Success of US assault on Falluja disputed
Topic: war in Iraq

U.S. Wins Battle of Fallujah; Critics Call It a "Hollow Victory"

Interview with Christian Parenti, journalist and author, conducted by Scott Harris

The claim of victory by U.S. forces in the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah came at a very high price. Half the residents of this now virtually destroyed city, once home to 300,000, have fled with an as-yet undetermined number of dead and injured civilians resulting from the weeks of American air strikes and the recent ground assault. The Pentagon says that 38 U.S. soldiers were killed and more than 200 were injured in the post-election Fallujah operation, while killing 1,000 insurgents and taking some 500 prisoners.

from Between The Lines here.

Success of US assault on Falluja disputed

US Lieutenant-General John Sattler's claim that his forces have broken the back of the resistance in Falluja, has been overshadowed by a large number of attacks elsewhere in Iraq.

Aljazeera article here.

Epidemic Insurgency

Iraq's insurgency is both growing and innovating quickly. A good way to understand this speed is to dive into how epidemics spread and cascade in social networks. In this first brief on this topic, I will look at how the innovation spreads through the global guerrilla network in Iraq -- the epidemic spread of information to individuals/groups that are highly susceptible (those that have already opted to join the insurgency).

Global Guerrillas article here.

Army's Insurgent Manual Author Speaks

Last week, Defense Tech took a look at the Army's new field manual for Counterinsurgency Operations - and how that guide seemed, at first blush, to be at odds with the assault on Fallujah.

The story kicked up a nice little dust-up over on the new Defense Tech forum. One of the people who weighed in: Lt. Col. Jan Horvath, with the Army's Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate. He's the man who led the team that put together the counterinsurgency manual, "FM-I 3-07.22."

Defense Tech article here.

Chart shows relationship between 2004 electoral vote result and voter IQ.
Topic: presidential election
I know that Daveycorn is all about researching hoaxes without going to Snopes.com, but I simply can't be bothered.

When I got this chart titled US Election 2004: Results listed by IQ from about a dozen different people I smelled an "urban legend."

Fool Me Twice

Claim: Chart shows relationship between 2004 electoral vote result and voter IQ.

Status: False.

Origins: Some pranks are so good they keep working over and over again.

Back in November 2002, someone (using the name Robert Calvert) created and posted to a USENET newsgroup a phony chart which purportedly showed the average IQ per state in the U.S., along with the average income and a column indicating how that state voted in the 2000 presidential election. The gag was that all the states that voted for Vice-President Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election were clustered at the top of the IQ scale, while all the states that voted for then-Texas Governor George W. Bush were clustered at the bottom.

Snopes.com read the rest here.

Everyone has sex eventually.
Topic: Sex
Interesting article over at PLOS: Convergent Evolution of Chromosomal Sex-Determining Regions in the Animal and Fungal Kingdoms. The late S.J. Gould liked to emphasize the importance of contingency and expressed skepticism that the shape of life would manifest itself in the same way if one could rewind the clock of natural history by fiat and allow evolution to do its work once more. Well, research that offers evidence as above undercuts the force of such musings (though those who deny the seminal importance of natural selection in evolution might argue that they would concede there are broad parameters that natural history must always be constrained by). What language is to evolutionary psychology sex is to evolutionary biology, the mother of a million papers and the patron of a thousand careers. Nevertheless, I will offer that in an ecosystem characterized by species plentitude and competition sex will evolve (see Narrow Roads of Gene Land: Volume 2 for more details on why complex organisms must be sexual organisms). Some might ridicule science fiction for the tendency for many of the "aliens" to simply be humans with strange growths on their noses. Some authors like Ursula K. Le Guin have offered worlds where conventional ideas of sex/gender are confounded in an effort to break out of the box of anthropomorphism. But I would be surprised if hermaphroditic sentient beings were common on earth-like planets (I have no idea how natural selection would shape organisms on gas giants for example). Certainly there are novel sexual life cycles among certain species, but they are usually exceptions that prove the rule.¹ The lesson that biology, and science in general, offers is that diversity exists constrained by certain parameters, what we like to call reality. This does not imply that there is one way to go from A to B, but some of the paths might be favored over others. The reality of physics is relatively transparent in its exposition, but just because biology is messier, more statistical, does not mean that its lessons don't have any utility.

