Cowboy Trent Set to Ride Roughshod. “As the law courts make ready the way for Bush Redux, the likes of Senator Lott are
emerging from those dark, cold places in which they were stored during the
governor’s campaign. It’s a wonder that the Gore team never did manage to point
out that the Clinton administration, for all its flaws, acted as a foil for the likes of the
cowboy-hat crowd, those faux populists who pose in denim and carry out the
businessman’s agenda of low labor costs and minimal government regulation. The
government shutdown in 1995 was but a metaphor for their fondest wishes, a world
without the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration,
the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, etc. Why didn’t Al Gore make
this case, or make it better? Then again, why didn’t Al Gore do a lot of things, chief
among them: act like a human being?” New York Observer

Joe Conason: Behind Bush’s Smile Lurks a Florida Fanatic. Tom Feeney, the Speaker of the Florida House, who is attempting to ram through the Bush elector slate in Florida by legislative action, has been called the “David Duke of Florida politics,” and was dropped from Jeb Bush’s ticket as a political liability because he’s so reactionary. New York Observer

Truth Catches Up to Fiction Dept. (cont’d.): Doctors arrested in kidney-running ring. “Indian police have arrested nine people, including two
doctors, for illegally purchasing or transplanting kidneys.” The kidneys were reportedly bought from cash-strapped Indians for between $1000 and $4000. Ananova

An Amish man chose to spend three days in jail rather
than pay a fine for refusing to put an
orange “slow-moving vehicle” triangle
on his buggy because he said the sign
violates his religious beliefs.

Barbara Ehrenreich: The Civility Glut. ‘I call some corporate bureaucracy and, whether
out of loneliness or confusion, opt for “0,” — the chance to speak to an actual
human. “Kelly” or “Tracey” wants to know my account number, which I willingly
share.

“Great!” says Kelly.

Next she wants to know my zip code, and it turns out to be “Perfect!”

Or suppose I’m calling a publishing company and get an administrative
assistant with a pricey British accent. When I tell her my phone number, she
declares that it’s “brilliant!”

I should be flattered, of course, to be associated with such an admirable
collection of numbers.’ AlterNet

Politicians Who Love Global Warming (PAC money received in 2000 elections):

Environmental Working Group

The American Medical
Association approved a resolution Tuesday asking
the government to consider making the “morning-after” contraceptive available
over-the-counter.

Road rage: “What is it about getting into a car that turns a decent,
upright citizen into a raving maniac?” A recent study shows that about one-sixth of people who are not quick to anger in the rest of their lives lose it behind the wheel. One contributing factor may be deindividuation, the process preventing us from relating to the driver of another car as a person because you only get “partial status information” about them. Even trying a conciliatory gesture from inside your car stands a chance of being wildly misinterpreted by the driver you just cut off.

Culturally, anger may be sanctioned as a way of helping yourself feel better, but neurochemically there is a price — once you get angry, you tend to stay angry longer. (Some people may be particularly predisposed in this direction by low serotonin levels as well.) And the angry brain is, in a way that makes evolutionary sense, a less efficient information processor. Also see the Global Web Conference on Aggressive Driving. New Scientist

Move over Casanova. “When you’re single no one wants to know. Yet the minute
you get a partner, the others come running. Ever
wondered why?” New Scientist

Welcome to the Complete Review.This book review site, to one of whose reviews Robot Wisdom linked recently, really gets the point about being web-enabled.

The Politics of Terror. “The war in Chechnya is not over. More than a year after
the federal troops first intervened, bombs, mines and
bullets continue to kill civilians. Despite the illusion of
normalization upheld by the Russian authorities, and the
resignation of the international community, the violence
against civilians is ongoing, and has merely changed its
appearance. Data from Chechnya hospitals shows that
the undiscriminate use of force is still causing many
civilian casualties.” Médecins sans Frontières

Autopsy: Actor killed by L.A. police shot in back CNN

Texas executes 38th convict so far this year, the most in any state in one year. Two further executions are scheduled for Texas before Jan. 1, and seven have been put on the docket for 2001 already. Now, how many people are on federal death row awaiting Jan. 20th?

Abandoned Tugboat Drifts 20 Miles in Puget Sound.

Estrogen Deprivation Leads To Death Of Dopamine Cells In The Brain, a finding by Yale researchers that could have implications
for post-menopausal women. Science Daily

Emerging Disease News (cont’d.): Ebola doctor buried as Uganda despairs. “Uganda was plunged into mourning on Tuesday as the doctor who had led the country’s two-month battle against the deadly Ebola epidemic
was buried hours after he died from the virus.

Matthew Lukwiya, the medical superintendent at St Mary’s Hospital in Lacor, died on Tuesday morning despite round-the-clock efforts by doctors to save him.” Reuters

AltaVista discontinues free Internet access. “…AltaVista announced that it will terminate its free Internet
access service on December 10th…because 1stUp Corp., the
company that provided the service and infrastructure, is going out of
business.

