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.

Under the influence: “Drug companies spend billions, showering gifts on doctors, to persuade them to prescribe new medicines. Critics say it’s bad for patients’ wallets – and maybe their bodies.” More on something on which I’ve vituperated before. When your MD offers you the latest-and-greatest instead of the tried-and-true, ask why it’s better. Philadelphia Inquirer

From Poynter.org, ‘I see dead people’: a compilation of resources for journalists, useful for the rest of us too, to help figure out whether a given celebrity is already dead or still alive . Avoid making the ‘Abe Vigoda gaffe’. And also from Poynter, I was entertained by these tips for ‘fair and accurate’ reporting on the clergy abuse scandal. Pointers include: avoiding blaming sexual abuse on clerical celibacy; not forgetting the poor wrongly acused priests when tallying the victims of the scandal; keeping in mind that some sexual sins are worse than others; recognizing that the Catholic Church is vulnerable to scapegoating; trying to broaden coverage of Church affairs to get beyond the abuse issue to some of its other involvements; and understanding that the Church is not monolithic and contains a spectrum of opinion and behavior. Pardon my heresy, the (self-professed) Catholic reporter who wrote this article is not exactly a poster child for impartiality; he sounds more like he works for the Vatican’s public relations office…

Forthcoming film of a Philip K. Dick short story is “…like the antidote to Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter,” says director.

From the diary of dan sandler, via randomWalks: ‘Now that iPod users have figured out how to use the iPod to store contacts, Apple has added the same functionality with updated iPod software.

There’s a clue, however, that the iPod team may not be terribly happy about having to cram this quite tangential feature into their svelte product. Take a look at the name in that screenshot: Alan Smithee. Where have you heard that name before? Yes, it’s the name used by disgruntled film directors to distance themselves from projects over which they have “lost creative control” to the studio.’

Here‘s the IMdb bio of Alan Smithee, and a list of 47 films he directed.

James Lileks creates the Orphanage of Cast-Off Mascots:

“The following page are filled with cast-off mascots – humanoid creatures who once served as advertising emmisaries in newspapers and magazines. Most of these products are dead, leaving their mascots orphaned; in many cases, the mascots were cast off to satiate the public’s taste for something new. None of them were particularly sucessful, or even well-loved. It’s hard to love the frightening face of Pepeco Pete, or want to be embraced by the razor-blade arms of Pal, the Shaving Boy. But they tried hard, day in, day out.

Most of them labored in the food-ad pages of the newspaper. In Minneapolis, the Thursday paper had all the coupons and ads – page after page of tiny ads, each with its own tagline or mascot. On a good fat day the paper might teem with three dozen of these happy folk. Imagine the nervous thrill of a Wednesday night in the mascot world, as they prepared for their one big shot, their weekly attempt to snare the wandering eye to their master’s products. Their payment? Nothing. Not even the promise of some ink the next week. Only the newspaper’s habit of microfilming every page kept them from vanishing altogether. That’s where I found them. Every day I crank up the microfilm machine, and release a few more from darkness.

Now it’s your turn to help. I’m calling on the citizens of the Web to adopt a cast-off mascot and affix him to your own page.”

“Britain is a nation of cyber snoopers. Almost nine in ten (87 per cent) of UK workers have surreptitiously read a boss’s private email on at least one occasion. That’s according to a survey of 200 professionals, sponsored by security firm Indicii Salus, which found that the vast majority of snoopers were motivated by curiosity rather than though of personal gain in accessing their boss’s email.” The Register

Finding Pay Dirt in Scannable Driver’s Licenses — another outrage. I wonder if you get to patronize the business if you insist on being ‘carded’ in the old way, with a visual inspection of the data on the front of the card instead of letting it be swiped in. I object to this for the same reason I don’t use the preferred-customer discount cards at grocery stores and drugstores unless they will agree to issue me one under a pseudonym. If swiping in the driver’s license gets to be a more widespread practice, what would be the downside to taking a penknife [or, as a reader suggested, a strong magnet, although the visible defacement of the card serves a civil disobedience purpose… –FmH] to the magnetic strip on the rear to prevent its data being readily harvested in the swipe?

The Selling of 9-11: ‘It has been six months since 9-11 and already we have had a formal anniversary. Stilted moments of silence, child poets, giant laser beams, and solemn speeches brought out the ghosts that have yet to be put to rest and never will, so long as there is a profit to be made on their continued haunting. HBO, Showtime, and FX have all announced plans to produce TV movies about the events, but on March 10th, CBS took the lead with a commercial-free special, 9/11. An important documentary to some and exploitative reality programming to others, the nearly uninterrupted two-hour broadcast of footage shot inside the World Trade Center provided an insider’s view of the results of the terrorist attacks. Gaining an estimated third of the American viewing population, 9/11 was profitable, but at the expense of many of the victims’ families who felt the timing was inappropriate. Although they publicly voiced their concern, it did not change the network’s decision to air the program.” AlterNet

Bush Acts to Drop Core Privacy Rule on Medical Data: This is an outrage. Read the proposal, formulate your own opinion and find a way to act during the thirty-day period for public comments. While the dysadministration says its concern is for patient care, it seems to me this move has a multifold motive, and none of them are for the good of the patient.

First, it is consistent with Shrub’s ideological battle against privacy as an end in itself. By basing his decision on worst-case scenarios in which upholding privacy rights could have an adverse impact on quality or rapidity of care, he says civil rights are only useful if they are means to an end. Calling his position ‘common sense’ implies that consumer advocates’ principles are nonsense. Second, he continues to dismantle Clinton achievements on principle as an ideological slap in the face to constituents of the Democratic administration. Thirdly, this is another giveaway to big business — in this case, the healthcare industry — at the expense of the rest of us, allowing insurance companies less fettered access to patient information for purposes not of patient care but reimbursement — to improve their cash flow. Finally, it clearly is an ideological tool to further his anti-abortion and pro-family fundamentalist agenda.

