“Where would we be without Valium? Certainly not in Nutley, New Jersey, savoring the soft Klonopin light of a warm spring day. Nutley, ten minutes west of the Lincoln Tunnel, is home to the corporate campus of the Roche pharmaceutical company, which a couple of weeks ago threw a birthday party for Valium and its inventor, Dr. Leo Sternbach. Valium was turning forty; Sternbach, ninety-five. Both are diminished but are still going strong.” New Yorker Talk of the Town

“The US government can forcibly administer mind-altering drugs to render criminal defendants competent to stand trial, but only under certain limited circumstances.

In a case with potential implications for those opposed to conventional medical care, the US Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 Monday that the government’s interest in bringing defendants to trial outweighs an individual’s decision to be free from forced medication.” Christian Science Monitor

If you scan the press coverage of this Supreme Court decision, you will find two distinctly different takes on it. One emphasizes that the Court upheld forced medication; the other that such stringent restrictions were placed on it. The ruling is a victory for the defendant in the case, although it dismisses the notion that there is a fundamental right under the Constitution to refuse treatment. A lower court ruling forcing the defendant to take medications against his will to restore his competency to stand trial was vacated and the court was instructed to reconsider the case with the toughter criteria, which he is not likely to meet.

The criteria are as follows:

• “First, the court must find important government interests are at stake.
• Second, it must conclude that involuntary medication will significantly further those government interests.
• Third, the court must conclude that involuntary medication is necessary to further those interests.
• And fourth, it must conclude that administration of the drugs is medically appropriate in light of the patient’s best medical interests.
• The justices also noted that a court must find administration of the drugs is substantially unlikely to have side effects that will significantly interfere with a defendant’s ability to assist in his or her defense at trial.”

While the majority opinion by Justice Breyer cautions that the permissible instances for forced medication may be rare, I am not so sure. Arguably, the government will argue that “important interests” will be met simply by restoring comeptency and allowing someone to be brought to trial, for most crimes even if not for this one. Involuntary medication will usually, if not invariably, be seen as the most expedient if not the only way, and inherently medically appropriate, to further such an objective. I am not saying I agree with construing things in that way, but I predict that is how the criteria will be applied.

The case at hand was one of a dentist indicted for Medicaid fraud who refused to take medication for a mental illness — diagnosed as delusional disorder, persecutory type — which rendered him incompetent to stand trial, i.e. unable to collaborate with his attorney in defending himself (likely because he was too paranoid to trust his lawyer). The article comments:

(The) case is unique in that the court determined he was legally incompetent to stand trial but he was nonetheless competent to make his own medical decisions. In addition, the appeals court ruled that he did not pose a danger to himself and others.

This, however, is really not so surprising, since competency is always determined relative to some particular sphere of functioning. Traditionally, courts have had more stringent criteria for finding someone incompetent to make decisions about bodily integrity or sanctity than competency in other spheres. And dangerousness and competency are totally distinct concepts. Although the patient was incompetent, he was not dangerous to self or others, and the Court suggests that in the absence of a burden to protect him or society, the state’s interest, merely to bring him to trial and prosecute for fraud, was not a compelling one and that it was wrong to force him on that account to take medication.

Hospital said to seek help on Virgin image:

Overrun with worshipers praying before a likeness of the Virgin Mary in a third-story window, Milton Hospital officials have asked the Archdiocese of Boston to caution people against placing faith in the image, a church official confirmed yesterday.

Word of the likeness, which hospital officials say is made by a chemical deposit inside a sealed window, began to spread last week. Over the weekend, more than 25,000 people crowded onto the grounds to see it, officials said.

(…)

A church official said the hospital has asked the archdiocese for help in cautioning people against placing faith in the image. In the past, church leaders have been reluctant to comment one way or the other on such phenomena. Boston Globe

The sheer number of devout visitors hoping to pray before the apparition has edged out parking spaces for staff and patients with healthcare needs and made it impossible to keep that sector of the hospital clean. But a further danger is that the Blessed Mother seems to be interfering in healthcare policy:

Among the theories was that Mary had come to warn Milton Hospital not to join with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. In February, the two announced they had formed a clinical affiliation. Milton Hospital does not perform abortions.

Nick Gillespie in Reason:

Teutonic-style outrage over the infinitely exploding amount of spam – unsolicited bulk emails – has officially replaced weapons of mass destruction and even monkeypox as the leading threat to all that is good and decent about life in these United States. …

In the current climate – which includes various pending and sure-to-be-useless legislative fixes – isn’t anyone brave enough to say something good about spam? Well, I am. I love spam – and not only because I just placed an order for a guaranteed system that will enlarge my penis so that I can use it to clean my septic tank while playing solitaire with a deck of Iraq’s Most Wanted cards. (As long as I’m sharing, I should mention that I only paid $59.99 for all this, using the same unsecured credit card that allowed me to take advantage of Mr. Kwame Ashantee’s generous and urgent invitation to invest heavily in the Ghana Gold and Diamond Mining Corporation. As a highly valued early investor, I also received 30 lbs. of herbal Viagra and refinanced my mortgage at the absolute lowest rate of negative 3.4 percent. Who said the Internet hasn’t delivered the goods?)

Gillespie goes on to cite the entertainment value of the spam he receives, opening a window on an alternative universe he would not otherwise know existed. But his main point is that legislative approaches to controlling spam are going to be ineffective. Since spam transcends national boundaries, no jurisdiction can effectively regulate it. Furthermore, spam is in the eye of the beholder. For these reasons, the only approaches that stand a chance of working are decentralized ones that empower the end-user. And that Gillespie finds worth appreciating. [Of course, this argument is a little like the one saying you should bang your head against the wall because it feels so good when you stop… — FmH]

A reader commenting on his article makes another point in favor of spam, claiming; that it is a great guarantor of personal privacy, making it much harder for the information-awareness Carnivores of the world trying to monitor the email traffic of strangers to recognize what is relevant. I don’t agree with this argument at all, though. Even if 90% of the email traffic is at some point spam, this would just make the surveillance effort more demanding; not impossible. The extra filtering is just an inevitable cost of doing business, but not a prohibitive one.

“The development of colour vision may have lead to Old World primates, and hence their human descendants, to lose their ability to detect pheromones, suggests a new genetic study. Pheromones are highly specific scent molecules that many animals rely upon to find and assess a potential mate.” The study establishes that the genetic emergence of full color vision in Old World primates coincided roughly with the shutoff of the pheromone signal transduction pathway, around 23 million years ago. How the switch to a visually-based approach to mate-selection conferred a selective advantage is a matter of speculation; it may relate to the ability to see color from a safer distance. New Scientist

Exotic Pets Come Bearing Exotic Germs : “Epidemiologists can be such killjoys. Consider, for instance, Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, who has been publicly denouncing prairie dogs since 1997. A prairie dog in a burrow is one thing, but a prairie dog in the house makes Dr. Osterholm a bit edgy.” NY Times

“Behind the rhetoric — and behind the veil of secrecy, invoked in the name of national security but actually used to prevent public scrutiny — lies a pattern of neglect, of refusal to take crucial actions to protect us from terrorists. Actual counterterrorism, it seems, doesn’t fit the administration’s agenda.

