Gibson returns to blogging -- and he's not exactly a fan of GWB

William Gibson

Why?

Because the United States currently has, as Jack Womack so succintly puts it, a president who makes Richard Nixon look like Abraham Lincoln.

And because, as the Spanish philospher Unamuno said, "At times, to be silent is to lie.

Bush - Nixon Redux

The New York Times > Arts > Frank Rich: Will We Need a New 'All the President's Men'?

... if our current presidency is now showing symptoms of a precancerous Watergate syndrome - as it is, daily - we have not yet reached that denouement immortalized by Hollywood, in which our scrappy heroes finally bring Nixon to heel in his second term. No, we're back instead in the earlier reels of his first term, before the criminality of the Watergate break-in, when no one had heard of Woodward and Bernstein. Back then an arrogant and secretive White House, furious at the bad press fueled by an unpopular and mismanaged war, was still flying high as it kneecapped with impunity any reporter or news organization that challenged its tightly enforced message of victory at hand.

It was then that the vice president, Spiro Agnew, scripted by the speechwriter Pat Buchanan, tried to discredit the press as an elite - or, as he spelled it out, "a tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men." It was then that the attorney general, John Mitchell, under the pretext of national security, countenanced wiretaps of Hedrick Smith of The Times and Marvin Kalb of CBS News, as well as a full F.B.I. investigation of CBS's Daniel Schorr. Today it's John Ashcroft's Justice Department, also invoking "national security," that hopes to seize the phone records of Judith Miller and Philip Shenon of The Times, claiming that what amounts to a virtual wiretap is warranted by articles about Islamic charities and terrorism published nearly three years ago.

"The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before," wrote William Safire last month. When an alumnus of the Nixon White House says our free press is being attacked as "never before," you listen. What alarms him now are the efforts of Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame-Robert Novak affair, to threaten reporters at The Times and Time magazine with jail if they don't reveal their sources. Given that the Times reporter in question (Judith Miller again) didn't even write an article on the subject under investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald overreaches so far that he's created a sci-fi plot twist out of Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report."

It's all the scarier for being only one piece in a pattern of media intimidation that's been building for months now. Once Woodward and Bernstein did start investigating Watergate, Nixon plotted to take economic revenge by siccing the Federal Communications Commission on TV stations owned by The Washington Post's parent company. The current White House has been practicing pre-emptive media intimidation to match its policy of pre-emptive war. Its F.C.C. chairman, using Janet Jackson's breast and Howard Stern's mouth as pretexts, has sufficiently rattled Viacom, which broadcast both of these entertainers' infractions against "decency," that its chairman, the self-described "liberal Democrat" Sumner Redstone, abruptly announced his support for the re-election of George W. Bush last month. "I vote for what's good for Viacom," he explained, and he meant it. He took this loyalty oath just days after the "60 Minutes" fiasco prompted a full-fledged political witch hunt on Viacom's CBS News, another Republican target since the Nixon years. Representative Joe Barton, Republican of Texas, has threatened to seek Congressional "safeguards" regulating TV news content and, depending what happens Nov. 2, he may well have the political means to do it.

Viacom is hardly the only media giant cowed by the prospect that this White House might threaten its corporate interests if it gets out of line. Disney's refusal to release Michael Moore's partisan "Fahrenheit 9/11" in an election year would smell less if the company applied the same principle to its ABC radio stations, where the equally partisan polemics of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are heard every day. Even a low-profile film project in conflict with Bush dogma has spooked the world's largest media company, Time Warner, proprietor of CNN. Its Warner Brothers, about to release a special DVD of "Three Kings," David O. Russell's 1999 movie criticizing the first gulf war, suddenly canceled a planned extra feature, a new Russell documentary criticizing the current war. Whether any of these increasingly craven media combines will stand up to the Bush administration in a constitutional pinch, as Katharine Graham and her Post Company bravely did to the Nixon administration during Watergate, is a proposition that hasn't been remotely tested yet.

To understand what kind of journalism the Bush administration expects from these companies, you need only look at those that are already its collaborators. Fox News speaks loudly for itself, to the point of posting on its Web site an article by its chief political correspondent containing fictional John Kerry quotes. (After an outcry, it was retracted as "written in jest.") But Fox is just the tip of the Rupert Murdoch empire. When The New York Post covered the release of the report by the C.I.A.'s chief weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, it played the story on page 8 and didn't get to the clause "while no stockpiles of W.M.D. were found in Iraq" until the 16th paragraph. This would be an Onion parody were it not deadly serious.

