From the Guardian, a series of primers on ‘difficult’ art forms:

• Jonathan Freedland on minimalism
  

• Stuart Jeffries on installation art
  

• Stephen Poole on sound art
  

• Adam Sweeting on soap operas
  

• Gary Younge on country music
  

• Libby Brooks on performance art
  

• Giles Foden on pottery
  

• Claire Armistead on video art
  

• Simon Hattenstone on electronic music
  

• Stephen Moss on modern architecture
  

• Jonathan Jones on jazz
  

• John Sutherland on surrealism
  

• Mark Lawson on ballet
  

I got this from the newly-relocated [sub]culture . [Some of these art forms don’t seem so ‘difficult’ to me…]

A massive compendium of Social Criticism source materials, categorized very intelligently. [via William Fields, who said “Holy shamoley!” when he found this…]

Via the null device, Mayo researchers can’t prove power of prayer. No difference in outcome between cardiac patients unknowingly prayed for over six months and matched controls. “The study drew immediate criticism as an attempt to measure God’s will.” Perhaps S/He made sure not to listen to these particular entreaties in order to punish the blaspheming researchers? Duluth Tribune Naturally, if the recipient of prayer knows about it, it’s a different story. That’s called, of course, the placebo effect, an erroneously disparaging term about an erroneously discredited phenomenon that is behind a far greater proportion of the healing benefits of medical interventions than we are willing to concede…

Suspect Claims Al Qaeda Hacked Microsoft – Expert

A suspected member of the Al Qaeda terrorist network claimed that Islamic militants infiltrated Microsoft and sabotaged the company’s Windows XP operating system, according to a source close to Indian police.

Mohammad Afroze Abdul Razzak, arrested by Mumbai (Bombay) police Oct. 2, has admitted to helping plot terrorist attacks in India, Britain and Australia, India’s Hindustan Times newspaper reported Saturday.

During interrogation, Afroze, 25, also claimed that a member or members of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network, posing as computer programmers, were able to gain employment at Microsoft and attempted to plant “trojans, trapdoors, and bugs in Windows XP,” according to Ravi Visvesvaraya Prasad, a New Delhi information systems and telecommunication consultant. NewsBytes

Further reason not to upgrade to Windows XP (which I’ve discussed before) even if you’re opting to remain in Microsoft’s grip; or to consider finally moving to Linux…

“It started last week with Jennifer Balderama’s Where Internet Promises Remain Unfulfilled article on CNET followed by Doc’s Fulfilling the Promise response and Jennifer’s guest blogger answers to Doc’s issues. After that Doc invited Jennifer to start a blog and Jennifer made it happen with her new blog on Friday….” Commentary from the Keep Trying metablog [via blogger.com]

Saudi stability on borrowed time: ‘Saudi Arabia expects a $12 billion budget shortfall for fiscal 2002. Unwilling or unable to turn to outside creditors, the government is considering a path of economic and social reform that could fuel public frustration and lead to upheaval. An embattled Riyadh will impact the stability of the entire Arabian Peninsula and strain relations with Washington.’ StratFor

Planespotters to be freed on bail: “Fourteen tourists on a Greek aircraft-spotting holiday may have spent six weeks in prison thanks, in part, to a quirk of mathematics. Planespotters, like trainspotters, are obsessed with collecting the numbers of the vehicles that they see – and unfortunately this habit is indistinguishable from one form of hostile intelligence-gathering…

The Greek authorities have expressed concern over records of serial numbers from the tailplanes of helicopters at the base. A handful of such numbers can reveal a surprising amount of information about total number of pieces of equipment and even production capacity.” New Scientist

This, about the band 3 Mustaphas 3, is apparently (a part of) my earliest usenet post (the beginning of the first sentence, which explains how I got to be there, being truncated), according to the new Google groups 20-year searchable archive. This archive enhancement turns out to be moderately embarrassing. If your searches are sorted by relevance rather than date, what comes up at the top of the list of a search for me is a discussion about whether I was a “bad trader”, one of the ultimate epithets on rec.music.gdead, i.e. whether I had stiffed someone in a tape trade. I hadn’t.

David Corn: The more Bush Grows, the more he stays the same:

My, how he’s grown! That’s the cliché tossed around by pundits and politicos about George W. Bush, deployed especially by those who never fancied W.

The plot-line: smirky boy-President, in the post-9/11 crucible, becomes a man and a true leader. Bush loyalists have simultaneously pooh-poohed and encouraged such talk. They certainly cannot admit their boss was a lightweight to start, and they deny he needed maturation. But they are eager to enhance (and exploit) his image as a strong, in-charge wartime president… The surprise is not that Bush has done all this reasonably well; the surprise would have been had he, a professional politician and presidential son who (like most pols) is surrounded by image-makers and communications specialists, not been able to seize the moment. I imagine that even Al Gore would have been able to rally the nation following the horrific assaults of September 11. Perhaps Michael Dukakis, too. (It is doubtful, though, that Republicans and conservatives would have been as supportive of a Commander Gore as the Democrats have been of Bush had Gore, like Bush, waited several weeks before initiating retaliation.)

