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

[I’m sorry, still having trouble with the page layout in CSS. It works fine in Internet Explorer under Windows, but users of Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, and Mac-IE are reporting either (a) an overlap between the sidebar and main content; (b) the absence of the sidebar text; (c) or that the sidebar text is pushed down so it starts below, rather than parallel with, the main content. It sounds like it’s something wrong with the parameters controlling the placement and size of the sidebar, doesn’t it? I’m struggling with it, learning CSS-based layout as I go. Given that it loads so much faster than a table-based layout, I’d like to stick with it until I can get it right. What do you think? Should I go back to the old table-based template in the meanwhile? Any CSS wizards out there who can (along with David Gagne who’s been such an enormous help already) take a look at my template and stylesheet and tell me what I’m doing wrong? –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

Nash Denies Film Is Whitewash

Dr. John Nash, the Nobel Prize winning mathematician whose life is portrayed in the Oscar-nominated film A Beautiful Mind, denies being anti–Semitic. His wife denies he’s homosexual. And a son denies he’s a bad father.

Critics of the box-office hit, based on a biography of the same name, have accused the filmmakers of whitewashing Nash’s life and leaving out depictions of that dark side of him.

But in an interview with correspondent Mike Wallace of the CBS News program 60 Minutes, Nash, who suffers from schizophrenia, his wife, Alicia, and son Johnny deny these allegations, which have made this Academy Award contender controversial in recent weeks.

This is the first time Nash has spoken out since the movie was released. CBS News

Michael Walzer: Can there be a decent left?

The radical failure of the left’s response to the events of last fall raises a disturbing question: can there be a decent left in a superpower? Or more accurately, in the only superpower? Maybe the guilt produced by living in such a country and enjoying its privileges makes it impossible to sustain a decent (intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced) politics. Maybe festering resentment, ingrown anger, and self-hate are the inevitable result of the long years spent in fruitless opposition to the global reach of American power. Certainly, all those emotions were plain to see in the left=s reaction to September 11, in the failure to register the horror of the attack or to acknowledge the human pain it caused, in the schadenfreude of so many of the first responses, the barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved. Many people on the left recovered their moral balance in the weeks that followed; there is at least the beginning of what should be a long process of self-examination. But many more have still not brought themselves to think about what really happened. Dissent

“People really seem designed to get along with others, and when you’re excluded, this has significant effects.” Rejection can dramatically reduce a person’s IQ and their ability to reason analytically, while increasing their aggression, according to new research.

“It’s been known for a long time that rejected kids tend to be more violent and aggressive,” says Roy Baumeister of the Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, who led the work. “But we’ve found that randomly assigning students to rejection experiences can lower their IQ scores and make them aggressive.” New Scientist

American Psychiatric Association Statement on the Insanity Defense and Mental Illness, by Richard K. Harding, M.D.,

President, American Psychiatric Association:

The American Psychiatric Association hopes that the Yates case will lead to

broad public discussion of how our society and its legal system deals with

defendants who are severely mentally ill.  Historically, the insanity defense

was used to excuse from moral culpability, mentally ill  people who were so

deranged that they could not tell right from wrong and could not control their

actions.  However, reviews of insanity cases show that the more heinous the act,

the less likely that an insanity plea will succeed, despite the disabling

presence of severe mental illness.



Also, the standards for handling mentally ill defendants vary across

jurisdictions.  A mentally ill person tried for a capital offense in one state

may be found "not guilty (meaning not responsible) by reason of insanity," while

another person with similar severity of mental illness tried in another state

may be convicted.  Some jurisdictions use the designation "guilty but mentally

ill."



Advances in neuroscience have dramatically increased our understanding of how

brain function is altered by mental illness, and how psychotic illness can

distort reality in very subtle ways, to the degree that black becomes white.

Research also has led to development of more effective treatments.

Unfortunately, public understanding has not kept pace with these advances.



A failure to appreciate the impact of mental illness on thought and behavior

often lies behind decisions to convict and punish persons with mental disorders.



The victims of mental illness are sick--just as sick as if they had cancer or

chronic heart failure--and as human beings, deserve humane and effective

treatment for their illness.  Prisons are overloaded with mentally ill

prisoners, most of whom do not receive adequate treatment.



Defendants whose crimes derive from their mental illness should be sent to a

hospital and treated--not cast into a prison, much less onto death row.





The American Psychiatric Association is a national medical specialty society

whose more than 36,000 physician members specialize in the diagnosis, treatment

and prevention of mental illnesses including substance use disorders.

“The U.S. Congress’s General Accounting Office is investigating claims that a scientific cover-up may have been perpetrated at the very heart of the missile defense program.

The program’s two prime contractors, the American aerospace firms TRW and Boeing, have been accused of manipulating data to hide the stark fact that their system cannot tell the difference between warheads and the decoys that accompany them. The controversy dates from the first flight test in 1997, which the Pentagon said was a complete success. Although an interceptor missile was launched in that trial, it made no attempt to hit the dummy warhead. Rather, the mission was a fly-by designed to test the computer algorithm that recognizes the target and the sensors on board the intercepting missile.” Tompaine.com

I’m waiting with bated breath for tonight’s sixth test of NMD over Kwajalein Atoll, which is supposed to demonstrate that the interceptor missile can tell the difference between the target warhead and several decoys. My prediction: the Pentagon will announce another total success. We may or may not be told that the interceptor had been programmed with the vector of the warhead it was supposed to destroy…

Portrait of the director of mental health at the Mazar-i-Sharif General Hospital in Afghanistan, who says that beneath their turbans, thier Islamic rigor and their armed bluster, the Taliban were a significantly depressed group of men. Dr Nader Alemi is one of the few mental health professionals in Afghanistan, facing staggering psychiatric treatment needs. LA Times

An Israeli researcher reports that drivers who listen to fast music in their cars may have more than twice as many accidents as those listening to slower tracks. New Scientist

Camera fished from pond now takes surrealistic photos, a sampling of which accompanies the article… Lawrence Journal-World [via Spike]

Interview with Toby Lester: ‘One of the debates that continually roils the field of New Religious Movements scholarship is whether a distinction can really be made between cults and new religions—after all, many of today’s established religious movements began on the fringes of society. Does this mean that the Hare Krishnas or the Wiccans could be the next big religion? It’s unlikely, but stranger things have happened. One thing is clear, though—a hundred years from now, our religious landscape will look radically different than it does now. “What new religious movements will come to light in the twenty-first century?” ‘ The Atlantic

