How Many Blonds Mess Up a Nash Equilibrium? “The film A Beautiful Mind is the first to deal with a profound social issue that touches everyone but that few people understand–a Nash equilibrium.” LA Times

“Please release my friend Daniel Pearl” Independent UK

Happy Mardi Gras!

Spike pointed out how depressing the Times of London‘s obituary of Princess Margaret is.

The 74th Annual Academy Award nominations are out, for those who think they mean anything.

Nicholas Confessore: Beat the Press “Does the White House have a blacklist?” The answer appears to be yes. For instance, even before his inauguration, Dubya’s axe man Karl Rove came out swinging, calling the Washington Post in an unsuccessful effort to have them not give the consistently dirt-digging Dana Millbank the White House beat. And they haven’t stopped swinging. The American Prospect

Michael Kinsley Is Logging Off As Editor Of Online Slate

Two months after telling the world that he’s battling Parkinson’s disease, Michael Kinsley said yesterday that he was stepping down as editor of Slate.

The 50-year-old columnist, who moved to Seattle six years ago to launch the online magazine for Microsoft, said he’s resigning mainly because he needs a change. “I was feeling a little bit stale, and I didn’t want the magazine to seem stale,” said Kinsley, who will continue to write a weekly column and contribute to other Slate projects. Washington Post

Although I don’t like Slate much, and can’t get over the taint of its Micro$oft kinship, Kinsley has a knack of writing “emperor-has-no-clothes” pieces that often make alot of sense. I hope he’ll keep up with his writing, and hope he does well with his Parkinson’s Disease.

ACLU Action Alert: Oppose Backdoor Attempts to Institute a National ID! One-click generation of letters to your representatives.

Gimme Shelter: Review of Doris Lessing’s The Sweetest Dream: “…picks up where the previous memoir left off, in the early ’60s. Lessing apparently wrote this in place of a third volume of autobiography, to protect the living.

Freed of the necessity to spare anyone’s feelings, Lessing lets rip, savaging the ’60s and ’70s with a portrait of the era so jaundiced it could only have come from the pen of a lapsed believer. Her memoirs documented the rapture of political commitment, people with “hearts permanently swollen with compassion for the world.” The Sweetest Dream is about the aftermath of that fervor, when gangrenous disappointment sets in. It’s a wildly uneven book, veering between a satire of the left and a contemporary family saga, but Lessing’s unsentimental eye provides an unexpected, rather poignant view of the late 20th century.” Village Voice

Village Voice: Pazz & Jop 2001 poll results.

Toys R Unusually Lame at Fair — ‘Growth in the toy industry is anemic. Big toy retailers like Toys R Us and KMart are closing stores. Perhaps worst of all, there is only a trickle of major new products coming out of the American International Toy Fair, the toy business’ biggest, most important showcase of upcoming playthings.

Instead, toymakers are rolling out a combination of movie licenses, retreads and brand extensions to the more than 20,000 people attending the trade show, which began Sunday.’ Wired

Bush’s Nonwar Budget: Hide and Sneak. Jonthan Chait:

As he went about crafting last year’s budget, President Bush had a problem. He wanted a big tax cut more than anything else, but polls showed the public was more interested in social spending. So Bush set out to obscure the trade-off between these objectives. His method? Hide his priorities behind the supposedly huge budget surplus. “We have increased our budget at a responsible four percent, we have funded our priorities, we have paid down all the available debt, we have prepared for contingencies–and we still have money left over,” he announced in his 2001 budget speech to Congress.

As he goes about promoting this year’s budget, released on Monday, Bush still has the same problem: He remains wedded to tax cuts uber alles, and, while his personal ratings remain stratospheric, poll after poll shows (by a wide margin) that the public would rather scale back the tax cut than run a deficit. And, since the surplus has evaporated, he can no longer hide behind the fiction of limitless resources. Fortunately for him, he has two new concealments: a war and a Democratic Congress. This year’s plan is to hide behind both. The New Republic

Part of me is celebrating as the Hague Tribunal begins the war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic. But it raises troubling questions as well, some of which are touched upon in this NY Times piece by Ian Fisher — e.g. whether it will be possible to directly implicate Milosevic in the crimes that occurred; whether, in the eyes of the world, this looks like “victors’ justice”; and how you draw the line in culpability between a head of state and the citizens, ‘willing executioners’, who back him.

Other important questions may remain unasked. Whose opinion sets the ethical standards for which heads of state will be held accountable for the war crimes of their time in office? Should Sharon be tried for crimes against the Palestinian people? Will a Russian chief of state come to trial for Chechnya? Kissinger or his henchmen for Vietnam?

And what about the fact that, after losing, oh probably around 3,000 on 9-11, the US is pursuing a multibillion-dollar, flag-waving War-on-Terrorism® while, despite our freely chosen peacekeeping role in the Balkans, we have not expended any resources or political will on bringing at-large Bosnian Serb ‘terrorists’ (they are, aren’t they?) Ratko Mladic or Radovan Karajic (who were personally responsible for at least twice that number of deaths in Srebenica alone) to justice?

“Milosevic, as a scapegoat in a show trial with a predestined outcome, would be a perfect medium to exorcise the guilt of those who are trying to obliterate their complicity in provoking and expanding the Balkan wars,” suggest Marko Lopusina and Andre Huzsvai in an LA Times op-ed piece. Even confining ourselves to the Balkans, the moral ambiguities are mind-boggling. Most recently, we witnessed a US-European military intervention to protect the Kosovo Albanians against Serbian ethnic cleansing, only to see the victorious Albanians terrorizing Kosovo Serbs in an identical way.

While we’re at it, The New Republic reviews God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492-1945 by Claude Rawson:

‘Genocide, alas, is a common practice across the globe and across historical eras. But it has now come to haunt Western consciousness in an especially unsettling way, for the obvious reason that on European soil in the twentieth century it was implemented with a systematic rigor and an ideological dedication that had not been seen before or elsewhere. In his important new book, Claude Rawson argues that whereas atrocities of this kind had not been seen, they had in fact been strongly imagined; and he argues also that there may be a disturbing connection, though by no means a simple causal one, between the imagining and the enactment. His book, as he succinctly remarks at the outset, “is concerned with the spectrum of aggressions which inhabit the space between such figures of speech [about exterminating certain groups of people] and the implementation.” ‘

Why This Link Patent Case Is Weak: “It may be a long time before British Telecom knows whether it lucked out or lost big in the legal sweepstakes. But even if it wins its court battle, experts said the British telephone company has already lost the war…

Even if BT wins, it’s hard to see what the payoff would be. Programmers insist it would be a trivial task to code an entirely new way to link Web pages. And legal experts believe that BT will never be awarded any retroactive royalties on hyperlinks.” Wired

