Mickey Kaus: What Black Hawk Down leaves out; that Somalia raid really was more a debacle than a victory. Slate [No surprise unless you’re getting all your history from Hollywood… -FmH]
Monthly Archives: January 2002
‘More people in America watch ‘Friends’ than have friends.’
“Leading American sociologist Robert Putnam made this semi-serious claim in a talk he gave recently to a large audience at the Brisbane Convention Centre.
Professor Putnam cites public health research which shows that people who are socially isolated are as much at risk of death as people who smoke.
Robert Putnam is the author of the term ‘social capital’, which refers to community bonds and interpersonal connections. These, he argues, are just as
important for the public good as economic wellbeing.
His bestselling book Bowling Alone: The Decline and Revival of American Community described how on many measures social capital has declined dramatically since the 1970s. Putnam analysed factors such as membership of voluntary organisations, how often people went on picnics, and levels of
philanthropy, and found sharp declines on all fronts.” abc.net.au
How a woman ‘nose’ who to mate
Women are designed to sniff out men with body odour similar to their fathers.
Researchers believe the discovery is an example of the way nature ensures the right individuals mate through subtle smell signals.
The research from the University of Chicago shows odours relate to the immune system genes a woman inherits from her father.
Ananova
Molly Ivins: What’s that sound that we’re not hearing?
After six years as governor of Texas, George W. Bush was infuriated by a federal report ranking Texas No. 1 in hunger. “You’d think the governor would have heard if there are pockets of hunger in Texas,” he said. Well, Texas had been No. 1 in hunger since the feds started keeping count in the 1960s. It’s a permanent condition here, but the governor had never seen it.
We better stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down. Dallas-Ft. Worth Star-Telegram
What is Art Music? Orlando Jacinto Garcia:
As we enter the next century the music world can seem a bit confusing. Twenty-five years ago what was considered the Western Art music canon consisted of music from either Antiquity or the Renaissance through the Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and into the 20th century. The music called by many in the general public “classical” music was relatively well defined in so far as the composers and their works. Today, this repertoire is not the only music deemed as relevant. Especially in post-modern times where categories are being redefined, it is easy for many to assert that a tango, a rock tune, and a Beethoven symphony are all the same except perhaps for the musical parameters that define the style. This can have its positive as well as negative ramifications. The positive perhaps being that all types of music are understood as having similar importance, the negative that everything is considered in many ways as being the same. NewMusicBox
Teaching Aesthetics to Artists
Artists tend to be repelled by aesthetics, for a number of reasons. Many are suspicious that too much analyzing of their art will harm their creativity; it will encourage them to develop their rational ego at the expense of their creative unconscious. Or they suspect that aesthetic analysis will have no effect on them, that thinking about art in this way is simply useless. Give a group of artists a copy of the latest issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and their response is likely to be that it simply doesn’t interest them, that the issues discussed are not ones that they face as artists, and that it seems to consist mainly of academic nit-picking and hair-splitting which has little to do with the real worlds of art.
Larkin’s lover bequeaths to church £1m of poet’s agnostic legacy:
Friends and admirers of the poet Philip Larkin were yesterday interested, surprised and in some cases affectionately amused to hear that £1m of his legacy had gone indirectly to the Church of England.
Larkin, who declined the poet laureateship a year before he died in 1985, remains best known for his reverently agnostic poem Churchgoing. However, he also said: “The Bible is a load of balls of course – but very beautiful.”
Guardian UK
Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.
Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new -
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.
Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?
Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone ?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,
A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,
Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these - for which was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that some many dead lie round.
Dum & Dummer – Michael J. Sheehan: “Our parents taught us not to speak negatively of others, but what’s a person to do when ignorance, the absence of knowledge, rears its empty head? Any thesaurus will provide us with substantives such as blockheadedness, denseness, doltishness, dumbness, dullness, stupidity, shallowness, incomprehension, unintelligence, and unenlightenment, but when we need heftier words or more striking language, where do we turn?” The Vocabula Review
We saw A Beautiful Mind last night. (Warning: spoilers ahead.) Jennifer Connelly is deservedly the critics’ darling, up for a Golden Globe. Ed Harris is underrated and breathtaking to watch in his limited time onscreen. Even more breathtaking is Russell Crowe, who does a wonderful job as John Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician with a lifelong struggle against paranoid schizophrenia, except for some moments when he was obviously directed to be a dorky stereotype which, in reality, has nothing to do with schizophrenia. This allows a gratuitous and incongruous scene in which some longhaired Princeton students — it’s the late ’60’s or early ’70’s at this point — make insensitive fun of him. As a psychiatrist whose primary clinical activity is treating schizophrenia, I was far more moved by the film than the non-mental-health-professionals with whom I saw it. What is most difficult to understand about schizophrenic delusions — the subjective, and ultimately terrifying, experience of being unable to differentiate internal fantasies from consensus reality — is well-portrayed here, although through a cinematographic artifice of populating his world with people who turn out to be imagined. No adult schizophrenic I have ever treated or read about has this literal version of an “imaginary playmate”; most of their hallucinatory experiences are of disembodied voices about whose identities they either speculate or remain ignorant. The film also provokes the right questions about the relationship between genius and mental instability. To be overly simplistic, does Nash create because of or in spite of his illness? And, the flip side of the coin, how germane is his intellectual strength — the answer, it seems to me, is not at all obvious — to his perseverence in the face of his illness? Worth seeing.
Information page on Nyiragongo, the volcano that just erupted in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
A superb, well-organized colection of the woodblock prints of Hiroshige, which I have always found sublime. The above, “Thunderstorm at Ohashi and Atake,” from the Hundred Famous Views of Edo, has long had a special resonance with me.
[thanks to fruitlog — now plep??]
A dwelling for the gods — “The door handles took a year to design. The radiators took another. And then the ceiling had to be raised – by a few millimetres. Stuart Jeffries on what happened when Ludwig Wittgenstein applied his philosophy to architecture.” A review of “The Unknown Wittgenstein: Architect, Engineer, Photographer” at the Royal Academy of Art, London. Guardian UK [via Fimoculous]
Wallace and Gromit to return online — “The stars of animator Nick Park’s Oscar-winning The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave are to make their return on the internet, it was revealed today.
