that the painstaking international detective work of the current phase of the war on terror is paying off. It also shows that Pakistan, whose security forces, with help from the F.B.I. and C.I.A., landed Mr. Zubaydah, can be counted on more than some expected.” NY Times editorial

Rethinking Reagan: Was He a Man of Ideas After All?

Mr. Heclo argued that Mr. Reagan “is among that handful of American politicians, and an even smaller group of presidents, who have conducted their careers primarily as a struggle about ideas.” Contrast that to what Mr. Patterson called the view of “virtually all students of Reagan’s ideas,” that the 40th president offered no more than “the well-traveled baggage of anti-statist, anti-Communist conservatism.”

I watched, with similar revulsion, as Nixon underwent a similar reappraisal in some quarters. Thinking about it, it isn’t really so surprising. Given enough time, it is virtually certain that some opinion contrary to the prevailing consensus will emerge from the woodwork; sooner or later someone slips the reins of inhibition against saying something sufficiently provocative and foolish. Reappraisal doesn’t inherently lend credence, despite the veneer of sober academic analysis and the imprimatur of the ‘judgment of history’. Decontextualization by distance in time may make understanding less, not more, accurate. Sometimes all that reappraisal represents is which ideological spin is in the ascendency at the time.

Going Post-al? “Before their reporters lose it, the paper needs to get a blog.” Brendan Nyhan of Spinsanityfame writes in The American Prospect about the Washington Post mini-flap.

Coin-operated CD duplicating vending machines, on the model of photocopiers, are starting to appear, at least in Australia, according to this news clipping. Like photocopiers, too, the burden of not violating copyright law is on the user; the machines are fitted with software to defeat the copy-protection schemes found on some CDs. [via boing boing]

Happy second blogday to Booknotes, Craig. You’re indispensible…

Robert Fisk: A Speech Laced With Obsessions and Little Else:

‘Ariel Sharon could not have done better. The heaping of blame upon an occupied people, the obsessive use of the word terror – by my rough count there were 50 references in just 10 minutes – and the brief, frightened remarks about “occupation” and (one mention only) to Jewish settlements and the need for Israeli “compassion” at the end were proof enough that President Bush had totally failed to understand the tragedy he is supposedly trying to solve.’ Common Dreams

American Samizdat pointed me to this essay, What the American Flag Stands For, by Charlotte Aldebron, a 12 year-old Maine student:

The American flag stands for the fact that cloth can be very important. It is against the law to let the flag touch the ground or to leave the flag flying when the weather is bad. The flag has to be treated with respect. You can tell just how important this cloth is because when you compare it to people, it gets much better treatment. Nobody cares if a homeless person touches the ground. A homeless person can lie all over the ground all night long without anyone picking him up, folding him neatly and sheltering him from the rain.

School children have to pledge loyalty to this piece of cloth every morning. No one has to pledge loyalty to justice and equality and human decency. No one has to promise that people will get a fair wage, or enough food to eat, or affordable medicine, or clean water, or air free of harmful chemicals. But we all have to promise to love a rectangle of red, white, and blue cloth.

Betsy Ross would be quite surprised to see how successful her creation has become. But Thomas Jefferson would be disappointed to see how little of the flag’s real meaning remains.

“The Kansas legislature passed a bill Wednesday for the creation of “Choose Life” license plates. Proceeds from the sale of these specialized tags would go toward a fund of the anti-choice group Kansans for Life, and would be distributed among 60 crisis pregnancy centers throughout the state.” If you have problems with this state intrusion into a woman’s right to choose, the link will take you to a site where you can register your objection. [via Bitter Shack]

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.