Via the null device, I learned something about Polari “(also seen as ‘Palare’), a gay slang language, which has now almost died out. It was more common in the 1960’s when gays had more need of a private slang…(I)n the last few years, more and more people have been finding out about it, and several web sites and magazine articles have been written…. (N)ever clearly defined: an ever-changing collection of slang from various sources including Italian, English (backwards slang, rhyming slang), circus slang, canal-speak, Yiddish and Gypsy languages. It is impossible to tell which slang words are real Polari. The page contains a lexicon of Polari slang of varying authenticity. Here is another lexicon with more source notation. Another essay, in some greater detail, is here at World Wide Words.

The poster was visited by the Secret Service for this post on kuro5hin. Since kuro5hin is down (for unrelated reasons), the events are discussed in this thread on Slashdot. And Sean Gullette received a phone call from the Secret Service after an online publication called “Why I Want to Fuck George Bush”, modelled on JG Ballard’s classic 1967 story on Reagan. Gullette says he struck up a good relationship with the agent, who assessed his essay as not representing a threat (whew!). He commented that it would have been a different matter if they had been questioning him about John Ashcroft. [Good to know that, in this dizzying, changed world, it’s still easy to tell the difference between intellectual and moral unpreparedness.]

Get your filthy hands off my CDs

By the middle of next year, the music industry will have … thoroughly embraced copy-protection technology. Major labels and independents alike will embrace products like Macrovision’s SafeAudio and use them to control how fans listen to new songs.

So says one of the minds behind such technology, Marc Tokayer, CEO of TTR Technologies. TTR developed SafeAudio in 1999 and more recently partnered with Macrovision to promote the system to the music industry. However, SafeAudio only became known to music fans when Macrovision and one or more record labels – Tokayer won’t say who – released copy-protected CDs on an unsuspecting Californian public.

That release, designed to test whether real music buyers could hear what SafeAudio does to music encoded on CD and how likely their audio equipment would reject the protected disks, was arguably the first inkling most listeners had that the music giants were serious about preventing PC users ripping songs to their hard-drives and – worse – sending those tracks to other users via the Internet. The Register

Conductor Pierre Boulez held as terrorist: ‘One of the world’s most famous conductors was briefly detained by Swiss police on suspicion of being linked to terrorist activities.

Frenchman Pierre Boulez had his passport confiscated in the town of Basle where he had been conducting at a music festival last month.

Europe has seen a series of anti-terrorist dawn raids since 11 September, but this must be the strangest…

In the revolutionary 1960s, it seems that Boulez said that opera houses should be blown up, comments which the Swiss felt made him a potential security threat.’ BBC

Free Congress Foundation Online — conservative critique of the civil liberties encroachment emergency. I found this page while looking into the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act, coming your way soon in most states including my own. Click on the commentary by Steve Lilienthal (“A Bad Idea Coming Your Way”) :

MEHPA is, of course, just what the liberal public health community ordered

to maximize their power. Indeed, the spearhead for this model bill is a

center for public health law at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins universities

that is funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Despite

its admirable sounding title, the CDC is as much – if not more – concerned

with enacting a political agenda as it is with ensuring public safety.

He pulls together some additional links to explore MEHPA.

Also at this site is an item by Connie Marshner, “Are We Homo Sapiens or Not?”, commenting about the human cloning issue. Interestingly, she echoes what Todd Gitlin said months ago, from the left, about how this will change the political landscape and make left-right distinctions obsolete:

What is it that can get the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (you know, the feminists who gave the world that veritable compendium of the sexual revolution, Our Bodies, Ourselves) to stand shoulder to shoulder with the evangelical Family Research Council? What is it that can get the Friends of the Earth to stand side by side with the Vatican? What can get the General Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church and the Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow singing off the same sheet of music?

When did this happen? At press conferences this very week, and in testimony before Congress last summer, these diverse groups were able to find common ground in their opposition to cloning. And in their opposition, currently in embryonic form to be sure, may be the promise of some new political landscape.

“This is science at its steamiest.”

Left Behind: Jacob Weisberg, in Slate, says that those fulminating about the supposedly inane or offensive comments of the anti-war left — he mentions Susan Sontag’s notorious New Yorker essay in the first paragraph — are missing the boat. There really is no serious anti-war left at the moment. Opposition to the war, he suggests, is confined to stalwart pacifists. those considered cranks even by the left, and “others whose ears hear only evil about the United States.” Even the American Friends Service Committee, he notes, concedes that the anti-war movement “is still in the process of taking shape.” Nothing like the Vietnam opposition, in which prominent intellectuals and radicals explicitly sided with our enemies, the better parallel is WWII, in which opposition sentiment was “marginal and idiosyncratic” … and scant.

Given its insignificance, the fixation of the supporters of the war on the opposition serves their own ulterior motives, which he goes on to explicate — in essence, since there is no serious anti-war movement, the patriots have had to invent one.

I recall blinking with relish to the item about Paul Krassner leading his audience in a rollicking chorus of a cherished obscenity last month in response to Cokie Roberts’ scurrilous, similar observation that there was no opposition that matters. Many of us who think we are earnest opponents of the war will be distressed at Weisberg’s comments, yet there’s something there we should take to heart. His sobering appraisal echoes my own concerns that dissent — to the war or the dramatic attack on our civil liberties that is its concomitant — is not massive or visible, not building up any momentum or impact. The majority of the thinking public does not read AlterNet, ConsortiumNews, tompaine.com or the left-leaning weblogs into which we pour our passion, largely for one another. We seem to be preaching only to the converted…

CIA blunder sparked Taleban revolt that became a mass suicide — ‘Whether it was incompetence, overconfidence or duty that prompted two CIA operatives to interrogate dozens of Taleban on their own will perhaps remain a mystery.

But their decision triggered a revolt that became the single bloodiest engagement since the Afghan war began.’ The Times of London

‘Human rights watchdog Amnesty International has called for an urgent inquiry into the killing of hundreds of Taleban prisoners who staged an uprising near the Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif.’ BBC

A village is destroyed. And America says nothing happened. Sarcastic commentary from an Independent correspondent, just as news emerges that five Afghani and three American forces were killed by an errant one-ton bomb dropped from a silent, remote B-52 high above on a sector north of Kandahar which representatives of the newly-formed Afghani government were surprised is even a bombing target. It’s my impression that we’re hearing about alot more targeting errors in this war. It doesn’t seem to me this could be attributed to reporting bias (which finds US military blunders and ‘friendly fire’ casualties sexy to report on in any conflict), and, if anything, journalists have less on-the-ground access than they have in other conflicts, and what information is released by Americna official sources is more highly controlled. Looking for knowledgeable military commentary that could address whether, and if so why, we are indeed having more targeting problems with our munitions as they supposedly get smarter and smarter.

Bush Describes Reaction to 9 – 11. He says his first thought was “There’s one terrible pilot.” He’s down in Florida again, talking to schoolchildren again (actually a town meeting to help his brother’s reelection prospects by stemming the tide of declining tourist revenues for Florida, but answering a third grader’s question), as he was on Sept. 11th when he heard about the attacks. He’s very comfortable explicating his ideas to elementary school students. NY Times

Robert Bork supports military tribunals. Not surprising. But much is being made of this comment toward the bottom of the article: “If there is a problem with Bush’s order, it is the exemption of U.S. citizens from trials before military tribunals.” Much as I’m among those who love to hate Bork, he’s being taken out of context. For someone who rationalizes the tribunals for foreign terrorists, it is not surprising that he also says he supports them for Americans for the same reasons (safeguarding sensitive intelligence data, the risk of them going free if given a fair enough trial, etc.); but he’s talking about American terrorists! It seems to me the Left can’t have it both ways; if we complain that the reactionaries are selective in the terrorists they’re after, and not including in the scope of their proposed repression so-called domestic terrorists (which, these days, comes mostly from the American Right), we can’t also complain about Bork’s equanimity here…

Many people saying bad things: I agree with Phil Agre, who calls this Jon Carroll opinion piece from the SF Chronicle the best response to Cheney’s academic witchhunt against unpatriotic thought. Add me to the list.