Sept. 11 has scrambled our concept of war: “The already fragile distinction between war and crime disappeared last September. We are now trying to fight terrorism with traditional weapons of war. But terrorism is not war; it is crime on a mass scale.” Boston Globe editorial

$75 Million of Stuff: ‘We know what happened to the cash donated to the victims of 9-11. But what about the boots, dog food, prom dresses and teddy bears?’ MSNBC

Never Have So Many Missed the Forest: “The biggest news out of 10 Congressional hearings on Enron last week was the claim on Thursday — sharply contradicted by others — by Jeffrey K. Skilling, the company’s former chief executive, that he had known nothing about the company’s questionable partnerships.” NY Times [Great headline… -FmH]

Mental Difficulties Can Persist Long After Chemo. Cognitive dysfunction, long recognized as a sequela of cancer chemotherapy, persists, perhaps indefinitely. It is difficult to sort out to what extent it is a toxic effect of the chemotherapy agents and to what extent an effect of other medications, the cancer patient’s emotional state, sleep disturbance or age-related changes. A decline may be attributed to the chemo by patient or caregivers even if this is not accurate. Reuters Health

Does marijuana withdrawal syndrome exist?

The question of whether a clinically significant marijuana (cannabis) withdrawal syndrome exists remains controversial. In spite of the mounting clinical and preclinical evidence suggesting that such a syndrome exists, the DSM-IV does not include marijuana withdrawal as a diagnostic category. The clinical syndrome has been characterized by restlessness, anorexia, irritability and insomnia that begin less than 24 hours after discontinuation of marijuana, peak in intensity on days 2 to 4, and last for seven to 10 days.

The question of whether this syndrome is clinically significant is important, not only because marijuana is the most commonly used illicit drug in the United States, but also because marijuana has been shown to produce dependence at rates comparable to other drugs of abuse and because relapse rates among individuals seeking treatment for marijuana dependence are similar to those with other drugs of abuse… Psychiatric Times

“Some forms of illegal hacking would be punished by life imprisonment under a proposal that Congress will debate on Tuesday.” Wired

Moira Redmond: The travesty of elementary-school valentines. Slate

Studios Assail ReplayTV Technology — ‘The lawsuits, which were brought by the largest TV networks and all seven major Hollywood movie companies, say the ReplayTV recorders violate copyrights by enabling users to send videos to other ReplayTV boxes over the Internet and skip commercials automatically.’ LA Times

Gene Experiment Comes Close to Crossing Ethicists’ Line

The trial, conducted by Avigen Inc. of Alameda, Calif., is designed to insert a corrective gene into the liver of patients with hemophilia B, the less common of two forms of hemophilia.

Two federal agencies that monitor gene therapy trials, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, wish to ensure that corrective genes are not allowed to enter patients’ eggs or sperm, known as germline cells.

Even though the genes might prevent the patients’ disease from recurring in the next generation, the agencies consider alteration of the human germline so profound a step that it should not be tried without further public discussion. NY Times

The Mind Made Flesh: “Nicholas Humphrey’s writings about the evolution of the mind have done much to set the agenda for contemporary psychology. Here, in a series of essays, he invites us to “take another look” at a variety of the central and not-so-central issues, including: the evolution of consciousness, the nature of the self, multiple personality disorder, the placebo effect, cave art, religious miracles, medieval animal trials, and the seductions of dictatorship.” amazon.co.uk

Richard Dawkins: The word made flesh — “Today we can read human and ape genetic legacies. In 50 years, we could resurrect the past…” Guardian UK

La. asks PayPal to halt service in state: ‘In a letter sent last week, Louisiana asked the online payments company to cease offering its service to the state’s residents until PayPal receives a license from the state, the company said in a regulatory document filed Monday. Although Louisiana residents account for a small fraction of the money sent through PayPal, the state’s move could presage other governmental attempts to regulate PayPal’s service.’ CNET

…Said to Match Quality of Film: “If Carver Mead is right, photographic film is an endangered species.

Dr. Mead, who is 67, was a pioneer of the modern computer chip industry in the 1970’s. But he has never stopped inventing. And on Monday his Silicon Valley start-up, Foveon, plans to begin shipping a new type of digital image sensor that outside experts agree is the first to match or surpass the photographic capabilities of 35-millimeter film.” NY Times

Dashboard surfing for the masses

Philips Semiconductors has introduced an integrated microprocessor it says will take the emerging niche of dashboard electronics beyond the realm of the luxury car.

Philips, a division of Dutch technology giant Royal Philips Electronics, claims to be the first to bring to market a fully integrated “telematics”–or dashboard electronics–processor combining all key hardware blocks onto one chip. The SAF3100 telematics processor is less expensive and smaller than many other back-end telematics bundles. CNET

Disgust, Morality, and Human Identity: Heather Looy:

“Theologically, the Judeo-Christian tradition uses disgust and related concepts of abomination and impurity in conjunction with moral codes designed to preserve communal identity as the people of God. Psychosocial research reveals disgust as a universal emotion that enables evaluation and regulation of one class of moral behaviors, and serves to express and preserve cultural identity. Neurobiology is beginning to trace the neural circuitry involved in disgust and morality, suggesting emotions are the basis for moral judgement, and revealing intriguing relationships between disgust, morality, and other aspects of the psyche.” Metanexus

Men Overestimate Women’s Sexual Interest: Study. ‘The phenomenon seems connected to a kind of psychological self-projection, according to researcher Robyn LeBoeuf of Princeton University in New Jersey. “They say, ‘Well, if I were to smile at a woman, I would be interested in having sex with her. So if she’s smiling at me, then she’s probably interested in having sex with me as well.”‘ ‘ Yahoo! News

Schizophrenia linked to mother’s lack of sunlight. I blinked to speculation about this link last summer, based on the observation that there is more of a disparity between winter and summer birth rates of schizophrenics in higher latitudes than nearer the equator, and an increasing likelihood with darker skin. Speculation was that the mediating factor is vitamin D, which the body needs sunlight to produce and which requires more sunlight in darker-skinned individuals than light-skinned. Now experiments with rats show that vitamin D deprivation produces neurobiological and behavioral changes which might be analogues to those seen in human schizophrenia. Because vitamin D can cause birth defects, pregnant women should not respond to this news by starting to take large amounts of it, but plenty of time outdoors on sunny days wouldn’t hurt. New Scientist

Spiral galaxy spins the wrong way: This beautiful spiral in Centaurus is puzzling astronomers who have determined that its spiral arms do not trail but rather lead the direction of rotation. It appears that the galaxy has swallowed another which was spinning in the opposite direction. New Scientist

Spike wrote to point out that the NY Post article about the Terry Gross-Gene Simmons interchange has been discredited. Dan Mitchell, an NPR producer/editor, wrote Jim Romenesko after Media News highlighted the Post article on the 6th:

‘ “NPR won’t post audio of Gross’s ‘Fresh Air’ spat with Simmons” is based on an erroneous New York Post story written by Michael Starr claiming that the interview with Gene Simmons of Kiss was “so controversial that NPR declined to make it available on its Website.” This is simply false. NPR aired the interview on a nationwide radio network, after all — it didn’t have to. The audio was not posted online because Simmons refused to grant permission for Internet rights to the interview, a step that is treated as routine by the overwhelming majority of guests. This fact could have been ascertained in about 30 seconds by merely picking up a phone.’

