Flu vaccine shortage: a failure of Republican governance

The New York Times > Health > With Few Suppliers of Flu Shots, Shortage Was Long in Making

The shortage caught many Americans by surprise, but it followed decades of warnings from health experts who said the nation's system for vaccine supply and distribution was growing increasingly fragile.

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Governments are responsible for vaccine programs. This is a failure of government. Certainly a failure of the Bush regime, but it's older than that. I suspect it's a failure of congress rather than the executive branch -- which makes it a classic failure of Republican governance.

It resembles the same failure in governance that led to the fragility of our electrical infrastructure.

Republicans don't do infrastructure.

Republicans can be the most shrill of all ...

The New York Times > Magazine > Without a Doubt

'Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: ''This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. . . .

''This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,'' Bartlett went on to say. ''He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.'' Bartlett paused, then said, ''But you can't run the world on faith.''

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There's a wing of the Republican Party that prides itself on a gimlet eyed rationalism. They're panicking now. They REALLY want Bush to lose.

Among the bad news -- a ray of light

The New York Times > Health > Malaria Vaccine Proves Effective

... The vaccine, tested on thousands of children in Mozambique, was hardly perfect: It protected them from catching the disease only about 30 percent of the time and prevented it from becoming life-threatening only about 58 percent of the time.

But because malaria kills more than a million people a year, 700,000 of them children, even partial protection would be a public health victory. The disease, caused by a parasite carried by mosquitoes, is found in 90 countries, and drug-resistant strains are spreading.

Dr. Allan Schapira, strategy coordinator for the Roll Back Malaria campaign at the World Health Organization, said the trial was "good news, and definitely of great interest for malaria control."

The director of the Malaria Vaccine Initiative, which is underwriting tests on 15 experimental vaccines with money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said the GlaxoSmithKline product tried in Mozambique was now its leading candidate and had proved that the concept worked.

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ONLY 58% reduction in life threatening disease?!! If this holds up with limited toxicity, Bill Gates will win the Nobel Peace Prize while the vaccine developers will win the Nobel in Medicine.

This is huge. Ok, so it's an early study with small numbers. Maybe too soon to light the fireworks. Still, the Carnegie-Mellons salvaged some honor by their good works. Gates intends to exceed past tyrants of capitalism in both capitalistic savagery and post-triumph generosity.

Slashdot | Data Miners Moving to Offshore Data Havens

Slashdot | Data Miners Moving to Offshore Data Havens

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Privacy is so dead -- except for the ultra-rich. The interesting question is how the privacy market will evolve in an essentially libertarian market.

One may expect all kinds of interesting trends. I think all these and more have been covered in science fiction stories of the past 20 years or so.

1. Noise generators: software and techniques that create false data, creating privacy by masking real data in a cloud of flase data. The same techniques used to filter spam may be used to identify the "true data".

2. Privacy scams: a form of noise generation. Since this is an unregulated industry a variety of data vendors will undercut one another on price -- while faking their own data.

3. High quality high cost vendors. Vendors who guarantee truth and accuracy and command a premium price. They might even allow victims to correct their (once) personal data.

4. An entire industry devoted to helping people create fake profiles, obscure their profiles, counter false and/or negative data ...

The current practices of Homeland Security into the low (fraudelent, lowball) range of the privacy vendor spectrum.

PS. The US government has dodged governmental rules for decades, including privacy rules, by moving data projects out of government and into the private sector. This offshore move, mediated by longtime government contractors, is just the next logical step.

How adolescent and adult brains differ. By Amanda Schaffer

Head Case - Roper v. Simmons asks how adolescent and adult brains differ. By Amanda Schaffer

Indeed, using brain-imaging techniques, it may be possible to show that many people who commit violent crimes have aberrant prefrontal cortical activity, or other brain features that differ from those of the average adult.

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Indeed. And so it begins -- the slow evolution of human thinking moves into a new cycle.