Yesterday The Washington Post printed an interview with Rand Beers, a top White House counterterrorism adviser who resigned in March. “They’re making us less secure, not more secure,” he said of the Bush administration. “As an insider, I saw the things that weren’t being done.” Among the problem areas he cited were homeland security, where he says the administration has “only a rhetorical policy”; failure to press Saudi Arabia (the home of most of the Sept. 11 terrorists) to take action; and, of course, the way we allowed Afghanistan to relapse into chaos.” — Paul Krugman, NY Times op-ed

“…(T)hough national support for capital punishment may be softening, this does not mean that fewer people will be sentenced to die in prison.” NY Times

Firm Finds Way to Keep Lost Dogs on Leash: “Japan’s largest home and office security provider Secom Co Ltd thinks it can offer the paranoid pet owner a little peace of mind.

Secom said Monday it plans to unleash a new service later this month to track missing dogs, using satellite-based global positioning systems (GPS) and mobile phone networks… The technology used by Secom is an extension of a similar service offered since April 2001 for tracking young children, the elderly and missing automobiles.” Yahoo! News

‘The apparent benefit “can be entirely attributed to measurement error,” said researcher Paul T. Williams, a biostatistician in the Life Sciences Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.’ AP/Salon

“Bill Clinton won the youth vote. Al Gore split it with George Bush. Will Democrats realize they must embrace pop culture, not demonize it, to win back the White House?”

As Goldberg points out — and no other political pundit, to my knowledge, has noticed this — in 1996, Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole by 19 points among voters under 24. In 2000, George W. Bush and Gore were dead even in that age group, a total of about 9 million votes. Restore even half of Clinton’s ’96 edge with youth, and the result of the election is clearly different, with or without the much-debated Nader factor.

— Andrew O’Hehir, Salon

wrote of unusual sex objects: feet. “William A. Rossi, 92, a podiatrist whose masterwork ”The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe ” elicited laughs from laymen and knowing nods from shoe salesmen, died Saturday at his home in Marshfield.” Boston Globe

Despite Rupert Murdoch and the soft-porn tabloid dailies, ‘the spectrum of thought (in the British print media) ranges so wide that a progressive-minded American might be tempted to take up residence here.

In comparison, the leading “liberal” dailies across the Atlantic – the New York Times and the Washington Post – are mouthpieces of corporate power and U.S. empire. If the Times and the Post were being published in London, then British readers would consider those newspapers to be centrist or even conservative.’ AlterNet

“Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o’er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably. I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the ends of his legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a’.

Won’t you come to Sandymount,

Madeline the mare?

Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. Acatalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the mare.

Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see.

See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.”

from ‘Proteus’ (Ulysses, chapter 3)

Class actions to end: “In the past, most class action suits were filed through state courts. In some of the better-known cases, against cigarette and later gun manufacturers, actions swept across states to become a tidal wave of litigation.

A case has recently been won in Madison, Illinois, against Philip Morris, where a judge awarded plaintiffs $12 billion after finding that the cigarette-maker failed to inform consumers that ‘light’ brands were no less harmful than full-tar cigarettes.

But the House of Representatives has voted by 253 to 170 to thwart the vast majority of class action suits in state courthouses, limiting all but the smallest claims to federal courts, where the big companies, say citizens’ groups, find it easier to delay the progress of suits and ‘shop’ for courts more favourable to their interests.” Guardian/Observer

If you are curious about how your representative voted, here’s the roll call. If you are curious about whom this will benefit, look no further than tto the fact that big business is jubilant about taking its business to the federal courts, the same ones the Republicans are packing with right-wing extremists even as they complain there is a partisan crisis in the judicial confirmation process. The GOP will talk all about tort reform, stopping giveaways to bottom-feeding lawyers (arguably the pot calling the kettle black, I would say, although trial lawyers are a perennial favorite GOP target.) and unclogging the courts of frivolous lawsuits, but the real agenda is clear and is of a piece with most of Bush’s domestic policy. Can you spell g-i-v-e-a-w-a-y? The Senate still has to approve this before it will become law. That’s the Republican-controlled Senate. Democrats: can you spell f-i-l-i-b-u-s-t-e-r (although several Democratic Senators have already lined up behind the bill)? And don’t even get me started on what the Bill Frist is trying to do to the cloture rule…

In one of the most successful efforts to rein in the fast-rising cost of Medicaid, the government health plan for the poor, states are limiting which drugs doctors can prescribe for Medicaid patients.

Two years ago, only three states had authorized the use of lists of preferred drugs for such patients; since then, 19 other states have done so, though not all their programs are up and running, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

(…)

Preferred drug lists steer doctors away from some of the most expensive drugs and toward different, less expensive ones that the state deems equally effective, a practice that many private insurance companies and employee health plans have adopted and that is being considered by Congress as part of a government-subsidized drug benefit for 40 million Medicare recipients. Such limits have persuaded pharmaceutical companies to lower the cost to states of some medicines. Doctors who want to deviate from the list must get prior approval, a process whose difficulty varies widely from state to state… NY Times

My state, Massachusetts, is phasing in these controls for MassHealth, its version of Medicaid, and dealing with the prior approval process is arduous enough that it is, within the first month, rapidly reshaping prescribing practices of myself and the colleagues with whom I am talking about the situation. It becomes essentially a case not of ‘preferred’ drugs but mandated ones.

Isn’t this good, you might ask? The cost-containment effort focuses on the impact on the pharmaceutical industry which, it is true, has a captive market for its newest and most expensive medications. But it is the Medicaid patients, not the companies, which are suffering from this regulation, which deprives them of significantly better medications and makes the cost criterion more important than the efficacy or tolerability one. The mental health medications are not at all the focus of the article — all about arthritis and gastroesophageal reflux — but, at least in Massachusetts, are a major focus of these Medicaid cost containment initiatives. As a psychopharmacologist, I can tell you that the list of mental health drugs a Medicaid patient will end up on is arbitrarily, ludicrously limited. We are rapidly moving toward a two-tier medical system in which those who are poor receive significantly poorer care with virtually no one speaking for them and for whom clinical factors have been virtually neutralized as the decisive factors in their physician’s prescribing choice.

The type of statistical studies showing that, across the population, drug X is as effective as drug Y for a given symptom or disease have nothing to say about the art of prescribing for the individual patient with his or her own unique physiology and treatment history, yet that type of study is the basis for the prescribing restrictions. Especially in mental health care, there has been an explosion in new drug development in the past two decades. While, as I have frequently written here, some of it has been motivated purely by the pharmaceutical industry’s efforts to invent a new twist that will allow them to keep proprietary control over an innovation for the forseeable future, innovation it is — new drugs in the antidepressant, antipsychotic and mood stabilizer areas are truly significantly better, and patients on them feel better and do better than on the medications of a generation before whose toll on the body was often worse than the symptoms they were meant to treat. The new Medicaid restrictions do not, to be fair, roll us back all the way to the prior generation, but they do attempt to level the distinctions among the newer drugs, ignoring the subtleties that make for successful prescribing.

The solution, it seems to me, is for the states to take on the pharmaceutical industry and force concessions with respect to their pricing policy, which gouges us all, much in the way activists are going after the obscenity of big pharma’s profiteering on AIDS medications. Attempting to mandate a state-sponsored boycott of their most expensive products will not achieve this. It ends up being just another way in which this society, which should properly be judged by the way it cares for its most unfortunate and least able, comes up wanting.

Trailers were not WMD labs:

A British inquiry into two truck-trailers found in northern Iraq has found they are not mobile germ warfare labs, the Observer reported yesterday. Instead, they were for the production of hydrogen to fill weather balloons.

A British scientist and biological-weapons expert, who examined the trailers in Iraq, told the London-based weekly: “They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories.

“You could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were: facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.”