I didn’t do my homework either, it’s clear, since this added detail is covered in several of the sites I read frequently. Others have written to point out that an .mp3 of the entire conversation between Gross and Simmons is available for download, although it’s a 25-megabyte file.

Woman Sees USA In Single Cab Ride SF Chronicle

Budget Battle Turns Personal:

Tensions between Congress and the White House over the president’s budget exploded into the open yesterday when a debate over congressional prerogatives turned into an unusually bitter and personal exchange involving two of Washington’s most powerful figures: Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) and Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neill.

The spat rocked an otherwise routine Senate Budget Committee hearing, where the normal dance of senatorial courtesy — and polite groveling by administration witnesses — suddenly vanished. O’Neill, telling Byrd he wouldn’t “cede to you the high moral ground of not knowing what life is like in a ditch,” struggled with his emotions by taking deep breaths.

Byrd, 84, chairs the Appropriations Committee and is arguably the fiercest defender of Congress’s interests. He spent 15 minutes berating O’Neill, a blunt former corporate executive, for a speech O’Neill made last year asserting that congressional rules “created by just ordinary people” are “like the Lilliputians tying us to the ground.”

Byrd noted that the administration’s glossy new budget document includes a cartoon of Gulliver tied down by Lilliputians. He denounced the cartoon — one of several illustrations of White House sentiments and criticisms — as “nonsense” that belittled how Congress represents the interests of Americans.

Since Monday’s release of the president’s budget plan, which vividly poked fun at alleged congressional pork, lawmakers from both parties have bristled at the administration’s rhetoric. Washington Post

Terrorism ‘expert’ takes on his critics: ‘In recent years, Emerson’s media presence has dimmed—perhaps because, as he has claimed, pro-Arab groups in the U.S. tried to blacklist him, or perhaps because he’s the type to see a terrorist under every kaffiyeh. In 1995, The Nation accused him of promoting anti-Arab “hysteria,” and in 1998, NPR dropped him as a commentator after he made what an NPR ombudsman called “unsubstantiated allegations,” such as linking the Oklahoma City blast to Arab terrorists. These days, Horowitz can only name one publication that Emerson writes for—The Wall Street Journal. According to one journalist, he has been “bounced from the mainstream” and spends his time “raising money from wealthy Jews.” ‘ Village Voice

A Safe Place for a War: Nicholas Kristof, reporting from the Phillippines, reinforces my speculation of yesterday that there is no hard evidence of recent links between Islamic insurgency there and al Qaeda. “If the Philippines can get $100 million because of a gang of 60 crooks, think how much New York City is entitled to!” NY Times But sustaining Dubya’s rantings and ratings requires an ongoing war against a global terrorist conspiracy no matter how implausible…

Arrogance and fear: the American paradox — Anatole Kaletsky: “The greatest danger to America’s dominant position today is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is the arrogance of American power.” The Times of London

“The quiet and high-minded National Public Radio airwaves were shattered earlier this week by a name-calling confrontation between – of all people – tongue-waggling KISS frontman Gene Simmons and soft-spoken interviewer Terry Gross…The interview was apparently so controversial that NPR has declined to make it available on its Website where it posts at least portions of nearly all other interviews that appear on “Fresh Air,” one of its most popular daily shows.” NY Post [via fimoculous]

Saudi Leader’s Anger Revealed Shaky Ties; Bush’s Response Eased a Deep Rift On Mideast Policy; Then Came Sept. 11 Washington Post

1,300 People May Sue NYC Over Handling of WTC Aftermath. ‘From rescue workers who say they have lung problems to business owners who say their shops were damaged, 1,300 people have given notice they may sue the city for a total of $7.18 billion over the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack. The claims involve injuries or damage caused not by the attack itself but by the alleged negligence of the city during the recovery and cleanup.’ Yahoo! News

This is a particularly outrageous, blatant example of how pharmaceutical company sponsorship of medical research and scholarship is done: ‘It said the drug was the best thing since sliced bread. I don’t think it is’ — David Healy, director of the north Wales department of psychological medicine Guardian UK

A reflection on Camille Paglia, penises, vulvas and dumb punditry from UFO Breakfast

Critical IP sucks.

How To Marry a High-Quality Woman — I hope this is a send-up to lampoon the Aryan ethic, but unfortunately I think it’s a for-real Neonazi guide to propagating the master race by finding true love, romance and domination over your Nazi dream goddess. For example:

‘State Openly that You Want to Be a Patriarch. Say things like, “I want to have at least four kids, and I want my wife to stay home while they’re young,” or “I’m looking for a High-Grade Woman to have my kids, none of this messing around stuff; I don’t play the dating game.” Say it simply and definitely, in a way that closes the door to questions. If a feminazi starts yelling, who cares. Extremely good-looking men actually have a disadvantage dating high-quality women because they’re assumed to be promiscuous or carrying a disease. She’s seen the Jew values on TeeVee and the phony “sexual double standard” myth is burned into her head, so it’s only reasonable of her to be suspicious of you.’ [via the null device]

Full of a pitiful and horrifying blend of xenophobia, grandiosity and whining inferiority complex.

On the other hand, here’s a review of Can Love Last? by Stephen Mitchell: “A philosophically inclined psychoanalyst’s daring final work explains that the ecstasy of romantic love doesn’t fade away over time — we kill it.” Salon

Are we hardwired for God? “In all cultures we find notions of gods, spirits and ancestors as supernatural agents, who are remarkably similar to humans. Where do these ideas originate? And why do they persist so strongly in the face of science? In this exclusive essay from the London Review of Books, WG Runciman examines the argument that recent advances in evolutionary psychology hold the answer to the ‘God-question’.” LRB via Guardian UK

Thomas Murray, President of the Hastings Center: Psychology should be in dialogue with bioethics. “Too often, the interactions between social scientists and philosophers were futile and frustrating exercises in mutual unintelligibility. Philosophers were trained to map the intellectual landscape, parse whatever interesting concepts they found there, and articulate and critically evaluate ethical arguments. Philosophers were, with rare exceptions, not trained to create, interpret, or critique empirical studies. Social scientists, on the other hand, understood how to frame and answer certain kinds of empirical questions – those within the purview of their field and methodologies – but they were often mystified by the forms of reasoning and argument employed by philosophers. What does a Kantian distinction between heteronomy and autonomy have to do with whether physicians should tell patients they have cancer? (In 1979, whether to tell the truth about a grave diagnosis such as cancer was still a contentious issue within medicine.)” APS Observer

