Landlord created ‘noise machine’ to drive tenants out. “A landlord who wanted to get rid of a family renting a flat in his
building rigged up a ‘banging machine’ to annoy them so much
they would leave.

A court in Germany has heard that the plan came unstuck
when he went out himself because of the noise – and the family
from Geretsried called the police. Ananova

Caffeine ‘reduces productivity’ “Office managers who want to get the best out
of their workers should put a limit on how much
coffee and tea they drink each day.

Researchers have found that caffeine intake
may be partly to blame for office workers’ poor
performance.” The research was supported by Volvic bottled water… BBC

Report: DEA’s Latin drug operation’s numbers show discrepancies. They attempt to score a public relations coup with cooked-up statistics that don’t bear up to investigation at all.

Could the Scientists Be Wrong on Madcow Disease? One of those mavericks-bucking-the-received-wisdom stories, but credible enough to keep track of. New York Times

Doctor’s Doctor Home. IMHO, these two pathologists use the language of empowerment —

Patients should be more in charge of their own care. One way to do this is to learn as much about your
disease as you can. Much of the information you need is already accessible, you just need to ask for it.

The laboratory, surgical pathology, and cytology reports are your property, but most patients do not ask for
copies. This web site is dedicated to keeping patients informed and in control.

— to prey on patients’ fears and take them for a ride. After they hook you in, you get to the heart of their site, where they offer to “translate” your pathology report or lab test results “into plain English” for $50 a pop. Save your money, I’ll empower you for free: as this web site points out, you should feel free to request a copy of any of your lab tests or pathology reports; it’s your property and you have a right to it for the asking. But the appropriate physician to get to interpret it is your own, with whom you have a treatment relationship. S/he knows the particulars of your health situation which can put the lab values in context, the most medically responsible way to interpret them for you. (A generic interpretation reminds me of the booklets you can buy on the corner newsstand offering “cookbook” interpretations of your dreams.) Most physicians should be willing to do this with you, and if yours doesn’t satisfy you in this respect, then be empowered enough to consider finding a different doctor.

And, in related news, the New York Times says Talking Back to Doctors is Good Medicine, warning that the baby boomers are poised to become uppity senior health consumers.

Curiouser and curiouser: Killer Dog Linked to Ring Run by Inmates. “What first looked like a terrifying
tragedy–young woman killed by rogue dog–has
revealed an illegal guard dog-breeding operation run
from behind the walls of the state’s most secure prison,
law enforcement officials said Tuesday.
Authorities investigating the death of Diane Whipple,
33, are on the trail of a bizarre story, complete with white
supremacists, a surprise adoption and the Mexican Mafia.” LA Times

The founder of the field of cognitive ethology is No Longer Alone in daring to say that animals other than humans have consciousness and thoughts. New York Times

Salon reviews a laundry list of Democratic ills; is the party Riding a road to nowhere? “While the Republican president tries to broaden his party’s
tent, critics are wondering aloud whether Democrats are
folding their party’s tent altogether.” And the New York Times sees the Democrats Shift into Reverse with “the
Democratic National Committee’s
expected election tomorrow of Terry
McAuliffe as chairman. Mr. McAuliffe is
a walking symbol of the wretched excess of the Clinton
years. He raised millions in special-interest money for
President Clinton’s campaign. He made it clear that no
amount of presidential misconduct would sour him on Mr.
Clinton. Now he is promising to lead the entire party on a
quest for big bucks, and he is also expected to push Mr.
Clinton forward as a principal party spokesman during the
presidency of George W. Bush. With Mr. Clinton in that role,
the D.N.C. might as well vote to give the Bush White House
a permanent deed to the character issue.” And, speaking of his endearing character, the Boston Globe reports that Dubya is inviting Democrats out on dates these days.

Who’s afraid of Falun Gong? In this interview, progressive journalist Danny Schechter (when I was in college in the early ’70’s, he was “the news dissector” on underground rock radio station WBCN in Boston), whose recent book Falun Gong’s Challenge to China has been called a whitewash by the New York Times, explains why it’s not the cult it’s made out to be and why the Chinese are so afraid of the movement some call the most effective protest against the Chinese regime since Tiananmen. This in the aftermath of the recent attempted self-immolation by five sect members, including a 12-year-old girl, protesting continued Chinese suppression of the sect (an act which the sect has publicly disavowed), and, in one of his first official acts as Secretary of State, Colin Powell’s criticism of China’s stance, which drew a bitter rejoinder from its Foreign Ministry. Salon

Bush II: Smells like the ’80s!

But even if the president were inclined to represent the will
of the people in 2001, how would he know what it is? He is
known to be averse to books, television, movies, travel,
culture, public policy, work and staying awake for extended
periods of time. Indeed, some have wondered what it is
exactly that the president does with all his spare time. Could
“napping” be a euphemism for “protracted coma”? Are we
in fact living in the early days of the van Winkle
administration?

“Plus: Advertising makes a hard
right” [this is funny] “and an elitist lefty gives rhetoric tips to nonelitist
righties” [and this is pitiful]. Salon

The seat of power: if any of these are going at fire sale prices as new startups close, I need a new desk chair from which to pilot FmH. Boston Globe

The American Jobs Machine: One of the measures of the quality of the ‘new economy’ can be found in a closer examination of the nature of the jobs it creates. The authors, University of Wisconsin sociologists, find a pattern of “low road capitalism” with racialized job polarization and expansion of the “working poor.” They argue that “the pattern of job expansion is not some “natural” result of the
operation of efficient markets, but the inevitable result of all sorts of public
policies: the nature of the tax code, the institutions of skill formation, the
regulation of the employment contract and working conditions, the minimum
wage, and laws regulating unions. The task of government is to design such
policies in such a way as to rebuild social mobility and expand job
opportunities in the middle of the employment structure.” In particular, they suggest that, for the first time since the New Deal, expansion of jobs in the public works sector, considered increasingly necessary with the nation’s crumbling infrastructure and increasingly economically feasible with growing budget surpluses, may be a politically and socially useful direction to consider. Public policy decisions can also “close off the low road and pave the high road”, they argue. Boston Review

You have to believe in something. “Lewis Wolpert argues that beliefs may
come from our genes and we have a
fundamental need to tell ourselves
stories to make sense of life.” If causal thinking is preordained biologically, it is no surprise that irrational beliefs hold such sway, and Skeptics will always face such an uphill battle. Certainly, while beliefs differ tremendously, it is quintessentially human to explain things, make sense of them and believe in our explanations. Telegraph

In my psychiatric practice and teaching about psychosis, I’ve reached similar conclusions to Wolpert. It’s never easy, and a source of endless debate, to figure out which psychiatric symptoms (especially in the severe illnesses we call psychotic) are the so-called “primary” manifestations of a disease process’s alteration in brain function, and which are “secondary” — attempts of the mind at restituton in the face of the dysfunction. I firmly stand on one side of the deep controversy in psychiatry surrounding delusional beliefs — with the assertion that they are not primary psychotic symptoms. Instead, they are the attempts at restitution — a bewildered mind finding a way to “believe in something” in the face of the dysfunction of the machinery for making sense of things. For example, if you’re overcome by terrifying paranoid feelings of danger, it’s much more powerfully tempting and comforting to have an explanation (no matter how outlandish and no matter to what extent it sacrifices consistency with reality or consensus) than to have no explanation at all for how you are feeling. So you’ll come to believe, for example, that those people lurking on the corner across the street are CIA agents who have you under surveillance — and that that’s why you are feeling these frightening bewildering feelings of being in danger.

