FDA Issues Approvable Letter For Abilify. Another new ‘atypical’ antipsychotic medication reaches the marketplace; ‘Abilify’ is its brand name, and aripiprazole its generic moniker. The new generation of ‘atypical’ antipsychotics represents a revolution in increased tolerability and efficacy as compared to the older, ‘typical’ or first-generation antipsychotics. For psychiatrists like myself who treat psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia, this is as exciting as the explosion in antidepressant development was a decade before. You don’t hear as much about this revolution because there is virtually no public constituency for schizophrenia. However, although you don’t think you have had much contact with the disease because those affected are largely socially shunned and segregated in a manner quite different from depressed patients (no TV ads for antipsychotics forthcoming!), you probably have had at least some indirect contact with its consequences given that it affects 1-3% of the population overall. So I think it’s worth my while wriitng about this development for a general audience of interested souls.

First, there’s its brand name. ‘Abilify’, although mercifully bucking the recent trend for new psychiatric medications to have a ‘z’, a ‘q’ or an ‘x’ in their name, is an extremely silly name, IMHO, and some Bristol-Myers Squibb representatives gearing up to market it to whom I recently spoke agree. [I hope there are no consequences for their disloyalty if any of their corporate superiors read this. — FmH]  We joked about the estimated $1 million fee some agency got to develop a name for this product. I offered the company that, from my vantage point in the psychiatric marketplace [yes, as FmH readers know, you should make no mistake about the fact that it is a marketplace!], I would create advantageous product names for half what they would pay anyone else, but for some reason they haven’t taken me up on my offer.

In any case, from my reading so far, aripiprazole (I try not to use brand names, as a matter of fact) does not seem a massive therapeutic advance over the other ‘atypical’ or ‘second-generation antipsychotics we have available already — clozapine (Clozaril), risperidone (Risperdal), olanzapine (Zyprexa &mdash ahhh, there’s that ‘x’ and that ‘z’!), quetiapine (Seroquel) and ziprasidone (Geodon). Predictably, sales efforts will soon begin to jockey for a share of the antipsychotic ‘market’ by spinning the clinical studies (often funded by Bristol-Myers Squibb money) to claim more rapid onset, better response, or improved tolerability. Even the explanations of mechanisms of action for these new molecules are ‘spins’, since the CNS is largely a black box and the molecular actions of these medications are opaque to us. (For those of you who are curious, what I’ve read so far indicates that while, like other atypical antipsychotics, aripiprazole has combined postsynaptic dopamine and serotonin activity, it is also supposed to be a presynaptic dopamine autoreceptor agonist. It remains to see if it is; if that is as distinct from the other atypicals as it is made out to be; and, if it is, how much of a contributor to its effectiveness that might be…)

How useful it is to me and other psychiatrists treating psychotic illnesses, other than those who accept funding from Bristol-Myers Squibb and have already reached their conclusions [grin], will only be clear over time. I may not begin to prescribe it until its track record is better-defined. As a hospital-based psychiatrist who sees patients who have ‘fallen apart’ in the community, I have the following unique opportunity to gauge its efficacy and tolerability quite rapidly, as a matter of fact. Every time a new antipsychotic medication emerges, there is a rush of psychiatrists who adopt it immediately and even take previously stable patients off their existing stabilizing medications in the interest of using the newest and greatest thing. (Being cynical, I assume these are the practitioners who get most of their current ‘continuing medical education’ from manufacturers’ representatives or drug-company-funded symposia, rather than reading independent refereed medical journals and being able to read betwen the lines…) This phenomenon often prompts an epidemic of fresh relapses among patients with major mental illnesses, and the extent to which I start to see admissions of patients who fell apart after being switched to aripiprazole will be one of my indicators of whether it seems to be a worthwhile medication.

The magnitude of that phenomenon when the previous-but-one new antipsychotic, quetiapine (Seroquel), was introduced several years ago has made me avoid that drug in most instances, much to the chagrin of the hardworking manufacturers’ representatives trying to persuade me to use more of it. (The drug companies these days have detailed databases of exactly how many prescriptions of their products, and their competitors’, I prescribe every month. I’d love to find a way to fight a battle about this fact on the privacy front — mine or my patients’…). Quetiapine was a particularly egregious case in point, because it was marketed largely around how superior it is in reducing side effects. True, true; it is much more tolerable, but it is probably in that class of ‘white elephant’ drugs which don’t produce side effects because… well, because they largely don’t produce any effects at all, including therapeutic ones! Actually, quetiapine is a pretty good sedative, but that’s different from having antipsychotic activity. I’m noticing a small number of psychiatrists are starting to notice that ‘the emperor has no clothes’ and question the consensus by writing about its lack of efficacy in major psychotic conditions. The company’s response is to say that they just haven’t been using high enough doses.

What we really need by way of the next advance in antipsychotic psychopharmacology is a long-acting injectible atypical antipsychotic. Many patients who are too disorganized to take daily medication, or who are so dangerous when they are off medication that they are under court compulsion to take it (unwillingly), benefit from receiving their antipsychotic treatment in the form of a deep intramuscular injection of a “depot” preparation of a medication whose effect last between ten and thirty days before another injection is necessary. So far, however, the only medications available in such depot preparations in North America are haloperidol (Haldol) and fluphenazine (Prolixin), both of which are first-generation antipsychotics with the full gamut of undesireable side effects which one would like to spare one’s patients, particularly the uncomprehending ones who have not consented willingly to such a price for their stability. Several European countries have a depot version of risperidone, but it is probably several years off in the US, and olanzapine or ziprasidone would be more preferable still.

Hoping these dispatches from the war zone are of interest; I certainly enjoy venting my spleen about my own profession! So, if anyone is interested, I’ll keep you posted on aripiprazole.

Year of Struggle and Change:

When the World Trade Center towers fell, they took more with them than human lives. A huge segment of the downtown economy collapsed with the falling steel and concrete, and the disaster encompassed far more than the large financial firms that are most often identified with the Sept. 11 attacks.

The trade center was home to hundreds of diverse companies, a polyglot village spanning everything from Asian food importers to graphic designers to dentists. Many had inhabited the towers for decades.

Those companies, more than half of which had fewer than 20 employees, became refugees on Sept. 11. Some have folded, overwhelmed by the deaths of owners or employees or undone by a lack of cash. Others have eked out a living in kitchens and basements. Some have relocated to Florida or Texas, while others have insisted on staying within a few blocks of ground zero. Some, miraculously, have flourished, growing even as the local economy foundered.

The New York Times set out to chronicle the fate of the complex’s tenants as they struggled to re-establish themselves over the past year. After compiling lists of tenants from several sources, The Times estimates that about 700 companies and organizations occupied the trade center buildings. Defining a more precise number, however, is difficult because so many of the companies were subtenants whose occupancy did not appear on official lists.

A review of Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence by Gerard Jones: ‘In fact, everything in Killing Monsters works, placing it in sharp contrast to the endless sky-is-falling rhetoric of the last few decades, which seems designed for no other purpose than make us fear both the media and our own children. When Bob Dole is on the election stump railing about Quentin Tarentino movies he’s never seen, when school officials are tossing kids for simply expressing themselves, when Steven Spielberg is pixel-editing guns out of the hands of the FBI in his re-release of E.T. so that perhaps children will be unaware that law-enforcement officers use guns, and when lawsuits which contend that students will be turned into slavering terrorists if they even look at the Qu’ran are being taken seriously, it’s high time we stop listening to the “experts” and start paying closer attention to our kids. They seem to be the only ones with a clue.’ PopMatters

New Nessie pictures spark debate: “Instead of the usual fleeting glimpse afforded her followers, Nessie stayed above the surface long enough for retired printer Roy Johnston to take at least four photographs showing the suspiciously snake-like Nessie arching out of the water and returning to it with a splash. The new photographs, printed in yesterday’s Daily Mail, prompted an immediate debate as to whether they are genuine. ” The Scotsman

“Viagra, the popular drug that helps give men erections, could save plants from even more serious cases of droop.

An Israeli scientist, Ya’acov Leshem, of Bar-Ilan University, was looking at how flowers wither and, acting on impulse, put some Viagra into a vase of cut flowers and found they stayed fresh for up to a week longer than usual.” The Age [via new world disorder]

Pagan conference center in rural Ireland: as close as you can get to Hogwarts in the real world? Yahoo!

A personal declaration of deep neutrality by R. U. Sirius. disinfo

“Get your own Chinese name based on your English name… Chinese uses characters rather than an alphabet, so names cannot be directly translated from English to Chinese. However, Chinese characters can be chosen which approximate the English pronounciation, which is what this program does.”

Top 10 Signs Your Neighbor is Brainwashed:

For example —

3) “We have to defend ourselves, and the war on terrorism is the only way to do that.”

Anyone who believes this war is simply a drive to eradicate terrorism must be brainwashed. The U.S. has been building military bases along proposed oil pipeline routes, and has its eye on the oil and gas reserves in the Caspian Sea region. All anyone need do is read Zbigniew Brzezinski’s “The Grand Chessboard” or brush up on the Wolfowitz Doctrine to understand the not-so-hidden agenda behind U.S foreign policy. In a recent appearance on Crossfire, Insight Magazine’s Jamie Dettmer deftly addressed America’s aim to control the oil fields in Iraq. “Nobody has suggested the United States is going into Iraq to control the oil,” Tucker Carlson asserted, leaving some to wonder if Tucker’s bow tie isn’t too tight. “Let’s not be unsophisticated about this,” Dettmer replied, warning that, “in the end, if America doesn’t restrain itself, [it’s] going to provoke groupings of countries which will restrain America instead.” Buzzflash

Warren Ellis writes in DiePunyHumans that Turkish chlamydia sufferers rape dogs, believing it cures their disease. [Ahh, the endless varieties of human ignorance and depravity! — FmH]  However, the report suffers a credibility gap, being from a Kurdish media source. [I’m not casting aspersions on Kurdish journalism, mind you — I don’t know enough about it to do so — but rather suggesting that they have more than enough reason to portray Turks in a depraved light…]

Can’t We Get Along?

