Have you been wondering who’s driving those new PT Cruisers and VW Beetles? [US News & World Reports]
“To put your head in the sand as a governor, to my mind, that’s dereliction of duty.” A Virginia activist has filed suit to compel Gov. James Gilmore to acknowledge clandestine UFO landings and alien abductions, and to repel the space invaders with all available force.
Salon: Slaves of a different color. “In writing a book on the mixing of black
and white life throughout American history, I discovered
that white slavery did occur before the Civil War in small
but significant numbers. And in unearthing this fascinating
lost chapter in American history, I also discovered how
slavery has been partitioned into a piece of
African-American cultural property — made sacred by black
Americans, abandoned by whites. Petrified by politics and
shame, the richest and most central drama of early American
history is now playing to segregated houses.”
Good news: [Chuck Taggart at Looka! chose to cluster these three news items together and I’m taking his lead.] First, in the Louisiana case, the Supreme Court ruled that schools can’t be required to include a disclaimer mentioning creationism whenever they teach evolution. Dissenting were (of course) Rehnquist, Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Next, in the Texas case, with George Dubya weighing in on the other side, the Court ruled that school districts allowing student-led prayer are violating the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state. Supporters of school prayer were hoping to be allowed to continue using student pawns to attempt to circumvent government-religion separation. Dissenting? Rehnquist, Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Lastly, Bob Lucente, the NYPD officer who had called Bruce Springsteen a “fucking dirtbag” and a “floating fag,” found that his apology to those he had offended was not enough, and he handed in his badge. Law enforcement officers around the city have protestedSpringsteen’s new song “American Skin”,
which they perceive as critical of police actions in the 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo, the West African
immigrant who was shot and killed during a confrontation with police.
Flesh or Fiction? Special effects capabilities in modern film have reached the point where it’s becoming more and more difficult to suspend disbelief…and it’s only going to get worse. [Hartford Courant]
Disney snubbed Churchill’s plea for comic relief.
Winston Churchill’s wartime government secretly urged Walt
Disney to make an anti-Nazi cartoon based on the legend of St
George and the Dragon.Documents discovered by The Telegraph disclose that ministers
desperately wanted a popular film to be made with a strong
pro-British message which would appeal to a large audience in
an isolationist America.The papers, dated 1940, show that Noël Coward, the playwright
and actor, and officials from the Ministry of Information went to
America to try to persuade Disney to help with Britain’s
propaganda campaign. Their requests, however, were ignored
by Disney who was determined to keep America out of the war
and was anxious to protect the international market for his films.There is also speculation that he may have snubbed Britain
because he was unhappy with the way his films had been
received by the London critics. He is known to have been
particularly hurt by a suggestion by some censors that Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs was too dark a film for children and
should not be shown in cinemas.This lack of respect for his efforts was in contrast to the critical
acclaim his films received elsewhere, particularly in Germany
where even Hitler was a fan.
Moyers Challenges PBS on Public Affairs Coverage.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he told attendees of the PBS annual meeting in his keynote address. “What we do is good. It’s just not enough. We need to
respond more to the needs of America as a democratic society, not just a
consumer market. We need more hard-hitting public affairs programming on
controversial issues. We’re good, but we’re bland,” he said, adding that too
often, producers and stations are fearful of offending Congress or driving off
the corporate underwriters who sponsor shows.
Moreover, said Moyers, “With media ownership consolidating, public
television stands alone in our ability to provide independent journalism free
from corporate strings.”
Consumers of classical recordings locked in cutthroat competition. “Classical-recording consumers are becoming the new counterculture.” [Philadelphia Inquirer]
Brill’s Content: Southern Exposure “The Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion-Ledger is prying open
murder cases from the ugliest days of the civil-rights era. In
the process, it has come to terms with its own role in fueling
the racism of the South.”
Satellite Events Art from the “perfect storm” 0f October 30, 1991, portrayed in the eponymous book (and forthcoming film), from The National Climatic Data Center of NOAA.
A new alternative to fans and heatsinks for cooling off your overheating CPU. It seems to have problems of its own, however. Anyone have experience with these?
