Treating hypochondria with cognitive therapy

A New Era in Treating Imaginary Ills

New treatment strategies are offering the first hope since the ancient Greeks recognized hypochondria 24 centuries ago. Cognitive therapy, researchers reported last week, helps hypochondriacal patients evaluate and change their distorted thoughts about illness. After six 90-minute therapy sessions, the study found, 55 percent of the 102 participants were better able to do errands, drive and engage in social activities. Antidepressant medications, other studies indicate, are also proving effective.

'The hope is that with effective treatments, a diagnosis of hypochondriasis will become a more acceptable diagnosis and less a laughing matter or a cause for embarrassment,' said Dr. Arthur J. Barsky, director of psychiatric research at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and the lead author of the study on cognitive therapy, which appeared in the March 24 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.

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The great challenge of treating patients with hypochondria is that just when you convince them their headache is harmless they start seizing from their brain tumor.

The patients in this study were seriously disabled by their fears. I can't tell from the NYT article how big an impact the intervention had and what the control group experienced. This may or may not be a meaningful therapy or a significant change. It was a lot of interventions. Similar work is being tried on chronic pain, which has some similarities to the disabling features of hypochondria. It is not the "reality" of the underlying problem that really matters, but how the mind responds to what it experiences.

Kristof does his part -- yet another genocide

Op-Ed Columnist: Starved for Safety:

... African and Western leaders should try much harder to stop civil wars as they start. The world is now facing a critical test of that principle in the Darfur region of Sudan, where Arab militias are killing and driving out darker-skinned African tribespeople. While the world now marks the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide and solemnly asserts that this must never happen again, it is.

Some 1,000 people are dying each week in Sudan, and 110,000 refugees, like Mr. Yodi, have poured into Chad. Worse off are the 600,000 refugees within Sudan, who face hunger and disease after being driven away from their villages by the Arab militias.

'They come with camels, with guns, and they ask for the men,' Mr. Yodi said. 'Then they kill the men and rape the women and steal everything.' One of their objectives, he added, 'is to wipe out blacks.'

This is not a case when we can claim, as the world did after the Armenian, Jewish and Cambodian genocides, that we didn't know how bad it was. Sudan's refugees tell of mass killings and rapes, of women branded, of children killed, of villages burned — yet Sudan's government just stiffed new peace talks that began last night in Chad.

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No-one will be able to say we weren't warned. The black Sudanese should convert to evangelical Christianity immediately. (I assume they're not Christian, if they are then Kristok is not doing them any favors by failing to mention that.)

Save NPR's Bob Edwards (Morning Edition)

Save Bob Edwards Petition

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NPR's senior management dumped Bob Edwards -- so the affiliates can better compete with commercial talk radio.

This is so insane. NPR has been sliding into the commercial space for years. Maybe they need to cut back on some executive salaries. Sign the petition!

My hobby site -- 3GB of monthly traffic?!

Faughnan's HomePage

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I received a bit of a shock today. I recently "upgraded" my web site from a legacy myhosting.com account to their new system. It gave me more space, but also a bandwidth cap of 5GB/month. Since my personal site is made up of dry textual material with few images, I wasn't much concerned about the bandwidth.

Until today, when, by chance, I happened to visit at the end of the month. My creaky, old, dry, dull site saw almost 3GB of traffic in March. That's the entire site -- downloaded 75 times. My average web page is 4KB in size; 3GB is around 750,000 such page views.

I don't think there are that many people reading my old web pages. Is all that traffic just indexing robots, hitting my pages because they've been up for so long that the robots are "obliged" to visit? (One odd feature of my site -- all the URLs are static, and they've not changed for years.)

Odd.

It does make me wonder, though, how many people read these blogs. I'd kind of assumed my readership consisted of my mother, my wife, and my wife's sisters.

Salon.com News | Creepier than Nixon - John Dean on Bush/Cheney

Salon.com News | Creepier than Nixon

The man who brought down Richard Nixon says Bush and 'co-president' Cheney are an even greater threat to the country.

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John Dean writes about Bush/Cheney/Rove. It's clear he thinks they are the greatest threat to American democracy since at least the beginning of the 20th century, if not since the civil war (aka the revolt of the south).

He divides them up this way:

1. Bush: masterful and utterly ruthless political operator, but disinterested in policy.
2. Cheney: Hobbesian brutality, loves policy and power. Tutors Bush and serves him.
3. Roves: Viscious and ruthless, loves personal power. Serves Bush.

Dean doesn't like these guys.

My sense is that our democracy is pretty frail. Another 9/11 attack and the American people will trade democracy for security -- as Hobbes would have predicted. It won't even take a mass bioweapons attack or a true nuclear weapon detonation.

Sadly the professional's analysis favors Bush winning by a pretty good margin. Kerry knows that too, so I wonder what he's planning ...

Should the United Nations run the Internet? | Perspectives | CNET News.com

Should the United Nations run the Internet? | Perspectives | CNET News.com

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I started out thinking this was incredibly silly, since by historical standards there's about a probability of 0% that the UN would ever have significant clout over the true Internet.

On second thought, alas, it's not like the US government, for tragically good reasons, will tolerate the freewheeling and open Internet of old. The age of open information has passed, we are entering the age of ever greater manacles upon knowledge. In this new world the US government shares a common interest with China, Cuba and North Korea in eliminating anonymity and restricting the flow of information.

Another gift to the world from al Qaeda et al.

What drove Clarke mad: the insane Clinton impeachment

The Washington Monthly:

... So what was it that seemingly turned him [Clarke] into a Democratic partisan? Oddly enough, it appears that the turning point came in August 1998 and was a combination of two things: the Monica Lewinsky scandal and al-Qaeda's attacks on two American embassies. It was only a couple of years earlier that the CIA had finally connected the dots and figured out that the al-Qaeda organization even existed, and the embassy bombings were their first major attack since then. Unfortunately, Republican opportunism made it hard to fight back. Although Clarke says he was 'beyond mad' at Clinton for failing to keep his zipper shut, he became flatly infuriated with the recklessness of his conservative opposition:

I was angrier, almost incredulous, that the bitterness of Clinton's enemies knew no bounds, that they intended to hurt not just Clinton but the country by turning the President's personal problem into a global, public circus for their own political ends. Now I feared that the timing of the President's interrogation about the scandal, August 17, would get in the way of our hitting the al Qaeda meeting.

....Our response to two deadly terroist attacks was an attempt to wipe out al Qaeda leadership, yet it quickly became grist for the right-wing talk radio mill and part of the Get Clinton campaign. That reaction made it more difficult to get approval for follow-up attacks on al Qaeda, such as my later attempts to persuade the Principals to forget about finding bin Laden and just bomb the training camps.

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This is what is driving the Republican right berserk. The growing horror of realizing just what they did when they paralyzed the Clinton administration.

Bush is in no danger of impeachment, but despite my belief that he and his partisans are a very bad news for the US and the world, I would not want Bush hounded the way Clinton was. It will suffice to retire him calmly and completely.

Star Telegram | 03/28/2004 | Molly Ivins and the Hart-Rudman report of 1/31/2001

Molly Ivins - Star Telegram | 03/28/2004 | A brief, shining moment amid the mud storm

... This thesis is born out by the eerily prescient and tragically ignored Hart-Rudman report on terrorism, presented on Jan. 31, 2001. (And let me point out that the media deserve much blame here, as well: All the networks ignored it entirely save for CNN, which did it justice. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal never printed a line about it, though The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times both did thorough jobs.)

That commission concluded, "Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers." It recommended a series of practical and effective steps.

Of the various institutions, Congress deserves some credit for trying to pick up on the report, which clearly would have moved us ahead by six months on terrorism planning. Donald Rumsfeld, not one of my favorites, also deserves credit for vigorously backing the report.

Congress scheduled a hearing on the Hart-Rudman report for May 7, 2001, but according to reports at the time, the White House stifled the move because it did not want Congress out in front on the issue.

True, the report was initiated by Clinton, but the commission was bipartisan and included former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and other Republicans. On May 5, the White House announced that rather than adopt Hart-Rudman, it was forming its own committee on terrorism headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. That group never met.

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Odd that Rumsfeld was an advocate, but Cheney dropped the ball. What was going on there?

It does seem like yet another validation of Clarke's thesis.

The CNN article Molly Ivins mentions is still online. That's good, because on reading it one can see the problems with it. The focus on science and engineering education as a crisis may have blunted its impact. This is in the good old days, when the now almost forgotten Oklahoma strike (remember when the nation thought it was an Iraqi attack?) was still on people's minds ...

CNNfyi.com - Guarding against an attack - February 1, 2001

New steps needed to prevent terrorism in U.S., panel says

The guilty verdict in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 and the scheduled execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh have renewed awareness of the perils and possibilities of terrorism. An expert panel, convened by the U.S. Defense Department, said this week that America is vulnerable to a "catastrophic attack," recommending a reorganization of several government agencies to combat terrorism and increased investment in education and scientific research. While few officials doubt the group's research, some question whether these suggestions are possible and necessary.

WASHINGTON -- A "catastrophic attack" is likely to strike the United States in the next 25 years, and the National Guard should be retrained as America's main protector against such an assault, an advisory commission on national security said this week.

In its report issued Wednesday, the panel recommended a reorganization of the State and Defense departments and more investment in education and scientific research.

Additionally, the commission recommended the creation of an independent Cabinet-level National Homeland Security Agency to coordinate a national strategy against terrorism.

"If we have a disaster, and we think it is quite probable in the next 20 to 25 years, we're not prepared to deal with it," former U.S. Sen. Warren Rudman, R-New Hampshire, and co-chairman of the commission, told CNN.

The bipartisan U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century was headed by Rudman and former U.S. Sen. Gary Hart, D-Colorado, and includes former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Georgia, among its 14 members.

The panel, commissioned by the Defense Department, spent more than two years making its evaluations, which included hundreds of interviews with national security experts.

The second-biggest threat is inadequate scientific research and education, something the panel said poses "a greater threat to U.S. national security ... than any potential conventional war that we might imagine."

The United States is presently not prepared to deal with terrorism on its home soil, says former U.S. Sen. Warren Rudman

The commission said the United States will lose its technical edge upon which national security is based if dramatic steps are not taken soon to increase the number of Americans studying advanced science, math and engineering.

As a result, the report recommends a "science and technical education act" offering loans to college students studying science, math and engineering, with the loans being forgiven if the student agrees to work for the government for a given number of years.


"We put science, and science and math education, second ... because we believe it's second only to the threat of a weapon of mass destruction (hitting) one of our cities," Gingrich said.

"The national security establishment has to look seriously at how much" is spent on such programs, Gingrich added.

The proposed security agency would take over the Border Patrol, the U.S. Customs Service, the Coast Guard, the FBI counterterrorism center and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, among others. The proposed agency also would assume responsibility for cyber security from the Commerce Department and the FBI.

"Some serious gaps presently exist," said Hart, noting that more than 40 agencies currently respond to various threats or attacks. "They are not presently coordinated either to protect, prevent or respond to a major terrorist attack."

Added Rudman: "We're not talking about creating a new bureaucracy. We're talking about taking a number of bureaucracies and consolidating them into one streamlined organization."

Rudman said the nation needs to be able to respond adequately to potential terrorists who could use chemical, biological or even small nuclear devices to cause destruction in the United States.

State National Guard units would take on homeland security as their primary task under the commission's proposals. The commission also recommended a series of upgrades of U.S. intelligence gathering against potential terrorists.

Giving the Guard an elevated role is not a new idea. The Clinton administration, for instance, had planned for the Guard to operate a national missile defense system, should one be deployed.

While the commission does have strong backing, many of its recommendations are likely to face stiff opposition due to the magnitude of some of the changes.

The panel also advised higher pay and better benefits for military personnel, particularly captains and majors, where attrition rates are highest.

Federal agencies are poorly coordinated to respond to terrorism, says former U.S. Sen. Gary Hart

On another front, the report argues that the National Security Council at the White House has too much power and should be strictly limited to giving the president advice on policy.

"Ever since (former Secretary of State Henry) Kissinger, it has become more and more operational," said one commission member, "because they don't have any congressional oversight to speak of so they can do whatever the president wants them to do -- à la Oliver North."

The operational power should be returned to the State Department, the commission report argued.

Bush administration officials said they will look closely at the commission's recommendations. But the proposal for a National Homeland Security Agency is sure to stir controversy, because it will take resources away from some well-entrenched agencies.

And critics such as James Steinberg, who was former President Bill Clinton's deputy national security adviser, said agencies simply need better cooperation in the fight against terrorism, not another new agency.

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The 2001 concern about science and engineering deficits as a threat to national security is interesting -- especially in light of today's outsourcing impact. US students are starting to avoid those domains; they may be right -- trade theory predicts outsourcing will have a devastating effect on many engineering and knowledge domains.

Jared Bernstein & Brad DeLong on "Outsourcing": a dialog with interesting discussions

Note: Jared Bernstein on "Outsourcing": Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal

Very interesting posting from Bernstein. DeLong gives an uncharacteristically very weak response, but the comment threads are very interesting. Very much in line with what I've written about for years (mostly personal correspondences). Neo-feudalism beckons!

JK Galbraith junior has a related article in Salon pummeling the Economist. Alas, the Economist is not what it was 10 years ago. It's been infected by rejects from the WSJ.

It's good that we're starting on these topics. Again, I think we need to sever benefits from employment, have mandatory-contribution 529 like plans for use during periods of underemployment, subsidize education and retraining, initiate consumption taxation and estate taxes, etc. etc.

How and why the Neocons missed 9/11, and why they may still be clueless

Peter R. Neumann, NYT OpEd: Why Nobody Saw 9/11 Coming

I love it when someone like this lays it all out in a way that's clear and convincing. The author is a research fellow in international terrorism at the Department of War Studies, King's College London. He combines a military with the tradition of clear minded UK thinking. I'm sure he didn't write the title however -- it's clearly untrue and contradicts his writing. Shame on the NYT headline writers!

