Natural Selection Moving Women To Have Kids Earlier. Factors that influence an earlier age of reproduction — e.g. earlier onset of menstruation — are selected for and can be expected to show increasing frequency over time. UniSci [via Robot Wisdom]

In the aftermath of a rampage by a psychiatric patient who killed a nurse and three patients at a Port St. Lucie, FL psychiatric hospital with his bare hands, a Florida co-conspirator, commenting in part,

“I’ll bet if this had happened in a media capital, the care of
psychiatric patients and the funding of the psych-care system would be a
prominent topic of conversation. People would talk about it on Sunday
morning talk shows. George Will would say that you have to expect a few
deaths on psychatric wards and it would be ridiculous to waste money making
them safer,”

send me this link to a Palm Beach Post feature on psychiatric nurses’ fears of violent patients. I’m of two minds about this. Psychiatric patients are already treated with enough irrational, xenophobic fear and stigmatization by the public that they don’t need anything that’d detract further from the compassion with which they need to be treated. But on the other hand, while statistics used to demonstrate that the mentally ill population is no more violence-prone than the general population, this does not appear to be the case any longer. I blame it mostly on global changes in the delivery of healthcare over the last decade, which can be neatly summarized under the rubric of “managed care. “

The upshot is fewer services, less continuity of care and less familiarity with the patients on an outpatient basis; and shorter lengths of stay and less thorough inpatient treatment when hospitalization occurs. Patients are sicker, and more apt to have been off necessary medications for longer, when they are admitted. A less thorough history to familiarize caregivers with the patient’s issues is available on admission or thereafter. The hospital units are less well-staffed, more chaotic and crowded, than they should be or had been in the past. The stresses of working under such conditions mean that veteran staff are more prone to leave the field, leaving care in the hands of generally less experienced and less well-paid nurses and mental health workers. Hospital administration has increasingly fallen into the hands of fiscally, but not clinically, sophisticated bureaucrats making decisions without firsthand knowledge of mental health care. Clinically astute caregivers such as psychiatric MDs are increasingly marginalized because of their intolerable agitation for quality-of-care measures with less concern for costs. Inpatient and outpatient services are more likely to see themselves as finger-pointing adversaries, pitted against each other competing to do more with fewer and fewer resources, than collaborators. Consolidation of health care delivery has meant that decision-making is more centralized, more removed, more corporate, less local, less responsive. And although this translates into more danger in treatment settings, the patients are largely the victims.

“Sexy emails between a fiancee and an unknown woman in Las
Vegas caused ex-Royal aide Jane Andrews to beat and stab her
lover to death, the Old Bailey heard yesterday.” The Register

Libertarian, or Just Bizarro? ‘Clyde Wayne Crews, the new director of technology studies at
the Cato Institute, the libertarian think-tank, …outline(s) his vision for what he
calls “splinternets,” or parallel Internets that would be run as distinct, private, and
autonomous universes.

Lamenting the flood of regulation over privacy, children’s safety, copyright, gambling,
taxation, and other issues on the Internet, Crews asks, “how about more Internets, not
more regulations?”

The Internet as we know it —- what people are already calling the “Big-I Internet” or the
commodity Internet — “is a classic example of the tragedy of the commons,” Crews said.’ Wired

The Myth of Matriarchal
Prehistory: “One of the more popular accounts of prehistoric human society is
that it was matriarchal: that women ruled globally, for hundreds of
thousands of years, until a patriarchal revolution reversed things
about 5000 years ago. Women were the heads of the households;
they worshipped goddesses, or a single great goddess; men
revered them and acceded to their rule.

It’s not hard to figure out why this theory became so popular among
second-wave feminists in the 70s, many of whom were coming out of
the Wiccan and neopagan movements. In fact, goddess worship had
been proposed as early as the 19th century, and vitalized by
archaeological findings of goddess figurines from early excavations.” Interview with Cynthia Eller, a professor of women and religion at Montclair State
University, who argues in her new book The Myth of Matriarchal
Prehistory that this speculative theory should be scrapped. New York Press

Nothing surprising about actor Robert Downey Jr.’s rearrest for alleged drug charges; or his being fired from Ally McBeal in response. The only surprising thing is that he got so far before going down in flames. This is not a celebrity phenomenon; literally millions in the US are in psychiatric and substance abuse facilities each day on similar, if not far more dramatic, paths of programmed self-destruction.

The actor’s legal troubles began in 1996 when he was stopped for speeding and authorities found cocaine, heroin and a pistol in his
vehicle.

A month later he was found unconscious in a neighbor’s home and hospitalized at a substance-abuse treatment center. Three days later,
he was arrested for leaving the recovery center.

In August 1999, Downey was sentenced to three years in prison for violating his probation by missing scheduled drug tests. He was
released a year later on $5,000 bail.

Last November, he was arrested at a Palm Springs hotel after police received a 911 call reporting someone in a hotel room with guns and
drugs.

He was charged with felony possession of cocaine and Valium and a misdemeanor count of being under the influence of a controlled
substance. No weapons were found. Nando Times

Where’s the prurient interest in their stories?

Drug Warriors Shot Down Planes Before; Law Exempts U.S. from Blame. “Almost immediately after the Peruvian Air Force shot up a Baptist-owned Cessna
bearing nothing more intoxicating than missionaries, the United States — whose
Central Intelligence Agency provided Peru with the Cessna’s intercept data —
moved quickly to put the bulk of the blame on the Peruvians.” AlterNet

FTAA Roundup. Media reports of the FTAA protests in Quebec were short on substance, focusing on the visual contrast between the men in suits inside crafting trade agreements and the clashes outside between masked protesters and riot-clad tactical police. There were more anti-globalization protestors than at the 1999 WTO action in Seattle, and their political critique was more focused. What really happened in Quebec, and should you care? AlterNet