From The London Times
Doctors ‘lack training in genetics to cope with medical revolution’
Mark Henderson, Science Editor,

San Diego Doctors must be taught more about genetics to prepare them for a revolution in personalised medicine, says one of America’s senior scientists, who is a pioneer of the Human Genome Project.
Francis Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health, who led the international team that first sequenced the human genetic code, said that far too many doctors in Britain and America lacked the training they will need to use DNA-based medicine.
The falling costs of reading DNA, and growing understanding of the links between genetic variation and common disorders, were poised to have a huge impact on the way GPs and hospital doctors treated patients, he said.
Individuals’ genetic profiles would soon be used to prescribe drugs that were most likely to be safe and effective. Few doctors, however, understood enough about the way genetics contributed to drug responses and common diseases to exploit such advances, he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in San Diego.
Many doctors were also resistant to reforming medical school syllabuses to include more genetics. Some claimed genetics was unimportant to their clinical practice, despite its contribution to disorders such as heart disease, diabetes and Alzheimer’s. “Changing medical education is one of the most challenging aspects of what needs to happen,” Dr Collins said. “We are working against great resistance, I am afraid. There are many practising docs out there who will tell you that genetics is irrelevant. They might have just seen two patients with diabetes, one with heart disease, another with Alzheimer’s, but genetics, they would say, is irrelevant to their practice. I was on the faculty of the University of Michigan for ten years, trying to get a little more genetics into the curriculum. You can’t believe the blood that got spilt over just one hour — it was easier to sequence the human genome than to change one hour of medical curriculum.”
The costs of reading DNA have fallen so sharply that many scientists predict it will be possible to sequence any individual’s entire genetic code for less than £1,000 within a year or two. Research has also revealed hundreds of genetic variations that affect an individual’s risk of disease or response to medicines. Companies such as 23andMe and Pathway Genomics are selling genome scans directly to consumers for between £300 and £600.
A House of Lords report said last year that medical education should be revised to take account of these developments, and The Times revealed that the National Genetics Education and Development Centre has begun a review of the medical curriculum.
Dr Collins predicted that patient demand would accelerate change.
“They will come in waving sheets of paper, saying, ‘I have just had my DNA analysed by 23andMe and it says I am at risk for diabetes, and will you interpret that?’. Docs don’t like to be embarrassed, so I suspect that will drive some degree of urgency.
“The good news is that genetics is pretty straightforward. You need to know a bit of the principles, and a little statistical risk prediction information, and you can do this.”

From The Sunday London Times
Robots and bees to beat the Taliban
The homemade IED is the extremists’ deadliest weapon and America is spending billions on trying to combat it. We are granted access to this secret, smart and bizarre world
Christina Lamb
Ever more sophisticated equipment is being tested at the Aberdeen proving ground in Maryland to counter the threat
Image :1 of 2The soldier breathes loud and fast as he lays a timed charge on an explosive in a Baghdad street. “I want these people to know if they’re going to leave a bomb on the side of the road for us, we’re just going to blow up their f****** road,” he growls, walking away. Before he can reach safety, an Iraqi punches a code into a mobile phone. The explosion sends the soldier flying in a cloud of dust and debris.
The opening eight minutes of the Oscar-nominated movie The Hurt Locker bring to light the terrifying work of bomb disposal units. The special effects may be Hollywood, but there is no exaggerating the horror of IEDs, the improvised explosive devices that are by far the biggest killers of British and American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The IED has supplanted the Kalashnikov to become the insurgent weapon of the 21st century. It can be assembled by villagers in a back yard and it enables the Taliban to take on an enemy with far superior numbers and fire power just as Stinger surface-to-air missiles enabled the Mujaheddin to neutralise Soviet air power in the 1980s.
In Afghanistan now, in the battle for Marjah, the coalition has 15,000 soldiers ranged against an estimated 400 Taliban fighters. It sounds like no contest. Yet progress is slow and bloody because the Taliban have ringed the town with IEDs in what soldiers call the “belt of death”.
The work of the British and American soldiers who disarm these devices is heroic. But the real race to counter the threat is going on thousands of miles away in secret laboratories on America’s east coast.
Over the past three years, the Pentagon has spent $15.5 billion and employed top scientific minds in an effort to come up with the best ways to detect and survive IEDs. Its scientists and engineers are working round the clock on robots, lasers, chemical detectors and even specially trained bees.
The Sunday Times has had unprecedented access to this massive shadowy programme, which brings together brainpower and money on a scale last seen in the second world war when the Manhattan project raced to develop the atom bomb.
Its headquarters is a grey office block with no name. Inside, the Wall of Fallen Heroes is covered with plaques bearing the names of US soldiers killed by IEDs. January was a bad month, with about one a day killed, all in Afghanistan. In 2003 there were 81 recorded IED incidents in Afghanistan. Last year there were 8,159. In Helmand it is common to see soldiers vomit before they go on patrol because the chances of being hit are so high.
IEDs are nothing new. Guy Fawkes used one to try to blow up parliament. Lawrence of Arabia placed bombs on the road and railway to disrupt Turkish supply routes during the first world war. They were common in Vietnam when the Vietcong fashioned them from unexploded American ordinance. The term IED was coined in the 1970s by the British Army when the IRA made bombs from fertiliser and Semtex smuggled from Libya.
The war in Iraq saw them used on a new scale. The country had enormous stockpiles of munitions. By September 2003 there were 100 explosions a month, soon rising to 2,000. General John Abizaid, who took over US central command in July 2003, asked the Pentagon for a “Manhattan project-like” approach. The Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organisation (Jieddo) now has more than 3,000 staff and funds of $4 billion a year.
The man in charge is General Michael Oates, a four-tour veteran of Iraq. “The war against IEDs is very personal,” he says. “I’ve lost many of my men to them and I’ve been in proximity many times. A vehicle behind you blowing up, a vehicle in front, your own vehicle getting hit ... My driver killed. Virtually every soldier I know has seen an IED or been close to one or knows someone who died.”
About half of all American soldiers who died in Iraq were killed by IEDs, while in Afghanistan the figure is now about two-thirds. But insurgents quickly learnt that they inflict more than just death and injury. “The IED is a tactical weapon in that people use it to maim and kill us, but also a strategic weapon in that it impacts the will of our countries to operate overseas,” says Oates. “So tactically we need to find ways to detect and defeat it, and survive it if we don’t, but in our national capitals we have to remove it as a weapon that overly influences our strategy, and that’s very difficult.”
Oates views the task of defeating IEDs as a combination of improving protection for the troops, detection and interrupting the financial networks behind the attacks. To this end, his team includes all sorts, from FBI agents specialising in gangs, top scientists, cultural specialists and social anthropologists as well as demolition specialists.
To see what progress is being made, I head north to the Aberdeen proving ground in Maryland. It’s a spooky place that houses the world’s first programmable computer (on which the ballistic calculations for the Manhattan project were done) and sealed buildings behind barbed wire.
In a hangar a group of soldiers is operating a remote-control robot the size of a lawnmower. The men are explosive ordnance disposal specialists in the 20th Support Command, whose informal motto is “Initial success or total failure”.