How to handle telemarketers. Some of these, forwarded by a reader, seem promising:
1. If they want to loan you money, tell them you just filed for
bankruptcy and you could sure use some money.2. If they start out with, “How are you today?” say, “Why do you
want to know?” Alternately, you can tell them, “I’m so glad you
asked, because no one these days seems to care, and I have all
these problems; my arthritis is acting up, my eyelashes are sore,
my car won’t start…” When they try to get to the sell, just
keep talking about your problems.3. If they say they’re John Doe from XYZ Company, ask them to
spell their name. Then ask them to spell the company name. Then
ask them where it is located. Continue asking them personal
questions or questions about their company for as long as
necessary.4. This works great if you are male: Telemarketer: “Hi, my name
is Judy and I’m with XYZ Company…” You: (Wait for a second)
With a real husky voice ask, “What are you wearing?”5. Cry out in surprise, “Judy! Is that you? Oh my God! Judy,
how have you been?” Hopefully, this will give Judy a few brief
moments of terror as she tries to figure out where she could know
you from.6. Say “No”, over and over. Be sure to vary the sound of each
one, and keep a rhythmic tempo, even as they are trying to speak.
This is most fun if you can do it until they hang up.7. If MCI calls trying to get you to sign up for the Family and
Friends Plan, reply, in as SINISTER a voice as you can, “I don’t
have any friends…would YOU be my friend?”8. If the company cleans rugs, respond: “Can you get blood out?
Can you get out GOAT blood? How about HUMAN blood?”9. Ask him/her to marry you. When they get all flustered, tell
them that you could not just give your credit card number to a
complete stranger.10. Tell the telemarketer that you work for the same company,
they often can’t sell to their fellow employees.11. Answer the phone. As soon as you realize it is a
telemarketer, set the receiver down, shout or scream “Oh my
God!!!” and then hang-up.12. Tell the telemarketer you are busy at the moment and ask them
if they will give you their HOME phone number, you will call them
back. When the telemarketer explains that they cannot give out
their HOME number, you say “I guess you don’t want anyone
bothering you at home, right?” The telemarketer will agree and
you say, “Now you know how I feel!” Hang up.13. Ask them to repeat everything they say, several times.
14. Tell them it is dinner time, BUT ask if they would please
hold. Put them on your speaker phone while you continue to eat at
your leisure. Smack your food loudly and continue with your
dinner conversation.15. Tell the telemarketer you are on “home incarceration” and ask
if they could bring you some beer.16. Tell the telemarketer, “Okay, I will listen to you. But I
should probably tell you, I’m not wearing any clothes.”17. Insist that the caller is really your buddy Leon, playing a
joke. “Come on Leon, cut it out! Seriously, Leon, how’s your
momma?”18. Tell them you are hard of hearing and that they need to
speakup… louder… louder… louder…19. Tell them to talk VERY SLOWLY, because you want to write
DOWN EVERY WORD
There’s a crop of interesting articles in this week’s Science Times I’ve just gotten to:
Health Sleuths Assess Homocysteine as Culprit. Elevated homocysteine levels are a new focus of concern as a cause of heart attack and other maladies. B-vitamin supplements are the major way of lowering it, as well as reducing stress.
Two Stars Collide; a New Star Is Born. 
Scientists at the first symposium on interstellar collisions report on detecting the aftemath of two- and even three-star collisions.
Mr. Mom Dies; 2 Hatchlings Live. Had been set to become the first weedy sea dragon to give birth in captivity.
Genetic Analysis Yields Intimations of a Primordial Commune: “Everything about the
origin of life on earth is a
mystery, and it seems the
more that is known, the
more acute the puzzles
get…The best efforts of chemists to
reconstruct molecules typical of life in the laboratory have
shown only that it is a problem of fiendish difficulty. The
genesis of life on earth, some time in the fiery last days of
the Hadean, remains an unyielding problem.”
Will the Web Make Us Better Patients? Two doctors discuss the problems and promise of patients’ coming for medical care armed with information from the ‘net. [Slate]
The relativistic heavy-ion collider has begun working and we’re still here. This newest and biggest particle accelerator in the world has been aiming gold ions at each other. The thought is that the quarks and gluons that make up the protons and neutrons in the gold nuclei will be freed for a fleeting moment to exist in a plasma simulating the conditions in the universe in the first millionths of a second after the Big Bang. The problem is that some credible critics feared that this might create a mini-black hole that would suck up all surrounding matter, perhaps destroying the earth. Others felt a new form of matter made up of strange quarks might begin converting all the other matter nearby to its type, sort of like Vonnegut’s Ice-9. Some physicists feared that such an energetic collision might even cause a decay in the fabric of empty space itself which would propagate outward at the speed of light until it changed the entire universe. Brookhaven National Laboratory actually convened a committee to consider such speculative disaster scenarios, which concluded that “…the candidate mechanisms for catastrophic
scenarios at RHIC are firmly excluded by existing empirical evidence, compelling theoretical arguments, or both. Accordingly, we see no reason
to delay the commissioning of RHIC on their account.” Many people have been reminded of the concerns in 1945 that the first fission bomb explosion might set the whole atmosphere on fire. Put yourself in the head of the scientist at the moment her/his finger is poised on the final button to initiate any of these experiments…
The Science of Sex. It makes good evolutionary sense that we find more symmetric faces more appealing. [Nerve]
“In 1916, as the
American daily
newspaper hit its
media peak, a
philosophical
cockroach
named archy
transmigrated
onto the pages of
the New York
Sun. Today, as
the Web hits its
own media peak,
archy’s cousin,
bernie, has
e-mailed his way
into
eXaminer.com”: bernie – the world’s first
cockroach in
cyberspace.
