Viewing the brain in whole new light: describes a laser-based brain imaging technique which compares favorably with MRI scanning, the ‘gold standard of noninvasive imaging”, is cheaper, easier to use, more portable, and reportedly “non-damaging.” As you know, I’m a big fan of functional MRI’s ability to elucidate structure/function correlations in the brain in realtime, but certain mental activities just cannot easily be performed inside its stationary massive enclosure.

Hawks try to implicate Iraq by hunting for evidence in UK

“A row has broken out in the Bush administration after it was revealed that hawks in the Pentagon had sent an ex-CIA director, James Woolsey, to Britain, behind the backs of the state department and the current CIA leadership.

News of Mr Woolsey’s travels, have exposed a deep fissure inside the administration over whether to extend the war against terrorism to Iraq.

Last month, the state department, led by Colin Powell, convinced President Bush that there was no clear involvement in the attacks and that Iraq should not be included on the target list as such action might destroy the fragile coalition.

However, hawks in the administration grouped around the deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, are determined to ensure military action to topple Saddam Hussein.

According to several sources in the U.S., Mr Wolfowitz paid for Mr Woolsey to travel to Britain last month to look for evidence of prior Iraqi involvement in terrorism.”

From Dawn, which describes itself as Pakistan’s largest-circulation English-language daily newspaper. Look at its light, breezy, thoroughly modern weekly review feature; you’d never know it originates from a deeply divided military dictatorship at the margin of the world’s newest, hottest conflagration. On the other hand, its front page is nothing but war news.

On the topic of efforts to implicate Iraq, some are suggesting that the capability to obtain and disseminate anthrax, if a part of terrorist actions, would not be within al Qaeda’s capabilities, and fits neatly with the assumed Iraqi bioweapons capability.

America, oil and Afghanistan: “Once the initial shock and hysteria gave way to reason, it became clear that the U.S. was using, in a diabolic way, this human tragedy to further its imperialist hegemony worldwide and to invoke a more draconian domestic rule by curtailing democratic rights and freedom in the name of combating terrorism. The crucial element in this strategy of zeroing in on Osama bin Laden, however, goes largely unnoticed.

Afghanistan occupies the central position in the U.S. strategy for the economic control of the oil and gas resources in the entire Middle East.” opinion piece in The Hindu

Spy agency halts flow of information: “The United States is becoming increasingly frustrated with the paucity of intelligence provided by Pakistan on Osama bin Laden?s whereabouts and his al-Qaeda terrorist camps.

Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan?s premier spy agency, which was involved in training and arming the Taleban militia, has reportedly told Washington that it has little information about bin Laden and the Arab fighters under his command in Afghanistan.” The Times of London

Melanie Phillips comments in this Sunday Times of London commentary about the relationship between the Middle East conflict and the ‘war on terrorism’:

…(T)he belief that a (in principle, desirable) two-state solution to the Israel crisis would secure Arab support for the coalition is extraordinarily facile. The essence of the Muslim grievance here is the existence of Israel itself. That is why Yasser Arafat rejected Israel’s offer of a fledgling state and launched the intifada in response.

But Blair, along with some advisers to President George W Bush, doesn’t seem to see it that way. He thinks solving the Middle East crisis will end terror. But this is an upside-down argument. It is only by ending terror that the Middle East crisis will be solved. Yet how can this be done if America and Britain actually ally themselves with states sponsoring terror in the Middle East, such as Syria, Iran or Saudi Arabia?

There is now a real danger, as Israel’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon, has warned, that Israel will be seen as expendable and a terrorist state will be imposed on its border – as the price for keeping together the coalition against terror. But even if the Middle East crisis were solved tomorrow, the threat would remain. For the issue is the hegemony of the West.

Her solution, unfortunately, is that ‘the West should end its “liberal” imperialism and stop telling other cultures how to behave. Instead, it must vigorously defend and reassert liberal values on its home ground,’ by which she means giving up the illusion of multicultural and remaking ourselves as a ‘Christian’ civilization, albeit one with respect for and support of the Jews and Israel. Moderate Muslims in the West must choose to live as a minority in such a liberal society, and may be the seeds of an Islamic reformation.

Meanwhile, Blair backs creation of Palestinian state: “The prime minister, Tony Blair, today gave his public backing to the creation of a Palestinian state following a meeting at 10 Downing Street with Yasser Arafat.

The Palestinian leader called on the Israeli government to come “immediately” to the negotiating table to thrash out a negotiated settlement for the Middle East.

Mr Blair said that the creation of a Palestinian state was central to his vision for peace. “A viable Palestinian state, as part of a negotiated and agreed settlement, which guarantees peace and security for Israel is the objective,” Mr Blair said after an hour of talks with Mr Arafat.” Guardian UK As Phillips (above) asks, however, does Blair put the cart before the horse?

Exposed Florida Man Falls Ill With Anthrax An American Media Inc. mailroom employee who was exposed to anthrax has fallen ill, state officials confirm. Ernesto Blanco, 73, has been diagnosed with the inhaled form of anthrax, state health officials said Monday.Florida health officials say Blanco is improving, and that they’re encouraged by his progress. And: the anthrax-bearing NBC letter and the letter that arrived today at Tom Daschle’s office were both postmarked Sept. 18th in Trenton, NJ. Two postal workers who have fallen ill (although one of them has “poison-ivy-like” symptoms) are being tested for anthrax exposure.

The Peacemakers Speak: seventeen of the world’s living Nobel Peace Prize laureates react to 9-11 and the U.S.’s response. Some, particularly the politicians, speak in somewhat predictable terms of living together and condemning terrorism, of extending sympathy to those who lost a loved one. Other messages, particularly those of the non-governmental figures among them — Rigoberta Menchu, Mairead Maguire, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Jody Williams — are more fervent, anguished and resonant.

Now that war is upon us, I feel it is imperative that the present conflict not be inflamed and extended into a “clash of civilizations,” nor that it be painted as a jihad or a crusade–two concepts that have been sorely abused over the course of history. There is truly nothing more disturbing than killing in the name of God and religion. Today I send my plea to those in the Muslim world, in Indonesia and Saudi Arabia, in Bangladesh and Iran, and in all places where the name of Allah is worshipped, to reject the false call to holy war against the West that is being put out by extremist leaders. At the same time, I call upon the leaders and the people of the West, in societies based upon the Judeo-Christian tradition, to recall that Christianity provides no basis for an assumption of superiority and dominance, quite the contrary. The holy writings of the Torah, the Bible, and the Koran have been twisted so often that it has become difficult for ordinary, good, and compassionate people of all faiths to discern the principles that are primary in all the holy books: peace and justice, fair treatment of our neighbors, and the primacy of love as the supreme value.

–Oscar Arias

Powers of 10. We’ve apparently missed International Powers of Ten Day (10/10), but it’s not too late to take this journey that has long been one of the best ways to contemplate the grandeur and scale of existence — the film at the Smithsonian, the book, the walk-through exhibit at the remodeled Hayden Planetarium in New York, and now this site.

From Windows guru Brian Livingston: There’ll be no XP for me; reasons why Windows XP is a downgrade instead of an upgrade include the Passport authentication system; your vulnerability to unlimited amounts of Microsoft spam and arbitrary changes in the Passport agreement at Microsoft’s whim after you sign on; weak Java support and no support for browser plug-ins; and the brain-dead product activation scheme. InfoWorld

Can you believe the people with whom Mick Jagger is going to take to the stage, even for a cause like this?

