Official Darwin Awards. The July newsletter is out. “They were both trained. The

manager and the customer told him not to, but he did it anyway.”

Cold Facts of Global Warming. New York Times op-ed piece captures what I’ve felt for a long time; that those denying global warming have their heads in the sand, and the sand is getting hotter and hotter.

Ambulances patrolled streets in southern Romania to pick up

some of the many individuals who fainted in temperatures

that were well over 100 degrees. Soldiers were deployed in

western Bulgaria to fight a major forest fire. At least 10

people were reported dead from the heat in Turkey. Intense

fires raged on a number of islands in the Aegean. And

wildfires in Italy consumed hundreds of acres of forest in the

southern Gargano region.

No single weather event can be attributed to global

warming. But this is the kind of terrible weather that

scientists have long predicted would accompany the

warming of the planet. That warming is not only well under

way, it is accelerating.

Email Forwards. Archive of those chainletters and useless emails that your friends think they’re doing you a favor by forwarding to you.

Progressive Review: How Nader won. A dream.

Windows-Help.NET News: New V.92 Analog Modem Standard. If you’re using dial-up access via an analog modem, a new ITU standard will offer some improvements, which modems available in the fourth quarter of 2000 will implement:

An increase of more than 40% in the maximum data rate

towards the network (Upstream) to a new maximum of 48

kbit/s on the best connections (above the former 33.6 kbit/s

upload maximum – download speed remains at 56 kbit/s max)

Significantly quicker start-up times on recognized connections

The ability to put the modem ‘on-hold’ when the network

indicates that an incoming call is waiting

Upgrade if you do alot of uploading from your present modem and your analog phone line is clear enough to realize the maximum speed improvement.

Meta-content: Starting to think about the backcountry vacation I’m taking at the end of August, when this weblog will languish for two weeks. Worrying about losing loyal readership that’s been painstaking and slow to amass. Do you other webloggers out there see a decline when you take a vacation from blogging? Does anyone have a ‘bot that’ll go out across the web, find the interesting content I would’ve found if I’d been at the computer during that time, and keep weblog entries coming in my absence (grin)? Comments?

This is maddening. I’m going to repost this now, as I think I have a few more readers (grin) than when I originally put it up in April. So far I’ve gotten no responses. Can anyone enlighten, please?

The Infamous Eagles Joke: I’m ashamed to say I have returned to this “intelligence

test” at intervals since it was first emailed to me several weeks ago, and I still haven’t a

clue. If you get the joke, please let me know, thanks!

Addendum:Thanks to the reader who sent me the solution to this!

CNN Transcript – Burden of Proof 7-5-00: ‘Harry Potter’ Book Lawsuit: Legend of Rah and Muggles Author Claims Trademark Violations. Reading this transcript of an interview with author Nancy Stouffer, it appears her pitiful claim of trademark violation is a real stretch and she’s got some real “ambulance-chasing” attorneys. Here’s how she frames it:

Well, I think the biggest

problem here is a level playing field. My muggles are human characters, they

just small human characters who are non-magical people. J.K. Rowling’s are

full-sized human characters as well, and it creates a confusion that is too difficult

to overcome.

Their “muggles” are both non-magical, human characters??!! How blatant is that?? Then she goes on:

And there are other similarities. I have a “Larry Potter” character and she has a

“Harry Potter” character. And I think those are really the two, although there are

many other areas that we have problems with, those two major character

problems really cause the unfair trade for me, and the usages of my mark. It’s

almost impossible to overcome them when the marketplace is not only driven by

just published work, but also the derivative products, such as licensed products,

such as toys or any other ancillary products. So when you have a confusion like

that, there’s no way that I have a capability to market my properties.

Comes off sounding abit mercenary, doesn’t she?

But I’m having an interesting experience of the derivativeness of the Harry Potter books. As each one has come out, my now-6 y.o. son and I have read it aloud (we started Goblet of Fire last night), and in between we’ve been immersed in reading The Lord of the Rings. My son has been commenting upon the convergence between, on the one hand, Dumbledore, Lord Voldemort and the Dementors and, on the other, Gandalf, Sauron and the Ringwraiths. But perhaps it’s just the mobilization of the archetypes when you’re writing about the battle between good and evil in the context of wizards and servants of darkness?

Culture jamming update: In June, I posted a blink to the CokeSpotlight website, an Adbusters-Greenpeace joint effort

to put heat on Coca-Cola as one of the world’s worst commercial HFC

polluters. Today,Adbusters announced: “Victory! We’re sending our thanks and congratulations. The

jam paid off: Coca-Cola has committed to stop keeping drinks cool

while warming the planet with greenhouse gases.

From the moment it “went live,” CokeSpotlight was crowded with

visitors from around the world. You downloaded stickers and posters,

you signed your names to petitions and letters – and you won.”