It's hard to imagine an operation more insidious than Mr. Murdoch's, but the Sinclair Broadcast Group may be it. The owner or operator of 62 TV stations nationwide, including affiliates of all four major broadcast networks, this company gets little press scrutiny because it is invisible in New York City, Washington and Los Angeles, where it has no stations. But Sinclair, whose top executives have maxed out as Bush contributors, was first smoked out of the shadows last spring when John McCain called it "unpatriotic" for ordering its eight ABC stations not to broadcast the "Nightline" in which Ted Koppel read the names of the then 721 American casualties in Iraq. This was the day after Paul Wolfowitz had also downsized American casualties by testifying before Congress that they numbered only about 500.

Thanks to Elizabeth Jensen of The Los Angeles Times, who first broke the story last weekend, we now know that Sinclair has grander ambitions for the election. It has ordered all its stations, whose most powerful reach is in swing states like Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, to broadcast a "news" special featuring a film, "Stolen Honor," that trashes Mr. Kerry along the lines of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads. The film's creator is a man who spent nearly eight years in the employ of Tom Ridge. Sinclair has ordered that it be run in prime time during a specific four nights in late October, when it is likely to be sandwiched in with network hits like "CSI," "The Apprentice" and "Desperate Housewives." Democrats are screaming, but don't expect the Bush apparatchiks at federal agencies to pursue their complaints as if they were as serious as a "wardrobe malfunction." A more likely outcome is that Sinclair, which already reaches 24 percent of American viewers, will reap the regulatory favors it is seeking to expand that audience in a second Bush term.

Like the Nixon administration before it, the Bush administration arrived at the White House already obsessed with news management and secrecy. Nixon gave fewer press conferences than any president since Hoover; Mr. Bush has given fewer than any in history. Early in the Nixon years, a special National Press Club study concluded that the president had instituted "an unprecedented, government-wide effort to control, restrict and conceal information." Sound familiar? The current president has seen to it that even future historians won't get access to papers he wants to hide; he quietly gutted the Presidential Records Act of 1978, the very reform enacted by Congress as a post-Watergate antidote to pathological Nixonian secrecy.

The path of the Bush White House as it has moved from Agnew-style press baiting to outright assault has also followed its antecedent. The Nixon administration's first legal attack on the press, a year before the Watergate break-in, was its attempt to stop The Times and The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers, the leaked internal Defense Department history of our failure in Vietnam. Though 9/11 prompted Ari Fleischer's first effort to warn the media to "watch what they say," it's failure in Iraq that has pushed the Bush administration over the edge. It was when Operation Iraqi Freedom was bogged down early on that it spun the fictional saga of Jessica Lynch. It's when the percentage of Americans who felt it was worth going to war in Iraq fell to 50 percent in the Sept. 2003 Gallup poll, down from 73 that April, that identically worded letters "signed" by different soldiers mysteriously materialized in 11 American newspapers, testifying that security for Iraq's citizens had been "largely restored." (As David Greenberg writes in his invaluable "Nixon's Shadow," phony letters to news outlets were also a favorite Nixon tactic.) The legal harassment of the press, like the Republican party's Web-driven efforts to discredit specific journalists even at non-CBS networks, has escalated in direct ratio to the war's decline in support.

"What you're seeing on your TV screens," the president said when minimizing the Iraq insurgency in May, are "the desperate tactics of a hateful few." Maybe that's the sunny news that can be found on a Sinclair station. Now, with our election less than three weeks away, the bad news coming out of Iraq everywhere else is a torrent. Reporters at virtually every news organization describe a downward spiral so dangerous that they can't venture anywhere in Iraq without risking their lives. Last weekend marines spoke openly and by name to Steve Fainaru of The Washington Post about the quagmire they're witnessing firsthand and its irrelevance to battling Al Qaeda, whose 9/11 attack motivated many of them to enlist in the first place. "Every day you read the articles in the States where it's like, 'Oh, it's getting better and better," said Lance Cpl. Jonathan Snyder of Gettysburg, Pa. "But when you're here, you know it's worse every day." Another marine, Lance Cpl. Alexander Jones of Ball Ground, Ga., told Mr. Fainaru: "We're basically proving out that the government is wrong. We're catching them in a lie." Asked if he was concerned that he and his buddies might be punished for speaking out, Cpl. Brandon Autin of New Iberia, La., responded: "What are they going to do - send us to Iraq?"

