A crazy thought occurred to me: if Clinton, Obama, and Edwards can throw their egos in the trash, and instead of being adversarial in the primary, negotiate a concession and vice-presidential cabinet for one of them, they can then put their time and money to work on destroying the Republicans.

Clinton/Obama? Obama/Edwards? Clinton/Edwards? Obama/Clinton (egos in the trashbin, remember)? Any of those tickets could rocket Democratic power into the stratosphere for several elections to come, I think. Obama talks a good talk about direct negotiations with Iran, for example, and yet apparently he can't pick up the phone and ask Clinton "what do I have to give you in order to be your vice-president (because you *know* that if I'm on your ticket, we're going to be *in* the White House, no if ands or buts), and if I am you Vice President, how much real power will you give me?"

I know I'm breaking with reality here, and that this will never happen, but on the other hand, I'd like to think Clinton is a far easier bargaining partner for Obama than Iran would be?

saul williams' niggy tardust is 'really good™'. that's officially my rating. 4/5 stars, something like that. you should know that means i like it enough that i'm going to have it on incessant repeat on my stereo, my mp3 player, my mind, for the rest of the week and then some. it's right up there with NIN's with_teeth and year-zero, and a step/giant-leap below The Downward Spiral, or Led Zeppelin (the album), or The Wall.

at first i thought it was too obviously crammed with reznor's year-zero soundscaping. but i get it now. saul and trent are a very organic fusion at this moment. Trent can write very intense lyrics when he's picking at his own emotional scabs, and while *he* doesn't get close to that level of power when he's trying social commentary, that's what Saul's all about.

So I don't think Niggy's sound is a case of trent not being able to sound like anything but himself, even when trying to make a hip-hop album. "Niggy" isn't Trent trying to do hip-hop. It's more like an in-between sequels, alternate take of year-zero. It's an iteration of year-zero. it ought to have a halo number. Saul's lyrics, notwithstanding their frequent use of "NGH" (which is often ironic at two or more levels), could easilly have formed the semantic content to year-zero. you might have to listen to Niggy a bit slant to hear that, but that's only fitting: saul's diction is down with dickinson's idea of truth and divinity.

Download it at niggytardust.com

funny addendum: my CD changer just tracked off the end of 'Niggy', and onto NIN's "Broken". Till the lyrics of "WiSH" kicked-in, I didn't quite notice that we'd switched discs!

New York Magazine interviewed Trent and Saul (unfortunately mostly about the distribution model rather than the music). Trent confesses to putting his money where his mouth his [when asked how much he paid for Radiohead's in rainbows]: "I bought the physical one, so I spent a whopping $80. [Pauses.] But, then I re-bought it and paid $5,000, because I really felt that I need to support the arts, so people could follow in my footsteps."

From Yahoo News: WASHINGTON - The economic costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are estimated to total $1.6 trillion — roughly double the amount the White House has requested thus far, according to a new report by Democrats on Congress' Joint Economic Committee.

The report, released Tuesday, attempted to put a price tag on the two conflicts, including "hidden" costs such as interest payments on the money borrowed to pay for the wars, lost investment, the expense of long-term health care for injured veterans and the cost of oil market disruptions.
Read more...

Fair enough, actually, as an estimation of the *costs* of the war. But they haven't attempted to balance that with the *gains* of the war, so really it's meaningless. What about spurred economic activity due to the war, military manufacturing, jobs created for Americans, and the potential returns from investsments that have been made in reconstruction efforts? I'm not an economist, and I have no idea what these "hidden gains" might be, but I'm sure they total to more than $0.00, which is what the Democrats are implying when they went about tallying hidden costs.

If they'd made a good-faith effort to look at gains as well as losses, the net loss would be a much more potent statistic.