The Observer reported the British sold Iraq an artillery-balloon system in 1987. Hydrogen-filled balloons, filled and launched from a mobile platform, are used for determining wind speed and direction at altitude to help in targeting artillery. The Globe and Mail [props to cs]

“One in three U.S. children born in 2000 will become diabetic unless many more people start eating less and exercising more, a scientist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns. The odds are worse for black and Hispanic children: nearly half of them are likely to develop the disease…” CNN [via walker]

Rebecca Blood is concerned about what she refers to as the ‘echo chamber’ effect in weblogging, particularly of the politically flavored sort. She’s eloquent about her concerns:

…(T)hink about it: do you regularly read (and, if you are a weblogger, link to) articles and weblogs you think are dreck? Do you link to flames? Do you link to articles you find to be simply nonsensical?

I’m not talking so much about the tendency of some people to use their weblogs to put forth a political agenda at any cost; my concern is that it’s easy for the rest of us, unconsciously and quite conscientiously, to gravitate to comfortable views of the world.

The important point for bloggers is, if you don’t link to it, it is invisible from your corner of the Web. A group of bloggers that uniformly dismisses or ignores certain points of view, effectively removes them from the discourse. More importantly, the sense of pervasive shared opinion created by that clustering creates a false sense of majority. If you are interested in uncovering the truth, you won’t find it this way. If you are interested in affecting public discourse, watch out–you may gain ascendency in certain circles, but you’re just as likely to marginalize yourself instead.

She differs with those — she cites AKMA, for example — who find the restriction in one’s circle of sources and links a matter of conscious choice. “It’s usually completely unintentional.” In my case, it is quite deliberate, and I’m left wondering, with all due respect to her perspicacity about weblogging, why it is she is so concerned about confirmation bias if it is intentional. I know there is some difference of opinion in the weblog community about this, but IMHO weblogging is not journalism, and objectivity is not necessarily the virtue to which we should aspire in order to appeal to, or be of service to, our readers. In fact, as I do not hesitate to say I was quite flattered by, Rebecca included me in her book as ‘a weblogger with strong voice’ … and, by extension, strong and confident opinions. Certainly, I would not be so obstreperous if I worried more about marginalizing myself, and I sometimes do lament the fact that I am preaching to the converted, but usually I feel more that I’m writing and linking for a like-minded community, and playing a role in building and strengthening that constituency (or at least entertaining it!).

I have no difficulty screening out and ignoring opinions I am confident by this point in my moral and intellectual development are patently absurd, misguided and morally bankrupt because they diverge too much from my own well-defined and strongly circumscribed viewpoint. Making them effectively invisible from my point of view is not a concern. From my beleaguered progressive perspective, the reality of the political ‘dreck’ on the right is in our face, increasingly so, every day. And, so, there is no danger in being deluded into believing my opinions represent the majority. Rather, one of the sole comforts in a world in which George Bush has an almost-70% approval rating is knowing there are some out there who disagree with the bandwagon. I would submit that that is very different from being close-minded, which is what Rebecca seems to be fretting about. Indeed, I would turn her litmus test —

…(I)s what you’re talking about important? The more important you think it is, the more important it probably is to consider the opinions of those who have thought about the same subject and drawn a different conclusion…

— on its head. The more important an opinion is — e.g., recently, the irrationality and immorality of the Iraqi invasion — the less obliged I feel I am to listen to the nonsense coming from the other side of the argument. The weblog is not, for me, the vehicle to work out my position on such an issue; it is the consequence of having already worked it out for myself, long ago. “My mind isn’t so open that it’ll admit any ol’ thing”, someone once said.

Longtime FmH readers will recall my agonizing at times in the past that there is little opportunity in the weblogging world for dialogue with those who believe very differently from me. Both I and the political sphere have moved beyond that concern which, in retrospect, has come to seem naive on my part, given the reality of polarization in the weblogging community and the larger political spectrum. I’m not, for instance, interested in reconciliation and reasonable exchanges with the Bush ideologues; we can’t argue about our respective religions. My constituency is the vociferous opposition which I can, hopefully, play a role in growing.

Now don’t get me wrong (Rebecca or anyone else) — it would be nice if our ‘democracy’ were a civil place where breathtakingly rhetorical debates still took place. It saddens me that that is long gone in the globalized, conglomerate-media, petty-demagogue party politics of the late 20th and at least early 21st century western world. We have betrayed the possibilities of being at our best in that way, and civility and thoughtful debate will not reclaim those aspirations. It is within smaller communities — both real, local geographics ones and the virtual assemblages of like-minded people on the net — that that is still possible, and within realistic functioning communities I have far less difference of opinion with you. What disagreement there is, I hasten to add, certainly leaves room for thoughtful dialogue on these issues — I’d welcome your comments.

“From buying organic to taking the bus, Leo Hickman is trying to adopt a more ethical lifestyle – and he’s writing a book about the process. But he needs your help…” Guardian/UK [via rebecca’s pocket]

“One in three U.S. children born in 2000 will become diabetic unless many more people start eating less and exercising more, a scientist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns. The odds are worse for black and Hispanic children: nearly half of them are likely to develop the disease…” CNN [via walker]

a virtual tour of Highgate Cemetery.

an online presence of the inspired artist of the twisted aphorism, Jenny Holzer.

“Not just obits of great statesmen and celebrities, but great obituaries of regular people,” from Brooke Biggs of Bittershack renown.

Aerial Photographs of the California Coastline: “Welcome to the website of the California Coastal Records Project. Our goal is to create an aerial photographic survey of the California Coast and update it on a periodic basis.” You can zoom in on each of the detailed photographs. I am reading a novel that takes place along the northern California coast; I can follow the action photo by photo. In fact, you can zoom in so much that Barbra Streisand is trying to sue for invasion of privacy to suppress photographs of her estate. [thanks, abby]

“Yesterday in Kennebunkport, Maine, President Bush managed to tip over a Segway while attempting to ride it — despite the fact that the recently invented motorized scooters are equipped with tilt sensors and five high-tech gyroscopes, which are supposed to prevent them from tipping over. So how did Bush manage to nearly fall flat on his face? The American Prospect

in NYC at the IBM Building Atrium (590 Madison Avenue at 56th Street), May 10 – July 31, 2003: “…(F)olks (3 at a time) are led into the large tear drop shaped work of art within which they’ll enjoy an interactive experience. Within the fiberglass sculpture are Technogel seats on which the visitors will relax and watch a 7 minute projection on the domed ceiling above. Each viewer wears a set of electrodes, which gather brainwave data. This information is instantly transformed into visual imagery, in real time correspondence with the actual activity of the brain, and projected onto the screen.”

Do you believe this is a frequently asked question? [via danelope]

“The humble slug may not be considered the most popular or attractive of creatures. But one gastropod in particular was responsible for establishing the most important precedent in legal history.” The Scotsman

‘Dual source’ caused Aids-like virus:

A genetic study of SIV – the Aids-like virus that infects monkeys – suggests that HIV – the virus that causes Aids in humans – came about through the combination of two viruses in chimpanzees.

Chimps could have been infected by other SIV-type viruses when they preyed on monkeys.

The study confirms what has been established about the origin of Aids: it emerged from the forests of western Africa some time in the last century.