1 - Amazon mollies "...are a unisexual (all female) species of molly that are parasitic on the closely related bisexual sailfin molly, P. latipinna. Conflict exists between male sailfin mollies trying to mate with the right species, and the unisexual females trying to appropriate a mating from these males...."

Gene Expression: read the rest here.

Enter Planet Simpson
Topic: the Simpsons

"Cartoons are just stupid drawings that give you a cheap laugh." -- Homer Simpson

"They're just a bunch of hilarious stuff you
know, like people getting hurt and stuff, stuff like that." -- Bart Simpson

For fans who enjoy reading about their favorite TV show, there's a new treat in the local bookstore. The book, entitled "Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Documented an Era and Defined a Generation", is an accessible cultural analysis of The Simpsons, its inside stories and the world it reflects.

read the whole article here.

Rice, Rice Baby...
Topic: police state
from Salon.com:

Colin Powell's final scene as secretary of state was a poignant but harsh reenactment of his self-delusion and humiliation. The former general held in his head an idea of himself as sacrificing and disciplined. But the good soldier was dismissed at last by his commander in chief as a bad egg... Powell has been a peripheral figure, even as a fig leaf, ever since his climactic moment before the United Nations Security Council, on which he staked his credibility, when he presented the case that weapons of mass destruction in Iraq required going to war, consisting of 26 falsehoods, and about which he later claimed he had been "deceived."

Powell had wanted to stay on for six months of Bush's second term to help shepherd a new Middle East peace process, but the president insisted on his swift resignation. Immediately, Condoleezza Rice was named in his place. She had failed at every important task as national security advisor, pointedly neglecting terrorism before Sept. 11, enthusiastically parroting the false claim that Saddam had a nuclear weapons program (while suppressing contrary intelligence), mismanaging her part of postwar policy so completely that she had to cede it to a deputy, and eviscerating the Middle East "road map."

But Bush's performance princess was his favorite briefer; ever devoted, the unmarried Rice in an unguarded moment once called Bush "my husband." As incompetent as she was at her actual job, she was as agile at bureaucratic positioning. Early on she figured out how to align with the neoconservatives and to damage Powell. Her usurpation is a lesson to him in blind ambition and loyalty.

read Bush's night of the long knives here.

Jackson [Pollock] had tickets to a play.
Topic: Art.
Jackson [Pollock] had tickets to a play. "I've seen this play before, but it's so good I want you to see it. It's by a very important Irishman named Beckett. Waiting For Godot is the most important play I've seen. It's abstract."
We had dinner in a place close to the theater and found our seats about middle orchestra. The theater was not full... I didn't get the point of the play but Jackson did. Every line made him cringe, he got more and more into the play, and by the time Alvin Epstein came out as Lucky in the most thrilling performance, Jackson was beside himself. He started to cry.
People around us were shushing him, turning around. It was a quiet play, only two characters on stage, and every sound was noticed. He started to cry, really cry, and then the crying turned into sobs and then it went into heartbreaking moans. He was out of control. I grabbed his arms, pulled him up out of his seat. His eyes were closed. He was lost, not realizing we were in the theater. "Jackson, come, let's go home," I said. I somehow got him out of the theater and into a taxi, and as we walked out of the theater his crying was so loud it was as though his heart was breaking...
Nothing would make him stop. I tried to think about the play and what had set him off, the futility of no one coming. "I'm here. I'll be there when you need me. Don't be so sad please." "It's not that. It's something else. I can't explain."
- Love Affair, Ruth Kligman (68-69)

Grand Unified Theory of Everything In the Universe Including the Human Soul.
Topic: Evolution
"For those who worry that our ingenuity has upset nature's equilibrium, Bloom has a message that is both reassuring and sobering. 'We are nature incarnate,' he writes. 'We are tools of her probings and if, indeed, we suffer and we fail, from our lessons she will learn which way in the future not to turn.'" -- The New Yorker.