Wallace, a prolific inventor fond of red ties, green tank tops and Wensleydale cheese with creations such as the aforementioned mechanical trousers to his name, will be reunited with his plasticine dog, Gromit, in 12 one-minute movies.” Guardian UK [via Fimoculous]
“Lab specimens of anthrax spores, Ebola virus and other pathogens disappeared from the Army’s biological warfare research facility in the early 1990s, during a turbulent period of labor complaints and recriminations among rival scientists there, documents from an internal Army inquiry show.
The 1992 inquiry also found evidence that someone was secretly entering a lab late at night to conduct unauthorized research, apparently involving anthrax. A numerical counter on a piece of lab equipment had been rolled back to hide work done by the mystery researcher, who left the misspelled label “antrax” in the machine’s electronic memory, according to the documents obtained by The Courant.”
Brussels can like it or lump it on sauce: “A spectacularly obscure EU body will meet in Brussels today to decide just how many lumps a sauce can contain before it ceases to be classified as a sauce and is regarded officially as a vegetable.” The Times of London
The C.I.A.’s Domestic Reach: “The charter of the Central Intelligence Agency expressly denies the spies any domestic police powers. … So the boundaries were drawn at the dawn of the cold war. The C.I.A. would find out what was going on outside the United States — and so prevent a second Pearl Harbor. The F.B.I. would work inside the United States to catch criminals and foreign agents.
That once bright line has blurred since Sept. 11.
Congress has given the C.I.A. new legal powers to snoop on people in the United States — not limited to investigating groups like Al Qaeda. It has been granted these new powers, along with billions of dollars, without any public post-mortem into how all these guardians of national security failed to protect against the September attacks.” NY Times
Why We Want Their Bodies Back: “As humans have evolved, they’ve learned there are good reasons not to bury an empty coffin… The desire for tangible proof of the death of someone we know or love is a natural human impulse. But often that desire extends well beyond a purely rational need for certainty. In circumstances where there is not the remotest chance that someone is still alive, we still expend great energy and often put other lives on the line in order to retrieve the dead.” Discover
Stress Causes Lasting Brain Changes: ‘The research team… looked at what happened to mouse brain cells and to live mice following brief exposure to different types of stress. Their findings appear in the Jan. 18 issue of Science.
They found that within minutes of exposure, brain nerve cells, or neurons, became hypersensitive. And the change lasted for several weeks — long after the stress was gone. This is in keeping with victims of posttraumatic stress, who despite time and distance from the original trauma remain physically, mentally, and emotionally agitated.’ WebMD
Poll: Bush Admin. Hiding Something, say almost two thirds of respondents. But will it change the Administration’s approval ratings in the face of the effective pressure for sheeplike loyalty? yahoo!
Laughter in the Time of Conflict Times of India editorial; Indians use humor as weapon against world terror Smirking Chimp
PR Watch: “public interest reporting on the PR/Public Affairs industry. PR Watch offers investigative reporting on the public relations industry. We help the public recognize manipulative and misleading PR practices by exposing the activities of secretive, little-known propaganda-for-hire firms that work to control political debates and public opinion.” From the Center for Media and Democracy.
Book review: Debunking Japan’s Myths of Its Exceptional Self
For centuries Japanese have been encouraged to look at their land as exceptional. A “small island nation” set off from the huge Asian landmass, Japan was “home to the gods” and to a supposedly homogenous race of people whose origins, like those of their language, defied detection.
At various times this exceptional view of self has been used as a pernicious ideology, justifying slaughter and discrimination. More recently, during the boom years of the late 20th century, it was used to explain the nation’s spellbinding successes.
From the very beginning James L. McClain, in his sweeping and vigorously told new book, Japan: A Modern History, debunks these cherished myths. In short order he takes apart the notions of monoethnicity and cultural exceptionalism, neatly explaining, for example, how the divine-origin myth of the imperial family is at bottom a fable to cover the political massacre that allowed the Yamato clan to rule. NY Times
Poll: Bush Admin. Hiding Something, say almost two thirds of respondents. But will it change the Administration’s approval ratings in the face of the effective pressure for sheeplike loyalty? yahoo!
Happy birthday to Janis Joplin, January 19th, 1943 — October 4th, 1970.
Goodbye Digital Democracy… “The Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the public airwaves and media providers, is poised to make a number of important, if not historic decisions on media ownership and monopolies.” An interview with Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy who monitors the FCC closely. Tompaine.com
Many people — for example, Craig at BookNotes — are keeping their finger on the pulse of the Enron scandal. I haven’t had the heart to follow it in detail, mostly because I think it’s so much business as usual. As a matter of fact, there doesn’t seem to be much notable news around in the past couple of weeks at all. Part of this is — I’m not sure if this is my imagination, but I’ve observed it in past years as well — there seems to be a lull in world doings for awhile after New Year’s, as if everyone slows down for a moment and takes a collective deep breath to face the twists and turns and bumps in the road ahead. It may also turn out that life during wartime — this perennial, unwinnable ‘war against terrorism’ in which security concerns are the pretext for every authoritarian move the Administration wants to make — is going to turn out to be just featureless longhaul drudgery.
In addition to the system makeover that’s been going on at my house, this has probably been one reason my blogging activity dropped off — you must’ve noticed? — in recent weeks. I’ve always been cynically unsurprised by the contemptible business of politics, until the theft of the Presidential election and then the terrorist attacks jarred me out of my complacent notion that there was nothing worth writing about in that sphere of life. Longtime FmH readers will remember haughty, superior vows I made at times in the past not to discuss politics too much. Maybe I’m coming back to my senses (grin) again…
In a related item, how much has business as usual changed since Sept. 11th? The Bush’s and others of their ilk would have you believe that events have brought the nation together and that more people want to “be-all-that-they-can-be”, but the numbers don’t support it. Washington Post And if you had any doubts about this being a kinder and gentler America, think again. Chicago Sun Times The Shrub, Inc. people would also have you believe that they have been successful in crafting an enduring, lofty international alliance against terrorism. You must’ve noticed already that this is largely a shifting fiction of spin and convenience. Now we may be heading for our Waterloo with even the most stalwart Western European ‘allies’, in Guantanamo Bay. Guardian UK And the Saudis may ask for the US exit soon too. Washington Post
The only stimulating aspect of the Enron affair would be if it were any kind of significant embarrassment to ‘Skunk’ Cheney, but don’t hold your breath. He’s been able to keep the proverbial, perennial low profile on the pretext of security demands since the fall. BookNotes, again, avows that
“…on Feb. 2, Dick Cheney will emerge from his bunker. If he sees his shadow, there will be six more weeks of war in Afghanistan…”
and, to be sure, three more years of corporate giveaways (by the way, did you realize that the net worth of Bush’s cabinet members is ten times that of their predecessors? the public i), and daily news reports that the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden are still not known. Here’s Cursor‘s take on it:
Also via Cursor: The US seems to want it both ways on our hunt for bin Laden.
