[Ed. Note: Marielaem hipped me to this story, and I am grateful.]

A group of south London graffiti artists were jailed last week for up to two years for defacing public property. Yet as they begin their sentences, their work is to be championed by a New York gallery.

By Arifa Akbar and Paul Vallely
Wednesday, 16 July 2008

On the face of it, as a society, we seem to be a little mixed-up when it comes to "graffiti", as you call it if you work in the local council's cleansing department, or "street art" as you say if you're the chap – and they do mainly seem to be blokes – wielding the spray can.

But the confusion now runs deeper than those who spray and those who remove the paint. Great British institutions have been polarised. Last week the might of English law delivered its verdict at Southwark Crown Court where five members of the DPM graffiti crew were jailed – one, Andrew Gillman, for two years – after admitting conspiracy to cause criminal damage costing the taxpayer at least £1m.

By contrast, just down the road, the riverside facade of Tate Modern had been covered in giant murals by six urban artists with international reputations, including Blu from Bologna, Faile from New York, and Sixeart from Barcelona, in the first display of street art at a major museum.

The courtroom and the museum were so close that supporters of the men on trial popped down to the Tate to do a bit of retouching during one lunchtime adjournment. "There is a huge irony in the juxtaposition of the two events," said one of the artists.

The man to credit for bringing street art into established gallery spaces is Banksy. A few years ago he was sneaking his work into galleries such as the Louvre and Tate Britain. Now Tate Modern is selling his book in its gift shop. His works go for hundreds of thousands of pounds and he was recently featured in a retrospective exhibition alongside Andy Warhol. He, more than anyone else, has legitimised the genre and spawned a new generation of young imitators – much to the chagrin of those who want to clean up behind them.

Bob has been involved in graffiti since 1982 when he was a punk. He now works, by day, for a London art gallery and describes himself as an upstanding taxpayer. "London is to street art, at the start of the 21st century, what Paris was for Impressionism at the start of the 20th," he says with unfeigned immodesty. "And yet we hate graffiti more than anywhere else in the world. England is by far and away the most draconian for punishments for what are only economic crimes."

A gallery in New York launches an exhibition next week based on the work of those convicted at Southwark. "DPM – Exhibit A", at the Anonymous Gallery Project in SoHo, will display large photographs of the convicts' work alongside copies of their charge sheets to ask whether the men are criminals or artists.

It is a question which prompts different answers in different parts of the world, says Cedar Lewinsohn, the curator of the exhibition at Tate Modern. "Brazil for instance is more relaxed about it," he says. "In parts of Australia, they are like the UK and people really hate graffiti and tags on vans and trains, but in Melbourne van drivers compete with each other as to whose is more decorated."

They have similarly schizophrenic responses in other nations too. In Toronto, police have just hired a street artist to paint walls to help find the man who murdered her brother. Elsewhere in Canada, a court has ruled that, after a police crackdown on graffiti artists, a 28-year-old man is only allowed to venture into town if he is accompanied by his mother. One internet blogger wrote: "In their twenties and still vandalising other people's property – shouldn't they have moved on to drug dealing, or perhaps become real estate agents by that age?"

Street art, you see, is a highly polarising phenomenon. On the one hand there are those like the American artist Elura Emerald, who is also involved in next week's New York exhibition, who insist that "artists who paint on the street are merely expressing themselves, not hurting anyone" and should not be punished "but appreciated and celebrated". Then there are those like Judge Christopher Hardy who, in court in Southwark, described the activities of the DPM Crew as "a wholesale self-indulgent campaign to damage property on an industrial scale".

How is such a dichotomy to be resolved? How, The Independent asked the street artist Bob, can artistic expression be reconciled with the fear and loathing that graffiti inspires in many citizens who see it as a symbol of lawlessness and the deterioration of their neighbourhood? "Well, not by sending them to jail," he says.

Gedis Grudzinskas, whose son Ziggy, 25, was one of those jailed last week agrees. "Ziggy has been sent to prison for 18 months having pleaded guilty to a crime not involving violence, terrorism, knives or drugs but vandalising public property," he says.

Having said that, Bob concedes, "you can't let people run wild". "If there's a clash of rights obviously those of the owner of the wall take precedence over those of the person painting on it," he adds. "There's room for debate but jail sentences shouldn't be part of that. They should just have to do youth work, or clean up ugly tags."

Greenwich and Tower Hamlets councils agree. They commissioned Ziggy and another DPM member to lead summer workshops as street art tutors for young and vulnerable people. The two councils sent references to court vouching that the DPM men were "positive" and "inspirational" in working with "young people who aren't able to do reading or writing". But it was not enough to save them from prison.

Is artistic merit enough of an excuse? A hoary old "is it art?" debate is taking place on street art next month at Tate Modern. Under the title "Graffiti – Utopia or a bit boring?", two art critics will consider whether graffiti is "glorified vandalism or a legitimate cultural movement". Bob does not think it will help much.

"Street art starts with kids doing ugly tags," he says. "When a kid starts to play music only the next-door neighbours hear but with street art the whole neighbourhood sees him not being very good when he starts out." The trouble is there is a whole lot of learning going on.

Some 85 per cent of graffiti is just tags, and another 10 per cent is gang communication, according to US sociologists who survey this kind of thing. And who, anyway, says Bob, is going to police "what is art and what is ugly"?