Humans caught it from chimpanzees when they ate them as food, or became exposed to their blood in rituals. BBC

Person-to-person cases of monkeypox suspected: A nurse and a medical assistant in Wisconsin who cared for patients with monkeypox infections have come down with symptoms suggestive of the disease, and so has the boyfriend of the medical assistant, raising concerns about person-to-person transmission in this less virulent ‘cousin’ of smallpox. Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Debates about the possible efficacy of smallpox inoculation aginst the spread of the disease are beginning. Discussion of the nontrivial risks of the inoculation, which had been couched in terms of the theoretical risk of a bioterrorist attack with the smallpox virus, must now be reframed in terms of a real, although lesser, threat situation.

Note, as well, that the monkeypox infection shares with most recent emergent diseases the fact that its origins were in a jump from an animal reservoir. Along with HIV (as discussed above), the SARS virus, Ebola and related hemorrhagic fevers, Hantavirus share that characteristic as well. With the control of infectious diseases being the medical success story of the 20th century, it might make sense that the most significant disease challenges leap out of the dark at us in this manner. On the other hand, does preoccupation with ‘sexy’ novel infections divert our attention from real public health emergencies of much wider scope, such as HIV/Aids, antibiotic-resistant strains of more common ‘bugs’, and the resurgence of tuberculosis and STDs (where the issue is more one of the political will to allocate resources properly rather than the scientific know-how to address the disease process)?

Happy birthday, Willy.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Are you paraskevidekatriaphobic? While the word apparently dates from 1992, the phenomenon has a long heritage. According to one source, 17 to 21 million Americans, 8% or so of our population, are affected to one extent or another, and it costs the U.S. economy up to $750 million in lost revenues annually. —Why? —How? The Guardian and Salon also have something to say on this matter.

Related:

Here’s a quiz to see how superstitious you are. Its queries include a number of superstitions I had not even been aware existed.

“Ghosts are the mind’s way of interpreting how the body reacts to certain surroundings, say UK psychologists.

Dr Wiseman’s team used hundreds of volunteers

A chill in the air, low-light conditions and even magnetic fields may trigger feelings that “a presence” is in a room – but that is all they are, feelings.

This explanation of ghosts is the result of a large study in which researchers led hundreds of volunteers around two of the UK’s supposedly most haunted locations – Hampton Court Palace, England, and the South Bridge Vaults in Edinburgh, Scotland.” BBC

[British psychologist Wiseman was also the one who recently reprised Stanley Milgram’s ‘six degrees of separation’ experiment, about which I wrote below.]

CamWorld Turns Six; one of my early weblogging inspirations. Many happy returns.

“A body is found in the frozen North Dakota woods. The cops say the dead Japanese woman was looking for the $1m she saw buried in the film Fargo. But the story didn’t end there.” Guardian/UK

But When?

“In a marriage of science and art, three astronomers have pinpointed the precise time and date of a painting by Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh based on calculations of the moon’s position in the picture.

Van Gogh’s painting depicts a field of haystacks in Provence, France, with a bright orange orb partially showing over a bluff. The vivid picture was known to have been painted sometime in the summer of 1889, toward the end of the most productive, but troubled, period of the artist’s life.” Wired

“…(M)oves are afoot to redesign that most sacred of British hallmarks – the union flag.

A campaign is being launched to modernise the red, white and blue flag by adding a touch of black to reflect multicultural Britain in the 21st Century.

The proposed new flag (see above) is the work of Nigel Turner, an enthusiastic fan of the UK’s transformation into a multiracial society over the past 50 years.” BBC

“International Business Machines Corp. and German chipmaker Infineon Technologies AG said they have made an important step toward developing a new kind of memory that could enable computers to boot up instantaneously.” CNN

“The idea that water retains a memory of substances once dissolved in it is generally ridiculed, but not in a new scientific paper …” New Scientist

In Gold Ink on a Chip, the World’s Tiniest Book: “Tiny writing has been an after-hours project of theirs since they were doctoral candidates at the M.I.T. artificial intelligence laboratory in the mid-1990’s. It was then that Mr. Sinha fell asleep during a conference and dreamed he was writing the Bhagavad Gita on a grain of rice. When he awoke, the feat seemed feasible, if he could employ the technology used to etch microchips.

In the next six years, he developed software that allowed him and Ms. Lipson to write in gold on a crystalline silicon chip, using a font with letters each four microns high — about the height of a red blood cell. They chose 24-karat gold because it not only resists oxidation but looks pretty, even under a microscope.

They started modestly, with a reproduction of the Lord’s Prayer, before setting to work on the 180,568 words of the King James version of the New Testament. (The Gita, a sacred Hindu text, was too short to be a real challenge.)”

Missing Weapons May Become Election Issue Washington Post

“America Online Inc. yesterday moved closer to turning its instant-messaging service into a profitable business by cutting a deal that would enable the company to earn money with the service in workplaces.” technews.com

Everyone is reporting this:

U.S. launches massive operation against Saddam loyalists, rounds up nearly 400 suspects.

Using jet fighters, tank-buster aircraft and patrol boats, the U.S. military launched a massive operation to crush opposition north of Baghdad and captured nearly 400 suspected Saddam Hussein loyalists in a bid to end daily attacks against American soldiers.

Code-named ”Operation Peninsula Strike” and involving thousands of American troops, the push began Tuesday and was centered on the Tigris River town of Thuluya 45 miles north of Baghdad, the Central Command said.

While the command did not mention Saddam, a leader of an Iraqi exile group said in New York Tuesday that the ousted leader was seen north of Baghdad as recently as three weeks ago.

Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, also claimed Saddam was paying a bounty for every American soldier killed, using $1.3 billion in cash taken from the Central Bank on March 18. Boston Globe

But FOX News‘ slant on it is just a little different:

Saddam Hussein has been seen north of Baghdad and is paying a bounty for every American soldier killed, the leader of an Iraqi exile group said Tuesday.

Saddam has $1.3 billion in cash taken from the Central Bank on March 18, is bent on revenge and believes he can “sit it out and get the Americans going,” said Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress.

Says ‘lower level’ Bush officials smeared him: ‘President Bush’s case against Iraq came under growing scrutiny on Wednesday when chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix accused “lower level” administration officials of mounting a smear campaign to discredit him in the lead up to war.

Secretary of State Colin Powell denied the charges, made public in a London newspaper on Wednesday.’ Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“As the waters rise behind China’s massive Three Gorges Dam, the controversial project continues to stir fears and protests.

June 1, 22 sluice gates in Yichang were shut, blocking off the flow of the Yangtze River. Strengthened by summer storms, the waters have been swiftly mounting the towering walls of Three Gorges. Tuesday, the silt-laden waters had already risen more than 400 feet, submerging dozens of villages, towns, factories, temples, and tombs under a 365 mile-long reservoir.

The Three Gorges project has faced widespread protest – from those worried about the loss of ancient artifacts to those who question its feasibility. Yet the most difficult challenge facing Beijing has been the resettlement of some 1.2 million people by 2009 – the largest resettlement program ever attempted. Many of the 700,000 residents who have been moved so far remain dissatisfied, saying promises of better lives have not been kept.” Christian Science Monitor

A recent British reprise of Stanley Milgram’s famous “six degrees of separation” experiment of the ’60’s suggests that contemporary Great Britain is a ‘smaller world’ than the U.S. at the time of the original experiment. Telegraph/UK. I’ve been a fan of the ‘small world’ phenomenon since I learned of Milgram’s work at the time. It is sociologically fascinating but not immediately obvious to me why small world theory has recently become so popular and, as this book review for example suggests, usurped other exlanatory schemes in network science. I suspect it has something to do with our efforts to assimilate the novel experience of connectedness in the internet era as well as the homogenization of the world we have all experienced with globalization… and, of course, because of Kevin Bacon’s advent on the scene in the intervening decades.

