Poland: Committee Warns against Revival of UFO Sect. ‘A national sect-monitoring

committee has issued a warning about the revival of an “apocalyptic

Polish sect” called Antrovis. It sees salvation in the landing of UFOs

on a southern Polish mountain and has been linked to the alleged

disappearances of individuals.’ The sect allows as how, when the saucers land, all terrestrials who are not sect members will be exterminated. Central Europe Online

Retailers’ Siren Song. “…your buying habits are being

mapped almost as closely as the human genome,

manipulated like Pavlov’s dog, and seduced like the

American electorate every fourth November.” Why not know what they know? Training about their insidious uses of consumer psychology may help stop you from being ‘had.’ Kiplinger’s

Bush is behaving like the U.S. version of

Milosevic, ‘telling Al Gore

“to hurry up and concede before the people find out I

really lost the election.” ‘

The man who says he wants to be “a uniter, not a divider”

and that he “trusts the people,” doesn’t give a damn that

some 20,000 voters in Florida were disenfranchised one

way or another – and the numbers keep rising. Or is it that

he figures if the country’s and world’s eyes are diverted

away from Florida, he can somehow save his baby

brother [Florida Governor] Jeb’s hide?

Jeb seemed mighty uncomfortable as he stood before the

cameras at a press conference Wednesday, rolling his

lower lip over his upper, his beady eyes darting about as

he announced he was recusing himself from the election

certification commission. State Attorney General Bob

Butterworth, a Democrat, was visibly shaken.

Does Butterworth know something we don’t? As the

state’s chief law enforcement officer, could he be

wrestling with bringing charges against Jeb and all the

constitutional officers engaged in this debacle?

Jeb promised George W. that he would deliver Florida to

him. What he left out of that statement was how he

planned to accomplish that. An investigation and a reform

of Florida’s election law are surely in order.

Florida has a long history of election fraud. So it takes a

grand stretch of the imagination to believe that so many

Florida voters and election officials are bumbling idiots,

when the funny business stretched from north to south and

east to west.

Perhaps Floridians and the nation should have paid more

attention to the 1997 election fraud in Miami. That ended

when Mayor Xavier Suarez’s election was overturned

because of fraud involving absentee ballots. City

Commissioner Humerto Hernandez, along with 13 other

elected officials and volunteers, were convicted and

sentenced to 364 days in prison for their roles in helping

to steal the election for Hernandez.

Now we learn that Suarez sits on the executive committee

of the Miami-Dade Republican Party and, in this year’s

election, was specifically involved in recruiting absentee

voters and helping to fill out absentee ballot forms. Do

you smell something rotten here?

Two breaking scandals drive Bush’s rush to

claim presidency. “Thursday afternoon the Bush

campaign scrambled frantically to seize the presidency as

it came closer to slipping out of its hands. Cabinet

appointments were announced, plans for a victory

celebration were underway, and old Bush associates were

called in to lend an air of authority.

The rush was necessary because of two breaking scandals

now nipping at Bush’s heels that could ultimately render

him ineligible for the office or heavily damaged as

president.

Bush has been accused of a deception in a Texas jury

questionnaire that has been characterized as perjury. He is

also under fire for refusing to release his military records,

despite numerous requests from the press and from

veterans groups who have provided documentation that

Bush deserted his National Guard post duty from May

1972 to May 1973.” Online Journal

Hubble Sees Bare Neutron Star Streaking Across Space. “It’s as big as Manhattan Island, is 10 trillion times denser than steel, and is hurtling our way at speeds over

100 times faster than a supersonic jet. An alien spaceship? No, it’s a runaway neutron star, called RX

J185635-3754, forged in a stellar explosion that was visible to our ancestors in 1 million B.C. Precise

observations made with the Hubble telescope confirm that the interstellar interloper is the closest

neutron star ever seen. The object also doesn’t have a companion star that would affect its appearance.

Now located 200 light-years away in the southern constellation Corona Australis, it will swing by Earth at

a safe distance of 170 light-years in about 300,000 years.”

Penguin-Toppling Claims Studied. Pilots are ridiculed for the claim that, when they fly over penguin colonies, the “curious birds topple over like dominoes as they stare up at the aircraft.” Now British Antarctic Survey researchers plan to spend a month studying the veracity of the phenomenon. Washington Post

Salon interviews Denis Dutton, founder of the Arts and Letters Daily website, and now starting up the online publishing house

Cybereditions, offering up out-of-print “worthwhile scholarly books” as etexts, HTML downloads and print-on-demand paperbacks.

In contrast to the plurality system of voting used in most American elections, Instant Runoff Voting, an election reform rapidly gaining attention throughout the US, allows all voters to vote for their favorite candidate

without fear of helping elect their least favorite candidate, and it

ensures that the winner enjoys true support from a majority of the

voters. Center for Voting and Democracy

Judges have power to overturn elections. “Under a 1998 court ruling, Florida judges have broad authority to invalidate

elections or order new elections in cases in which fraud, or even unintentional error,

results in flawed outcome.” Tampa Tribune

Buchanan Says Disputed Florida Votes Are Gore’s

Alexander Cockburn on Gridlock: . “So it all came out right in the end: gridlock

on the Hill and Nader blamed for sabotaging

Al Gore.

First a word about gridlock. We like it. No

bold initiatives, like privatizing Social Security

or shoving through vouchers. No

ultra-right-wingers making it onto the

Supreme Court. Ah, you protest, but what

about the bold plans that a

Democratic-controlled Congress and Gore

would have pushed through? Relax. There

were no such plans. These days gridlock is the

best we can hope for.” And Cockburn continues with a good summary of the reasons Greens voted Green rather than “sneaking back to the Gore column.” CounterPunch

Nader and La Follette: History Repeats Itself. Should Nader’s run be cast in the same tones as Robert La Follette’s 1924 campaign as an independent against “a conservative Republican and an only marginally less conservative Democrat”?

Described as an antiracist educator, organizer and writer, Tim Wise of Alter Net writes an Open Letter to the Pioneer Fund, delighted to discover he shares their interest in “the proposition that people of different

ethnic and cultural backgrounds are, on the basis of heredity, inherently

unequal and can never be expected to behave or perform equally” , as their charter proclaims. Wicked tongue firmly ensconced in cheek, he wants them to fund his investigation into the reasons for Causasian genetic inferiority, as demonstrated by their “disproportionate drug use, binge drinking, and propensity for serial murder.”

It may be that nothing can wean whites from their insatiable appetites for

drugs and alcohol. If so, then just as your founder, Wickliffe Draper, once

said blacks were “genetically inferior,” and “ought to be repatriated to

Africa,” so too will you surely be brave enough to call for a full-fledged “back

to Europe” movement, so as to rid the U.S. of millions of narcotized

Caucasian parasites.

As one of your grantees, Richard Lynn says, it might even be necessary to

“phase out” inferior cultures: a prospect that might apply to whites if they’re

unwilling or unable to clean themselves up. Such is the price of progress.

