NoMoPoMo! Ftrain

Mad Poets Society: McLean Hospital, in suburban Boston,

is not the nation’s oldest mental hospital; that distinction belongs to the Pennsylvania Hospital, in Philadelphia. Nor is it generally considered the country’s best; most professionals would probably rank the Menninger Clinic, in Topeka, Kansas, above McLean. But before the advent of diagnose-dose-and-discharge mental-health care, McLean, which sits on a gorgeous 240-acre campus in the town of Belmont, was probably the country’s most aristocratic mental institution and definitely its most literary. Ralph Waldo Emerson complained in a letter about the high costs of treatment for his brothers. In the late nineteenth century Henry Adams’s sharp-tongued wife, Clover, remarked to her father that McLean “seems to be the goal of every good and conscientious Bostonian.” Her brother, the treasurer of Harvard University, ended his life there. Reputable historians and even a former chief administrator of McLean insist that the father of American psychology, William James, was a patient there, although there is little evidence that this is true. Frederick Law Olmsted, who also died at McLean, chose the land for the campus. Atlantic Magazine

The essayist focuses on the three most famous latter-day McLean sojourners — Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. No mention of that other famous alumnus, James Taylor. McLean is where I had one of my first mental health jobs — as a ‘mental health worker’, previously known less gloriously as an ‘attendant’, when I was just out of college — and where some of my closest psychiatric friends and associates work. It’s certainly neither aristocratic nor literary anymore, and it’s dying as a clinical institution, surviving largely on expanding its research activities and bringing in grant funding. It’s about to sell off a large portion of its exquisite wooded grounds to developers, after a long and bitter battle with residents of its neighborhood and the town of Belmont in which it is situated.

Are you a classical music snob? You may have a right to gloat. Neuroscientists begin to suspect that appreciating classical music takes more grey matter. As aficionados develop dementing disease, one study shows, they lose their appreciation of classical music and begin to like pop; apparently it never goes the other way ’round. One expert concedes, however, that there are some ‘highly academic’ people who like pop music,

I have to say, however, that this goes against the grain of my own clinical experience. In my work with demented patients, most still appreciate and take comfort in classical music if that was previously their musical choice. Mere force of habit? Perhaps the emergence of new tastes in senescence is not a sign of diminished capacities but, in a paradoxical way, capacities enhanced by dementia, another study suggests. BBC

Netizens: On the History and Impact of the Net, Michael Hauben’s and Ronda Hauben’s on-line and paper book, coined the term netizen and “presents the history and impact of various aspects of the Net: the Internet, ARPANET, Usenet, etc. We hope to provide information which will help readers to understand where the Net has come from so as to help preserve its value throughout future developments and changes.” I learned on MetaFilter that Michael Hauben has just died at 27.

Kendall Clark: The Global Privileges of Whiteness — “White racism, and the White supremacist ideology it reflects, and the network of White privilege it maintains, are alive and well.

Racist expressions of White supremacist ideology maintain three particular nodes in the vast network of White privilege: White empire, White corporate profits, and aggrieved White victimhood…” monkeyfist

“The studies are very significant in that we have a group of people with no brain function … who have well-structured, lucid thought processes with reasoning and memory formation at a time when their brains are shown not to function.” Scientist Says Mind Continues After Brain Dies — “A British scientist studying heart attack patients says he is finding evidence that suggests that consciousness may continue after the brain has stopped functioning and a patient is clinically dead.

The research, presented to scientists last week at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), resurrects the debate over whether there is life after death and whether there is such a thing as the human soul.” Reuters

Japan rape report worries US: ‘The United States says it is taking reports that American soldiers may have been involved in the rape of a woman on the Japanese island of Okinawa “very seriously” ‘… yet again. BBC

Ahhh, <a href=”http://abuddha.terrashare.com/bookmark.htm

“>Abuddhas memes has moved, IMHO well worth your while to follow it to its new location…

Love Shack – an Interview with Alexa Albert — “What is life like inside a brothel? Harvard-trained physician Alexa Albert went to

Nevada’s Mustang Ranch to conduct a safe-sex study, but found herself caught up in

the lives of the women who worked there. She ended up staying for seven months.

The book that came out of the experience, Brothel: Mustang Ranch and Its Women, is

the best kind of accessible sociology — full of empathy, detail and the unique

perspective of an outsider who got deep inside.” Nerve

A Pledge Broken. Foulmouthed racist, sexist, homophobic radio shockjock Don Imus pledged to clean up his act in May, 2000 after journalist Philip Noble’s “Imus Watch” series in Tompaine.com documented his repulsive content. Noble returns to see how Imus’ pledge has fared in the ensuing year. Can you guess? How does one of Time magazine’s “twenty-five most influential Americans” get away with it?

State Farm Insurance’s ten most dangerous intersections in the U.S.

Geologist says Nessie just a trick of tectonics: ”One can imagine [a] peasant feeling a rumble next to the shores of Loch Ness,

turning to the water, and seeing roiled water and bubbles. It is not

likely that the peasant would conclude that he had witnessed a manifestation of

plate tectonics – more likely a sea monster.” [Science knows everything and only backward simpletons believe in the uknown.] Boston Globe

Thomas Book Author Says He Lied in His Attacks on Anita Hill. David Brock’s high-profile repudiation of his right-wing unscrupulousness more than makes up for the former leftie, now-rabid DavidHorowitz! Brock confesses his character assassination of Anita Hill and a witness who corroborated her allegations of harassment by Clarence Thomas… and he had Thomas’ help in the disinformation campaign. New York Times

Now showing: beta of Google image search; returns thumbnails of the ‘hits’ for your search.

Honey, I kidded the shrink… A brief history of the intertwining of psychoanalysis and cinema on the occasion of the Guardian-Observer‘s psychoanalytic film festival.

Results of the Illuminated Keyboard Competition are in. The Register

Virtually human — “I’d like to

subject it to carcinogenic materials. I think you

should be able to give it a suntan or a blister. I’m serious. I

mean, you should be able to cut it. You should be able to have

it cough up a hairball if you want to.” Disappointingly, but realistically: ‘…even the most ambitious modellers are steering clear of

one important organ: the brain. “There is every possibility of

modelling a human neuron, and perhaps a cluster of neurons,”

explains (its developer), “but modelling the human brain is outside the

realm of our reality.” ‘ New Scientist Still, might ethical dilemmas arise about whether to afford it the protections customarily reserved to things we call alive?