“Sometimes it’s hard not to think machines are out to get us. An unusual art installation in Dublin examines people’s relationship with electronic devices.”

Wired News – Culture

Where is the damned beef ? NY Times and Washington Post

U.S. Ready to Go It Alone on Iraq: “President Bush made clear on Saturday he would act against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein with or without world support, and was said to be ready to strike within four or five months.” Yahoo! News – Most-emailed Content

Saddam Hussein Trained Al Qaeda Fighters – Report: “British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s promised dossier on Iraq is to reveal that Saddam Hussein trained some of Osama bin Laden’s key lieutenants, The Sunday Telegraph reported.” Yahoo! News – Most-emailed Content

Arab leaders appeal to Iraq: Let inspectors in: “Arab League nations are appealing to Iraq to allow UN weapons inspectors in, to avert a confrontation that could inflame the Middle East.” Ananova: News

Straw: UN backs Bush on Iraq : “Mr Straw says there is overwhelming support in the UN for President Bush’s stance on Iraq.” Ananova: News

UN fears Iraq anarchy. World Press Review: Breaking News

Arab League Urges Iraqi Inspections: “Under pressure from Arab nations to allow U.N. weapons inspectors back, Iraq’s foreign minister said late Saturday he hoped the crisis could be resolved without a new U.N. resolution that could threaten serious consequences.” AP World News

War Could Unshackle Oil in Iraq: “A U.S.-led ouster of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein could open a bonanza for American oil companies long banished from Iraq, scuttling oil deals between Baghdad and Russia, France and other countries, and reshuffling world petroleum markets, according to industry officials and leaders of the Iraqi opposition.” Washington Post: Front Page

UN Wants Arms Inspectors in Iraq in Weeks – Downer. Reuters World News

War Talk Hits Its First Target: The Pivotal Ally: “After years of antagonizing, criticizing and disdaining the U.S., there are strong signs that France is groping for a more openly cooperative relationship.” New York Times: International News

White House dismisses Iraqi offer. CNN – World

Action Against Iraq Possible in January – Italy. Reuters World News

“It is very irresponsible to think this method could be used for the reproductive cloning of humans.” U.S. Study Says All Clones Genetically Abnormal. The process leads to inevitable genetic flaws, say MIT researchers, with no immediately obvious ways around them. Yahoo! News

IM giants told to work it out. A consortium of financial services giants, which are getting into instant messaging, wants to force interoperability among ICQ, AIM, Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger. “The call for interoperability comes as corporations are beginning to look more seriously at IM as a communications tool within the office–a trend that has IM providers salivating at the thought of turning what has been mostly a free service into a paid product.” CNET

“How Would The Bush Administration’s Claims Of Self-defense, Used As Justifications For War Against Iraq, Fare Under Domestic Rules Of Self-defense?” Joseph Fletcher, professor of jrusiprudence at Columbia, argues that the administration’s claim of “self-defense” in justifying its coming war against Iraq is “banal”. Most aggressors lay claim to self-defense and broaden the claim to include preemptive actions that do not pass muster with legal standards that require an “imminent unlawful attack”. International law, in fact, is even more extreme; the UN Charter, e.g., requires not just an imminent but an actual attack to invoke the right of self-defense. The US’s threat to Iraq meets neither standard but may be justifiable under other alternative, lesser, legal arguments, e.g. that a danger so great exists that ‘an attack is “immediately necessary” on this “present occasion” ‘. However, the US fails to make international law arguments even when some may be applicable. FindLaw

Iraq war hawks have plans to reshape entire Middle East: “As the Bush administration debates going to war against Iraq, its most hawkish members are pushing a sweeping vision for the Middle East that sees the overthrow of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq as merely a first step in the region’s transformation.

The argument for reshaping the political landscape in the Mideast has been pushed for years by some Washington think tanks and in hawkish circles. It is now being considered as a possible US policy with the ascent of key hard-liners in the administration…” Boston Globe

Year of Struggle and Change:

When the World Trade Center towers fell, they took more with them than human lives. A huge segment of the downtown economy collapsed with the falling steel and concrete, and the disaster encompassed far more than the large financial firms that are most often identified with the Sept. 11 attacks.

The trade center was home to hundreds of diverse companies, a polyglot village spanning everything from Asian food importers to graphic designers to dentists. Many had inhabited the towers for decades.

Those companies, more than half of which had fewer than 20 employees, became refugees on Sept. 11. Some have folded, overwhelmed by the deaths of owners or employees or undone by a lack of cash. Others have eked out a living in kitchens and basements. Some have relocated to Florida or Texas, while others have insisted on staying within a few blocks of ground zero. Some, miraculously, have flourished, growing even as the local economy foundered.

The New York Times set out to chronicle the fate of the complex’s tenants as they struggled to re-establish themselves over the past year. After compiling lists of tenants from several sources, The Times estimates that about 700 companies and organizations occupied the trade center buildings. Defining a more precise number, however, is difficult because so many of the companies were subtenants whose occupancy did not appear on official lists.

‘This week we are finally getting to the core excuse from the Bush administration for attacking Iraq right now. Vice President Dick Cheney, in an interview with CNN’s John King on Sunday, laid it out nice and simple, the way they like it back in Wyoming: “We have to worry about the possible marriage, if you will, of a rogue state like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq with a terrorist organization like Al Qaeda.”

This notion that the Iraqi leader is in cahoots with Osama will be easy to feed the American people. To the American people, one bad Arab is the same as the next, and Osama equals Saddam. People who wonder about the Bush war-urgency only need to think about this: There’s a blind spot that needs to be exploited now, before too many journalists get the idea to go inside Iraq and find out what’s really happening.’ TomPaine.com [via Walker]

…by Nina Burleigh, who has written for The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and New York magazine. As a reporter for TIME, she was among the first American journalists to enter Iraq after the Gulf War.

Fossil find reveals world’s oldest penises: “A perfectly preserved shellfish fossil over 100 million years old has revealed a surprising feature – the oldest penis in the world. The fossil, a one millimetre-wide crustacean called an ostracod, was found in Brazil and examined by David Siveter at the University of Leicester. It was preserved with its shell open displayed another surprise – not one but two penises…” New Scientist

It Turns Out It is a Possible ‘Hoax’:

‘Three men reportedly overheard talking about a terrorist plot were pulled over and detained for 17 hours Friday before authorities said the men were apparently kidding around and released them.

“If this was a hoax, they will be charged,” Collier County Sheriff Don Hunter said angrily after an all-day search of the men’s two cars turned up no sign of explosives.’Yahoo!

So the ‘terrorists’ are damned if they are and damned if they aren’t ; this seems to indicate that the intention to ‘hoax’ comes from them. However, Plastic‘s take on the issue

, unfortunately without much attribution, is that the dissembling comes from the supposed informant:

‘…Several people who went to High School with Eunice Stone, the woman who reported the trio to the FBI, were quoted as saying ‘Oh yeah, Eunice always was a gossipy bitch, trying to start trouble and get attention with her lies.’ Neighbors also reported that Mrs Stone was ‘Overly intrusive into other people’s lives…with a tendency to excite the situation at someone else’s expense.”

“CNN, Fox News, and Yahoo somehow all managed to quote the same person, but not quite with the same quote. After reading several ‘quotes’ carefully I can say with some conviction that there is enough variation in what she ‘heard’ that I would feel safe in saying she didn’t hear it at all. Perhaps even more vindictively filling in information that she thought she heard, and then passing that along without mentioning that maybe she didn’t hear it so well, and maybe didn’t hear it at all but just made it all up in her head.’

I have wondered for a year why we haven’t heard more irresponsible hoaxing and tattletale tales. The boy-who-cries-wolf hysteria of the current administration’s repeated terror alerts certainly guarantees such attention-getting maneuvers will get what their perpetrators’ hearts desire…

Important Note:: “We recently uncovered these classic “Get Your War On” cartoons in the attic. They were made in the 1980s, when we were young and naive. The drawings, grammar, and typography of these early strips are a little crude, but they offer valuable context for recent exciting news developments!”

Sen. Charles Schumer (D.-NY): “Installing devices that could detect nuclear weapons as terrorists attempt to smuggle them into the country would cost far less than an invasion of Iraq.” NY Times op-ed

How we figured out why people walk up staircases but not up escalators. By economist Steven E. Landsburg in Slate

‘Shape Up and Dress Right’:

For several months, the Special Operations Forces soldiers whom the United States sent to Afghanistan have been growing beards and donning local garb in an effort to blend in with the local people and their surroundings.

But last weekend, the story goes here, Pentagon brass were shocked by news photos of scruffy looking Special Operations Forces swinging into action to help abort the assassination attempt here against President Hamid Karzai in which his companion, Gul Agha Shirzai, governor of Kandahar Province, was wounded.

“On Monday,” said a Special Operations Forces officer, leaning against the mud wall of a local bazaar, “we got the word: some general in Washington ordered no more beards.” NY Times [thanks, Abby]

Imagine my delight to find the UK’s Sp!ked covering my hometown’s ‘Big Dig’, the largest public works project in history.

“The construction of tunnels under the old highway, while the traffic flows unimpeded, has required some innovative technology. Sub-zero temperature brine is pumped through pipes to freeze the ground solid. Tunnelling can then take place without disturbing roads, trains, or building foundations, and when this is complete the ground thaws out.”

And here’s The Big Dig’s website.

