Scientists consider protocol for massive asteroid impact: “A group of scientists is working on a standardized protocol for dealing with the possibility
of a comet or massive asteroid striking the Earth, saying humans can do more than the dinosaurs ever could before a colossal impact
precipitated their extinction 65 millions years ago.” Nando Times

More on how much slack Li’l George catches from the Washington press corps. “The truth is, this new President has done things with relative impunity that would have been huge uproars if they had occurred under Clinton. Take it from someone who made a living writing about those uproars..There is no well-coordinated corps of agrieved and methodical people who start each day looking for ways to expose and undermine a new president… It is Bush’s good fortune that the liberal equivalent of this conservative coterie does not exist.” Washington Post

AA Unmasked: “For 66 years, AA has been the refuge of last resort for millions of desperate alcoholics who have hit
bottom. AA has always been free for the taking, and as testament to its revolutionary Twelve Steps,
its program has been successfully adapted over the years to over 40 12-step fellowships. But
throughout AA’s 66 years runs a history of mistreatment of non-alcoholic addicts and dually addicted
alcoholics that is not in keeping with AA’s own criteria for membership and the spiritual principles the
program espouses.” The Village Voice I’m not sure I agree with this essay that AA ought to embrace drug abusers’ problems. The central importance of identification to the self-help process, the vastly different societal attitude toward alcohol use as opposed to drug addiction, and often the demographic differences between the drug-addicted and the alcoholic all argue for ‘separate but equal’ programs. A drug abuser can attend AA — the ‘steps’, which include acknowledging powerlessness, asking for help, taking things one day at a time, etc., are the same — especially if the more suitable NA meetings are not available enough, but I advise those who do to listen to the alcohol recovery talk as analogy, rather than attempt to explicitly engage the group around their drug abuse issues. The dually-addicted (alcohol and drugs) are the losers in this process, of course.

But I’m even more concerned with the plight of another ‘dual-diagnosis’ clientele, those dually diagnosed with alcohol and a major mental illness. AA groups have usually proven themselves undiscriminating about the differences between self-administered drugs of abuse and therapeutic drugs used for major mental illnesses under a doctor’s supervision. Countless patients have reported to me that, needing appropriate treatment both for their alcoholism and their psychiatric illness, they are caught between a rock and a hard place, needing to attend AA but slammed by its blanket condemnation of ‘mood-altering drugs’. Different AA groups have diferent degrees of enlightenment on this issue, and I’ve given patients permission to be choosy in this regard. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised about this attitude within AA, since it is reflective of a general societal attitude that the psychiatrically ill rely on drugs to feel better because they lack the willpower or resolve to get over their difficulties on their own.

By the way, if you’re interested in how AA works (or doesn’t), think about trying to find a copy of visionary Gregory Bateson’s 1971 essay ‘The Cybernetics of “Self”: A Theory of Alcoholism’, which appeared in his now-out-of-print Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and was reprinted in the exhaustive 1992 The Restoration of Dialogue: Readings in the Philosophy of Clinical Psychology edited by Ronald B. Miller.

Patients Embrace New Generation of Imaging Machines. Claustrophobia has made many patients, and imaging centers, flock to open MRI scanners. Critics say that this is an entrepreneurial phenomenon and patients do not realize that engineering limitations (on the strength of the magnetic field generated in the open machines, as compared with the conventional closed confining ones) make the scans far less accurate, defeating the advantages of MRI. New York Times

“You have a bona fide story here. It’s the first
federal execution in nearly 40 years and
the biggest crime in U.S. history.” Story of McVeigh’s Death Gives Journalists Pause: ‘(M)any news people are grappling with the question of what exactly so many of them
will be doing in Terre Haute that morning (of May 16th). For even as a satellite-dish invasion of
the prison property begins later this week, producers and news executives say
they are determined to observe the solemnity of the occasion and keep it from
taking on a carnival atmosphere.

“There is nothing extravagant and nothing excessive,” said Phil Alongi, a senior
producer for NBC News in charge of logistics for Terre Haute, who nonetheless
will be sending 40 technicians, producers and reporters for it. “We’re trying to
be very sensitive to all the folks who will be affected. This is a very hard story to
cover: a person is dying. We’re not going to get into all that anchor booth stuff,
with the lighting and who has the most of what.” New York Times My prediction? Carnival atmosphere will prevail; the media circus is inevitable.

Borneo’s apes face extinction as jungle shrinks. “Environmentalists say that in the past decade, the number of apes on Borneo and nearby
Sumatra islands has halved to about 25,000. Within another 10 years, they are likely to be
extinct if the government does not act urgently.

