‘Defective brain’ causes impulsive acts. The BBC bills it this way: “Scientists at Cambridge University believe they

have discovered the part of the brain

associated with impulsive behaviour.” The nucleus accumbens doesn’t function properly, as evidenced on fMRI scans, in extremely impulsive people who “can’t help it.” Rats which underwent n. accumbens lesioning were unable to delay gratification. The BBC article concludes that this is evidence of a “strong biological and, therefore, genetic basis to impulsive behavior.” Extremely reductionistic and misleading reasoning. To start simple, biological does not equal genetically based. The rats’ injuries were biological but acquired, not inherited.Organic injury, especially to frontal lobe structures, often causes impulsivity; most neurobehavioral conditions causing dyscontrol are acquired but not inherited. ADHD may have a heritable component but it’s not clear if it is primarily an impulse disorder, or if it’s even one homogeneous disorder at all. I’ve been studying, treating and writing aabout adult ADHD for more than a decade and I don’t believe it is. Don’t get me started on the absurdities of the current ADHD bandwagon fad!

Doubtlessly it is not a single small structure but the concerted action of many frontal structures that helps us with being planful, maintaining set, inhibiting urges, and deferring gratification, all parts of the complex human capacity for “impulse control.”

Are readers aware that clicking on the icon at the end of any post can start a fertile, intelligent, enlivening and enlightening discussion on that post on the FmH mailing list?

The intolerable truth of genetic inequality: “In free Western democracies today there

are certain ideas which are so explosive that

even to acknowledge their existence

publicly is to incur the most savage penalty

from the reigning liberal establishment. You

will be labelled a bigot, a racist, a sexist, a

fascist or in some way be demonised as

intolerant. Henceforth you will have no credibility. Nothing you say will be listened

to.

You will cease to exist in current debate, except in the ridiculed fringe. Your

persecutors will be the people who most preach tolerance. Yet they are the most

intolerant of all.

In a way that is what happened to American social scientist Charles Murray after

he wrote his controversial 1994 book which linked race and IQ, The Bell Curve:

Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. Sydney Morning Herald

“A British eating disorder organisation was today warning women

about the dangers of visiting pro-anorexia Websites and chatrooms. These corners of cyberspace are filled with people who are aware

that they have eating disorders, but see it as a positive way to live

their lives.

Many refer to themselves as ‘pro-Anna’, and swap tips on how to

starve themselves and how to hide the obsession from others.

The sites and chatrooms are often littered with pictures of terrifyingly

skinny women.

They also include photos of celebs such as Ally McBeal star Calista

Flockhart and model Kate Moss.” The Register

“When we got the first shipment we

weren’t sure that it had arrived. The worker who unpacked it

said we’d got the packaging but not the things inside.” Invisible toy doll makes money out of thin air. “The US company behind action figure Invisible Jim says it

encourages children to use their imaginations and doesn’t

take up any space.” Ananova

666 Watch:

‘What is 666: The Mark of the Beast? Can a Christian take the 666: The Mark of the Beast? Is “www” equal to “666” in Hebrew? Can someone “innocently” or “accidently” receive 666: the Mark of the Beast? What if I “innocently” take a debit card, credit card, a vaccine, smart-card, or

biochip and it turns out to be — 666: The Mark of the Beast? Is the biochip implant The Mark of the Beast? What about barcodes and 666: The Mark of the Beast? Do barcodes really have the number 666 “hidden” in them?’

Missing in Action: what happened to the men of the 364th? “The story, whispered around Centreville, Mississippi since World

War II, goes like this: Members of the 364th (Negro) Infantry

Regiment were killed at Camp Van Dorn to silence their

relentless–and sometimes violent–demands for equality in a

segregated Army. Some swear they witnessed the shoot-out or

events that led to a shoot-out or its aftermath. Some say the

casualties were many, others say just a few. Some testimony

claims to be first-hand, much is just hearsay.” In These Times [I certainly don’t know if this is true, but if you don’t think it’s plausible, that’s another story.]

Blogging as a Form of Journalism: “Weblogs offer a vital, creative outlet for alternative voices” USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review

“Once I noticed I was on fire, I decided to relax and enjoy the fall.” Matthew Rossi’s back, finally.

Stressed Out? Bad Knee? Try a Sip of These Juices As if you didn’t know it, the juice drinks with the herbal additives with which you’ll quench your thirst this summer come from the big beverage companies and are probably no healthier than Coke or Pepsi, except insofar as they inflate your self-righteousness when you drink them. And when pressed about the veracity of the health-promoting claims they make for them, the beverage companies say things like “We don’t claim that,

it’s just a playful theme.”

