Saturday, January 14

King Children Divided Over Fate of Center 

“As the civil rights leader's widow struggles to recover from a stroke, their offspring fight over selling the King Center, which she founded...

The spectacle of King's children squabbling over their father's legacy has embarrassed many of Atlanta's civil rights activists, who have spent months preparing for what would have been King's 77th birthday.” (LA Times via walker)

1/14/2006 06:45:00 PM   •  

'Doomsday' seed bank to be built 

“Norway is planning to build a "doomsday vault" inside a mountain on an Arctic island to hold a seed bank of all known varieties of the world's crops.

The Norwegian government will hollow out a cave on the ice-bound island of Spitsbergen to hold the seed bank. It will be designed to withstand global catastrophes like nuclear war or natural disasters that would destroy the planet's sources of food.

Seed collection is being organised by the Global Crop Diversity Trust. "What will go into the cave is a copy of all the material that is currently in collections [spread] all around the world," Geoff Hawtin of the Trust told the BBC's Today programme. Mr Hawtin said there were currently about 1,400 seed banks around the world, but a large number of these were located in countries that were either politically unstable or that faced threats from the natural environment.” (BBC)

Technorati tags: doomsday disaster

1/14/2006 12:33:00 PM   •  

Scientists: Donner Family Not Cannibals 

Well, that's a relief: “There's no physical evidence that the family who gave the Donner Party its name had anything to do with the cannibalism the ill-fated pioneers have been associated with for a century and a half, two scientists said Thursday.” (Yahoo! News)

Technorati tags: cannibals cannibalism Donner

1/14/2006 01:01:00 AM   •  

Full Moon Names for 2006 

More lunacy: “Full Moon names date back to Native Americans, of what is now the northern and eastern United States. Those tribes of a few hundred years ago kept track of the seasons by giving distinctive names to each recurring full Moon. Their names were applied to the entire month in which each occurred.

There were some variations in the Moon names, but in general the same ones were current throughout the Algonquin tribes from New England on west to Lake Superior.

European settlers followed their own customs and created some of their own names. Since the lunar (“synodic”) month is roughly 29.5 days in length on average, the dates of the full Moon shift from year to year.

Below are all the Full Moon names, as well as the dates and times, for the next twelve months.” (Yahoo! News)

Technorati tags: moon astronomy lunacy

1/14/2006 12:59:00 AM   •  

A Hearing About Nothing 

E.J.Dionne: “A listless intellectual fog had fallen over the Senate hearing room on Tuesday, the first full day of questioning for Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. before the Judiciary Committee. As one Democratic senator strode out to the hallway during an afternoon break, he leaned toward me and said: "We have to hit him harder."

The senator was expressing frustration over a process that doesn't work. It turns out that, especially when their party controls the process, Supreme Court nominees can avoid answering any question they don't want to answer.” (Washington Post op-ed)

Technorati tags: SCOTUS Alito Congress confirmation

1/14/2006 12:52:00 AM   •  

Are Hyperactive Kids the 'Indigo's? 

Are They Here to Save the World? “If you have not been in an alternative bookstore lately, it is possible that you have missed the news about indigo children. They represent "perhaps the most exciting, albeit odd, change in basic human nature that has ever been observed and documented," Lee Carroll and Jan Tober write in The Indigo Children: The New Kids Have Arrived (Hay House). The book has sold 250,000 copies since 1999 and has spawned a cottage industry of books about indigo children.

...Indigo children were first described in the 1970's by a San Diego parapsychologist, Nancy Ann Tappe, who noticed the emergence of children with an indigo aura, a vibrational color she had never seen before. This color, she reasoned, coincided with a new consciousness.