Figuring out whether delusions are primary symptoms of the alteration in brain function in the illnesses in which they occur has important clinical consequences in how we treat these disorders. I contend that treatments of psychosis, especially the powerful and effective antipsychotic medications we have at our disposal, never change delusional thinking, because once formed beliefs are very compelling and we abandon them only with great difficulty and at great cost even if the occasion for them has passed. Perhaps this “conservation of belief”, as I call it, speaks to Wolpert’s assertion of a biological determinism driving it. In any case, the implication is that we should stop throwing medications at a patient expressing fixed delusional beliefs if that’s his or her only “symptom”; instead, a focus on slower, cognitive measures for belief-changing is called for.

There is precedent for this distinction between primary symptoms and compensatory beliefs from other areas of psychiatry where it is more generally accepted. Panic disorder is a crippling condition with explosive spontaneous outbursts of severe anxiety. Along with it, patients often develop agoraphobia, the fear of going out, because they become convinced that certain places or activities away from the security of their home and family will bring on the panic attacks. Even when these patients have become completely free of panic attacks with the use of the appropriate medications, the agoraphobic avoidance persists as a fixed belief. The patient cannot be convinced that, because their susceptibility to panic attacks is stabilized, they no longer have to avoid the feared exposure. No medication can correct this, but rather only a variety of cognitive therapy approaches.

Well, enough of getting technical on you…

Hunting Web Rumors: ‘A Swiss online marketing company called Agence Virtuelle has created
RumorBot, a software robot intended to uncover the source of rumors
on the Internet. Using 44 autonomous agents (small programs),
RumorBot scans the Web, newsgroups, chat rooms, and listservers for
target words and phrases and then determines posting dates and
origins, a “chain of evidence” for malicious content (e.g., the Emulex
false press release scandal).’ Geek.com

Levi Strauss asked to apologize for Super Bowl ad which apparently (I didn’t see the ad) makes light of the plight of those awaiting organ donation. 74,000 people are on a national waiting list for an organ transplant, and 16 of them die each day because an organ is
not available to them, according to the executive director of a national organ donor registration organization. How about an ad from Levi Strauss in penance — it doesn’t even have to be aired during the Super Bowl — that, in addition to an apology (designed to restore lost sales) gives people the contact information for an organ donor registration organization? Nando Times

If you’ve sat here in the US in recent months watching the chances for a reasonable government slip through your fingers, imagine how it must feel for reasonable Israelis slouching toward Ariel Sharon’s election. I’ve heard several American commentators wishfully invoke
“only-a-Nixon-could-go-to-China” hopes, but it appears that most Israelis aren’t electing Sharon because they believe he is the only one who can make peace with the Palestinians, despite an almost singleminded focus on the peace process in the election campaign. Instead, the election is a disappointed and embittered personal rejection of Barak for his “addiction to a diplomatic formula that by now has been
empirically proven unworkable.” The only debate among those Israelis who hope for peace seems to be whether there will be any prospects left after Sharon, who says ominously “I know the Arabs and they know me” with a General’s sneer. With this, Israel elects the author of the “Lebanese misadventure” and repudiates the man who extricated their forces from the occupation of southern Lebanon. A dismal moment for peace, especially with a Shrub in the White House in place of Clinton, with his interest in leaving a peacemaker’s legacy.

I’ve migrated the FmH mailing list to ListBot after eGroups got swallowed up by Yahoo. Previously subscribed folks should’ve gotten an emailed invitation to join the new group already. If not, of if you’re anyone else wanting to subscribe, please click on this link or go to the sidebar.

Divided U.S. Senate Confirms Ashcroft 58-42. At least he didn’t quite get the 60 confirmation votes that gloating Republican leaders predicted. But it wasn’t quite the united front of opposition the Democrats are preening over either. The cave-in started in the judiciary committee with Sen. Russ Feingold (D.-Wisc.) who said it would be important for the Democrats’ political future not to take a purely ideological position against a nomination and said he felt the president should have the prerogative to choose like-minded people for his cabinet. Well, hello, the Senate Democrats are the only thing that can stand between a rabid unelected President without a popular mandate and the more than 50% of the electorate whose ideological positions won’t otherwise get a hearing for the next four years. The fallback position will have to be a hard line against the explosion of conservative judicial appointments that’s surely coming. Can you spell f-i-l-i-b-u-s-t-e-r?

Well, the only development in the bursting of the dot.com bubble that has the potential to affect me directly, since I’m not involved at all in the new Internet economy, is happening. Pyra is folding. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, it’s the parent company of Blogger, the software/web
service I use to
publish this site. This essay from Pyra co-founder and CEO and Blogger developer Evan Williams, from his weblog evhead, offers assurances that he’s going to continue to work on and support Blogger, but a shudder passes through me considering the possibility of being without it, or having to migrate FmH to a different platform. Because it’s web-based, if Blogger is down, as it has been for the past day or so, it’s nearly impossible for me to post to my weblog; you may have noticed the dearth of new content for the past day or so, if you’re a regular reader. I’d been sitting on my hands thinking about my dependence on Blogger even before hearing about the demise of Pyra.

I wish Ev all the best in his future endeavors and, unabashedly, hope Blogger will remain among them as he promises. I was heartened by the response from the weblogging community to his recent fund drive for new servers, and hope he takes it as an indication of the support of his user base. I’m eagerly awaiting the souped-up Blogger Plus he has projected, not only for the promised enhancements but because his plan to charge for it may contribute to the stability of the platform. If Blogger’s been “shareware”, the trial period is certainly over and it’s time to register.

Congratulations to the winners of the Bloggies, especially Wockerjabby, the winner in the best-kept-secret-weblogs category (where Follow Me Here was a contendah).