By the way, in light of my reemergent dialogue with Dan Hartung, I feel compelled to offer at least a halfhearted apology for my continuing cynicism and pessimism. Perhaps it’s like Pascal’s wager — hedging my bet if I turn out to be wrong? Here, BTW, is what former Suck editor Tim Cavanaugh has to say about the “warblogs” (at the USC Annenberg’s Online Journalism Review):
Shine on, you crazy bloggers! Someday the rest of us will hold our manhoods cheap that we did not blog with you this day. But as long as courage lives and liberty endures, every American will be proud to have you out there, blogging for an audience of none.
What Comes After Welfare Reform? Two authors from the Center on Hunger and Poverty at
Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management suggest — novel idea — that we consider ways to ensure economic security for all Americans.
The reauthorization debate is the domestic policy opportunity of the near future, but it will be a lost opportunity if it devolves into an argument over whether this or that element of the 1996 changes succeeded. No honest analyst should feel good about discussing the minutiae of an economic security policy that clearly has not been a credible success. Reauthorization will also be a lost opportunity if it focuses only on the poor to the exclusion of other low-income working families, or even the conditions of tenuously “middle class” families. The upcoming debate offers a tremendous occasion to focus the nation and its leaders on the needs that all households have for a meaningful chance to achieve economic well-being, and it can start a discussion that one day results in a new domestic framework with asset-building policy as its common core. An asset policy framework appeals to fundamental values: opportunity, choice, personal responsibility, fairness, and social responsibility. Boston Review
OxyContin Prescribers Face Charges in Fatal Overdoses
Moving against what law enforcement officials say is a boom in “pill mills,” prosecutors are charging doctors with murder or manslaughter in the deaths of patients from overdoses of prescription drugs, including the powerful painkiller OxyContin.
In a Florida courtroom this week, Dr. James Graves went on trial on manslaughter charges stemming from the overdose deaths of four people for whom he had prescribed OxyContin and other drugs; next month in a California state court, a similar case is to begin against Dr. Frank B. Fisher. Last year, Florida prosecutors charged Dr. Denis Deonarine with first-degree murder in connection with a fatal overdose.
Legal experts said it was extremely rare for a doctor to be charged with murder or manslaughter because of their prescribing practices. Doctors accused of improperly dispensing drugs have usually been charged with fraud or with illegally prescribing controlled substances.
Related:
Few States Track Prescriptions as a Method to Bar Overdoses (December 21, 2001)
Maker Chose Not to Act to Reduce Abuse of OxyContin (August 13, 2001)
The Alchemy of OxyContin: From Pain Relief to Drug Addiction (July 29, 2001)
NY Times
Free State — ‘In recent American foreign policy, two principles loom large. In Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor, we have argued that national self-determination brings justice and peace. In Afghanistan, we have insisted that democracies should give no quarter in the war against terrorism. Now, if India and Pakistan can ignore both those principles, they may be able to avert a war over Kashmir.’ The New Republic The author argues that India essentially faces a no-win situation in Kashmir because of historical accident and contemporary pressures.
‘X-Files’ To Be Permanently Sealed
According to the Hollywood Reporter online, the final episode of “The X-Files” will air in May. It will be the 201st show of the series, which began nine years ago.
“I’d rather go out now and celebrate rather than have to make an announcement in the summer,” show creator Chris Carter told the site. The Boston Channel
About time someone finally put the show out of its misery…
ME: the making of a new disease — British physician Michael Fitzpatrick, author of The Tyranny of Health: doctors and the regulation of lifestyle, writes here about myalgic encephalomyelitis, which is what the British call chronic fatigue syndrome or CFS. A working group reporting to the UK’s Chief Medical Officer, the equivalent of the Surgeon General of the US, has endorsed the idea that ME is a real disease and requires prompt recognition and attention. Like me, the essayist is skeptical, and notes that before reaching its consensus statement, the committee was riven by controversy and resignations. My close study of CFS as one of a number of controversial syndromes on the medical-psychiatric interface about which I have written and taught convinced me that, while there is an organic basis for CFS in a small proportion of cases, by and large the diagnosis is misused by self-deceiving sufferers and politically correct clinicians with the misguided notion that it is a stinging rejection to tell a patient that their dysfunction is “all in their head.” This is enabling to patients who are invested in finding a physical explanation for their psychological distress, often personality disorders that are hard to pin down.
The essay also underscores the medical perils of the essentially political nature of the recognition of new diagnoses. This is quite familiar to those of us in the mental health field who watch the squabbling around the periodic revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the official ‘bible’ of diagnoses in psychiatry. It should not be surprising in an era when there are pitched battles over paying for medical care. As Dr Fitzpatrick notes, it “represents the capitulation of medical authority to irrationality.”
‘Self-pity and self-deception are the great enemies of Mankind’ writes medical commentator Theodore Dalrymple in his recent book, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Medicine. Yet both are pervasive in modern society, and nowhere more than among patients with ME, above all in the ME organisations. To any observer who takes a historical or sociological perspective on the emergence of novel diseases such as CFS/ME, their origins in the existential distress of their sufferers is readily apparent – as indeed it usually is in the doctor’s surgery.
The tragedy of the sufferers is their lack of insight into this process, a deficit that is reinforced by the provision of a pseudo-medical disease label. Whereas according to the new policy of the Chief Medical Officer, doctors are now obliged to collude with the self-deception of ME sufferers, for Dalrymple, it is necessary to ‘undeceive’ to achieve change. From his humanistic perspective, it is the doctor’s responsibility, acting with due circumspection, to ‘undeceive the self-deceived’. While the official line ratifies confusion and promotes incapacity, this approach points the way towards enlightenment and recovery.spiked!
Robert Kuttner: Daschle Too Timid To Take On Bush Tax Cut:
“(W)hen Democrats try to blame Bush for this year’s escalating deficit, Republicans can easily demonstrate that most of the current fiscal deterioration is the result of the recession.