This is not a knock on Bush, whose job approval rating appears to be approaching 137 percent. Here comes the knock: his growth has not changed much. On substance, he remains the same sort of president he was prior to September 11… Arrogant unilateralism, a continuing obsession with tax cuts for the well-heeled. The newly-somber George W. Bush, having confronted the harsh realities of war, has dropped the adolescent-like smirk, but there are some things he has not grown out of.AlterNet [thanks to BookNotes]

Unto us a lamb is given: on the long and happy friendship that existed between men and sheep before the present slaughter began. “So far this year we have slaughtered and burnt four-and-a-half million of them; it may not be enough. We are planning to kill or castrate hundreds of thousands more. The government is awarding itself powers to destroy any it chooses, and no right of appeal will exist. We have declared total war on sheep.” Spectator UK

Unto us a lamb is given: on the long and happy friendship that existed between men and sheep before the present slaughter began. “So far this year we have slaughtered and burnt four-and-a-half million of them; it may not be enough. We are planning to kill or castrate hundreds of thousands more. The government is awarding itself powers to destroy any it chooses, and no right of appeal will exist. We have declared total war on sheep.” Spectator UK

Unto us a lamb is given: on the long and happy friendship that existed between men and sheep before the present slaughter began. “So far this year we have slaughtered and burnt four-and-a-half million of them; it may not be enough. We are planning to kill or castrate hundreds of thousands more. The government is awarding itself powers to destroy any it chooses, and no right of appeal will exist. We have declared total war on sheep.” Spectator UK

Why I’m Not Sending Christmas Cards This Year: “As much as our leaders want us all to get back to normal, it’s time to admit that when it comes to going postal — this is not your father’s mail. Now that postal workers are suddenly on the front line of the war against terror, shouldn’t the generous spirit of Christmas dictate that we contribute not one more piece of inessential mail to their substantial load?” Arianna Huffington

Bin Laden videotape was result of a sting: “This weekend, as the debate the tape has provoked continued across the Islamic world, several intelligence sources have suggested to The Observer that the tape, although absolutely genuine, is the result of a sophisticated sting operation run by the CIA through a second intelligence service, possibly Saudi or Pakistani.

‘They needed someone whom they could persuade or coerce to get close to bin Laden and someone whom bin Laden would feel secure talking to. If it works, you have got the perfect evidence at the perfect moment,’ said one security source. ‘It’s a masterstroke.’ ” Guardian UK [On the other hand, if the tape was disinformation and doubtful reactions began to accumulate, they could be countered neatly with the rumor that it was a CIA sting, simultaneously asserting its authenticity and explaining its fortuitously-timed appearance.]

Hate Hits the Mainstream. Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center says that, while everyone has bent over backwards to show tolerance for Muslims in the wake of the war on terrorism, anti-Semitism has gone mainstream across the Arab world, unacknowledged and uncountered. LA Times

The irrepressible Molly Ivins: Watch Out for Those Bush Photo-Ops

“When George W. Bush was governor of Texas, many political observers had a theory that whenever he started holding photo ops with adorable little children, it was time to grab your wallet because it meant some unconscionable giveaway to the corporations was in the wind.

I did not fully subscribe to the theory, but having noticed a number of adorable-child ops in the past few weeks, I decided to check for what might be flying under the radar…” Common Dreams

Wind may explain mystery anthrax cases New Scientist

Coming to a Mall Near You: Just War: “The phrase, ‘Just War,’ used in reference to the battle being waged in Afghanistan, is beginning to resonate. Not as a deep philosophical concept, but like the names of those specialty stores you find in shopping malls: ‘Just Lamps,’ ‘Just Bulbs,’ and ‘Just Paper.’ In fact, ‘Just War’ turns out to be an eerily accurate marquee for the little shop known as The United States of America. War, to the increasing exclusion of everything else, is the only thing that America collectively cares about anymore.” David Potorti, brother of a 9-11 attack victim, in CommonDreams

Bin Laden’s voice ‘heard in Tora Bora’ — ‘US troops apparently intercepted radio messages last week which showed that Osama Bin Laden was still commanding his forces in the area.’ BBC

W. G. Sebald, Elegiac German Novelist, Is Dead at 57: “…(T)he profoundly elegiac and distinctive author of Austerlitz and other novels and one of the most acclaimed of contemporary writers was killed yesterday in an automobile accident in Norfolk, England, near his home in Norwich in East Anglia. He was 57.” NY Times

Tongue piercing causes brain abscess New Scientist

An Israeli company reportedly knows who calls whom in virtually every phone call made in US Fox News

Report: London Attack Plan Found: ‘A British newspaper said it has found a notebook at an al-Qaida training camp in southern Afghanistan that contained a terrorist “blueprint” for an attack on London.’ Washington Post

Don’t Throw It Away — ‘Grammatical English is now the near-exclusive province of the middle-aged and elderly because it hasn’t been formally taught in most schools (on my side of the Atlantic, at least) for about thirty years. Knowledge of the mechanics of how words, clauses, and phrases are hooked up to form sentences and paragraphs has been withheld from most children for such a long time that clear grammatical precision is now a rarity.

Those few young people who do learn it, seem to pick it up, against the odds, by instinct. Even then they’ve no template of understanding with which to correct their own writing when something goes wrong.’ The Vocabula Review

Nice Distinctions: “(A) word whose meaning is ambiguous is likely to be shunned by those who would make their meaning clear…” The Vocabula Review

The Grammar of Anthony Burgess’s The Eve of Saint Venus: “Simply to speak ill of those who truly deserve it shows a lack of imagination. All it requires is simple description. An infinitely more engaging task is merely to praise those who we think are worth our consideration — and ignore the rest. This positively dispraises the unmentioned by implication.

And, indeed, a very effective way for tenure-track literature teachers to stay on track while helping their students distinguish between sound literature and literary litter is to require that those students read good writing to learn what good writing is, and Cliff Notes to prepare for department-wide exams. Those teachers who are given tenure can then stop assigning Cliff Notes to, for instance, that recent well-seller that has a male dolphin kill the bad guy by raping him. Merely to notice such grotesqueries is to seem to elevate them beyond their proper status — that of literary litter.

