[Follow Me!]

"I am the world crier, & this is my dangerous career... I am the one to call your bluff, & this is my climate."

—Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972)

Friday, December 6

Bigfoot is dead. Really. 

Lovable trickster created a monster with Bigfoot hoax:

'Ray L. Wallace was Bigfoot. The reality is, Bigfoot just died," said Michael Wallace about his father, who died of heart failure Nov. 26 in a Centralia nursing facility. He was 84.


The truth can finally be told, according to Mr. Wallace's family members. He orchestrated the prank that created Bigfoot in 1958.


Some experts suspected Mr. Wallace had planted the footprints that launched the term "Bigfoot." But Mr. Wallace and his family had never publicly admitted the 1958 deed until now.' Seattle Times


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What the World Thinks in 2002 

How Global Publics View: Their Lives, Their Countries, The World, America The Pew Research Center

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An Animal's Place: Thanks to rebecca for pointing to this. I've had no interest in absolutist vegetarianism for several decades, but a more mindful and ethical take on my meat-eating is appealing, even overdue:
"For my own part, I've discovered that if you're willing to make the effort, it's entirely possible to limit the meat you eat to nonindustrial animals. I'm tempted to think that we need a new dietary category, to go with the vegan and lactovegetarian and piscatorian. I don't have a catchy name for it yet (humanocarnivore?), but this is the only sort of meat eating I feel comfortable with these days. I've become the sort of shopper who looks for labels indicating that his meat and eggs have been humanely grown (the American Humane Association's new ''Free Farmed'' label seems to be catching on), who visits the farms where his chicken and pork come from and who asks kinky-sounding questions about touring slaughterhouses. I've actually found a couple of small processing plants willing to let a customer onto the kill floor, including one, in Cannon Falls, Minn., with a glass abattoir." New York Times Magazine

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Helping chickens come home to roost for Poindexter: 

Eyeballing Total Information Awareness:

The SF Weekly's column by Matt Smith in the Dec 3 issue points out that there may be some information that John M. and Linda Poindexter of 10 Barrington Fare, Rockville, MD, 20850, may be missing in their pursuit of total information awareness. He suggests that people with information to offer should phone 1 301 424 6613 to speak with that corrupt official and his wife. Neighbors Thomas E. Maxwell, 67, at 8 Barringon Fare ( 1 301 251 1326), James F. Galvin, 56, at 12 ( 1 301 424 0089), and Sherrill V. Stant (nee Knight) at 6, may also lack some information that would be valuable to them in making decisions -- decisions that could affect the basic civil rights of every American. cryptome

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Bush anything but moronic, according to author. When Mark Crispin Miller began the Dyslexicon, compiling Dubya's burgeoning catalogue of verbal blunders and malapropisms, he thought he was just out for the entertainment value. But he ended up noticing something far more sinister.
"Bush is not an imbecile. He's not a puppet. I think that Bush is a sociopathic personality. I think he's incapable of empathy. He has an inordinate sense of his own entitlement, and he's a very skilled manipulator. And in all the snickering about his alleged idiocy, this is what a lot of people miss."

...Miller's rendering of the president is bleaker than that. In studying Bush's various adventures in oration, he started to see a pattern emerging.

"He has no trouble speaking off the cuff when he's speaking punitively, when he's talking about violence, when he's talking about revenge.

"When he struts and thumps his chest, his syntax and grammar are fine," Miller said. "It's only when he leaps into the wild blue yonder of compassion, or idealism, or altruism, that he makes these hilarious mistakes." The Star (Ontario)


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Fuck hiphop 

(yeah, that's right, he said it): I was also sent here from the null device (I really should check in there more often!)

I know you’ve been thinking it. And if you haven’t, you probably haven’t been paying attention. The art we once called hip hop has been dead for some time now. But because its rotting carcass has been draped in platinum and propped against a Gucci print car, many of us have missed its demise.


I think the time has come to bid a farewell to the last black arts movement. It’s had a good run but it no longer serves the community that spawned it. Innovation has been replaced with mediocrity and originality replaced with recycled nostalgia for the ghost of hip hop past, leaving nothing to look forward to. Honestly when was the last time you heard something (mainstream) that made you want to run around in circles and write down every word. When was the last time you didn’t feel guilty nodding your head to a song that had a ‘hot beat’ after realizing the lyrical content made you cringe. applesauce


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Baby's Named a Bad, Bad Thing 

This site about the horrible babynaming practices committed in the name of misguided 'uniqueness' is getting much airplay. I was pointed to it from the null device, where you'll find speculation about a rule of inverse proportion between the uniqueness of a child's name (or a tortured [mis-]spelling) and the intelligence of her/his parents.