Review: Mind in Everyday Life and Cognitive Scienceby Sunny Y. Auyang: “If you want to know how the human mind works, the one thing you shouldn’t do is ask a cognitive scientist. So says science writer and Ph.D. physicist Sunny Auyang, whose latest polemic suggests that the psychologists, computer scientists, linguists, philosophers and neuroscientists whose mission is to investigate our mental functioning are less purveyors of scientific truth than nutty zealots with a pathetically overdeveloped sense of their own importance.” American Scientist

1,300 People May Sue NYC Over Handling of WTC Aftermath. ‘From rescue workers who say they have lung problems to business owners who say their shops were damaged, 1,300 people have given notice they may sue the city for a total of $7.18 billion over the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack. The claims involve injuries or damage caused not by the attack itself but by the alleged negligence of the city during the recovery and cleanup.’ Yahoo! News

Thanks to Jim Higgins for suggesting this. Weblogger William Fields is also a wonderful composer. Here’s a page of Fields’ Music at his website, with links to downloads.

As an unabashed anglophile, I’m indebted to plep for pointing to this index of British Myths & Legends.

Tuning in to multimedia reporting:

For the past year, NPR has been asking its radio reporters to lug digital cameras and video cameras an assignments as a way of enhancing its Web site. Reporters are not required to add cameras to their usual bag of sound recorders, but the station’s push for a greater Web presence has made incorporating multimedia into its reports inevitable.

“These people are certainly not professional photographers, but they capture what reporters are seeing on the ground,” said Maria Thomas, vice president of NPR Online. CNN

Dear Members of the American Conservative Union Foundation:

I am highly concerned about an escalation among people to advance their political causes through violence. What has been remote for most of my lifetime–groups with particular interests expressing their positions with car-bombs and automatic weapons–is no longer just something I see on the news. I’ve seen terrorism out my window. It is out of this concern that I appeal to you to issue a public statement denouncing the call to violence implicit in the comments of Ann Coulter at the Conservative Political Action Conference on February 2, 2002.

Ann Coulter said, “When contemplating college liberals, you really regret once again that John Walker is not getting the death penalty. We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too. Otherwise they will turn out to be outright traitors.”

It promotes neither unity nor security to stand behind a statement that people who share a particular ideology within our society ought to be murdered. It does not serve national unity to assert that John Walker is a liberal when he is not. It does it serve national security to assert that liberals have any particular likelihood to evolve into traitors.

The purpose of the CPAC, to “advance important everyday issues such as taxes, crime, culture and foreign policy and to provide basic conservative viewpoints and solutions” is ill-served when the overwhelming message the CPAC brings to the greater community is a call to exterminate fellow citizens. I think that the community at large wants to know that conservatives don’t truly intend to work toward a future where opposing viewpoints are punishable by death.

I am concerned about the impact of Ann Coulter’s statement on the people of our nation, wherever they stand on the political spectrum, as they read about the recent conference in the press. As the developer of the nations premiere conservative conference, the CPAC, it is up to you to whether you want to send a message to America that a new mission of conservatism is to promote the murder of “college liberals” by letting Ms. Coulter’s statement represent the tone of the CPAC, or to send a message to America that the American Conservative Union does not advocate the physical intimidation of law-abiding citizens because of their political beliefs. As much of the public is concerned, I appeal to you to make a public statement denouncing Ms. Coulter’s inflammatory remarks.

Thank You…

Schools Translate Terror Into Curriculum Changes: ‘The Sept. 11 terror attacks and their aftermath are taking a front-and-center seat in the nation’s classrooms, sparking a surge of student interest in topics from Arabic to crisis management and prompting educators in fields as disparate as Islamic studies and microbiology to revamp their courses.’ Washington Post

Pakistan Hopes Suspect’s Family Will Lead to Pearl. “Getting closer every day.” Sounds ominously like whistling in the dark to me… NY Times

“I don’t know where he’s coming from, except he’s the director and he’s in denial. It was absurd. Nobody in the building believed it, not even the people who were cleaning up the room.” — Sen. Richard Shelby (R.-Ala.)

Wolf Blitzer: CIA Intelligence Failures? ‘When Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet appeared this week before the Senate Intelligence Committee — his only public question-and-answer session since September 11– he firmly denied that there was any U.S. intelligence failure leading up to the terrorist attacks. “Where did the secret for the planning reside?” he asked the senators. “Probably in the head of three or four people, and at the end of the day, all you can do is continue to make the effort to steal that secret and break into this leadership structure. And we have to keep working at it. There will be nothing you do that will guarantee 100 percent certainty here. It will never happen.” ‘ CNN

Safety board says pilots can cause tail fin to break off

‘Many airline pilots are unaware that their maneuvering can cause part of an airplane’s tail fin to break off, the National Transportation Safety Board announced Friday during a progress report on the crash of American Airlines Flight 587.

“We’ve calculated that certain rudder inputs by pilots made during certain stages of a flight can cause catastrophic failure of an airline’s vertical stabilizer,” said NTSB chairwoman Marion Blakey.’ CNN

Reports of Priests’ Abuse Enrage Boston Catholics. ‘As the number of implicated clergy members soared to 80, the crisis grew so deep that nearly half the Roman Catholics polled said Cardinal Bernard Law should resign. The turmoil over what church officials knew, when they knew it and what they did or did not do to protect themselves and their parishioners has rocked a region that is more than 50% Catholic.’ LA Times Certainly, to use Malcolm Gladwell’s phrase, we seem to have reached a tipping point in public sentiment, although this emerging evidence of a longstanding Catholic Church coverup should have surprised no one…

No matter what your position on capital punishment, think for a moment about the barbarity of sending to her/his execution someone without sufficient mental capacity to grasp the fact of her/his imminent demise. Now, some glad tidings in this regard: Va. Moves To Limit Executions — ‘The Virginia Senate voted unanimously today to bar the execution of mentally retarded people convicted of capital crimes, a highly unusual step for a state legislature that since the 1970s has consistently expanded the reach of the death penalty.

By shielding a mentally retarded person, Virginia would join 18 states, including Maryland, that bar such executions.’ Washington Post

Creating a Stir Wherever She Goes

“What does `Moving Devi’ mean?” (the organizer) asked.

“The answer,” she said, “is a change in the relation of the subject who is writing from a place where Devi belongs as she slowly moves into the text of the museum. What I’m looking at here is that itinerary, not the nostalgic identatrianism of the metropolitan migrant.”