The California GOP is seriously considering drafting Arnold Schwarzenegger for Governor. As Chuck Taggart put it at Looka!, ” Jesus H. Christ on a
bike. Our most talented satirists couldn’t make up anything as
absurd as this.” He also spewed some four-letter words at the prospect, which I’m tempted to echo.

Sobering thought: “Rowdy drinkers can’t blame their violent behaviour on alcohol,
say Canadian researchers who have found that drinkers can
‘sober up’ if offered a small reward. The findings suggest that
being intoxicated is no defence if someone commits a crime.” But, on the other hand, even water makes you stupid. New Scientist

G. Gordon Liddy, on trial for defamation of Ida Wells, a Democratic National Committee secretary, advances the theory that John Dean masterminded the Watergate break-in to retrieve photos of his future wife Maureen. He claims her pictures were part of a packet of photos of call-girls used to set up liaisons in nearby apartments for visitors to the DNC, and were kept in Wells’ desk. Liddy claims he committed the break-in under the misconception that it was, as has been commonly understood, about bugging the DNC in support of the Nixon re-election effort, and that he only found out the true rationale for the break-in years later when he was told about the photographs by “a disbarred attorney and convicted felon with a history of mental illness,” Phillip Mackin Bailley.

‘ “I know he hates my husband but I know on some level he’s
trying to lessen his culpability and stupidity for the Watergate
break-in and to get even with my husband for exposing all of
the criminal acts in the Nixon White House,” (Maureen) Dean said
in what she described as her first interview on the subject in
10 years.’ Boston Globe

This is a bizarre theory from one of the strangest characters on the American scene, but is it really any more implausible than the commonly accepted theory of the break-in? Coverage of this defamation trial is the first I’ve heard of this zaniness but he and Dean have apparently been battling it out for awhile now. Here’s a Google search on “Liddy AND ‘Maureen Dean’ AND call-girl”.

Salon.com Radio launches March 1 on Public Radio International affiliates. “Each week, Salon.com Radio will take the
wry, opinionated personality of Salon.com
to the airwaves. Hosted by Stephan Cox,
the one-hour program will feature stories,
interviews and commentary on current
events, technology, arts and culture, with
reporting and interviews by Salon.com‘s
writers and editors.” How will it differ from, say, All Things Considered on NPR (except insofar as it is only one hour a week)?

“When You Get an Email Petition, Think Delete“. I’ve usually just signed them and passed them on if I agree with them, but this columnist makes a coherent argument that it’s largely a waste of your time. Chicago Tribune

Peggy Kamuf, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at USC, describes the witchhunt by a freelance reporter for Salon and, subsequently, a US News and World Reports columnist, who couldn’t even begin to understand the line of argument she was making in her lecture ‘The End of Reading.’ In the lecture, she tried to describe the contributions literary criticism and psychoanalytic theory could make to the neurologically-based science of reading and reading disorders, expanding our perspective on the interiority of the reading experience rather than just focusing on its externals. She was described by her detractors as making a 45-minute rant about the violence done by parents’ reading aloud to their children. She links to the text of her lecture, the Salon article and the USN&WR writeup, and her responses to both. Here, admittedly taken out of context, is the offending passage of her lecture:

The common notion of reading
as information-extraction sets the principles, and thus institutes the laws and the institutions through which reading practices are maintained, that is,
reintroduced, reproduced, and reinforced in each new generation of readers, as we like to think of them. And we do like our dearest common notion of
reading to remind us of the whole family scene. Reading is also thereby getting produced and maintained as site for the patriarchal, paternalistic family’s
reproduction of itself. The practice gets passed down, most typically, in the voice of mothers, usually mothers, reading aloud to their children. There where
this ancient practice of reading aloud survives, before the child’s invention of silent reading, it is the mother’s voice that has been made to echo with the
letters taking shape on the page. I say “has been made to” because the scene is certainly not a natural one. It has also to be produced, reproduced, instituted.
With the scene we are evoking of the child learning to read by listening to the mother’s voice, it is the institution of written signs themselves, and thus of all
possible institutions that is being passed down. The institution of the family of man takes place in a scene of learning to read. But what we forget, what we
have to forget or repress is that this is always also a violent scene inasmuch as it has to repeat, reinflict the violence that wrenches the human animal out of
the state of sheer animality, where, as we are taught to believe once we can read, there is no such thing as reading in this common sense, the sense we all
supposedly share, sharing thus the belief that only humans read or do what we call reading.

Some might suggest that, with prose like that, Prof. Kamuf set herself up for a hysterical misreading! But it’s no more lurid than much to be found in the psychoanalytic literature, for example, and far more comprehensible than much contemporary literary criticism, IMHO.

Chronicle of a Massacre Foretold: “The growing power and brutality of Colombia’s paramilitary forces have become the chief concern of international human rights groups
and, increasingly, Colombian and U.S. officials who say the 8,000-member private army might pose the biggest obstacle to peace in the
country’s decades-old civil conflict.

This massacre, the largest of 23 mass killings attributed to the paramilitaries this month, comes as international human rights groups push
for the suspension of U.S. aid to the Colombian armed forces until the military shows progress on human rights. The armed forces, the
chief beneficiary of the $1.3 billion U.S. anti-drug assistance package known as Plan Colombia, deny using the paramilitaries as a shadow
army against leftist guerrillas, turning a blind eye to their crimes or supporting them with equipment, intelligence and troops.” Washington Post

A Phoenix New Times reporter scores An Exclusive Interview With the Preserves Arsonist, and an Arizona Republic editorial is roundly critical, asking Where’s The Outcry Over These Arsons?

Wired has two stories about what the connectivity of the Internet has done to two very different social phenomena.
First, Will the Hatemongers Survive? Rightwing hate groups are evolving a new model in which their dirty work is done by “lone wolves”, individuals acting independently after having been inspired by the hatemonger’s justification and encouragement. The Internet is tailor-made to trawl in this way for adherents whle insulating the hate group from any direct connection to or legal liability for the actions committed in their name.

And Holy and Hooked Up in India tours the web presences of some of the “enlightened souls” at this year’s Kumbh Mela. By the way, the site has an incredible satellite photo (right) showing the dense mass of millions of people at the river bank at the start of the most sacred and busiest bathing day of the festival.

A gold star for tedium. As a father of two children whom we shower with books and to whom we read aloud all the time, I look for any pointers I can get to good children’s literature. I commented some months ago on the bewildering variety of children’s book medals, but the greatest attention and acclaim seem reserved for the Newbery medalists. So why do they have to be so boring, I wondered as I perused this year’s list, and this Salon essayist agrees that the Newberys are “insomnia-curing”, “eat-your-spinach books”, “the books
that stayed on display at the library
because no one checked them out”.

