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[BLOOMSDAY--CELEBRATING JOYCE'S ULYSSES, HAS COME AND GONE. BUT HERE IS A LOOK BACK]

FOUR DISPATCHES FROM JAMES JOYCE’S CITY DURING THE CENTENNIAL OF BLOOMSDAY

DISPATCH ONE

In most places in the world, June 16 is just another day on the calendar, but here in Dublin, the day that James Joyce earmarked for Ulysses is celebrated with a fervor not seen here since the days of the druids when, if you really wanted to party, you needed a couple skeins of wine and a grove full of virgins.

When Dubliners celebrate they don’t mess around. June 16, Bloomsday, isn’t nearly enough time. The celebrations started the weekend before and will continue throughout the week and into next weekend. The 19th International James Joyce Symposium kicked off with a reading by Nobel Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney. Joyceans woke up early Sunday morning for an outdoor breakfast on O’Connell Street, strolled to the National Concert Hall for a plenary reading by John Banville and rounded out the evening with a civic reception for symposium delegates at city hall hosted by Dublin’s Lord Mayor.

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How our brains fool us on climate, creationism, and the vaccine-autism link.

By Chris Mooney

“A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.” So wrote the celebrated Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger, in a passage that might have been referring to climate change denial—the persistent rejection, on the part of so many Americans today, of what we know about global warming and its human causes. But it was too early for that—this was the 1950s—and Festinger was actually describing a famous case study in psychology.

Festinger and several of his colleagues had infiltrated the Seekers, a small Chicago-area cult whose members thought they were communicating with aliens—including one, “Sananda,” who they believed was the astral incarnation of Jesus Christ. The group was led by Dorothy Martin, a Dianetics devotee who transcribed the interstellar messages through automatic writing.

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.These days, America has one dominant search engine, one dominant social-networking site, and four phone companies. The structure of the information industry often goes unnoticed, but it has an enormous effect on the ease with which the government spies on citizens. The remarkable consolidation of the communications and Web industries into a handful of firms has made spying much simpler and, therefore, more likely to happen.

Think back to the late nineteen-nineties, and try to imagine the federal government trying to wiretap the Web. Where to start? There were multiple, competing search engines, including Lycos, Bigfoot, and AltaVista, few of which had much information worth getting one’s hands on. Social networking? Well, there was GeoCities, sort of an early version of Facebook or Tumblr, but that site allowed fake names and didn’t have access to a lot of data. Even getting at e-mail was more difficult in those days, with hundreds of I.S.P.s offering localized e-mail services. AOL was the best bet. Finally, for a government wiretapper, there was no continuity: with firms rising and falling, a wiretap might go down with the company.

In the nineties, tapping the Web, if not impossible, was certainly a pain, which is not to say that the Web itself was better for users. We can concede that Google is superior to Archie-Veronica. But we will always face a trade-off: more centralization and concentration means convenience for consumers, but it also makes government surveillance and censorship easier.

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New York Stock Exchange. Photo: mimtdotcom/Flickr

Did the government really disrupt a bomb plot targeting the New York Stock Exchange?

The FBI deputy director said that today in a Spygate hearing where the government for the first time said secret spy techniques publicly disclosed two weeks ago had halted some 50 terror attacks in 20 countries.

Sean Joyce, the bureau’s deputy director, identified Khalid Ouazzani as the culprit. “Ouazzani had been providing information and support to this plot,” Joyce testified to the House Select Committee on Intelligence.

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The German poet Christian Morgenstern once said that “all seagulls look as though their name were Emma.” Though Morgenstern was known for his nonsense poetry , there was truth in his suggestion that some linguistic labels are perfectly suited to the concepts they denote. “Dawdle” and “meander” sound as unhurried as the walking speeds they describe, and “awkward” and “gawky” sound as ungainly as the bodies they represent. When the Gestalt psychologist and fellow German Wolfgang Köhler read Morgenstern’s poem, in the nineteen-twenties, he was moved to suggest that words convey symbolic ideas beyond their meaning. To test the idea more carefully, he asked a group of respondents to decide which of the two shapes below was a maluma and which was a takete:

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Members of the original investigation team claim their report into the 1996 crash was subject to a government coverup…A new documentary features interviews with six whistle-blowers who claim that the official explanation given for the ill-fated Trans World Airline Flight 800 crash in 1996 is wrong….The flight crashed off the coast of Long Island 17 years ago, killing all 230 people on board in what is the third-deadliest aviation accident in U.S. history….The official explanation given by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) at the time was that the crash was caused by a gas tank explosion.