William F. Buckley, Jr. reviews Joseph Epstein’s Snobbery:

Joseph Epstein’s new book about snobbery ends up being a book about Joseph Ep- stein, which is perfectly okay—provided one is Joseph Epstein. Another’s book about snobbery, displaying the author’s biography, his likes and dislikes, suspicions, affections, affectations, crotchets, would not guarantee against a reader’s strayed attention. There isn’t the slightest risk of this happening upon reading Epstein’s book, because he is perhaps the wittiest writer (working in his genre) alive, the funniest since Randall Jarrell. The New Criterion [via Walker]

Forbidden thoughts about 9/11: The readers respond. Six pages that read like this:

In the days and weeks that followed the attacks I found myself worrying about the rescue dogs that were working the site. There were reports in the media almost daily about injuries to the dogs (and in some cases deaths) and I found myself wondering if it was really that important to recover things like concrete splashed with the victim’s DNA. Salon [via Spike]

Mark Crispin Miller, author of The Bush Dyslexicon, opines that, In the Wake of 9-11, the American Press Has Embraced a ‘Demented Caesarism’:

Just after 9/11, I was one of those who thought, and said out loud, that the catastrophe might knock some sense into the gibbering “culture” of the US media. Now there would be no more prime-time seminars about the likely cruising style of Gary Condit, no more shark watches, and quite a lot more coverage of, and talk about, the wider world. (The term “Afghanistan” had long been used inside the TV news biz as a handy term for all those faraway and over-complicated stories that the advertisers didn’t want to see.) And I believed that there would be a lot less dumbbell irony, a lot less potty comedy, and a lot less homicidal stand-up from the right. In short, I thought that Adam Sandler was all through, and that Ann Coulter would soon be forgotten, if not gone, and that the news would finally try to tell us some things that a free and democratic people needs to know.

Boy, was I wrong. Everywhere you look, Ann Coulter’s up there on her broomstick, cracking manic jokes about mass murder, and Adam Sandler’s said to be involved in seven movies soon to flood the multiplexes. Now I am old and wise enough to know that such bad acts are always with us, so I’m only disappointed – and, on cool reflection, not surprised – that there isn’t more stuff out there like “The Simpsons,” “The Sopranos,” “Lovely & Amazing,” Wilco. On the other hand, I find that I am absolutely flabbergasted at the many jumbo helpings of outright crapola that our “free press” has been laying out for us day after day since 9/11. While foreign journalists routinely tell their readers and/or viewers what’s going on – inside Afghanistan, Iraq, DC and all throughout this land of ours – our journalists don’t tell us anything. democrats.com [via Walker]

[Oh my God, another Wilco reference! (see “Shoddy Bookkeeping”

below) — FmH]

Rent a Rapist:

“Crimebusters in Japan’s major cities are currently being plagued by a new type of criminal… — the rachiya. Literally translated into English as kidnappers, the rachiya are believed to be male members of secret associations that engage in simulated rapes. But there’s nothing simulated about what they’re apparently prepared to do for a price, picking up women off the streets and violating them for a yen.” Mainichi Daily News

[via the null device; thanks, Walker]

Observation found on Seb’s Open Mind

The main professions that are represented in the weblogging community are:

• (open source) software developers
  
• journalists
  
• librarians
  
• educators
  
• lawyers
  
• web designers and information architects
  
• knowledge management types
  
• consultants
  
• researchers

Each item in the above list of professions links to a list of weblogs by members of that profession. He goes on:

Is there a pattern here?

Those are mainly kinds of people who:

• must interface to ordinary people.
  
• are pattern explainers.
  
• have little to hide and more to share.
  
• are not afraid of writing.

Hey, Seb, what about psychiatrists?? (Well, at least the part about interfacing to ordinary people and explaining patterns…) [via wood s lot]

A Salon interview with Dr. Charles Grob:

Last week, an essay in the Psychologist, a magazine published by the British Psychological Society, called into question the validity of recent research on the effects of Ecstasy. Its publication drew loud and immediate reaction from the British press, which printed stories under headlines like “Ecstasy Not Dangerous, Say Scientists.” The study’s authors demanded, and received, a retraction from at least one newspaper (the Guardian); but the question the researchers had hoped to raise — whether MDMA may have medical benefits — was lost in the din. And not for the first time, according to Dr. Charles Grob, a longtime researcher of MDMA and hallucinogenic drugs and one of the study’s three authors.

Grob, the head of adolescent and child psychiatry at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Southern California, is also the editor of a newly published collection of essays, Hallucinogens: A Reader

, which explores the social and psychological worth of such drugs. Speaking from his office, Grob spoke about the essay he coauthored, the current war on drugs, and the history of Ecstasy, which he believes has therapeutic benefit — not to mention potential as a facilitator of peace in the Middle East.

Anna, from annatopia

, wrote this piece

about Grob and MDMA and emailed me, pointing me to it and curious about my reactions. Among other things, she asked me if I had ever used it (in my work, she hastened to add). Here’s an (edited) version of my response:

— I haven’t gven MDMA in my work, but that’s mostly because I specialize in treating severely ill, nonfunctional, hospitalized, and often psychotic patients. I’ve known some of the researchers and clinicians who have used it clinically. I support entheogens/empathogens in general but think my patient population doesn’t have the ego strength, as the “walking wounded” do, to benefit from them. More than that, it takes a lot of thoughtful courage to buck the dominant cultural norms about illegal, hallucinogenic drugs being dangerous and degenerate. Although I ask that of myself, I wouldn’t ask that courage of my patients in their current suffering.

— I agree absolutely about distinguishing therapeutic and recreational use. Except for one thing; you have to tolerate the bad with the good. This is a longer-standing issue, as Grob’s reader about hallucinogens indicates. Leary and Alpert were Harvard psychologists; LSD was/is a valuable tool for psychic exploration too, as other hallucinogens, if taken with reverence and intellectual curiosity, but if you give people the freedom to do so you also give them the freedom to trivialize its use as a means of just “getting high”. (Funny, I never thought of what LSD gives you as a “high”!)

If one of the dangers of MDMA is how often the ravers take it, the thing about an exploratory/therapeutic approach is that it will result in limiting one’s exposure, as Anna and Dr Grob rightly point out, and taking it in the context of a psychotherapeutic relationship. You want to assimilate the information it gives you about yourself and the world, which takes time. You grow from it, which means there might be diminishing returns from dropping it over and over. And if you’re interested in taking an exploratory/therapeutic approach, you’re usually a person who is committed to taking good care of yourself, which means you’ll limit the adverse impact of frequent, repeated dosing. That’s one of the things that bothers me about the ravers’ use — that with no limits on the magnitude of their indulgence, they’re really really at risk of health complications and ‘suicide Tuesdays’. The self-destructive image of recreational use is deserved, but there isn’t going to be a substantial risk of cardiac or neurotoxic complications from judicious, intermittent, informed use.

However, when you’re talking about recreational Ecstasy users, one issue is that they are often taking a lot of different drugs — it’s kind of a poly-drug-use scene. They often take high dosages. They’re up all night, they’re sleep deprived, they’re nutritionally deprived, they’re basically taking the drug in the most adverse environment you could possibly imagine: Hot, stuffy, crowded clubs, not replacing fluids, exercising all night. That will accentuate the likelihood of an adverse response.

The only environment I can think of that’s worse would be taking it in a hot tub.

But make no mistake about it — and probably even moreso if you try to regulate it into a controlled drug available only under a health practitioner’s prescription — you’ll get the recreational use fist-in-glove with the serious, therapeutic/exploratory. However, I don’t *blame* the ravers for the war against MDMA. As much as those who wage war on recreational drugs point to specific adverse outcomes, sudden deaths, bad behavior, etc., of users, these are not the *causes* of their convictions; they are after-the-fact justifications. Deeper-seated cultural norms — uhhh, prejudices — determine that! IMHO, don’t vent your spleen against the ravers, they are not the ones who ruin it for you. They’re just caught in the crossfire.

In my work as a trainer and supervisor of psychiatric residents and other mental health trainees, I ask them to look at why clinicians, as a rule, dislike treating drug abusers. I think it has something to do with the fact that we are people whose personality structure involves an investment in deferring gratification for goals we find more valuable in the long term. As such, we are rubbed the wrong way most by the classes of patients who, for hedonistic or other reasons which seem diametrically opposed to our mindset (I don’t actually think most of the drug abusers we treat in the mental health field are motivated by uncomplicated pleasure-seeking, but that’s the first assumption about them), appear unwilling to defer indulging or gratifying themselves. (Of course, that’s not the whole story; we are also dissed by our well-intentioned efforts to help being rebuffed.) Mental health professionals are generally similarly distressed by happy manic patients. (Some manics can be irritable or dysphoric instead of euphoric, and we have considerably less difficulty with those.) There is a similar anti-hedonistic streak in the work- and productivity-ethic-driven culture at large, for similar reasons.

While the ravers don’t deserve our resentment,

I mean, if we follow to the letter this “Just Say No” mandate, and then if the kid isn’t wise enough to follow the “Just Say No” edict, are we saying he deserves whatever adverse effects he experiences?

they do probably deserve our empathy. It saddens me that so many people have no idea that their own minds can be an object of contemplation and study for themselves, like holding a jewel up to the light and marvelling at its scintillations. Instead they treat themselves as trivial playtoys. Their loss.

Oregon weblogger Don Wakefield writes that he’s loving the new Wilco recording Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Since he gets most of his music referrals from his websurfing, he’s curious who recommended it to him but, through his “shoddy bookkeeping” he is frustrated that he cannot recall. A source whose tastes are similar to his is slipping through his fingers! Finally (courtesy of Google??) he ascertains that it was my two recent references on FmH. Actually, I’ve mentioned Wilco three times around the current attention the band is getting — here

, here

, and here

. But Wakefield laments that, while I point to rave reviews, I do not make my own reactions known. Can he trust my taste?

The answer, Don, is yes and no. As it happens, I’m wild about YHF too, and it has had an honored place on my CD turntable in recent months (actually, right now it is in my car deck). I loved the Mermaid Avenue stuff as well, although that was at least at first because I’m a fierce Billy Bragg fan and reverent about Woody Guthrie. But I think Tweedy has reached a pinnacle with the new material.