The Science of Sex. It makes good evolutionary sense that we find more symmetric faces more appealing. [Nerve]
Navy sonar may have killed whales in Bahamas. [AP via Robot Wisdom]
Dumb and Dumber. To judge from the new crop of men’s magazines, it’s getting harder and harder to be a man’s body even vaguely connected to a brain. Dreck sells, says Andrew Sullivan in The New Republic.
Author George Saunders defends like. ‘There’s an Orwell essay that I love, called “Politics
and the English Language,” in which he says that
language is inherently political. So something like
“like” is a sort of indicator of a larger societal
dysfunction. What “like” does is allow you to join
two thoughts that are grammatically distinct but
associatively linked, without having to go to great
lengths to make the connection. It’s kind of an
impressionistic device. You can say, “The truck was
going so fast, like, I just went, like: Slow down,
jerk?” I’m sure we stumbled across that sort of
device because we needed it. It’s meaningful.’ [Atlantic]
Public Citizen: did you think the high price of gasoline at the pump was just higher costs being passed on to the consumer??
A plea to let corporations accelerate efforts to buy the rights to attach their names to public edifices and institutions.
One third of Eritreans face humanitarian crisis – UN. “I believe nobody is entirely ready to deal with this scale of disaster, which has grew dramatically in the last 30 to 45 days,” says Carol Bellamy, head of the UN’s children’s agency.
Navy sends agents into gay bars. Washington Post: “Navy investigators are routinely
sending informants and undercover agents into
Washington area gay bars to identify military
personnel among the clients, and then using
sting operations to catch some of them in drug
trafficking, according to Navy officials and
testimony in a recent military court proceeding.”
Number of US Nuclear Targets Has Grown Since 1993. Like I said, if you think the arms race is over, think again. [Manchester Guardian via Common Dreams]
Sovereign Bank Coming To Massachusetts. Thirty years ago I opened a bank account at Harvard Trust Co. when I moved to the Boston area. When it conglomerated with other Massachusetts banks, I had a “Bay Bank Harvard Trust” account. Then they dropped the affiliates’ autonomy and it became a “Bay Bank” account. About two or three years ago, the Bank of Boston bought Bay Bank and my new cards and checks said “BankBoston.” Last month, after Fleet bought BankBoston, they gave me Fleet accounts and cards. And now it appears that, to avoid anti-trust implications, they’re forcing me to become a Sovereign Bank customer. All this without lifting a finger in thirty years.
The sniffing detective. The effort to develop an “electronic nose” that could hone in on the time of death of a decomposing body (by analyzing the chemicals it produces over time) includes getting a graduate student to spend successive nights in a morgue taking vapor samples near corpses. A forensic entomologist objects, saying his approach — analyzing developmental stage of the insect populations that populate a decomposing body — is more accurate. [New Scientist]
Medical Records Sent To Wrong Place. This is probably so common it shouldn’t even be a news item anymore, unfortunately.
RadioShack to Co-Sponsor Moon Mission. “With a new age of commercial space exploration on the horizon, U.S. electronics
retailer RadioShack Corp. hopes to bolster its image and sales by going to the moon.
RadioShack said on Thursday it will co-sponsor the first commercial lunar landing, a robot probe for ancient
ice… “
Neurosurgeons ‘fear risky surgery’. Patients are losing out as neurosurgeons, faced with burgeoning numbers of lawsuits, curtail chancy practices.
The Decline and Fall (cont’d.): Why didn’t the NYPD stop the Central Park wolf pack? “With Amadou Diallo, the
cops went too far. In
Central Park, not far enough. But guess what? It’s the same
problem.” The author makes a case that the problem is the NYPD’s contempt for the people of the city, leading it to be both tough on suspected ‘perps’ and soft on victims; and that this attitude trickels down from above, ultimately from Giuliani. There’s also the possibility that this is payback for recent protests of police brutality including, of course, the flap over the new Springsteen song “American Skin (41 Shots)”. [Salon] But let’s get more basic — is why the police didn’t stop this even the right question to ask? Giuliani actually tried to softpeddle the events (until the rising tide of public outcry against the police flipped him to a get-tough ‘spin’) by saying that there wasn’t any more violence at this year’s Puerto Rican Day parade than there was last year, and one of his police spokespeople said something along the lines of: what’s the big deal, this happens in New Orleans every year at Mardi Gras? It’s unbelievable to me that we have come to the point of living in the kind of world where bystanders are going to be savaged at a public celebration unless they have police protection.