But swift action to protect the environment is not of the highest concern to Indonesian politicians at
the moment. The economy is in tatters; a political crisis is occupying leaders, and communal
fighting is gripping much of the world’s fourth-most-populous country.

Throughout this sprawling archipelagic country, loggers are wiping out centuries-old tropical rain
forests, much of them illegally, as fast as the trees can be chain-sawed. Even national parks, the
last sanctuaries for many species, are being destroyed.” Here’s a blink to the Balikpapan Orangutan Survival Foundation, for those who might think efforts on behalf of the survival of the ‘gentle apes’ are perhaps at least as worthy as those on behalf of their less gentle cousins. Toronto Globe and Mail

Professor set to ‘control’ wife by
cyborg implant. “Surgeons are preparing to create the first husband and wife
cyborgs: they intend to implant computer chips in a British
professor and his wife to see if they can communicate
sensation and movement by thought alone.” I don’t know if it’s just the way The Times covered it, but the wife’s comments on being part of such a momentous event seem pretty prosaic. She is worried about going under anaesthesia for the implant procedure, and she says she agreed to do it because she didn’t want her husband linked up to another woman. Perhaps the ‘control’ issue in that marriage is settled even without a chip implant? The Sunday Times

This Juice Gets Joints Jumping. U.S. ski team surgeon and orthopedist develops Joint Juice, a “new edgy drink” [I hope this is ‘edgy’ as in ‘on the edge’ rather than ‘on edge’…] containing glucosamine, which preliminary evidence suggests can facilitate the maintenance and proliferation of cartilage. The drink is being marketed to arthritis sufferers and athletes concerned with preventing joint breakdown. I’m not sure the developer’s boast that “it took three years to develop because (glucosamine) tastes so bad” is actually a selling point. Wired

“…and if you think Peace is a common goal, well that goes to show just how little you know!” BushWacker is “a weblog on Bush and serious politics” by an FmH reader. Best wishes, Fred!

The FTC Pushes Music Censorship As Consumer Protection: ‘First there was the September
Federal Trade Commission report entitled “Marketing Violent Entertainment to Children.” Then there
was a wild hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee, in which Lynne Cheney submitted her
review of Eminem’s new album: “It is despicable. It is horrible. This is dreadful. This is shameful. This
is awful.” Then last Tuesday the FTC released a follow-up report, singling out the record industry for
pernicious marketing practices. Thursday, Joe Lieberman, along with senators Herb Kohl
(D-Wisconsin) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-New York), introduced the Media Marketing
Accountability Act of 2001. The bill would “treat the marketing of adult-rated movies, music, and
video games to children like any other deceptive act that harms consumers . . . [I]t would give the
FTC the authority . . . to penalize companies that violate this provision with civil fines up to $11,000
per offense.” ‘

And “saving kids from offensive lyrics is nothing new, as this time line demonstrates.” Village Voice

The FTC Pushes Music Censorship As Consumer Protection: ‘First there was the September
Federal Trade Commission report entitled “Marketing Violent Entertainment to Children.” Then there
was a wild hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee, in which Lynne Cheney submitted her
review of Eminem’s new album: “It is despicable. It is horrible. This is dreadful. This is shameful. This
is awful.” Then last Tuesday the FTC released a follow-up report, singling out the record industry for
pernicious marketing practices. Thursday, Joe Lieberman, along with senators Herb Kohl
(D-Wisconsin) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-New York), introduced the Media Marketing
Accountability Act of 2001. The bill would “treat the marketing of adult-rated movies, music, and
video games to children like any other deceptive act that harms consumers . . . [I]t would give the
FTC the authority . . . to penalize companies that violate this provision with civil fines up to $11,000
per offense.” ‘

And “saving kids from offensive lyrics is nothing new, as this time line demonstrates.” Village Voice

The FTC Pushes Music Censorship As Consumer Protection: ‘First there was the September
Federal Trade Commission report entitled “Marketing Violent Entertainment to Children.” Then there
was a wild hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee, in which Lynne Cheney submitted her
review of Eminem’s new album: “It is despicable. It is horrible. This is dreadful. This is shameful. This
is awful.” Then last Tuesday the FTC released a follow-up report, singling out the record industry for
pernicious marketing practices. Thursday, Joe Lieberman, along with senators Herb Kohl
(D-Wisconsin) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-New York), introduced the Media Marketing
Accountability Act of 2001. The bill would “treat the marketing of adult-rated movies, music, and
video games to children like any other deceptive act that harms consumers . . . [I]t would give the
FTC the authority . . . to penalize companies that violate this provision with civil fines up to $11,000
per offense.” ‘

