Patents Prove Cell-Phone Dangers? The Baltimore attorney best-known for a high-profile suit against the cellphone industry claiming phone use was the cause of her client’s brain tumor says that the industry supports her claim by having filed for “dozens” of patents to create radiation-shielding technology. “Those patents aren’t snake oil. They’re from the defendants’ mouths themselves.”

Botswana leaves Bushmen in desert without water: “…The government cut off water supplies to the remaining Bushmen communities in its latest attempt to force them off their ancestral lands. Many of the 700 Bushmen still living in the reserve at the start of this month have now been forced to leave.

The Gana* and Gwi* have lived on their lands, which include the area covered by the reserve, for 20,000 years. Under international law, they own the land. But for 16 years the Botswana government have waged a campaign of harassment to force them off their lands and into ‘resettlement camps’ where they cannot continue their way of life, and where they are dependent on government handouts. Boredom, alcoholism and despair are rife in the camps, described by one Bushman as ‘a place of death.’ ” Survival International
(*The names Gana and Gwi contain sounds not conveyed by this spelling, and can be written as G//ana and G/wi. Survival omits the symbols ‘//’ and ‘/’ as they are not understood by most people internationally.)

Nicholas Kristof: A Life of Balances: “As I mourn Danny Pearl’s death, I hope — against expectation — that we journalists will be more cautious. And most of all, I honor all those foreign correspondents out there.” NY Times

‘Push off Sarah’ , says naked civil servant

The Register

Checkout the OS-free PCs at walmart.com

The arch-discounter is offering nine (own-brand?) Microtel PCs for sale online, with prices – sans monitor, as well as OS – ranging from a bargain basement $399 for 1GHz Duron and Celeron models, all the way up to $868.74 for a 2GHz P4 replete with 256MB of SDRAM.

The idea of the Windows-free promo is to attract tech- savvy custom at a time when consumer PC sales are flatter than a flat pancake. The idea is that buyers can install their own operating system – maybe open source, maybe a license from an dead PC (but make sure you have all the documentation, folks). The Register

Much captivating science news at the New Scientist site recently. A sampling:

• Kidnap the key to saving rare species: ”

  Temporarily kidnapping males with a sexual monopoly should give others a shot at reproduction, boosting genetic diversity”

• September 11 blood donations “wasted”: ”

  Less than one percent of the blood donated in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks was used to treat victims”

• Antimatter atoms captured for the first time: ”

  CERN researchers may have trapped thousands of the elusive particles – the few previous antiatoms were moving at the speed of light”

• UK computer theft takes sinister turn: ”

  Thieves might be selling brainpower from one of the UK’s largest academic super-computers to rogue states for weapons research”

• Eerie link between 17th century clocks explained: ”

  Christiaan Huygens’ pair of pendulum clocks always swung in opposite directions – now scientists know why”

• Japan plans tearoom for the ISS: ”

  The tearoom could be launched in 2004 – but the traditional ceremony does not lend itself easily to zero-g”

• Common virus linked to brain tumours: ”

  High concentrations of proteins produced by the virus are found in samples of malignant brain tumours”

• Anthrax screensaver finds promising new drugs: ”

  The project has hit paydirt in just four weeks – but not all participants are happy”

Abducting The Tragedy: Jimmy Breslin’s powerful, damning Newday column on Giuliani and his appropriation of the WTC tragedy. [thanks, Adam]

Dr Pepper under fire for ‘Godless’ Pledge: ‘The Dr Pepper soft drink firm is drawing criticism from religious groups for omitting the phrase “under God” in an abbreviated version of the Pledge of Allegiance on its “patriot can.”

The company began distribution of over 41 million of the promotional cans in a dozen states last November. A statement from Dr Pepper said that the special graphic presentation was designed “to show the world that we are a united nation of people who place a high value upon freedom.” The can features a portrait of the Statue of Liberty with the phrase “One Nation … Indivisible.” ‘ [via randomWalks] The Dr Pepper (the period after the ‘Dr’ was eliminated in the ’50’s, you know) website is here.

Reports: FBI Has Tape Proving Pearl Dead

“Several news outlets are reporting that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has a video which proves that kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl is dead… A statement issued by the Wall Street Journal said that they now believe, based on the reports from the U.S. State Department that Pearl is dead.” TheBostonChannel

We should not be shocked, however, that journalists doing their job are no longer sacrosanct; another of the rules of civilization that has fallen by the wayside over the past decade or so, it seems. My thoughts are with Daniel Pearl’s loved ones…

Point-‘n’-Shoot Sound Makes Waves: “New transmitters can aim sound waves so that only individuals in a

crowd can hear them. The U.S. military sees a weapon in the making.” Wired

Howard Kurtz, Media Notes: Pounding a PBS Poohbah

The latest bugaboo for those on the right is Bill Moyers. Yes, he’s liberal. Yes, he worked for LBJ. But there’s something about the combination of Moyers’s lofty style and his PBS perch that makes some conservatives’ skin crawl.

The Weekly Standard is trashing him in a cover story.

What makes this a spectator sport worth watching is that Moyers is punching back. Hard. Washington Post

Brain Study Casts Doubt on Theory of How Human Intelligence Evolved

“According to a popular view of human cognitive capabilities, much of what sets our species apart from the other primates can be attributed to a disproportionate enlargement of a part of the brain known as the frontal cortex that occurred at some point in human evolution. But the evidence traditionally used to support that argument, say Katerina Semendeferi of the University of California at San Diego and her colleagues, comes from small studies that in many cases did not include data from apes, our closest relatives. Furthermore, the studies varied in the way they defined the region of the cortex.” Scientific American

UNESCO: 3,000 Languages Could Die Off. Just as the reduction in biological diversity from species extinction is a threat to the ecosystem, we should be concerned about the loss of linguistic diversity. Especially if language constrains and shapes the ways we think or can think, á la the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, is it a stretch to worry about the potential effect on of language loss on freedom of thought? I believe in the ‘weak form’ of linguistic determinism; while it is probably true that linguistic constraints don’t make us unable to conceive of certain things in certain languages, they certainly can make it easier or harder. Also consider that linguistic assimilation and oppression do not occur in a vacuum, but usually in the company of other aspects of cultural imperialism.