The only criticism I'd make of this article is that he fails to fully emphasize the critical role of technologic progress and the dissemination of education in the growth of non-state terrorism.

LONDON — Did the Bush administration, before the 9/11 attacks, fail to take terrorism seriously enough? At first the contention seems unlikely. Isn't this the most hawkish administration in living memory?...

... there is something to these accusations — although perhaps not in the sense that the people making them intend. The administration's early failures on terrorism cannot be pinned down to individual instances of "neglect." To understand what really went wrong, we need to go back to the last decades of the cold war, when people like Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, and Vice President Dick Cheney first started to make sense of terrorism.

In the 1970's and 80's, the predominant view among Washington hawks was that none of the various terrorist groups that operated in Western Europe and the Middle East was truly independent. They were all connected through a vast terrorist network, which was created and supported by the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites. The Communists' aim, the hawks believed, was to destabilize the Western societies without being directly linked to violence.

It all seemed to make perfect sense, and books like "The Terror Network" by Claire Sterling [1981, she later followed up with a 1994 book on organized crime], which argued the network hypothesis with considerable force and conviction, became essential reading for anyone who wanted to make his way in the Reagan White House.

...According to the classically "realist" mindset, only states can pose a significant threat to the national security of other states, because lesser actors simply do not have the capacity, sophistication and resources to do so... it was only by tackling the state sponsors (in this case, the Soviet bloc), that you could root out the terrorists.

With the end of the cold war, however, things changed. While there was no longer a prime state sponsor for any "terror network," there was also no longer any need for one. It became easy to travel from one country to another. Money could be collected and transferred around the globe. Cell phones and the Internet made it possible to maintain tight control of an elusive group that could move its "headquarters" across continents. In fact, by the end of the decade, it seemed as if the model of state-sponsored terrorism had effectively been reversed: Al Qaeda was now in charge of a state — Afghanistan under the Taliban — rather than vice versa.

But the Washington hawks failed to see what was happening. The world around them had changed, but their paradigm hadn't. For them, states continued to be the only real movers and shakers in the international system, and any serious "strategic" threat to America's security could only come from an established nation.

Consider an article in the January/February 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine by Condoleezza Rice, titled "Campaign 2000 — Promoting the National Interest." Ms. Rice, spelling out the foreign policy priorities of a Bush White House, argued that after years of drift under the Clinton administration, United States foreign policy had to concentrate on the "real challenges" to American security. This included renewing "strong and intimate relationships" with allies, and focusing on "big powers, particularly Russia and China." In Ms. Rice's view, the threat of non-state terrorism was a secondary problem — in her to do list" it was under the category of "rogue regimes," to be tackled best by dealing "decisively with the threat of hostile powers."

...Sept. 11, 2001, brought about a quick re-orientation of foreign policy. What didn't change, however, was the state-centered mindset of the people who were in charge. According to Mr. Clarke, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld immediately suspected Saddam Hussein, and suggested military strikes against Iraq. While cooler heads prevailed at the time, and there was a real effort to track down and destroy the Qaeda network, there was also a reluctance to abandon the idea that terrorism had to be state-based. Hence the administration's insistence that there must be an "axis of evil" — a group of states critical in sustaining the terrorists. It was an attempt to reconcile the new, confusing reality with long-established paradigm of state sponsorship.

In the end, the 9/11 hearings are likely to find that the intelligence failure that led to the horrific attacks stemmed from the longstanding problems of wrongly placed agents, failed communications between government departments and lack of resources. But it was also a failure of vision — one for which the current administration must take responsibility.

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There have been two consistent themes in analyses of the Bush administration thus far:

1. Bush likes simple answers. He's not stupid, but his reasoning is heavily faith-based. He has tremendous confidence in his intuition.

2. Rumsfeld, Cheney et al were mired in a world that had passed them by. Remember the missile defense initiative? Many editorials asked how this was supposed to protect us from backpack nukes.

The idea that only states could threaten states was true once. But the cost of weaponry falls much faster than the costs of defense. That trendline continues.

The Rice Foreign Affairs article validates Clarke's testimony. Rice is not stupid, but she was wrong. She knows better than to admit that, but she was simply wrong.

This isn't merely academic, or even about historical justice. The Bush administration STILL doesn't get it.

If Clinton had not been impeached, or if Gore had won ... would 9/11 have been prevented? The conclusion Bush is running from ...

Could We Have Prevented 9/11? - Slate tells you what Richard Clarke's book reveals about the Bush and Clinton administrations' war on terror. By Julia Turner

Although the book amounts to a chronicle of what many in the present Bush administration did wrong (and what Clarke and Clinton did right), it is neither shrill nor overly self-congratulatory. Unlike some of the books Slate has diced and julienned in this space, this one's worth reading, mostly for Clarke's informed account of al-Qaida's rise and the U.S. government's awareness of the threat. But since you may not have time to read the whole thing, Slate presents Clarke's most salient pieces of criticism and praise.

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Bottom line, the Clinton administration did a good job and they'd have done an even better job if the hell-hounds of the Republican party had not been striving to destroy Clinton.

It's not so much that the Bush cronies did a bad job. Yes, they were arrogant and stupidly dismissive of the Clinton administration. Yes, they had severe misconceptions that caused critical delays. Yes, they were obsessed with Iraq and missed the bigger picture. Yes, Bush is not a strong thinker. BUT, despite their myriad failings, they were heading in the right direction. They're arrogant, foolish, irrational and often wrong -- but they're not dumb.

No, what really enrages Bush et al is how well the Clinton administration comes across. They are left with two terrible, unthinkable and thus far unspoken conclusions:

1. Gore might well have done better than Bush at preventing 9/11.
2. If Clinton had not been impeached, 9/11 might have been stopped.

No, we really can't diagnose abuse by physical exam

BBC NEWS | Health | Doubt over shaken baby diagnosis: "Scientists have cast doubt over the theory that certain eye injuries are a sign a baby has been violently shaken.

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This whole business is a much greater scandal than physician over-enthusiasm for estrogen replacement.

In the 80s we thought certain vaginal findings were proof of abuse. Until recently in the UK a second case of SIDS in a family was considered proof of murder. Some have thought that retinal bleeds were a sure sign of shaken baby syndrome. Before we understood von-willebrand's disorder I'm sure bruises in affected children led to abuse cases. At one time certain warts were felt to guarantee child abuse (that may still appear in textbooks, but I wonder how good the science is).

Crappy science, crappy logic. There's something about the horror of infant abuse that drives people to nutty conclusions, and drives thoughtful researchers far from the domain. There is no good, reliable, test for child abuse short of the most extreme findings. I doubt we'll ever have one -- unless we research in advanced "lie detection" actually works out. We'll either err towards removing children from loving and trustworthy homes, or err towards leaving them to be hurt and abused. There are no perfect solutions, which is why child-protective services is such a terribly hard business.

BBC NEWS | Health | Aids risk reduced SIX-FOLD by circumcision?!!

BBC NEWS | Health | Aids risk 'cut by circumcision'

en who have been circumcised may be six times less likely to contract the HIV virus than uncircumcised men, research carried out in India suggests.

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SIX TIMES?!!

If we had a vaccine that reduced infection 6-fold we'd be singing in the streets. This is damned amazing -- if true. It seems too great an effect to be real.

But if it is ...

Whack 'em off. (ouch!)

PS. I've circumcised lots of (male) babies. It's pretty barbaric, though nowadays we at least use anaesthetics. I hated it, but figured it was an American cultural tradition I just had to put up with. Now it looks like there might be an amazingly good reason to lose the foreskin. Circumcising adults is more challenging.

BBC NEWS | Europe | The EU has a terror plan. Now.

BBC NEWS | Europe | Key elements of EU terror action plan

The European Union's summit in Brussels is being dominated by the need to co-ordinate and co-operate in countering terrorism.

This was drawn up by EU interior ministers on 19 March - a week after the Madrid bombings - and then adopted by foreign ministers on 22 March.

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In the days when I chaired a (small) hospital "quality assurance" committee, I was frustrated because I could only effect change in response to serious patient injury rather than before bad things happened.

I was young then. I figured it was just the group I was with; that a more forward thinking group would be proactive, not reactive.

It took me a surprisingly long time to realize that humans are hardly ever proactive. It's simply not in us. We can only react to what's happened, not what is likely to happen.

If some alien species writes our obituary, it will read -- "reactive, not proactive".

Clarke Humilitates his interrogators, GWB gets help from Fox/Pravda (WaPo

Clarke Stays Cool as Partisanship Heats Up (washingtonpost.com)

The Sept. 11 commission shed its bipartisan spirit and turned a Senate hearing room into a courtroom yesterday for the testimony of Richard A. Clarke, the White House counterterrorism chief-turned-Bush administration whistle-blower.

... Shortly before the hearing, the White House violated its long-standing rules by authorizing Fox News to air remarks favorable to Bush that Clarke had made anonymously at an administration briefing in 2002. The White House press secretary read passages from the 2002 remarks at his televised briefing...

Back at the hearing, former Illinois governor James R. Thompson, a Republican member of the commission, took up the cause, waving the Fox News transcript with one hand and Clarke's critical book in the other. "Which is true?" Thompson demanded, folding his arms and glowering down at the witness.

Clarke, appearing unfazed by the apparent contradiction between his current criticism and previous praise, spoke to Thompson as if addressing a slow student.

"I was asked to highlight the positive aspects of what the administration had done, and to minimize the negative aspects of what the administration had done," he explained. "I've done it for several presidents."

With each effort by Thompson to highlight Clarke's inconsistency -- "the policy on Uzbekistan, was it changed?" -- Clarke tutored the commissioner about the obligations of a White House aide. Thompson, who had far exceeded his allotted time, frowned contemptuously. "I think a lot of things beyond the tenor and the tone bother me about this," he said. During a second round of questioning, Thompson returned to the subject, questioning Clarke's "standard of candor and morality."

"I don't think it's a question of morality at all; I think it's a question of politics," Clarke snapped.

Thompson had to wait for Sept. 11, 2001, victims' relatives in the gallery to stop applauding before he pleaded ignorance of the ways of Washington. "I'm from the Midwest, so I think I'll leave it there," he said. Moments later, Thompson left the hearing room and did not return.

... Republican commissioners labored to change that reputation. Fred F. Fielding implied that Clarke may have perjured himself when he spoke to a congressional investigation into the attacks but did not raise complaints about Bush's Iraq policy then. Clarke, though the back of his neck and head were a burning red, replied coolly: "I wasn't asked, sir."

The gallery drew quiet when Lehman questioned Clarke. "I have genuinely been a fan of yours," he began, and then he said how he had hoped Clarke would be "the Rosetta Stone" for the commission. "But now we have the book," Lehman said, suggesting it was a partisan tract.

Clarke was ready for that challenge. "Let me talk about partisanship here, since you raised it," he said, noting that he registered as a Republican in 2000 and served President Ronald Reagan. "The White House has said that my book is an audition for a high-level position in the Kerry campaign," Clarke said. "So let me say here, as I am under oath, that I will not accept any position in the Kerry administration, should there be one."

When Clarke finished his answer, there was a long pause, and the gallery was silent. Lehman smiled slightly and nodded. He had no further questions.

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The gray bureaucrat outguns the pompous senators. Lovely. Washington veterans are tough bastards.

Fox once again plays its role as the American Pravda. In this case, however, they probably didn't do anything wrong. They did earn themselves some political favors, which they'll use wisely. Bush may be corrupt, but he keeps his promises -- to his donors.

In retrospect, even distracted by the insane assaults of the republican right, the Clinton administration comes out well head of the early GWB administration in defending the nation. That must so enrage Bush.

How nice that Kerry didn't have to spend money on attack ads this week.

Wapo is very confused about Microsoft

Regulators, Rivals React (TechNews.com)

The European Union's decision yesterday to fine Microsoft Corp. and require it to make alternate versions of its Windows operating system is a tougher and more far-reaching approach than the one taken by the Justice Department in a similar U.S. case.

When that happens, legal experts said yesterday, it can be hard for companies to know how to behave, which is why regulators on both sides of the Atlantic work to minimize such disagreements.

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Idiot. The US court that found Microsoft to be a monopoly, and in breach of antitrust law, advocated splitting the company in two. That's MUCH tougher and more appropriate than the relatively limp wristed EU judgment.

Gates made the appropriate donations every businessman has to make, and GWB accepted them. Being an honorable crook, GWB had his administration effectively drop the case.

There's a very intersting case playing out in the Minnesota courts, far from the limelight. This case is exposing how Gates and Co crushed the "Go Corporation" in the 1980s/90s. They were only then emerging into full power, and were relatively crude about destroying perceived threats.

The EU decision is to weak to really impact Microsoft. In any case it will be appealed and more donations will be made along the way. I don't expect much impact.

The only threat to Microsoft is China and India deciding they can't trust their inftrastructure to a US company and instead funding Linux development. I think that's rather a longshot.

Kaplan on Clarke: it's as bad as it looks

Dick Clarke Is Telling the Truth - Why he's right about Bush's negligence on terrorism. By Fred Kaplan

Interesting tidbit from Kaplan. After Clarke came another exit, this one voluntary.:

Most pertinent, Rand Beers, the official who succeeded Clarke after he left the White House in February 2003, resigned in protest just one month later—five days before the Iraqi war started—for precisely the same reason that Clarke quit. In June, he told the Washington Post, "The administration wasn't matching its deeds to its words in the war on terror. They're making us less secure, not more." And: "The difficult, long-term issues both at home and abroad have been avoided, neglected or shortchanged, and generally underfunded."

Kaplan's review is dead-on and devastating. I hadn't imagined the Bush situation was this bad. He concludes:

The Principals meeting, which Clarke urgently requested during Bush's first week in office, did not take place until one week before 9/11. In his 60 Minutes interview, Clarke spelled out the significance of this delay. He contrasted July 2001 with December 1999, when the Clinton White House got word of an impending al-Qaida attack on Los Angeles International Airport and Principals meetings were called instantly and repeatedly:

In December '99, every day or every other day, the head of the FBI, the head of the CIA, the Attorney General had to go to the White House and sit in a meeting and report on all the things that they personally had done to stop the al Qaeda attack, so they were going back every night to their departments and shaking the trees personally and finding out all the information. If that had happened in July of 2001, we might have found out in the White House, the Attorney General might have found out that there were al Qaeda operatives in the United States. FBI, at lower levels, knew [but] never told me, never told the highest levels in the FBI. ... We could have caught those guys and then we might have been able to pull that thread and get more of the conspiracy. I'm not saying we could have stopped 9/11, but we could have at least had a chance.