These are agencies to which you can contribute for children’s aid and relief efforts in Afghanistan:

• Catholic Relief Services: http://www.catholicrelief.org
  

• Christian Aid: http://www.christian-aid.org.uk
  

• Church World Service: http://www.churchworldservice.org
  

• Lutheran World Relief: http://www.lwr.org/
  

• Mennonite Central Committee: http://www.mcc.org/afghancrisis
  

• World Vision: http://www.worldvision.org

[courtesy of Progressive Review]

Your cholesterol can be too low: Here are the results of a Google search on “low cholesterol” and “suicide”, the association between which was recently brought to my attention. Does low cholesterol or some aspect of a cholesterol-lowering lifestyle (rigidity? self-discipline? preoccupation with one’s cardiac risk factors? anxiety about one’s physical health in general? lower body weight? some effect of cholesterol-lowering drugs? some metabolic effect e.g. on brain chemistry of low cholesterol?) contribute to depression, or perhaps to poorer treatment response to antidepressants, somehow? Does a depressive biochemistry or personality somehow contribute to low cholesterol? Or are both correlated, without a causal link, with some other factor?

Dialogue in the Mountains

You ask me why I lodge in these emerald hills;

I laugh, don’t answer — my heart is at peace.

Peach blossoms and flowing waters

go off to mysterious dark,

And there is another world,

not of mortal men.

—Li Po (701-762 AD)           

wood s lot reminded us to beware of aibohphobia, the fear of palindromes. This Metafilter thread on the occasion of the palindromic date 10-02-2001 has some good ones to be afraid of. My favorite new discovery there: “Rettebs iflahd noces, eh? Ttu, but the second half is better.” Speaking of palindromes and nonsense, 9-11 is palindromic in Roman numerals. Many have noted that there is no natural monicker for the new Day of Infamy coming to mind. We’ve fallen back on referring to the ‘unfortunate events’, the ‘disaster’, the ‘terrorist attacks’, the ‘attacks on America,’ by their date. Should we call it “IXXIMMI”, “ixximmi“? It rhymes with “infamy” too, sort of…

Don’t shoot the messenger, says al Jazeera. “A senior journalist from groundbreaking Arab television channel al Jazeera has urged the White House not to try to stifle media coverage of comments by Saudi-born fugitive Osama bin Laden.

“We should not shoot the messenger just because we hate the message,” said Hafiz al Mirazi, Jazeera’s Washington bureau chief.

The Bush administration appealed to newspapers on Thursday not to publish in their entirety statements issued by bin Laden and his top aides, asserting they may contain coded messages to followers to carry out fresh attacks on U.S. targets.’ Yahoo! The administration appears disingenuous about this; the concern about coded messages is probably largely a pretext for not wanting bin Laden’s inflammatory message spread. The major news outlets, to their credit, acknowledge this distinction but, to their shame, have acceded to the “patriotic” request unquestioningly. This is effrontery to the public’s right to know. Many commentators, certainly not just this Arab critic, have noted that of course the best way for the American people to evaluate propaganda claims is to hear them, and that goes for propaganda from both sides.

The Pacifist Weblog. Nevertheless, from Sam Smith’s Progressive Review, “…just a few reasons a non-pacifist might oppose the war:

• It will just lead to worse problems including increased guerilla actions.
  

• It is a war we can’t win.
  

• It is not a just war.
  

• It is unconstitutional.
  

• It violates international law including the UN Charter.
  

• It is wrecking our constitutional system.
  

• It is a high risk act of mindless machismo
  

• It is poorly planned by incompetent and corrupt leaders.
  

• It is giving the nation a mass case of agoraphobia, making us prisoners of our own fears.
  

• It is a war without defined objectives, a defined enemy, or a definition of victory.
  

• It is a war we can’t win without simultaneously ending our imperial role in the Muslim world.
  

• It will badly hurt the American economy.
  

• It is a war premised on the assumption that 6,000 innocent Americans’ lives are worth more than the 500,000 innocent Iraqi children’s lives lost during the Iraqi embargo.
  

• It is a war for unstated corrupt ends, including the interests of multinational oil companies.
  

Those who are labeling as pacifists all critics of the war don’t want to deal with such issues. Instead writers for major papers — such as Michael Kelly in the Washington Post and Scott Simon in the Wall Street Journal — create a deceitful dichotomy with some of the most intellectually dishonest arguments of recent times.” [via wood s lot]

MIT makes available on the web course materials for all its undergrad and graduate courses. The MIT press release makes it clear this is neither a distance learning initiative or a way to get an MIT degree remotely, but that “Institutions around the world could make direct use of the MIT OpenCourseWare materials as references and sources for curriculum development. These materials might be of particular value in developing countries that are trying to expand their higher education systems rapidly.”

Susan and Jay Love Each Other, and Their Dog, and Their Pharmacologist. ‘(A)ccording

to Dr. Amy Banks, a psychiatrist at the

Stone Center for the Study of Relationships

at Wellesley College: ”There are two categories of medicated couples.

There are those in which the medication allows the rightful relationship to

emerge, and then there are those in which medication serves as a screen

to cover up real issues. How can you tell them apart?” It’s a good

question. But let’s put that aside for a moment and just consider the

phenomenon. For now, maybe we should not be asking whether our

relationships are more or less true under these pharmacological conditions

but, simply, what does love look like in such a strange state of union?’ (by Lauren Slater, a psychologist who runs a mental health and substance-abuse clinic in Boston. Her most recent book is Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir.) NY Times Magazine [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

Collateral Damage (cont’d.): Death From Above Devastates Simple Afghan Village: “There aren’t many witnesses to say

what happened to Khorum village in eastern Afghanistan last

Wednesday night.

There aren’t many survivors.” And: Pentagon Says Error Led to

Bombing of Houses in Kabul: “A Navy jet

mistakenly dropped a 2,000-pound bomb

today into a residential neighborhood of Kabul, the

Pentagon said. Initial reports from the Afghan

capital said four people had been killed and eight

others wounded in the attack, which occurred as the

bombing of Afghanistan resumed after a pause for

the Muslim holy day on Friday.” NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

Bush Is Said to Scale Back His Religion-Based Initiative NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

Susan and Jay Love Each Other, and Their Dog, and Their Pharmacologist. ‘(A)ccording

to Dr. Amy Banks, a psychiatrist at the

Stone Center for the Study of Relationships

at Wellesley College: ”There are two categories of medicated couples.

There are those in which the medication allows the rightful relationship to

emerge, and then there are those in which medication serves as a screen

to cover up real issues. How can you tell them apart?” It’s a good

question. But let’s put that aside for a moment and just consider the

phenomenon. For now, maybe we should not be asking whether our

relationships are more or less true under these pharmacological conditions

but, simply, what does love look like in such a strange state of union?’ (by Lauren Slater, a psychologist who runs a mental health and substance-abuse clinic in Boston. Her most recent book is Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir.) NY Times Magazine [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

Outcry over ‘Pinky’ and ‘Yellowy’ (right).

Battle of Kabul delayed by US row with Pakistan: “A deepening diplomatic rift between Washington and Islamabad has threatened to weaken the American-led campaign against Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. American use of Pakistani military bases and airspace is in jeopardy after President Pervez Musharraf objected to any decisive US military support for the Northern Alliance, the rebel group preparing to strike at Kabul.”

And: Taliban troops prepare for underground fight : “Afghanistan’s leading cave-fighting veteran from its 1980s war with the Soviet Union has been appointed head of the Taliban army. The move raises the prospect of British and American soldiers having to fight in the country’s labyrinth of tunnels and mountain caverns if they mount an invasion to find Osama Bin Laden… Allied forces, however, are likely to be far better equipped than the Russians were to beat Haqani’s veterans.” Sunday Times of London

The making of a master criminal “An anguished John le Carré says we wasted our cold war victory and are now assisting our enemy.” I’ve been following le Carré for twenty years, reading everything of his I could get my hands on, ever since one of my psychiatric mentors, Leston Havens, mentioned that le Carré had the best characterizations he had ever read in fiction. Here’s how he nails bin Laden:

The stylised television footage and photographs of Bin Laden suggest a man of homoerotic narcissism, and maybe we can draw a grain of hope from that. Posing with a Kalashnikov, attending a wedding or consulting a sacred text, he radiates with every self-adoring gesture an actor’s awareness of the lens. He has height, beauty, grace, intelligence and magnetism, all great attributes unless you’re the world’s hottest fugitive and on the run, in which case they’re liabilities hard to disguise. But greater than all of them, to my jaded eye, is his barely containable male vanity, his appetite for self-drama and his closet passion for the limelight. And just possibly this trait will be his downfall, seducing him into a final dramatic act of self-destruction, produced, directed, scripted and acted to death by Osama Bin Laden himself.