Sometine in the next 100 years the foundational concept of "responsibility" will begin to shift and sag. In the absence of a soul it is a hollow idea. What is a woman then, but the product of chance? Virtuous or neglectful, brilliant or average, spiritual or concreate -- all is but throws of the dice.

In some variations of Christianity it is said that God loves all humankind. This is not widely accepted. Presumably the list of God's beloveds would then include Hitler, Stalin, Mao, bin Laden, Ghengis Khan and a myriad of other "evil" humans. If, one day, we decide they were all tragic victims of misfortune, will we then be ready to talk with God?

Cheney threatens to attack the US

The Onion | Cheney Vows To Attack U.S. If Kerry Elected

'If the wrong man is elected in November, the nation will come under a devastating armed attack of an unimaginable magnitude, one planned and executed by none other than myself,' Cheney said, speaking at a rally in Greensboro, NC. 'When they go to the polls, Americans must weigh this fact and decide if our nation can ignore such a grave threat.'

Added Cheney: 'It would be a tragedy to suffer another attack on American soil, let alone one perpetrated by an enemy as well-organized and well-equipped as I am. My colleagues and I urge voters to keep their safety in mind when they go to the polls.'

Although Cheney would not comment on the details of his proposed attack on a John Kerry-led U.S., national-security experts said he possesses both the capabilities and the motivation to pose a serious threat.

'There is no question that Cheney has the financial assets and intelligence needed to pose a threat to our nation,' said Peter Bergen, terrorism researcher and author of Threats And Balances: Former Executive Branch Officials And The Danger To America. 'After all, this fanatic can call upon the resources of both the Republican Party and Halliburton to aid him in his assault. America would be foolish not to take his warning seriously.'

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Really, but Bush/Cheney standards, not so big a step.

One of the whackier bin Laden/Bush conspiracy theories ...

Ok, so this is ineptly translated wild-eyed tin hat stuff. It's also now new. Thinking about it a bit, I remember that after the Afghan war it was speculated that China would be a great refuge for bin Laden. China, Afghanistan and Pakistan all meet (more or less) in one of the most beautiful, harsh, complex and exotic parts of the earth. I rather doubt they have stringent border controls. It's also somewhat risky for the US to run covert ops into China.

So, yeah, bin Laden could be there. I think it's rather less likely that the Chinese government would strike a deal with him, though who's to say they're any smarter than the current US regime.

Bottom line -- as journalism this has about as much value as wild-eyed blogger ravings. As an indicator of what people think and talk about it's interesting.

Bin Laden is in ChinaTranslated from El Mundo, Gordon Thomas 

10/13/04 "El Mundo"  -- During the home stretch of the Northamerican elections, Osama bin Laden could prove to be the ace in the sleeve of president Bush. As we speak, Washington is negotiating a highly secretive agreement with Beijing, the Chinese capital, for the eviction of bin Laden from his sanctuary in the turbulent Muslim provinces of China, in the Northwest of the Great Wall nation. 

More than five million people, many of them fanatic followers of Osama, live in that region, which can be called one of the most volatile regions of Earth. Thousands of them work for the mafias who specialize in the trafficking of humans and drugs to the West. Last summer, Bin Laden sealed an agreement with the authorities in Beijing, in which he was granted asylum in return for his guarantees that the guerilla war of the Muslim Chinese against the Chinese nation would end. 

Over the years, tens of thousands of troops of the Popular Liberation Armee had been sent to the region with the intent to squash the insurgents. 

Since the arrival of the Saudi Osama Bin Laden, the region has been relatively quiet, and the Muslims who live there are allowed to continue their trafficking of humans and drugs. 

However, Bin Laden could now see himself trapped in his refuge, if an extraordinary agreement between Beijing and Washington would come to pass, in which China would hand over to the United States the most wanted terrorist in the world. 

The capture of Bin Laden would virtually guarantee the reelection of George Bush Jr., as it would confirm to the millions of undecided voters of the U.S. that the war against terrorism was judstified after Bin Laden had authorized the attacks of 9/11 against New York and Washington. 

