![[Image 'http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/images/hs-2009-12-f-web.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/images/hs-2009-12-f-web.jpg "Face of Saturn transited by four of its moons.")
Face of Saturn transited by four of its moons.
Fantastic Hubble image of the transit of four moons — Enceladus, Dione, the giant orange moon Titan, and Mimas — across Saturn’s face. Icy white Enceladus and Dione are on the left, casting their black shadows on the cloud surface of the planet. Mimas is on the right edge of Saturn’s disc, just above the rings. via HubbleSite.
“Autism is terrifying the community of Somali immigrants in Minneapolis, and some pediatricians and educators have joined parents in raising the alarm. But public health experts say it is hard to tell whether the apparent surge of cases is an actual outbreak, with a cause that can be addressed, or just a statistical fluke.
… A small recent study of refugees in schools in Stockholm found that Somalis were in classes for autistic children at three times the normal rate.
Calls to representatives of Somali groups in Seattle and San Diego found that they were aware of the fear in Minneapolis but unsure about their own rates. Doctors familiar with the Somali communities in Boston and Lewiston, Me., had heard of no surges there.” NYTimes.
“A hatchling of a rare reptile with lineage dating back to the dinosaur age has been found in the wild on the New Zealand mainland for the first time in about 200 years, a wildlife official said Thursday.
The baby tuatara was discovered by staff during routine maintenance work at the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary in the capital, Wellington, conservation manager Raewyn Empson said.
”We are all absolutely thrilled with this discovery,” Empson said. ”It means we have successfully re-established a breeding population back on the mainland, which is a massive breakthrough for New Zealand conservation.”
Tuatara, which measure up to 32 inches 80 cm when full grown, are the last descendants of a lizard-like reptile species that walked the Earth with the dinosaurs 225 million years ago, zoologists say.
There are estimated to be about 50,000 of them living in the wild on 32 small offshore islands cleared of predators, but this is the first time a hatchling has been seen on the mainland in about 200 years.”
(New York Times )
“Download a free 10-song sampler of the artists featured by NPR Music at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, TX this month. Click the link below and the songs will automatically begin downloading into your iTunes account.” via NPR Music.
“Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced today that the Army will virtually eliminate the unpopular practice of “stop loss” — or mandating that soldiers stay in the Army beyond their service obligation — by March 2011 and will offer extra pay to soldiers whose service is extended under the policy.
About 13,000 soldiers are serving in the Army under the stop-loss policy, nearly double the number of two years ago. Gates said the goal is to reduce that number by 50 percent by June 2010 and to bring it down to scores or less by March 2011.” via Salon.
This article in Scientific American by David Dobbs reports on the growing concern that “the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder is itself disordered”. The writer is critical of a culture which “seemed reflexively to view bad memories, nightmares and any other sign of distress as an indicator of PTSD.” To critics like this, the overwhelming incidence of PTSD diagnoses in returning Iraqi veterans is not a reflection of the brutal meaningless horror to which many of the combatants were exposed but of a sissy culture that can no longer suck it up. As usual, the veil of ‘objective’ ‘scientific’ evidence is used to cloak ideological biases.
FmH readers know that I too am critical of the frequency of PTSD diagnosis in modern mental health practice, but I think that is not a problem with the theoretical construct of PTSD but its slapdash application. With respect to domestic PTSD, the problem is one of overzealous and naive clinicians ignoring the diagnostic criteria and, more important, misunderstanding the clinical significance and intent of the diagnosis, labelling with PTSD far too many people who have ever had anything more than a little upsetting or distressing happen to them. Essentially, PTSD is meant to refer to the longterm consequences of either an experience or experiences that are outside the bounds of what the human psyche can endure. Both emotionally and neurobiologically, the capacity of the organism is overwhelmed and the fact of the trauma assumes an overarching and inescapable central role in future information processing, functioning and sense of self. Experience that occurs when the body is flooded with unimaginably high levels of stress hormones, when the nervous system is in the throes of the fight-or-flight response, and when the normal processes for making sense of what we are going through utterly break down are encoded differently in the body and mind, with immeasurable effects. Only someone who did not grasp this at all could misrecognize simple anxiety, depression or adjustment difficulties as PTSD. But it happens all the time, especially in the treatment of depressed women, largely because of do-gooder clinicians’ desires to be politically correct and not be seen as insensitive to their clients’ suffering. Unfortunately, what it mostly does is train these clients to remain lifelong inhabitants of a self-fulfilling inescapable victim role.