It's not just the war either. Climate change folks need to do this. Sure there may be increased costs to society from the frequency and intensity of natural disasters, land lost to rising seas, species loss, and a slew of public health problems due to flood conditions, increased energy expenditures for heating and cooling, etc. But perhaps grasses or C4 plants (that includes corn and rice) are more productive under higher temperatures? Perhaps growing seasons for some temperate crops will be extended? All plants need CO2 to photosynthesize, but when they open their stomates (basically air- and water- tight pores in the leaves that can open and close) to let CO2 in, they lose water vapor as it evaporates out. Under low water conditions, plants may not be able to photosynthesize as much as they could if they didn't have to conserve water. But with more CO2 in the air, the plants can get more bang for each second they have their stomates open. Under some conditions of heat, water availability, and sunlight, some crops may grow better with more CO2 in the air. (This benefit is NOT likely to be of the same magnitude as the costs of climate change, but it may be a real, measurable effect).

Any attempt to tally costs without equal zeal spent on discovering off-setting benefits is an unscientific and political scam. Same goes for reporters or former Presidents elect Presidential candidates who quickly hand-wave away the potential benefits while schooling us on the costs. That won't do. Give us a *number* for the benefits, say 4 cents on every dollar of costs, and more people will listen. Make the effort to always always report the offsetting number (benefits, when you're reporting about costs; costs, when your reporting on benefits). Should be journalism 101, but I rarely see it done in practice.

Pakistan, Burma, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, sub-prime madness, a mad president (choose the sense of that word that befits your politics), recession, wildfires, climate change. the news ain't good.

before casting your lot with those ready to usher in the apocalypse, consider how easy it is to effect meaningful change; among all these stories the bbc reported one other this morning: that 12 and 14 year old girls in natal province are walking long distances to fetch water, and consequently are unable to walk the long distances needed to get to school. that's a problem we (meaning Homo sapiens, not Americans) can solve using fiscal, political, social, and technological resources available in south africa. all it needs is a little nudge from the developed world.

bono is right, people (even according to Jesse Helms). so go to it: click your mouse a few times and buy the latest (product)red™ thing, or quit your job to go forth and be the change.... Maybe just blog an uncapitalized but inspi(red)™ post from your cellphone and spam all your friends with it.

just don't throw your hands up in the air and wail that times are dark and getting darker still. they aren't; we're just far more interconnected, and informed, despite ourselves. 21st century growing pains aside, that's a good thing, folks! To use uniquely 21st century jargon: ubuntu is umami.


Photo: Time Magazine.

Last week the PBS TV show NOW reported statistics on military rape and sexual assault. How about some support for our troops? No, really, how about it?

I don't particularly like it when people report statistics on sexual harrassment along with ones on rape, because it can tend to confuse people. In military terminology, according to NOW "Military Sexual Trauma" includes acts of harassment all the way through acts of rape. I'll make an unjustified assumption that NOW was careful with their editing, and that when they have Dr. Patricia Resick, a V.A. psychologist state, that 15% of women in the firts gulf war were raped (see the show's transcript) they really mean rape.

Fifteen percent of women raped in a few months??! By fellow soldiers? You Go Girls! Join the military. Heck, with ROTC, the military might even pay for you to get rape training in the college fraternity/sorority system so you'll be used to it when you get raped under combat conditions later on.

I'm not being glibly sarcastic. I'm fucking furious. Why the fuck don't we train our men and boys not to rape?

On page F6 in the health section of Tuesday's New York Times is an aprox. 200 word article: "Abstinence-Only Programs Not Found to Prevent H.I.V.". I'd skimmed the main "A" section of the paper that gives international and national stories, and hadn't seen an article there. Surely this is bigger news, in a country that still practices abstinence-only health education, than the front page article devoted to Brooke Astors' passing?

Anyway, the facts reported in The Times are that a study was published in the August issue of the British Medical Journal comparing abstinance-only programs to various controls, including no treatment. Abstinence-only had no effect positive or negative towards STIs, pregnancy, unprotected sex, or the age of first sexual experience. I'll have to take a gander at the actual journal article to tease out what exactly their control groups included in addition to "no treatment" groups.