AltaVista also stated that after a thorough investigation it was unable to
find another supplier to provide a free Internet access service. As a
result, the company has made special arrangements with MSN to offer
U.S.-based AltaVista members three free months of unlimited Internet
access, which will cost $21.95 per month thereafter. Geek.com

More on Houellebecq: “Whether by design or default, Houellebecq is an ideal
media-adapted writer for America: he is obnoxious, a
one-man circus of existential confusion, trafficking in sex,
anomie, death and crucially, contradiction – he is the very
embodiement of what he rages against. He even propositions
the Times’ writer visiting him in Dublin. She demurs, but how
– how French. (And how appropriate that his home is in the
most vulgar, over-hyped yuppie capital of Europe.)

…

The good news is that The Elementary Particles is, in one
sense, already old news. It was published two years ago in
France, and France has apparently moved on. Newswatch

Downer “To have a sane argument about drug policy, the media needs
to consider the Robert Downey, Jr.’s and Darryl Strawberry’s
of the world who repeatedly fail treatment, perhaps because
they simply aren’t ready to stop using. The treatment
providers have few answers for them other than keep
forcing them back into care, even when it clearly isn’t
helping.” Newswatch

Domestic Violence Deja Vu President Clinton: ‘ “In America today, domestic violence is the number one
health risk for women between the ages of 15 and 44 …
Every twelve seconds, another woman is beaten. That’s
nearly 900,000 victims a year.” A dreadful state of affairs, if
true. The trouble is that all three of these statements are
untrue.’ Newswatch

Courtship in the south of France 35,000 years ago “was nasty,
brutish and short. The boys would go out in groups of three and
track an unsuspecting girl across the rolling Provençal
landscape; then, when she was happily playing with a couple of
old flints they would pounce. Chat up lines were rudimentary
(Him: “Nargo!” Her: “Hama!” Him: “Yeda!”) but effective. After a
while, however, the hunter got captured by the game: intrigued
by her matted hair and eyebrows, the butchest caveman got
quite affectionate, and even parted with a juicy hunk of
marrowbone.” The Guardian

If you yawn, you’re a human dynamo. The purpose of the yawn examined. The Sunday Times of London

How ideas change. ‘If Sigmund Freud was the central
cultural figure in the first half of the
20th century (for having introduced the
concept of the ”unconscious” into everyday
life), then perhaps the dominant figure in
the second half was a retiring historian of
science named Thomas Kuhn.

Haven’t heard of him? That means you
probably didn’t go to college before, say,
1970. Don’t know his work? Of course you do. Kuhn introduced the word ”paradigm” into everyday language.’ Boston Globe

“… a triumph for global cooperation”: Ozone hole will heal, say scientists. “The hole in the Southern Hemisphere’s ozone layer will start
shrinking within a decade and should close completely in the next
50 years, according to an international panel.

Data unveiled at a conference in Argentina suggest that the global
effort to reduce the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)— the
main menace to the ozone layer — is succeeding, just three
months after Nasa revealed that the size of the ozone hole in the
Southern Hemisphere had grown to 11 million square miles and
had reached the tip of South America for the first time.” The good news is attriutable to global cooperation in reducing chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) use since a 1987 worldwide protocol was signed in Montreal. Global warming, however, will slow ozone recovery. The Times of London

“Extending hope where perhaps there should be none…” An idiot’s guide to writing? “To the cynical, reading writing about how to write may seem like chasing one’s own tail, but
to others these magazines have become the holders of Masonry secrets, month by month
decanting the distilled essence of the craft.” National Post

Clinton Creates Vast Hawaiian Coral-Reef Preserve President Clinton continues his trend of using executive order to protect large tracts of land in one fell swoop, this time creating a “Yellowstone of
the sea” protecting an expanse of Hawaii’s pristine
coral reefs larger than the states of Florida and Georgia.

“The order would establish the Northwest Hawaiian Islands Coral
Reef Ecosystem Reserve covering 131,000 square miles along a
1,200 mile-long island chain northwest of the main Hawaiian
islands. The reserve would encompass about 70 percent of U.S.
coral reefs.

The area is the only home to the endangered Hawaiian monk
seal. It provides habitat to other protected species including sea
turtles and birds, and to migratory species such as humpback
whales.” Reuters

Swallowing ships. Giant bubbles of methane gas from the sea floor may suddenly engulf and sink ships at sea. Investigation reveals this may have been the fate of a trawler that disappeared in the North Sea, recently found intact and shrouded in fishing netting on the sea floor. New Scientist

We knew that cell phones may be hazardous to your health, but this is ridiculous. New Scientist

The Decade of the Brain, which ends this year, marked an acceleration of neuroscience research. This radio show, from the NPR series The Infinite Mind,
” takes a look at some of the astounding progress we’ve made in that decade, highlighting the ten most
important breakthroughs. Guests include Dr. Guy McKhann, associate director for clinical research at the
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke; Dr. Miguel Nicolelis, associate professor of
neurobiology at the Duke University Medical Center; Dr. Jeffrey Kordower, director of research at the
Center for Brain Repair at Rush Presbyterian St. Luke’s Medical Center; and Dr. Ronald McKay, chief of
the laboratory of molecular biology at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Narration and commentary by John Hockenberry. Includes a link to the real audio recording of the program.

Michelangelo may have deliberately depicted breast cancer. “Scholars have argued for years over the unusual misshapen
appearance of the left breast of Michelangelo’s marble statue Night.
The statue, in the Medici chapel in the Church of San Lorenzo,
Florence, shows an obvious large bulge in the breast next to the
swollen nipple, causing tethering and retraction of the skin on the
opposite side.