My Life as a Stunt Bum: “It seems like her only driving force is the desire never to let

Hurley, Crawford and Anderson down by having a

less-than-perfect butt.” The Sunday Times of London

For those who have been wondering what he’s been up to, an op-ed piece from Sunday’s Washington Post by Bill Clinton — We Can Win the War on AIDS — “The question is no longer whether we can or can’t win the war on AIDS. Of course we can. The question is: will we, or won’t we? Besieged by a common enemy, we must join together in common cause — in memory of 22 million human souls, and for the future of many millions more. Our humanity requires it.”

Survey finds two in five Bush appointees worked for his father Boston Globe

Self-Cleaning Windows to Be Sold in U.S. This Year — “Window washing ranks high on the list

of most hated household tasks, and

some glass makers are hoping that this

loathing runs deep.

Today, Pilkington, a British glass maker, is

set to outline its American sales plans for a

new technology: window glass that cleans

itself.” A coating of titanium oxice is apparently the key. New York Times

One of the more ridiculous examples of the self-serving, disempowering medicalization of everything: “Parents who want the best for their offspring, say

experts, must become amateur therapists. It’s no longer enough to be attentive, loving and caring to

children.

‘Parents don’t instinctively know how best to raise children,’ said

Jane Askew, co-founder of a parenting course in cognitive

behavioural therapy (CBT) at the faculty of health at De Montfort

University in Leicester. ‘If parents want to raise their children in

as positive a way as possible, they should all have some

training in CBT.’ ” Guardian UK

Alt-log — “ Salon used to run a column called Alt, which highlighted stories from that week’s crop of alternative weeklies from all around

the country. I loved it. They’ve stopped running it, so I’ve decided to highlight my own favorites from the week here.” –Gael Fashingbauer Cooper (who also maintains the Pop Culture Junk Mail blog and the weekly Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune weblog). Recent items in alt-log include a critique of Zagat, a pointer to “my dinner with an etiquette expert”, coverage of a “pet communicator” ‘s intervention with the reporter’s troubled cat, and an account of the attempt by the arts section of a “Mormon-stronghold Utah” newspaper to ignore a local production of The Vagina Monologues. Just for starters. Many of the links receive little more commentary than “I liked…”, “I really enjoyed…”, or “I’m a sucker for…”, but she does her footwork.

Calls to kill off living goddess: “During the past 300

years, a succession of small girls have been chosen to become kumari, or Nepal’s living goddess – a job that entails living in an ornate cloister, appearing at religious

festivals on a chariot and retiring at the age of 11 with a small pension.

But human rights activists are questioning the tradition now that the current kumari has reached puberty, obliging her to step down, and the search for her successor is

about to begin.

‘Nepal has ratified the convention on the rights of the child. It says that you can’t exploit children in the name of culture. And yet the kumari is forced to give up her childhood. She has to be a goddess instead. Her rights are being violated.’

Opponents of the tradition point to the “horrifying” ritual involved in selecting the kumari and the bizarre lifestyle the new goddess is expected to lead.

Potential kumaris, aged four or five, are taken to Kathmandu’s royal palace and locked in a darkened room filled with freshly severed buffalo heads.

The true kumari, who is believed to be an incarnation of the blood-loving goddess Durga, is said to identify herself by emerging unperturbed from the ordeal.” Guardian UK

“…a total suspension of common sense”: ‘Ministers ordered the slaughter of up to two million healthy animals despite being told by their leading foot and mouth expert that the killing was not needed

to control the disease… Officials now admit that some of the assumptions that led to the cull may have been wrong. But at the time, says Dr Paul Kitching – then head of foot and

mouth at the institute’s Pirbright Laboratory, the world’s leading centre for research on the disease – his objections were ignored.’ Independent UK

I’ve told lots of people this story by K r i s t i n T h o m a s about her replacing her Tide with RIT dye to get back at the neighbors who were helping themselves to her detergent. Most of the people I tell it to are appalled (some have asked me if I heard it from one of my patients). But IMHO her whimsical vengefulness is justified well … not the least by the fact that her antagonists kept using the bottle with the dye in it again and again and again!

Pentagon Study Casts Doubt on Missile Defense Schedule. ‘Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has indicated a willingness to

deploy a system before tests have been completed if an attack seems imminent,’ but here’s where we are so far:

‘…An October 1999 test in

which a Global Positioning System inside a mock warhead helped guide an

intercept missile toward a target over the Pacific…was successful, but two

more recent flight tests failed.

None of those tests used the kinds of sophisticated decoys that a real ballistic

missile would use to confuse an antimissile system, the report said. Instead, the

decoy in each test was a large balloon that did not look like a warhead and that

the kill vehicle’s sensors could easily distinguish from the target.

The report also asserted that the Pentagon had not even scheduled a test

involving multiple targets, the likely situation in an attack. And it found software

problems with a training simulator that made it appear as if twice as many

warheads had been fired at the United States as had been intended in a 1999

exercise.

The simulator then fired interceptors at those “phantom tracks,” and operators

were unable to override it, the report said.’ New York Times

Birth in Boston Riches, Death in Idaho Ruins: “It was an unlikely ending for a man who

had been born into a Boston Brahmin

family, who had started out with money,

charm, status and an elite education. One of

the enduring American myths is that of the

pioneer who heads West and strikes it rich.

Michael McGuckin’s story is the opposite. He

came to Idaho with everything and lost it

all, leaving behind a penniless family that so

mistrusted outsiders that his children

barricaded themselves inside their squalid

house for five days while the international

news media camped down the road.” A descent into madness, perhaps potentiated by his multiple sclerosis, propels the tragic story. New York Times

Review of this-page-intentionally-left-blank.org: “…(E)veryone has a website. And some of

these people would like to point out that we

are (they are, that’s where the

self-examination comes in) spending too

much time on the Web. Or that the Web is

not the only thing, not even the only

medium, out there. Or maybe just that the

Web is a medium.

So there’s The Last Page of the Internet. A Day

Without Weblogs. And now, taking it all one

step further, we have

this-page-intentionally-left-blank.org, a site devoted

entirely to urging webmasters to put up

blank pages on their sites in the hopes of

spurring self-reflection.

