Meet The New COs.
Topic: war in Iraq
"There is a strong, innate predisposition against killing," Hinzman says, "and the military breaks that down." In target practice, he recalls, we "started out with black circle targets. Then the circles grew shoulders and then the shoulders turned into torsos. Pretty soon they were human beings."

Hinzman can pinpoint the moment he realized he "made the wrong career decision."

"About five weeks into basic training, we were on our way to the chow hall shouting 'trained to kill, kill we will.' We were threatened with push-ups because we were not showing enough enthusiasm."

from the Progressive: here.

Life's A Gas
Now Playing: "I Am Seeing UFOs" by Dee Dee and Joey
Topic: Evolution

"Some creators announce their inventions with grand eclat. God proclaimed, "Fiat lux," and then flooded his new universe with brightness. Others bring forth great discoveries in a modest guise, as did Charles Darwin in defining his new mechanism of evolutionary causality in 1859: 'I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection.'"

"Darwin himself strongly emphasized the multifactorial nature of evolutionary change and warned against too exclusive a reliance on natural selection, by placing the following statement in a maximally conspicuous place at the very end of his introduction: 'I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the most important, but not the exclusive, means of modification.'"

-- The Evolution Of Life by Stephen Jay Gould

"The human position is no longer tenable." - William S. Burroughs

"Did I get here on a rocket... did I come from another planet? I am seeing UFOs and I guess it's because I had a hard time out with you last night." -- Dee Dee Ramone

Tea With Jimmy.
Topic: esoterica


The Led Zeppelin show depends heavily on volume, repetition and drums. It bears some resemblance to the trance music found in Morocco, which is magical in origin and purpose--that is, concerned with the evocation and control of spiritual forces. In Morocco, musicians are also magicians. Gnaoua music is used to drive out evil spirits. The music of Joujouka evokes the God Pan, Pan God of Panic, representing the real magical forces that sweep away the spurious. It is to be remembered that the origin of all the arts--music, painting and writing--is magical and evocative; and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result. In the Led Zeppelin concert, the result aimed at would seem to be the creation of energy in the performers and in the audience. For such magic to succeed, it must tap the sources of magical energy, and this can be dangerous. William S. Burroughs, "The Jimmy and Bill Show," June 1975.

Infoshop's PICTURE OF THE WEEK
Topic: the Medium is the Massage



Greenpeace activists wearing costumes throw plastic bottles in front of Coca-Cola Company plant in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Tuesday, Nov. 9, 2004 to protest against contamination. Greenpeace supporters called on the company to find ways to better dispose of the plastic bottles it uses for bottling, saying the discarded bottles contribute to trash build-up in the Argentine capital.(AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

Infoshop.org Picture Of The Week archive.

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)