Wanted: Homeland for 300 Webheads. ‘Most college students don’t tend to say things like “Whether or not we see a

nation of liberty on this planet could hinge largely on my competence.” Then

again, most college students aren’t self-proclaimed royalty… He doesn’t use slang or even

contractions, and he signs his correspondence “Yours in Liberty.” His chief

hobby is improving his qualifications for princehood by studying political

philosophy and keeping up with international news.’ By one writer’s count, the web is home to 118 self-defined virtual “micro-nations” with self-declared sovereignty. And some of them are looking for territory in the actual world. Alter Net

Here, in full, is a dispatch from Phil Agre (Red Rock Eaters mailing list owner), who has rapidly pulled together alot of concerns about the Florida vote situation:

[People have been sending me a flood of material about the Florida

vote, so much that I can hardly keep up with it as I’m typing here.

The situation is a mess, and it just gets worse. I’ve gathered URL’s

for a great deal of relevant information, and I urge you to pass

it along to everyone who can use it. I’m getting so much material,

the situation is evolving so fast, and the relevant Web sites are so

overloaded, that I cannot guarantee that I have summarized everything

100% accurately, or that the URL’s all still work. I’ve done my best.

Earlier I passed on a report that a locked ballot box had been discovered

in a Democratic area. Now the cnn.com Web site reports that, according

to “Miami-Dade County election officials”, this box contained no ballots:

http://www.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/11/08/ballotbox.found/

There is a lot of vague talk about other missing ballot boxes, but this

is the only one that has been formally reported to my knowledge.

But the missing ballot box was hardly the only problem, or the worst.

For example, there are the misleading “butterfly ballots”. Here is an

article from the Sun-Sentinel newspaper in Palm Beach County:

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/daily/detail/0,1136,36000000000123102,00.html

This article is being continually updated. The Sun-Sentinel Web site is

overwhelmed, so keep trying.

You can see an image of the misleading ballot on these pages:

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/elections/palmbeachballot.htm

http://cnews.tribune.com/news/image/0,1119,sunsentinel-nation-82373,00.html

The Democrats are asserting that this ballot design was illegal under

Florida law:

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/politics/AP-ELN-Florida-Ballot-Confusion.html

Bob Kerrey is calling for a new vote in Florida:

http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/11/07/results/

The problem has two aspects. First, statistical arguments and massive

anecdotal evidence suggest that the misleading ballot produced easily

enough bad votes to throw the election. Second, one of the authors of

the Sun-Sentinel article just said on public radio that something like

20,000 more ballots than one would statistically expect were discarded

in the strongly Democratic areas where the misleading ballots were used.

There is a brief statistical discussion of the issue here:

http://cuwu.editthispage.com/2000/11/08

This page should include a dramatic plot of the voting data, but it only

seems to appear under certain browsers. Here’s another URL for the plot:

http://madison.hss.cmu.edu/palm-beach.pdf

Here are some more articles on the subject:

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20001108/el/eln_ballot_confusion_1.html

http://www.time.com/time/campaign2000/story/0,7243,60132,00.html

I have enclosed another statistical discussion by Jeff Harris, a former

official at the Office of Management and Budget now working a public

policy consultant in Los Angeles. I have also enclosed a message by a

friend, also in Los Angeles, who was involved in an investigation of a

rigged election out here. He knew about the 1988 case in Florida, and

I found his message interesting. People have made further claims about

the 1988 election that they aren’t willing to put their names on, so I

won’t repeat them.

Nobody to my knowledge is arguing that the ballots were consciously

designed to bias the election. They are only arguing that the ballots

were badly designed, illegal, and very likely had the effect of changing

the outcome on the national level.

Enough about the butterfly ballots. Here are some other subjects…

For a while last night, the cnn.com Web site said that CNN was trying

to investigate an apparent discrepancy between the Florida voting figures

that were reported to the press and the actual count. If I understood

the sequence of events correctly, these discrepancies may have had an

impact on the bizarre sequence of events last night, possibly motivating

Al Gore’s premature concession call to George W. Bush. I was watching

the numbers minute-by-minute until about 5am EST, and there certainly did

seem to be a discrepancy. But I have not heard anything further about the

matter on cnn.com or elsewhere.

The Wall Street Journal mentions complaints of voter intimidation

(or fraud or something) based on claims that at least one conservative

radio host in Florida broadcast an assertion that, due to high turnout,

Democrats should vote on Wednesday. In the few days before the election

I saw just that claim, framed as a joke, in messages circulating on

the Internet. But then other messages said that it was Republicans

who should vote on Wednesday. In any case as I say these messages were

clearly jokes. If a radio host made such assertions in anything but a

clearly joking way then that would be a serious matter as well.

The police have locked the elections office of Volusia County, Florida

(which Gore won) after they caught an employee removing bags from it.

http://orlandosentinel.com/news/1108guard.htm

http://cbsnews.com/now/story/0,1597,247897-412,00.shtml

You can get county-by-county numbers at cnn.com. The numbers do look

strange for the down-ballot candidates compared to other counties.

It is worth remembering that Dade and Broward counties in south Florida

have big-time histories of voter fraud. For a story on one recent

episode, see today’s issue of Feed:

http://www.feedmag.com/templates/daily_master.php3?a_id=1389

One Florida journalist mentioned on public radio that the whole Miami

area is full of ex-CIA people including right-wing anti-Castro activists

and many of the major figures of the Watergate scandal, and that people

in Florida are not surprised to hear of strange goings-on in that area.

I also recommend the concise analysis at http://www.orvetti.com/.

My conservative friends are telling me what a pissy loser Al Gore is

for contesting this problematic vote in Florida. So it’s worth noting

that the Bush campaign was quite prepared to contest an election if

(as widely predicted) he won the popular vote but not the electoral:

http://www.nydailynews.com/2000-11-01/News_and_Views/Beyond_the_City/a-86769.asp

On a different and flakier subject, Consortium News reports that a voter

has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission that the

New York Times made improper in-kind contributions to the Bush campaign

by repeating large numbers of false statements about Al Gore from Bush

press releases:

http://www.consortiumnews.com/110700a.html

The complaint probably won’t (and shouldn’t) succeed, but it does point

to a real and serious problem:

http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.The.New.Science.of.C.html

I’ve been told of all sorts of scenarios involving compromises between

the Gore and Bush campaigns, but I see no evidence that these things are

really happening.

I have also received all sorts of unsubstantiated reports of problems

with the vote in Florida, including rumors about suspicious turnout

levels and the handling of write-ins (and not just in the southern part

of the state). But I don’t want to report any of these reports until

someone can document them. The only reason I’m mentioning them is

because people (who I don’t know) claim to have heard about them in the

Florida media, which is something but not very much. At the same time,

I would encourage students of Florida politics to study the numbers all

across the state very carefully. You can start at cnn.com.