The concern, on the other hand, with soldiers returning from the wars in central Asia, is the opposite. All evidence is that PTSD is being underdiagnosed, because of systematic biases within the government and the military to deny the scope of the problem. Articles such as this, and the research that it depicts, should be seen as nothing but a conservative backlash, an effort to blame the victims. If coping with the scope of PTSD is a problem, deny the reality of PTSD. Certainly considerable research suggests that a proportion of soldiers returning from the battle front in bad shape will have shown their resilience, will no longer show a high magnitude of emotional disturbance, and will not warrant a diagnosis of PTSD if reassessed months or years later. Research also suggests that early intervention using a trauma paradigm may do more harm than good, perpetuating the vulnerability of the patient. And most Defense Dept. research on the effects of combat trauma is intended to figure out how to block the stress reaction so that a soldier can remain functional and return to a combat role as soon as possible. But it remains the case that the human nervous system did not evolve to endure the horrors of modern war, and that the indefensibility and anomie of this war in particular, based as it has been entirely on lies, amplifies the intolerability and makes it far less likely that a veteran can find sustaining meaning in the suffering they endured. This will inevitably turn into higher rates of PTSD than among veterans of other wars.
To deny the scale of PTSD in our returning veterans is to be an unquestioning apologist for the untrammelled American imperialist projection of power in lawless aggression. As Dobbs describes it, the PTSD deniers construe us as having a cultural obsession with PTSD which embodies “a prolonged failure to contextualize and accept our own collective aggression.” What horse manure. Our cultural neurosis, rather, lies in the unquestioning acceptance of suggestions like Dobbs’ that we should mindlessly embrace such aggression as natural. This was the neurosis that made it possible to elect Bush and his handlers to enact an administration that set about violating every supposed principle of our democracy and our humanity. I know we are not supposed to draw this particular analogy, but this brand of PTSD denial strikes me as akin to nothing as much as Holocaust denial. Via Scientific American.
Years ago when I got my own domain, I solved the problem of ever having to change my email address again. A couple of years ago, I was lucky enough to wangle a GrandCentral phone number from Google (“one phone number for all your phones for life”) to secure voice contact in a similar way. Now, as this TechCrunch rave describes, it is out of beta and relaunched as Google Voice, and it is even better. You can text to the GV number; you can individualize the treatment of different groups of callers, e.g. friends vs. business contacts; and there is voicemail transcription. And it is all free. I do want to read more about the privacy concerns, though.
“A secret Red Cross report from 2007 concluded that the treatment of al-Qaeda captives by CIA interrogators “constituted torture,” the Washington Post reported Monday.
The newspaper quotes the International Committee of the Red Cross report as saying the treatment of inmates at secret prisons run by the US Central Intelligence Agency amounted to “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” which is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.
The findings were based on conclusions by ICRC officials who were granted exclusive access to the CIA’s “high-value” detainees after they had been transferred in 2006 to the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the report said.
The 14 detainees gave uniform accounts of abuse that included beatings, sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures and, in some cases, waterboarding, the paper noted.” via Google-hosted AFP
“Out in the culture, suicide notes are often romanticized, quoted as poetry or as laugh lines. But… suicide almost always rises from psychic distress that distorts thinking, distress that might have passed if time allowed. Maybe one day there will be a cryptographer who can decipher the notes left behind and figure out how to stop the next one.” via Chicago Tribune.
