Capitol Hill Blue: Civil Rights Groups Challenge Ashcroft
Selection, “demanding that Democratic senators abandon the tradition of supporting former colleagues
and vote against the nomination.” Ashcroft (whose recent distinction, you’ll recall, was to lose his
reelection bid for his Missouri Senate seat to an opponent who had been killed in a plane crash before
the election) “has drawn opposition for his anti-abortion views and for leading a drive to defeat the
nomination of a black Missouri Supreme Court judge, Ronnie White, to the federal bench.”

In a
related story, a researcher in Ashcroft’s home state finds that he has “…actively cultivated <a href=”
http://www.accuracy.org/new.htm”>ties to white supremacists and extreme hate groups.” John Hickey,
executive director of the Missouri Citizen Education Fund, singles out Ashcroft’s praise of the quarterly
Southern Partisan, which the New Republic characterizes as the “leading journal of the neo-
Confederacy movement,” for over 20 years serving up “a gumbo of racist apologies.”

To each their own: Russia looks for funding to build a tunnel link to the U.S., while France seeks financial backing to allow President Jospin to roll the workweek back to 35 hours.

Passersby may have ignored dead woman. “Commuters may have stepped over a woman killed by an escalator in Calgary after assuming she was intoxicated…. An anonymous caller had told police a woman had passed out there.

The paramedics found Ms. Turning Robe’s scarf and hair snarled in the escalator. Police believe she died of strangulation
and head injuries. National Post

Researcher Challenges a Host of Psychological Studies. “If scientists do not know whether they are dealing with
elephants or mice, …it becomes anyone’s
guess what small and large really mean.” New York Times

Dysfunction in the brain’s ‘hub’ in the earliest stages of schizophrenia: “A new brain imaging study from the Institute of Psychiatry shows for the first time that the thalamus, the brain’s main sensory filter
or ‘hub’, is smaller than normal from the earliest stages of schizophrenia. The findings, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry
in January, may explain why people with schizophrenia experience confusion during their illness.

The thalamus is the area where information is received and relayed to other areas of the brain. It is of particular interest in
schizophrenia because of the role it plays in processing information. The thalamus receives information via the senses, which is then
filtered and passed to the correct regions of the brain for processing. People with schizophrenia often have difficulties in processing
information properly and as a result may end up with an information overload in some areas of the brain.” EurekAlert

As people who have read some of my earlier comments know, I think some schizophrenia involves a primary information processing deficit…since I think it’s really a wastebasket term for a collection of disparate diseases. Because the study populations are, from this point of view, heterogeneous, it’s been difficult to find any important defining characteristics in most studies of “schizophrenics.” There will be “brain findings” in a subset of any schizophrenic population, I’m fond of saying. And it’s a further obfuscating factor that it’s difficult to find medication-naive schizophrenics in this day and age, and the medications used to treat psychosis have been such heavy-hitters that the brain may take a hit from them. If this finding about the thalamus is as universal as claimed, it could prove very important. The abstract of the article, from the American Journal of Psychiatry, is here.

Obscene Interiors: “Amateur porn photography is one of the rare instances where
everyday people expose their naked bodies to the public. Seeing your
neighbors nude my be shocking, I, however, am more frequently disturbed by
the gross display of amateur interior design found in these photos.

‘Oh my God! How could they do that? Those curtains are so wrong, I
can’t believe this stuff is allowed on the net.’ Yes, it can be pretty
hardcore stuff. I’ve gathered a random selection of male amateur porn and
personal ad photographs and asked a professional interior designer to join me
in a lively critique of these truly obscene Interiors. (No need to shield your
virginal eyes, the nude figures have been laboriously obscured.)”