The Laws of War Yale University Law School and the Uniform Code of Military Justice

I think I won’t link to Bruce Sterling’s “Geeks and Spooks” speech at the “Global Challenges, Trends and Best Practices in Cryptography” conference at the Information System Security and Education Center, Washington, DC on November 20. Many others are. Oops, I just did. If you read it, persist; he’s slow to get into the meat of things. Viridian Notes

Authority Finder: “Whether you are writing a paper, business plan, speech, or simply looking for reliable research material, use Authority Finder to locate a quote from an authoritative source to support your hypothesis or argument. Use this intelligent tool to instantaneously find, quote, and cite a relevant and legitimate source with a few clicks of a mouse.” This looks like it will be a very useful resource. [via net.narrative environments]

(“It reminds me of the Taliban. If you’re not Muslim, you’re worthless,” said Bob Farnan, the owner of Port Inglis Restaurant. “She just reversed the situation.”) Mayor banishes Satan from Inglis, Florida. Critics are up in arms about the mayor’s crossing the boundary between church and state in her official proclamation, which has been rolled up and placed in hollowed-out fenceposts labelled Repent, Resist and Request at the four entrances to the town. How about just how dumb it is? [Sorry, more eloquent words fail me…]

“Here’s one from the banality of evil file,” Rafe at rc3 comments regarding Bush’s order preventing access to the presidential papers of his predecessors:

“Bush’s goal is obviously to keep records from the Reagan administration sealed. Either the papers contain information so damning that they would ruin his father’s legacy or the careers of some of his current staffers, or they contain trivial information that would be embarrassing to people he doesn’t want to see get embarrassed. If it’s the former then Bush is evil. Americans have the right to know what was done in their name. If it’s the latter, Bush is a small and petty man who’s willing eviscerate a useful and important law to protect people from things they probably ought to be accountable for anyway. John Dean is certainly right about one thing, if Bill Clinton had tried to pull a stunt like this, the Republicans would have been beating down his door with subpoenas.”

Managing Managed Care: Habitus, Hysteresis and the End(s) of Psychotherapy

—

Abstract:

In this paper we examine how clinicians at a community mental health center are responding to the beginnings of changes in the health care delivery system, changes that are designated under the rubric of ??managed care.?? We describe how clinicians? attitudes about good mental health care are embodied in what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls their habitus, i.e., their professional habits and sense of good practice. Viewed in this light, their moral outrage and sense of threat, as well as their strategic attempts to resist or subvert the dictates of managed care agencies, become a function of what Bourdieu terms the hysteresis effect. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted by a team of researchers at the mental health and substance abuse service of a hospital-affiliated, storefront clinic which serves residents of several neighborhoods in a large northeastern city. Data consist primarily of observations of meetings and interviews with staff members. We describe four aspects of the clinicians? professional habitus: a focus on cases as narratives of character and relationship, an imperative of authenticity, a distinctive orientation towards time, and an ethic of ambiguity. We then chronicle practices that have emerged in response to the limits on care imposed by managed care protocols, which are experienced by clinicians as violating the integrity of their work. These are discussed in relation to the concept of hysteresis. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry

White House Issues Alert of New Terrorism Threat. Ridge: “The threats we are picking up are very generic. They warn of more attacks but are not

specific about where or what type. We do know that the next several weeks, which bring the final weeks

of Ramadan and important religious observations in other faiths, have been times when terrorists have

planned attacks in the past.” NY Times

Eyes Focus on Trade Center’s ‘Bathtub’ as Debris Is Cleared NY Times

A Fresh Look at a Quick Fix for Heroin Addiction. The New York Times explores the controversial procedure in which withdrawal is precipitated rapidly by giving an opiate antagonist to a patient under general anaesthesia; a number of patients have died in high-profile cases. Critics say it’s a moneymaker for hospitals and clinics to treat high-rolling celebrity addicts. My concern is that, psychologically, addicts are addicted not so much to drugs as to quick fixes — for their ‘jones’, and for coping with stresses. The use of their drug of choice has replaced, or prevented the elaboration of, other options for coping. This new technique is essentially just another quick fix, and will leave the pitiful addict bereft of replacement strategies that would develop during a more gradual rehabilitation from drug dependence. In short, it won’t prevent the unchanged, vulnerable, addiction-prone person from relapsing.

And next question: what position will health insurance providers, who historically want to do as little as possible for their chemically dependent customers, take on paying for the treatment? Two possible scenarios: (1) Despite evidence that doing the procedure safely (after all, it does involve general anaesthesia, and it has killed people…) necessitates inpatient hospitalization, they may refuse to cover costs; (2) They may push people toward the procedure, despite its physiological and psychological dangers, as more expedient than the detox admissions they now pay for. Over the past decade, I’ve seen inpatient detoxes whittled down from 21 to 7, 5 and now most commonly 3 days under managed care pressure; here’s a great opportunity for cost-savings by pushing the envelope down further.

This search connects you to previous FmH discussions of opiate addiction, including a reference to the investigation of the physician whose patients were dying during rapid detoxification.

When I read the Times‘ headline above, I thought for an instant I might find mainstream press discussion of ibogaine, the powerful (and toxic?) hallucinogen the administration of which is reputed in underground circles to ‘cure’ opiate addiction, about which I’ve previously written. The difference between this and the rapid naloxone withdrawal the Times discusses is that ibogaine, according to published accounts, might precipitate a searching reappraisal of the self creating change in the psychological as well as the physiological grounds for the addiction-proneness. Here’s a Google search on ibogaine.

U.S. budget deficit projected until 2005. Grim economic reminder that not only was the government stolen from us but it’s proceeding to sell us down the river with glee: ‘Bush promised during the presidential campaign to avoid tapping Social Security except in cases of war, recession or a national emergency.

“Lucky me. I hit the trifecta,” Bush told Daniels shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the budget director.’ Miami Herald [with diolchgarwch — that’s gratitude in Welsh (grin) — to wood s lot for the link]

“So, will it (a.k.a Ginger and Segway) revolutionize urban life as the press-hype surrounding its initial disclosure dared predict? Probably not.

First off, it’s expensive. On top of that, it weighs 65 lbs, making it a real monster to drag home on an empty battery. But then again, it’s not so heavy that it can’t easily be grabbed and tossed into the back of someone else’s pickup truck.

And anyway, they’ll be banned from municipal sidewalks the split second some 18-month-old toddler gets crushed and paralyzed for life. Teenagers will re-jigger them, make them go very fast, and break their necks in Extreme Ginger exhibitions in front of admiring babes, leading to further restrictions by official killjoys. Small children will ride them down stairs, to very bad outcomes.” At least, The Register concludes, dogs will love them.

On the topic, someone on a mailing list I receive comments that they must not have had their acronym checker working the day they decided to call this the Segway Human Transporter.

Weekend Fireballs: “Pieces of a Proton rocket disintegrated in Earth’s atmosphere this weekend, startling sky watchers in western Europe and at least seven US states.” science@NASA

David Morris, v-p of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance: “Kenneth Lay is living proof that one person can change the world. His company, Enron, may be in shambles. In three months, it may no longer exist. But for the rest of our lives we will live in a world redesigned by Kenneth Lay.” The Man Who Screwed the World:

Why was Lay so successful? The Economist magazine described Enron as an “evangelical cult,” with Lay its “messiah.” It didn’t hurt that Lay was preaching the gospel of deregulation, a gospel widely shared by both political parties.