The consistent pattern is that Bush is confident in his own vision. He sees the world not as it is, but as he thinks it is.

Psychotic schizophrenics have similar attributes -- delusions are all about confidence and decisiveness. Bush is more mystical than rational, more intuitive than logical, and maybe even a bit delusional. These are good traits in a religious leader, bad traits in a modern president. Bush should have been an evangelist.

NOVA | The Elegant Universe -- Online

NOVA | The Elegant Universe | Watch the Program | PBS

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You can pick segments of 10 or so minutes apiece to watch. Quicktime or RealVideo. Ahhh, PBS.

Phil Carter has some excellent commentary on Clarke and GWB

INTEL DUMPGreat overview.

Why your daughters should be roofers -- not architects

BW Online, Aaron Bernstein | March 22, 2004 | One Giant Global Labor Pool?

Americans have become increasingly worried over the past year about the lack of job growth in an otherwise strong economy, amid fears that the "offshoring" of white-collar work is a key culprit...

A number of economists are worried, too -- but, unlike the politicians, not about how many jobs the U.S. will create between now and November. They're concentrating instead on an aspect of international job competition that hasn't yet gotten much notice: The conceivably widespread impact, at some point, on U.S. incomes and living standards.

...It may sound premature to be concerned about that. For instance, no one has even been able to pinpoint precisely how many white-collar positions have moved overseas of late -- and many economists doubt that the number is high enough to make it a primary cause of sluggish employment gains. Even if a few hundred thousand jobs have departed for low-wage countries such as China and India in recent years, that number pales beside the routine job flux in the U.S., points out Harvard University trade economist Robert Z. Lawrence. In 2002, the latest year for which full data is available, 32.1 million jobs in the U.S. disappeared, while 31.7 million were created, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Even so, the recent transfer to other countries of so-called knowledge work -- jobs requiring lots of education and creative skills -- could be a signal of what lies ahead. For a precedent, look at what globalization has done to the pay of less-skilled U.S. factory workers over the past three decades or so. As low-wage countries developed the ability to produce things such as apparel, electronics, and textiles, Americans in those industries found themselves competing with people who'll work for a tenth of their pay. This has exerted downward pressure on U.S. factory wages that continues today.

True, the domestic economy usually plays a larger role in wage-setting than does foreign competition. That became clear during the boom of the late 1990s, when red-hot demand for employees who were in short supply more than offset the globalization effect and lifted pay of even the lowest-skilled Americans. Still, in non-boom times the downward tug from abroad is powerful. It's probably one reason average inflation-adjusted wages in the U.S. have slumped by 0.1% in the past year. Without the countervailing force of full employment in America, foreign competition rules.

... That's why the spread of global labor competition to the top of the skill ladder could be so significant. The ability of U.S. companies to find architects, engineers, programmers, and financial analysts in places like India for a fraction of what they cost at home almost certainly will create a dampening effect, sooner or later, on the pay of the 80% of U.S. employees who until now have been unaffected by such global job competition. "White-collar offshoring will make the wage outlook worse for high-skilled Americans, no question," says Brookings Institution economist William T. Dickens.

Indeed, trade theory suggests that the impact ultimately could be larger for high-skilled workers than it has been for the lesser-educated. As the world increasingly begins to look like one big labor pool, market forces should tend to move wages everywhere toward the same level for similar work, all else being equal. After all, employers won't pay more for labor in one country if they can easily get the same work done elsewhere for less. They wouldn't remain competitive for long if they did.

Problem is, all else isn't necessarily equal: Wages tend to move toward equilibrium only after productivity is factored into the equation. If American apparel workers earn $10 for making 10 shirts, their pay starts to come under pressure only when a Mexican worker can churn out the same quality shirts for less than $1 each. That has happened with apparel, so the U.S. has lost many clothes-making jobs. But U.S. skill and technology have made many factories at home more productive than their foreign counterparts -- one reason that all American factory jobs haven't shifted abroad.

"DIRECT COMPETITION." The question that white collar offshoring raises is whether American professionals are more productive than their Chinese or Indian rivals. If the answer is no, the result could be sobering. Many of the highest-skilled jobs that are fleeing offshore seem to depend more on brainpower than on capital or technology -- the last lines of defense in manufacturing. After all, a software programmer with sufficient smarts and education needs only an office, a computer, and plenty of caffeine to do a good job. So if an Indian programmer can produce as much high-quality code as an American one, wage equalization for programmers may occur at a faster pace than it has for apparel workers...

---

Not bad. Economists aren't yet concerned about the outsourcing effect, but there are strong theoretical reasons to expect huge impacts in the next decade.

The net effect is more wealth everywhere, but the distribution, as always, will be uneven. Architects, accountants, legal aides -- the losers will be widespread. The author calls for more education, etc. That's far from enough. We need to change the way we related to employment; we need to make it something we move in and out of with appropriate modifications to savings, benefits, etc. The impact will be strongest where a foreign worker can be "virtually" insourced. The enabling technology here is definitely the Internet.

Oh, and why roofers? Can't do virtual outsourcing.

George Bush's Resume

Google Bush's Resume

A friend forwarded an email spoof of GWB's resume. It came without attribution, so I tried a Google search to see who claimed it. I found 29,500 links, mostly to variations on the spoof. The email was better than most I scanned -- evidently it's gone through some evolutionary improvements. So here's yet another example of it, with my selected emphases. BTW, I don't consider GWB's substance abuse history all that relevant -- except that his acolytes felt Clinton's inhalations were somehow remarkable.

RESUME
GEORGE W. BUSH
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Washington, DC 20520

EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE:

Law Enforcement:

I was arrested in Kennebunkport, Maine, in 1976 for driving under the
influence of alcohol. I pled guilty, paid a fine, and had my driver's
license suspended for 30 days. My Texas driving record has been "lost" and
is not available.

Military:

I joined the Texas Air National Guard and went AWOL. I refused to take a
drug test or answer any questions about my drug use. By joining the Texas
Air National Guard, I was able to avoid combat duty in Vietnam.

College:

I graduated from Yale University with a low C average. I was a cheerleader.


PAST WORK EXPERIENCE:

I ran for U.S. Congress and lost. I began my career in the oil business in
Midland,Texas, in 1975. I bought an oil company, but couldn't find any oil
in Texas. The company went bankrupt shortly after I sold all my stock.

I bought the Texas Rangers baseball team in a sweetheart deal that took land
using taxpayer money.

With the help of my father and our friends in the oil industry (including
Enron CEO Ken Lay), I was elected governor of Texas.


ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS GOVERNOR OF TEXAS:

I changed Texas pollution laws to favor power and oil companies, making
Texas the most polluted state in the Union. During my tenure, Houston
replaced Los Angeles as the most smog-ridden city in America.

I cut taxes and bankrupted the Texas treasury to the tune of billions in
borrowed money.

I set the record for the most executions by any governor in American
history.

With the help of my brother, the governor of Florida, and my father's
appointments to the Supreme Court, I became President after losing by over
500,000 votes.


ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS PRESIDENT:

I am the first President in U.S. history to enter office with a criminal
record.

I invaded and occupied two countries at a continuing cost of over one
billion dollars per week.

I spent the U.S. surplus and effectively bankrupted the U.S. Treasury.

I shattered the record for the largest annual deficit in U.S. history.

I set an economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in any 12-month
period.

I set the all-time record for most foreclosures in a 12-month period.

I set the all-time record for the biggest drop in the history of U.S. stock
market.

In my first year in office, over 2 million Americans lost their jobs and
that trend continues every month.

I'm proud that the members of my cabinet are the richest of any
administration in U.S. history. My "poorest millionaire," Condoleeza Rice,
has a Chevron oil tanker named after her.

I set the record for most campaign fund-raising trips by a U.S. President.

I am the all-time U.S. and world record-holder for receiving the most
corporate campaign donations.

My largest lifetime campaign contributor, and one of my best friends,
Kenneth Lay, presided over the largest corporate bankruptcy fraud in U.S.
history, Enron.

My political party used Enron private jets and corporate attorneys to assure
my success with the U.S. Supreme Court during my election decision.

I have protected my friends at Enron and Halliburton against investigation
or prosecution.

More time and money was spent investigating the Monica Lewinsky affair than
has been spent investigating one of the biggest corporate rip-offs in
history.

I presided over the biggest energy crisis in U.S. history and refused to
intervene when corruption involving the oil industry was revealed.

I presided over the highest gasoline prices in U.S. history.

I changed the U.S. policy to allow convicted criminals to be awarded
government contracts.

I appointed more convicted criminals to administration than any President in
U.S. history.

I created the Ministry of Homeland Security, the largest bureaucracy in the
history of the United States government.

I've broken more international treaties than any President in U.S. history.

I am the first President in U.S. history to have the United Nations remove
the U.S. from the Human Rights Commission.

I withdrew the U.S. from the World Court of Law.

I refused to allow inspector's access to U.S. "prisoners of war" detainees
and thereby have refused to abide by the Geneva Convention.

I am the first President in history to refuse United Nations election
inspectors (during the 2002 U.S. election).

I set the record for fewest numbers of press conferences of any President
since the advent of television.

I set the all-time record for most days on vacation in any one-year period.

After taking off the entire month of August 2001, I presided over the worst
security failure in U.S. history.

I garnered the most sympathy for the U.S. after the World Trade Center
attacks and less than a year later made the U.S. the most hated country in
the world, the largest failure of diplomacy in world history.

I have set the all-time record for most people worldwide to simultaneously
protest me in public venues (15 million people), shattering the record for
protests against any person in the history of mankind.

I am the first President in U.S. history to order an unprovoked, pre-emptive
attack and the military occupation of a sovereign nation. I did so against
the will of the United Nations, the majority of U.S. citizens, and the
world community.

I have cut health care benefits for war veterans and support a cut in duty
benefits for active duty troops and their families in wartime.

In my State of the Union Address, I lied about our reasons for attacking
Iraq and then blamed the lies on our British friends.

I am the first President in history to have a majority of Europeans (71%)
view my presidency as the biggest threat to world peace and security.

I am supporting development of a nuclear "Tactical Bunker Buster," a WMD.

I have so far failed to fulfill my pledge to bring Osama bin Laden to
justice.


RECORDS AND REFERENCES:

All records of my tenure as governor of Texas are now in my father's
library, sealed and unavailable for public view. All records of SEC
investigations into my insider trading and my bankrupt companies are
sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public view.

All records or minutes from meetings that I, or my Vice-President, attended
regarding public energypolicy are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for
public review.

PLEASE CONSIDER MY EXPERIENCE WHEN VOTING IN 2004.

Speech, Journalism, and American Pravda

Frank Rich (NYT): Après Janet, a Deluge

If we lived in Afghanistan under the Taliban, perhaps it might make sense that Janet Jackson's breast (not even the matched set!) would lead to one of the most hysterical outbreaks of Puritanism in recent, even not-so-recent, American history...

Not all of this can be pinned on Ms. Jackson's nipple ring. This story dates back to 9/11, or, more specifically, to two weeks after, when the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, condemned a historically astute Bill Maher wisecrack about America's "cowardly" pre-9/11 pursuit of Al Qaeda. Mr. Fleischer warned Americans that they should "watch what they say," and some Americans took heed. Mr. Maher's "Politically Incorrect" was dropped by a few network affiliates and advertisers and then canceled by ABC.

The message had been sent that governmental media management was in play, and we've seen its ramifications ever since — whether in the docility and self-censorship of the news media in the run-up to the Iraq war or in an episode as relatively trivial as CBS's dropping of "The Reagans." While the current uproar over broadcast indecency is ostensibly all about sex, it is still all about politics, especially in an election year when a culture war rages. Washington's latest crew of Puritan enforcers — in the administration, Congress and the Federal Communications Commission — are all pandering to a censorious Republican political base that is the closest thing America has to its own Taliban. The media giants, fearful of losing the deregulatory financial favors the federal government can bestow, will knuckle under accordingly until the coast is clear.

...Censorship is when the government suppresses speech, so, technically at least, Howard Stern, like Bill Maher before him, has not been censored. The only sanction applied to Mr. Stern's show so far has been the action taken by a corporation, Clear Channel Communications, which yanked him from six stations it owns, as it is freely entitled to do. (Mr. Stern's program, a product of Viacom, continues to air on roughly 35 other stations.)

But the story line is more subtle than that. Both Clear Channel's founder, Lowry Mays, and a director, Thomas Hicks, have long financial associations with George W. Bush, whether as recent campaign contributors or past business cronies (in the Texas Rangers, in Mr. Hicks's case). Clear Channel needs Washington's powers-that-be to protect its huge share of the radio market. It's only after Mr. Stern turned against Mr. Bush on the air that Clear Channel dropped his show, which is otherwise no more or less racy and politically incorrect than it always has been. A Clear Channel executive told Bill Carter of The New York Times this week that his company had "no political agenda," but those words seem like spin when weighed against the actions of its stations and personnel.

It was another of that company's talk show stars, Glenn Beck, who convened pro-war "Rallies for America," some paid for by Clear Channel stations, to counter antiwar dissent last year. Clear Channel stations were also prominent among those that dumped the Dixie Chicks from their playlists after Natalie Maines's dustup with Mr. Bush. If anything, the company's political affiliations are somewhat more consistent than its enforcement of good taste; last month the trade publication Broadcasting & Cable cited Clear Channel's penchant for "tolerating shock jocks so raw they'd make Howard Stern blush." Even as it dropped Mr. Stern and another long-running show, "Bubba the Love Sponge," for indecency, The Daily News reported that one of the company's New York outlets, Z-100, was promoting Eamon's "I Don't Want You Back," a fount of sexual innuendo that contains the four-letter version of the contraband Bono word in its full title.