A largely incoherent article about an intensely poignant subject. Mental health professionals are all about deciphering messages that arise from distressed distorted thinking, which does not appear to have occurred to the writer of this article. Hard to understand in what possible sense suicide notes are not messages.
Frank Rich thinks the culture wars are over. I think he’s deluding himself.
“…The family-values dinosaurs that once stalked the earth — Falwell, Robertson, Dobson and Reed — are now either dead, retired or disgraced. Their less-famous successors pumped out their pro forma e-mail blasts, but to little avail. The Republican National Committee said nothing whatsoever about Obama’s reversal of Bush stem-cell policy. That’s quite a contrast to 2006, when the party’s wild and crazy (and perhaps transitory) new chairman, Michael Steele, likened embryonic stem-cell research to Nazi medical experiments during his failed Senate campaign.
What has happened between 2001 and 2009 to so radically change the cultural climate? Here, at last, is one piece of good news in our global economic meltdown: Americans have less and less patience for the intrusive and divisive moral scolds who thrived in the bubbles of the Clinton and Bush years. Culture wars are a luxury the country — the G.O.P. included — can no longer afford.” via New York Times op-ed.
“Tell Secretary Salazar you oppose removing federal protections for gray wolves.
Independent scientists say that 2,000 to 3,000 wolves are required to ensure the survival of the species. But this new rule would clear the way for Idaho and Montana to kill hundreds of wolves, reducing the population to a level that is too small to survive.
Speak out today. 10,704 people have already taken action—add your voice today.” via Earthjustice: Environmental Law.
“Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh’s bombshell earlier this week that Vice President Dick Cheney controlled an “executive assassination ring” [on which I reported here — FmH] continues to reverberate throughout Washington, with Nixon aide John Dean going so far as to accuse the former VP of murder if the charges are true.” via The Raw Story.
“”The New Mexico Senate voted to abolish capital punishment, a measure already approved by the lower House.” via The Raw Story.
The measure awaits Gov. Richardson’s signature.
Sorry I missed alerting you in time for 1:59:26.But you can always have some pie with dinner instead of (or in addition to) with lunch. via Newser.
(I didn’t know this, but math geeks reportedly celebrated on 3/3/09 as well, “Square Root Day”, the next occasion for that being in seven years and one month.)
Teen Conflicts Linked To Potential Risk For Adult Cardiovascular Disease:
‘…[I]n a study of otherwise healthy, normal teens who self-reported various negative interpersonal interactions, researchers found that a greater frequency of such stress was associated with higher levels of an inflammatory marker called C-reactive protein, or CRP. CRP has been identified as an indicator for the later development of cardiovascular disease (CVD).
“Although most research on stress and inflammation has focused upon adulthood, these results show that such links can occur as early as the teenage years, even among a healthy sample of young men and women,” [an investigator] said. “That suggests that alterations in the biological substrates that initiate CVD begin before adulthood.” ‘ via Science Daily.
“Around the world, several labs are drawing close to the threshold of a second genesis, an achievement that some would call one of the most profound scientific breakthroughs of all time. David Deamer, a biochemist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has been saying that scientists would create synthetic life in “five or 10 years” for three decades, but finally he might actually be right. “The momentum is building,” he says. “We’re knocking at the door.”
Meanwhile, a no-less profound search is on for a “shadow biosphere” – life forms that are unrelated to the life we know because they are descendants of an independent origin of life. We know for sure that life got going on Earth once, so why couldn’t it have happened twice? Many scientists argue that there is no reason why a second genesis might not have taken place, and no reason why its descendants should not still be living among us.” via New Scientist.
“The Obama administration said Friday that it is abandoning one of President George W. Bush’s key phrases in the war on terrorism: enemy combatant. But that won’t change much for the detainees at the U.S. naval base in Cuba _ Obama still asserts the military’s authority to hold them. Human rights attorneys said they were disappointed that Obama didn’t take a new stance.
The Justice Department said in legal filings that it will no longer use the term “enemy combatants’ to justify holding prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
“This is really a case of old wine in new bottles,” the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has been fighting the detainees’ detention, said in a statement. “It is still unlawful to hold people indefinitely without charge. The men who have been held for more than seven years by our government must be charged or released.”