And this missionary had clout. Lay had worked for FERC and was Deputy Undersecretary for energy matters for the Department of Interior. In the 1980s he became a principal fund raiser for President Bush and later his son. His board of directors included Wendy Gramm, wife of Senator Philip Gramm of Texas. A month after they left office, Enron put former Secretary of State James Baker and former Secretary of Commerce Robert Mossbacher on the Enron payroll. Lay golfed with President Clinton.

AlterNet

Tamim Ansary: An Afghani Primer: “What journalists need to know in order to keep expectations in tune

with what’s likely to unfold in Afghanistan.” AlterNet

Tai Moses: Before and After: September 11 — ‘The events of September 11 divided our world into two radically different eras. We watch wistfully as the pre-9/11 world drifts away on its raft of memory, cast in Technicolor shades of nostalgia. We will remember that assassinated world as idyllic, secure (never mind that it was neither), we will speak of it in the reverent tones reserved for the dead.

Meanwhile, the post 9/11 era looms like an unmapped wilderness. As with other unclaimed territories throughout history, a fierce battle is being waged for its psychic, political and material capital. Former president Bill Clinton has called this conflict “the struggle for the soul of the 21st century,” and the spoils of war include some of our most cherished values and liberties. Leading the charge are the warriors of the Bush Administration, a battalion of securitycrats and generals who are attempting to colonize the future with their own repressive agenda.’

On the beautiful, glass-bright morning of September 11, a man — an ordinary, unremarkable American — called his wife on his cell phone. “We’re all going to die,” Thomas Burnett said as United Flight 93 careened over the Pennsylvania countryside, “but some of us are going to do something about it.” All we know of the rest of Tom Burnett’s narrative is that his life ended horribly. He and his fellow passengers did not let what must have been abject fear prevent them from acting — that is the true definition of courage.

What happened aboard Flight 93 was the country’s first real victory against terrorism, and it came out of the tradition of democracy. The passengers came up with a plan and they voted on it. Some of the men would rush the hijackers and force the airliner to crash, rather than allow it to be used in another suicide attack on Washington DC, where it was surely headed.

It’s a terrible irony that for a short time, while the condemned jet was aloft, the ideal of American democracy also reached its apex. The rest of us can only strive to do as well. Fortunately, Tom Burnett’s last communication to the world was an unintentional gift to us all, a battle cry for the age of anxiety. We are all going to die sooner or later. Let that consciousness not prevent us from acting in each other’s best interests, from trying to create a better, safer world.

AlterNet

Creating a CIA Poster Boy: “In releasing the name of Johnny Spann, ‘America’s first casualty’, the CIA is breaking tradition

and attempting to rehab its somewhat tarnished image.” tompaine.com

Charles R. Smith: FBI v. CIA: Battle in Cyberspace

The U.S. government is struggling to rebuild its image after it failed to discover the plot to attack America on Sept. 11.

The FBI and CIA, two agencies charged with law enforcement and intelligence operations, have taken the most heat for the failure. Both agencies had few areas of cooperation prior to Sept. 11.

Now the FBI and CIA have suddenly discovered conflicting roles inside cyberspace.

The FBI recently was forced to reveal another part of its Cyber-Knight project, an effort by the agency to monitor all Internet communications…

Yet, as the FBI struggles to introduce its new system to monitor the Internet, the CIA is working to develop a software program that thwarts government monitoring.

The CIA is a major sponsor of SafeWeb, a company that distributes a free program called Triangle Boy. Triangle Boy allows users to surf the Web anonymously. Citizens inside dictatorships are using the program to avoid monitoring by the oppressive regimes. NewsMax

Boong-Ga Boong-Ga: a Japanese arcade game that has to be seen to be believed. The Register

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” said Arthur C. Clarke. ‘It’ is revealed. Reinventing the Wheel

“Just lean forward,” Kamen commands, so I do, and instantly I start rolling across the concrete right at him.

“Now, stop,” Kamen says. How? This thing has no brakes. “Just think about stopping.” Staring into the middle distance, I conjure an image of a red stop sign–and just like that, Ginger and I come to a halt.

“Now think about backing up.” Once again, I follow instructions, and soon I glide in reverse to where I started. With a twist of the wrist, I pirouette in place, and no matter which way I lean or how hard, Ginger refuses to let me fall over. What’s going on here is all perfectly explicable–the machine is sensing and reacting to subtle shifts in my balance–but for the moment I am slack-jawed, baffled. Time [thanks to boing boing]

Mark Fiore’s The All-Purpose Excuse Mother Jones [requires flash player; slow to load] and, from your friendly Office of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge’s Operation Mandatory Patriotic Tattoo [like the one yer man in the FmH masthead above has been sporting for years…]

FBI agents rebel over new powers

The US Attorney General, John Ashcroft, was yesterday reported to be ready to relax restrictions on the FBI’s powers to spy on religious and church-based political organisations.

His proposal, leaked to the New York Times, would loosen limits on the FBI’s surveillance powers, imposed in the 1970s after the death of its founder J. Edgar Hoover.

The plan has caused outrage within the FBI itself with agents expected to act upon new surveillance powers describing themselves as ‘very, very angry’. Guardian UK

A vehement New York Times editorial decrying the police state tactics of the administration — Justice Deformed: War and the Constitution:

‘The inconvenient thing about the American system of justice is that we are usually challenged to protect it at the most inopportune moments. Right now the country wants very much to be supportive of the war on terrorism, and is finding it hard to summon up much outrage over military tribunals, secret detentions or the possible mistreatment of immigrants from the Mideast. There is a strong temptation not to notice. That makes it even more important to speak up.

…(I)f the antiterrorism effort is to be a genuine success, Americans must speak up. We do not want history to record this as one of those mixed moments in which the behavior of our government failed to live up to the performance of our troops in the field. We do not want to remember this as a time when the nations of the world united in a campaign against terrorists, and then backed away when America attempted to prosecute foreign nationals in secret trials conducted according to unfair rules.’

Well-reasoned rejoinder to Rush Limbaugh’s defense of military tribunals, from rc3. Here’s an excerpt. Read the whole thing.

Limbaugh: In 1942 the Supreme Court ruled that Roosevelt’s military commissions were constitutional when used to try eight Nazi saboteurs for violating the laws of war, spying and conspiracy. The lawyers who drafted Bush’s order no doubt relied on FDR’s court victory in that case — an irony obviously lost on Bush’s critics.

rc3: I don’t need to tell readers of this site that this decision was widely seen as regrettable, and was reached under different circumstances than Bush’s executive order. As a refresher, the tribunals for the eight Nazi saboteurs were held during a state of declared war, and the order was written specifically for the 8 saboteurs in question, not for any old saboteur we might possibly catch in the future.

Furthermore, the military tribunals ordered by FDR are nothing to look back on with pride. It’s widely understood now that the tribunals were held in order to avoid embarrassment for Hoover’s FBI. The saboteurs were caught because one of the eight turned them in as soon as he arrived in the United States. The embarrassment stemmed from the fact that the first time the saboteur attempted to turn himself (and the others) in, he was dismissed as a crank. Only on his second contact with the FBI did they actually investigate the case and apprehend the saboteurs.

After making specious arguments that the military tribunals do not violate the Bill of Rights, he goes into the problems with trying terrorists in criminal courts, ignoring the fact that we successfully tried the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center the first time, the terrorists who blew up the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, and the terrorists who blew up US embasses in Africa in 1998 in civil courts without issue.