Clear Channel's banishment of Mr. Stern has troubled even clear-cut Bush allies. In what must be a first, the conservative Sean Hannity and the liberal Alan Colmes on Fox were in agreement that, in Mr. Hannity's words, "this is chilling because I think at the end of the day, those people that have conservative viewpoints on the radio can similarly be targeted." Rush Limbaugh said, "I haven't ever heard the Howard Stern show, but when the federal government gets involved in this, I get a little frightened." He wondered what would happen if "John Kerry-John Edwards-Bill Clinton-Terry McAuliffe types end up running this country someday again" and decide that "conservative opinion is indecent" because it "causes violence." (Some days later, perhaps after realizing Mr. Stern's anti-Bush animus, he took to defending Clear Channel, with whom he is in partnership, in a Los Angeles Times Op-Ed piece.)

... Entertainment built on violence and sex, in other words, isn't going away as long as Americans lap it up. Even now, two networks that missed out on CBS's Janet Jackson action on Super Bowl Sunday have booked her in the weeks to come — ABC for "Good Morning America" and NBC for "Saturday Night Live." Ms. Jackson's nipple ring, meanwhile, still peeks out of a CBS Web site even as the more insidious indecency, of callow media giants bedding down with cynical politicians, remains largely under wraps

---

Rich is hopeful that corporate interests will ensure a full package of sex and violence reaches all Americans, irregardless of government intent. No argument there -- Rome will have its circuses. Rome, however, was not known for its vibrant democracy. The real concern is not nipple exposure, it's political exposure. Aside from a few rabid bloggers and some veteran columnists, who's exposing what this administration is up to? Few younger journalists can afford loss of sources and/or loss of employment. Independent journalists can't afford major investigative works.

In an era of media consolidation and Rovian ruthlessness, Clear Channel is a greater threat to our freedom than the American Taliban. Our American Pravda will be profitable.

Bush's 9/11 Obsession: It had to be Iraq (washingtonpost.com)

Aide's Book Faults Bush 9/11 Response (washingtonpost.com)

... For Clarke, then in his 10th year as a top White House official, that day marked the transition from neglect to folly in the Bush administration's stewardship of war with Islamic extremists. His account -- in 'Against All Enemies,' which reaches bookstores today, and in interviews accompanying publication -- is the first detailed portrait of the Bush administration's wartime performance by a major participant. Acknowledged by foes and friends as a leading figure among career national security officials, Clarke served more than two years in the Bush White House after holding senior posts under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He resigned 13 months ago yesterday.

Although expressing points of disagreement with all four presidents, Clarke reserves by far his strongest language for George W. Bush. The president, he said, 'failed to act prior to September 11 on the threat from al Qaeda despite repeated warnings and then harvested a political windfall for taking obvious yet insufficient steps after the attacks.' The rapid shift of focus to Saddam Hussein, Clarke writes, 'launched an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq that strengthened the fundamentalist, radical Islamic terrorist movement worldwide.'

Among the motives for the war, Clarke argues, were the politics of the 2002 midterm election. 'The crisis was manufactured, and Bush political adviser Karl Rove was telling Republicans to 'run on the war,' ' Clarke writes.

Clarke describes his book, in the preface, as 'factual, not polemical,' and he said in an interview that he was a registered Republican in the 2000 election. But the book arrives amid a general election campaign in which Bush asks to be judged as a wartime president, and Clarke has thrust himself loudly among the critics. Publication also coincides with politically sensitive public testimony this week by Clinton and Bush administration officials -- including Clarke -- before an independent commission investigating the events of Sept. 11.

... "Any leader whom one can imagine as president on September 11 would have declared a 'war on terrorism' and would have ended the Afghan sanctuary [for al Qaeda] by invading," Clarke writes. "What was unique about George Bush's reaction" was the additional choice to invade "not a country that had been engaging in anti-U.S. terrorism but one that had not been, Iraq." In so doing, he estranged allies, enraged potential friends in the Arab and Islamic worlds, and produced "more terrorists than we jail or shoot."

"It was as if Osama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush, chanting 'invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq,' " Clarke writes.

---

Senior civil servants like Clarke are the people who truly govern our nation. When they resign things are very bad.

Note the reference to the 9/11 committee. It's easy to see why Hastert and Bush have wanted to kill the 9/11 committee -- including chairing it with someone who shares Bush's negligence.

It looks like Bush was wrong to believe Saddam was involved with 9/11. But right or wrong, it's very clear Bush had no particular evidence to justify his beliefs. He believed his intuition, and had no use for contrary facts or opinions.

Bush is certainly decisive. Decisively irrational.

Two comments on the last statements. Some particularly craven journalists give Bush credit for deciding to invade Afghanistan. Jimmy Carter, much criticised for an allegedly pacifist and indecisive nature, wouldn't have hesitated for a fraction of second to invade Afghanistan. That was a forgone conclusion. Bush gets no points for invading Afghanistan. Secondly some have claimed that Kerry is "bin Laden's candidate". I don't think so! No president could have done a better job of serving bin Laden's agenda than George W. Bush. If we can convince the terrorists that their actions will elect Kerry, we may yet avert an attack prior to November.

Worst buying decision this year: TaxCut Deluxe 2003 and the nature of market failures

What a waste. I should have spent the time and money on my accountant. TurboTax reviews on Amazon are hardly better. Looks like the tax law, and rampant product piracy, has finally broken the end-user software market.

Next year I won't even bother.

I really miss the software quality I experienced in the 1980s and early 1990s. Nowadays the only quality software seems to come from small businesses (often shareware) and a few major open source projects. Neither are likely to provide home accounting or tax software. Guess it's back to spreadsheets.

Talk about market failures ...

BTW. As usual Amazon reviews are a much more reliable source of information than trade industry magazines.

[Addendum: it turns out some of the most glaring defects were actually fixed, but Tax Cut doesn't remind users to exit and restart after an update is downloaded. This doesn't change my net opinion though.

U.S. Senator John McCain on the Medicare Drug Benefit Bill: BEFORE the "scandal"

U.S. Senator John McCain

STATEMENT OF SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN ON THE MEDICARE CONFERENCE REPORT

Mr. President, we have before us a conference report that represents one of the biggest expansions of the Medicare entitlement program, and offers enormous profits and protections for a few of the country’s most powerful interest groups, paid for with the borrowed money of American taxpayers for generations and generations to come. This legislation most reminds me of the ancient Medieval practice of leeching. Every special interest in Washington is attaching itself to this legislation and sucking Medicare dry. We do not need leeching, what we need is reform.

On top of the existing $7 trillion accumulated deficit -- which translates into $24,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States -- this year’s current deficit is quickly approaching a half trillion dollars. Adding a new unfunded entitlement to a system that is already financially insolvent, is so grossly irresponsible that it ought to outrage every fiscal conservative.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, this package is estimated to cost just under $400 billion over ten years. But if you believe that is the maximum we will spend over ten years, I’ve got some beach front property in Gila Bend to sell you. My friends, $400 billion is merely a down payment.

Four months later, the "shocking scandal".

No wonder McCain is said to be the most respected politician in America. As to the rumor of the Kerry-McCain ticket, note I wrote it first. (Though I don't believe it will happen.)

The Medicare scandal -- is it really so different from the WMD Scandal?

MSNBC - The Smell of a Real Scandal

... The whole world knows we "got taken for a ride," as the president of Poland says, on Iraq. But because Bush & Co. were as shocked as anyone at the absence of WMD, that's more in the category of grotesque hype than outright lie. The Medicare story is a clearer example of dishonesty and, yes, corruption at high levels. As former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill's statements make clear, the lying about budget numbers began early in the administration, when the White House falsely claimed that the government could not use the surplus to further draw down the debt. It continued after 9/11, when an assistant Treasury secretary complained that the administration was squandering the national consensus by insisting on tax-cut projections that weren't real. But the most shocking deception took place in the run-up to the signing of the Medicare prescription-drug benefit on Christmas Eve.

Recall how that bill squeaked through Congress only after some heads were cracked. A retiring Republican from Michigan, Rep. Nick Smith, even charges that supporters of the bill offered him a bribe in the form of financial support for the political campaign of his son. The bill was priced at the time at $400 billion over 10 years. After the deed was done (the specifics of which amounted to a huge giveaway to the pharmaceutical and health-care industries), it came out that the real cost will be at least $551.5 billion—a difference of $150-plus billion that will translate into trillions over time. Now we learn that the Bush administration knew the truth beforehand and squelched it. Rick Foster, the chief actuary for Medicare, says he was told he would be fired if he passed along the higher estimates to Congress. 'I'll fire him so fast his head will spin,' Thomas Scully, then head of Medicare, said last June, according to an aide who has now gone public.

---

This journalist is doing a backhand favor to Bush; he tries to claim the WMD affair was merely a misunderstanding, whereas the medicare affair is real foul play.

I think he's wrong about them being so dissimilar. A common theme is forcing others to provide the "right" answer, where "right" is whatever Bush defines "right" to be. (Maybe because God tells him what's "right"? Hard to argue with that one.) Bush deals with competing perspectives ruthlessly -- as his people dealt with Valerie Plame. He's no scientist, nor much of a rationalist. He's definitely decisive -- which is easy when you know the right answer to everything.

In the medicare affair Bush knew the right answer. It would be affordable. Sculley did the dirty work; he's since been richly rewarded by the pharmaceutical industry. (It's a measure of the decay of our press that the timing and nature of Sculley's transition passed with little comment.)

But is this really such a shocking scandal? It would only be shocking if the representatives and senators who voted for the medicare bill really believed Bush's numbers -- and were "shocked, shocked" to discover a true yearly cost 40% higher than they'd voted for. I rather doubt that. They knew what they were voting for; the HHS numbers were just political cover for some fiscally conservative republicans who needed an excuse while they betrayed their core values. Yes, the leadership of the AARP also needed these numbers. Their rewards await them.

The people who feel genuinely wronged are probably the career professionals in Health and Human Services who trusted Secretary Thompson. He's had a long and distinguished career, this does not reflect well on him.

What is it about the Bush administration that seems to corrupt so many good people so quickly? One day maybe we'll have a seminar on the topic with Thompson, Powell, O'Neill, Whitman and every economist and science advisor Bush has owned.

Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush and the Iraq Obsession

CBS News | Sept. 11: Before And After | March 19, 2004 20:37:27

(CBS) Former White House terrorism advisor Richard Clarke tells Correspondent Lesley Stahl that on Sept. 11, 2001, and the day after - when it was clear al Qaeda had carried out the terrorist attacks - the Bush administration was considering bombing Iraq in retaliation.

Clarke's exclusive interview will be broadcast on 60 Minutes, Sunday, March 21 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

Clarke was surprised that the attention of administration officials was turning toward Iraq when he expected the focus to be on al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

'They were talking about Iraq on 9/11. They were talking about it on 9/12,' says Clarke.

The top counter-terrorism advisor, Clarke was briefing the highest government officials, including President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

'Rumsfeld was saying we needed to bomb Iraq....We all said, 'but no, no. Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan,' recounts Clarke, 'and Rumsfeld said, 'There aren't any good targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good targets in Iraq.' I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with [the September 11 attacks].''

Clarke goes on to explain what he believes was the reason for the focus on Iraq.

'I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection [between Iraq and al Qaeda], but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there, saying, 'We've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked and there's just no connection,'' says Clarke.

Clarke, who advised four presidents, reveals more about the current administration's reaction to terrorism in his new book, 'Against All Enemies.'

---

There was a case to be made for invading Iraq. Most intelligence services believed Sadaam had not "reformed", even Hans Blix felt he was probably concealing weapons. The sanctions regime had all but collapsed. The US military build-up had forced partial compliance, but it was not sustainable politically, economically, or militarily. Sadaam was (and is) profoundly evil. Iraq was a festering sore at the heart of one of the world's most volatile and fragile regions. Sadaam would gain increasing wealth and power fostering his megalomania. In time he'd arrange to have a nuke detonate in a van parked outside the White House. (The latter seems ever more feasible as we learn of the Khan nuclear trade.)

There were cases to be made for not invading too. The case against was of three sorts: 1) It will make things worse in the near-term and the long-run. 2) It is not right to slay even 10 innocents so that 1000 may be better off. 3) We did not raise our children to die for the benefit of the Iraqi people.

Strong cases either way, lots of room for reasoned and passionate argument.

In the end, though, the Bush administration was not really arguing either case. They argued a case that they invented and probably believed -- that Sadaam was behind al Qaeda and the attack of 9/11 and that he already had the capabilities others feared he was seeking. The Bushites were the tools of Chalabi, a brilliant schemer who many people seem to have underestimated. They lied to US senators when they provided them bone-chilling super-secret intelligence briefings -- so chilling that even Paul Wellstone considered voting for war. They lied to us (see Rumsfeld caught out, prior posting). They lied to themselves as well.

The last irony is the one yet to be played by history. Iraq is far more complex than the media usually reports. The governing council alone is a bewildering mix of plot and counter-plot. Some of the US military representatives in Iraq are people of astounding intellectual power, courage, and will. It is not inconceivable that Iraq will weather terrorist attacks, Baathist sabotage, Sunni-Shia conflict and the US/UK invasion (the last being by far the easiest to get through -- unless you're collateral damage).

There is a future, though not perhaps the most likely, wherein Iraq does become a shining example for the Arab world.

Where will high paying jobs be in a globalized world?

Star-Telegram.com

Here's the catch. Even if the globalizers are right, and outsourcing every manufacturing job in America is a terrific idea, what does it take to get the 'good, high-paying jobs' that Bush claims they're creating?

---

Reading tutors, in some parts of the US, are already very well compensated. It's a job that can't be outsourced. Interventional radiology can't be outsourced, diagnostic radiology can. Roofing can't be outsourced, some types of accounting can.