And “saving kids from offensive lyrics is nothing new, as this time line demonstrates.” Village Voice

The chamber revolution: “It’s never been harder for string quartets to make a living.” Telegraph UK And: What’s New in Classical Music? Not Much. “We’re still too close to the 20th century to say for sure, but most people would
probably pick film as the international art form of the era, with pop music a close
second. In comparison, classical music was hardly a contender: quite a slip from
the highs of the 19th century. Classical music is in trouble, and unless some basic
things change, the troubles will continue in the 21st century.” Except for special events for informed audiences in international cultural capitals, classical music is culturally marginal. New York Times

The FTC Pushes Music Censorship As Consumer Protection: ‘First there was the September
Federal Trade Commission report entitled “Marketing Violent Entertainment to Children.” Then there
was a wild hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee, in which Lynne Cheney submitted her
review of Eminem’s new album: “It is despicable. It is horrible. This is dreadful. This is shameful. This
is awful.” Then last Tuesday the FTC released a follow-up report, singling out the record industry for
pernicious marketing practices. Thursday, Joe Lieberman, along with senators Herb Kohl
(D-Wisconsin) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-New York), introduced the Media Marketing
Accountability Act of 2001. The bill would “treat the marketing of adult-rated movies, music, and
video games to children like any other deceptive act that harms consumers . . . [I]t would give the
FTC the authority . . . to penalize companies that violate this provision with civil fines up to $11,000
per offense.” ‘

And “saving kids from offensive lyrics is nothing new, as this time line demonstrates.” Village Voice

Making the Cut. The forthcoming enormous Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism establishes critical theory as a basic component of the college-level study of literature and sets the canon, even after the publisher had the editors cut a number of figures from the book, complaining that its size would make it too expensive and unwieldy to market widely. But it is much more theory than literary criticism, the editors having concluded that it would be difficult to include examples of ‘close reading’ of texts with which a less-broadly-read audience might not be sufficiently familiar. One critic opines:

“Criticism
implies some engagement with writing, but there’s almost none of
that here. Norton anthologies have always been about
literature. This reflects a really unfortunate trend toward the
study of ideas about ideas about literature. It’s metacriticism,
really.” Chronicle of Higher Education [via Robot Wisdom]

“Scientists have confirmed that the first
genetically altered humans have been born and
are healthy.

Up to 30 such children have been born, 15 of
them as a result of one experimental
programme at a US laboratory.

But the technique has
been criticised as
unethical by some
scientists and would be
illegal in many
countries, including the
United Kingdom.” BBC The New York Times spin on the story is different, choosing to highlight the fact that these babies have genetic material from three different people.

Jay Belsky doesn’t play well with others: “Colleagues of the controversial child-care expert (featured prominently in coverage of last week’s study showing a link between increased aggression in children and time spent in day care) say he
hogs the limelight, has an agenda and makes alarmist claims
that the evidence doesn’t support.” Salon

China’s Execution, Inc.: “The People’s Republic Has Long Been Suspected of Selling
Organs From Prisoners. Now One New York Doctor Knows the
Rumors Are True.

In China, human rights groups say, citizens have been executed for nonviolent offenses like taking
bribes, credit card theft, small-scale tax evasion, and stealing truckloads of vegetables. Political
dissidents have also been sentenced to death. Chinese embassy officials did not respond to requests
for comment, but in the past the government has denied promoting the for-profit organ trade…

Executions in China have surged to 400 in April alone as the
Communist government conducts another of its periodic “strike hard” crackdowns on crime. During
the most recent campaign, in 1996, more than 4000 prisoners were killed…

Even in a normal year China executes more inmates than in all other nations combined, reports
Amnesty International. In 1999, the confirmed toll reached 1263, according to the organization,
which gathers its statistics from tallies published, for propaganda purposes, in government-run
newspapers.” Village Voice

A Guide to the Hall of Fame of Cartoonist Cranks. “Cranks are people who
get stuck on an issue and can’t shut up
about it. It always pops up, and always in
the wrong place. You could be discussing
the funny thing you just heard on the train
and within seconds you’re back to getting
that damned marriage penalty tax cut —
NOW. Cranks, they just can’t let it go. The
world irritates them so, what with its
dimwitted Presidents, half-baked legal
system, and all those noisy kids riding their
damn bikes on your lawn.” Suck

Review of the Field Guide to the Difficult Patient Interview by Platt and Gordon. JAMA

Lethality Without Guilt? ‘The U.S. military is trying to
go green, and not just with berets or fatigues.