As she spoke, Ms. Spivak summoned a dazzling array of references: Marx, Hegel, Freud, Lacan, Rilke, Aristotle, and Hindu and Sufi mysticism. “The Sufi is not invaginated in the polytheistic universe,” she said, “but the supernatural is invaginated in the natural.” NY Times

Two pieces of cannabis-related news from the New York Times: Oregon Doctor Stands Out in Marijuana Prescriptions. One Portland MD has granted 50% of the authorizations under Oregon’s recently-passed medical-marijuana law. Regulators who cannot quibble with the law, the will of Oregon voters, are turning to the standards of care the doctor uses to diagnose and treat his patients. He has previously been disciplined for inappropriate prescribing of pain medications.

And: the DEA has extended its deadline for banning hemp in food, about which I wrote when the regulation was first proposed as one of those examples of narrow-minded misguided witchhunt mentality I’m so fond of railing against…

Philippine Arrest Offers Clues to Web Of Asian Terrorists. As attention in the America-Strikes-Back® Show shifts to the role of Islamic insurgencies in Southeast Asia, I wonder whether the US notion about a global conspiracy of terrorists, reflected in stories like this from the Washington Post, is largely a self-serving fantasy-land misreading of local movements. In an earlier iteration of the same pathology of American thought, it is clear in retrospect that there really was never a global conspiracy of Communism to dominate the world; rather Marxist ideology and alignment with foes of the West was a convenient and inspiring peg on which local self-determination movements hung their hat. Makes me wonder whether shaping bin Laden and al Qaeda’s image into that of global masterminds of terrorism is actually going to drive local insurgents to forge new links to their heroic figurehead, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. I haven’t seen much to indicate the contrary, that other ‘terrorist’ groups are running scared, chastened by the ferocity of US resolve.

A related point by Michael Kinsley: ‘The more things you call terrorism, the fewer you are likely to wipe out.’ Slate And The Progressive‘s editor Matthew Rothschild comments:

‘There was something almost pathetic about George W. Bush’s attempt to make his fight against terrorism akin to the fight against the Nazis.

In his State of the Union address, he evoked the comparison when he said that North Korea, Iran, Iraq, “and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil.” ‘

And, from Toronto Star

columnist Thomas Walkom [via wood s lot]:

The war against terrorism is a brilliant construct. It may not have been started by George W. Bush, but it certainly works to his advantage.

It has provided oomph to the sagging U.S. economy and a new raison d’être for the alliance of politicos, defence contractors and security specialists who make up what former U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower christened the military-industrial complex.

What makes this war so superior, in political terms, is its vagueness. Since the terrorist, by definition, can be anyone — the man in the next apartment, the person lurking on the subway platform — we can never be sure who the enemy is.

Also noticed by wood s lot, from Stephanie Salter in the SF Chronicle [via CommonDreams]:

Bush: All War All the Time —

“…(W)hen it comes to marketing a mediocre product, my hat is off to the GOP.

Nobody does it better.

In George W. Bush, Republicans have transcended the Emperor’s New Clothes Hall of Fame. And, now, thanks to the murderous, Sept. 11 deeds of a newly christened “evil axis,” Republicans hardly need to work to ensure long-lasting, widespread brand loyalty for their boy.

In fact, as Bush so enthusiastically demonstrated in his State of the Union message last week, the only thing his administration must do is keep America afraid and “at war.”

[All right, enough already, Eliot, they get the picture…]

Two pieces of interesting war news in the Washington Post

today: Taliban Foreign Minister Gives Up. “The foreign minister of the Taliban, Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, surrendered to Afghan government officials yesterday and was turned over to U.S. forces, U.S. officials said last night. He is believed to be the highest-ranking member of the Taliban to have beentaken into custody.”

And “I’m not angry at the Americans. It’s not their fault, it was Mullah Mohammad Omar and his friends’ fault. They’re the ones to blame.”

While Washington debates its culpability for civilian casualties in the U.S. war on terrorism and Omar’s radical Taliban movement, ‘Kabul has proven remarkably forgiving of military attacks that have mistakenly killed innocent people. Afghan political leaders eager to cement good relations with the West for the difficult days of reconstruction ahead have brushed off the issue as largely insignificant. And even many of the ordinary Afghans who have suffered most as a result of what the Pentagon calls “collateral damage” express little bitterness toward the foreigners who visited it upon them.’ While the reporter acknowledges that the sentiment may not reflect feeling in other parts of the country, there is no broad sense of outrage in the capital. Could it be, however, that he has access largely to those who have a vested interest in US reconstruction aid? He admits that the issue of ‘collateral damage’ is discussed, with some irritation, only when brought up by journalists.

Fury at president’s ‘axis of evil’ speech: Patten lays into Bush’s America: ‘Chris Patten, the EU commissioner in charge of Europe’s international relations, has launched a scathing attack on American foreign policy – accusing the Bush administration of a dangerously “absolutist and simplistic” stance towards the rest of the world.

As EU officials warned of a rift opening up between Europe and the US wider than at any time for half a century, Mr Patten tells the Guardian it is time European governments spoke up and stopped Washington before it goes into “unilateralist overdrive”.’ Uhhh, George? Anybody home? There’s probably no more valuable, trustworthy feedback you should be listening to than the growing sense of everyone in Europe (except your obsequious toady Blair) that you haven’t a clue on how to manage a real alliance if your life depended on it…

A pox on scientific debate:

“(The BBC drama-documentary) Smallpox 2002 teaches us little but panics us a lot. When US postal officials issue anthrax warnings to Americans, saying ‘Look at your neighbour and see if he fits the profile’, while the US State Department warns everybody to be on the lookout for suspicious types, we seem to have moved from The X-Files‘ message ‘Trust no one’ to ‘Fear everybody’. The G7 conference of health ministers might be better informed if they watched reruns of the X-Files.” sp!ked

William Saletan: Adopting Premises – The sneaky debate over legalizing adoptions by gay couples.

‘Several million American children reportedly live in homes with at least one gay parent. In most cases, the same-sex domestic partner of that parent has no legal parental rights or responsibilities. This week, the American Academy of Pediatrics declared that these “co-parents” should be allowed to undertake such rights and responsibilities by adopting their partners’ children. The announcement has provoked outcries from conservatives, with each side claiming to represent science against politics. In truth, each side’s “science” is loaded with politics. Here’s how they fudge the data.’ Slate

In Shift, Bush Says Geneva Rules Fit Taliban Captives but Not Qaeda Members: ‘President Bush decided today that the Geneva Convention would be applied to the Taliban captives being held in Cuba but not to Al Qaeda detainees, a decision that will make little difference in the day-to-day treatment of either but may help protect American soldiers captured in foreign conflicts.