The money men will not help much, for all their attempts to cash in on street art. Red Bull, Adidas, Puma, 55DSL and Lee Jeans have all incorporated graffiti into their marketing campaigns. The BBC hired the DPM Crew's ringleader Andrew Gillman to deface the set of EastEnders to add a sense of authenticity to Albert Square. And the German paint firm Belton has even developed a new line of spray paint called Molotov aimed at street stencillers, with colours named after well-known graffiti artists.

So if artistic merit and commercial value aren't yardsticks for resolving our national confusion what is?

"I suppose the greater the cost of removing the graffiti, the greater the punishment should be, though not prison," says Bob, somewhat unexpectedly. This is not a million miles from Judge Hardy's verdict on the two-year spree in which the DPM Crew staged 120 night-time attacks on stations, trains and railway rolling stock in London, Somerset, Liverpool, Manchester, Sunderland, Paris, Amsterdam and the Czech Republic.

The judge had little patience with Gillman's notion that "trains were like a moving canvas" on which to create something artistic and thought-provoking that made "commuters look up from their paper".

Judge Hardy admitted that "it would be wrong of me not to acknowledge that some examples of your handiwork show considerable artistic talent", but he concluded, "the trouble is that it is has been sprayed all over other people's property without their consent and that is simply vandalism." Over the two years the bill must have run into millions of pounds.

If art is defined by the artist's intent then vandalism must be determined by the response of the owner of the thing vandalised. Peterborough City Council recently tried to find a compromise. It erected two 8ft by 4ft boards to allow artists there to express themselves freely. The trouble was that they were pulled down by vandals.

Additional reporting by Kate Mead

Six of the best street artists (apart from Banksy)

Paul Insect

Insect's Pop-art inspired street art has rapidly risen in profile. Last year, Damien Hirst snapped up his entire collection before it reached exhibition for a reported £50,000, while the actor Kevin Spacey has also acquired some pieces. Insect is best known for his anti-establishment messages.

Rough

One of the most respected and sought-after artists in Britain, Rough uses letterforms for his graffiti artwork. With a career spanning nearly two decades, Rough's work has been exhibited to critical acclaim in Australia and across Europe. A graphic designer, Rough has published a book, runs a T-shirt label and releases records as a rapper in a hip-hop band.

Blek Le Rat

The grand old man of street art is said to have paved the way for Banksy. After years of dodging the French authorities, he ended up being embraced by them. The Parisian has been spraying stencil-art graffiti since the early 1980s, the style favoured by Banksy.

Eine

Best known for the letters he paints on shop fronts around London. He spray-painted the word "nightmare" along a 110ft wall in an exhibition of street art in east London last year showing an alternative vision of Christmas.

Nick Walker

Emerged from the 1980s Bristol graffiti scene alongside Banksy. His work Moona Lisa – a bottom-baring version of La Joconde – went for £54,000 at Bonhams.

Robert Del Naja

Also known as 3D, the street artist and musician was part of the Bristol collective known as The Wild Bunch and went on to become a founding member of Massive Attack. His first live gig was as a DJ accompanying artwork he had produced in a Bristol gallery.

Jail/gaol is a place for murderers, rapists, corrupt politicians/bankers/wall street bastards, people who beat people up for money who don't have promoters and do it on streets instead of in a ring with a fellow fighter, hardcore b&e folks and thieves, pa/edophiles, folks who sell nasty drugs to kids, and their ilk.
It is not a place for women forced into prostitution, artists, people who smoke pot/use hallucinogens, folks who think in a way that's different from their ruler's way of "thinking," etc.

Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
By FRANK RICH
Published: July 13, 2008

WE know what a criminal White House looks like from “The Final Days,” Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s classic account of Richard Nixon’s unraveling. The cauldron of lies, paranoia and illegal surveillance boiled over, until it was finally every man for himself as desperate courtiers scrambled to save their reputations and, in a few patriotic instances, their country.

“The Final Days” was published in 1976, two years after Nixon abdicated in disgrace. With the Bush presidency, no journalist (or turncoat White House memoirist) is waiting for the corpse to be carted away. The latest and perhaps most chilling example arrives this week from Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, long a relentless journalist on the war-on-terror torture beat. Her book “The Dark Side” connects the dots of her own past reporting and that of her top-tier colleagues (including James Risen and Scott Shane of The New York Times) to portray a White House that, like its prototype, savaged its enemies within almost as ferociously as it did the Constitution.

Some of “The Dark Side” seems right out of “The Final Days,” minus Nixon’s operatic boozing and weeping. We learn, for instance, that in 2004 two conservative Republican Justice Department officials had become “so paranoid” that “they actually thought they might be in physical danger.” The fear of being wiretapped by their own peers drove them to speak in code.

The men were John Ashcroft’s deputy attorney general, James Comey, and an assistant attorney general, Jack Goldsmith. Their sin was to challenge the White House’s don, Dick Cheney, and his consigliere, his chief of staff David Addington, when they circumvented the Geneva Conventions to make torture the covert law of the land. Mr. Comey and Mr. Goldsmith failed to stop the “torture memos” and are long gone from the White House. But Vice President Cheney and Mr. Addington remain enabled by a president, attorney general (Michael Mukasey) and C.I.A. director (Michael Hayden) who won’t shut the door firmly on torture even now.