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Subject Matter: 

Rafe Colburn at rc3 writes about the double life of the weblogger who has a non-virtual life as well as her/his online presence. While some of my boundaries are abit different — Rafe not only doesn't mention his boss or talk about competing products, as he notes, but does not appear to mention his work at all (I'm a casual reader; I can't swear to the fact that a scholarly study of rc3 wouldn't provide clues as to what he does...), whereas my being a psychiatrist is one of the things for which I think some people read FmH — I agree with his conclusion that confessional weblogs are only pseudo-intimacy. I've never met anyone in the 'real world' who had previously known me only from my site, whereas Rafe seems to do so with some frequency (why?), but it would probably freak me out far less than it would were I publishing an online diary. For example, you don't want to know (and I feel no compulsion that you should) what just happened to me at work...



Rafe also points to this definition of bikeshed discussions, which, I agree, is a very useful metaphor I will file away for appropriate future use, although I further agree that (it's a pity) no one will know what the hell I'm talking about when I make the reference.


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Legonomics: 

Surprisingly compelling reasons to make Legos the U.S. national currency defective yeti

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The Rightward Press: This is one of my pet peeves about the crybaby Right. Washington Post columnist EJ Dionne nails it: "The fat is in the fire on the issue of media bias, and that is a good thing. It's time to revisit a matter on which the conventional wisdom is, roughly, 180 degrees off.

You hear the conventional wisdom all the time from shrewd conservative commentators who understand that political pressure, relentlessly applied, usually achieves its purposes. They have sold the view that the media are dominated by liberals and that the news is skewed against conservatives.

This belief fueled the construction of a large network of conservative institutions -- especially on radio and cable television -- that provides conservative viewpoints close to 24 hours a day. Conservatives argued that hopelessly left-wing establishment news sources needed to be balanced by brave, relentless voices from the right.

But the continuing attacks on mainstream journalists have another effect. Because the drumbeat of conservative press criticism has been so steady, the establishment press has internalized it. Editors and network executives are far more likely to hear complaints from the right than from the left.

To the extent that there has been a bias in the establishment media, it has been less a liberal tilt than a preference for the values of the educated, professional class -- which, surprise, surprise, is roughly the class position of most journalists."


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Israel 'killed unarmed civilians': "A UN official says eight of 10 Palestinians killed during an Israeli incursion into Gaza were civilians - but the Israelis are denying it." BBC World

And:
Israel's assassination strategy
BBC World


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Falling arches: "McDonald's is under fire all over the world -- literally. With restaurant bombings and shutdowns on the rise, can the fast-food conglomerate withstand the heat of global anti-Americanism?" The icon is readily transmuted into a target of the various species of contempt for what it signifies; ubiquitous brand recognition has its costs.
"In many parts of the world if people can't reach the embassy, there's always a McDonald's," says James L. Watson, a Harvard professor of anthropology who studies McDonald's, particularly its function as a "worldwide political target."

Fast-food bombings began after the Cold War, when opposition political groups -- whether it was Chilean splinter group FPMR/D or the Greek Fighting Guerrilla Formation -- started to focus more on the sources of "cultural power," Watson says: "to questions of cultural imperialism as opposed to rather old-fashioned forms of military imperialism." Salon

Starbucks beware...

Related:


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Got Paper? 

Beth Israel Deaconess copes with a massive computer crash: "The crisis began on a Wednesday afternoon, Nov. 13, and lasted nearly four days. Before it was over, the hospital would revert to the paper systems that governed patient care in the 1970s, in some cases reverting to forms printed ''Beth Israel Hospital,'' from before its 1996 merger. Hundreds of employees, from lab technicians to chief executive officer Paul Levy, would work overtime running a quarter-million sheets of paper from one end of the campus to the other." Boston Globe

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Top Ten: 

The Defining Moments in Digital Culture: "Film and TV have had them, as have music and books. What we're talking about are those moments that have defined and redefined a genre, whether it's a line, character, lyric, scene, or performance. The internet, though very much in its infancy compared to other mass mediums, has still managed to have many of its own seminal moments." Shift [via Walker]



Also: Modern Humorist's Top Ten Funniest Moments of the Past Ten Years: " A laughably arbitrary and idiosyncratic list by John Aboud".


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Male biological clock? 

Research reveals a cellular basis : "Men, as well as women, have a reproductive clock that ticks down with age." EurekAlert!

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What's Normal? 

A Look at Asperger Syndrome: "It was an exciting moment for me — and, I imagine, for other parents of children with the baffling neurological disorder called Asperger syndrome — when The New York Times Magazine published Lawrence Osborne's "Little Professor Syndrome" in June 2000.


The title may have been condescending, but the article itself was terrific, perhaps the best yet about Asperger's in a mainstream publication: a 4,500-word exploration, in remarkably vivid and sympathetic language, of a world that few readers had visited.