I would, however, have probably blinked to the Wilco stuff even if I didn’t like the music so much. I tend to post what interests me — and what I think will interest or edify FmH’s readers [which may be tautologous, because you wouldn’t keep reading if it didn’t keep interesting you…] — and I was struck by Wilco’s giving the album to their fans for free download before its commercial release; by the fact of a rave in the NYT, especially by critic Jon Pareles; and by how an attempt to make a film about the band turned into “a classic three-act narrative, replete with surprise turns, stunning rejections, and an emblematic clash with Corporate Rock.” The documentary is on my list, although I probably won’t get to see it until I can rent the DVD, because I could never get my wife to go along with spending one of our hard-won opportunities for time together, when we have managed to score a babysitter, in that way. And therein hangs a tale…

Coming of age in the ’60’s and early ’70’s, I wore my artistic sensibilities like a bumper sticker of political correctness (I could easily be embarrassed by someone associated with me being seen to like the ‘wrong’ thing), but what I enjoy now is much more a matter of what moves me, in an interior and unfathomably individual way, rather than what social clique I participate in by liking something. So I no longer have to proclaim my tastes and no longer have any expectation that anyone I love or appreciate will have similar tastes. And, indeed, my closest friends are incredibly diverse in what moves them aesthetically. I once chuckled in print

about how at one time I could never have imagined spending my life with someone who didn’t love the Grateful Dead as much as I did, and I ended up marrying someone who was only barely aware of their existence. On the other hand, I could never conceive of being married to a Bush Republican (or even a card-carrying Democrat!). My wife and I would consider it a failure to convey our entire set of values to our children if they turned out to support some of the oppressive, life-denying, heinous standards of our elected leaders (or most corporate officials, for that matter). Yet I have nothing invested in them grooving to the same Garcia licks or, for that matter, transported by the same moments in St. Matthew’s Passion, that I enjoy. Our children’s musical and literary tastes are, already, quite distinctive,but they understand about Bush…

In my weblogging, while I am unabashed about my political opinions (I’m edified, for example, that Rebecca Blood

cited me in her list of “webloggers with strong voice” in her new book

, and I seem to get noticed by Le Blogeur

more when I’m most “out there”), Don’s post helped me realize that, indeed, I have been much less committal about my taste in music, film or books here and, yes, you cannot necessarily conclude that I am endorsing a particular creative work if I mention it. Nor should you conclude that, because we like something in common, you will like other things that I like. Nor, I hope, should you think anything less of me if you don’t, for example, care for Wilco… Even if you find my musical tastes totally uncool, I’m still a cool guy…

Only peripherally related: Chuck Palahniuk’s forthcoming novel

appears to be about the dangers of excessive congruence of musical taste [grin]:

In his last novel, Choke (1999), Palahniuk proved he could write a best-seller without sacrificing his trademark biting satire. And in Lullaby, he manages an even more impressive feat by showing himself capable of tenderness as well as outrage. The story, of course, is plenty outrageous. Middle-aged journalist Carl Streator discovers that all children who die of SIDS are read the same poem the night before their deaths, an African “culling song” traditionally sung to sick animals and people to ease their pain and hasten death. Once he discovers that simply reciting the poem in someone’s direction is invariably fatal, Streator can’t stop murdering. Then he finds out that Helen Hoover Boyle, a real-estate agent who sells the same haunted houses over and over again, knows the secret, too. They set out on a grand literary road trip to destroy all extant copies of the song. The narrative itself becomes a sort of lullaby, hypnotically repeating its anti-advertising, anti-everything catchphrases, lulling the reader into a false sense of security just as it launches all-out attacks on America’s “It’s a Small World after All” culture. It’s a fun ride, but what separates this novel from Palahniuk’s previous work (Fight Club, 2001) is its emotional depth, its ability to explore the unbearable pain of losing a child just as richly as it laments our consume-or-die worldview. amazon.com

“Researchers have made a significant discovery involving breast cancer that will have no impact on the treatment of the disease, yet it’s being heralded as profound work and a watershed discovery.” Wired

Just about everything I want to say about Bush’s speech before the UN today was said, prophetically, in this piece from The Onion:

‘Vice-President Dick Cheney issued a stern admonishment to President Bush Tuesday, telling the overeager chief executive that he didn’t want to hear “so much as the word ‘Iraq'” for the rest of the day.

“I told him, ‘Listen, George, I promise we’re going to invade Iraq, but you have to be patient,'” Cheney said. “‘We need a halfway plausible casus belli. You know that, George. Now, stop bugging me about it.'” ‘

Ten Reasons Why Many Gulf War Veterans Oppose Re-Invading Iraq: “With all the war fever about re-invading Iraq, the press and politicians are ignoring the opinion of the veterans of our last war in the Gulf. But we veterans were there, and we have unique and critical first-hand knowledge of the course and consequences of warfare in Iraq. Our opinions should be solicited and heard before troops deploy for battle, not after they have returned wounded, ill or in body bags.” Anonymous in AlterNet

His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s Message:

…Human conflicts do not arise out of the blue. They occur as a result of causes and conditions, many of which are within the protagonists’ control. This is where leadership is important. It is the responsibility of leaders to decide when to act and when to practise restraint. In the case of a conflict it is important to take necessary preventive measures before the situation gets out of hand. Once the causes and conditions that lead to violent clashes have fully ripened and erupted, it is very difficult to control them and restore peace. Violence undoubtedly breeds more violence. If we instinctively retaliate when violence is done to us, what can we expect other than that our opponent to also feel justified retaliating. This is how violence escalates. Preventive measures and restraint must be observed at an earlier stage. Clearly leaders need to be alert, far-sighted and decisive…

Anis Shivani:

“The left thinks of Bush as an idiot. He is, but only in the sense of not being intellectual. He is the smartest fascist to come down the pike in a long while, and has completely outwitted the opposition.

As long as progressives continue to grant the basic premises of the “war on terrorism–that it is a “war” and that we’re fighting “terror” – it will wage a losing struggle. If voices who question the basic reality of events remain isolated–voices like those of the ousted Cynthia McKinney–we are doomed to an era of complete silence. The dictators in Washington are in a great hurry to do away with this country’s freedoms and numb us to a new American militarism. If progressives treat them as political actors who will go along with the normal rules of liberal contest, it’ll continue to be blindsided by the next shocks in the works. ” OutLookIndia [via allaboutgeorge]

Thank you, Lewis H. Lapham, for these thoughts, and thank you, Mark Woods, for pointing me to them.

On historic day, U.S. turns away from eloquence:

Between dawn and dusk on Sept. 11 the mindless coverage of everything and nothing will sit every demographic division of the audience in the warm bath of its own tears, and if the media are themselves the message, then by filling up the dome with enough of the stuff … surely we can go back to sleep. Toronto Star

‘From gloating about getting off work to enjoying the “country road” ambience of lower Manhattan to hating on-the-make firemen: A spectrum of improper responses to the terror attacks.’ Salon

shinybluegrasshopper

“There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.”

And now for something completely different — glad tidings and hopeful signs in place of the wash of self-righteous, self-indulgent trivialization and political spin that is the Victims’ Day remembrance.

‘An experiment to store large quantities of carbon dioxide emissions under the floor of the North Sea has been highly successful, according to seismic imaging data.

Over five million tonnes of CO2have been pumped into sandstone under the Sleipner Field since 1996. The greenhouse gas had been separated from extracted natural gas and would normally have been released into the atmosphere…

“This method of carbon dioxide sequestration is probably one of the most powerful techniques we have for the next 50 years for reducing CO2 emissions,” says Chadwick. “We believe it is safe, technically feasible and certainly has very little environmental downside.” ‘ New Scientist

“Clever calculations and a lucky conjunction of quasars and planets means this key prediction of general relativity will get its first test.” New Scientist

‘The Universe might yet collapse in a devastating “big crunch”. Physicists have shown that even though its growth is speeding up, it could still start to implode by the time it is only twice its current age.’ New Scientist

Nicholas Kristof and Paul Krugman in tagteam match against Ashcroft and minions on today’s New York Times op-ed page: “When we look back at how our country has handled the last year, we have much to be hugely proud of — and, perhaps, one thing to be just a bit embarrassed about“, according to Kristof. And for The Long Haul, “the challenge now is to find a way to cope with the threat of terrorism without losing the freedom and prosperity that make America the great nation it is, ” says Krugman. NY Times

…but the Worrying Never Will. NY Times

‘There are Buddhas and Buddhas-to-be all over New York City. That man asleep on the sidewalk is a candidate. Likewise that working mother with the three irrepressible kids on the subway. Even guys in business suits have potential. Why not? It makes sense that a great city of immigrants is also a city of transmigrant souls.

The new art season will offer lots of opportunities for Buddha-spotting with a multi-institutional collaboration called “The Buddhism Project,” designed to explore links between Buddhism and the arts in contemporary American culture. Exhibitions and installations will pop up in all five boroughs; artists, curators and scholars will join monks, nuns and lamas to share work and ideas.’ NY Times

“Skeletons have come out of the closets and are creeping along Cincinnati’s streets. People say that Jim Cissell released them.

Four years ago, Mr. Cissell decided that it was time to move the county’s court records onto the Web. The documents were already public. They were already electronic. Where else to put public electronic documents but on the Internet?” NY Times

Sam Parry: “Many Republican strategists saw the American people’s anger over Sept. 11 and George W. Bush’s “united-we-stand” poll numbers as a way to lock down a second term in 2004. But recent poll numbers suggest a less certain future…” The Consortium

Do you know your classical composers?: “A recent survey found that 65% of children under 14 cannot name a classical composer, while only 14% knew that Mozart and Beethoven wrote music. Can you do better than that?” Guardian UK I got 11:11 and by no stretch of the imagination should I be considered well-versed in classical music. The bar is set pretty low if this is ‘cultural literacy’!

The Skinny on “Weight Loss” Supplements: The bottom line is, “Forget it.” Yahoo! Health [via Eaton]

“Sears, Roebuck & Co., the fourth largest U.S. retailer, has stopped selling a line of T-shirts after an outcry from mental health advocates who said the slogans on them make fun of the mentally ill.” Reuters

“An attack on Iraq would so radicalise Arabs it could bring on what al-Qaeda sought to do“, writes Salman Rushdie in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Writer Will Self puts head on the block: ‘Novelist Will Self is to lock himself in a one-bedroom flat on the 20th floor of a Liverpool tower block and allow the public to observe him while he writes a short novel…Self’s planned 12,000 word novel is part of a “reality art” project, sponsored by the Liverpool Housing Action Trust, to mark the passing of high-rise housing in the port city… The public will only be able to see the back of Self as he writes, but they will not be allowed to talk to him. As the story develops the author will post pages in an adjoining room to allow visitors to see how the novella is taking shape.’ Reuters

This has gotten alot of notice in the weblog universe. Scientists Develop Atomic-Scale Memory. Using silicon atoms to represent data 1’s and 0’s has provided data density 10^6 times that of a CD-ROM.