I am also hearing unsubstantiated reports of street protests. Have

you noticed the widespread pattern of inadequate provision for voters

in African-American communities? These include Miami and New York.

In St. Louis, large numbers of voters who had been waiting in line

were sent home by an appeals court after a day of chaos; according

to cnn.com, George W. Bush won Missouri by fewer than 80,000 votes.

phonespell.org: “Enter a 6 to 10 digit phone number and we’ll show you what words and phrases your phone number spells.

Moving? Pick a new 7 or 8 digit phone number by typing in an available exchange (first 3 to 5 digits) and see what one-word numbers you

can choose from. ”

Annals of the Age of Depravity: San Jose woman kept 5-year-old son in car trunk, police say (11/07/2000) [SJ Mercury via Obscure Store]

From a reader’s suggestion: “Keeping Time”. “We have learned to measure time via a system that is

actually more accurate than the phenomena, the events and the

movements that gave rise to it namely the movements of the earth, the

rotation and revolution of the earth. We’ve got the calendar pinpointed,

tuned so perfectly that we can refer it to the oscillation of a caesium

atom in the National Bureau of Standards. I like to think we’ve gone

about as far as we can go. Our shortest unit of time the femtosecond , a

very valid unit to be used in physics, is so small that if the distance

between the earth and the moon were a second the femtosecond would

be the width of a human hair. So maybe we haven’t stopped yet as long

as there are physical laboratories around the world we’ll probably just

keep splitting hairs won’t we.”

Dewey Defeats Truman? It’s 1:30 a.m. Eastern time and I’m going to bed to the sound of anchors intoning “too close to call, too close to call” ad nauseum. It’s certainly looking from this jaundiced vantage point as if we can look forward to four more years of these Slate “Bushisms of the Day”. I just heard, however, that it’s only in 25 of the 50 states (and D.C.) that the electors are bound to vote the way their state electorates determined. In an election as close as this — I really don’t know the answer to this — will the losers try to bring some political influence to bear on the electoral votes of the other 25 states?

Thank God, at least, the ad nauseum of the campaign season is over for another four years. And that the end of the Clinton follies is in sight. As Jonathan Freedland reflects in The Guardian,

His fellow Americans will miss him –

more, perhaps, than they realise. They’ll

miss the two terms of peace and record

prosperity, of course, but they might even

miss the psychodrama: an eight-year

rollercoaster ride so turbulent that those

who followed it become queasy at the

recollection. They’ll miss the daily

triumphs and disasters of a character of

Shakespearean complexity, a president

who stirred in the American people

passions of love and hatred unseen since

the days of John F Kennedy and Richard

Nixon – and almost never aroused by a

single man. Above all, they will miss his

signature feature, one which may well

have redefined the presidency itself: an

almost eerie gift for empathy.

I don’t know if I’d exactly call it empathy, which has a particularly complimentary connotation among us mental health professionals. Certainly, he does have an eerie — but somewhat pitiful — skill at using interpersonal insights to his advantage.

Interesting prank targets San Francisco’s movers and shakers. [via boing boing]

“The 21st century can’t

possibly be as awful as the 20th.” Review of Zeitgeist.

“In his epic new novel, Bruce Sterling leaves technophilia behind and sides with humanity.” Salon

Shakespeare a dope smoker? “Scientists believe they may have discovered the source of William

Shakespeare’s genius smoking cannabis, a British newspaper has reported.

Researchers are investigating whether the secret of the Bard’s creativity was

his dopesmoking, according to the Independent on Sunday. Pipes found at Shakespeare’s home in StratforduponAvon, central England,

are being tested for traces of the drug, the paper said.” The Age [via Null Device]

R.I.P.: David Brower Dies At 88. IMHO, the most important, evangelical environmental activist since John Muir, responsible for the influence of the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth.

“More interesting than threatening…”: Scientists Downplay ‘Space Object’. “Scientists who announced last week that a

mysterious space object had a 1-in-500 chance of striking the

Earth in 30 years have retracted their prediction, saying it poses

little threat.

The object, which is either a small asteroid or piece of space

junk, has virtually no chance of hitting the planet in 2030.

However, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena

said there’s a 1-in-1,000 chance it could hit Earth in 2071.”

Funding to Deorbit Mir Confirmed, Russian Official Says. ‘The Russian government has set aside the $25 million needed to

bring down the Mir space station, an official said.

“The Russian government has already taken the decision to provide the financial resources

needed to deorbit Mir,” said Russian space agency chief Yuri Koptev. The statement runs

contrary to some media reports.’ Reuters

Studies Find Ways to Diagnose, Treat Alzheimer’s Several potential advances. First, positron emission tomography (PET) scanning of the brain apparently shows a distinctly different pattern of brain activity in Alzheimer’s Disease than in other brain dysfunctions with which it may be confused. Up ’til now, no diagnostic technique short of autopsy has been shown to improve on the educated guess we make to diagnose the condition.

A definitive diagnosis might be important if there were therapies that target the specific disease process in Alzheimer’s, which appears to be the deposition of rogue proteins in the brain in characteristic configurations called “plaques” and “tangles”. These progressively destroy normal brain tissue and interfere with cognitive functioning. The disease is incurable and inevitably fatal. A team at Johns Hopkins have now identified the enzyme that is the major player in forming plaques. Growing mice genetically engineered to be deficient in this enzyme will give a first approximation to whether blocking the enzyme could be a potential preventive or therapeutic measure agains Alzheimer’s, or whether it would have any adverse consequences.

Palestinians Try to Keep Children Away From Clashes. Latest development in this reprehensible Children’s Crusade. Israel is surely guilty of using excessive force against the uprising especially in light of the fact that many demonstrators, and many casualties, are youths. Palestinians claim that schoolchildren’s participation is spontaneous (here’s a spokesperson’s view: “the children take part because they feel the loss of

relatives along with a sense of grievance that their rights have been violated by Israeli

occupation” ) but it’s difficult for me to believe they’re not being used as cannon fodder either by toleration or active encouragement of that “sense of grievance.” We’ll see if the reported Palestinian effort to spare their children bears fruit.

On the other hand, here‘s a wonderfully written, heartfelt and earnest journal from a Palestinian woman under Israeli occupation.

Court: Prosecutors Can’t Invoke God for Death Penalty. “A federal appeals court panel

overturned a death sentence passed against a convicted

murderer on Monday, saying prosecutors should not have argued

that God sanctioned capital punishment.

In vacating the death sentence against Alfred Sandoval, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said

it was improper for prosecutors to suggest to the jury that “destroying Sandoval’s mortal

body might be the only way to save Sandoval’s eternal soul.” He also said the penalty would

be a wake-up call.” Reuters

George Will, in an op-ed piece titled The Case for Bush , makes the opposite case, IMHO.