In a multimillion dollar project, the Army has
come up with a new bullet said to be just as
deadly as the old lead-based one but cleaner for the Earth.

“We want to be good stewards of the environment,” said Army spokeswoman
Karen Baker.’ Fox News

‘Stem cells” can be harvested from postmortem brains and surgical specimens, up to twenty hours postmortem. Ethical conflicts about the use of fetal stem cells could be avoided if this proved a viable source of tissue to treat neurodegenerative diseases, for example. Nature

Chevron redubs ship named for Bush aide. “Leaving a wave of controversy in its wake, one of
the most visible reminders of the Bush
administration’s ties to big oil – the 129,000-ton
Chevron tanker Condoleezza Rice – has quietly
been renamed, Chevron officials acknowledged
yesterday.

… The giant vessel was part of the international fleet
of the San Francisco- based multinational oil firm,
christened several years ago in honor of Rice, a
longtime Chevron board member. Rice, a former
Stanford University provost, served on Chevron’s
board from 1991 until Jan. 15, when she
resigned after Bush named her his top national
security aide. ” SF Chronicle

The Execution Tapes: Radio Documentary by Sound Portraits. Controversial show aired on WNYC in New York, including recordings made in Georgia’s death house during state electrocutions; the first time the public gets to hear what happens during a state-sponsored killing. Read the transcripts or listen in Real Audio.

“My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub,” says Grover Norquist: ‘Field Marshal’ of the Bush Plan .

‘Stocky, bearded and owlish, Norquist, 45, is a thumb-in-the-eye radical rightist whose tactical sophistication and singularity of purpose has led observers
to compare him, with some drollery, to Lenin. A Harvard-educated intellectual and self-conscious student of the left, over the past decade Norquist has
eclipsed such older stalwarts as Ed Feulner of the Heritage Foundation, David Keene of the American Conservative Union and Paul Weyrich of the Free
Congress Foundation to emerge as the managing director of the hard-core right in Washington. But while firmly planted on the extreme end of the
political spectrum, Norquist has also built a solid working alliance with the Fortune 500 corporate elite and its K Street lobbyists. “What he’s managed to
do is to chain the ideological conservatives together with the business guys, who have money, and to put that money to work in the service of the
conservative movement,” says Roger Hickey of the Campaign for America’s Future, who’s repeatedly clashed with Norquist. “And he picks big issues.”
Besides taxes, Norquist is also the go-to guy on virtually all of the right’s favorite agenda items, from privatization of Social Security and Medicare to
school vouchers and deregulation.’ The Nation

Flown Soyuz Descent Capsule to be Auctioned:” A flown Russian descent capsule from Soyuz
TM-26 will be only the second flown manned capsule to be publicly
auctioned, and is the only joint U.S./MIR spacecraft ever to be
offered for sale. This is a historic piece of equipment, which comes ‘fully loaded’ and
includes an invitation for two to attend a Russian space launch, a
guided VIP tour of Star City and a tour of RSC Energia. Perhaps
even more important, all shipping, packing and customs detail will
be handled free of charge to the winning bidder.” Somewhat scorched from reentry, naturally.

Large Art Creates a New Breed of Movers and Shakers: “Art has always moved the masses, but it
takes a cadre of specialists to move massive
art. … With all the variables, it is not
surprising that museums rely on experts,
usually outside contractors, to do the work.” New York Times

Seven Days of Spam: a writer responds to all 107 spam e-mails he receives in a typical week, and what has he got in the end for his efforts? LA Times

Where are the media as Bush redefines himself, and us? “After three months, what do
we know about the Bush administration? Less
than we should. A review of the press coverage
of President Bush reveals some unexpected and
troubling features of contemporary political
journalism.

What is most striking is that the image emerging
of Bush as president is so indistinct. Even the
most serious newspapers in the country have
pulled back dramatically on covering the
presidency.” Sacramento Bee

Excerpts from Slanting the Story: the forces that shape the news by Trudy Lieberman:

Part 1, Black Holes of Power: how, with the help of the
mainstream media, right-wing think tanks have moved their ideas
to the front of the national agenda and engineered big changes in
public policy.

Part 2, Ralph Nader and the Right: how the right wing has
co-opted the media strategies pioneered by consumer activist
Ralph Nader.