The lead author of the study is quoted in The Times as saying: "It appears that this evidence base is frequently neglected in debates over abstinence-based prevention". No kidding.

I feel slightly bad that I didn't write in support of the Chocolate naked Jesus Figure "my sweet lord" whose display in a NYC hotel's art gallery has been stopped.

Businesess in NYC can, with impunity, use Buddha heads in bars, spas or other completely non-religious contexts, and New Yorkers seem to be savvy enough to realize that these decorative elements don't somehow invalidate Buddhism. Some Buddhists, my Mom among them, probably would be a little skeeved by the practice, and she'd certainly have a problem with a chocolate naked Buddha. Probably such a statue would have been taken down just like the "my sweet lord" was.

What exactly is the problem though? A chocolate Buddha would be quite in keeping with the Buddhist tenant of impermanance: when Buddhists offer flowers at Buddha statues, they are making the point that all things, like the pretty petals, are subject to decay. Nakedness just emphasizes the corporeality of the human form. A chocolate naked Buddha would be a fitting embodiment of Buddhist ideas.

"My sweet lord," probably doesn't have any such theological justification in Christianity, and yet why would anyone object to its being displayed? It's not "Piss Christ", (which itself I'd argue was a rather intriguing image, and not the same as, say, putting a Jesus figurine in a urinal). Chocolate is made from Cocoa, whose scientific genus name "Theobroma" means "God's Gift". Nakedness is, well, the original sinless state in Eden. God's own form, if one takes literally that God created Humans in hir own image.

Sigh. People jump so quickly to see theological insult where none might be. God, assuming sie created anything, created shit and shit-beetles people. It's only the puny minds of Homo sapiens that think that chocolate or nakedness could insult Jesus, or those who follow his teachings.

OK, I'm not as naive as all that. This is about power. The Christian community tests and demonstrates their cultural power by getting the exhibit closed. Perhaps it's fortunate that the non-christian community doesn't care enough to flex their power. Perhaps it's unfortunate that we let a good idea get sentenced to death and buried in the name of religion.

Brian Lehrer reports that the US, after participating strongly in some aspects of the negotiations, is not expected to sign the UN convention on the rights of persons with disabilities.

The US pushed negotiations to, among other things, remove any language pertaining to "occupied territories", and to excise any explicit reference to abortion when talking of the right to health services.

If we can't sign this convention, what *can* we sign? Instead, apparently, the US pointed out that it has existing legislation in the Disabilities Act, which other countries are invited to emulate. In other words, human rights for the rest of the world, American rights for Americans. The US seems to wish to politically secede from the Human race.

Worse, we wish to retain veto-power or just plain bully-power over the rest of humanity. Perhaps it's the done thing in UN negotiations, but it strikes me as rather sinister that the US participates in shaping an international instrument that it plans not to join. I could be wrong, but this doesn't seem like a case of negotiations having been made in good faith, only to fail to live up to some sine qua non that the US needs in order to sign on. I find it hard to believe that the US could not have negotiated for a palatable treaty on disabled rights, seeing as the US does indeed have advanced national laws in the area already.

We also haven't signed certain other human rights convections such as the convention on the rights of the child, and the convention against discrimination of women. (Moral failiures which may or may not have been originally committed by previous Presidencies, but obviously upheld by the current one).

Shame on us. Again.

Bono seems to be good at appropriating rhetoric and getting people to agree with him. Most famously he made Jesse Helms a supporter of an AIDS initiative. Here he's being interviewed by Bill O'Reilly, and shuts down O'Reilly's rhetoric at one point by saying about inaction in response to AIDS, "God won't accept that answer, and history won't accept that answer". O'Reilly, of course, is helpless, at the name dropping of the Almighty, to do anything but nod in agreement.