The Real Story of Flight 93: Newsweek reporters reconstruct the details of the last minutes of the doomed flight from the cockpit voice recorder and interviews with family members who received phone calls from passengers.

This letter to the editor from the Eugene Register-Guard of Nov. 23 [via Adam] bears printing in full:

Patriotism is running strong, so we can expect to see some important changes in the near future. Americans who think nuclear power is a good idea will soon call for an aggressive switch to wind and solar because nuclear plants make excellent terrorist targets, but windmills scattered across the rural areas of our country do not.

Americans who think toxic-right-to-know laws are absurd will change their minds when they discover that the paint factory near their home is a prime terrorist target. Those who think Microsoft software is excellent will reconsider upon realizing that a terrorist hacker can attack 90 percent of the country’s computers with a single virus.

Americans who think factory food tastes good will soon switch to organics because small farms are less likely to have their crops poisoned by terrorists. Those who think their automobiles deserve new freeways paved through wetlands will soon switch to mass transit and bicycles so that America becomes less dependent on foreign oil.

And Americans who think the above statements are correct are dreaming. Most Americans don’t think much at all. Once the flag is in the car window, they’re done. They are now official patriots. Forget clean air, clean water, healthy neighborhoods: “I’ve got a flag and I’m covered. Presidential papers hidden? So what. Government access to e-mail? Sure. Military tribunals? No problem. Limits to media access? But of course. So where is the remote? Did the game start yet?”

Charles Magee

Eugene, Oregon

Meanwhile …: ‘A Pennsylvania legislator has announced she will seek a second term next year even though she claims in a $7.5 million lawsuit that she “needs help with reading and understanding material and carrying on conversations” due to brain and other injuries she suffered in a car wreck.’

But the most significant piece of information, confirming all our suspicions, follows:

‘Rep. Jane Baker, a 56-year-old Republican, says in her lawsuit that the injuries make her “virtually unemployable” outside the Legislature.” ‘ Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial [thanks, Adam]

Pictures reveal how nerve cells form connections to store short- and long-term memories in brain

A Mind So Rare by Merlin Donald, reviewed: “There has been tremendous progress over the past few decades in understanding the nature and functioning of human consciousness. Although this knowledge has not yet settled into an explicit consensus, and details are lacking, nevertheless all the necessary elements are in place. A theory of human consciousness is here or hereabouts.

From the evidence of this book, Donald is one of those who substantially understand consciousness — which is to say that he can give a coherent and broadly valid account of the evolved function of consciousness and its main modes of operation. A Mind So Rare can therefore be added to a list that would include Francis Crick’s The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994), and Antonio R Damasio’s Descartes’ Error (1994) and The Feeling of What Happens (1999).” British Medical Journal

See the Patriarchy Tumblin’ Down!: Using Sociobiology to Bolster Feminist Claims

Susan Haack: Science, Scientism, and Anti-Science in the Age of Preposterism

We are in danger of losing our grip on the concepts of truth, evidence, objectivity, disinterested inquiry. The preposterous environment in which academic work is presently conducted is inhospitable to genuine inquiry, hospitable to the sham and the fake. Encouraging both envy and resentment of the sciences, it has fed an increasingly widespread and articulate irrationalism.

That is preposterous which puts the last first and the first last. . . . Valuing knowledge, we preposterize the idea and say . . . everybody shall produce written research in order to live, and it shall be decreed a knowledge explosion.

— Jacques Barzun

Skeptical Inquirer

Is it time to remove the “What’s a Weblog?” paragraph in the sidebar? Do you suppose any new readers come this way these days who don’t already know one when they see one?

PBS’ glossary on faith and reason.

“Freedom to vote, smoke, dress down, act up, disagree, organize, bear arms, ride helmetless – America is about nothing if not individual freedoms. But there’s one freedom very few people are fighting for because hardly anyone realizes it’s being denied. This is a new kind of freedom, and it may well be the most important one of them all:

Freedom in the mental realm… ”

Adbusters 38 is a manifesto for the creation of ‘mental environmentalism’. Selected features:

• Birth of a Movement:
  

  The environmental movement gelled in the summer of 1989 as a flurry of shocking news items appeared day after day: seals dying mysteriously in the North Sea; acid rain devastating the mythical Black Forest; hypodermic needles washing up on New York beaches; people suffering from a fatigue syndrome that no doctor was able to diagnose.

  Now we have evidence of a mental environment no less in crisis: 20 million North Americans diagnosed with clinical depression; another 20 million suffering anxiety disorders; antidepressants now a $10-billion-a-year business; commercial messages everywhere the eye can rest – from the banana in the supermarket to the booster-rockets of the space shuttle, to product placement in the movie you’re watching to escape it all. The number of megacorporate gatekeepers of most of the world’s information stands at six – and falling.

  In 1989, we realized that our natural environment was dying. That was pretty good incentive to march.

  Today, we are realizing that our mental environment is dying too and we’re getting ready to march again with a new vision: the vision of a wave of antitrust suits against the media megacorps, a new science of mental ecology, a new way of managing the production of meaning in our society.

  Synchronize your watches, folks. And remember this day.

• American Psycho:
  

  After two and a half years, researchers Brad Bushman and Craig Anderson of the University of Iowa had a blockbuster study in hand. It pointed, decisively, to troubling conclusions about a social problem at the core of an ongoing national debate. The findings appeared as the lead article in American Psychologist, the flagship of their field. Colleagues were applauding. And then came the mainstream media reaction.

  “A lot of silence,” says Bushman flatly.

  Here, in a nutshell, is the story the media missed. Bushman and Anderson carried out an exhaustive review – a “meta-analysis” – of every existing study of the link between media violence and real-life violence. The result: Research has indicated a clear connection since at least the 1970s, and the body of evidence has been growing ever since.

• Has David Byrne sold out to Microsoft? His fans discuss it.
• Listening to Homer: why the Seinfeldesque is turning Kafkaesque.
• Nine Pioneers of Mental Environmentalism:

  • Neil Postman:
    

    “The big issue we need to face is information glut. We are in a situation where there is so much information available from so many different sources – not just television – that we have a problem.

    Schools are still acting as if they need to provide people with information, which the schools were pretty good at when there was information scarcity. When you have information overload, then the schools have something entirely different to do…”

  • Len Masterman: “The author of Teaching The Media says corporations belong in school – on our terms, never theirs.”
  • 
    
    Jerry Mander: “Twenty-three years after the publication of his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, [one of the most important, still unsurpassed cultural critiques ever written, IMHO –FmH] Mander still sees TV as the primary threat to a healthy mental environment – though a competitor is fast on its heels.”
    

  • 
    
    Robert McChesney, research professor at UIUC:

    I’ve always argued that people who want to change the world had better get serious about changing media and communications, and not think it’s a dependent variable that will work itself out once you’ve changed everything else. What we’ve seen is that the rapidly evolving global movement for democracy – and against neoliberalism and hyper-commercialism – is making media reform an integral part, woven right into the heart of the movement. The dominance of the corporate media system has made this almost unavoidable.

    The major ideological defence of the corporate media is that the Internet is changing the system, making it much more competitive and responsive, and that therefore previous concerns about corporate control or commercialism are now completely irrelevant. If you don’t like what you’re getting, then go to one of the other 80 billion websites, or start your own. Everyone should just shut up and shop.

    It’s a lot easier to start a website than to organize people to get a sufficient force to change the system. The sad and inescapable truth is we have to do both. If we concede that all the laws and regulations and subsidies can go to these corporate giants, but we’re going to have our groovy websites, then barring a phenomenal upsurge in political activity we will guarantee our marginality.