Software that can spy on you.
“Why did Mattel include technology that can encrypt and send data to and from your PC in its children’s CD-ROMs?” [Salon, via Robot Wisdom]
Complete list: “100 Funniest Films” as chosen by a panel of 1,800 people in the
industry for the American Film Institute. Here are the top ten:
1. “Some Like It Hot,” 1959
2. “Tootsie,” 1982
3. “Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love
the Bomb,” 19644. “Annie Hall,” 1977
5. “Duck Soup,” 1933
6. “Blazing Saddles,” 1974
7. “M*A*S*H,” 1970
8. “It Happened One Night,” 1934
9. “The Graduate,” 1967
10. “Airplane!,” 1980
The Y2K MacArthur Fellowship winners announced. Links to biographical sketches of the award winners.
[American Prospect]: Harvey Blume, “Neuro-Narrative,” May 22, 2000. I thought it was only because of my own involvement with neuroscience that I’ve been noticing fiction pivoting around characters with such conditions as Tourette’s disorder, autism, and temporal lobe epilepsy. But this essayist argues that, reflective of an emerging new worldview, “neurology and neuroscience have in recent years become major forces in American arts and media, charting new narrative pathways. If noted at all, this development
has been written off as only another example of our
culture’s hunger for varieties of victimhood.”
Review of Daniel Pick’s Svengali’s Web: the alien enchanter in modern culture:
The intricate complicity between symptoms and cures – and
between what people are considered to be suffering from and
what they claim to be suffering from – has made the history of
medicine, in its broadest sense, of so much recent interest. Part
of the fascination (so to speak) of mesmerism and hypnosis –
and of the history that is so well told in Svengali’s Web – is that,
as potential cures for a wide range of miseries, they were so
quickly seen to be at once remarkable breakthroughs, and
disreputable, if not criminal activities.
The reviewer wonders what it is about psychoanalysis that keeps it from being another form of hypnosis, if indeed it is not; and whether hypnosis shows that seducing and being seduced are the only things we are truly free to do, “making a mockery of our ideas of freedom.”
The impossible world of DI John Rebus. A London Review of Books essay surveys Ian Rankin’s appealing, encyclopedic series of crime novels featuring a gritty Scottish detective.
The sheer
range of subjects treated in the novels is one of the keys to their
interest. John Rebus, born in irritation at the self-ghettoising of
the literary novel, grew into a highly effective tool for describing
and engaging with modern Scotland. Rankin does not indulge
any temptation to play formal games with his character. There is
no ludic or ironic component to the series, just as there is none
to Rebus himself; the books do not experiment with the
crime-novel form, and do not make any kind of distancing or
Post-Modern gestures towards it. A writer who began by trying
to write a book his father might want to read found himself, after
the publication of Dead Souls, occupying eight of the top ten
positions in the Scottish bestseller list.
Memorable journalistic bloopers submitted by readers to Jim Romenesko’s Media News.
Two-faced kitten dies unexpectedly in Pennsylvania. “Image, the…kitten that received
a good prognosis for survival even though he
was born with two sets of eyes, two mouths
and two noses, died yesterday morning in his
quilt-lined bed…Aside from his
facial features, the rest of the kitten seemed
normal. The two mouths opened in unison but
were attached to one esophagus. Image has one
head, two ears and one set of lungs.” 
The kitten was too young for its four eyes to have yet opened, rendering moot the fascinating question of how it would have seen the world.
Flawed process leads to executions in Texas despite Bush’s vows of confidence in the system. The Chicago Tribune conducted the first comprehensive investigation of all 131 executions in Texas under Bush’s tenure and concludes that scandalous flaws undermine the process of capital convictions there. As a psychiatrist, I’m particularly appalled by the abuse of psychiatric expert testimony:
In at least 29 cases, the prosecution presented
damaging testimony from a psychiatrist who,
based upon a hypothetical question describing
the defendant’s past, predicted the defendant
would commit future violence. In most of
these cases, the psychiatrist offered this
opinion without ever examining the
defendant. Although this kind of testimony is
sometimes used in other states, the American
Psychiatric Association has condemned it as
unethical and untrustworthy.