Read the entire essay, both for his tortured message and his eloquence. He concludes:

…please, Mr Bush – on my knees, Mr Blair – keep God out of this. To imagine God fights wars is to credit Him with the worst follies of mankind. God, if we know anything about Him, which I don’t profess to, prefers effective food drops, dedicated medical teams, comfort and good tents for the homeless and bereaved, and, without strings, a decent acceptance of our past sins and a readiness to put them right. He prefers us less greedy, less arrogant, less evangelical, and less dismissive of life’s losers.

It’s not a new world order, not yet, and it’s not God’s war. It’s a horrible, necessary, humiliating police action to redress the failure of our intelligence services and our blind political stupidity in arming and exploiting Islamic fanatics to fight the Soviet invader, then abandoning them to a devastated, leaderless country. As a result, it’s our miserable duty to seek out and punish a bunch of modern-medieval religious zealots who will gain mythic stature from the very death we propose to dish out to them.

And when it’s over, it won’t be over. The shadowy armies of Bin Laden, in the emotional aftermath of his destruction, will gather numbers rather than wither away. So will the hinterland of silent sympathisers who provide them with logistical support. Cautiously, between the lines, we are being invited to believe that the conscience of the West has been reawakened to the dilemma of the poor and homeless of the earth. And possibly, out of fear, necessity and rhetoric, a new sort of political morality has indeed been born.

But when the shooting dies and a seeming peace is achieved, will the United States and its allies stay at their posts or, as happened at the end of the cold war, hang up their boots and go home to their own back yards? Even if those back yards will never again be the safe havens they once were. Sunday Times of London

5 More at Florida Office Test Positive for Anthrax, company officials said today, raising to eight the number of workers for the South Florida publishing company who have been exposed to the deadly bacteria.” NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

An esteemed reader fired back at me:

“Not a shred of supporting evidence for the Goff allegations. You truly believe that we allowed 4 planes to be hijacked and sent into the WTC and the Pentagon to get some oil and knew they were doing this and said nothing? Wow.”

My response:

“You have at times reacted to things I’ve posted in my blog as if you think I’m endorsing them. Please understand that the only thing I’m endorsing is that they’re interesting to read and think about. Although I clearly have my selective biases, I don’t want to be construed as trying to tell people 100% of the time what to believe. FmH is far from having a party line; I hope that’s clear. Please continue your skeptical barbs if you ever think otherwise.”

I knew the Goff piece would provoke some querulous responses; in some ways, he sounds like the zealous conspiracy theorist he doth protest too much that he is not. But read his message; I too have been troubled by the lack of accounting for the amount of time during which the authorities probably knew they were tracking four improbably simultaneous hijackings that morning, by Dubya’s apparent non-plussed response to learning of the attacks, and by the shifting halftruths the administration has been feeding us since. What do other readers think, either about Goff, or about the ‘party line’ at Follow Me Here? [I don’t agree with Fukuyama (below) either, by the way…His argument seemed little better than gussied-up jingoism in 1989, and nothing I’ve seen or heard since including this update changes that….]

Francis Fukuyama: ‘We remain at the end of history.’ ‘I remain right: modernity is a very powerful freight train that will not be derailed by recent events, however painful’.

A stream of commentators has been asserting that the tragedy of 11 September proves that I was utterly wrong to have said more than a decade ago that we had reached the end of history. The chorus began almost immediately, with George Will asserting that history had returned from vacation, and Fareed Zakaria declaring the end of the end of history.

It is, on the face of it, nonsensical and insulting to the memory of those who died on 11 September ? as well as to those who are now participating in military raids over Afghanistan ? to declare that this unprecedented attack did not rise to the level of a historical event. But the way in which I used the word “history” was different. It referred to the progress of mankind over the centuries toward modernity, which is characterised by institutions like liberal democracy and capitalism.

Independent UK

A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues: A Philosopher Counts 18: “A Martian who knew some of our literature and religion but nothing about our bodies might be forgiven for thinking that people have seven fingers. Why else would they be so puzzlingly keen to make lists of seven items? We have — or had — seven deadly sins, Seven Wonders of the World, seven liberal arts, seven sages of Greece, seven virtues, seven sacraments and (if we are highly effective people) seven habits. The list of lists could go on and on, and most of the collections would be as arbitrary as these, er, seven.

The virtues, to be sure, almost didn’t make it. In Plato’s day, there were just four cardinal ones: justice, courage, prudence and temperance. But luckily Christianity came along and brought the total up to quota with a convenient trio of theological virtues: faith, hope and charity. Today, it seems, we are more demanding or ambitious. André Comte-Sponville counts no fewer than 18 in A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues: the four cardinal virtues, one theological one (namely love, of which charity, in its Christian sense, is a variant), plus politeness, fidelity, generosity, compassion, mercy, gratitude, humility, simplicity, tolerance, purity, gentleness, good faith (by which he means respect for truth) and humor. Humor? For the author, this important virtue is the capacity that prevents us from taking ourselves too seriously — an unusual sentiment to find in a philosophy book.” NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

More Executions, Fewer Deaths? “A new study suggests that the death penalty deters many more murders than most people thought plausible. A death-penalty opponent analyzes the evidence.” Controversial findings of recent studies using a new “econometric” methodology have included not only that executions save, on average, eighteen lives apiece by their deterrent effect, but also the salubrious effects on the crime rate from carrying concealed weapons and from legalizing abortions. The researchers, the essay’s author explains, went through contortions to explain some counterintuitive findings of the study which, although I’m not qualified to assess econometric analysis, make me dubious overall about this methodology; has it been seized upon because its findings serve conservative purposes? (Do I doubt it because it does not serve my purposes [grin]?) Many compelling studies have established the lack of a deterrent effect by demonstrating that the presence or absence of capital punishment in a constituency fails to correlate with the murder rate, and that the rates of change of the murder rate fail to correlate with changes in death penalty status. It’s probably worth noting that, while the author is advertised as a death penalty opponent, it is on religious grounds which have little relationship to one’s attitude about deterrence. From American Outlook, magazine of the conservative Hudson Institute think tank.

The roots of conflict: “Is western culture better than any other? Umberto Eco argues that what is important is not superiority but pluralism and toleration.” Guardian UK

A thread on kuro5hin discusses what is deemed The Utter Failure of Weblogs as Journalism. I entirely agree. Weblogging is not journalism, and should not pretend to be. It utilizes some of the presentation skills but none of the information-gathering and -verification ones. Adding personal commentary, or ‘spin’ to the items noted, or even just the act of selection, juxtaposition (and selective omission!) without explicit comment, makes weblogging much more akin to personalized editorializing rather than reportage. Please, please, no one should use FmH as their primary news source!

Not in my name: Anti-war protesters rally in London 20,000 in a CND-led march against the military air strikes on Afghanistan. BBC

Someone on a mailing list I’m on mentioned Dr. Michael Osterholm, former state epidemiologist for Minnesota until Jesse Ventura arrived on the scene. Osterholm has written a well-received and terrifying book, Living Terrors: What America Needs to Know to Survive the Coming Bioterrorist Catastrophe, (the link points to a Nov. 2001 capsule review in The American Scientist; here’s a Google search to further references to the book) filled with scenarios which

“show how just one person, with a little training in microbiology, could bring on immense suffering. Chilling revelations from former Russian bioweapons researchers illustrate, all too clearly, the accessibility of anthrax, botulinum toxin and, most frightening of all, smallpox. These organisms can be stored in modified fountain pens, brought without incident through high-security checkpoints and cultivated into weapons of mass destruction with only mail-order lab equipment.”