    The evidence is overwhelming and irrefutable that the Internet is not going to radically change and improve our media system. If you read the business press, like Fortune magazine (owned by AOL Time Warner), they acknowledge that the Internet is basically run by corporations and it’s just tightening up their control of the commercial media…
    

  • 
    
    Cees Hamelink professor of communications at the University of Amsterdam:

    “The growing importance of media, at least in my analysis, is strongly related to advertising. Some people tend to believe we are moving towards an information society or communications society. I think we are really moving to what I like to call a ‘global billboard society.’ ”
    

  • 
    
    Theodore Roszak, founder of ecopsychology:

    “How often in history did people wake up in the morning and have someone tell them what they needed in life? All through the day advertising is trying to convince you of what you require in order to manage. Of course that’s been going on since advertising began. But just within my lifetime the technique of getting between people and the ordinary aspects of life – from eating to sleeping to working to sex to diet – has compounded enormously…”

  • 
    
    Jay Rosen, author of What Are Journalists For? and a professor of journalism at New York University, discussing journalists’ accountability in media reform.
    

  • 
    
    Sheri Herndon, one of the organizers of the 65 Independent Media Centers.
    

  • 
    
    George Gerbner, founder and president of the Cultural Environment Movement:

    “Are we too late? I have no definition for what is ‘late’ or ‘too late.’ Nor do I have definite criteria for what is ‘success.’ We must do what we can do. You light a candle under a pot of water. For a seemingly long time ‘nothing happens.’ At one point it begins to boil — a qualitative transformation. (It took only some six degrees rise in the average temperature to melt down the Ice Age.) So, you just keep up the pressure and hope the change occurs in your lifetime. But, if not, no energy ever disappears, no effort is ever wasted.”

• 2-Minute Media Revolution:
  

  “For nine years now, Adbusters has tried to get its famous TV “subvertisements” aired by the NBC, CBS and ABC networks. Every year, they refuse. We need to make a hairline crack in that media monopoly. How long will it take? Let’s start with two minutes.

  The “Two-Minute Media Revolution” is a campaign to demand that two minutes out of every broadcast hour be made available for advocacy messages that could come from anyone, on any topic. We’ve launched cyberpetitions to the US Federal Communications Commission and the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission.”

ACLU Letter to Members of Congress Regarding President Bush’s Order Establishing Military Tribunals

Gore Vidal: Times Cries Eke! Buries Al Gore: ‘The late Murray Kempton once noted that although the New York Times likes to pose as being above the battle, this position has never stopped the Times, once the battle’s fought, from sneaking onto the field and shooting the wounded. November 12, krauthammers at the ready, Times persons swept through the electoral swamps of Florida, shooting those survivors who questioned “President” Bush’s alleged plurality.’ The Nation [via Adam]

“It’s past time to focus on the gravest dangers that we face.” A Nuclear Nightmare: It Could Happen Today

Few things concentrate the mind like the prospect of a nuclear mushroom cloud in your own neighborhood. So please concentrate on this: I asked Ambassador Thomas Graham Jr., a sober, respected, retired career arms control official who was President Clinton’s special representative for nonproliferation and disarmament from 1994-97, to quantify the risk of nuclear terrorism. Here is what he said, from Moscow, via cell phone:

“Any judgment like this is a guess. But my judgment is that in the next year, there is perhaps a 10 percent risk of a major nuclear event in a large city, and in the next five years, perhaps a 50 percent risk. This risk would include the theft and use of an actual nuclear weapon, the fabrication and detonation of a crude nuclear device from fissile material, as well as a radiological bomb possibly based on fissile material.”

Five years. Fifty percent. Maybe several cities destroyed. Hundreds of thousands or millions dead. The nation in chaos. Worse than our worst nightmares. The Atlantic

Part of my reaction to the scale of the destruction in the World Trade Center attack was its eerie resonance with the recurrent waking nightmares I’ve had for most of my adult life as someone preoccupied with preventing the use of nuclear weapons. Yet I flinch every time I hear the lower Manhattan site referred to, as has come to be general practice, as ‘ground zero’. We can’t afford the degree of denial and minimization in that linguistic artifice, diluting as it does the internal imagery we must have about a veritable ground zero.

ACLU Letter to Members of Congress Regarding President Bush’s Order Establishing Military Tribunals

Many weblogs are linking to the Oppose Ashcroft site, which was created by People for the American Way to educate people about his virulent record at the time of his nomination as attorney general. I linked to it back then, and hate to say I told you so. From this weblog community vantage point, the outrage about the Dictatorship’s mad, ongoing powergrab under Ashcroft’s influence seems so palpable, but where’s the organized opposition behind the spleen? It may turn out to be one of the greatest, most enduring humiliations in American history — certainly on a par with McCarthyism, if that phrase still makes anyone blush — that reasonable Americans are allowing this to happen with no more than ineffectual spluttering like this. Is it time to write your Congressional representatives? Ha! Time to march on Washington? blockade the Justice Dept? Do the words mass protest, or nonviolent civil disobedience, resonate with anyone anymore? [illustration courtesy of BlackHoleBrain]

Man gets $5,525 check for confiscated pot plants — ‘A man who says he uses marijuana for medicinal purposes received $5,525 from his insurance company after arguing that the backyard crop police ripped up was covered by his homeowner’s policy.’ SF Gate

Dept. of Fried Synapses: Comcast to launch video game channel: “Comcast Corp., owner of the nation’s third largest cable company, said it will launch a channel next spring dedicated entirely to video games.

The new network, dubbed G4, will target teen-agers and men between the ages of 18 and 34.” SF Gate

AIDS-related news for World HIV/AIDS Day. Click and think:

• ‘Almost 30 years ago, the crisis was marked by panicking operators of blood banks, gurneys of dying men filling the halls in San Francisco General Hospital, a massive political protest movement and “safe sex” placed into our societal psyche.’ Tahoe Daily Tribune
• Deadly Myths: ‘The recent spate of rapes involving babies and children bears grim testimony to the widespread myth that that sex with a virgin will “cure” an HIV-infected male.’ allAfrica.com
• “Two AIDS drugs will be cheaper in South Africa from next year as Europe’s biggest drugmaker, GlaxoSmithKline, cuts 20 percent off the price. South Africa has five million people estimated to be living with the disease.” CNN Europe
• “(A) small biotechnology firm in California claims to be closing in on the elusive goal of developing a vaccine that could be used in preventing AIDS. VaxGen Inc. is in late-stage patient testing that’s aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of its experimental AIDSVAX.” CBS Market Watch
• AIDS continues devastating sweep: “The virus that causes AIDS is continuing to spread worldwide at a dramatic pace, with eastern Europe particularly hard hit, the United Nations has warned. The U.N.”
  
  CNN Europe

• Africa’s AIDS Fight: Are We Winning or Losing? “It seems the need is almost bottomless. United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has called for a “Global Aids Fund” – a war chest of US$7-10bn to be replenished at that level for at least the next five years.” allAfrica.com
• ” Nearly 30 percent of people deemed at risk for HIV have never been tested, the government said in warning they could be unknowingly spreading the virus that causes AIDS.”
  
  CNN Europe

• In-Depth Special – AIDS: 20 years of an epidemic — “On June 5, 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a notice on page two of its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report about a strange outbreak of killer pneumonia striking homosexual men.”
  