Nixon parallels take us only so far, however. “The Dark Side” is scarier than “The Final Days” because these final days aren’t over yet and because the stakes are much higher. Watergate was all about a paranoid president’s narcissistic determination to cling to power at any cost. In Ms. Mayer’s portrayal of the Bush White House, the president is a secondary, even passive, figure, and the motives invoked by Mr. Cheney to restore Nixon-style executive powers are theoretically selfless. Possessed by the ticking-bomb scenarios of television’s “24,” all they want to do is protect America from further terrorist strikes.

So what if they cut corners, the administration’s last defenders argue. While prissy lawyers insist on habeas corpus and court-issued wiretap warrants, the rest of us are being kept safe by the Cheney posse.

But are we safe? As Al Qaeda and the Taliban surge this summer, that single question is even more urgent than the moral and legal issues attending torture.

On those larger issues, the evidence is in, merely awaiting adjudication. Mr. Bush’s 2005 proclamation that “we do not torture” was long ago revealed as a lie. Antonio Taguba, the retired major general who investigated detainee abuse for the Army, concluded that “there is no longer any doubt” that “war crimes were committed.” Ms. Mayer uncovered another damning verdict: Red Cross investigators flatly told the C.I.A. last year that America was practicing torture and vulnerable to war-crimes charges.

Top Bush hands are starting to get sweaty about where they left their fingerprints. Scapegoating the rotten apples at the bottom of the military’s barrel may not be a slam-dunk escape route from accountability anymore.

No wonder the former Rumsfeld capo, Douglas Feith, is trying to discredit a damaging interview he gave to the British lawyer Philippe Sands for another recent and essential book on what happened, “Torture Team.” After Mr. Sands previewed his findings in the May issue of Vanity Fair, Mr. Feith protested he had been misquoted — apparently forgetting that Mr. Sands had taped the interview. Mr. Feith and Mr. Sands are scheduled to square off in a House hearing this Tuesday.

So hot is the speculation that war-crimes trials will eventually follow in foreign or international courts that Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, has publicly advised Mr. Feith, Mr. Addington and Alberto Gonzales, among others, to “never travel outside the U.S., except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel.” But while we wait for the wheels of justice to grind slowly, there are immediate fears to tend. Ms. Mayer’s book helps cement the case that America’s use of torture has betrayed not just American values but our national security, right to the present day.

In her telling, a major incentive for Mr. Cheney’s descent into the dark side was to cover up for the Bush White House’s failure to heed the Qaeda threat in 2001. Jack Cloonan, a special agent for the F.B.I.’s Osama bin Laden unit until 2002, told Ms. Mayer that Sept. 11 was “all preventable.” By March 2000, according to the C.I.A.’s inspector general, “50 or 60 individuals” in the agency knew that two Al Qaeda suspects — soon to be hijackers — were in America. But there was no urgency at the top. Thomas Pickard, the acting F.B.I. director that summer, told Ms. Mayer that when he expressed his fears about the Qaeda threat to Mr. Ashcroft, the attorney general snapped, “I don’t want to hear about that anymore!”

After 9/11, our government emphasized “interrogation over due process,” Ms. Mayer writes, “to pre-empt future attacks before they materialized.” But in reality torture may well be enabling future attacks. This is not just because Abu Ghraib snapshots have been used as recruitment tools by jihadists. No less destructive are the false confessions inevitably elicited from tortured detainees. The avalanche of misinformation since 9/11 has compromised prosecutions, allowed other culprits to escape and sent the American military on wild-goose chases. The coerced “confession” to the murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to take one horrific example, may have been invented to protect the real murderer.

The biggest torture-fueled wild-goose chase, of course, is the war in Iraq. Exhibit A, revisited in “The Dark Side,” is Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an accused Qaeda commander whose torture was outsourced by the C.I.A. to Egypt. His fabricated tales of Saddam’s biological and chemical W.M.D. — and of nonexistent links between Iraq and Al Qaeda — were cited by President Bush in his fateful Oct. 7, 2002, Cincinnati speech ginning up the war and by Mr. Powell in his subsequent United Nations presentation on Iraqi weaponry. Two F.B.I. officials told Ms. Mayer that Mr. al-Libi later explained his lies by saying: “They were killing me. I had to tell them something.”

That “something” was crucial in sending us into the quagmire that, five years later, has empowered Iran and compromised our ability to counter the very terrorists that torture was supposed to thwart. As The Times reported two weeks ago, Iraq has monopolized our military and intelligence resources to the point where we don’t have enough predator drones or expert C.I.A. field agents to survey the tribal areas where terrorists are amassing in Pakistan. Meanwhile, the threat to America from Al Qaeda is “comparable to what it faced on Sept. 11, 2001,” said Seth Jones, a RAND Corporation terrorism expert and Pentagon consultant. The difference between now and then is simply that the base of operations has moved, “roughly the difference from New York to Philadelphia.”

Yet once again terrorism has fallen off America’s map, landing at or near the bottom of voters’ concerns in recent polls. There were major attacks in rapid succession last week in Pakistan, Afghanistan (the deadliest in Kabul since we “defeated” the Taliban in 2001) and at the American consulate in Turkey. Who listened to this ticking time bomb? It’s reminiscent of July 2001, when few noticed that the Algerian convicted of trying to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on the eve of the millennium testified that he had been trained in bin Laden’s Afghanistan camps as part of a larger plot against America.