The Bush administration had already decided not to grant prisoner- of-war status to any of the captives, and that decision holds.’ NY Times The grandiose hubris of the Shrub’s claiming the right to decide whenever it’s useful to be above the rule of law is a large part of what fuels resentment of us both among our European ‘allies’ and throughout the developing world. And is there no contradiction between our propagandistic insistence that this is a ‘war’ against terrorism and our transparently self-serving refusal to label our captured opponents prisoners of war?

At least there’s this:

“The decision marks the second victory this week for Secretary Powell, who has at times battled some of his more hard-line cabinet colleagues over foreign policy issues. Earlier this week, he announced that the administration would meet Russia’s demand for a legally binding agreement regarding the reduction of nuclear weapons. Some White House officials had not wanted to tie Washington’s hands with a written arms control agreement.”

I still, however, haven’t decided whether I should consider it pitiful that Colin Powell is the voice of moderation and diplomacy in a sitting administration…

On a related note: Legalizing War Against Iraq — Robert Wright: “One fact you probably won’t hear President Bush mention is that Iraq is in violation of international law. After all, that would require him to utter the phrase ‘international law’. ” Slate

100 Years, 100 Stinkers: The Worst Films of the 20th Century. In all candor, I’ve seen nine on this list, of which I enjoyed, oh probably, three…

“Call me crazy, but it seems like everyone I know is manic-depressive.” Friends in High Places: This writer from the San Jose MetroActive intersperses colorful anecdotes about bipolar (manic depressive) friends and acquaintances with reportage about why the illness is becoming more visible — the lessening stigma to major mental illness, the increasingly accurate recognition and diagnosis of the disease, and the increasingly effective treatments for it that allow normalization of the life of its sufferers (which probably contributes to reason #1) — even though it is probably not becoming more prevalent.

I think that, while this may be true, it is not necessarily the case that the increasing number of people among us who are ‘out of the closet’ with their manic-depressive diagnosis really warrant that diagnosis. One of the deplorable cultural trends shaping my environment as a psychiatrist has been the way in which the increasing medicalization of distress over the time I’ve been in the field has increasingly allowed people to adopt the bipolar diagnosis to explain (to others) and explain away (to themselves) other less palatable categories of labile mood and unstable behavior, especially borderline personality disorders (which, arguably, have become more prevalent in society from decade to decade). Increasing recognition of bipolar disorder dates from around 1970, when the first medication with proven and dramatic stabilizing impact on manic depressive disorder, lithium, entered the pharmacopoeia — because, arguably, one of the important reasons for diagnosis is to recognize something that you can do something about . Other comparably or perhaps even more effective medicines for bipolar mood swings have followed in the intervening decades, making this recognition even more important, but perhaps the diagnosis more circular (how do you know if it’s truly a case of bipolar disease? if the medications that treat bipolar disease are effective against the case. What makes you think these are bipolar medications? They work on bipolars, of course!) But, in point of fact, mood stabilizing medications are non-specifically stabilizing to any cause of fluctuating or labile mood! Too much diagnosis is done by the ‘walks-like-a-duck, quacks-like-a-duck” doctrine, which for the sake of empirical utility throws out almost all subtle depth-derived insight into the human process of a psychiatrically ill patient. Approaching a personality disorder as if it were an unstable mood disorder has profound and misguided consequences unless you believe that all there is to treatment is throwing medications at someone’s life out of balance.

While I’m an adult and not a child psychiatrist, I can’t help being similarly concerned about the last decade’s ‘recognition’ of a hidden epidemic of childhood bipolar disorder (spearheaded by a group of psychiatrists, some of them friends of mine, at the Mass. General Hospital, with lots of pharmaceutical industry grant funding…). Lo and behold, the proponents of this message go through theoretical contortions — not very convincingly, IMHO — to explain that we never recognized childhood bipolar states before because, counterintuitively, they look nothing like manic depression in adults. Predictably, they resemble conduct disorders and oppositional-defiant disorder, childhood analogues and precursors of personality disorders which may not be neurobiological in nature at all. Calling these behavioral disturbances bipolar takes them out of the realm where treatment and training to enhance personal accountability and self-control are conceived as useful. This ‘recognition’ of childhood bipolar disorder is one of the reasons for the explosive growth in prescribing of psychoactive medications to children. The other source of this, of course, is the ‘recognition’ of the epidemic proportion of childhood attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which is now so prevalent in our school-age children that we could almost by current diagnostic practice label the modal behavior of the majority of kids in that age range with a disease! And, of course, being the good cultural materialist that I am, I can’t help pointing out the economic advantages to the two big classes of ‘winners’ that sustain this ‘medicalization of distress’. The pharmaceutical lobby, of course, wins big with the societal adoption of the meme that our emotional and behavioral distress can and should be medicated away. And members of the beleaguered psychiatric profession, struggling to hold onto market share in a managed care environment in which cheaper allied health professions increasingly displace them in conducting psychosocial interventions, do so by insisting they are the only ones who can take care of behavioral or emotional disturbances which are inherently medical or neurobiological in nature. ‘I prescribe, therefore I am’ …

Read your EULA! Some new shrink-wrap license terms seem tailor-made for UCITA. Ed Foster gripes in InfoWorld about the clauses you may be agreeing to when you open a software product’s shrink-wrap — prohibitions on your writing critical reviews or publicizing adverse benchmarking data on the product; arbitrary termination of your contract at the publisher’s whim; the manufacturer’s right to monitor your computing remotely.

Oral sex makes pregnancies safer and more successful – study: “New research suggests oral sex may not only help a woman conceive but may make her pregnancy safer and more successful.

The Australian study found that semen contains a growth factor which helps persuade a mother’s immune system to accept sperm.

It claims to have found evidence that regular exposure before pregnancy, especially by mouth, helps her immune system get used to her partner’s sperm.” Ananova

Babies learn in their sleep — ‘By the time babies are a year old they can recognise a lot of sounds and even simple words. Marie Cheour at the University of Turku in Finland suspected they might progress this fast because they learn language while they sleep as well as when they are awake.’ New Scientist

The Common Thread by John Sulston and Genrgina Ferry:

In 1998, an ambitious American geneticist called Craig Venter announced that his company, Celera Genomics, would get the sequence first, and make it private property. This is the story of how a coalition of scientists fought to ensure that no one could claim to own this information, from the viewpoint of a key combatant: Cambridge scientist John Sulston. The book aims to explain, blow by blow, how the forces of good narrowly won the first battle. It also purports to tell the story of one’s scientist’s life. Independent UK

P2P Faceoff — CNET’s Eliot Van Buskirk: “Six months ago, not long after Napster shuttered its service, I pitted the top eight file-sharing competitors against each other to find out which one found the largest number of MP3s. At the time, Gnotella snared the music-swapping crown. But a lot has changed since July; most of these apps have been updated, and the shifting popularity of the programs means that some of them now work better than others. That’s why I decided to run my survey again. My test methods might not be terribly scientific (after all, everyone has their favorite method of finding and downloading MP3s), but they do give a snapshot of how these various networks are performing.”