Paul Krugman:

‘The real reason conservatives want to drill in ANWR is the same reason they want to keep snowmobiles roaring through Yellowstone: sheer symbolism. Forcing rangers to wear respirators won’t make much difference to snowmobile sales — but it makes the tree-huggers furious, and that’s what’s appealing about it. The same is true about Arctic drilling; as one very moderate environmentalist told me, the reason the Bush administration pursues high-profile anti-environmental policies is not that they please special interests but that they are “red meat for the right.” (The real special-interest payoffs come via less showy policies, like the way the administration is undermining enforcement of the Clean Air Act.)… Oil companies are not behind the push for drilling there — indeed, they are notably unexcited by the prospect. Studies by the U.S. Geological Survey suggest why: Arctic oil is so expensive to get at that it’s barely worth extracting at current market prices. For energy companies it’s the rest of the Bush energy plan, which would give them about $35 billion in tax breaks and subsidies, that really matters.’ NY Times

For Bush, secrecy is a matter of loyalty: “Administration’s tight control over flow of information draws charges of ‘arrogance of power’ in Washington.” As Phil Agre, who pointed me to this blink, put it, “the United States is drifting into monarchy (not just secrecy but a general imperiousness and a broad pattern of nepotism).” USAToday

William Bennett announces “Americans for Victory Over Terrorism” (AVOT), a new project to support America’s war on terrorism. Bennet’s insidious message, in part, says

The threats we face today are both external and internal: external in that there are groups and states that want to attack the United States; internal in that there are those who are attempting to use this opportunity to promulgate their agenda of ‘blame America first.’ Both threats stem from either a hatred for the American ideals of freedom and equality or a misunderstanding of those ideals and their practice. “The threats we face today are both external and internal: external in that there are groups and states that want to attack the United States; internal in that there are those who are attempting to use this opportunity to promulgate their agenda of ‘blame America first.’ Both threats stem from either a hatred for the American ideals of freedom and equality or a misunderstanding of those ideals and their practice.

i.e. “anyone who doesn’t support us is pro-terrorism.” So, in response, would people care to join me in membership in AVOAVOT?

Study Finds Sexism Rampant In Nature: “According to a University of California–San Diego study released Monday, sexism is rampant throughout the natural world, particularly among the highest classes of vertebrates…”Females living in the wild routinely fall victim to everything from stereotyping to exclusion from pack activities to sexual harassment.”

Nowhere is the natural world’s gender inequity more transparent… than in the unfair burden females assume for the rearing of offspring.” The Onion

Can Lyme Disease Cause Psychiatric Disorders?

Lyme disease is no small health threat to persons living in the Northeast, the Mid-Atlantic states, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and northern California. True, the first signs of its onslaught are usually no more than flulike symptoms. But it is also capable, over the long haul, of inflicting a variety of other physiological insults—say, muscle pain, arthritis, heart inflammation, severe headache, stiff neck, or facial paralysis.

Now a new study adds one more malady to that list: psychiatric illness.

The study was conducted by Tomá Hájek, M.D., a psychiatry resident at the Prague Psychiatric Center in the Czech Republic, and his colleagues. It is reported in the February American Journal of Psychiatry.

There were several reasons that Lyme disease piqued the interest of Hájek and his colleagues. For one, Lyme disease is the most frequently recognized anthropod-borne infection of the central nervous system in Europe, as well as in the United States. Second, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease—Borrelia burgdorferi—belongs to the same family as does the bacterium that causes neurosyphilis. Around 1900 neurosyphilis accounted for some 10 percent to 15 percent of psychiatric hospital admissions, but because of penicillin treatment, it is now an uncommon disorder. And third, anecdotal reports have suggested that Lyme disease can lead to psychiatric consequences—say, mood changes or depression. Psychiatric News

I’ve written before about what has essentially been an Inquisition directed against those who claimed there is an insidious chronic outcome of some Lyme Disease infections, with prominent neuropsychiatric consequences — both the patients seeking recognition of and treatment for these effects and the medical personnel who sought to treat them. But there are both compelling theoretical and clinical lines of evidence, for those not wearing blinders, suggesting the need for this paradigm shift.

Saudi police ‘stopped’ fire rescue: “Saudi Arabia’s religious police stopped schoolgirls from leaving a blazing building because they were not wearing correct Islamic dress, according to Saudi newspapers.

In a rare criticism of the kingdom’s powerful ‘mutaween’ police, the Saudi media has accused them of hindering attempts to save 15 girls who died in the fire on Monday.” BBC

Witness to a World Of Defiant Enemies: Interview with a 22-year-old Afghan describing the Taliban cave complex near Shahikot in which he says he was a captive during last week’s battle. “(The man’s) credibility was difficult to judge with certainty; his very name could have been an alias. But three hours of detailed questioning left little doubt that he had spent time in the caves with the anti-American forces during the battle of Shahikot, whether he was taken there willingly or not.” Among other details, he describes how the Afghan and foreign fighters freely “slip into nearby villages despite a security belt established by U.S. and allied Afghan forces.” Washington Post

Domestic Disturbance: the growing labor movement among New York’s nannies and housekeepers. Village Voice

US sends suspects to face torture: “The US has been secretly sending prisoners suspected of al-Qaida connections to countries where torture during interrogation is legal, according to US diplomatic and intelligence sources. Prisoners moved to such countries as Egypt and Jordan can be subjected to torture and threats to their families to extract information sought by the US in the wake of the September 11 attacks.” Guardian UK

Remains of 11 Firefighters Are Found at Trade Center NY Times

National Review

editor suggests nuking Mecca The American Prospect

Improving the Way Humans Walk NY Times

Andy Borowitz: Gore loses bid to run ‘shadow government’:

Just days after it was revealed that there is a “shadow government” in place underground somewhere outside of Washington, D.C., former Vice-President Al Gore was trounced in his bid to become President of it.

Subterranean voters gave the former vice-president a scant 38% of the vote, with 59% going to Buford T. Bush, an amateur motocross competitor and a distant cousin of President George W. Bush. JWR

Mugabe’s villainy and Africa’s cynical complicity: ‘(Opposition candidate) Mr Tsvangirai, and the men and women who have conquered their fear in his support, deserve the unstinting support of all African leaders with any claim to democratic legitimacy. They are not getting that support. The Organisation of African Unity, true to its reputation as a despots’ club, has pronounced the poll to be “transparent, credible, free and fair”. Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi has congratulated his “dear brother” on the “confidence and high esteem the people of Zimbabwe hold in you”. Tanzania’s President delights in his “richly deserved” triumph. The observers sent by South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki, ferociously mocked at home for their complacency, term the outcome “legitimate”, though they could not quite bring out the words “free and fair”.’ The Times of London

America is becoming its own worst enemy,” says Anatole Kaletsky in The Times of London.