Literary litter lays claim to the title of authentic literature because, among other reasons, it observes all the rules of grammar. Because grammar, if not virtue, can be taught, much of today’s literary litter exhibits good grammar along with its bad taste. But good grammar is as appropriate to literary litter as jewels and expensive cosmetics are to loathsome hags. This essay written in praise of the grammar of Anthony Burgess’s The Eve of Saint Venus addresses the difference between grammar used as drabs use jewels and lipstick, and those very same rules of grammar used as the necessary and appropriate complement to good writing. But if we are to think that a readership is correct in judging a book to be authentic literature merely because it is written following the rules of grammar, then we must conclude that grammar has the power to turn sows’ ears into silk purses. Grammar cannot do this, and the readership that thinks it can is clear neither about what a sow’s ear looks like nor what a silk purse looks like — an easily understood mistake. After all, each can be used to carry small change, and small change, whatever sort of purse is used to carry it in, is still small change.” The Vocabula Review

Dying to know the truth: visions of a dying brain, or false memories? Thoughtful commentary about out-of-body experiences during near-death events and whether they indicate consciousness without brain function, as several recent research studies have suggested. The commentator is at the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at the University of London:

The nature of mind-brain relationships and the possibility of life-after-death are some of the most profound issues relating to mankind’s place in the universe. The report in today’s Lancet by Pim van Lommel and colleagues of near-death experiences (NDEs) in survivors of a cardiac arrest provides intriguing data that are relevant to these issues. Theirs is the second prospective study of this type, the first being a smaller-scale study done in Southampton by Parnia and colleagues. Both groups of researchers think that their findings indicate a need for radical revision of current assumptions about the relationship between consciousness and brain function. van Lommel and colleagues ask, “How could a clear consciousness outside one’s body be experienced at the moment that the brain no longer functions during a period of clinical death with flat EEG?”. But the truth is that nobody knows when the NDEs reported by these patients actually occurred. Was it really during the period of flat EEG or might they have occurred as the patients rapidly entered or gradually recovered from that state? The Lancet [free acces; requires registration]

Capitol Hill Anthrax Matches Army’s Stocks. This is in direct contradiction to a government spokesperson’s claim that the terrorist anthrax was of a different strain than the weaponized anthrax the US has recently produced at Dugway (secretly, and in violation of the US commitment to refrain from production of biological weapons), about which I wrote below.

Genetic fingerprinting studies indicate that the anthrax spores mailed to Capitol Hill are identical to stocks of the deadly bacteria maintained by the U.S. Army since 1980, according to scientists familiar with the most recent tests.

Although many laboratories possess the Ames strain of anthrax involved in this fall’s bioterrorist attacks, only five laboratories so far have been found to have spores with perfect genetic matches to those in the Senate letters, the scientists said. And all those labs can trace back their samples to a single U.S. military source: the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Md. Washington Post

The Nose Knows: How the Olfactory Influences Conduct: ‘Olfaction, says neuroscientist Cori Bargmann, University of California, San Francisco, holds a key that might unlock the different strategies involved in assembling complex behaviors. Many scientists view olfaction research as a way of gaining understanding not only about the sense of smell, but also about the biology of behavior. According to neurobiologist Stuart Firestein, Columbia University, some envision the olfactory system as a model for signal transduction, including receptor-ligand interactions, modulation by second messengers, ion channel gating, and the long-term mechanisms of adaptation and desensitization.’ The Scientist

Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment ed. Randolph Nesse:

Commitment is at the core of social life. We live in a social fabric woven from a warp of promises and a weft of threats, and we spend much of our lives deciding which commitments are credible, and trying to manage our own commitments and reputations. Classical economics and sociobiology sometimes seem to suggest that this should not be too hard, because people should generally act in ways that benefit themselves or their genes. While reciprocity and kin selection are indeed powerful principles, attempts to force all behavior into their Procrustean bed have aroused much intellectual consternation and moral indignation. This conflict has deepened the rift between biological and social sciences. Commitment offers a bridge across this chasm. In this book, some of the world’s most distinguished researchers examine the nature of commitment, and the question of whether our capacities for making, assessing and keeping commitments have been shaped by natural selection. Many commitments are fairly straightforward attempts influence others by giving up options and thereby making it worthwhile to fulfill the commitment. Examples include burning your bridges behind you or signing a contract. However many commitments are not enforced by such tangible incentives. These subjective commitments are enforced by pledges of reputation and by emotions. Some are benevolent, such as a promise of life-long love. Others are not, such as a threat to murder a straying spouse. Although some such commitments may seem irrational in the extreme, they nonetheless influence us. Commitment thus offers a possible evolutionary explanation for irrational passions that are otherwise difficult to explain, and for our moral capacities.

Unto us a lamb is given: on the long and happy friendship that existed between men and sheep before the present slaughter began. “So far this year we have slaughtered and burnt four-and-a-half million of them; it may not be enough. We are planning to kill or castrate hundreds of thousands more. The government is awarding itself powers to destroy any it chooses, and no right of appeal will exist. We have declared total war on sheep.” Spectator UK

Connect the Enron Dots to Bush: “Enron is Whitewater in spades. This isn’t just some rinky-dink land investment like the one dredged up by right-wing enemies to haunt the Clinton White House–but rather it has the makings of the greatest presidential scandal since the Teapot Dome.” The Nation [thanks, David]

• Looking beyond Yasir Arafat: “…Arafat is a spent figure whose usefulness is rapidly dwindling, but he may still be able to help make a transition to a new generation of moderate Palestinian leaders.” NY Times editorial
• William Pfaff: Silly Question: Support the Palestinian Authority or Hamas? International Herald Tribune op-ed
• Michael Lerner: Unholy alliance — how Sharon and Hamas work in concert against peace Salon

On a BBC chatboard, the majority of both US and foreign contributors are skeptical about the authenticity of the bin Laden tape.

Free speech advocates are worried that a recent federal appeals decision could have a chilling effect on online journalists who use hyperlinks to direct readers to relevant, newsworthy sites that contain illegal material.