Yahoo: X-Men I wouldn’t usually be interested in something like this but the film is directed by Bryan Singer, whose previous credits include The Usual Suspects and Apt Pupil. The director is again paired with Sir Ian McKellen, who gave a devastating performance in Apt Pupil — simple concept (the attempt to dominate evil corrupts an innocent) unforgettably and disturbingly executed. McKellen’s well-designed website posts personal reflections on the making of the X-film (as well as his involvement in the upcoming film of the Lord of the Rings!) . There’s a porrtrait of Bryan Singer and the new film in today’s Arts & Entertainment section of the New York Times, but so far no online link to the article. Part of what makes this potentially interesting is that Singer was never a fan of the X-Men comic books as a child and has no need to be reverent to the comic book tradition. So the movie is not likely to be an over-the-top caricature. I’m not expecting highbrow, but it should be fun.

Use your mosquito repellant this summer, wherever you live: West Nile virus causes an encephalitis for which there is no specific treatment and which seems to kill around 10% of those infected. Spread to humans by mosquitoes infected after biting birds which are a reservoir of the virus, the virus appeared in New York last year (either via an imported bird or, for you conspiracy buffs, released from an experimental protocol at Sloan Kettering) and a massive mosquito eradication effort has apparently not impacted on its persistence in New York area birds, where it was hoped that it would not survive a winter. Now researchers say that there are 77 species of migratory birds in North America capable of carrying the virus and that it has probably spread all over the continent by now. Experts project a Gulf Coast outbreak where migratory birds congregate. A finding of infected birds in a region could trigger targeted mosquito spraying to reduce risks of transmission to humans, but debates rage among public health officials about whether funding for extensive screening of wild birds would be “cost-effective”. For those who think the undisputed triumph of 20th century medicine was the control of microbial illness, if you haven’t been chastened over the last decade by AIDS, keep an eye on the ongoing outbreaks of often mysterious emerging infectious diseases.

Born with the munchies. Naturally-occurring cannabinoids have been detected in human and cow’s milk and their levels are highest the day after giving birth. Their function, and the evolutionary significance of human sensitivity to them and hence to cannabis, has been puzzling. Now, a biologist in Israel reports that the chemicals might be necessary to jumpstart feeding behavior in the newborn; when neonatal mice were treated with a cannabis blocker, they didn’t feed and didn’t survive, but when given enough THC to overcome the blockade, they developed normally. Many of you are not surprised, I suspect, by the notion that cannabis is necessary to survival…

Pass it on. A Canadian research team reports that an artificial extra chromosome manufactured to contain a specific gene can be incorporated into the genome of a mouse, passed on to its descendants, and remains active, with no apparent harm to the three generations so far studied. Speculation of course abounds about possible mind-boggling human implications. ‘Such techniques might soon make it possible to treat patients by loading their cells with extra chromosomes that are

purpose-built to produce a therapeutic protein and operate entirely independently of our natural chromosomes. It

might even be possible to treat genetic diseases with extra chromosomes that can themselves be inherited, though

this would mean challenging the taboo against “germline” gene therapy.’ The research team reporting this works for a Canadian biotech firm about to go public, so you can either (a) rush to buy in; or (b) take the whole thing with an enormous grain of salt.

New Scientist: Sudden increases in placental oxygen levels during the first trimester of pregnancy are a stressful event for the fetus and may cause some unexplained miscarriages; high doses of antioxidant vitamins are being studied as a possible preventive measure. But: how safe are they to the first trimester of fetal development?

GettingIt: A rant, not about “reality TV” but its critics: “…there’s really nothing to be

said about excrement, aside from the

occasional poop joke. So shut the fuck up. It

is stupid and redundant to scrutinize it at

length with your college-educated mind (or

even better, criticize it from a distance) and

declare that it smells bad. “

Think Tanks: the Rich Get Richer.

While this survey reveals that media show a greater reliance on think tanks than at the time of the last survey two years ago, the

constituencies representing a center/right debate have further cemented their positions as media-friendly analysts. In the survey of 1997,

conservative or right-leaning think tanks received 53 percent of all citations, 32 percent of citations went to centrist think tanks, and

only 16 percent of the citations went to progressive or left-leaning think tanks. The percentages for progressive or left-leaning think

tanks have declined slightly since then.

WTO/IMF Globalization Protests– comparing the coverage by mainstream and alternative media. Few surprises here: “…media critic Norman Solomon says the corporate globalization bias of

America’s mainstream news outlets makes them ill-positioned to shed light on the

underlying issues protesters raise. ”

oneworld.net: Internet Sapping Broadcast News Audience: Just as people lamented that broadcast news was supplanting print newspapers, there’s a rapid increase in the number of people going online for their news instead of sitting in front of the other box. But overall, the American appetite for news is declining, according to the Pew Research Center’s biennial survey of the national news

audience. [They should try weblogging; it’s certainly reinvigorated my news habits…]

Bumper stickers appear to be a dying means of self-expression; reasons include the lack of discrete bumpers on new cars; the prevalence of leasing; the moderation of baby boomers’ attitudes as they age; and fear of retribution in this age of road rage.

Controversy Shadows AIDS Summit. South African President Thabo Mbeki’s wrong-headed rejection of the expensive but effective protease inhibitors (which have been a revolutionary breakthrough in treatment of AIDS in the first world) even with subsidies from pharmaceutical manufacturers, and his reliance on advisors skeptical that HIV causes AIDS, sit squarely in the face of the onrushing South African AIDS epidemic. The opening of the 13th International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa, the first time it occurs on the African continent or indeed in the developing world, is sure to highlight tensions in the face of impending tragedy. 95% of the world’s people with AIDS live in developing countries.

