“The trouble with American history, NPR-style, is that it unlinks the past from the present.” — Andrew Christie (Sierra Club), AlterNet

“What Team Bush faces in Iraq is more than guerrilla war. It is the first major crack in the larger neo-con fantasy of a forced reorganization of the Mideast. ” — Carol Brightman, AlterNet

“How is the yellowcake lie different? Why is it the first Bush lie to send the media pack into a feeding frenzy? Why did it prompt David Broder of the Washington Post to see ‘the shadow of defeat’ cross Bush’s presidency? Why yellowcake? Why now?” — Timothy Noah, Slate

Studying the mechanisms of religious belief could lead to a better understanding of what goes on in the minds of people with psychiatric delusions.

An international conference in Sydney this week will hear that some religious beliefs – including that a virgin gave birth to the son of God – qualify as delusions.

Macquarie University PhD student Ryan McKay, who has been studying under one of Australia’s leading authorities on delusions, Max Coltheart, said the idea that religion was a delusion dated back to Sigmund Freud about 100 years ago.

To judge from this coverage in The Age, McKay’s take on the matter appears to be burdened by the assumption that there’s something abnormal about delusions which, by contagion, applies to religious beliefs if they are similar. But, in fact, as the headline says, it is religion which might be the model for delusion, not the other way around; we could turn the equation on its head — delusions are similar to religious beliefs, simply because they are both examples of strong, faithful belief. As for invoking Freud, while he did not take religious belief seriously, he was not as pejorative as this article suggests. His essay on the subject was called The Future of an Illusion — illusion, not delusion. There has been perennial debate about which symptoms are the cardinal features of a psychotic disease such as schizophrenia, i.e. direct manifestations of the neurobiological processes which are awry in the disease; and which are secondary, compensatory efforts on the part of the sufferer. I am a strong proponent of the idea that delusions are compensatory. To illustrate with an example, if you are beset by inexplicable and unberable paranoid feelings (primary symptom), you try to comfort yourself by making sense of your feelings, even if the sense you make is a delusional one like believing those people passing by on the street are CIA agents monitoring you because you hold a special key to the survival of the planet.

Beliefs we have generated to make sense of alarming and inexplicable experiences often persist long beyond the experiences themselves; belief is very tenacious. We like to believe we can rely on the sense our mind makes of things; it would be far more alarming if we could not even trust that. So even when a psychosis is successfully treated (e.g. with antipsychotic medication), compensatory delusions persist, even though the patient may start to realize others will find their beliefs odd or unacceptable and becomes more canny about divulging them. This fits with my clinical observation that medication never treats delusions directly, and that the disappearance of delusional thinking should not be a criterion for the success of medication treatment while the disappearance of, say, hallucinations or paranoia should be. (understand here, I’m making a distinction between paranoia, which is an experience, and persecutory beliefs, which are delusions. One can be paranoid without having elaborated it into persecutory delusions; and one can believe one is being persecuted without paranoid distress.) There are many other examples in clinical psychiatry of compensatory beliefs which persist after the stabilization of the symptoms they were meant to compensate for. People with panic disorder will do anything to avoid further panic attacks and may come to associate the onset of panic with visiting a specific location or, more generally, with going outside at all. They will often avoid these locations (anticipatory avoidance) or avoid going out at all (agoraphobia) long after medication treatment has successfully prevented further panic attacks. There is no altered neurobiology to a belief, psychotic or not. Belief change can only be effected, if at all, by slow gradual cognitive engagement. You can’t argue about religion…

Back to the article.

Many religious beliefs were triggered by a bizarre or unexplained “religious experience”, often produced by changes in brain activity.

For example, it had been shown that when Buddhist monks went into deep mediation and had a sense of “being at one with the world”, they also had decreased blood flow to the part of the brain responsible for concepts of the “self”.

The crux of delusion lay in the question of why these experiences triggered a religious belief system in some people but not in others, Mr McKay said.

“It’s as if the meditation causes a certain neuropsychological anomaly,” he said. “The idea is that you need some sort of second deficit, which means you’re unable to discard the impossible experience.”