Perhaps you were expecting this review itself

to be blank. That would be too, too easy.

But, more to the point, the TPILB-Project (as

they call it) site isn’t blank, so my review

doesn’t have to be either. The TPILB-Project

engages in wispy speculation about the

nature of the Web, so I get to do it too.” Flak

An Arthur Machen Gallery — ‘Presenting a few interesting Arthur Machen editions. Most of these were contributed by Machen collectors, a

few are from my own collection, and others are “found scans”.’ Delve deeper into Machen’s life and work, which inspired among others H.P. Lovecraft and the contemporary psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, here.

I continue to be appreciative of David Anderson’s kind comments. Increasingly, I turn to Metaforage as one reaches for a daily paper, and click on an extraordinarily high proportion of his blinks. Now I’ll be even more eager to read him, waiting for further installments in his affair with Dana Scully. And don’t fail to click on the link within that story.

How Cheney Lost His Cool — “California’s energy crisis sends the veep over the edge.” Newsweek

How to Avoid a Blackout. Is the New York Times supporting utility hacking? (Scroll to the bottom of the article.)

Surprisingly, Li’l George announces support for limits on use of DNA tests to prevent genetic discrimination. “Mr. Bush may have acted

now because two senators who have long pressed for federal restrictions on the

commercial uses of genetic indicators — Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the

majority leader, and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts — said when the

Senate switched to Democratic control that they would push the legislation

through in a few months.” New York Times

The University of Virginia mounts a special exhibition on the ‘Psychedelic 60s’ — literature, art, historical context and precursors. I was there and I do remember. I feel a certain mournfulness at those who look back at the ’60’s as if at a dead artifact, frozen static in time, rather than understanding the way in which there is an ongoing living presence of its virtues in some of our lives. Even if I wear a shirt and tie to work…

Mistaken identity Researchers cast doubt on the assumption that the 300-year rampage of the Black Death through Europe was bubonic plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. The pattern of its emergence, spread, symptoms and disappearance is more consistent with an Ebola-like virus, they say. Ironically, exposure to this virus may have given some Europeans resistance to HIV infection. Guardian UK

Japan PM’s Million-Human E-Mail. Wildly popular new Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has just begun publication of his own e-zine, with over a million Japanese subscribers to the first issue. No English translation available so far of this unprecedented use of the web by a world leader to communicate to his constituency. Wired

Japan PM’s Million-Human E-Mail. Wildly popular new Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has just begun publication of his own e-zine, with over a million Japanese subscribers to the first issue. No English translation available so far of this unprecedented use of the web by a world leader to communicate to his constituency. Wired

Japan PM’s Million-Human E-Mail. Wildly popular new Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has just begun publication of his own e-zine, with over a million Japanese subscribers to the first issue. No English translation available so far of this unprecedented use of the web by a world leader to communicate to his constituency. Wired

Japan PM’s Million-Human E-Mail. Wildly popular new Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has just begun publication of his own e-zine, with over a million Japanese subscribers to the first issue. No English translation available so far of this unprecedented use of the web by a world leader to communicate to his constituency. Wired

“Windows Minesweeper (Winmine) is an offence against the victims of the mines and those who risk or sacrifice their own lives to clear them,” according to the International Campaign to Ban Winmine (ICBW). You can support their campaign to abolish Minesweeper by deleting it from your machine and helping pressure Microsoft into leaving it out of future Windows versions. The Register

The TV’s Eye Is Set on You “Americans have been watching television commercials for more than 50 years. Pretty soon, commercials will be watching them.

Cable and satellite giants are installing technology that will enable them to zap targeted TV commercials to different homes based on the occupants’ age, gender, ethnicity, income and other personal details, including what shows they watch.” LA Times

This is how Microsoft will end up running the

Internet

Dear The Register

Your Internet licence is due for renewal in two

weeks. Please contact your local Microsoft branch

for an extension. If you do not pay within 30 days

of the termination date, we will downgrade your

connection. There will be a $500 reconnection

charge.

Yours,

Microsoft Corporation

The Brain Basis of a “Consciousness Monitor”

Surgical patients under anesthesia can wake up unpredictably and be exposed to intense, traumatic pain. Current medical techniques cannot maintain depth of

anesthesia at a perfectly stable and safe level; the depth of unconsciousness may change from moment to moment. Without an effective consciousness monitor

anesthesiologists may not be able to adjust dosages in time to protect patients from pain. An estimated 40,000 to 200,000 midoperative awakenings may occur in

the United States annually. E. R. John and coauthors present the scientific basis of a practical “consciousness monitor” in two articles. One article is empirical

and shows widespread and consistent electrical field changes across subjects and anesthetic agents as soon as consciousness is lost; these changes reverse

when consciousness is regained afterward. These findings form the basis of a surgical consciousness monitor that recently received approval from the U.S. Food

and Drug Administration. This may be the first practical application of research on the brain basis of consciousness. The other John article suggests theoretical

explanations at three levels, a neurophysiological account of anesthesia, a neural dynamic account of conscious and unconscious states, and an integrative field

theory.

Memory, whose accuracy is a pillar of common knowledge, is actually quite synthetic and unreliable for the sake of making sense of things, as several studies reviewed at the website of the American Psychological Association show. First: People make sense out of stand alone effects by thinking they “remember” seeing their probable causes —

Memory “illusions” may result from the basic human need to make

sense out of events. A series of experiments has provided the first scientific evidence

that when people see effects (a student toppling onto the floor) without also seeing

its cause (a student leaning back in a chair), they automatically “fill in the blank” with

that probable cause — even if they haven’t actually seen it with their own two eyes.

The result: a memory that seems real, but isn’t. The inference may be correct, but

it’s not based on actual perception, suggesting that memory helps us to make sense

of the world, perhaps at the expense of a complete reliability.

And: Jurors distort evidence to favor their tentative verdict as they move through the course of a trial —

Presenting further proof that jurors are vulnerable to human error,

psychologists … found significant

evidence of a deep bias affecting both students and prospective jurors…, hypothesiz(ing) that “predecisional distortion” of new information

could cause a juror to evaluate trial evidence with a bias toward supporting

whichever party that juror currently favors. Already known to sway consumer

decisions, predecisional distortion would then bias juror decisions as well. Such a

finding could raise questions about the adequacy of conventional jury instructions to

not reach a verdict prematurely.