The new memory was constructed on a silicon surface that automatically forms furrows within which rows of silicon atoms are aligned and rest like tennis balls in a gutter. By lifting out single silicon atoms with the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope, the Wisconsin team created gaps that represent the 0s of data storage while atoms left in place represent the 1s. Technology Review

Here

‘s some more detail, with pictures. The problem with this memory? It’s really slow, of course! So far…

Thanks to boing boing for making sure we’d all know about this. CrashBonsai, a site from Boston artist John Rooney, sells smashed model cars with which you can adorn your bonsai trees to make “little living car crash sculptures”

“No passengers have been injured in CrashBonsai accidents, although some drivers have reported a brief, even euphoric loss of consciousness.”

Could they have had a falling-out? Leuschke throws out an Irish swear and Mark Woods mumbles back an insult from the Renaissance. Then Leuschke actually scoffs at him, scoffs!

I can’t say it better than Brooke at the bitter shackzilla has already done, responding to W’s proclaiming September 11th Patriot Day:

“The people who died in the World Trade Center did not die for their country. If anything, they died because of their country. They did not willingly lay down their lives for a cause, for God and a nation. They did not die chanting America the Beautiful. They died not knowing what the hell was going on. They died eating doughnuts and drinking coffee and shuffling papers and counting up profits and cleaning bathrooms and making meals. Some died thinking it was all just a terrible accident. Nothing about how these people died makes them patriots. But that does not make their deaths any less significant.

And, I would argue, nothing about my grief for their loss makes me a patriot, certainly not in the sense Bush is implying: That I am sad, and therefore I want open-ended revenge and I will call this reflex “patriotism” to make it sound better than what it is.

Just when you think Bush can’t stoop lower in exploiting tragedy for his own ends …

Besides, we in Massachusetts already have a ‘Patriot’s Day’.

Planet’s PDA enables CD shoppers to browse music:

“Net venture business Planet Co said Thursday it has developed a personal digital assistant (PDA) that enables customers to “browse through” or listen to the contents of music CDs simply by having the PDA sensor recognize the bar code attached to CD’s plastic cover.

Once a shopper brings the “HOTNAVI” PDA system close to the CD cover and lets it recognize the bar code, the music on that CD will be played back and radioed to the shopper via a headphone attached to the PDA, the company said.” Japan Today [via Declan McCullagh’s Politech]

The technology is easy. My guess is that they’ll probably stream the music to you wirelessly. It would have to be a local network; if it were just sent over the Internet you could give the machine whatever barcoding it needed to provide you with a given recording no matter where you were, even if you had to figure out a way to spoof the machine into thinking it were in the music store. But even if broadcast only locally within the confines of the store, it seems it would be difficult to prevent the digital cloning that’ll inevitably arise by clever users who circumvent whetever copy protection scheme they engineer into the PDA.. Perhaps they won’t provide the entire recording? Does anyone know more about how this scheme will really work? A Google search comes up with nothing further…

Stop the Rush to War: “Tell President Bush invading Iraq would be a terrible mistake.” [One click gets your message to the President and gets you put on Ashcroft’s list of potential detainees. — FmH]

The Sights and Sounds of Schizophrenia: ‘The textbook description of schizophrenia is a listing of symptoms: delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech and behavior. But what does schizophrenia really feel like? NPR’s Joanne Silberner reports on a virtual reality experience that simulates common symptoms of the mental illness.’ NPR You can view a multimedia slideshow (requires Real Player) of highlights of one of Janssen Pharmaceutica’s simulations of a schizophrenic episode here

Doctors Consider Diagnosis for ‘Ill’ Relationships: “Some of the nation’s top psychiatrists are advocating the creation of an entirely new category of mental illness that could profoundly alter the practice of psychiatry and result in tens of thousands of families being diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder.

In a monograph being circulated by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the doctors recommend that a category called “Relational Disorders” be added to the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), which is the psychiatric profession’s official guide for defining emotional and mental illnesses.” Washington Post [thanks, Norton] This is a perfect illustration of how diagnostic categories and, in fact, the very nature of diagnosis, have expanded and contracted to meet secondary agendas throughout the history of psychiatric classification. It will never fly, but it clearly represents a response to psychiatrists’ diminishing market share in mental health as well as an internal conceptual struggle between the biological and nonbiological schools of thought in the profession. The difference between identifying problematic relationships as causes of psychiatric difficulties and labelling the relationships themselves as psychopathology opens the door to pathologizing all sorts of social problems. However, there is another sense in which this is a valiant effort. Shifting insurance coverage and research protocols to diagnoses which reside in a relationshipo, or a system of people (e.g. a family system), as the family systems theorists have been doing for years, removes some of the stigma imposed on the ‘identified patient’ in the system. I’m looking forward to the debate.

“What would be gone from our lives if the theater disappeared overnight?” The Village Voice

UK Saudi Envoy Says Bush ‘Obsessed’ with Iraq

“Any U.S. war against Baghdad would come from a nation hungry for revenge led by a president “obsessed” with Iraq and is bound to end in tragedy, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to London said Thursday.”

On Reuters

Clinton: Get bin Laden before pursuing Saddam

On Yahoo! News

Bush Officials Say the Time Has Come for Action on Iraq

“In almost identical language that signaled a coordinated campaign, the vice president and others cited Saddam Hussein’s efforts to increase Iraq’s arsenal.”

On New York Times: International News

Saddam’s Alleged Mistress Says He Met Bin Laden

“Iraqi President Saddam Hussein met Osama bin Laden on two occasions and gave money to the al Qaeda leader in 1996, a woman who claims to be a long-time mistress of the Iraqi leader told ABC News.”

On Yahoo! News – Most-emailed Content

Canada Won’t Back U.S. Strike on Iraq – Manley

“Canada will not back the United States if it decides to launch a pre-emptive strike to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Deputy Prime Minister John Manley said on Sunday in an interview during CTV’s “Question Period.””

On Yahoo! News – Most-emailed Content

Ex-weapons inspector: Iraq not a threat

On CNN

U.S. Envoy Zinni Urges Caution over Iraq Action

On Reuters Top News

Iraq Denies Seeking Nuke Materials

“Iraq denied reports it is trying to collect material for nuclear weapons and building up sites once targeted by U.N. inspectors, saying Sunday the claims were lies spread by the United States and Britain to justify an attack.”

On AP World News

Iraq Defiant After Bush-Blair Summit

On Reuters Top News

Animal Sacrifice Ritual Sparked L.A. Fire, say officials. Reuters

A walk in central London: “This site is based on a walk by Phil Baines for his graphic design students which was then written up for the 1997 ATypI conference. The text has been updated and expanded to include other examples. This walk concentrates on larger examples of public lettering and doesn’t mention incidentals – stop–cocks, manholes, dates on buildings, builders marks, &c – of which there is much en route. Much of the pleasure of this kind of walk, is finding things yourself. Although also ‘public’, it entirely ignores advertising hoardings, store signs and most corporate identities as these are usually approached as pieces of graphic design rather than opportunities for specialist, site–specific lettering.”

Polly Toynbee: “The final answer is no. A letter (apparently) from the BBC governors has finally refused the modest request of the National Secular Society, the British Humanist Association and 100 other signatories (I was one), that non-religious thinkers should contribute to Thought for the Day on Radio 4’s Today programme. No, the governors have decided that creationist fruitcakes have “thoughts” of more depth and resonance than moral philosophers who lack the requisite superstition. Maybe the competition would be too daunting. Woolly homilies from carefully selected moderate pulpits might sound a little weak when challenged by hard thought. Nor might their emotions stand comparison with poets or secular writers. Benjamin Zephaniah versus the Bishop of the Day? No contest.” Guardian UK [thanks, Richard]

Polly Toynbee: “The final answer is no. A letter (apparently) from the BBC governors has finally refused the modest request of the National Secular Society, the British Humanist Association and 100 other signatories (I was one), that non-religious thinkers should contribute to Thought for the Day on Radio 4’s Today programme. No, the governors have decided that creationist fruitcakes have “thoughts” of more depth and resonance than moral philosophers who lack the requisite superstition. Maybe the competition would be too daunting. Woolly homilies from carefully selected moderate pulpits might sound a little weak when challenged by hard thought. Nor might their emotions stand comparison with poets or secular writers. Benjamin Zephaniah versus the Bishop of the Day? No contest.” Guardian UK [thanks, Richard]

Oppose Culture War Against Raves!:

In a misguided spin-off of the “War on Drugs,” the Senate is considering legislation that targets raves and would have the effect of classifying common rave items like glow sticks and massage oils as drug paraphernalia. The Reducing Americans Vulnerability to Ecstasy (RAVE) Act, S. 2633, introduced by Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE), would also impose huge fines and even prison time on the owners of venues into which customers bring controlled substances. No matter how much security is put in place, they could be held responsible for the actions of just one customer.

Holding club owners and promoters of raves criminally liable for what some people may do at these events is no different from arresting the stadium owners and promoters of a Rolling Stones concert or a rap show because some concertgoers may be smoking or selling marijuana. Unless a loud and powerful objection to this legislation is voiced, an already misunderstood community and culture could be criminalized.

Urge your Senators to oppose attacks

on youth culture!

American Civil Liberties Union Freedom Network

“The mental health problems of one musician could have led to the creation of jazz.