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Bank of America whistle-blowers detail evil schemes to fleece borrowers — including staff bonuses for foreclosures

Bank of America’s mortgage servicing unit systematically lied to homeowners, fraudulently denied loan modifications, and paid their staff bonuses for deliberately pushing people into foreclosure: Yes, these allegations were suspected by any homeowner who ever had to deal with the bank to try to get a loan modification – but now they come from six former employees and one contractor, whose sworn statements were added last week to a civil lawsuit filed in federal court in Massachusetts.

“Bank of America’s practice is to string homeowners along with no apparent intention of providing the permanent loan modifications it promises,” said Erika Brown, one of the former employees. The damning evidence would spur a series of criminal investigations of BofA executives, if we still had a rule of law in this country for Wall Street banks.

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Over the past two weeks, the US government has insisted that its powers under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act require the NSA to get a “special, particularized order” from the FISA court to intercept an individual American’s communications. Analyzing both the law on the books and NSA documents, Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian concludes that in practice, the FISA Amendments Act allows the NSA to cast a much wider net, and that once the NSA secures FISA court approval, the decisions about which communications to “task” fall on individual analysts and their supervisors at the NSA. Further, while the government has argued that Section 702 is designed strictly to intercept foreign communications, NSA documentation indicates that captured correspondence between US citizens can still have intelligence value, and procedures are in place for filing, analyzing, and disseminating so-called “domestic communications.”

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In July 2011, an army combat team known as the Arctic Wolves moved into the Kandahar district of Panjwai, where the Taliban was born and where Osama bin Laden is said to have planned the 9/11 attacks. The area was all but evacuated—it was not yet poppy-growing season, and Panjwai’s residents had gone to nearby cities to find work. For two months, the Arctic Wolves went about their business of clearing the territory of weapons and establishing a combat outpost without suffering casualties.

But as the Wolves continued to patrol the area in their brand new, supposedly bomb-resistant armored vehicles, they could feel eyes watching them. Insurgents were starting to move into the houses abandoned by the villagers. During this season of uneasy quiet, a 21-year-old Army specialist from Wichita, Kansas, named James Burnett called home. Burnett had enlisted while he was still in high school, and he intended to marry his fiancé and become a cop once he returned to Wichita. Those plans seemed distant now.

“I’m in a bad place,” the soldier told his stepmother. “I’m scared. Pray for me.”

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REUTERS/Paul Faith

U.S. President Barack Obama speaks to guests at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast June 17, 2013.

Since we began began publishing stories about the NSA’s massive domestic spying apparatus, various NSA defenders – beginning with President Obama – have sought to assure the public that this is all done under robust judicial oversight.

“When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” he proclaimed on June 7 when responding to our story about the bulk collection of telephone records, adding that the program is “fully overseen” by “the Fisa court, a court specially put together to evaluate classified programs to make sure that the executive branch, or government generally, is not abusing them”. Obama told Charlie Rose [on Monday] night:

“What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a US person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls … by law and by rule, and unless they … go to a court, and obtain a warrant, and seek probable cause, the same way it’s always been, the same way when we were growing up and we were watching movies, you want to go set up a wiretap, you got to go to a judge, show probable cause.”

The GOP chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Rogers, told CNN that the NSA “is not listening to Americans’ phone calls. If it did, it is illegal. It is breaking the law.” Talking points issued by the House GOP in defense of the NSA claimed that surveillance law only “allows the Government to acquire foreign intelligence information concerning non-U.S.-persons (foreign, non-Americans) located outside the United States.”

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The FBI uses drones for domestic surveillance purposes, the head of the agency told Congress early Wednesday.

Robert Mueller, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, confirmed to lawmakers that the FBI owns several unmanned aerial vehicles, but has not adopted any strict policies or guidelines yet to govern the use of the controversial aircraft.

“Does the FBI use drones for surveillance on US soil?” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) asked Mr Mueller during an oversight hearing on Capitol Hill Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“Yes,” Mueller responded bluntly, adding that the FBI’s operation of drones is “very seldom.”

Asked by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) to elaborate, Mueller added, “It’s very seldom used and generally used in a particular incident where you need the capability.” Earlier in the morning, however, Mueller said that the agency was only now working to establish set rules for the drone program.