So it was doubly exciting when Mr. Osborne, a widely published health and science journalist, expanded the article into a book, American Normal, published last month." NY Times


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Different Diet-Acne Link Proposed: 

Plague of pimples blamed on bread:
Eating too much refined bread and cereal, rather than chocolate and greasy foods, may be the culprit behind the pimples that plague many a youngster.


That is the theory of a team led by Loren Cordain, an evolutionary biologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Highly processed breads and cereals are easily digested. The resulting flood of sugars makes the body produce high levels of insulin and insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1).


This in turn leads to an excess of male hormones. These encourage pores in the skin to ooze large amounts of sebum, the greasy goop that acne-promoting bacteria love. IGF-1 also encourages skin cells called keratinocytes to multiply, a hallmark of acne, the team say in a paper that will appear in the December issue of Archives of Dermatology.


An Australian team will soon test the theory by putting 60 teenage boys with acne on a low-carbohydrate diet for three months to see if it makes a difference. New Scientist


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Adding Insult to Injury: 

Radioactive patients set off subway alarms: "Americans undergoing radioactive medical treatments risk setting off anti-terrorism sensors in public places, and subsequent strip searches by police, warn doctors at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

A 34-year-old patient who had been treated with radioactive iodine for Graves disease, a thyroid disorder, returned to their clinic three weeks later complaining he had been strip-searched twice in Manhattan subway stations. Christopher Buettner and Martin Surks report the case in a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association." New Scientist


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Slicing Spam... 

...with smart email addresses: "Software that generates a unique email address for every message sent could help cut down spam, a US computer scientist believes.

This is because hidden in the address are encrypted rules determining who is permitted to reply to the address, as well as how many replies can be sent and when." New Scientist

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Interracial Intimacy: "White-black dating, marriage, and adoption are on the rise. This development, however, is being met with resistance—more vocally by blacks than by whites." — Randall Kennedy, The Atlantic

A white writer has a different take on the development:

In a world brimming with bad news, here's one of the happiest trends: Instead of preying on people of different races, young Americans are falling in love with them.

Whites and blacks can be found strolling together as couples even at the University of Mississippi, once the symbol of racial confrontation.

"I will say that they are always given a second glance," acknowledges C. J. Rhodes, a black student at Ole Miss. He adds that there are still misgivings about interracial dating, particularly among black women and a formidable number of "white Southerners who view this race-mixing as abnormal, frozen by fear to see Sara Beth bring home a brotha."

Mixed-race marriages in the U.S. now number 1.5 million and are roughly doubling each decade. About 40 percent of Asian-Americans and 6 percent of blacks have married whites in recent years. — Nicholas Kristof, NY Times


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Wolf in dog's clothing 

"Man's best friend has been around longer than anyone thought. The great Dane, pit bull and Pekinese are all descended from a few far-eastern wolves that befriended humans at least 15,000 years ago.

Even the new world canines - such as Alaskan huskies and Chesapeake Bay retrievers - have DNA sequences which make them indistinguishable from European dogs, geneticists report in Science today." Guardian UK

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The Cultural Politics of the Sociobiology Debate -- Abstract:
The sociobiology debate, in the final quarter of the twentieth century, featured many of the same issues disputed in the culture war in the humanities during this same time period. This is evident from a study of the writings of Edward O. Wilson, the best known of the sociobiologists, and from an examination of both the minutes of the meetings of the Sociobiology Study Group (SSG) and the writings of Stephen Jay Gould, the SSG's most prominent member. Many critics of sociobiology, frequently radical scientists who were attached to the lineage of the New Left, argued for the same multicultural values promoted by radical humanities professors in this period. Conversely, liberal sociobiologists defended the universalist values of the liberals in the humanities. Journal of the History of Biology
With a link to a PDF of the full article.

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Why we get ill at weekends 

"People who get ill at the weekend or while on holiday may be suffering from a 'new' medical condition.

Researchers in the Netherlands say a significant proportion of the population is suffering from so-called leisure sickness.

They have found 3% of people become ill with a variety of different complaints as soon as they stop working and try to relax.

Symptoms like fatigue, muscular pains and nausea are most common at weekends." BBC

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Thursday, December 5

Seven tenths incorrect: Heterogeneity and change in the waist-to-hip ratios of Playboy centerfold models and Miss America pageant winners:
We seek to correct what appears to be an emerging "academic urban legend" (Tooby & Cosmides, 2000) regarding the stability and precision of what heterosexual males find sexually attractive. The academic urban legend in question is that there has been a remarkable consistency in the waist-to-hip ratios (WHR) of both Playboy centerfolds and winners of the Miss America pageant. Because these women are taken as representative icons of venerated beauty standards, this supposed consistency has been taken by some authors as prima facie evidence of an evolved basis for this very specific preference, although that claim would seem to be refuted by studies that have failed to find the preference in societies whose conditions resemble those of our Pleistocene ancestors far more closely than our own. There is also dispute about the validity of the arguments that have been made for why such a preference would have been adaptive in the environments of our evolutionary past. We do not pursue these points here; what we dispute are the empirical assertions that have been made about the WHR of these supposed twin pillars of American beauty: Playboy Playmates and Miss Americas. The data presented below demonstrates both that the WHR has been more variable than others have suggested and that the average WHR has in fact changed in what seems to us to be a consistent fashion over time. Journal of Sex Research