Believe me, patient care would not be significantly compromised by patients having to sign another form; there are already massive paperwork transactions involved in any healthcare encounter, and one more consent form will be dealt with as automatically as the rest. From the inside, I can tell you that healthcare facilities have easily taken in stride preparing for the Clinton privacy provisions, and efficient policies and procedures for complying are in place. But the potential for misuse of patents’ medical data if it is not strictly protected are rampant. NY Times

Anti-Copy Bill Hits D.C.: “Sen. Fritz Hollings has fired the first shot in the next legal battle over Internet piracy.

The Democratic senator from South Carolina finally has introduced his copy protection legislation, ending over six months of anticipation and sharpening what has become a heated debate between Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

The bill, called the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA), prohibits the sale or distribution of nearly any kind of electronic device — unless that device includes copy-protection standards to be set by the federal government.” Wired

On the other hand, courtesy of Rebecca Blood, there’s the Digital Consumer Bill of Rights:

1. Users have the right to “time-shift” content that they have legally acquired.
   This gives you the right to record video or audio for later viewing or listening. For example, you can use a VCR to record a TV show and play it back later.
2. Users have the right to “space-shift” content that they have legally acquired.
   This gives you the right to use your content in different places (as long as each use is personal and non-commercial). For example, you can copy a CD to a portable music player so that you can listen to the songs while you’re jogging.
3. Users have the right to make backup copies of their content.
   This gives you the right to make archival copies to be used in the event that your original copies are destroyed.
4. Users have the right to use legally acquired content on the platform of their choice.
   This gives you the right to listen to music on your Rio, to watch TV on your iMac, and to view DVDs on your Linux computer.
5. Users have the right to translate legally acquired content into comparable formats.
   This gives you the right to modify content in order to make it more usable. For example, a blind person can modify an electronic book so that the content can be read out loud.
6. Users have the right to use technology in order to achieve the rights previously mentioned.
   This last right guarantees your ability to exercise your other rights. Certain recent copyright laws have paradoxical loopholes that claim to grant certain rights but then criminalize all technologies that could allow you to exercise those rights. In contrast, this Bill of Rights states that no technological barriers can deprive you of your other fair use rights.

Revisiting the New York Times Magazine music issue, I found I’d missed this article. Band of Outsiders — as someone who’s long been fascinated by outsider art and who never misses a chance to visit the Musée de l’Art Brut whenever I’m anywhere near Lausanne, I should’ve considered there might be outsider music as well, especially because I had heard the Innocence and Despair (Langley School Project) CD and, like this essayist, found it arresting.

A Show Honors the Long Lives of Images of the Dead: ‘”The Last Portrait,” at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, includes some 200 images of famous people in the time between their final breaths and the grave.’ NY Times

Norton Blog wrote to tell me about a list of pointers to further reading about Bose-Einstein condensates for those who want to understand ‘this new state of matter’ (about which I wrote yesterday) further.

Color Coded Executive Branch Alerts from San Francisco animator/cartoonist Mark Fiore.

This new “chicken hawk” concept, as rendered by Tom Tomorrow, seems useful. [thanks, David]

I’m continuing to catch up with my favorite-weblogs backlog. Garrett posted on 3-13 that he had just learned of the murder of a friend. I’m not sure if you’re reading, but my thoughts are with you. My best friend and roommate from college was murdered several years afterward — more than 20 years ago now — but it’s still with me, so I may have a firsthand sense of what you’re going through.

Long, thoughtful, must-read reflection on the growing love affair the media have with weblogging, from Turbulent Velvet. As stories about weblogging become more prevalent, he observes, “People are using a small subset of urbane and civilized weblogs in order to draw conclusions about both the medium and the sociology of blogging without acknowledging some far more ugly developments,” by which he means the attack blogs and in particular the “warblogs”. While I’d like to be complacent in the distinctions, as I read I became more and more disquieted by how much the things for which the warblogs are vilified in my circles also apply to the antiwarblogs of my circles:

“The right’s attack blogs are really a very efficient chain of routers, repeaters essentially, multiplying punditry about punditry. I can’t think of one that is adding to the sum of human knowledge.” Bingo. And not only that: there are as many if not more attack blogs out there as urbane dialogic, thoughtful ones. “What worries me is that the cumulative effect [of attack blogs] actually diminishes the value of news…as they drive the fact/opinion ratio down through the floor.”

I’m not comfortable reassuring myself that the repeater phenomenon and the degradation of signal-to-noise ratio are any more endemic to the conservatives than the progressives. I’m not sure if TV is troubled by this when he attempts to pull the following rabbit out of the hat — that it’s more courageous to blog in dissent against the prevailing norms, like support for the War-on-Terrorism®, than in lockstep support of the status quo. As a fervent dissenter, I’d love to think I’m taking an illustrious, courageous stand, but it worries me how easy this is when I’m preaching to the converted. If you don’t like my cynical critique of everything under the sun, I know you won’t be reading FmH regularly for long no matter if I’m the most thoughtful, literate, erudite weblogger on the planet.

