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]
[Slate]: Timothy Noah notices something funny about Bayer. As part of the IG Farben German industrial conglomerate, the pharmaceutical giant was a key
player in the Final Solution (“it manufactured the Zyklon B used to
gas Jews in the death chambers; it designed ovens used to
incinerate the corpses; and it used as slave laborers those Jews
at Auschwitz who were still alive”) and has recently just barely, in a sense, acknowledged its role by conceding massive financial reparations to Holocaust survivors. Best known for Bayer aspirin, it has just decided that the next product for which it will create brand-name recognition is Bayer Advanced Home, a highly efficient poison to kill household pests. “Bayer, though dunderheaded enough to trumpet its valuable
brand name in a TV commercial that will remind people of this
history, was, sadly, just smart enough to deny Chatterbox’s
request to view the ad in question (and to instruct its ad firm to
do the same).”
Rethinking Tactics in War on Drugs. After 30 years of fervent support by the church-at-large for the war on drugs since
the Nixon administration declared war on
drugs in the late 1960s–a war pressed by each succeeding
administration–growing numbers of religious leaders are breaking
ranks.
Not only are they questioning the war’s effectiveness and its
burgeoning costs–they also charge that its execution violates
biblical imperatives of justice and mercy.
Rather than reducing the threat to society posed by illegal
narcotics trafficking, the war is making orphans of tens of thousands
of children by unnecessarily jailing their parents and
disproportionately targeting people of color, religious critics charge.
A new group, Religious Leaders for a More Just and Compassionate Drug Policy, counts many of the U.S.’s most influential religious leaders among its founding members. They focus on disparities in policing drug offenses by race and class; the decreasing opportunities for prosecutorial or judicial discretion in sentencing in face of “get-tough” policy pressures; and the lack of rehabilitative efforts in the penal system. (Update: Human Rights Watch report cites disparity in race-based drug offense sentencing in the U.S. [New York Times]) “When it comes to addiction, the rich go to Betty Ford, the poor
go to county jail,” the Rev. Scott Richardson, of All Saints
Episcopal Church in Pasadena, said recently.
A Rand Corp. study in 1997 found that treatment reduces 15
times more serious crime than mandatory minimum sentences and
that residential treatment programs cost a little more than half of the
$30,000 annual cost of housing a prisoner, Richardson notes.
Gen. Barry McCaffrey, “czar” of the White House Office of National Drug Policy, warns that if the public begins to think the war on drugs is unfair, it will lose crucial momentum and support. [LA Times]
In other WoD (War on Drugs) news, powerful U.S. anti-drug forces in Congress and the corporation supplying the raw goods are compelling Colombia to apply fusarium, a fungus that acts as an herbicide, to the coca crop in their country. Trouble is, it can destroy other crops and farm animals and may cause overwhelming infection to immune-compromised humans. Years of U.S.-backed aerial spraying of other herbicides has been at best useless against the coca and opium crops, and at worst harmful. “The New York Times reported in early May that US-funded
spraying of the herbicide glyphosate (marketed as Roundup by
Monsanto Company) may have exposed scores of Colombian
villagers to harmful toxins and damaged nondrug crops. But the
proposed Fusarium program, experts say, could unleash far
worse consequences.” [The Guardian]
David Brake just pointed me to his blog, with a worldview quite consonant with mine.
Stuffing Yer Holes: Feasting Black Hole Blows Bubbles.
“A monstrous black hole’s rude table manners include blowing huge bubbles of hot gas into space. At least,
that’s the gustatory practice followed by the supermassive black hole residing in the hub of the nearby
galaxy NGC 4438. These NASA Hubble Space Telescope images of the galaxy’s central region clearly show
one of the bubbles rising from a dark band of dust.” And: Black Holes Shed Light on Galaxy Formation. “Astronomers are concluding that monstrous black holes weren’t
simply born big but instead grew on a measured diet of gas and stars
controlled by their host galaxies in the early formative years of the
universe. These results, gleaned from a NASA Hubble Space Telescope
census of more than 30 galaxies, are painting a broad picture of a
galaxy’s evolution and its long and intimate relationship with its central
giant black hole. Though much more analysis remains, an initial look at
Hubble evidence favors the idea that titanic black holes did not precede
a galaxy’s birth but instead co-evolved with the galaxy by trapping a
surprisingly exact percentage of the mass of the central hub of stars
and gas in a galaxy.”