In the first five minutes of the interview, Bono comes off as a bit self indulgent, and then he proceeds to calmly dissect and disengage from any spin that O'Reilly tries to bring up. Bono's debate tactic -- which works well for him here -- is to not bite at rhetorical red-herrings, and to calmly let any possible inflamatory remarks go by almost as if unheard, while pointedly debating matters of fact that he's got first hand experience with. At the same time, he appropriates enough of O'Reilly's own "traditionalist" rhetoric, that O'Reilly is disarmed. I swear, whether accidentally or on purpose, Bono seems to wield diplomacy and rhetoric with the precision and deft touch that a fencer does hir foil.

OReilly: "why isn't the UN doing more..."
Bono: "actually they are. The global health fund which fights TB, AIDS, and malaria, was an initiative by Koffi Annan" O'Reilly shuts up, since his normal schtick was to criticize the UN's rampant spending and Annan in particular.

O'Reilly: "You remember your friend Bob Geldorf [sic]... and the money raised by liveaid... very little of that money actually went to help people"
Bono: "Well, I've been to Africa, and I've seen the help it did."

Part 1:

Part 2:

Nine Inch Nails knows how to make money without seeming like that's all they're after. When the 2005 album With_Teeth was released, the *whole album* was available to listen to on mySpace. Hordes of NIN fans went out and bought the album.

NIN promises a new full-length release in April. The marketing for this one is just plain fun. First, they've set up a bunch of websites purportedly created in the 2022 world that the album describes. The sites are ( the usual suspects for a dystopian future world )

Parallel to this Alternate Reality Game (ARG), USB drives are being left in bathroom stalls at NIN concerts. The drives contain mp3s of tracks from the forthcoming NIN album (thusfar three have been leaked), along with other files that contain clues to the ARG. There are more clues in tour T-shirts, and numbers to call with recordings on them. The latest (and most disturbing) is 216-333-1810 (in conjunction with the leak of the song "Me, I'm not" and the uswiretap.com site). WARNING The recording at that phone number is a simulated cellphone call from a girl in a nightclub where people get locked-in and massacred. Not pleasant to listen to (for me, much worse than the torture stuff in the Broken movie, which was clearly simulated), and you can find transcripts online if your interested in the ARG, but not getting the heebie-jeebies.

Oh yeah, the Songs... You can find the dload sites at echoingthesound.org and other places. As these are unofficial "official" leaks from NIN, they're not pirated. Go get them and listen.

was the 1st leak (and indeed is officially released to radio stations). It's OK.

" was next. People have called-it Public Enemy-ish, which is kindof like saying Stravinsky is Mozart-ish because they use the same instrumentation. I'm not sure what to classify it as. It's fun as hell to dance to with it's crazy beat.
came out today. Very, danceable. Not in an 'industrial EBM' way, but just flat-out nightclub stuff. Reminds *me* of the Timbaland/Timberland "Sexy Back" thing, although it's a very different song. Both songs have deceptively insipid sounding lyrics (if you bother to look them up, you'll realize that Justin Timberlake isn't just moaning about 'get your sexy on', but actually goes into some light bdsm stuff in that song!).

Anyway, Year_Zero, is a damn geeky and fun concept for an album release.

Just watched a very tough documentary about an OB/GYN in Afghanistan, himself originally an economic refugee to the States from Afghanistan in the 70s. The one hospital he worked at, which was supported by the US dept. of Health & Human services had rotting toilets, and was so low on supplies that they use dirty needles as paper clips. The problems were not all due to the logistics of US supply and funding however: one pregnant woman was brought near-death to the hospital after first having been taken to a local mullah who beat her with a whip to exorcise her. What he exorcised, unfortunately was her unborn baby, whom he killed. The doctor was caught between the lack of resources on the one hand, and what he himself called "thirteenth century" cultural ignorence of medicine.

Another hospital which was founded and run by a local organization was clean, and adequately supplied, but many of the patients who walked miles to get there were pretty far gone.