Ominous Start for Program to Insure Drugs for Elderly. Nevada has pioneered a drug prescription plan for the elderly similar to the one the US House of Representatives approved last month, but it appears to be going nowhere. ‘…a state assemblywoman who is

co-chairwoman of a task force monitoring use of the money,

said: “I have my doubts that an insurance company will be

able to offer meaningful drug benefits under this program. If

an insurance company does bid on it but the benefits are

paltry, senior citizens will be up in arms.” ‘

GettingIt: A rant, not about “reality TV” but its critics: “…there’s really nothing to be

said about excrement, aside from the

occasional poop joke. So shut the fuck up. It

is stupid and redundant to scrutinize it at

length with your college-educated mind (or

even better, criticize it from a distance) and

declare that it smells bad. “

Intifada redux? This appears to be a photo of Palestinian-American academic Edward Said throwing a stone at Israeli soldiers from across the south Lebanese border, apparently from the Jordan Times. [It is said to be an unreliable link so it might not open for you.] And Palestinian woman reportedly shot dead by Israeli troops. [Nando Times]

New front in the war against science :

“An underground of ‘dissident’ scientists and self-described experts publish their theories in newsletters and on the Web, exchanging ideas in a great battle

against ‘the temple of relativity.’ According to these critics, relativity is not only wrong, it’s an affront to common sense, and Einstein was

a cheat.” A number of fundamentalist, paranoid, prejudicial and otherwise hysterical trends seemingly converge here, but is there a non-lunatic fringe as well? [Salon] On a related topic, a less-than-lukewarm review of Michael Paterniti’s Driving Mr. Albert, in which a journalist and a pathologist take off on a cross-country encounter with America, the universe and themselves, carrying the preeminent scientific brain of the 20th century in the trunk.

Nando Times: Missile Test Fails: “The missile interceptor

the Pentagon is developing as the key component of a national missile defense not only missed

its intended target over the Pacific Ocean early Saturday, it didn’t even attempt to hit it….The $100 million test was the third to attempt an intercept, and the second to fail….It remained unclear Saturday whether the Pentagon still believed the missile defense project

was ready to move toward deployment.”

New Scientist: They’ve seen a ghost. Resonances caused by swarming electrons around atoms precisely placed in “quantum corrals” produce “ghost images” of the atoms at a distance. It’s like a quantum analogy to a whispering gallery. Because these structures, in essence, transmit information, they may become the basis of subatomic-scale circuitry.

New Scientist: “What we’re trying to do is to build a Web browser for

parrots…”

Prevalence of Intimate Partner Violence and Injuries In a random telephone survey in Washington in 1998 just reported in Morbidity and Mortality, >23% of females and >16% of males reported that they had been the victims of domestic battering during their lifetime. More than 90% of battered women, and ~50% of battered men, had experienced consequent injury.

Not only, some say, the biggest publishing event in the English-speaking world but, to others quoting Deuteronomy, an “abomination” full of character after character who “useth divination, or (is) an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a

consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.”

Nando Times: Controversial ardent proponent of drinking in moderation for alcoholics goes on trial for killing two while driving drunk. Reportedly she had had second thoughts about moderation before travelling wrong way down I-90 in Washington with a blood alcohol level three times the legal limit and causing deaths of a father and 12-year-old daughter in head-on collision.

What would happen if, crazy as it might sound, a

newspaper published the correct numbers of a

lottery before the numbers were drawn?

The Sunday Times: The rise of tokophobia: Psychiatrists are reporting an increasing number of women, especially white middle class intelligent women, with a profound and sometimes disabling dread of childbirth. Some are so afraid of conceiving that they use several methods of contraception. “In some cases the women will not

even contemplate having sex for fear of falling

pregnant. And some who do become pregnant

will request a termination, or even try to induce

a miscarriage themselves…

Not Exactly It Came from Beneath the Sea, but close. [Discovery]

Google Search: “Foreign Accent Syndrome”. After a stroke or a blow to the head, people suddenly begin to speak with a foreign accent in this exceedingly rare, fascinating syndrome. In some cases the accent is that of their childhood origins decades before, but in other mysterious cases it appears to be one with which they’ve had no prior connection.

Something to Watch Over Me. You know those ankle bracelets convicts wear when they’re on house arrest or restrictive parole? Now you can slap one onto your child!

Publius Home Page. The original Publius was the pen name of the pseudonymously published Federalist Papers. The new Publius is a system developed by AT&T Lab researchers to evade potential censorship of web content and provide a “high degree of anonymity” to publishers. If I understand the explanation rightly, it works by encrypting a document and distributing its content among a number of servers who host random-looking shares of the document with no idea what they are hosting. The publishing process produces a special URL that readers use to retrieve a proportion of the shares of the document sufficient to reconstruct it. The underlying principle — of encrypting and distributing content among several servers — has previously been articulated among the “cypherpunk” movement, and other schemes to achieve this are also being tried, but the Publius system seems to be a more sophisticated implementation…if it works.