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, the consensus in Britain and most of Europe could be described as morally sympathetic but pragmatically hostile…

Today, the reaction to Vice-President Cheney’s anti-Iraq mission is the mirror image of last year’s view about Afghanistan. The world is emotionally hostile to President Bush’s belligerent and overweening rhetoric. Even Washington’s best friends abroad resent American arrogance and are forced to acknowledge publicly, as Jack Straw did last month, that Mr Bush’s “axis of evil” campaign is motivated as much by domestic political calculations as by legitimate security concerns. Yet despite the emotional hostility and the public expressions of distaste, politicians all over the world are quietly offering Mr Bush practical reassurance…

Unfortunately for America and the world, the tacit support for US policy on Iraq today may prove every bit as misguided as were the anxieties about Afghanistan last year.

Exploding star may have sparked Earth disaster: “Piecing together clues from astronomy, paleontology and geology, scientists have proposed that an ancient supernova may have damaged the protective ozone layer around the Earth and wreaked havoc on terrestrial life.

The researchers theorize that a group of young stars prone to short, cataclysmic lives passed relatively near our solar system several million years ago.” CNN

Shamanism and the Ancient Mind : A Cognitive Approach to Archaeology by James L. Pearson:

“Pearson brings a cogent, well-argued case for the understanding of much prehistoric art as shamanistic practice. Using the theoretical premises of cognitive archaeology and a careful examination of rock art worldwide, Pearson is able to dismiss other theories of why ancient peoples produced art-totemism, art-for-art’s sake, structuralism, hunting magic. Then examining both ethnographic and neuropsychological evidence, he makes a strong case for the use of shamanistic ritual and hallucinogenic substances as the genesis of much prehistoric art. Bolst ered with examples from contemporary cultures and archaeological sites around the world, Pearson’s thesis should be of interest not only to archaeologists, but art historians, psychologists, cultural anthropologist, and the general public.” amazon.com

Did Humans and Neandertals Battle for Control of the Middle East? National Geographic [Some wag might ask whether they still are… –FmH]

Peering Through the Gates of Time

It’s all come down to this.

In one corner is Dr. John Archibald Wheeler, 90, professor emeritus of physics at Princeton and the University of Texas, armed with a battery of hearing aids, fistfuls of colored chalk, unfailing courtesy, a poet’s flair for metaphor, an indomitable sense of duty and the company of a ghost army of great thinkers.

In the other is a “great smoky dragon,” which is how Dr. Wheeler refers sometimes to one of the supreme mysteries of nature. That is the ability, according to the quantum mechanic laws that govern subatomic affairs, of a particle like an electron to exist in a murky state of possibility — to be anywhere, everywhere or nowhere at all — until clicked into substantiality by a laboratory detector or an eyeball.

Dr. Wheeler suspects that this quantum uncertainty, as it is more commonly known, is the key to understanding why anything exists at all, how something, the universe with its laws, can come from nothing. Or as he likes to put it in the phrase that he has adopted as his mantra: “How come the quantum? How come existence?”

Standing by the window in his third-floor office in Princeton’s Jadwin Hall recently, Dr. Wheeler pointed out at the budding trees and the green domes of the astronomy building in the distance. “We’re all hypnotized into thinking there’s something out there,” he said. NY Times

“Dear FBI, be sure to read my entire web sites to make sure I’m not a terrorist,” says Mark Perkel on his site www.overthrowthegovernment.org, which he describes as attention-getting rather than frankly revolutionary. “Can I actually overthrow the government?

No I can’t, for one simple reason. The government has already been overthrown. George W. Bush and his right wing Republican Bible thumping jesus freak cronies have already overthrown the government.” A message to Declan McCullagh’s Politech mailing list today says that Perkel was arrested returning to the US from a trip to Australia this morning and is being held without bail; the LA Sheriff’s Dept booking record is here. “Perkel is also the owner of the web-site behind BartCop.com, a daily political humour site which is sometimes

critical of the current federal administration. Updates of Perkel’s

situation will probably be posted first at , or

(on online chat forum) if the

police pull the plug on Perkel’s server,” says the poster to McCullagh’s list. It is not clear to what extent Perkel’s arrest relates to the political views he espouses, or teases us with.

Is Dan Hartung’s Lake Effect gone? http://www.lakefx.nu/ doesn’t seem to work any longer. Dan, has your site moved? folded? Anyone?

Is Al-Amin Conviction a Requiem for the ’60s? AlterNet

I’m hoping people (especially with dialup connections) are noticing a dramatic improvement in the speed at which this page loads. David Gagne did me the tremendous favor of rewriting the template for FmH using CSS- instead of table-based positioning, something that the slow-loading page has been crying out to me about for a long time. I learned to format text with styles a few months ago, and also eliminated some of the deeply-nested tables in my dinosaur layout, but CSS-based layout has not been something I’ve had the time to take on.

David did try to sneak some extra color into the design but, as you can see, I’ve resisted [grin] and restored the familiar grey and white… Seriously, though, I’m deeply indebted to his skill and generosity (which is hardly obscured by his claim that his motives are selfish, given his slow dial-up connection…) and proud the page gets to wear the CSS and HTML validation medals (although, David warns, even though the template may be standards-compliant, some of my posts may not be…). Tweaking the last problem out of the new setup (the sidebar loads beneath the content rather than alongside) now but impatient, a boy with his new toy, to use the new template and post this public thank-you to David right away this evening. He’s been a longtime reader of FmH (I recall him as an early supporter of the ‘blink’ nomenclature) and I’m a sometime reader of his blog, a pleasing combination of beautiful design and tasty content; I’ll frequent it more often from here on out. Consider checking it out…

Long cautionary tale about the perils of mixing Verizon DSL and WinXP (with a happy ending, sort of) The Register

Slaughter in the Name of God: Salman Rushdie contemplates the Hindu-Muslim violence rending the Indian subcontinent: “India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.” Washington Post

Why We Need ‘Nightline’ Washington Post [via Spike]