That, of course, misses the real point, which is that the big tax cut misallocates national resources for the long term. Worse, instead of making national priorities the issue, Democrats make deficits the issue.
The Democrats are also loath to draw the logical conclusion that most of the 10-year tax cut should be repealed. Bush has vowed that this would occur ”over my dead body,” a vow reminiscent of his fathers famous braggadocio (”Read my lips, no new taxes”). But the Democrats should take up Bush II’s challenge.” The American Prospect
U.S. Says Tribal Leaders Balk at Aiding Search for Taliban. “Many Pashtun tribal leaders in eastern Afghanistan have balked at cooperating with American Special Operations Forces in the hunt for Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters, weapons caches and intelligence that could prevent future terrorist attacks, military officials said today. The leaders’ reluctance has left American forces with few Afghan allies in one of the most dangerous regions of the country, a former Taliban and Al Qaeda stronghold that may still harbor hostile fighters and contain underground command bunkers and hideouts for staging guerrilla attacks, officials said.
” NY Times
“There are two excesses: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason. The supreme achievement of reason is to realise that there is a limit to reason. Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go as far as to realise that.”
–Pascal
The suprascientific in clinical medicine:
I first heard of him half a century ago. He is one of those people who become more articulate, more cocksure, and more formidable in debate the older they get. Continental Europeans call him Erik the Genius. Although he is highly esteemed in the United Kingdom, he impresses Americans less. I call him Professor Know-All because every time a new fact emerges in science or medicine, he has expected it. Nothing puzzles him. So I decided to see what he would make of these four case histories. British Medical Journal (BMJ)
Ancient Engravings Push Back Origin of Abstract Thought: Two pieces of ochre show our ancestors were thinking symbolically at 75,000 BCE. Scientific American
ABC’s Nightline briefing on “neurotheology”: “There are certain [brain] patterns that can be generated experimentally that will generate the sense, presence and the feeling of God-like experiences,” says professor of Neuroscience Michael Persinger of Ontario’s Laurentia University. “The patterns we use are complex but they imitate what the brain does normally.”
What’s in a name? Nominal kinship cues facilitate altruism.
In an age of instant communication, what is it that makes us choose to respond to one email over another and when are we more likely to offer help to a complete stranger? The answer is when we share the same name as the other person, according to new research published in the Royal Society’s journal Proceedings B. An analysis of responses to 2,960 emails by researchers at McMaster University, Ontario, Canada, found that a shared name leads to a perceived connection with and positive attitude towards, the other person, that arises from a feeling of shared ancestry – or kinship. The recent clamour by millions of people trying to access the UK Public Record Office’s 1901 census website bears this out. Our responses to people with the same name are also likely to be quicker and friendlier than when our names are different.
Half a Brain Is Enough: The Story of Nico “Some things we believe because, even though they seem impossible, someone we trust says that they are true. It’s like that with the little boy in Dr Antonio Battro’s book, Half a Brain is Enough: The Story of Nico. Nico has half a brain–and a complete mind. Battro is so expert and likable and forthright that you come away from his book not only knowing Nico’s story is true, but sharing his awe at that amazing fact.” JAMA
My comments below in response to Dan Hartung, about how depression although painful may be an adaptive response at times, have provoked a number of impassioned email responses both pro and con. For those interested in pursuing the issue further (re: depression, not antiwar thinking…), some of the links in this Google Search may be of value. Dan jotted me a note promising to reply to my comments; I’ve just checked in at lake effect again and I see he has done so.
Next step: Philippines? Washington Post
Danger Persists After Hobbling Of Al Qaeda: ‘…(A)uthorities in the United States and Europe remain deeply worried about the possibility of more terrorist attacks of smaller scope, either by al Qaeda itself or by sympathizers to bin Laden’s cause.
Even more alarming is the possibility that bin Laden and his closest associates may have preapproved another spectacular act of terrorism on the magnitude of the Sept. 11 hijackings, Bush administration officials said. At least a half-dozen alleged terrorist plots connected to al Qaeda have been unmasked since Sept. 11, including plans to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Paris and to attack U.S. interests in Singapore.’ Washington Post The article suggests that the dismantling of al Qaeda’s infrastructure in Afghanistan precludes another monumental act like the the Sept. 11th events. But, especially given that bin Laden appears to have eluded capture, on what basis should we have any confidence that we can detect clandestine communication to ‘sleeper’ cells biding their time with similar long-gestating plans in the US or elsewhere in the West?
Trawler nets giant squid. “It is thought it would have stretched to about 5.5m in length if it still had its two feeding tentacles, which were lost when it was caught.” BBC
Discovery That Common Mood Disorders Are Inherited Together May Reveal Genetic Underpinnings: ‘The genetic underpinnings of panic disorder and manic depressive (bipolar) illness have long eluded scientists. Now, researchers at Johns Hopkins studying the inheritance patterns of these conditions have concluded that they probably are not separate diseases at all, but different forms of a shared and complex biological condition.
“We’ve shown that panic attacks and panic disorder are related genetically to bipolar disorder and therefore likely share a common cause,” says Dean F. MacKinnon, M.D., assistant professor of psychiatry at Hopkins and lead author of a report on the study in the current issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry. “We still can’t say what specific gene or genes cause what, but this is a major step toward solving these problems,” says MacKinnon.’ PsychLinx
We already know that anxiety and mood disorders share some common neurochemical underpinnings, because antidepressants are the best anti-anxiety medications as well. There are few “textbook cases” of either pure anxiety or pure depression untinged by the other. Clinicians have suspected that anxiety disorders evolve into more chronic, depressive conditions longitudinally. But, especially if this genetic analysis leads to the identification of a common locus, this is big news. Science Daily
Todd Gitlin: Blaming America First: “Why are some
on the left, who rightly demand sympathy for
victims around the world, so quick to dismiss
American suffering?” Mother Jones
There was an old lady who swallowed a fly: ‘The universe might make more sense if it were not alone… The idea of multiple universes is a surprisingly attractive one.