But Milgram, a psychologist at Yale, was responsible for another of the most disturbing social psychology experiments of that era as well, the so-called Obedience to Authority study. This has equal applicability to our times, although is far more disturbing to contemplate, than the ‘six degrees’ material. With a clever experimental design, he found that most people had relatively few compunctions about inflicting what they thought was significant pain on strangers when influenced to do so:

Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted a study focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. He examined justifications for acts of genocide offered by those accused at the World War II, Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Their defense often was based on “obedience” – – that they were just following orders of their superiors.

In the experiment, so-called “teachers” (who were actually the unknowing subjects of the experiment) were recruited by Milgram. They were asked administer an electric shock of increasing intensity to a “learner” for each mistake he made during the experiment. The fictitious story given to these “teachers” was that the experiment was exploring effects of punishment (for incorrect responses) on learning behavior. The “teacher” was not aware that the “learner” in the study was actually an actor – – merely indicating discomfort as the “teacher” increased the electric shocks.

When the “teacher” asked whether increased shocks should be given he/she was verbally encouraged to continue. Sixty percent of the “teachers” obeyed orders to punish the learner to the very end of the 450-volt scale! No subject stopped before reaching 300 volts!

At times, the worried “teachers” questioned the experimenter, asking who was responsible for any harmful effects resulting from shocking the learner at such a high level. Upon receiving the answer that the experimenter assumed full responsibility, teachers seemed to accept the response and continue shocking, even though some were obviously extremely uncomfortable in doing so. The study raised many questions about how the subjects could bring themselves to administer such heavy shocks. More important to our interests are the ethical issues raised by such an experiment itself. What right does a researcher have to expose subjects to such stress? What activities should be and not be allowed in marketing research? Does the search for knowledge always justify such “costs” to subjects? Who should decide such issues?

I remember reading Milgram’s reflection on the study, The Perils of Obedience, in Harper’s magazine in 1974. They include some fascinating portrayals of the dilemmas of conflicted clinical subjects and Milgram’s dissection of the psychological process of such obedience. He points to forces of social alienation which allow one to evade taking responsibility for one’s (even morally heinous) actions.

Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps, but he had only to sit at a desk and shuffle papers. At the same time the man in the camp who actually dropped Cyclon-b into the gas chambers was able to justify his behavior on the ground that he was only following orders from above. Thus there is a fragmentation of the total human act; no one is confronted with the consequences of his decision to carry out the evil act. The person who assumes responsibility has evaporated. Perhaps this is the most common characteristic of socially organized evil in modern society.

Chillingly, these trends have progressed, if we can use that word, in the intervening decades to an extent that makes authoritarian influence and obedience to it even more robust. The techniques of social control are ever more powerful but, fist-in-glove, ever more subtle and opaque to social discourse. The relatively limited scale of conscientious objection to US military adventurism, which I have discussed here during the Iraqi invasion, and recent revelations of US military research into neurobiological interventions to forestall the formation of traumatic memories during combat to enhance our troops’ fighting efficiency, are just two random threads in a net that should be viewed in this light. And I cannot help thinking the phenomenon is linked to the question I keep raising here about why the American public has acquiesced to the justifications for the invasion with nary an outcry about having been lied to egregiously. The maxim is trite, but more important than ever: ‘Speak truth to power.’

“Our third annual send-up of the most ill-conceived, embarrassing, and downright appalling developments of the past year.” Business 2.0 [via walker]. Some of these would be entertainingly funny if they weren’t — yes — “appalling”. The contempt of the business establishment for the customers they must exploit is most evident when they are stupid at it.

“…new government restrictions aimed at terrorists threaten to ground a hobby that can get youngsters fired up about science.

Homeland security regulations that took effect in May require a background check, fingerprinting and a $25 federal permit for people wanting to buy high-powered rocket engines.” Newsday

“You have two new big brothers and both are watching you closely.

The Democratic National Committee boasts electronic files on 158 million Americans. The Republican National Committee says it’s way ahead, with files on 165 million.

National party computers today keep track of where you live, your phone number and e-mail address, whether you vote, your willingness or refusal to make political contributions, your interests, ethnic background, reading habits and church attendance. Some files contain hints about your sexual preferences, whether own a gun, and your views on abortion and other issues.

The Democrats call their system “Demzilla.” Republicans call theirs “Voter Vault.” Advocates of privacy call it Orwellian.”

Are you familiar with the Fotolog phenomenon? “12,238 Fotologgers,

171,861 Photos, 882 Photos Today.” I wasn’t, until this Wired piece:

The increasingly popular Fotolog website is becoming a battleground where high and low culture clash.

Fotolog is a relatively new weblog-cum-photo-gallery that allows anyone to post digital photos in chronological order. Thanks to the ability to link to, and comment on, others’ work, the site is rapidly building a large community of enthusiast snappers.

But like many new online societies, members with radically different ideas are waging a battle for its “soul.”

“The environmental writer and poet says George Bush is ‘our shadow’ embodying the arrogance, impatience, entitlement and greed that we are all complicit in.” AlterNet

Molly Ivins riffs off Joshua Marshall’s “(award) for the Iraq-hawk who can come up with the most ingenious, Orwellian, up-is-down rewriting of the history of the year-long lead-up to the Iraq war.” Nominees include William Safire, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, and good ol’ Ari Fleischer. At one point in her column, she refers to one of the twisted concoctions that passes for the truth these days as ‘what the BBC — not normally noted for overstatement — called, “One of the most stunning pieces of news management ever conceived.” ‘ It is a sad commentary on the prominence of this rogue’s gallery of Orwell Award contenders that you would be hard pressed to even figure out to which of the current distortions the out-of-context BBC quote might refer.

Blood disease symptoms resemble child abuse. “…(A) study in the latest issue of Pediatrics (vol 111, p 636)… is the first time attention has been drawn to the potential confusion between HLH and child abuse injuries. No one knows how many other cases there are like this worldwide – and the tragedy is not just that parents are wrongly accused, but that without prompt diagnosis and treatment HLH can be fatal.

(…)

The rareness of HLH and the commonness of child abuse are a disastrous combination. “Most paediatricians will never see a case of this during their careers,” says James Whitlock of Vanderbilt College of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee. So when they are confronted with symptoms such as retinal haemorrhaging, widely taken to be a sure sign of “inflicted injury”, the logical assumption is child abuse.

Most of the time they are right. Indeed, child protection workers worry that raising the profile of HLH could let child abusers off the hook…” New Scientist

“CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) The winner of the state’s annual tall-tale telling contest is planning a career in politics.

Justin Wood, 17, a junior at George Washington High School, was named the biggest liar in last month’s Liars Contest, held in conjunction with the 27th annual Vandalia Gathering.

“I’m just a natural liar, I guess,” said Wood, the recently elected class president who plans to major in political science at either American University or George Washington University.” Boston Globe

“…(H)ow, precisely, did we get here — to a point where the midsection has supplanted all other parts of the female anatomy as the one most eroticized in the culture’s image bank?” NY Times

“Two of the highest-ranking leaders of Al Qaeda in American custody have told the C.I.A. in separate interrogations that the terrorist organization did not work jointly with the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein, according to several intelligence officials.” Osama bin Laden apparently did not want to be beholden in any way to the likes of Saddam Hussein. NY Times

ePatriots is a collaboration between the daily Kos weblog and the Democratic National Committee “to help narrow the GOP’s massive cash advantage.”