Review of A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon: ‘…The authors, in their discussion of the limbic system, the center of the emotions, and the unconscious mind make clear that they are not referring to the Freudian unconscious, that maladaptive “cauldron” of aggressive and sexual impulses. Nor do they give credence to the Freudian theory of personality development, psychopathology or psychotherapy. Instead they are speaking of the highly adaptive and prosocial cognitive unconscious, including both the cortex and limbic system, both of which are interacting in therapy and all other intense human relationships, and most centrally in mothers and children.’ Human Nature Review

“Memories are made of this…” “Elegant research released today from Nobelist Eric Kandel’s laboratory reveals that the cAMP response element binding protein (CREB), long implicated in memory consolidation, primes brain cells to retain long-term memories. Regulated expression of CREB, during or shortly before a memory task, might allow single-trial learning, and eventually lead to development of memory-enhancing drugs, Kandel says.” BioMedNet [requires free registration]

America’s shady ally against terror: ‘Uzbekistan is drifting toward an anti-American stance, if one understands “American” as implying democracy, human rights and the struggle against state-sponsored terror.’ NY Times

“There is a deep degree of uncertainty. It has to do, in part, with a sense that safety was taken for granted and then ripped away with a suddenness.” Even 6 Months Later, ‘Get Over It’ Just Isn’t an Option. “Mental health professionals across the country say the psychological fallout from Sept. 11 — affecting people with chronic psychiatric and addiction problems and people who had never experienced anything like the wrenching angst they are battling now — is strikingly pervasive

… Many therapists, psychiatrists and drug and alcohol counselors say that they are seeing more serious problems now — and more evidence of a widespread anxiety — than they did in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, attributing it to a delayed reaction after the shock of the attacks wore off. In most cases, these mental health professionals are treating patients who did not lose a relative or close friend, participate in the rescue effort or directly witness the attack but were nevertheless deeply affected.” NY Times

Privacy Watch: Guess who’s tracking you by cell phone?

“The nation’s cell phone service providers will soon know exactly where every one of their customers is, at all times, and privacy rights groups are asking what they plan to do with the information.

All U.S. carriers are under Federal Communications Commission orders to make it possible for police to locate cell phones calling 911, something police can’t do now. Carriers plan to use the same systems to sell services like helping stranded motorists even if they don’t know their location, or finding the closest restaurant.

Because people with cell phone generally always carry their phone with them, the FCC regulations give the thriving market for personal information something its never had a chance to get: the exact locations at all times of more than 140 million people.” ZDNet

In response to my thoughts about inline images and leeching bandwidth, Kareem writes to disagree with my impression that musical sampling is considered fair use. “Musical sampling is not generally not

protected under fair use according to the courts if it

is taken for commericial use. Or at least since 1991

anyway:

http://www.alankorn.com/articles/sampling.html.” And several people wrote to support the idea that no one should have to pay for the bandwidth viewers of other sites eat up when those sites link to their images. I agree with one thing, on reflection; it is impossible to draw a line based on the number of hits. After the first hit, one is on a slippery slope.

Nuclear Arms for Deterrence or Fighting? Responding to the furor over the leaked nuclear posture review, Pentagon spokespeople have begun, quite confusedly, to suggest that their talk of first use of tactical nuclear weapons against subnuclear “situations” is deterrence talk, obscuring the fundamental line they’ve crossed to the acceptability of certain uses of these weapons. At the same time, they maintain the importance of not ruling out any options for targets “able to withstand nonnuclear attack.” This New York Times news analysis points out another administration attempt to obfuscate by positing a distinction between a “policy review” and an “operational plan.” I’ve heard and read credulous journalists considering the implications of the Pentagon analysis take this bait already. But, as the essay points out, “The Pentagon review, however, clearly points to important changes by touting the need for new variable- yield or reduced-yield nuclear weapons, and improved targeting systems so they could be rapidly used in war.” An added, worrisome point is that this change in American posture sends a message to third world countries that there can be acceptable defense policy reasons to develop and consider using nuclear weapons; in so doing, it undermines nonproliferation.

Andy Borowitz: Condit blows job interview with Blockbuster video; declares most questions ‘off limits.’ JWR

Criminal lineups use drivers’ photos. “Ever been in a criminal lineup?

Maybe you haven’t, but the picture on your driver’s license might have, and could be in the future.

Legislation to restrict law enforcement’s use of face-recognition technology shed new light Tuesday on the practice, which surprised many people.

Law enforcement routinely scans the state’s driver’s license photographs to find look-alikes for criminal photo lineups.” Denver Post

Slyck is a compendium of news from the P2P filesharing universe… [via Red Rock Eaters]

Family resemblance may be in eyes of beholder: “Perceptions that a child resembles a parent may be based on an assumption the two are genetically related rather than a strong similarity in features, Italian researchers report.” Reuters Health In my family we have known this ever since we adopted our daughter four years ago…

I’m apparently a “net snowboarder”, a “minuteman of the digital revolution”. MIT Tech Review

The secret contingency plan for the use of nuclear weapons against at least seven nations — Russia, China, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Syria and Libya — in some battlefield situations is the most alarming and enraging evidence of the Dr. Strangelove mentality loose in the Bush dysadministration.

The secret report, which was provided to Congress on Jan. 8, says the Pentagon needs to be prepared to use nuclear weapons against China, Russia, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya and Syria. It says the weapons could be used in three types of situations: against targets able to withstand nonnuclear attack; in retaliation for attack with nuclear, biological or chemical weapons; or “in the event of surprising military developments.” LA Times

Even more than the national missile defense plan against which I’ve been railing since Bush forces took the White House, this indicates that there are no longer any inhibitions against first use of nuclear weapons and ‘thinking the unthinkable’ — crossing the line from maintaining a nuclear arsenal only as a deterrent, paradoxically for the sole purpose of assuring it would never be used, to actually considering the use of nuclear weapons acceptable in some, any, circumstances. What is important is that the American people understand the significance of this fundamental shift and make an informed decision about whether they want to continue to be governed by a cabal of nuclear blackmailers. Organized ways of disseminating the outrage and alarm of people who share my concern are desperately necessary. I have wondered if the weblogging community could be an instrumental part of such a hue and cry.