Sergeant John Stricklett has done four tours in Baghdad, often taking the “long walk” to defuse a bomb. He shows me how he can operate the Talon robot from a laptop in a case, studying the area from its four mounted cameras and manoeuvring its claw-like hands.
“It becomes my hands and disassembles the bomb while I can stay at remote distance,” he says. “On my last deployment I lost three robots. If I’d walked down that street instead, they would have got me.”
At $150,000 a time, the robots are expensive, but cheap in comparison with the lives they save. When robots don’t work, the technicians have to put on a blastresistant suit and a transparent face shield, resembling an astronaut’s mask. The suit is enormously heavy and suffocatingly hot.
“All you can hear inside is your breathing and your heart beating,” says Master Sergeant Charles Wyatt.
The scientists working on ways to defeat the IEDs are led by Dr Augustus Way Fountain, the US army’s chief chemist and an expert in electro-optics. I meet him at his lab in the Edgewood chemical biological centre. Every IED encountered in Afghanistan is sent here to be replicated.
“The operational word in IED is ‘improvised’. As they are constantly changing, we need to keep vigilant and maintain our technological expertise to stay ahead of the game,” he says. The main focus of his work is finding chemical signatures of bombs. A ground-penetrating laser known as a Huskie has been developed to try to detect them through mass spectroscopy. The task now is to miniaturise it and enable it to work from a distance.
The irony of amassing all this money and brainpower to defeat a bunch of largely illiterate Afghan farmers assembling bombs in their mud houses using fertiliser packed in kitchen jugs is not lost on him. “Sometimes the simplest things are the hardest to defeat,” he says. “As Americans we like technology, we like complicated things. That’s what I’ve been trying to get my head round — how to think more simply.”
One of the more bizarre suggestions has been to use honeybees because of their acute sense of smell. The small hairs that bees use to detect pollen can be used to detect any scent, prompting them to stick out their tongues.
A defence research laboratory in Los Alamos has found they can be trained within 20 minutes to recognise a particular chemical. It proposes putting bees in a detecting machine with a monitor that registers a signal when the bees stick out their tongues. But the logistics of carrying bees inside army vehicles moving around Afghanistan have proved unworkable.
The main testing site for the counter-IED programme is an island in Chesapeake Bay at a facility so secret I am asked not to name it. It is dotted with concrete bunkers. Signs proclaim “extreme noise area” and “firing in progress”. Every so often there is a loud boom. Every device encountered in Afghanistan, once replicated, is tested here, and for the past five years Scott Schoenfeld, a computational physicist, has been studying nothing else.
A siren sounds and he takes me into a bunker with a thick steel blast wall and lots of computers. About 100 yards away a copy of the latest Taliban IED is blown up and the screens all light up. “As it explodes, the device sends out lethal fragments and explosive gases, and what we are doing is using X-ray imaging to capture this in real time,” he says. The information enables Schoenfeld and his team to design better armour for army vehicles.
Once the debris stops raining down and the all-clear sounds, we go outside. The wooden stall where the IED was placed has been obliterated and the wall where the armour is tested is pitted with scars.
Schoenfeld admits that, whatever his team comes up with, the insurgents always seem to be one step ahead. “As soon as we discover a way to find this stuff or protect our men, the enemy adapts.”
First the army strengthened the Humvee from a 1.25-ton chassis to 2.5 tons. Then it built 20-ton MRAPs — mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles with V-shaped hulls to deflect blasts. Now even those are being hit as the Taliban have adapted by using larger explosives.
“You might argue, why don’t you just armour more,” says Oates. “But the problem is, you reach a crossover point where you can so protect yourself you can’t do your mission. What we really want to do is cause the population to stop people placing IEDs and we can’t do that if we’re inside vehicles so protected we can’t go outside.”
Last month Afghanistan banned ammonium nitrate fertiliser, which is the main ingredient of Taliban bombs. But most of it comes from across the border. And there’s no ban — yet — on ammonium nitrate in Pakistan.
The real secret, as Schoenfeld says, to defeating the IED is to get into the minds of the insurgents. Jieddo has set up a group called the technical gaming team that sits in an office plastered with maps of Pakistan and Afghanistan and tries to predict what future IEDs might look like.
“Think chess, not checkers, always trying to be one move ahead of insurgents,” says Erin Piateski, a mechanical engineer who is part of the group. “They come up with things we never expected,” she says, in an almost admiring tone. “They take something extremely simple and make it extremely complex. These guys are really creative.”
She takes out a big cardboard box of what looks like junk — old mobile phones and wires, circuit boards, 7-Up cans, toy cars, walkie-talkies, key rings, handheld electronic games. “This is what we call the IED petting zoo,” she says, “otherwise known as the ‘petting zoo of death’.”
The most common IEDs in Afghanistan are simple pressure plates — two wooden blocks with metallic strips inside that make contact when a person or vehicle goes over them, attached to a command wire that sets off the explosion.
“Look at this,” says Piateski, taking out some metal-lined strips of wood. “They come up with pressure plates so intricate and I wonder, ‘Why did you go out of your way to make it so complicated?’ Maybe the maker is a budding engineer.”
She pulls out a wire with several pressure plates along it. “This is what’s known as a Christmas tree light,” she says.
The problem with the basic pressure-plate design is that the insurgent can’t select a target and may end up blowing up a farmer and his goat. For a while, insurgents were using wireless devices that could be triggered by punching a code into a cellphone as a convoy passed. When coalition forces started using jammers on their vehicles to block the phone signal, the Taliban devised new command-wire and pressure-plate IEDs. These are hard to detect because they use graphite for the connections to avoid being found by metal detectors, though this is expensive. The insurgents are also working on ways to defeat the jammers.
The Taliban are not believed to have a centralised IED unit, and there is a lot of regional variation. But everyone under a certain regional commander will tend to use the same design. “After a while we begin to recognise their signature,” says Piateski.
The Taliban are good at disguising IEDs in rubbish, potholes or craters from previous blasts. But for all the US technology, a high percentage of IEDs found are spotted by soldiers noticing that something doesn’t look right.
In the assault on Marjah last week, a British lieutenant moving into a bazaar with his men noticed a new wire on an old pole. Further investigation revealed it was connected to eight buried mortar shells.
“Finding devices is in my view a stop-gap measure,” says Piateski. “If someone really has it in their mind to set off an IED they will succeed — you can’t catch them all the time.”
Back in Jieddo’s head office, Oates agrees. Though optimistic that his scientists will come up with new means of detection, he believes the real answer is to go after the financiers who pay for the explosives. To help, he has brought in organised crime experts from the FBI as well as experts in Afghan culture and society.
“IED networks are like organised crime — people have turf,” he says. “You’ve got to understand who is operating where and why. At first we assumed the IEDs were all there to kill us, but they may not be. The purpose may be very different if you’re involved in a criminal enterprise such as drug smuggling. The last thing you want is coalition forces interdicting your free flow, so you may put a device out there to say ‘don’t mess with this porcupine’.”
The money Oates has to spend is almost double the entire spending of the Afghan government. Not everyone agrees throwing all this money at the problem is the best way to go. “Defeat of the IED is not an arms-race type environment where you win by protecting or detecting,” said Brigadier-General Jonathan Vance, the Canadian general who commanded Nato forces in Kandahar until November. “It’s the Afghan population who will defeat IEDs — it’s them who see them being made and planted. Just as your towns are safe not because of the police but because of you — picking up the phone to the police to say there’s someone doing X.”