Here's the website for the documentary: http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/motherlandafghanistan/

Afghanistan's problems started well before we in the US decided to blast it, and I really don't know if we've helped or hurt what was already a dismal situation. We have to stop equating destitute countries who host terrorists with *being* "The Terrorists". I'm not really articulating it but I'm really angry. Ordinary citizens who backed the wars really had no idea of the reality of it all. And we still don't. We continue to watch FoxNews, or perhaps listen to the equally vapid vitriol of AirAmerica, but nobody's watching PBS documentaries.

Radio is having a call-in show about women in positions of power, alluding to Hillary Clinton. The usual ideas surfaced, including one woman who said that as a feminist, she won't vote for Clinton because she occupies the narcissistic space that's supposed to be reserved for men. Yeah, OK, whatever.

I briefly wondered why nobody was making reference to real women heads of state. For whatever reason, I forgot completely about Western examples like Thatcher and Brundtland, and thought instead of some Asian ones: Ghandi Gandhi [come-on now! Misspelling Gandhi goes beyond the pale of laziness!], and the Bandaranaikes. In their cases, authority is conferred by their membership in a privileged wealthy upper class. No, South Asians are no more or less "feminist" than people in the US. It's just that class divisions are far more pronounced.

This is blindingly obvious, and yet I don't remember having had this thought till today.

The internet may have made the global village possible, but in practice it functions much like a bunch of segregated barrios within a megaplex megapolis [wrong suffix lol].

On NPR's Weekend Edition (link Audio avail. after 13:00 EST), a story aired about the Palestinian Holocaust museum. According to the director, Palestinian understanding of the Holocaust would cause Palestinians to realize that there is no justification for violence against Israellis, which in turn would cause Israel to treat Palestinians with legitimacy. The director's own brother doesn't speak to him because he's seen as an Israelli lackey, and on the other end, both the Israelli Museum and the Anti-Defamation league have issues about the Holocaust "being politicized".

At the same time, PBS will run a documentary this week about the rise of global anti-semetism (by which word they mean anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe and the Middle-East).

I don't presume to think that Palestinians have internet access, but WTF? Is it too much to wish that they are at least exposed to virtual (or video) tours of Auswitz, and that the Western world, OTOH, is more exposed to realities of Palestinian life.

On that second point, Kudos to Tavis Smiley in his interview of President Carter. The title of Carter's new book compares the Palestinian situation to Apartheid in S. Africa. I say the title does the comparing, not the book itself, because it's a marketing thing. Carter himself is way too nuanced and understanding of the issues involved to not identify the shortcomings of the comparison.

Carter said that one thing he strongly condems the Bush Administration for is for caracterizing Hamas as a terrorist organization, after the administration unilaterally (suprise) insisted on the Palestinian's holding an election when both Arafat and Israel didn't want it. Ooops! some 40% of the voters voted for Hamas. While Hamas doesn't recognize Israel, Carter also mentioned that no Israelli civilian has died at Hamas' hands in several years, and that the reason for this is that Hamas wanted widespread political legitimacy with Palestinians, and that avoiding terrorism was a precondition to that. So we have a democratically elected group that provides needed services within the Palestinian community, and they are condemned as terrorists.

Police using tazer against a non-compliant subject in UCLA library in November:

The ensuing discussion at youTube is quite interesting.

Knowing that several people were killed in Iraq during the course of that blog-discussion is even more interesting.

There's an LA times article floating around somewhere about the incident. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-taser18nov18,0,4080498.story?coll=la-home-headlines

"Get up, Stand up" Isn't that a line, ironically, from a Bob Marley song?

And before screaming police brutality, take a gander at this next video. Admittedly not the same kind of weapon and the shocks are very brief. But people do take this kind of pain for fun. Lack of consent makes all the difference. You can run both vids simultaneously for a VERY interesting effect.