A March 2002 Wired article last month (which won’t be available online until March 12th) had both comforted and worried me on the nuclear warfighting score already. The article began by noting that the technical knowledge about designing, building and maintaining working nuclear weapons was disappearing as a generation of weapons scientists and engineers retired. Much of their knowledge has never been written down but only passed by word of mouth; and no actual weapons tests (only computer simulations) have been run since the Nuclear Test Ban treaty. But, sadly, a new set of training programs at Lawrence Livermore, Sandia and Dugway to preserve and expand on the knowledge is graduating its first class, mentored by some of the earlier generation before they depart. These Young Republican physicists seem to have a particular interest in designing — and finding a way to test again — usable tactical and low-yield battlefield nuclear weapons. In tandem with this is an attempt to build a computerized database linking all the scattered secrets relating to nuclear weapons development. Now of course I don’t advocate anything illegal here, but it would seem to me that it would be difficult to blame some macho hacker who thought that disrupting this database would be a particularly difficult and righteous challenge…

Getting serious online: A new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project concludes that, ” As Americans gain experience, they use the web more at work, write emails with more significant content, perform more online transactions, and pursue more serious activities.”

Social Network Explorer version of FmH; try it out.

In my common book, I include without attribution the sort-of-bumper-sticker-and-teeshirt-aphorism “Dance like no one’s watching, and love like it’s never gonna hurt.” A friend of mine checking out my site noticed, and wrote to tell me it’s from a 1988 lyric from singer-songwriter Guy Clark. Since my reaction was that Clark had probably grabbed it from somewhere else, I embarked on a Google search to see if I could get a bead on its provenance . I haven’t pursued it too far, though; it turns out that there are about 558,000 indexed hits on the phrase “Dance like no one’s watching…” in Google! What is perhaps most amazing is that most of them seem to be to found embedded in this saccharin meditation which is posted over and over again, unattributed (warning: often accompanied by a Windham-Hill-like soundtrack). And they say the real danger is that the Internet is degenerating into a commercial vehicle! [thanks, Rich]

Diary of a hospital application reader: “Medical students endure four years of intense schooling, during which the limitless mysteries of the human body appear as either A, B, C or D. After years of measuring one’s progress with multiple choice exams, how is a person to approach the alien task of self-expression?” Salon

IE and Outlook run malicious commands without scripting: “An attacker can run arbitrary commands on Windows machines with a simple bit of HTML, an Israeli security researcher has demonstrated. The exploit will work with IE, Outlook and OutlooK Express even if active scripting and ActiveX are disabled in the browser security settings.

The problem here is data binding, an old ‘feature’ going back to IE4 in which a data source object (DSO) is bound to HTML.” The Register US

Social Network Explorer version of FmH; try it out.

Bush’s endless war:

“Inexperienced in foreign affairs and intoxicated by domestic polls, George W. Bush may have misread the initial U.S. military success in Afghanistan as a blueprint for intervening in guerrilla wars all over the globe. New international polls have found he is fast alienating Muslims and other populations whose support is vital if terrorism is to be curbed.

Bush appears not to understand that a key to any successful counterinsurgency operation is to mix reasonable security measures with winning hearts and minds. Instead, Bush is charting a course of tit-for-tat violence that risks turning the world into a giant version of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

” The Consortium

From Penthouse Pets to Kelly’s Thumbnails: The author, a former attorney for Penthouse who had zealously pursued reposters of his magazine’s nudes elsewhere on the web, writes:

(In a) recent landmark case, Kelly v. Arriba Soft, …(t)he U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in February 2002 held that posting thumbnails of another’s aesthetic photos is a fair use when done for information-gathering or indexing purposes.

Kelly is a professional photographer known for his shots of the American West. Arriba (now Ditto.com) is a search engine that locates and indexes images and presents them in thumbnail form, as opposed to the traditional text listings one normally gets from an Internet search engine.

To highlight how delicate fair-use analysis can be, the court also held that where a thumbnail of Kelly’s photos could be opened into a larger, higher-resolution image, the copying was not excused as fair use. The larger image constitutes copyright infringement.

The gist of the court’s decision is that thumbnails, for indexing and information-gathering purposes, are of such low resolution that they cannot be used for the same aesthetic appreciation as the original and thus do not expropriate the creative energy of the original author of the image. In fact they may do that person a favor by pointing people with interest in her/his direction.

The decision has caught flak from both those who feel that even thumbnails infringe on the rights of the original image poster, and that one should always use a text pointer (“a href=”) to an image instead of an “img src=” tag; and those who feel that ‘inline posting’ of even fullsize images is permissible — that anything posted on the web is in the public domain, that ‘information wants to be free’, etc.

Apart from the general issue of limitations to access to information and the thorny notion of ‘fair use’, this issue is of particular concern to webloggers, whose practices vary between inline posting of images from elsewhere; through posting of smaller teaser renditions which function similarly, IMHO, to the ‘indexing or information-gathering’ function of the court case; to those who never leech an image from elsewhere. I myself do use “img src” tags to place small online images with some of my weblog entries, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. Often these capture images from news sources or magazines which aren’t going to bother with the copyright infringement aspects of my use.

My practice has only been objected to once in the two-plus years of FmH’s operation. When I used Hokusai’s “Wave” here to point to a gallery of Hokusai block prints someone had lovingly put up at his site, the author actually changed the name of the image on his site to stop my link from working. When I noticed that my link was broken, I first assumed I had just miscoded it and edited my link to point to the image again. He fired off an angry message to me demanding I remove the link and berating me for not having understood his intent in changing the name of the image on his site to prevent my link from working. In addition to his opinionated and unenforceable assertion that all inline linking is illegal, he made several claims to me that illustrate that the issue is broader than that of the treatment it got in Kelly v. Arriba Soft, and which troubled me and might trouble other webloggers who have used others’ images in the way I have.

Of course, Hokusai’s image per se was not this web author’s creative output, and he does not own the rights to the image, as Kelly does. But does the court’s distinction between “information-gathering” and aesthetic enjoyment vanish when the creative energies of a web author have been used in gathering, arranging and contextualizing images on a unique site? Did the court have a broad enough notion of aesthetic appreciation or aesthetic use of an image in its decision? This is how this guy asserted I was leeching off him, and it’s a troubling assertion to me. In point of fact — stating the obvious — weblogs are usually somewhere east of being mere catalogues of neat things found on the web and somewhere west of independent aesthetic creations in their own right. How far away from each of those poles a weblog — either the Platonic ideal, or any individual examplar — is, is a time-honored subject of debate in the relatively brief history of this medium of expression… although more energy, in fact, seems to have been expended in deciding how much weblogging resembles journalism (especially since Sept. 11th) — which, IMHO, as a medium it does not, except in the pretensions of some of its authors — than the equally important question of how creative a medium it is.