What "they" can do is try to intimidate, harass, discredit and prosecute news organizations that report stories like this. If history is any guide, and the hubris of re-election is tossed into the mix, that harrowing drama can go on for a long time before we get to the feel-good final act of "All the President's Men."

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These are the days to try the souls of journalists. Some will rise to greatness, some will pay a severe price for resistance. Frank Rich is a risin'.

GOP front destroying democrat voter registration documents?

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: October 10, 2004 - October 16, 2004 Archives

Fascinating. Employees of Voters Outreach of America, a GOP-funded voter registration outfit operating in Nevada, say they personally witnessed company employees shredding hundreds or even thousands of Democratic registrations. Now the same company (VOA) is being accused of destroying Democratic registration forms in Oregon.

The head of VOA is Nathan Sproul, a Republican political consultant who used to be the executive director of the Arizona state Republican party.

In gaining access to venues to register voters, he has apparently been claiming that his group is part of America Votes, a voter education and registration groups put together by a consortium of Democrat-leaning groups like the AFL-CIO, Emily's List, the Sierra Club and others.

A quick scan of Nexis shows Sproul's outfit is also operating in West Virginia (see Charleston Gazette, August 20th), where they've already raised some controversy for misleading tactics if not destroying legally valid registrations.

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If true, it's another measure of how low the Republican Party has sunk. This sounds like the tricks developed during the era of American apartheid.

Bush Like Me - an anti-Republican puts on wolf's clothing

Bush Like Me - an anti-Republican puts on wolf's clothing
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/6539082?pageid=rs.Home&pageregion=single7&rnd=1097529183054&has-player=false
RollingStone.com: Politics - Bush Like Me

Republicans are everywhere, but everywhere is not a good place to look for them. For my purposes I wanted to try to catch them in their ideal habitat. That was why I chose Orlando. For me, it is hell on earth, the worst city on the planet, a place that would make me long for Kinshasa or Volokolamsk. But for Republicans, it is ideal: a scorching-hot paved inland archipelago of garish shopping malls and stadium-size steel-and-glass Baptist churches, a place with no nonhuman life apart from the caged animals at the theme parks, and an entire economy organized around monstrous temples to fake experience.

... Part of my job, I soon came to understand, was to be supportive when people like portly Tampa sheriff's deputy Ben Mills came in to share their very serious utopian ideas -- like the benefits of having a society guarded by a clone army. "We'd save a hell of a lot on benefits and medical expenses," he said. " 'Cause you know if they got wounded..."

"You could just shoot them," I said.

"Exactly -- pow! Just shoot 'em dead, right in the ground."

He went on.

"We'd just have a big breeding farm in Colorado," he said. "Course, it'd be a security problem if they got out, you know, if you had rogue clones running around. You'd have to have a special security force to maintain 'em."

"That's where folks like us would come in," I said.

"Exactly," he said.

Folks like us. I was getting the hang of it.

... During my time on the campaign, I noticed an unusual phenomenon. The more involved a person was with the campaign, the more likely he was to be politically moderate. Most of the core group of our office -- Vienna, Rhyan, Ben, Don -- were quietly pro-choice or socially liberal in some other respect. It was the casual volunteers and the people whose only involvement was a bumper sticker who were likely to rant about liberals being traitors and agents of Islamo-Fascism who should be exiled from the country or jailed, etc.

I saw this clearly one weekend at a local gun show, where we were manning a voter-registration booth. I rotated with Rhyan and Vienna that weekend, and all three of us were quietly freaking out at the sight of all these fat weirdos from the sticks buying huge assault rifles and Confederate bumper stickers with messages such as IF I'D KNOWN THIS WOULD HAPPEN, I'D HAVE PICKED MY OWN COTTON.

"Man, I'm glad I'm a socially liberal Republican," whispered Rhyan at one point, laughing.

... . The problem not only with fundamentalist Christians but with Republicans in general is not that they act on blind faith, without thinking. The problem is that they are incorrigible doubters with an insatiable appetite for Evidence. What they get off on is not Believing, but in having their beliefs tested. That's why their conversations and their media are so completely dominated by implacable bogeymen: marrying gays, liberals, the ACLU, Sean Penn, Europeans and so on. Their faith both in God and in their political convictions is too weak to survive without an unceasing string of real and imaginary confrontations with those people -- and for those confrontations, they are constantly assembling evidence and facts to make their case.