  CNN Europe

• AIDS 2001: Living longer, not better — “While people with HIV and AIDS are living longer, the disease for which there is no cure is infecting blacks and Hispanics more disproportionately than ever…” Dayton Daily News
• Some are still finding ways to observe World AIDS Day as a Day Without Art, as in past years. Seattle Post-Intelligencer
• “Former South African President Nelson Mandela called on Saturday for AIDS victims to be given access to drugs that fight the disease and said heads of state must take the lead in raising awareness of the illness.” BayArea.com
• “South African scientists are hoping that a cheap and effective AIDS treatment for the millions of South Africans living with the disease could be closer than anyone thought – right underfoot in fact.” New Scientist
  

Happy second anniversary to dangerousmeta!

Tempest for Eliza: “a program that uses your computer monitor to send out AM radio signals. You can then hear computer generated music in your radio.”

Bin Laden’s mountain fortress at Tora Bora (graphic) The Times of London

The calendar flips over to December and with it comes the NaNoWriMo finish line. Here are the posted winners so far. Congratulations to you all.

Flesh-eating bugs become cancer killers: “Injecting the bacteria into patients may sound crazy – but the only danger may be that they destroy tumours too fast.” New Scientist

Right whales teeter on the brink: “But a new population model suggests saving just two females a year would halt decline of the highly endangered north Atlantic species.” New Scientist

‘Is the Internet a revolution? Is it a linguistic revolution? Beyond the visual panache of the presentation on a screen, the Internet’s “linguistic” character is immediately obvious to anyone online. As the Internet has become incorporated into our lives, it is becoming clearer how it is being shaped by and is adapting language and languages. Language and the Internet is the first book by a language expert on the linguistic aspects of the Internet. Opening up linguistic issues for a general readership, (David) Crystal argues that “netspeak” is a radically new linguistic medium that we cannot ignore.’ Cambridge University Press

Plotting Along — Best-Selling Authors Are Richer Than Ever. So Why Is Prose From These Pros So Poor?

…short-spurt grafs.

Sometimes in choppy sentence fragments. Other times with no verbs. Or maybe. Single. Words.

These are the new masters of the No-Style style.

The article: heart-stopping prose! a page-turner! I couldn’t put it down…

Washington Post

North America’s Most Dangerous Mammal: How best to deal with the menace of Bambi.

Hunting solutions, from Reason magazine’s science correspondent:

Hunters traditionally want to kill bucks with big sets of antlers. In the past century, state game managers have persuaded hunters to leave does alone to reproduce. However, an innovative program called Quality Hunting Ecology advocated by Brent Haglund, president of the Sand County Foundation in Wisconsin, is being adopted by some states. The idea is that hunters must kill two does before they can shoot a buck. This program reduces the number of fertile females. One apparent side effect of having fewer female deer is that testosterone levels rise in bucks that must compete for access to the remaining females, thus making them bigger trophy animals. Preliminary results of the Quality Hunting Ecology program in Wisconsin show that it does reduce the deer population and improve forest quality. Pennsylvania has just adopted a similar program for this current hunting season.

In a loose segue: Predators key to forest survival: “A forest without predators may not be a forest for long – that is the ominous conclusion of a unique new study by an international team of scientists. The team has found that when predators vanish, herbivore populations can explode, leading to the mass destruction of plant life.” New Scientist

Michael “Skeptic” Shermer in Scientific American:Baloney Detection — hints to distinguish science from pseudo-science:

• How reliable is the source of the claim?
• Does this source often make similar claims?
• Have the claims been verified by another source?
• How does the claim fit with what we know about how the world works?
• Has anyone gone out of the way to disprove the claim, or has only supportive evidence been sought?

And in part II:

• Does the preponderance of evidence point to the claimant’s conclusion or to a different one?
• Is the claimant employing the accepted rules of reason and tools of research, or have these been abandoned in favor of others that lead to the desired conclusion?
• Is the claimant providing an explanation for the observed phenomena or merely denying the existing explanation?
• If the claimant proffers a new explanation, does it account for as many phenomena as the old explanation did?
• Do the claimant’s personal beliefs and biases drive the conclusions, or vice versa?
  

Artificial Heart Patient Dies: ‘Robert Tools, the first person to receive a fully self-contained artificial heart, died Friday after suffering a setback a day earlier. He was 59 and had lived with the device for 151 days.’ CBS

Notable Fiction Books of 2001 from the New York Times. And the editors’ choice of the best of the best, including Booker Prize winner Peter Carey, this year’s darling Jonathan Franzen, Alice Munro’s latest, and the intriguing W.G. Sebald in fiction choices. Louis Menand’s portrait of the Metaphysical Club (somewhere in my pile of books to get to) and the new Oliver Sacks memoir hold down the nonfiction end, along with the McCullough biography of John Adams (in which I have no interest).

Germ Defense Said to Cost Nearly Twice Bush Proposal — ‘ As Congress

debates how much to spend to bolster the

nation’s defenses against bioterrorism, two

leading federal health officials today put the

figure at roughly $2.8 billion, almost twice the

$1.5 billion the Bush administration has proposed.’ NY Times

Engineers Suspect Diesel Fuel in Collapse of 7 World Trade Center: “Amost lost in the chaos of the collapse of the

World Trade Center is a mystery that

under normal circumstances would probably have

captured the attention of the city and the world.

That mystery is the collapse of a nearby 47-story,

two-million-square-foot building seven hours after

flaming debris from the towers rained down on it,

igniting what became an out-of-control fire

…As engineers and scientists struggle to explain the

collapse of 7 World Trade Center, they have

begun considering whether a type of fuel that was inside the building all along

created intensely hot fires like those in the towers: diesel fuel, thousands of

gallons of it, intended to run electricity generators in a power failure.” NY Times

Rivals Mobilize Alternatives to U.S. System — ‘Around the world, countries are mobilizing to build independent satellite navigation networks, troubled that the Global Positioning System, the only functioning worldwide network, is run by the U.S. military and controlled by the government.’ International Herald Tribune

Fifty Nobel laureates in science write an open letter to the Congressional leadership urging us not to abrogate the ABM treaty. For a brief moment after Sept. 11th, I shared the hopes of some pundits that the attacks had put the lie to the mongering of more exotic fears of ‘rogue states’ which had been the pretext for the Bush Dictatorship’s national missile defense program. But no such luck, and with Putin won over it looks like this program of technological unfeasibility, fiscal boondoggle and destabilizing madness will be realized without even the flimsiest of rational justifications..

Journal axes gene research on Jews and Palestinians. A keynote research paper by a Spanish geneticist has been pulled from the journal Human Immunology, after being accepted. Indeed, some copies of the journal issue with the paper have already been sent out, and the editors are urging recipients to rip the offending pages out and destroy them.

By studying immune system genetic variations among Middle Eastern populations, the team found no data to suggest that the Jewish ‘race’ is genetically distinct from other Mediterranean peoples. This is not a novel conclusion and supports a number of earlier research results finding no genetic basis for Jewish distinctiveness. The cultural offense is that this can be seen to undermine the meme that “the Jews are a special chosen people and that Judaism can only be inherited.”

After accepting the paper, the journal’s editors now claim it provoked a firestorm of complaints based on its political bias and the ‘inappropriateness’ of suggestions that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is based in ‘cultural and religious, but not in genetic differences.’ The paper’s lead author has reportedly not seen or been given an opportunity to respond to such criticisms. He does concede he made some unfortunate choices of inflammatory language.

The Guardian comments: “Such a drastic act of self-censorship is unprecedented in research publishing and has created widespread disquiet, generating fears that it may involve the suppression of scientific work that questions Biblical dogma.”

Safety in the Skies: Malcolm Gladwell, on target.

