An astonishing number of teenage boys suffer from a problem known in Japan as hikikomori, which translates as "withdrawal" and refers to a person sequestered in his room for six months or longer with no social life beyond his home.

(The word is a noun that describes both the problem and the person suffering from it and is also an adjective, like "alcoholic.")

Some hikikomori do occasionally emerge from their rooms for meals with their parents, late-night runs to convenience stores or, in Takeshi's case, once-a-month trips to buy CD's.

And though female hikikomori exist and may be undercounted, experts estimate that about 80 percent of the hikikomori are male, some as young as 13 or 14 and some who live in their rooms for 15 years or more.

It is also a phenomenon elsewhere. Thousands of teens and young adults in America have sealed themselves off from the outside world. In increasing numbers, America's youth have fallen victim to a condition called Acute Social Withdrawal.

"It isn't all bad, you know. I mean, I guess it can get pretty boring sometimes, but at other times it's kinda like a spiritual experience," says Andy, a 17 year old boy who hasn't left his bedroom in over eight months.   more »

There is a growing awareness among the chattering classes in the United States that President W. Bush may be guilty of war crimes.

Democratic Congressman and ranking minority member of the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers, introduced resolutions calling for the creation of a panel to investigate Bush and Cheney’s handling of the war. Although a long way from framing articles of impeachment, it is an important first step.

There is overwhelming and irrefutable evidence that President Bush and others in his administration have violated numerous international laws and conventions. They have violated the Hague Conventions, the Nuremburg principles, the UN charter, the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture, The Convention on Conventional Weapons and possibly the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

In addition, they have violated the War Crimes Act, a section of the American criminal code, and Article VI of the constitution

The War Crimes Act states that “Whoever…commits a war crime…defined as a grave breach in any of the international conventions signed at Geneva 12 August 1949, or any protocol to such convention to which the United States is a party” will be “fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.”   more »

Most natural forms of healing are thought to work largely because they evoke a placebo response through the trust patients have in the treatment, the practitioner, or both.

Pharmaceutical companies stand accused of actively trying to get people to internalise morbid messages that suggest they are ill.

"The way to sell drugs is to sell psychiatric sickness. If you are Paxil and you are the only manufacturer who has the drug for social anxiety disorder, it's in your interest to broaden the category as far as possible and make the borders as fuzzy as possible," said US bioethicist Carl Elliott.

Paxil's product director, Barry Brand, told the journal Advertising Age that the company GlaxoSmithKline had been largely successful in this respect.

"Every marketer's dream is to find an unidentified or unknown market and develop it. That's what we were able to do with social anxiety disorder."

As more research dollars are poured into the workings of our mind, a rapidly growing range of conditions is being developed that, ostensibly at least, can be treated pharmacologically.   more »

The US air strike carried out on January 13 on the isolated village of Damadola, near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, was as reckless as it was criminal. At least 18 civilians were killed, including five women and five children, further inflaming already high political and social tensions inside Pakistan.

Under international law, the strike was an act of war. The Pakistani government of President Pervez Musharraf has collaborated with the US takeover of Afghanistan and its broader international aggression, but it has never formally granted the US military the right to cross the border and carry out operations on Pakistani soil or airspace.

It is unclear whether the Pakistani government and military had pre-knowledge of the attack. But in the face of public outrage it has been compelled to issue a protest to the US ambassador and deplore the bombing of Damadola as “highly condemnable”.

Not only was the attack a violation of Pakistani national sovereignty, the intended target—the senior Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri—was not even in the village.   more »

The recent proposal that Norway boycott Israeli goods has provoked passionate debate. In my view, a rational examination of this issue would pose two questions:

1) Do Israeli human rights violations warrant an economic boycott?

2) Can such a boycott make a meaningful contribution toward ending these violations? I would argue that both these questions should be answered in the affirmative.

Although the subject of many reports by human rights organizations, Israel's real human rights record in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is generally not well known abroad.

This is primarily due to the formidable public relations industry of Israel's defenders as well as the effectiveness of their tactics of intimidation, such as labeling critics of Israeli policy anti-Semitic.

Yet, it is an incontestable fact that Israel has committed a broad range of human rights violations, many rising to the level of war crimes and crimes against humanity.   more »

William Gladstone, the on-again, off-again British prime minister for most of the second half of the 19 th century, famously liked to walk the streets at night, counseling prostitutes to a more wholesome life.

He did so when he was young. He did so when he was old, and through his four terms as prime minister from 1868 through 1894.

Those were the years when Britain thought itself Queen Victoria’s and God’s gift to the world (in that order), when the sun never set on the Union Jack, when imperialism found cover behind the infomercial known, then as now, as the white man’s burden.

The link between Gladstone’s streetwalking and Britain ’s globe-trotting is one of those striking historic parallels between a man’s ideals personifying a civilization’s presumptions. The link isn’t just symbolic.

It betrays the rot at the heart of western assumptions about right and wrong, about who, your majesty, the savages are. For Gladstone wasn’t a compulsive streetwalker for virtue all those years. He was, in fact, an assiduous whoremonger.   more »

In essence, petrodollar hegemony is eroding, which will ultimately force the U.S. to significantly change its current tax, debt, trade, and energy policies, all of which are severely unbalanced.

World oil production is reportedly “flat out,” and yet the neoconservatives are apparently willing to undertake huge strategic and tactical risks in the Persian Gulf.

Why? Quite simply – their stated goal is U.S. global domination – at any cost. – Petrodollar Warfare: Dollars, Euros and the Upcoming Iranian Oil Bourse by William Clark

Anybody who doesn’t think control of energy sources is at the root of US/UK actions in Iraq and elsewhere is suffering a serious (but hopefully treatable) delusional disease of denial.

Even the most cursory exploration of the 20th century reveals the centrality of oil to pretty well every event of any significance, and in no small part goes a long way toward explaining why the corporate/state media won’t go near the subject with a length of oil-drilling pipe—except to deride the idea.   more »

17 JANUARY

Faking Cellphone Calls: Reach Out and Touch No One

God Bless America? No Fucking Chance

Al Gore Attacks Bush...Calls for Impeachment

"Jewish Ideology" & Apartheid in "Israel"

Bush, If Impeached, Will Use "Idiot Defense"

Tourists Turn Thailland into a Hellhole

Class-Ridden America: The 'Rat Race' for University Places

Demonizing Ahmadinejad: Western Propaganda Performs Its Usual Trick