“The Philosophical Health Check is designed to identify tensions or contradictions (a Tension Quotient) between various beliefs that you have. The PHC does not aim to identify which of your beliefs are true or false, but where the set of beliefs you hold may not be compatible with each other.” Unlike the spate of meaningless but entertaining ‘tests’ on the ‘net (“What carbonated beverage am I?” :What rock star?” etc…), I was amazed at how readily this gets at meaningful potential inconsistencies in your worldview. It may make for painful self-examination. The Philosophers’ Magazine

Annals of Depravity (cont’d.): Man buried alive next to murdered son: “A man whose throat was slashed and who was buried in a shallow grave next to his slain 12-year-old son survived and later led police to two men charged with the boy’s murder.” SF Chronicle

The New York Times is doing a fullcourt press to influence Saudi chief of state Crown Prince Abdullah to formally announce his plan to spearhead normalization of Arab relations with Israel in exchange for a negotiated peace with the Palestinians, as Thomas Friedman described on Sunday (a blink to which I had here). Here’s an editorial and further op-ed analysis by Mideast analyst Henry Seigman. In the meantime, Israel and the Palestinians are closer to all-out war than they have ever been; Israel steps up ‘retaliatory’ attacks and the Palestinians are more explicitly targeting — successfully — Israeli troops in the occupied territories. Sharon pushes forward with plans for ‘buffer zones’ bordering Palestinian areas in Gaza and the West Bank to ‘achieve separation’ and ‘protect Israeli citizens.’ Reuters

William Safire: The Flipped-Over Rock: “Stop pretending Enron and Global Crossing are political scandals and start dealing with the accounting and financial derivatives scandals.” NY Times op-ed

A Grateful Artist Who Wants to Repay His Elephant Helpers —

For a decade Mya, Layang Layang and Dilberta have been the unheralded contributors to Chris Ofili’s rise to fame. The three Asian elephants, visited nearly every month by Mr. Ofili, the British-born painter, replenish the supply of dung that he uses in nearly all his paintings, including the one of a black Virgin Mary that enraged former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani when it appeared in the “Sensation” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999.

Now Mr. Ofili says the time is right to repay his friends. When the Armory Show 2002 opens in Manhattan on two Hudson River piers tomorrow, he will auction one of his latest paintings to benefit the Zoological Society of London, caretakers of the three elephants. NY Times

Pat Buchanan: “Whoever fed Bush those lines, or did not argue against his delivering them, disserved the president. For that speech has blown our coalition against terror to smithereens.” TownHall [thanks again, David!]

The Idler interviews Sam Vaknin on the relevance of pathological narcissism to the W-o-T®; interesting fellow:

former economic advisor to the President of Macedonia, and frequent contributor to The Idler on international affairs, is also the author of Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited, owner of the Narcissistic Abuse Study List, and webmaster of the Narcissistic Personality Disorder Topic in Suite101. He is an economic and political analyst for United Press International (UPI).

I had a scurrilous thought, while reading this, that his characterization of the terrorists sounds alarmingly like us webloggers:

The terrorist and serial killer regulate their sense of self esteem and self worth by feeding slavishly on the reactions to their heinous deeds. Their cosmic significance is daily enhanced by newspaper headlines, ever increasing bounties, admiring imitators, successful acts of blackmail, the strength and size of their opponents, and the devastation of human life and property.

Seriously, though, read the interview. The concept of pathological narcissism is an undercurrent through late-20th century civilization and its discontents.

An Estimate of the Type, Quantity, and Value of Munitions Dropped on Afghanistan, October 7 – December 10, 2001 Dack

Predicting America’s Next Attack Against Terrorism Dack

Going down: “Tuvalu, a nation of nine islands – specks in the South Pacific – is in danger of vanishing, a victim of global warming. As their homeland is battered by ferocious cyclones and slowly submerges under the encroaching sea, what will become of the islanders?” Guardian UK

Ashcroft Invokes Religion In U.S. War on Terrorism; I thought the Bush administration worshipped only at the altar of the War Machine these days, but evidently I’m wrong. The official state religion they’re setting up is multifaceted; as well as Might making Right, there’s apparently an Almighty behind our superiority too. Washington Post Tom Tomorrow, from whence this blink arises, comments, in part:

Think about this: the Attorney General of the United States of America has publicly declared that the freedom of our nation is not derived from the Constitution, the work of that group of Deists and freethinkers who gathered one sweltering Philadelphia summer to lay the cornerstone of a government based on the rule of law –but is, rather, a miraculous blessing bestowed upon us by some supernatural entity.

In a sane world, that statement alone would be grounds for impeachment.

Beyond Survival: Slavery is a matter of caste and race in Mauritania; activists say “twisted notions of Islamic scripture” have been used to justify blacks’ servitude to their Moorish masters for centuries. This Village Voice essayist interviews a Mauritanian refugee from enslavement, now in Brooklyn’s ‘Little Mauritania’, about his life there and the fight for those who remain behind. As you might expect, despite a 1996 US congressional resolution decrying the persistence of “chattel slavery, with an estimated tens of thousands of black Mauritanians considered property of their masters and performing unpaid labor, …despite its legal abolition in 1980”, the Shrub Administration has turned its back on advocacy on the issue because Mauritania’s repressive chief of state Maaouya Ould Sidi Ahmad Taya, who came to power in a coup d’etat in 1984, is an important W-o-T® ally. Taya has taken the world’s preoccupation with the terrorist attacks as an opportunity to ban the Mauritanian anti-slavery opposition party.

The Enron Voice Mail System, 2002 WitCity [thanks, Pam]

at your digital watch: it’s 2002 2002 2002 (20:02, 20/02/2002). A symmetrical moment like this hasn’t occurred for 1,001 years and will never repeat itself…

This is where Chuck tells you to go if you don’t like his opinions on Looka!, I just noticed…

MGM becomes the first of the big seven Hollywood studios to offer film distribution to consumers by download, through a concern called CinemaNow!.

AmazonScan.com — “a program that scans different products on Amazon.com and records their sales ranking over time.” In related Amazon news, Dean Kamen is auctioning off three limited-edition Segway Human Transporters there. Current bids are over $60,000; bidding closes on March 28th.

Not All Asian E-Mail Is Spam: “Anti-spam activists confirm that a growing number of beleaguered systems administrators are now blocking all e-mail originating from Asia from their systems, in an attempt to choke off a flood of spam from China, Taiwan and Korea, an action that has upset non-spamming Asian e-mailers.” Wired

Games Elevate Hate to Next Level:

“Hate groups are increasingly using racist and anti-Semitic computer games to recruit young people, the Anti-Defamation League charged in a report released Tuesday.

Ethnic Cleansing, Shoot the Blacks and Concentration Camp Rat Hunt were some of the titles studied by the group. The objective of these first-person shooters are predictably similar — to kill as many non-whites, Jews and everyone else they hate as possible.” Wired

Why blacks love Bill Clinton

In her now-famous defense of a scandal-plagued Bill Clinton, Nobel prizewinner Toni Morrison, went so far as to call him “our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime.” “Clinton,” Morrison wrote in the 1998 New Yorker essay, “displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.”