The better we are at preventing and solving the crimes before us, the more audacious criminals become. Put alarms and improved locks on cars, and criminals turn to the more dangerous sport of carjacking. Put guards and bulletproof screens in banks, and bank robbery gets taken over by high-tech hackers. In the face of resistance, crime falls in frequency but rises in severity, and few events better illustrate this tradeoff than the hijackings of September 11th. The way in which those four planes were commandeered that Tuesday did not simply reflect a failure of our security measures; it reflected their success. When you get very good at cracking down on ordinary hijacking — when you lock the stairs at the back of the aircraft with a Cooper Vane — what you are left with is extraordinary hijacking.

New Yorker via gladwell.com [thanks, David]

Intimations of the great unlearning: interreligious spirituality and the demise of consciousness which is Alzheimer’s. “What remains after the unraveling of mind, language, and knowledge in Alzheimer’s was there in the beginning.” CrossCurrents

Turns Out It’s Not the Black Cats You Have to Watch Our For. Although it in no way means that he’s a less inhumane man, it’s a little simplistic to characterize Ashcroft, as Andrew Tobias does here, as “telling (us) that we have to endure unimaginable pain.” And Tobias’ recounting of a Jerry Groopman anecdote aside (a straw man, with nothing directly to do with Ashcroft or his policies), whether the Oregon “assisted suicide” law is reversed or not, doctors will continue ministering compassionately to the agonized terminally ill regardless of the moralizing of the pig-ignorant.

Ape brains show linguistic promise Three members of the family of great apes have a crucial speech-related brain feature previously thought unique to humans.” The finding, essentially a left-right asymmetry in the part of Broca’s area that subsumes speech production in humans, was revealed through a project doing MRI imaging of great apes’ brains and may be related to the apes’ prominent use of gesture in their communication. BBC

If you weren’t already familiar with this (it only recently came to my attention; I heard or read nothing about this when my children, now 3 and 7, were infants), it is a recent trend in some circles to teach preverbal children sign language as a tool for communication enhancement and intellectual enrichment in general as well as to facilitate the inclusion of those with hearing impairments in society.

Goffmania: an FmH reader debuts a new weblog with a social science bent, dedicated to social psychologist Erving Goffman, whose Presentation of Self in Everyday Life was one of the more influential books I read in a certain era. [Add to that Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, Levi-Strauss’ The Savage Mind, Berger and Luckman’s Social Construction of Reality and Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger and you have a weltanschaaung…] Godspeed, Neel.

DOJ’s Already Monitoring Modems: ‘The Department of Justice already is using its new anti-terrorism powers to monitor cable modem users without obtaining a judge’s permission first.’ Wired

Fezzes, Sphinxes and Secret Handshakes — “What do Mozart, George Washington, J. Edgar Hoover and Michael Richards of ‘Seinfeld’ have in common? Membership in the mysterious, and dwindling, fraternity of the Freemasons”.Washington Post

Russia Checkmated Its New Best Friend

But, while the Bush administration was busy tearing apart Afghanistan to find Bin Laden, it

failed to notice that the Russians were taking over half the country.

The Russians achieved this victory through their proxy–the Northern Alliance. Moscow,

which has sustained the alliance since 1990, rearmed it after Sept. 11 with new tanks, armored

vehicles, artillery, helicopters and trucks.

To the fury of Washington and Islamabad, in a coup de main the Russians rushed the Northern

Alliance into Kabul, in direct contravention of Bush’s dictates.

The alliance is now Afghanistan’s dominant force and, heedless of multi-party political talks in

Germany going on this week, styles itself as the new “lawful” government, a claim fully

backed by Moscow.

The Russians have regained influence over Afghanistan, avenged their defeat by the U.S. in

the 1980s war and neatly checkmated the Bush administration, which, for all its high-tech

military power, understands little about Afghanistan. LA Times

Will ‘It’ Finally Be Revealed? Wired

Jeffrey Isaac: Doing Things with Words

In the weeks, months, and years ahead, it is important that each of us is very clear about what we are doing with our words. We will be pressed to make declarative statements. And such statements will have their place. But it is just as important to remember that the qualifications, and the questions, and the ambivalences have their place. We need to make sure that they have their place in our individual minds. And, even more important, we need to make sure that they have their place in our public culture. The struggle against terrorism is a struggle on behalf of security and of life. But it is also a struggle on behalf of freedom and democracy. Right now the defense of our democracy requires us to be attentive to the things we do with weapons. But above all, democracy requires us to be supremely attentive to the things we do with words.

Brainstorming for Peace:

Campus Activists Reconsider Their Slogans

: “Between sloganeering and flag-waving, I wonder what’s left sometimes.” The American Prospect

Another reader comments on Safire:

A libertarian is a conservative who’s been wiretapped. Safire has had a

strong libertarian streak at least since he found that Kissinger was

snooping on him, but if you look back, you can find a number of attacks on

police and intelligence excess, and he did a marvelous piece about his

revulsion at the Republican Party in 1992 when Pat & Pat were calling

shots. He’s looked worse in recent years because he’s deranged on the

subject of the Clintons, but so is Christopher Hitchens over on the other side.

I think in retrospect I hadn’t given Safire enough credit, and hadn’t followed his exploits carefully enough, and was tarring him with a broad brush as an unnuanced “conservative”, or I wouldn’t’ve been so surprised at his recent outrage… Thanks to all who wrote to point this out to me, compassionately.

jerrykindall pointed to this Interview with Neil Gaiman from January magazine. As usual, Neverwhere is glossed over or ignored. I’ll go out on a limb here and say I enjoyed it more than American Gods, its inventive, tight control as opposed to the sprawl of the latter.

I was surprised to find there have been claims, which I hadn’t previously heard, that Harry Potter was derivative of some of his work:

What was it of yours they were accusing her of stealing from you?

My character Tim Hunter from Books of Magic who came out in 1990 was a small dark-haired boy with big round spectacles — a 12-year-old English boy — who has the potential to be the most powerful wizard in the world and has a little barn owl.

So there were commonalties, for sure.

Well, yes and as I finally, pissed off, pointed out to an English reviewer who tried to start this again, I said: Look, all of the things that they actually have in common are such incredibly obvious, surface things that, had she actually been stealing, they were the things that would be first to be changed.

I had actually pondered less trivial parallels between Potter and Neverwhere when I read it several months ago — the notion of the unrecognized commingling of the magical and mundane Londons, as in Diagon Alley or Platform 9 3/4, and specifically the way one walks through seemingly solid walls to cross between worlds.

A History of Bombing by Sven Lindqvist, Swedish cultural historian and author of Exterminate All the Brutes.

Sven Lindqvist is one of Sweden´s most innovative writers, fast building a cult following for his unorthodox, fiercely moral works of cultural history. Desert Divers and Exterminate All the Brutes exposed the depths of European imperialism and racism in Africa; now Lindqvist turns his clear inquisitive eye on aerial bombing, and the profound and terrible effects of its aftermath on the 20th century.

Drawing on a rich range of sources, from popular fiction, to first hand accounts by the victims and perpetrators of bombing, from official government documents, to his own personal experiences as a child, parent and grandparent, Lindqvist unearths the fascinating history of the development of air power. He exposes the racist assumptions underlying colonial bombing campaigns in North Africa, and France and England’s use of bombing to subdue postwar independence movements; and he probes the psychology of Bomber Harris. He sets out the recipe for napalm, and the science of smart bombs, and he asks some uncomfortable questions: did bombs ever produce the expected results? Is bombing civilians a war crime, and if so why have the laws of war and international justice proved so impotent? Why can´t the truth about Hiroshima be told in the Air and Space museum in Washington?