American ‘Culture,’ Cooked by the Melting Pot. In the strict (anthropological) sense of the word, culture no longer exists; we live in a post-cultural world, says Christopher Clausen, whose book Faded Mosaic is reviewed here by Jonathan Yardley. And the distinction is not merely a semantic one [Washington Post]:
“The truth is that “the connection with an ancestral culture is now so vestigial that whether to assert or deny it has become entirely a matter of choice.” The greatest influences on us are not ethnic or religious or racial (though this last, for African Americans, remains a powerful and unavoidable consideration) but “the expanding reach of a homogenizing federal government, universal access to the same products and television programs, interstate highways and a restlessly mobile population.” Today, Clausen argues, “what most ordinary people who call for multiculturalism want is something more like post-culturalism: no conflict based on cultural factors, none of the sharp edges that cause bleeding.” The idea of the melting pot may no longer be fashionable, but a melting pot is where we live.
Instead of a crazy quilt of conflicting cultures with specific rules, demands and expectations, we inhabit a mass society that claims to value individuals and that places “extreme emphasis on personal feelings and self-gratification” yet is in fact a society of “mass individualism, an individualism without much individuality.” We are “oriented to pleasure–the desires of the self, not its duties,” yet because we all worship at the same altars–most notably, or notoriously, mass entertainment and the cult of personality, or celebrity–the result is “a mass individualism that encourages people to assert themselves in nearly identical ways.”
New Statesman: Scott Lucas, a University of Birmingham cultural historian, asserts that George Orwell was not a socialist, despite usually being held up as having impeccable “English socialist” credentials. For one thing, he apparently “named names” in the British equivalent of the McCarthy witchhunt; for another, Lucas says, his values were not particularly socialist.
Praise, if you will, Orwell’s fighting spirit, praise his
generous anger, praise his free intelligence. Just
remember that, no matter how smelly the
orthodoxies, 19th-century liberalism and 20th-century
anti-communism did not, and still do not, constitute
socialism.
New Statesman: After a long preamble on Ted Hughes’ gatekeeping on Sylvia Plath’s posthumous legacy, Ian Hamilton decries the stranglehold T.S.Eliot’s widow has on his reputation.
So, one day, one day. In the meantime, let us hope
that, by the time an Eliot biography gets nodded
through, he won’t be consigned to the popular
histories as an anti-Semite who wrote amusingly
about pussy cats and had his first wife locked away
for keeps in an asylum – a first wife who may have
written certain of his best-known lines. Eliot’s
posterity, one feels, will always need an extra
measure of protection from the philistines, and
maybe, in his case, disclosure will serve his
reputation more effectively than reticence.
A Dangerous Masquerade
“Anyone watching the hostage
crisis in Luxembourg last week
would applaud the release of nursery
school children and their caregivers
after a crazed gunman was shot by
local police. But by using a camera crew as camouflage for
their gun and by shooting the suspect who thought he was
getting ready to give a television interview, the Luxembourg
police have now made it more dangerous for other
journalists to do their jobs and thus harder for them to get
news of critical importance.” [New York Times]
The Guardian: Iranian link to bomb on Pan Am 103. CNS News last night reported that an Iranian defector (who reportedly controlled his country’s terrorist operations for a decade and is being debriefed by the CIA) has proof that Iran planned and financed the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.
Blair gets tough with doctors, comes back from his paternity leave ready to move British medicine away from professional self-regulation and the “consultant is king” culture of the National Health Service.
GoodBye! The Journal of Contemporary Obituaries, “an opinionated bimonthly magazine which chronicles the dead – famous, infamous and non-famous.”
A science writer I like very much, Matt Ridley, summarizes the evidence for a controversial theory that AIDS was caused when thousands of Africans were given a live polio vaccine grown on chimpanzee kidney tissue in the ’50’s. “(A) particular type of live polio vaccine called Chat may have been grown in the 1950s in cells
derived from chimpanzee kidneys. Chimpanzees are the probable animal source of the AIDS virus; live
vaccines could have been contaminated if an infected animal was used. Chat was tested on more than 1 million Africans in 1957-60, in the very areas where AIDS subsequently became epidemic for the first time.
Two other, less serious forms of AIDS developed in parts of west Africa at about the same time, each epidemic closely associated with an
area in which similar live polio vaccines may have been tested.
Stated thus, the theory seems purely circumstantial. It boils down to seven assertions, all of which must be tested to destruction….”