Suppressing the presence on the web of a Publius-published document would require securing the cooperation of the operators of however many servers the content had been divided among — difficult but not unthinkable, it would appear. So much for the C-h-u-r-c-h o-f S-c-i-e-n-t-o-l-o-g-y’s war on unsalutory web content, for example. Of course, the method could be used to disseminate undesirable content, such as child pornography or materials pirated or otherwise in violation of copyright — the price of freedom? Could this be a largely unstoppable way to bear witness to a repressive political regime, sort of a twenty-first century samizdat system? The Publius system will be given away for free when ready. The developers of the process are seeking Publius Server volunteers for a two-month live trial beginning at the end of July.

In the continuing saga of the anti-missile defense boondoggle, look at Slate‘s coverage of what’s happening “In Other Magazines”:

A superb article describes how the Pentagon is fixing an important

missile-defense test scheduled for July 7. In the

‘Potemkin’ test, the missile will travel at an

artificially low speed, will have only one lame

decoy, and will travel on a preset path that the

defense team already knows. The test’s success will

almost certainly ensure that the United States will

build and deploy a missile defense.

Is the Pentagon really calling this test “Potemkin”, or is the commentator in the quote above just evoking the phrase “Potemkin villages”?

French Prosecutor Investigates U.S. Global Listening System. More and more uncomfortable European attention is being turned on the once-secret Echelon system.

Advantage Williams: It’s Venus vs. Serena in Wimbleton semi-final match. I’m not a big tennis fan, but this is too nifty to miss.

Happy Birthday, Louis! WBUR’s Connection talk show host Christopher Lydon had an excellent interview with Wynton Marsalis on Louis Armstrong yesterday to commemorate the “official” hundredth anniversary of his birth. Marsalis gives interesting testimony on Satchmo considering he started out as a disbeliever and, asked to sum up Armstrong’s place in 20th century culture, ends up swearing that even a Picasso’s originality pales in comparison to Armstrong’s. Read polymath Lydon’s pithy essay introducing his subject and click on the link for streaming audio of the entire hour. [Yes,The Connection can be worthwhile even when it’s not devoting an hour to the weblogging phenomenon.. Bill McKibben wrote a telling portrait of this show and its host in The Atlantic Monthly last fall.]

Thanks once more to Jorn Barger for pointing to a thoughtful film critic with sensibility. The New York Press‘ Armond White reflects on the state of the cinema, and cinema audiences, so far in 2000, including the ten best films you’ve never seen. “So where does this leave movie culture right now? Suffering a post-Titanic diminution of intelligence with the likes

of Gladiator, The Patriot and The Perfect Storm–a Hollywood triptych of inanity. These movies are unimportant–no

matter how many itchy teens rush to see them. (Besides, how can Russell Crowe, Mel Gibson and George

Clooney compete with such real-life excitement and satisfaction as the April 22 liberation of Elian Gonzalez from

his Miami kidnappers?) The excellent movies listed above do more than thrill–they supply wonder and clarity. It’s

tragic to realize that most of them have disappeared from theaters, unlikely to be seen again except in the

diminished formats of home viewing. Though other good movies may yet come, so much beauty has already gone.

Hype culture leaves us bereft; knowing so will, hopefully, inspire your own moviegoing perseverance.”

Salon: The corruption of Col. James Hiett. “In two weeks, a retired Army colonel will stand for sentencing before Judge Edward Korman in the Cadman Plaza federal courthouse. The

colonel’s name has never been uttered on the Senate floor. You can rummage in vain for any mention of him in congressional committee testimony and reports.

Yet the case of Col. James Hiett, former commander of U.S. Army anti-drug advisors in Colombia, due to be sentenced in mid-July for covering up his

wife’s drug smuggling, has everything to do with the passage last week of more than $1 billion in military aid to Colombia. Hiett’s case offers dark hints of

what the United States is in for by turning the Colombian drug-war theater into a large-scale American military enterprise — and it reveals, too, some of the

costs of the drug war on America’s own streets.” Visions of being mired in Indochina make me think this is starting to sound like “deja vu all over again.”

Here Comes Comet Linear

Brightest comet in more than three years, Comet Linear is already visible with moderate-power binoculars and is expected to become a faint naked-eye

object similar in appearance to the Andromeda Nebula

as it glides by the Big Dipper this month.

Thank you Maurice Rickard, who also suspected that <a href=”http://world.std.com/~emg/2000_07_01_blog_archive.html # “>the Dalai Lama’s message (below) was a hoax, and pointed me to the scoop at the Urban Legends Reference Pages:

Much as we can’t help but grin at the thought of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin

Gyatso, head of state and spiritual leader of the Tibetan people, pecking away at a computer keyboard

as he sends a chain glurge advising people to “approach love and cooking with reckless abandon”

winging its way around the Internet, we have to admit that this list has nothing to do with the Dalai

Lama.

Neither this chain message nor its “Instructions for Life” originated with His Holiness. The “Instructions

for Life” are a truncated version of a much longer list that worked its way around the Internet in 1999 in

conjunction with an ASCII art representation of a “Nepalese Good Luck Tantra Totem.” (The list was also

sometimes identified as being a “modern Japanese good luck tantra.”)