Other failings included representation in one-third of the cases by an attorney later disbarred, suspended or otherwise sanctioned; and the frequent use of jailhouse informants (“a form of testimony so unreliable
that some states warn jurors to view it with
skepticism. The prevalent use of jailhouse
informants in capital cases was one of the
central problems Gov. George Ryan cited when
he declared the moratorium in Illinois”). Witnesses, experts and lawyers on whose contributions capital convictions have turned have included
a forensic scientist who was
temporarily released from a psychiatric ward
to provide incriminating testimony in a capital
case; a pathologist who has admitted faking
autopsies; a psychiatrist, nicknamed “Dr.
Death,” who was expelled from the American
Psychiatric Association; a judge on the state’s
highest criminal court who has been
reprimanded for lying about his background;
and a defense attorney infamous for sleeping
during trials.
This all ought to be disturbing regardless of whether one supports the death penalty or not in the abstract. Let’s elect George W. to the presidency just to get him out of the role of signing death warrants in Texas, for God’s sake!
New heights of intrusiveness from the Census Bureau.
“I work for the federal government and I’ll do what I have to do to do my job,” says arrested census worker.
Controlled infection “A live HIV vaccine that can’t infect the people it’s supposed to protect may be possible after all. A team based in
California has created a hybrid of HIV and another virus that can enter cells, but can’t replicate once it’s there. ” Not really a vaccine as much as immunotherapy for those already HIV-infected; introduced to the patient through an arduous process, to prime the patient’s cell-mediated immune response. [New Scientist]
Taste for flesh troubled Neanderthals. The Neanderthals were dedicated carnivores; was this related to their demise? [BBC]
Seattle’s Purple Haze. Frank Gehry (who prefers Haydn) meets Jimi Hendrix. [Newsweek.com]
Behind Enemy Lines – Premier Services Exposed. Hacking into a spammer’s computer. [via Phil Agre’s Red Rock Eaters News Service]
Secret Nuclear Weapons Data Missing From Los Alamos Lab. As if it weren’t already bad enough, hard drives containing sensitive data had disappeared from inside locked containers which were inside a locked vault when officials went to check for them after the lab had been evacuated in the brush fires last week.
The material, stored in the vault of
the laboratory’s X Division, where
nuclear weapons are designed,
contained what officials described
as nuclear weapons data used by the
government’s Nuclear Emergency
Search Team, or NEST, which
responds to nuclear accidents and
nuclear-related threats from
terrorists. The material includes all
the data on American nuclear
weapons that the team needs to
render nuclear devices safe in
emergencies.In addition, the missing material
included intelligence information concerning the Russian
nuclear weapons program, law enforcement officials said.
The article contains many links to older stories in the continuing saga of security leaks from the U.S. Nuclear Lab.[New York Times]
Radio-Frequency Tags Could Pierce Some of the Fog of War. Other applications for transponders of the sort I use to whiz through a toll booth without stopping are being pioneered by the military.
Call me old-fashioned, but: I hadn’t realized that there’s already, apparently, a brisk trade in digitized pirated hit films on the web. [Washington Post]
Screams haunt town. Bloodcurdling cries in a wooded area of a Quebec town prompt large scale search. Rescuers continue to hear the screams, increasing their urgency to find the source, but the cries fall silent by dawn and the searchers turn up nothing. Eventually written off as coyotes, but residents see they’ve never seen any around…
The first chapter of British philosopher Colin McGinn’s Mysterious Flame, which argues that not only do we not presently understand how consciousness arises out of the physical brain in which it is rooted, but that the intellect we have is ill-equipped to ever understand this essential mystery.
…the bond between the mind and the brain is a deep mystery. Moreover, it is an ultimate
mystery, a mystery that human intelligence will never unravel. Consciousness indubitably exists, and it is connected
to the brain in some intelligible way, but the nature of this connection necessarily eludes us. The full import of this
thesis will take some time to unfold. I am especially concerned to examine the reasons for this mystery. I am not
just throwing my hands up in despair; I am interested in uncovering the deep reasons for our bafflement and
examining the consequences of our constitutional ignorance. Socrates was concerned to show people that they
know less than they think they do. I too am concerned with the nature and source of human not-knowing; I want to
know why some things are so hard to know. What is it about consciousness that makes it so elusive to theoretical
understanding? And what is it about the knowing mind that makes it founder here?
Slate: The End of Mystery – The encroachment of science on fantasy’s last redoubts. Charles Paul Freund takes the occasion of the Church’s revealing the Third Mystery of Fatima to say that science is taking all the mystery out of life:
Comes science with its DNA and its bioarchaeology,
its mummy CAT scans, its satellite imaging, its sonar, its
computer analysis, and soon lost cities are found, dead
royalty turns out really to be dead, pretenders to be but
pretenders. The past must then reveal itself in fantasy’s
ashes.