In The Indigo Children, Mr. Carroll and Ms. Tober define the phenomenon. Indigos, they write, share traits like high I.Q., acute intuition, self-confidence, resistance to authority and disruptive tendencies, which are often diagnosed as attention-deficit disorder, known as A.D.D., or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or A.D.H.D.” (New York Times)

As readers of FmH know, I have treated ADHD for a long time in my psychiatric practice but have been appalled by its burgeoning and unsystematic, laughably faddish overdiagnosis. It is now a wastebasket diagnosis comprising some children with a characteristic set of hardwired neurocognitive deficits in the regulation of attentional processes (who deserve the diagnosis); some with other psychiatric causes of inattention, distractibilityor impulsivity (warranting other psychiatric diagnoses), some children at the mercurial, impulsive or energetic end of the temperament spectrum; and some children whose difficulty paying sustained attention, avoiding distraction or maintaining decorum are shaped by sociocultural rather than internal influences. These latter two groups of ADHDers really do not warrant a psychiatric diagnosis at all.

While I have no affinity for diagnosis by aura, I think Carroll and Tober may be overcompensating for the overpathologizing with an equally silly lionization of the 'ADHD child'. On the other hand, I do think that some children come to be seen as having attention deficit disorder in the classroom because the stultifying curriculum does not hold their interest and they are all over the map seeking stimulation. In my children's school system, the townwide parent interest group for gifted and talented children is full of the parents of children with different, and often difficult, learning styles, and it is no accident.

Technorati tags: ADHD ADD hyperactive pseudoscience

1/14/2006 12:46:00 AM   •  

Friday, January 13

Tough Interrogation Tactics Were Opposed 

Despite their approval by Sec'y of Defense Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, there was opposition within the ranks to aggressive interrrogation techniques;...otherwise known as torture, of course. Members of a Defense Dept. investigative taskforce were told by their commanders and attorneys not to participate. Declassified memos and emails show that they joined the FBI in reporting allegations of prisoner abuse.

This Washington Post investigative piece by Josh White assembles other evidence of pushback against the institutionalized encouragement of prisoner abuse. As an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained the documents in a lawsuit, noted,

"This just confirms that the policies that were adopted at Guantanamo were adopted as a matter of policy and over significant objections, not just within the FBI but within units of the Army. It calls into question the adequacy of the investigations the military undertook. It underscores that high-ranking officers were responsible for the abusive techniques that were put in place."

It makes a mockery of Rumsfeld's baldfaced denials that high-level policy condoned or encouraged prisoner abuse and of the scapegoating of lower level military personnel being disciplined for the perpetration of these acts. Isn't it interesting that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who was both in charge of the Guantanamo Bay mission and then traveled to Iraq to help establish Abu Ghraib prison, this week invoked his right against self-incrimination when he testified in abuse cases brought against two low-ranking soldiers? and that his application for retirement has been accepted by the Pentagon without prejudice?

Throughout the criminal and immoral invasion and occupation of Iraq, I have tried to post items here encouraging conscientious objection and resistance to the Bush regime's policies from within the military. I think webloggers of like mind should be conspicuously publicizing such opposition as is reported on in this WaPo piece. Since the Vietnam era, when significant numbers of (conscripted) military personnel rejected complicity in the American crimes against the Vietnamese people, the climate of disssent has eroded to the point where awareness of the possibility of such acts of conscience is much more effectively suppressed. We should do what we can to counter that. See also my note on the passing of My Lai massacre whistleblower Hugh Thompson last week.

Technorati tags: torture Guantanamo resistance Abu Ghraib

1/13/2006 11:35:00 PM   •  

You and Me and Baby Makes... 

...300 Million or So: “If the experts are right, some time this month, perhaps somewhere in the suburban South or West, a couple, most likely white Anglo-Saxon Protestants or Hispanic, will conceive a baby who, when born in October, will become the 300 millionth American.” (New York Times )

1/13/2006 02:34:00 AM   •  

"Condoleezza Rice's anti-Russian stance based on sexual problems" 

Condoleezza Rice's anti-Russian stance based on sexual problems: “The US Secretary of State released a coarse anti-Russian statement. This is because she is a single woman who has no children.