Oates does not agree. How can he? The money protects his soldiers. It saves lives: civilian as well as military. And he knows what it feels like to face IEDs when you are just trying to do your job. His emotion when he talks about it is infinitely more powerful than the Hollywood special effects that give The Hurt Locker its force. “After you’ve survived one but clearly felt the effect, you know the feeling next time you go out, when you’re looking around all the time so much your neck hurts, waiting for the next,” he says. “Try and explain that to someone. That’s why we’re doing this.”

Two Chinese Schools Said to Be Tied to Online Attacks
By JOHN MARKOFF and DAVID BARBOZA
SAN FRANCISCO — A series of online attacks on Google and dozens of other American corporations have been traced to computers at two educational institutions in China, including one with close ties to the Chinese military, say people involved in the investigation. They also said the attacks, aimed at stealing trade secrets and computer codes and capturing e-mail of Chinese human rights activists, may have begun as early as April, months earlier than previously believed. Google announced on Jan. 12 that it and other companies had been subjected to sophisticated attacks that probably came from China.
Computer security experts, including investigators from the National Security Agency, have been working since then to pinpoint the source of the attacks. Until recently, the trail had led only to servers in Taiwan.
If supported by further investigation, the findings raise as many questions as they answer, including the possibility that some of the attacks came from China but not necessarily from the Chinese government, or even from Chinese sources.
Tracing the attacks further back, to an elite Chinese university and a vocational school, is a breakthrough in a difficult task. Evidence acquired by a United States military contractor that faced the same attacks as Google has even led investigators to suspect a link to a specific computer science class, taught by a Ukrainian professor at the vocational school.
The revelations were shared by the contractor at a meeting of computer security specialists.
The Chinese schools involved are Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang Vocational School, according to several people with knowledge of the investigation who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the inquiry.
Jiaotong has one of China’s top computer science programs. Just a few weeks ago its students won an international computer programming competition organized by I.B.M. — the “Battle of the Brains” — beating out Stanford and other top-flight universities.
Lanxiang, in east China’s Shandong Province, is a huge vocational school that was established with military support and trains some computer scientists for the military. The school’s computer network is operated by a company with close ties to Baidu, the dominant search engine in China and a competitor of Google.
Within the computer security industry and the Obama administration, analysts differ over how to interpret the finding that the intrusions appear to come from schools instead of Chinese military installations or government agencies. Some analysts have privately circulated a document asserting that the vocational school is being used as camouflage for government operations. But other computer industry executives and former government officials said it was possible that the schools were cover for a “false flag” intelligence operation being run by a third country. Some have also speculated that the hacking could be a giant example of criminal industrial espionage, aimed at stealing intellectual property from American technology firms.
Independent researchers who monitor Chinese information warfare caution that the Chinese have adopted a highly distributed approach to online espionage, making it almost impossible to prove where an attack originated.
“We have to understand that they have a different model for computer network exploit operations,” said James C. Mulvenon, a Chinese military specialist and a director at the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis in Washington. Rather than tightly compartmentalizing online espionage within agencies as the United States does, he said, the Chinese government often involves volunteer “patriotic hackers” to support its policies.
Spokesmen for the Chinese schools said they had not heard that American investigators had traced the Google attacks to their campuses.
If it is true, “We’ll alert related departments and start our own investigation,” said Liu Yuxiang, head of the propaganda department of the party committee at Jiaotong University in Shanghai.
But when asked about the possibility, a leading professor in Jiaotong’s School of Information Security Engineering said in a telephone interview: “I’m not surprised. Actually students hacking into foreign Web sites is quite normal.” The professor, who teaches Web security, asked not to be named for fear of reprisal.
“I believe there’s two kinds of situations,” the professor continued. “One is it’s a completely individual act of wrongdoing, done by one or two geek students in the school who are just keen on experimenting with their hacking skills learned from the school, since the sources in the school and network are so limited. Or it could be that one of the university’s I.P. addresses was hijacked by others, which frequently happens.”
At Lanxiang Vocational, officials said they had not heard about any possible link to the school and declined to say if a Ukrainian professor taught computer science there.
A man named Mr. Shao, who said he was dean of the computer science department at Lanxiang but refused to give his first name, said, “I think it’s impossible for our students to hack Google or other U.S. companies because they are just high school graduates and not at an advanced level. Also, because our school adopts close management, outsiders cannot easily come into our school.”
Mr. Shao acknowledged that every year four or five students from his computer science department were recruited into the military.
Google’s decision to step forward and challenge China over the intrusions has created a highly sensitive issue for the United States government. Shortly after the company went public with its accusations, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton challenged the Chinese in a speech on Internet censors, suggesting that the country’s efforts to control open access to the Internet were in effect an information-age Berlin Wall.
A report on Chinese online warfare prepared for the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission in October 2009 by Northrop Grumman identified six regions in China with military efforts to engage in such attacks. Jinan, site of the vocational school, was one of the regions.
Executives at Google have said little about the intrusions and would not comment for this article. But the company has contacted computer security specialists to confirm what has been reported by other targeted companies: access to the companies’ servers was gained by exploiting a previously unknown flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser.
Forensic analysis is yielding new details of how the intruders took advantage of the flaw to gain access to internal corporate servers. They did this by using a clever technique — called man-in-the-mailbox — to exploit the natural trust shared by people who work together in organizations.
After taking over one computer, intruders insert into an e-mail conversation a message containing a digital attachment carrying malware that is highly likely to be opened by the second victim. The attached malware makes it possible for the intruders to take over the target computer.
John Markoff reported from San Francisco and David Barboza from Shanghai. Bao Beibei and Chen Xiaoduan in Shanghai contributed research.

The Lean Years

By DAVID BROOKS NY TIMES
Financial crises stink. In their wake, public debt explodes. Nations default. Economic growth falters. Taxes rise. Unemployment lingers.
The current financial crisis is no different. The U.S. will have to produce 10 million new jobs just to get back to the unemployment levels of 2007. There’s no sign that that is going to happen soon, so we’re looking at an extended period of above 8 percent unemployment.
The biggest impact is on men. Over the past few decades, men have lagged behind women in acquiring education and skills. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, at age 22, 185 women have graduated from college for every 100 men who have done so. Furthermore, men are concentrated in industries where employment is declining (manufacturing) or highly cyclical (construction).
So men have taken an especially heavy blow during this crisis. The gap between the male and female unemployment rates has reached its highest level since the government began keeping such records.
In a powerful essay in The Atlantic, Don Peck reports that last November nearly a fifth of all men between 25 and 54 did not have jobs, the highest figure since the labor bureau began counting in 1948. We are either at or about to reach a historical marker: for the first time there will be more women in the work force than men.
Young people are the other group disproportionally affected by the downturn. High school and college grads are entering a miserable job market. In his Atlantic piece, Peck rounds up the academic research on what happens to people who enter the labor force in hard times.