Mueller began answering questions just after 10 a.m. EDT. He briefly touched on the recently exposed NSA surveillance program that has marred the reputation of the United States intelligence community. Mueller said 22 agents have access to a vast surveillance database, including 20 analysts and two overseers.

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Rick Zeman writes “‘Confidentiality is critical to national security.’ So wrote the Justice Department in concealing the NSA’s role in two wiretap cases. However, now that the NSA is under the gun, it’s apparently not so critical, according to New York attorney Joshua Dratel: ‘National security is about keeping illegal conduct concealed from the American public until you’re forced to justify it because someone ratted you out.’ The first he heard of the NSA’s role in his client’s case was ‘when [FBI deputy director Sean] Joyce disclosed it on CSPAN to argue for the effectiveness of the NSA’s spying.’ Dratel challenged the legality of the spying in 2011, and asked a federal judge to order the government to produce the wiretap application the FBI gave the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to justify the surveillance. ‘Disclosure of the FISA applications to defense counsel – who possess the requisite security clearance – is also necessary to an accurate determination of the legality of the FISA surveillance, as otherwise the defense will be completely in the dark with respect to the basis for the FISA surveillance,’ wrote Dratel. According to Wired, ‘The government fought the request in a 60-page reply brief (PDF), much of it redacted as classified in the public docket. The Justice Department argued that the defendants had no right to see any of the filings from the secret court, and instead the judge could review the filings alone in chambers.”

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Ibtisam Ali Aboud (with her son Jafar) says that her husband, a Syrian Alawite, was killed by his Sunni friend.

The Damascus neighborhood known as Mezze 86 is a dense, dilapidated warren of narrow hillside streets adorned with posters bearing the face of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad. The presidential palace is nearby, and the area is crawling with well-armed guards and soldiers. It is next to impossible to enter unless you are accompanied by government officials or well-known locals, almost all of them members of Assad’s Alawite sect. I drove there on a quiet Friday morning in May, and we were stopped several times at checkpoints by young soldiers who examined our documents carefully before waving us on. When we arrived at our destination, in a small parking lot hemmed in by cinder-block towers, I emerged from the car to the suspicious glares of several middle-aged men in fatigues. “They are not expecting foreigners here,” one of the men who accompanied me said. “The rebels are trying constantly to hit this place, because they know who lives here.” He pointed to a damaged roof not far away. “A mortar struck very close the other day. A lady was killed just above us, and another just below.”

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When a new species emerges following adaptive changes to its local environment, the process of choosing a mate can help protect the new species’ genetic identity and increase the likelihood of its survival. But of the many observable traits in a potential mate, which particular traits does a female tend to prefer?

A new study from the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis finds that a female’s mating decisions are largely based on traits that reflect fitness or those that help males perform well under the local ecological conditions.

Males’ bright colors, flashy ornaments, and elaborate songs are examples of fitness-related traits that females appear to have evolved to prefer, according to the study, which appears in the journal Ecology Letters.

An example of these fitness-related traits can be found in the tropical Heliconius butterfly, where diverging color patterns on the butterflies’ wings influence mate choice and hence divergence of populations. Another example are Darwin’s finches, whose beaks evolved over millions of years with changes in birdsong, an important mating signal, and thus contributed to the rise of new and distinct finch species.

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Don’t Trust the Applause .

Tough Love: Male Spiders Die for Sex .

Tiny batteries: 3-D printing could lead to miniaturized medical implants, compact electronics, tiny robots.

New drug reverses loss of brain connections in Alzheimer’s.

City slicker or country bumpkin .

Older males make better fathers says new research on beetles .

Aspirin may fight cancer by slowing DNA damage .

The verdict on tiger-parenting? Studies point to poor mental health .

News in Brief: In dark fishing spiders, males’ post-mating nap is permanent .

New NASA astronauts headed for destinations unknown .

Today on New Scientist .

Farmed fish overtakes farmed beef for first time -.

One day, sometime around the middle of this century, during the lifetime of people now alive, the population of the planet will be smaller than it was the day before. Global population growth is slowing, will level off, and one remarkable day, decline.

The Most Important Day of the 21st Century – .

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[note source of photo]

War News Updates: A Look At The NSA’s Facility In San Antonio.