I think there will be enough high paying jobs, though they will increasingly reward people skills and service work. The trick is the painful transition. We can ease that transition by separating benefits from employment, mandatory contributions to 529 plans to support transitions, and enhanced and extended unemployment benefits.

Strategies for teaching reading to the cognitively disabled

This guy sounds like Heaven's Gift to children with reading disorders. He has a web site with lots of additional material...

Strategies for Teaching Reading to Students with Severe Disabilities

... Dr. Koppenhaver notes that, in his research (see the link below), he and his colleagues found that the cognitive processes of learning to read for students with severe disabilities are almost identical to those of typically developing students. The only difference is in their ability to demonstrate skills through standard assessment measures...

Updated 5/15/09: Reformatted and tagged. See also the UNC center for literacy and disability studies and Teaching reading to persons with cognitive disorders.

Pakistanis don't approve of Khan and Co's nuclear trade?

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Nuclear scandal still begs questions

The proliferation controversy has shocked the country. Its demoralising effect on most Pakistanis can be compared to the country's defeat in the 1971 war with India, which led to the creation of Bangladesh.

Dr Khan's admission of responsibility has virtually shattered those who regarded him as a national hero.

---

How a people respond to events is rarely reported reliably. Journalists focus on a few crowd scenes for local reaction, then report at the government level. The most sensational and provocative statements are amplified.

So this is interesting -- if true. Not provocative, but actually surprising and hopeful. I'd kind of imagined that most Pakistanis were somewhat proud of Dr. Khan's democratic approach to nuclear annihilation. Instead, if one believes this single report, he may be seen as more Strangelove than Einstein. That's good.

Rumsfeld caught lying

MoveOn.org: Democracy in Action

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Lovely video. He's caught during an interview on "Face the Nation" lying about the "imminent danger" claims. It was beautiful, the interviewers had the quotes ready.

BBC NEWS | Health | How vCJD proteins trigger disease - deeply weird

BBC NEWS | Health | How vCJD proteins trigger disease

Researchers had assumed this must only be possible if these proteins - prions - had some form of genetic content.

But US researchers have shown that they are made up solely of protein, and that new 'strains' result simply from prions twisting into new shapes...

It suggests that the ability of prions to misfold into new formations - or strains - accounts for their ability to trigger different diseases...

The researchers, from the University of California at San Francisco and Florida State University, believe that once a prion has folded into a new shape, it acts as template for others.

This produces a chain reaction that allows infection to spread.

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This is much weirder than it sounds. Information processing actions, including replication and mutation, are occurring based on the ability of proteins to create multiple conformations ... the resulting "code" is then executed in the cellular interpreter. Prions are the spam of the body.

How do creationists think students will be able to understand ANYTHING without understanding how natural selection and emergent complexity works? Complex adaptive systems tend towards self-sustaining information processing cycles because natural selection drives towards persistent signals. Again, the ancient pattern of recursive complexity.

Where does it all end?

(PS. Yes, I know the above doesn't quite make sense, but trust me that there's something big here ...)

The Center for Public Integrity: Corruption in America

The Center for Public Integrity

I heard a Cleveland Club address from Charles Lewis via NPR today. Per the NPR blurg:

Investigative journalist and author, Charles Lewis, speaking recently at the City Club of Cleveland. Lewis is the founder and executive director of the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit, non-partisan watchdog group that tracks the links between monied interests and American elected leaders. His books include The Buying of the President 2000, and The Buying of the President 2004: Who's Really Bankrolling Bush and His Democratic Challengers--and What They Expect in Return.

The bit I heard was every bit as bad as I've long feared. The intense corruption is as expected, what surprises me is that Charles Lewis continues to struggle against this. There is far more idealism left out there than most of us would expect -- even in an era where people like Ralph Nader have trashed their reputation.

I will have to send them some money.

BBC Iraqi survey: it's good to have data, esp. positive data

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Survey finds hope in occupied Iraq

... of the 2,500 people questioned, 85% said the restoration of public security must be a major priority.

Opinion was split about who should be responsible, with an Iraqi government scoring highest.

Creating job opportunities was rated more likely to improve security effectively than hiring more police.

Seventy percent of people said that things were going well or quite well in their lives, while only 29% felt things were bad.

And 56% said that things were better now than they were before the war.

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On a quick reading this BBC survey sounds like it might be better done than most surveys. It may actually say something useful. I don't think 70% of Americans feel things are going well or quite well in their lives, this fits with happiness research which emphasizes the effect of relativity. Prosperity is not as important to happiness as is exceeding expectations and feeling improvement. More than half thought their lives were getting better compared to before the start of the war (the sanctions period). Security was felt to be the responsibility of the Iraqi government.

This has to boost the morale of our soldiers.

Al Qaeda: retreat is an option for some

Following Attacks, Spain’s Governing Party Is Beaten: "26-year-old window frame maker, who identified himself only as David, said he had changed his vote from Popular Party to Socialist because of the bombings and the war in Iraq. 'Maybe the Socialists will get our troops out of Iraq, and Al Qaeda will forget about Spain, so we will be less frightened,' he said. 'A bit of us died in the train.'

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The hope of this man is that al Qaeda will leave Spain alone if Spain appears to accede to its demands.

One problem is that one of al Qaeda's demands is for operating bases to attack their enemies. Since Spain is an ideal forward platform, al Qaeda won't be satisfied with retreat from Iraq, they will want an end to investigations and arrests. I doubt the new Spanish government will stop arresting al Qaeda operatives. On the other hand al Qaeda does have a lot to worry about right now, and they may now shift their focus from Spain.

Complex adaptive systems spawn al Qaeda as an agent of progress?

United Press International: Commentary: Al-Qaida in Africa

... a new insurgency erupted in the west -- the Chad-based Darfar rebellion.

Khartoum hit back ruthlessly with scorched-earth tactics and ethnic cleansing. About 100,000 refugees made it across the border into Chad. Another 600,000 were without shelter and the United Nations and Doctors Without Borders said they were now faced with "the worst humanitarian crisis in the world." No TV footage, no story.

The only sub-Saharan country with a professional army up to Western standards is South Africa, which keeps 75,000 under arms. Forty percent of the force is HIV positive. And only 3,000 men are deployable for peacekeeping duties. Nigeria, Africa's most populous country with 130 million, maintains a 17,000-strong air force, but only one troop transport can fly.

West Africa is a graveyard of failed nation-states. Government writs seldom extend much beyond capital-city shantytowns. In the countryside, bush and savanna, radicalized Islamist clerics and Christian missionaries battle it out in a war of words for desperate African souls.

The Christian missions offer rudimentary medical services, T-shirts and occasional staples. The Muslim clerics get stipends from the Saudi Arabian Wahhabi clergy and train youngsters to become "jihadis," meaning "holy warriors." Hunger stalks most west and equatorial African states. And the Supreme Allied Commander, Gen. James Jones is alarmed. He is responsible for 93 countries, including all of Africa, except the Horn -- Ethiopia, Somalia and Djibouti. And in a recent trip in SACEUR's G-5, from Algeria to South Africa, Jones -- who speaks flawless, unaccented French -- saw first-hand the emerging failed and failing states that contain huge ungoverned areas that now serve as breeding grounds or sanctuary for terrorists.

The 27 "least developed countries" are all African, says the United Nations Development Program. Half of the 25 "worst countries in the world" are West African. The average Sierra Leonean doesn't live beyond 39. Nigeria, supposedly comparatively well off, pumping 2.1 million barrels of oil per day, is now on the verge of becoming a failed state. It is breaking apart along ethnic and religious fault lines. The Muslim north is terra incognita for federal authorities.

Rwandan and Ugandan forces have reinfiltrated the Democratic Republic of Congo. The DRC, formerly Zaire, is the size of the United States east of the Mississippi. Some 11,000 ineffectual U.N. peacekeeping troops are lost in the vastness of Africa's answer to "Darkness at Noon" that is costing the world body $90,000 per blue helmet per year. It is the United Nations' most expensive operation.

DRC is only a country on a map. Nineteenth-century tribalism has displaced the Western notion of a nation state. Gone are a modern highway system, a network of airports with daily air service between major cities, guest houses in national parks, plantations, water and sewage treatment plants -- in short, all the components of the former Belgian colony's infrastructure.

There are 11,000 U.N. troops in Sierra Leone, 15,000 in Liberia, 6,200 in the Ivory Coast, all stovepipe operations with separate commands for each of these mini-states, and 4,200 in Ethiopia and Eritrea. The nations that contribute troops to the United Nations for blue-helmet assignments are now tapped out. So are contributions to peacekeeping from dues-paying U.N. member nations. U.N. stabilization has become unsustainable. No sooner are these troops withdrawn from the civil war they went in to stop than the fighting starts again.

Sierra Leone, Liberia and (former French) Guinea are states in name only. Two generations of young Africans in these countries, from the ages of 10 to their early 20s, have known no other life than shooting and being shot at.

Flat-earth Muslim clerics are quick to exploit opportunities by inculcating their jihadi creed. Northern Nigeria, where the Sharia law of Islam has been imposed in large swaths of the province, armed Islamist thugs descend on a village with the marabou, a sort of religious enforcer and his noisy tintinnabula. Some of the larger towns have been occupied by jihadi militants who demand more volunteers -- and government authorities kindly oblige by staying out of their way.

There has been sufficient al-Qaida input in the thousands of square miles of unpoliced territory in both West and Equatorial Africa for French and U.S. intelligence to draw the conclusion terrorist networks are alive throughout the region. But there is also ample evidence that little of this is controlled by al-Qaida Central.

Osama Bin Laden and his associates haven't been using satellite and cell phones for the past two years. They know the National Security Agency can intercept mobile phone signals in a nano-second and flash global positioning system information back to Special Forces looking for them in the mountain ranges that straddle Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Al-Qaida cells operate autonomously with sleeper agents among Muslim communities in most western, eastern and African countries. Bin Laden's capture -- dead or alive -- won't change the correlation of forces between terrorists and counter-terrorists. The growing wretchedness of West Africa's populations -- over a million a year die of malaria in Nigeria alone -- greatly facilitates the marabou's mission of recruiting Islamist desperadoes.

The toughest among them survive the desert trek to Morocco and Algeria and from there take small craft to Spain. Their bodies wash up on Spanish beaches every day. Those who make it alive into Spain have also made it into the European Union.

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This is an astounding cry of warning. An anonymous UPI scribe calls out to the empty dark. Well written.

I've written earlier about "emergent intelligence"-- a fundamental property of complex adaptives systems -- such as humanity.

Perhaps we can think of al Qaeda, the avowed enemy of modernity, as the mechanism by which a complex adaptive system maintains itself. We rich nations can, and have, ignored the misery and poverty of much of the world. Now, however, that misery is a threat to our lives and wealth, and the lives and wealth of our children.

We are now forced to pay attention -- not by virtue of any nobility of character, but rather from the far more reliable incentive of base survival. The attention of the Pentagon, and belatedly of the fools of the Bush regime, now turns to Africa. Complex adaptive systems, as in the ecosystems that drive evolution, are not kind or compassionate. They merely perpetuate themselves by virtue of that famous pseudo-tautology: them that do not perpetuate do not long exist. In this case, they spawn a foul spot of evil -- al Qaeda. The system cares not a whit, but we will be forced to act.

As I wrote 3 years ago, al Qaeda may yet be a gift to humanity.

Better brains born on choline (this is your brain on drugs ..)

Science Blog - Prenatal choline supplements make baby's brain cells bigger, faster

From Duke University:

Prenatal Choline Supplements Make Brain Cells Larger, Faster

The important nutrient choline "super-charged" the brains of animals that received supplements in utero, making their cells larger and faster at firing electrical "signals" that release memory-forming chemicals, according to a new study.

These marked brain changes could explain earlier behavioral studies in which choline improved learning and memory in animals, say the researchers from the departments of pharmacology and psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center and from the Durham VA Medical Center.

The implications for humans are profound, said the researchers, because the collective data on choline suggests that simply augmenting the diets of pregnant women with this one nutrient could affect their children's lifelong learning and memory. In theory, choline could boost cognitive function, diminish age-related memory decline, and reduce the brain's vulnerability toxic insults.

The Duke group is part of a national team of scientists who are exploring the benefits of prenatal choline supplementation on learning and memory. This ongoing research has been instrumental in the Institute of Medicine's decision to elevate choline to the status of an essential nutrient for humans -- particularly pregnant and nursing women, the scientists said.

Results of their study, led by Qiang Li, M.D., of Duke and the Durham VAMC, will be published in the April issue of Journal of Neurophysiology.

"Previous studies at Duke have shown that choline-supplemented animals are smarter and have a greater learning capacity, but we hadn't known until now whether the cells that make up memory-relevant brain circuits are changed by choline" said Li. "Choline didn't just change the general environment of the brain, it changed the fundamental building blocks of brain circuits -- the cells themselves."

Choline is a naturally occurring nutrient found in egg yolks, milk, nuts, fish, liver and other meats as well as in human breast milk. It is the essential building block for a memory-forming brain chemical called acetylcholine, and it plays a vital role in the formation of cell membranes throughout the body.

In the current study, the researchers explored the effects of choline on neurons in the hippocampus, a brain region that is critical for learning and memory. They fed pregnant rats extra amounts of choline during a brief but critical window of pregnancy, then studied how their hippocampal neurons differed from those of control rats.

The researchers found that hippocampal neurons were larger, and they possessed more tentacle-like "dendrites" that reach out and receive signals from neighboring neurons.

"Having more dendrites means that a neuron has more surface area to receive incoming signals," said Scott Swartzwelder, Ph.D., senior author of the study and a neuropsychologist at Duke and the Durham VA Medical Center. "This could make it easier to push the neuron to the threshold for firing its signal to another neuron." When a neuron fires a signal, it releases brain chemicals called "neurotransmitters" that trigger neighboring neurons to react. As neurons successively fire, one to the next, they create a neural circuit that can process new information, he said.