…(M)any adult
readers unquestioningly and uncritically accept the
Newbery medal…because many of us were well-trained and
obedient children, children who respected authority.
Bookish kids were often the homework-doers, the
good-grade-getters, the ones who took our vitamins and sat
still for the eye doctor. When we rebelled we did so
sneakily, with a flashlight under the covers. And so lurking
in the back of many minds is an atavistic belief that the
grownups are always right — that the books we were
sneaking for pleasure weren’t as good for us as the
award-winners we should have been reading. We too often
treat the Newbery awards as if we were still children being
told what’s good and what’s bad, what’s right and what’s
wrong.

The New Yorker Inane Ad of the Week site proclaims: “Each week this site highlights an especially absurd advertisement from the pages of the militantly bourgeois
New Yorker magazine. The selected advertisements evince the ridiculous excesses of our consumer culture.
They target an audience with a disgustingly high rate of disposable income and hawk to it the most frivolous
of baubles, endeavoring to engender — and promising, for a hefty sum, to gratify — desires nobody could have
developed on her or his own. So check this URL every seven days for a new, hilarious, hyperbolic example of
decadent consumerism.”

Tongue twisters, Zungenbrecher, Trabalenguas, Skorogovorki: the first international collection.

Making the complex simple. In the early ’90’s, scientists hoped it would be easy to find the generalities that explained complex systems or processes, and failed miserably, especially if real applicability (predicting the weather, the stcok market, human behavior, etc.) was to be the gold standard. Now complexity science has another, more modest go at it. The Economist [Could the answer be ’43’ after all?]

After Meritocracy. The sociology of the presidential administrations: Bush Sr.’s people were “WASP elitists”, Clinton’s were “meritocratic elitists”, and the Shrub’s people are “smart but anti-intellectual organization men. They rose through the
ranks of institutions—government,
industry, the military—and value loyalty
above all other traits. Their backgrounds have made the
transition run smoothly, but at the first sign of crisis, they
might lack the creative flexibility to wiggle their way out.” The New Republic

Human clone attempt ‘in a year’. It’s always been clear to me that, as soon as it can be done, it will be:

A fertility expert says he will try to produce the first cloned human being within a
year.

After a vote in the House of Lords to allow scientists to clone human embryos for
research, Severino Antinori, who runs a fertility clinic in Rome, claimed to have 10
couples willing to take part in the experiment.

If successful, it will produce a baby who will be an exact genetic replica of its
father.

Dr Antinori is already notorious for enabling a mother of almost 63 to have a child to
replace her adult son who died, and for causing uproar in Britain six years ago when
he helped a 59-year-old unmarried woman have twins.

Dr Antinori told a meeting in Lexington, Kentucky, that he was forming an
“international coalition” of scientists to work on the cloning project in ‘a country of
the Mediterranean where I had consent’.

Why I am Not a Cultural Anthropologist by Nicholas Nicastro

Darwin Awards Candidate? Boy Suffers Burns After Imitating MTV. But then again, if shows like ‘Jackass’ pandering to the lowest common denominator of human intelligence bring in the advertising revenues, isn’t this just an unfortunte cost of doing business? After all, there is a disclaimer warning viewers not to attempt these stunts at home…

Ring Travels 10,000 Miles, Stuck in Man’s Boot. “A ring given up for lost by its owner traveled 10,000 miles around Egypt,
the United States and Costa Rica stuck to the bottom of her boyfriend’s hiking boot.”

Humans Biggest Threat to Galapagos. ” ‘It was a close shave, but I think it’s safe to say the spill did
not have a major impact on the Galapagos,” said Godfrey
Merlen, a British researcher who has lived in the archipelago for
two decades and is helping the Galapagos National Park Service
monitor the damage…

Only one pelican and two seagulls are known to have died from
the spill off San Cristobal, the easternmost island in the remote
Pacific archipelago. But dozens of sea lions and birds, including
albatrosses and blue-footed boobies unique to the Galapagos,
had to be trapped and cleaned.

Scientists say the main concern now is whether fuel will settle
to the bottom of the ocean and kill algae, the only source of
food for marine iguanas, another species found only in the
Galapagos.” AP

The AIDS Questions That Linger. What we still don’t know, on the eve of the upcoming international conference:

Why does AIDS predispose infected persons to certain types
of cancer and infections and not others?

What route does H.I.V. take after it enters the body to
destroy the immune system?

How does H.I.V. subvert the immune system?

What is the precise function of H.I.V.’s nine genes?

What is the most effective anti- H.I.V. therapy?

Is a vaccine possible?

In the absence of a vaccine, how can H.I.V. be stopped?

Why do most babies born to infected mothers escape
infection?

Why do H.I.V. rates differ so greatly among regions in Africa
and elsewhere?

How many people are infected in the United States and has
the rate changed in recent years?

Where did AIDS come from?

New York Times

New Yorkers Ponder ‘Rain Rage’. “What this city needs is better umbrella etiquette.” New York Times

“Before
the UN inspectors came, there were 47 factories involved in the
project. Now there are 64.” Saddam has made two atomic bombs, says Iraqi defector: “Saddam Hussein has two fully operational nuclear bombs and is
working to construct others, an Iraqi defector has told The
Telegraph…The fresh evidence comes only a week after President George
W Bush took office. In his inaugural address, he promised to
confront weapons of mass destruction, without mentioning Iraq.
Under Anglo-US policy, any attempt by Saddam to build nuclear
or biological weapons could lead to military action.

Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State and a Gulf war veteran,
and Vice-President Dick Cheney are both known to favour a
radical approach in dealing with Iraq.” How convenient this comes up just a week after the contentions ascension of Dubya, as the international consensus to maintain the pressure on Saddam is fading. His father did so well consolidating his leadership of the “Free World” with the demonization of the Iraqi Hun.

Dogs don’t kill people, people kill people?? Friends and neighbors saddened, angered over deadly dog attack. The San Francisco woman died in the hospital after being set upon by two dogs, each of which weighed more than she did, who bounded out of their owner’s neighboring apartment as she was putting her keys into her door. The dogs were a blend of the Canario, a Spanish fighting breed so ruthless that it was outlawed in Spain in the ’30’s, and the massive English Mastiff; the cross has been deemed irresponsible by some dog experts. Apparently the owner had only recently acquired them. How should we parse out the responsibility for this? SFGate

Start Paying for Napster in June. “Germany’s publishing powerhouse Bertelsmann said on Monday it was planning for an
early summer introduction of a subscription service of Napster music downloads over the Internet.” Wired And Gnutella is spreading itself thin. “Predictions that Gnutella would quickly offer an effective file-swapping alternative to
Napster have proven premature, with the technology’s own developers admitting
more work is needed before it will take off as a way to trade free music and other
digital wares. ” ZDNet

Nominees announced for National Book Critics Circle Awards: ‘Jacques Barzun, a best-selling author at 92, and Zadie Smith, a best-selling author
at 24, were among the nominees announced Monday for the National Book Critics Circle Awards. [Smith’s White Teeth is on the pile of pending books on my nightstand.]