There’s very little crosstalk; I’m disappointed that the warbloggers don’t find me to get under their skins enough to flame back, with the exception of Dan Hartung, an early supporter and friend in the weblogging community, and even that dialogue didn’t last long. (They surely do lambast some of the thoughtful, passionate, leftist bloggers out there; why aren’t I on their radar screens? Am I just too much off the beaten path, without sufficient visibility? Or not worthy of replying to?) In this sense, the weblogging community is not at all seeming like the digital equivalent of the speakers’ corner in a pluralistic society it is sometimes made out to be. More often, it is seeming like a sad reminder of our atomization and solipsism. So what do I want here? to find comfort in a likeminded countercultural community? to have some influence if I’m ever, for a moment, thoughtful and original enough that I can transcend the usual sanctimoniousness of my dissenting views? to provoke a fight and unleash my reservoir of rage against the machine? to surpass mere passive whining and help build a vigorous opposition movement again in this nation of sheep? I think so, at least a little, in each instance. ’60’s and ’70’s lefties like myself, with the experience of inhabiting a viable countercultural and politically dissenting context, have not thought through the challenges and opportunities to community-building that the digital age provides. The weblogging world should be a deliberate part of that…

But I’m not sure I’m really talking about, narrowly defined, political dissent, with which through my life I’ve had quite a dialectical relationship. When I started this, long ago in a galaxy far away (everyone says that 9-11 was a demarcation line, but for me it was only one of twin ‘hits’, along with the theft of the Presidential election the year before, that have moved me — us — into an irrevocably changed alien world) I was in a relatively apolitical period in my life and FmH had a meandering, more eclectic flavor. I said here, with superior disdain, that I couldn’t be bothered to expend much energy or attention on the Presidential campaign, that there couldn’t be much of a difference regardless which of the Republicrats bought the Office (and I couldn’t get behind Nader’s impaired judgment in any sense…). Now I think at times FmH’s focus has become a bit too narrowly, obsessively, built around political criticism. Not that I’ve had some kind of religious conversion to membership in the Liberal Democratic Church or anything, but just because Bush is so unbelievably bad, such an execrable, befitting figurehead for what is so wrong with American politics and modern life. I am pulled vigorously, too vigorously, to reading the political news first, and often never getting beyond it. I never watch The West Wing (or virtually any television, for that matter), but last night I walked into the room and caught a little vignette in which a White House staffer is amazed that a fearsome political reporter hasn’t taken offense at some deception he suffered in covering the White House. He explains, to paraphrase, that he hates his beat, hates being “a stenographer,” and that she can’t imagine how little he cares about the trivial machinations of Palace intrigue. Sometimes I feel like that…

So, increasingly, I hope what I write here is more than just easy cheap shots and variations on one, obvious, theme. (On the other hand, when I read how well it’s done by some, e.g. blowback, cursor, ethelor rc3, off the top of my head, I’m inspired that there is a quality way to do polit.crit….) Still, I hope to get a bit away from this groove, if I can let go. Who was it who said, surveying the impact of the Shrub hegemony even before 9-11, that the only sane response was to resurrect beatnik counterculture again? It seems even more relevant as we seem to be slipping into this Orwellian age of permanent amorphous war footing and increasing autocratic intrusion. Yet these are not new phenomena. While what we’re subjected to now is unprecedented in magnitude rather than in kind — an opportunist perfection of age-old tendencies toward mind-control and autocratic rule by whatever memes are handy. A deeper, more fundamental critique of consensus reality, a critique of the cultural trance, the perennial human susceptibility to self-delusion, alienation and submissiveness, is called for. That’s what ‘Beat’ must mean. That’s a community to get behind. A political stance flows out of that, as a subsidiary, unavoidably. [Although it might be worthwhile postponing a retreat from politics until we have organized massive resistance to the momentum to attack Iraq… ] In any case, thanks, Velvet, for allowing me to riff off your thoughts; it’s been a useful reflection to me, especially if it means anything at all to you all. (I’m sure the warbloggers would think it doesn’t…)

“I refuse to be intimidated by reality anymore. After all, what is reality anyway? Nothin’ but a collective hunch.” –Lily Tomlin (parenthetically, there’s an appreciation of the much-beloved Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe over at the bitter shack; and a happy birthday, Brooke!)

Bin Laden likely injured by strikes on Afghanistan: ‘ “He may have been wounded more than once,” one official said. The official said an assessment that bin Laden was wounded had become a “firm belief” by some military analysts.’ The Washington Times [Sounds more like a ‘leap of faith’ than a ‘firm belief.’ –FmH]

Navy report shows polar cap is shrinking fast

The polar ice cap has been shrinking so fast that regular ships may be steaming through the Northwest Passage each summer by 2015, and along northern Russia even sooner, according to a new U.S. Navy report.

Global warming will open the Arctic Ocean to unprecedented commercial activity. The seasonal expansion of open water may draw commercial fishing fleets into the Chukchi and Beaufort seas north of Alaska within a few decades. The summer ice cover could even disappear entirely by 2050 — or be concentrated around northern Greenland and Ellesmere Island.

For the U.S. Navy, this presents an unprecedented challenge: a new ocean.

The nation’s maritime military does not yet have the ships, training, technology and logistics in place to patrol or police a wide-open polar sea, according to the final report from a symposium on Naval Operations in an Ice-Free Arctic. Anchorage Daily News

And an arresting news report today dramatizes the rapidity of these changes: Large Ice Shelf in Antarctica Disintegrates at Great Speed:

A Rhode Island-size piece of the floating ice fringe along a fast-warming region of Antarctica has disintegrated with extraordinary rapidity, scientists said yesterday

(…)

While it is too soon to say whether the changes there are related to a buildup of the “greenhouse” gas emissions that scientists believe are warming the planet, many experts said it was getting harder to find any other explanation. NY Times

Facial expression of pain: an evolutionary account: Amanda C de C Williams, PhD, University of London —

“This paper proposes that human expression of pain in the presence or absence of caregivers, and the detection of pain by observers, arise from evolved propensities. The function of pain is to demand attention and prioritise escape, recovery and healing; where others can help achieve these goals, effective communication of pain is required. Evidence is reviewed of a distinct and specific facial expression of pain from infancy to old age, consistent across stimuli, and recognizable as pain by observers. Voluntary control over amplitude is incomplete, and observers better detect pain which the individual attempts to suppress than to amplify or to simulate it.”