Even more troubling, the critics say, may be an emerging double standard in the way courts treat traditional print publishers and their online offshoots, especially when it concerns printing a controversial address in a newspaper vs. linking to it from a Web page.

The recent, high-level judicial guidance on the law of linking came about in a relatively overlooked part of a widely-reported decision two weeks ago in the so-called “DeCSS” case. NY Times

Bush Invokes Executive Privilege: ‘President Bush invoked executive privilege for the first time Thursday to keep Congress from seeing documents of prosecutors’ decision-making in cases ranging from a decades-old Boston murder to the Clinton-era fund-raising probe.

“I believe congressional access to these documents would be contrary to the national interest,” Bush wrote in a memo ordering Attorney General John Ashcroft to withhold the documents from a House investigative committee that subpoenaed them.

The decision institutes a dramatic change in the way the administration intends to deal with Congress after years in which the Justice Department, sometimes reluctantly, shared sensitive investigative documents with lawmakers.

Republicans and Democrats alike excoriated the decision, suggesting Bush was creating a “monarchy” or “imperial” presidency to keep Congress for overseeing the executive branch and guarding against corruption.

The Republican House committee chairman who sought the documents raised the possibility of taking Bush to court for contempt of Congress.’ Associated Press

Morons.org – Who Said It?

Attorney General John Ashcroft has been sounding a lot like former Senator Joseph McCarthy, infamous for starting the “Red Scare” of the 1950’s, finding communists at every turn, especially in people who disagreed with his witch hunt.

Test your knowledge of history and the present. See if you can tell Ashcroft from McCarthy in our “who said it” test. To make it more difficult we’ve replaced words like “communist” and “terrorist” with “___”.

And The Progressive has a New McCarthyism Watch. Read what happened to a nonviolence activist who went to a post office in Chicago and asked for 4,000 stamps for a political mailing they were putting out — but didn’t want stamps with the American flag on them! And, to make matters worse, he wanted to pay cash!

How We Lost Afghanistan

Now a Third Afghan War is wrapping up its final act around Kandahar, and a laughable band of charlatans has lobbied in Bonn, Germany, for the right to rule the unruly. Somehow, if the Bushalopes and the Annanites are to be believed, a New Democratic Afghanistan will be cobbled together from the Hekmatyars and Dostums and Rabbanis, all united under the banner of an 87-year-old king who owes more to Fellini than to Shah Mohammed. And get this: After the Afghan parliament gets together, the burkas will come off, the Fairway will open up next to the main gate of the Kabul bazaar, and that Internet-famous Unocal pipeline project, dormant for far too long, will begin sucking Kazakh crude out from under the Caspian and into the Pakistani port of Karachi. Next mission: bombing Iraq into capitalism.

The networks aired maps turning from Taliban red to Northern Alliance blue, but here on the ground, as people who prefer to remain anywhere-but like to say, no such thing occurred. Dasht-e Qaleh and Taloqan and Kunduz all “fell,” but 99 percent of the conquerors were Taliban troops who shed their beards and turbans and picked up Shah Masood’s hip hat for a buck. There were, before September 11, a mere 6000 to 20,000 Northern Alliance soldiers holding the eastern portion of Takhar province and the extremely mountainous Badakhshan and Wakhan corridor, an inland peninsula created as a buffer zone between imperial Russia and British India during the 19th century.

When your taxpayer-funded $75,000 bombs began pounding frontline Taliban positions and the not-so-occasional farming village, the age-old Afghan tradition of ideological flexibility and self-preservation led thousands of Taliban to cross the lines to “defect.” “I am so sorry,” a Taliban commander cried in the welcoming arms of his Northern Alliance counterpart a day before Kunduz “fell.” “We are brothers and should not have fought.”

Finally, a rare truth in a land of lies—both men had fought together in the Taliban and before that against the Soviets. The vast majority of “Northern Alliance” fighters now were Taliban a few weeks ago; welcome to the first fashion war of the new millennium. Village Voice

Farewell Message from Azzam Publications – for Jihad and Mujahideen. It’s about war between Islam and the West, stupid… [via Red Rock Eaters]

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Islam: ‘Because representative government is a concept that originated in the West in accordance with a non-Muslim worldview, the question of the suitability of democracy for governing Islamic states and peoples has long been up for debate. A number of Atlantic articles from the early to the late twentieth century have addressed the issue from a variety of perspectives.’ The Atlantic

Khaled Abou El Fadl, Distinguished Fellow in Islamic Law at UCLA and author of Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law: The Place of Tolerance in Islam On reading the Qur’an — and misreading it. Boston Review

A Setback for Missile Shield as Booster Rocket Fails Test: ‘A test of a prototype booster rocket for missile defense failed today when the rocket veered off course seconds after liftoff and had to be destroyed over the Pacific Ocean, the Pentagon said.’ Unfortunately, test failures probably won’t prevent deployment, now the ABM Treaty is abrogated. NY Times

Making a MEMRI — ‘Washington-based Middle East Media Research Institute spreads hate speech, baseless conspiracy theories and vicious calumny in a blatant effort to discredit Arabs and stir up malice toward Muslims. And they’re providing a pretty valuable service in the process.’ Online Journalism Review (OJR)

My son is prescient. Longtime FmH readers will know he was way ahead of the curve in his fondness for Harry Potter, which entire series we read aloud (admittedly not from the time of publication of the first book, but from slightly before the second book came out). In recent months, we’ve been devouring this series together; it’s starting to be touted as The Next Big Thing A.P. (after Potter). The books are enthralling, but the bulge in the author’s cheek from his tongue and his obfuscation about his identity are abit precious for my taste. Reading increasingly common portraits of the “Who is Lemony Snicket?” ilk tempts one to say “Oh, come off it already” if not something far more rude. Oh, and the series is published by HarperCollins (see below). Guardian UK