Here‘s more on Osterholm, also from Google, for those who wish to pursue this further. He now heads a consulting group called ican Inc. (Infection Control Advisory Network), and although his medical politics seem to be progressive (from what I’ve read; his resignation from the Ventura administration reportedly revolved around his opposition to privatization of public health services), he appears to be connected — at least in that he is featured as one of their notable quotes — to the Journal of Homeland Security, which is published by a retired US Air Force colonel and seems to have a strong rightwing bias in the direction of military involvement in domestic civil control. [Might it even have been an influence in Dubya’s nomenclature for his new cabinet post?] The webpage of the Journal’s parent agency, the ANSER Institute for Homeland Security, run by the same retired USAF colonel, has links to suggested readings, federal organizations connected with domestic security issues, a virtual library, and outside links, among others.

Here‘s a link to a description of Dark Winter, a wargame exercise they co-led recently whose scenario involves a smallpox attack on the U.S.

One dimension of the public health response to a bioterrorist attack would be the question of who would be in charge. Writing in one of a series of articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) by members of the Working Group for Civilian Biodefense, a group of experts representing research, government, military, public health, and emergency management institutions and agencies (which includes Osterholm), Dr Thomas Cole warns:

Until recently… lawmakers never examined the legal authority for a response to bioterrorism. When the authors of the US Constitution were reserving public health powers to the states, all epidemics were local. Today, he said, “laws are so antiquated and unclear that no one even knows what our powers and duties are.” For example, said Gostin, it isn’t clear whether any legal authority has the power to force people to be vaccinated, treated, quarantined, or isolated. It isn’t clear whether hospitals can be confiscated, or doctors can be compelled to triage and treat patients.

I was pointed by Also Not Found in Nature to this discussion by Stan Goff, a former Special Forces operative and instructor in military science and tactics, of why we should not believe the official version of the events of Sept. 11th and their aftermath. “…the official line only works if they can get everyone to accept its

underlying premises… Those premises are twofold. One, there is the premise that what

this de facto administration is doing now is a ?response? to September

11th. Two, there is the premise that this attack on the World Trade Center

and the Pentagon was done by people based in Afghanistan. In my opinion,

neither of these is sound.” It’s the oil, stupid, he says, and suggests that the Bush cabinet, which looks to him like a “military general staff”, has had designs on Afghanistan for a long time. bin Laden is a trumped-up villain. The gov’t had foreknowlege of the attack that was criminally covered up. The administration was facing a confluence of crises from which they were temporarily rescued by this event. The increased domestic repression that will arise from the crisis serve the powers-that-be well as they face “the beginning of a

permanent and precipitous decline in worldwide oil production, the

beginning of a deep and protracted worldwide recession, and the unraveling of the empire.”

The Deep Intellectual Roots of Islamic Terror — ‘ “Many Americans seem to think that bin Laden is

just a violent cult leader,” said Michael Doran, a

professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. “But the truth is that he is tapping into a minority

Islamic tradition with a wide following and a deep history.”

Although many Muslims are horrified at the notion that their faith is being used to justify terrorism, Mr. bin

Laden’s advocacy of jihad, or holy war, against the West is a natural extension of what some radical

Islamists have been saying and doing since the 1930’s. These radicals were jailed, tortured and often

executed in their home countries, particularly in Egypt during the 1950’s and 60’s, for their attacks on

Western influences and their efforts to replace their own regime with an Islamic state.’ NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

U.S. Has Received Additional Credible Threats of Attacks. New information amplifies on the sense of imminent threat the gov’t had announced earlier this week, and points to a possible attack by Sunday. But the euphemistic “senior gov’t officials” report that the information on which they base this assessment is “an accumulation of tidbits”, and frustratingly fragmentary. The Sears Tower in Chicago, Disneyland and Disney World are all mentioned but other sources downplay the information. They take pains to say, also, that there is no data linking the anthrax cases to the terrorist threat. NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

The Times itself has editorialized that it is unlikely terrorists would target the supermarket tabloids. But William Powers, for one, finds it more plausible. They are both pillars of American morality and symbols of its frivolous excesses, he says. National Journal [via Romanesko]

My sense is that, if they are saying there are credible immediate threats, it is axiomatic that they know more than they are willing to tell us — cf. the delay in making news of the NBC anthrax case public — which makes sense from the point of view of the devil you know being worse than the devil you don’t (don’t let the terrorists know you’re on to their planned targetting, so they don’t change on you). The administration hasn’t found a safe path through the minefield between telling us too much and too little. There may not be a unified policy on this account either, as leaks — e.g. the unnamed sources who seem to be keeping the Times informed — would seem to indicate. Although the leaks don’t tell us much either…

Here’s a vignette from life during wartime. The Times has another headline today that filled me with a mixture of hope and curiosity, White House Said to Have Plan to Cover New Attacks. Looking at the article, however, I deflated when I realized they were only talking about insurance coverage.

‘Germs’: The Troubling Story of Biological Weapons. The New York Times reviews this book co-authored by its reporter Judith Miller, whose receipt yesterday of a mysterious powder-containing letter was responsible for the closure of the newspaper’s building in Times Square.

“In the case of the United States, the nation no longer stands for the enlightenment tradition, but rather for military-political hegemony and the total commodification of life.” Waiting for the barbarians A once-great empire, Rome fell into catastrophic cultural and economic decline. Morris Berman, author of The Twilight of American Culture, notes parallels with modern America:

“(In my book, I wrote that) (t)he contemporary American situation could be compared to that of Rome in the Late Empire period, and the factors involved in the process of decline in each case are pretty much the same: a steadily widening gap between rich and poor; declining marginal returns with regard to investment in organisational solutions to socioeconomic problems (in the US, dwindling funds for social security and medicare); rapidly dropping levels of literacy, critical understanding, and general intellectual awareness; and what might be called “spiritual death”: apathy, cynicism, political corruption, loss of public spirit, and the repackaging of cultural content (eg “democracy”) as slogans and formulas.

What I overlooked, however, was perhaps the most obvious point of comparison; obvious, at least, with the benefit of hindsight. This is the factor of external barbarism, destruction from without. The events of September 11 brought that possibility home, in stark relief.” Guardian UK [thanks, David!]

What’s Wrong with Missile Defense? MIT Professor Ted Postol, former defense consultant and now leading critic of the NMD plan, was interviewed on Sept. 5th. An afterword includes his post-Sept. 11th reflections. Boston Review

The co-director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project describes The Search for New Voting Technology — “Changing the way we vote is more urgent — and less complicated — than you think.” Boston Review:

Presented without comment: “how to eliminate hunger from the entire world”

In the more prosaic terrorism category: Two girls held for allegedly pouring acid in teacher’s coffee. Chicago Tribune Probably nothing about this twist on coffee consumption at the Coffee Science Information Centre, but just about anything else you want to know about coffee and health. Caveat: the site appears to be a mouthpiece for the coffee industry.

Rob Morse: Staying sane in time of terror: “…the all-news networks seem designed to drive people crazy. Sensory overload leads to emotional overload as talking heads are intercut with nightscope and bombing footage, with a constant buzz of scary headlines running underneath.

CNN, MSNBC and Fox News are boob-tube cocaine, addictive and paranoia inducing, but with no highs. Definitely limit your exposure to the stuff.

You can read the paper, though, because you can always flip to the comics and find amusing jokes in columns, maybe even toward the bottom of this one.” SF Chronicle

Kofi Annan, U.N. Win Nobel Peace Prize: ‘The United Nations and Secretary-General Kofi Annan won the centenary Nobel Peace Prize today for working for “a more peaceful world” in the 21st century by tackling challenges from poverty to terrorism.