…The longer list is itself yet another truncation of a larger work, which in this case is Life’s Little Instruction

Book, by Jackson Brown and H. Jackson Brown, Jr. Perhaps the Dalai Lama isn’t concerned with

royalties (in a copyright sense, at least), but we suspect Messrs. Brown are, so finding something other

than a copyright violation to pass around with the goal of improving people’s lives would probably be in

order.

A New Income Source for Geeks. Many of you probably donate your unused CPU cycles to SETI@home or the like. Now, two companies want to buy them from you instead. [Wired]

Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus

An engaging experience in language and interface, the

Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus is an artistic exploration that

is also a learning tool. Through its dynamic interface, the

Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus alters our relationship with

language, creating poetry through user action, dynamic

typography, and design. The experience is rewarding from

both a linguistic and an aesthetic perspective. The Visual

Thesaurus was created using Plumb Design’s Thinkmap™

software.

What cowboys really wore [via Robot Wisdom]

Instructions for life circulating around the net, reputedly from the Dalai Lama, forwarded to me from a reader. What do you think? They almost sound abit too pat, like someone’s caricature of great Buddhist homilies. But maybe that’s just in the translation:

1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve

great risk.

2. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.

3. Follow the three Rs:

Respect for self

Respect for others and

Responsibility for all your actions

4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful

stroke of luck.

5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.

6. Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.

7. When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to

correct it.

8. Spend some time alone every day.

9. Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.

10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.

11. Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and think back,

you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.

12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.

13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current

situation. Don’t bring up the past.

14. Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.

15. Be gentle with the earth.

16. Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.

17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for

each other exceeds your need for each other.

18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.

19. Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.

The New York Observer: The enormous secrecy about the fourth Harry Potter book, as it turns out, was apparently because the book wasn’t even delivered to the publishers until — depending on whom you believe — February or mid-April. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is to be released July 8 at 12:01 a.m. Other tidbits from this article: J. K. Rowling is reputedly the third richest woman in the UK now; and the New York Times, possibly to prevent seeing five of her books in its fiction best-seller list, is starting a separate children’s fiction list.

The Pentagon is turning to unmanned aerial vehicles as bomb-delivery platforms. These would contravene the 1988 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty but, no problem, it wouldn’t be the first pillar of arms control the current administration is trying to topple.

Beyond the Grave. “Mummification, it

seems, is making a comeback, and for a stiff fee, an

American company will take your beloved pet or family

member and preserve them for posterity…These 21st century interments are a little more hi-tech

than the old ‘hook-up-the-nose’ Egyptian rituals, but the

end result is still a work of art. However, for those involved in the preservation, there’s

no lack of spirituality to their work. The mummification services are provided by

Summum, a Salt Lake City religious group led by the delightfully-named Corky Ra.

Somewhat akin to the ancients, Ra and his adherents feel that preserving a body helps

the soul of its owner to find reference in the afterlife.”

Tibetans in U.S. Rally Against World Bank China Loan. This is not just any loan to China. Its purpose is to fund resettlement of 60,000 non-Tibetans to Tibet to facilitate its assimilation by breaking the back of its ethnic identity and culture. Genocide without murder? This has been going on since the Chinese occupation of Tibet began with the 1951 invasion, but the loan will fund an amplification of the scale of the process. The World Bank’s own independent review department was critical of the Bank’s granting the loan, in violation of the organization’s own social/environmental impact rules.

Chip That Would Restore Sight Implanted in People. Silicon microchip replacement retinas implanted in three patients who have lost their vision from retinitis pigmentosa. Too soon to tell if vision will be restored, but can you imagine how impressive an advance it would be if so?

New HIV Infections Soar in San Francisco. Public health officials said new infections in SF doubled last year. They attribute the disturbing reversal to the fact that the success of the past decade’s prevention and treatment efforts has inspired complacency about risk and a resurgence of high-risk activity. Trends in the SF gay community are considered harbingers of nationwide direction in AIDS infection.

Tibetans in U.S. Rally Against World Bank China Loan. This is not just any loan to China. Its purpose is to fund resettlement of 60,000 non-Tibetans to Tibet to facilitate its assimilation by breaking the back of its ethnic identity and culture. Genocide without murder? This has been going on since the Chinese occupation of Tibet began with the 1951 invasion, but the loan will fund an amplification of the scale of the process. The World Bank’s own independent review department was critical of the Bank’s granting the loan, in violation of the organization’s own social/environmental impact rules.

The Village Voice: Piss, Puke, and Prizes. “If you thought the TV networks were getting brash with so-called reality-based programming like Survivor, get set for a

wave of shock sites on the Internet, produced by young entrepreneurs looking to profit off America’s thirst for sordid

spectacle.”

Miranda‘s not the real problem: This National Review commentator essentially says that upholding Miranda was no sweat off conservative Supreme Court Justices’ backs, because “… the police have learned to work with — and

to work around — Miranda. Delivering the Miranda warnings

is, these days, little practical impediment to procuring

confessions….As anyone who watches television police shows knows, people

who have been arrested have a right to remain silent and a right

to counsel; the Miranda warnings are meant to make sure that

they know about those rights. Since almost everybody watches

television — and since everyone who is arrested gets the

Miranda warnings — why do so many people confess

anyway?