“Our nominee will emerge from the primaries bloodied and broke, only to run smack head into $200 million in GOP attack ads. The DNC recognizes the increasing power of the blogosphere, and was receptive when I approached them with a request — give us the tools to help the party and our nominee defeat Bush. The end result? ePatriots. So donate now and help us retake our nation from Bush and his cabal. Your donations will be crucial to this effort.”

Kos’ Markos Moulitsas adds at his site,

“I worked with the DNC in setting up ePatriots. As such, I am essentially test driving it to ensure everything works as advertised. Once we are certain the system is solid the DNC will make this system available to all bloggers and webmasters.”

I must admit that it sticks in my craw to donate to any party machine, especially without knowing where the Democrats are going in the 2004 campaign, and with whom. And I am not so sure that the weblogging community has the numbers and the reach to be influential in grassroots politics, especially of the progressive variety, in the sense that it may be a phenomenon in its own mind more than anywhere else. But I could be wrong, which might ultimately mean that the contributions of netizens could help shape the Dems into a responsive, grassroots, 21st-century organization that might function as the effective opposition party it has never been and which we need so desperately. It is a sort of Pascal’s Wager — there seems to be no harm in beginning to link to this effort from the get-go. If for no reason other than as a social experiment, spread the word. And even moreso if you believe there is enough of a difference between even the most vapid ‘Dixiecrat’ least-common-denominator of a potential Democratic candidate and our unelected Resident Bush to make it worthwhile to begin to build the warchest now. I am thinking of joining the ABBA Party…

Evelyn Nieves, the Washington Post‘s west coast correspondent best known for covering the opposition to the invasion of Iraq, extolls the Beat bookstore on the occasion of its fifthieth birthday. I make a pilgrimmage there every time I travel to San Francisco, as I did last month to find it beneath a fresh coat of paint for the occasion, and lucky enough to have just finished the novel with which I was travelling and being in a book-buying mood (but, then again, I’m usually in a book-buying mood…); ended up with an obscure Iain Sinclair and a Denis Johnson I hadn’t already read.

In honor of the occasion, what say we have a little Michael McClure?

        BABY'S IN BLACK

             Michael McClure



THE NIGHT HYMNS BRIGHT THOUGHTS in Baby's contemplation.

His fists beat and toes clench. His voice

wails terror of the crocodiles

         beneath the bed

         but he's in silence.     Screaming is

         only in his head while moths

         die at the windowsill.  The ice wagon

         loads up and the horse is harnessed

         for the daily trudge through

                North Seattle



                    --like

                    the smell of cinnamon

                    and nutmeg

                it never goes away!



                  I

                am



           this hungry thing



               DESPITE

            the collapse

          of six dimensions,



      lying by the fire and smelling

          granpa's snuff and cedar kindling,

          listening

          to the crackle,



      DON'T TELL ME THIS IS REAL!

Related:<img align=”left” src=”LastGathering.jpg” border=”0″ width=”110″ height=”144″ alt=”[Image ‘LastGathering.jpg’ cannot be displayed]” title=”The Last Gathering of Beat Poets &Artists, City Lights Books

North Beach, San Francisco 1965″>The Last Gathering of Beat Poets & Artists, City Lights Books

North Beach, San Francisco 1965 [scroll down the page for a larger image and identifying caption]: “Lawrence Ferlinghetti wanted to document the 1965 Beat scene in San Francisco in the spirit of the early 20th century classic photographs of the Bohemian artists & writers in Paris…”

Underdiagnosed Syndrome May Affect 5 Percent To 10 Percent Of U.S. Population:

Restless legs syndrome (RLS) may sound like something right out of a 1950s horror flick. And for some sufferers, it is. This affliction causes an irresistible urge to move the legs often accompanied by creepy-crawly sensations in the legs. The sensations are only relieved by movement, and become worse as the sun goes down. Night after night this sleeplessness occurs for the millions who suffer with RLS and their partners.

Because little is known about what causes RLS, researchers at Penn State College of Medicine and Johns Hopkins University went looking for answers. The team, led by James Connor, Ph.D., professor and interim chair, Department of Neuroscience and Anatomy, Penn State College of Medicine, performed the first-ever autopsy analysis of the brains of people with RLS. This research, presented today (June 5, 2003) at the Association of Professional Sleep Societies meeting in Chicago, uncovered a possible explanation for this syndrome.

“We found that, although there are no unique pathological changes in the brains of patients with RLS, it appears that cells in a portion of the mid-brain aren’t getting enough iron,” Connor said. “It was a relief to many that there was no neurodegeneration, or loss or damage of brain cells, like we see in Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.”

The discovery of a physical cause for this disorder establishes it as a sensory motor rather than a psychological disorder. Because cells aren’t lost or damaged but rather iron-deficient, there is more hope that treatments can be developed. ScienceDaily News

Mourning the Death of American Radio NY Times editorial

A reader with WebTV says the layout of FmH is awry to the point that much of the content cannot be read because of overlapping columns. Does anyone else read this weblog over WebTV? If so, can you drop me a line if it formats correctly, or if you are having the same difficulties? Thanks in advance…

When death comes

like the hungry bear in autumn;

when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse



to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;

when death comes

like the measle-pox;



when death comes

like an iceberg between the shoulder-blades,



I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:

what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?



And therefore I look upon everything

as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,

and I look upon time as no more than an idea,

and I consider eternity as another possibility,



and I think of each life as a flower, as common

as a field daisy, and as singular,



and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,

tending, as all music does, toward silence,



and each body a lion of courage, and something

precious to the earth.



When it’s over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.



When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,

or full of argument.



I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

— Mary Oliver (1991)

To beat bugs?? “Humans may have lost their body hair to reduce their vulnerability to fur-loving parasites and therefore attract the opposite sex, a new evolutionary theory proposes.

The nakedness of the human species is extremely rare among the 3000 or so living mammal species. Other naked mammals include elephants, walruses, pigs, whales and the bizarre naked mole-rat.

A widely accepted view is that humans lost their hair to help control their body temperature as they evolved into upright creatures on the warm plains of the African savannah. But this theory has problems that researchers believe the new theory can solve.” New Scientist

I thought this might be interesting even for non-medical readers who might be consumers of medical care for a painful condition at some point.

“…(P)hysicians face serious issues when it comes to prescribing opiates. Legitimate worries include not only fears about addicting patients to painkillers, but concerns about sanctions for overprescribing the drugs.

…(But physicians can) aggressively manage pain using all means at their disposal, especially opiates. (S)trategies focus… on setting appropriate dosages, minimizing side effects and avoiding trouble with local medical boards… (N)ew ideas about pain began to alter practice patterns about 20 years ago. Instead of viewing pain as a symptom of disease or injury, he explained, physicians began to view it as a problem in its own right… (C)ontrasting old and new ways of thinking:

• Pain scale

  Old: Treat patient pain only when patients rank it 10 on a 10-point scale.

  New: Anticipate pain and treat it before it reaches unacceptable levels (usually between four and six on the 10-point scale).
  

• Dosages

  Old: Give a maximum of 10-15 mg of morphine per hour.

  New: Use whatever is needed to treat pain.

• Drug choices

  Old: Use only morphine or another opiate for pain.

  New: Use multiple medications and combine morphine with adjuvant medications for better pain control.

• Act vs. react

  Old: Administer treatment “as needed” when patients report pain symptoms.

  New: Use a steady-state treatment and build up a steady level of narcotics to provide complete relief.

• Drug action

  Old: Use short-acting preparations.

  New: Combine longer-release medications with short-acting preparations for incidents of breakthrough pain.”
  