And: Laughter? It’s a funny business: “We laugh more frequently than we eat, sing or have sex. So why do we know so little about it?” Telegraph UK

The Anti-Gun Male: Once I read that Julia Gorin is billed as a stand-up comic, I could grasp that her column was meant to be a parody, but it reads as a chilling, realistic depiction of how the very real NRA types out there think of their opponents.

Burn, Baby Burn!: Not clear why they restricted it to webloggers, but the first round of the Blogger CD Swap is garnering much attention. Basically you put your name into a (digital) hat and draw out five other names at random, each of whom receives a copy of a lovingly crafted CD of summer music you’re going to burn. In return, you receive five such CDs from the people who have drawn your name. Everyone is, of course, oblivious to everyone else’s musical tastes, the beauty of it; perhaps the conceit is that bloggers are all discerning people, so you can’t go wrong? [Read a random assortment of blogs and tell me if you’d agree… –FmH] I’d want to rig the drawing so I got to be one of Chuck Taggart‘s recipients, for sure…

As this page points out, they’ve closed registration for the first round, but other similar swaps are springing up, at Metafilter and the CD Mix of the Month Club and Midsummernight’s Burn. This phenomenon may or may not be “fair use” — there’s a discussion at the Metafilter blink above — but you’d be advised to watch your back for the RIAA. Or just keep using those anonymous P2P networks…

Actually, I would be curious to see postings of the music various participants end up choosing. I’ve already found a few new interesting things from Beck’s iPod.

Experts Argue for Mandatory Organ-Donor System: “Switching to a mandatory system of organ donation–one where viable organs are harvested from the recently deceased without the family’s permission–would alleviate the nation’s donor-organ shortages and prevent people from needlessly dying while waiting for an organ, according to two US and UK researchers. If nothing else, the idea should “at least” be discussed, they argue in an opinion piece in the March issue of the American Journal of Kidney Diseases.” Yahoo! News

FEC To Debate Rules On Net’s Role In Federal Elections: “The Federal Election Commission will hold a public hearing Wednesday to air concerns over its plan to apply existing election laws to online campaign activity. The proposed regulations would exempt from disclosure rules individuals who use computer equipment, software or Internet services that they personally own to advocate a candidate for federal office,” Washington Post

Forced Drugging Upheld By Eigth Circuit: “Defendants can be forcibly drugged even though they haven’t been convicted of any charges and pose no danger to themselves or others.

That’s the ruling issued March 7, 2002 by the Federal Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in the case of United States v. Charles Thomas Sell. The 2 – 1 split decision establishes government power to forcibly medicate a person with mind altering drugs even before trial.” This site, the Alchemind Society, “the international association for cognitive liberty,” is a provocative and interesting resource, it appears.

Lying to the public is all right, says Washington’s chief liar, errr, lawyer. Roundly criticized during pre-confirmation public debate as dishonest and unethical, Solicitor-General Theodore Olsen didn’t take long after appointment to show his true stripes, ‘…telling the US Supreme Court that misleading statements are sometimes needed to protect foreign policy interests.

“It’s easy to imagine an infinite number of situations where the government might legitimately give out false information…” Olson was arguing in the Jennifer Harbury case. Harbury is a US attorney whose Guatemalan rebel leader husband died in 1993 after a year in Guatemalan army custody during which US officials lied to her to conceal CIA involvement in his torture and murder. Sydney Morning Herald Although the events occurred years before, the court case’s most immediate relevance is to current dysadministration arguments regarding how much they can conceal from the American public in the interest of the War-on-Terrorism®.

Adam [thanks…] scanned in and sent me an excerpt from a recent New Yorker review of David Brock’s Blinded by the Right which bears similarly on Olson’s bona fides:

[Brock needs an authoritative voice to keep R. Emmett

Tyrrell, editor of The American Spectator, from

publishing lies about the death of Vincent Foster, a

Clinton White House aide who committed suicide]

…”For help, Brock turned to Ted Olson, an informal

but influential adviser to the Spectator. Olson had

been Reagan’s private lawyer; he was a sachem of the

Federalist Society, an association of conservative

lawyers and jurists whose membership included future

Justices of the Supreme Court; and he was a close

friend and former law partner of Kenneth Starr’s.

Olson, Brock thought, was ‘the model of a sober,

careful lawyer with impeccable judgment.’ Brock faxed

him the piece. Olson’s response was evidently not

what he was expecting. Olson, Brock writes, “told me

bluntly, in a tone of voice that I had never heard him

use before, that while he believed, as Starr

apparently did, that Foster had committed suicide,

raising questions about the death was a way of turning

up the heat on the administration until another

scandal was shaken loose, which was the Spectator‘s

mission.”

Pull Up a Chair: Thomas Friedman writes an imaginary dialogue with his readers around an incendiary proposition: “There is no way that America will be able to sustain a successful Middle East policy unless the U.S. is prepared to station American troops on the ground, indefinitely, around both Afghanistan and Israel.