But I say pity anyone whose mystery is so petty that it can be cast aside by the results of DNA analysis and the the like! There’s still plenty to truly, unassailably enchant us.
Not Your Average Bear. Reinhold Messner, first to climb Mt Everest solo (and without oxygen) claims to have solved the yeti mystery, determining it to be a species of bear, in a frustratingly colorless book that never explains why no one else pondering the mysteries of the abominable snowman had ever noticed the similarities before.
Who Gets to Tell a Black Story? The behind-the-scenes racial politics of the fascinating HBO miniseries The Corner, from the book by a white Baltimore reporter who says he’s colorblind, directed by the complicated and mercurial Charles Dutton, one angry African-American man who himself comes from these very corners, has been there, done that. An unflinching look at ghetto life and especially the way heroin is interwoven through its fabric, but would it be too humiliating to blacks to be that real? [New York Times]
Slate: The Myth of Russian Reform by Anne Applebaum
This is why Western newspaper analysis of Russia is so often
wrong or at least misplaced: To date, the writing about Putin’s
Cabinet and entourage has generally focused on how
well-known a given Putin appointee or adviser is in the
West—and therefore how “reformist” he is likely to be.
Russian analysts, on the other hand, focus on which particular
business clan supports the man in question (they are all men)
and whose interests he is therefore likely to favor. Likewise,
the most important political battle in Russia over the past year,
that between the interests grouped around Putin and the
interests grouped around Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov and
former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, had nothing to do
with “Left vs. Right” or “Reform vs. Nasty,” but is better
characterized by the Leninist phrase “Who Whom?” In that
context, calling one group more or less “democratic” or
“internationalist” or “pro-Western” makes no sense.
Finding New Audiences for Alienation. New York Times status report on the Beckett Film Project, bringing all nineteen of his plays to celluloid with impressive personnel by the end of this year. Can you imagine seeing them all in one sitting??
Texas Lawyer’s Death Row Record a Concern. You don’t have to be legally well-versed to recognize the incompetence of the Texas attorney portrayed here. He believes he’s had more clients sentenced to death than any attorney in the US and the jurisdiction in which he practices has the third-highest number of executions in the country; he boasts that he failed criminal law in law school; he’s been reprimanded multiple times for professional misconduct; it appears he conducts professional business with the smell of alcohol detectable on his breath; and listen to how he handled the defense of Gary Graham, scheduled for execution in Texas on June 22. It is contended that he assumed throughout his defense that his client was guilty. “There’s nothing I could have done that would have changed the result,” he said. Sounds true enough; as his new attorneys handling his appeal point out, this is a textbook case of how poor representation sends poor people to death row throughout the nation.
The Nation‘s Deathrow Rollcall site keeps a running tally of the year’s executions by state, and has a calendar of upcoming executions. You can click on an inmate’s name to send an email to the governor of her/his state requesting a stay of execution for the inmate and a moratorium on executions on the whole. The source of The Nation‘s information is Rick Halperin’s Death Penalty News & Updates.
Mysterious deadly disease surfaces among drug users. Almost sixty cases, in Glasgow, Dublin and English sites, involving local inflammation at the IV injection sites, dropping blood pressure, elevated white blood cell counts, and frequently progressing to heart failure. More than half of affected patients have died, usually within about two days and despite aggressive treatment with antibiotics. Reports last week suggested it might be anthrax, but this has not been borne out. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control, called in by British health officials to help with the investigation, says “the emergence of a new disease is possible…Right now, though, the greatest likelihood is that it is an organism previously known and described and showing itself in a new way.” Multiple organisms are cultured out of blood and tissues of victims, but none so far is a likely culprit. Surveillance in the UK and the US (where no cases have yet been seen) is being tightened. Global dissemination of overwhelming infection is just a plane ride away, as AIDS taught us, but AIDS also taught us that the urgency about a disease depends on the constituency it affects. Press releases from health officials so far are attempting to reassure the public that this disease, whatever it may be, appears intrinsically associated with IV drug use.
CIA, FBI Say Iran Defector Is Impostor –Washington Post. Below, I took note of this man’s claim that Iran had been behind the Lockerbie bombing. CIA says no. This might signal U.S. wishes for a warming of relations with Iran, it would seem, otherwise wouldn’t we let the suggestions stand even if they were misinformation?
Testing the claims for Gingko. The NIH’s fledgling National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine initiates its largest project yet — a prospective study of whether ginkgo biloba extract halts cognitive decline in the aged.
Half fish, half robot. An “artificial animal” using part of the brain of the sea lamprey to control an off-the-shelf mechanical body exhibits complex behavior in response to external stimuli.