Two deep problems would go away if the universe were not, in
fact, universal, but were merely one example of an infinitely
large class of such objects. These problems are the true
nature of the uncertainty principle, and the “anthropic
principle”—the coincidence that the universe seems to be set
up with precisely the right conditions for human-like life to
evolve within it. Unfortunately, the sorts of “multiverse”
proposed to resolve these two problems are different.’ The Economist
Why We Don’t Marry: James Q. Wilson considers the growth in single-parent childrearing pivotal to the decline and fall of Western civilization, and wonders why. City Journal And while we’re at it:
Singleton society: “… adults are not only finding it difficult to sustain marriage, but just about all forms of intimate relationships.” spiked!
More than 2,300 IRS computers missing. “The Internal Revenue Service, which holds taxpayers strictly liable for accurate tax returns, is working to account for more than 2,300 computers that have gone missing over the past three years.” USA Today
Fountains and Bubbles: New Cosmic Mysteries: “…(T)he meeting of the
American Astronomical Society last
week in Washington was a sounding
board for scientists with new findings
and ideas about nearly everything
from mysterious gamma ray bursts in
deep space to revealing images
penetrating the turbulent heart of the
Milky Way, Earth’s home galaxy.
Two new discoveries described at the
meeting underscored the growing and
bewildering realization that planetary
systems abound in the nearby
universe and that they come in all
shapes and sizes, bearing little
apparent resemblance to the Sun’s
family of planets.” New York Times
Justice Department Will Seek Life in Prison for Walker: “The Bush administration will charge
American Taliban John Walker Lindh with conspiracy to kill U.S.
citizens in Afghanistan and will ask for life imprisonment rather
than the death penalty, Attorney General John Ashcroft said
Tuesday.” New York Times
Britain and US discuss Cuba captives. The UK wants assurances about the welfare of three al Qaeda detainees who are subjects of the Crown, but decline to discuss with the US concerns about other detainees reportedly ill-treated en route to Cuba. BBC
Can anyone in the world reach anyone else through a chain of just six friends?
In 1967, sociologist Stanley Milgram created what is known as the “small world
phenomenon,” the idea that every person in the United States is connected by a chain
of six people at most.Milgram’s “six degrees of separation” theory has trickled down through popular
culture, inspiring renditions such as the Kevin Bacon game.But Milgram’s theory has gone largely unproven for more than 30 years and hasn’t
yet been repeated with any success. Now, two separate research projects are using
electronic communication to test the small world phenomenon. Wired
By Royal Appointment, therapeutic counsellors to the House of Windsor: ‘The Prince of Wales has been praised for doing “what any responsible father would do” by making the wayward Prince Harry visit a drugs rehabilitation clinic to see the effects of addiction. In truth, if every middle-class parent whose child had drunk some cider and smoked a little cannabis did the same as Prince Charles, there would be little room left in rehab for the recovering heroin addicts at whom the Hooray Harrys and Harriets are supposed to gawp.’ The Times of London
. linkdup . . . . world wide web stimulus . . . . : “Design, content and technology are coming of age on the web and this maturation continues at a pace. It can be difficult to know where to look to see the best sites, so we collect and categorise them for you and save you the time and effort… WHATS THE CATCH? None. linkdup is non-commercial so there’s no nasty revenue-models to oblige us to do anything other than bring you the best, impartially.”
The Asylum on the Hill: ‘Alex Beam, the author of Gracefully Insane, probes the rich past of a mental hospital renowned for ministering to prominent, creative, and aristocratic patients…’ (McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., where I worked early in my career and about whose literary and artistic denizens, among whom figure Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Ray Charles and James Taylor, I’ve previously written here). The Atlantic [thanks, Abby]
Amour Online: Darwin Wouldn’t Have Been Surprised: ‘Is online dating a bleak reflection of an overworked, increasingly alienated, rootless and commodity-oriented society? Or is it the greatest technological love panacea ever created?’ AlterNet
‘Yeah, Right’ Dept: Pretzelgate: What Really Happened? “Last weekend President Bush was reported to have choked on a pretzel, passed out and suffered a bruise on his cheek after hitting the floor. Given this highly unusual chain of events, speculation has been rampant as to what really caused the contusion on the presidential facade.” AlterNet
Geov Parrish: White America Misuses MLK Day
In many ways, Ronald Reagan did the worst possible thing for the memory of Dr. King by acceding — reluctantly — to the national holiday that bears King’s name. Because the holiday has become a feel-good lie.
King, the man, is, along with Mohandas Gandhi, one of the two most internationally revered symbols of nonviolence in the 20th century. He spent his too-brief adult life defying authority and convention, citing a higher moral authority, and gave hope and inspiration for the liberation of people of color on six continents. MLK Day, the holiday, has only made new generations of white people mislearn King’s story.
King is not a legend because he believed in diversity trainings and civic ceremonies, or because he had a nice dream. He is remembered because he took serious risks and, as the Quakers say, spoke truth to power. He is also remembered because, among a number of brave and committed civil rights leaders and activists, he had a flair for self-promotion, a style that also appealed to white liberals, and the extraordinary social strength of the black southern churches behind him. And because he died before he had a chance to be ridiculed as a relic or buffoon. Workingforchange
Arianna Huffington: America’s Other War Heats Up: “A day after getting 14 Black Hawk combat choppers from the
U.S. — supposedly to fight the Drug War — Colombia’s president
broke off peace talks with FARC rebels, pushing his country to
the brink of war.”
The victims of the terrorist attacks deserve tremendous sympathy. They died tragically and often horrifically. But not all died in a way that people have previously described as heroic. And even the heroism attributed to the rescue workers stems as much from the country’s needs in responding to the disaster as from what actually happened in the collapsing buildings.
It is long overdue that Americans appreciate their public servants. It is also necessary to honor those who died simply for being in America. But changing the definition of hero to accommodate tragic victims may actually weaken us by diminishing the idea of role models who perform truly extraordinary acts. Boston Globe [thanks, Gary]
What? Now We Have to Make a Profit and Be Ethical?
So you’re wondering, Will things ever get back to normal? They already have. For most businesses, the new normal means bolstering backup and contingency plans, ratcheting up security, and preparing for the worst. That’s easy. Now comes the tough part: meeting the public’s escalating ethical expectations of corporations.