Other finalists included four-time nominee Cynthia Ozick for her essay collection Quarrel & Quandary and Michael Chabon for his fanciful novel about
comic books, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. ‘ Nando Times

BlogVoices is back.

“…it seems we inhabit and enjoy
a world where the real thing does not really matter”. On “the declining
importance of authenticity in western culture and our
acceptance of a world where imitation is
all-pervasive….

In the arts and in our lifestyles, endless bricolage,
regurgitation and imitation bear testament to this
trend. We drink in fake Irish pubs, cocoon ourselves
in virtual reality, and visit Disneyland to immerse
ourselves in the worlds of ancient Egypt, Greece,
Rome, Olde England or the Wild West. Some – such as
the residents of Celebration, Florida, a recreated
world of Midwest America – even live in a simulated
world. Eclectic genres of rap and dance music
unashamedly borrow guitar riffs from the Seventies,
looping them over a Sixties bass-line. Meanwhile, a
put-together girl band mimes on stage and reaches
number one.” New Statesman

Techgnosis author Erik Davis ponders the “cost to our sense of being” of wireless technology and its erosion of place:

As with so many technologies, the
penetration of wireless into global society will be
simultaneously convenient, weird, banal, and
deeply disturbing. We already accept the little
antisocial wormholes that cell phones open up in
the midst of public space, a phenomenon that,
while further cranking up the knob on
individualism, at least adds another wrinkle to the
boundaries that define our social interaction. But
the growth of wireless access to data may have
a very different effect, because it erodes the
sense that the world we wander through has any
real variation at all.

A droll Washington Post staff writer trolls the hot, hot AOL Britney Spears chatroom for opinions on Dubya and the election.

Kevin Phillips: “The GOP has never met a tax cut it didn’t like, and that weakness may pave the way for a repetition of the 1981-92 recession.” With Federal Reserve chairman Greenspan having gone forked-tongued on this one already (he knows where his bread is buttered), and the doubts expressed by new Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill being steamrolled over, keep your fingers crossed for the misgivings of Charles Grassley (R., Iowa), new chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and William Thomas (R., Calif.), new chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee to amount to something.

“It is a conspiracy theory that would make Oliver Stone blush, but the pieces fit
so perfectly well together that it has an eerie ring of truth. The theory: California
utilities and a Texas-based power cartel purposely turned the lights out to pressure
California’s governor and Legislature into a lucrative bailout.
If this theory is correct, it would be one of the most outrageous examples of
corporate exploitation ever perpetrated. This is not just because of the tens of
billions of dollars to be transferred from Californians to corporate interests. It is also
because the crisis may well drag the rest of the nation into a nasty recession.
Let’s look then, at the facts and logic supporting the ‘blackout-bailout’ theory.” LA Times

EJ Dionne to the illegitimate son: “We’ll Get Over It If You Get Off Your High Horse” Washington Post

‘Promising’ tests on car speed limiters extended. After a three-year trial with a Ford Escort, the government of the UK has commissioned a twenty-car experiment with limiting vehicle speed using a computerized override on the throttle linked to a GPS which downloads data about the speed limit for a given road. Guardian

Despair, Inc. secures official trademark registration for :-( “In a move that has
millions across the Internet
community frowning, Despair,
Inc. today announced that the
U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office (USPTO) had awarded
them a registered trademark for
the ‘frowny’ emoticon which
serves as their logo.” Will an explosion of trademark infringement lawsuits ensue? I have just one thing to say about that:

:-(

[from Red Rock Eaters]

Must men fight? Probably. “Tests on fighting fish, angry wasps show
machismo may be biologically inevitable.” Toronto Globe and Mail

Must men fight? Probably. “Tests on fighting fish, angry wasps show
machismo may be biologically inevitable.” Toronto Globe and Mail

Must men fight? Probably. “Tests on fighting fish, angry wasps show
machismo may be biologically inevitable.” Toronto Globe and Mail

A fairly technical exposition on How SETI@Home works, from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). From radio telescope reception to distributed computing and postprocessing. And what the SETI project will do if a signal arrives, according to the 1989 “Declaration of Principles
Concerning Activities Following the Detection of
Extraterrestrial Intelligence“.

S*c*i*e*n*t*o*l*o*g*y allegedly steals website. [You’ll notice I always write their name that way. I’ll admit to trying to cloak myself from search engine hits because I’m paranoid about their web-intentions if they find me badmouthing them.]

Google Link Is Bush League:
‘There’s an old schoolyard taunt that goes, “When you look up ‘stupid’ in the dictionary, you’ll see a picture of
George.”

Well, here’s a tech spin on that insult, only this one is not for kids.

When you type “dumb motherfucker” into Google, the search engine’s top result is a site about President Bush. Actually, what you get is a link to an online store that sells George W. Bush merchandise. The
site is decidedly pro-Bush, and doesn’t cast any aspersions upon the intelligence of the new U.S.
president.’ Wired

Monster move for Church of Godzilla. Churchgoers hope that renaming the Church of God in Zillah, Washington the ‘Church of Godzilla’ will
prove Christians have a sense of humour and attract younger churchgoers. A 10-ft. statue of the monster now adorns the church’s parking lot. Ananova

New Primates Discovered in Madagascar and Brazil. “Nine new lemur and
two marmoset species have been discovered in the forests of
Madagascar and Brazil, scientists announced earlier this month. But
the news is not all good – some of the newly named species may
already be endangered, joining the dozens of other primate species
that may face extinction this century. ” Environmental News Service

Police radios can trigger positive breath test, at least with the equipment used in the UK, according to an ex-police officer informant for The Register who revealed that while at training school they were taught never to hit the transmit button on their handset while waiting for the breathalizer analysis to finalize. This leads to inevitable speculation that an officer “might surreptitiously give a
quick burst of transmit on his radio whilst his partner was
administering the breath test to an uncooperative suspect.” Even if the suspect is eventually acquitted, they will have been paid back for their cheekiness with massive inconvenience. The Register article advises those stopped for suspicion of driving under the influence to request that the officers turn their radios off. Let’s forget for a minute the fact that you ought to be caught if you drink and drive. IMHO it would be better for you to just keep an eye on their itchy fingers on their handset triggers and, if they transmit, you might be able to use the facts above to invalidate any positive test findings. (It’s akin to the way in which you can get your radar speeding citation dismissed if you can establish that the officer doesn’t know how long it’s been since the radar gun was last calibrated.)