The world’s new look: ‘Globalisation creates the conditions for such things. Arguably, it will lead tomorrow to the development of the company-state which, just like Bin Laden, will take over countries that are empty, unstructured and prey to endemic disorder, to use them for its own ends. In this respect Bin Laden may be a terrifying precursor.’ Le Monde Diplomatique

U.S. Recently Produced Anthrax in a Highly Lethal Powder Form. The significance of this revelation is not that Dugway might be the source of the purified anthrax used in the Daschle and Leahy letters — spokespeople say that it is of a different strain, and that none of it has gone missing — but that this is the first disclosure of US biological weapons production since our supposed 1969 renunciation of biological warfare and destruction of our arsenal of germ agents. NY Times

Racism Not Hardwired, Scientists Say

In recent years a number of studies have reached the same thorny conclusion about human cognition: when encountering a person for the first time, our brains automatically make note of the individual’s race. But new research indicates that this is not necessarily the case. Findings reported today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicate that even brief exposure to an alternative social world can markedly diminish the extent to which people categorize others by race. The results suggest that racism may be an erasable by-product of cognitive adaptations that evolved to detect coalitions and alliances. Scientific American

Michael Moore’s publisher tells him his forthcoming book Stupid White Men and Other Excuses for the State of the Nation will not be distributed, and the print run will be destroyed, because the content is offensive and he is intellectually dishonest for not saying that the President has done a “good job” in recent months. The copyright and publishing rights revert to him in six months; meanwhile, his attorneys are trying to rectify the situation. He told the public gathering where he announced this, however, that he doesn’t want a public outcry because people have more important things about which to take action. IMHO, however, it doesn’t take too much time to write a shaming letter to HarperCollins, if Moore’s version of things is accurate… Update: Two readers comment:

• “why is moore doing business w harper collins anyway? pretty sure it is
  
  owned by fox/murdoch…”

• “I was annoyed to learn too that Gore Vidal’s new book, and an excerpt from it
  
  planned for Vanity Fair, were cancelled by publishers because it was deemed
  
  too critical of the U.S.”

Reading the transcript of the bin Laden video tape, one wonders how the obvious embarrassment to the Saudis will affect the “alliance against terror”. Speaking of the devil, US ties to Saudi elite may be hurting war on terrorism, reports the Boston Herald.

U.S. Considers Restricting Cellphone Use in Disasters. “Federal officials are working on a plan to close cellphone networks to almost everyone but government officials in the event of another major emergency like the Sept. 11 attacks, officials said.

The move is intended to prevent the networks from being so clogged with calls that emergency workers cannot communicate. But there is some concern among cellphone companies about the costs and the possible public outcry if people cannot contact loved ones in an emergency.” NY Times

Rotten in the state of Denmark? Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist has received sensational coverage in proclaiming that we don’t need to fear ecological disaster. In a special issue of Grist magazine, a panel of acknowledged authorities on various environmental topics subjects the book to rigorous scrutiny and finds its thesis seriously wanting. Lomborg is a political scientist and has not published one paper in the areas on which he declaims in the book, they note. tompaine.com

A Long, Strange Trip to the Taliban. Long, typical Newsweek portrait of John Walker, with this interesting, central paragraph about his conversion:

Walker discovered his passion for Islam online, after sampling other possibilities. At the age of 14, under the handle “doodoo,” he was visiting Web sites for hip-hop music with particularly crude raps on sex and violence. In one e-mail posting, he scorned a critic of hip-hop as a “worthless d—krider.” In one e-mail at the height of his fascination with hip-hop, he appeared to pose as an African-American, writing, “Our blackness should not make white people hate us.” But as he got older, he veered to a very different direction. He began visiting Islamic Web sites, asking questions like “Is it all right to watch cartoons on TV or in the movies?” His family says the turning point may have come at the age of 16 when he read “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” which describes the conversion to Islam of the famous black militant. Some Internet postings examined by NEWSWEEK show that young Walker soon became pretty militant himself. In a 1997 message to a hip-hop site, he demanded to know why a rapper named Nas “is indeed a ‘God’? If this is so,” Walker indignantly asks, “then why does he smoke blunts, drink Moet, fornicate, and make dukey music? That’s a rather pathetic ‘god’, if you ask me.” He quizzes an online correspondent about the Five Percent Nation of Islam—a small North American sect—about its adherents’ vision of bliss and how to pursue it. “I have never seen happiness myself,” writes Walker. “Perhaps you can enlighten me … where I can go to sneak a peek at it.” Selling off his hip-hop CD collection on a rap-music message board, he converted to Islam.

Bombing Raises Question of Al Qaeda Fate. “If the United States does in the last phase of the Afghan war wage a campaign of extermination against the network’s leaders — for example, by refusing to accept surrenders so it can continue bombing the Tora Bora caves where some al Qaeda members are holed up — it may lose international support by appearing overly vengeful and, some legal experts say, could even find itself accused of war crimes.” Washington Post

Stanley Kauffmann reviews Todd Field’s In the Bedroom, adapted from an André Dubus story. “In the Bedroom leaves us with the happy knowledge that with Field the American film scene, continually deplored as scraggly, can boast another admirable directing talent.” Quite rightly, Kauffmann also alludes to Egoyan’s Sweet Hereafter. The New Republic

‘Designer babies’ to save siblings get UK go-ahead — ‘The production of babies genetically selected to save the lives of their seriously ill siblings is now permitted in the UK. The controversial procedure, which has led to claims of the creation of “designer babies”, is already legal in the US.’ New Scientist

Lifting the lid on jar problem: Dutch scientists have finally solved that age-old problem, by finding the optimal torque to apply to a jar lid to close it to the maximum tightness that everyone can open. New Scientist

Did Noah really need the ark? Doubts cast on 1997 findings of a cataclysmic Bosporus flood around 7000 BC that may have been the historical basis of the Deluge myth. Globe and Mail

Are men emotional mummies? Psychologists line up across a great divide over ‘normative male alexithymia’. APA Monitor

Brain links pain with pleasure. New research suggests that areas of the brain that react to pleasure also respond to pain. Surprising finding only to Western dichotomists. BBC

France debates right not to be born Christian Science Monitor

Underwater phonebooth??