The choice brought a flood of praise from around the globe, except from survivors of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda who accused Annan of responsibility in failing to stop the slaughter. He was head of U.N. peacekeeping at the time.’ LA Times

Screenshots of Online News Sites, September 11/12, 2001: “The web has no memory – unless it is created.”

Edward Said gives a good thumbnail of Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis, then takes grave exception to the much-touted notion that Sept. 11th confirms Huntington’s conception. The Clash of Ignorance:

The basic paradigm of West versus the rest (the cold war opposition reformulated) remained untouched, and this is what has persisted, often insidiously and implicitly, in discussion since the terrible events of September 11. The carefully planned and horrendous, pathologically motivated suicide attack and mass slaughter by a small group of deranged militants has been turned into proof of Huntington’s thesis. Instead of seeing it for what it is–the capture of big ideas (I use the word loosely) by a tiny band of crazed fanatics for criminal purposes–international luminaries from former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi have pontificated about Islam’s troubles, and in the latter’s case have used Huntington’s ideas to rant on about the West’s superiority, how “we” have Mozart and Michelangelo and they don’t. (Berlusconi has since made a halfhearted apology for his insult to “Islam.”) The Nation [via AlterNet]

Hintington’s Clash of Civilizations essay is reprinted here.

Prolific ‘public intellectual,’ perhaps the most prominent spokesperson for the Palestinian cause in the U.S., secular Protestant born in Jerusalem and educated there and in Cairo, ‘doggedly optomistic’ University Professor at Columbia, and all the while struggling against chronic leukemia. Edward Said is interviewed in late September in The Progressive. I think the Moby Dick metaphor he describes here is very much to the point:

Q: In a recent article in the London Observer, you say the U.S. drive for war uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick. Tell me what you have in mind there.

Said: Captain Ahab was a man possessed with an obsessional drive to pursue the white whale which had harmed him–which had torn his leg out–to the ends of the Earth, no matter what happened. In the final scene of the novel, Captain Ahab is being borne out to sea, wrapped around the white whale with the rope of his own harpoon and going obviously to his death. It was a scene of almost suicidal finality. Now, all the words that George Bush used in public during the early stages of the crisis–“wanted, dead or alive,” “a crusade,” etc.–suggest not so much an orderly and considered progress towards bringing the man to justice according to international norms, but rather something apocalyptic, something of the order of the criminal atrocity itself. That will make matters a lot, lot worse, because there are always consequences. And it would seem to me that to give Osama bin Laden–who has been turned into Moby Dick, he’s been made a symbol of all that’s evil in the world–a kind of mythological proportion is really playing his game. I think we need to secularize the man. We need to bring him down to the realm of reality. Treat him as a criminal, as a man who is a demagogue, who has unlawfully unleashed violence against innocent people. Punish him accordingly, and don’t bring down the world around him and ourselves.

“The U.S. government was incredibly shortsighted,” says Raymond Zilinskas, a senior scientist at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. “This kind of research is permissible under the Biological Weapons Convention if it’s carried out in the open and reported as part of the confidence-building measures — neither of which was done. Here we are doing activities that, if we found out they were being done in Iraq or Iran or North Korea, we would probably immediately bomb the hell out of them.”

U.S. Undermining International Bioweapons Controls: “Just a week before the September 11 terrorist attacks, American news media reported that the U.S. government had conducted clandestine research on biowarfare preparedness. The Pentagon had secretly drawn up plans to reproduce a Russian genetically-engineered strain of the anthrax bacterium in order to test the U.S. military’s anthrax vaccine. It had also built a germ factory in Nevada out of commercially available materials, in which the government apparently planned to manufacture not actual bioweapons agents but germ simulants, to gauge how easily others could do the real thing. Meanwhile, the Central Intelligence Agency had constructed a copy of a Soviet germ bomblet that the agency feared was being sold on the international market.

Many experts believe these sub rosa experiments violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC).” The American Prospect

David Corn: Calling for a Wider, but Smarter War

The Bush Administration can offer BDAs (for non-cable-news addicts, that’s bomb damage assessments) showing destroyed terrorist camps, pulverized Taliban infrastructure. It can note the number of Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders “neutralized.” But, most probably, the true effectiveness of this assault will not be readily determinable, since the target is a murderous band that only mounts attacks every few years. (So far, that is.) All may appear well with President Bush’s war on terrorism — assuming it doesn’t spark unrest in the region and the outbreak of other wars — until the Sears Tower is leveled in 2003 or a human-bomb takes an orchestra seat at the 1000th performance of “The Producers” or New Orleans is nuked during the next presidential campaign.

With that in mind, it is best to wish for and to urge a limited military action. Not a war, but a modest use of force that does not spread by design (as the let’s-get-Iraq hawks in the Pentagon crave) or by accident.

In fact, it was a mistake for Bush to label this endeavor a “war on terrorism” and pitch it as a battle for freedom. “Terrorism” has long been a loaded word; used in this manner it creates an overly broad target. “War” raises expectations here, and in other lands fuels suspicions among those wary of U.S. intentions. And who believes that Bush is fighting for freedom, as he cuts deals with autocratic and repressive regimes to entice them into joining his anti-terrorism coalition? AlterNet

Declan McCullagh: Terror Bill Limits Gambling, Too: ‘Osama bin Laden is not, according to news reports, a terribly big fan of Western vices.

Nor has there been any reliable confirmation that last month’s suicide-hijackers, who completed the bloodiest terrorist attack in American history, were habitual gamblers.

But that didn’t stop the House Financial Services committee from voting 62-1 on Thursday for an “anti-terrorism” bill that limits Internet gambling.’ Wired

I would appreciate any links readers could send me regarding the reactions of the rightwing militia movement to the events of Sept. 11th and its aftermath.

Anthrax Found In New York. Authorities are quick to announce it is a “different type” than, and “apparently unrelated” to, the Florida cases. Boston Channel Certainly the route of infection was different — cutaneous rather than pulmonary — but that does not establish that it was a different strain of the bacterium. As I understand it, they have not completed its genetic analysis. This, not the route of entry, will tell us if it had a common origin with the Florida strain. If they want to reassure us, they should restrict themselves to reminding the public that there is no risk of person-to-person contagion. Take-home lesson? “Don’t inhale.”

Other interesting aspects of this case; it appears to have been destined for Tom Brokaw but was instead opened by one of his staffers, who became infected. She’s had the infection for almost two weeks, but it is only being revealed now. The contents of a suspicious letter received at Microsoft’s offices in Nevada have been confirmed to test positive for anthrax spores as well. Both the New York and the Nevada letters were reportedly postmarked in St. Petersburg, Florida. [What do you think the odds are that all these anthrax isolates are of the same strain?]

Satire in Surreal Time: “I’m worried about the Weekly World News. It is published by the same company that puts out such supermarket tabloids as the Sun, the Globe and the National Enquirer. Anthrax has been found in the company’s Florida headquarters, and one Sun editor recently died of the disease. It sounds like a WWN headline — Anthrax Attacks America’s Tabloids! — but it’s all too grimly true.

Weekly World News is sometimes mistaken for a supermarket tabloid, but nothing could be further from the truth. Tabloids such as the Sun and the National Enquirer cover celebrity scandals and other tawdry trash. WWN is completely different. It prints detailed news dispatches from a parallel universe, a weirdly familiar dreamworld where popular culture mixes with urban legends, paranoid delusions and bizarre fantasies.

Consider just a few of the treasures found in WWN in the last month alone… Washington Post

Happy birthday, Winnie.

Steve Perry: What Is To Be Done? “There are lots of Americans who would like an alternative to prolonged war. Is there one?”

• Counter the two big lies that undergird Desert Storm II:
  
  • That the enemy is religious zealotry, and the zealots hate the U.S. because it is a free society.
    