For the official World Series magazine, Gore and Bush provided

written answers to some questions pertaining to baseball, including, “What

do you think of domed stadiums?” Gore’s complete answer was: “The design and

construction of domed stadiums–in Seattle (the Kingdome was the first

free-standing cement dome ever built), Houston (the Astrodome was the first

stadium to use Astroturf) and Minnesota (the Metrodome is the only stadium

in the US whose roof is suspended without beams or rods–it’s supported by

air pressure), for example–have been feats of architectural and engineering

excellence. But the real measure of any stadium, domed or otherwise, is how

much fun you have inside.” Bush’s complete answer was: “I like to go to

baseball games outdoors.” Washington Post

But then again, as I noted the other day, the American people don’t seem at all scared of having an intellectually deficient man in the White House. I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I’m sure that there are those among Dubya’s handlers who will have an extra special reason to celebrate should their man win, knowing who’ll really be running the country behind the scenes. Let’s hope it’ll at least be better than Nancy Reagan and her astrologers this time.

Semiotics for Beginners

Context is a quarterly publication intended to create a historical and cultural context in which to

read modern and contemporary literature. Its goal is to encourage the development of a literary

community.Its latest issue has several dense but thoughtful articles, among them a description by Curtis White of the cultural criticism of George W. S. Trow. Trow’s “real contribution to the

genre is a very persuasive ability to determine

when a social formation is alive and dominant, and when it is dead….Trow argues that for the last fifty years the

United States, at the height of its world dominance and authority, has been caught in a

process of persistent social devolution that has left us with a world dominated by television

and the likes of David Letterman. It is a world emptied of all honor and truthfulness, and

whose only depth is the abysmal depth of self-reflection and ‘ironic self-contempt.’ ” Along the way, he has a very interesting analysis of the failure of the ’60’s counterculture, which he calls “vitalitarianism” insofar as he sees its central force to be the opposition to the “creeping catatonia” of television and the tabloids. In its wake, it left “our moment, …isolated, utterly lacking context, illiterate, illiberal, empty

of useful information, narcissistic,

and incapable of a single serious moment. That’s our post-Reagan, Clinton-in-ascendance,

cultural dominant. And damned if I know why Trow is wrong to say so.” Perhaps caught up in the ironic spirit, White wonders why, “…if Trow has a

brilliant grasp of when a ‘cultural aesthetic’ is alive and when dead (and he does), how is it

that he could, for thirty years, make these critical and intellectually lively distinctions from

within something that is itself dead?” He is referring to Trow’s career as a staff writer for the New Yorker, which White makes a point of explaining why he does not read (he doesn’t find the cartoons funny, among other reasons).

Plants show their bright side. A leading biologist warns us to underestimate the intelligence of plants at our peril. Telegraph

Stop Smiling, Start Griping: Why gloom is good for you ‘…Pessimism and negativity may have their

advantages. Curmudgeons may cope better than those who

succumb to the “tyranny of the positive attitude”. ‘ Telegraph

Compounds Also Present In Alcoholic Beverages May Explain Chocolate Cravings. ‘A Spanish researcher has a new clue to what motivates “chocoholics”:

a group of chemicals that might contribute to the good feelings

associated with binging on the tasty treat. The finding is reported in the

current (October 16) issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Food

Chemistry… The researchers are the first to find that ordinary cocoa and chocolate

bars contain a group of alkaloids known as tetrahydro-beta-carbolines,

according to Tomas Herraiz, a researcher at the Spanish Council for

Scientific Research in Madrid, Spain. In previous research, the same

chemicals were linked to alcoholism, he said. The family of

compounds, which are also known as neuroactive alkaloids, continues

to be investigated for possible influences on mood and behavior.”

Effect of death of Diana, Princess of Wales on suicide and

deliberate self-harm . “The death of the Princess of Wales in 1997 was followed by widespread public mourning. Such major events may influence

suicidal behaviour. To assess the impact of the Princess’s death on suicide and deliberate self-harm (DSH), analysis of the number of suicides and open verdicts (‘suicides’) in England and Wales following the

Princess’s death compared to the 3 months beforehand, and the equivalent periods in 1992-1996, and similar analysis on DSH presentations to

a general hospital, revealed that suicides increased during the month following the Princess’s funeral by approximately 17%. (The author concludes that) the death of a major public figure can influence rates of suicidal behaviour. For DSH, the impact may be immediate, but

for suicide it may be delayed.” British Journal of Psychiatry

Lawyers Plan Slave Reparations Suit

A powerful group of civil rights and class-action lawyers who

have won billions of dollars in court is preparing a lawsuit

seeking reparations for American blacks descended from slaves.

The project, called the Reparations Assessment Group, was confirmed by Harvard law

professor Charles J. Ogletree and appears to be the most serious effort yet to get American

blacks compensated for more than 240 years of legalized slavery. Lawsuits and legislation

dating back to the mid-1800s have gone nowhere.

“We will be seeking more than just monetary compensation,” Ogletree said. “We want a

change in America. We want full recognition and a remedy of how slavery stigmatized,

raped, murdered and exploited millions of Africans through no fault of their own.”

Ogletree said the group, which includes famed attorney Johnnie Cochran, first met in July

and will hold its fourth meeting in Washington D.C. later this month. AP

Lawyers Plan Slave Reparations Suit

A powerful group of civil rights and class-action lawyers who

have won billions of dollars in court is preparing a lawsuit

seeking reparations for American blacks descended from slaves.

The project, called the Reparations Assessment Group, was confirmed by Harvard law

professor Charles J. Ogletree and appears to be the most serious effort yet to get American

blacks compensated for more than 240 years of legalized slavery. Lawsuits and legislation

dating back to the mid-1800s have gone nowhere.

“We will be seeking more than just monetary compensation,” Ogletree said. “We want a

change in America. We want full recognition and a remedy of how slavery stigmatized,

raped, murdered and exploited millions of Africans through no fault of their own.”

Ogletree said the group, which includes famed attorney Johnnie Cochran, first met in July

and will hold its fourth meeting in Washington D.C. later this month. AP

Lawyers Plan Slave Reparations Suit

A powerful group of civil rights and class-action lawyers who

have won billions of dollars in court is preparing a lawsuit

seeking reparations for American blacks descended from slaves.

The project, called the Reparations Assessment Group, was confirmed by Harvard law

professor Charles J. Ogletree and appears to be the most serious effort yet to get American

blacks compensated for more than 240 years of legalized slavery. Lawsuits and legislation

dating back to the mid-1800s have gone nowhere.

“We will be seeking more than just monetary compensation,” Ogletree said. “We want a

change in America. We want full recognition and a remedy of how slavery stigmatized,

raped, murdered and exploited millions of Africans through no fault of their own.”

Ogletree said the group, which includes famed attorney Johnnie Cochran, first met in July

and will hold its fourth meeting in Washington D.C. later this month. AP

Celluloid Visions Are What Dance in My Head. “No matter how many

good baking and roasting

smells waft through the house or apartment, no matter how

old-fashioned and bountifully decorated the Highland Fraser

fir, no matter how many halls are decked with boughs of

holly and how many carols about merry gentlemen and lords

a-leaping are sung, my Christmases will always have a tragic

flaw. They’re not taking place in England.