…Israelis and Palestinians do not have the resources, or mutual trust, ever to find their way out of this problem alone — not after the collapse of Oslo. And the U.S. can no longer afford to just let them go on killing each other. It will undermine America’s whole position in the Middle East, as more and more Muslims will blame us for what Israel does to protect itself. It will spin off more and more suicide craziness that will land at our door. And it will make it impossible for the U.S. to take on Saddam.” NY Times

Review of The Haunting of L by Howard Norman: “…Norman’s novels are hard to like. Starting in 1987 with The Northern Lights, each novel has featured a taciturn, antisocial male protagonist, as disconnected from his own inner life as he is from the people around him. Norman’s landscapes mirror the emptiness of the characters who inhabit them: this American writer is unique in setting his books in the bleakest regions of Canada, from the expanses of northern Manitoba to turn-of-thecentury Newfoundland. And his prose is as inhospitable as the terrain. Bumpy in pace and flat in texture, it goes down awkwardly, like something hard to chew.” The New Republic

The Media and European Identity — “Even greater media concentration, writes Juan Luis Cebrián, could save Europe from homogenised cultural globalisation.”

Just a few years from now, less than a dozen companies will be able to control the majority of the contents of communications in the European continent. These groups will be British, German, French and, maybe, Italian. Smaller, but more advanced countries, such as Holland, may be able to defend themselves in this territory. But many of the so-called national cultures and local identities will submit their balance sheet to foreign boards of directors.

I am not criticising the phenomenon, merely describing it. On the other hand, this will be the only way of protecting ourselves (if we want to be protected) against the American invasion. The plurality of Europe, its multiplicity and diversity, which we all praise and promote, will finally be left in very few, and quite uniform, hands. One more of the many paradoxes with which we will have to live in the coming century. eurozine

Errant Stem Cells May Account For Symptoms Of Schizophrenia: “Neural stem cells are a ready supply of new parts for the constant wiring and rewiring of the brain’s circuitry as this complex organ responds to environmental stimuli so that we can learn new skills, interpret new data and rethink old ideas. But if those cells can’t migrate to the right place and morph into the right kinds of neural links, our cognitive and psychological functions fail.” ScienceDaily

“Scientists have created a new kind of matter: It comes in waves and bridges the gap between the everyday world of humans and the micro-domain of quantum physics… Bose-Einstein condensates (“BECs” for short) aren’t like the solids, liquids and gases that we learned about in school. They are not vaporous, not hard, not fluid. Indeed, there are no ordinary words to describe them because they come from another world — the world of quantum mechanics.” Science@NASA

Bug sets windows shaking: a British-designed gadget the size of a computer mouse turns any smooth hard surface into a loudspeaker. It’ll plug into a personal audio device with a regular phone plug. They’re working on a bluetooth interface for cell phones. You can use two in your car to turn the car windows into speakers, if you’re not considerate enough to care about sharing your music with everyone you’re passing by. You can even attach it to the back of your skull. BBC

EU says terror war must respect human rights:

“The European Union has told the United Nations’ top human rights body the battle against terrorism must respect the rule of law.

Spanish Foreign Minister Josep Pique has told the UN Human Rights Commission that countries cannot allow terrorism the victory of abandoning principles.

Mr Pique also said the EU would make it a top priority this year to push for the elimination of the death penalty worldwide.

“Ananova

Mickey Kaus: Campaign-finance reform could turn him into a kingmaker. Slate

Sign the petition: “We, the undersigned, in the interest of international harmony and seeking an end to all violence in this world, do hereby call on the president of the United States, George W. Bush, to find a fully consenting adult intern to service his sexual needs…” [via boing boing]

A helicopter attack on a car-sized wasp’s nest 65 feet above the ground in the New Zealand countryside has probably failed to destroy the nest. Ananova [via boing boing]

Targeted Serendipity: a Fast Company feature — among many these days — about the weblogging phenomenon and the weblogging community, but this one prominently features weblogger Rebecca Blood and her forthcoming book, The Weblog Handbook.

“Automatic Text Summarization is a subfield of Natural Language Processing (NLP), an interdisciplinary area utilising research in Linguistics, Computer Science, Statistics, and Cognitive Science. Automatic Text Summarization, attempts to produce computer systems that summarise textual documents. This website contains a number of resourses primarily aimed at those who are new to text summarization. Hopefully, the material in this website will give the reader an understanding of the problem behind text summarization, a snapshot of the current state-of-the-art systems in both academic and industrial circles, as well as a list of published papers to read, most of which can be found in this website.”

U.S. Intelligence and the Cult of the Confidence Man: “The Confidence Man has long huckstered for U.S. intelligence agencies. Keep that in mind in today’s debates about government intelligence, writes Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, a professor of American history at the University of Edinburgh.” Chronicle of Higher Education

In a Skinhead’s Tale, a Picture of Both Hate and Love

On the subway, a muscular young man with a shaved head steps on the toes of a college student wearing a yarmulke and glasses. Outside, the skinhead grabs his book, knocks him down and beats him. The scene has the eerie familiarity of a nightmare, but for one jarring detail. “Get up, yeshiva bucher,” the attacker yells at his fallen prey. How many skinheads know enough Yiddish to employ the favored locution for a shy, unworldly boy?

The scene is from The Believer, a film, based on a true story, about an Orthodox youth who becomes a neo-Nazi leader. “When people would ask me, ‘What’s your film about’?” Henry Bean, the 56-year-old writer and director of “The Believer,” said recently over a bagel (naturally) in a New York coffee shop, “I’d say, `It’s about a Jewish neo-Nazi. But it’s not your typical Jewish neo-Nazi movie’.”

NY Times

Meaning?

“It’s not just about some guy eaten up with self-loathing and wanting to kill people,” he explained. “The film is also my love poem to my religion.”