In another court filing Thursday criticized by human rights advocates, the Obama administration tried to protect top Bush administration military officials from lawsuits brought by prisoners who say they were tortured while being held at Guantanamo Bay.” via Huffington Post.
“…After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.
“Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. …
“Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.
“Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.
“It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.
“In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.
“I’ve had people say to me — five years ago, I had one say: ‘What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don’t get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee?’
“But they’re not gonna get before a committee.” via MinnPost.
“Most people consume far too much salt, and a University of Iowa researcher has discovered one potential reason we crave it: it might put us in a better mood.
UI psychologist Kim Johnson and colleagues found in their research that when rats are deficient in sodium chloride, common table salt, they shy away from activities they normally enjoy, like drinking a sugary substance or pressing a bar that stimulates a pleasant sensation in their brains.
“Things that normally would be pleasurable for rats didn’t elicit the same degree of relish, which leads us to believe that a salt deficit and the craving associated with it can induce one of the key symptoms associated with depression,” Johnson said.
The UI researchers can’t say it is full-blown depression because several criteria factor into such a diagnosis, but a loss of pleasure in normally pleasing activities is one of the most important features of psychological depression. And, the idea that salt is a natural mood-elevating substance could help explain why we’re so tempted to over-ingest it, even though it’s known to contribute to high blood pressure, heart disease and other health problems.” via physorg.com.
This may be a blockbuster finding:
“Prion protein, notorious for causing the brain-wasting mad cow and Creutzfeldt-Jakob diseases, may also be a coconspirator in Alzheimer’s disease, a new study in mice suggests.
In mad cow and Creutzfeldt-Jakob diseases, misshapen prion proteins do the damage. But the new paper, appearing February 26 in Nature, offers evidence that the harmless version of the prion protein assists the amyloid-beta protein responsible for brain cell death in Alzheimer’s disease.”
The prion protein — a role for which in the brain has been a headscratcher for neuroscientists — acts as the middleman in amyloid-beta binding to the cell membrane. This may hint at a new therapeutic strategy for Alzheimer’s prevention.
‘Get rid of the prion protein middleman, or its ability to bind A-beta oligomers, and get rid of the disease. “In many ways it may be better than addressing A-beta levels,” which are difficult to reduce completely, [one of the investigators] says.’ via Science News.
‘The neuroimaging results showed significant activity in two regions of the brain during the encoding of impression-relevant information. The first, the amygdala, is a small structure in the medial temporal lobe that previously has been linked to emotional learning about inanimate objects, as well as social evaluations based on trust or race group. The second, the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), has been linked to economic decision-making and assigning subjective value to rewards. In the Nature Neuroscience study, these parts of the brain, which are implicated in value processing in a number of domains, showed increased activity when encoding information that was consistent with the impression.
“Even when we only briefly encounter others, brain regions that are important in forming evaluations are engaged, resulting in a quick first impression,” commented NYU’s Phelps.
NYU’s Schiller, the study’s lead author, concluded, “When encoding everyday social information during a social encounter, these regions sort information based on its personal and subjective significance, and summarize it into an ultimate score–a first impression.” ‘ via physorg.com.
An interactive inquiry about why America hasn’t been attacked again. — Timothy Noah in Slate.
Of course, which theory you believe may have more to do with how much you want to worry than anything else.
Actually, I think that most of these ‘awesome’ web apps inspire a vigorous “Eh?” in reaction. The most interesting part of this list is the silly names for web apps to which they resort these days. Via 2Crenk.
“Yesterday’s announcement that former Bush White House aides Karl Rove and Harriet E. Miers will answer questions from congressional investigators about the U.S. attorney scandal puts an end to the absurd proposition advanced by the previous administration that senior advisers to the president have blanket immunity from any congressional oversight whatsoever, and if subpoenaed don’t even need to show up.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that the interviews will be held behind closed doors — and the transcripts will only be released on a delayed basis. That’s bad in part because the public now won’t see Rove and Miers sweating under the hot lights. But the more significant problem is that journalists, bloggers and the greater public won’t be able to immediately pore over their responses in detail.” — Dan Froomkin via White House Watch.
