German director “…Tom Tykwer said he is in the pre-production stages of making (an) adaptation of one of my favourite novels: Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a Russian classic about the arrival of the Devil in Moscow, flanked by two demons, a naked girl and a huge black cat. When he leaves the asylums are full and law and order in disarray. Only the Master, a man devoted to the truth, and Margarita, the woman he loves, remain unaffected.” Johnny Depp plays the Devil. One of my favorite novels as well. [via the Null Device]

Dean asks, on FindLaw, Is Lying About The Reason For War An Impeachable Offense?

To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be “a high crime” under the Constitution’s impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony “to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.”

One day soon (although you on the East Coast may at this point in time find it exceedingly difficult to believe) the sun will be beating down mercilessly and you’ll be looking desperately for some shade. That is, unless you’re sporting an FmH baseball cap. As far as I know, there are three of you out there who read this weblog regularly. Two of you are my personal friends from a former life; I gave one of the caps to one of you as a birthday present a couple of years ago, and the other one got an oversized coffee mug with the disquieting and enigmatic barcoded bald guy on it on some occasion last year. But that’s the full extent of the traffic in FmH swag; the third one of you readers — yeah, you! — has never bought anything from the Cafépress shop here on the FmH premises. Cafépress is about to change the terms of service and stop it from being worth my while to continue to offer this stuff unless I earn them some money in the coming quarter. So take a look at these opportunities to display an icon of your membership in the secret and exclusive society of Followers.

reverse-engineered from the prototype at Area 51. [via b0ing b0ing]

Attention turns to another, far more disturbing persistent pattern of a NY Times reporter giving readers dubious information risking “playing with the kind of fire that starts or justifies wars, gets people killed and plays into the hands of government officials with partisan axes to grind.” — Russ Baker, The Nation. Venerable Times veteran reporter Judith Miller is increasingly in the crosshairs, especially for her reporting on the Weapons of Mass Disappearance. Here, for example, is a contrast between some of her recent Times headlines and those of her competitor at the WaPo, Barton Gellman:

Here are typical Miller headlines from May:

• May 21: “U.S. Analysts Link Iraq Labs to Germ Arms”

• May 12: “Radioactive Material Found at a Test Site Near Baghdad”

• May 11: “Trailer Is a Mobile Lab Capable of Turning Out Bioweapons, a Team Says”

• May 9: “G.I.’s Search, Not Alone, In the Cellar of Secrets”

• May 8: “U.S. Aides Say Iraqi Truck Could Be a Germ-War Lab”
  

Now Gellman:

• May 18: “Odyssey of Frustration; In Search for Weapons, Army Team Finds Vacuum Cleaners”

• May 11: “Frustrated, U.S. Arms Team to Leave Iraq; Task Force Unable to Find Any Weapons”

• May 10: “Seven Nuclear Sites Looted; Iraqi Scientific Files, Some Containers Missing”

• May 4: “Iraqi Nuclear Site Is Found Looted; U.S. Team Unable to Determine Whether Deadly Materials Are Missing”
  

A Spy Machine of DARPA’s Dreams

The Pentagon is about to embark on a stunningly ambitious research project designed to gather every conceivable bit of information about a person’s life, index all the information and make it searchable….

The embryonic LifeLog program would dump everything an individual does into a giant database: every e-mail sent or received, every picture taken, every Web page surfed, every phone call made, every TV show watched, every magazine read.

All of this — and more — would combine with information gleaned from a variety of sources: a GPS transmitter to keep tabs on where that person went, audio-visual sensors to capture what he or she sees or says, and biomedical monitors to keep track of the individual’s health.

This gigantic amalgamation of personal information could then be used to “trace the ‘threads’ of an individual’s life,” to see exactly how a relationship or events developed, according to a briefing from the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, LifeLog’s sponsor.

Someone with access to the database could “retrieve a specific thread of past transactions, or recall an experience from a few seconds ago or from many years earlier … by using a search-engine interface.” Wired

Here is one text-messaging service to which you won’t catch me subscribing. Infosync

This has been brewing for awhile and is IMHO a very welcome development; now the industry’s last court challenge to the FCC requirement has been rejected. Yahoo! News

A group of CalTech scientists announce the development of a fast TCP protocolpromising to vastly speed up data transfer over the existing internet infrastructure. An initial demonstration gave us a 6000-fold increase in transmission speeds. Video-on-demand, here we come, hastening the death of text-based communication and the progress of the net into just another mndless entertainment medium? New Scientist

Historian (and former policy

analyst on the staff of US Rep. Bernie Sanders) Jeremy Brecher: “The Bush administration and its successors are likely to continue this juggernaut until they are made to stop… As the Bush administration sought global support for its attack on Iraq, the New York Times wrote, “The fracturing of the Western alliance over Iraq and the huge antiwar demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the U.S. and world opinion.” But is that “tenacious new adversary” with whom President Bush appeared “eyeball to eyeball” really a superpower, or is it just a well-intentioned but ineffective protest against the inexorable advance of the Bush juggernaut?” Foreign Policy in Focus

His ill-informed rhapsody about GM food at G8 got my goat, but Jeremy Rifkin responds so effectively there’s no need to add anything. Guardian/UK

Joshua Micah Marshall is discussing other points of controversy around the Wolfowitz interview in Vanity Fair beyond the ‘swimming in a sea of oil’ matter to which I referred several days ago. Wolfowitz is apparently “confident” that Saddam was involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and considers the possibility of his involvement in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing as well. There is a dispute about whether those thoughts were on- or off-the-record, as Marshall discusses.