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Now Here's a Really Big Idea 

"A university professor wants to create a catalog of human ideas. Not
just a few choice ideas, but all of them. He believes this 'mental map'
will help bridge the gaps between the world's cultures." Wired News

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Shoot Back, Record the Lens That Records You
Ronald Deibert, a University of Toronto associate professor of political science, wants people to grab their cameras and hit the shopping malls Dec. 24 and participate in World Sousveillance Day. Surveillance means "to view from above." Sousveillance means "to view from below."

On the day before Christmas, at noon, local time, all over the world, Deibert wants citizens to "shoot back" at surveillance cameras -- not with guns, but with cameras of their own. Participants are to head out, in disguise, to their favorite malls and public spaces, and photograph all the security cameras they find. Wired News


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Vampire Population Dynamics: Brian Thomas, a PhD candidate in ecology at Stanford University in California, considers Vampire Ecology, population dynamics and models of predator-prey relationships:
We are gathered here today to ponder the ways in which the humans and vampires of Sunnydale interact. Specifically, Betsy asked:
"Ooh, Brian, can you help us work out the vampire carrying capacity of a typical population? I'm assuming a typical vampire accounts for, say, 150-200 humans a year. So how big does a town have to be to support Sunnydale's apparently limitless supply of vampires? Are there human warrens in the catacombs somewhere, used only for feeding purposes?"
The term “carrying capacity” isn’t often applied to predator population dynamics. Instead, ecologists generally estimate stable predator populations by first coming to grips with the prey’s population dynamics, including its carrying capacity. Actually, in a lot of different cases, the prey’s carrying capacity ultimately determines how well the predator does.

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Comments? 

Thanks to Walker for pointing me to this O'Reilly Network article on How to Validate an E-mail Address which contains the following tidbit:
"Yes, e-mail addresses can contain comments. I tested them too - and they work. A comment is (to the best of my knowledge) any text placed in parentheses anywhere in the email address. For example, my e-mail can be:



* kevin@kbedell.com, or

* kev(you da man!)in@kbedell.com, or

* kevin@k(evin)bedell.com



All these work - I tried them."

Caveat: Don't assume, however, that the comment is necessarily private, should you have the burning desire to list your boss in your contact list as, e.g., "john(that_fool)@company.com", or something even less printable in a family medium. Walker cautions that the comment may be appended to the email address when mail is sent. (David, thanks, how did you know I'd be tempted?) Addendum: when I set up "mailto" URLs for the commented email addresses and click on them in my browser, the comment is extracted and prepended to the email address in the "To:" line. For example, "mailto:john(that_fool)@company.com" would become "To: that_fool john@company.com".

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New theory for origin of life 

Mineral 'cells' may have incubated first life: "Life on Earth may have begun in rocks on the ocean floor. More than 4 billion years ago, tiny cavities in minerals may have served as the first cells, two biologists are proposing1. Other researchers argue that the idea leaves many questions unanswered." Nature

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Human Conditions: 

Kenan Malik's review essay on The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker and Straw Dogs by John Gray: "The psychologist Geoff Miller has called it a 'paradigm shift': the restoration of human nature into discussions of human behaviour, political policy and social organisation. Where once the idea of human nature was treated with suspicion and ridicule, today there is barely a human activity for which someone does not have an evolutionary account." Also: David Lodge and psychologist Kenan Malik discuss what the novel — and science — have to tell us about human consciousness. BBC [Real Audio]

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Killer Among Us? 

Chronic Wasting Disease and You Milwaukee Magazine

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Strom at 100: 

Thurmond Celebrates Century Mark Washington Post Will veneration for this 'achievement' outweigh sobering reflection on his virulence or relief at his enfeeblement?

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The New York Times Books Feature -- Ted Hughes: " A retrospective on the career of the late poet laureate of England includes Times reviews and articles and excerpts from Hughes's poetry."

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No such thing... 