These expectations are primarily the fault of the 1951 British

film version of A Christmas Carol, directed by Brian

Desmond-Hurst and starring Alastair Sim as a sympathetic if

rather bug-eyed Ebenezer Scrooge. Mr. Scrooge’s clerk, Bob

Cratchit, may be poor, but the holiday dinner at his house is

the epitome of Yuletide merriment.”

Pollution News Update: First, Supreme Court to Consider Air Pollution Rules. In what is considered the most important environmental case since the adoption of the Clean Air Act 30 years ago, business groups who have failed to get Congress to gut environmental regulations ever since are taking their appeal for relief to the Supreme Court, attempting to argue that the EPA is overstepping its regulatory authority. Because newly promulgated regulations tighten up air pollution standards further at great cost to polluters, industrial concerns are attempting to reverse the principle that environmental regulations can consider health effects without regard to cost-benefit analysis. And: What’s This About Cultural Pollution? “Popular culture is getting more and more juvenile, and

the serious arts, or what used to be the serious arts, often emulate popular culture,

depressingly. But we can be disappointed in our arts without being made coarser as a society.

There’s a difference. Why as a nation do we periodically presume that society is coarsened by

culture? That’s the real question.” Although of course it’s not one or the other, I think the

argument is stronger that the degradation of culture is not a cause so much as an effect of

societal decay. Serious artistic expression seems to me to have lost the power to shape the

zeitgeist. A heroic, thoughtful artist can hope at best to reflect, and reflect upon, it. New York

Times

Lawyers Plan Slave Reparations Suit

A powerful group of civil rights and class-action lawyers who

have won billions of dollars in court is preparing a lawsuit

seeking reparations for American blacks descended from slaves.

The project, called the Reparations Assessment Group, was confirmed by Harvard law

professor Charles J. Ogletree and appears to be the most serious effort yet to get American

blacks compensated for more than 240 years of legalized slavery. Lawsuits and legislation

dating back to the mid-1800s have gone nowhere.

“We will be seeking more than just monetary compensation,” Ogletree said. “We want a

change in America. We want full recognition and a remedy of how slavery stigmatized,

raped, murdered and exploited millions of Africans through no fault of their own.”

Ogletree said the group, which includes famed attorney Johnnie Cochran, first met in July

and will hold its fourth meeting in Washington D.C. later this month. AP

Nowhere to go: Britain’s Toilets Find New Uses as pubs, cafes, offices and theaters. Fans of urban regeneration have long admired the Victorian edifices and wanted them preserved, but as loos or something else? Washington Post

Pro-toilet forces boost them as tourist attractions; here‘s the Loo of the Year award site.

A bit belated but: R.I.P. Steve Allen, Television’s Font of Wit . Washington Post critic Tom Shales quotes Steve Allen’s wife, Jayne Meadows, who said of her marriage: “I live polygamously with eight men: a published writer of earthy prose and poetry; a deep thinker; a comedian; a pianist; a composer; a crusader; a motion picture star, and a tender father.”

Europe told there is no choice but to adapt

to extremes of climate

which will cause new deserts in the south

and floods and wind storms in the north,

according to a new report before the

European commission. The Guardian

Giant Deep-Sea Creature Amazes Spanish Scientists. “Fishermen off northern Spain have

captured a giant specimen of a strange, light-emitting,

deep sea cephalopod, scientists said Friday.

The octopus-like creature, a taningia danae, weighs in at 275 pounds, measures seven feet

and is easily the biggest of its type discovered.” Reuters

How Jaded Are We? Russian-U.S. Crew Sets Up in Space. I’ve been amazed there hasn’t been more excitement about the fact that humans have for the first time taken up permanent extraterrestrial residency.

New Moons For Saturn:

“Which planet has the most moons?

For now, it’s Saturn. Four newly discovered satellites

bring the ringed planet’s total to twenty-two, just

edging out Uranus’ twenty-one for the most known

moons in the solar system.” Astronomy Picture of the Day

You’ve got hate mail: “Steve and Jean

Case’s $8.35

million donation to

a school affiliated

with an anti-gay

ministry prompts a

call for a boycott of

AOL.” Salon

Not with a bang but a whimper: A Wilderness Ecosystem in Collapse. The vast subarctic ecosystem of the Aleutian Islands has suddenly gone to hell in a handbasket. In just a handful of years, there has been a catastrophic reduction in the biodiversity of the Gulf of Alaska, and no one knows why. Sea mammals, crustaceans and varieties of fish, and the kelp forests that were the foundation fothe food chain have vanished. Scientists are beginning to unravel the tangled, cascading chain of effects that has led to this “regime shift”; and it’s not encouraging how fragile a web the ecosystem turns out to be. As usual, the ultimate causes of such a disastrous upset to the vital balance appear to be manmade efffects. “If this rugged, remote ecosystem is

collapsing, can any place on Earth be safe?”Indeed, there is growing suspicion that other ocean realms are undergoing such a drastic change, just with no one there to see. LA Times

Annals of the Decline and Fall (cont’d.): Films aren’t as good as they used to be, it is generally conceded. ‘Foreign-language “art house” films are still being made but… they

are a diminished force in our cultural life – on cinema and television screens and in

the eyes of the critics.’ Will serious thoughtful filmmaking survive “Hollywood’s

feelgood factor”?

WWGD? Gandhi’s Spirit Hovers as India Debates Iodized Salt. “India has made

tremendous progress in

eradicating the ancient

scourge of iodine deficiency

— the single most

preventable cause of mental

retardation — by making

cheap, iodized salt available

to most of its billion people.

But a recent government

decision has jeopardized

these advances, medical

researchers say.

Indeed, India’s entire

scientific establishment,

including the Indian Medical

Association and the Indian

National Science Academy,

seems aghast that Prime

Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee

and his Health Ministry lifted a two-year-old ban on the sale

of noniodized salt in September. In doing so, the

government bowed to a lobbying campaign by Hindu

nationalists, Gandhians and small- scale salt producers.

…Those on both sides of iodization claim to be the true

inheritors of Gandhi’s legacy. The scientists say Gandhi

would be happy that salt has become a way to ensure that

even India’s poorest children do not have their intelligence

dulled by a lack of iodine, while some followers of Gandhi

contend that he would object to the compulsory iodization

of salt.” New York Times

Switched on: “In lab mice all over the world, genes are being turned

on and off like light bulbs to find out what they do.

Scientists have rewound Huntington’s disease,

probed the roots of memory and staged the onset of

prion disease. And that’s just in the brain. The man

who made it all possible is Hermann Bujard, chairman

of the Centre for Molecular Biology at the University

of Heidelberg, Germany. With his colleagues, Bujard

developed the Tet system which allows genes to be

controlled remotely–from outside a living organism.