The left breast is quite different from the right and from the breasts on
Dawn, another figure in the Medici Chapel, or in the many other
depictions of women by Michaelangelo.

Experts have agreed that its unusual appearance is intentional and not
due to an error but art historians and plastic surgeons have argued
that it reflects the artist’s supposed lack of interest in, or unfamiliarity
with, the nude female figure.

Now, Dr James Stark, a cancer specialist at the Cancer Treatment
Centers of America in Portsmouth, Virginia, and Jonathan Nelson, an
art historian at New York University, claim that Michelangelo
deliberately set out to portray a woman with breast cancer. ” Independent

Refresh: the art of the screen saver. “22 artists have created digital projects that are both works of art and
functional screen savers. All of the screen savers can be downloaded freely
from this site and enjoyed as public art.” artmuseum.net

‘In cyberspace, music is now bigger than sex… Apparently,
“MP3” has
now overtaken “sex” as the
most frequently searched term online.’ The Times of London

Mixed Message. So that awful “Grinch” movie has become a hit. And, in so doing, the message of the original Dr. Seuss story is being profoundly subverted. “For weeks now, merchandising tie-ins to the film have contributed to that acquisitiveness, emphasizing
to the public that Christmas does, indeed, come from a store.” Hartford Courant

The World Question Center: “What is Today’s Most Important Unreported Story?”. Coverage of this spinoff from John Brockman’s Edge site in the San Jose Mercury said: “Don’t assume for a second that Ted Koppel, Charlie Rose and the editorial high command
at the New York Times have a handle on all the pressing issues of the day….when
Brockman asked 100 of the world’s top thinkers to come up with pressing matters
overlooked by the media, they generated a lengthy list of profound, esoteric and
outright entertaining responses.”

The Decade of the Brain, which ends this year, marked an acceleration of neuroscience research. This radio show, from the NPR series The Infinite Mind,
” takes a look at some of the astounding progress we’ve made in that decade, highlighting the ten most
important breakthroughs. Guests include Dr. Guy McKhann, associate director for clinical research at the
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke; Dr. Miguel Nicolelis, associate professor of
neurobiology at the Duke University Medical Center; Dr. Jeffrey Kordower, director of research at the
Center for Brain Repair at Rush Presbyterian St. Luke’s Medical Center; and Dr. Ronald McKay, chief of
the laboratory of molecular biology at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Narration and commentary by John Hockenberry. Includes a link to the real audio recording of the program.

A Bush Family Slip-Up. “The official story is that Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has stayed out of his
state’s electoral fray. But his father thinks otherwise.” Consortium News

Australian humpback whales adopt new love song . ‘Male humpbacks migrating along the east coast have stunned scientists by
abandoning their signature mating song and adopting a new tune from a
small group of visiting Indian Ocean whales.

“There has been a cultural takeover by the west coast whales,” marine
scientist Michael Noad told Reuters today.

“What is staggering is that all the males have switched to the new song
which was brought over by a few ambassadors from the west coast,” said
Noad, co-author of a report on the musical revolution in the latest
issue of scientific journal Nature
.’ Environmental News Network

Review: Beethoven’s Hair
by Russell Martin. “Sometimes the truth really is stranger than fiction. More conspiring.
And more filled with coincidence than would be credible in a work
constructed purely through imagination. Russell Martin’s striking
Beethoven’s Hair: An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and a Scientific
Mystery Solved
is like that.”

Do Remarkable Female Mutants Walk Among Us? . “Most people are trichromats, with retinas having three kinds of color sensors, called cone photopigments — those for red, green, and blue. The 8 percent of men who are color-blind typically have the cone photopigment for blue but are either missing one of the other colors, or the men have them, in effect, for two cone photopigment, for a color between red and green.

The theoretical possibility of this secret sorority — genetics dictates
that tetrachromats would all be female — has intrigued scientists since
it was broached in 1948. Now two scientists, working separately, plan to
search systematically for tetrachromats to determine once and for all
whether they exist and whether they see more colors than the rest of us
do.

Besides the philosophical interest in learning something new about perception, the brain, and the evolution of our species, finding a tetrachromat would also offer a practical reward. It would prove that the human nervous system can adapt to new capabilities. Flexibility matters greatly in a number of scenarios envisaged for gene therapy. For example, if someone with four kinds of color photopigments cannot see more colors than others, it would imply that the human nervous system cannot easily take advantage of genetic interventions.

For years now, scientists have known that some fraction of women have four different cone photopigments in their retinas. The question still remains, however, whether any of these females have the neural circuitry that enables them to enjoy a different — surely richer — visual experience than the common run of humanity sees. “If we could identify these tetrachromats, it would speak directly to the ability of the brain to organize itself to take advantage of novel stimuli,” says Dr. Neitz. “It would make us a lot more optimistic about doing a gene therapy for color blindness.”

Red Herring

In much of
the world, democracy
is still a ‘low-tech, old-economy business: ballots are
marked by hand —
with crosses or
stamps or fingerprints — and then counted by hand,
with an assortment of officials supposed to
guarantee impartiality looking on.