I remember reading Morrison’s essay and choking. Morrison’s estimation of Clinton’s blackness seemed shallow, offensive and beside the point. At the time, I wasn’t the only one unnerved, and I’m sure many people still have problems with calling Clinton “the first black president,” no matter how Morrison intended it. Yet, in retrospect, I realize that my sharp reaction had something to do with age: I was pretty young when Reagan and Bush were in office. Like most white people, I didn’t understand how Clinton related to the African-American community; I also had a limited memory of how other presidents treated blacks. Salon

Since I got a broadband connection (yes, I gave up 56K for Lent…), I can finally indulge productively in streaming media on the web. Here are two Oscar-nominated shorts I’ve enjoyed: Fifty Percent Grey (“In this gruesome black comedy about suicide, Sgt. Cray awakens alone in a desolate environment, with only a widescreen TV and a gun for entertainment.”) and Copy Shop (“Viennese director Virgil Widrich obsesses on the implications of replication in this … short composed of nearly 18,000 photocopied frames that Widrich animated and shot on 35 mm.”).

Spike sent this link my way a week ago and I’ve just slogged through my backlog enough to examine it and say thanks. In Put a Psychiatrist in His Corner, A GWU professor of psychiatry argues in the LA Times that Mike Tyson should be compelled to seek mandatory psychiatric care. “We don’t have to accept Tyson’s outrageous acts. For society’s sake, and for Tyson’s own sake, we must open our eyes to the perils of untreated mental disorders.

Instead of continuing to attack this sick man, we need to help him get well.”

Carol Kino: Ceci N’est Pas Surrealism – Even if you don’t know Surrealism, it knows you. “Since September, Surrealist exhibitions seem to be cropping up everywhere: in big surveys in London, New York, San Francisco, and soon, Paris, and in countless smaller gallery shows. Perhaps you feel that life in those and other cities has grown surreal enough already. But there’s a major difference between the little-s and big-S surrealisms: Our everyday use of the term shows how much we owe to the artistic movement of the same name, but it also glosses over its aims and accomplishments. If nothing else, the current explosion of historical Surrealism may help clarify the matter.

Even those who know something about Surrealism (the movement) often get it somewhat muddled…” Slate

Anne Applebaum: In Defense of Colin Powell – He wins friends and influences enemies. ‘…Powell’s ability to bring foreigners around to the American point of view is something this administration, which is carrying out nothing short of a revolution in foreign policy, needs badly—so why should Powell be thought of as a loser or an outsider? White-House-watchers always insist on seeing policy-making as a zero-sum game: If Condi Rice is up then Powell must be down; if Rumsfeld is in then Powell must be out. They should try, instead, to look at foreign-policy-making like a game of golf, in which you use the right iron for the right hole. Send Wolfowitz to scare Saddam. Send Condi to speak Russian to the Russians. Send Powell to build coalitions and keep the allies on board—and stop calling Powell a “fading global eminence.” ‘ Slate

Matt Welch pulls this ‘priceless exchange’ out of a Chicago Tribune interview with Ralph Nader:

Q. Would you have made an effective wartime president?

A. This war would never have happened had I been president, because for 30 years we have had an aviation safety group, and we have been urging the airlines to toughen cockpit doors and improve the strength of the locks, and they have been resisting for 30 years.

(What can be added to Welch’s reaction, “Good God, man, get ahold of yourself”?) If you’re curious about whether the impression this creates is distorted by being taken out of context, the entire interview is here.

Jomoh Temple: “Head Priest Ishiko of Daioh Temple feels that there is an unnatural balance existing between the reliance on material needs and the lack of concern for spiritual fulfillment. He believes that this imbalance is the reason why most people are not totally satisfied with their lives. Through this virtual temple, he hopes to draw attention to this imbalance and through it’s recognition help us to lead fuller, richer lives.”

Expert says anthrax suspect identified: ‘An advocate for the control of biological weapons who has been gathering information about last autumn’s anthrax attacks said yesterday the Federal Bureau of Investigation has a strong hunch about who mailed the deadly letters.

But the FBI might be “dragging its feet” in pressing charges because the suspect is a former government scientist familiar with “secret activities that the government would not like to see disclosed,” said Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Chemical and Biological Weapons Program.’ New Jersey Online [via David Farber’s IP mailing list]

ex-Monty Python Terry Jones: OK, George, make with the friendly bombs: “To prevent terrorism by dropping bombs on Iraq is such an obvious idea that I can’t think why no one has thought of it before. It’s so simple. If only the UK had done something similar in Northern Ireland, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in today. Guardian-Observer

Another reason to take your vitamin C.

Tabloids: Elvis is Dead: “Bad news: The National Enquirer has become a little less insane.” The American Prospect

Right Wing Myths Exposed: The Red-Blue Myth, The Liberal Media Myth, the Myth of the Homosexual Lifesyle (a work in progress) [thanks to David]. [The myth of Andrew Sullivan? –FmH]

Pentagon Readies Efforts to Sway Sentiment Abroad: “The Pentagon is developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations as part of a new effort to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries, military officials said.” NY Times If you think they were bristling already, what will our (former?) allies in Western Europe and the Middle East think of this??

Hijacking the Brain Circuits With a Nickel Slot Machine — in search of the neural basis of the unconscious:

“…(T)he brain systems that detect and evaluate such rewards generally operate outside of conscious awareness. In navigating the world and deciding what is rewarding, humans are closer to zombies than sentient beings much of the time.

The findings, which are gaining wide adherence among neuroscientists, challenge the notion that people always make conscious choices about what they want and how to obtain it. In fact, the neuroscientists say, much of what happens in the brain goes on outside of conscious awareness.” NY Times

Want a Fight? Pick One Book for All New Yorkers:

‘An ad hoc group of librarians, bookstore owners, educators and others has quietly hatched a plan to turn New York City into a giant reading group. Over the last few weeks, the committee has convened to select a single book that the organizers hope to see assigned in city schools, discussed in groups at public libraries, promoted in local bookstores and read by millions of New Yorkers.

Plenty of other cities have read books together. Last year, Chicago drew national attention with a campaign to read To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, and since then, dozens of towns have followed suit, usually by selecting novels that impart a civic-minded message of cultural tolerance and racial harmony.

But just what book to recommend to a city of eight million souls where more than 100 languages are spoken has already turned out to be a ticklish question, one about politics as much as about literature. And some say the difficulty of picking a single book suggests that New Yorkers may not be receptive to literary direction.’ NY Times

In search of extra dimensions: Hang on — a new reality may be around the corner.