"A new administration Bush would present China as its great new ally in the war against terrorism. China would enjoy in Washington the status of a most favored nation with all of its facets. Contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars would be approved by fast track. The history of human rights violations in China would be ignored," confirmed last week a high-level representative of the Pentagon. He added that only a small number of "members of very high rank" in the Bush administration knew about the plan to "seize Bin Laden in exchange for a special relationship with China." With almost certainty, among them would be the vice-president, Dick Cheney, and the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. 

Agreeing to speak under anonymity, the functionary offered details of the plan to capture Osama Bin Laden as a means to keep Bush in the White House. He explained that this is not the first time that an American administration has resorted to similar maneuvers during an electoral campaign. 

Towards the end of the presidency of Jimmy Carter, a secret deal was signed between the then future president of the U.S., Ronald Reagan, and Iran, in which the American diplomats, who had been kidnapped in Teheran, the Capital of Iran, would be freed the very day that Ronald Reagan would be inaugurated to the White House. 

According to Ari Ben-Menashe, the former national security advisor of the Israeli government of Yitzhak Shamir, " they paid an enormous sum of money to the Ayatollas of Iran." Ben-Menashe affirms that this deal formed a pivotal piece in the negotiations that later became known as Reagan's October surprise. 


Theresa on the campaign trail 

Theresa, the wife of the senator and democratic candidate, John Kerry, gave to understand that another October surprise could be imminent. Two weeks ago, she surprised the political advisors of her husband by declaring in public: "I wouldn't be surprised if, prior to the elections, president Bush were to capture Osama." Since then, Mrs. Kerry rejected to further comment on her explosive declaration. However, there are rumors in the intelligence community that both she and her husband had been advised that any further comments concerning an agreement that would include the capture of Bin Laden could comprimise the national security of the U.S. 

Furthermore, also the Washington analyst, Al Santoli, the national security advisor and Californian Congressman, Dana Rohrabacher, and the editor of the respected bulletin China Monitor, affirmed that "an October surprise wouldn't surprise me in the least." 

In his first confirmed sighting in many months, the refuge of Bin Laden has been pinpointed by an NSA satellite, one of many that the supersecret U.S. agency utilizes in their search for him. His hideout is located near a lake at the border between China and Pakistan. 

At the other side of the Zaskar mountains, the white summits that majestically look out over Bin Laden's sanctuary, a detachment of special forces of the Pakistani and U.S. armies are awaiting orders to capture Bin Laden, and move him by plane to Pakistan. 

Escorted by 50 guerillas 

During the last six months, Bin Laden has been sighted several times in the mountains and open ranges of the Northwest. American intelligence agents in the region are of the opinion that the Saudi millionaire, accompanied by an escort of 50 guerilla mujaheddin, moved East towards Cachemira, and from there crossed into China. 

The agents furthermore believe that, previously, Bin Laden held various meetings with high officials of Beijing. He convinced them that he would be capable of obtaining peace in their Muslim provinces. "We know about these meetings," confirmed Mansur Ahmed, police chief of Bandipoor, North of Cachemira. "However, they took place on Chinese territory." 

Bin Laden is accompanied by Ayan al-Zawahiri, his primary advisor and personal physician (Bin Laden suffers from a serious renal ailment). Al-Zawahiri is a surgeon, educated in Cairo, accused of terrosrism in Egypt, and condemned to death for rebellion. After Bin Laden, he is the second most wanted terrorist world-wide. 

White House sources reject to comment on this issue publicly. "If the negotiations should fail, this would not be the most suitable moment for the president to be seen directly involved in these negotiations," affirmed one source. 

It is believed that the possibility for such a deal emerged early this year, after Donald Rumsfeld had met with a delegation of the Chinese government during a visit to the far East. Later, George Tenet, then director of the CIA, requested a viability study for an operation to capture Bin Laden. Tenet was informed that the only possibility would be if they could count on the cooperation of the Chinese. 

"To what extent that collaboration will occur in the few weeks remaining until the elections, will depend to a good extent on the confidence

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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.