For all you pious vampire fans — recognize the actor? [via MetaScene]

I can’t believe it. I finally got one of those scam letters we’re always warned about!

Subject: Investment Pact

Greetings,

It is with strict confidence and trust that I wish to contact you seeking for your assistance to help

as regards an investment opportunity. I sincerely hope that this letter will not come as a surprise to

you, or cause you any embarrassment since we neither knew each other before, nor have had any

previous contact or correspondence. I would appreciate your benevolence in giving this matter the

much-needed attention as I am presently in a difficult situation and need your assistance and

guidance urgently.

I am Mrs. Ndaye Banya, wife of Maj. Timothy Banya, the former commander and head of the

Secret Unit in charge of Diamond dealing for the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) of Sierra-

Leone. My husband was formerly working directly with the former Rebel Leader Mr. Foday

Sankoh who is presently in government custody. The government intends trying Mr. Sankoh for

illegal diamond dealing and especially for the killing of 21 people during a public demonstration

outside his home in May last year which subsequently lead to this arrest. As the situation is, my

husband is very much likely to be prosecuted alongside for activities in the diamond mining.

The RUF is now headed by Gen. Issa Sesay who is determined in bringing peace to Sierra Leone,

he signed a cease-fire agreement with the government on Friday 10th Nov., 2000 and instructed

that peace must returned to our fatherland after nine-years conflict, pledging to allow U.N. troops

unhindered access throughout Sierra-Leone. My fear is that the government will try Mr. Sankoh

and that my husband may also be prosecuted alongside and our assets may be confiscated. Also all

accounts abroad and locally traceable to our name and families may also be frozen given the

circumstances.

In view of this development, I was initially trapped with about US$20,000,000.00 (Twenty Million

United States Dollars) that is in cash in boxed containers. Through the assistance of my proxy in

collaboration with a set of Diplomats, I was able to move to this consignment out of Sierra Leone

to a Security Firm in a neighboring West African country. The money is kept and lodged in a

security vault under the auspices of the Security in a crate marked antique. For the time being it is

safe and content undisclosed.

All I want you to do is to receive the said amount in your name and invest it on my behalf while

maintaining my anonymity in whatever business endeavour you decide undertaking. My situation is

very desperate, as I cannot leave Sierra Leone because of the house arrest I am under.

In the light of above, I am soliciting your assistance and partnership to move this money out of the

Security Firm as both of us can make a fortune. I would require your assistance in terms of logistics

and materials to enhance the movement of the consignment from the Firm in question. Therefore,

contact me immediately, if you are able and interested in assisting me in this endeavour preferably

using my alternative email address at ncbanyand@email.com, as soon as possible.

Thanks for your anticipated understanding and assistance.

Yours faithfully,

MRS. N. BANYA

Email: ncbanyand@email.com

---

A Note:

Each generation must out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it. (Frantz

Fanon)

I intend to send an encouraging reply; I’ll share any further correspondence from “her” with you. You could write her with excitement, saying you just heard about the fantastic investment opportunity she offered an acquaintance of yours and you wanted to get in on the action. I won’t mind that you violated her “strictest confidence”, honest.

Owning the Future: Looting the Library:

” As we plunge

into the digital realm, the nation’s 16,000 public libraries are

striving to uphold their tradition as protectors of public access to

new books and articles. But publishers, in an increasingly bald,

frontal assault on the library’s mission, have something very

different in mind: a pay-per-use model for information content

that will largely shut libraries out.

The battle is being waged on many fronts, from legislative

initiatives and lawsuits to the publishing industry’s unilateral

pursuit of copy-protection technologies that will keep

users—including libraries—from sharing digital content.”