Here’s why: Miranda warnings are often delivered

ritualistically, and in a perfunctory tone of voice — thus making

them appear bureaucratic and trivial. After hearing the Miranda

warning delivered in a perfunctory voice, many suspects opt to

talk to the police, in the foolish belief that they can convince the

police of their innocence.”

BBC: Robo-man wows Japanese. Honda unveils what it describes as the

highest-performing bipedal robot in the world. “With the ability to judge the ground conditions

in human environments, the robot is capable of

walking on two legs and can also perform

simple tasks with its two hands.”

Discovery.com: Mayan Stone

Tablet Depicts

Horror. A previously-unnoticed limestone panel just discovered shows that the late Maya began to experiment with depicting emotion in their stone carvings. Two horrified captives brought before the king are shown clutching themselves in terror, probably contemplating their imminent sacrifice.

Drink more wine! Study seems to show why French suffer less heart disease, cancer.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill scientists have discovered why a compound found in grapes and grape

products such as red wine shows natural cancer-fighting properties that might be important in preventing or treating the illness.

The work appears to explain the so-called “French paradox” — the fact that French people experience lower rates of heart disease

death and certain cancers despite drinking more wine on average than U.S. residents do.

Scientists found that the substance, trans-Resveratrol, or Res, modulates the activity of NF-kappa B, a protein that attaches to DNA

inside cell nuclei and turns genes on and off like a switch, the scientists found. Res apparently helps turn off a natural protective

mechanism in the body involving the protein that prevents cancer cells from being killed, as they should be.

R.I.P., Walter Matthau. Take a look at his filmography. When everyone mentions The Odd Couple, Grumpy Old Men and The Sunshine Boys, don’t forget his work in the early ’60’s in such films as Lonely Are the Brave, Charade, Mirage and Failsafe.

MSNBC: Will snazzy new jet fly high?

It weighs less than a German shepherd,

could fit in a baby’s crib, is quieter from a

distance than a blender and can propel six

passengers through high-altitude air at a 423-mph

clip: The new FJX-2 jet engine is so unlike

anything flying today that airplane executive Vern

Rayburn calls it “disruptive technology,” akin to

the culture-changing impact of the personal

computer he helped bring to market.

100 Countries Approve War Tribunal. The U.S. is struggling with over a hundred other countries over wording that would make Americans subject to arrest in foreign countries for war crimes even if the U.S. has not ratified the treaty. The U.S. government claims that would make our citizens and troops subject to “politically motivated” prosecution. It seems to me that full participation in the treaty process, rather than whining and seeking special treatment from an indefensible position of moral superiority, would be the only way to ensure a morally and legally robust tribunal system.

French Rally Around Unlikely National Hero. Charismatic anti-globalist sheep farmer on trial for trashing a MacDonald’s.

Mr. Bové was a little-known farmer and union official until

last August, when he and the nine other men took a tractor,

pick axes and power saws to the local McDonald’s. Mr. Bové

said at the time that he was incensed by what he saw as the

unfairness of the United States to tax French delicacies like

Roquefort cheese and paté de foie gras in retaliation for

Europe’s decision not to import hormone-treated American

beef.

[New York Times] (Mr Bove was reportedly at the recent WTO protests carrying around a wheel of Roquefort to feed demonstrators.)

Flight Tests by Iraq Show Progress of Missile Program. “Eighteen months after

American and British warplanes

badly damaged its missile factories,

Iraq has restarted its missile program

and flight-tested a short-range

ballistic missile, Clinton

administration and American military

officials said this week.” [New York Times]

Failed Dot-Coms May Be Selling Your Private Information. “Some failed

dot-coms are releasing information

their customers may have thought would

remain under lock and key as they scramble

to sell assets to appease creditors.” [New York Times]

“You can’t spoil a system that’s spoiled to the core,” says Ralph Nader, on the suggestion that he might be a spoiler in the presidential race.

Storm Debut Sobering For Town. Gloucester, MA girds itself to relive the traumatizing loss of the Andrea Gail as the film opens.

US Gays Tie Historic Knot in Midnight ‘Marriage’, as the Vermont civil union law takes effect. “Twenty-seven and a half years, that’s a long engagement.

It’s nice after all this time to say Holly’s my spouse”, said Lois Farnham. Meanwhile, the Presbyterians have voted to prohibit their ministers from celebrating same-sex marital vows even in jurisdictions where legal.

Fashion Craze Deprives Planes of Seatbelts.

A new fashion craze is threatening air safety in Norway — teenagers are stealing seatbelts to keep up their baggy

trousers.

Barbie Gets Rival in Presidential Doll Race

Perot Won’t Run for President

Japan Suicide Rate Clings Near Record High. The tortured Japanese society has twice the per capita suicide rate of the U.S. and illustrates the close relationship suicide has with social and economic turmoil, first systematically characterized by French sociologist Durkheim a century ago.

New Scientist: Major havoc ahead. Road traffic will regularly grind to a halt and train services will increasingly be disrupted as a result of global

warming, a scientist at Britain’s Meteorological Office said last week.