"...Complex-prone women are especially dangerous. They are like malicious mothers-in-law, women that evoke hatred and irritation with everyone. Everybody tries to part with such women as soon as possible. A mother-in-law is better than a single and childless political persona, though.

"This is really scary. Ms. Rice's personal complexes affect the entire field of international politics. This is an irritating factor for everyone, especially for the East and the Islamic world. When they look at her, they go mad.

"Condoleezza Rice needs a company of soldiers. She needs to be taken to barracks where she would be satisfied." ” — Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the Liberal and Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR)

(Pravda via Wonkette)

1/13/2006 01:32:00 AM   •  

Tragically Hip 

When buying organic pays (and doesn't) : “Know when it pays to buy organic food products to reduce your exposure to pesticides and other additives, when it might sometimes pay, and when it’s a waste of your money. ” (Consumer Reports)

Technorati tags: consumer tragicaly hip

1/13/2006 01:11:00 AM   •  

Thursday, January 12

iTunes update spies on your listening and sends it to Apple? 

Cory Doctorow writes on Boing Boing: “A new version of Apple's iTunes for Mac appears to communicate information about every song you play to Apple, and it's not clear if there's any way to turn this off, nor what Apple's privacy policy is on this information.

Yesterday, I updated my version of iTunes to 6.0.2, at the recommendation of Apple's Software Update program. I noticed immediately that iTunes had a new pane in the main window -- the "Mini-Store" which showed albums and tracks for sale by the artist whose song was presently playing.

The question is: how does Apple know which version of the Mini-Store to show you unless iTunes first transmits the current song that you're playing to Apple? I've turned off the Mini-Store, but a look at Apple's site, the iTunes license, and the iTunes documentation does not state whether this turns off this spyware behavior, or whether it merely causes iTunes not to show me things to buy based on the track I'm presently playing.”

Some of his readers have looked at the situation with packet sniffers and confirmed that if you turn off the mini-store function, iTunes does not upload any information, and Steve Jobs says that Apple discards any personal information the Ministore transmits to Apple.

Doctorow gives the credit for breaking this story to Marc at since1968.com, and makes note of this typology of silly apologists for Apple's behavior:

• "It's not spyware if Apple does it."


• "Stop hyperventilating, iTMS is only collecting the songs you play. Where’s the harm?"


• "It’s your duty to monitor your outbound traffic.."


• "Corollary: You should expect that companies will take your information without asking, and it’s your duty to sniff and counter as desired."


• "Privacy is dead, stop acting like companies are immoral for spying on you."

I often get a version of some of these whenever I raise privacy concern about any sort of corporate behavior — either it is my responsibility to try to protect my privacy, or I should give it up and recognize that the battle is long since lost. I'll be damned if I roll over and accept the latter; as to the former, I agree that it is my responsibility, when the data is collected transparently. For instance, to avoid their building a consumer database on me, I never sign up for the frequent buyers' discount programs at large corporate chains at which I am forced to shop, since there are virtually no independent pharmacies, supermarkets, pet shops or stationery stores around anymore. (I am fortunate enough not to be faced with the same dilemma at Barnes and Noble or Borders, since I can frequent one of two wonderful independent bookstores and never shop the chains at all.) Likewise, as Marc's discussion suggests, if I rip a CD into iTunes, it queries Gracenote for the tags on the tracks, but it tells me it is doing so.

"What I do assert is that sending a packet of your information, however innocuous that information may be, to a third party without your consent or knowledge is foot-in-the-door behavior: if customers don’t make it clear that it’s got to be disclosed now, companies will take the lack of opposition as assent. It’s not evil; it’s just what corporations do."

1/12/2006 08:18:00 PM   •  

Wednesday, January 11

Eyes wide open... 

...but not wide awake: “"We've known about sleep inertia for many decades now," says Kenneth Wright, lead author with the University of Colorado. "But we didn't know how bad it was, especially in the morning. When we woke them up, what we found was their performance was worse than anything we saw with sleep deprivation."” (New Scientist)

Technorati tags: sleep cognition

1/11/2006 03:57:00 PM   •  

US troops seize award-winning Iraqi journalist... 