Feared medical complications such as respiratory depression, somnolence and confusion, or addiction; and concerns about possible regulatory trouble from opiate prescribing patterns hamper physicians’ effectiveness in treating their patients’ pain. The article takes these concerns in turn and suggests ways to address or bypass them. ACP (American College of Physicians) Observer

Here are the “Model Guidelines for the Use of Controlled Substances for the Treatment of Pain” from the Federation of State Medical Boards. The guidelines acknowledge the important role opiates play in pain management and were designed to alleviate physician uncertainty and encourage better pain treatment.

All well and good to address these ‘rational’ if misguided concerns. However, IMHO it is often an irrational, attitudinal reluctance to adequately treat pain that is more at issue. In a strange unconscious sense, physicians may begrudge patients the relief of their distress, since the physician’s identity is so built around the central experience of their training that suffering and deprivation builds professional competency and self-esteem. A workshop to enhance physicians’ effectiveness in managing pain should, in this manner, include a component on managing their own pain in a sense.

Lobbying Starts as Groups Foresee Supreme Court Vacancy:

Interest groups on the left and the right are beginning full-scale political campaigns — including fund-raising, advertising and major research — to prepare for what many expect to be a Supreme Court vacancy in the next several weeks.

While none of the justices have said they plan to retire, any decision would traditionally be announced at the end of the court’s term in late June.

Both conservatives and liberals say the time is right for a change in at least one and perhaps two seats, given the age of several justices and the general recognition that this is President Bush’s last chance to name a justice before the presidential campaign begins in earnest. NY Times

Former Opposition Leaders Considered Unrepresentative and Too Disorganized

“Former Iraqi opposition leaders, many of whom were brought back from exile by the U.S. government with the expectation that they would run the country, have been largely sidelined by the U.S.-led occupation authority here, which views them as insufficiently representative and too disorganized to take charge.” Washington Post

Since longstanding U.S. allies mean little to us anymore, why should we care about recent friends or those to whom we might be obliged?

protest government cybersnooping by spoofing a terrorist conspiracy .

Since and even well before the 11th of September laws have been passed in the United States and in Europe, that permit certain nations to keep all e-mail traffic under close surveillance… SuPerVillainizer is a project aimed at ridiculing the notions of “the enemy” or the “bad guy” that these data retention surveillance scenarios are based on.

SuPerVillainizer is about creating profiles of villains, rogues, bad guys, and scapegoats, equipping them with real email accounts at a Swiss provider, uniting them into conspiracies, and then watching as the villains start to automatically communicate with each other using SuPerVillainizer-generated conspiracy content, infiltrating the carefully planned surveillance system with more and more disinfoming mails every day.

British film 28 Days Later… dir. Danny Boyle, reviewed:

An excess of grainy news images rains down with each one showing a different picture of terrible violence. When the camera slowly tracks back to reveal several TV screens apparently running on a loop the recipient of this information turns out to be a monkey. This opening few seconds of 28 Days Later… sets the tone for what is a weird, tense and bloody scary British film.

The premise for the film is simple. A corporation doing experiments has managed to come up with a ‘rage’ virus that spreads like wildfire should an infected subject bite you or get their blood into you. Within 20 seconds you are infected with a raging desire for flesh. Some animal activists release a chimp that is infected and therefore trigger the start of an epidemic.

“Stories of children rescued from the wilderness have for centuries inspired awe, fascination and disbelief; (a review of) a phenomenon that helps to define the frontier between human and animal.” Fortean Times

“Come on, poor babe:

Some powerful spirit instruct the kites and ravens

To be thy nurses! Wolves and bears, they say,

Casting their savageness aside, have done

Like offices of pity.”

[Shakespeare, Winter’s Tale, Act II, scene 3, line 185.]

Underdiagnosed Syndrome May Affect 5 Percent To 10 Percent Of U.S. Population:

Restless legs syndrome (RLS) may sound like something right out of a 1950s horror flick. And for some sufferers, it is. This affliction causes an irresistible urge to move the legs often accompanied by creepy-crawly sensations in the legs. The sensations are only relieved by movement, and become worse as the sun goes down. Night after night this sleeplessness occurs for the millions who suffer with RLS and their partners.

Because little is known about what causes RLS, researchers at Penn State College of Medicine and Johns Hopkins University went looking for answers. The team, led by James Connor, Ph.D., professor and interim chair, Department of Neuroscience and Anatomy, Penn State College of Medicine, performed the first-ever autopsy analysis of the brains of people with RLS. This research, presented today (June 5, 2003) at the Association of Professional Sleep Societies meeting in Chicago, uncovered a possible explanation for this syndrome.

“We found that, although there are no unique pathological changes in the brains of patients with RLS, it appears that cells in a portion of the mid-brain aren’t getting enough iron,” Connor said. “It was a relief to many that there was no neurodegeneration, or loss or damage of brain cells, like we see in Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.”

The discovery of a physical cause for this disorder establishes it as a sensory motor rather than a psychological disorder. Because cells aren’t lost or damaged but rather iron-deficient, there is more hope that treatments can be developed. ScienceDaily News

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.

“Americans, still reeling after Sammy Sosa was ejected from a baseball game for using a corked bat, now have another corking story to face. Doctors at the Bethesda Naval Hospital announced that a routine brain scan of Vice-president Dick Cheney revealed that he was corked.” BBspot [via walker]. Yeah but, as with Sosa’s bat, expert testimony suggests it didn’t really do anything for his performance.

Try ‘Flow’

We humans take our feelings very seriously. How else to explain the theatrical dread most of us have of boredom? After all, who among us hasn’t threatened to die of it at some time or another?

Recently faced with a long trans-Atlantic flight, I naïvely assumed I could trot out an assortment of diversions to beat the tedium of cramped confinement, airplane food and wailing infants.

Shortly after takeoff, I pulled out a stack of magazines and books, feeling impervious to the ennui that would soon overtake my fellow passengers. Dead wrong… NY Times

I have been blessed with the ability to defy boredom. I don’t really experience boredom unless I’m trapped at some intolerable event with absolutely nothing to read or otherwise divert myself — and usually people-watching suffices at such desperate times. I don’t really understand the capacity to be bored…

Violent offenders and paedophiles coming up for parole could one day be screened to discover whether they still harbour criminal inclinations.

A new technique, developed to get inside the minds of pathological liars, has already revealed that one reason violent psychopaths become murderers is that they do not regard violence as unpleasant.

Although the finding is hardly suprising, the test breaks new ground because it provides what is thought to be an objective glimpse of what psychopaths actually think: those such as Ted Bundy can often project a deceptively charming persona.

The test is the first to have “the ability to reveal criminal thoughts and beliefs that the offender may wish to disguise”, said Dr Nicola Gray, co-author of the study published in the journal Nature. Telegraph/UK

How about screening them before they commit any crime, á la Minority Report. Any takers? Mr. Ashcroft?

Truthout still has this article up — “Oil was the main reason for military action against Iraq, a leading White House hawk has claimed, confirming the worst fears of those opposed to the US-led war.” However, the Guardian has withdrawn the article, perhaps because it was a serious misrepresentation of Wolfowitz’s comments. Not very believable on the face of it, when you think about it, that Wolfowitz would admit we went to war for the oil merely because even if Wolfowitz is among the most craven, he is also among the most crafty in the Bush cabal. It is really only the headline that takes him so seriously out of context; if you read the article, you’ll see he was really drawing an economic contrast between North Korea and Iraq, explaining that because Iraq is ‘swimming in a sea of oil’ we could not hope to use a path of negotiation based on bribing an impoverished nation, as in our attempt to manipulate North Korea. Thus we had no choice with Iraq, in his estimation, but the more belligerent path.