‘The descent into scumdom is a slippery slope, as
(Harry) Stein notes in his charming new memoir, How I
Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing
Conspiracy (And Found Inner Peace)…His
fellow converts from the pre-fab liberalism of their
youth will know what he means. One day you get
an inkling that maybe affirmative action isn’t very
fair; the next thing you know, you’re joining the
NRA, even though you hate guns…Like the good conservative he now is, he
blames it all on a woman…’
Philospoher Ian Hacking is tired of “the social construction of…”
Joey Skaggs is at it again: cemetery theme parks. [Salon]
New Scientist reviewer says frothy book deserves cult status.
The Punch Lines: ‘Although the literati like to think they’re
superior to the millions of simple folk who tune
into Jerry Springer and Who Wants to Be a
Millionaire, their savage attacks on each other
are often as ugly, tacky, and phony as any
World Wrestling Federation bout. Still, a quick
breeze through last month’s Manhattan
publications proves that literary fuck-you fests
are alive and kicking, along with our
fascination for them.’ [The Voice Literary Supplement]
Salon: If code is free, why not me?
“Some open-source geeks are as open-minded about sex
as they are about hacking,” says reporter Annalee Newitz from a rapturous position “at the feet of three charming naked men…” in a state of partial undress.
The New York Times calls it a Rebel Outpost on the Fringes of Cyberspace. It’s going to be interesting to see how this shakes out. A group of libertarians has struck a financial deal with Roy Bates (a British businessman and former army major who has maintained that the abandoned antiaircraft bunker in international waters six miles off the coast of England of which he took possession in 1968 is the independent Principality of Sealand, and that he and his wife are its regents) to allow them to establish a “data haven” there for “a diverse
clientele that may wish to operate beyond the reach of large
nations for reasons of privacy or financial necessity. They
expect their customers to include people who wish to keep
their e-mail safe from government subpoenas as well as
other businesses seeking to avoid regulation, like
international electronic commerce, banking and gambling.” In other Sealand news, purported representatives of the principality “tried to
acquire arms worth at least $50 million from Russia, Spanish
authorities said Friday.” The investigation also revealed that Bates has commissioned a tailor to design battle uniforms for Sealand, “reserving one with the rank of Colonel for himself”, and that a vigorous trade in driver’s licenses, university degrees and passports from Sealand goes on. When investigated, those pursuing these activities have claimed diplomatic immunity for their actions.
How U.S. Left Sierra Leone Tangled in a Curious Web. 1998: Clinton goes to Africa, promising an African Renaissance and greater U.S. involvement in the continent. 1999: U.S. brokers peace accord empowering rebels. 2000: U.S. invisible in the faltering peacekeeping effort. “When the Rev. Jesse Jackson, President Clinton’s special
envoy for democracy in Africa, came to West Africa to help
defuse the crisis, he was forced to cancel a stop in Sierra
Leone because he was not welcome.
Mr. Jackson was given the role of special envoy to Africa
after helping to keep the black vote solidly behind Mr.
Clinton in 1996. He is a vocal proponent of intervening in
Africa’s conflicts.
In May last year, Mr. Jackson criticized the administration for
protecting Kosovo Albanians but leaving Africans to defend
themselves so that Sierra Leone’s war was “fought in the
dark” for seven years.” [New York Times]
Matan Has Two Mommies, and Israel Is Talking. ‘A classic Israeli idiom, which means to proclaim that there’s
no one like mom, says, “There is only one mother.” And the
government felt that the catch phrase should be taken
literally: it was biologically impossible, the government
insisted, for anyone to have more than one.’ [New York Times]
Nymphet at the Net: skin-deep still counts. [New York Times]
Living in the Shadow of Chernobyl’s Reactors. A current status report from the site of the 1986 disaster. There’s continuing thyroid cancer downwind; the concrete “sarcophagus” is on shifting ground, admitting rainwater to corrode pipes and girders and increase the risk of collapse; President Kuchma has promised to close the remaining operating reactor at Chernobyl but international wrangling about the costs of decommissioning it and replacing its electricity generating capacity has stalled implementation; the “forbidden zone” turns into a post-industrial resurgent wilderness tempting poachers in search of burgeoning deer populations; and — this is just nuts — employees of the plant wearing surgical masks stir up the radioactive soil with hoes to till the earth to plant flowers. Someone with post-apocalyptic credentials — Lewis Shiner, Jack Womack or Samuel Delaney come to mind off the top of my head — should write a novel set there.