‘ “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a persistent one,” according to the late Albert Einstein. But, “if everything is an illusion and nothing exists,” humorist Woody Allen has observed, “I definitely overpaid for my carpet.”

Hang onto your carpet receipts:

Our understanding of reality – that is, a world where events happen over time within a three-dimensional space – may be turned on its head by the year 2005, scientist Maria Spiropulu said today during the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting.

“The way we think about things is about to change completely,” said Spiropulu. “This is truly a revolution in the way we understand our world.”

And: more coverage from the annual meeting of the AAAS is here. EurekAlerts

“I can’t quite imagine what he thinks he’s up to. Although he wasn’t ever brilliant, he used to be an average poet and now he’s turning out twaddle.” — AN Wilson. Is Motion any good? “The poet laureate has written lyrics for a hymn to mark the Queen’s golden jubilee. But do they stand up to critical scrutiny? And what about his recent poems on Princess Margaret and the census? We ask poets, critics, a royal expert and a random 80s pop star for their verdicts.” Guardian UK

Big Brother is watching you read. “Increasingly, the government is demanding that bookstores reveal what books their customers have purchased.” Salon

The ideas factory: “You might not know much about the films, but you probably recognise the titles – and storylines – of a slate of forthcoming releases: Charlotte Gray, About a Boy, Killing Me Softly. Why the sudden rash of British bestsellers hitting our screens?” Guardian UK

One man’s explanation of the report of the Times’ scrubbing the 9-9 bin Laden warning article. [pointer from Rebecca Blood]

The Secret Life of Numbers: “The authors conducted an exhaustive empirical study, with the aid of custom software, public search engines and powerful statistical techniques, in order to determine the relative popularity of every integer between 0 and one million. The resulting information exhibits an extraordinary variety of patterns which reflect and refract our culture, our minds, and our bodies.”

Blah, Blah, Blah and Blog — blogging gets mentioned on NPR, and Wired covers it. I’m warning you, I’m going to get nervous if blogging goes much further mainstream…

Public Financing Is Key…: “If you want a government by the people and for the people, then the people have to pay the bill. Otherwise, the favors will flow right back to those who’ve actually picked up the tab.”Newsday Most cynicism about campaign finance reform cites the loopholes that will remain to be exploited, the likely cash flow from state party coffers to the national organizations, or the replacement of ‘soft money’ by ‘hard money’ at double the limit. Public financing will solve some or all of this but I think it misses the boat. We have to focus not on where the money comes from but where it goes. A political system in which campaign finance goes to hire consultants to tell the candidates how to read the public’s desires and then buy TV time to present themselves as that flavor-of-the-day is what’s bankrupt, however the money is raised. Oh, and an endlesly gullible electorate that eats it up uncritically no matter how much evidence there is that they’re being fooled again and again by the unreality industry.

To Protect Top Bureaucrats, NY Times SCRUBS Its OWN Osama Bin Laden Warning That It Published on 9-9-01

On 9-9-01 – just two days before Osama Bin Laden’s attack on the US – the NY Times published a lengthy and chilling article about Osama Bin Laden by reporter John Burns. Some time after 9-11, the Times SCRUBBED this article, replacing it with a completely different article that Burns wrote on 9-12. Both articles discuss a 2-hour videotape by Bin Laden that intelligence agencies first saw in June 2001, but ignored until September. Why was the 9-9 article scrubbed? Read it yourself – we’ve UNSCRUBBED it. We believe it demonstrates the GROSS NEGLIGENCE of the CIA, NSA, Justice Department, and the White House in the events leading to 9-11. These agencies had MANY warnings, but the people at the top IGNORED them, at a cost of over 3,000 lives and billions of dollars. ALL OF THESE SCREWUPS REMAIN IN THEIR JOBS!!! We demand a Blue Ribbon Commission on 9-11 and a thorough housecleaning – not a Congressional Coverup! democrats.com

State Department rejects portions of MTV profile of Powell “that depicts him as the sole dove and moderate in an administration of unreasonable hard-line unilateralist hawks”, reports Yahoo! . But was it that the Administration wants to persuade the public that there are other moderates?? Noooo, it appears rather that they wanted to make it clear that Powell is in line with the rest of the unreasonable hawks instead…

W-o-T® Me Worry? According to a report in a Lebanese daily as related by Ha’aretz, CIA director George Tenet reportedly asked President Mubarak not to oppose a US attack on Iraq, reportedly stating during his visit to Egypt Saturday that the US has already decided to take this next step. The scenario reportedly involves the US demanding that Iraq allow the return of arms inspectors, fully expecting Iraq to defy the ultimatum and open itself to a massive attack The Guardian ‘But former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter writes that Iraq has already called Bush’s bluff, by showing a willingness to discuss the issue of inspectors, and raising the question as to whether a U.S. call for them “has been merely rhetorical”.’ CommonDreams [via Cursor, as are many of these links] The New York Times yesterday had Colin Powell rejecting Iraqi assurances on arms inspectors as, well, rhetoric.

“…let’s find Osama bin Laden, together. If alive, he is certainly not in Baghdad,” Michael Naumann, former German Minister of Culture and editor of Die Zeit, writes in a NY Times op-ed piece. Why Europe Is Wary of War in Iraq:

“…While American patriotism proudly celebrates its armed forces’ power and victories, Europe’s diverse loyalties and identities are formed by a war-weary pessimism thoroughly grounded in our history: Wars can be just, certainly those fought in self- defense can; but they can be bloody useless, too. This pessimism may shade, potentially, into appeasement, yet its roots are real. They explain European reluctance to intervene quickly in Bosnia — a deplorable reluctance, in hindsight — and the present refusal to join arms with the United States against Iraq.

This time, however, the powder keg is not the Balkans but the highly armed, explosive Mideast. Too many guns are drawn, too many fingers are on the triggers, and some of them could be on nuclear bombs. This should be the hour of forceful diplomacy, not to be mistaken for appeasement.

The distance between Europe’s leaders and the Bush administration continues to grow. The existence of a new threat — global terrorism — is undisputed. But Washington’s unilateralism, from here, looks like simply a form of America’s longstanding isolationism, which is to say that the distance is created by America, not by Europe. Perhaps North Atlantic Treaty Organization members should not whine so much about being left out of Pentagon planning sessions. But the United States might benefit from recalling the late Senator J. William Fulbright’s diatribes against “arrogance of power.” Europe’s liberal and conservative pundits already are.”

However, what this argument does not explain is why the US after Vietnam should not be as war-weary and -wary as Europe. A European FmH reader wrote to suggest that this is because wars have been fought on European but not US soil; could that really be the difference, when most of the living European adult population is as remote in time from the last pan-European ground war in 1945 as the US is in space? I’m convinced one has to turn instead to temperamental differences. The cowboy strain in American psychology — both rugged individualism and cocky adventurism — born of having had a frontier to push against for most of our history, has been an important difference, especially when the yahoos off the ranch are the same people managing the interests of Big Oil.