Part 3, Courting the Press: how the Manhattan Institute put tort
reform on the national agenda.

Part 4, Clubbing the Press: how conservatives, by criticizing the
“liberal” press, have moved the media further to the right.

Part 5, Advancing the Cause: how the Heritage
Foundation has framed the debate on Medicare reform.

TomPaine.com

Gore in 2004? That’s a toughie for Democrats. “(H)is popular-vote victory and near-tie in Florida have, at least with
some, left Gore with a plausible rationale for a comeback campaign in
2004.

That’s a prospect the Democrats need to mull long and hard.

For whether he campaigns as moderate New Democrat or a
tub-thumping neopopulist, if the party’s 2004 nominee concludes his
convention speech by turning to plant a lingering liplock on Tipper, the
Democrats may well have missed one of the most basic lessons from
Campaign 2000.” Boston Globe

Found on memepool: “Curiosity is building around Jeanine Salla‘s connections with the film A.I.
… and with the mysterious death of Evan Chan. Some amateur
investigators are trying to unravel the mystery.”

British woman killed by own bomb “… in Athens yesterday when a bomb she was
carrying in her car exploded.

Police investigators think that her rottweiller
probably set off the remote control detonator.” Telegraph UK

Outrage at Indonesia Court’s Timor Murder Sentences: “Indonesia jailed six
men for up to 20 months on Friday over
the brutal slaying of three U.N. aid
workers in West Timor, and immediately
earned international outrage for being
too lenient.” Reuters

Rational rant about Bob Kerrey’s confession of war atrocities from Jorn’s friend Jeff Dorchen (This Is Hell):

“I really want all you listeners to look at what stories get told about the Vietnam war. Because they really concern us. If we allow the
Vietnam war to become story about a series of tragic accidents, I think we’ll really lose something. We’ll lose the vivid image of a war that
really was one of the purest of all wars. It’s an example not of war’s insanity, but of its rationality. Of the calculatedly vicious, violent,
unconscionable decisions of those who were the managers of the war. There was no separation from the dark and the light. There was no
heart of darkness here in the heart of the jungle, with civilization so many miles away from the madness of primal evil. Evil civilization was
supervising the madness, moving the pieces on the map below into each other for the purpose of creating hell.

If we don’t remember this key aspect of the war against Indochina we run the risk of slipping into the complacent stance that ‘all people
really just want to do what’s right– like in the Vietnam War, our good intentions just got totally out of hand, and it just kept snowballing into
this monster no one could stop.’ No, there are people who have no such desire to do what’s right, they’re perfectly happy to do what they
know to be so horrible that they’d rather kill innocent people than let it be discovered.”

Jorn Barger, in Robot Wisdom, pointed today to “Cat Yronwode’s Internet romance”. I don’t know why; perhaps she’s a friend; I surfed out of curiosity. Among other things I found, these are some links to the writings of the man she just married, who refers to himself in various ways including “nagasiva yronwode: tyaginator, nigris (333), nocTifer, lorax666, boboroshi”. Not for the faint of heart; not quite sure why I’m linking to them…

Monk Mind and Eternity: “Entertainment is a form of enlightenment which takes
place in eternity. Eternity is so far away, so unreal, and so
subtle that few of us can reach it. We find it so appealing
to spend our time in eternity. We find eternity so appealing
that we go to lengths to engage it. We engage eternity by
focussing on our navel or watching our breath or counting socks.
Some lazes and Buddha-heds have named this delightful activity
‘monk mind’, because the mind, in its efforts to engage eternity,
sits quietly and obediently as a monk in a zendo. Probably a
healthier way to engage it, if you must engage eternity, is by
jumping about wildly like a monkey in a cage, dancing, walking,
etc. But advice from Far Western sages would tell us that
doing whatever we want to do is the healthiest way to handle
entertainment or encounter ‘eternity’.”

Hermetic Self-Destruction Ritual: “Beyond the possible necessities of having contacted and communed
with the Holy Guardian Angel, developing one’s Body of Light to
absolute perfection, and resolving all material world affairs,
the following items will be necessary:

Poison (suffient to effect a slow but sure death)

Bottle of ticks (ravenous and lively)

Scalpel (seriously sharp)

Ice Pick (rusty)

Bolt Cutters (light but effective)

Acid (pref. Aqua Regia or some more potent concoction)

Chain Saw (the lighter the better)

(optional) Firecrackers (illegal in some states)”

Encouraging Suicide — Frequently Asked Questions:
“Attempts at suicide, and suicidal thoughts or feelings are usually
a symptom indicating that a person is ready and needful of a change,
often as a result of some event or series of events that one
personally finds overwhelmingly traumatic or distressing… Since this decision can be extremely difficult to make, this
article is an attempt to provide encouragement for suicide, so
that we may be prepared to recognize and help ourselves to end
the pain and the parasitic drain on ecological and social resources.”