College grads who entered the job market during the recession of 1981 earned 25 percent less than grads who entered when times were good. That earnings gap persisted for decades. Seventeen years after graduation, the recession kids were still earning 10 percent less than the boom kids. Over a lifetime, recession kids can expect to earn $100,000 less than their luckier cohorts.
It’s pretty easy to take these economic facts and draw stark cultural consequences. Long-term unemployment is one of the most devastating experiences a person can endure, equal, according to some measures, to the death of a spouse. Men who are unemployed for a significant amount of time are more likely to drink more, abuse their children more and suffer debilitating blows to their identity. Unemployed men are not exactly the most eligible mates. So in areas of high unemployment, marriage rates can crumble — while childbearing rates out of wedlock do not.
Young people who enter the work force in a recession, meanwhile, are psychologically altered. They are less likely to get professional-level jobs throughout life. They are less likely to switch jobs later in their career, even in pursuit of greater opportunity. But there’s also reason not to be too despairing. The country endured stagflation and recession between 1977 and 1983, and rebounded smartly in the 1980s and ’90s.
That’s because people are not passive pawns of economic forces. Recessions test social capital. If social bonds are strong, nations can be surprisingly resilient. If they are weak, things are terrible. The U.S. endured the Great Depression reasonably well because family bonds and social trust were high. Russia, on the other hand, was decimated by the post-Soviet economic turmoil because social trust was nonexistent.
This recession has exposed America’s social weak spots. For decades, men have adapted poorly to the shifting demands of the service economy. Now they are paying the price. For decades, the working-class social fabric has been fraying. Now the working class is in danger of descending into underclass-style dysfunction. For decades, young people have been living in a loose, under-institutionalized world. Now they are moving back home in droves.
The economic response to the crisis is everywhere debated, but the social response is unformed. First, we need to redefine masculinity, creating an image that encourages teenage boys to stay in school and older men to pursue service jobs. Evangelical churches have done a lot to show how manly men can still be nurturing. Obviously, more needs to be done, and schools need to be more boy-friendly.
Second, antipoverty programs have long focused their efforts on inner cities, but now there also is great vulnerability in working-class places like central Pennsylvania and rural Michigan. Many social workers are not exactly comfortable in socially conservative areas, but if the working class disintegrates, then look out.
Third, Facebook is great, but social networking sites do not by themselves create support networks when jobs disappear and poverty looms. Somebody has to provide institutions for unaffiliated 24-year-olds.
There’s no sign that government will nimbly repair these social gaps. It will probably be up to social entrepreneurs to take a midcrisis look at their priorities. Somehow there must be a way to use the country’s idle talent to address freshly exposed needs.

How to write an incendiary blog post
By Chris Clarke Boston Globe
This sentence contains a provocative statement that attracts the readers’ attention, but really has very little to do with the topic of the blog post. This sentence claims to follow logically from the first sentence, though the connection is actually rather tenuous. This sentence claims that very few people are willing to admit the obvious inference of the last two sentences, with an implication that the reader is not one of those very few people. This sentence expresses the unwillingness of the writer to be silenced despite going against the popular wisdom. This sentence is a sort of drum roll, preparing the reader for the shocking truth to be contained in the next sentence.
This sentence contains the thesis of the blog post, a trite and obvious statement cast as a dazzling and controversial insight.
This sentence claims that there are many people who do not agree with the thesis of the blog post as expressed in the previous sentence. This sentence speculates as to the mental and ethical character of the people mentioned in the previous sentence. This sentence contains a link to the most egregiously ill-argued, intemperate, hateful, and ridiculous example of such people the author could find. This sentence is a three-word refutation of the post linked in the previous sentence, the first of which three words is “Um.” This sentence implies that the linked post is in fact typical of those who disagree with the thesis of the blog post. This sentence contains expressions of outrage and disbelief largely expressed in Internet acronyms. This sentence contains a link to an Internet video featuring a cat playing a piano.
This sentence implies that everyone reading has certainly seen the folly of those who disagree with the thesis of the blog post. This sentence reminds the reader that there are a few others who agree. This sentence contains one-word links to other blogs with whom the author seeks to curry favor, offered as examples of those others.
This sentence returns to the people who disagree with the thesis of the blog post. This sentence makes an improbably tenuous connection between those people and a current or former major political figure. This sentence links those people and that political figure to a broad, ill-defined sociodemographic class sharing allegedly similar belief systems. This sentence contains a reference to the teachings of Jesus; its intent may be either ironic or sincere.
This sentence refers to a different historic period, and implies that conditions relevant to the thesis of the blog post were either different or the same. This sentence states that the implications of the previous sentence are a damned shame. This sentence says that the next sentence will explain the previous sentence. This sentence contains a slight rewording of the thesis of the blog post, a trite and obvious statement cast as a dazzling and controversial insight.
This sentence contains an apparent non sequitur phrased as if it follows logically from the reworded thesis of the blog post. This sentence is a wildly overgeneralized condemnation of one or more entire classes of people phrased in as incendiary a fashion as possible which claims to be an obvious corollary to the thesis and non sequitur.
This sentence proposes that anyone who might disagree with the wildly overgeneralized condemnation is, by so disagreeing, actually proving the author’s point. This sentence explains that such people disagree primarily because of the author’s courageous, iconoclastic approach. This sentence mentions the additional possibilities that readers who express disagreement with the wildly overgeneralized condemnation are merely following political fashion or trying to ingratiate themselves with interest groups. This sentence is a somewhat related assertion based in thoughtless privilege and stated as dispassionate objective truth. This sentence explains that if the scales would merely fall from those dissenting readers’ eyes, they would see the wisdom and necessity of the author’s statements.
This sentence invites readers to respond freely and without constraint as long as those responses fall within certain parameters. This sentence consists of an Internet in-joke that doesn’t quite fit the topic.
Chris Clarke is an environmental and natural history writer. He divides his time between the Mojave Desert and Los Angeles. This article originally appeared on his blog, "Coyote Crossing," which can be found at http://faultline.org/.

London Times
Judi Dench and Peter Hall play tug of love
These old friends are reuniting after 48 years to give Shakespeare's Midsummer Night’s Dream a delightful surprise twist
Lesley White
An audience with the royals is always nerve-wracking, but at least there is usually a butler on hand with a stiff drink. Today, alas, there is only sad-looking guacamole in a tub for lunch, and a loudspeaker intoning: “Fifteen-minute call for Gentlemen of Verona.” Then again, we are visiting arts royalty, unsubsidised, egalitarian, concerned with the classical canon and the common good, curtsey not expected. Dame Judi Dench and Sir Peter Hall are enthroned but determinedly ungrand, stars who prefer to see themselves as troupers, busy as bees with plans for the future (he as director emeritus at the Rose Theatre in Kingston upon Thames; she with her late-flowering movie career, including another M in next year’s Bond), but, given half a chance, relaxing into their shared past as into a warm bath.
This month, Dench opens as Titania in Hall’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 48 years after they staged it for the RSC at Stratford — the oldest fairy on the block, although not, thankfully, with a diaphanous frock and gossamer wings. When Hall called to offer her the role, he didn’t pause for breath in case she thought he’d gone mad, explaining that he wanted her to play the queen of the forest as Elizabeth I, in a play within a play. “There was a slight pause after I’d finished my spiel, and she said, ‘Right, I’ll do it.’” “Just like that with us, isn’t it?” Dench smiles. “It tends to be,” he replies. “Yes, it is. It’s very nice.”