Possible blood test for schizophrenia? “Israeli researchers may have found a way to diagnose schizophrenia by analysing
white blood cells for signs of a chemical that is overactive in patients with the
psychiatric condition.” The amount of mRNA that codes for a specific subset of the dopamine receptor, D3, implicated in schizophrenia, is reliably sngiificantly elevated in the new test. Over the decades, there have been a number of claims of blood chemistry alterations that could predict schizophrenia, none of which has panned out. But this seems less smoke and mirrors than most to me. Of course I’ll mention my standard caveat — schizophrenia is a heterogeneous condition, only some of which relates to neurotransmitter or receptor alterations, so this test isn’t going to be global. British Medical Journal

Negative Emotions Fade with Age: Study. “In a study that spanned 23 years and four different generations, a team of researchers probed
the positive and negative emotions of 2,804 people. … They say that negative emotions like loneliness,
depression or boredom become less burdensome as people age.” This is something anyone who spends considerable time with a selection of elders already knows.

Must men fight? Probably. “Tests on fighting fish, angry wasps show
machismo may be biologically inevitable.” Toronto Globe and Mail

If you enter your (or any) zipcode at EnviroMapper, this EPA site generates a map depicting your local environmental quality, including “drinking water,
toxic and air releases, hazardous waste, water discharge permits, and Superfund sites.
EnviroMapper also links to text reports, which provide even more information.” They’ll also give you the code to display an EnviroMap on your website.

Thanks for Jorn Barger at Robot Wisdom for pointing to this update on the progress of Martin Amis’ novels to film. No word yet about my favorite, London Fields; not sure it would translate that well (or that anyone would go to see it if it did). Here‘s a feature from the New York Times archives about Amis, including a collection of reviews of his books and links to articles about him.

Bottom Dollar: “The ultimate in sophisticated swabbing products has just been launched by US sanitary
giant Kimberly-Clark. The busy boffins at K-C have been beavering away to bring the
world “Cottonelle Fresh(TM) Rollwipes — America’s first and only dispersible,
pre-moistened wipe on a roll!”

Yep, you guessed it. Now you can buy a roll of wet toilet paper; highly useful for
achieving that squeaky clean feeling.” And for your littlest ones: “For parents wishing to do away with the smell and mess
of wet, leaky diapers, wrapping their baby in mashed fish
may be the answer. A food scientist at the University of
Wisconsin, Madison, believes that we should extend our
recycling consciousness to embrace dead, unwanted fish,
and in so doing reduce both waste and diaper rash.” Beyond 2000

DeCSS Allies Ganging Up The federal court ruling in a suit brought by eight movie studios against 2600 Magazine that restricted its right to publish a decryption program for DVDs “ignores free speech rights and should be
overturned, eight different coalitions claim.

The groups, representing everyone from cryptographers to journalists, have ganged up to attack the ruling in separate amicus
briefs scheduled to be sent to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday.” Wired

The killer illness for a new world order: “Mad cow fits the classic profile of a disease likely to cause
hysteria. Ebola, AIDS, and polio—three of the most
flamboyant illnesses of the century—overshadowed deadlier
but less flashy plagues, such as malaria, for several reasons.
First, the hysteria-inducing illnesses usually affect young
people and strike in particularly gruesome ways. Ebola causes
massive bleeding from every orifice. AIDS is responsible for
grotesque cancers and infections. Polio paralyzed young
children.

Second, at the moment of the panic—before much is learned
about the disease’s origin—everyone seems vulnerable, and
it’s not clear that prevention is possible. Maybe an Ebola
victim flew in from the Congo and breathed on you! Maybe
your dentist is HIV-positive! And finally, the disease
organism is new and weird and seems to have sprung from a
dark, mysterious place. AIDS is a creepy mutating monkey
virus. Ebola remains a riddle: The Hot Zone traces it to the
bats in a spooky East African cave.” Slate

Telling the Truth About “False” Memory: ‘Researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia
now can distinguish between true and “false” memories, which could lead to further discoveries about the human mind.

“Although people believe they remember events accurately, the human memory is error prone, creating memories of events that never happened,” said
(one of the researchers). “Learning how true and false memories differ will allow us to better understand how memory works
and fails, and how memories are stored and processed.”

“Memory retrieval involves the reactivation of sensory information present during an event…However, memories of events that never
occurred have no sensory information to reactivate. By detecting this brain activity, we can differentiate between true and false memories.” ‘ Although this research technique is not soon likely to become a clinically useful test, this has enormous implications for the polarizing and seemingly insoluble debate — kind of like arguing about religion — about the falsity or reality of “recovered memories” of early abuse (zealously defended and sometimes zealously encouraged by some therapists, and met with contempt by others) that has been ripping through the mental health field and the popular culture over the last decade. This link should take you to the abstract of the study in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

The 2001 US Big Brother Awards. Call for nominations for the four awards, which will be given at the March 7 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference in Cambridge, MA:

Worst Government Official/Most Heinous Government Organization:

A government department, ministry, or agency which has unreasonably invaded privacy
and established comprehensive programmes of surveillance. Or a government official
who has a particularlly bad record in promoting or encouraging privacy invasions.
Previous winners were the US Department of Commerce and Rep. Bill McCollum
(R-FL)

Most invasive company:

A company or other private organization based in the United States which has
demonstrated profound disregard for the privacy of either its own personnel or the
general public. The previous winners were Elensys Inc and DoubleClick.

Most Appalling Project —

private, government or a partnership — that has reached an advanced stage of
development or implementation, and which will achieve substantial intrusion into
privacy. Winners have included the FDIC’s ‘Know Your Customer and the Federal
Aviation Administration’s BodyScan system.

Lifetime Menace:

A person or organization (government or non-governmental) that has made an
extraordinary contribution to the destruction of privacy. The previous winners have been
TransUnion and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

‘ “Winners” are encouraged to attend and accept their awards.’ [via Red Rock Eaters]

Big Bang Scientists Get Dense More than 700 scientists convened last week at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Stony Brook NY, the site of the new Relativistic Heavy Ion Accelerator, to discuss its preliminary success in creating the highest density of matter ever made. The point of producing such exotic matter composed of pure quarks held together by gluons is to approach on a small scale the conditions in the universe microseconds after it came into existence in the Big Bang, “an explosion from a single point of nearly infinite energy density.” Wired [Is anyone wondering: if they can get back all the way to the singularity, any chance they could create a new universe, microscopic or otherwise? What effects might that have on our own,”inside” which it was created?]

At least Dubya’s accession is likely to lead to a resurgence of clever sloganeering on the nation’s rear bumpers.