Thanks to mark wood for pointing me to these: Scientists need no longer be afraid to ask the big questions about what it means to be human with empirical evidence now answering ancient philosophical questions about meaning and existence.

• Lecture 1: Phantoms in the Brain – Professor Ramachandran shows how phenomena such as Capgras’ delusion illuminate fundamental aspects of our minds such as body image, emotions and the evolution of humor.
  
• Lecture 2: Synapses and the Self –

  How does the activity of the 100 billion little wisps of protoplasm – the neurons in your brain – give rise to all the richness of our conscious experience, including the “redness” of red, the painfulness of pain or the exquisite flavour of Marmite or Vindaloo?
  

• Lecture 3: The Artful Brain –

  Professor Ramachandran draws on neurological case studies and work from ethology (animal behavior) to present a new framework for understanding how the brain creates and responds to art. He will use examples mainly from Indian art and Cubism to illustrate these ideas.
  

• Lecture 4: Purple Numbers and Sharp Cheese –

  Professor Ramachandran demonstrates experimentally that the phenomenon of synesthaesia is a genuine sensory effect. For example, some subjects literally “see” red every time they see the number 5 or green when they see 2.
  

• Lecture 5: Neuroscience – the New Philosophy –

  Professor Ramachandran argues that neuroscience, perhaps more than any other discipline, is capable of transforming man’s understanding of himself and his place in the cosmos.
  

BBC The lectures are by Vilayanur S Ramachandran, Director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition and professor with the Psychology Department and the Neurosciences Programme at the University of California, San Diego. I’ve linked to Ramachandran’s discussion of “mirror neurons” at The Edge recently.

We’ll Bomb Who We Want! Micah Ian Wright’s wonderful ‘remixed’ war propaganda posters are now collected as a book.

“At a tech conference last week, journalists in attendance were told

anything they heard at panel discussions was ‘off the record.’ But

bloggers, not held to the niceties of traditional journalism, posted

away. Time to rethink the rules?” Wired News

Living without Ultimate Moral Responsibility:

“There is an undeniable human tendency to see ourselves as free and morally

responsible beings. But there’s a problem. We also believe-most of us

anyhow-that our environment and our heredity entirely shape our characters

(what else could?). But we aren’t responsible for our environment, and we

aren’t responsible for our heredity. So we aren’t responsible for our

characters. But then how can we be responsible for acts that arise from our

characters? There’s a simple but extremely unpopular answer to this question:

we aren’t. We are not and cannot be ultimately responsible for our behavior.” — Galen Strawson interviewed in The Believer [via naturalism.org]

“The company plans to buy Handspring to strengthen its grip on the market for handheld devices. It also has finalized plans to spin off its PalmSource software unit.” That’s one way to respond to the criticism that all the innovation in the handheld field is with Palm’s competitors…

How its makers learned to hate the bomb Boston Globe

“Daycare owner charged with breast-feeding someone else’s baby…” This next strikes me as pretty amazing in itself:

“The mother found out months later when a rumor circulated around the town of 2,500…”

Next point to ponder:

‘The state Department of Human Services, which licenses daycare centers, has no policy on breast-feeding someone else’s child. “It’s a commonsense sort of thing,” department spokesman George Johnson said. “It’s something that today you don’t even think about.” ‘

SF Chronicle

I’m getting tired of articles like this one of Robert Scheer’s, from the LA Times. The public forum is spinning its wheels on the issue — heavens! — of the government’s having lied to us on the WMD/imminent threat issue:

Of course, the marketing of policy — spin — is an established, albeit unfortunate, part of politics. However, it is unacceptable to misinform your troops going into battle or mislead your citizens about why you are putting their sons and daughters in harm’s way.

Bush and his band of hawks seem to believe the ends justify the means. Thus, the terror of 9/11 and the boogeyman of Iraq’s supposed WMD stash became the key to pushing an ambitious plan to redraw the map of the Middle East. That was the pet project of a band of neocon missionaries who had failed to convince either the first Bush administration or the Clinton administration that such a campaign was plausible or desirable.

That’s not even in question; many of us knew we were being lied to from the time the Bush cabal set its sights on Iraq. At least Scheer attempts to take us further by making the obvious next point:

British Prime Minister Tony Blair is feeling real political heat for arguing before the allied invasion that Saddam Hussein “has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes,” a terrifying claim apparently now proved false.

Yet the White House seems to believe nobody cares that its war was based on the same distortions pushed by our president.

Paul Wolfowitz, one of the general’s top civilian bosses in the Pentagon and a key proponent of invading Iraq, certainly seems unconcerned with the implications of making arguments for war based on convenience rather than facts. [emphasis added — FmH]

Exactly; why does nobody, outside the progressive political commentators (who preach only to the converted) and the weblogging community (which only talks to itself) care? Is it the credulity or the apathy of the audience, or the increasing skill of the propagandists? Perhaps most of the public is just averse to living with the necessity of such constant rage at our leaders (which, after all, dates back to the Big Lies of Vietnam and the worldwide Communist conspiracy), whereas some of us, because of our own character pathology, thrive on ragefulness instead…

Related:

• US Senate Opens
  
  Public WMD Probe BBC News

• Ex-Army Boss:
  
  Pentagon Won’t Admit
  
  Reality in Iraq USA Today

• International Outrage
  
  At Deceitful Iraq
  
  War Rationale Guardian/UK

• Clare Short:
  
  Blair Lied to Cabinet,
  
  Made Secret War
  
  Pact with US Guardian/UK

• Newsweek:
  
  Where are Iraq’s WMDs? MSNBC

• William Rivers Pitt: We Used To Impeach Liars truthout

If the outcry mounts (which is an open question in my mind, since the American public seem to be rolling over on this one as much as they have on Bush’s theft of the election two years ago), I predict the dysadministration will conduct some sort of token witchhunt for “intelligence failures” to divert attention from the reality of the baldfaced lies at the policy level. As you see, for example from the item below, if there was “faulty intel”, it was recognized as such and used anyway.

Another stratagem coming: No Weapons in Iraq? We’ll Find Them in Iran… Edinburgh Sunday Herald

Powell was under pressure to use shaky intelligence on Iraq: report: ‘US Secretary of State Colin Powell was under persistent pressure from the Pentagon and White House to include questionable intelligence in his report on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction he delivered at the United Nations last February, a US weekly reported.

US News and World Report magazine said the first draft of the speech was prepared for Powell by Vice President Richard Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, in late January. According to the report, the draft contained such questionable material that Powell lost his temper, throwing several pages in the air and declaring, “I’m not reading this. This is bullshit.” ‘ Yahoo! News

each of 29 special FX and costume design ‘whiz kids’ to receive £1.75 million. This degree of generosity goes a long way to convince me we really are living in an alternate universe…

If it is hard to believe that conceptions of the Gods are ignored in most recently written histories, it is harder yet to understand why Gods were long ago banished from the social-scientific study of religion. But that is precisely why I have devoted two volumes to demonstrating the crucial role of the Gods in shaping history and civilization, and to resurrecting and reformulating a sociology of Gods.

If asked what the word “religion” means, most religious people will say it’s about God or the Gods. Yet, for a century, most social-scientific studies of religion have examined nearly every aspect of faith except what people believe about Gods. When and why did we get it so wrong? — Rodney Stark, Chronicle of Higher Education