They are like a clever, doting old married couple, finishing each other’s sentences, mildly disagreeing on dates, forgetting names, happy in their jokey reminiscence. In a tiny dressing room at the Rose, we huddle before the bulb-lit mirrors, although between these two home-grown legends, the twinkle factor almost requires sunglasses. He is 80 in November, bearded and wry and hacking pitifully this morning. “The cough has come back,” he wails. “Oh, it hasn’t,” she soothes, as if to a little boy. “Did you get cold yesterday?”
She is four years younger, swathed in elegant cream layers, petite, soft, cuddly (not that you’d ever dare) and utterly rigorous: a few years ago, he offered her the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet and she told him “where to get off”. Her speciality is being adored — however much she curses her national-treasure status — and Hall seems as susceptible as the next man. Close up, she can look shockingly old, but only if, like me, you have come fresh from viewing her near-naked appearance as Titania in Hall’s 1968 film of AMND. Diana Rigg played Helena and Helen Mirren Hermia, but neither of those fêted sex kittens is half as alluring as the 33-year-old Dench, daubed a foresty green, with fig leaves to cover not much of her modesty and fired with such wanton lust for the donkey-headed Bottom that she gives Equus a run for its money.
She has never seen the film, but remembers the costume all too well. “It was just ivy,” she chuckles naughtily. “I got in in the morning, and it was stuck on. I was painted green and wore wellingtons. I was meant to have clothes, but Peter thought they didn’t look right against a real background, so gradually the clothes got eroded.” She had no misgivings about disrobing in a chilly November location, only about the wildlife: spotted snakes with double tongues would have posed no problem, but the earthworms wriggling beneath her bare body were suddenly too much to bear. “I was frightened of worms. We were lying in the bower, and, just as we were about to start filming, I leapt up and everything went up in the air. I was screaming.” She beams a late apology at the director, who seems to have forgiven her.
Partly, Dench agreed to the new production to help Hall draw audiences to a local theatre considered unworthy of funding by the Arts Council — “Who regard southwest London as having enough theatres,” he says. In the mood for a blockbuster, he worked out what Shakespeare parts were left to “the Dame”, and it appeared she’d done the lot. “Some of them several times,” he laughs, and his leading fairy shoots him a mock-surprised look. “Elizabeth was a keen theatre patron who often had Shakespeare’s company to the palace, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream was in the repertory. There were plays in which the court participated. She was a great dancer and musician, so we thought, ‘Why couldn’t the queen play Titania?’”
Dench has serious, award-winning form playing queens: Victoria in Mrs Brown, the performance that impelled Harvey Weinstein to make her a movie star at 62, and the ageing but mischievous Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love, which won her an Oscar and a Bafta. What difference to the role of the beauteous Titania does the pock-marked monarch make? The actress looks stricken for a moment. “Oh, I can’t answer that at the moment...”, but, as she likes to scare herself, we can assume that the slight panic is part of her equipment.
It helps that she knows the role by heart. “I know all the parts... they stay in there.” She first played Titania at the Mount, a Quaker boarding school in York. “It was a huge thing to have been chosen,” she says, still proud. After drama school, she played both the first fairy and Hermia, and Hall’s 1959 Dream, with Charles Laughton as Bottom, was one of the first productions she saw at Stratford. Before that, she had watched Michael Redgrave’s Lear on a school-holiday trip with her parents, while ordinary aircraftman Hall was stationed down the road with the RAF Education Corps, doing his national service, taking the bus to the theatre and standing at the back for two shillings.
Hall set up the RSC in 1960; Dench arrived to join his troupe in 1962. Their original Dream, with Ian Richardson as Oberon and Ian Holm as Puck, opened at the Aldwych, he recalls. Dench corrects him gently. “No, no, we started at Stratford.” “Are you sure?” “Yes, then it went to the Aldwych, where I wasn’t in it, but Michael [Williams, her late husband] was. We weren’t married then. You see...” She looks momentarily forlorn. “This play is so entwined with my family. It was a beautiful production at the Aldwych, with a big tree. Mikey and Ian Richardson set up a little bar inside it, and had a stiff vodka before the very end of the play.”
Dench lives with her daughter, Finty, and 12-year-old grandson in Surrey, but has always talked of her second “family” — of the theatre companies, the camaraderie of the ensemble. Since Williams’s death in 2001, after 30 years of marriage, its ties have been her security and her comfort. “I couldn’t do anything on my own,” she says flatly. Her private and personal realms merge seamlessly: Finty was directed by Hall at the Rose in Bedroom Farce last year; her friend Diana Rigg’s daughter, Rachael Stirling, plays Helena in the new Dream.
Much as Pete and Jude dote on each other, however, a memory-lane venture like this could be swamped in melancholy; and Dench is thinking of her husband through much of our conversation. For all her film triumphs (Iris, Notes on a Scandal, Rob ­Marshall’s musical Nine and, of course, the Bonds, in which her acerbic M is more indispensable than the latest six-pack lead), classical theatre is her home and history. It is also a sustaining connection with Williams and the life they shared: domesticity, acclaim, a very English sort of stardom and, in the best of times, a stage. In 1972, they both appeared in the RSC’s London Assurance. “I was hugely pregnant in it, too,” she laughs, “and it was very unsuitable. I had this wonderful part of a virgin in a Gloucestershire garden and, before Sinead Cusack took over, Janet Whiteside was saying over my huge stomach, ‘Do you feel nothing stirring?’”
Of her nine collaborations with Hall, it is not their Dream she remembers most affectionately, but their 1987 Antony and Cleopatra, with Anthony Hopkins, at the National Theatre. Hall was a taskmaster at times; if she is the famous, bigger-earning star, he is still the boss. “Nobody misses anything out with Peter. There’s no cheating. No mis-scans.” When she and Miranda Foster were called to rehearse the death of Cleopatra, they thought it would take half an hour. “Three hours later, Peter’s still standing there with a lectern, making everybody speak the verse properly. And Miranda got up and went [she imitates Foster’s cheeky, over­emphasised rhythm]: ‘Our roy-al la-dy’s dead.’ I was in hysterics. And there was a moment. And Peter said: ‘Thank Christ!’”
Hall looks bemused. “Really? I have no memory of that at all.” “Oh, yes,” Dench says firmly. “And we had a picnic each night inside the monument. They asked us for our favourite food, and we said it was seafood and a glass of champagne. And on the last night, there it was. You’d never have known from the front.”
“In 1962, at the end of the Dream,” Hall recalls, looking at his leading lady, “I said to this one, ‘One day, you’ll play Cleopatra.’ And she said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous! A little runt like me? I couldn’t possibly. And I said, ‘Well, just bear in mind, when the time comes for you to play her, that I’m first in the queue.’ Twenty years later, the phone rings and it’s Dame Judi, saying, ‘Hello. I’ve been asked by Stratford to go and do Cleopatra. Will you do it?’ And I said, ‘How long have I got?’ And she said, ‘Oh, about a week.’”