In last Sunday’s Washington Post, the national security expert Daniel Benjamin sounded an alarm about the “chronic” indecisiveness and poor execution of Bush national security policy as well as the continuing inadequacies of the Department of Homeland Security. Mr. Benjamin must feel a sinking sense of déjà vu. Exactly seven years ago in the same newspaper, just two months before 9/11, he co-wrote an article headlined “Defusing a Time Bomb” imploring the Bush administration in vain to pay attention to Afghanistan because that country’s terrorists “continue to pose the most dangerous threat to American lives.”

And so we’re back where we started in the summer of 2001, with even shark attacks and Chandra Levy’s murder (courtesy of a new Washington Post investigation) returning to the news. We are once again distracted and unprepared while the Taliban and bin Laden’s minions multiply in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This, no less than the defiling of the Constitution, is the legacy of an administration that not merely rationalized the immorality of torture but shackled our national security to the absurdity that torture could easily fix the terrorist threat.

That’s why the Bush White House’s corruption in the end surpasses Nixon’s. We can no longer take cold comfort in the Watergate maxim that the cover-up was worse than the crime. This time the crime is worse than the cover-up, and the punishment could rain down on us all.

By BENEDICT CAREY and GARDINER HARRIS
The New York Times
Published: July 12, 2008

It seemed an ideal marriage, a scientific partnership that would attack mental illness from all sides. Psychiatrists would bring to the union their expertise and clinical experience, drug makers would provide their products and the money to run rigorous studies, and patients would get better medications, faster.

But now the profession itself is under attack in Congress, accused of allowing this relationship to become too cozy. After a series of stinging investigations of individual doctors’ arrangements with drug makers, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, is demanding that the American Psychiatric Association, the field’s premier professional organization, give an accounting of its financing.

The association is the voice of establishment psychiatry, publishing the field’s major journals and its standard diagnostic manual.

“I have come to understand that money from the pharmaceutical industry can shape the practices of nonprofit organizations that purport to be independent in their viewpoints and actions,” Mr. Grassley said Thursday in a letter to the association.

In 2006, the latest year for which numbers are available, the drug industry accounted for about 30 percent of the association’s $62.5 million in financing. About half of that money went to drug advertisements in psychiatric journals and exhibits at the annual meeting, and the other half to sponsor fellowships, conferences and industry symposiums at the annual meeting.

This weekend in Chicago, the psychiatry association’s board will meet behind closed doors, in part to discuss how to respond to the increasingly intense scrutiny and questions about conflicts of interest.

“With every new revelation, our credibility with patients has been damaged, and we have to protect that first and foremost,” said Dr. Steven S. Sharfstein, a former president of the association and now president of the Sheppard Pratt Health System in Baltimore. “I think we need to review all arrangements between doctors and industry and be very clear about what constitutes a conflict of interest and what does not.”

One of the doctors named by Mr. Grassley is the association’s president-elect, Dr. Alan F. Schatzberg of Stanford, whose $4.8 million stock holdings in a drug development company raised the senator’s concern. In a telephone interview, Dr. Schatzberg said he had fully complied with Stanford’s rigorous disclosure policies and federal guidelines that pertained to his research.

Blocking or constraining researchers from trying to bring medications to market “will mean less opportunities to help patients with severe illnesses,” Dr. Schatzberg said, adding, “Drugs that are helpful may not be developed by big pharmaceutical companies, for a variety of reasons, and we need some degree of communication between academia and industry” to expand options for patients.

Commercial arrangements are rampant throughout medicine. In the past two decades, drug and device makers have paid tens of thousands of doctors and researchers of all specialties. Worried that this money could taint doctors’ research plans or clinical judgment, government agencies, medical journals and universities have been forced to look more closely at deal details.

In psychiatry, Mr. Grassley has found an orchard of low-hanging fruit. As a group, psychiatrists earn less in base salary than any other specialists, according to a nationwide survey by the Medical Group Management Association. In 2007, median compensation for psychiatrists was $198,653, less than half of the $464,420 earned by diagnostic radiologists and barely more than the $190,547 earned by doctors practicing internal medicine.

But many psychiatrists supplement this income with consulting arrangements with drug makers, traveling the country to give dinner talks about drugs to other doctors for fees generally ranging from $750 to $3,500 per event, for instance.

While data on industry consulting arrangements are sparse, state officials in Vermont reported that in the 2007 fiscal year, drug makers gave more money to psychiatrists than to doctors in any other specialty. Eleven psychiatrists in the state received an average of $56,944 each. Data from Minnesota, among the few other states to collect such information, show a similar trend.

In both states, individual psychiatrists are not top earners, but consulting arrangements are so common that their total tops all others. The worry is that this money may subtly alter psychiatrists’ choices of which drugs to prescribe.

An analysis of Minnesota data by The New York Times last year found that on average, psychiatrists who received at least $5,000 from makers of newer-generation antipsychotic drugs appear to have written three times as many prescriptions to children for the drugs as psychiatrists who received less money or none. The drugs are not approved for most uses in children, who appear to be especially susceptible to the side effects, including rapid weight gain.

Senator Grassley’s investigations have not only detailed how lucrative those arrangements can be but have also shown that some top psychiatrists failed to report all their earnings as required.

After The Times reported on such an arrangement involving Dr. Melissa P. DelBello of the University of Cincinnati, Mr. Grassley asked the university to provide her income disclosure forms and asked AstraZeneca, the maker of the antipsychotic Seroquel, to reveal how much it paid her.