New York bicyclist:
“The nature of the hate has changed. Once, they hated us because we were a rarity, like a rat in the kitchen, a pest. Now, they hate us because we are ubiquitous.” via New York Times Magazine.
The situation once called for civility from outraged nonbikers; now it is the bicyclists who must take the high road, he says.
What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.” ‘ (New York Times op-ed)
‘
“As a professor of government at Harvard, Louise Richardson concentrated for many years on international security, with a special focus on terrorism – a relatively obscure academic field until the day George W. Bush declared war on it. At which point Richardson was pitched from the cloisters into the public arena, giving lectures to a variety of audiences – policymakers, the military, intelligence agencies and business communities – as well as testifying before the US Senate. She also picked up awards both for teaching and for her contribution to international peace, and became executive dean at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.
Everywhere Richardson went, people seemed to be asking the same question: which single book should we read to get a handle on terrorism? There wasn’t one. And so Richardson wrote What Terrorists Want – a freethinking examination, informed by three decades of research, of this complex subject. It was her counterblast – if it’s possible to have a peaceful, measured counterblast – to what she calls America’s “absolutely catastrophic” response to September 11. Her book became that rare thing in academic publishing – a bestseller with no trade-off between accessibility and scholarly rigour.
Which is not to say it was uncontentious. Richardson holds that despite the dreadfulness of their deeds, most terrorists are neither “crazy” nor even “amoral”. On the contrary, most terrorists see themselves as altruistic and noble – Davids against Goliaths – and their objectives are rationally calculated. “Terrorism is a tactic,” Richardson says, “and terror is an emotion. It makes no sense to declare war on either.” While arguing that terrorism cannot be defeated, Richardson believes passionately that it can be contained. The first step is to understand its appeal to those who practise it, and on the basis of this understanding to devise effective counter-terrorist policies.” via Financial Times.
“I asked one of them who I assume can get through to the President or at least to Rahm Emanuel any time he wants why he doesn’t make his case more clearly to the occupants of the White House. The response was, “Yes, I can get through to Rahm Emanuel any time, but I get three minutes with him, and then someone else gets their three minutes, and so on. Rahm is the three minute guy — and he’s great during those three minutes.”
Wealthy donors on the outside of the political process probably should not be able to just call up the President and get their way — but the frustration I’m hearing from a great number of these types of donors — types who are not only wealthy and helped finance much of the Democratic Party’s victory in November but who are also smart and connected — is that they are not getting through where it counts. The policy options they are proposing aren’t getting into the basket of proposals that Obama is considering.
In other words, some feel that Obama is not getting a full range of choices on the economy and is being provided a narrow band of views that fit the preconceived biases of Larry Summers and Tim Geithner.
One of the fatal mistakes of the Bush administration in the build up to the Iraq War was the tight constriction of choices and views that Bush’s advisors allowed him to see.
Let’s hope that the Obama team isn’t making the same mistake on the economy.” via The Washington Note.
A team of traditional indigenous healers and regional health authorities from the North Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAN) trekked out to visit three rural Miskito communities along the Río Coco on Tuesday to investigate reports of an outbreak of a mysterious collective hysteria, known as “grisi siknis,” or “crazy sickness.”
Centuriano Knight, the regional health coordinator for the RAAN, told The Nica Tim es yesterday in a phone interview that 34 people have reportedly fallen ill with grisi siknis in the river community of Santa Fe, seven people in the nearby community of Esperanza and two in the neighboring community of San Carlos. The outbreak of grisi siknis, which has no scientific explanation, is the largest case of collective hysteria since a massive outbreak in the RAAN community of Raití in 2003.