Pat Schroeder, in a former life a distinguished progressive Congressional representative from Colorado and now chief lobbyist for the publishing industry, “has been quoted as saying that

publishers have to ‘learn to push back’ against libraries, which

she portrays as an organized band of pirates!” Technology Review And: The science world is in revolt at power of the journal owners: “Scientists around the world are in revolt against moves by a

powerful group of private corporations to lock decades of publicly

funded western scientific research into expensive,

subscription-only electronic databases.” The Guardian

The Quest for Justice: Aryeh Neier’s essay reviews a number of books on war crimes tribunals, the truth-and-reconciliation commission model, and the modern problem of making a people think about their responsibility for the atrocities committed in their name. New York Review of Books

Corporate anthropology: Dirt-free research. I studied cultural anthropology as an undergraduate. Money wasn’t the reason I didn’t go into the field, but it could have been; job prospects in anthropology never extended far beyond the campus — except to things like an uneasy marriage to oil companies consulting on how to exploit indigenous people’s land rights in “culturally sensitive” ways. But now it appears anthropology has successfully, comfortably reinvented itself as a tool of the domestic corporate economy. CNN

A Brief History of SPAM®, and Spam: ‘In a policy statement on SPAM® and the Internet posted on its website, Hormel now

says that it “does not object” to use of the slang term “spam” to describe unsolicited

commercial e-mail.

Instead, the company asks only that people writing specifically about square, canned

pork follow a set of trademark guidelines.’ Wired

“You have to be courageous to publicly criticize the Church

of Scientology. The organization recently proved — again

— how far it will go to investigate, smear and intimidate

critics… Scientology claims that it has reformed

and says it should be treated like any

other church. But the Jesse Prince case

and others continue to set this church

apart.” St. Petersburg Times

State of the Art: Zeroing In on Wristwear New York Times

Bush Is Putting Team in Place for a Full-Bore Assault on Regulation. Not just in the areas of the environment and energy, but everywhere. Among other tidbits in this article is news of a Harvard professor tapped by Shrub as an appointee for a major regulatory post (whose research on risks is a favorite of big business) who believes low-level dioxin exposure is good for you. At first glance, this anti-regulatory gobbledegook might sound appealing to those of you readers who are of the libertarian persuasion, but is the corporate terrorism against our environment, our pockets and our bodies really the price you want to pay for illusory relief from government tyranny? I was pointed to this article, by the way, by Phil Agre’s Red Rock Eater Digest mailing list. Phil has started to see the new president as a four-letter word; I notice he’s begun to refer to him as “B—.”

Chinese President Jiang Zemin has also had some recent harsh words for Li’l George, says CNN. ‘Jiang is said to have called Bush

“logically unsound; confused and

unprincipled; unwise to the extreme,”

at a high level internal Communist

Party meeting. ‘ And let’s not forget the simple classical epithet, liar: Washington Post or New York Times.

Bush Is Putting Team in Place for a Full-Bore Assault on Regulation. Not just in the areas of the environment and energy, but everywhere. Among other tidbits in this article is news of a Harvard professor tapped by Shrub as an appointee for a major regulatory post (whose research on risks is a favorite of big business) who believes low-level dioxin exposure is good for you. At first glance, this anti-regulatory gobbledegook might sound appealing to those of you readers who are of the libertarian persuasion, but is the corporate terrorism against our environment, our pockets and our bodies really the price you want to pay for illusory relief from government tyranny? I was pointed to this article, by the way, by Phil Agre’s Red Rock Eater Digest mailing list. Phil has started to see the new president as a four-letter word; I notice he’s begun to refer to him as “B—.”

Chinese President Jiang Zemin has also had some recent harsh words for Li’l George, says CNN. ‘Jiang is said to have called Bush

“logically unsound; confused and

unprincipled; unwise to the extreme,”

at a high level internal Communist

Party meeting. ‘ And let’s not forget the simple classical epithet, liar: Washington Post or New York Times.

Bush Is Putting Team in Place for a Full-Bore Assault on Regulation. Not just in the areas of the environment and energy, but everywhere. Among other tidbits in this article is news of a Harvard professor tapped by Shrub as an appointee for a major regulatory post (whose research on risks is a favorite of big business) who believes low-level dioxin exposure is good for you. At first glance, this anti-regulatory gobbledegook might sound appealing to those of you readers who are of the libertarian persuasion, but is the corporate terrorism against our environment, our pockets and our bodies really the price you want to pay for illusory relief from government tyranny? I was pointed to this article, by the way, by Phil Agre’s Red Rock Eater Digest mailing list. Phil has started to see the new president as a four-letter word; I notice he’s begun to refer to him as “B—.”

Chinese President Jiang Zemin has also had some recent harsh words for Li’l George, says CNN. ‘Jiang is said to have called Bush

“logically unsound; confused and

unprincipled; unwise to the extreme,”

at a high level internal Communist

Party meeting. ‘ And let’s not forget the simple classical epithet, liar: Washington Post or New York Times.

More on the Face on Mars: an Astronomy Picture of the Day closeup. (Click on it today; link changes daily. You can find it in the archive afterwards.)