5 Rules for Arming Rebels – By Edward Luttwak .

The Attribution Revolution

Adventures of a Libyan weapons dealer in Syria .

Iraq: Holding Off The Holocaust.

Swiss parliament halts US tax deal following CIA espionage claims <

Kurds fight for place in Syrian civil war .

Today’s congressional hearing was a joke. The reason: Firms like Booz Allen bankroll and own Congress. Here’s howHave you noticed anything missing in the political discourse about the National Security Administration’s unprecedented mass surveillance? There’s certainly been a robust – and welcome – discussion about the balance between security and liberty, and there’s at least been some conversation about the intelligence community’s potential criminality and constitutional violations.

Thanks to what I’ve previously called the No Money Rule, however, there has only been indirect references to how cash undoubtedly tilts the debate against those who challenge the national security state.

Those indirect references have come in the form of stories about the business model of Booz Allen Hamilton, the security contractor which employed Edward Snowden.

CNN/Money notes that 99 percent of the firm’s multi-billion-dollar annual revenues now come from the federal government. Those revenues are part of a larger and growing economic sector within the Military-Industrial Complex – a sector that, according to author Tim Shorrock, is “a $56 billion-a-year industry.”

For the most part, this is where the political discourse about money stops. We are told that there are high-minded debates about security and liberty, with politicians of differing parties contributing to those debates from positions of principle and ideology. We are also told in passing that there’s this massively profitable private industry that makes billions a year from the policy decisions that ultimately emerge from such a debate.

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GALLERY.

Vowels and Continents

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Frankenstein, Milton & the Computer
On this day in 1816, the Shelleys, Lord Byron and entourage gathered at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva to tell the ghost stories that would trigger Frankenstein. This most legendary of storm-tossed evenings may or may not have been a literary lightning bolt, as there are conflicting accounts of how Mary Shelley arrived at her idea, or how long she mulled it over. On the other hand, the June 19th evening and the lazy days at Byron’s villa that summer inspired more than Frankenstein; and the byways of literature being what they are, the occasion has connections backwards to John Milton, and forwards to the language of computer programming.

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Sept. 27, 1954. Smithtown, New York. “Smithtown Shopping Center. General view.” Meet you at Play Mart in an hour. Photo by Sam Gottscho.

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Today’s picture shows a worker on the rig floor. His foot is on a segment of drill stem. Each segment of drill stem is 30 feet long. He has his hands on the “Tongs” which are an enormous set of pipe wrenches, suspended in the air by chains and cables. You can see another rig immediately in the background.

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Justine Kurland, Smoke Bombs, 1998 (689.2000)

In Smoke Bombs, from one of Kurland’s earliest bodies series, Runaway Girls, the artist orchestrates narratives within landscapes, often the American West, and features teenaged girls as her models. The uncharted or forgotten spaces Kurland depicts capture the feral state of the runaway. The artist casts her girls into active roles, reinventing the Lost Boys narrative.

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American Girl in Italy » ruth_orkin_girl_italy, forence. 1951

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Two teams of physicists have stumbled across a weird new subatomic particle that’s unlike anything else we’ve ever seen—and it could rewrite the rules of matter as we know them.

Researchers from both the Japanese High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) and the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in China have been studying a particle originally discovered 2005, called Y(4260). As physicists are wont to do, they’ve been smashing together electrons and positrons to create bucket loads of Y(4260), which exists for just 10-23 seconds before falling apart into different subatomic particles.

But they’ve observed something weird: a bump in their data, at 3.9 gigaelectronvolts, that corresponds to about four times the weight of a proton. While it’s far from certain, that suggests that there exists a new kind of particle—currently known as Z(3900)—which is made of four quarks.

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Of all the startling disclosures to emerge from the unfolding NSA data-collection scandal, perhaps the most shocking is this: As the Washington Post reported on June 8, the material collected from Internet company servers is electronically “pushed” to classified FBI computers in Quantico, Virginia, and then “shared with the NSA or other authorized intelligence agencies.”

Wow. Who knew the FBI had computers that could communicate with other agencies?

The last time the topic came up, back in 2007, things didn’t work that way. That’s when we learned that the FBI and CIA had incompatible computer systems that couldn’t interface to share information or even communicate. It caused a flurry of tut-tutting and then disappeared from view.

