Torture Is Breaking Falun Gong: “Expanding its use of torture and high-pressure indoctrination, China’s Communist Party has gained the upper hand in its protracted battle against the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, according to government sources and Falun Gong practitioners. As a result, they say, large numbers of people are abandoning the group that presented the party with its most serious challenge since the 1989 student-led protests in Tiananmen Square.” Washington Post

Is the addition of ReBlogger (discussion functionality) making FmH slower-to-load on a regular basis (I know I’ve gotten sporadic feedback to that effect)? Looking down at the last week of items, there’s a steady stream of ‘[0]’ comments. I’m of two minds. Take it out, and give up on commenting capacity, or simply leave it in no matter how little use it gets. The ‘[0]’s don’t clutter up the landscape very much, after all…

The Spike Report might just as well be doing an addiction-and-psychopathology special edition today, given these three items:

A physician and reformed righteous eater has coined the term Orthorexia Nervosa ‘as a label for those who push itnerest in normal healthy food to dangerous extremes.’ From a strict psychodiagnostic perspective, I’m not sure the term is necessary, since other psychopathological labels already exist to capture this obsessive compulsive condition well. But I’m glad someone is getting the word out!

And while we’re on the topic of addiction, oh man, I couldn’t believe this blink.

‘Mainline Lady, a new Dutch glossy magazine for female drug addicts, is

perhaps the ultimate in heroin chic.

Stuffed with tips on fashion, sex, beauty and health, the stockintrade of women’s journals the

world over, the new magazine bears a passing resemblance to its more staid sisters.

But Mainline Lady, financed by the Dutch Health Ministry, is no mainstream publication.

Its fashion model is Shauna, a tattooed recovering addict. The sex section recounts recollections of

a junkie prostitute. The beauty rubric counsels on countering druginduced dry skin, and “Dear

Doctor” deals with HIV hazards for syringe users.

Wijnie, a 38-year-old cocaine and heroin addict from Amsterdam, gets a hair and face

makeover. An HIV-positive former convict talks about her experiences in prison.

The magazine is the brainchild of the Mainline foundation, a 10-year-old, non-governmental

organisation that works to improve the health and quality of life of drug users. “Female users are

not just skinny hags. They have lots of interests, and that’s what we wanted to reflect in the

magazine,” says editor-in-chief, Jasperine Schupp.’ The Age

Finally, Spike pointed me toward this.

“Boomers’ Newest Fad: Self-Loathing.

At the Big Five-Oh, the Woodstock Generation Changes Its

Tune.” International Herald Tribune

Hidden Wheat Fields Spark Outrage: “Canadian farmers are upset that they have no way of knowing whether neighboring

fields are full of genetically-modified wheat that could potentially cross-pollinate with their conventional

crops.” Wired

New Yorker Annals of Medicine (link from David Brake): As Good As Dead:

“Confusion about the concept of brain death is not

unusual, even among the transplant professionals,

surgeons, neurologists, and bioethicists who grapple

with it regularly. Brain death is confusing because

it’s an artificial distinction constructed, more than

thirty years ago, on a conceptual foundation that is

unsound. Recently, some physicians have begun to

suggest that brain-dead patients aren’t really dead at

all—that the concept is just the medical profession’s

way of dodging ethical questions about a practice

that saves more than fifteen thousand lives a year.”

In essence, the paradox is this. Most people think it would be unethical to kill a person for their organs, even if they are irreversibly moribund. So they have to die of some other cause before their organs can be harvested. Yet, it is physiologically ideal that the organs still be perfused and oxygenated right up to the time of harvest and transplant, i.e. come from a living body. The solution? The concept of brain death, when it is asserted that, no matter what other functions remain, the neocortex or seat of consciousness is irreversibly defunct.

Critics say this is “conceptual gerrymandering”, in reality a quality-of-life judgment and places us on an ethical slippery slope — would some profound degree of impaired self-awareness, e.g. in extremely brain-injured patients or the senile elderly, qualify? Can someone become “so

devastated that they had lost their claim on

existence”? Persuading the family of a dying person that ‘brain death’ is ‘death’, to obtain their consent for organ donation, is a matter of semantic niceties. But if, as extreme critics insist, someone ‘brain dead’ is not ‘dead’, where does that leave us? Are they ‘alive’? Are they, philosophically, a ‘body’ or a ‘person’?

Even proponents of the ‘brain death’ concept are known to express anxiety that “the public” not know what doctors have come to know about the practice. Critics suggest that, in the interest of ethical explicitness and scientific rigor, we begin to say we are harvesting organs from patients who are “as good as dead.” Then we can start to discuss the overwhelming ethical dilemmas that would bring up.

[I have always carried an organ donor card. Now my head is spinning with degrees of the complexity of my decision I had not even considered, and I am a physician! For the sake of the position my wife or children might have to be in to carry out this wish of mine, I will have to rethink my preferences carefully in light of this article.]

Team plans to clone up to 200 humans: “A

team of reproductive specialists is

expected to announce plans Tuesday

to clone up to 200 human beings.

The announcement will be made at a

cloning conference held by the National

Academy of Sciences in Washington,

Panos Zavos told CNN Monday. Zavos

is a retired professor and head of a

Lexington-based private corporation that

markets infertility products and

technologies.

He said his team is working with 200

couples who are infertile and the aim of

the ‘attempt’ is to help them have a

baby.” Meanwhile, critics warn of cloning risks. CNN Several months ago, scientists reported in Human Genetics that early gene processing in cloned embryos frequently goes haywire, resulting in out-of-control growth or premature death.

London novelist and psychohistorian Iain Sinclair interviewed: “After Lights out for The Territory, a man sent me an X ray of his brain tumour. He’d superimposed it over a map of London and was trying to heal himself by walking out its routes through the city.” Fortean Times And: The long birth of psychohistory: “Welcome to the discipline

of psychohistory, a discipline

that concerns itself with

collective psychology, a field

that, surprisingly, has never

garnered much interest in

both popular culture and the

academic world.” Spark The web presence of The Institute for Psychohistory (“the science of historical motivation combines the insights of psychotherapy with the research methodology of the social sciences

to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations, past and present”) is here.