And there's always the remix version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmRoNM_dzcU

The bbc reported on an Indian 800m runner being stripped of her Asian games silver medal after failing a gender test. What really surprised me was that in a radio interview, a doctor pointed out that the test is no longer genetic. Now I understand that a certain genotype can be expressed differently in the body, so genetics *alone* is not sufficient, but mustn't there be a genetic basis to any sex determination in humans? The doctor said that anatomical investigation is the most effective method, while the news articles mention that endocrinologists and psychologists are also consulted.

We're dealing with elite athletes, who by definition, are on the extreme of whatever statistical groups they belong to. I trust there is sound science behind the gender testing.

The test is called a "gender test", which confuses things even further, since the word "gender" has social connotations, while the biological definition of sex does not.

Further discussion on this can be found here in the _scientists_ community.

Athletes do fail gender tests. Biological hermaphrodites exist, as well as clear cut men and women who are physiologically extreme for their gender. Physically, to say little of psychologically, biological reality does not conform to the discrete, binary gender categorization. To put the political consequence bluntly: why did god fuck-up so badly in designing animals if sexual behavior is supposed to be a clear-cut binary thing with dire spiritual consequences for deviance?

NPR did a story on PTSD and the lack of mental health care that vets receive. A congressional study found that -- surprise! -- vets are not getting proper mental health care.

One real issue is that the military is built on diciplined training, and mental health problems disrupt that with messy symptoms that, unlike a severed limb or even the flu, might look to commanders like poor dicipline, morale or behavior. Paraphrasing a low-level commander: "PTSD is the classic back-door excuse that soldiers use to get out of the Army". Think about that, folks. It's a volunteer army. There's no draft. People do not *need* excuses to get out of the Army in the way they did during the Vietnam era. There's this whole fucked up economic system of federal jobs -- as advertised on goarmy.com -- and it's sucking people in, and lo and behold when they face the reality of deployment, we the civilians who put them in harms way in the first place, are suprised that they're not hapilly chewing on their Thanksgiving Turkeys or flipping Playstation III's for profit on eBay.

For what it's worth, I'm complicit in the war, and since I'm really not having to pay the price yet, I'm going to be grateful for my blessings. Do something good for yourself, -- or for your friends and familly, or for the world -- today. There are plenty who don't have the opportunity.

In a campaign to get Apple computer to "go organic" Greenpeace writes:

Hello, I'm a Mac and iToxic

Let me introduce you to Apple’s latest release: hundreds of tons of contaminated, unrecycled products. Apple is selling you a fresh, clean image and innovative technology, but behind their messaging is a dirty little secret: their products are made with poison. That’s because under their skin, Apples are full of toxic chemicals like polyvinyl chloride plastic and brominated flame retardants.

When old Apples get tossed, they can end up at the fingertips of children in China, India and other developing world countries. They dismantle them for parts, and are exposed to a dangerous toxic cocktail that threatens their health and the environment.

All electronics have nasty stuff in them. I'm not sure why Greenpeace is targetting Apple over Dell and HP, who also have heavy PC advertising going on. The recent Dell/Apple battery recall involved batteries that were manufactured by Sony. Likewise, there are many parts, from the Intel CPUs to disk drive cables, that are manufactured by third-parties, and that may well be shared -- or at least equally toxic -- across PC dealers.

At least Greenpeace chose to e-mail me this time (despite the fact that I'd unsubscribed previously), rather than including me on a mass snail-mailing of fund-raising propaganda written in soy ink on recycled paper. The fossil fuels burned to power the CPUs involved in Greenpeace's e-mail blast, however, did add to the organization's CO2 production.

In the preface to his Ecology of Commerce, Paul Hawken writes

Management is being told that if it wakes up and genuflects, pronunouncing its amendes horoable, substituting paper for polystyrene, that we will be on the path to an evnironmentally sound world. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The problem isn't the half measures, but the illusion they foster that subtle course corrections can guide us to a good life that will include a "conserved" nature, and cozy shopping malls, ...