In scientific publications, Dr. DelBello has reported working for eight drug makers and told university officials that from 2005 to 2007 she earned about $100,000 in outside income, according to Mr. Grassley.

But AstraZeneca told Mr. Grassley it paid her more than $238,000 in that period. AstraZeneca sent some of its payments through MSZ Associates, an Ohio corporation Dr. DelBello established for “personal financial purposes.”

The University of Cincinnati agreed to monitor those payments more closely.

In early June, the senator reported to Congress that Dr. Joseph Biederman, a renowned child psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, and a colleague, Dr. Timothy E. Wilens, had reported to university officials earning several hundred thousand dollars apiece in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007 when in fact they had earned at least $1.6 million each.

Another member of the Harvard group, Dr. Thomas Spencer, reported earning at least $1 million after being pressed by Mr. Grassley’s investigators. The Harvard psychiatrists said they took conflict-of-interest policies seriously and had abided by disclosure rules.

In late June, after Mr. Grassley singled out Dr. Schatzberg, Stanford disputed some of the numbers in the report and has denied that Dr. Schatzberg violated any research rules devised to police such conflicts.

In an interview on Wednesday, Dr. Nada L. Stotland, president of the psychiatric association, said the group had studied Mr. Grassley’s letter and Stanford’s response and agreed with Stanford. Dr. Schatzberg will take over as president of the association as planned, she said.

“The larger issue here is that there’s a revolution going on” in how medicine handles industry money, said Dr. Stotland, a psychiatrist at Rush Medical College in Chicago. “That’s good, that’s what we need, and I believe we’ve been on the cutting edge of that revolution in many ways.”

Dr. Stotland said that the association began reviewing the income it received from pharmaceutical companies last March, to identify potential conflicts. Doctors and academic researchers generally worked at arm’s length from industry until the early 1980s, when Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act. This legislation encouraged closer collaboration between researchers and industry to bring products to market more quickly. The act helped foster the growth of the biotech industry, and soon professors and universities were busy obtaining patents and building relationships with industry.

Some psychiatrists have long argued that consulting with a company — to help design a rigorous drug trial, for instance — benefits patients, as long as the researcher has no financial stake in the product and is not paid to speak about the drug to other doctors, like a traveling pitchman.

Others say industry and academic researchers are now so deeply intertwined that exposing doctors’ private arrangements only stokes suspicion without correcting the real problem: bias.

“Having everyone stand up like a Boy Scout and make a pledge isn’t going to quell suspicion,” said Dr. Donald Klein, an emeritus professor at Columbia, who has consulted with drug makers himself. “The only hope to rule out bias is to have open access to all data that’s produced in studies and know that there are people checking it” who are not on that company’s payroll.

Studies have shown that researchers who are paid by a company are more likely to report positive findings when evaluating that company’s drugs. The private deals can directly affect patient care, said Dr. William Niederhut, a psychiatrist in private practice in Denver who receives no industry money.

Dr. Niederhut said company-sponsored doctors had spread the word that new and expensive drugs were better in treating bipolar disorder than lithium, the cheaper old standby treatment.

“It’s a sales pitch, and now it’s looking like a whole lot of people would have done better if they’d started on lithium in the first place,” Dr. Niederhut said in a telephone interview. “The profession absolutely has to come clean on these industry deals, and soon.”

Tighter rules, stronger statements and more debate may not make much difference, if Mr. Grassley’s findings are any guide. Universities have rules requiring that faculty members disclose their outside income so that conflicts of interest in research or patient care can be managed. But some of the psychiatrists named in the investigations apparently ignored the rules.

“I think we may be coming to a point where hospitals and medical schools have to get serious about sanctioning,” said Dr. Paul S. Appelbaum, director of the division of psychiatry, medicine and the law at Columbia. “You can suspend doctors’ privileges, or suspend their right to treat patients; both have a huge impact on income and career. But if you’re serious about these disclosure policies, you have to be willing to back them up.”

Editorial
The New York Times

The Bush administration made clear on Friday that it will do virtually nothing to regulate the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. With no shame and no apology, it stuck a thumb in the eye of the Supreme Court, repudiated its own scientists and exposed the hollowness of Mr. Bush’s claims to have seen the light on climate change.

That is the import of an announcement by Stephen Johnson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, that the E.P.A. will continue to delay a decision on whether global warming threatens human health and welfare and requires regulations to address it. Mr. Johnson said his agency would seek further public comment on the matter, a process that will almost certainly stretch beyond the end of Mr. Bush’s term.

The urgent problem of global warming demands urgent action. And the Supreme Court surely expected a speedier response when — 15 months ago — it ordered the E.P.A. to determine whether greenhouse gas pollution from vehicles (and, by extension, other sources) endangers human welfare and, if so, to issue regulations to limit emissions.

Mr. Bush initially promised to comply, and last December, a task force of agency scientists concluded that emissions do indeed endanger public welfare, that the E.P.A. is required to issue regulations, and that while remedial action could cost industry billions of dollars, the public welfare and the economy as a whole will benefit.

The agency sent its findings to the White House. The details of what happened next are not clear. But investigations by Senator Barbara Boxer and Representative Edward Markey have established that the White House, prodded by Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, decided to ignore the findings — refusing at first to even open the e-mail containing them and then asking Mr. Johnson to devise another response that would relieve the administration of taking prompt action.