Without his schizophrenia, Charles “Buddy” Bolden – the man credited by some with starting off the jazz movement – might never have started improvisation, psychiatrists have heard.” BBC [thanks, Michael]

“A nearly perfect ring of hot, blue stars pinwheels about the yellow nucleus of an unusual galaxy known as Hoag’s Object. This image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captures a face-on view of the galaxy’s ring of stars, revealing more detail than any existing photo of this object. The entire galaxy is about 120,000 light-years wide, which is slightly larger than our Milky Way Galaxy. The blue ring, which is dominated by clusters of young, massive stars, contrasts sharply with the yellow nucleus of mostly older stars. What appears to be a “gap” separating the two stellar populations may actually contain some star clusters that are almost too faint to see. Curiously, an object that bears an uncanny resemblance to Hoag’s Object can be seen in the gap at the one o’clock position. The object is probably a background ring galaxy.” STScI

“There’s one way to take 11 September away from

terrorists and politicians: remove it from the

calendar… For as long as it exists, 11 September will be a popular attack date for radical Islamists or those who want to pass off their own nefarious deeds as the work of radical Islamists. Get rid of it, and the world will be a safer place.” sp!ked

Brendan O’Neill finds that the first casualty is clarity: “Commentators are reading meaning into Bush’s

stance on Iraq where none exists.” sp!ked

Police investigate road racing rodent: “Detectives are investigating the mystery of a hamster found driving a toy racing car along a promenade at a northern seaside resort, newspapers say.” Yahoo! News

Underground art and culture from San Francisco and beyond: “Laughing Squid is an online resource for independent art and culture of San Francisco and beyond. It also is home to the Squid List: a daily event announcements list, The Tentacle List: a list to find artists & perfomers and the Tentacle Sessions: a monthly series that features many of the artists featured on the Laughing Squid website and The Squid List. “

When contemplating war, beware of babies in incubators: “The babies in the incubator story is a classic example of how easy it is for the public and legislators to be misled during moments of high tension. It’s also a vivid example of how the media can be manipulated if we do not keep our guards up.” On the CS Monitor [via Walker]

Iraq Said Likely to Have Bioweapons

“Despite its denials, Iraq probably possesses large stockpiles of nerve agents, mustard gas and anthrax, former U.N. inspectors say.”

On AP World News

Iraqi Hospital Prepares for War

“Dr. Luay Qasha is preparing for a U.S. attack on Iraq by turning the basement of his Baghdad children’s cancer hospital into a bomb shelter – stocking enough food, medicine and water for 500 people.”

On AP World News

Inspectors Step Up Iraq Preparation

“U.N. weapons inspectors are stepping up preparations for a possible return to Iraq, seeking new sources for satellite photos, scouting laboratories to test samples, and pressing friendly governments for more intelligence reports.”

On AP World News

U.S. Steps Up War of Nerves in Skies over Iraq

“The United States is intensifying air operations over Iraq in a war of nerves which military experts said on Saturday appears designed to show resolve and confuse Baghdad over a strike date.”

On Yahoo! News – Most-emailed Content

Disarm Iraq Quickly, Bush to Urge U.N.

“President Bush plans to tell world leaders at the United Nations next week that unless they take quick, unequivocally strong action to disarm Iraq, the United States will be forced to act on its own, senior administration officials said yesterday.”

On Washington Post: Front Page

Lauren Bush Falls Ill at Arab-Look Fashion Show

“A stomach bug rather than diplomatic jitters kept President Bush’s niece Lauren from modeling an Arabic-inspired collection at a fashion show in Barcelona, fashion house Toypes said on Friday.”

On Yahoo! News – Most-emailed Content

Plans for Iraq Attack Began on 9/11

On CBS News [via Red Rock Eaters]

Jets Bomb Key Iraqi Air Base

In The Scotsman [via Red Rock Eaters]

<a href=”http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0906/p01s02-wosc.htm

“>History of deceptive claims about Iraq

In CS Monitor [via Red Rock Eaters]

Dissenters fault reactions to attacks:

Over the course of the year, the few audible voices that publicly questioned the quasi-official narrative of Sept. 11 have been ridiculed and criticized, often harshly.

But now, a year after the attacks, a handful of scholars is once again suggesting that there are other ways of looking at what happened last year, that perhaps the attacks weren’t so shocking and the response not so justifiable.

”We academics are paid to sit on our butts and think, and yet we mainly underwrite the sentimentalities that the culture desires when we’re supposed to be telling the truth,” said Stanley M. Hauerwas, a prominent professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School. ”I find the lack of dissenting voices to the current outrage of Americans about September the 11th, and the resulting attack on Afghanistan, to be absolutely horrendous.”

Hauerwas and Frank Lentricchia, a professor of literature and theater studies at Duke, have edited a new collection of writings, Dissent from the Homeland: Essays After September 11, that is being published on Wednesday, Sept. 11, in a special edition of The South Atlantic Quarterly. In the journal, 18 theologians, philosophers, and literary critics speak out against the war on terrorism, led by the two Duke professors, who complain in an introductory note that ”this war has … seen the capitulation of church and synagogue to the resurgence of American patriotism and nationalism.” Boston Globe

Richard Reeves thinks President Bush is Losing It:

Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, writing in The Washington Post last Thursday under the headline “On Invading Iraq: Less Talk, More Unity,” warned the Bush administration that too many official voices are saying too many contradictory things about Iraq. “Loose lips sink ships,” he said, and they could sink the administration’s war plans, too.

That advice may be too late for Mr. Bush. In exactly one year, the president and his men have managed to divide a nation unified by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The administration’s obsession with deposing Saddam Hussein looks to be one of the stupidest efforts to manipulate public opinion in the country’s democratic history.

Over the past year, when I have criticized the president, my mail has shifted from about 20-to-1 calling me a traitor to about 10-to-1 complimenting me for my obvious common sense. I realize that those numbers indicate I may be preaching to a liberal choir, but the change is striking. And I see the same thing happening on the letters page of journals with a far greater reach than my voice.

Stopping the inanity of a strike against Iraq, of course, cannot be achieved in the letters columns unless the tide of shifting public opinion it reflects has an impact. Do you really believe that Bush’s offer to confer with the Congress before starting a war will make his zealots any less emboldened to do whatever they want regardless of what anyone else thinks? The war probably won’t be stopped without a massive civil disobedience effort on the scale of anti-Vietnam War protests, and I see no signs that anyone is doing that preemptively. Maybe several years into the quagmire…

Waist Deep in the Big Muddy



It was back in nineteen forty-two,

I was a member of a good platoon.

We were on maneuvers in-a Loozianna,

One night by the light of the moon.

The captain told us to ford a river,

That's how it all begun.

We were -- knee deep in the Big Muddy,

But the big fool said to push on.



The Sergeant said, "Sir, are you sure,

This is the best way back to the base?"

"Sergeant, go on! I forded this river

'Bout a mile above this place.

It'll be a little soggy but just keep slogging.

We'll soon be on dry ground."

We were -- waist deep in the Big Muddy

And the big fool said to push on.



The Sergeant said, "Sir, with all this equipment

No man will be able to swim."

"Sergeant, don't be a Nervous Nellie,"

The Captain said to him.

"All we need is a little determination;

Men, follow me, I'll lead on."

We were -- neck deep in the Big Muddy

And the big fool said to push on.



All at once, the moon clouded over,

We heard a gurgling cry.

A few seconds later, the captain's helmet

Was all that floated by.

The Sergeant said, "Turn around men!

I'm in charge from now on."

And we just made it out of the Big Muddy

With the captain dead and gone.



We stripped and dived and found his body

Stuck in the old quicksand.

I guess he didn't know that the water was deeper

Than the place he'd once before been.

Another stream had joined the Big Muddy

'Bout a half mile from where we'd gone.

We were lucky to escape from the Big Muddy

When the big fool said to push on.



Well, I'm not going to point any moral;

I'll leave that for yourself

Maybe you're still walking, you're still talking

You'd like to keep your health.

But every time I read the papers

That old feeling comes on;

We're -- waist deep in the Big Muddy

And the big fool says to push on.



Waist deep in the Big Muddy

And the big fool says to push on.

Waist deep in the Big Muddy

And the big fool says to push on.

Waist deep! Neck deep! Soon even a

Tall man'll be over his head, we're

Waist deep in the Big Muddy!

And the big fool says to push on!



Words and music by Pete Seeger (1967)

TRO (c) 1967 Melody Trails, Inc. New York, NY

“Some people have a rare disorder — Munchausen’s — in which they deliberately cause illness in others, and then use the illness to get sympathy and medical attention. Most cases involve mothers who hurt their own children, but a new report shows that people with this illness may also hurt their pets.” Reuters Health

[Addendum: Hal is of course completely correct to note that Munchausen’s Syndrome is the name of the condition where you induce illness in yourself for the gratification the medical attention provides. It is “Munchausen’s by proxy” when you do it via your child or your pet.]

BLTC Research was founded in 1995 to promote paradise-engineering. We are dedicated to an ambitious global technology project. BLTC seek to abolish the biological substrates of suffering. Not just in humans, but in all sentient life.

Absurdly fanciful? No. The blueprint for a Post-Darwinian Transition is conceptually simple, technically feasible and morally urgent.

At present, life on earth is controlled by self-replicating DNA. Selfish genes ensure that cruelty, pain, malaise are endemic to the living world.

Yet all traditional religions, all social and economic ideologies, and all political parties, are alike in one respect. They ignore the biochemical roots of our ill-being. So the noisy trivia of party-politics distract us from what needs to be done.

Fortunately, the old Darwinian order, driven by blind natural selection acting on random genetic mutations, is destined to pass into evolutionary history.

For third-millennium bioscience allows us to:

• rewrite the vertebrate genome
  

• redesign the global ecosystem
  

• deliver genetically pre-programmed well-being

Biotechnology can make us smarter, happier – and nicer. Post-Darwinian superminds can abolish “physical” and “mental” pain altogether.