Indeed, European warnings about the rift in the Atlantic alliance that would be caused by an attack on Iraq don’t seem to give Dubya pause. Neither does criticism of an Afghan-style intervention by even a key Iraqi resistance leader, reports the Christian Science Monitor. In fact, ‘President Bush and his top aides now seem to welcome, even to egg on, the sharp differences prompted by Mr. Bush’s determination to expand his battle against what he calls “evil” regimes’, suggested yesterday’s New York Times. Bush relishes his dark, struggle-against-evil worldview, says this Washington Post foreign policy analyst who found that Bush had picked the brains of grim foreign correspondent Robert Kaplan months before 9-11.

‘Many Republicans criticized the Clinton administration for entering peacekeeping operations without having an exit strategy. It’s ironic, perhaps, that this administration seems to be waging war without any exit strategy other than moving to the next battlefield. The war could become, as in the Orwell novel 1984, a permanent state of being. “War is Peace,” the Ministry of Truth slogan read in the novel.

Or, as Kaplan has argued, war becomes a condition no longer distinctly separate from peace. Bush has embraced that view, at least for now. As he declared in his State of Union address, “I will not wait on events, while dangers gather.” He has seen a grim landscape, to paraphrase Kaplan, and seems determined to confront it.’

The administration jackasses are so enamored of their grandiose anti-axis-of-evil mission that a set of new campaign ads will suggest, in essence, that supporting Democrats aids the terrorists. ABC via MetaFilter

Meanwhile, David Corn asks in The Nation, US mis-strikes: mistakes or war crimes?

That’s a provocative question, the sort of query that few, if any, reporters at the Pentagon briefing room are going to toss at Rummy. Nevertheless, it’s a question that may bear consideration as new details emerge about the latest US mis-strikes.

Over the past week, two US military operations originally touted as successes have turned into PR nightmares for the Defense Department and the CIA First, the Pentagon had to acknowledge (sort of) that a January 24 commando raid that attacked two small compounds in Hazar Qadam–resulting in the deaths of 21 or so Afghans and the capture of 27 others–had been a mistake. Those people killed or grabbed were not, as the Pentagon first announced, Taliban or Al Qaeda fighters, but troops and local officials loyal to the current government. Then The Washington Post reported on Monday that the three men killed on February 4 in the remote village of Zhawar by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone were not Al Qaeda leaders, as the Pentagon had suggested. They were Afghan peasants foraging for scrap metal, and the group did not include Osama bin Laden. Media reports following the attack raised the possibility the Al Qaeda chief had been one of the dead.

Corn and others in the progressive/alternative press have, of course, been raising such questions all along. But now the mainstream press, as well, is revisiting ‘collateral damage’ as war coverage takes a negative turn, reports the Washington Post

“I was screaming inside my helmet…” Skeleton Plunges Face-First Back Into Winter Games —

“Picture riding the lid of a turkey roaster pan down a roller coaster rail after an ice storm.

Picture it at almost 80 miles an hour, with wicked turns, at G-forces so powerful that you cannot raise your helmet from the ice, which glitters just an inch away.

Now picture making that ride face first.” NY Times

Taliban Minister Predicts Revival of His Movement: “A senior member of Afghanistan’s defeated Taliban derided the interim government Monday for failing to stem rising lawlessness and said the people would soon demand the return of his hard-line movement.

Mullah Abdul Razzak, fugitive Taliban interior minister and a former key military commander in northern Afghanistan, told Reuters in an interview that supreme leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, was still in Afghanistan but he did not know where.” Reuters via Yahoo!

The fundamentalist question: “Three young British Muslim men from Luton and Crawley were reportedly killed fighting with the Taliban; a man from Bromley in London tried to blow up an aeroplane mid-Atlantic; an American youth crashed a plane into a Florida skyscraper in the name of Osama bin Laden; a man from California was picked up with the Taliban; two men from Tipton, West Midlands, and one man from Croydon, south London, are being held as al-Qaeda suspects in Camp X-Ray.

To lose one citizen may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose at least nine looks like carelessness. Why is it that these men, born and brought up in Britain and the USA, are gripped to fight for an irrational, religious dogma – and seemingly possessed with an absolutist hatred for the infidel West? Why does their experience of living in the West not imbue them with a respect for the virtues of democracy, rational debate and secularism? Why don’t they feel like they belong?” sp!ked

Scientists: Ocean depths being destroyed: ‘In recent years, sturdier winches, stronger cable and more powerful engines have allowed fishing trawlers to extend their reach to depths of 3,000 feet and beyond, biologist Callum Roberts said in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At those depths, growth is so slow that harvested fish can take decades to be replaced and damaged coral may require centuries or more to grow back.

“The pace of life in the deep sea is virtually glacial,” said Roberts, a professor of environment at the University of York in Britain. “What we are destroying now will take centuries to recover.” ‘ Salon

The Illusion of Conscious Will: “Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality. Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles.” amazon.co.uk

Afghans’ mental health services badly outdated: “Killings, executions, massive persecution, forced internal displacement, fear from living with hidden land mines, long-term unemployment and security concerns have left an indelible mark on Afghans’ psychological health. People complain of depression, anxiety and insomnia.

But mental health services are outdated and practically nonexistent.” Miami Herald There is a strain of thought that dismisses such concerns in this way — “Well, of course, you’d be depressed or anxious too if…” — erroneously suggesting that a population ravaged by war is not worthy of mental health intervention. And the profession as a whole has not risen to the challenge of dealing with the terror of the 20th and now the early 21st century as a massive public mental health problem. Reconstruction governments in troublespots throughout the world should be inviting in teams of mental health experts to consult on designing nationwide public mental health interventions; and training in dealing globally with a war-torn populace and individually with victims of war trauma, refugees, and asylum-seekers should become commonplace in mental health training programs, since it appears this human problem is not only not going away but growing in magnitude…

The Eskimo Snow Vocabulary Debate: Fallacies and Confusions. Freelance editor and writer Mark Halpern writes in the new issue of The Vocabula Review: “The Eskimo snow vocabulary (ESV) debate concerns the number of words Eskimo languages have for snow and ice in their various forms and situations, compared with other languages. The debate was set off a decade ago by an essay, “The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax,” by Geoffrey K. Pullum, professor of linguistics at the University of California Santa Cruz. Pullum there ridiculed the idea that the Eskimo languages used significantly more words for snow than did English, for example. He was motivated to do so, he explained, partly by a wish to correct a specific popular misconception, but much more by a wish to use this canard as a cautionary example of human gullibility, shoddy scholarship, and even latent racism.”

