A very happy new year to all of my readers and all those close to you.

Hey, this eGroups thing is great. Participate in a reader survey, if you please, by following this link: When I read Follow Me Here, I prefer:

Jorn Barger’s provocative post on his Robot Wisdom weblog — he headlined a link to an article claiming that assassinating unarmed Palestinian freedom fighters is official Israeli government policy “Is Judaism simply a religion of lawless racists?” — has been roundly condemned in a discussion forum he set up for responses. The consensus seems to be that Barger had blurred the distinctions between Zionism and Judaism, between Israel and Jews, and was doing the kind of generalizing and stereotyping we associate with bigotry. By and large, the responses were civil despite the posters’ perception that Barger had been way out of line, and by and large they have commented on their surprise at how uncharacteristic they considered this of Barger, as well-respected and widely-read as his weblog is. But Barger has pushed the issue further by asking, “Are Jews incapable of polite discourse?”

In separate incidents today, the son of rabid anti-Arab Jewish leader Meir Kahane — himself assassinated a decade ago — and his wife were ambushed and killed in the West Bank by Palestininan gunmen; and a Fatah official was shot dead leaving his West Bank home in what Palestinian officials described as an assassination. Israel claimed he had been killed in firefight between Palestinian gunmen and Israeli security forces. Draw your own conclusions about the continuing cycle of violence and murder.

Allergies to MSG May Not Exist. Although IMHO the study’s methodology is flawed, it claims to show that people don’t react negatively to MSG as they believe they do.

Bush Appoints Leader of Health And Human Services. Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson is pro-life, in favor of school vouchers and spearheaded the welfare-to-work reform movement. But he has no significant experience in the health arena and had made no secret of his desire to be given the Dept. of Transportation. I’m excited at the prospect that at least people may end up with better arrangements for their rides to doctors’ appointments! (unless they’re going to a women’s health clinic…)

Rare Baby Elephant Delights Seattle. “The
answers to the three
most commonly asked
questions at the Woodland
Park Zoo in Seattle these
days are: one, 235 pounds;
two, 22 months (the longest
pregnancy of any mammal in
the world); three, natural
insemination, after her
8,800-pound mother was
transported 2,000 miles for a
tryst in Missouri.” New York Times

Doctor faces trial over rapid detox method. I’ve been aware of the antics of this physician, himself long recovered from drug dependency, who does “rapid opiate detoxification” as an outpatient office procedure without hospitalizing his patients … and losing at least seven of them within days of his procedure over the last four years. Part of the process involves putting them under general anaesthesia, which IMHO is just crazy to do outside a hospital setting. Both his grandstanding on TV talk shows and the operation of his procedure through a for-profit company reinforce the impression of the cowboy unprofessionalism and possibly frank irresponsibility of his activities. No surprise that state regulators are going after him. AP

Doctor faces trial over rapid detox method. I’ve been aware of the antics of this physician, himself long recovered from drug dependency, who does “rapid opiate detoxification” as an outpatient office procedure without hospitalizing his patients … and losing at least seven of them within days of his procedure over the last four years. Part of the process involves putting them under general anaesthesia, which IMHO is just crazy to do outside a hospital setting. Both his grandstanding on TV talk shows and the operation of his procedure through a for-profit company reinforce the impression of the cowboy unprofessionalism and possibly frank irresponsibility of his activities. No surprise that state regulators are going after him. AP

Doctor faces trial over rapid detox method. I’ve been aware of the antics of this physician, himself long recovered from drug dependency, who does “rapid opiate detoxification” as an outpatient office procedure without hospitalizing his patients … and losing at least seven of them within days of his procedure over the last four years. Part of the process involves putting them under general anaesthesia, which IMHO is just crazy to do outside a hospital setting. Both his grandstanding on TV talk shows and the operation of his procedure through a for-profit company reinforce the impression of the cowboy unprofessionalism and possibly frank irresponsibility of his activities. No surprise that state regulators are going after him. AP

He’s a nurtural Calculational prodigies use different brain regions than we do when performing the same mental activities.

I’ve just set up a Follow Me Here mailing list through eGoups. Feel free to join. FmH posts generate a trickle of feedback and reactions from readers, sent to me 1:1 as direct email.
Why not generate some discussion with other similarly gregarious FmH readers through this mailing list instead? This will be an unmoderated list and, in fact, I expect I will
participate more as a lurker than a poster, as I’m letting you get to know how I think with my weblog
postings in the first place. When you post to the mailing list, it’s set up so that the subject line of your contributions begin with
“[FmH]” so that recipients of the mailings can readily identify them in our email inboxes. If you
want to talk to me “offlist” about this list, you can email me directly about it.

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Dan Hartung’s weblogger’s manifestito: “I don’t feel the need to turn my personal weblog into a
community, any more than I do to turn it into a diary. As it is,
though, what I get out of it is clearly informed by the larger
coummunity of webloggers. I steal links from them, to be sure, but
I also respond to their comments, learn from them, and get ideas
from this interplay. I can safely say that a year plus of doing this
has excited me intellectually as nearly no other undertaking has
done.”

Better Living Through Snoezelan. More about the background and details of the sensory stimulation treatment of dementia (Alzheimer’s Disease etc.) — to an account of which I blinked earlier. New York Press

Sham summit promised little for the
Palestinians. “The result? The world believes
that Mr Arafat turned down what he had always demanded, and the
cancellation of the Sharm el-Sheikh summit was entirely his fault.

Having claimed in the past that Israel was offering 92 per cent of the
West Bank – and then 94 per cent – to the Palestinians, the Americans
insisted that the latest Clinton proposals would give Mr Arafat 95 per
cent. But a careful reading of the Clinton document proves this to be
untrue. With the Dead Sea waters that would become Palestinian
‘territory’, with the Israeli army ‘buffer zones’, with the ‘rental’ of the
Kiryat Arba settlement land, with the exclusion of the West Bank land
illegally annexed into Jerusalem by the Israelis (including the massive
Male Adumim settlement), Arafat was still likely to get no more than 64
or 65 per cent.” The Independent

UCSF study of HIV patients identifies interleukin-7 as a key factor in controlling T-cells. “Researchers at the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology have learned how T-cell levels may be maintained in
people. The study has important implications for developing treatment strategies for patients who have diseases like HIV and
cancer where the immune system is destroyed and for patients whose immune system is suppressed by chemotherapy or who
are undergoing a bone marrow transplant, the researchers said.” EurekAlert

Doctor faces trial over rapid detox method. I’ve been aware of the antics of this physician, himself long recovered from drug dependency, who does “rapid opiate detoxification” as an outpatient office procedure without hospitalizing his patients … and losing at least seven of them within days of his procedure over the last four years. Part of the process involves putting them under general anaesthesia, which IMHO is just crazy to do outside a hospital setting. Both his grandstanding on TV talk shows and the operation of his procedure through a for-profit company reinforce the impression of the cowboy unprofessionalism and possibly frank irresponsibility of his activities. No surprise that state regulators are going after him. AP