...who just happens to be investigating American misappropriation of Iraqi funds: "American troops in Baghdad yesterday blasted their way into the home of an Iraqi journalist working for the Guardian and Channel 4, firing bullets into the bedroom where he was sleeping with his wife and children.

Ali Fadhil, who two months ago won the Foreign Press Association young journalist of the year award, was hooded and taken for questioning. He was released hours later.

Dr Fadhil is working with Guardian Films on an investigation for Channel 4's Dispatches programme into claims that tens of millions of dollars worth of Iraqi funds held by the Americans and British have been misused or misappropriated." (Guardian.UK)

1/11/2006 03:34:00 PM   •  

Create an e-annoyance, go to jail 

"Annoying someone via the Internet is now a federal crime.

It's no joke. Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.

In other words, it's OK to flame someone on a mailing list or in a blog as long as you do it under your real name. Thank Congress for small favors, I guess.

This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil much of Usenet, is buried in the so-called Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines and two years in prison.

'The use of the word 'annoy' is particularly problematic,' says Marv Johnson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. 'What's annoying to one person may not be annoying to someone else.'

Buried deep in the new law is Sec. 113, an innocuously titled bit called 'Preventing Cyberstalking.' It rewrites existing telephone harassment law to prohibit anyone from using the Internet 'without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy.'" — Declan McCullagh (CNET)

1/11/2006 03:32:00 PM   •  

In a Filmmaker's Debut, the Day of the Virus Bombs 

This New York Times filmmaker portrait has an unfortunate headline. They do not mean that his debut film is 'bombing' or 'tanking', merely that it is about 'virus bombs.' Intentional or unintended ambiguity??

1/11/2006 12:06:00 PM   •  

Why Do Some Turks Have Bird Flu Virus but Aren't Sick? 

While panic-stricken coverage focuses on the dire pandemic awaiting us, there are suggestions that avian flu may not be as deadly as currently thought and that many mild cases may be going undetected. (New York Times )

More: Bird flu might be less deadly than feared: "Many mild or symptom-free H5N1 infections may have gone undetected in humans, meaning the real fatality rate is lower, a Vietnamese study suggests." (New Scientist)

Technorati tags: emerging disease avian bird flu

1/11/2006 12:04:00 PM   •  

In the Treatment of Diabetes, Success Often Does Not Pay 

Dramatic contentions by the New York Times that the healthcare establishment has little incentive to control diabetes because treating the devastating consequences is so much more lucrative. "It's almost as though the system encourages people to get sick and then people get paid to treat them," one observer is quoted as saying starkly. However, I don't think this is as nefarious as the sensationalistic spin suggests. It has been a perennial struggle to get the industry to fund wellness and preventive care, and there are complicated reasons why it does not happen, but they do not include powerful interests explicitly making sure that people do not get better because it is more profitable to treat them when they are sicker. Healthcare, of course, has long been dominated and defined by physicians who specialize in treating illness rather than maintaining health. Modern medicine has scored monumental success with intensive interventions in acute problems and in general flounders in approaching the more chronic insidious degenerative and lifestyle-related health problems that become more and more prominent on the healthcare landscape in the industrialized world. And the focus on the quick fix rather than the subtle holistic process is something endemic to the Western mindset. So I'm afraid the type of problem highlighted by this Times exposé will not be fixed by sensationalistic investigative reporting, legislative reforms or judicial proceedings as much as consciousness-raising and philosophical debate.

Technorati tags: healthcare reform

1/11/2006 12:01:00 PM   •  

The Unmasking of JT Leroy 

The New York Times posts intricate speculation that the writer who so starkly portrays prostitution, drug addiction and homelessness is a concoction both in public persona and authorship. But can it ever be said that an author is exactly who we think they are from reading them (and would we want that?).