Conventional wisdom long held that only two basic strategies earn a company its competitive advantage: selling goods or services at a lower cost, and making sure those products are superior in quality to those of competitors. But the world is finally making room for a third path. Consumers are showing that they will reward companies that prove they are social, not just corporate, leaders — and that they will punish those they perceive as bad citizens. Business 2.0
Dan Hartung (lake effect), whom I’ve considered one of my weblogging friends but whose views and mine have diverged dramatically since Sept. 11th (I think), understands cognitive therapy for depression quite well (“the key feature of cognitive therapy is the idea that you have an inner voice that’s thinking negative thoughts, and you need to “talk back” at yourself to combat them. Call it a rationalist’s version of the daily affirmation”) but then has an insight that there’s an analogy between the automatic negative thoughts of the depressive and “much of the anti-war journalism the anti-idiotarian warbloggers have been shredding with varied amounts of glee or exasperation.” He describes cognitive distortions like all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, the mental filter, and disqualifying the positive, as characteristic of his ‘opponents’, and in the process indulges in all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, selective filtering and disqualifying the positive about antiwar discourse.
But my major bone to pick with him about this simile between depressive cognition and antiwar thought is that he assumes, as do many, that because depressive thinking causes such distress, it’s necessarily wrong. In fact, there are serious arguments that depression may be an adaptive response to loss, setback or grief. Depressive thinking may actually be a more realistic appraisal than we can usually afford and hope to go on, and the organism’s shutdown in response to it may be a resource-conserving one in the service of survival. . In the modern world, with its rather superficial emphasis on productivity and function, we can have no truck with this response, so we jump to treat the depression. And, of course, we hasten to treat it if the pessimistic distortion is vastly out of proportion to the reality of the situation. But it isn’t necessarily out of proportion! It’s like the old line about bugs and insects — while all depressive thought is pessimistic, not all pessimism is pathological. These nuances should factor into anyone’s analogizing , it would seem to me.
Dan, I haven’t heard anything from you, as I was accustomed to hearing, since you and I began shooting our mouths off in divergent directions after Sept. 11th. I’m pretty sure my expressed sentiments place me among the cognitively distorted in your mind. That’s okay. But, particularly as both an opponent of the war effort and an experienced therapist, I think you’re wrong about whether “we” think “you” are the “sick ones,” as you suggest in your last line. In ministering to the depressed, you rarely get anywhere by a frontal assault on the contradictions in the depressive thinking, especially if you label the person or the thining as “sick.” Cognitive therapy works only for a subset, the most intellectualized subset, of the depressed, and at great cost of keeping one divided from oneself and some of one’s mental content. As the saying goes, you can never succeed arguing about politics or religion (and this is both to each of us, it would appear…). We only get somewhere when we recognize “sickness” as a different, not a priori better or worse, way of thinking about a situation, and engage in an open-minded exploration of whether it works or not. Anything less is just namecalling…
Michael Byers: US doesn’t have the right to decide who is or isn’t a PoW
Would you want your life to be in the hands of US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld? Hundreds of captured Taliban and al-Qaida fighters don’t have a choice. Chained, manacled, hooded, even sedated, their beards shorn off against their will, they are being flown around the world to Guantanamo Bay, a century-old military outpost seized during the Spanish-American war and subsequently leased from Cuba by the US. There, they are being kept in tiny chain-link outdoor cages, without mosquito repellent, where (their captors assure us) they are likely to be rained upon.
Since Guantanamo Bay is technically foreign territory, the detainees have no rights under the US constitution and cannot appeal to US federal courts. Any rights they might have under international law have been firmly denied. According to Rumsfeld, the detainees “will be handled not as prisoners of war, because they are not, but as unlawful combatants”. Guardian UK
Military Looks to Cut Patrols in US: ‘The military has flown more than 13,000 fighter-jet patrols over American cities since Sept. 11 at a cost exceeding $324 million. Now it wants to cut back.
The round-the-clock patrols designed to deter terrorists may be straining planes and personnel, the Pentagon said Monday.
Four months after the airliner attacks, any decision on ending or changing the patrols may come down to a calculation of how safe Americans would feel with the change, some officials say.’ Guardian UK
Crackpot index: ‘A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics.’
The Art of Turning a Sow’s Ear Into a Silk Purse. Remember the pre-Sept. 11th pattern of rape and pillage of the environment by Shrub administration policy decisions? Not surprisingly, the administration is still as anti-environment, but this New York Times piece suggests they’re more aware of the PR impact of their stance. Expect full steam ahead by the spin doctors. The essay also suggests that environmental concerns are too big for corporations to ignore. I doubt it, especially during a recession when such niceties are the first expenses trimmed. Unless there are financial incentives to minimize environmental impact, forget it.
Eclogues observed: ‘Hey, my hit count has gone up! Oh… okay, that’ll teach me to have the words “Aragorn” “Boromir” “Legolas” and the phrase “slash fiction” on the same page…’ Let’s see if quoting that comment does anything for FmH’s hits…
‘Alien’ message tests human decoders: ‘A message that will be broadcast into space later in 2002 has been released to scientists worldwide, to test that it can be decoded easily. The researchers who devised the message eventually hope to design a system that could automatically decode an alien reply.
Unlike previous interstellar broadcasts, the new message is designed to withstand significant interference and interruption during transmission.’ New Scientist
Religion, group affiliation at root of conflicts — an interview with Richard Dawkins. Daily Yomiuri
Creating Mental Illness by Allan V. Horwitz reviewed by Lynn E. O’Connor: “…a fascinating and scholarly critique of our classification of mental disorders. Horwitz begins by stating boldly that many so-called mental disorders according to our current symptom-based system of classification, are not really mental disorders at all, but normal responses to social stress, relationship problems, work or other problems in living, or social deviance that may be in some cases, culturally supported.” Although a sociologist, Horowitz is not a social constructionist insisting that there is no reality to mental illness except that conferred by social attitude. But his view appears similar to mine in exploring the effect of social labelling and stigmatization on distress and outcome.
Consuming Rituals of the Suburban Tribe “Focus groups have their problems. So marketers are mimicking anthropologists and studying consumers in their native habitat: the home.” NY Times Magazine
Cyrus R. Vance, a Confidant to Presidents, Is Dead at 84. An Ivy-League establishment diplomat with integrity; I won’t forget his resignation, a rare act of principle in the business of government, as secretary of state over his opposition to Carter’s proposed military rescue of the Iran hostages in 1980. NY Times
The Art of Turning a Sow’s Ear Into a Silk Purse. Remember the pre-Sept. 11th pattern of rape and pillage of the environment by Shrub administration policy decisions? Not surprisingly, the administration is still as anti-environment, but this New York Times piece suggests they’re more aware of the PR impact of their stance. Expect full steam ahead by the spin doctors. The essay also suggests that environmental concerns are too big for corporations to ignore. I doubt it, especially during a recession when such niceties are the first expenses trimmed. Unless there are financial incentives to minimize environmental impact, forget it.