In what at least has the appearance of impropriety, according to the New York Post the inclusion on Clinton’s Presidential pardon list of four members of a New York Hasidic community (convicted in 1999 of a $40 million swindling scheme) may have been the price for delivering their community’s votes to Hilary Clinton in her recent successful bid for a New York Senate seat. Her near-unanimous vote in the neighborhood was in marked contrst to the Republican majorities polled in two adjacent but unrelated Hasidic districts. Ms Clinton’s denials sound disingenuous in the same way as her husband’s denials about having sex with Monica Lewinsky, master wordsmiths that they both are.

Annals of the Age of the Clown Prince: Dubya Exits the Information Superhighway. “Never much of a cyber-cowboy, President Bush
has now exited the information superhighway altogether to
avoid having his e-mail become public. Before he came to
Washington, Bush said he wasn’t much of an Internet surfer but
did like to e-mail family members, especially his mother and
brother Jeb, Florida’s governor.”

An Inside Look at the First United Nations Prison, located in Tanzania to hold detainees being tried at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. If convicted and sentenced, African countries have agreed to imprison them; the United Nations is exerting pressure for these countries — so far Mali, Swaziland and Benin — to bring conditions in their prisons up to acceptable standards to host those convicted of some of the most heinous genocidal atrocities known. Internews, which got this ‘scoop’, is a US-funded organization that provides support to worldwide independent media; I wasn’t aware that they appear to do their own reporting as well.

And in other war crimes news, a US Report Says Serbs Burned Ethnic Albanian Bodies: “Serbian security forces
incinerated the remains of hundreds of ethnic Albanians in a lead refinery during the 1999
hostilities in the Yugoslav province, a U.S. radio reporting team said on Thursday.” An explicit
aim appears to have been to destroy evidence that might lead to war crimes prosecution,
according to a Serbian source close to the operation.

A Living Hell or a Life Saved? Attorneys for Russell Weston, a man with paranoid schizophrenia who killed two U.S. Capitol Police officers in July 1998, have fought a successful battle since to prevent his forcible medication in the federal psychiatric hospital where he has been detained since. They argue that treating his psychosis and making him competent to stand trial on charges for which he could face the death penalty if convicted is unethical and illegal. In the meanwhile, he remains tortured by his illness and, potentially dangerous, has been kept in seclusion for an unheard-of two years. But which is the greater cruelty? Washington Post

Wrong response to energy mess could be recipe for environmental ruin: “At the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, which opens here Thursday, the conversations among
corporate, political and academic leaders will be more about bringing Western-style economic progress to
developing economies than about finding ways to save the planet. Oh, the program pays some attention to the
issues. For example, there’s a session titled “Whatever Happened to Sustainable Development?” and
non-governmental organizations, including environmental groups, were invited to be part of the conversation. But
the bulk of the talk will be about sustaining growth in the rich nations, and bringing growth to the places where so
many people live in hopeless deprivation.” San Jose Mercury News

Dalai Lama Criticizes Proselytizing. “Stepping into one of the hottest religious
controversies in South Asia, the Dalai Lama today joined Hindu leaders in
condemning the Muslim and Christian practice of proselytizing.” As a sometime student of comparative religion, I have long felt that the worth of a religion is inversely proportional to the degree to which its devotees actively seek converts. ABC News And, while we’re on the topic of religion without prescription,
“Killing the Buddha is a
religion magazine for
people made anxious by
churches, people
embarrassed to be
caught in the ‘spirituality’
section of a bookstore,
people both hostile and
drawn to talk of God. It is
for people who somehow
want to be religious, who
want to know what it
means to know the
divine, but for good
reasons are not and do
not. “

Think of words ending in ‘gry’ .

Angry and hungry are two of them.

There are only three words in the English language.

What is the third word?

The word is something that everyone uses every day.

If you have listened carefully,

I have already told you what it is.

I guess whether you think the departing Clinton administration staffers’ actions at the White House were innocent pranks or heinous crimes of vandalism is a litmus test.

The goal of the Degree Confluence Project “is to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world,
and to take pictures at each location. The pictures and stories will then be posted here.” Courtesy of last year’s US government removal of restrictions on the accuracy of civilan GPS’s. So far, 432 “successful, official confluences” in 38 countries are posted.

Blogvoices discussion service closes. Here’s the author’s notice:

I have received word that several BlogVoices users have sent
harassing emails to Hostrocket.com. Please stop. I understand your
frustration, but harassment will not solve anything.

UPDATE

A “friendly face” has offered to host BlogVoices. I am currently
discussing the situation with them. Stay tuned.

NOTICE

At 10:53PM on Monday, January 22: I received an email from the
billing department of Hostrocket.com informing me that the
BlogVoices.com account was in violation of the Hostrocket Terms of
Service. Regardless of whether or not I agree with the reasoning, the
decision has been made.

Hostrocket was to be the third and final attempt to host the
BlogVoices service and I do not intend to deviate from my
resolution. BlogVoices.com will be closing indefinitely.

Unfortunately, the short and long-term demands of my job prevent
me from dealing with the situation in a more preferable manner. I
will, however, continue with the planned source code release and will
continue to work on the code-base as time permits. For further
up-to-date information relating to BlogVoices, please check:
http://www.chrish.org regularly. I will set up a permanent location for
downloads and documentation as soon as possible.

I will be saving the entire BlogVoices database and will make every
opportunity to provide each user (as requested) an exported version
of their BlogVoices data. For those who choose to install BlogVoices,
I can provide the data in a manner useful to the mysql
command-line utility.

I wish I could adequately express my feelings in the wake of this
decision, but given the electronic nature of this notice, that is just
not possible. I would like to thank everyone who supported the
service and hope that you will support those who launch their own
Blogger discussion systems.

It’d be nice to know the entire story; it seems to be the latest variant on the “tragedy of the commons”, in which selfish users of a community resource thoughtlessly ruin it for the rest of us. I’ll be removing the “discuss” facility from my template when I get a chance. Anyone out there who knows of an add-in to Blogger similar to Blogvoices — please point me to it. I loved providing discussion capability on the weblog! Please consider the mailing list (see sidebar) I set up several weeks ago.

What’s become of the papers? A friend sent me this:

The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.

The New York Times is read by people who think they run the country.

The Washington Post is read by people who think they ought to run the country.

USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don’t
understand the Washington Post.

The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn’t mind running the country
if they could spare the time.

The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country.

The New York Daily News is read by people whho are not sure who is
running the country.

The New York Post is read by people who don’t care who’s running the
country as long as they do something scandalous.

The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren”t sure there is
a country or that anyone is running it.

The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country.