Annals of the Decline and Fall (cont’d.): Developed World Sees Rise in Youth Suicide, Murder — ‘Since the mid-1950s, an analysis of data from 26 industrialized nations reveals, the rate of death among adolescents and young adults has decreased by almost 50%. But death rates in this group from motor vehicle accidents, homicide and suicide combined have risen by 17%, according to the analysis.

And among 15- to 34-year-olds in the sampled countries, the US had the second highest rate of death from homicide, and the third highest rate of death due to motor vehicle accidents, the researchers found.’ Reuters Health via Yahoo!

Digging Deep Into Compression. Because file compressibility is intimately related to degree of repetitiousness in data (which differs from language to language and even author to author within languages) researchers have shown that measurement of compressibility with common utilities such as WinZip or StuffIt can “discern the language of mystery texts as short as 20 characters. Furthermore, using a database of 90 texts from 11 different authors, they found their method could even pick out individual authors with a success rate of 93 percent.

Search engines, they say, could use this simple technique to categorize their quarry by semantic content and more qualitative categories such as style and readership level.” Wired

Further analysis of Palm OS 5.0; only around 80% of existing applications will be compatible. The Register

Choosing the Right Enemies: Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, describes the damage to our security which will be done by Dubya’s undiscerning aggregation of “countries like Iran, Iraq and North Korea with their terrorist associates”, particularly with respect to Kim Jong Il. NY Times op-ed Bush’s speech shuts door on tenuous opening to Iran Washington Post; and a commentator finds that Bush’s omission of Syria from the list leaves a bad taste. Ha’Aretz Meanwhile, Angered by snubbing, Libya, China, Syria form Axis of Just as Evil,

Cuba, Sudan, Serbia Form Axis of Somewhat Evil; Other Nations Start Own Clubs. SatireWire

Henry Kloss, 72, Innovator in Audio and Video, Dies. Over the years, my listening pleasure has been channelled through a number of Henry Kloss’ innovations including AR-1, Advemt and KLH speakers, Model 8 and Model One table radios, and of course Dolby B. I’ll continue to think of him… NY Times

A Curator Defends His Show Exploring Nazi Imagery

More than a month before the March 17 opening of his new exhibition, “Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art,” and long before anyone has even seen any of the pieces in the show, the ink is flowing: The Wall Street Journal, The Daily News, Newsweek and The New York Times have all mentioned the exhibition in conjunction with “Sensation,” the Brooklyn Museum of Art show that former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani tried to shut down in 1999.

Mr. Kleeblatt has an odd take on this. The problem, he said, is that at this point “the works are shown only in reproduction” in the catalog. And that is the worst way to see installation art and sculpture, which many of this exhibition’s works are, he noted. These pieces are big and confrontational. They are meant to engage the viewer, to raise questions. They are incomplete without the viewer in the gallery. NY Times

Bye, Bye Love: How Men, Women Dish Out Rejection — ‘It can cut like a knife, or make your brown eyes blue. It’s romantic rejection, and a new study finds big differences in how men and women give would-be partners the brush-off.

When it came to the reasons cited most often for turning someone down, “men and women were different on every one of them,” according to researcher Dr. William F. Chaplin of the University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa.

He and co-researcher Susan Reneau presented their findings here Saturday at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.’ Reuters Health via Yahoo!

[Yeah, but the study was done in Alabama! – FmH]

Thinking robots go to war in fight for survival:

‘With a hiss and a clank, one of the world’s first predatory robots seized its metal prey yesterday, plunged a claw into its electronic heart and then whirred off to a computerised mate to “breed”.

“It’s pure survival of the fittest,” said Noel Sharkey, happily preparing another victim for the arena in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, where the frontiers of artificial intelligence yesterday took a dramatic leap forward.

Designed to mature robotic “thinking”, to allow machines to adapt and survive in extreme conditions without human help, the tests mimic a child’s development with eerie accuracy.

Predators and prey do battle – from next month in front of human audiences at the £42m Magna science centre – for limited supplies of electric power, storing the lessons of victory and defeat in their micro-computers.’ Guardian UK

[The Comedy Channel is probably beating down their door for a t.v. contract… -FmH]

Bush Eyeballs Heavy Tech Spending — Declan McCullagh:

President Bush is asking Congress to grant federal police hundreds of millions of dollars for surveillance, information-sharing and computer upgrades.

In his proposed 2003 budget sent to Capitol Hill on Monday, Bush proposed an unprecedented increase on spending for anti-terrorism efforts, saying that doing so “recognizes the new realities confronting our nation, and funds the war against terrorism and the defense of our homeland.”

Because the complex document is merely a proposal, Congress will spend much of this year wrangling over what form the final budget will take for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, 2002. Wired

Who You Calling Mediasaurus? – The New York Times dodges Michael Crichton’s death sentence. Jack Schafer:

‘ “To my mind, it is likely that what we now understand as the mass media will be gone within ten years,” novelist-filmmaker Michael Crichton wrote in a widely quoted Wired magazine piece, “Mediasaurus,” which he adapted from an April 1993 speech before the National Press Club. “Vanished, without a trace.”

…Replacing the established media within a decade, Crichton predicted, would be an Infotopia in which “artificial intelligence agents” would roam “the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page, or a nightly news show, that addresses my interests.”

…Where did Crichton go wrong? (Where did I go wrong?) Fables of the near future have a way of never materializing, whether they be fevered dreams of nuclear energy too cheap to meter or fossil fuels too expensive to burn. To be fair, Crichton wasn’t the only one to get puking drunk on the new media moonshine. Many of us spent a lost weekend—sometimes months—in a stupor after reading early issues of Wired. But instead of blotting out conventional media, the emerging Infotopia seems only to have made the conventional media more ubiquitous.’ Slate

The Few, the Proud, the Marins – A top conservative is wrong about John Walker. Scott Shuger:

It is, to say the least, hard to believe that a young American could have ended up in the Taliban. But saying the least is not the conservative’s discourse of choice. And so it was that soon after John Walker’s dirty, bearded face was beamed worldwide, conservative commentator Shelby Steele appeared on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page with a 1,100-word unified Walker theory, which boiled down to this: The 20-year-old Walker could do what he did only because his formative years were spent in hot-tubbing, wine-loving, liberal Marin County, California. Steele explained that in Marin “there are no external yes’s and no’s, or rights and wrongs … just the fashionable relativism (Islam is as good as the family Catholicism) that makes places like Marin so cool,” and that there, “a little anti-Americanism becomes a sophistication, a mark of authenticity.”