The night before we met, Dench was watching Sir Ian McKellen in Waiting for Godot with her old friend Roger Rees, an assistant set painter in the Stratford of her youth who ended up playing Hamlet there, an apprenticeship whose demise she mourns. “There just isn’t the opportunity for that to happen now, for young actors to learn,” she says. “When I went to the Vic between 1957 and 1960, I never left the side of the stage. Dame Peggy [Ashcroft] was fantastic to me when we did The Cherry Orchard...” Hall cuts in: “I only had reason to reprimand Dame Peggy once, and that was at the height of the Wars of the Roses [his 1964 cycle of Shakespeare histories]. At the matinée, it was reported to me that she was listening to the cricket on a tiny radio affixed to her helmet. A lot of junior actors who were cast as soldiers were coming for the latest score. She was passionate for cricket...”
Despite their grumbles about long-lost repertory companies and stingy arts funding, neither veteran is gloomy about the state of the modern theatre. Hall points to the fact that his Stratford season ran from spring to autumn, but it now “trots on all round the clock”. What keeps him going is the next play: “I don’t like not to be in rehearsal.” As for the venerable queen who hates her wrinkles but cherishes her unnatural energy, what sustains her is work, doing the crossword, learning something new each day, the buzz of the undisclosed movie for which she has just signed up, beginning four days after the Dream closes. “I will lie down for four days, I think.”
More meaningful than any of that, though, is her misty-eyed pride about taking her grandson — “my Sammy” — to see Brendan O’Hea’s Cymbeline. She also took him to All’s Well That Ends Well — “Three times!” — and Jude Law’s Hamlet. “His attention span is normally short, but he sat throughout it without moving. If it’s interesting enough, you see, they will.”
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is in preview and opens at the Rose Theatre, Kingston upon Thames, on February 15

Wi-Fi Turns Rowdy Bus Into Rolling Study Hall
By SAM DILLON
VAIL, Ariz. — Students endure hundreds of hours on yellow buses each year getting to and from school in this desert exurb of Tucson, and stir-crazy teenagers break the monotony by teasing, texting, flirting, shouting, climbing (over seats) and sometimes punching (seats or seatmates).
But on this chilly morning, as bus No. 92 rolls down a mountain highway just before dawn, high school students are quiet, typing on laptops.
Morning routines have been like this since the fall, when school officials mounted a mobile Internet router to bus No. 92’s sheet-metal frame, enabling students to surf the Web. The students call it the Internet Bus, and what began as a high-tech experiment has had an old-fashioned — and unexpected — result. Wi-Fi access has transformed what was often a boisterous bus ride into a rolling study hall, and behavioral problems have virtually disappeared.
“It’s made a big difference,” said J. J. Johnson, the bus’s driver. “Boys aren’t hitting each other, girls are busy, and there’s not so much jumping around.”
On this morning, John O’Connell, a junior at Empire High School here, is pecking feverishly at his MacBook, touching up an essay on World War I for his American history class. Across the aisle, 16-year-old Jennifer Renner e-mails her friend Patrick to meet her at the bus park in half an hour. Kyle Letarte, a sophomore, peers at his screen, awaiting acknowledgment from a teacher that he has just turned in his biology homework, electronically.
“Got it, thanks,” comes the reply from Michael Frank, Kyle’s teacher.
Internet buses may soon be hauling children to school in many other districts, particularly those with long bus routes. The company marketing the router, Autonet Mobile, says it has sold them to schools or districts in Florida, Missouri and Washington, D.C.
Karen Cator, director of education technologyat the federal Department of Education, said the buses were part of a wider effort to use technology to extend learning beyond classroom walls and the six-hour school day. The Vail District, with 18 schools and 10,000 students, is sprawled across 425 square miles of subdivision, mesquite and mountain ridges southeast of Tucson. Many parents work at local Raytheon and I.B.M. plants. Others are ranchers.
The district has taken technological initiatives before. In 2005, it inaugurated Empire High as a digital school, with the district issuing students laptops instead of textbooks, and more than 100 built-in wireless access points offering a powerful Internet signal in every classroom and even on the football field.
“We have enough wireless to make your fillings hurt,” says Matt Federoff, the district’s chief information officer.
District officials got the idea for wiring the bus during occasional drives on school business to Phoenix, two hours each way, when they realized that if they doubled up, one person could drive and the other could work using a laptop and a wireless card. They wondered if Internet access on a school bus would increase students’ academic productivity, too.
But the idea for the Internet Bus really took shape in the fall, when Mr. Federoff was at home, baby on his lap, and saw an advertisement in an electronics catalog offering a “Wi-Fi hotspot in your car.”
“I thought, what if you could put that in a bus?” he said. The router cost $200, and came with a $60 a month Internet service contract. An early test came in December, when bus No. 92 carried the boys’ varsity soccer team to a tournament nearly four hours away. The ride began at 4 a.m., so many players and coaches slept en route. But between games, with the bus in a parking lot adjacent to the soccer field, players and coaches sat with laptops, fielding e-mail messages and doing homework — basically turning the bus into a Wi-Fi cafe, said Cody Bingham, the bus driver for the trip.
Mariah Nunes, a sophomore who is a team manager, said she researched an essay on bicycle safety.
“I used my laptop for pretty much the whole ride,” Mariah said. “It was quieter than it normally would have been. Everybody was pumped about the games, and there were some rowdy boys. But the coach said, ‘Let’s all be quiet and do some homework.’ And it wasn’t too different from study hall.”
Ms. Bingham recalled, “That was the quietest ride I’ve ever had with high schoolers.”
Since then, district officials have been delighted to see the amount of homework getting done, morning and evening, as Mr. Johnson picks up and drops off students along the highway that climbs from Vail through the Santa Rita mountains to Sonoita. The drive takes about 70 minutes each way.
One recent afternoon, with a wintry rain pelting the bus, 18-year-old Jeanette Roelke used her laptop to finish and send in an assignment on tax policy for her American government class.
Students were not just doing homework, of course. Even though Dylan Powell, a freshman, had vowed to devote the ride home to an algebra assignment, he instead called up a digital keyboard using GarageBand, a music-making program, and spent the next half-hour with earphones on, pretending to be a rock star, banging on the keys of his laptop and swaying back and forth in his seat.
Two seats to the rear, Jerod Reyes, another freshman, was playing SAS, an online shooting game in which players fire a machine gun at attacking zombies.
Vail’s superintendent, Calvin Baker, says he knew from the start that some students would play computer games.
“That’s a whole lot better than having them bugging each other,” Mr. Baker said.
A ride through mountains on a drizzly afternoon can be unpredictable, even on the Internet Bus. Through the windows on the left, inky clouds suddenly parted above a ridge, revealing an arc of incandescent color.
“Dude, there’s a rainbow!” shouted Morghan Sonderer, a ninth grader.
A dozen students looked up from their laptops and cellphones, abandoning technology to stare in wonder at the eastern sky.
“It’s following us!” Morghan exclaimed.
“We’re being stalked by a rainbow!” Jerod said.

Sallywood? Famous Hollywood landmark gets a makeover
The sign was originally an advert for a housing development that failed
Chris Ayres in Hollywood Times of London

For the past 87 years, it has sat high above the glittering megatropolis of Los Angeles, advertising a luxury housing development that was never finished because of the crash of 1929.
