The seat of power: if any of these are going at fire sale prices as new startups close, I need a new desk chair from which to pilot FmH. Boston Globe

The American Jobs Machine: One of the measures of the quality of the ‘new economy’ can be found in a closer examination of the nature of the jobs it creates. The authors, University of Wisconsin sociologists, find a pattern of “low road capitalism” with racialized job polarization and expansion of the “working poor.” They argue that “the pattern of job expansion is not some “natural” result of the
operation of efficient markets, but the inevitable result of all sorts of public
policies: the nature of the tax code, the institutions of skill formation, the
regulation of the employment contract and working conditions, the minimum
wage, and laws regulating unions. The task of government is to design such
policies in such a way as to rebuild social mobility and expand job
opportunities in the middle of the employment structure.” In particular, they suggest that, for the first time since the New Deal, expansion of jobs in the public works sector, considered increasingly necessary with the nation’s crumbling infrastructure and increasingly economically feasible with growing budget surpluses, may be a politically and socially useful direction to consider. Public policy decisions can also “close off the low road and pave the high road”, they argue. Boston Review

You have to believe in something. “Lewis Wolpert argues that beliefs may
come from our genes and we have a
fundamental need to tell ourselves
stories to make sense of life.” If causal thinking is preordained biologically, it is no surprise that irrational beliefs hold such sway, and Skeptics will always face such an uphill battle. Certainly, while beliefs differ tremendously, it is quintessentially human to explain things, make sense of them and believe in our explanations. Telegraph

In my psychiatric practice and teaching about psychosis, I’ve reached similar conclusions to Wolpert. It’s never easy, and a source of endless debate, to figure out which psychiatric symptoms (especially in the severe illnesses we call psychotic) are the so-called “primary” manifestations of a disease process’s alteration in brain function, and which are “secondary” — attempts of the mind at restituton in the face of the dysfunction. I firmly stand on one side of the deep controversy in psychiatry surrounding delusional beliefs — with the assertion that they are not primary psychotic symptoms. Instead, they are the attempts at restitution — a bewildered mind finding a way to “believe in something” in the face of the dysfunction of the machinery for making sense of things. For example, if you’re overcome by terrifying paranoid feelings of danger, it’s much more powerfully tempting and comforting to have an explanation (no matter how outlandish and no matter to what extent it sacrifices consistency with reality or consensus) than to have no explanation at all for how you are feeling. So you’ll come to believe, for example, that those people lurking on the corner across the street are CIA agents who have you under surveillance — and that that’s why you are feeling these frightening bewildering feelings of being in danger.

Figuring out whether delusions are primary symptoms of the alteration in brain function in the illnesses in which they occur has important clinical consequences in how we treat these disorders. I contend that treatments of psychosis, especially the powerful and effective antipsychotic medications we have at our disposal, never change delusional thinking, because once formed beliefs are very compelling and we abandon them only with great difficulty and at great cost even if the occasion for them has passed. Perhaps this “conservation of belief”, as I call it, speaks to Wolpert’s assertion of a biological determinism driving it. In any case, the implication is that we should stop throwing medications at a patient expressing fixed delusional beliefs if that’s his or her only “symptom”; instead, a focus on slower, cognitive measures for belief-changing is called for.

There is precedent for this distinction between primary symptoms and compensatory beliefs from other areas of psychiatry where it is more generally accepted. Panic disorder is a crippling condition with explosive spontaneous outbursts of severe anxiety. Along with it, patients often develop agoraphobia, the fear of going out, because they become convinced that certain places or activities away from the security of their home and family will bring on the panic attacks. Even when these patients have become completely free of panic attacks with the use of the appropriate medications, the agoraphobic avoidance persists as a fixed belief. The patient cannot be convinced that, because their susceptibility to panic attacks is stabilized, they no longer have to avoid the feared exposure. No medication can correct this, but rather only a variety of cognitive therapy approaches.

Well, enough of getting technical on you…

Hunting Web Rumors: ‘A Swiss online marketing company called Agence Virtuelle has created
RumorBot, a software robot intended to uncover the source of rumors
on the Internet. Using 44 autonomous agents (small programs),
RumorBot scans the Web, newsgroups, chat rooms, and listservers for
target words and phrases and then determines posting dates and
origins, a “chain of evidence” for malicious content (e.g., the Emulex
false press release scandal).’ Geek.com

Levi Strauss asked to apologize for Super Bowl ad which apparently (I didn’t see the ad) makes light of the plight of those awaiting organ donation. 74,000 people are on a national waiting list for an organ transplant, and 16 of them die each day because an organ is
not available to them, according to the executive director of a national organ donor registration organization. How about an ad from Levi Strauss in penance — it doesn’t even have to be aired during the Super Bowl — that, in addition to an apology (designed to restore lost sales) gives people the contact information for an organ donor registration organization? Nando Times

If you’ve sat here in the US in recent months watching the chances for a reasonable government slip through your fingers, imagine how it must feel for reasonable Israelis slouching toward Ariel Sharon’s election. I’ve heard several American commentators wishfully invoke
“only-a-Nixon-could-go-to-China” hopes, but it appears that most Israelis aren’t electing Sharon because they believe he is the only one who can make peace with the Palestinians, despite an almost singleminded focus on the peace process in the election campaign. Instead, the election is a disappointed and embittered personal rejection of Barak for his “addiction to a diplomatic formula that by now has been
empirically proven unworkable.” The only debate among those Israelis who hope for peace seems to be whether there will be any prospects left after Sharon, who says ominously “I know the Arabs and they know me” with a General’s sneer. With this, Israel elects the author of the “Lebanese misadventure” and repudiates the man who extricated their forces from the occupation of southern Lebanon. A dismal moment for peace, especially with a Shrub in the White House in place of Clinton, with his interest in leaving a peacemaker’s legacy.

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