The Satanism of JDeboo:
“Having received volume #5 of Jeffrey Deboo’s (hereafter
‘JDeboo’) Satanist essays in 1998, I’d like to to provide a
review of his expressions on the subject of Satanism as I feel
his text is the most eloquent and convincing of Satanists that
I have seen besides that which flows from my own cursor.”

[Poor Cat??!]

“In a move that reflected a growing frustration with America’s attitude toward international organizations and treaties, the United States was voted off the United Nations Human Rights Commission today for the first time since the panel’s founding under American leadership in 1947. The ouster of the United States from the commission while nations like Sudan and Pakistan were chosen for membership was certain to generate further hostility to the United Nations among conservatives in Washington. The unexpected move, which came in a secret vote, was apparently supported even by some friends of the United States. The vote also served notice that a bloc of developing nations opposed to American policies is becoming much stronger and more effective, and that Washington can no longer expect to be elected automatically to important panels.” New York Times Best seen as the world community’s verdict on America-under-the-Clown-Prince, it seems. Reuters

Murder Victims’ Families Try to Spare McVeigh: “Right up until convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh takes his last breath on May 16, Bud Welch says he will fight to stop the execution of the man who
took his only daughter in the Oklahoma City blast.

Death penalty opponent Welch lost his daughter Julie Marie in the Alfred P. Murrah federal
building bombing on April 19, 1995, and says that killing McVeigh will only
deepen his pain.”

Lionel Tiger: ‘Brain-and-Mouth Disease’: Nonsense About Low-Fat Diets New York Press

The Quest For A Superkid: “Geniuses are made, not born — or so parents are told. But can we
really train baby brains, and should we try?” Time

Strange articles are popping up in the British Medical Journal, observes the acerbic Feedback column in The New Scientist.

Brain, genetic studies shed light on stuttering

‘… “For a long time, stuttering
was thought to be psychogenic, rooted purely in psychology,” says
Allen Braun of the National Institute on Deafness and Other
Communication Disorders. “That’s clearly not the case now.”

Genetic quirk? Now the focus is on genes and the inner workings of
the brain. Investigators announced last November at the American
Speech-Language-Hearing Association meeting that they had found the
first tangible evidence of a genetic aberration underlying at least some
cases of stuttering. What’s more, new PET imaging studies have
revealed striking differences in the brain physiology of stutterers and
nonstutterers. Stutterers, it turns out, may be using the wrong side of
their brains when they speak. “The right hemisphere seems to be
interrupting or interfering with the left hemisphere,” says Peter Fox,
neurologist and director of research imaging at the University of Texas
Health Science Center.

The new findings don’t mean that the crushing anxiety many stutterers
feel has nothing to do with their affliction. But researchers now suspect
that psychological factors, such as nervousness and stress, are not the
starting point; instead they “aggravate, exacerbate, and perpetuate,”
says Edward Conture, professor of hearing and speech sciences at
Vanderbilt University. A neurological mishap may cause a person to
stutter on a word for the first time; later the stutterer might remember the
embarrassing experience, making him more likely to stumble over the
word again.’

And writer Edward Hoagland’s memoir of his lofelong struggle with stuttering:

Stuttering is like trying to run with loops of rope around your feet. And
yet you feel that you do want to run because you may get more words
out that way before you trip: an impulse you resist so other people won’t
tell you to “calm down” and “relax.” Because they themselves may
stammer a little bit when jittery or embarrassed, it’s hard for a real
stutterer like me to convince a new acquaintance that we aren’t
perpetually in such a nervous state and that it’s quite normal for us to be
at the mercy of strangers. Strangers are usually civilized, once the
rough and sometimes inadvertently hurtful process of recognizing what
is wrong with us is over (that we’re not laughing, hiccuping, coughing, or
whatever) and in a way we plumb them for traces of schadenfreude. A
stutterer knows who the good guys are in any crowded room, as well as
the location of each mocking gleam, and even the St. Francis type, who
will wait until he thinks nobody is looking to wipe a fleck of spittle off his
face.