Stephen Hawking’s Universe: Strange Stuff Explained. Concise elegant refrresher course on the concepts with which Hawking challenged us in A Brief History of Time. Partial contents:

Antimatter,

The Big Bang,

Black Holes,

Cosmic Background Radiation,

Dark Matter,

Imaginary Time,

Quarks,

Quasars,

Singularity,

Superstrings,

The Uncertainty Principle, Wormholes, etc. And, for more, the current issue of Discover has a primer on the efforts to study anisotropy in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, currently considered our best approach to unravelling ultimate cosmological mysteries.

Salon: Don’t tweak the geeks! “Hacker historian Eric Raymond critiques Kakutani’s “wrongheaded New York Times assault on digital culture”, and gets some licks in for Paulina Borsook’s Cyberselfish as well.

…Kakutani and Borsook’s failure to notice the native

generosity and sustained cooperation typical of hackers and

geeks makes the predictable slam at libertarianism and Ayn

Rand that follows unintentionally humorous. Borsook and

Kakutani are correct in describing the “cyberculture” (not a

term hackers would use) as implicitly libertarian. Where

they go wrong is in their presumption that this means my

peers desire to kill and eat the weak. The truth is, we don’t

build our networks to abolish ordinary people — we do it to

empower them.

New Scientist: “Just a normal town…

out of nowhere a wave of chaos was to wash over

that world. In a millisecond it was gone. There were no

phones, no computers, no power, nothing. Yet nobody

had died, no buildings razed to the ground. And then the

blind panic set in.” EMP weapons may already be part of some nations’ arsenals.

CNN.com: No prescription for the Pill? The FDA considers allowing over-the-counter sale of the pill. The price would be right, and on the surface of it, it would be an extension of a woman’s discretion over her own body. But I think this is a very very bad idea. It comes down to the amount of irrationality, eccentricity and bad judgment there is around so many matters related to sexuality and sex. Because of the possible complications of hormonal treatment, skipping gynecological checkups (as unpleasant as the exams can be) would be tempting but potentially disastrous. Then there’s taking the pill continuously to suppress the inconvenience or discomfort of menstruation, which can be quite medically dangerous if unsupervised. And the problems with potential overdoses (for example, in an ill-advised attempt to induce an abortion). And the considerable potential for adverse interactions with other prescription medications, which no lay person can be expected to recognize or track. By all means, women should learn as much as they can about the incredibly complicated reproductive cycle and its hormonal manipulation, but by all means allow an MD who is qualified to do so and committed to “first doing no harm” be an expert consultant.

Can you really trust the pharmaceutical companies who manufacture and distribute oral contraceptives to give you reliable and complete information in an unregulated market, when the only protective considerations toward their “customers” they have are around product liability costs? Take a look at some of the direct-to-consumer ads for other medications and tell me if they appear to be thoughtful comprehensive attempts to make you an informed careful consumer, or if they’re just trying to sell you something while making the most perfunctory of nods in the direction of product safety, usually in rapidly-scrolling small print. Don’t you bet the industry is just salivating at the potential expansion of this market, and that they will trot out any number of physicians in their pockets to talk about how medically safe this will be?

Other drugs being considered for release from prescribing requirements include antihypertensives, oral diabetic agents, and anti-cholesterol medicines. I’m ambivalent about some of these as well, especially the antihypertensives.

Addendum: an article that develops a more comprehensive critique of the medical advertising phenomenon. “If direct-to-consumer advertising empowers anyone, it’s drug companies.” This comes from a thought-provoking anti-consumerist webzine I was just pointed to, Stay Free.

Responding to Hate Groups: Ten Points to Remember, from the Center for Democratic Renewal.

The excellent weblog Romenesko’s Obscure Store and Reading Room is too subversive for some people’s tastes, apparently. If you’ve been blocked from accessing his site from your workplace, you may not have seen this yet. So, as a public service:

ACCESS DENIED?: Several Obscure Store visitors report that their companies

— AT&T included — now block my site. It seems that obscurestore.com has

been added to some master list of sites to be filtered out. If you need to get

around that, you can also enter Obscure via redwood.he.net/~obscure. Also,

some people say they’re being directed to http://www.he.net when they punch up

obscurestore.com. If a friend or associate reports this, tell them to refresh

their browser to access the site via my new Web hosting service.

Now, finally, there might be some entertainment value in Election 2000. [Salon]

An original Declaration of Independence auctioned off at SOTHEBYS.COM today went for $8.14 million; the opening bid was $4 million. The document had reportedly been found in the backing of a picture bought at a Philadelphia flea market in 1989 for $4 by someone who was interested in the frame.

Gene found for color blindness in Pacific Islanders. I can’t believe that this news report doesn’t even mention that this (achromatopsia) is the subject of Oliver Sacks’ fascinating Island of the Colorblind.

Retailers Hid True Costs of ‘Free’ PCs – FTC You’re all pretty savvy consumers, aren’t you? The FTC says you might not have known what you were really getting yourself into if you bought one of those computer-and-internet deals, because of deceptive advertising.