The God of new things: 'Indeed, there was no such thing as ''Hinduism'' before the British invented the catch-all category in the early 19th century and made India seem the home of a ''world religion'' that was as organized and theologically coherent as Christianity and Islam. The word ''Hindu'' itself was first used by the ancient Persians to refer to the people living near the river Indus (''Sindhu'' in Sanskrit). It later became a convenient shorthand for those who weren't Muslims or Christians.' Boston Globe

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Administration seeks repeal of family leave pay.  "Labor Department officials, citing poor economic conditions, said they are acting to repeal the Birth and Adoption Unemployment Compensation Rule to protect states' unemployment insurance trust funds for laid-off workers, even though no state has chosen to pay for leave with those funds." AP via Salon

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Investigators Find Repeated Deception in Ads for Drugs 

"Some companies have repeatedly disseminated misleading advertisements for prescription drugs, even after being cited for violations, and millions of people see the deceptive commercials before the government tries to halt them, Congressional investigators said today." NY Times

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R.I.P. Ivan Illich, 76 

Philosopher Who Challenged Status Quo Is Dead
Mr. Illich was a priest who thought there were too many priests, a lifelong educator who argued for the end of schools and an intellectual sniper from a perch with a wide view. He argued that hospitals cause more sickness than health, that people would save time if transportation were limited to bicycles and that historians who rely on previously published material perpetuate falsehoods.

His intellectual ordnance of anarchist panache, hatred of bureaucracy, Jesuitic argumentation, deep reverence for the past and watered-down Marxism, was applied to many targets, including relations between the sexes. More often than not, his conclusions were startling: he thought life was better for women in pre-modern times. NY Times

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Has pop culture couched our fear of the shrink? 

Are increased numbers of people seeking psychotherapy responding to recent media characterizations?
''A depiction of anything in popular culture can help make participation in that thing spike,'' said Robert Thompson, head of Syracuse University's Center for the Study of Popular Television. After Fonzie got a library card on ''Happy Days'' in the 1970s, Thompson noted, thousands of Americans followed suit.

Psychiatry has been a theme of TV shows from ''Newhart'' to ''Frasier,'' but seldom has it been so central to a show as on ''The Sopranos.'' Major plot twists are reheated in Melfi's office; mob hits are attributed to Tony's ''impulse control problem.'' In one episode, three characters paid visits to three different therapists. Even Tony's therapist sees a therapist. Boston Globe [thanks, Spike!]
I wonder if this isn't putting the cart before the horse. Stonger cultural forces — growing social anomie, the effort to medicalize a growing range of distresses, the increasing suborning of the psychiatric profession by the powerful marketing forces of the pharmaceutical giants — shape our depictions when filtered through the scriptwriters' (often neurotic?) vision. It's different than running out to get a library card on whim because you were inspired by a TV character. Finding Tony Soprano's struggles sympathetic is a far cry from breaking down the considerable barriers to investing the time, money and demanding effort in a mental health consultation. And let's not think for a moment, despite this columnist's suggestion, that it is the macho, acting-out, impulse-ridden types who are coming to see therapists un droves. Not to mention that there is, especially in the current Sopranos season, a more complicated depiction of the therapist and the therapy process as flawed and sometimes ludicrous, some would say deeply so, rather than the unconditional positive regard which would demystify and inspire viewers to emulate Tony as suggested. Those who follow The Sopranos will know that in the season's 11th episode last week he ditched his therapy after four years, perhaps partly because he is sinking to new lows he cannot examine but perhaps as much because Dr. Melfi's clumsiness has failed him. It is likely, on the other hand, that the relationship with Dr. Melfi will resume. given that the show will return for a fifth season...


In other organized crime news:

Mobster, wife indicted in sperm smuggling

One of five New York mobsters believed to have smuggled their sperm out of a Pennsylvania prison to impregnate their wives has been indicted, along with his wife, on a charge of criminal conspiracy.


Kevin Granato, a convicted hit man for the Colombo crime family, came under suspicion four years ago after he was seen in the visitation room at the Allenwood Federal Prison showing off a toddler he called his child, even though he had been in jail since 1988.


Last week, a federal grand jury indicted Granato, 42, and his wife, Regina Granato, on two counts of criminal conspiracy. Regina Granato, who lives in New York, is also charged with one count of providing a prohibited object -- a cryogenic sperm kit -- to an inmate. Salon


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Wednesday, December 4

Release me: 

Mozilla 1.2.1 is out. IMHO, this browser, at least for the Windows platform, so far outweighs M$IE that it hurts. If this is news to you, start by considering the memory-resident stub that makes for instant loading, the skinnability, bulletproof blockade of popup windows, and tabbed browsing interface.

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Harry Potter's biggest challenge yet 

"After just two films, the Harry Potter franchise is in trouble. The third movie will be late, the fourth book is proving unadaptable, the director is burned out and the boy wizard is facing a greater enemy than Voldemort - the march of time." Get a load of who has been tapped to direct the next one. Telegraph UK

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Oh Henry! 

Joe Conason: Will he explain his job for Unocal when the oil giant was cozying up to the Taliban?
'As a New Yorker who wants a full, fair and unsparing probe of 9/11, I'm not moving on just yet from the absurd appointment of Henry Kissinger to chair the new "independent commission." Neither is the New York Times editorial board, whose latest salvo described Kissinger's insouciance about his conflict of interests as "quaint."