But the Hollywoodland sign - long since shortened to Hollywood, and now a world-famous symbol of LA’s movie industry - might not be visible for much longer.
The 15m-by-61m (50ft x 200ft) floodlit billboard would remain in place. But from many angles it would be hidden thanks to a proposed residential development - ironically enough, the very same kind of development that the giant white letters were originally designed to promote.
In protest, a conservation group known as The Trust for Public Land last night began to cover the sign with a banner reading “Save The Peak”. By 5:30pm (LA time), the first two letters of the sign had been covered, leaving the landmark to read Sallywood.
The stunt was primarily a fund-raising effort: the trust says it has already raised £4.5 million to buy the land around the sign - currently owned by an investment firm, Fox River Financial Resources - but needs another £3.3 million to close the deal before an April deadline.
“More than 100 acres of open land and the view of the one of the world’s most famous landmarks, the Hollywood sign, are threatened,” said Tom LaBonge, a Los Angeles City council member who enlisted the Trust for Public Land to help save the area.
“It is absolutely critical that we acquire this property.” Until recently, hillside engineering technology wasn’t affordable enough to make development of the site feasible. But that’s no longer the case, and Fox River is keen to capitalise on the spectacular 360-degree views of LA from above the sign, an area known as Cahuenga Peak, formerly owned by the aviation pioneer Howard Hughes.
The Hollywood sign has faced plenty of other dramas during its life time.
In 1932, for example, the Welsh Broadway actress Peg Entwistle committed suicide by jumping off it, after her movie debut as Hazel Cousins in the psychological thriller Thirteen Women was received poorly by test audiences, resulting in the studio cutting her out of scenes.
“I am afraid, I am a coward,” she wrote in her suicide note, left at the base of the letter H. “I am sorry for everything. If I had done this a long time ago, it would have saved a lot of pain.” Entwistle’s body wasn’t found at the bottom of the ravine until two days later: the actress had most probably died a long, agonising death from multiple pelvis fractures.
Since then, access to the sign by the public has been extremely limited. But that didn’t stop the letter H being destroyed in 1940 when the sign’s caretaker crashed his car into it, while drunk. Meanwhile, those who went on to live in the semi-completed Hollywoodland development included the British writer Aldous Huxley, until his home - along with 23 others - was destroyed by a fire. Many of the surviving Hollywoodland homes are still there today, but efforts to retain the original European Village architecture have largely failed.
The sign itself, which cost $21,000 to build, with each sheet metal panel being dragged up the hill by a caterpillar tractor, fell into disrepair by the 1940s with the ‘land’ part of the sign disappearing when those letters collapsed. By 1973, however, the Hollywood sign had been declared a Historic-Cultural Monument - in spite of many having originally regarded it as a blight on natural beauty of the Santa Monica mountains - and in 1978 a handful of celebrities, including the rock star Alice Cooper agreed to buy individual letters for $27,000 each, so that the landmark could be rebuilt. Cooper later turned his O into lots of small Os and handed them out to his friends.
Aside from the issue of the sign being obscured, there is also concern that the landmark might be increasingly used as a billboard to raise money for the city. It has already been modified several times, provoking complaints from the editorial pages of the Los Angeles Times (whose former publisher, Harry Chandler, was one of the backers of Hollywoodland).
Nevertheless, the paper gave the most recent stunt its blessing, saying that protection of the sign and the surrounding land “would be a lasting gift to the people of LA”.

Sinatra Song Often Strikes Deadly Chord
By NORIMITSU ONISHI NY TIMES
GENERAL SANTOS, the Philippines — After a day of barbering, Rodolfo Gregorio went to his neighborhood karaoke bar still smelling of talcum powder. Putting aside his glass of Red Horse Extra Strong beer, he grasped a microphone with a habitué’s self-assuredness and briefly stilled the room with the Platters’ “My Prayer.”
Next, he belted out crowd-pleasers by Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck. But Mr. Gregorio, 63, a witness to countless fistfights and occasional stabbings erupting from disputes over karaoke singing, did not dare choose one beloved classic: Frank Sinatra’s version of “My Way.”
“I used to like ‘My Way,’ but after all the trouble, I stopped singing it,” he said. “You can get killed.”
The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”
The killings have produced urban legends about the song and left Filipinos groping for answers. Are the killings the natural byproduct of the country’s culture of violence, drinking and machismo? Or is there something inherently sinister in the song?
Whatever the reason, many karaoke bars have removed the song from their playbooks. And the country’s many Sinatra lovers, like Mr. Gregorio here in this city in the southernmost Philippines, are practicing self-censorship out of perceived self-preservation.
Karaoke-related killings are not limited to the Philippines. In the past two years alone, a Malaysian man was fatally stabbed for hogging the microphone at a bar and a Thai man killed eight of his neighbors in a rage after they sang John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” Karaoke-related assaults have also occurred in the United States, including at a Seattle bar where a woman punched a man for singing Coldplay’s “Yellow” after criticizing his version.
Still, the odds of getting killed during karaoke may be higher in the Philippines, if only because of the ubiquity of the pastime. Social get-togethers invariably involve karaoke. Stand-alone karaoke machines can be found in the unlikeliest settings, including outdoors in rural areas where men can sometimes be seen singing early in the morning. And Filipinos, who pride themselves on their singing, may have a lower tolerance for bad singers.
Indeed, most of the “My Way” killings have reportedly occurred after the singer sang out of tune, causing other patrons to laugh or jeer.
“The trouble with ‘My Way,’ ” said Mr. Gregorio, “is that everyone knows it and everyone has an opinion.”
Others, noting that other equally popular tunes have not provoked killings, point to the song itself. The lyrics, written by Paul Anka for Mr. Sinatra as an unapologetic summing up of his career, are about a tough guy who “when there was doubt,” simply “ate it up and spit it out.” Butch Albarracin, the owner of Center for Pop, a Manila-based singing school that has propelled the careers of many famous singers, was partial to what he called the “existential explanation.”
“ ‘I did it my way’ — it’s so arrogant,” Mr. Albarracin said. “The lyrics evoke feelings of pride and arrogance in the singer, as if you’re somebody when you’re really nobody. It covers up your failures. That’s why it leads to fights.”
Defenders of “My Way” say it is a victim of its own popularity. Because it is sung more often than most songs, the thinking goes, karaoke-related violence is more likely to occur while people are singing it. The real reasons behind the violence are breaches of karaoke etiquette, like hogging the microphone, laughing at someone’s singing or choosing a song that has already been sung.
“The Philippines is a very violent society, so karaoke only triggers what already exists here when certain social rules are broken,” said Roland B. Tolentino, a pop culture expert at the University of the Philippines. But even he hedged, noting that the song’s “triumphalist” nature might contribute to the violence.
Some karaoke lovers are not taking chances, not even at family gatherings.
In Manila, Alisa Escanlar, 33, and her relatives invariably gather before a karaoke machine, but they banned “My Way” after an uncle, listening to a friend sing the song at a bar, became enraged at the laughter coming from the next table. The uncle, who was a police officer, pulled out his revolver, after which the customers at the next table quietly paid their bill and left.