What started as a hobby has spawned two thousand

research papers and contributed to work that led to a

Nobel prize last month–for somebody else.” New Scientist

Making them fit the genital norms: “The rationale for clitoridectomy in (the 19th century) was

straightforwardly terrible, and ridiculously unscientific. By contrast,

modern theories seem slightly more humane, but when you get down to

it, the same question of gender links the Victorian Age’s clitoridectomy

to its Dot-Com Age cousin. We have been altering the healthy genitals

of our children-—boys as well as girls-—for 135 years so that a girl will

look and act like a girl, and a boy will look and act like a boy, according

to social norms. The strict division between female and male bodies and

behavior is our most cherished and comforting truth.

“All over this country there are people whose clitorises have been

removed, either totally or partially. They range from your great-aunt’s

roommate in the nursing home to your neighbor’s two-year-old. They

include hundreds of women from every generation. Some were born

clearly female; some were born clearly male but were reassigned as

female and then had their genitals altered; and some were babies whose

sex was not so easy to define. Although statistics for childhood clitoral

surgery are extremely difficult to gather, one can extrapolate a figure

from the number of babies born each year in the U.S., the number born

with conditions that produce enlarged clitorises, and the number-—most

of them-—who will undergo clitoroplasty. Approximately five times a

day in the U.S., surgeons change the size and shape of a child’s healthy

clitoris. Few of these children are capable of expressing what they want.

Some, if given the choice later in life, might choose clitoroplasty. But

judging from the responses of women who had the surgery done either

without their agreement or at an age when they were too young to know

what they were agreeing to, many would have preferred to stay the way

they were.” Ms. Magazine

A bad place to have schizophrenia? Budgetary concerns in the British National Health Service have led to doctors ‘rationing the best mental health drugs’ in a way that even U.S. “managed care” has not succeeded in doing. The newer atypical antipsychotic medications (clozapine, risperidone, olanzapine and quetiapine) are such an improvement over conventional antipsychotics for the treatment of schizophrenia and related conditions that they have made the older conventional antipsychotic medications all but obsolete in North America and the rest of Europe. They are effective against a broader range of the symptoms with which afflicted patients are beset, and they are far safer and more tolerable. Consultants advise that all patients requiring antipsychotic treatment in the UK receive these atypical medications as well, but in fact fewer than one in eight do. The official NHS position is that there have not been enough trials to establish the superiority of the newer drugs, although this flies in the face of the experience of every clinician treating psychotic disorders.

The real concern is that these newer medications are vastly more expensive — sometimes approaching a hundred times the cost of the older, side-effect-riddled medications, which are often available in generic form. “But if you compare with the cost of long term

treatments for other conditions like diabetes

the atypicals aren’t that expensive,” said a spokesperson for the British National Schizophrenia Fellowship; not to mention the costs of recurrent hospitalization when patients are not compliant with the older less desireable medications. Critics suggest that the

reluctance to pay for newer treatments is a

form of discrimination against people with a

mental illness.

“Part of the problem is that it’s difficult to

measure things like quality of life, but if you

look at other areas of health care, when a new

drug comes along with much fewer

side-effects, then the old treatments are

unceremoniously dumped even if they are

cheaper.” BBC

Tricks and Treats (James Ridgeway): ‘After surviving Gore-inspired “flash attacks” over the weekend, Ralph Nader’s campaign is

now the target of a propaganda wave. One high-profile Gore partisan this morning was spreading a nasty

rumor about the Nader machine. According to the scuttlebutt, Nader operatives had leaked information

that the consumer advocate had been secretly offered $12 million—the amount his Green Party would get

in federal matching funds if he won 5 percent of the vote next Tuesday—to take a fall against Gore in key

states. The whisperer said Nader had refused the money.’ The Village Voice

Moon and his ballet stars. “When the Rev Moon’s son died in a car crash,

the controversial religious leader formed a

dance company for the young man’s fiancée.

With money no object, it has impressed critics

around the world.” The Telegraph

White Light UV Laser Could Replace Current Lighting: “The first ultraviolet (UV) solid-state microcavity laser has been

demonstrated in prototype by scientists at the Department of Energy’s

Sandia National Laboratories, working with colleagues at Brown University.

Among their benefits, UV VCSELS (vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers)

coated with phosphors can generate the white light most prized for indoor

lighting — illumination currently provided by gas-filled fluorescent tubes

widely used in offices, schools, factories, and by incandescent bulbs used

in most homes.

Such solid-state emitters will last five to ten times longer than fluorescent

tubes, be far hardier, and perhaps most noticeably, grouped several

hundred to a postage-sized chip, will have aesthetic value: instead of a

single clunky tube, the chips will be arranged in any configuration one might

wish on ceiling, wall, or furniture.”

Steven Pinker said, “I have never met a person who is not interested in language.” Language Miniatures is a regularly-updated set of “mini-essays about human language in its endless kaleidoscope of aspects, such as the social, the mental, the historical, the structural.”

Expo Seeks Greener Pastures Did you even know there was a World’s Fair going on in Hanover, Germany this summer? A far cry from the big deal these expo’s used to be back in the 20th century. Wired

Vote Swapper Swatted Down

“Your website specifically offers to broker the exchange of votes throughout the United States of America,”

said the (letter from the California secretary of state) to site owners Jim Cody and Ted Johnson. “This activity is a corruption of the

voting process in violation of Elections Code sections 18521 and 18522 as well as Penal Code section 182,

criminal conspiracy.” Wired

Dan Hartung, in a 10-26-00 post to his weblog Lake Effect, was one of several who only grudgingly accepted my distaste for Ira Glass (grin). I’ll concede — when I ranted about Glass, I did neglect to mention that I essentially agree with Dan’s point: if you separate out Glass’ presence, This American Life can be of interest because other people do tell interesting stories. Thanks, Dan, for throwing me this bone in finishing:

Eliot, however, may enjoy this 1998 sour-grapes story of Glass’s

rejected partner from their Chicago show The Wild Room

before he was offered the chance to take his schtick national.

I actually read that story and thought about linking to it when Jorn Barger pointed to it in Robot Wisdom on 4-29-00 (probably because he follows Lynda Barry, the second of Glass’ “rejected partners” featured in the story).

While I’m thinking about it, thanks, Jorn, for the wonderful page of Blake quotations, especially your selections from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. “If others had not been foolish, we should be so.”

Don’t Vote — It Only Encourages Them:

There was an anarchist slogan in the 1960s: If voting could change anything, it would be illegal.