The story of the computer glitch was contained in a pair of documents released several months apart, scrubbed versions of secret reports by the two agencies’ inspector-generals’ offices, examining the intelligence failures that led up to the September 11 attacks. The FBI report was completed in November 2004 and released in June 2006; the CIA report was completed in June 2005 and released in August 2007.

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The cold remains a mystery, more prone to fell men than women, more lethal to the thin and well muscled than to those with avoirdupois, and least forgiving to the arrogant and the unaware.

When your Jeep spins lazily off the mountain road and slams backward into a snowbank, you don’t worry immediately about the cold. Your first thought is that you’ve just dented your bumper. Your second is that you’ve failed to bring a shovel. Your third is that you’ll be late for dinner. Friends are expecting you at their cabin around eight for a moonlight ski, a late dinner, a sauna. Nothing can keep you from that.

Driving out of town, defroster roaring, you barely noted the bank thermometer on the town square: minus 27 degrees at 6:36. The radio weather report warned of a deep mass of arctic air settling over the region. The man who took your money at the Conoco station shook his head at the register and said he wouldn’t be going anywhere tonight if he were you. You smiled. A little chill never hurt anybody with enough fleece and a good four-wheel-drive.

But now you’re stuck. Jamming the gearshift into low, you try to muscle out of the drift. The tires whine on ice-slicked snow as headlights dance on the curtain of frosted firs across the road. Shoving the lever back into park, you shoulder open the door and step from your heated capsule. Cold slaps your naked face, squeezes tears from your eyes.

You check your watch: 7:18. You consult your map: A thin, switchbacking line snakes up the mountain to the penciled square that marks the cabin.

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Paul & Linda McCartney: Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey – from Ram, 1971

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Exposed, Bryan Adams

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The Mancorbo Canal in the Picos de Europe by Carlos de Haes (1876)

My Daily Art Display blog today incorporates the two things I enjoy most in art; landscape paintings and discovering a painter I had, up till now, never heard of. Today I am featuring the nineteenth century Belgian born Spanish landscape painter Carlos de Haes.

Carlos de Haes was born in Brussels in January 1826. He was born into a dynasty of merchants and financiers and was the eldest of seven children. When he was nine years old his family moved to Malaga where he grew up and went to school.

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Monsoon season in southern Asia has begun, and in India the rains arrived ahead of schedule, easing drought concerns. Monsoon rains can be disruptive and even deadly, but crucial for the farmers whose crops feed millions of people. Though concerns for flooding are prevalent, the arrival of the rains brings colorful celebrations and relief from the heat every year. -Leanne Burden Seidel (32 photos total)

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“Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.”

—Iris Murdoch

A few years ago, in an introductory fiction workshop, my students and I witnessed a young man make relentless awkward attempts to get to know a young woman in the class. He was passionate and clumsy and his efforts were wholly transparent. When the time came for him to turn in his story, he submitted a piece about a young man much like himself who is hopelessly in love with a young woman much like the young woman in the class, and the two characters are in a creative writing workshop together. One night the male character shows up tipsy at the young woman’s house to ask if she will stroll with him in the warm night air and hold his hand, but the door is opened by her boyfriend, who answers for her with a punch to the jaw, sending the character flying and leaving a scrape on his chin—much like the scrape on the chin of the young man in my workshop.

Undaunted, the character retreats to his dorm to write a story about yet another character who is much like the first character who is much like the author, with the idea that a female character who is much like the first female character who is much like the girl in the workshop will read the story and understand that this literary version of himself represents his real self and that he is in love with her.

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Rubʿ al-Khali, (literally “Empty Quarter” in Arabic), also spelled Al-Rabʿ al-Khali, is a vast desert in the southern Arabian Peninsula, covering about 250,000 square miles (650,000 square km) in a structural basin that takes in a substantial portions of Saudi Arabia, as well as parts of Oman, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates. It is the largest area of continuous sand in the world. It holds roughly half as much sand as the Sahara, which is 15 times the Empty Quarter’s size but composed mostly of graveled plains and rocky outcrops.

The desert is 1,000 kilometres long, and about 500 kilometres, and its topography is varied. In the west the elevation is as high as 2,000 feet (610 metres) and the sand is fine and soft, while in the east the elevation drops to 600 feet (183 metres) with sand dunes, salt flats, and sand sheets. The terrain is covered with sand dunes with heights up to 250 metres (820 ft), interspersed with gravel and gypsum plains.

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