I’ve stuttered for more than 60 years, and the mysteries of the
encumbrance still catch me up…” U.S.News [via higgy]

Rising Waters: “The seven million inhabitants of the Pacific Islands have
already experienced the first effects of global warming.
Elevated water temperatures, violent storms and rising sea
levels are beginning to destroy delicate ecosystems, forcing
islanders to consider leaving their homes and communities.
Cultures that have thrived for centuries are threatened with
extinction.

Tracing the impacts of climate change from the tropical
Pacific to the island of Manhattan, Rising Waters:
Global Warming and the Fate of the Pacific Islands examines international policies and the lives of
those most urgently affected by the global warming debate.”

The Breasts in my Camera ‘So what is it that compels men to take pictures of naked women, and perhaps specifically, their breasts? Is it as
simple as breast envy? Do we all simply want our very own pair to play with and have and hold and fondle and…
you get the point. That is certainly a possibility. If a man can’t have breasts, he can at least “own” them by taking
a picture of them.’

Paul McCartney Finds a New Mode for Expressing Love and Loss. The New York Times covers his recent poetry reading at the 92nd Street Y in NYC.

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

Time Capsule Music Gets Flushed The team putting together The New York Times Capsule, being buried for our descendants in the year 3000, has had to scrap its plans to include representative late-20th century pop music because of its inability to get copyright permission from the music industry. Wired

Happy May Day!

Ethel the Blog has been watching these stories recently:

insights from J. R. McNeill’s Something New Under the
Sun: An Environmental History of the
Twentieth-Century World;

a remembrance of Harvard’s renowned ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes; I’m only just learning of, and diminished by, his death on April 10 at the age of 86. Schultes, from whom I was privileged to take a seminar as an undergraduate (he gave the class at 6:00 a.m., as I recall, to screen out the frivolous and undisciplined [yes, I attended every meeting]), was the mentor of Wade Davis, Marc Plotkin and (Ethel fails to note) Andrew Weil, and arguably one of the West’s experts on indigenous mind-altering and medicinal plant use in the Amazon. He was a swashbuckling Indiana Jones figure who “went native” with indigenous peoples in search of their botanical knowledge and a conservationist raising the hue and cry about the preservation of the rainforests decades before it was fashionable. From the New York Times’ obituary:

Dr. Schultes’s research into plants that produced hallucinogens like peyote and
ayahuasca made some of his books cult favorites among youthful drug
experimenters in the 1960’s. His findings also influenced cultural icons like Aldous
Huxley, William Burroughs and Carlos Castaneda, writers who considered
hallucinogens as the gateways to self-discovery.

Dr. Schultes disdained these self- appointed prophets of an inner reality. He
scathingly dismissed Timothy Leary, the drug guru of the 1960’s who also taught
at Harvard, for being so little versed in hallucinogenic species that he misspelled
the Latin names of the plants.

According to a 1996 article in The Los Angeles Times, when Mr. Burroughs once
described a psychedelic trip as an earth-shaking metaphysical experience, Dr.
Schultes’s response was, “That’s funny, Bill, all I saw was colors.”

coverage of James Bamford’s claim, in his new book Body of Secrets about the National Security Agency [it’s on my list…] , that the 1967 Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, fatal for 34 American sailors, was not as Israel has always claimed an accident, but carried out for counterintelligence purposes;

Orrin Hatch’s pivotal and hypocritical role in the brewing storm over Shrub’s judicial appointments; and

an interesting, head-turning followup to the Lockerbie trial suggesting it may not have been the Libyans after all who were responsible for the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing.

Several webloggers’ links to this exciting medical news show how relieved they are.

Here She Comes to Save the Day! Was This Man a Genius?, Julie Hecht’s relentless, obsessional portrait of Andy Kaufman gets “as close to answering the Kaufman question as any book, movie or REM song”, says the New York Times reviewer. I missed the whole Kaufman phenomenon since I never watched TV in those days and had a particular commitment to avoiding Saturday Night Live. I caught the Milos Forman film more recently on TV late one aimless, sleepless night, and it sounds like Hecht’s book gets at the same frustrating love-hate relationship Kaufman provoked according to the film — was he a genius? an obnoxious fool? or both? (Liked the REM song, though…)

Lunch at the White House Proves No Big Draw: ‘President Bush marked his first 100
days in office with a White House luncheon
today to which all 535 members of
Congress were invited. But only about a
third of them showed up, and the political
parties ended up squabbling over the value
of what had been billed as a bipartisan
outing.’ Dick Armey commented, “A romance has got to be reciprocal. If I were the president, I’d be starting to get courtship fatigue. How
much can you pursue these guys and have them continue to complain that you’re
not pursuing them?” The dessert was described by one guest — a Republican, no less — as “nasty.” Sorry to crow. New York Times