The blink below about the new ‘aliteracy’ has stimulated some discussion offline. While not solely, or probably even centrally, attributable to the computerization of our consciousness, it’s worth asking what technological advances are doing to the English language and language in general, as MIT media technology professor Michael Hawley does in Things That Matter: Waiting for Linguistic Viagra.

It’s important to communicate. It’s important to have a lingua

franca. But it’s also important to think differently. The most fertile,

thriving cultures have a balance of order and chaos, with

constant ferment. But today’s computer media are flat and

Anglocentric. Things are a bit too stuck, a bit too ordered. Both

within the machines and across the network, we could enjoy a

little more linguistic turmoil. Technology Review

By the way, my gratitude to Fred Lapides for pointing out to me this epigram by Hawley — who’s an interesting, prolific, guy — atop Mark Woods’ wood s lot: “Language is the mind’s opposable thumb.” I like that… as much as William Burrough’s comment about language being a virus… and Laurie Anderson’s immortalization of the latter in song. Looking at wood s lot today, you’ll find, from Wittgenstein: “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” And speaking of minor bewitchments by language, Mark, I know, you’re “Woods”, not “Wood”, so “woodlot” just wouldn’t work, but the lack of an apostrophe in “wood s lot” has always struck me like an itch I can’t scratch. [Oh, there, I just scratched it.]

“We at Literary

Kicks believe in deconstructionism as long as you

clean up after you’re done. ” LitKicks: “The site is devoted to a few experimental literary

movements that tried to uncover some deeper

truths about life. In studying the life stories of the

writers as well as their works, there are sometimes

even more interesting truths to be revealed than

are found in the works themselves… And we do not believe

masterpieces exist, nor do we want them to. We

prefer the glory of brilliant mistakes.” Four main sections cover the Transcendentalists, what they refer to as ‘La Boheme’ (Verlaine, Rimbaud, Baudelaire… and Blake), the Beats and the post-Beat Hippie writers.

Could Senate Balance of Power Shift Again? As I speculated when I noted Jeffords’ switch below, “(t)he fragile balance of power could be further altered or even shifted back in the GOP’s

favor if another senator were to switch parties or forced to give up their seat in the

Senate.” ABC News has an improbably expansive list here considering nine other fence-sitters as well as the seats of the potentially indisposed Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, which would probably go to the Democrats.

I was out of town and not weblogging on Saturday, so I missed my chance to note Miles’ 75th birthday. Fortunately, journalist and online friend (“e-friend”?) Jim Higgins wrote to point me to this article he recently wrote on Davis, which makes an important point on the lack of attention paid to Miles’ electric years from the late ’60’s onward. Higgins describes Dutch guitarist Paul Tingen’s Miles Beyond, which claims that Davis’ plugged-in years still pack plenty of influence. I’d have to say I fit Higgins’ description of “many

listeners from the jazz continuum (who) dismiss his electric

era as a mistake, a sellout, a dead end in bad odor” I make an exception for In a Silent Way, at which I imagine most electric Miles fans scoff, probably because of its transitional nature. It’s not being plugged-in per se that’s the problem for me, any more than I would’ve joined the Newport Folk Festival audience in boo’ing Dylan when he played electric. It was rather the bastardization of jazz by funkifying and rockifying it that was the problem for my tastes. I’ve been relieved that many electric jazz musicians have, more recently, migrated back to straight-ahead acoustic formats, including Miles’ former sidemen Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Bush Is Putting Team in Place for a Full-Bore Assault on Regulation. Not just in the areas of the environment and energy, but everywhere. Among other tidbits in this article is news of a Harvard professor tapped by Shrub as an appointee for a major regulatory post (whose research on risks is a favorite of big business) who believes low-level dioxin exposure is good for you. At first glance, this anti-regulatory gobbledegook might sound appealing to those of you readers who are of the libertarian persuasion, but is the corporate terrorism against our environment, our pockets and our bodies really the price you want to pay for illusory relief from government tyranny? I was pointed to this article, by the way, by Phil Agre’s Red Rock Eater Digest mailing list. Phil has started to see the new president as a four-letter word; I notice he’s begun to refer to him as “B—.”

Chinese President Jiang Zemin has also had some recent harsh words for Li’l George, says CNN. ‘Jiang is said to have called Bush

“logically unsound; confused and

unprincipled; unwise to the extreme,”

at a high level internal Communist

Party meeting. ‘ And let’s not forget the simple classical epithet, liar: Washington Post or New York Times.