But here's the twist. They are not looking for facts with which to defeat opponents. They are looking for facts that ensure them an ever-expanding roster of opponents. They can be correct facts, incorrect facts, irrelevant facts, it doesn't matter. The point is not to win the argument, the point is to make sure the argument never stops. Permanent war isn't a policy imposed from above; it's an emotional imperative that rises from the bottom. In a way, it actually helps if the fact is dubious or untrue (like the Swift-boat business), because that guarantees an argument. You're arguing the particulars, where you're right, while they're arguing the underlying generalities, where they are...

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It's a curious article. In places he's sympathetic, in others caustic. He makes some interesting observations, but ends seeming rather puzzled and confused.

I do need to rise to the defense of Orlando. Disneyworld is not to my tastes, but there's still a bit left of the town of old Orlanda, and it's fairly interesting.

Insurgent Alliance Is Fraying In Fallujah (washingtonpost.com)

Insurgent Alliance Is Fraying In Fallujah (washingtonpost.com)

If accurate, it suggests the sensor guided missile strikes in Fallujah have been quite effective. It also suggests that Fallujahns, to some extent, have been repulsed by the cruel and brutal beheadings of foreigners and of non-Sunni Iraqis. If the "foreign terrorists" lose local support, it will be increasingly easy for the Iraqi and US forces to find allies willing to plant sensors near Zarqawi's forces.

Sinclair Broadcast Group Advertisers - Boycott Page

Sinclair Broadcast Group Advertisers

The Sinclair group is a set of networks owned by a group of radical Bush supporters. They're publishing an anti-Kerry slander that's probably illegal, but they know any consequences will be mild and will be post-election.

This site lists advertisers to contact.

Is this what Rove means by his "October Surprise"?

Boing Boing: Law enforcement memo of "imminent" terror attack?

... At the meeting of the Southern District of the Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council (ATAC) that was held yesterday in Houston, US Attorney Michael Shelby informed the group that a terrorist attack of 09/11/01 proportions was going to be carried out on US soil within the next 6 weeks.

Mr. Shelby stated that on 09/13/04, US Attorney General John Ashcroft had a conference call with all 93 US Attorneys, an event which is extremely rare. The US Attorneys were informed that without a doubt an attack was going to be perpetrated in the US within the next 6 weeks, prior to the elections. Mr. Shelby urgently requested that all law enforcement be aware of any situation that may be out of the ordinary and report the activity immediately. Mr. Shelby also requested that we get the word out to patrol officers and detectives to talk to their informants and report anything odd or remotely suspicious. Mr. Shelby ended this warning by saying that unless we get a bit of "luck" and the attack can be detected and prevented, that another attack of 9/11 scale will be carried out.

... A Democratic senator said he will close his Capitol Hill office until after the November 2 election, fearing a possible terrorist attack that could harm his staff or visitors.

Sen. Mark Dayton of Minnesota issued a statement Tuesday, citing a 'top-secret intelligence report on our national security' provided to congressional members by Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tennessee 'Based upon that information,' Dayton wrote, 'I have decided to close my office in the Russell Senate Office Building until after the upcoming election.

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Dayton's web site says nothing about his office closing, but CNN reports it has been shut. Weird.

Unfortunately Bush/Ashcroft/Rove vaporized any trust I had in them, so I can't say whether:

1. This is a typical anxiety induced response to a scam or a mangled rumor.
2. This is a rational assessment of a real threat.
3. This is a scam by Karl Rove to boost Bush in the polls.

I'm betting on all three.

Pre-eclampsia -- tracking down a terrible disorder

BBC NEWS | Health | Clue to pregnancy disorder found

The natural killer cells, which are part of the mother's immune defence system that fights infection and foreign invaders, help to set up the blood vessels in the placenta needed to feed the baby.

In pre-eclampsia, the blood supply is compromised for some reason.

The scientists found the women with pre-eclampsia had different genes controlling the chemical signals than the healthy women.

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This sounds like true progress. Over the past 5-10 years we may have begun to disentangle the mechanisms of a terrible disorder. Pre-eclampsia is usually managed successfully, but every so often a healthy woman dies in an particularly terrible manner.

Amazing to think that the cells we named "Natural Killer (NK)" help build the placenta. Maybe they could be renamed? (The consequences of naming in biology are manifold.)

There has been much speculation about the evolutionary basis of pre-eclampsia. Mostly it focuses on the degree to which a mother and a fetus are in a state of low level war, reflecting competition between parternal and maternal genes. The paternal genes want "more" from the mother's body, the maternal genes want "less". This is an ancient war -- and only the dynamic tension between the two permits a healthy baby and mother. If the paternal genes lose the baby dies, if the maternal genes lose the mother and baby die.