If manual counting is “subjective,” as George W. Bush
suggested this week, then global democracy is
overwhelmingly a subjective thing. ‘ New York Times

Carl Hiaasen writes in the Miami Herald about Rioting by GOP tourists “imported and paid for by the Republican Party
and the Bush-Cheney campaign” during the presidential vote recount — “It’s a page right out of the old Richard Nixon
playbook, the type of stunt favored by G. Gordon Liddy and the other dirty
tricksters.

The difference is, Liddy was smarter about covering his tracks.”

Will Irian Jaya be the next East Timor? International Herald Tribune

Two Men Shoot First, Figure It Out Later. One of these 20-year-olds in rural Manitoba brought home a bullet-proof vest and asked his roommate to shoot him in the chest, first with a .22 and then — pleased with the results — a 12-gauge shotgun. Luckily, they decided on the insurance policy of stuffing a phone book inside the vest for the second shot, and the target suffered only bruising and cracked ribs. Might’ve been a candidate for the Darwin Awards otherwise…

Criticism on the Job is a Pain in the Posterior…

“This month, things should get interesting.” Adbusters: Jamming Harper’s. The irreverent and profound social gadflies at Adbusters have made a cause celebre out of buzzing around Lewis Lapham’s ears since 1995, when they first took him to task for accepting Philip Morris’ ad support on a monthly basis in Harper’s, “a progressive voice of record.” Lapham fired back one volley over their bow but has consistently refused to be drawn into further debate. Now they’ve bought ad space in Harper’s for their anti-Philip Morris ad asking Why Are You Buying Your Food from a Tobacco Company?” “Now, we’re eager to find out: Will Philip Morris tolerate this
intrusion onto their traditional turf? Will they threaten to pull
their ads? Will the cozy, decades-long relationship between Harper’s and Philip Morris suddenly turn sour?”

Charles Taylor Interviewed. “Depending on your philosophical perspective, Charles Taylor is either the philosopher of
the self par excellence or the thinker who writes about everything else but the self. His
comprehensive conception of identity incorporates philosophical, historical, political,
sociological, anthropological, psychological, religious and aesthetic elements, stepping
across the boundaries that standardly separate philosophy from other disciplines.” Taylor finds that modern Western secular society is a stark forbidding place for a self to be. The Philosophers’ Magazine on the Internet

Lie Test: Bush 57, Gore 23: A portable polygraph meant for consumer use, claiming around 80% accurate detection of lies, was used by Time magazine reporters during the three Presidential debates. The Handy Truster, based on voice analysis technology originally developed for the Israeli military, said that Bush told 57 lies and Gore 23 during the three debates. Its manufacturers ‘…recommend using the product only as
a “decision-support tool” and strongly suggest that people use their common sense in
analyzing the results.’ [But if common sense were at play in the Presidential election process, we wouldn’t need a decision-support toll in the first place, right?] Wired

No Running, No Jumping: Christina Hoff Sommers, in her recent The War Against Boys, describes the public education system’s intolerance of “youthful male exuberance” and finds “misguided feminism” behind it. Discipline and medication are two of the inappropriate responses to this thinly-veiled notion that there is something wrong with being a boy. The educational system may be failing our sons. Hoff Sommers’ concerns counterbalance the notion of a “girl crisis” that has been

seized upon by feminists and promoted by leading academic experts.
Sommers examines the work of some of the “experts” and finds that it
is girls who are outperforming boys academically. Under the guise of
helping girls, many schools have adopted policies that penalize boys,
often for simply being masculine. Sommers says that boys need help,
but not the sort they’ve been getting. They need help catching up with
girls academically, they do not need to be rescued from masculinity.

Here’re the results of a Google search on coverage and discussion of the issues she raises. Dr. Carol Gilligan, professor of gender studies at the Harvard School of Education, whose research findings are directly criticized by Sommers, leads off a hefty set of responses in the Atlantic‘s letters column.

More on The Physics of Gridlock by Stephen Budiansky. If we accept that the gas dynamics model of traffic flow that various physicists have worked out is as good a simulation as they claim it is, spontaneous “sludging” of flow may be unavoidable and irremediable barring Orwellian control of the volume, speed and spacing of vehicular traffic. Atlantic

Art, Science and Postmodern Society. Arthur Pontynen, an art historian at the University of Wisconsin: “The tragedy is that American culture is increasingly Postmodernist, whether we identify ourselves as pragmatists or as persons of faith, as
defenders of tradition or as progressives. To ask about the practical value of the fine arts is to trivialize them as thoroughly as the rabid academic
deconstructionists who argue that standards and canons are simply tools of oppression and that all art is ultimately political. Both sides seek to
subsume art to base political purposes.

The Right wants to use art to “remoralize” the society, and the Left wants to use it for social therapy, to encourage “oppressed” groups. Moreover,
the assumption that sensible people called moderates avoid the extremes of both Left and Right offers no relief. The mean resulting from two
incoherent starting points is not golden; it has all the translucence of mud. …Whereas the Right and Left
both wish to censor art, moderate opponents of censorship trivialize art, by claiming that movies, books, and the like cannot harm people. If they
can do no harm, however, how can they do any good? Thus, opponents of censorship ironically trivialize the arts through the very arguments by
which they hope to protect them.