Not only were neurons structured with more dendrites, they also "fired" electrical signals more rapidly and sustained their firing for longer periods of time, the study showed. The neurons also rebounded more easily from their resting phase in between firing signals. These findings complement a previous study by this group showing that neurons from supplemented animals were less susceptible to insults from toxic drugs that are known to kill neurons.

Collectively, these behaviors should heighten the neurons' capacity to accept, transmit and integrate incoming information, said Swartzwelder.

"We've seen before that the brains of choline-supplemented rats have a greater plasticity -- or an ability to change and react to stimuli more readily than normal rats -- and now we are beginning to understand why," he said...

"Overall, we found that neurons in choline-exposed rats were more excitable, more robust in their physiologic response," said Wilkie Wilson, Ph.D., a Duke pharmacologist and member of the team at the Durham VAMC. "We've demonstrated a measurable change in brain cells prompted by moderate amounts of choline given during a narrow window of prenatal development."

Biochemical studies on the brain effects of choline at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Boston University have complemented the Duke findings, Wilson said.

Steven Zeisel, M.D.,at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has demonstrated that choline alters a gene called CDKN-3 by adding a "methyl group" of atoms to the gene. The methyl group switches off the gene and, in doing so, uninhibits the cell division process in the memory centers of the brain.

Tiffany Mellott and Jan Krzysztof Blusztajn, Ph.D., at Boston University -- in collaboration with Christina Williams, Ph.D., and Warren Meck, Ph.D., at Duke, -- recently found that two hippocampal proteins known to participate in learning and memory, called MAPK and CREB, are activated to a greater extent in the animals prenatally supplemented with choline. These studies provide biochemical correlates to the new data reported by the Swartzwelder group.

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More fascinating and disturbing information from the neuroscience world. One near term implication may be a focus on maternal vitamins and nutritional supplement in low income groups and low income nations. There are usually unforseen consequences though. Since schizophrenia seems to be associated at some stage in its evolution with excessive and inappropriate neuronal interconnections, would choline supplementation predispose to schizophrenia in vulnerable groups?

It's a long way from rats to humans.

The story of the Bush drug benefit package -- standard operating procedure

KR Washington Bureau

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The Bush drug benefits bill is quite an interesting tale. This is one take on it.

Structural causes of healthcare inflation

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The cost of healthcare is rising much faster than general inflation. In the US a chunk of that is the collapse of managed care. There are fundamental structural causes however; aging population, new technology, etc.

Today I ran into a structural example I'd not thought of for a while. My son needed an antibiotic for a strep throat and co-occurring ear infection. Ten years ago that would have cost about $10. Instead today it's $120. A tenfold cost increase, because of antimicrobial resistance.

We expect antimicrobial resistance to worsen. Eventually many old favorites, such as augmentin, will bite the dust. Their replacements will cost even more.

Will a strep infection eventually cost $1000 to treat with antibiotics? Talk about health care inflation ...

Productivity and Demographics: Was the boom from the boomers?

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In the past decade we've had nice year on year productivity increases. Productivity increases grow the pie -- they're generally a good thing. I'm hoping much of it comes from the application of IT, globalization, etc.

I wonder about demographics though. Over past 10 years the number of workers between the ages of 32 and 47 must have peaked, following the boomer's age path. Now the oldest boomers are almost 60. For knowledge workers productivity probably peaks, for most people, between the ages of 36 and 50. As we boomers move out of that range, will productivity decline?

Unintended consequences: DVRs & the death of broadcast tv, HDTV and massive hard drives

Mercury News | 03/10/2004 | Hitachi unveils massive drive for digital media

Digital media hogs can celebrate.

A new, whopping 400-gigabyte hard drive from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies can store up to 400 hours of standard television programming, 45 hours of high-definition programming or more than 6,500 hours of digital music...

San Jose-based Hitachi said it designed the monster drive, the Deskstar 7K400, for audio/video products such as digital video recorders.

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So many fascinating aspects it's hard to figure where to start. Quickly:

1. The storage industry has moved to Hitachi and Toshiba. Quite a shift from a few years ago. I think the movement of mass storage from dedicated computers to consumer devices has transformed that industry. The iPod and the DVR are the leading edge. Massive hard drives in cellphones, video cameras and still cameras are obvious additions, but where else will they appear. Ten years ago we thought ubiquitious networking would make hard drives less important -- but we were way wrong. Weird. I remember when CDs first came out, and Bill Gates had his name an a MASSIVE tome about the glorious age of cheaply replicated mass read-only devices. I wrote a letter to a Canadian aid agency waxing enthusiastic about the potential of cheaply distributing educational and reference materials via CD. Then came Gopher came along and that "fork in history" was forgotten with some embarrassment. (Yes, Gopher came before the web -- and it alone demoted the CD as a reference source.)

Now storage is back, as limits to network traffic have become apparent. The world now seems to be converging on a combination of local storage, network traffic, and the critical new world of local caching of massive amounts of data.

Very neat.

2. We thought HDTV would drive the creation of cheap hi resolution display technology. It will, but the conjunction of HDTV and DVRs is driving the creation of massive storage. Unexpected.

3. DVRs, even though they are used by relatively few people, have destroyed broadcast tv. We watched the Simpsons the other day, for the first time in 10 years (we don't watch much tv). The density of commercials was stunning for one unaccustomed to commercial tv. It was unwatchable without a DVR to zip past the commercials. DVRs make standard commercials less effective, also mortal. The natural reaction of a dying industry is to redouble their efforts. But that makes tv less watchable, so it accelerates the move to DVRs (and cable). End result -- an accelerated technology transition. This feedback phenomenon also hit with pay phones and mobile phones. As mobile phone use grew pay phones became worth less and were less reliable and less available. That meant one could not rely on a pay phone, so one needed a cell phone. Feedback is interesting.

The Endocannabanoids - medicine does move on

Entrez-PubMed

After the discovery, in the early 1990s, of specific G-protein-coupled receptors for marijuana's psychoactive principle Delta(9)-tetrahydrocannabinol, the cannabinoid receptors, and of their endogenous agonists, the endocannabinoids, a decade of investigations has greatly enlarged our understanding of this altogether new signalling system.

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I finished medical school in 1986, so my core medical sciences ended in 1983, about 21 years ago. The endocannabanoids, endogenous (natural) agents that act on the same neuro receptors as cannabis, feel like the most dramatic new discovery since that time. Researchers long suspected that, just as we have endogneous opioids, we must have endogenous cannabinoids. It just took a while to find them.

True, we did sequence the genome -- and that's been amazing. But, oddly enough, it felt like a continuation of what we new or guessed in the early 80s. New physiology feels more "real" and proximal to a physician. For example, I went to this research article because of hype about an endocannabinoid derived medication that allegedly helps with weight loss and smoking cessation. Talk about near term impact.

This feels new, and exceptionally interesting. I know nothing at all of the basic science, but I'll be looking for a "popular" (eg. physician oriented review) in JAMA or NEJM.

This probably also provides some insight as to why cannabis sativa manufactures its namesake product in the first place.

MSNBC - Avoiding attacking suspected terrorist mastermind

MSNBC - Avoiding attacking suspected terrorist mastermind

In June 2002, U.S. officials say intelligence had revealed that Zarqawi and members of al-Qaida had set up a weapons lab at Kirma, in northern Iraq, producing deadly ricin and cyanide.

The Pentagon quickly drafted plans to attack the camp with cruise missiles and airstrikes and sent it to the White House, where, according to U.S. government sources, the plan was debated to death in the National Security Council...

Four months later, intelligence showed Zarqawi was planning to use ricin in terrorist attacks in Europe.

The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan, and the White House again killed it.  By then the administration had set its course for war with Iraq...

In January 2003, the threat turned real. Police in London arrested six terror suspects and discovered a ricin lab connected to the camp in Iraq.

The Pentagon drew up still another attack plan, and for the third time, the National Security Council killed it.

Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi’s operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.

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If Bush loses the next election the truth may come out; this will be one of the cases to investigate.

Wahhabism and the Saudi Front (NYT Magazine)

Intruders in the House of Saud, Part I: The Jihadi Who Kept Asking Why

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Long NYT Magazine article -- Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are the next "front" in the Forever War.

Betting against Bush's America ... Buffet's move.

NYT: Weak Dollar Gains Notice of Buffett

Warren E. Buffett, the billionaire investor, has a $12 billion bet against the United States. Mr. Buffett said over the weekend in an annual letter to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., his holding company, that he began investing in foreign currency for the first time in 2002 and expanded his positions in 2003.

By the end of 2003, Berkshire Hathaway held foreign-exchange contracts valued at $12 billion that were spread among five unspecified currencies, he said in the letter, which was released on his company's Web site.

He said Berkshire also owned $1 billion of euro-denominated junk bonds. Mr. Buffett, who still has the bulk of his assets in the United States, bought into the foreign currency as the United States trade deficit swelled and enjoyed large investment gains as the dollar continued to weaken. 'As an American, I hope there is a benign ending to this problem,' Mr. Buffett wrote, referring to the trade deficit and the weaker dollar. He said, however, that the impact could reach 'well beyond currency markets.'

One Berkshire shareholder said the move was an about-face for Mr. Buffett.

'I've attended the annual meeting for well over the past 15 years, and every year until this year when asked about the dollar or foreign currency, Berkshire's basically said, 'You don't make money betting against the United States of America,' said Tom Russo, a partner at Gardner, Russo & Gardner, which owns about 1,000 Berkshire shares. 'Something must have really scared him.'

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And so it begins. Seriously, about 1-2 years ago, looking at the Bush budgets, I looked for an easy way for a small investor to bet against the Bush budget. I didn't have the time or expertise to devise a strategy. Buffett is less constrained.

Evolution in action: why Theocons need to teach natural selection in the schools

Wapo: Dueling Viruses Are Latest Computer Pest (TechNews.com)

The programmers behind the ongoing wave of computer worms and viruses hitting the Internet are starting to take aim at each other, and consumers and businesses around the world are getting caught in the crossfire, security experts said yesterday.

In the space of about three hours early Wednesday morning, five new variants of widespread bugs MyDoom, Bagle and Netsky were spotted roaming the Web...

... Ken Dunham, director of malicious code at Reston-based iDefense, said the authors of Bagle and MyDoom appear, in essence, to be wrestling for remote control over compromised computers, while the Netsky worm attempts to deactivate the other two.

... "We are seeing just variation after variation after variation," said Steven Sundermeier, vice president of products and services at Central Command Inc., a Medina, Ohio-based antivirus company.

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If the theocons are able to remove natural selection from our science curriculum, how will students understand the evolution of their spam?

Viruses and worms have one of four agendas:

1. economic and military disruption (allegedly used by US forces prior to GW I and possibley GW II).
2. terrorism (no clear examples known)
3. an unusually ineffective form of display competition between teenage boys
4. seizing control of computing resources (increasingly important).

Natural selection has only a limited role in understanding #1 and #2. In #3, and especially #4, it has a strong role. Theory predicts that computer worm/viruses should increasingly protect the host computer by limiting harm to it while simultaneously fighting off rival code. In time worm/viruses should emerge that are effective antiviral agents while simultaneously causing minimal harm to the host, indeed in time they should theoretically improve performance of the host. (example: more efficient code for particular functions inserted by the virus).

On wonders if this is partly how early multicellular immune systems developed. Were the first immune systems in bacteria constructed by competing viruses?

Kristof: The market failure of CEO Compensation

Op-Ed Columnist: Millions for Moochers

...The problem with "the great C.E.O. pay heist," as Fortune magazine once called it, is that the free market is not at work here. The average C.E.O. of a major corporation now gets $10.8 million a year, almost 20 times as much as in 1981, as the result of a classic market failure.

"The salary of the chief executive of the large corporation is not a market award for achievement," John Kenneth Galbraith noted back in 1980. "It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself." ...

... These pay packages are negotiated, reflecting what a good C.E.O. brings on the free market. How's that? There is a huge supply of would-be C.E.O.'s and negligible demand from companies for new ones, so their price should be cheap — if boards would use their leverage. When Jack Welch retired, General Electric held a contest among three underlings to succeed him. Each was desperate to get the job. If G.E. had done its usual tough bargaining, it could have signed Jeffrey Immelt on a 15-year contract for a mere $750,000 a year in salary, plus reasonable incentives for long-term success.

If you don't pay a chief executive an obscene sum, you'll lose him. Nope, it doesn't happen. Except for turnaround experts, C.E.O.'s have few transferable skills and are in little demand elsewhere. The average 63-year-old head of a plastics company has almost zero chance of finding a better job elsewhere. One study found that of 77 cases when a major company had to find a new boss, only twice was this because the C.E.O. had left for another corporate job.

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Kristof does a very nice job of summarizing and dismissing the usual vapid explanations of multimillion dollar CEO packages. Yes, it's often brutally hard work -- but it doesn't need to be. I suspect many CEOs would make better decisions if they slept more, exercised better, and traveled a bit less. CEOs work like crazed loons not because they have to, but because it's their nature. It's the same reason many of the tenured professors I know work 60 hours a week. It's just the way they are.

On the other hand Kristof is wrong when he suggests the CEO has to accept a lower wage because they've nowhere to go. Kristof should know better. A highly compensated CEO will almost always have a net liquid asset value of over $10 million. That's known in the industry as f___-you money, because anyone with that asset value can leave work at any time without undue suffering. The alternative to lower pay for these CEOs is to retire, start another company, etc.

CEO compensation is indeed a classic example of market failure. The last 20 years have been very hard on the religion of the invisible hand. Markets are still the best method we have to allocate resources, but they do fail. When they fail we need to find ways to resuscitate the market.

When you have eight strong candidates fighting to be CEO, let's try dropping the compensation package until only three remain.

How Will the Universe End? - A cosmic detective story about the demise of the world, in three parts. By Jim Holt

How Will the Universe End? - A cosmic detective story about the demise of the world, in three parts. By Jim Holt

Before I was going to start worrying about the extinction of absolutely everything in some inconceivably distant epoch, I thought it would be a good idea to talk to a few leading cosmologists. Just how certain were they that the cosmos was undergoing a disastrous runaway expansion? Was intelligent life really doomed to perish as a result? How could they, as scientists, talk about the ultimate future of "civilization" and "consciousness" with a straight face?