Sophisticated psychotherapists have known this for a long time. Clients in therapy, ‘remembering’ the past to make sense of their lives are actually synthesizing coherent stories, inventing mythologies for themselves, under the influence of a therapist whose job it is, whether consciously or unconsciously, to shape them so that they are most helpful.

I’m sure it’s a spoof (although I haven’t dug down to see who owns the domain), but the self-proclaimed Net Authority is keeping us off-kilter by announcing it’s keeping a database of weblogs reported to be in violation of its Acceptable Internet Usage Guidelines. Some webloggers are all puffed up when they receive notification that they’ve been reported and investigated. While I uphold several of the guidelines, a few others deserve to be broken liberally. By the way, is it blaspheming to send up the Net Authority? If so, report me…

The ever-excellent Random Walks captures the enraging and worrisome absurdity of the Gap expropriating anti-globalization anti-corporate sentiment to market its jeans.

“…(D)ue to the tremendous power of corporate advertising over consumers, Gap might just pull it off, trivializing the movement… and selling jeans at the same time.

The effect that this new marketing could have on the movement is tremendous. If Gap

succeeds, it will mean that every protest that is staged will be building on their new

image, in effect turning protestors and activists into living, walking ads for Gap.”

Gapsucks.

I hated Archie Bunker. I hated all TV during the All In the Family era, come to think of it, but I especially hated Archie Bunker. Getting a little confused between the character and the actor (“The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon”, the saying goes), I didn’t think too much about Carroll O’Connor’s passing until I read this arresting quote, also from Random Walks:

“As James Baldwin wrote, the white man here is trapped by his own history, a history that he

himself cannot comprehend and therefore what can I do but love him?”

R.I.P. O’Connor.

Lynnette Millett at Medley considers a Scripting News post calling “weblogs without discipline” a waste of time, thoughtless “impulse journalism” with narrow “expressive bandwidth”. She doesn’t agree that every post ought to say something affirmative, as she puts it, about the item linked to. Millett goes on: “If you want to hold me to a standard beyond ‘she links/quotes stuff she finds interesting and/or worthy of note’ then you should probably go elsewhere,” and she gives a sympathetic nod to my wry sidebar disclaimer,

“For entertainment

purposes only.

All content is provided as is, with no

warranty stated or implied

regarding the quality or accuracy of any

content on or off this website.

Absolutely no responsibility is taken for

the content of external pages to which I

link.”

While I’m cited as an authority here [grin], I have to say I don’t fully agree. I feel my weblogging is more “on” when I can give you my own take on things, and most of the posts at FmH to which readers respond are those, rather than the ones I excerpt or point to without exposition. I sometimes barrage you with alot of frantic webclipping, and I often feel I’d rather slow it down and be more thoughtful. But, on the other hand, I’m driven… and I do feel, rationalizing, that I am being expository when I merely post something. It’s usually more than just saying it’s “interesting.” FmH is polemical; 90% or more of my posts make a point I want to get across, whether I say so or not. And I trust you’ll be curious about what the significance of any post was to me, or at least what significance it’ll have for you.

For a slightly different flavoring, consider this post of Matt Rossi’s I just happened upon again, coincidentally on the one-year anniversary of his posting it:

Lately, it seems as though you might as soon admit to consorting with Lucifer as

maintaining one of these sites. Everyone’s tired of it, it seems. Everyone’s sick of

the link economy, or the cookie cutter nature of 9/10’s of the content of these

‘blogs’ as people have taken to calling them. Everyone wants to get back to the

purity of maintaining a site just for them.

Well, not me, baby. Me and my diseased imagination are gonna keep on keeping

on till they pry our cold dead fingers away from the keys. Let me bare myself to

my limited readership for an instant; I am fully aware of how unique I am, and I

like it. I like that I’m smart. I like that I’m erudite. I like that I read and think about

what I read and melt my disparate reading into mental alloy. I am, in short, not all

that humble about this page, or what it is I do on it. Is it Earth-Shattering? Nope.

Does anyone care? Well, a few people do, and they’ve been very nice about it.

To everyone who has bothered to come by and send me a nice email, I thank

you kindly. Your simple generosity has been appreciated.

But I do not do this for you, and I never did.

And he concludes later on, lovingly: ” I admit it! I consort with Lucifer! Whew. That was a load

off. Well, back to the salt mines…I got nuggets of strange glowing gold to wrench

from the rock. It’s my task, and it isn’t by far unpleasant. Oh my no. I do so love

shattering reality.”

Boy Testifies Dog Raped Him: “For seven years, she’s maintained

her innocence, insisting that she did not brutally sodomize her

7-year-old son, injuring him so badly that doctors considered

removing part of his bowel.

It was the family dog, Bugsy the pit bull, that raped the boy, she said.

Now, the woman, who is serving a life sentence in an Ohio prison for

felonious penetration, may get a shot at freedom, after her son, who

has remained silent for seven years, testified in court Tuesday that

the woman’s story is true.” APBnews

Do People Aggress to Improve Their Mood? “…people who had been induced to

believe in the value of catharsis and venting anger responded

more aggressively than did control participants to insulting

criticism… (R)esults

suggest that many people may engage in aggression to regulate

(improve) their own affective states. ” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, July 2001 Abstracts

Technical difficulties — “Today’s technology is wreaking havoc on the old-fashioned methods of building plot complications.” The essayist suggests several plot contortions to get around the dilemma — setting a plot in the past or in a remote region without access to technology, portraying the protagonist as anti-technology, etc. But surely a modern world full of Palm Pilots, cell phones and computers still presents human dramas without outlandish plot contrivance? I know I’m technologically replete, but there’s plenty of drama, pathos and even melodrama in my life. [Maybe you don’t want to write a book about it, though…] Salon [via spike]

Annals of the Erosion of Privacy (cont’d.): Roadrunner vs. Big Brother — The driver’s speed is transmitted back to the rental car company by a GPS onboard, which ‘allows rental car agents to “manage driver

behavior by auditing location information” and “receive boundary crossing and

excessive speed reports.” An agent can even shut a car off by remote control if it’s

going too fast or heading into territory it’s not supposed to be in.’ The police never pulled him over, but the company is fining the driver… exorbitantly. It’s all legal; it was in the fine print of the rental agreement the driver signed. And the company ‘claims it’s for humanitarian reasons, that it’s not about collecting money.