I responded to him that I thought I was doing him a favor, noting my appreciation of his site, sending him viewers, etc., but I’m not so sure I wasn’t appropriating his creative energies for my own aesthetic purposes, nor whether it would be wrong if I were. Where do you draw the line? Sampling in hip hop has been found to be fair use in repeated court challenges Certain images enter the lexicon as iconic and get used as signifiers in others’ works of collage or bricolage. At the other extreme, there’s frank plagiarism…

In asking me to remove the link, the web author was also objecting to my exploitation of his bandwidth to save data space on my web server. Of course, my page gets only around 500 or 600 hits a day, around 4,000 for the week that the link to his image would be up on the weblog’s main page and probably another few dozen a year thereafter when people view the archived page. But, again, where should the line be drawn? If my site were ten times as popular, would my appropriation of bandwidth from him matter? A hundred times as popular? Does the fact that he operates a small independent web page as opposed to a giant infomedia site make a difference?

Images of some form or another are, I’m confident, not likely to stop appearing on FmH; my site if anything lacks visual appeal and could use more. The web is, and my own sensibilities are, sufficiently anarchic that I’m not at all concerned with whether I violate some legalistic definition-of-the-moment of ‘fair use.’ Much more, my deliberation is about how to satisfy myself that I’m being ethical and reasonable to others in the web community. I don’t have any clearcut answers about how to do that, although since the Hokusai brouhaha I’ve certainly been more actively involved in thinking about it.

Smile, You’re on Bootleg Camera: “After last week’s story about a teenager who used his iPod to copy software from a demonstration computer at CompUSA, it has emerged that there are myriad clever ways to steal software from computer stores.

Wired News readers submitted dozens of tawdry tales involving built-in CD burners, digital cameras and even the Internet, which was used to send software from inside an Apple store.” Wired

Antibiotics Found to Have Helped Limit Anthrax Infections: “The widespread use of antibiotics in response to the October bioterrorist attacks spared at least nine people from being infected with inhalation anthrax, the deadliest form of the disease, according to a study released today.” New York Times

Beige Cosmos Produces Red Faces New York Times

The Anatomically Correct Oscar:

‘Two women’s groups, the Guerilla Girls and Alice Locas, have mounted a giant billboard in the heart of Hollywood depicting the “anatomically correct oscar” in the ungainly shape of a pudgy, middle-aged man.

“We decided it was time for a little realism in Hollywood,” they said in an statement yesterday.

“So we redesigned the old boy so he more closely resembles the white males who take him home each year.” ‘ Sydney Morning Herald

“John Rockwell, editor of The New York Times’ Sunday Arts & Leisure section for the past four years, steps down from the influential post today. He will move into the newly created position of senior cultural correspondent, writing cultural news stories and criticism.

Since it became public last December, the impending shift has caused widespread concern in the arts community, particularly because of the Times ‘ stated wish to further emphasize pop culture in the Arts & Leisure section. Under Rockwell’s guidance, it has developed into perhaps the country’s most prominent source of performing arts commentary, with coverage of everything from movies to music, from the mainstream to the fringe.” Andante

NPR Cultural Programming Put to Triage:

‘National Public Radio has begun an extensive review of its musical programming, and is considering overhauling or eliminating some of its venerable jazz and classical offerings.

A strategy paper written by NPR’s top programming executive says some of the network’s live performance and recorded music shows “may disappear,” although officials stress that nothing is final.’ Washington Post

The curse of coffee-table cinema

Movies are all about illusion, and the greatest illusion of them all is the illusion of quality. This is Miramax’s stock-in-trade. It takes stories that seem a bit classy – Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Shakespeare in Love, Chocolat – and turns them into cultureless mush, affected little movies which are grand in their own way, and which win Oscars, but which are actually meritless escapades fine-tuned to dupe the public.

Miramax has given the world a host of cliches about European culture – naughty French priests, macho Greeks, hoity-toity Englishmen, zany Italians – and has reduced human complexity to a bunch of hopeless stereotypes bursting with sentiment. Yuck. I hate Miramax. It is the cinematic equivalent of coffee-table books and slim cuisine: full of big type and hidden sugars, but popular with those who want a taste of culture with a minimum of effort. Telegraph UK

The Last Days of Bamian’s Buddhas: “It took decades to build the magnificent stone Buddhas of Bamian. It took the Taliban nearly a month to obliterate them.

The destruction required an extraordinary effort, so complex that foreign explosives experts had to be brought in and local residents were forced to dangle on ropes over a cliff face to chip out holes for explosives. According to witnesses and participants, the Taliban struggled with ropes and pulleys, rockets, iron rods, jackhammers, artillery and tanks before a series of massive explosions finally toppled the statues.” LA Times

Bush Zigzags After Choice Loses in California Primary Making it much more likely that the governorship of the state, with one of eight American voters, will remain Democratic, this not only compromises Bush’s chances to take the state in 2004, but damages him for having “picked the wrong candidate.” Grey Davis, in a sense, engineered it:

In a highly unusual move, Mr. Davis essentially picked his own opponent by spending as much as $10 million on television commercials — about as much as Mr. Simon and Mr. Riordan combined spent — that depicted Mr. Riordan as a flake who shifted his positions on abortion and the death penalty. Some strategists said it was as if Mr. Davis won both primaries, his own, with token opposition, and the Republican contest.

Although the advertising barrage deeply wounded Mr. Riordan, he did not help himself by being impetuous on the stump and by focusing just on Mr. Davis and neglecting conservatives who are crucial to winning Republican primaries here. NY Times.