Postmodernism is so rampant a cultural contagion that it destroys not only our cultural health but our ability even to perceive our decline…By arguing that all statements are
political and therefore equally meaningful (and meaningless), Postmodernism undermines our ability to draw distinctions and, of particular note here,
to make value judgments.” American Outlook

Neurotransplantation of fetal tissue into patients with Huntington’s Disease showed evidence of significant benefit, in two studies from the University of South Florida and McLean Hospital in Massachusetts. ‘ “Everybody said ten years ago that this was outlandish — you
can’t transplant cells into a toxic brain (because) those new cells
will die,” Dr. Ole Isacson…, who helped direct the (McLean) study,
said in a statement.’ While excitement in neurotransplantation to combat a range of degenerative nervous system diseases continues, ethical concerns about using fetal tissues will probably limit the applicability of this technique in our abortion-polarized society. Fortunately, recent studies have shown that stem cells derived from adult bone marrow may be able to do the same trick, differentiating into healthy neural tissue.

Research to Develop Anti-Cancer Vaccine is Promising. Argentinian scientists have succeeded in ridding mice of tumor cells by injecting them with immune cells from healthy mice who had previously been provoked into an immune response against specially-treated colon cancer cells. Interestingly, promoting the rejection of the tumors in the recipient, ill mice worked regardless of what type of tumor they had.

“For the moment, this is just an experiment on animals which has
provided biological proof of a very important concept — that one
could imagine a single type of vaccine against cancer, against
different sorts of tumors,” Osvaldo Podhajcer, who led the team of
eight Argentine researchers and one British scientist, said on
Thursday.

Human trials could start soon.

Far Right Watch: Skinheads Sentenced for Temple Bomb in Reno. The five, self-professed white supremacists ages 19-26, received prison terms of up to 15 years in a plea bargain. Not succeeding in breaking a window of the synagogue before they tossed their molotov cocktail, they had only succeeded in scorching the sidewalk outside. AP

It is Cantwell in disputed Senate race in Washington State, and the U.S. Senate is 50-50. Reuters

“It covers everything except the exceptions and the exceptions
cover everything.” Enforcement of a law making English the official language of Utah was blocked by the courts today.

Ecomafia Dumping on Italy. Organized crime’s interest in trafficking in nuclear and radioactive materials is gaining rapidly on its involvement in the illegal arms and drug trade. An Italian environmental agency warns that Italy is sitting on a “radioactive waste bomb”; around 5,000 tons of radioactive metal waste originating in Eastern Europe finds its way into the country annually, most of it passed off as innocuous scrap metal. In 1998, the accidental smelting of radioactive metal scrap by a Spanish foundry spread a plume of cesium-137 across five European countries.
Wired

The Oddness of Oz: “The year 2000 is the centenary of a famous and much-loved but essentially very odd
children’s classic: L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. Those who recall the story only from
childhood reading, or from the MGM film, have perhaps never realized how strange the
original book and its sequels are. New York Review of Books

A New Star in the Sky: “Something in the heavens is growing brighter and it will
soon become one of the more eye-catching stars in the
night sky. No, it’s not a supernova. It’s the International
Space Station.”

Code breakers believe Poe puzzle solved after 150 years. The second of two coded messages left by Edgar Allan Poe in 1841 in a magazine where he was an editor, which he challenged his readers to decipher, has finally been decoded. The deciphered message is such a saccharin, trite passage that doubts are raised if it was even penned by Poe.

If you’ve ever thought that the man in your life was only half-listening, a new study shows your hunch correct.

Leaked Report Says Chernobyl Replacements a Hazard: Soviet-designed nuclear power reactors
at Khmelnytsky and Rivne, which are already 80 percent
complete and sit on seismic fault zones, are “highly hazardous” according to a Vienna University report for the Austrian government. Greenpeace leaked the report to the media in the week preceding the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s pending decision about funding the Ukraine’s completion of the new facilities. The Ukraine says it will not take the Chernobyl plant offline unless it gets this funding for replacement energy generating needs; Greenpeace maintains Chernobyl should be replaced by conventional, nonnuclear power generation sources.

Possible Vaccine To Fight Ebola succesfully protects laboratory monkeys, “raising doctors’ hopes of developing a means of inoculating people against the
terrifying disease.”

Search for Another Earth Quietly Underway. “After a five-year search that has turned up more than 40 giant, inhospitable planets around
other stars, the hunt is quietly underway to discover another place like home. And while no
scientist can say for sure that any such planet exists, optimism is high that another Earth will
be found within the decade, possibly much sooner.”

FBI Probed Groucho for Marxist Ties. For those of you old enough to remember, shades of the Firesign Theater.

Have you lost your sense of humor? This man knows where to find it. ABC

“Scientists should not be so scared of racism that they ignore facts”: “‘This restraint has become a massive and
unjustifiable taboo today that is both foolish and
destructive…There is an unspoken rule that says that race and science make a
deadly combination, and that the effect of “scientific racism” is always
malevolent. In his comprehensive, must-read book, The Meaning of
Race, Kenan Malik provides a detailed description of how social
Darwinism, eugenics, positivism, slavery and colonialism all used real
and pseudo-scientific theory to justify white superiority and, at times,
class superiority, too.” Yasmin Alibhai-Brown writes in the Independent.

All Creatures Great and Smart. ” Research reveals animals’ brains to
be bioengineering marvels

Nearly every important recent brain
discovery comes from the study of simpler
nervous systems in animals. But it seems
those animal brain circuits aren’t so simple
after all.

Roaches, for example, listen with their
knees.