Pat Metheny on Kenny G’s musical necrophilia.
since that record came out – in protest, as
insigificant as it may be, i encourage
everyone to boycott kenny g recordings,
concerts and anything he is associated
with. if asked about kenny g, i will diss
him and his music with the same passion
that is in evidence in this little essay.normally, i feel that musicians all have a
hard enough time, regardless of their
level, just trying to play good and don’t
really benefit from public criticism,
particularly from their fellow players. but,
this is different.
Thanks for Nothing A master’s degree candidate is denied his degree for adding a postscript (after his thesis committee signed off on it) telling his institution and advisors what he really thinks of them. He says it’s a free speech issue; they say it’s…well, it’s not.
V.S. Ramachandran: “The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of
monkeys, and their potential relevance to human brain
evolution — which I speculate on in this essay — is the
single most important “unreported” (or at least,
unpublicized) story of the decade. I predict that mirror
neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for
biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help
explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto
remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.” To my read, an intriguing but overreaching theory. Good to see they intend to empirically test some elements. [Edge]
Scientists boost power of morphine. The opioid receptor, site of action of morphine and like analgesics,desensitizes with continuing exposure to opiate drugs. It appears now that scientists have isolated the mechanism of that down-regulation, provoking hopes that they can figure out how to defeat desensitization and produce more sustained opiate effects. In other pain control news, researchers have found a way to make kappa-opioids, a class of painkilling substances thought effective only in women, work in men too, and more effective in both.
Nader Picks Up Speed In New Bid For Election. This time around he’ll be campaigning in all fifty states rather than just “standing still for President” as he did in 1996. The reason he’s fired up, even though he knows he can’t win? If the Green Party gets 5% of the popular vote, it’ll qualify for federal election matching funds for 2004. Sounds like a reason voting Green would not be a waste if you can’t bring yourself to vote Republicratic.
An op-ed piece in the St Louis Post-Dispatch says nothing changes until some forbidden topics get discussed.
We should have such problems: Who’s Spoiled? Forbes columnist’s advice for dealing with the angst of raising children of affluence.
NATO’s shame: our morals are right, everybody else’s are wrong, and international law be damned.
War Hero Sent To Prison For Protesting US Army’s ‘School of Assassins’. Former medal of honor winner given one-year sentence for civil disobedience at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, which trains Latin American military officers. “I consider it an honor to be going to prison as a result of an act of conscience in response
to a moral imperative that impelled and obligated me to speak for voices silenced by
graduates of the School of the Americas, a military institution that has brought shame to
our country and the U.S. Army.”
Man says he doesn’t remember leaving waitress $10,000 tip
“A British man who left a Chicago waitress a $10,000 tip later rejected by his credit card company claims he was drunk and doesn’t remember
leaving the huge amount on a $9 bar tab…But Leg Room owner Fred Hoffmann said (the man) seemed to be thinking clearly at the time, noting that the bar’s manager photocopied his
passport and had him sign a statement agreeing to the tip….The bar’s owners have pledged to give (the waitress) the money themselves because of the publicity generated by the incident.”
BBC: Cannabis found in Palace kitchen “…Furious
Queen has demanded a full search for the
culprit. ” But what were police doing raiding Buckingham Palace??
Foreskin Cells May Assist HIV Transmission. Compelling evidence accumulates that circumcised males are far less likely to contract HIV with HIV-positive sexual contacts.
WebBrain.com. I do like this search interface.
Success of Christian Thriller Reflects Rising Interest in Religious Fiction. “Pre-millennial dispensationalism,” a literal interpretation of the Book of Revelation, drives potboiler fiction. “The books read like artifacts of a time
machine sent to retrieve pulp science fiction — and our
morality — from the 50s,” said one critic.
No, I’m Not Talking to You. The New York Times takes the proliferation of those little earbud-and-mic-bud hands-free cellular phone accessories as an opportunity to take another well-deserved potshot at all the people seemingly talking to themselves on city streets and in other public places. [Curmudgeon that I am, I love the approach to this constant barrage of people’s personal business in my aural space that someone once suggested — feel free to join into their personal conversations, offering observations and suggestions, since they’ve already been so kind as to include you. At best, it’ll chasten them and may change some behavior; at worst, at least you’ll have some fun.]
November 17 group: Small but deadly. ‘A Greek politician who survived a November 17
attack remarked that “Greece is the only
country where it has been impossible to not
only smoke out terrorism, but even to make a
single substantial strike against it.”
But some commentators believe that because
the group emerged from the same resistance
movement that gave rise to today’s political
establishment, there may be influential figures
in Greece who do not want its members
brought to book.’ [BBC]
A Data Sanctuary is Born. This Wired article has alot more color and background on the goings-on at Sealand than the Times coverage I logged below.