Also in the new VR are quibbles about computer spellchecking, the replacement of “you’re welcome” by “no problem”, of “forgo” by “forego”, and the use of “hey” for “hi” or “hello” (‘Perhaps the best way to discourage people from using hey is to respond with a hearty diddle, diddle?’), as well as numerous other goodies for those who believe in precision, elegance and — yes — an element of tradition in their language…

Scores of Bodies Found Outside U.S. Crematory —

“Officials had counted 80 bodies so far and there could be hundreds, according to the media reports. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution quoted officials as saying the bodies could date back as far as two decades. Authorities could not immediately be reached for comment.

“Some (bodies) had been there just days, still dressed in their funeral clothes. Others were so old they had become mummies,” the Journal-Constitution said. Some of the bodies were found in long-rotted coffins.

The operator of the Tri-State Crematory in Noble, about 85 miles (137 km) northwest of Atlanta, told police the bodies were not cremated because the incinerator was not working, according to the media reports, which said the operator was charged with five counts of theft by deception for allegedly charging relatives for cremations that were not performed.” Reuters via Yahoo!

Estimates of Mentally Ill Too High, Study Says: “A new study suggests that mental disorders may be less prevalent among adults in the United States than was thought.” The profession’s most reliable estimates of the prevalence of mental illnesses have been based on an extraordinary study, the Epidemiological Catchment Area Program of 1980-85, and another similar study five years later. Door-to-door interview surveys tallied how many people had taken medication, consulted professionals, or reported a degree of emotional distress sufficient to interfere with their functioning. But many mental health professionals, including myself, felt intuitively that the resulting finding that over 30% of the study sample qualified for a diagnosis of a mental disorder was implausible, calling into question the study methodology, the reliability of the surveyors’ conclusions and the prevalent definitions for various diagnoses. Readers have often heard me observe that the profession has a vested interest in maintaining “market niche” in an increasingly competitive field, and I wondered if the discipline’s unconscious biases were contributing to inflation of the estimates. The new study agrees.

Thomas Friedman: An Intriguing Signal From the Saudi Crown Prince

Earlier this month, I wrote a column suggesting that the 22 members of the Arab League, at their summit in Beirut on March 27 and 28, make a simple, clear-cut proposal to Israel to break the Israeli-Palestinian impasse: In return for a total withdrawal by Israel to the June 4, 1967, lines, and the establishment of a Palestinian state, the 22 members of the Arab League would offer Israel full diplomatic relations, normalized trade and security guarantees. Full withdrawal, in accord with U.N. Resolution 242, for full peace between Israel and the entire Arab world. Why not?

I am currently in Saudi Arabia on a visit — part of the Saudi opening to try to explain themselves better to the world in light of the fact that 15 Saudis were involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. So I took the opportunity of a dinner with Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, and de facto ruler, Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, to try out the idea of this Arab League proposal. I knew that Jordan, Morocco and some key Arab League officials had been talking about this idea in private but had not dared to broach it publicly until one of the “big boys” — Saudi Arabia or Egypt — took the lead.

After I laid out this idea, the crown prince looked at me with mock astonishment and said, “Have you broken into my desk?” NY Times op-ed

It appears, disappointingly however, that the Crown Prince has decided against making this proposal given heigghtened Israeli violence in recent days. He’s been advised by other Arab League members that it would appear, unacceptably to them, as if Sharon’s hard line had successfully won Arab concessions.

Emerging Disease News: Strange Rash Baffles Medical Sleuths

Hundreds of youngsters in at least seven states have broken out in mysterious rashes, and some health investigators suspect it might be caused by a new or yet-to-be-identified virus.

The red, itchy rash appears to be more an annoyance than a serious health threat, but it has managed to temporarily close schools, worry parents and frustrate school administrators, for whom answers have been elusive.

Students in Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia, Virginia, Ohio, Oregon and Washington state have complained about rashes on the face, arms, legs and body. For the most part, the rash goes away when the students leave school.

“For something like this to occur almost simultaneously in different parts of the country is, to my knowledge, unprecedented,” said Dr. Norman Sykes, who examined about 30 suburban Philadelphia students who came down with the rash this month.

Scores of Bodies Found Outside U.S. Crematory —

“Officials had counted 80 bodies so far and there could be hundreds, according to the media reports. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution quoted officials as saying the bodies could date back as far as two decades. Authorities could not immediately be reached for comment.

“Some (bodies) had been there just days, still dressed in their funeral clothes. Others were so old they had become mummies,” the Journal-Constitution said. Some of the bodies were found in long-rotted coffins.

The operator of the Tri-State Crematory in Noble, about 85 miles (137 km) northwest of Atlanta, told police the bodies were not cremated because the incinerator was not working, according to the media reports, which said the operator was charged with five counts of theft by deception for allegedly charging relatives for cremations that were not performed.” Reuters via Yahoo!

A feature earlier this week on NPR led me to this coverage of the Aryan Nations’ plans to set up headquarters in remote Potter County PA, including a paramilitary training camp, under the direction of virulent racist August Kreis. Kreis may have wrested leadership of the far-right group from Richard Butler, 83-year-old Aryan Nations leader who lost the group’s former headquarters in Idaho in a court case brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center which the SPLC’s Morris Dees predicted had broken the back of the Aryan Nations. In radio and print interviews, Kreis is both brazen and savvy, stressing the importance of forging links with other far-right groups such as the World Church of the Creator. With cocky self-assurance, he states that the new degree of interconnectivity and fusion among far-right hate groups will push their activities to a new level. There are suggestions that recruitment to the Aryan Nations is once again on the rise.

Grassroots opposition groups such as the Education and Vigilance Network, to whose site the above link points, and Community Action Against Racism are raising the hue and cry. As readers of FmH know, I think there’s no more urgent cause than combatting virulent racist hatred from the far right. Consider supporting the Southern Poverty Law Center, which regularly litigates important anti-hate victories with courage and conviction. Disclaimer: I have no financial ties with the SPLC; just an interested contributor myself.

In Lost E-Mail, a Dividend: “Frantically, I started scrolling back, then back further. Finally, I realized that in the two hours I had been away from my desk, three years of saved e-mail messages had either disintegrated into babble or disappeared altogether. A chunk of my life had floated away before my eyes.” So she consults psychologist Sherry Turkle to understand how she’s feeling about it… NY Times

Lab-built bladders on the way “A leading surgeon in the US has told BBC News that he is ready to perform the world’s first transplant of an artificially grown organ.” BBC

Baby with selected gene born in Britain:

A joyful couple were celebrating at home in Britain yesterday with the country’s first – and the world’s second – baby to be born with a desired genetic characteristic known in advance.