Along the way, the administration engaged in what Senator Boxer has aptly called a “master plan” to ensure that the E.P.A.’s response to the Supreme Court’s decision would be as weak as possible.

This campaign of obfuscation and intimidation included doctoring Congressional testimony on the health effects of climate change; ordering the E.P.A. to recompute its numbers to minimize the economic benefits of curbing carbon dioxide; and promoting the fiction that the modest fuel-economy improvements in last year’s energy bill would solve the problem of carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles.

All this is unfortunate but not surprising. Mr. Bush spent years denying there was a climate change problem. And while he no longer denies the science, he still insists on putting the concerns of industry over the needs of the planet.

We were skeptical last week when Mr. Bush joined other world leaders in a pledge to halve global greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of the century. We worried that without nearer-term targets there would be too little pressure on governments to act. Now we have no doubt that he was merely posturing. The next president, armed with the E.P.A.’s findings, can and must do better.

Editorial
The New York Times

After watching wholesale lots of the Bush administration’s most important e-mails go mysteriously missing, Congress is trying to legislate against any further damage to history. The secrecy-obsessed White House is, of course, threatening a veto — one more effort to deny Americans their rightful access to the truth about how their leaders govern or misgovern.

The House approved a measure last week that would require the National Archives to issue stronger standards for preserving e-mails and to aggressively inspect whether an administration is in compliance. The Archives needs spine stiffening. Congressional investigators found that its staff backed off from inspections of e-mail storage after the Bush administration took office.

We fear we may never find out all that has gone missing in this administration, although we urge Congressional investigators to keep trying. What we do know is that the Bush gaps of missing e-mails run into hundreds of thousands during some of the most sensitive political moments. Key gaps coincide with the lead-up to the Iraq war — and the White House’s manipulation of intelligence — as well as the destruction of videotapes of C.I.A. interrogations and the outing of the C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame Wilson.

Missing e-mails include entire blank days at the offices of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Also mysteriously wiped from the record are e-mails from Karl Rove, the president’s political guru, and dozens of other White House workers who improperly conducted government business on Republican Party e-mail accounts. The White House now claims that nothing has been lost, though officials previously acknowledged large-scale purging, claiming they were accidental.

An administration with nothing to fear from the truth would be in the forefront of protecting the historical record. The Senate must stand with the House and ensure that at least future administrations are stopped from doing wholesale damage to history.

They want all the privacy in the world while they tap our phones, and read our mail, credit card bills and email.  Screw you, washington dc.

Editorial
The New York Times

Anyone who has doubts that this country is abusing and terrorizing undocumented immigrant workers should read an essay by Erik Camayd-Freixas, a professor and Spanish-language court interpreter who witnessed the aftermath of a huge immigration workplace raid at a meatpacking plant in Iowa.

The essay chillingly describes what Dr. Camayd-Freixas saw and heard as he translated for some of the nearly 400 undocumented workers who were seized by federal agents at the Agriprocessors kosher plant in Postville in May.

Under the old way of doing things, the workers, nearly all Guatemalans, would have been simply and swiftly deported. But in a twist of Dickensian cruelty, more than 260 were charged as serious criminals for using false Social Security numbers or residency papers, and most were sentenced to five months in prison.

What is worse, Dr. Camayd-Freixas wrote, is that the system was clearly rigged for the wholesale imposition of mass guilt. He said the court-appointed lawyers had little time in the raids’ hectic aftermath to meet with the workers, many of whom ended up waiving their rights and seemed not to understand the complicated charges against them.

Dr. Camayd-Freixas’s essay describes “the saddest procession I have ever witnessed, which the public would never see” — because cameras were forbidden.

“Driven single-file in groups of 10, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, chains dragging as they shuffled through, the slaughterhouse workers were brought in for arraignment, sat and listened through headsets to the interpreted initial appearance, before marching out again to be bused to different county jails, only to make room for the next row of 10.”

He wrote that they had waived their rights in hopes of being quickly deported, “since they had families to support back home.” He said that they did not understand the charges they faced, adding, “and, frankly, neither could I.”

No one is denying that the workers were on the wrong side of the law. But there is a profound difference between stealing people’s identities to rob them of money and property, and using false papers to merely get a job. It is a distinction that the Bush administration, goaded by immigration extremists, has willfully ignored. Deporting unauthorized workers is one thing; sending desperate breadwinners to prison, and their families deeper into poverty, is another.

Court interpreters are normally impartial participants and keep their opinions to themselves. But Dr. Camayd-Freixas, a professor of Spanish at Florida International University, said he was so offended by the cruelty of the prosecutions that he felt compelled to break his silence. “A line was crossed at Postville,” he wrote.

By SAUL HANSELL
The New York Times
Published: July 12, 2008

Federal regulators are prepared to take action against sellers of Internet access that want to restrict what their customers can do online.

Kevin J. Martin, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said Friday that Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company, should be sanctioned because it had interfered with the Internet connections of users who were exchanging files with other people.

Mr. Martin’s recommendation is a strong push for network neutrality, the idea that Internet access providers like Comcast should not be allowed to favor some uses of their networks over others. Internet companies like Google and free speech advocates have backed this approach.

The cable and phone companies that provide most of the nation’s Internet service have argued that such rules were not needed. They have said that they should be free to run their networks as they see fit, and that there had been no cases of problems with such discrimination.