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This guy is good. He covers a lot of fun cosmology in a very short essay, and he manates to talk with some great physicists. I really enjoyed this, and his prior essays are fun to. I was particularly struck by a phrase in his Christmas essay:

...You can believe, as I do, that the universe is presided over by a being that is 100 percent malevolent but only 80 percent effective (which explains pretty much everything)

He's got a good point there. I'd tended to assume a disinterested deity, or trillions of short-lived deities with very odd interestes, but malevolence and ineffectiveness has a certain symmetry with human affairs.

Republican party: anti-gay yes, but also anti-adoption?

NYT: Senate Hears Testimony on a Gay Marriage Amendment

Lawmakers and other supporters of the proposed amendment disputed the notion that it amounted to discrimination and said that accusation was offensive. They said their goal was to place in the Constitution a recognition of the traditional view of marriage and family.

"Children are raised expecting to have a biological mother and father," said the Rev. Richard Richardson, president of a child welfare agency in Boston and a leader of the Black Ministerial Alliance of Greater Boston. "It is not just society — it is biology, it is basic human instinct."

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When John McCain ran for the 2000 republican presidential nomination in South Carolina, his daughter appeared beside him. She was born in Bangladesh and was adopted by McCains. The usual story is that he lost that race in part because of a Rove-inspired push poll that alleged his daughter was an illegitimate offspring of a liaison with a black woman. (Since it was widely understood in South Carolina that this was true of Strom Thurmond it may have had some superficial credibility.) I wonder, however, if the voters were really that uninformed. I wonder if they knew his daughter was adopted -- and perhaps that was the real problem for them.

Now, in the context of the anti-gay amendment, some of these sentiments are leaking out. Reverend Richardson, I suspect, is only speaking plainly what many socially conservative Republicans believe. Like tribalists everwhere they may find the concept of adoption profoundly unsettling -- particularly intraethnic adoption.

Child bearing and raising is undoubtedly the true tender issue in discussions of gay marriage. It's arguably a winning issue for Republicans ... but it has risk for them too. It will be hard to keep the message from straying into an attack on adoption by heterosexual couples. Many of those couples might vote Republican, but not if their family comes under attack.

Rove may not like how this goes.

Salon.com | Theocons vs. neocons: The contradictions within the republican party

Salon.com | Theocons vs. neocons

Theocons vs. neocons
With Mad Mel scaring the Jewish vote and Bush pandering to his theocratic base, the Republicans are quickly losing their secular swing voters.

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I like the term "theocons". It's definitely catchier than "religious right" and more specific than Evangelicals. This is a scary group. At their core they believe Bush is the "Anointed President", an agent of God's will who will lead the forces of righteousness against the armies of the Antichrist. He is the end time president.

The Republican party may, at last, be coming apart at the seams. The ultra wealthy think the Bush economic policy emperils their children, their society, and their fortune. Large corporations like the service they get as corporations, but their executives don't enjoy paying bribes, and don't like anti-Gay policies. Economic conservatives are in shock. Foreign policy conservatives feel Bush/Cheney blew it in Iraq, and vaporized American credibility around the world. Libertarians worry about loss of privacy and the reincarnation of "Total Information Awareness". Intelligent conservatives and historians look at Mel Gibson and think neo-Fascism.

For all the talk about Karl Rove's genius, Bush may be blowing his reelection. Since he's evidently a very stubborn ideologue, I can only hope he'll persist.

Building a better memory

Wired News: The Masters of Memory Lane

Hagwood said he wasn't born with an outstanding ability to memorize, and claims anyone can learn the skill. There are specific techniques that mnemonic masters use -- such as associating images with each number and suit when memorizing card positions -- but in general it all comes down to keeping your brain synapses in good working order.

To do that, Hagwood, who gives seminars on how to improve memory skills, advises people to use their non-dominant hand in daily chores, do crosswords and puzzles, play chess, take a different route on your daily commute, learn to tango, play an instrument and speak another language.

No matter how challenging your job is, it isn't demanding enough. Brains thrive on constant challenge, so presenting them with the same activities that they already excel at doesn't keep the gray matter in top shape. You can, however, substitute the waltz for tango lessons -- just ensure that you have a good balance of fresh thinking and activities built into your life.

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I have wondered, is my deteriorating memory merely middle aged senescence, or has heavy use of PIMs, PDAs, and other data management systems accelerated the atrophy? Hmmmm.

The power of the internet combined with social networks ... it still stuns me

MacInTouch Home Page

John Faughnan emailed us about a QuickTime 6.5 EXIF problem he has been tracking down with Thorsten Lemke, author of Graphic Converter:

When you import an image using Image Capture or iPhoto, both of which use Quicktime 6.5, the EXIF header for image orientation is duplicated and one version is incorrect. You can see the two tags using EXIF Viewer.

A portrait image taken with a camera oriented vertically that supports the EXIF orientation tag, after importing via Image Capture, has these duplicate tags (comments mine):

Image Orientation: Top, Left-Hand [I think this is the misleading tag]
Image Orientation: Right-Hand, Top [I think this tag reflects the state of the image]

This image will display the following ways...

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The above was featured prominently on Ric Ford's Macintouch this morning. It was read by perhaps 10,000-100,000 Macintosh geeks, who in turn probably act as a knowledge resource for 50,000 - 500,000 Macintosh users. That's amazing enough, but the full story shows the power of the internet, of authentication and reputation, and of social networks. Here's a quick outline:

0. I've never met Ric Ford (Macintouch) or Thorsten Lemke (Graphic Converter). However, both men know me by correspondence over the past several years. I have a recognizable name, and I always make my identity clear. They have a certain degree of trust in what I write. Ric Ford and his co-editors at Macintouch know and respect Thorstent Lemke's reputation -- but they've probably never seen him.

1. I notice that my digital images are not being rotated or handled correctly during image import. After a month of dealing with this hassle, it really starts to annoy me. I correspond with Thorsten, but we don't yet understand the problem.

2. Google searches provide no explanation. I puzzle a bit and correspond some more. It occurs to me that the only possible explanation is that there are two orientation messages with different values. Thorsten confirms this is true (I don't know if he already knew the problem -- his english is far better than my German but it is not his first language). He sends me a version of his software to test -- it doesn't quite do the trick and I suggest an alternative approach. Twelve hours later he sends me a version of Graphic Converter with a good workaround for the bug in the Apple software -- not quite what I suggested, but very workable.

So in the space of several hours, across the world, 3 people who've never met one another identify an annoying bug in one of Apple's core software applications, educate most of the Macintosh users, put pressure on Apple to fix it, and adapt a well regarded image management application to fix the problem. It's not the internet alone, it's the internet plus social networks and reputations.

I'm old enough to remember when email was available only to researchers. This is such a different world.

And now, unleash the dogs of democracy ...

Big Margins in Key States Assure Kerry the Nomination

Senator John Kerry blazed to victories in Democratic primaries from New York to California today, according to early returns and surveys of voters leaving the polls, effectively capturing his party's presidential nomination and setting up an eight-month general election battle between President Bush and Mr. Kerry, the senator from Massachusetts.

and from the local paper

... [Caucus] Turnout was heavy, estimated at well over twice the 12,000 who turned out in 2000. DFL Party Chairman Mike Erlandson said it was the best caucus showing since the Vietnam era. At his own caucus, attendance was 177, compared to seven people four years ago.

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The war starts Thursday with a deluge of Bush attack ads. It will be one hell of a campaign. Most of us have been keeping our powder dry, waiting for the nominee.

I attended my first ever caucus (DFL) in Minnesota. The traffic was backed up for about a mile and most of us parked 1/4 to 1/2 mile away from the school. Inside the school rooms were packed. Kerry won handily in our precinct. There was little sign of surprise, nor of either celebration or disappointment. It was merely the start of a vast struggle.

I did get to see the Minnesota DFL caucus in action. I now understand why the state party has such a bizarre collection of resolutions and "planks". By the time I left, fairly early in the evening, the residual group would have passed a resolution mandating lifetime employment and shutting down all trade with the rest of the world. I can see why democrats elected in Minnesota almost always win without the party's endorsement.

Krugman: The corruption of Alan Greenspan

Krugman, NYT: Maestro of Chutzpah

The Bush White House has made it clear that it will destroy the careers of scientists, budget experts, intelligence operatives and even military officers who don't toe the line. But Mr. Greenspan should have been immune to such pressures, and he should have understood that the peculiarity of his position — as an unelected official who wields immense power — carries with it an obligation to stand above the fray. By using his office to promote a partisan agenda, he has betrayed his institution, and the nation.

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The Bush administration is making the tax code less progressive and is reducing the subsidies that flow from the wealthy to the poor. This is ideologically consistent. They believe that that people should "stand on their own feet". The unstated corollary is that those who fall deserve their fate.

This is compassionate conservatism. I suppose the compassion part is tastefully looking away rather than tossing cake crumbs.

Krugman is angry about Greenspan's betrayals. Given Greenspan's heritage as a Randian (devotee of Ayn Rand, the apostle of libertarianism) I'd say he's returned to his roots. Rand would approve, she had no patience for the weak.

An end to spam? But not a new idea ...

iTNews

Microsoft is suggesting a new tactic in the fight against spam. Execs have proposed a broad industry plan to publish technical details about big companies' email servers, in an attempt to block fake email.

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Differential filtering based on reputation management of an authenticated sending service. I proposed this in usenet posts over two years ago and on my spam page. I suspect someone else proposed it about 8 years ago.

This will work. It doesn't require Palladium. It doesn't require all of us to have a Passport or manage personal keys. It doesn't require ePostage or load metering. It's not fancy, it's not automatic, but it will work. It moves the user authentication problem to the sending service, which is where it belongs.

In big complex world, authentication and reputation are fundamental. With spam as with junk products as with brands -- it's a recurrent pattern.

Mars probe Opportunity -- plop into a martian swamp?

Mars: A Water World? Evidence Mounts, But Scientists Remain Tight-Lipped

[UPDATE: unless you're a geologist, the actual news conference on 3/2/04 was a bit of a downer for we overly exciteable space nuts. There was lots of water at the landing site .... once.]

PASADENA, California -- Evidence that suggests Mars was once a water-rich world is mounting as scientists scrutinize data from the Mars Exploration rover, Opportunity, busily at work in a small crater at Meridiani Planum. That information may well be leading to a biological bombshell of a finding that the red planet has been, and could well be now, an extraterrestrial home for life.

There is a palpable buzz here at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California that something wonderful is about to happen in the exploration of Mars.

... what has truly been uncovered by the robot at Meridiani Planum is under judicious and tight-lipped review.

Those findings and their implications are headed for a major press conference, rumored to occur early next week ...

It is clear that Opportunity's Earth-to-Mars hole in one -- bouncing into a small crater complete with rock outcrop -- has also proven to be a scientific bulls-eye. The robot is wheeling about the crater that is some 70 feet (22 meters) across and 10 feet (3 meters) deep.

It is also apparent that there is a backlog of scientific measurements that Mars rover scientists working Opportunity have pocketed and kept close to their lab coats.

For one, the rover found the site laden with hematite -- a mineral that typically, but not always -- forms in the presence of water. Then there are the puzzling spherules found in the soil and embedded in rock. They too might be water-related, but also could be produced by the actions of a meteor impact or a spewing volcano.

A few spheres have been sliced in half and their insides imaged. Patches of these spherules, or "berries" as some call them, have undergone spectrometer exam to discern their mineral and chemistry makeup. Close-up photos of soil and rock have also shown thread-like features and even an oddly shaped object that looks like Rotini pasta

There is speculation that the soil underneath the wheels of both Spirit and Opportunity rovers contains small amounts of water mixed with salt in a brine. That brew of dissolved salts keeps the mixture well below the freezing point of pure water, permitting it to exist in liquid form...

... One scientist eagerly awaiting the news from Mars, particularly from Opportunity, is Gilbert Levin. He is Chairman of the Board and Executive Officer for Science of Spherix Incorporated in Beltsville, Maryland.

Levin is a former Viking Mars lander investigator. He has long argued that his 1976 Viking Labeled Release (LR) life detection experiment found living microorganisms in the soil of Mars....

Levin points to Opportunity imagery that offers conclusive proof of standing liquid water and running water on a cold Mars. 

Other images show the rover tracks clearly are being made in "mud", with water being pressed out of that material, Levin said. "That water promptly freezes and you can see reflecting ice. That's clearly ice. It could be nothing else," he said, "and the source is the water that came out of the mud."

As for the spherical objects found at the Opportunity site, Levin has a thought.

"I wonder on Mars if it can rain upwards," he said. The idea is that subsurface water comes up through the soils and then freezes when it gets to the surface.

"Maybe these little spherules form just like raindrops form up above," Levin explained.

Levin said that brine on Mars is a code word for liquid water. He senses that great care is being taken by rover scientists because the liquid water issue starts the road to life.

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The author of this space.com article is rather excited. He's on the verge of declaring that Opportunity is sitting atop a Martian swamp infested with extremophile bacteria. We'll see soon enough if Levin receives a vindication rare in history.

Seymour Hersh (New Yorker) The spring offensive for bin Laden, and the nuclear chasm opening up ...

The New Yorker

This Hersh article may explain a few things, including why the military is more confident about getting bin Laden, and why bin Laden's rumored to have fled Pakistan for Afghanistan. Bin Laden aside, the nuclear black market story is going from big to unprecedented, with astonishingly little popular excitement. This may be one of those "I really prefer not to know" situations for most Americans. As I've noted before, the Malaysian connection is extremely interesting and very scary. They have the technology to do miniaturized bombs.

The spring offensive has been rumored for months. It sounds bigger all the time; it may be driving the hurried exit from Iraq almost as much as Bush's reelection campaign. Of course Iraq was supposed to have been such a cakewalk that our forces were to have been freed up last year and rested by now.

As with all Hersh exclusives, one wonders who in the CIA is leaking this and why ... How much is real and how much deception ...