Hate Sites Bad Recruiting Tools. Several hate-watchers say that, contrary to public concerns, the aggressive and expanding web-presence of right-wing hate groups has not paid off in terms of recruitment. Moreover, increased public scrutiny may be harmful to them. [Wired]
“This isn’t just a
decent film or a good film. If everything comes together right, this could stand as a beloved film, something that not only honors the memory of Dr. Seuss, but actually adds to the luster of his name.” [via Robot Wisdom]
Another new tick-borne disease, HGE, human granulocytic erlichiosis. First recognized in 1994, around 1,000 cases have been reported. 2-3% fatality rate reported when prompt diagnosis and care are not received, according to the CDC.
Archaeologists’ playtime: Ancient Cities Reported Found Under Sea Off Egypt, and Lost City Discovered in Peruvian Jungle.
Canada Funds Clinical Trials of ‘Invisible Condom’. This probably deals with the male concerns about the notorious loss of sensation caused by conventional condoms, but of course it appears to be inconvenient to use and the burden falls on the woman (in heterosexual sex).
Look at it this way. This is one of those things that is perfectly obvious once you think about it but took a long time for anyone to recognize. Engineers at Fuji have realized that the world has more horizontal and vertical lines than oblique ones, probably because both natural and manmade things organize themselves in relation to the pull of gravity. That means that the linear gaps in a conventional horizontal array of photodiodes in a digital camera will result in more loss of detail than an innovative, different arrangement of the diodes they are now introducing. [New Scientist]
Raising a stink. The methane produced from decaying vegetation in stagnant water makes hydroelectric power schemes worse greenhouse-gas offenders than large coal-fired power plants, says the World Commission on
Dams, a group of scientists, engineers and environmentalists supported by the World Bank, the world’s biggest funder
of large dams.
The New York Times Book Review summer reading list 2000.
Salon TV critic Joyce Millman reflects on the debut episode of The Survivor, finds few surprises. “When the president of CBS TV, Leslie Moonves, tells
reporters that he participated in the casting of “Survivor,”
helping choose the final 16 contestants, and gets all giddy
describing the show’s “voyeuristic appeal,” then you can bet,
my friends, that this is not “reality,” but some winking faux
version of it. Still, I’m sure that won’t stop “Survivor” from
becoming this summer’s national obsession and then, who
knows, maybe next year’s sweeps programming main event.
I can see the celebrity edition of “Survivor” now: Bobby
Knight, Oprah Winfrey and the cast of “Friends” vs. Martha
Stewart, the Dixie Chicks, Jerry, George, Kramer and
Shaquille O’Neal.”
The Turn. “At the very heart of winged flight lies the banked
turn, a procedure that by now seems so routine and
familiar that airline passengers appreciate neither
its elegance and mystery nor its dangerously
delusive character. The author, a pilot, takes us up
into the subject.” One of the points in this essay is the way in which the aerodynamic forces in a turn can counteract the inner ear’s positional sense and contrary to common sense one may be unable to feel one’s position relative to the vertical, especially when flying without visual cues. A pilot friend of mine explained to me the way in which, if I understood it correctly, this can easily get inexperienced pilots in trouble and may have caused the fatal crash of JFK Jr’s plane. [Atlantic Monthly]
Salon: L.A. to serve toilet water. One proposal for the Southern California water shortage. In the ’70’s, I worked briefly for an environmental concern that promoted wastewater recycling. But they were talking about “grey water” — bath-, sink- and laundry-drainage. In this scheme, waterless composting toilets keep human waste contamination out of the recycling stream and “stop the five-gallon flush”; seemed like a good idea then and now. In recent years, I’ve been delighted to discover this system in use at several of the Appalachian Mountain Club’s backcountry huts in the White Mountains, but imagine the economy of scale and public acceptance that could come from its LA-wide introduction!
Cal State Long Beach (CSLB) psychology professor Kevin MacDonald, as a recent New Times LA article describes it, uses
evolutionary
psychology to argue that Judaism is not merely a religion; it is
also a Darwinian strategy that serves to raise Jewish IQ, and
that anti-Semitism can be understood rationally as a by-product
of natural selection. He writes that Jews have reacted to
anti-Semitism by taking over intellectual movements and
attacking Gentile culture to promote Jewish interests. The
result, he warns, is a “present decline of European peoples in
the New World.” He also asserts that Jews protect their
interests by suppressing criticism of Judaism, and cites David
Irving as an example of a writer whose work has been
suppressed by Jewish groups.