Snakes can remember what they see.

And homing pigeons, with a brain the size
of a pecan, can sniff their way home with
such efficiency that scientists hope to copy
it in futuristic route- finding devices.

These creatures were among dozens of
species represented at the recent annual
meeting of the Society for Neuroscience,
an international research showcase that
reflected growing appreciation of the
bioengineering marvels in nature.

San Francisco Chronicle

Tillmans wins Turner Prize One of the most important modern art awards
in Britain — the Turner Prize — has been won
by the German photographer, Wolfgang
Tillmans.

It’s the first time a photographer has won the
prestigious award, which is worth
thirty-thousand dollars and honours the best
young artist working in Britain.

Tillmans, whose work includes naked bodies
and household rubbish, said he wanted to shift
the perspective about what was beautiful and
acceptable in society.

However, it’s possible that we’ve been there, done that already:

Outside the ceremony, demonstrators dressed
in clown and carnival costume protested that
the prize no longer represented genuine art.
Last year’s winner showed an un-made bed,
while the previous winner used elephant dung
on a painting of the Christian saint, the Virgin
Mary. BBC

Happy Birthday, Emmett Grogan, Digger and author.

Art and Revolution. “We emphasize politics and direct action in our work. We see activism as crucial
to meaningful arts expression. We believe that our politics suffer without creative
vision in the same way that our art suffers without political or social relevance.”

You can find out who links to any website by entering the AltaVista search phrase “link:http://%5BURL%5D”. Doing this for “link:http://world.std.com/~emg/blogger.html”, one of the ways to get to Follow Me Here…, came up with wood s lot, a Canadian blog with exceedingly small print and lots of interesting blinks; there’s a remarkable overlap with items I point to in FMH…

Tonga becomes the latest nation to sell its inhabitants’ genome. Wired

Sex speech by Nobel laureate shocks audience: ‘A Nobel laureate’s
provocative speech on sunshine and sex — complete
with slides of bikini-clad women — left some at the
University of California, Berkeley, aghast.

James Watson, who co-discovered DNA, dumbfounded
many at a guest lecture when he advanced his theory
about a link between skin color and sex drive.

“That’s why you have Latin lovers,” he
said, according to people who were
there last month. “You’ve never heard
of an English lover. Only an English
patient.”

“… People were
laughing at the beginning of Watson’s lecture. But the
laughter turned nervous as he developed his theme. There was a lot of looking at the person next to you
and saying, ‘I can’t believe he’s saying this’ ” …’ Salon

I’ve removed the link I published last night to the Modestino Bee‘s report of further charges in a depraved child torture case in Wonder Valley, CA; the link has expired and clicking on it directed people to today’s top story in that paper instead. But here is the Oct. 18 News Release from the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Dept. of the original findings. And the Oct. 17 Desert Sun coverage, for those of you hungry to follow this disturbing story further.

‘X-Men’ Top ‘Warped Toys’ List. ‘The Rev. Christopher Rose takes Christmas very seriously —
especially when it comes to kids.

For 14 years now, the minister in Hartford has released his
“warped toys” list — just as parents are heading out to stores for
Christmas shopping. ‘

This year, toys modeled on the movie “X-Men” and on the World
Wrestling Federation head his list.

Study: Teenage Ecstasy Use Up. The interesting thing about this study report is that teens report marijuana use is down; more are “turned off” than “turned on” by cannabis, fearing its use will make them behave foolishly. General Barry McCaffrey is taking the credit for this turnaround. Boston Channel

“Orpheus Emerged”, Jack Kerouac’s first book, has just been released, only as an e-book. A link here takes you to an MP3 audio clip of an excerpt.

Good Riddance Dept.: Chernobyl Reactor Shut Down, Possibly Forever. “Power
line failures forced the shutdown of the
Chernobyl nuclear power station on
Monday, raising doubts over whether
engineers would restart it less than three weeks before its final
closure. Reuters

Gulf War Syndrome Symptoms Linked to Brain Damage. New research shows cell loss (of an extent comparable to that seen in degenerative neurological diseases such as multiple sclerosis, ALS [Lou Gehrig’s Disease] and dementia) in three regions of the brain of Gulf War Syndrome sufferers. The extent of damage at each site correlates with the degree of specific symptom complaints or impaired functions. Involved areas include the basal ganglia in each hemisphere and various brain stem regions. I’ve discussed several pieces of evidence that there really is a Gulf War Syndrome (actually, syndromes in plural, in all likelihood) and that symptoms relate to brain dysfunction due to various toxic exposures during the war. Here’s a page of Atomz search results to my earlier references.

Court To Hear Death Penalty Appeal in the case I discussed below of the Texas man with mental incapacities placing him in the range of a seven-year-old. The Court has also agreed to decide if medical necessity for marijuana use justifies violating federal laws making its distribution illegal. The Clinton Administration has challenged a California law which has allowed a group to provide the drug to seriously ill patients for pain relief.

Bumper sticker idea: He’s Not My President!

Annals of the Erosion of Privacy (cont’d.): Software to Track E-Mail Raises Privacy Concerns. David Brake‘s blog pointed me to this New York Times piece covering the little-known fact that, if your email client can read HTML mail, senders can tell when and if you read their messages. You can route your outgoing messages through Postel Services in Korea to be alerted when someone reads your mail.