The tailor who created the emperor’s new clothes: ‘Artists have been challenging what we perceive to be art for nearly a century, from Marcel Duchamp’s provocative placement of a signed urinal in an open-submission exhibition in 1917, to Yves Klein’s empty white gallery exhibited as The Void in 1958. Perhaps we should be grateful that in Creed’s Turner Prize artwork, the lights go on and off every five seconds – in 1966, Arte Povera artist Alighiero e Boetti unveiled his Yearly Lamp, which flickered into life on only one unspecified day per year.’ Charlotte Mullins, former editor of Art Review and anti-minimalist, on the Turner Prize. Independent UK

Mobiles meet primal urge to gossip: ‘A study into the evolution and effects of gossip found that it was an inherent need in order to maintain our social, psychological and physical well-being and that the mobile phone was the primary way of satisfying that need.’ Telegraph UK

When It Comes to Romance, Listen to Your Friends — ‘When it comes to predicting whether or not a heterosexual romantic relationship is going to last, the female partner’s friends seem to be particularly astute, according to new study findings.’ Reuters Health

September 11 research claims ‘evidence’ of global consciousness: “Researchers say computers set up to generate random numbers produced a mysterious pattern on September 11.

They say it may be evidence of a global consciousness which affected the world around us.” Ananova

Human Life Span Will Continue to Increase, Researchers Suggest

— ‘University of California, Davis researchers propose that, among humans and other social species, a long life span is a desirable trait that has developed through the evolutionary process. In fact, their model of longevity suggests that long life spans among social species offer benefits conducive to even longer life spans in successive generations. Extension of the life span is a “self-reinforcing” process, they propose.’

Anti-Taliban Commanders Issue a New Ultimatum. Lessee, the deadline’s Tuesday, no, the deadline’s Thursday, no, we’ll go on fighting them, no ultimatum… LA Times

New York Times editorial: The bin Laden Tapes: “Having discouraged American

television news organizations from

broadcasting videotapes made by

Osama bin Laden, the White House now

finds itself in the awkward position of weighing what to do with a new

recording that it obviously wants the world to see. It should make the tape

public, as it seems inclined to do. The White House never should have

gotten into the news management business in the first place…

When

information is not to the government’s liking, discouraging broadcast and

publication may seem enticing to officials. But the tables can quickly be

turned, as the White House is now learning. That’s just one of the reasons

why the initiative was misguided. There are other, more important reasons

as well, including an implicit lack of faith in the press freedoms that help

sustain American democracy. News organizations can make their own

judgments about the value of bin Laden tapes. The American people can

certainly handle whatever he has to say. “

Court: Online Scribes Protected. ‘Online journalism is the same as print, radio and TV news when it comes to free-press protections against charges of libel.

That’s the decision of the New York State Supreme Court in the widely watched case of the National Bank of Mexico against Narconews.com. [which I discussed when the suit was first filed –FmH]

The court ruled that online journalists reporting on matters of public importance, like their colleagues in other media, can only be found guilty of libel if their actions are deemed malicious.’ Wired

Google announces availability of twenty-year usenet archive. The announcement page has links to a number of noteworthy posts in the archive like Tim Berners-Lee’s announcement of the worldwide web. Today is the tenth anniversary of the posting of the first U.S. page on the web, at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, by the way, according to this evening’s All Things Considered. Happy anniversary.

In 27 Cities, U.S. Carries Out Raids in Software Piracy Case NY Times

U.S. Nearing ABM Treaty Withdrawal. As you know, I’ve been railing against this plan since soon after Dubya took the throne and began making noises in this direction. Abrogating this treaty and pushing the ill-conceived national missile defense scheme was, prior to Sept. 11th, just about the Administration’s only foreign policy agenda. Sadly, it’s coming to pass, and we’re likely to see the newly-destabilized arms race restart. Back to the glory days again, I guess, and I can’t hope to convey how damnable it is for him to hold my children and their generation nuclear hostages for a brain-dead pipedream like NMD that isn’t needed and could never work anyway. Reuters

“The treaty banning biological weapons is in disarray, after the US disrupted a meeting of treaty members in Geneva with a last-minute demand it knew other governments would reject.

European Union countries, stung by US failure even to warn them of the move, will now be questioning whether they can continue working in alliance with the US on international arms control treaties.” New Scientist

Mechanism of short term memory loss revealed

When the brain forms new short-term memories, it creates new neurons in a region of the hippocampus called the dendate gyrus. This process also clears outdated memories, making room for more new ones, say Joe Tsien of Princeton University, and his colleagues.

Patients with Alzheimer’s disease lose cells in the hippocampus, and one suggested treatment is to transplant stem cells into the region to replace the dead cells. But the new work suggests that the addition of new cells might in fact disrupt memory retention by dramatically altering connections between neurons in the hippocampus and boosting memory clearance, the researchers say.

New Scientist

This is probably something with which we should not be meddling, at least with our current state of ignorance about the ‘black box’ between our ears.

First world map of lightning activity New Scientist

The American Prospect covers the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, “a normally obscure academic enclave that, for obvious reasons, found itself under a bit more of a spotlight than usual this year”, now laboring under a cloud from conservative criticism for not predicting the terrorist attacks led by flagbearer Martin Kramer’s new book Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America.