MacDonald agreed to testify on behalf of Irving at the prominent London libel suit Irving recently lost against Deborah Lipstadt, whose academic criticism of Holocaust deniers claims distortions in Irving’s work. MacDonald says he is an “agnostic” about the question of the reality of the Holocaust because he has not studied its history extensively enough and that his decision to support Irving was based on academic freedom considerations. (He writes here about his reasons for testifying.)
Now critics on the faculty of CSLB want him to defend his own controversial doctrines in a public academic forum, which he refuses to do partially on the grounds that it is not appropriate to ask a tenured professor to present such complicated ideas orally to an audience that is likely to be hostile. CSLB, whose enormous psychology dept. (with over 1200 students and 55 faculty) was criticized in a 1994 external audit for doing too little to foster open debate of academic issues, has put off until the fall its decision on calls for a public forum on MacDonald’s ideas. Many colleagues say they’ll be reading his work this summer, vowing to move forward with criticism in the fall whether MacDonald participates or not. His colleagues point out that they believe MacDonald’s right to do the kind of research he does is protected by academic freedom, and no one is calling for his discipline or expulsion.
One prominent critic is UC Santa Barbara professor John Tooby, arguably the founder of the discipline of evolutionary psychology in the early ’90’s. Tooby wants to defend the good name of evolutionary psychology against what he perceives as a disreputble extremist extrapolation. He has recently reportedly denied that MacDonald’s work is even evolutionary psychology at all. ‘Blaming the new science for MacDonald’s views, Tooby says,
is like asking doctors, “What do you physicians have to say
about Josef Mengele?”‘ A lengthy refutation of MacDonald’s work on which Tooby is currently at work is slated to appear on his website later this summer.
MacDonald may essentially be cursed simply by being a shy, reluctant public speaker whose trio of books on Judaism, published between 1994 and 1998, received little attention (except among rightwing extremist hatemongers, whose websites have been laudatory), but he may now regret the visibility his decision to participate in Irving’s trial has engendered. Academic work in which there is such a dramatic tension between scholarly freedom and the use of the work in the service of extremist hatred and divisiveness has long provoked heated ethical controversy on campus. I recall the very similar bitterness of the debate over the work on the genetic basis of intelligence done by Harvard professor Roger Herrnstein in the early ’70’s, EO Wilson’s sociobiology (also engendered at Harvard in the ’70’s), and the Bell Curve flap (Herrnstein again, with Charles Murray) several years ago. Critics always claim that these are bad science even if well-intentioned; prejudice presented as if it were undistorted scientific fact. It’ll be interesting to see how explicitly MacDonald paints himself as a victim of the “Jewish agenda” he sees at work against threats to its “eugenics program” in public defenses.
Read an earlier New Times LA article about MacDonald and his work here. And, thanks to Jorn Barger who commented that the above exposition was one-sided (I actually feel I’m not being unfair to MacDonald as much as noting with interest a one-sided groundswell of response), this link to MacDonald’s replies to the New Times LA publicity. MacDonald says in part:
Ortega quotes me as saying that the Jews brought the Holocaust on
themselves. This is just wrong. I claim only to have a theory of anti-Semitism,
not a theory of the Nazi Holocaust. In my book, Separation and Its
Discontents, I argue that perceptions of real conflicts of interest engendered
and exacerbated widespread popular anti-Jewish feelings in Germany prior to
and during the Nazi era, as they have in many other times and places. These
perceptions of conflicts of interest are related complexly to real conflicts of
interest. For example, exaggeration and even fantasies may color the
situation once the battle lines have been drawn between groups. Other
scholars have also argued that Jewish behavior—very often Jewish success—is
an important factor in anti-Semitism; see, e.g., Albert Lindemann’s Esau’s
Tears[Cambridge University Press, 1998]). My position is that we should not
simply assume that every instance of anti-Semitism is completely irrational.
Rather, we should suppose that in general there are indeed real conflicts of
interest between groups and that outbreaks of hostility are a complex
interplay of fantasy and reality. Anti-Semitism has taken many different
forms from simple dislike to economic boycots, pogroms, expulsion and
genocide.
And:
In the last chapter of The Culture of Critique I suggest that the
increasing ethnic division in the U.S. and other European-derived societies
resulting from high levels of immigration and the rise of multiculturalism will
lead to increased ethnocentrism on all sides and a decline in the
Enlightenment values of de-ethnicized individualism. I state only that this is
a dangerous situation and I do so on the basis of psychological theory and my
reading of the history of the Jews as well as a great many examples of ethnic
conflict in contemporary and past societies.