“It saves lives by discouraging speeding. It’s an accepted [rental car] trade practice.” ‘ At $150 for each of the three instances of speeding, the renter found his bank account had already been drained of $450 by the time he returned the car. Now he’ll tell it to the judge. [Will you ever rent again from a company that uses GPS in this way? If a court upholds the rental car company’s practices, will you have a chance not to for long?] The New Haven Advocate

A Data-Mining Bonanza Squandered? Financial corporations have accelerated data management on their customers drastically in the past 12-18 months to do targeted marketing. “Now shrinking profit margins, a homogenization of products among firms and a move to self-service by customers has pushed companies to seek a personalized view on how each customer uses — or, more importantly, could use — myriad financial services, from securities trading to checking accounts to life insurance.” Washington Post

More news from the World Federation of Neurology XVII World Congress: Lunacy revisited — persistent suspicion about the relationship of the full moon to psychiatric and neurological distress is usually scoffed at by medical professionals. A Florida neurologist describes a case where a patient’s seizure disorder is destabilized each month by the full moon. Laboratory testing confirms the significant contrasts in this man’s seizure incidence around the lunar cycle. Other neurologists continue to scoff. Tidal effects of gravity on bodily fluids are often suggested as a physiological basis for full moon effects. One conference respondent also wonders about moonlight-induced sleep deprivation. Suffice it to say we have no good explanations yet… BioMedNet [registration required]

The mayor of Toronto has foot-in-mouth disease. On the eve of an African trip to promote Toronto’s bid to host the 2008 Olympics, Mel Lastman remarked, “What the hell would I want to go to a place like Mombassa

… I just see myself in a pot of boiling water with all these

natives dancing around me.” The comment may just lose him the votes of 16 Africans on the IOC. Here’s the transcript of the press conference he called to apologize; interesting use of contrition as obfuscation. And he’s no stranger to controversy; his foot-in-mouth disease appears to be chronic.

A Lesson in Cruelty: Anti-Gay Slurs Common at School. Perhaps because of the increasing social visibility of gay students, anti-gay slurs are the insults of choice in America’s schools, according to teachers, counselors and students themselves. Such taunts have been cited in more than half of the recent rash of schoolyard shootings. It doesn’t even appear to be directly associated with sexual orientation. ‘Gay’ and ‘fag’ appear to be the synonyms of choice for ‘stupid.’ World New York, in discussing this Washington Post article, raises the concern that, rather than just a reflection of societal intolerance, the school setting may be a breeding ground for the origination of social attitude problems. Why didn’t I think of that?

John Lee Hooker 1917-2001

Taking a Page from Science Fiction. Didn’t realize that Cory Doctorow, from one of my favorite weblogs boing boing, is both an entrepreneur and an accomplished science fiction author and winner of the John W. Campbell Award in 2000, at age 29. Congratulations, Cory! Here’a an Inc. magazine interview with him.

This story — of the Houston mother who systematically killed her five children ages 6 months to 7 years, and of her husband’s public statement of support for her in the midst of his mindnumbing grief — is unbearably tragic. Andrea Yates suffered from recurrent postpartum depression and had just lost her father several months ago. She did not respond the second time around to the antidepressant medication (unspecified) that had helped her when she had become depressed after she bore her previous child. Now for the potential righteous indignation — was she being treated by a psychiatrist or given an expedient antidepressant prescription by her obstetrician or primary care provider?

Road Rage Leads to Shooting, Suicide. Cut off by a pickup truck driver on a California highway, a motorist confronts and assaults the man from the pickup despite a handgun in plain view; he’s shot point blank in the face and killed. Two weeks later, the pickup driver returns to the very site, calls 911 on his cellphone, states he is going to “serve justice on myself” and inflicts a lethal gunshot wound to himself. Should I be surprised that he had access to a gun the second time? ABC And here’s a case where a dramatic, heroic police intervention stops a suicide and is captured on the police cruiser’s video camera. CNN

“This is catastrophic in my office, with patients coming in and demanding a drug they saw on television.” Doctors want AMA to seek ban on prescription drug ads for consumers — “The American Medical Association would urge the government to ban prescription drug ads from television, newspapers and magazines under a proposal many doctors say is needed to keep patients from being misinformed.” First AMA position in a long time that I, as a physician (but not an AMA member) can get behind. Proponents note that ads undermine physician credibility if a physician thinks the advertised drug isn’t the best choice (“but they said on TV…”). And it often won’t be, of course, since the pharmaceutical companies’ best interests in spinning a product to you have nothing to do with your best interests as a consumer. ABC

Latest battle lines in the war on drugs: Saving the ‘vine of the soul’. US -backed coca spraying in Colombia to interdict cocaine manufacture and supply is inadvertently destroying yagé , sacred hallucinogen of the region’s indigenous people (Richard Evans Schultes is surely rolling over in his grave). National Post And Sell a glowstick, go to prison — “Authorities are shutting down 21st century

raves using 1980s crack-house laws — and

turning pacifiers and Vicks VapoRub into

the new drug paraphernalia.” Salon

Interview with Simeon Saxe-Coburg, the exiled last king of Bulgaria who returned last year and leads the party that just took control of Parliament in the Bulgarian elections. The electorate waits with bated breath to see if he will accept the post of prime minister. If he doesn’t, it may be a signal that his party may try to resurrect the monarchy. Interesting times.

Putin Says Russia Would Counter U.S. Shield — “President

Vladimir V. Putin said today that if

the United States proceeded on its own to

construct a missile defense shield over its

territory and that of its allies, Russia would

eventually upgrade its strategic nuclear

arsenal with multiple warheads — reversing

an achievement of arms control in recent

decades — to ensure that it would be able

to overwhelm such a shield.” That’s all it would take to render missile defense moot (oh, except against piddling little ‘rogue states’; does anyone really believe it’s meant to defend against them? really?), billions of American dollars wasted, and decades of painstaking gains in stabilizing the arms race flushed down the toilet.

I wondered if NMD is driving anyone to tax resistance to take a moral stand against complicity in this madness. Here’s a Google search on “tax resistance” and “national missile defense”.