Lindqvist has constructed the book in an ingenious way: as a sort of labyrinth in which the reader is offered a number of paths through a century of war. This makes for a fascinating reading experience, allowing us to grasp the chaos of history, and the way in which different narratives attempt to make sense of it.

” This book is a labyrinth with twenty-two entrances and no exit. Each entrance opens into a narrative or an argument, which you then follow by going from text to text according to the instruction To + the number of the section where the narrative is continued. So from entrance 1 you proceed to section 166 and continue reading section by section until you come to 173, where another To takes you back to entrance 2.

In order to move through time, you also have to move through the book, often forwards, but sometimes backwards. Wherever you are in the text, events and thoughts from that same period surround you, but they belong to narratives other than the one you happen to be following. That’s the intention. That way the text emerges as what it is-one of many possible paths through the chaos of history.

So welcome to the labyrinth! Follow the threads, put together the horrifying puzzle and, once you have seen my century, build one of your own from other pieces.”

Grenade factory in backyard annoys neighbors. Ananova

The Belligerent Bunch: Rabid Journalists and Pundits Push Bush to Extremes

By calling for Bush to step up the war effort, curtail civil liberties, consider torture and imagine the deaths of tens of millions of Muslims, these writers and TV personalities have dominated the intellectual debate. By grossly distorting the positions of critics, they have helped to give Bush a free ride and undermine healthy discourse. This pundit group has upped the ante for the Bush administration, either pushing it further to the right, or providing it with cover to keep pushing the envelope. No matter how far the Bush administration goes in expanding security power and remaking the international landscape, the war boys will still be calling for more. AlterNet [via Blowback]

Oh heck, blogback doesn’t seem to be working either. I just looked back over a week of entries here and there has not been a single comment. I’m excising the code; click on the comment icon [ ] beneath any post to send me an email comment on that post.

By the way, the other icon [ ] — which is supposed to be a pencil — is not there for you. It’s just for me to “remotely” edit my posts, i.e. edit them from my browser window without surfing over to blogger.com. If Blogger’s remote editing weren’t broken, as it appears to have been for months, you wouldn’t even see that icon unless you had permission to edit remotely, i.e. unless you were me. I leave it there for its enormous convenience to me, even though it has been confusing to some readers (who, for instance, have clicked on it to post a comment to me and found, to their consternation, that they were presented with some obscure login prompt).

But I’m curious — I never see any remote-editing links when I read any other Blogger-based weblogs. Does that mean that people have gotten remote editing to work properly, so the links are invisible to readers like me? Or does no one else use the remote editing mechanism at all? If you’re a Blogger-based blogger who’s gotten it to work properly, please write back and, if you please, share the relevant code. I’d love to make that icon go away and clean up the interface further while maintaining my functionality. TIA.

Mental gymnastics increase biceps strength — ‘It is a couch potato’s dream – just imagining yourself exercising can increase the strength of even your large muscles. The discovery could help patients too weak to exercise to start recuperating from stroke or other injury. And if the technique works in older people, they might use it to help maintain their strength.’ New Scientist

The Hotline World Extra, daily from The Atlantic, is an interesting collection of source news related to the war and connected issues. Here are todays’ four lead items, f’rinstance:

Forget anthrax. Bin Laden scientists working on way to disseminate cyanide via weather balloon.

The “Who’s Next” Watch:

Somalia seen as more likely than Iraq.

Trust But Verified?

India says U.S. patrolled their nuke site.

A Novel Idea!

Saudi prince’s proposal calls for holding actual elections in the country.

Jennifer Homans on Dance: Dancing in the Dark — “Osama bin laden may have destroyed the World Trade Center, but he has saved American dance. I know this sounds a little grotesque; but so you would suppose, to hear the pronouncements of leading figures in the New York dance world.” The New Republic

Routes of Least Surveillance — ‘It’s not the journey or the destination; it’s the getting there unseen that counts.

Or so goes the thinking behind a new mapping utility created by civil libertarians to guide New Yorkers through Manhattan along routes with the fewest surveillance cameras.’ Wired

Bad Memory — why Afghans take revenge: ‘Then my driver squatted down next to the prisoner and said, “Fuck off, Osama. Osama’s the husband of your mother. I hate you. Why did you bring Pakistan and the Arabs here to destroy our country? You killed our great Ahmed Shah Massoud. If I’d captured you, I would have killed you. But now we’re telling these soldiers not to hit you because we are kind.” ‘ The New Republic

Guinness ‘Clouds’ Fill Irish Sky. Part of an interactive web project by Irish artist Grace Weir, inaugurating a new Guiness-sponsored art gallery that will be a centerpiece of an emerging digital district in central Dublin sponsored by the Irish government, the virtual cloud is visible from many places around the streets of Dublin. Wired

Dead men walking… ” The Islamic world after the terrorist attack of September 11th is teetering on the edge of massive change. There may well be global realignment as extensive as the collapse of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact in 1989. In retrospect Osama bin Laden may be seen as the most effective terrorist since Gavrilo Princip killed the Hapsburg heir Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914…

What will it really matter if the American coalition conquers the rocky wasteland of Afghanistan only to find Al Queda in control of nuclear-armed Pakistan, or the oil riches of Saudi Arabia — and with strong popular support?” Thomas Lipscomb, Jewish World Review

The Post-September 11 Environment. Public watchdog group OMB Watch is compiling a running list of public information to which the government is removing access since the attacks.

John Berger: A Gratitude Hard to Name: ‘Is it still possible to write more words about him? I think of those already written, mine included, and the answer is “No.” If I look at his paintings, the answer is again—for a different reason—“No”; the canvases command silence. I almost said plead for, and that would have been false, for there is nothing pathetic about a single image he made—not even the old man with his head in his hands at the gates of eternity. All his life he hated blackmail and pathos.’ The Threepenny Review

Keeping a Who’s-Naughty List: ‘London police are planning to register children who exhibit criminal potential in an effort to prevent them from developing into full-fledged lawbreakers… Teachers, social workers, health care professionals, law enforcement agents and other authorities who have contact with troublemakers will contribute information to the database program, which will be rolled out in 11 London boroughs before being implemented nationally, according to a copy of the speech. Special squads formed by police and community workers will supervise the actions and behavior of children included in the registry.’ Wired

Malaria and Cancer Cells Yield to the Same Garlic Compounds: the multiplicity of health benefits of garlic has been indisputable but the basis of its effectiveness mysterious. New research sheds light on the common strands in conditions that may be garlic-sensitive. Scientific American

“Behind the jargon about failed states and humanitarian interventions lie thousands of dead.” The incendiary John Pilger on how liberals tolerate the suffering of innocents as we prepare for the next phase of the good terrorists’ war on the bad. New Statesman

When do we take the flags down? “The question is as complex — and American — as the nation’s relationship with patriotism”, writes Paul Lieberman, a staff writer in the New York Times‘ New York bureau. LA Times On a related topic, and with apologies in advance to any of you Followers who are also flag-fliers, has anyone else noticed that the people who drive like madmen on the road, weaving in and out and cutting others off, etc., the ones I call all kinds of foul names from behind the safety of my closed windows, all seem to be the ones who are flying flags on their cars? It used to be I only had to look out for the people who wore their baseball caps backwards…

Mark Rasch, formerly head of the U.S. Department of Justice Computer Crime Unit, writes on Ashcroft’s Global Power Grab: “A little-noticed provision in the new anti-terrorism act imposes U.S. cyber crime laws on other nations, whether they like it or not… An amendment to the definition of a “protected computer” for the first time explicitly enables U.S. law enforcement to prosecute computer hackers outside the United States in cases where neither the hackers nor their victims are in the U.S., provided only that packets related to that activity traveled through U.S. computers or routers.” Security Focus