Their mission is restricted to determining what nuclear materials were looted from Tuwaitha, the Iraqi nuclear installation. They warned U.S. authorities in February about the vulnerability of the facility and the importance of guarding it, yet it was apparently unprotected after the Iraqi regime fell. “U.S. military commanders acknowledged that, after nearly three months on the ground, they remain unequipped to handle the nuclear site” or to assess the damage that has resulted from the ensuing looting. The story that’s circulating is that local residents dumped the uranium out of the facility’s barrels to use them for food storage. International Herald Tribune

Despite assurances in this article that there are no health effects, I have heard that radiation sickness cases have begun to crop up. We may be seeing just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the emerging long-term consequences of the radiation exposure of the looters and their families and neighbors as well as the contamination of the water table and soil by the dispersal of the finely powdered dumped uranium. And that would be the awful extent of it unless it transpired that some of the radioactive material had been diverted onto the black market as well. Oh, and the U.N. team is operating under continuous U.S. military escort to ensure that they restrict their activities to their mandate.

“Alastair Hay is an environmental toxicologist. He is a chemical weapons expert who is much quoted in newspapers. He advises select committees, lectures, writes papers and travels to conflict zones such as Bosnia to find out which deadly toxins have been released in the name of peace and freedom, or gives evidence in US courtrooms in high-profile proceedings involving the food biotechnology company Monsanto or Vietnam veterans.

He never supposed that at the height of his career he would find himself using his specialised skills and knowledge to investigate the death of his wife.” Guardian/UK

Another in a series of irresponsible attacks on the medication rather than the way it was used and supervised. Forgive me if you’ve read it here before; I go off on this type of tirade periodically here at FmH whenever this topic comes up. I am no fan of big pharma’s marketing of these medications, or their apparent ongoing efforts to sweep complications of SSRI therapy under the rug, but all medications have risks and benefits and require an experienced and quality-controlled prescriber. Regarding Prozac, Hay — perhaps abit ghoulishly? — reports he did toxicological studies of his wife’s tissues after her suicide and found evidence that fluoxetine (Prozac) and its metabolites had built up to exceedingly high levels in her system. He is right, ‘one size does not fit all’ with this medication, and there is good evidence that excessive levels of this or other similar antidepressants in a person’s system can induce irritability, agitation, ragefulness, etc. sometimes sufficient to induce a person to take their life. This probably accounts for a subset of people who begin to improve on the medication and then, as it continues to build up in their system, plummet again. Hay’s reaction? To wonder why blood level monitoring is not part of treating people with these drugs, as it is with other medications — he mentions warfarin, but I would add anticonvulsants, some antibiotics, some antiarrhythmics, lithium carbonate, theophylline, even some other classes of antidepressants. Surely the toxicologist’s solution, but there are several reasons why it is not possible with SSRIs. First, serum levels (that can be measured in the living, as opposed to post-mortem tissue levels) are so miniscule that the margin of error is quite high. Second, studies have shown that there is little correlation between levels and physiological effects or responses.

But, at least from the Guardian article, it is not clear that is what we are dealing with here, in other words not clear that his wife was not suicidal on the basis of her progressing psychiatric disease, as Eli Lilly will claim at the inquest in response to Hay’s imputations about the medication. If the only tool you have is a hammer, you start to see everything as a nail; the grieving husband who is a toxicologist — and, let us add, an environmental toxicologist rather than a clinical one, at that — may be forgiven if only on that grounds for focusing on a real or imagined toxicological problem to the exclusion of other factors. As I usually point out, the fact that his wife’s prescribing was conducted by a GP rather than a psychiatric specialist better trained to evaluate and manage treatment response and complications in the medication treatment of depression was almost surely the greater problem.

The added twist in this case is that Hay himself seems to have tried to control her treatment at times in a manner which is shockingly inappropriate, so much so that if the journalist who wrote this piece wasn’t so obviously in Hay’s thrall, she might have realized how unflattering some aspects of her portrayal of Hay are. His motivations may have been admirable; I am not sure, but in any case the picture is pretty damning. I’ve already mentioned that he did the toxicology on her remains. Then there’s the issue, which the author of the article finds admirable but I find shocking, of his claiming to have taught himself cognitive behavioral therapy from some books and conducted it on his wife himself to circumvent the long wait for services she encountered. Let us start with the hubris of thinking he can become a competent therapist in this manner and add to that the fact that no competent therapist treats a family member.

In what other ways might he have been interfering, overbearing, controlling (which, it is even tempting to speculate, may have contributed to his wife’s depression and suicidality)? I doubt Hay has either the insightfulness or the candor to self-assess these factors, although I noted that the writer does indicate Hay’s ‘beating himself up’ for not recognizing warning signs of his wife’s impending suicide. It is not clear he is so much remorseful as merely regretful, however — too bad it happened, but no way his responsibility. He pleads ignorance, which is precisely my point. A trained mental health practitioner, rather than someone who is not a clinician and thinks he can learn to care for a major mental illness from a book, would not have missed them. And I won’t even deign to comment on the lack of empathy for his wife’s suffering that runs through his reminiscences — what seems to bother him most about her suicide is how painful it is for him to go on afterward.