Paul Krugman: Bad Medicine: “Think of it as the collision between an irresistible force (the growing cost of health care) and an immovable object (the determination of America’s conservative movement to downsize government). For the moment the Bush administration and its allies still won’t admit that there is any conflict between their promises to retirees and their small-government ideology. But we’re already past the stage where this conflict can be hidden with fudged numbers. The effort to live within unrealistically low targets for Medicare expenses has already translated into unrealistically low payments to health-care providers. And it gets worse from here.” NY Times

In Search of the World\’s Best Mobile Phone

U.S. official: Missile test ‘still not realistic’

A successful U.S. missile defense system test completed this week did not realistically duplicate conditions of an actual attack, a top U.S. defense official said Saturday.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said on CNN’s “Novak, Hunt & Shields” that decoys used to try confusing the “kill vehicle” were not “as good a decoy [as] we expect to face later.” CNN

Three posts courtesy of David:

• World Press Photo of the Year 2001
  

• The Jean-Paul Sartre Brigade vs. the Taliban
  

• The Company Therapist: this /. paean by Jon Katz describes a site whose premise is that you are reading the case files of a fictional therapist whose patients are employees of a fictional San Francisco tech company.
  

  …(A) company called Pipsqueak Productions devised this hyperfictional environment as the perfect vehicle for collaborative fictional storytelling in cyberspace. Very original move. A therapist’s office is a font of narrative, a great device for collecting different stories, honing different voices, full of interesting characters with evolving problems and case histories, able to draw on telephone calls and office transcripts, a place to discuss theories of treatment. Balis’s world — the pressured, constantly changing world of hi-tech – emerges vividly. Updated daily, The Company Therapist provides nearly two years of well-organized, easily accessible stories, doctor’s notes and other materials. Since it’s written by its collective audience rather than a single author or the site’s creators, the range of tales and voices is fascinating.

  Every contributor retains a recognizable style, yet is still able to move the collective narrative forward. In fact, many stories are moving forward at once, relating both to “work” and the personal lives of the patients, each told in an idiosyncratic voice and representing the challenges of a different life, yet collectively, painting a vivid portrait of a culture. This site is unique on the Web, both for its originality and quality of design, strong testimony to the notion online, technology and art are fusing to create things that are as new as they are exciting.
  

  The Company Therapist site is here; this might be a place I would explore if I had the time, but a totally irresponsible first impression after a cursory scan is that I might be annoyed at its focus on the stereotypical aspects of being a therapist…

Review of Warrior Poitics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos By Robert D. Kaplan:

‘In late January, the diligent Internet surfer might have come across a chilling exchange of letters between Robert Wright and Robert D. Kaplan, the latter a respected foreign correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly; an author who has written a number of books based on his travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa, and North America; and war guru of the moment. Kaplan’s books blend history, current affairs, and forecasts of future world trends.

The first two letters reveal that Kaplan favors some form of “benevolent global hegemony” exercised by the United States. He instructs Wright that “nation-building requires the implicit assumption that we will only have one or two nations at a time to rebuild.” This sentence reflects what Kaplan believes to be humility and realism.

(…)

Conclusion:

Kaplan’s book seems to be, at bottom, a briefing book to justify the switches and turns, contradictions, and conflicting rationales for American foreign policy and the domestic political control to which it is tightly bound. The Pagan Ethos aims to provide a kind of pseudo-intellectual and historical cover for the governing class of the United States to do anything it wants, anywhere in the world it wants, all the while claiming the moral high ground and demonizing any opposition. Likewise, U.S. allies have a free reign to overthrow democracy, violently suppress independence movements, sell narcotics, and engage in torture, mass rape, and ethnic cleansing, while designated “enemies” of the United States can be bombed and invaded for doing the same things, or even for simply being accused of doing them.’

I had similar concerns about Kaplan’s dangerous conceit when I heard him interviewed on NPR last month. More about Ludwig von Mises and his Institute, which is located in Auburn, Alabama, and which describes itself as “defend(ing) the market economy, private property, sound money, and peaceful international relations, while opposing government intervention as economically and socially destructive”, appears here. While I’m by no means aligned with absolutist free-market, private-property, non-interventionist less-government-at-any-cost principles, politics makes strange bedfellows…

Thatcher: Britain must start to quit EU: ‘The time has come for Britain to start pulling out of the European Union, according to Baroness Thatcher. She damns the EU as “fundamentally unreformable”.

The former Prime Minister says in her new book, serialised in The Times, that most of the problems the world has faced, including Nazism and Marxism, have come from mainland Europe. Enoch Powell had been right when he gave warning in the 1970s that entry to the Common Market involved an unacceptable loss of sovereignty.’ The Times of London

“Francis Boyle is a lawyer of the quality of Thomas More or Gandhi… the most competent and impassioned advocate of international law in the U.S.”

The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence by Francis A. Boyle, rofessor of law at the University of Illinois:

‘The Clinton Administration’s Presidential Decision Directive 60 asserted a U.S. right to target non-nuclear states with nuclear weapons in 1997. But PDD60, as well as nuclear deterrence as a whole — both the use and threatened use of nuclear weapons — is illegal under the international law of warfare.

In fact, Francis A. Boyle argues in The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, the Bush administration’s toying with the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Afghanistan, its intent to proceed with National Missile Defense, to renew nuclear testing and develop “bunker-busting” nuclear weapons will have disastrous impact on existing international efforts to rein in the global nuclear arms race through the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. Already, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty has fallen before its scythe.

This book provides a succinct and detailed guide to understanding the arms race from Hiroshima/ Nagasaki through the SALT I, SALT II, ABM and START efforts at arms control, to Star Wars/National Missile Defense, U.S. unilateral abrogation of the ABM Treaty, and events in Afghanistan and beyond.’