Some 20 years ago, my union local held an election. I read the many campaign mailings. When I

received the ballot, I voted only for those candidates who had sent no literature and of whom I

knew nothing. Unlike the others, they hadn’t proven themselves idiots…

I find two honorable arguments for not voting: the philosophical and the immediate. The first is

nearly as old as the Republic and premised on the common law. As advanced by Josiah

Warren, Lysander Spooner, Voltairine de Cleyre and Benjamin Tucker, no person can ethically

occupy a position of power over another without that person’s consent. … In 1890, De Cleyre explained her moral opposition to political office and the process of voting

thus: “A body of voters cannot give into your charge any rights but their own. By no possible

jugglery of logic can they delegate the exercise of any function which they themselves do not

control. If any individual on earth has a right to delegate his powers to whomsoever he chooses,

then every other individual has an equal right; and if each has an equal right, then none can

choose an agent for another without the other’s consent. Therefore, if the power of government

resides in the whole people and out of that whole all but one elected you as their agent, you

would still have no authority whatever to act for that one.”

…If one does not reject the state, however, the immediate argument for not voting remains: the

men on the ballot. “If the Gods had meant us to vote,” Jim Hightower has written, “they would

have given us candidates.” New York Press

Happy Halloween from the Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Support for a Moratorium in Executions Gets Stronger New York Times

The Fake to the Left: Michael Kinsley’s finger-pointing starts now

It is striking that in this election both candidates pretended to be further left than they really are. In George W. Bush’s case, it’s sort of a double-bluff: a man with no real interest in policy or ideology pretending to be a committed conservative who then pretends to be a sort of neoliberal moderate government reformer. Trouble is, the first bluff is a life strategy while the second bluff is a political convenience. Only the second bluff is likely to be discarded after the election.

In Gore’s case, there is real, traditional left-wing populism in his bloodlines (his father). But it was never a note he struck much himself until his convention acceptance speech two months ago. Throughout his career, he was almost exactly the neoliberal moderate his opponent is now pretending to be. Gore has sold this stock just as Bush was buying. One of these two has made a terrible mistake.

It’s dispiriting that both candidates chose to fake who they are, though from a liberal perspective, it’s encouraging that both candidates chose to fake left (and did so before Ralph Nader became a serious threat). But in Gore’s case, it’s also puzzling. Bush, at least, was following the conventional strategy of appealing to his party’s base during the primaries and then reaching for the center during the general election. What did Gore think he was doing by making a sharp left turn the very night of his nomination?

It’s especially puzzling in a campaign where your strongest asset is record-breaking prosperity. Gore’s message was: “You’ve never had it so good, and I’m mad as hell about it.” Slate

More for Halloween: the Carfax Abbey Horror Films and Movies Database includes best-ever-horror-films lists from Entertainment Wekly, Mr. Showbiz and Hollywood.com. I’ve seen most of these; some of their choices are not that scary, some are just plain silly, and they give extremely short shrift to my real favorites, the classics of the ’30’s and ’40’s — when much eeriness was allusive and not explicit. And here’s what claims to be a compilation of links to the darkest and most gruesome sites on the web. “Hours and hours of fun for morbidity lovers.”

A rogues’ gallery of Vultures and Condors. Some only a mother could love, others oddly beautiful, many endangered.

A pathologist’s detailed description of The Routine Autopsy. “The procedure related in narrative form: a guide for screenwriters and novelists.”

Chicago News Experiment Is Calling It Quits. The high road was a dead end. New York Times

The first postmodern ironist. ‘We live in a passionless age, wrote the philosopher

Soren Kierkegaard. That is why he speaks to us

today, believes Julian Evans …There are good reasons why we…might listen

to him now, at a moment when relations between

leaders and led, corporations and consumers, press

and people have rarely looked so shaky.

Listen to this: “A revolutionary age is an age of

action; ours is the age of advertisement and

publicity. Nothing ever happens, but there is

immediate publicity everywhere. In the present age,

a rebellion is, of all things, the most unthinkable.

Such an expression of strength would seem ridiculous

to the calculating intelligence of our times.”

Or this: “In order that everything should be reduced

to the same level, it is first of all necessary to

procure a phantom, its spirit, a monstrous

abstraction, an all-embracing something which is

nothing, a mirage – and that phantom is the public.”

Both passages were written in 1847.’ New Statesman

In Rural China, a Steep Price of Poverty: Dying of AIDS. “Small

towns … scattered (throughout) central China are

experiencing an unreported, unrecognized AIDS epidemic. A

few covert studies suggest some of the towns have some of

the highest localized rates of H.I.V. infection in the world;

some say 20 percent.

The problem is that for many years large numbers of poor

farmers have illegally sold their blood to people known as

blood heads, whose unsterile collection methods have left

many infected with the virus that causes AIDS. The blood

donors get the virus not only because blood heads reuse

contaminated needles but also because donated blood is

often pooled and, after the desired elements are removed,

the remainder divided and returned to donors.” Hospitals don’t take these patients; their families turn them out; doctors trying to treat them are sometimes run out of town. While China acknowledges drug-related AIDS infections in its major cities, it denies the existence of this more pervasive and insidious epidemic and forbids media coverage of the issue. No government assistance for treatment or prevention efforts is forthcoming. Premarital blood testing still does not include HIV titers. Most patients found to be HIV-positive when tested during hospitalization are never told of the results. [Are the autocrats practicing genocide against the rural Chinese peasantry?] New York Times

New look at Martian meteorite breathes new life into ‘panspermia’ theory.

A new study in the journal Science of the infamous “Martian meteorite” raises

the possibility that life on Earth may have been “seeded” here from outer

space. Some scientists believe the meteorite, known as ALH-84001, contains

microfossils of Martian life. Now, researchers from the California Institute of

Technology are suggesting that any bacterial spores fossilized in the rock could

have theoretically survived the trip from Mars to Earth. This is because

magnetic characteristics of the rock indicate the meteorite’s inner temperature

never rose above 40 degrees Centigrade – even as it plunged through the

Earth’s atmosphere. Proponents of the panspermia theory say this supports the

idea that living organisms could have been spread throughout the universe on

vessels such as meteors.

Will it finally get some respect? “Scientists are close to deciphering the makeup of the Y

chromosome, that essential core of maleness that’s saddled

with a bad reputation, a weird past and an uncertain future.

It’s true, guys: Millions of years from now, your descendants

might not have a Y chromosome at all.” The Y chromosome is unique for how few genes it has and how specialized their function is: mostly all related to becoming male.

Would-Be U.S. Space Tourist Hopes Mir Has Time Left. Let’s say you knew that the Mir had outlived its projected lifetime three-fold already and that the Russians were debating scrapping it even despite the loss of face and the loss of $20-million-a-throw revenues from rich American cosmonaut-wannabe’s like yourself. Would you be hoping those that wanted it to stay in orbit and let you hitch a ride up to it won the debate?

Trick-or-treaters say “Hold the salt!”

Babies With Colic: “I need a little extra

help here folks, and I need it early on in infancy because I can’t quite pull it all together on

my own…”

Mapping the dark side of the web for fun and profit. Financial Times

This, from the Astronomy Picture of the Day archive, shows a variant of the Green Flash. Usually it is not the sun’s disc that turns green but, for an instant, the horizon at the point where the sun has just sunken. I saw a green flash for the first time this summer (been looking for years) during a sunset out over the Pacific.