A Do-It-Yourself SIOP — “(R)esearchers at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) have developed a

computer program, part of their ‘Nuclear War Simulation Project,’ that can mimic the” top secret

current U.S. nuclear war plan, the ‘SIOP’ or Single Integrated Operational Plan which dictates how our nuclear weapons would actually be used in a strategic exchange. “The NRDC team hopes that by using their software, anyone can visualize the outcome of

a nuclear attack scenario. Their goal is a deeper public understanding of what it really means

to target countries like Russia and China with thousands of nuclear weapons on a day-to-day

basis.”

Researchers at NRDC have been

studying the issue of nuclear weapons

targeting, nuclear force numbers, and

the mountains of other data surrounding

the support of the nuclear arsenal for

more than two decades. A confluence

of advances in computer technology, availability of commercial satellite data, and old-fashioned

ingenuity, allowed the NRDC team to create an interactive computer model of what they believe

the SIOP might look like.

NRDC claims that for the first time in unclassified literature people can view—with maps,

charts, images, and other visual representations—and better understand the cumulative effects

of the large-scale nuclear “counterforce” attacks that are part of U.S. and Russian nuclear war

planning. They hope their program will illustrate alternatives to the current arms control process

and eventually lead to more modest contingency war planning with far fewer weapons. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Italian Mafia Sees Rise of Girl Power — “… a quiet gender revolution in the Italian Mafia has seen women shatter the glass

ceiling of organized crime, as an increasing number of women take on the top job for

some of Italy’s major crime clans.

The penetration of women into the highest levels of one of the world’s most

patriarchal social institutions has caught the eye of Italian media and experts as well

as crime statisticians. In 1990, one woman was indicted for Mafia association. By

1995, there were 89 such indictments.” ABC

Neoliberalism from Reagan to Clinton: review of Michael Meeropol’s Surrender: How the Clinton Administration Completed the Reagan Revolution — “If Bush seems oddly comfortable with

Clinton’s economic legacy, that’s because

Washington policy disputes have become

questions of pace and degree — and not

substance. Clinton’s surrender to

neoliberalism is now a complete rout.” Tompaine.com

Playmate Profiles of Famous Philosophers

‘HID

(high-intensity-discharge) headlights enable drivers to see more

effectively at night than conventional tungsten-halogen lights… Based on field experiments in which drivers responded to objects in

their field of vision while using both sorts of lighting, LRC

researchers concluded that drivers using HIDs were better at

“detecting edge-of-roadway hazards, such as pedestrians and

animals… “[HIDs] produce more light, last longer, and use less energy,” … “There’s no question they result in better visual

performance. Now we’ve quantified that,”

HIDs are widely used on European automobiles and are growing

increasingly popular in the United States. The National Highway

Traffic Safety Administration has ruled HIDs do not exceed

maximum illumination standards.’

Military foods could enhance soldiers’ performance by 2025 — “U.S. soldiers of 2025 will be eating foods that

are a combination of hometown comfort and

space-age wizardry.

‘Opportunities in Biotechnology for Future Army

Applications,’ a report released today (Wednesday,

6/20) by the National Research Council’s Board on

Army Science and Technology, lays out a vision of foods

and agricultural activities that will keep future warriors

fed, disease-free and even safe from friendly fire.” The Defense Dept. looks to be shaping up as a major consumer of genetically modified foods — to enhance caloric content and digestibility, rapidity of growth, fold in antimicrobial factors, and even to include biological markers that could be used to distinguish friend from foe in firefights.

Invasive procedures still performed on conscious children despite new anaesthetic techniques; study shows striking differences between North American and European practice in managing painful procedures in children with cancer. EurekAlert!

Garden Gnome Waiting For Right Time To Kidnap Boy

“Netscape Communications is denying reports that it’s bailing out of the PC browser market it once

dominated. To further that point, the company has issued the first beta of its new Netscape 6.1 browser.” Wired

Centering the House — “With GOP moderates willing to take on their

party’s conservative Southern leadership,

bolstered by a unified Democratic caucus

willing to compromise to pull our politics back

from the right wing, the House could be

centered.” Tompaine.com

Aliens have completed their survey of earth.

“Meet the secret rulers of the world:” The Truth About Bohemian Grove from Cockburn and St. Clair. Counterpunch

It’s on the tip of my tongue, the wag says: “One friend with whom I discussed this suggests that the recent

popularity of both species of oral sex reflects improvements in indoor

plumbing since 1945 and escalating standards of personal hygiene,

from one bath per week to one shower per day. I am not sure this

really meets the case, though. The French are not best known for

dedication to personal freshness. Contrariwise, upper- and

upper-middle-class English people were taking baths daily by the

mid-19th century, yet fellatio does not seem to have been part of

their sexual repertoire.” NYPress Four fears prevent men from giving in fully to the pleasure of fellatio, says Ishmael Gradsdovic — the fear of possession, of “the monster”, of pain, and of death. And on the tip of another’s tongue: “A Chinese woman has launched divorce proceedings

against her husband after the family’s pet mynah bird reportedly spilled

the beans on his marital indiscretions.

According to the Xinmin Evening News, the woman first suspected something

was amiss when the bird began repeating words apparently picked up from her

husband’s secret telephone calls to his lover after she returned from a

month-long visit to her parents.