Bill Designed to Force Draft Registration:

‘California’s draft-age men, among the nation’s worst at registering with the Selective Service, could be denied driver’s licenses for failing to sign up under a bill moving through the Senate.

Despite objections that it would quash dissent to the draft and might be used to “flush out” illegal immigrants, the bill passed the Senate Governmental Organization Committee on Tuesday.’ LA Times

The bill is opposed by immigrant advocacy groups and pacifist organizations such as the Quakers, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mennonites whose members’ faiths may compel noncomplicity with the selective service system. More generally insidious, however, is the the bill in effect automatically registers draft-age men when they are issued their first driver’s license or state ID by forwarding their names to a federal databank, in essence implementing the cradle-to-grave totalitarian identity control which opponents of a national ID card system decry. 15 other states, it should be noted, sanction nonregistrants with similar consequences, but it does not appear they take this extra step of automatically forwarding driver’s license information to Washington.

An injustice in any tongue: Funding runs out next month on the Massachusetts account that pays for 90% of the interpreters in the courts of the state. Trials involving non-English-speaking parties will simply be put off, according to judicial planners. Nobody seems to care very much; providing interpreters is usually seen as a perk for perps. But in reality it speaks to the very core of our system of rights. This Superior Court judge, a friend of mine, is considering refusing to hear any cases because of the blatant inequality of allowing the English-speaking but not those who speak foreign tongues their day in court. Government is abdicating its responsibility to ensure equal protection under the law, in his powerful argument. Boston Globe

Gray Whales Rebound for West Coast Ritual: “After several trying years for the migratory gray whales, when hundreds of calves and their parents washed up dead along the shore — baffling scientists and dismaying a public that gives them nicknames and tracks their movements — the beginnings of a recovery are meandering up from Mexico, leaving behind a local tourist economy that just hates to see them go.” NY Times

Jennifer Szalai‘s thoughtful essay, whether you agree with it or not, reflects on issues of renewed relevance as we grapple with fundamentalism — among the terrorists and in the dysadministration in Washington. ‘Evil’ is back, and Americans seem to be leading the charge. From Ronald Reagan’s ‘evil empire’ to Dubya’s ‘axis of evil,’ is the problem the disingenuous misuse of the word, with its hypocrisy and namecalling, or having recourse to the concept of evil at all? After a century that has seen some of the worst atrocities in human history, suggesting almost no bounds to the human capacity to inflict harm on others of his own race (yes, it’s usually males…), do we have to grapple seriously with a notion of the diabolical, free of detachment or irony? Is it unfair that moral absolutism has been usurped by the pitiful and embarrassing Right, from McCarthy through Falwell and Buchanan, to Reagan and the Bushes and Shrubs? Does a notion of evil preclude understanding the perpetrators of heinous acts?

Try to understand we should. But suppose, for a moment, we were to come to a point where we amassed all of these “root causes” and then arranged them into a narrative resembling a “logic” behind 11 September; what kind of story would satisfy our craving for “cause and effect”? What kind of structural factors could completely account for the magnitude of the intended carnage? We can try to say that 3,000 office workers were incinerated “because” of American hegemony in the Middle East or Israeli barbarism in Palestine; we can try to say that 800,000 Tutsis were butchered “because” of the legacy of Belgian imperialism; we can try to say that six million Jews were murdered “because” of the Treaty of Versailles, or “because” Hitler was an illegitimate child. All of these factors surely helped to create grievances, and these grievances surely helped to create the events that followed. After a certain point, however, they ceased to contribute anything, as what was to follow exceeded any sense of necessity that characterises the causal relationships we desperately seek.

This dark space – this gap between what would conceivably constitute a necessary response and what could only be considered a horrifying excess – deserves a name. New Statesman

Conference announcement: “Rational Animals?” (Oxford, UK, October 3-4, 2002) — “Are any non-human animals rational? Do they act for reasons? Do they employ reasoning or are there simpler explanations for their behaviour? The focus of this two-day meeting will be on the character and limits of rationality in animals, in particular, apes, cetaceans, and birds. Speakers will include leading scientists from around the world researching cognitive abilities in animals and philosophers interested in the issues raised by their work.”

“A Newsnight investigation raised the possibility that there was a secret CIA project to investigate methods of sending anthrax through the mail which went madly out of control.

The shocking assertion is that a key member of the covert operation may have removed, refined and eventually posted weapons-grade anthrax which killed five people.” BBC

Jerry Westerby (a pseudonym, he tells us, invoking the venerable John Le Carré and, in so doing, growing even more in my esteem) makes a public announcement of his conversion to Catholicism. Somehow his recent preparation for this is tied in with his decreased weblogging proclivity of late, and he says his conversion “may or may not” bear on his productivity in the future. I for one hope it will not hamper his online activity, since he promises us that,

“…when this report continues, its politics will remain unchanged. On that I confidently swear. Actually the politics will probably be more vigorously leftist and the rhetoric much more shrill, maybe even apocalyptic, now that God is on my side and He will smite morally corrupt governments collaborating with evildoing capitalists to enslave our brothers born with Adam….”

Let’s rock and roll, Jerry!

[Sorry; too many complaints; back to the old, slower-loading table-based template until I can get it right…
–FmH]

Boston Archdiocese’s newspaper questions celibacy: “In a special issue on the priest sex abuse scandal, the official newspaper of the Boston Archdiocese said the Roman Catholic Church must confront the question of whether to continue to require priests to be celibate.