‘Singing’ Queen Elizabeth at Center of Fishy Tale. ‘Britain’s Queen Elizabeth has been entertaining guests at her Balmoral estate

in Scotland with renditions of “Don’t Worry Be Happy” in a duet with a rubber singing fish, Britain’s

Sun tabloid said on Thursday.’ Excite via Looka!

Update on voteswapping, as I wrote about below. The Voteswap site exists. 2344 votes have been traded as of my visit to the site. “Our Goal: To maximize the percentage of the popular vote that Nader receives, yet allow Gore to win

the national election.”

Beautiful people ‘ruin’ lives. BBC

Beautiful people ‘ruin’ lives. BBC

Beautiful people ‘ruin’ lives. BBC

Much of the intellectual criticism of Bush during this campaign attempts to persuade readers that they should not vote for him because he is an intellectual lightweight. I’m afraid that misses the point. His appeal to a segment of the American public is precisely that he is not smart. Chuck Taggart at Looka! quotes from an essay on AlterNet by David Corn:

At one Bush rally, a senior-citizen W. enthusiast — no

names, please, she said — told me that it was obvious that Bush could

not match Gore in terms of gray matter. But that did not faze her.

“Smart people don’t have all the answers,” she said. “And if you’re not

so smart, maybe you won’t tell the rest of us what to do.” Perhaps

after the past seven years, many Americans actually are eager to have

a president they do not have to take seriously.

I think it’s more basic than that, and it certainly can’t be blamed on the Clinton legacy. This campaign has made it clear to me that a large segment of the American public are afraid of thought and complexity per se. As has been said, they’ll get the President they deserve.

U.S. Plan Would Sacrifice Baby Eagles to Hopi Ritual. “The Department of the

Interior has decided

that Hopi Indians should be

allowed to use golden eagle

hatchlings collected at a

national monument in

Arizona in an annual, ancient

rite in which the birds are

smothered…But critics say the legal reasoning used by the agency to

justify its position, detailed in a rule the agency plans to

propose next month, is so broad that it could open the way

to much wider hunting and trapping by Indians in parks from

Alaska to Florida.” New York Times

Beautiful people ‘ruin’ lives. BBC

How Nader and Gore can both win: What if frustrated Gore voters wasting their votes in states where Bush has a commanding lead “swap” votes with progressives in “swing states” where voting for Nader could lose the election for Gore? Slate

Today is the 793rd anniversary of the reputed birthday of Sufi mystic poet Jelaluddin Rumi.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

Don’t go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.

Don’t go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill

where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

Don’t go back to sleep.

The Molecular Biology of Paradise

A mainstay of forensic science is on trial. Almost everyone accepts unquestioningly the power of fingerprint evidence in criminal investigation. Yet there appears to be no scientific justification to the assertion that each person’s fingerprints are unique. Moreover, fingerprint examiners rely on fragmentary, blurred, smeared and overlapped prints. They then proceed to

avoid statistics, rely on mere hunches,

and then …couch their conclusions in terms of absolute

certainty. The strongly held belief among FPEs that latent

fingerprints can be matched to one person alone, wrote David

Stoney in a 1997 legal practice manual, is “the product of

probabilistic intuitions widely shared among fingerprint examiners,

not of scientific research. There is no justification based on

conventional science, no theoretical model, statistics, or an

empirical validation process.”

The reliance on fingerprint evidence was nearly struck down in a recent court case, and there’s probably more to come. Lingua Franca

Gifted Children May Be Stressed Out. New research from this week’s meetings of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in New York suggests that teasing, social isolation, and other pressures take their toll on the gifted. The article appears to focus on the costs of subjecting children to “pull-out” programs as a means of providing educational enrichment. It appears to me to miss the most pervasive and insidious stress of being gifted, however. There is a great cost to “buying into” intellect or academic achievement as the sole basis of self-esteem, as most gifted children do in an “educational meritocracy” system. The effects on both identity formation and social relationships of such a stilted value system may take the better part of a lifetime to overcome, if ever.

This is from blogger.com: ‘…Odd, but true: there’s a nasty email virus circulating from the email

account ShysterAll@aol.com with a subject line “hahaha.. this is the funniest

blogger images in the world!!” There’s an attached file called blogger.exe, which

is actually the Backdoor.SubSeven virus. Don’t run this file under any

circumstances and make sure your antivirus program is up to date (though it

seems to only affect windows 98 users).’ [I don’t know about you, but I would never open any email message in whose subject line the subject and predicate don’t agree…]

Plasma magic:

“…Plasma is the height

of fashion in aerospace research.

The trouble with fashion is that it is based on the whims of

those who buy into it, and the amazing claims made for

plasmas have the insidious smell of Cold War hype about them.” New Scientist

Some details on the elaborate Microsoft hack. The Register

MIT’s Technology Review reflects on The Cell-Phone Scare and finds it irrational: “Eventually the anxiety-of-the-decade will fade, to be replaced in our minds and our newspapers by

a more up-to-date apprehension. It would be nice to think that eventually we’ll outgrow the cycle,

but I have to defer here to my late mother, who was a lay expert on anxiety. The time to really

worry, she used to say, is when things seem so good you have nothing to worry about.”

Is progression to complexity a necessary law of life itself? The Sunday Times of London

The NYT and the Washington Post Under the Microscope: A respected economist examining our fears about the coming bankruptcy of the Social Security system claims that ” the public is badly misinformed, because there is virtually no imaginable

economic scenario in which the program could not pay benefits.

The media, including the elite media, deserve much of the blame for the

public’s misperception.” Tompaine.com

Math Against Tyranny. A physicist has spent about two decades developing a formal theorem protecting the electoral college system against would-be reformers by “proving” that, “without this quirky

glitch in the system, our democracy might well have fallen apart long

ago into warring factions.” In other words, it protects us against real choice among true alternatives? [via Robot Wisdom]

“Europeans are terrified at

the prospect of a George W. Bush presidency and are

wondering if Americans have lost their good sense.

Canadians, too, are shaking in their boots. ” Thanks to a reader for pointing me to this commentary.

Several unsavory revelations about Gore’s presidential rivals hit last week and may give Gore a last-minute boost, according to this Online Journal commentary. The essayist hopes for more where this came from if the media start giving as much critical scrutiny to the other candidates as they have Gore. First, a new Rand Corp. study came out debunking the “Texas Eduational Miracle” phenomenon (based on an earlier Rand Corp. study) Dubya has been touting so highly in his campaign. Next, it is revealed that a company overseen until four months ago by Dick Cheney is under criminal investigation for fraudulent billing on federal contracts, i.e. bilking the government bigtime. And, with increasing attention to Nader’s role as a spoiler for Gore comes a proposal that he is actually more conservative than we give him credit for, according to an article by a senior fellow at the far-right National Center for Policy Analysis attempting to find a way to, as the saying goes, find a way to befriend the “enemy of my enemy.”