Alzheimer’s: A disease of the young? “Figures suggest that more and more young
people are being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s
disease…It’s a terrifying illness
even for those in their
80s – but the tragedy
can be even more
poignant for those in
their 50s, 40s, and 30s.” BBC

BBC News has an all-you-need-to-know primer on Alzeimer’s Disease here. And –backing up a moment — here‘s a good overview of memory and its dysfunction in general, from the Canadian Broadcasting Co.

Defiant Milosevic Re-elected As Leader of Socialist Party. “An official at the U.N. war crimes
tribunal Sunday expressed outrage that
Slobodan Milosevic could
flaunt himself in the public and political arena while under an
international arrest warrant. Sunday he won re-election as leader
of Serbia’s Socialist party and has appeared on state television
twice in the week leading up to the party congress.” Reuters

U.N. Climate Conference Ends, No Agreement Reached. “World economic powers hurled blame at each other
for the two-week Hague summit’s ending without a plan to
coordinate cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.” The third world, which is considered at much higher risk from increased temperatures, faults the industrialized nations for squabbling over cost. The US, in particular, is criticized for thinking it can buy its way out of trouble, and, because it stands to face the greatest costs under the proposed new treaty, for a move, generally considered sleazy, to attempt to obtain credit for the CO2-removing photosynthetic effects of its forests and grasslands. (The New York Times says the US “can’t see the forest for the trees.”) The stalemate stacked up as the US, Australia, Canada and Japan against the EU. One more try is scheduled for May, 2001.

A Hangout That Caters to a Crowd From Space New York Times

Walter Dembski‘s book The Design Inference, this critic writes, is the spearhead of a new creationist attack on science, and remarkably ignorant of more than two hundred years’ of critical rejection of the argument from design dating from David Hume. BioScience

The new issue of Lingua Franca has several rewarding articles. First is a portrait of E. Fuller Torrey, an inspiring psychiatrist who has long argued that psychiatry should either just treat the most severe of brain disorders or give up its pretensions to being part of medical science. His mix of common sense and controversy has mostly been applied to schizophrenia (patients with which form the core of my professional activities as well); his 1983 book Surviving Schizophrenia is unexcelled as a guide for sufferers and their families. (In the same year, Torrey was demoted from his post at St. Elizabeth’s, the federal maximum-security psychiatric institution in Washington, DC, for publishing his findings that the hospital had colluded with Ezra Pound by declaring him insane to protect him from prosecution for treason during WWII.)

One thread of Torrey’s attention has been to the possibility that viral infection can cause schizophrenia. There has been a long, scientifically inconclusive, love affair with this theory in psychiatry, part of the agonizing search to explain such a mysterious, incurable and devastating condition. [My take on this is that the problem with explanations of schizophrenia is that it is probably a heterogeneous, “wastebasket” diagnosis for a number of different neurobiological conditions. For this reason, the effect size of any etiological theory that is researched is likely to be “washed out” by noise.]

Some of the provocative evidence includes data on the worldwide distribution of the disease; a seasonal pattern to schizophrenic births; and the discredit to the usual hereditary explanations done by the disease’s persistence in the face of its obvious adverse impact on reproductive fitness. Torrey has been fascinated by the possibility that toxoplasmosis, transmitted from housecats, could be an important key to this conundrum. Several studies under his aegis have shown that cat ownership (and, in the most recent study, specific serological evidence of toxoplasmosis exposure) is significantly more common among the parents of children who become schizophrenic, and it can be argued that there was an increase in the frequency of the illness at around the same time in the late 19th C. when cat ownership became popular.

“I’ve given talks on the cat stuff
and people’s response is almost universal: ‘I’m not surprised—I’ve
known my cat is schizophrenic for years!'” He chuckles. “One talk I
gave at a department of psychiatry, a fellow came up to me and said, ‘I
don’t want you to repeat this, but the former chairman of our
department of psychiatry was convinced that his cat was hallucinating,
so he gave him liquid Thorazine and it really seemed to help.'” Torrey
looks at me and smiles. “People find cats strange, so they don’t find
this idea so odd.”

Then there’s an interesting portrait of Richard Rorty, controversial, ambitious and erudite philosopher who arguably has best captured the era’s challenge to the concepts of truth and objectivity and who some describe as the closest thing we’ve got on this side of the Atlantic to a public, postmodern French intellectual. His work is a particular source of anxiety to conservative critics who feel it undermines the foundations of the public’s moral interity.

Like his idol John Dewey, whom he credits with breaking
through “the crust of philosophical convention,” he has pursued
twin careers as disciplinary bad boy and high-minded public
philosopher. He has set out to deflate the aspirations of his
profession—he rejects the idea of truth as an accurate reflection of
the world—while placing his own unorthodox philosophical views at
the center of an ambitious vision of social and historical hope. In
recent writings especially, he champions an unlikely brand of
“postmodern bourgeois liberalism” that has largely infuriated
postmodernists and liberals alike.

Finally, Jim Holt considers the Multiple Universes Hypothesis.

Sampling hidden populations. ‘A Cornell University sociologist has transformed the small world concept
of “six degrees of separation” into a scientific sampling method for
finding and studying “hidden populations,” from drug users to jazz
musicians.