A few days later, the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, detecting a rash generalization, begged to differ. “I am willing to wager,” Cohen wrote, “that most of the kids born in 1981 (or any year, for that matter) are still in America. In fact, there may be more of them with the U.S. armed forces than with the Taliban. I am way out on a limb on that one, I know.” Slate

High-Risk Sex Among Men Linked to Childhood Abuse

Men who were sexually abused as children are more likely to engage in unsafe sexual practices as adults, putting them at higher risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV, a new study has found.

“We often think of childhood sexual abuse as a problem for women and ignore or discount the impact of such abuse for men…(so) I think that the findings highlight the importance of childhood sexual abuse among men,” lead author Dr. Colleen Dilorio of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, told Reuters Health. Men who were sexually abused as children are more likely to engage in unsafe sexual practices as adults, putting them at higher risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV, a new study has found.

“We often think of childhood sexual abuse as a problem for women and ignore or discount the impact of such abuse for men…(so) I think that the findings highlight the importance of childhood sexual abuse among men,” lead author Dr. Colleen Dilorio of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, told Reuters Health. Yahoo!

Faults Suggest a High Calling for Delphi Priestesses: “…evidence is growing that the priestesses, known as pythia, were ripped on hydrocarbon gases, especially ethylene, a sometime anesthetic which, taken in modest doses, can induce lively conversation of a somewhat incoherent nature.” Washington Post

Sesame Street Getting Huge Makeover: “Rest assured, Elmo is keeping his red fur. And his goldfish. The street won’t be different, but the way it’s presented to young viewers will be.” Yahoo!

“Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) studies the relationships between mental states and the nervous, endocrine, and immune systems. Among the issues it focuses upon are how mental states, in general, and belief states, in particular, affect physical health. The book examines a series of PNI topics that relate to religious faith and behavior. The contributors argue that religious involvement and belief can affect certain neuroendocrine and immune mechanisms, and that these mechanisms, in turn, positively affect a wide variety of health outcomes, such as susceptibility to cancer and recovery following surgery. This book is the first to present medical research establishing a connection between religion and health and to examine the implications for Eastern and Western religious traditions and for society and culture.” Oxford Uiversity Press

Geov Parrish: Bush’s Sickening Super Bowl Propaganda: “During America’s most jingoistic sporting event, Bush spent $3.2 million to convince us that drug use equals terrorism. It would be laughable nonsense if it wasn’t so horribly misleading.” AlterNet

Bush’s Death Squads: “It now seems likely, given the unprecedented ‘license to kill’ President Bush granted to the CIA (after 9-11), there was U.S. complicity in the murders of the following individuals. Human rights commissions and war crime tribunals in Belgium and France should take a close look at these likely criminal misadventures…” Analysis by Wayne Madsen, formerly with the NSA. Cryptome

“President Bush has been keeping a “war on terrorism scorecard” in his desk drawer and using it to cross off photographs of al-Qa’eda and Taliban leaders as they have been killed or captured.

“Early on, I said, ‘I’m a baseball fan. I want a scorecard’,” Mr Bush explained in an interview with Bob Woodward of the Washington Post.’ Telegraph UK

apparently while he was in office, and perhaps planned further attempts on world leaders, United Press International has learned.

Specific references to Clinton were found among handwritten notes and sketches of U.S. Secret Service protective methods recovered from the Shomali compound near Kabul where al Qaida members received specialized training in assassination and hostage taking.” UPI

Peter Spiro, a former State Department lawyer and NSC staff member, now a professor at Hofstra Law School: Deploying A Law Enforcement Model In The Fight Against Terrorism

President Bush claimed in his State of the Union address earlier this week that “our war against terror is only beginning.” In fact, this war is over — except, perhaps, in a metaphorical sense.

Military operations are winding down in Afghanistan, and normalcy is returning on the domestic front. Leaving aside the horrific civilian casualties on September 11 itself, this conflict closely parallels our experience with such other recent deployments abroad as the Kosovo campaign. It was quick and neat, with few American casualties. The conflict demanded no direct sacrifice at home; far from the economic deprivations and military service requirements of real wars, in this one civilians were asked only to deploy their purchasing power.

Now that the engagement in Afghanistan is over, its aftermath is better addressed through a law enforcement model than under the model President Bush has suggested, of a continuing war that operates for an indefinite period of time, and is not ended even by the cessation of hostilities. The events of September 11 have demonstrated the obsolescence of old models of conflict premised on hostilities among states, from both a domestic and international perspective. Under domestic law, that means rejecting extraordinary procedures, such as the proposed military tribunals, and pursuing terrorists as we pursue criminals, within normal constitutional constraints.

FindLaw

I agree entirely; I have been a proponent of a law enforcement model for responding to 9-11 ever since and, like Spiro, I cannot refer to the “war” on terrorism without putting “war” in quotes.

Banished Words List: Lake Superior State University

Every New Year’s Day since 1976 the University has issued an annual “List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-Use, Over-Use or General Uselessness” compiled from nominations sent from all over the world, covering all manner of word or phraseology which some consider to be worthy of exile.

“For more than a quarter-century our list has rooted out grammatical subterfuge at the source,” says a spokesman for the word-sifters. “Doublespeak and sloppy talk continue to flourish. Now is not the time to drop our guard.”

Much Riding on Palm’s New OS. In conjunction with the OS change, Palm is going from a 33 MHz Motorolla Dragonball processor to a Texas Instruments ARM chip that will reportedly clock better than 200 MHz. “While the Palm OS 5 operating system — which analysts and applications developers expect to ship in early 2003 — is faster and can handle more robust multimedia applications than the current OS, it doesn’t take advantage of the multimedia capabilities of the Be operating system that Palm purchased last September.” Wired

Motivational Effects of Cannabinoids Are Mediated by µ-Opioid and [kappa ]-Opioid Receptors. This study by a Spanish-French research team using a ‘knockout’ mouse model (in which mice are genetically engineered to lack a class of neuroreceptors) produced the surprising finding that the modulation of reward pathways produced by THC is mediated by opiate receptors. J. Neurosci. — Abstracts: 22 (3): 1146

Philips Burning on Protection: ‘Electronics manufacturer Philips has been fanning the flames in the fight over copy-protected music CDs, threatening to undermine the record industry’s attempts to tinker with disc formats in order to thwart music pirates.

Could Philips take on the major labels and win? Yes, it could — but the company may only be hastening the death of the 20-year-old compact disc format.’ Wired

Confusing the Facts of the GAO-Cheney Dispute — ‘An analysis of the rhetoric from presidential spokesperson Ari Fleischer and Vice President Cheney reveals a disturbing pattern of dissembling that has caused much of the confusion. The two have consistently exaggerated the GAO’s request to make it appear unreasonable and to paint the administration as a victim.’ Spinsanity