Kramer’s basic thesis — which he repeated in a scathing Wall Street Journal opinion piece that appeared, with exquisite timing, just days before the conference — was simple. According to his bill of indictment, Middle Eastern scholars have adopted a knee-jerk, leftist “third worldism.” They have failed America by consistently downplaying the threat of radical Islamic movements, and by criticizing U.S. foreign policy in Israel and throughout the entire region.

“This very sick discipline,” wrote Kramer in his Wall Street Journal article, “did nothing to prepare America for the encounter with Muslim extremism, and . . . can’t contribute anything to America’s defense.” Martin’s salvo unleashed a wave of similar expressions of disgust from the usual suspects on the right, such as The Weekly Standard and National Review, who lambasted the scholars for not predicting the World Trade Center attacks.

Ultrasound may disrupt fetal brain development, suggests a recent study comparing Swedes exposed to prenatal ultrasound with those who had not been. ’32 per cent more than expected were left-handed. In an average population, around nine per cent of men are left-handed.

[…]

The results suggest that some men who genetically would have been expected to be born right-handed had actually grown up to be left-handed. (The researcher) says this could be due to a disruption of their brain development in the womb: “It’s commonly known among neuropsychiatrists that right-handed people can become left-handed by slight damage to the brain.” New Scientist

How civil rights went wrong:

It is clear that there has been a shift in the meaning of the term racism. It is no longer the legalised persecution and ill-treatment of a supposedly inferior race. It is more a disease of the soul, or a kind of witchcraft that can be divined only by witch-finders armed with anti-racist equivalents of the Malleus Maleficarum (professional anti-racists need their racists at least as badly as the National Front needs them). And it is clear also where this shift in meaning first occurred: in America, whose trends the British follow as faithfully as any dog follows its master, despite the clear historical differences between our two countries: no slavery or legalised segregation in Britain, for example – that is to say a complete lack, pace McPherson, of institutionalised racism.

Anthony Daniels reviews Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn’s Race Experts. Telegraph UK

Does this painting by Walter Sickert reveal the identity of Jack the Ripper? “The American crime novelist Patricia Cornwell was last night accused of “monstrous stupidity” for ripping up a canvas to prove that the Victorian painter Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper.

Even in the context of the crackpot conspiracy theories, elaborate frauds and career-destroying obsessions that London’s most grisly whodunnit has spawned, Cornwell’s investigation is extreme. Not only did she have one canvas cut up in the vain hope of finding a clue to link Sickert to the murder and mutilation of five prostitutes, she spent £2m buying up 31 more of his paintings, some of his letters and even his writing desk.” Guardian UK

Officials Go on Trial for Contempt — ‘Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton and an assistant secretary for Indian Affairs went on trial for contempt of court today, the second time in two years that senior government officials have faced charges that they lied to a U.S. District Court judge about a poorly managed trust fund for Native Americans.’ Washington Post

Gulf War Link to Lou Gehrig’s Disease: Soldiers who served in the Gulf are almost twice as likely to develop the progressive neuromuscular degenerative disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, eponymously known for its most famous sufferer, as the general public, according to new findings. This disease is a major enigma of neurology whose cause remains a mystery, as the references in this Google search on [ALS + (etiology or pathogenesis)] will show, if you care to explore further. This New York Times article, which observes that the current findings represent the first official acknowledgement of a link between service in the Gulf and a specific disease, focuses largely on the Veterans Administration response in providing disability and survivor benefits commensurate with the finding. To now, the medical literature on ALS has remarked on the uniform incidence of the disease around the world, which has argued against an identifiable environmental agent. What is extraordinary, and receives no mention in the article, is that this study hints at the first robust epidemiological association between ALS and an environmental cause. Even if it is not clear what aspect of battlefield exposure may be to blame, this may prove to be a breakthrough in investigating the etiology of this mysterious and devastating illness. Indeed, if veterans suffered some neurotoxic exposure in the sands of Kuwait, it might affect more in the CNS than the upper motor neurons whose degeneration causes ALS, and might explain other aspects of “Gulf War Syndrome.”

Parity for Mental Health: “The stigma surrounding mental illness is lifting as it becomes increasingly

apparent that millions of Americans who suffer from afflictions ranging

from schizophrenia to depression can obtain treatment that allows them to

lead full lives. The Senate’s bipartisan measure, co-sponsored by 66

members, would force insurance companies to cover mental disorders on

the same terms as they would physical ailments. It would prevent large

employers’ health plans from setting higher deductibles and co-payments

for patients treated for mental disorders than for those treated for

illnesses like cancer or respiratory problems.” NY Times editorial

Slate Editor Kinsley Has Parkinson’s: ‘Journalist Michael Kinsley says he has had Parkinson’s disease for eight years but didn’t go public with the revelation because he was in denial.
[…]

Kinsley, 50, says that only a few people knew his secret “but in the past couple of years, it seems to me, the symptoms have become more evident.”

Kinsley says he was offered the editorship of The New Yorker three years ago but the offer was withdrawn after he told “the owner” that he had Parkinson’s.’

The last paragraph of this AP story errs in saying: ‘Parkinson’s, which results from nerve-cell damage in the brain, causes muscle tremors and stiffness and affects more than 1 million Americans. It is incurable but not usually fatal.’ As Parkinson’s advances, especially when it has had an ‘early’ onset, in causes progressive mental deterioration (dementia). People often do succumb to the effects of this inanition.

Ebola Confirmed in West Africa: ‘An outbreak of fever in the west African nation of Gabon has been confirmed as the deadly disease Ebola, the World Health Organization said Sunday.