Though doctors, anthropologists and sociologists have all studied previous cases, no one has been able to explain the phenomena, Knight said. Traditional healers and witches have explained the mysterious illness with different theories ranging from a curse to incomplete witchcraft.
The strange illness apparently affects young people more than old, putting people in a strange trance and apparently giving them super-human strength, according to Knight and other witnesses.” via The Tico Times.
Perhaps because I was a student of cross-cultural studies before I became a psychiatrist, these reports of indigenous illnesses or culture-bound syndromes have always fascinated me. I used to teach a class on them to medical students, which was pure entertainment as far as I was (and, I hope, many of the students were) concerned. Because psychiatric illnesses are as much social constructs as biological realities, a culture-specific syndrome is in a real sense culture-specific. That is why it makes so much more sense that it be dealt with by indigenous practitioners rather than a WHO swat team. Of course, when I moved into psychiatry, I felt I was still utilizing my skills in cross-cultural communication, as every interpersonal interaction is in a sense cross-cultural, if you take my meaning. Thus, every episode of emotional distress is in a sense a culture-bound syndrome, despite what DSM-IV or functional MRI studies might tell you.
Very disappointing to Big Pharma, which of course only accepts greater regulation in hopes it will protect it.
“The court, by a 6-to-3 vote, upheld a jury verdict of $6.7 million in favor of a musician from Vermont whose arm had to be amputated after she was injected with an antinausea drug. The drug’s manufacturer, Wyeth, had argued that its compliance with the Food and Drug Administration’s labeling requirements should immunize it from lawsuits.” via NYTimes.com.
“The diatribes are getting McCain plenty of exposure on cable news, but they’re also starting to make observers wonder if the man who rolled his eyes at “that one” during the presidential debates is having trouble moving on from last November’s defeat.” via Salon.
Ed Vul’s bombshell of a paper, Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience, is a strong indictment of the spate of studies using fMRI to localize complex brain functions, arguing that the statistical correlations between behaviors and brain activity of many social neuroscientists are spurious. It has provoked a spate of angry responses from other neuroscientists. Jonah Lehrer (Proust Was a Neuroscientist and How We Decide) interviewed Vul at Scientific American and excerpts the interview at his own weblog The Frontal Cortex.
The tree has entered my hands,
The sap has ascended my arms,
The tree has grown in my breast-
Downward,
The branches grow out of me, like arms.
Tree you are,
Moss you are,
You are violets with wind above them.
A child – so high – you are,
And all this is folly to the world.
— Ezra Pound
“Rock-band worship is nothing new, of course, but the relationship between Darnielle and his fans has its own special hue. This is not the mass, global adulation of arena bands like U2. Nor is it fandom as lifestyle as practiced by Dead Heads. It’s the confessional-indie-troubador-and-his-flock-of-disciples model of Nick Drake, the Smiths, and Rufus Wainwright. Like those musicians and their tribes, Darnielle and his acolytes share an unusually intimate, and often pained, bond. Mountain Goats fans tend to have an air of sadness about them, and because Darnielle sings so openly and candidly about his own difficulties, he connects with his audience on a level that few artists are able to reach (the band is called the Mountain Goats, plural, but the group—and the fuss over them—is entirely about Darnielle). Darnielle sings about what his fans feel but can’t articulate. He’s their hero, but he’s also their soulmate, the one person in the world who understands them. That’s why Stephen Wesley and the legions of fans like him can’t get enough of the Mountain Goats. And that burden is crushing Darnielle.” via New York Magazine.
Are we in the midst of a suicide epidemic? And, if so, what is it about modernity that lies behind this contemporary death wish? via Standpoint.
“It can be, but it can be good for you, too—a fact scientists tend to ignore and regular folks don’t appreciate.” via Newsweek.
Predictable that we will see a spate of articles like this as the economy continues to melt down.
“Conservatives have never had, and never should have, a problem with elitism. Why have we allowed carny barkers to run away with the Right?” — National Review editor John Derbyshire via The American Conservative
Why libertarians don’t fit well within the conservative movement. via Policy