Michael Moore’s Rockstar Moment: The kerfluffle over HarperCollins’ threat not to publish Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men after the “political climate change” caused by 9-11 has given legs to the book it otherwise might not have had, making HarperCollins a bundle in the process. Moore, perhaps guilty about being in bed with Rupert Murdoch in the first place, isn’t going to go easy on his publisher, whom he accuses of lackluster promotion of the book. AlterNet

Fortune Telling: Democratic Presidential primary candidates will be the major losers in campaign finance reform “soft money” restrictions; the winner will exit the primary campaign, expected to be hotly contested, underfunded and set to take a beating from Dubya, who is not expected to have any serious challengers in the primaries to drain his coffers. The New Republic

Archaeologists believe they have uncovered the origins of monotheism at the ruins of a 3,600-year-old temple in a remote corner of Jordan. The Daily Star

Gifted few make order out of chaos: Chaotic patterns are nonrandom but disordered, yet some people appear to have a gift for predicting the next elements in a chaotic series, a new study by an Australian psychologist demonstrates. No one has any idea how they do it… [Did William Gibson write this story? –FmH] New Scientist

“Maybe the only lesson that is applicable is: whenever you use local forces, they have local agendas…” How Osama bin Laden got away: “In retrospect, it becomes clear that the battle’s underlying story is of how scant intelligence, poorly chosen allies, and dubious military tactics fumbled a golden opportunity to capture bin Laden as well as many senior Al Qaeda commanders.” CS Monitor

“Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the software giant would have to withdraw the Windows operating system from the market if a federal court approves sanctions being sought by nine of the states in the antitrust case, according to depositions released Monday.” ZDNet News

From Lloyd Grove’s Reliable Source column in the Washington Post yesterday: ‘Here’s a vignette we’re dying to see on the ABC broadcast of Sunday’s Ford’s Theatre Presidential Gala: When Stevie Wonder sat down at the keyboard center stage, President Bush in the front row got very excited. He smiled and started waving at Wonder, who understandably did not respond. After a moment Bush realized his mistake and slowly dropped the errant hand back to his lap. “I know I shouldn’t have,” a witness told us yesterday, “but I started laughing.” ‘ [thanks again, Adam!]

Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center by Michael Downing

reviewed by Frederick C. Crews in the New York Review of Books. An essay on the downfall of Richard Baker-Roshi, which was a personal disillusionment for me as well as an entire community.

‘Every school of Buddhism aims at the same characterological goals: self-insight, serene detachment from impermanent objects of desire, apprehension of the underlying unity of all things, compassion toward suffering, reaching out to the needy, and sangha, or a loving community of the faithful. In this light Richard Baker presented a disturbingly anomalous model for his flock. He maintained three residences, spent large sums from the general coffers on remodeling, surrounded himself with unpaid student clerks and servants, collected exquisite and expensive works of religious art, traveled widely, and kept company with millionaires and celebrities whose interest in Buddhism was casual at best. His abbacy, Gary Snyder told Downing in disgust, had turned into “an imperial presidency…. He had become the Dick Nixon of Zen.” ‘ [thanks, David]

EU hits back against US steel duties BBC

Annals of Depravity:

Bizarre details of man’s death revealed: “Hit-and-run victim lived for two days while trapped in windshield” Dallas-Ft Worth Star Telegram

Bush’s Bunker Presidency: Galvanized by the news of the “shadow government,” the phrase “bunker mentality” is, appropriately on everybody’s lips with regard to the Bush dysadministration. Reassess the Shrub’s performance since 9-11 in this light and we see, if we haven’t already, that the impression of a confident resolved leader collapses beneath a haze of ‘spin’ by his handlers from his father’s era. James Carroll comments:

George W. Bush’s frantic, ad hoc ”war against terrorism” can seem to be yet another manifestation of presidential unsteadiness. Indeed, an air of low-grade panic has been a mark of Bush’s responses since the very day the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked.

Since then the president’s careless rhetoric and bluster have appalled allies, mobilized new enemies, and turned the US State Department into a damage control center. The vice president’s status as the man in hiding has become a national joke. The Defense Department initiated, then dropped, a Soviet-style office of strategic disinformation. Boston Globe via Common Dreams

As an aside, can we really be confident with the announcement that the disinformation office has been closed? It is more likely that is disinfo…

Sure, one would expect such sentiment from the Boston Globe, but Bush Doctrine: war for the appearance of purpose, an editorial from the Daytona Beach News-Journal (“no hotbed of radicalism, as far as I know”, says Adam in sending the link), suggests that a broader range of people are starting to notice that the emperor has no clothes, despite the ‘popularity ratings.’ Noting with concern that the complimentary profiles of Dubya can’t exactly get a bead on which powerful past president he is supposed to be like —

“to be so often compared to so many presidents should signal alarm, not self-confidence. It speaks of a void at the center of power that must be made up.”

it concludes that, with such a disconnect between blurred vision and reality, coherent doctine is shelved in favor of

“this administration’s best trick: war. War, especially war against a ragged but resilient enemy, at least projects the appearance of purpose while obscuring failures of leadership.”

As Adam asked, how much cognitive dissonance can the nation bear? [thanks, Adam…]

But, of course, in the eyes of some of our friends, the editorial staff at the Daytona Beach News-Journal are aiding and abetting the enemy. spinsanity

Staff cry poetic injustice as singing Ashcroft introduces patriot games. Oh, man, you can even see and hear one of his performances on the web! Thank you, thank you, George W., for an appointment rife with such entertainment potential.

Cognitive Functioning of Long-term Heavy Cannabis Users Seeking Treatment: “These results confirm that long-term heavy cannabis users show impairments in memory and attention that endure beyond the period of intoxication and worsen with increasing years of regular cannabis use.” Journal of the American Medical Association

Hate Watch: Rallying against hate on the bench:

Clergy representing scores of Alabama and Southern houses of worship joined local and national gay rights advocates on the front steps of Alabama’s Supreme Court yesterday, calling for the removal of Chief Justice Roy Moore for “hateful and homophobic remarks” made in a recent judicial opinion…

Moore’s incindiary remarks came in his concurring opinion in a child custody case between a lesbian mother and heterosexual father. The unanimous opinion of the court, which allowed the father to keep custody of his two children, made no mention of the mother’s sexuality. Justice Moore, however, attached a long concurrence saying that homosexuality is “an inherent evil against which children must be protected.” tolerance.org

Park Rangers With Respirators: “Unless President Bush bestirs himself, the controversy over snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park is likely to become for Interior Secretary Gale Norton what arsenic was for Christie Whitman: a thoroughly misguided and wholly unnecessary policy initiative that favors a small group of people Mr. Bush has in his camp anyway while annoying a far larger constituency he can ill afford to lose.” NY Times editorial

Thomas Friedman: The Core of Muslim Rage: “Why is it that when Hindus kill Muslims it elicits an emotionally muted headline in the Arab media, but when Israel kills a dozen Muslims it inflames the entire Muslim world?” NY Times

The Psychology of Submission: “Today, the goal of nation-building is a courageous submission to the market. The international community has a duty to help make it happen. There are four steps, time-tested by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.” Adbusters

David Corn: When 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Go Bad: ” Theories that the U.S. government aided or engineered the 9/11 attacks aren’t just horribly misguided — they distract from the nefarious deeds our leaders actually do perpetrate.” AlterNet

The Imperialism of Everyday Life: John Zerzan, a philosopher and writer in Eugene, Oregon and author of the forthcoming Running on Empty:

“The less people really live – or perhaps more correctly, the more they become aware that they haven’t really lived – the more abrupt and frightening death becomes for them, and the more it appears as a terrible accident.” Theodor Adorno’s observation of decades ago seems even more pertinent today. Exploding jetliners and anthrax can terrify; meanwhile a much deeper crisis triggers a far more pervasive and fundamental fear. Adbusters

Very tentative, but could we be edging toward a breakthrough in the Middle East peace process? The Saudi land-for-peace proposal seems to be gaining momentum, from a surprising corner: Syria backs Saudi Middle East plan:

‘The Middle East peace proposal put forward by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdullah gained significant momentum yesterday when Syria gave its backing to the land-for-peace plan, according to the official Saudi press agency.