Related:

Best-Selling Memoir Draws Scrutiny:“Police reports and other public records published online on Sunday have raised substantial questions about the truth of numerous incidents depicted in James Frey's best-selling memoir, A Million Little Pieces.

The book, originally published in 2003 by the Nan A. Talese imprint of Doubleday, soared to the top of the best-seller lists in the fall after it was chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her television book club. Ms. Winfrey's enthusiastic endorsement helped the book to sell more than two million copies last year, making it the second-highest-selling book of 2005, behind only Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. A Million Little Pieces currently tops the New York Times paperback best-seller list; Mr. Frey's second book, My Friend Leonard, is on the paper's hardcover best-seller list.

Mr. Frey has repeatedly stated that his book is true. But a lengthy article posted Sunday by The Smoking Gun Web site (www.thesmokinggun.com) quotes Mr. Frey as saying that events "were embellished in the book for obvious dramatic reasons."” (New York Times )

Technorati tags: literary fraud

1/11/2006 11:37:00 AM   •  

Tuesday, January 10

Playing with words to hide horror 

“Beyond any shadow of a doubt, the ugliest phrase to enter the English language in 2005 was "extraordinary rendition."” — Salman Rushdie (Toronto Star; thanks, Seth)

Technorati tags: human rights war crimes

1/10/2006 06:28:00 PM   •  

Monday, January 9

What a long strange trip it's gonna be 

One-way plunge into black hole takes 200,000 years: “The one-way journey from the heart of a galaxy into the oblivion of a black hole probably takes about 200,000 years, astronomers said on Monday. By tracking the death spiral of cosmic gas at the center of a galaxy called NGC1097, scientists figured that material moving at 110,000 miles an hour would still take eons to cross into a black hole.” (Yahoo! News)

Technorati tags: astronomy cosmology cosmic

1/09/2006 06:55:00 PM   •  

Mystery Solved: 

High-Energy Fireworks Linked to Massive Star Cluster: “Call it the Bermuda Triangle of our Milky Way Galaxy: a tiny patch of sky that has been known for years to be the source of the mysterious blasts of X-rays and gamma rays. Now, a team of astronomers, led by Don Figer of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., has solved the mystery by identifying one of the most massive star clusters in the galaxy. The little-known cluster, which has not been catalogued, is about 20 times more massive than typical star clusters in our galaxy, and appears to be the source of the powerful outbursts.” (Space Telescope Science Institute: Hubblesite)

Technorati tags: astronomy science

1/09/2006 06:33:00 PM   •  

Electric Hurricanes 

Mysterious lightning characterized three powerful hurricanes this season. I was actually surprised to learn that lightning is unusual in hurricanes, although the reason makes sense once you understand what makes lightning in the first place:

"[T]he reason most hurricanes don't have lightning is understood. 'They're missing a key ingredient: vertical winds.'

Within thunderclouds, vertical winds cause ice crystals and water droplets (called 'hydrometeors') to bump together. This 'rubbing' causes the hydrometeors to become charged. Think of rubbing your socked feet across wool carpet--zap! It's the same principle. For reasons not fully understood, positive electric charge accumulates on smaller particles while negative charge clings to the larger ones. Winds and gravity separate the charged hydrometeors, producing an enormous electric field within the storm. This is the source of lightning.

A hurricane's winds are mostly horizontal, not vertical. So the vertical churning that leads to lightning doesn't normally happen."

A NASA flyover of Hurricane Emily measured electric fields comparable to those seen over massive land-based thunderstorms. While flyovers were not done of Rita and Katrina, electric discharges were detected by remote land-based sensors. The investigators dismiss the tempting concept that the sheer violence of these three category 4 and 5 storms was responsible for the generation of the electrostatic fields, since the phenomenon has not been observed in other equally violent storms. They conclude that they have alot to learn... (NASA)

1/09/2006 06:30:00 PM   •  

Sunday, January 8

Feingold won't rule out Bush impeachment 

“If Pres. George Bush broke laws when ordering wiretaps and secret spying on U.S. citizens, a key Senate Democrat said he would not rule out calling for his impeachment.