Proponents of socially responsible business ... are inintentionally giving companies a new reason to produce, advertise, expand, grow, capitalize, and use up resources. ... But flying a jet across the country, renting a car at an airport, air-conditionaing a hotel room, gassing up a truck full of goods, commuting to a job, -- these acts degrade the evnvironment whether the person doing them works for the Body Shop, the Sierra Club, or Exxon.

To create an enduring society, we will need a system of commerce and production where each and every act is inherently sustainable and restorative. Business will need to integrate economic, biologic, and human systems to create a sustainable methed of commerce ... where doing good is like falling off a log, where the natuaral, everyday acts of work and life accumulate into a better world as a matter of course, not a matter of conscious altruism. That is what this book tries to imagine.

Remains to be seen where he takes it from there. But thirteen years after that was published, Greenpeace is still in the business of mass-marketing feel-good half-measures. For them to criticize Apple's hip-consumer image is an excercise in irony. I concede, however, that a larger critique of the environmental potential of commerce for both good and bad is warranted.

Pick 1 For their opening movie of the semester, the film society screened Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth". It was better than I thought it would be, and I encourage people to see it when it comes on DVD. The film-makers used a heavy hand to edit autobiographical sketches of Gore into his slide show on global warming. The slide show itself was very effective, and when the sketches were effective when they added emotional breaks from the facts and figures. Gore talks about the perspective shift that almost losing his son to an accident had, as well as the cruel irony of having been a 2nd generation tobacco farmer in the era of Surgeon General's warnings, only to lose his sister to lung cancer. Gore oversteps the otherwise reasonable tone of his slideshow when he concludes by saying that nothing less than life on Earth is at stake.

Pick 2 Having heard the liberal and scientific consensus, do yourself a favor and read Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist. I don't think Lomborg is correct in the depth of his skepticism, but good science demands that all claims be evaluated against critiques such as his. Gore's movie, for example, is guilty of picking and choosing specific receding coastlines and glaciers to show, without ever mentioning whether the total landmass or icemass on Earth is decreasing. Don't let Lomborg cast FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) over all claims, but do make the effort to find evidence to counter the FUD.

Pick 3 Having experienced Gore's feel-good activism, and Lomborg's curmudgeony skepticism, are you ready for something sensible? Read Lawrence Slobodkin's A Citizen's Guide to Ecology. It's so good I'm giving it to my friends for the holidays. :) Slobodkin (I knew him in grad school), is nothing but a scientist, and IMHO can't be accused of having "an agenda". Moreover, the book is about the science of ecology, and while perhaps not as poetic in a literary sense as Rachel Carson or Lewis Thomas's work, conveys the same beauty to the workings of nature. Slobodkin also makes a good argument for the scientist to be an advocate and activist.

Pick 4 Haven't even read it yet myself, but I was recomended to read The Ecology of Commerce by a pretty intelligent-sounding guitarist that I met while he was playing outside a bar. I'll let y'all know how it is soon.

Slightly paraphrased from NPR: "Believe me when I say that I've never even had this conversation before. This is the first time I'm discussing it... I believe we should adhere strictly to the Geneva Conventions... when they are whacking people around in these secret prisons... you don't need blanket advanced aproval for blanket torture... the President could take personal responsibilty for it, but on a case-by-case basis"

1) He's never talked about torture before? Did he never attend CIA security briefings when he was President?

2) He's as opposed to torture as he can be without closing the door for the case when you know he knows that a bomb's about to go off.

3) "whacking people around in these secret prisons"? That better make the sound bites on TV!

4) Once again, hearing him speak has left me with a near-desperate need to vote for him. For something.

5) It abuses my credulity to think that he was investigated for getting a blowjob, and W. is legally declaring himself, the CIA, the military, and some of his administration above the law.