"I am speechless with admiration, overwhelmed by virtuosity." -- Walter J. Freeman, M.D. Walter J. Freeman Neurophysiology Lab, UC Berkeley, author How Brains Make Up Their Mind

In the coming weeks, months, and years, this website will present hors-d'ouevres, desserts, and solid meals for the mind, bits of brainfood harvested from author and mass-behavior expert Howard Bloom's Grand Unified Theory of Everything In the Universe Including the Human Soul.

Blastfurnace TV beta
Topic: media faction
Blastfurnace TV is assenbled and gearing up for it's grand opening. BTV will feature diverse audio/video art and independant journalism. In the meantime you can catch some craaaazy videos from the MC5, Timothy Leary, Michael Moore, Hunter Thompson and the Guerilla News Network... and more!

check it out:

http://www.notowar.com/tv-beta.htm

Please drop me an email if you'd like to get involved, or if you have any questions.

Thanks!

Thoughts on the media and the election.
Topic: by Lenny
A Corporation is a Virus.

TV news is a business and, like most business it's number one concern is it's own perpetuation. A Corporation is a Virus.

Blame the Middle Class.

Myself, I blame the Middle Class. The guys with the money are few and there is no doubt in my mind that we could take 'em, if we really wanted to. The poor are victims of violence and are kept down mostly by a Middle Class that thinks that one day, if they try hard enough, they will be very rich.

The Media Is The Muddle

With the Major Media existing as one arm of an obnoxious profit-making structure we naturally get distortions -- muddles -- that are dictated not by a supposed "objectivity" but blinkered "special interests" that are all the more insiduous because they are denied by those that are supposed to report the news.

Suggested reading includes: Jamie Whyte's Bad Thinking, Manufacturing Consent by Herman and Chomsky, and Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising.

A Country Divided

1. How do the election numbers really add up? Sick of that stupid graphic with a big red swath down the middle of the country?



(click here and here to see how things really added up.)

2. Michael Moore: The Kid's Are Alright: "If there was one group who really came through on Tuesday, it was the young people of America. Their turnout was historic and record-setting. And few in the media are willing to report this fact."

3. Over two thirds of the country didn't vote for Bush... they either wanted him out of office or were sharp enough to realize that politics is beneath them:

CANDIDATE / VOTES / percentage

Bush / 59,459,765 / 32.122%
Kerry / 55,949,407 / 30.225%
Nobody / 69,696,269 / 37.652%

(sources: CNN.com, Ameristat.org.)

4. Who really won the election, anyways?

Vote fraud evidence: here.
More vote fraud evidence: here.

5. Don't mourn, organize!

Says David Grenier: "It's time too ask yourself why you wanted to see Kerry win. Was it an end in itself, or merely a means to an end? Did you want to see Kerry win just because you like him as a person, or because you want better health care, better jobs, or an end to the war in Iraq ... If it's the latter, then you need to simply keep fighting." (more here.)

Posted by mediafaction at 12:01 AM EST

Updated: Monday, 29 November 2004 10:09 AM EST

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I Must Take Issue With The Wikipedia Entry For 'Weird Al' Yankovic
Topic: music
"...To start: Your entry for "Weird Al" is laughably brief, and fails to account for the grand impact and scope of his career. How can you justify a "Weird Al" biography of only a paltry 850 words?

"Particularly galling to this author is the fact that Madonna and U2 were given articles two and three times the length of the Weird One's. Yes, those artists may have sold more records than "Weird Al," but surely the Wikipedia community is not one to confuse net profits with artistic merit. Nevertheless, while we are on the loathsome subject of money, I might point out that nowhere in the article is it mentioned that Yankovic has earned no less than four gold and four platinum records."

(read more here.)