‘There are no lists available or associations of runaway youths, for
example. But this sampling method takes advantage of the fact that
individuals in a group know each other. As we gather information during
the sampling process of referrals, we look at the degree to which people
tend to recruit those similar to them. Then, we can mathematically
correct for the non-randomness and project what the sample would have
been had there been no biases,” says Douglas Heckathorn, professor of
sociology at Cornell.’

Sampling hidden populations. ‘A Cornell University sociologist has transformed the small world concept
of “six degrees of separation” into a scientific sampling method for
finding and studying “hidden populations,” from drug users to jazz
musicians.

‘There are no lists available or associations of runaway youths, for
example. But this sampling method takes advantage of the fact that
individuals in a group know each other. As we gather information during
the sampling process of referrals, we look at the degree to which people
tend to recruit those similar to them. Then, we can mathematically
correct for the non-randomness and project what the sample would have
been had there been no biases,” says Douglas Heckathorn, professor of
sociology at Cornell.’

Life, death and Everquest: “A virtual suicide in the popular online multiplayer game is making some
fans queasy about their favorite addiction.” Salon

Auto body and soul “He’ll fix your shocks, he’ll change your oil, and he’ll align your
wheels, but what Mahmood Rezaei-Kamalabad really wants to do is restore
your spirit.” Giving new meaning to full-service auto repair. Boston Phoenix

Death traps: In the aftermath of the Kitzsteinhorn ski train disaster, why are we still building tunnels with no escape routes, a New Scientist
editorial asks.

Scientist Raises New Mobile Phone Fears Children who use mobile phones risk suffering memory loss, sleeping
disorders and headaches, according to research published in the medical
journal The Lancet.

Neo-fascism watch: “Far-right demonstrators marched through central
Berlin on Saturday, openly challenging efforts by German
leaders to fight neo-Nazism and mobilizing a massive police
operation in the capital.” USA Today

How these bald, blue men make music CNN

Coney Island of the Mind. We’re still obsessed with the spectacles that defined Coney Island seventy years ago.

There
is now serious talk of redeveloping Coney — and
perhaps the possibility of its renaissance is one
reason we are currently interested in revisiting the
enormous spectacles of those bygone days.

But maybe our interest has something instead to do
with the way this kind of theme park entertainment
has developed over the past half century, with the
advent of parks like Disney World and Universal
Studios, and with new, massively themed attractions
opening in Las Vegas every year. Today, our theme
parks give us a happy world. Human beings (if you
don’t count those dressed up as Cinderella and
Mickey Mouse) are not on exhibit — the creatures on
our rides are animatronic, and the performers are
possessed of skills like juggling or tap dancing. Our
notion of spectacle has changed — not just from the
“real” sightseeing of the urban flaneur to the
“hyperreal” entertainments discussed by critics like
Umberto Eco and Ada Louise Huxtable, but also in
the kind of fake worlds our amusement parks
present. Transgressive attractions — from the freak
show to the tunnel of love (designed for stolen
kisses) — have been replaced by wholesome
“entertainment for the whole family,” at least in the
world of immersive, American attractions like theme
parks and Vegas. Feed

Top 10 best-mannered cities CNN

The Case for a Revote. “The Washington Monthly has dug up an article addressing the
invalidation of state elections, written in the New York University
Law Review in 1974. It makes the case for a revote if a close
election were violated by an ‘illegal act’ – which, the monthly
suggests, that ballot paper might be construed to be. Its author:
Judge Kenneth W. Starr.”

The Outlook for U.S. Central Europe Policy under Dubya’s Presidency is very worrisome to Central European commentators. ” Many
of his advisors are from the old Bush camp, and include
those involved in the “Chicken Kiev” fiasco in which Bush
championed the unity of the USSR; those partly responsible
for the shamefully slow reaction to the Lithuanian campaign
for freedom (which caused a well-documented near-fistfight in
the Oval Office between cabinet officials); and those who told
Bush to tell the world he ended the Cold War.

Ex-Secretary of State James Baker is still around. This is
the man who personified the shameful Baltic policies of the
Bush presidency, and he is, in fact, now the man delegated
by the new Bush camp to oversee the Florida recount.
Former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft remained
an advisor of Bush on foreign affairs and has publicly
expressed opinions against NATO enlargement.

However, most worrisome is the possible Bush foreign policy
team. First of all, a likely candidate for secretary of state is
Colin Powell, the military leader from the Gulf War era.
Powell is well respected as a soldier and is liked by both
sides of the political divide, but his credentials are far more
military than diplomatic — two things, many argue, that do not
mix. Powell has been critical of various aspects of Clinton’s
policy in Europe, questioning, for example, the recognition of
the independence of some countries as, in Powell’s view, it
is often only a prelude to conflict.

Even more harrying is the possible appointment of Bush’s
main foreign policy advisor, Condoleezza Rice, as national
security advisor (and it is worthwhile noting that the post of
national security advisor does not require Senate
confirmation, unlike the secretary of state position). Rice
was a major advisor to Bush Senior on Soviet affairs, and
that policy was a dark mark in the 1990s for Washington.
Rice has gone on to make other comments that have turned
her into one of the biggest enemies of the Baltic
communities in the US, as well as others.” And given Dubya’s limited leadership capacities, the likes of Baker, Rice and Powell will be running U.S. foreign policy in earnest. Central Europe Review</small