This is just a start; I imagine MacDonald would agree with me that a “soundbite”, or weblog, review cannot be thoughtful enough about these complex issues. If this controversy interests you, I’m sure you’ll delve further.
In connection with my post on this issue, Barger has also referred me to his page on Israel Shahak, a Holocaust survivor turned anti-Zionist civil rights campaigner in Israel. He has paid special attention to the efffects of Jewish fundamentalism on Israeli policy and politics. I’m just beginning to absorb this material. Thank you again, Jorn.
CokeSpotlight. Greenpeace and Adbusters kick off a massive campaign against Coca Cola’s environmental hypocrisy as a polluting sponsor of the first “Green” Olympics: ‘To be Number One in the world: that’s the
goal of The Coca-Cola Company. That’s
why Coke is the longest running
corporate sponsor of the Olympic Games.
It’s a partnership that has helped make
Coke the world’s best known brand, sold
in nearly 200 countries.
But there’s something different about the
2000 Summer Olympic Games in Sydney,
Australia. They will be the first Green
Games, a global celebration of sport,
culture, and the environment.
In the Green Games, Coca-Cola isn’t winning the race. Coke keeps
its products “always cool” with the help of HFCs, some of the most
potent global warming gases ever produced.’
Mental Health is Not an Issue…Yet. “Then, you realize you’ve asked the wrong question. You are asking how many of the downtrodden have to die. Nobody gives a rat’s ass about
the mentally ill. They’re crazy. Not until the mentally ill begin to see who is responsible for their continued suffering, and find that person, and show
up on his doorstep with their agony, and share it with him, will mental health care be available for all who need it.”
“…simply a mistake where a piece of type accidentally fell onto the page during production”, or (much more likely, it would seem) a clever culture-jam by a guerrilla Seattle Times employee?
I want one of these!
Alas, Inability to secure funding stream axes NewsWatch.
‘On Tuesday, May 30,
NewsWatch.org, a daily media
criticism Web site run by The Center
for Media and Public Affairs, ceased
operations. Described by Smart
Computing as one of the “best
little-known Web sites,” on the Web,
NewsWatch.org was launched a year
and a half ago to serve as a
“consumer’s guide to the news.”
Rather than look at the inside stories
behind the day’s news – who was up,
who was down and who did what to
whom – NewsWatch focused on news
content, examining inaccuracies,
distortions, lack of context and other
controversies of interest to the
consumers as well as the producers
of news.’
Scientists Excited by Rare Meteorite Find in Canada:
like “…sampling on the surface of a comet”. But why does Reuters confuse meteorites and asteroids?
A Spelling Test of fifty commonly misspelled words. I consider myself to be a strong speller yet I’m chagrined to say I only scored 86%.
Adult stem cells can produce a wealth of cell types, Science authors report. This exciting study by a Swedish team shows that, when grown within an embryo, adult neural stem cells can revert to a precursor state that can give rise to lineages of a variety of tissue types. The pluripotentiality of embryonal stem cells has long been recognized, but current ethical concerns have led to a ban on tissue from embryos. This discovery about the open-ended potential of stem cells from adults opens the way to therapeutic advances, such aas growing replacement organs, that do not require embryonic tissue. Of course, neural stem cells are among the most difficult cell types to obtain from living adults, so it would be nice if we discovered similar versatility in other types of adult stem cells.
Toshiba euthanasia laptop goes on display. “The patient got a needle in their arm, while the computer sat on the bed. The laptop
asked the patient twice if they knew what they were doing. The third time they had to
hit the space bar to confirm they wanted to die. Fifteen seconds later a message was
sent to a switching unit, which turned on a compressor.” [The Register]
New Scientist: Before the big bang. One cosmologist’s attempt to apply string theory to the thorny problem of the singularity at the origin of the universe has some surprising results:
“Our Universe is a patch of the inside
of a black hole,” amd there was a time before the Big Bang. Something like this notion is all over science fiction, however, from even before we knew about black holes. Does anyone remember the culmination of James Blish’s Cities in Flight series from the late ’50’s?
Survey: Online Therapy Bad Idea. I don’t think I’m just trying to protect my market niche as a psychiatrist when I say that I agree with this survey finding.
Little-known ventriloquist puts words into Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ mouth.
Annals of the Age of Depravity (cont’d.): Mother Kept Son Locked Up for 30 Years.
‘”Why didn’t we report it? Because this was something between the two of them,” one person from the village was quoted as saying.’
The Travel Guide Says what? Words fail me.