  • That with sufficient military resolve, the United States can smother terrorism in its cradle.

• First bin Laden. Directly guilty or not, his elimination is a foregone conclusion. So genuflect to his pursuit by a clumsy spy satellite game of Where’s Waldo? and cheer his eventual demise. Grunt a lot in public about the evils of terrorism, but meanwhile take steps in the background to retool U.S. Mideast policy:
  
  • Take a step back from sponsorship of Israeli aggressions against the Palestinians.
    

  • Likewise, back away from the unconditional support of Arab client regimes that repress their own people in the name of continuing U.S. control of the region’s oil supply. CounterPunch

Dan Bricklin, reading historian Bernard Bailyn, finds analogies between the pre-Revolutionary pamphleteers and modern personal websites.

It’s been a puzzle to me why the US is keeping up a level of saturation bombing, with Administration statements that the bombardment might even continue through the winter and into the spring, when every strategic target in Afghanistan must already be levelled. Now Debka suggests that, in addition to keeping up a continuous air presence in case we spot “emerging targets” (shorthand for signs of bin Laden), we are doing it to thwart

the secret Russian plan they have got wind of. Our military sources and informants in Moscow reveal that the tanks, the APCs and the self-propelled artillery Moscow gave the forces of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance are in fact manned by Russian troops. Altogether three armored brigades of the 201st Russian Motorized Rifle Division are now poised on the outskirts of Kabul, planning to enter the Afghan capital ahead of US forces.

This exercise would repeat the gambit the Russians pulled in the 1999 Kosovo War, when they beat NATO to the draw by taking over Kosovo’s main airport before the alliance had a chance to effect a troop landing there.

By their round-the-clock bombing threat, the Americans hope this time to deter the Russians from jumping in first again.

higgy’s page delves more deeply into Bruce Cockburn (scroll down! quickly!), occasioned by featuring his 1970-87 singles collection as higgy’s CD of the day. Always worth listening to (I mean Cockburn and higgy!). BTW, higgy wrote me to say that those “songs stuck in your ear” are called earworms up where he comes from. A fitting term. Now that I’ve finally got My Sharona out of my head… oops, I did it again, it’s back… I would love to come down with a Bruce Cockburn earworm sometime.

As an aside, if any readers have any live performance recordings of Cockburn, I’d love to trade for a copy of any or all, although I haven’t been doing much if any tapetrading at all in recent years. My tapelist comprises mostly my old passion, the Grateful Dead and its friends and relations from the ’60’s and ’70’s San Francisco scene. You can click here to get to the miscellaneous, non-Dead-related stuff.

Speaking of Cockburns and music, David Vest writes on Alexander Cockburn’s CounterPunch about Dylan and 9-11:

Did he write these songs this morning?!? How could he get this album in the stores within moments after these things happened?

Maybe you picked up the Village Voice, where Greg Tate was asking, “What did Dylan know, and when did he know it?”

Man, he knew it before we were born.

“Things are breaking up out there,” he sings. Unbelievable. But you better believe it

.

Terror Unanswered: William Saletan argues that it is a disastrous mistake to ignore, rather than respond to, bin Laden’s video, which has “saturated the Muslim world” and “attacks all (the stated) premises” of the U.S. campaign. Slate Robert Fisk agrees: “Bush and Blair have already lost the talking war across the Middle East.”

. The Independent UK

Anthrax scare spooks tabloid readers, afraid they’ll contract the disease by reading or handling American Media’s tabloids, or even from going into supermarkets where they are sold. Ad Age [Now I’m convinced the anthrax attack must have been part of the terrorists’ plans to disrupt the bedrock of American culture.]

Timothy Garton Ash: Why this war in Afghanistan will redraw the map of Europe: increased stature for Britain as intermediary between Europe and the U.S.; launchpad for Russian entry to the European community; acceleration of the eastward expansion of NATO but, potentially, a slowing down in elaboration of the European Union; decreased attention to the Balkans; “a European foreign policy? One can argue this both ways. On the one hand, the Islamic and Arab worlds are Europe’s ‘near abroad’, and we have perhaps 20 million Muslims in Europe. So there is a vital European interest in addressing the underlying causes of the discontents on which terrorism feeds, whether among Palestinians, Kurds or Algerians. This crisis should therefore catalyse co-ordinated action in the Middle East and North Africa. On the other hand, the left-Gaullist idea that Europe should have an approach very different from that of the US, and perhaps even see itself as a rival superpower, must seem less plausible and palatable at a time when the West as a whole is under attack.” The Independent UK

‘I Lost My Brother on 9-11; Does He Matter?’ ‘On October 8th, as most Americans rose concerned and curious about the military action taking place on the other side of the globe, NPR’s Morning Edition host Bob Edwards asked Cokie Roberts to weigh in. “Leaders of Congress were quick to issue a statement in support of the military action in Afghanistan,” he said. “Were there any dissenters?”

“None that matter,” she replied.

It’s a jaw-dropping statement when you think about it, one that says nothing and yet says everything. There was opposition to the bombing. But how much? From whom? But before you go demanding simple facts or objective reportage, let’s cut to the chase: it doesn’t matter.’ AlterNet

Elmo’s Worth More Than a Tickle After Christmas, select “Tickle Me Elmo” ‘s will stop giggling and announce to five people that they are winners of a big-money sweekstakes. The strategem is praised breathlessly by the Toy Indiustry Association, but critics are incensed at an insidious marketing scheme to get parents to buy a toy for their children because they lust after a boon for themselves. Wired [I share that concern but have a more basic one; what if it belongs to a child too young and unsophisticated to understand the congratulatory announcement? Will parents have to take the toy away from their uncomprehending child and play with it all day on the designated day to satisfy themselves that they’re not the big winner?]

The Hi-tech manhunt from the skies to ensue. Wired

Circuits That Bug Out Bugs: “That cockroach skittering behind your computer may be after more than your sandwich crumbs: It could be looking for a home inside your PC.

Entomologists are warning of the growing risks that insects pose to electronic hardware, but few electronics manufacturers in the United States are aware of the danger.

It turns out cockroaches like to nest in the warmth and darkness that electronic equipment provides.

And in everything from household appliances to network servers, their waste and rotting carcasses can corrode printed circuit boards and short out electronic components.” Wired

‘The US administration had very specific information about Osama Bin Laden, his whereabouts, details of his al-Qaeda network and the degree of Pakistani military and security involvement in Afghanistan as far back as March, courtesy of the Russians, but still elected to take no action. The latest issue of Jane’s Intelligence Review, published from London, says that Moscow’s Permanent Mission at the United Nations “submitted an unprecedentedly detailed report” to the UN Security Council six months before the American atrocities.

According to Alex Standish, the editor of the Review, the attacks of September 11 were less of an American intelligence failure and more the result of US inaction based on “a political decision not to act against Bin Laden”.’ The Times of India

India helped FBI trace ISI-terrorist links. The Times of India is reporting that India was instrumental in establishing the link to one of the suicide bombers of the former director-general of Pakistan’s intelligence service; he has just stepped down in scandal after it came to light that he had funneled $100,000 to Mohammed Atta. his Indian source delights in adding:

“A direct link between the ISI and the WTC attack could have enormous repercussions. The US cannot but suspect whether or not there were other senior Pakistani Army commanders who were in the know of things. Evidence of a larger conspiracy could shake US confidence in Pakistan?s ability to participate in the anti-terrorism coalition.”