Pepsi Looks to a New Drink to Jolt Soda Sales. Essentially a wild cherry Mountain Dew, Pepsi engineers the new drink to add the urban minority market to other niches — Rocket Power white youth, computer programmers — it has addicted to its original high-caffeine soft drink. In so doing, it breaks ranks with stonewalllling beverage companies by acknowledging for the first time that caffeine is in soft drinks for the physiological effect, not the flavor. New York Times

Law Professor Sees Hazard in Personalized News. Intelligent filtering software [and webloggers, i.e. “intelligent filtering wetware”??] making focused information delivery possible but, argues University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein in Republic.com, can narrow minds and souls.

The last part of Sunstein’s book contains some modest proposals. He’d like to see
a large Web site that was “privately-created, and that operated as a
deliberative domain,” he said, where curious people could go to encounter a mix
of viewpoints on various topics, like abortion, gun control and politics.

He’d also encourage Web sites to offer links to opposing viewpoints as a matter
of course. “Liberal publications to conservative ones, and vice versa,” he said,
adding that government regulation of links to promote democratic values was
“worth considering.”

Wood s lot points to this essay from The Globe and Mail: When depression turns deadly, which asks “Can antidepressants transform despair into suicide?” Although there’s no love lost between me as a psychopharmacologist and the rapacious pharmaceutical manufacturers, the article is misleading. It’s no surprise that the manufacturer of Prozac, Eli Lilly, settles lawsuits out of court and tries to minimize negative evidence, but that doesn’t damn the drug, only the corporation. The research studies that purported to show a link between SSRIs and suicide are largely discredited, methodologically flawed and inconclusive. I’m familiar with several of the Boston-area psychiatrists featured prominently as critics of the SSRIs, and know them to be sensationalistic media hounds. Anecdotal reports of suicide on Prozac and other SSRIs come from a number of factors:

Early on, when these observations were first made, Prozac was being tried on the most desperately ill patients who had failed most existing antidepressant treatment. Many of us think the suicidal despair that arose in a subset of these early users was not due to a pharmacological effect of the drug but subjects’ added disappointment at its failure to live up to its miracle ‘hype’ in such recalcitrant cases. Many of the most chronically, treatment-resistant depressed cases do not represent classical ‘major depressive episodes’ which have a good prognosis for medication response, but rather the entrenched,lifelong and atypical depression of patients with personality disorders, especially borderline personality disorder. These patients are prone to both suggestibility and self-destructiveness. Suicidality is always a risk factor in unresponsive depression.

Suicidality is a risk factor in improving depression too. All antidepressants can promote suicidality in that, paradoxically, as depression responds, the first thing to change — before the despair and hopelessness that make the sufferer conclude she should end her life — may be her energy, motivation and confidence to carry out a suicide plan. It is an old chestnut in psychiatric training to watch for this problem, a skill that has fallen by the wayside with modern prescribing practices (see below).

Prozac and several other SSRIs can cause as a side effect a particularly uncomfortable kind of restlessness technically known as akathisia, which can make a person feel like jumping out of their skin — or jumping out of a window. But which can be managed and reversed.

The real culprit here regarding suicide risk is that the SSRIs were such a real advance over previous generations of antidepressants in ease of use (except for the akathisia and sexual dysfunction they cause, which were not appreciated at the outset) absence of severe side effects and nonlethality in overdose, that the prevalence of antidepressant treatment in the population exploded when they caught on. This was largely achieved by an as-yet-unheard-of marketing strategy — the manufacturers targeted not psychiatrists but internists and other primary practitioners to be their major prescribers. Very appealing to the target practitioners — they could handle their patients’ emotional complaints themselves without referrals to psychiatrists, and could offer these endlessly complaining patients (who some estimates suggest make up as much as 50% of the traffic in many primary care practices) something more than time-consuming talk in their office visits. The upshot, of course, was that depression — and, worse yet, difficult personality disorders — began to be treated without adequate time, sufficient skill in the subtle art of suicide assessment, or expertise in management of psychopharmacological side effects.

Finally, let us recall that the anti-Prozac movement was spearheaded by S*c*i*e*n*t*o*l*o*g*i*s*t*s, and that is not just an ad hominem argument! [The asterisks, of course, are because I am paranoid about persecutory lawsuits or denial-of-service attacks…]