It is the world’s first documented outbreak of Ebola since last year in Uganda, where 224 people – including health workers – died from the virus. Ebola is one of the most virulent viral diseases known to humankind, causing death in 50 to 90 percent of all clinically ill cases.’ AP

This is ill-timed indeed. What would stop terrorists of financial means from quickly rounding up some infected, or exposed, individuals and promising to pay their survivors beyond their wildest dreams if they’ll get on a plane to an American or European city to spread the outbreak there before they die? Or if recruits deliberately infect themselves for the same purpose to die as martyrs to the cause? Could al Qaeda have sleeper cells in West Africa waiting for this next outbreak?

Bin Laden’s sons will kill him on TV: ‘Osama bin Laden plans a TV suicide that will trigger attacks on landmarks in London, Paris and the US.

His estranged wife Sabiha said last night he would order his elder sons to shoot him rather than be captured.

Sabiha, 45, added: “That will be the signal for a new wave of terror. The targets this time would be the Capitol building in Washington, Big Ben in London and the Eiffel Tower in Paris.”

Her claims were broadcast on Russian television as al-Qaeda boss bin Laden reportedly led 1,000 loyalists into forests in Afghanistan after being flushed out of his Tora Bora caves.’ Mirror UK [via Drudge]

Worst-Case Scenario: The U.S. Has None. ‘Constitutional Crisis, Chaos Foreseen if Top Leaders Killed. Imagine the unimaginable: The president, in the White House, the vice president, at the National Observatory, and all Cabinet members, in their respective agency headquarters, are killed in a terrorist attack on downtown Washington. So are all members of Congress, except the few who happen to be out of town.

What happens to the Republic? At the moment, the answer is alarming: chaos.’ Washington Post

The Evildoers And The Misled: Ariana Huffington on John Walker, the captured 20-year-old American who had been fighting with the Taliban.

Psychology Falls Down on WTC Tragedy:

In the wake of the tragedy, I am disturbed more than ever by the professional culture of what passes for modern Psychology. Psychology maginalizes such authentic psychological phenomena as dreams, emotions, and spirituality because these do not lend themselves as readily to empirical methodologies, and Psychology is not willing to tolerate or reward the creative and original adaptations of standard designs that is required. If our military can adjust itself to a “new war,” then academia could show a little flexibility and open-mindedness. So, in the wake of the tragedy, having heard so many claims of precognition prior to the bombings, I decided to recruit participants for an exploration of a broader and possibly more routine form of precognition in dreams.

Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, of the Federation of American Scientists: A compilation of evidence and comments on the source of the mailed anthrax. She concludes: “The recent anthrax attack was a minor one but nonetheless we now see that it was perpetrated with the unwitting assistance of a sophisticated government program. It is reassuring to know that it was not perpetrated by a lone terrorist without state support. However it is not reassuring to discover that a secret US program may have been the source of that support, and that security is so dangerously lax in military or defense contractor laboratories.”

Two from First Monday:
Communicating information about the World Trade Center Disaster:

‘This paper traces a timeline of different aspects of news coverage during the week immediately following the disaster, and then over subsequent, more reflective, weeks. The material is used to show how a single dramatic event happening locally reverberates globally, and the impact of the developing global information infrastructure (GII) on these phenomena, geographically, temporally, and sectorally.’

The Fading Altruism of Open Source Development:

‘The nexus of open source development appears to have shifted to Europe over the last ten years. This paper explains why this trend undermines cultural arguments about “hacker ethics” and “post-scarcity” gift economies. It suggests that classical economic theory offers a more succinct explanation for the peculiar international distribution of open source development: hacking rises and falls inversely to its opportunity cost. This finding throws doubt on the Schumpeterian assumption that the efficiency of industrial systems can be measured without reference to the social institutions that bind them.’

The Right Still Has Religion: ‘After Pat Robertson’s resignation last week as president of the Christian Coalition, much of the commentary focused on the declining importance of the man and his movement. Critics note that the Christian Coalition has been losing members and financial support for years, and that Mr. Robertson lost credibility when, on his television show, “The 700 Club,” he agreed with his fellow conservative religious leader Jerry Falwell that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 were God’s punishment on America for tolerating feminists, gays and lesbians, libertarians and certain federal judges. But the fact remains that Pat Robertson has been the most influential figure in American politics in the past decade.’ NY Times

Two from the American Psychological Association Monitor:
A new take on psychoneuroimmunology: ‘Research pointing to a circuit linking the immune system and brain connects illness, stress, mood and thought in a whole new way.’

Why a bad marriage is worse for women than men: “Why is it that married men are physically and mentally healthier than unmarried men, but for women in unhappy marriages, the reverse is true?

The answer may lie in differences in the way men and women process their spouses’ and their own emotions

…”

The Disregard Syndrome: A Menace to Honest Science? Scientific advances published prior to the advent of electronically searchable archives are routinely disregarded in modern science … at our peril. The Scientist

A new take on psychoneuroimmunology: ‘Research pointing to a circuit linking the immune system and brain connects illness, stress, mood and thought in a whole new way.’ APA Monitor

Oxford historian Niall Ferguson: Was Sept. 11th far less of an historical turning point than generally accepted? NY Times Magazine

Thinking of relocating geographically? This page will rank the most hospitable metropolitan areas for you after you weight the importance of various economic, environmental, artistic, social and lifestyle variables.

From Fimoculous, an ever-growing collection of links to year-in-review pages.

Homo erectus ‘was never a teenager’ BBC

‘Big stink over a simple link’ Wired

KPMG.

“Sure, it’s not really The Lord of the Rings … but it could still be a pretty damn cool movie. ” — Peter Jackson. ‘The complete list of changes’ is one fan’s project to document all the films’ reported departures from Tolkien’s books. If you’re planning to see the film and haven’t read LoTR, you should probably steer clear of the spoilers you’ll find here. [thanks to Ghost in the Machine]