FindArticles.com: searchable archive of articles dating back to 1998 from more than 300 magazines and journals. [via Red Rock Eater]
Beyond the Fringe: A review of Them: Adventures With Extremists
By Jon Ronson:
Ronson, a writer and documentary filmmaker in Britain, insinuated himself into the homes and graces of a variety of conspiracy theorists and ”extremists,” whom he defines as those who ”have been called extremists by others.” The project began with Omar Bakri Mohammed, who is said to be Osama bin Laden’s ”man in London.” Ronson went on to ingratiate himself with American Klansmen, neo-Nazis and the New World Order conspiracy theorists, some of whom he joins in the quest for the one ”secret room” where a conclave of rulers supposedly plots the conspiracies that control the world.
There is a lively account of Ronson’s attempts to penetrate the meeting of the Bilderberg Group, a publicity-averse conclave of globalists — and recent focus of ”secret room” theorists. Then there is his more successful attempt to sneak into the annual Bohemian Grove encampment in Northern California, where the rich and powerful cavort, cross-dress and enact rituals like the ”cremation of care,” in which an allegorical figure representing the tedium of everyday life is set ablaze. A conspiracy theorist radio host who accompanies Ronson insists this is proof the Bohemians practice human sacrifice. NY Times
The Right to Think: An Interview with Howard Bloom
From 2100 to the End of Time by Frank J. Tipler:
(Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University, Tipler is the co-author of The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford University Press, 1986), about the significance of intelligent life in the universe, and the author of The Physics of Immortality (Doubleday, 1994) about the ultimate limits of computers, and the role computers will play in the universe. Professor Tipler was the post-doc of a post-doc of John von Neumann, the mathematician who made the first American digital computer. Tipler was also the post-doc of a post-doc of a post-doc of Albert Einstein. Finally, Tipler was the post-doc of John Wheeler, the man who named the black hole, and Wheeler was in turn the post-doc of Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. Not surprisingly, Tipler’s research is on discovering the mutual implications of computer theory, relativity, and quantum mechanics.)
The year is 2100. AI’s and human downloads have begun to explore and colonize interstellar space. The spaceships carrying the AI’s and human downloads are tiny, massing no more than a kilogram. Quantum computers, which can code more bytes of information in 400 atoms than there are atoms in the entire visible universe, do not require much mass. An entire simulated city with thousands of humans and AI’s can be coded in a few grams. And a tiny spaceship has a huge advantage over the ponderous rockets of today. Powered by matter- antimatter annihilation, such tiny spaceships can reach 90% of lightspeed with only a few kilograms of fuel. At such a speed, the nearest star, some four and one-half light years away, will be reached in only five years. Acceleration to 90% of lightspeed will be very fast, because the downloads and AI’s will be impervious to acceleration. Humans not living in computers can take only a few gravities of acceleration, and can take that small acceleration only for a short time. Simulated humans will experience only the usual one gravity acceleration in their simulated environment. Human downloads have such a natural advantage over present-day humans in the environment of space, that it is exceedingly unlikely non-downloaded humans will ever engage in interstellar travel. The stars are to be the inheritance of our downloaded descendants, of the children of our minds rather than our bodies.
Alan Wolfe reviews Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline by Richard Posner, which includes a ranking of the top one hundred public intellectuals in America based on media recognition. The New Republic
New York Times review: The Reckless Mind: When Smart People Get Dumb Ideas
The essays that make up Mark Lilla’s book — essays on the Nazi tastes of Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, on Walter Benjamin’s mystical Marxism, on Alexandre Kojeve’s weakness for Stalin and on the antiliberal fusillades of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida — are driven by his sense of disappointment, a lover’s kind of disappointment, that such profound and influential minds should have been so politically insouciant when confronted by the hectic barbarity of the 20th century.
Earth at Night — a spectacular picture of the Earth taken from the new Space Station.
You have to scroll down and right to view the whole thing. Interesting observations below the picture.
Judge Rules Fingerprints Cannot Be Called a Match:
‘A judge has ruled for the first time that fingerprint evidence, a virtually unassailable prosecutorial tool for 90 years, does not meet the standards set for scientific testimony and that experts in the field cannot testify that a suspect’s prints definitely match those found at a crime scene.
The decision, by a senior federal judge in Philadelphia, comes after two years of efforts by defense lawyers to hold fingerprint analysis to standards set by the Supreme Court in 1993.
The judge, Louis H. Pollak, found that fingerprint analysis had not been subjected to the rigorous testing required under those standards.’
NY Times
Wake Me When It’s Over: ‘The attorney general of Texas has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the overturned death penalty conviction of a man whose lawyer slept through his trial.
The 5th circuit appeals court ruled that the “consistent unconsciousness” of his attorney had compromised the defendant’s rights to due process. But the state of Texas is not about to give up on this execution.’ The American Prospect
Animal Virus May Contribute to Mental Illness: ‘A virus that infects animals but is thought to be relatively harmless to humans might possibly contribute to some cases of mental illness, according to a virologist who presented the controversial evidence at a meeting here Wednesday.
Prof. Norbert Nowotny, from the University of Veterinary Sciences, Vienna, told researchers at the meeting that Borna disease virus, which causes a fatal brain disease in animals, might be linked to schizophrenia, depression and chronic fatigue syndrome in humans.’ Reuters
The BBC reviews the silly stories of 2001, as only the BBC can.
State of the Pundit: William Safire comments on the reactions to his supposed change of political heart in criticizing the Bush Dictatorship, about which I scratched my head in FmH. He does not (naturally) mention the theory that he is angry he was played for a fool by Cheney’s disinformation about ongoing terrorist threats. NY Times
Slate opens UK offshoot and, curiously, its editors and many of its writers will be anonymous.