Quaint must be the polite way to say stunningly arrogant. But the wily Kissinger is probably quite right to brush off the halfhearted gnawing of the press corps, whose appetite for scandal has diminished markedly since the advent of the Bush administration. They're already ignoring information about Kissinger that probably merits further exploration.' Salon


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Brief Interviews With Devious Men 

Village Voice 'meta-coverage' calls newly-released film Adaptation 'the brainiest film of the year'; they devote five articles to it. The trailer for it is the most arresting thing I've seen during the coming attractions in a long time. The Heart of the Meta
"I'm a walking cliché," begins Charlie Kaufman's breathy voice-over over a blank page in Adaptation, a pop-surrealist manifesto that works at every turn to confound the meaning of these words. Directed by Kaufman's Being John Malkovich cohort Spike Jonze, Adaptation (in theaters Friday) looks into the horrific abyss experienced by all self-conscious writers who aspire to art—how do I create something original when everything has been done before?—and responds, as many self-conscious writers have, by writing about the process of its own creation: The movie's neurotic, overweight, balding protagonist shares the name (and, we assume, the nebbish identity) of its Oscar-nominated screenwriter.



Adaptation is ostensibly the story of Kaufman's own crackup after being hired to turn Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief into a big-budget screenplay. Following many tortured attempts to adapt Orlean's book, a nonfictional exploration of the passion generated by the testicular flower, Kaufman (in the hefty form of Nicolas Cage) responds with the ultimate challenge to both commercial Hollywood and its novocained cousin, director-centric auteurism: He writes himself into the script. Charlie's "twin brother" Donald plays the foil to his torment, his natural screenwriting skills blossoming thanks to plot-workshop guru Robert McKee. Village Voice


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Tuesday, December 3

Author who claims 9/11 attack was faked coming to NYC 

"A French author who suggests that the Sept. 11 attacks were concocted by a faction of the U.S. military is planning to promote his book on a tour that will begin in New York City.

The English title of Thierry Meyssan's book is 9-11, The Big Lie, which also suggests that the Pentagon was hit by an American missile, and not American Airlines Flight 77. " NY Daily News

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Spiders weave huge natural wonder in B.C. 

"A biology professor in northern British Columbia has spotted a clover field crawling with spiders.



Brian Thair of the College of New Caledonia in Prince George said he saw a silky, white web stretching 60 acres across a field.



"When you see horror movies with spider web festooned from this place to that place and so on, it comes nowhere near approaching what occurred in this field," Thair told CBC Radio's As It Happens." CBC News With links to a spider web photo gallery.


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Postcards From Planet Google 

"Google is taking snapshots of its users' minds and aggregating them. Like a flipbook that emerges when successive images are strung together, the logged data tell a story.



So what is the world thinking about? (...) Despite its geographic and ethnic diversity, the world is spending much of its time thinking about the same things." New York Times


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Texas Death Row Appeals Lawyers Criticized 

"Death row inmates in Texas are often assigned incompetent or unqualified state appellate lawyers who do not raise legitimate constitutional arguments and who fail to unearth facts that could prove the innocence of their clients, according to a new study by an advocacy group for capital defendants." NY Times ...But you knew that already.

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Monday, December 2

The Magdalene Sisters 

Controversy over Venice winner: 'Scottish film director Peter Mullan has defended his film as based on "true events" in the face of strong criticism after winning the prestigious Golden Lion at the Venice film festival.

The Magdalene Sisters follows four promiscuous girls who were used as labourers by the Catholic church in Ireland in the 1960s and shows them being abused by nuns in the notorious asylums.' BBC

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Did quark matter strike Earth? 

"A group of researchers have identified two seismic events that they think provide the first evidence of a previously undetected form of matter passing through the Earth. The so-called strange quark matter is so dense that a piece the size of a human cell would weigh a tonne. The two events under study both took place in 1993." Even those scientists who are dubious concede they have no alternate explanations for the seismic events. BBC

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The Latest Kissinger Outrage 

Christopher Hitchens asks, "Why is a proven liar and wanted man in charge of the 9/11 investigation?" Slate

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A few good toys 

"The U.S. Army has some imaginative ways to annihilate the Saddams of the future.
As the U.S. Army prepares for war in Iraq (and beyond), it has been moving fast to transform itself from a Cold War relic into a deadly, rapidly deployable force. The last two major U.S. conflicts, Desert Storm and Kosovo, were largely won by the U.S. Air Force before the Army's lumbering tanks ever got there. The Army used to be a sledgehammer; now it needs to be a cordless drill." Forbes

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"The reign of the Mayberry Machiavelli's..." 