The family say that their baby girl, who was born at 8pm on Thursday night in a British hospital, is not a “designer baby”, but a much longed-for child who brings with her into the world, as an extra gift, cells capable of saving her older brother if he suffers a relapse into leukaemia. Guardian UK

French Judge Gives Taliban Victory: ‘Despite making what most observers agreed were “obvious technical errors,” such as surrendering, the Taliban were awarded victory in the Afghanistan war last night after the French judge said they won on presentation.’ SatireWire [via David]

Can the US be defeated?

“Those who have argued that America’s war on terror would fail to defeat terrorism have, it turns out, been barking up the wrong tree. Ever since President Bush announced his $45bn increase in military spending and gave notice to Iraq, Iran and North Korea that they had “better get their house in order” or face what he called the “justice of this nation”, it has become ever clearer that the US is not now primarily engaged in a war against terrorism at all.

Instead, this is a war against regimes the US dislikes: a war for heightened US global hegemony and the “full spectrum dominance” the Pentagon has been working to entrench since the end of the cold war. While US forces have apparently still failed to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, there is barely even a pretence that any of these three states was in some way connected with the attacks on the World Trade Centre. What they do have in common, of course, is that they have all long opposed American power in their regions (for 10, 23 and 52 years respectively) and might one day acquire the kind of weapons the US prefers to reserve for its friends and clients.” Guardian UK [again, thanks, David]

PCs Are Incorrect on TV: Good guys use Macs, villains PCs. Wired

Humans may not be as aggressive and competitive as thought: “Is it human nature to be competitive? Aggressive? Violent? Popular and scientific literature says yes. An anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis who studies primate behavior says no.

Robert W. Sussman, Ph.D., professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and a colleague found that affiliated behavior — or friendly behavior like grooming and playing — is probably a hundred times more frequent than aggressive behavior in primates, and that aggressive behavior constitutes less than 1 percent of primates’ activities.” [But, oh, that 1%… -FmH]

I occasionally read Outside Counsel– Notes on a Glamor Profession, a stimulating weblog by a New York attorney. I noticed this there today:

I have written before on the topic of physicians unionizing, (scroll down to the second letter) but it seems to be a bad idea whose time has come. Doctors want to practice medicine, and they keep thinking that the way to do this is by giving away control of their profession. We have accountants deciding whether an MRI is necessary today because the docs liked the idea of HMOs (mostly because HMOs looked like a good way to universalize health insurance, maximizing the profitability of medical practice). Now they are in businesses, and they don’t like it. Quite right, too, since one of the hallmarks of being a “professional” is being independent. Unionizing amounts to conceding that they have lost control of their profession, however, and merely substitutes one group of nonprofessionals for another. I look at this, and I marvel that there are lawyers who favor multidisciplinary practice. Accountants are the natural enemies of independent professionals– and the group-think paradigm which unionization represents is likewise no way for a professional to operate. It is frustrating that the American health care system is so disfunctional that its doctors are starting to believe they are disenfranchised– where does that leave the patients?

From my perspective as a practicing physician, I agree that it would’ve been misguided if true, but it is a gross misrepresentation to claim that the profession has willingly given up its autonomy. The managed care approach to cost containment was externally imposed; the species of HMOs that dominates today comprises ‘products’ essentially generated by the health insurance industry, not MDs. I don’t think any physicians felt it would maximize profitability in comparison with fee-for-service paradigms, and by and large MDs employed by HMOs are salaried employees, making less, and under the gun with productivity demands, working harder, than their colleagues in other sectors of medical care. Business incentives are inherently incompatible with taking adequate care of patients, and physicians have always known it (except those ‘businessmen in white coats’ whose interest has always been entrepreneurial rather than patient-care-oriented!).

I agree, the impetus to unionization is an essential acknowledgement of a loss of autonomy, but the labor movement has always represented empowerment of exploited and alienated labor. If there is a problem with doctors unionizing, it is that it does not have any ‘bite’ without the threat of a strike, and I’m not sure a work stoppage is compatible with a service profession, not that my friends who are nurses agree. I also agree that we have to be concerned about the fate of patients in a healthcare system where physicians are disenfranchised. There are some indications that the public realizes they are getting a raw deal from the healthcare bean counters. For example, see this, from the Boston Globe, regarding the mental health sector.

The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick: “…an interesting graphic interpretation [by R. Crumb! -FmH] of a series of events which happened to Dick in March of 1974. He spent the remaining years of his life trying to figure out what happened in those fateful months.

You will find all 8 pages of this story here. The file sizes are rather large (120-140K each) so that the text was readable and the detail visible.

. …In typical Dick fashion, you will find that it raises more questions than it answers.” [via metascene]

Brain activity in ventromedial prefrontal cortex correlates with individual differences in negative affect: Overactivity in this brain region can be the source of chronic ‘bad moods’, i.e. increased intensity of negative affect. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science

Hivelogic Email Address Encoder: “Win the Spam Arms Race:

As most of you know, posting your email address on your website is a sure-fire way to guarantee a healthy portion of spam delivered to your Inbox for years to come.

This web-based tool encodes the email address using Numerical Equivalents and wraps that in JavaScript. The result will be rendered correctly by your browser, but will be undecipherable by most spambots.”

How to Fake a Passport NY Times Magazine

Working with the CIA, from Parameters, the US Army War College Quarterly:

In 1993, I had the privilege of being a CIA student at the US Army War College. During the academic year, I had some frank exchanges with my military colleagues about the intelligence community and how those military leaders viewed it, rightly or wrongly. The two principal conclusions I came away with were: (a) the intelligence community does not know enough about the military and its operations, and (b) the military does not know enough about the intelligence community and its operations.

Immediately upon graduation from the War College, I was selected as the CIA Chief in Mogadishu, Somalia. Within 30 days, I was on the ground there, trying to come to grips with the quickly evolving crisis.

This article will not be about the policy disaster that took place in Somalia, however. Rather, it will seek to illuminate the working relationship between the military and the CIA, offering some of the knowledge I gained in Mogadishu and over a career. In a way, it is the incoming brief I wish I could have given to the Ranger Task Force commander and his senior staff when they arrived in Somalia.

Also in Parameters: Caution, Children at War: “As we enter the 21st century, a new phenomenon of warfare has emerged, one quite different from the technical revolution in military affairs. While not a formal doctrine, it similarly represents a body of fundamental principles, deliberate instrumental choices, and transferred teachings. In this case, it prescribes the methods and circumstances of employing children in battle.”