Attack Altering Politics Across Southeast Asia. Uniting and motivating Muslim constituencies is a boon to power of Muslim political parties, e.g. the large minority bloc in the Indonesian parliament, which hopes to capitalize on public opposition to President Sukarnoputri’s support for the U.S.-led war effort. Washington Post

Anthrax was genetically modified strain

Federal investigators now believe the strain of anthrax bacterium that killed Robert Stevens and got stuck in the nasal passage of an American Media co-worker was genetically modified, The Palm Beach Post has learned.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the strain is more lethal, because officials say it is sensitive to penicillin. What remains unclear is how the strain was modified. Although it could have been altered in a terrorist’s bioweapons factory, it also could have been retooled in an academic or commercial laboratory for research or be a natural mutation never seen before. The strain’s name hasn’t been made public. Palm Beach Post

State: Hoaxes cause biowar scares around U.S.: “Across Florida, mysterious but apparently harmless powders send emergency crews scrambling.” St.Petersburg Times

University of Wisconsin Bacteriology 330 Lecture Topics: Anthrax

Heeding the Lessons of the War Against Drugs

Declan McCullagh: FBI Warns of ‘Skyfall’ Attack — ‘In a brief but dramatic statement, the FBI warned Thursday that Americans should expect additional terrorist attacks.

A two-sentence press release on FBI.gov said there “may be additional terrorist attacks within the United States and against U.S. interests overseas over the next several days.”

The content was disturbing enough, but even stranger was the Web address of the press release: http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel01/skyfall.htm.

Just what did the FBI mean by inserting the word “skyfall” into a description of a press release? Was it a reference to the 1970s-era disaster novel entitled Skyfall, or a hint that the bureau was remembering the children’s tale in which Chicken Little warned of calamity — but was not believed?

A harried FBI spokeswoman who had been deluged with calls about “skyfall” said the answer was none of the above — and the press release soon would be renamed.’ Wired

Another Cliché site, the ClichéSite, perhaps better than the previous one. [thanks, Carol!]

U.N. Head ‘Disturbed’ by U.S. Statement on Broader Attacks: ‘UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Tuesday he and diplomats at the world body were “disturbed” by a U.S. statement claiming a legitimate right to extend military attacks beyond Afghanistan

…Washington is interested in ensuring that the coalition include Muslim nations such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan – and possibly even Iran.

So far, very few Muslim nations have volunteered to join the coalition. Egypt and Iran have said they would enlist only if the coalition were under the auspices of the United Nations.’ Common Dreams

Watching How the Brain Works as It Weighs a Moral Dilemma. Different moral dilemmas engage different parts of the brain, according to the first study watching brain processes as subjects conisder such problems.

Dr. Jonathan Cohen of Princeton, a psychologist and expert on brain imaging who worked on the study, says it begins to provide tools to understand why people with different cultural backgrounds can arrive at different conclusions about moral dilemmas, like taking a life for some greater good. If people’s gut-level emotions are organized differently as a result of their backgrounds, he said, they may reason differently about what is right or wrong.

Experts say the findings may be useful to philosophers as well. While moral philosophy deals with ethics and logic rather than emotion and biology, Dr. Stephen Stich, a professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Rutgers, says that in the real world people have feelings about life- and-death issues. Knowing how their brains behave as they wrestle with difficult issues like abortion and euthanasia may be more useful than most philosophers realize, Dr. Stich said. New York Times

U.S. Forces Suffer First Fatality “An Air Force sergeant killed in northern Arabian Peninsula became the first American death of Operation Enduring Freedom, military officials say.

Officials said the man was killed in a heavy-equipment accident.” Boston Channel

U.S. Lists Most Wanted Terrorists and Offers Reward of Millions: “President Bush today announced

the creation of a most wanted list of

international terrorists, a roster of 22

suspects led by Osama bin Laden and

several of his lieutenants. Mr. Bush promised multimillion- dollar

rewards for their capture.” New York Times [name: “FMHreader”, password: “FMHreader”] Rogues’ gallery <a href=”http://www.fbi.gov/mostwant/terrorists/fugitives.htm

“>here.

At U.S. Request, Networks Agree to Edit Future bin Laden Tapes “…and abridge any future videotaped statements from

Osama bin Laden or his followers to remove language the

government considers inflammatory…Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, indicated in his news briefing yesterday that Ms. Rice was

primarily concerned that terrorists could be using the broadcasts to send coded messages to other

terrorists, but the network executives said in interviews that this was only a secondary consideration.” New York Times [name: “FMHreader”, password: “FMHreader”] Meanwhile. there are reports that Iomart, a Scottish company enlisted to aid the U.S. intelligence effort, has found messages that might be linked to bin Laden embedded inside other material on the web. “The company has been using sophisticated software to search the net for so-called steganography, the system of hiding messages inside electronic images and music files.

The system of encrypting text on the Internet is thought to be used by bin Laden and his associates as a means of communication, according to Iomart.

In recent weeks, Iomart experts have unearthed hundreds of files, some of them containing Arabic text and dates which have been passed on to investigators.” Ananova Of course, Iomart would have a vested in terest in inflating this finding, as it claims its software is the only package that can do the job. There are reports that this decoded information is a large part of the “proof they did not reveal” about al Qaeda’s responsibility for the attacks on 9-11. Sunday Times of London

Is Tom Ridge in the Cabinet? Slate explainer

Cliche Finder: “Have you been searching for just the right cliché to use? Are you searching for a cliché using the word “cat” or “day” but haven’t been able to come up with one? Just enter any words in the form below, and this search engine will return any clichés which use that phrase…”

CNN responds to the Switzerland map error

My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack of what is found there.

–William Carlos Williams,
from “Asphodel, The Greeny Flower”

Can Poetry Matter? A 1991 Atlantic essay by Dana Gioia that may cause you to rethink a few things.

(W)hy should anyone but a poet care about the problems of American poetry? What possible relevance does this archaic art form have to contemporary society? In a better world, poetry would need no justification beyond the sheer splendor of its own existence. As Wallace Stevens once observed, “The purpose of poetry is to contribute to man’s happiness.” Children know this essential truth when they ask to hear their favorite nursery rhymes again and again. Aesthetic pleasure needs no justification, because a life without such pleasure is one not worth living.

Nobel Prize in Economics to three Americans for work on market asymmetries. The article explains the implications of what sounds like an elegantly simple formulation of the information advantage enjoyed by sellers over buyers in transactions across the economic spectrum. One application of the work by one of the winners, Joseph Stiglitz (until recently chief economist at the World Bank), attacks ‘aspects of the free-market “Washington consensus” that has shaped the policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank’, arriving at a theoretical understanding of why markets do not work for ‘poor people and poor countries.’ Nobel Committee’s nod in the direction of the anti-globalization movement? Financial Times [via MetaFilter]

Why Anthrax Vaccine Is Scarce — “The vaccine against anthrax is in the hands of a single company that is running out of money, hasn’t gained FDA approval for the vaccine or its manufacturing facilities and hasn’t produced a single dose of the vaccine since it took over production in 1998.

The entire United States is relying on BioPort, of Lansing, Michigan, to produce the anthrax vaccine, for which demand has spiked since Sept. 11. The company has supplied the military with only half a million doses out of 14 million promised, leaving even front-line military personnel unprotected in the event of a bio-terrorism attack.

The company, which would not return phone calls, has a spotty past, and possibly not much of a future if Congress passes the Defense Authorization bill, which includes an amendment that would bring the production of the anthrax vaccine under government control.” Wired

Save Harry! A letter-writing drive spearheaded by the Center for Science in the Public Interest to get author J. K. Rowling to eschew future sponsorship of the Harry Potter movies by Coca Cola and donate to nutritional campaigns the estimated $15 million she will receive from the junk beverage corporation’s deal with Warner Bros. for the marketing rights to November’s first Harry Potter movie.