Trial Heat:
The American Prospect asks seven pundits — Wendy Kaminer, David L. Kirp, Michael Nelson, Peter Schrag, Cass Sunstein, Jon Margolis,
Russ Baker, Rick Perlstein, and Hans Riemer — who they’d like to see challenge George Bush in
2004. And a readers’ poll.

Francis Fukuyama gets his digs in about the Clinton legacy. Under the guise of profound social analysis, the piece is just an excuse to remind the reader about the ‘bobo’ (‘bomemian bourgeoisie’) concept, and then conclude: ‘(T)he Clintons were quintessential “bobos”: crudely materialistic, self-absorbed, and
power-hungry, but at the same time unable to admit any of this to themselves because they believed
their intelligence, education and sophistication entitled them to a higher level of respect. Like others in
his generation, the man presiding over America’s most recent decade of greed could look himself in the
mirror and pronounce himself satisfied with what he saw.’ Wall Street Journal

“It would have been `Wow,’ but the W was removed, so now it’s just `o.’ ” New White House Staff Faces a Few Mysteries, e.g. how can George W. ascend to the throne when the White House keyboards are all suddenly bereft of their W’s, and other pranks of the departing Clinton staff. One former Clinton aide commented on the pranks, “It was nothing serious. Nothing
like stealing an election.”

There are also suggestions that a few of the new denizens of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue have not yet figured the place out.

“Anybody got any burgers in there?” Mr. Bush said at one point today, suddenly and unexpectedly sticking his head into a briefing room where reporters were idling away the time. They were too stunned to answer, and not in possession of ground beef.

New York Times

Planet Suffers Big Hack Attack. ‘A group calling itself Pentaguard simultaneously cracked
government websites in the United States, England and
Australia

The group replaced the home pages of the sites over the
weekend with a statement reading “The largest .gov & .mil
mass defacement in the history of mankind.” It caused the
temporary disruption of at least two dozen sites….In the United States, the Republican Caucus for the California
Legislature was hit while the state is facing rolling blackouts. The
Alaskan Office of the Department of Interior was targeted because
Secretary of the Interior-designate Gale Norton favors drilling for oil in
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.’ Wired

The “Bloggies”: The finalists in the 2001 Weblog Awards have been posted and voting is open to the weblogging public from now until January 31. I’m honored that Follow Me Here
is a finalist in the “best-kept secret Weblog” category (“Best weblogs that are not in the Weblogs.com Hot List“). [If I win in my category, there’s a $1.50 prize waiting for me!]
The ballot itself, apart from being your medium to vote, is worth a visit as a sort of portal to what the weblogging community considers its best. There are some unsurprising favorites there, of course, but also many sites and resources with which I’m not familiar and which I’m excited to explore, especially those others in the best-kept-secret category. Congratulations to all of you finalists who might be reading, welcome to any of you who are encountering FmH for the first time via the ballot page, and thank you to all you return visitors for your support of FmH. I’ve already won the real brass ring, which is a lively readership base for whom to continue to write!

A No-Drug Approach to Wellness. A thoughtful essay by an internist-turned-psychiatrist, confronting the struggle many patients have accepting medications for emotional symptoms such as depression or anxiety because they don’t want to cede control over who they are. Ironically, people who reluctantly accept antidepressants, as the essayist concludes, often end up saying they “feel more like myself.” New York Times

Mysterious Night Glow in the Skies of Venus Puzzles Scientists New York Times

Pee on Your Own Time Arkansas Times [via Red Rock Eaters]

Bush Bans Aid to Foreign Groups Promoting Abortion. As if we were surprised, we wades right into the most polarizing issue in domestic politics with the first major action of his administration. “Uniting, not divisive”? Wanting to make early points with the religious right, as he did with the Ashcroft nomination? Opponents of abortion are loving it.

Ominous Findings on Seattle Quake Risk “It’s like building on Jell-O. You put a bowl of
Jell-O on a table and shake the table, that bowl of Jell-O is
going to oscillate a lot.” New York Times

Andy McFadden’s canonical CD-Recordable FAQ (frequently asked questions)

Small town tests TV, DSL combo via phone lines. Instead of bringing you telephony over your cable hookup, the local telephone company in this small Georgia town is offering 60 channels of TV over the phone lines. CNN [via Slashdot]

Anesthesiologists Outraged Over New Policy. A change in Medicare regulations will now allow nurse anaesthetists to administer anaesthesia during surgery without being under the supervision of an anaesthesiologist or other medical doctor. Nurses argue that this is good policy for underserved areas where no anaesthesiologists are available; the MDs counter that in such areas the nurse should be supervised by the surgeon performing the surgery (whom Medicare hasn’t yet ofund a way to do away with). The rhetoric about serving the underserved just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, and this smacks of more meddling with lives to save an almighty dollar. Besides, who thinks it is going to remain restricted to medically underserved areas?

The closest I come to having seen anything like this in my own specialty of psychiatry is the growing encroachment of cheaper “nurse clinical specialists” managing psychiatric outpatients’ medications in place of psychiatrists. Unfortunately, I have rarely seen one who has the breadth and depth of perspective to do justice to sorting out the complicated patients, often the sickest in the mental health arena, they tend to treat, since they usually appear to be hired by the public sector mental health clinics that are under the tightest budgets. Being at the receiving end of the fruits of their difficulties managing their patients in the community, I can attest to the fact that patients simply do not od as well under their care as under the care of a physician, and end up requiring psychiatric hospitalization at a far greater rate than patients who have psychiatrists. And that’s just expensive hospital bills; in the realm of anaesthesia, we’ re talking about mortality. WCVB Boston

Is ANDi a miracle or a monster?

Readers will remember the dark eyes of ANDi, the world’s first
genetically modified monkey, gazing up at them from this
newspaper recently.

After several failed attempts to insert jellyfish genes into rhesus
monkeys, ANDi – “inserted DNA” in reverse – was created at the
Oregon Regional Primate Research Center in America. ANDi’s
case has attracted worldwide interest because of its implications
for the manufacture of “designer babies”: genetically modified
humans, created from a shopping list of desirable
characteristics. Other GM animals already exist, but the
modification of primates brings the possibility of similar
experiments on humans much closer.

Ever since Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World appeared nearly 70
years ago, thoughtful people have been haunted by his vision of
a dystopian society of laboratory-bred human robots. Until the
Nazis gave eugenics a bad name, many intellectuals in Britain and
America supported the idea. Now the genetic revolution has
made eugenics respectable again. Scientists at the cutting edge
of genetic research are often invited to defend their work, but
we hear less often from philosophers. Theirs, however, is the
task of assessing the meaning of such research.

The Telegraph asked seven of the world’s leading philosophers a
number of questions arising from the ANDi case.

The Telegraph