White House Decries Ex-Aide's Criticism
President Bush's spokesman dismissed as "baseless and groundless" a former aides' criticism that the White House values politics over domestic policy and has failed to produce the president's promised "compassionate conservative" agenda.



John J. DiIulio Jr., who quit his White House domestic policy post in August 2001, said in an interview with Esquire magazine: "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: complete lack of a policy apparatus.



"What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavelli's," he was quoted as saying. Washington Post


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Assembling the Digital Sky 

"U.S. astronomers are gathering terabytes of data into a worldwide 'virtual observatory' that will be accessible to scientists and laymen alike." Technology Review

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Arrest after online 'murder confession'? 

A man was arrested in Concord NH for the murder of a California police officer nine days earlier after, bizarrely, making a confession in an online chatroom at the San Francisco Indymedia site. More bizarrely, he reportedly claimed it was a blow against corporate irresponsibility; indeed, he incorporated before doing the deed and therefore says he is not personally responsible for what is just one more corporate crime. Perhaps most bizarrely — while considering the possibility that the suspect is "a tasteless, publicity-seeking prankster who's trying to use an unsolved murder to promote his cause", The Register's reporter also wonders if the story might be "a psyops operation to discredit the burgeoning anti-globalization movement..."

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"Children have been expelled for less..." 

Teachers' chatroom death threats: 'Teachers using an online "virtual staffroom" have been making death threats against the children in their care.

One fantasised about using "a large handgun ... to blow the head off of the first pupil who has failed to shut up/do homework/sit properly at their desk/speak politely to me."

Another wrote of her satisfaction at having "vengefully" reduced a six-year-old child to tears.' BBC

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Face transplants 'possible within a year' 

"Face transplants will be technically possible within six to nine months - now the public must decide whether the procedure is ethically acceptable, says a leading UK plastic surgeon.

The issue will be debated during a meeting of the British Association of Plastic Surgeons starting on Wednesday. Peter Butler of the Royal Free Hospital in London will argue that face transplantation will be the only effective way of treating some severely disfigured patients, such as those who have suffered extensive burns or facial cancer." New Scientist

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If TiVo Thinks You Are Gay... 

...Here's How to Set It Straight: 'Many consumers appreciate having computers delve into their hearts and heads. But some say it gives them the willies, because the machines either know them too well or make cocksure assumptions about them that are way off base. That's why even TiVo lovers are tempted to hoodwink it -- a phenomenon that was also spoofed this year on another TV show, HBO's "The Mind of the Married Man." ' Wall Street Journal

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Antiwar Effort Gains Momentum 

Growing Peace Movement's Ranks Include Some Unlikely Allies Washington Post

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Deconstructing Modern Antidepressant Therapy? 

Patch Raises New Hope for Beating Depression
It was the first type of antidepressant, and for many people the monamine oxidase, or MAO, inhibitor remains the best hope for relief from major depression.



The trouble is that the side effects can be so serious that MAO inhibitors are rarely prescribed. When taken with certain foods, for example, they may bring on sudden and severe hypertension.



The problems, however, may soon be resolved.



A study reported in November in The American Journal of Psychiatry suggests that by administering the MAO inhibitor selegiline in patch form, patients can receive the antidepressant benefits of the drug without the usual side effects. NY Times



Even without the patch formulation, the MAO inhibitors remain a woefully neglected powerful class of antidepressants. Both clinical lore and my own experience suggest they are useful for types of depression (more ingrained or severe; with 'atypical' features or comorbid with other conditions) which have not responded to more 'modern' (post-Prozac) agents. The risk of hypertensive reaction is highly overrated if the medication is given to patients who are competent to understand and motivated to comply with the dietary restrictions, and these restrictions (the so-called "MAO Inhibitor Diet") are less draconian than the hysterics usually make them out to be.

True, a medication that involves "active" participation by prescriber and recipient will be inconvenient to some in comparison with the SSRIs (Prozac etc.), which have supplanted all other antidepressants due to the marketing claims that prescribing them requires "no muss, no fuss." As readers of FmH know (because I hammer this point home whenever I have the opportunity), the well-publicized complications of rampant SSRI use (including successful litigation against the manufacturers for acts of violence, suicidality and discontinuation syndromes about which I've written here) result in large measure from the illusion that they are so easy to prescribe that they require no art to manage and thus may be given with less supervision than previous antidepressants, and often by nonpsychiatric prescribers. A further consequence of the ascendency of the SSRI and post-SSRI antidepressants may be an overall decrease in antidepressant effectiveness, both because of the lax supervision of their use; and (as readers of FmH may recall I and other psychiatrists suspect) because they are probably "watered-down" antidepressants which do not attack the 'core symptoms' of a depressive disorder but rather make sufferers feel better by controlling 'downstream' epiphenomena, symptoms which accompany depression. I don't mean to be a psychopharmacological Calvinist, but sometimes I wonder if that isn't precisely why they are so much easier to give. They have fewer side effects than older, more robust antidepressants because there is no free lunch, you get what you pay for.