Emphases mine. Note bin Laden's goatherds are now all dead.

THE DEAL by SEYMOUR M. HERSH - The New Yorker
Why is Washington going easy on Pakistan’s nuclear black marketers?
Issue of 2004-03-08
Posted 2004-03-01

On February 4th, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, who is revered in Pakistan as the father of the country’s nuclear bomb, appeared on a state-run television network in Islamabad and confessed that he had been solely responsible for operating an international black market in nuclear-weapons materials. His confession was accepted by a stony-faced Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s President, who is a former Army general, and who dressed for the occasion in commando fatigues. The next day, on television again, Musharraf, who claimed to be shocked by Khan’s misdeeds, nonetheless pardoned him, citing his service to Pakistan (he called Khan "my hero"). Musharraf told the Times that he had received a specific accounting of Khan’s activities in Iran, North Korea, and Malaysia from the United States only last October. If they knew earlier, they should have told us, he said. Maybe a lot of things would not have happened.

It was a make-believe performance in a make-believe capital. In interviews last month in Islamabad, a planned city built four decades ago, politicians, diplomats, and nuclear experts dismissed the Khan confession and the Musharraf pardon with expressions of scorn and disbelief. For two decades, journalists and American and European intelligence agencies have linked Khan and the Pakistani intelligence service, the I.S.I. (Inter-Service Intelligence), to nuclear-technology transfers...

A Bush Administration intelligence officer with years of experience in nonproliferation issues told me last month, One thing we do know is that this was not a rogue operation...The intelligence officer went on, We had every opportunity to put a stop to the A. Q. Khan network fifteen years ago. Some of those involved today in the smuggling are the children of those we knew about in the eighties. It’s the second generation now.

...Musharraf, who seized power in a coup d’état in 1999, has been a major ally of the Bush Administration in the war on terrorism. According to past and present military and intelligence officials, however, Washington’s support for the pardon of Khan was predicated on what Musharraf has agreed to do next: look the other way as the U.S. hunts for Osama bin Laden in a tribal area of northwest Pakistan dominated by the forbidding Hindu Kush mountain range, where he is believed to be operating...

Musharraf has proffered other help as well. A former senior intelligence official said to me, Musharraf told us, ‘We’ve got guys inside. The people who provide fresh fruits and vegetables and herd the goats’ for bin Laden and his Al Qaeda followers. It’s a quid pro quo: we’re going to get our troops inside Pakistan in return for not forcing Musharraf to deal with Khan.

The spring offensive could diminish the tempo of American operations in Iraq. It’s going to be a full-court press, one Pentagon planner said. Some of the most highly skilled Special Forces units, such as Task Force 121, will be shifted from Iraq to Pakistan...

A large-scale American military presence in Pakistan could also create an uproar in the country and weaken Musharraf’s already tenuous hold on power. The operation represents a tremendous gamble for him personally (he narrowly survived two assassination attempts in December) and, by extension, for the Bush Administration -- if he fell, his successor might be far less friendly to the United States. One of Musharraf’s most vocal critics inside Pakistan is retired Army Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, a fundamentalist Muslim who directed the I.S.I. from 1987 to 1989, at the height of the Afghan war with the Soviets. If American troops start operating from Pakistan, there will be a rupture in the relationship, Gul told me. Americans think others are slaves to them. Referring to the furor over A. Q. Khan, he added, We may be in a jam, but we are a very honorable nation. We will not allow the American troops to come here. This will be the breaking point. If Musharraf has made an agreement about letting American troops operate in Pakistan, Gul said, he’s lying to you.

The greatest risk may be not to Musharraf, or to the stability of South Asia, but to the ability of the international nuclear monitoring institutions to do their work. Many experts fear that, with Khan’s help, the world has moved closer to a nuclear tipping point. Husain Haqqani, who was a special assistant to three prime ministers before Musharraf came to power and is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noted, with some pride, that his nation had managed to make the bomb despite American sanctions. But now, he told me, Khan and his colleagues have gone wholesale: Once they had the bomb, they had a shopping list of what to buy and where. A. Q. Khan can bring a plain piece of paper and show me how to get it done -- the countries, people, and telephone numbers. ‘This is the guy in Russia who can get you small quantities of enriched uranium. You in Malaysia will manufacture the stuff. Here’s who will miniaturize the warhead. And then go to North Korea and get the damn missile.’ He added, This is not a few scientists pocketing money and getting rich. It’s a state policy.

... Last October, the Iranian government, after nine months of denials and obfuscation, and increasingly productive inspections, formally acknowledged to the I.A.E.A. that it had secretly been producing small quantities of enriched uranium and plutonium, and had been operating a pilot heavy-water reactor program, all potentially in violation of its obligations under the nuclear-nonproliferation treaty. Some of the secret programs, Iran admitted, dated back eighteen years...

... On a trip to the Middle East last month, I was told that a number of years ago the Israeli signals-intelligence agency, known as Unit 8200, broke a sophisticated Iranian code and began monitoring communications that included talk between Iran and Pakistan about Iran’s burgeoning nuclear-weapons program. The Israeli intelligence community has many covert contacts inside Iran, stemming from the strong ties it had there before the overthrow of the Shah, in 1979; some of these ties still exist...

The Israeli intercepts have been shared, in some form, with the United States intelligence community, according to the former senior intelligence official, and they show that high-level officials in Islamabad and Tehran had frequent conversations about the I.A.E.A. investigation and its implications. The interpretation is the issue here, the former official said. If you set the buzzwords aside, the substance is that the Iranians were saying, ‘We’ve got to play with the I.A.E.A. We don’t want to blow our cover, but we have to show some movement. There’s no way we’re going against world public opinion, no way. We’ve got to show that we’re coöperating and get the Europeans on our side.’ (At the time, Iran was engaged in negotiations with the European Union on trade and other issues.) It’s clear from the intercepts, however, the former intelligence official said, that Iran did not want to give up its nuclear potential. The Pakistani response, he added, was Don’t give away the whole ballgame and we’ll look out for you. There was a further message from Pakistan, the former official said: Look out for your own interests.

.. analysts throughout the American intelligence community, he said, are asking, How could it be that Pakistan’s done all these things,-- developed a second generation of miniaturized and boosted weapons -- and yet the investigation has been shorted to ground?

... Libya had been able to purchase hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of nuclear parts, including advanced centrifuges designed in Pakistan, from a firm in Malaysia, with a free-trade zone in Dubai serving as the main shipping point. It was a new development in an old arms race: Malaysia, a high-tech nation with no indigenous nuclear ambitions, was retailing sophisticated nuclear gear, based on designs made available by Khan.

... I.A.E.A. inspectors, to their dismay, even found in Libya precise blueprints for the design and construction of a half-ton nuclear weapon. It’s a sweet little bomb, put together by engineers who know how to assemble a weapon, an official in Vienna told me. No question it’ll work. Just dig a hole and test it. It’s too big and too heavy for a Scud, but it’ll go into a family car. It’s a terrorist’s dream.

... One Arab intelligence operative told me that Libyan intelligence, with Qaddafi’s approval, then quickly offered to give American and British intelligence details about a centrifuge deal that was already under way. The parts were due to be shipped aboard a German freighter, the B.B.C. China. In October, the freighter was seized, and the incident was proclaimed a major intelligence success. But, the operative said, it was the Libyans who blew up the Pakistanis, and who made the role of Khan’s black market known. The Americans, he said, asked questions about those orders and Libya said it had them. It was, in essence, a sting, and was perceived that way by Musharraf. He was enraged by what he called, in a nationally televised speech last month, delivered in Urdu, and not officially translated by the Pakistani government, the betrayal of Pakistan by his Muslim brothers in both Libya and Iran. There was little loyalty between seller and buyer. The Pakistanis took a lot of Libya’s money and gave second-grade plans, the Arab intelligence operative said. It was halfhearted.

... There is a nuclear network of black-market centrifuges and weapons design that the world has yet to discover, a diplomat in Vienna told me. In the past, he said, the I.A.E.A. had worked under the assumption that nations would cheat on the nonproliferation treaty to produce and sell their own nuclear material. He said, What we have instead is a black-market network capable of producing usable nuclear materials and nuclear devices that is not limited to any one nation. We have nuclear dealers operating outside our front door, and we have no control over them...

This is a question of survival, the diplomat said, with a caustic smile. He added, Iraq is laughable in comparison with this issue. The Bush Administration was hunting the shadows instead of the prey.

Nonetheless, a senior Pentagon adviser told me in mid-February, the spring offensive is on...

The operation, American officials said, is scheduled to involve the redeployment to South Asia of thousands of American soldiers, including members of Task Force 121. The logistical buildup began in mid-February, as more than a dozen American C-17 cargo planes began daily flights, hauling helicopters, vehicles, and other equipment to military bases in Pakistan. Small teams of American Special Forces units have been stationed at the Shahbaz airbase, in northwestern Pakistan, since the beginning of the Afghanistan war, in the fall of 2001.

The senior Pentagon adviser, like other military and intelligence officials I talked to, was cautious about the chances of getting what the White House wants: Osama bin Laden. It’s anybody’s guess, he said, adding that Ops Sec (operational security) for the planned offensive was poor. The former senior intelligence official similarly noted that there was concern inside the Joint Special Operations Command, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, over the reliability of intercepted Al Qaeda telephone calls. What about deception? he said. These guys are not dumb...

We’ve got to get Osama bin Laden, and we know where he is, the former senior intelligence official said. Osama bin Laden is communicating through sigint -- talking on satellite telephones and the like -- and his wings have been clipped. He’s in his own Alamo in northern Pakistan. It’s a natural progress -- whittling down alternative locations and then targeting him. This is not, in theory, a ‘Let’s go and hope’ kind of thing. They’ve seen what they think is him. But the former official added that there were reasons to be cautious about such reports, especially given that bin Laden hasn’t been seen for so long. Bin Laden would stand out because of his height; he is six feet five. But the target area is adjacent to Swat Valley, which is populated by a tribe of exceptionally tall people.

Two former C.I.A. operatives with firsthand knowledge of the Pakistan Afghanistan border areas said that the American assault, if it did take place, would confront enormous logistical problems. It’s impenetrable, said Robert Baer, who visited the Hindu Kush area in the early nineties, before he was assigned to lead the C.I.A.’s anti-Saddam operations in northern Iraq. There are no roads, and you can’t get armor up there. This is where Alexander the Great lost an entire division. The Russians didn’t even bother to go up there. Everybody’s got a gun. That area is worse than Iraq. Milton Bearden, who ran the C.I.A.’s operations in Afghanistan during the war with the Soviet Union, recounted, I’ve been all through there. The Pashtun population in that belt has lived there longer than almost any other ethnic group has lived anywhere on earth. He said, Our intelligence has got to be better than it’s been. Anytime we go into something driven entirely by electoral politics, it doesn’t work out.

One American intelligence consultant noted that American forces in Afghanistan have crossed into Pakistan in hot pursuit of Al Qaeda suspects in previous operations, with no complaints from the Pakistani leadership. If the American forces strike quickly and decisively against bin Laden from within Pakistan, he added, Musharraf could say he gave no advance authorization. We can move in with so much force and firepower -- with so much shock and awe -- that we will be too fast for him. The consultant said, The question is, how deep into Pakistan can we pursue him? He added, Musharraf is in a very tough position...

... Robert Gallucci, a former United Nations weapons inspector who is now dean of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, calls A. Q. Khan the Johnny Appleseed of the nuclear-arms race. Gallucci, who is a consultant to the C.I.A. on proliferation issues, told me, Bad as it is with Iran, North Korea, and Libya having nuclear-weapons material, the worst part is that they could transfer it to a non-state group. That’s the biggest concern, and the scariest thing about all this -- that Pakistan could work with the worst terrorist groups on earth to build nuclear weapons. There’s nothing more important than stopping terrorist groups from getting nuclear weapons. The most dangerous country for the United States now is Pakistan, and second is Iran. Gallucci went on, We haven’t been this vulnerable since the British burned Washington in 1814.

Stupid journalism:| Breast milk 'does cut heart risk'

BBC NEWS | Health | Breast milk 'does cut heart risk'

Breast-feeding does have a positive long-term effect on reducing blood pressure, research has suggested.

The study, by Bristol University, suggests that breast-fed babies grow up to have lower blood pressure than their bottle-fed counterparts.

If true, the finding, published in the journal Circulation, could mean breast-fed babies are less likely to develop heart disease.

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I suspect the authors are somewht guilty, the journalist worse, and the headline writer worst of all. A typical pattern. This probably means absolutely nothing. Wake me up when they randomize the infants to bottle vs. breast then study them 20 years later.

Hyperlexia: an explanation of why we can read? (washingtonpost.com)

Studying Hyperlexia May Unlock How Brains Read (washingtonpost.com)

Understanding hyperlexia may also help explain how normal brains accomplish the feat of reading. Unlike seeing and hearing, skills acquired through evolution, reading is usually not acquired naturally. Humans have been reading for only a few thousand years, and the pressure for everyone to become good readers has become intense in only the past couple of centuries.

Reading involves a complex series of brain activities: Visual centers must first perceive variable, tiny features of printed symbols on a page, then those changes must be mentally converted into strings of sound, and finally the patterns of sound must be interpreted by language centers in the brain to register their meaning.

'Hyperlexia is the antithesis of dyslexia,' said Guinevere Eden, director of Georgetown University's Center for the Study of Learning, who has studied Alex. 'We spend all our time studying individuals who have a hard time learning to read, and here are these children who acquire reading in a spontaneous way. It's as if they know it already.'

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Twenty years ago, when I first did a neuropsych course, I thought the "miracle of reading" was the most interesting question in human evolution. I guessed, as have many, that it developed from sign language. Indeed, if sign language preceded fluent verbalization, it may be that reading is more fundamental than speaking.

That would fit this story -- hyperlexic children often have difficulty with speech. We know from brain injured patients that speaking and reading abilities are likewise somewhat independent.

It would be very interesting to know how quickly hyperlexic children learn to sign, and whether there's a relationship in deaf children between signing ability and reading ability.