The Decline and Fall (cont’d.): Wildfire Rages at Wash. State Nuclear Site. Is there a natural uprising against human nuclear hubris this summer? Grassfires now threaten the Hanford Reservation as they did the Los Alamos National Laboratory last month. Radioactive environmental catastrophe looms, some say, if the winds spread the fire the wrong way through this obscene, contaminated dumping ground. Plutonium could be dispersed in smoke and ash, and radioactive ground denuded of vegetation by the fires could be washed into the Rio Grande by seasonal rains. Public health officials have demonstrated over and over again that they minimize risks to prevent public panic; “serves-you-right” doomsayers (like me) always spin worst-case-scenarios to wag our fingers more dramatically. I’d love to hear some credible, objective environmental scientist’s estimation of the degree and impact of such risks.

Pollution Eats Into Russian Exports of Caviar. What is the story on why the reduction is so drastic? This news item says that pollution of the Caspian Sea attributable to oil exploration and industry, as well as a contribution from increased illegal poaching, has cut caviar harvests by 2/3 in just one year.

Technology may finally enter the land mine-disposal fray.

Pressure Increases to End Nuclear Reprocessing. 90% of radioactive pollution of the northeast Atlantic comes from the Sellafield (UK) and La Hague (France) reprocessing plants for spent nuclear fuel. Now, but for the abstention of Luxembourg, the other countries with northeast Atlantic concerns are unanimously urging a move to dry storage of spent nuclear fuel instead of reprocessing. No comment from the UK or France yet. In the early ’90’s, this watchdog group was successful in pushing through a ban on direct sea dumping of nuclear wastes, which had been rampant up to that point. The UK and France, which initially opposed that earlier ban, joined in within a year. Recall that Sellafield’s viability is already questioned on fiscal grounds, far more persuasive than environmental concerns are to the nuclear industry. Also recall that Germany recently became the first industrialized state to resolve to totally decommission its nuclear power-generating capacity.

Forget me not. Neuroscientists are pushing the envelope, even if the work remains reductionistic and inferential for now, of understanding the biological basis of social affiliation. Recall the posts below on mirror neurons in primates, and autistic subjects’ failure to use facial recognition circuitry in the brain in interpersonal perception. Now this elucidation of the role of oxytocin in shaping relationships, at least in rodents…

Do they really still think, no matter how glaring or grotesque, that New Tobacco Labels actually deter smokers? It’s not as if any of the health warnings will be news to anyone, or that being better informed is the key to beating one’s compulsion.

Relatively Few Watch Penile Implant Webcast. The penile pump is the highest-rated solution for serious male erectile dysfunction; an implantation was webcast to increase public understanding of the technique, but only a few thousand, orders of magnitude less than those who have “tuned in” to other surgical procedure webcasts, watched. Might penile surgery be too unbearable for male viewers in particular?

The venue is different, but the white man is still not letting any savages stand in the way of his land grab.

Canada Researchers Make Major Anti-Cancer Discovery. Many common cancers are destroyed by being injected with vesicular stomatitis virus, not infectious to humans. Tumors affected include melanomas, leukemia, lung, breast and prostate cancers. Human patients have not yet been exposed to the massive doses of VSV that therapeutic application of this discovery would involve.

The mortuaries in Lagos, Nigeria are filling up due to a strike of government workers, and Authorities Have Ordered a Mass Burial of over 600 unclaimed corpses.

Supreme Court Strikes Down Anti-Abortion Law. The Nebraska law banning “partial birth abortion” (a heinous propagandistic term for the medical procedure flogged by its opponents) is unconstitutional. You never know with this Court, but you do know where some of its justices sit. The usual Gang of Three — Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas — were joined in dissenting by Kennedy.

In a 6-3 vote, the Court also upheld the states’ rights to protect those going into or out of medical facilities from anti-abortion protesters. Kennedy wrote the opinion, and Kennedy and Scalia wrote dissents.

Regrettably, a 5-4 vote upheld the right of the Boy Scouts to exclude gays, overturning a decision by the New Jersey Supreme Court in the case of a Scout leader dismissed once known to be gay. Rehnquist wrote for the majority. Let’s see how the Boy Scouts fare now as an openly anti-gay institution.

Thank Goodness, It Appears Finally to be Over

Jon Carroll, a San Francisco Chronicle columnist, ponders Mondegreens.

Duh: Reasons to Live Help Prevent Suicide During Depression, says new psychiatric research. However, as a psychiatrist treating suicidal patients every day, I largely disagree with the article’s inference that treatment of a suicidally depressed patient be directed toward instilling hope. You can rarely persuade a hopeless patient that they should not be hopeless. If they were susceptible to that kind of reasoning, they wouldn’t be as desperately depressed,would they? And, more important, if you contradict their hopelessness, you’ve usually just made them feel you don’t take their complaints seriously and you’ve blown your alliance with them. One of my mentors once said that treating the suicidal means, first and foremost, paradoxically empathizing with the desireability of death.

I knew they couldn’t pull off the (derivative) public fiberglass animal art in NYC as they did in Chicago. Holland, Mich. is having difficulties too. And Toronto as well.

Steven Baum’s feeling abit peevish about some of the attributes of the weblogs he’s finding. I agree. [Ethel the Blog]