She said words such as “divorce”, “I love you”, and “be patient” had become an

increasingly frequent feature of the feathered telltale’s idle twitterings.” CNN

RobotWisdom noted this rave review: Andrew Sarris on A.I. — ‘Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick have collaborated in

spirit on a fabulous fable called A.I. that is well on its way to

becoming the most controversial

conversation-piece to hit the

dumbed-down American movie scene since heaven knows

when. Its ending alone may invade your dreams, as it has mine

ever since I saw it at a screening. I frankly don’t know if I

would wish this psychic experience on children, and as a marginally certified adult I

am still grappling with the task of explaining exactly how A.I. has managed to push

the envelope of cinematic expression so far beyond what we have been conditioned

to expect as “family entertainment” over the past century.’ New York Observer

With the death of Sister Marie Frances Burgess, the last remaining Shaker community, in Sabbathday Lake, Maine, is reduced to its last six voluntarily celibate members. New York Times

Here’s a review of Celibacy, Culture, and Society: The Anthropology of Sexual Abstinence ed. Elisa Sobel and Sandra Bell: “…offers an in-depth examination of the

anthropology of sexual abstinence. This edited volume includes

chapters by a variety of individuals, using diverse perspectives. The

goal is ‘to explore . . . examples of the occurrences, perceptions, and

meanings of celibacy.’ ” Journal of the American Medical Ass’n

Mike Wallace, whose 60 Minutes broadcast a tape of a mercy-killing by Dr Jack Kevorkian in 1998, won’t say how (Kevorkian, now serving 10-25 years in a Michigan prison, is forbidden to talk to the press) he obtained it, but he’s given a copy of a letter Chief Justice Rehnquist received from Kevorkian to the New York Review of Books, which published excerpts:

“As a secular profession medicine is relevant to the full spectrum of human existence from conception through

death. Any arbitrary legal constriction of that relevance is irrational, cruel, and barbaric. As guardians of

human rights, you and your colleagues have the authority, opportunity, and obligation to rid society of this

lingering medieval malady by using the Ninth Amendment to guarantee this most precious and humane

right of choice for all Americans. “ [thanks to David Walker]

Big Effects From Small Packages: “Don’t laugh, but condoms have played key technical roles in movies from King

Kong to Perfect Storm. ” LA Times [via Spike Report]

Al Go Rhythms has picked up on my use of the term ‘blink’.

Unknown poisonous spider invades bowels of Windsor Castle: “up to three inches long, venomous, and with jaws strong

enough to puncture human skin.

The arachnids were discovered last week in an underground

maintenance tunnel in Windsor Great Park, not far from the

Queen Mother’s weekend residence, Royal Lodge. They are

being examined by an entomolgist to try to identify them- they

could be either a new, underground-dwelling species or one

previously thought extinct.” The Guardian UK

Dotcom casualties litter skid row: “It’s always being thought that staff from failed e-commerce ventures

had gained marketable experience, however ropy the business plan

of the firms they worked for was.

However Associated Press has uncovered evidence to the contrary

after visiting the soup kitchens and homeless shelters that lie on the

flip side of the American dream. Depressed database programmers

and the like have joined drug addicts, alcoholics and the mentally ill

as society’s hard luck cases.

Nearly 30 unemployed high tech workers are among the 100 men at

shelters run in San Jose by charity InnVision, according to Robbie

Reinhart, director of the charity, who said the high cost of housing in

the area in contributing to the problem.” The Register

Found magazine. If you’ve every found anything that gave you an epiphany about the owner who lost it — “love letters,

birthday cards, kids’ homework, to-do

lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins,

telephone bills, doodles, anything” — Found wants to hear about it from you.

A compendium of news from the XVII World Neurology Conference:

Left-Right asymmetry found in emotion. “Theories that dubbed math- and

art-types as left- and

right-brainers have long grown

out of fashion in academia, but

new research suggests a

surprising role for brain

asymmetry in emotion.” Preeminent neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, a skeptic about emotional asymmetry, was surprised by his findings: essentially, the right hemisphere is more active in reacting to experiences with negative emotional valences and the left hemisphere to those that are more pleasant.

Mad leader disease threatens world: “Neuroscientists need to develop tools to identify mental

illness in world leaders, the president of the World

Federation of Neurology told thousands of neurologists

assembled at the opening ceremony of the World Congress

of Neurology last night.”

Putting numbers into words: “The brain circuits for

mathematical approximations

and for exact calculations

have been shown to be

separate and distinct. The

architecture for the former is

specialized and also appears

to exist in monkeys, but the

latter is embedded in language

systems and may be uniquely

human.”

Lip service to phantom limbs: “German researchers

may have found a way

to prevent the cortical

reorganization that

occurs following

amputation, and block

the phantom limb pain

associated with it.”

BioMedNet [registration required]

Studying the Autoimmune Disease Puzzle:

“For reasons that researchers are just

beginning to understand, women are at a

much greater risk than men of falling prey

to an autoimmune disease, in which the

body’s immune system turns paranoid and

begins to attack one or more of the body’s

organs.

The list of autoimmune diseases is long and

varied, composed of more than 80

disorders afflicting virtually every sector of

mortal flesh and function: the liver, the

kidneys, the adrenal glands, the ovaries,

the pancreas, the skin, the joints, the

muscles, the myelin sheaths that buffer the

nerves, the salivary ducts that spit, the tear

ducts that weep.”

One recent finding that mother and fetus exchange body cells that can persist in each other’s circulation in a state called “microchimerism” may hint at the increased incidence of autoimmune responses in women, and in their children. DNA analysis of postpartum autoimmune disease victims indicates they have increased amounts of their child’s DNA in their system. It may be that, if a child’s histocompatibility genes (“tissue type”) are very different from the mother’s, her immune system cleans the fetal cells out with efficiency. The increased risk may be in the cases where the child is genetically just a little bit different from the mother, confusing the immune system about whether it’s recognizing self or other. And:

Preliminary evidence even suggests that there is such a thing as multigenerational

microchimerism, in which a woman with an autoimmune disorder can blame both

her mother and her children for her misery. In these bizarre instances, the woman

harbors circulating cells from her mother and from her offspring that turn out to

be more compatible in their HLA palette with each other than either is with the

mother in the middle.

Theoreticians also suspect a role for the reproductive hormones, given the correlation of risk with the childbearing years and the effects of the changing hormonal environment of pregnancy — sometimes ameliorating, sometimes exacerbating — on various autoimmune diseases. But hormonal treatments are not entered into lightly. Another exciting study succeeded in curing mice of Type I diabetes (the autoimmune kind) by injecting a substance that programmed the white blood cells involved in the immune response for cell death. My question: what happened to the mouse’s immune defenses after a treatment of such ferocity? New York Times

Useful Legacy of Nuclear Treaty: Global Earphones: “Though the Senate voted two years

ago to reject a treaty that bans

nuclear testing, one of its provisions is alive

and thriving: the global network of sensors

meant to listen for clandestine nuclear blasts. Though still under construction, the

International Monitoring System is already

yielding a wealth of science spinoffs, detecting violent winds, volcanic eruptions

and the crash of meteoroids from outer space.” New York Times

An Artificial Insemination Referendum? Single women in Slovenia could be barred from becoming pregnant by artificial insemination.