Why don’t I know anyone personally who died in the Sept. 11th disasters? ‘The World Trade Center question falls into a category that mathematicians call “small-world” or “degrees of separation” problems. The key work in the field for our purpose is being done by a team of five social scientists and mathematicians who have already written a paper on 9/11, “Estimating the Ripple Effect of a Disaster.” It is being published in the journal Connections. You can read it here…’ The upshot of the back-of-the-envelope calculation is that around 1:200 Americans is likely to have known a victim. “The math offers a kind of solace, too. Yes, it shows that we are less directly connected than we think to 9/11. But it also shows that we’re more indirectly connected. The most amazing statistic of Bernard et al. is how many people knew someone who knew a victim. According to their estimates, essentially all Americans — more than 80 percent of them — know someone who knows someone. We are all mourners at the second degree.” Slate. Jargon Watch: While we’re at it, here are the results of a Google search on “back-of-the-envelope.”

These are some interesting items from recent Stratfor Situation Reports:

• The Russian military has secretly positioned troops on the outskirts of Kabul for an assault on the Afghan capital with the opposition Northern Alliance forces, the Russian weekly Moscow News reported. Oct. 9. 2005 GMT, 011009
• A group of 40 Taliban military commanders and 1,200 troops reportedly defected to the opposition today, and took control of the only road linking the southern part of the country with the north, Reuters reported. 2002 GMT, 011009
• A man dispensed an unknown substance on a Maryland subway causing 15 people to become ill Oct. 9. The man struggled with a police officer before being arrested, the Washington Post reported. 1615 GMT, 011009
• An IRS office in Ohio has been evacuated after an envelope was opened that contained a suspicious soapy substance. Hazmat teams were seen decontaminating people outside of the building and crews had entered the building, The Cincinnati Enquirer reported. 1700 GMT, 011009
• The United States has reportedly asked Israel for information on assassination techniques that Israel has perfected after many years of dealing with terrorist threats, IRNA reported. Israel has used a variety of methods to strike back at terrorist groups including Apache helicopter gunships, laser-guided bombs fired from fighter airplanes, car-bomb attacks and special forces operations. 1600 GMT, 011009

Osama Has a New Friend: “…in a move that defies all rules of logic, a doctored photo showing (Sesame Street Muppet puppet) Bert with the world’s most-wanted terrorist, Osama bin Laden, seems to have made its way into an anti-American Islamic protest in Bangladesh.” Wired Here’s a MetaFilter thread about this breakthrough [thanks, Miguel]

Ten proposed new laws for this crisis [From Alan MacKay, courtesy of Sam Smith’s Undernews]:

1. To buy an American flag, you must present proof you have voted at least
   
   once in the last three elections (yes, local and state elections count).

2. To display an American flag in any form, you must present proof of voter
   
   registration.

3. To wave an American flag in public, you must be able to name at least one
   
   of the following: A. Your Senator B. Your Representative C. Your President
   
   (“George Bush” does not count; ambiguous)

4. To sell any product with an American flag on it, you must answer the
   
   following question: The Bill of Rights is part of: a) the Constitution; b) the
   
   Magna Carta; c) the Declaration of Independence.

5. Those heard singing patriotic songs in public may be asked to show their
   
   voter registration cards.

6. To be permitted to scream “Nuke Afghanistan,” you must be able to
   
   correctly locate Afghanistan on a map or globe.

7. To be permitted to scream “Arabs go home,” you must list and correctly
   
   locate ten Arab homelands.

8. Those who wish to express opinions about Arabs and Arab-Americans must
   
   pass the following test: A. Those who follow the religion of Islam are
   
   called: a) Moslems; b) Muslins; c) Fanatics . . . B. The holy book of Islam
   
   is called: a) The Koran; b) The Koram; c) The Bible . . . C. In Arabic, God
   
   is called: a) Ali; b) Allah; c) Jehovah

9. Priority for purchase of American flags will be given to those whose
   
   ancestors lived on American soil the longest. When all American Indians who
   
   wish to display the red, white and blue are satisfied, other applicants will
   
   be accepted.

10. A call for war on any radio talk-show will be construed as a public
    
    declaration of willingness to enlist in the US Army; callers will have 24
    
    hours to complete the paperwork.

Florida cases likely to be first ever anthrax attack. The New Scientist is reporting that, in addition to the death of Robert Stevens, the detection of anthrax bacilli on his computer keyboard and in the nasal passages of a second worker in the company, another employee has developed suggestive pneumonia symptoms and so has a man in Virginia who recently visited the company. This appears to be “the first documented and fatal attack with anthrax, long feared as a biological weapon.”

Other goodies from the latest New Scientist:

• ” The Kursk, the Russian navy’s doomed sunken submarine, has been raised and is set to begin its final journey to a naval base near Murmansk.”
  

• “A (drunken) man who shot a hole in the Trans-Alaska Pipeline last week caused one of the biggest spills since the pipeline opened in 1977, say local clean-up workers.
  
  The Aleyska Pipeline Service Company has patched the hole, but workers will spend months cleaning up the 8000 square metre site covered with an estimated 1.1 million litres (285,000 gallons) of crude oil.”
  

• “An unobtrusive prototype (wristwatch) device that allows the wearer to run a computer with hand gestures is revealed in Switzerland.”
  

• Sue postmortem reveals extensive injuries: “A postmortem of the most complete T. rex yet found reveals evidence of numerous injuries and infections.”

Afghan Buddhas resurrected in China — “A Chinese entrepreneur is attempting to resurrect the giant Buddhas destroyed by the Taleban regime in Afghanistan by building replicas of them in China.

The project is the idea of Liang Shi-mian, who expects them to be finished early next year.

He has begun building a towering red stone version of one of the Bamiyan statues in his country’s Buddhist heartland.

Some 375 stonecutters and carvers are working all hours to complete the 121ft sculpture by March, the one year anniversary of the destruction of the originals.” ITN

U.S. details damage; revenge vowed. More on the acknowledged civilian deaths: ‘The Associated Press reported from Kabul that the intended target might have been a Taliban anti-aircraft position and transmission tower 300 yards away.

But the demining agency’s director suggested to NBC News that the United States might have mistaken the two-story building for a radio station. The official, Farid Elmi, said that the office housed Kabul Radio 10 years ago and that an old antenna had still stood nearby, MSNBC.com’s Preston Mendenhall reported from Islamabad, Pakistan.

The office, two miles from downtown Kabul, was on the U.N. list of its facilities in Afghanistan, Elmi added.

Bunker said the guards had not been warned or told to relocate. “It was assumed they were safe where they were. Otherwise, they would have been relocated for sure,” she said, adding that the guards were not affiliated with the Taliban. ‘ MSNBC

diveintomark/Now extremely available: “Welcome to my weblog. I hope you enjoy it. I just got fired for it.”

Declan McCullagh writes in Lycos News: New weapons for a new war — “America’s war against the Taliban and al-Qaida will allow U.S. forces to test newly developed weapons never used on a battlefield before.

Following is a review of many of the weapons that have been introduced since the 1991 Gulf War — and systems currently being designed that could be introduced over the next few years.”

McDermott first U.S. lawmaker to criticize attack: ‘Breaking bipartisan solidarity on Capitol Hill, Rep. Jim McDermott yesterday criticized the U.S.-led attacks on military targets in Afghanistan, questioning whether President Bush had “thought this action out completely or fully examined America’s cause.”

The Seattle Democrat issued a two-paragraph statement that suggested Bush and his military advisers reacted too quickly to the Sept. 11 suicide jet attacks against the Pentagon and World Trade Center. The statement was the first public criticism of the retaliatory strikes by a federal lawmaker.’ Seattle Times

Switzerland has moved.

The Science Behind the Song Stuck in Your Head: “For years, humans have been tortured by Stuck Tune Syndrome, in which a seemingly innocuous piece of music lodges in the brain and won’t leave. So far, no reliable cure exists, but a University of Cincinnati professor hopes to change that. James Kellaris has embarked on a study to figure out why songs sometimes commandeer people’s thoughts.” LA Times Since this article mentioned it, I can’t get My Sharona to stop playing in my head. There, I’ve done it to you too…