Comcast’s practice of slowing the use of BitTorrent, a method of trading video, music and software files, provides such a case. The practice was intended to prevent frequent file-swappers from clogging up the company’s network.

Under Mr. Martin’s recommendation, which would need to be approved by the full commission, Comcast would not be fined. But it would be forced to change its practices and give the commission more details on what it did in the past.

Mr. Martin wants to set a standard that will make it difficult for an Internet provider to discriminate against users based on what they want to do online.

“The Internet is based upon the idea that consumers can go anywhere they want and access any content they want,” Mr. Martin said in an interview. “When they show they are blocking access to some sort of content, they have the burden to show that what they are doing is reasonable.”

Mr. Martin also said Comcast did not explain to its customers what it was doing. “If they are going to put limits on individual customers if you use a certain amount of bandwidth per month or per hour, they have to be willing to tell their customers more about how it works,” he said.

But Mr. Martin said the issue went beyond simple disclosure because Comcast’s approach was not tightly related to the problem it said it was trying to solve. For example, BitTorrent users who were not exchanging large files were also blocked.

Mr. Martin said that the commission wanted to protect legal activities, and that the rules would not apply to an Internet service that tried to block the unauthorized transmission of copyrighted material or child pornography.

Comcast argues that its approach is legitimate, and that the commission does not have the authority to impose any sanctions.

“We believe that the network management technique we chose at the time was reasonable,” said Sena Fitzmaurice, a Comcast spokeswoman. She added that Comcast had already said it planned to change its approach to dealing with heavy use. It is developing a system that will slow the Internet connections of people who are moving large amounts of data at busy times.

Ms. Fitzmaurice was nonetheless concerned about Mr. Martin’s approach. She asked: “Does this create some broader precedent or authority for the F.C.C. that would be asserted in other cases?”

She said that if the action was approved by the commission, the company would have to examine the order before deciding whether to appeal.

Spokesmen for Time Warner Cable and Verizon, two other large providers of Internet access, concurred that their preferences would be for the commission to limit its scope to ensuring that providers properly disclose their practices to their customers.

Some advocates of network neutrality are hoping that the commission uses this case to establish a broader principle.

“The normative message is that it is wrong to block the Internet,” said Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School who is the chairman of Free Press, an advocacy group that filed the complaint about Comcast for which Mr. Martin is proposing a resolution.

“The deeper message he’s sending here is that users are sovereign. If two people want to send a file between each other, the carriers are not to get in the way.”

Professor Wu said the issues at stake go back to the common-law concept of a common carrier, which defined certain businesses — from blacksmiths to ferries — as so essential to commerce that their owners could not discriminate against any paying customer.

These ancient concerns are increasingly relevant to the Internet as an ever-greater share of commerce is conducted online. Companies that sell products or offer content over the Internet have worried that without regulation, the Internet access providers might chose to offer better and faster service to some companies — perhaps those that pay for preferred treatment — than to others.

Many are particularly concerned that cable and phone companies, which are in the pay television business, will choose to inhibit the growth of free video over the Internet from sites like YouTube, which is owned by Google.

“If it turned out that the system accidentally or deliberately discriminated against online television, that would be anticompetitive because online television competes with Comcast,” said Marvin Ammori, the general counsel of Free Press.

Other Internet experts say that Comcast is simply trying to compensate for the limited capacity of its network. On Internet connections delivered over cable systems, there is much more capacity for users to receive information than to send it, so uploading large files can quickly overwhelm the sending capacity.

Some are concerned that if Mr. Martin presses these rules, the Internet providers will move away from offering unlimited Internet service. Already Time Warner is testing a system that would impose significant caps on how much its users could download.

Happy Almost Stumble Birthday!

Lemme rustle us on up some grub, fetch your prezzies, and gen'lly get the party started.

Oh, but first thangs first.
This is for the gentleman w/the eau de poop perfume.


Splash some on yrself too when it gets hot. It's a lovely way to maintain one's sanity during Summer, and one never actually reeks of the stuff. I'll try to find you a spray bottle too, since it's easier to spritz a sweaty back than splash it.








Right. That's that then.
Oh, and here's your cake.


My Inner Mongolian objected and called it a girly cake, but I told him he doesn't have to eat any. :)
Ssshhh! Kinda hide this somewhere:


It's just for you.
I'm set anyway:


Django's playing an acoustic set


while the sound gets sorted.


Good luck, mate.
Cuppa?


I like a little tea with my tea.


Thanks, Toots. You're lovely.

Gotta fetch your gifties.


A singing, yodelling, dancing pair of wurst-remote-controlled lederhosen!


A tasteful Surrealist poster.


Some high literature.


A chocolate freshwater poil pendant...


A chocolate sundae kiss pendant...


A pair of rings what look like choccies...


...and a chocolate-filled jewelry box to put 'em in, once you've emptied it. :)

Well, they're still having trouble getting the sound sorted, so here's an acoustic all-goil band complete wif dancing goils.


They've brought a great flower arrangement, too!
Fancy a choccy, dawling?


Mmm...toffee


Those are too fancy to share, so best stash 'em.


Not many in there, but the box was so cute I couldn't resist.
Hooray! They finally got the sound running, and guess who's gonna play now?


Toots and The Maytals! That means we need...






HA! Where there's a will there's a fucking way, baby!


Damn straight.

Hey! What's all this then?

Heh heh heh. If you see anything there you don't fancy (click pic to giganticize it), they can be used as party favo/urs. :)


Oooh. Maybe that last toke wasn't such a good idea.