New Tree Disease May Afflict California’s Giant Redwoods: ‘California’s awe-inspiring redwoods may be susceptible to a fast- spreading new disease that has already killed tens of thousands of oaks and other trees and infected many plant species in the state, according to preliminary findings by University of California scientists.” New York Times
Stellar ‘Fireworks Finale’ Came First in the Young Universe: ‘The deepest views of the cosmos from the Hubble Space Telescope yield clues that the very first stars may have burst into the universe as brilliantly and spectacularly as a fireworks finale. Except in this case, the finale came first, long before Earth, the Sun and the Milky Way Galaxy formed. Studies of Hubble’s deepest views of the heavens lead to the preliminary conclusion that the universe made a significant portion of its stars in a torrential firestorm of star birth, which abruptly lit up the pitch-dark heavens just a few hundred million years after the “big bang,” the tremendous explosion that created the cosmos. Though stars continue to be born today in galaxies, the star birth rate could be a trickle compared to the predicted gusher of stars in those opulent early years.’ STSCI
Brian Livingston: The next Windows: ‘With due respect to my colleagues who use the Mac OS or Linux, I believe the operating systems on the computers we’ll soon be using — and taking for granted — will look more like a newer, leaner OS named Symbian.
The future belongs to devices we’ll carry around, not boat anchors that must remain tied to our desks. Symbian — as any search on the word at InfoWorld.com will reveal — is already competing seriously with Microsoft in the handheld space.” InfoWorld
A memetics reader: “Throughout 1996-1997 I researched Richard Dawkins’ meme (a cultural unit of information that propagates across our ecologies of mind) and considered specific applications within advertising, cults and postmodern ‘designer religious viruses’ (Richard Brodie). My research trajectory was influenced by my fascination with the late Gnosis Magazine and the science fiction author Philip K. Dick. I was freelancing for the Australian science/culture magazine 21.C and considering the initiatory/philosophical implications of Cyberpunk while in the Temple of Set. In mid-1997 I discovered Clare W. Graves through Dr. Don Edward Beck and Chris Cowan’s book Spiral Dynamics, and a synthesis began to form.” disinfo
“Oh, laddie, go tell it to the Marines!”
In the mid-70s, I attended a full day seminar by the wonderfully eccentric, British psychiatrist R.D. Laing. At one point in his address, given before an audience of rather tight-assed, Calgary, Alberta, psychiatric professionals, he explained what the term, hubris, meant to him. It was a wonderful, dramatic moment. And while I no longer have my notes, I recall the scene clearly.
Laing stood on a stage before a microphone, no podium, no notes. There were several hundred in attendance. “Hubris,” he said in his Scottish brogue, “means to miss the mark. Let me illustrate it more literally. Imagine that I am a Greek archer and my target lies behind you at the back of this auditorium.” He pointed over the audience toward the rear exits. Some heads turned.
“Now, he said, “I am the Greek archer.” Slowly, he raised his imaginary bow. Just as slowly, he drew the bowstring back to his cheek. Then, deliberately and carefully, he began to turn until his back was to the audience, the “bow” still held in position. “And now,” he said, “I release the arrow.”
Again, slowly, he turned to face the audience. “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is modern psychiatry. The target is out there,” pointing to the exits, “and we are loosing our arrows there,” waving to stage rear. He had alienated his audience, of course, and spent the rest of the afternoon jousting with them.
Last night, was a restless, sleepless night, and my thoughts turned to this memory of Laing and to the arrows loosed internationally and domestically by the Bush administration. The end of the old year and beginning of the new used to be a time to take stock, to determine which marks were hit, which were missed, and more important, were the targets appropriate in the first place? I could be wrong, but I don’t think this type of assessment is practiced much anymore. Too bad.
Wonderful image, from this psychiatrist’s favorite anti-psychiatrist. And applying Laing’s incisive irreverence to my favorite target, the risible Bush administration…
Terrorism Beyond Islam: “Whether the purest form of Islam or the most perverted, it so enveloped the hijackers in religious zeal that the centrality of Islam to the attacks is hard to deny.
So let me try.
It is easier to try that here in East Asia. The kind of defiant and violent antagonism to the West that we now associate with Islamists was for centuries linked instead to places like Japan, Korea and China.” New York Times [name: “FMHreader”, password: “FMHreader”]
A Quiet Revolution for Those Prone to Nodding Off. The New York Times reviews advances in the treatment of narcolepsy, especially modulation of the neurotransmitter orexin by the first of a promising new class of drugs which may have much broader potential to modify fatigue and sleep disturbances. Surprisingly, the new drug, Xyrem, contains the compound GHB (gamma-hydroxybutyrate), which has gained notoriety as a “date-rape drug.” The developers of Xyrem plan to distribute it by a novel mechanism to preclude its diversion into recreational use, sidestepping the abuse that is virtually crippling other medically essential but highly abusable drugs like Oxycontin. An added dividend from this article is the news, which which I had been unacquainted, that narcolepsy appears to be an autoimmune disease. Autopsies of narcoleptics show severe deficits in orexin-containing neurons in the CNS, suggesting they have been destroyed. While narcolepsy is not strictly a psychiatric disorder and thus out of my purview, it is of course true that disorders in sleep regulation and architecture are prominent in psychiatric illness, and I’m sure that the new discoveries about the role of orexin will have psychiatric applications. By the way, narcolepsy involves not only sudden sleep attacks but some other extraordinary — and frightening to patients — syptoms, including cataplexy (sudden loss of muscle tone, often in conjunction with emotional arousal, which can lead for example to people literally falling down laughing), hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations (bizarre distortions in the perception of reality when on the point of falling asleep or awakening, often terrifying, which represent the intrusion of REM sleep into wakeful consciousness) and sleep paralysis, also terrifying. Some think, by the way, that the sleep paralysis of narcoleptic conditions may be the basis for alien abduction experiences.
In Dark Matter, New Hints of a Universal Glue: “Sometimes, defying its wont, science makes the cosmos look a little simpler. Recently it seems as if astronomers have been sprung from a long cosmological nightmare. Last month a consortium of astronomers announced that an analysis of some 130,000 galaxies showed that the the universe, at least on large scales, is structured pretty much the way it looks.
That might sound unremarkable, but it didn’t have to come out that way…” New York Times [name: “FMHreader”, password: “FMHreader”]
No, I didn’t deliberately change the text to lightest-grey-on-white; experienced a stylesheet glitch. And just when I’m moving between machines and not able to update regularly. Many of you have written to complain, and I am sorry. You can read it now, right? And there’ll even be content again RSN…