My viewpoint may be jaundiced because, as a consulting psychopharmacologist and a hospital-based psychiatrist, I see the most truly ill of the depressed patients, the patients in whom I am concerned about the reduced efficacy of the SSRIs, rather than the 'walking wounded' who form so much of the modern market for antidepressants for whom an SSRI may be effective enough. (At one extreme, this latter class, of course, blend into those for whom psychopharmacology has famously been called "cosmetic" rather than therapeutic; another consequence of the scourge of the SSRIs.) So, in a number of senses — increased efficacy, mindful prescribing, the participation and responsibility of the recipient, filtering of recipients, etc. — the return of the MAOI is a welcome development, if the patch facilitates it. For technical reasons, however, selegiline, the MAOI about which they are talking here, is not the only one upon which I believe we should focus, however. Other, perhaps better, MAOIs go by the names of tranylcypromine (Parnate), phenelzine (Nardil), and isocarboxazid (Marplan). Selegiline, however, as the newest MAOI, still 'belongs' to a pharmaceutical company and generates profits, whereas the other, older agents are in the public domain and nobody's cash cow. So industry interest in further promoting them is not as likely. Trivia: while this is still an unresolved point, (weak) MAO inhibition may in fact be the mechanism of action for St. John's Wort's putative antidepressant effects.


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The Mombasa Bombing: 

Al Qaeda claims responsibility for Kenyan attack. "An announcement attributed to al-Qaeda, in which the organization claims responsibility for last week's terror attacks in Kenya, was released yesterday on the Internet. The announcement is signed in the name of Tanzim Qa'adat al Jihad - the political bureau of Osama bin Laden's organization.

Experts in analyzing and assessing Internet messages said the announcement includes expressions, nicknames and definitions characteristic of the dialogue that has been conducted in recent months in the name of al-Qaeda." Ha'aretz Police Close In on Owner of Terrorist Vehicle. "A Kenyan woman owned the Mitsubishi Pajero which was used by suicide bombers in the attack on Mombasa’s Paradise Hotel.

This revelation was made in the wake of intensified investigations that have brought together detectives from the Kenyan police and the military, Israel and the US." East African Standard, Mombasa " Kenya Police yesterday denied that there was a dispute between them and Israel detectives investigating the bombing of Mombasa Paradise Hotel." East African Standard, Mombasa "Kenya's security agencies were warned four times of an impending bombing a clear eight months before last week's suicide attack near Mombasa, it can be revealed today." The Nation, Nairobi Rafael ready to install anti-missile protection on civilian airliners: 'Following the launching of Strella anti-aircraft missiles at an Arkia airliner taking off from Mombasa, Kenya, on Thursday, Rafael, the Israeli Armament Development Authority, has gone into emergency production of an anti-missile system for civilian aircraft. "We can fit aircraft with this system within months," company officials said.' Israel Insider





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Sunday, December 1

Take the Homeland Security Quiz 

Ideal for turning into a pamphlet to raise public awareness, as the site suggests. truthout
[via Walker]

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Ten Best Smoking Gun Stories of 2002 

"Shift's profile of The Smoking Gun mentioned a number of great scoops the guys have put together over the years, but they're only a taste of what the site has to offer -- mere appetizers to fuel your hunger for dishes marinated in eau de political scandal and smothered in creamy, steamy celebrity hypocrisy sauces. So just in case you haven't been logging on to The Smoking Gun on a near-daily basis like all of us in the Shift office, here's a collection of the best stories from the past year." [Be sure to browse through no. 3, the collected concert contract riders and mug shots of the stars.] [thanks, Walker]

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In an age of biowarfare, US sees new role for nukes 

"Bush administration mulls resuming nuclear testing and developing tactical warheads to deal with threats like Iraq." Christian Science Monitor

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Trapped by the USA 

Trapped by the USA
When the United States attacks Iraq, Israel will be the country most immediately placed under direct threat, not the USA. Already, the Israeli minister of security has informed Israeli citizens that, in case of war, "we are expected to be the victims." Israeli newspapers report plans to evacuate the metropolitan area of Tel Aviv, and to transform parks and stadiums into temporary mass graves.



Yet, Israelis seem unable to express their vital interest against a war with Iraq. Why have Israelis adopted a passive mood of "expected catastrophe"? Why do many Israelis believe that the violent policies the United States is practicing in the Middle East will actually reduce the dangers to Israel in the future, instead of increase them? Tikkun


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Little lights 

Marge Piercy: 
 Tonight I light the first candle

on the chanukiya by the window

and then a second in the bathtub,

the yahrzeit candle for your death. [