William Saletan: Adopting Premises – The sneaky debate over legalizing adoptions by gay couples.

‘Several million American children reportedly live in homes with at least one gay parent. In most cases, the same-sex domestic partner of that parent has no legal parental rights or responsibilities. This week, the American Academy of Pediatrics declared that these “co-parents” should be allowed to undertake such rights and responsibilities by adopting their partners’ children. The announcement has provoked outcries from conservatives, with each side claiming to represent science against politics. In truth, each side’s “science” is loaded with politics. Here’s how they fudge the data.’ Slate

In Shift, Bush Says Geneva Rules Fit Taliban Captives but Not Qaeda Members: ‘President Bush decided today that the Geneva Convention would be applied to the Taliban captives being held in Cuba but not to Al Qaeda detainees, a decision that will make little difference in the day-to-day treatment of either but may help protect American soldiers captured in foreign conflicts.

The Bush administration had already decided not to grant prisoner- of-war status to any of the captives, and that decision holds.’ NY Times The grandiose hubris of the Shrub’s claiming the right to decide whenever it’s useful to be above the rule of law is a large part of what fuels resentment of us both among our European ‘allies’ and throughout the developing world. And is there no contradiction between our propagandistic insistence that this is a ‘war’ against terrorism and our transparently self-serving refusal to label our captured opponents prisoners of war?

At least there’s this:

“The decision marks the second victory this week for Secretary Powell, who has at times battled some of his more hard-line cabinet colleagues over foreign policy issues. Earlier this week, he announced that the administration would meet Russia’s demand for a legally binding agreement regarding the reduction of nuclear weapons. Some White House officials had not wanted to tie Washington’s hands with a written arms control agreement.”

I still, however, haven’t decided whether I should consider it pitiful that Colin Powell is the voice of moderation and diplomacy in a sitting administration…

On a related note: Legalizing War Against Iraq — Robert Wright: “One fact you probably won’t hear President Bush mention is that Iraq is in violation of international law. After all, that would require him to utter the phrase ‘international law’. ” Slate

100 Years, 100 Stinkers: The Worst Films of the 20th Century. In all candor, I’ve seen nine on this list, of which I enjoyed, oh probably, three…

“Call me crazy, but it seems like everyone I know is manic-depressive.” Friends in High Places: This writer from the San Jose MetroActive intersperses colorful anecdotes about bipolar (manic depressive) friends and acquaintances with reportage about why the illness is becoming more visible — the lessening stigma to major mental illness, the increasingly accurate recognition and diagnosis of the disease, and the increasingly effective treatments for it that allow normalization of the life of its sufferers (which probably contributes to reason #1) — even though it is probably not becoming more prevalent.

I think that, while this may be true, it is not necessarily the case that the increasing number of people among us who are ‘out of the closet’ with their manic-depressive diagnosis really warrant that diagnosis. One of the deplorable cultural trends shaping my environment as a psychiatrist has been the way in which the increasing medicalization of distress over the time I’ve been in the field has increasingly allowed people to adopt the bipolar diagnosis to explain (to others) and explain away (to themselves) other less palatable categories of labile mood and unstable behavior, especially borderline personality disorders (which, arguably, have become more prevalent in society from decade to decade). Increasing recognition of bipolar disorder dates from around 1970, when the first medication with proven and dramatic stabilizing impact on manic depressive disorder, lithium, entered the pharmacopoeia — because, arguably, one of the important reasons for diagnosis is to recognize something that you can do something about . Other comparably or perhaps even more effective medicines for bipolar mood swings have followed in the intervening decades, making this recognition even more important, but perhaps the diagnosis more circular (how do you know if it’s truly a case of bipolar disease? if the medications that treat bipolar disease are effective against the case. What makes you think these are bipolar medications? They work on bipolars, of course!) But, in point of fact, mood stabilizing medications are non-specifically stabilizing to any cause of fluctuating or labile mood! Too much diagnosis is done by the ‘walks-like-a-duck, quacks-like-a-duck” doctrine, which for the sake of empirical utility throws out almost all subtle depth-derived insight into the human process of a psychiatrically ill patient. Approaching a personality disorder as if it were an unstable mood disorder has profound and misguided consequences unless you believe that all there is to treatment is throwing medications at someone’s life out of balance.

While I’m an adult and not a child psychiatrist, I can’t help being similarly concerned about the last decade’s ‘recognition’ of a hidden epidemic of childhood bipolar disorder (spearheaded by a group of psychiatrists, some of them friends of mine, at the Mass. General Hospital, with lots of pharmaceutical industry grant funding…). Lo and behold, the proponents of this message go through theoretical contortions — not very convincingly, IMHO — to explain that we never recognized childhood bipolar states before because, counterintuitively, they look nothing like manic depression in adults. Predictably, they resemble conduct disorders and oppositional-defiant disorder, childhood analogues and precursors of personality disorders which may not be neurobiological in nature at all. Calling these behavioral disturbances bipolar takes them out of the realm where treatment and training to enhance personal accountability and self-control are conceived as useful. This ‘recognition’ of childhood bipolar disorder is one of the reasons for the explosive growth in prescribing of psychoactive medications to children. The other source of this, of course, is the ‘recognition’ of the epidemic proportion of childhood attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which is now so prevalent in our school-age children that we could almost by current diagnostic practice label the modal behavior of the majority of kids in that age range with a disease! And, of course, being the good cultural materialist that I am, I can’t help pointing out the economic advantages to the two big classes of ‘winners’ that sustain this ‘medicalization of distress’. The pharmaceutical lobby, of course, wins big with the societal adoption of the meme that our emotional and behavioral distress can and should be medicated away. And members of the beleaguered psychiatric profession, struggling to hold onto market share in a managed care environment in which cheaper allied health professions increasingly displace them in conducting psychosocial interventions, do so by insisting they are the only ones who can take care of behavioral or emotional disturbances which are inherently medical or neurobiological in nature. ‘I prescribe, therefore I am’ …

Read your EULA! Some new shrink-wrap license terms seem tailor-made for UCITA. Ed Foster gripes in InfoWorld about the clauses you may be agreeing to when you open a software product’s shrink-wrap — prohibitions on your writing critical reviews or publicizing adverse benchmarking data on the product; arbitrary termination of your contract at the publisher’s whim; the manufacturer’s right to monitor your computing remotely.

Oral sex makes pregnancies safer and more successful – study: “New research suggests oral sex may not only help a woman conceive but may make her pregnancy safer and more successful.

The Australian study found that semen contains a growth factor which helps persuade a mother’s immune system to accept sperm.

It claims to have found evidence that regular exposure before pregnancy, especially by mouth, helps her immune system get used to her partner’s sperm.” Ananova

Babies learn in their sleep — ‘By the time babies are a year old they can recognise a lot of sounds and even simple words. Marie Cheour at the University of Turku in Finland suspected they might progress this fast because they learn language while they sleep as well as when they are awake.’ New Scientist

The Common Thread by John Sulston and Genrgina Ferry:

In 1998, an ambitious American geneticist called Craig Venter announced that his company, Celera Genomics, would get the sequence first, and make it private property. This is the story of how a coalition of scientists fought to ensure that no one could claim to own this information, from the viewpoint of a key combatant: Cambridge scientist John Sulston. The book aims to explain, blow by blow, how the forces of good narrowly won the first battle. It also purports to tell the story of one’s scientist’s life. Independent UK