Awash in more than one million illegal guns, the Philippines has long suffered from all manner of violence, from the political to the private. Wary middle-class patrons gravitate to karaoke clubs with cubicles that isolate them from strangers.
But in karaoke bars where one song costs 5 pesos, or a tenth of a dollar, strangers often rub shoulders, sometimes uneasily. A subset of karaoke bars with G.R.O.’s — short for guest relations officers, a euphemism for female prostitutes — often employ gay men, who are seen as neutral, to defuse the undercurrent of tension among the male patrons. Since the gay men are not considered rivals for the women’s attention — or rivals in singing, which karaoke machines score and rank — they can use humor to forestall macho face-offs among the patrons.
In one such bar in Quezon City, next to Manila, patrons sing karaoke at tables on the first floor and can accompany a G.R.O. upstairs. Fights often break out when customers at one table look at another table “the wrong way,” said Mark Lanada, 20, the manager.
“That’s the biggest source of tension,” Mr. Lanada said. “That’s why every place like this has a gay man like me.”
Ordinary karaoke bars, like the Nelson Carenderia here, a single room with bare plywood walls, mandate that a singer give up the microphone after three consecutive songs.
On one recent evening, at the table closest to the karaoke machine, Edwin Lancaderas, 62, crooned a Tagalog song, “Fight Temptation” — about a married man forgoing an affair with a woman while taking delight in their “stolen moments.” His friend Dindo Auxlero, 42, took the mike next, bawling songs by the Scorpions and Dire Straits. Several empty bottles of Red Horse crowded their table.
“In the Philippines, life is difficult,” said Mr. Auxlero, who repairs watches from a street kiosk, as he railed about government corruption and a weak economy that has driven so many Filipinos to work overseas, including his wife, who is a maid in Lebanon. “But, you know, we have a saying: ‘Don’t worry about your problems. Let your problems worry about you.’ ”
The two men roared with laughter.
“That’s why we come here every night — to clear the excesses from our heads,” Mr. Lancaderas said, adding, however, that the two always adhered to karaoke etiquette and, of course, refrained from singing “My Way.”
“Misunderstanding and jealousy,” in his view, were behind the “My Way” killings. “I just hope it doesn’t happen here,” he said.

fighting words
A Nation of Racist Dwarfs
Kim Jong-il's regime is even weirder and more despicable than you thought.

By Christopher Hitchens
Visiting North Korea some years ago, I was lucky to have a fairly genial "minder" whom I'll call Mr. Chae. He guided me patiently around the ruined and starving country, explaining things away by means of a sort of denial mechanism and never seeming to lose interest in the gargantuan monuments to the world's most hysterical and operatic leader-cult. One evening, as we tried to dine on some gristly bits of duck, he mentioned yet another reason why the day should not long be postponed when the whole peninsula was united under the beaming rule of the Dear Leader. The people of South Korea, he pointed out, were becoming mongrelized. They wedded foreigners—even black American soldiers, or so he'd heard to his evident disgust—and were losing their purity and distinction. Not for Mr. Chae the charm of the ethnic mosaic, but rather a rigid and unpolluted uniformity.
I was struck at the time by how matter-of-factly he said this, as if he took it for granted that I would find it uncontroversial. And I did briefly wonder whether this form of totalitarianism, too (because nothing is more "total" than racist nationalism), was part of the pitch made to its subjects by the North Korean state. But I was preoccupied, as are most of the country's few visitors, by the more imposing and exotic forms of totalitarianism on offer: by the giant mausoleums and parades that seemed to fuse classical Stalinism with a contorted form of the deferential, patriarchal Confucian ethos.
Karl Marx in his Eighteenth Brumaire wrote that those trying to master a new language always begin by translating it back into the tongue they already know. And I was limiting myself (and ill-serving my readers) in using the pre-existing imagery of Stalinism and Eastern deference. I have recently donned the bifocals provided by B.R. Myers in his electrifying new book The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters, and I understand now that I got the picture either upside down or inside out. The whole idea of communism is dead in North Korea, and its most recent "Constitution," "ratified" last April, has dropped all mention of the word. The analogies to Confucianism are glib, and such parallels with it as can be drawn are intended by the regime only for the consumption of outsiders. Myers makes a persuasive case that we should instead regard the Kim Jong-il system as a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right. It is based on totalitarian "military first" mobilization, is maintained by slave labor, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia.
These conclusions of his, in a finely argued and brilliantly written book, carry the worrisome implication that the propaganda of the regime may actually mean exactly what it says, which in turn would mean that peace and disarmament negotiations with it are a waste of time—and perhaps a dangerous waste at that.
Consider: Even in the days of communism, there were reports from Eastern Bloc and Cuban diplomats about the paranoid character of the system (which had no concept of deterrence and told its own people that it had signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty in bad faith) and also about its intense hatred of foreigners. A black Cuban diplomat was almost lynched when he tried to show his family the sights of Pyongyang. North Korean women who return pregnant from China—the regime's main ally and protector—are forced to submit to abortions. Wall posters and banners depicting all Japanese as barbarians are only equaled by the ways in which Americans are caricatured as hook-nosed monsters. (The illustrations in this book are an education in themselves.) The United States and its partners make up in aid for the huge shortfall in North Korea's food production, but there is not a hint of acknowledgement of this by the authorities, who tell their captive subjects that the bags of grain stenciled with the Stars and Stripes are tribute paid by a frightened America to the Dear Leader.
Myers also points out that many of the slogans employed and displayed by the North Korean state are borrowed directly—this really does count as some kind of irony—from the kamikaze ideology of Japanese imperialism. Every child is told every day of the wonderful possibility of death by immolation in the service of the motherland and taught not to fear the idea of war, not even a nuclear one.
The regime cannot rule by terror alone, and now all it has left is its race-based military ideology. Small wonder that each "negotiation" with it is more humiliating than the previous one. As Myers points out, we cannot expect it to bargain away its very raison d'etre.
All of us who scrutinize North Korean affairs are preoccupied with one question. Do these slaves really love their chains? The conundrum has several obscene corollaries. The people of that tiny and nightmarish state are not, of course, allowed to make comparisons with the lives of others, and if they complain or offend, they are shunted off to camps that—to judge by the standard of care and nutrition in the "wider" society—must be a living hell excusable only by the brevity of its duration. But race arrogance and nationalist hysteria are powerful cements for the most odious systems, as Europeans and Americans have good reason to remember. Even in South Korea there are those who feel the Kim Jong-il regime, under which they themselves could not live for a single day, to be somehow more "authentically" Korean.
Here are the two most shattering facts about North Korea. First, when viewed by satellite photography at night, it is an area of unrelieved darkness. Barely a scintilla of light is visible even in the capital city. (See this famous photograph.) Second, a North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean. You may care to imagine how much surplus value has been wrung out of such a slave, and for how long, in order to feed and sustain the militarized crime family that completely owns both the country and its people.
But this is what proves Myers right. Unlike previous racist dictatorships, the North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult: This horror show is in our future, and is so ghastly that our own darling leaders dare not face it and can only peep through their fingers at what is coming.Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2243112/
_