Get Your War on by David Rees, scheduled for November 2002 release as a book! Powell’s Books

Love Letters in Ancient Brick by George Herrimam:

The greatest comic strip of all-time. In a 1999 special issue, The Comics Journal named George Herriman’s Krazy Kat as “the greatest comic strip of the 20th Century.” In 2002, Fantagraphics embarked on a publishing plan to reintroduce the strip to a public that has largely never seen it: this volume is the second of a long-term plan to chronologically reprint strips from the prime of Herriman’s career, most of which have not seen print since originally running in newspapers 75 years ago. Each volume is edited by the San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum’s Bill Blackbeard, the world’s foremost authority on early 20th Century American comic strips, and designed by Jimmy Corrigan author Chris Ware. In addition to the 104 full-page black-and-white Sunday strips from 1927 and 1928 (Herriman did not use color until 1935), the book includes an introduction by Blackbeard and reproductions of rare Herriman ephemera from Ware’s own extensive collection, as well as annotations and other notes by Ware and Blackbeard. Krazy Kat is a love story, focusing on the relationships of its three main characters. Krazy Kat adored Ignatz Mouse. Ignatz Mouse just tolerated Krazy Kat, except for recurrent onsets of targeting tumescence, which found expression in the fast delivery of bricks to Krazy’s cranium. Offisa Pup loved Krazy and sought to protect “her” (Herriman always maintained that Krazy was genderless) by throwing Ignatz in jail. Each of the characters was ignorant of the others’ true motivations, and this simple structure allowed Herriman to build entire worlds of meaning into the actions, building thematic depth and sweeping his readers up by the looping verbal rhythms of Krazy & Co.’s unique dialogue. As Lingua Franca once wrote, “Herriman was a rare artist who bridges the gap between high and low culture. His surrealistic strip was admired by popular entertainers like Walt Disney and Frank Capra yet also had a highbrow fan club that included E. E. Cummings, Willem de Kooning, and Umberto Eco”…

[…and me. — FmH] Powell’s Books

Declan McCullagh: “The danger of Congress being unusually profligate in discarding both money and Americans’ privacy is especially real right now. First, it’s an election year. Second, the war on terror has eliminated most of the usual obstacles to fiscal extravagance. Third, the Bush administration seems determined to reduce Americans’ protections against government snooping–all in the name of protecting America from terrorists.” C/Net

With Towers Gone, Area May Be Vulnerable to Lightning: “The issue received little attention after Sept. 11, in part because New York had so few storms this year. But on Aug. 2, when an unusually powerful thunderstorm struck, a 25-year-old Manhattan man was struck and killed by a bolt of lightning on the roof of a six-story apartment building on Broome Street, on the edge of Chinatown.” NY Times

Maureen Dowd: ‘As crazy Al Haig said Sunday on Fox, Bush 43 “has to be careful of the old gang. These are the people that created the problems in the first place by not handling Saddam Hussein correctly. . . . I’m talking about the previous administration and their spokesmen, Jim Baker, Scowcroft, and a very wise daddy who’s not talking at all and he shouldn’t.”

The pathologically blunt General Haig simply spit out what other conservatives imply: Daddy wimped out in Iraq and Junior has to fix it.’ NY Times op-ed

Russia Scraps Space Plans of Pop Star: “The Russian Aviation and Space Agency has scrubbed Lance Bass, of the pop group ‘N Sync, from its passenger list for an October flight to the International Space Station.” NY Times

“Call it gourmet cuisine’s dirty little secret: A lot of it is fake.” MSNBC [via Walker]

Fat tissue has a daily life of its own with previously unknown neural connections to the brain’s biological clock. The discovery adds to a new view that the biological clock regulates not only behavior, but also the body’s main organs and that, in turn, those organs can “talk back” to the brain. BioMedNet [requires free registration]

Experts Declare Story Low on Saturated Facts: “Last month, a provocative article argued that a low- fat diet may be responsible for America’s obesity epidemic — and that high-fat may be healthier. The problem: a lot of good science suggests otherwise.” Washington Post [via Plastic [via Walker]]

Diverse psychiatric/neurobiological speculations from Medical Hypotheses:

• Did schizophrenia change the course of English history? The mental illness of Henry VI:
  

  Henry VI, King of England, at age 19 founded Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge. At 31 he had a sudden, dramatic mental illness in which he was mute and unresponsive. Before, he had been paranoid, grandiose, and indecisive. Henry’s story illustrates how schizophrenia can devastate individuals and families and change the course of history and yet it raises questions about how achievement and illness are related… Medical Hypotheses

• 
  
  Mind from genes and neurons: a neurobiological model of Freudian psychology :
  

  
  A hypothetical neurobiological model of Freud’s architecture of the mind is presented in an attempt to unify concepts and data derived from molecular biology (e.g., genomic imprinting), systems neuroscience (e.g., neuroanatomochemical circuitries), evolutionary psychology (e.g., human mating strategies), and Freudian psychology… Medical Hypotheses

• 
  Pneumoobstruction of the tracheobronchial tree as a hypothetical cause of balbuties :
  

  
  The occurrence of balbuties is a common phenomenon. Balbuties is defined as frequent repetition and lengthening of syllables and words, alternatively frequent halting with pauses impairing the rhythmic flow of speech. Balbuties may have a negative influence upon the psychic as well as social development of an individual … Medical Hypotheses

• 
  Thinking outside the synapse:
  

  
  Bridging the gap between the parallel, distributed processing of groups of neurons and the serial, integrated processing of higher cognitive functions is a difficult hallenge. One possible mechanism originates in the shared space of the extracellular compartment. The opening and closing of ion channels in this space produce mechanical waves, presumably in the ultrasonic range. If the broadcast signals are selectively received by target neurons, then several cognitive abilities readily emerge, including learning, memory, pattern recognition, and problem solving… Medical Hypotheses

This is a statement of conscience against the War on Terrorism® and the domestic repression that have followed 9-11. It is quite abit broader than the simple statement I invited you to join in below

, declining to be a part of any consensus the Administration might think it has to attack Iraq:

‘Not in Our Name’ “… will be published in the New York Times in September. The New York Times ad will feature those names with the greatest potential to have an impact on public opinion, but we will make every effort to list everyone who contributed to the ad. In addition, the ad will also refer people to the web site where the name of every signer

will be available.” Here is the original Guardian UK story on the statement

. Here is the text of the statement

, which begins:

Let it not be said that people in the United States did nothing when their government declared a war without limit and instituted stark new measures of repression.

The signers of this statement call on the people of the U.S. to resist the policies and overall political direction that have emerged since September 11, 2001, and which pose grave dangers to the people of the world.

We believe that peoples and nations have the right to determine their own destiny, free from military coercion by great powers. We believe that all persons detained or prosecuted by the United States government should have the same rights of due process. We believe that questioning, criticism, and dissent must be valued and protected. We understand that such rights and values are always contested and must be fought for.

We believe that people of conscience must take responsibility for what their own governments do — we must first of all oppose the injustice that is done in our own name. Thus we call on all Americans to RESIST the war and repression that has been loosed on the world by the Bush administration. It is unjust, immoral, and illegitimate. We choose to make common cause with the people of the world…

Click here to add your name

to the endorsers. This conscientious stand, for me, is one of the most pertinent and urgent ways to celebrate the year’s anniversary of the terrorist attacks. Consider using the yellow graphic above on your webpage as an anchor pointing to the NION project, as I have.

I already blinked to this AdBusters project, prozacspotlight.org but Richard DeGrandpre’s “Lilly Suicides” essay has just been reprinted on AlterNet. Rebecca Blood pointed me to the article, soliciting my comments. Here goes:

There are three distinct problems here. The first is what Prozac and the other SSRIs actually do in the way of worsening people’s agitation, and what that might lead to in behaviors. The second is the corporate response. And the third is the societal attitude toward the issue. [To get what I’m saying here fully, you should have read the ‘Lilly Suicides’ article already…]

Clinicians have never been unclear about the adverse effects of the SSRIs and the care required to manage them properly. It is pretty certain that they can cause akathisic restlessness and agitation. At its worst it is pretty much excruciating torture, although that degree of akathisia is very very rare – perhaps just enough to account for the handful of well-publicized cases the article and others like it refer to? I’ve treated literally thousands of patients with SSRIs, was part of the pre-marketing clinical trials for Prozac before its approval and release, etc. i.e., I’ve been using these meds since the mid-80’s, and I’ve never seen a patient agitated enough to want to jump from heights or compelled to jump in front of traffic. It is usually more like a bad case of the jitters from, e.g., too much caffeine. It certainly is true, as the Healy study whose description starts out the AlterNet article indicates, that this effect is a physiological reaction to the drug even when given to a healthy nondepressed subject, but it is not clear to me what the “dangerously agitated and suicidal” impact he describes Zoloft as having on two of his volunteers actually means in clinical rather than histrionic terms. I’m dubious without more detail.

Nevertheless it is notable to me that so many of the gruesome suicides, or murder-suicides, noted in the article occur just after  the patient has been put on the drug, and before its antidepressant benefits can accrue. It seems you have a situation of adding agitation on top of preexisting depression during this initial period of drug use. The depression itself might not have been severe enough to make the patient suicidal, but patients may interpret the new-onset painful agitation pessimistically — as is the case in depression — as a worsening of their illness and more evidence that their recovery is hopeless. This was a big problem when the SSRIs were first introduced in the late ’80’s. They were not yet considered “first-line” antidepressants and were often reserved for use with the most desperately ill depressed patients who had previously failed all the preexisting classes of antidepressant medication. All their hopes were riding on the new drugs, and the prescribing doctors were swept up in the ‘hype’, as is the case whenever a supposed breakthrough class of medication is introduced. (There’s a joke in psychiatry, indeed throughout medicine, about how we should “use it or lose it”, i.e. hurry up and prescribe new drugs before the bloom is off the rose and they lose the benefit of everyone’s blind enthusiasm toward them… which really does, through the placebo effect, make them more effective at the outset…) So when such patients don’t get better on SSRIs any more than they did on their previous antidepressants, they are more and more despondent. Their last, best hope has failed them… Now I know that’s not the typical story in the AlterNet article, but it does illustrate the expectancy effect.

Moreover, the side effects of an SSRI are worst in the first few days of use, before the body acclimatizes to the medication. They are exacerbated by introducing the drug in too abrupt a fashion rather than easing the dosage up gradually. Finally, the “jolt” the patient gets from starting the antidepressant may provide the energy for them to act on a plan they were too listless to implement up to that point.

