Almost 50 years ago, archaeologists searching for the ruined house of Augustus found a tiny clue buried deep in 2,000 years' worth of rubble overlooking the Forum in Rome.

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | House of Augustus opens to public

In a scandal that's sending shock waves through both the publishing industry and academia, the author Franz Kafka has been revealed to be a fraud.

" 'The Metamorphosis' - purported to be the fictional account of a man who turns into a large cockroach - is actually non-fiction," according to a statement released by Kafka's editor, who spoke only on the condition that he be identified as E.

oh yes that little thing called imagination -- making strange -- ostranenie from Victor Shklovsky - the joys of narrative - take the world we know and twist it -- oh i'm sorry how very old fashioned of me it's just that i'm linked into and in love with a literary and oral tradition that probably predates agriculture and goes back to africa and our hunter gatherer roots

A bug's life. Really - International Herald Tribune

Much of the constitutional struggle that engulfed the English-speaking world in the seventeenth century revolved around two fairly simple phrases. One was “no man is above the law,” and the other “the king can do no wrong.” Each of these expressions reflected a fundamentally different notion of the rule of law, and they could not be reconciled.

Post-Restoration Britain found a series of legal fictions to address the problem of misconduct by the state, but in concept this often turned on the notion that the king commanded compliance with the law so that unlawful conduct could not be the king’s.

In America today, the mentality of courtiers has reappeared, and many of them seem bent on reassembling the fragments of that old crown that our ancestors brushed from the head of a Hanoverian usurper. They’re offering that crown up to a new King George. And the new attorney general, barely three months on the job, is installing himself not as a law officer to a republic but as a lackey bent on undoing not one revolution, but three.

What were those legal principles that allowed the Justice Department to find that torture was not torture, and that torture was therefore lawful? When we pull back the curtains, and shine a bright light, we find it rested on the same royal prerogative that Charles Stuart maintained all the way up the steps to the scaffold.

Have you seen John Yoo in Taxi to the Dark Side?

Mukasey’s Law

Amid increasingly turbulent credit markets and ever-weaker reports on the U.S. economy, the Federal Reserve has been unusually swift and determined in its lowering of the overnight lending rate. The White House and Congress have moved quickly as well, approving rebates for families and tax breaks for businesses. And more monetary easing from the Fed could well be on the way.

The central question for America's economy is this: Will this medicine work? The same question was asked repeatedly in Japan during its "lost decade" of the 1990s. Unfortunately, as was the case in Japan, the answer may be no.

The unwinding of excesses - International Herald Tribune

The number of children who die worldwide each year before the age of five has dropped below 10 million for the first time in recorded history — compared with 20 million annually in 1960 — Unicef noted in a report last month, “Child Survival.” Now the goal is to cut the death toll to four million by 2015.

Think about that accomplishment: The lives of 10 million children saved each year, 100 million lives per decade.

To put it another way, the late James P. Grant, a little-known American aid worker who headed Unicef from 1980 to 1995 and launched the child survival revolution with vaccinations and diarrhea treatments, probably saved more lives than were destroyed by Hitler, Mao and Stalin combined.

Good News: Karlo Will Live - New York Times

A whole post-cold-war European generation has grown up in peace, give or take “some Balkan horror on television,” which makes it hard to explain that “it’s a political and moral imperative to fight for our core values in the Hindu Kush.”

The Long Haul in Afghanistan - New York Times

The Sudanese government started the first genocide of the 21st century in Darfur, and now it seems to be preparing to start the second here among the thatch-roof huts of southern Sudan.

the Sudanese abetted by the Chinese and the Russians
whilst the West plays the three monkeys -- see, hear speak no evil
and people die, are tortured, women are raped, ethnic cleansing occurs
turn the page on another horror taking place in a far away country of which we know little
what's today's Dilbert?

wash your hands? shame on me! shame on you?

A Genocide Foretold - New York Times

Support from studios has been widely cited as the reason for Blu-ray's victory, but few consumers know that the studios were likely won over by the presence of a digital lock on movies called BD+, a far more sophisticated and resilient digital rights management, or DRM, system than that offered by HD DVD.

This is very interesting.

How Crypto Won the DVD War | Threat Level from Wired.com

possibly noteworthy wrote:
Now out in paperback:

The strange history of auditory hallucination throughout the ages, and its power to shed light on the mysterious inner source of pure faith and unadulterated inspiration.

From Booklist:

Daniel B. Smith's father and grandfather both heard voices, and thereby hangs the tale Smith tells at the outset, and also his interest in the phenomenon of hearing people speak when no one else can and without otherwise sensing them. Research indicates that hearing voices isn't all that rare; that many cope well with it, belying its association with madness; and that so many parts of the brain are involved in audition that finding those responsible for hearing voices may be impossible. Smith proceeds from present-day science to the nineteenth-century labeling of hearing voices as hallucinatory, and then to famous cases of it, most of them preceding but one during its pathologization. Socrates (Smith posits that the voices the philosopher heard affected his sentencing to death), Joan of Arc, and a German jurist who largely recovered from schizophrenic voice hearing are the three figures about whom Smith writes so intelligently and absorbingly that one wishes he had covered others he notes, especially William Blake, as fully. One also wants to read more of him, on any subject he chooses.

Watch his Colbert interview from last year.

Consider this in light of The New Autism, in the latest Wired:

Traditional science holds that people with severe autism are prisoners in their own minds, severely disabled, and probably mentally retarded. Don't tell that to Amanda Baggs, an autistic woman who achieved viral fame with her YouTube video "In My Language," which has so far received more than 350,000 hits. Wired contributor David Wolman gets inside the life that Baggs has created for herself, which includes blogging, hanging out in Second Life, corresponding with her friends, and a "constant conversation" with the world around her. Wolman's conclusion: Much of past research about autism and intelligence is catastrophically flawed.

From the NYT review of "Muses":

Smith sets (but does not explore) a provocative challenge: Had antipsychotic medication been available, would Moses have dismissed Yahweh’s demands at the burning bush “as his dopamine system playing tricks on him?”

the autism pdf is excellent

however on the subject of hearing voices i can't help but wonder if there is an element of romantisization going on. My own experience of hearing voices has been entwined with acute stress, delusions and schiziphreniform psychotic episodes and generally not much fun and i'd have a tough time deciding whether waterboarding is more fun. The 2mg of stelazine I take daily plus exercise to boast naturally my seratonin levels plus avoiding stress is something I live with -- so I react with caution to narratives which challenge the disease model of hearing voices however debate is good and obviously my personal experience is not the sum of the phenomena but merely one example

RE: Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Hearing Voices and the Borders of Sanity

If Europe and the West want to understand what is happening in Russia, they should send observers not to the polling stations, but to Moscow's Basmanny Court, where the Constitution and rule of law are being unraveled on a daily basis.

Here, and not in any electoral race, is where the battle over the presidential succession is playing itself out. The contenders are a group of former KGB officers known as the siloviki, from the Russian word for strong.

Highlights from the battles between these warring factions include murders of politically connected figures and a spate of arrests of public officials on allegations of corruption - arrests instigated by members of one clan or another. The result is a group of jailed hostages from each of the silovik clans to be used as pawns in the power struggles.

The real power struggle - International Herald Tribune