"I think there is an orderly and dignified way to find out what happened," said Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. "And, if there was a legal violation there needs to be accountability ... you can't put the cart before the horse, but I would not rule out any form of accountability."

That would include impeachment, Feingold told reporters.” (Guardian.VT)

1/08/2006 08:13:00 PM   •  

Starbucks Economics 

Solving the mystery of the elusive "short" cappuccino: “Here's a little secret that Starbucks doesn't want you to know: They will serve you a better, stronger cappuccino if you want one, and they will charge you less for it. Ask for it in any Starbucks and the barista will comply without batting an eye. The puzzle is to work out why.” (Slate)

1/08/2006 08:03:00 PM   •  

Scandal of force-fed prisoners 

“Hunger strikers are tied down and fed through nasal tubes, admits Guantánamo Bay doctor.” (Guardian.UK)

1/08/2006 07:57:00 PM   •  

Toshiba to Push Blog Reviews to Mobile Shoppers 

Snap a photo of a product bar code, get web info: “There is a report that Toshiba is developing software that will allow people to take a picture of the bar code label of many products, send it to a related service and quickly receive back information related to the product.

The data the service returns? From blogs. Yep, Toshiba will send back summary information on how many blogs gave the product positive and negative reviews. Related product information will also be displayed.” (Techcrunch)

1/08/2006 07:03:00 PM   •  

MP3 players to select tunes to your taste 

“A new technology could let your computer recommend new music you might like based on an acoustic analysis of the tunes it already knows you enjoy. By analysing the characteristics of a song – like timbre, rhythm, tempo and chord changes – then comparing it to a database of a million songs, the software can recommend similar pieces of music, and even rank them by characteristics, like their key or dance-ability.” (New Scientist)

Somehow, I think this would be less satisfying and productive than recommendations already available, culled from a much larger database by a far more sophisticated and subtle analytical process! For instance, communities like Audioscrobbler, to which my listening history is automatically uploaded by a plug-in in my mp3 client, will show me music I haven't yet heard that listeners with similar taste listen to. (I love it that by dragging a slider I can control how obscure or popular the recommendations will be, too.)

Several of the artists on the recommendation list I know to be on the mark, in that I have heard of them and gotten the sense they are up my musical alley, although I have not yet had a chance to listen to them. Several others are names I had yet to discover, precisely the purpose of the recommendation system. I am open to your assessments of them (am I going to like Neutral Milk Hotel? Built to Spill? Destroyer, which sounds like the name a heavy metal band would choose for themselves?) or any other recommendations you might have, based on your appraisal of whom I listen to, by the way...

The only problem I find with Audioscrobbler is that I download alot of music from mp3blogs to try it out, which thus will appear to Audioscrobbler as part of my listening habits although not necessarily stuff that I end up liking. To counteract that, I sometimes keep iTunes playing my playlist of highest-rated favorites even when I am away from the computer to exert a corrective influence on my Audioscrobbler statistics. Weird, huh?

1/08/2006 06:48:00 PM   •  

Brain Protein Crucial to Depression Discovered 

One of the vexing issues in understanding and treating depression is that, although antidepressant medications change the levels of neurotransmitters implicated in depression almost immediately, they do not have clinical effects for several weeks or even several months. Somehow, a change in serotonin levels, say, has to be accompanied by a change in the way the brain responds to the increased serotonin. Now a group led by Paul Greengard at Rockefeller University has found a protein that seems to regulate neurons' response to serotonin.

In a mouse model for depression which has proven reliable in the past at probing various neurochemical aspects of human depression (the "learned helplessness model"), the protein p11 upregulates the numbers of serotonin-1B cell surface receptors so the cells are more sensitive to available serotonin. The evidence for its pivotal role includes demonstrating that p11 increased in mice in parallel to their response to varied treatments for depression; that mice bred to be genetically p11-deficient are more depressed, have less serotonin activity, and show less response to antidepressant medication; and that mice bred to have high levels of p11 show extra levels of serotonin receptors and do not exhibit depression-like behavior.