E does not equal mc2: review of Who Rules In Science: An Opinionated Guide to the Wars

by James Robert Brown:

Few terms, when uttered in academic circles, are so instantly polarizing as the phrase “social construction.” Taken at face value, the notion is innocuous enough: some things that we come to know, like the rules of baseball and the letters of the alphabet, are not objective truths about the universe but products of social convention. The problem is that “constructivists,” whose ranks now include many—if not most—scholars of the humanities, are not content to stop there. From their point of view, all knowledge is subjective and all facts are arbitrary; in baseball, for example, we “construct” not only what counts as a strike, but also the trajectory of a pitch and the physiology of a batter’s swing.

For postmodern humanists, the constructivist enterprise is exciting and subversive, liberating them from the supposedly racist and sexist shackles of Western thought. For many scientists and philosophers, on the other hand, whose business it is to describe the world as it exists, the idea is confusing and absurd; in the words of the eminent biologist E.O. Wilson, it “menaces rational thought.” And not only that. To the extent that postmodernists have come to dominate the study of literature and the arts, their way of thinking has had a corrosive effect on the academy, giving rise to intellectual balkanization and a general decline of standards. Commentary

Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus: “an exploration of sense relationships within the English language. By clicking on words, you follow a thread of meaning, creating a spatial map of linguistic associations. The Visual Thesaurus was built using Thinkmap™, a data-animation technology developed by Plumb Design.”

Utah Olympic Peace Project

“You are invited to take a stand for peace by adding your name to the growing list of individuals who have signed our Declaration of Peace. We believe that the Winter Olympics are an ideal time to make a public stand for world peace. During the Olympics, individuals from all over the world will converge upon Salt Lake City. We are using this opportunity to spread our message of peace and global justice to the world as we publicly reveal the names of those who have signed the Declaration of Peace. By signing, you are joining people from around the world who believe that there are alternatives to war as well as people who are committed to working for peace and justice in their lives and communities.” Utah Indymedia

‘I Have a Middle East Dream’: James Zogby, the president of the Arab-American Institute in Washington, calls for Palestinian nonviolence in the mold of Dr. King. workingforchange.

Akilah Monifa: Abolish the Farce of Black History Month: “Black History Month has grown into an excuse to sell commercial goods and ignore African Americans 11 months out of the year.” Alternet

Molly Ivins: Play-by-play on campaign reform: “The U.S. House of Representatives is debating campaign finance reform, and it’s one of those days when all citizens should be political junkies. It doesn’t get better than this — the stakes couldn’t be higher, the tension couldn’t be thicker, the theater is superb. Passion, drama, comedy, hypocrisy, devious plot devices, splendid villains, noble heroes … this is just the best. The casting director has a spectacular imagination: Tom DeLay and Dick Armey alternating in the role of Iago — wow.” workingforchange Also: David Corn at tompaine.com asks: Is Pseudo Reform Better Than None?: “Shays-Meehan opens as many loopholes as it closes.” John Nichols writes in The Nation: “The debate on the Shays-Meehan bill provided an all-too-rare display of what an engaged Congress might look like.”

Geov Parrish: Welcome to the American Olympics: “The Olympics are supposed to be about international peace

and understanding. NBC makes it look more like a Fourth of

July parade.

” AlterNet And: Olympic Farce: ” Once upon a time, the Olympics were about patriotism and the celebration of virtue. Now they’re a multi-culti festival.” The Weekly Standard

Two papers from the Journal of Research in Personality bear on earlier discussions about the overrated value of self-esteem, as per Lauren Slater’s New York Times Magazine article of last week:

• Are Happy People Healthier? The Specific Role of Positive Affect in Predicting Self-Reported Health Symptoms by Jeremy Pettit et al
• Personality Correlates of Self-Esteem by Richard Robins et al

Thanks to Adam for pointing me to today’s SF Gate front page, where this item appears:

Spann Family: Lindh Is a ‘Traitor’

They showed up, unannounced, to call John Walker Lindh a traitor. The mother, father and widow of slain CIA officer Johnny Micheal Spann have a score to settle — and no hesitation about saying so.

“John Walker is a traitor because of the way he lived,” Spann’s mother, Gail, said Wednesday. “If you go back from the time he was 16 years old and just go through his history, you know, what more could I say? It’s so simple and I hope that all Americans will feel the same way that I do.” AP via Yahoo! News

Sorry for their loss, but it is shameful, idiotic misguided vindictiveness to claim that Lindh was responsible in any sense for Spann’s death.

Suspect Tells Court He Thinks Pearl Is Dead: “The chief suspect in the kidnapping of U.S. reporter Daniel Pearl told an anti-terrorism court in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi Thursday he thought the U.S. reporter was dead.

The Pakistan government dismissed the statement as untrustworthy while Pearl’s employer, The Wall Street Journal, said it remained confident Pearl was alive.” Reuters

Beyond a Bid to Change Lies an Uncertain Future: “Both the financing and the tone of American politics could change profoundly if the campaign finance bill passed by the House this morning becomes law.

Yet, for all the certainty expressed during a long, bitter debate, neither its advocates nor its foes can be sure which party would be helped or hurt by the bill. The history of legislation to curb the influence of money and politics, including the election laws passed after the Watergate scandal, suggests that short-term effects may not last as politicians and donors figure their way around new laws.” NY Times

Well there's one kind of favor I'll ask for you 

Well there's one kind of favor I'll ask for you 

There's just one kind of favor I'll ask for you

You can see that my grave is kept clean.



And there's two white horses following me

And there's two white horses following me

I got two white horses following me 

Waiting on my burying ground.



Did you ever hear that coffin sound 

Did you ever hear that coffin sound

Did you ever hear that coffin sound

Means another poor boy is under the ground.



Did you ever hear them church bells toll

Did you ever hear them church bells toll

Did you ever hear them church bells toll

Means another poor boy is dead and gone.



my heart stopped beating and my hands turned cold 

my heart stopped beating and my hands turned cold

my heart stopped beating and my hands turned cold 

And I believe what the father told.



And there's one last favor I'll ask for you 

And there's one last favor I'll ask for you 

And just one last favor I'll ask for you

You can see that my grave is kept clean. 

Is action against Iraq imminent? Bush Keeps Iraq Options Open, but Secret. ‘President Bush, speaking as his administration considered ways to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, said on Wednesday he reserved all his options to act but he would not disclose them at this time.

“I will reserve whatever options I have. I’ll keep them close to my vest.

…” ‘ Close to my vest??? Reuters via Yahoo! News

“Heinz launches chocolate fries; Food firm also plans to tempt kids with cinnamon, sky blue Funky Fries.” CNNmoney