Senate Democrats Square Off With Bush Over Missile Plan “Senate
Democrats put forward some of
their most influential voices on national
security policy today and made clear that
President Bush’s plans for an expansive
missile defense system could well become a
defining point of contention between the
two parties.” New York Times

There had better be a line in the sand over this issue! Most coverage of the opposition to the NMD plan cites concerns over expense and questions of effectiveness. It’s important that the public debate be couched instead in terms that help the American people understand that the real issue is the abandonment of the ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) treaty, one of the cornerstones of arms control, and the invalidation of the premise of mutually assured destruction that has been the only thing between them and nuclear holocaust.

The overarching activist passion of my life was disarmament work until it appeared possible to rest easier over the last decade or so and come out from under the shadow of the “psychic numbing,” to use the phrase of psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, that was necessary to carry on daily existence under the threat of annihilation. The human race was engaged in almost the most profound struggle for its survival imaginable, without most even recognizing it — and appeared to be winning, slowly but surely turning back the hands of the famous clock on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that told us how many minutes away from ‘midnight’ we were. (It’s 11:51 now, by the way.)

And now these wretched bloody brainwashed fools in Washington, worshipping at the altar of nuclearism, will unilaterally return us to the shadows of a new arms race, and for what? So that Bush can hearken back to the only kind of world in which his advisors — his Daddy’s advisors, for God’s sake! — know how to live?

Relapsing into terror after a respite is even worse than realizing one had been living with it unremittingly for one’s entire life, and now we have children my wife and I thought we were going to be able to raise in a world that, no matter how terrible, it would always be possible to assure them would continue to exist. We can’t live with this, literally.

If the Democrats have the political will to do something about this, it’s one very good reason to wish for haste in Strom Thurmond’s departure from the Senate…

Moral Poverty and Body Counts: “John Walters is a veteran of drug policy shambles. As the deputy director under
former drug czar William Bennett, he helped craft drug war policies that have
shattered millions of lives, wasted billions of dollars and exacerbated America’s
drug crisis. He’s a hard-core ideologue who misrepresents the facts and spouts
tough-on-crime rhetoric.

In other words, John Walters is the Bush administration’s perfect choice to be the
next drug czar.” AlterNet

Some readers have given me feedback, intermittently, that the URL to FmH is too convoluted for convenience. They’re probably using an unnecessarily complicated web address. Here’s a rundown of how to get here.

Most people probably use “http://world.std.com/~emg/blogger.html.”

My webserver, I just discovered, has a slightly simpler alias, so you can use “http://TheWorld.com/~emg/blogger.html.” Of course, uppercase is optional.

These expand to the mother of them all, “http://world.std.com/home/dacha/WWW/emg/public_html/blogger.html.” Not many takers, I’m guessing.

By far the easiest: “http://gelwan.com/blogger.html.” Has the advantage of portability too, if I ever change web host I’ll point the gelwan.com domain to my new site. I’m Eliot Gelwan, by the way.

Update: A reader wrote to let me know that “http://fmh.webhop.org” is will get you here too. Some kind soul set that up through the Dynamic DNS Network. I just created an account there and set up “http://fmh.webhop.net” to point here too. [thanks, Daniel]

I know I should get around to owning followmehere.com or something similar. Maybe some day [but don’t think that if you ‘squat’ at that domain you can ever ransom it to me for large sums of money (grin)]…

Hackers vs. Hollywood, the Sequel: “2600 Magazine, the hacker-zine that posted the DeCSS utility on its site and was sued by
the motion picture industry, is appealing its loss during a trial that took place last year.” Facing off to argue the case will be, on one side, the dean of Stanford University’s law school and, on the other, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Wired

Bupropion Sustained Release for Bereavement: Results of an Open Trial. “Major depressive symptoms occurring shortly after the loss of a loved one (i.e., bereavement) appear to respond to bupropion SR.
Treatment of these symptoms does not intensify grief; rather, improvement in depression is associated with decreases in grief intensity. The results of this
study challenge prevailing clinical wisdom that DSM-IV-defined bereavement should not be treated.” J Clin Psychiatry IMHO, this study’s conclusions exemplify the worst of the mechanistic modern psychopharmacologically astute but psychologically naive clinical psychiatric approach. The authors appear to think that their findings challenge the ‘prevailing wisdom’ because they have demonstrated the efficacy — measured in terms of symptom intensity reduction — of treatment, but refraining from treating grief with antidepressants was never based on the misapprehension that the treatment would be ineffective! It is precisely because antidepressant treatment does decrease grief intensity that the ‘prevailing wisdom’ suggesting that bereavement not be treated is wisdom! Just because we can treat something doesn’t mean we must, and bereavement is a prime example; grieving serves a purpose which should not be prevented from unfolding in most instances. From Freud’s psychoanalytic understanding of melancholy to the modern psychobiological conception of depression and the evolutionary biology perspective, the distinctions as well as the similarities between grief and melancholic depression have been clear — the latter is the former gone awry in some way. And that, in simple but profound terms, is the reason you treat one but not the other.

‘…(N)ew rules in a Beijing school district
this spring have listed “40 forbiddens” – words, phrases, and sentences – that teachers may no
longer fire off at their trembling charges… (I)t is no longer acceptable to say, for example: “If I were
you, I would not continue to live. You are hopeless.” Or, “You
are a wood post with two ears. Get out.” Banned, too, is a
phrase students say is among the most unpopular and most
heard phrases: “Whoever teaches you has the worst luck.” ‘ Christian Science Monitor

Why We Love The Sopranos by Philip Ringstrom,Margaret Crastnopol, Glen Gabbard, and Joel Whitebook continues: “Here again we see that Tony is not a psychopath but is
a complex person who is capable of conflict-based
suffering. Jennifer looks disgusted about his poor
compliance with the medication she prescribed him,
but she doesn’t seem to notice that he goes further
than he usually does by revealing that his lost friend
worked for the feds. He seems to be trying to use the
therapy in this episode.”

“(I)n this episode, either the writers have lost
their feel for the psychotherapy, or the therapist has
lost her feel for the patient. Jennifer misses the
significance of Tony’s effort to tolerate and consider
the complexities of his plight, having caught Jackie in
his web of lies–Tony knows what Jackie’s like deep
down, hopes it’s not true, wants to protect Meadow,
and yet is (narcissistically) unable to allow her to
transcend his own life or worldview.”

Slate