I'm flashing back on these chocolates, an' they're lookin' mighty strange. Kinda fractalled-out.
Wish I could describe it.

What's Wrong with the Sun? (Nothing)

07.11.2008

+ Play Audio | + Download Audio | + Email to a friend | + Join mailing list July 11, 2008: Stop the presses! The sun is behaving normally. So says NASA solar physicist David Hathaway. "There have been some reports lately that Solar Minimum is lasting longer than it should. That's not true. The ongoing lull in sunspot number is well within historic norms for the solar cycle." This report, that there's nothing to report, is newsworthy because of a growing buzz in lay and academic circles that something is wrong with the sun. Sun Goes Longer Than Normal Without Producing Sunspots declared one recent press release. A careful look at the data, however, suggests otherwise. But first, a status report: "The sun is now near the low point of its 11-year activity cycle," says Hathaway. "We call this 'Solar Minimum.' It is the period of quiet that separates one Solar Max from another." Above: The solar cycle, 1995-2015. The "noisy" curve traces measured sunspot numbers; the smoothed curves are predictions. Credit: D. Hathaway/NASA/MSFC. [more] During Solar Max, huge sunspots and intense solar flares are a daily occurance. Auroras appear in Florida. Radiation storms knock out satellites. Radio blackouts frustrate hams. The last such episode took place in the years around 2000-2001. During Solar Minimum, the opposite occurs. Solar flares are almost non-existant while whole weeks go by without a single, tiny sunspot to break the monotony of the blank sun. This is what we are experiencing now. Sign up for EXPRESS SCIENCE NEWS delivery Although minima are a normal aspect of the solar cycle, some observers are questioning the length of the ongoing minimum, now slogging through its 3rd year. "It does seem like it's taking a long time," allows Hathaway, "but I think we're just forgetting how long a solar minimum can last." In the early 20th century there were periods of quiet lasting almost twice as long as the current spell. (See the end notes for an example.) Most researchers weren't even born then. Hathaway has studied international sunspot counts stretching all the way back to 1749 and he offers these statistics: "The average period of a solar cycle is 131 months with a standard deviation of 14 months. Decaying solar cycle 23 (the one we are experiencing now) has so far lasted 142 months--well within the first standard deviation and thus not at all abnormal. The last available 13-month smoothed sunspot number was 5.70. This is bigger than 12 of the last 23 solar minimum values." In summary, "the current minimum is not abnormally low or long." The longest minimum on record, the Maunder Minimum of 1645-1715, lasted an incredible 70 years. Sunspots were rarely observed and the solar cycle seemed to have broken down completely. The period of quiet coincided with the Little Ice Age, a series of extraordinarily bitter winters in Earth's northern hemisphere. Many researchers are convinced that low solar activity, acting in concert with increased volcanism and possible changes in ocean current patterns, played a role in that 17th century cooling. For reasons no one understands, the sunspot cycle revived itself in the early 18th century and has carried on since with the familiar 11-year period. Because solar physicists do not understand what triggered the Maunder Minimum or exactly how it influenced Earth's climate, they are always on the look-out for signs that it might be happening again. The quiet of 2008 is not the second coming of the Maunder Minimum, believes Hathaway. "We have already observed a few sunspots from the next solar cycle," he says. (See Solar Cycle 24 Begins.) "This suggests the solar cycle is progressing normally." What's next? Hathaway anticipates more spotless days1, maybe even hundreds, followed by a return to Solar Max conditions in the years around 2012. Stay tuned to Science@NASA for updates. SEND THIS STORY TO A FRIEND Author: Dr. Tony Phillips | Credit: Science@NASA more information: Spotless Days  1Another way to examine the length and depth of a solar minimum is by counting spotless days. A "spotless day" is a day with no sunspots. Spotless days never happen during Solar Max but they are the "meat and potatoes" of solar minima. Adding up every daily blank sun for the past three years, we find that the current solar minimum has had 362 spotless days (as of June 30, 2008). Compare that value to the total spotless days of the previous ten solar minima: 309, 273, 272, 227, 446, 269, 568, 534, ~1019 and ~931. The current count of 362 spotless days is not even close to the longest. The plot below compares the Solar Minimum of 2008 to a longer one in 1933: Orange bars represent the number of spotless days per month. The ongoing solar minimum needs to accumulate another 206 spotless days before it matches the duration of the 1933 minimum, which is considered unremarkable by solar historians. What does a spotless day look like? The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) recorded this blank sun on July 1, 2008: Click here for a Solar Max comparison.

I nicked this from

First Jaguar D-Type fetches record £2.2m

By Daily Telegraph reporter

A vintage Jaguar racing car has been snapped up for a world record price of more than £2 million.

Vintage Jaguar D-Type first appeared on Britain's roads in 1955

The 3.4-litre car was the first Jaguar D-Type to roll off the production line in 1955.

The motor car with the chassis number XKD509, was sold for £2,201,500 following frantic bidding at the auction held at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in Chichester.

A British vintage car enthusiast bought the much sought after motor at the Bonhams sale.

The price beats the previous world record for a Jaguar car of £1,706,000 set in 1999.

The XKD509 was sold on behalf of the Littlewoods Football Pools family and was raced in America in the 1950s.

Hundreds of motor enthusiasts crammed in to the six-hour sale as more than 350 lots went under the hammer.