The agitation caused by starting SSRI treatment is not usually so severe, emergent and abrupt that it cannot be anticipated, prevented, and treated with careful attentive treatment. Such prudent care is lacking in the modern treatment environment for a number of reasons. First, ‘managed care’ pressures doctors to achieve results rapidly, which translates into starting the drugs at too high a dose and increasing the dosage too frequently. Seond, ‘managed care’ translates into pressure to spend too little time with patients, or to see them too infrequently. Finally, as I never hesitate to point out, a coalescence of pharmaceutical-marketing and ‘managed-care’ influences have caused prescribing to shift more and more to the primary care MDs, family practitioners, internists, etc., rather than the psychiatrists, IMHO creating even less adequate care than the psychiatrist would have given in the equivalent situation. This is not always the case; several of the AlterNet vignettes were of people treated by psychiatrists, but it contributes…

There are also several other adverse effects of SSRIs (and all other antidepressants) which are alluded to in the article but which are a different risk than akathisia. First, the SSRIs produce part of their beneficial effect, I and a subset of psychiatrists are convinced, by a sort of therapeutic numbing. If the medication works, things just don’t get to you so much, your skin is thicker in a way. Now this is abit reductionistic I know, but, physiologically, this is probably a function of the drug’s actions in damping down the function of parts of the frontal lobes. Because the frontal lobes also control inhibitions, it is possible that in some cases the “frontal lobe apathy” they create, particularly if exaggerated, could remove inhibitions against impulsive and even heinous acts; this would be especilly true for people who are motivated, and stopped from acting up, by concern about people’s opinions or reactions. With the SSRIs, one could care less, so to speak. One does care less…

Another adverse effect of the SSRIs and all other antidepressants is the induction of mania. A depressed patient may always be an ‘undeclared’ manic depressive (bipolar), which is an accident waiting to happen if you give an antidepressant. It can’t be avoided; you can only discover their bipolar tendencies when their first antidepressant treatment makes them manic — which is a different form of disinhibition, hyperactivity and agitation than akathisia, but can result in the similar dangerous behaviors. The Forsyth vignette in the article, in which one day he feels better than good and the next commits a “maniacal” act, may actually be a “manic”, as in bipolar illness, act.

Finally, SSRIs, and other antidepressants, can also induce psychosis, or unmask it in a depression that was already headed in a “psychotic depression” direction. You get that feeling in murder-suicides — that the reasoning it takes to decide to kill your family or spouse as well as yourself is often delusional rather than just depressed. As the author describes the Forsyth murder-suicide, these were “senseless acts that were simply unimaginable to those who knew (him).”

By the way, one added reason for a rate of suicide 5-6 times that of the tricyclics, the older class of antidepressants, was not only the contributions I’ve mentioned above to an attitude of laxity in prescribing the SSRIs, but that there had been an attitude of hypervigilance with the tricyclics. This is for one simple reason : overdose. While SSRI overdose is trivial from the point of view of medical complications, and nonlethal, tricyclic overdoses KILL, because they have direct effects on cardiac conduction. Prescribers of tricyclics were never lulled into the false sense of security they were to have with the SSRIs.

So much for the effects of the drugs. On to the manufacturers’ stances. I believe the thrust of the article, that the corporations pursued a substantial coverup of the adverse effects and adverse outcomes from their medications. Lilly probably would have gone under if Prozac tanked, for example. It represented a third of the company’s revenue for many of its years, and it has not come up with a really viable successor cash cow. So every day that it postponed any threat to Prozac’s profitability was another good day for the company. Ironically, the evidence of the coverup — the appearance of guilt, etc. — is what is damning, not the data on the drugs’ effects. The damage awards and culpability findings are all going to revolve around the contention that the companies should have known, did know, should have warned, did not warn, with due diligence. As I’ve stated above, I don’t really think these companies are marketing truly dangerous drugs that inherently hurt just to enhance their coffers. Properly managed and prescribed, the SSRIs have been breakthroughs in depression treatment, with relatively minor prices to pay — the akathisia risk and, as I wrote last week, the discontinuation syndrome (esp. with Paxil) — if doctors are experienced, aware, and have the time to follow patients on these drugs with due care. If Lilly and other co’s hadn’t spent more than a decade fighting their rearguard action, lawsuits would probably not be able to reach the “deep pockets” of the pharmaceutical industry and would have stopped where they ought to — with the individual prescribing clinician, as malpractice actions. And the standard for malpractice is whether there was negligence and whether that negligence caused a forseeable and avoidable harm. Stupid greedy Lilly, Glaxo, etc. etc…

Finally, societal attitudes. Look at the article; the author thirsts for a righteous story around the size of the Karen Silkwood or Erin Brockovich sagas (“a final conclusion seems unavoidable: that next to Big Tobacco and the marketing of cigarettes, the selling of the SSRIs is perhaps the deadliest marketing scandal of the 20th century. “). Glory calls! One example is calling akathisia “the most terrifying potential side effect” of these drugs. It simply is not that terrifying! The article also extrapolates from an estimate that only 1% of serious side effects are ever reported to the manufacturers’ surveillance programs to conclude that the number of Prozac-related suicides must be 100x greater than the incidents on record. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics… Additionally, to make the Case of the Evil Corporations more dramatic, the crusaders lump together various physiological reactions to the medications and diverse adverse outcomes in a manner which is all too plausible to an uncritical and psychopharmacologically nonastute public, neatly fitting deep-seated biases against psychiatric drugs and the stigma of mental illness.

And by the way, the introduction of newer antidepressants which no longer work via a solely serotonergic mechanism has absolutely nothing to do with the liabilities of the SSRIs, unlike the author’s contention in the final paragraph. Medications that work by a serotonin-based mechanism alone are just not suitable for everyone or everything… which is the market the pharmaceutical companies want to capture…

“As the anniversary of Sept. 11 approaches, terror-related urban legends are running rampant.” Don’t drink Coke after Labor Day

, by the way… Salon [thanks, Walker!]

A compendium of recent ‘weird news’ of various ilks:

• Man faints each time alarm clock or doorbell rings. He is now finally cured

  Madville

• Love your kids? Prove it by beating them!

  Madville

• The finest hackers in the land can’t work for the FBI even if they want to because of the agency’s physical fitness requirements

  Madville

• 8-Year-Old Drives 20 Miles

  “An 8-year-old foster child clad only in pajamas stole a pickup truck and went on a 20-mile drive to visit his family, police said.”
  

  Yahoo! News: Strange News – AP

• Inventors create condom which can be fitted in three seconds

  Madville

• Couple Bed Down in Shop for Art’s Sake

  “A naked couple has taken to bed in the front window of a London art gallery for a week in the name of art and to promote safe sex.”
  

  Yahoo! News: Oddly Enough [Shades of Lennon and Ono?]

• Relief as the Cows Upstairs Move Out

  “A Turkish woman has begun selling the cows she kept in upstairs apartments in the city of Trabzon, to the relief of her neighbors.”
  

  Yahoo! News: Oddly Enough

• Girl breaks legs four times a day for four months to try to grow to be air hostess. Grows four inches to 5ft 1 inch. Airlines demand 5ft 2ins. Ouch!

  Madville

• Woman rushes husband to hospital. On arrival, hospital tells her to call 911 instead

  Madville

Advisory Panel Says Administration Should Decide Soon Between Just Two Plans: “The previously undisclosed recommendation, which came last month from a group of prominent defense experts under the auspices of the Defense Science Board, puts added pressure on the administration to begin defining an actual missile-defense architecture. It reinforces complaints among some in Congress, the defense industry and elsewhere about the lack of specificity in an administration plan that involves as many as eight different approaches for knocking down long-range missiles.” San Jose Mercury News The NMD debacle was lost to public scrutiny (along with much else the Administration is quietly pursuing) after 9-11, but it remains on the agenda, to our peril.

Commanders Want Elite Units Freed From Qaeda Hunt: ” Some senior officers in the Joint Special Operations Command have concluded that Mr. bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, was probably killed in the American bombing raid at Tora Bora last December, officials said. They concluded that he died in a bombing raid on one of several caves that had been a target because American intelligence officials believed they housed Qaeda leaders. ” NY Times

It is a nation of nothing but poetry . . .



It is a nation of nothing but poetry

The universities are sties   John Wieners

has suffered the most   Catholics

have a shame of the body   The soul

lives in the body until it escapes   Main Street High Street Court

where my auto

threw itself over

the crosswalk   The sign read



your body

is to drop

its load



                   Your body

is a holy

thing



                Your body

is a wave

of Ocean



                        Your eyelids

will reveal your soul, your mouth will

                                                                  your clothes will fall

as you do



November

1962

[info.chymes.org

]

Charles Olson: “It was very beautiful the way the fierceness of Pound has settled down into a voiceless thing which only responded twice to me…”

“Clemenceau famously declared that war is too important to be left to the generals. It’s a no-brainer to see that war is too important to be left to the likes of Bush… ” Robert Higgs, Senior Fellow in Political Economy at The Independent Institute and editor of The Independent Review, is concerned that

President George W. Bush has been reading a book. At least, he claims to have been reading one. I know what you’re thinking, but the First Shrub swears that he has been reading more than just the funny papers lately. We’d all be better off, however, if he had stuck to the comics.

In an interview with an Associated Press reporter, Bush said that on his vacation he had been reading a recently published book by Eliot A. Cohen, The Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime. Cohen is a well-known neocon war-hawk and all-around armchair warrior who professes “strategic studies” at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and, in his spare time, ponders mega-deaths (his own not included) with other lusty members of the Defense Policy Board. The quintessential civilian go-getter, he never met a war he didn’t want to send somebody else to fight and die in.

The Supreme Command consists of case studies of how four “statesmen” — Abraham Lincoln, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, and David Ben-Gurion — successfully managed to make their generals act more vigorously than those officers really wanted to act. By spurring their too-timid generals, these four micro-managing commanders-in-chief supposedly got superior results from their war-making efforts. The common soldiers who were fed into the consuming maw of war under these worthies might have given us a different opinion, but dead men don’t make good critics.

So what are we to make of Bush’s reading of this book, assuming that he really has been reading it? The short answer is that this is not good news for the world. Such reading seems calculated to bend the president’s mind, never a mighty organ in any event, toward thinking of himself in Lincolnian or Churchillian terms. Indeed, those of us who have had the stomach to observe his public strutting and puffing since September 11 might have suspected that his juvenile sensibilities would be drawn all too readily toward such a grandiose self-conception. After all, does he but speak, and mighty armadas are launched on a global war against evil? AlterNet [thanks, Walker]