The mileage in improving understanding and possibly treatment of psychiatric disorders is all going to come from turning the focus from the neurotransmitter-and-receptor based understanding we have had for the past half-century to an understanding of the involved intracellular processes. I am not sure p11 is 'the' answer, since the more we look the more reductionistic we find any given model to be.

However, as I said above, p11 seems to help answer the vexing issue of finding a neurochemical process that mirrors the time course of clinical response to depression treatment. The next generation of psychopharmacology might involve therapeutic drugs that manipulate p11 directly — rather than indirectly through alterations in neurotransmitter levels — to treat depression more efficiently. If a genetic deficiency in p11 turns out to be one of the vectors for hereditary vulnerability to depression, gene therapy to augment the brain's supplies of p11 could be a preventive measure. I would also of course want to know what else, if anything, p11 does in brain cells, to understand what we could be meddling with in tryng to manipulate it directly.

It is also worth noting that Greengard, whose work I have followed since I knew his son in medical school, shared the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2000 for work which presaged this finding. It seems pretty unusual to award a Nobel Prize so contemporaneously that the Nobelist still has the potential for monumental scientific discovery ahead of him/her.

1/08/2006 06:22:00 PM   •  

Alito's Credibility Problem 

In a Washington Post op-ed piece, Sen. Edward Kennedy writes: “Every Supreme Court nominee bears a heavy burden to demonstrate that he or she is committed to the constitutional principles that have been vital in advancing fairness, decency and equal opportunity in our society. As Judge Samuel Alito approaches his confirmation hearings next week, the more we learn about him, the more questions we have about the credibility of his assurances to us. Consider these five areas... [more]”

My question is, how will this turn into action to stop the Alito accession to the Court? This is alot of blowing smoke unless it translates into Democratic resolve. I don't see Republican fractionation over issues such as ethics and corruption, domestic spying, or the continued viability of the occupation of Iraq translating into support for opposition to the Alito nomination, and nobody's backs seem up against the wall in the face of decorous Democratic hints that they might filibuster.

1/08/2006 03:46:00 PM   •  

Did Jesus exist? 

Court to decide: “Forget the U.S. debate over intelligent design versus evolution.

An Italian court is tackling Jesus -- and whether the Roman Catholic Church may be breaking the law by teaching that he existed 2,000 years ago.” (CNN)

But... if he existed:

Jesus 'healed using cannabis': “Jesus was almost certainly a cannabis user and an early proponent of the medicinal properties of the drug, according to a study of scriptural texts published this month. The study suggests that Jesus and his disciples used the drug to carry out miraculous healings.” (Guardian.UK)

1/08/2006 03:40:00 PM   •  

'Truthiness' 

The word of the year: “A panel of linguists has decided the word that best reflects 2005 is "truthiness," defined as the quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts.” (CNN)

It is not a new phenomenon — viz. 'spin' — but the fact that we want to encapsulate the concept in a word gives it the prominence that it deserves after six years of a dysadministration living in its own distorted reality and trying so hard to foist it off on the rest of the world.

1/08/2006 03:39:00 PM   •  

Googling Google 

“A deal with NASA? A subculture of former employees? What's really going on behind the walls of the Googleplex? Washington Post staff writer David A. Vise was online ...to dig into what makes Google Google.” (Washington Post)

1/08/2006 03:33:00 PM   •  

Online Data Gets Personal 

Cell Phone Records for Sale: “A tool long used by law enforcement and private investigators to help locate criminals or debt-skippers, phone records are a part of the sea of personal data routinely bought and sold online in an Internet-driven, I-can-find-out-anything-about-you world. Legal experts say many of the methods for acquiring such information are illegal, but they receive scant attention from authorities.” (Washington Post)

1/08/2006 02:33:00 PM   •