The Decline and Fall (cont’d.): “Mixing obscenity with retail is nothing new. That’s what porn is, right? But the way Betty Ray does it, the
product is almost literary…In episodes to come, the group will stumble on Fuckertown and its
shady lady leader, Natasha Strap. The products the characters use and see are all for sale
to Fuckertown viewers.”
Small Bookstores Get Booksense, finally a unified web presence to compete with amazon and barnesandnoble. “A publisher pays Barnes and Noble $10,000 to feature a certain title…But the
titles on our front tables are there simply because we’ve read them and loved them. This
marketing effort will make the public to understand that our opinions haven’t been bought.” [Wired]
Bedside terror. “18,391 people like me — fresh from medical school —
will be unleashed on the patients of this country on July 1.
We will infiltrate local hospitals, clinics and medical centers
near you. Despite the four years we spent memorizing
textbooks and not sleeping, many will feel, like I did on that
day, completely ill-prepared to be a doctor.” [Salon] And even after several years of residency training, this doctor didn’t know what he was doing… or on the other hand, maybe he knew exactly.
Mugged by a serpent? [Salon]
Charges and counter-charges over Montenegran assassination. Whom to believe? CIA spokesman or senior Milosevic aide?? Remember Sergio Aragones’ Spy vs. Spy? [Nando Times]
Big Brother is coming [Brill’s Content]
A reader commented on something that is painfully obvious to me — how slow this enormous blog page has been to load, especially for those of you who may well still have a dial-up connection as I do. I’m probably losing readers who are more impatient than you are about waiting for the page to come up. How frequently do you read Follow Me Here? Instead of ten days’ worth of my posts, I’ve just whittled it down to five days on the main page. Go back to the archives (link at the bottom) for older posts if you like. Let me know if this seems okay, and if it seems faster to download…
The Sunday Times: novelist James Delingpole is Young, Successful, Prosperous: I Could Just Kill Myself.
“How our ancestors would have laughed if we had mentioned
any of these perils to them. Rightly so, for such things could
be taken seriously only in an age so pampered and decadent
that it has to invent illusory dangers in order to replace real
ones that no longer exist. You do not agonise about animal
rights and gluten allergies when your family is starving; you do
not worry about Lyme disease in times of rampant
tuberculosis, typhus or bubonic plague; you have no urge to go
bungee jumping or white-water rafting when you are about to
be blown up on the western front.
We have all been spoilt rotten, that’s our problem.”
Salon: Billy and the bullies. I seem to have missed out. This is about a dispute between Billy Collins’ humble university press and blockbuster Random House over publication rights to some of his poetry. But Collins is supposed to be America’s most popular poet?? Oh, that’s it, sales figures had soared after two appearances on A Prairie Home Companion in 1998, and his poems are described as “funny and accessible.”
Feed: Legal rights for apes.
“Chimpanzees are our
closest biological relatives, sharing 98.4 percent of our DNA…
Because the similarities between us are so compelling, there is
no ethical justification for the difference in legal status.”
A FAQ from the Guardian about the National Missile Defense plan, “son of Star Wars.” Learn more about this issue! Major problems with the plan: (1) it’s made to deal with a nonexistent threat, nuclear attacks by “rogue states”. It could legitimately be perceived, therefore, as a stalking horse for a more large-scale program directed against other nuclear powers.(2) It will utterly destabilize hard-won arms control measures that have kept the real danger of the strategic arms race at bay. (3) Technologically, it won’t work. (4) If funded, it would be a massive windfall for the ailing aerospace corporations which can’t afford it to be found unnecessary or unfeasible. (5) It looks like the Administration is pushing us towards implementation at least partially to position Gore better against his more hawkish opponent. (6) There’s little effective public opposition because most people have been lulled into complacency about the continuing dangers of the arms race by the “end of the Cold War”, most people think it’s a non-issue because they think we already have a Star Wars defense system (since the Reagan years), and most people don’t make foreign policy issues a factor in their voting decisions. [By the way, here’s a wonderful resource, the entire archive of FAQs, which the Guardian calls “The Issue Explained”, on a range of topics in the news deserving further explanation.]
Before leaving the issue, read why Jonathan Schell, author of the seminal disarmament tract The Fate of the Earth and, most recently, of The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now, calls today The Second Age of Nuclear Danger:
In short, the post-Cold War period has turned out to be less hospitable to nuclear arms control than the Cold War. Why has the end of
the great global conflict in whose name almost all nuclear weapons were built been followed by the near-collapse across the board of the
world’s efforts to control these weapons? Why has peace been worse for nuclear disarmament than cold war?
[Boston Review]