“The advertising industry will shortly reveal how it’s going to bombard

cellphone and PDA users with commercials. The Wireless Advertising Association convenes in downtown San

Francisco on 26 June to unveil its technical infrastructure for

beaming promotional material to handhelds and phones. The body

has already produced metrics and definitions for adverts to GSM

phones.” As The Register comments,

“RCTLE

DYSFNCTN?

U

NEED VGRA NOW!”

Maureen Dennis et al: Understanding of Literal Truth, Ironic Criticism, and Deceptive Praise Following Childhood Head Injury. Abstract:

“Children with closed head injury (CHI) … may have difficulty with comprehension tasks involving first- and second-order intentionality, such as those involved

in understanding irony and deception. We studied how 6- to 15-year-old children, typically developing or with CHI, interpret scenarios involving literal truth, ironic

criticism, and deceptive praise. Children with severe CHI had overall poorer mastery of the task. Even mild CHI impaired the ability to understand the intentionality

underlying deceptive praise. CHI, especially biologically significant CHI, appears to place children at risk for failure to understand language as externalized

thought.” Brain and Language 2001, 78(1)

Genes link to social attitudes: ‘Attitudes to ethical issues such as abortion and the death

penalty are partly determined by genes, researchers claimed

yesterday.

It used to be thought that such attitudes were wholly learned

from parents, friends, teachers and cultural environment. But the

new study by Canadian scientists surveyed 336 pairs of adult

twins and found a genetic influence in 26 of 30 subjects

investigated.

Genes appeared to be most influential in views on abortion,

voluntary euthanasia, the death penalty and organised religion,

racial discrimination, immigration and “getting on well” with

others.’ The study used the tried-and-true method of comparing correlations between identical and fraternal twins. Since presumably all twins reared together share environmental influences, the closer concordance between identical twins is considered attributable to their identical genes. The Guardian UK

Todd Gitlin comes closest to capturing the helpless alarm I feel at American disdain for intelligence, and the continual affront to a thinking person that comes with living in such an environment. This essay, The Renaissance of Anti-Intellectualism, is a thoughtful extension of the trends discerned in Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, and their culmination in the ascendency of Duh-bya. I spent the whole interminable campaign, as my social circle and readers of FmH know, sputtering ineffectually about how the electorate had to see how stupid the man is, only too late coming to realize that they did, and love him for it.

But the Bushes are men of social credentials who went to the right

schools and passed through them without any detectable mark.

They represent aristocracy with a populist gloss, borrowing what

they can from the evangelical revival, siding with business and its

distaste for time-wasting mind work, holding intellectual talent in

contempt from both above and below. Pleasant enough for the

pundits, they have been able to count on a surplus of populist

ressentiment. That Bush fils, country-club Republican, could gain

stature (and keep a straight face) in his presidential campaign

for proposing an “education presidency” and denouncing an

“education recession” tells us something about the closing of the

American mind that Allan Bloom did not dream of. The Chronicle of Higher Education [via wood s lot]

TaxRebatePledge.org: “The idea for this site is simple. Congress recently

passed a tax cut bill that included a tax rebate. In the

next few months, each taxpayer will be receiving a

check from the government for $300. The only thing

TaxRebatePledge.org is asking you to do is pledge that

when you receive your tax rebate check, you will

donate that money to an existing organization that is

engaged in the fight against Bush and his agenda.

That’s it. We don’t want you to send us your tax rebate.

We don’t want to tell you who to donate your tax

rebate to; we’ll leave that to you to decide. We just

want you to promise that you will use this tax rebate to

fund the fight against Bush and his agenda!”

Barbelith: Books: Harry Potter and Capitalism:

One of the things that reveals Harry Potter as pure escapist fantasy, rather than – as

with the best (children’s or not) fantasy – an attempt to imagine a different

organization of the world and our relationship to it, is the use of magical artefacts

purely as commodities. The wizard world is our world, but with better stuff. The

sweets are better. Football is better, because it’s on broomsticks. The postal

service is better, because there are cute owls who don’t go on strike. This is not

creating an alternative way of looking at the world; it’s inventing gimmicks. Just as

some apparently anti-capitalist actions fall back into a capitalist model through a

reliance on “ethical shopping”, Harry Potter is “magical shopping”.

This is a little overblown; I would worry about the author if I thought it was likely she is actually reading children’s books with any real children. It reminds me of the scene in Jack the Bear (which I just watched with my son) in which the impeccably-credentialed grandfather (a blacklisted victim of McCarthyism) tortured his grandson, the main character, by refusing to let him win at chess ‘for his own good’, while the boy yearns for his absent father after multiple traumas and losses.

The time my son and I have spent sharing the Potter books is not going to make him a good little capitalist consumer any more than it will make him a Satanist. Sounds pretty obvious to observe that the values don’t come so much from the specific books as the overall cultural and ethical context of the upbringing. For some more hopelessly earnest thoughts about the effects of children’s literature, see Herbert Kohl’s Should We Burn Babar? This, however, goes the extra distance with impassioned prescriptions for how to use storytelling constructively.

Scientist finds fungus that eats through compact discs. So far only in the tropical climate of Belize, “the fungus had burrowed into the CD from the outer

edge, then devoured the thin aluminium layer and some of the

data-storing polycarbonate resin.” Telegraph UK

The two child killers of toddler James Bulger, in a British case eight years ago that cut to the heart of that vertiginous feeling that the ‘civilized’ world is going to hell in a handbasket, are close to 18 and parole, with new identities planned to protect them from public sentiment which is overwhelmingly opposed to their release. BBC

Are you quirkyalone?

Europe Sees Bush’s Trip Exceeding Expectations … which would not have been hard. On the other hand, his diplomatic naiveté seems to have been in full flower in dealing with Putin. New York Times

U.S. hostage ‘may be dead’, says military, according to accounts pieced together from other recently released hostages of the Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines. “(They) say they are fighting for Muslim self-rule in the south of the

mainly Catholic Philippines but the group’s main pursuit has been kidnap for

ransom.

Last year, it abducted scores of people, including Western tourists from a resort

in nearby Malaysia. Local officials say the group secured about $20 million in

ransom.” CNN