In its lead editorial published Thursday, The Pilot newspaper said the celibacy issue raises tough questions such as whether there would be fewer scandals if celibacy were optional for priests and whether the priesthood attracts an unusually high number of homosexual men.” The Nando Times

Johan Söderberg: Copyleft vs. Copyright: A Marxist critique: “At the end of my inquiry, I will suggest that the development of free software provides an early model of the contradictions inherent to information capitalism, and that free software development has a wider relevance to all future production of information.” First Monday

Leaked Document Ignites Heated Debate: “This has ignited a healthy public debate over nuclear policy in a post 9/11 world. It’s all reminiscent of the 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers by the New York Times. We aren’t telling who the Daniel Ellsberg is in the Nuclear-Posture leak, but conscientious government employees who are willing to risk their careers by leaking classified documents may be the only check on government excesses carried out behind the screen of national security.” What’s New

Two Americans Among Five Killed at Pakistan Church by a grenade-wielding attacker. In October, 16 were massacred at a Sunday service at a Christian church in the Pakistani city of Bahawalpur.

Official: Al-Qaida Moving Money Again: “Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network has stepped up its financial activity markedly in recent weeks, suggesting some leaders are reasserting control and may be seeking to finance more attacks against American interests, a U.S. official says.

The increased flow of money corresponds with a recent increase in communications between surviving al-Qaida members, the official said, speaking only on condition of anonymity.”

Older Men Make Better Lovers, Psychologist Says and: Middle-Aged Sex and Sympathy Ring Busted

The Bearable Lightness of Healing: “This is the single biggest breakthrough in healthcare I’ve seen in 30 years.” Wired

In its continuing quest to court a more youthful audience, The New York Times Magazine this week is a special issue on Music 2002. Do you want to know:

• what Beck and Moby are listening to these days (Update: the .pdf of what’s on Beck’s iPod is a popular download, according to blogdex)
  

• what it’s like to be in a Guns’n’Roses tribute band
  

• where music will be coming from, according to Kevin Kelly
  

• how Sue Mingus got swept up in the fury that was Charles
  

• whether we should begin making opera relevant again by basing it on lurid talk shows
  

• how (even now) to become an indie-rock success
  

• who some of the ‘downtown girls’ (shouldn’t that be ‘grrrls’?) who help make “Lower Manhattan the center of female music-making” are
  

• how to make a killer (literally) folk song

Exploitationware detection — “If you are using Internet Explorer for Windows, and you haven’t turned JavaScript or ActiveX off, your browser has just been checked for parasites. If there’s a red box with warnings in just above this text, you should check it out!

If there are no warnings, you are probably clean. (But there are unfortunately other parasites about which the script cannot detect, so don’t feel too complacent!)”

Heaven and Hello:

‘ “Hello” is such a characteristic American greeting that, back when I was a child in Korea, it was our name for Americans. It was, after all, the first sound out of the GIs’ mouths when they saw anyone. Now that I am a professor with twenty years of academic inquiry behind me, I turn again to the question of why Americans say “Hello” and not “Good day” or its many counterparts — “Bon jour,” “Guten Tag,” “Buon giorno,” “G’day” — to greet each other; and I do this because my inquiry into the origins of symbols and folk meanings seems constantly to skirt around the profound meanings of the utterly mundane.’ Vocabula Review

The Defense Rests — Permanently: “Innovations like mandatory sentencing and the plea bargaining it engenders are stacking the criminal-justice system against defendants while beginning to make superstar defense lawyers obsolete. No one feels sorry for the lawyers, of course. But is something valuable — like, say, the presumption of innocence — in danger of being lost?” New York Magazine

No Tower Can Withstand Attack as Jets Get Bigger, Expert Says: ‘As commercial jets grow larger, faster and carry ever-greater amounts of fuel, no skyscraper can be built to withstand a terrorist attack of the kind that destroyed the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, the chief structural engineer for the trade center project said last night.

“We have to conclude, we cannot fail to conclude, that it’s not practical to design buildings as we know them — buildings that we’d want to live and work in — to resist the impact of these jet aircraft,” the engineer, Leslie E. Robertson, said in his most extensive public comments to date about the trade center disaster. “It is not possible or sensible to do that.” ‘ NY Times

Free AOL use sparks new worries: “Free Web access may be a bygone perk of the dot-com bubble, but it appears to be alive and well at the world’s largest Internet service provider, America Online.

AOL offers a battery of free promotion and retention programs, but it refuses to disclose how many of its subscribers pay nothing for the service. Now, Wall Street is zeroing in on some financial details that it believes offer a guide to this elusive number–and it doesn’t like what it sees.” CNet

ani difranco’s 9/11-inspired as-yet-untitled work-in-progress reads in part:

yes, 

us people are just poems 

we're 90% metaphor 

with a leanness of meaning 

approaching hyper-distillation 

and once upon a time 

we were moonshine 

rushing down the throat of a giraffe 

yes, rushing down the long hallway 

despite what the p.a. announcement says

yes, rushing down the long stairs 

with the whiskey of eternity 

fermented and distilled 

to eighteen minutes 

burning down our throats 

down the hall 

down the stairs 

in a building so tall 

that it will always be there 

yes, it's part of a pair 

there on the bow of noah's ark 

the most prestigious couple 

just kickin back parked 

against a perfectly blue sky 

on a morning beatific 

in its indian summer breeze 

on the day that america 

fell to its knees 

after strutting around for a century 

without saying thank you 

or please 

[thanks, Adam]

Al Qaeda’s Grocery Lists and Manuals of Killing: The Mew York Times analyzes over 5,000 pages of documents its reporters collected from abandoned safe houses and training camps where they had been left behind by fleeing Taliban and al Qaeda fighters last fall at sites across Afghanistan. Among other details, the writers conclude that “the training camps, which the Bush administration has described as factories churning out terrorists, were instead focused largely on creating an army to support the Taliban, which was waging a long ground war against the Northern Alliance.” NY Times