That's the theory anyway. Maybe we'll find out more soon. I'm not sure how the "intelligent design" folks explain there kinds of mechanisms.

ABC has a spine?

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: October 03, 2004 - October 09, 2004 Archives: "The plain intent of the memo is to tell ABC reporters that they should feel neither obligated nor permitted to equate the level of deceptiveness of the Kerry and Bush campaign's if and when they are in fact not equal."

The perils of living with lackeys

The New York Times > Arts > Frank Rich: Why Did James Baker Turn Bush Into Nixon?

... But those who live by Fox News can die by Fox News. If you limit your diet to Fox and its talk-radio and blogging satellites, you may think that the only pressing non-Laci Peterson, non-Kobe, non-hurricane stories are "Rathergate" and the antics of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Your diet of bad news from Iraq is restricted, and Abu Ghraib becomes an over-the-top frat hazing. You are certain that John Kerry can't score in the debates because everyone knows he's an overtanned, overmanicured metrosexual. You reside in such an isolated echo chamber that you aren't aware that even the third-rated network news broadcast, that anchored by the boogeyman Dan Rather, draws 50 percent more viewers on a bad night than "The O'Reilly Factor" does on a great one (the Bush interview).

Eventually you become a prisoner of your own fiction and lose touch with reality. You start making the mistakes Mr. Baker made - and more. The whole Bush-Cheney operation is less sure-footed about media manipulation than it once was. You could see this the week before the debate, when the president rolled out Mr. Allawi for a series of staged Washington appearances that were even less effective than his predecessor Ahmad Chalabi's State of the Union photo op with Laura Bush. No one at the White House seemed to realize that if you want to keep a puppet from being ridiculed as a puppet you don't put him on camera to deliver sound bites (some 16, by the calculation of Dana Milbank of The Washington Post) that are paraphrases of the president's much replayed golden oldies. The whole long charade played out like a lost reel of "Duck Soup."

...If anything, the first Bush-Kerry confrontation has given split-screen television a new vogue. Having defied the efforts of both campaigns to squelch its use on Sept. 30, emboldened TV news organizations can run with it at will. So we saw on the Sunday after that debate, when Condoleezza Rice appeared on ABC's "This Week."

There she was quizzed about the report in that morning's Times saying that in 2002 she had hyped aluminum tubes as evidence of Saddam's nuclear threat a year after her staff was told that government experts had serious doubts. Ms. Rice kept trying to talk over the soft-voiced George Stephanopoulos's questions, but he zapped her with a picture: a September 2002 CNN interview in which she had not, shall we say, told the whole truth and nothing but. As the old video played, ABC used a split screen so we could watch Ms. Rice, "This Is Your Life" style, as she watched the replay of her incriminating appearance of two years earlier. Maybe, like Mr. Bush at the first debate, she knew her reaction was being caught on camera. But even if she did, the unchecked rage in her face, like that of her boss three days earlier, revealed that her image and her story, like the war itself, had spun completely out of her control.

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Tom Friedman similarly ambushed Rumsfeld on camera. He was telling his usual incredible bold lies when Friedman quoted directly from a past Rumsfeld speech. I'm told Rumsfeld was filmed gasping for air.

By controlling the US media, by controlling the audiences they interact with, by controlling what they read, by speaking only to themselves, by consistently shooting the messengers, by their ruthless destruction of dissenters, Bush et al have created a hermetic fantasy world. It may yet work for them, but it will not work for our world.

It may be that the US media is waking up. One senior journalist tells me he feels the media was essentially asleep for the past two years, paralyzed by fears of the "liberal media" accusation, misled by false patriotism, trapped by conventions of "neutrality". He thinks those days are passing.

NPR : Secret Service Cleanses the Disloyal Voter

NPR : Morning Edition for Friday, October 8, 2004

An amazing story. We've known for some time that the Bush campaign has been allowing only the most loyal supporters to attend Bush rallies. Now we learn that the Secret Service has been the muscle for some of these screenings -- threatening anyone carrying Kerry paraphenelia with arrest and imprisonment as suspected terrorists.

Repeat. Some Secret Service agents consider anyone with less than full loyalty to George Bush to be a terrorist threat to America.

We are way past too far.