It quoted a Saudi official as saying that talks yesterday between Crown Prince Abdullah and the Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad, had been “positive and successful”. However, no Syrian statement on the talks was immediately available.’ Guardian UK

Faking It: Sex, Lies, and Women’s Magazines: Liza Featherstone from Columbia Journalism Review: “How can women’s magazines run scrupulously reported and fact-checked articles on such subjects as breast cancer and women in Afghanistan, but tell complete lies in articles about sex?” AlterNet

A Belgian court on Wednesday delayed a ruling on a war crimes investigation against Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for his role in the 1982 massacre at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Boston Globe Recall speculation that the January carbomb assassination of Lebanese militia leader Elie Hobeika related to the possibility of his testimony at the looming war crimes trial.

Blair Fires New Warning at Iraq, Gets Flak at Home:

“British Prime Minister Tony Blair issued a stark warning to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein on Wednesday that he could face the wrath of the West but quickly ran into fire from members of his own Labour Party…

But he faces stiff opposition, not just from European allies, but his own rank-and-file. A parliamentary debate on Wednesday was suspended after politicians traded bitter accusations over Iraq with a Foreign Office minister.”

Reuters

Intercepted Al Qaeda E-Mail Is Said to Hint at Regrouping: “Newly detected Internet traffic among Al Qaeda followers, including intercepted e-mail messages, indicates that elements of the terror network may be trying to regroup in remote sanctuaries in Pakistan near the Afghan border, government officials say.

United States officials said they had discovered the existence of new Web sites and Internet communications that appeared to be part of a concerted Al Qaeda effort to reconstitute the group and re-establish communications after the war in Afghanistan.” New York Times [name: “FMHreader”, password: “FMHreader”]

Ethical Philosophy Selector

These questions reflect the dilemmas that have captured the attention of history’s most significant ethical philosophers. Answer the questions as best you can. When you’re finished answering the questions, press “Select Philosophy” to generate your customized match of ethical philosophers/philosophies. The list orders the philosophers/philosophies according to their compatibility with your expressed opinions on ethics. Click on a philosopher/philosophy to see a summary and links.[via randomWalks]

The site is part of selectsmart.com, which claims to be “the Internet’s biggest collection of selectors. Decision-making based on your preferences.” The general methodology is that you answer qauestions about your preferences in an area; in some surveys, you also indicate what weight should be given to any particular preference you express. At the site, you can operate selectors for anything ranging from “gifts and collectibles” or “lawns and gardens” to “jobs and careers”, “personalities” or “belief systems”. They vary in incisiveness tremendously and, of course, in many cases if you already recognize your preferences you don’t need to be told what to select. But, I agree, the ethical philosophy selector is informative and possibly useful if you want a starting point to explore moral thought and clarify your own.

Rafe Colburn at rc3.org commented on March 2 on the Israeli incursions into the Palestinian refugee camps:

I try to restrain myself from commenting on Israel and Palestine. I really do. Really. But sometimes I cannot. The current Israeli incursions on Palestinian refugee camps are surreal, and I don’t think the media is describing them vividly enough…

And the most grotesque point here is that the even as the Israeli government rightfully condemns terrorism, the IDF is engaged in actions that inevitably result in the deaths of civilians and inevitably fail to accomplish any positive outcome as well. If they captured every militant who they believe is hiding in the refugee camps, would it put an end to the suicide bombings? Would it even reduce their frequency? I think we can all predict the long term effects of living in miserable conditions and being the subject of repeated military assaults by an occupying force…

One thing I find interesting in reading the conservative Israeli press is that they talk about what wretched hives of scum and villainy the refugee camps are, but fail to examine the conditions that lead to their current state. I have no doubt that many terrorists operate out of the camps, but perhaps an alternate solution would be to change things so that the camps are no longer needed.

A secular history if Islam: adapted from Tariq Ali’s forthcoming book, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity, a fascinating attempt to grapple with the intersecting trends, some dating from the time of Mohammed himself, that explain why Islam has never undergone a Reformation, why it was not touched by the Enlightenment, and why its clashes with the West, from the Crusades to Sept. 11th, have been of a fundamentalist variety.

“It was the discovery of black gold underneath the Arabian desert that provided the old religion with the means and wherewithal to revive its culture while Britain created new sultans and emirs to safeguard their newest and most precious commodity. Throughout the 20th century, the West, to safeguard its own economic interests, supported the most backward, despotic and reactionary survivals from the past, helping to defeat all forms of secularism. As we know, the story is unfinished.” London Review of Books

About the major new exhibit surveying Surrealism at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The link points to NPR’s feature on the exhibit (“the art movement defied rigid definitions, but curators keep trying…”). The Met’s own servers have been too busy for me to succeed in getting to their page on the exhibit. Maybe you’ll have better luck…

The stormtrooper tactics of the cult of scientology — both on and off the ‘net — have long been of broad concern. Readers of FmH know I’ve frequently linked to accounts of their antics. I’ve usually written the name of the cult as “s*c*i*e*n*t*o*l*o*g*y” so they wouldn’t find my comments as easily in trolling the net for critical comments; they’ve been known to hack their opponents’ sites in the name of enlightenment and freedom… Thanks to wood s lot, I was pointed to this site which details their meticulous efforts to manipulate the ranking of their own sites in Google and other search engines to prevent readers from finding sites critical of scientology. It might be useful, as Mark Woods and I have done, to use the scientology link to point to such critical sites instead. If this were done enough, it might interfere significantly with their attempt to have only their own hits shown in searches on the term scientology.. Consider doing this too if you agree, please. [thanks, Mark]