Bush and his remote control pod

Salon.com News | Bush's mystery bulge

Mystery-bulge bloggers argue that the president may have begun using such technology [remote teleprompt with intra-otic mike] earlier in his term. Because Bush is famously prone to malapropisms and reportedly dyslexic, which could make successful use of a teleprompter problematic, they say the president and his handlers may have turned to a technique often used by television reporters on remote stand-ups. A reporter tapes a story and, while on camera, plays it back into an earpiece, repeating lines just after hearing them, managing to sound spontaneous and error free.

Suggestions that Bush may have using this technique stem from a D-day event in France, when a CNN broadcast appeared to pick up -- and broadcast to surprised viewers -- the sound of another voice seemingly reading Bush his lines, after which Bush repeated them. Danny Schechter, who operates the news site MediaChannel.org, and who has been doing some investigating into the wired-Bush rumors himself, said the Bush campaign has been worried of late about others picking up their radio frequencies -- notably during the Republican Convention on the day of Bush's appearance. 'They had a frequency specialist stop me and ask about the frequency of my camera,' Schechter said. 'The Democrats weren't doing that at their convention.'

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Bush had some device strapped to his back during the debates. What was it?

Note that rumor has it that Bush has also deferred his October medical into November. (I've no substantiating evidence on this.) Given the bizarre behaviors and intrigues of this administration, the story almost writes itself. Cheney has been poisoning Bush for years, inducing an organic brain syndrome. After the election Bush-bot receives a "thorough" exam and his dementia is detected. He shuffles off to a nursing home. Cheney takes power. A mysterious dirty bomb causes great panic; Cheney declares martial law. Opponents disappear. Quietly, Bush passes on. A new world begins ...

You gotta admit, doesn't Cheney look like he could do something like that?

Anyway, if some journalist can figure a way to tap the frequencies used for teleprompt devices they might break a good story at the next debate.

Innovators work for free - historically

Marginal Revolution: The returns from innovation

The implication is that “society” pays a paltry $2.20 for every $100 worth of welfare it enjoys from innovating activities.

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This may change with recent abuses of patent and copyright -- innovators may capture more of the value. On the other hand, it is pretty clear we'll get less innovation from an era of protected intellectual property.

Bottom line, innovators innovate because they have to. It's a compulsion. Some people need to run, some people need to innovate.

Edwards and Cheney -- revealed

Boing Boing: Best VP debate parody image EVAR

The truth will come out.

Identification of the 1918 pandemic's lethality factor

The New York Times > Science > Critical Gene a Suspect in Lethal Epidemic

By recreating the influenza virus that killed up to 50 million people in 1918-19, researchers may have identified the gene that turned it into one of the most lethal in human history.

The gene, one of eight in the virus, seems to have an unexpected capacity for sending the body's immune system into overdrive, causing inflammation, hemorrhage and death, the scientists report today in the journal Nature.

... Dr. Kawaoka, Dr. Taubenberger and others have been reinserting the 1918-type genes into ordinary flu viruses to see if they can pinpoint which of the genes made the virus so lethal and how it did so. In the latest of these experiments, which Dr. Kawaoka reports today, a gene called the hemagglutinin or HA gene seems to be largely responsible for the dire effects of Spanish flu, as the 1918 epidemic is also known.

... The HA gene studied by Dr. Kawaoka's team is well known to flu experts because it changes from year to year. Since the protein made by the gene is the one singled out for attack by the immune system, the body's defenses are caught off guard each year as flu virus arrives with a novel version of the protein to which the body has no prior immunity.

... What he has now found is that the Spanish flu version of the HA gene, in addition to its break-in and enter role, seems able to trigger the release of cytokines, the signaling agents with which the immune system gears itself up for massive attack against an infectious agent.

Uncontrolled overdrive can make the immune system kill the body in order to save it, through excessive inflammation. The virus carrying the Spanish flu version of the HA gene produced high levels of cytokines in mice, Dr. Kawaoka says, and this is probably what led to the inflammation and lung damage that killed them.

... Survivors of the 1918 epidemic have high levels of antibody to the engineered virus, Dr. Kawaoka reports, but people infected recently with a similar class of flu virus do not. "Thus, a large section of the population would be susceptible to an outbreak of a 1918-like influenza virus," he and his colleagues concluded.

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If this is borne out by further work, Drs Kawaoka and Taubenberger may share the Nobel prize. Of course by the time they get their prize, high school students will have the facilities to create viruses that make this one seem relatively benign.

Today in central China a baby boy was born. Sixteen years from now he'll swear revenge on an unfaithful lover -- and in heartbroken spite he'll create the pathogen that saves the earth from humanity.

And some people think we should worry about al Qaeda.