This is in line with my point. Changes in brain activity may indeed produce altered experience but they do not directly cause religious beliefs. Religious belief may be the consequence of such profound experiences just as delusional belief may be the consequence of, but is not identical with, profoundly altered and distressing psychotic alterations of experience. My strong prediction — you’ll get nowhere trying to understand delusions by studying the physiology of devout religious belief, because there is no specific physiological alteration to be found in either phenomenon. The equation, or analogy, between religious devotion and delusional belief says more about the dynamics of belief than it does about psychopathology, psychosis, or neurophysiology.

“Bending a bit to privacy concerns, the Pentagon changes some of the

experiments to be conducted for LifeLog, its effort to record every

tidbit of information and encounter in daily life. No video recording

of unsuspecting people, for example.” Wired

“The controversial Terrorism Information Awareness program, which would troll Americans’ personal records to find terrorists before they strike, may soon face the same fate Congress meted out to John Ashcroft in his attempt to create a corps of volunteer domestic spies: death by legislation.

The Senate’s $368 billion version of the 2004 defense appropriations bill, released from committee to the full Senate on Wednesday, contains a provision that would deny all funds to, and thus would effectively kill, the Terrorism Information Awareness program, formerly known as Total Information Awareness.” Wired

“If Harry Potter’s adventures are joyful skyrockets of the imagination for children who suspect they are somehow more special than the mere mortals around them, then Ryan’s story is a depressing reminder that sometime in childhood most of us put in some years as mere misfits.” NY Times

Reports of HIV ‘Superinfection’ Increase: “Evidence is growing that ‘superinfection’ with more than one strain of HIV may be more common than previously thought, which could complicate efforts to make a vaccine, experts said Monday at an international AIDS conference.

Scientists reported three new cases of HIV-infected people who initially were doing well without drugs but became sick years later after contracting a second strain of the AIDS virus.

‘Superinfection is sobering,’ said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the chief U.S. AIDS research agency. He was not involved in the studies.

‘That means that although you can mount an adequate response against one virus, the body still does not have the capability to protect you against new infection, which tells you that the development of a vaccine is going to be even more of a challenge.'” Dallas Morning News

Eric Alterman wrote, before the State of the Union, considerably before the invasion of Iraq and certainly before any scrutiny of the uranium statements: Bush Lies, Media Swallows:

“Ben Bradlee explains,

‘Even the very best newspapers have never learned how to handle public figures who lie with a straight face. No editor would dare print this version of Nixon’s first comments on Watergate for instance. ‘The Watergate break-in involved matters of national security, President Nixon told a national TV audience last night, and for that reason he would be unable to comment on the bizarre burglary. That is a lie.”

Part of the reason is deference to the office and the belief that the American public will not accept a mere reporter calling the President a liar. Part of the reason is the culture of Washington– where it is somehow worse to call a person a liar in public than to be one. A final reason is political. Some reporters are just political activists with columns who prefer useful lies to the truth. For instance, Robert Novak once told me that he “admired” Elliott Abrams for lying to him in a television interview about illegal U.S. acts of war against Nicaragua because he agreed with the cause.” AlterNet

The flap over the radioactive lie and the general pattern of dissembling about the rationale for invading Iraq has to be placed in the more general context of this President’s lying contempt for the American people, whom he considers an unfortunate impediment to his ability to do whatever he wants. Fortunately, they are a credulous and gullible lot who can easily be deceived with even the sloppiest of fictions and falsehoods, or so he is advised by his handlers. If the man were smarter, he would be embarrassed at the public spectacle of his clumsy, blundering pattern of blatant prevarication on every issue of importance. My thesaurus is open continuously to the right page, but I’m running out of synonyms for “lie” and “liar”. And while the media descend in a feeding frenzy on the fabrications and inconsistencies of the uranium issue, the administration has succeeded in keeping it appearing to be an isolated, unfortunate incident of bad intel rather than part of a general pattern. As per Ben Bradlee’s 1997 comment, it is up to the press to do differently.

again postponing a withdrawal of 3rd Infantry Division soldiers, many of whom the Pentagon says can now expect to remain in Iraq “indefinitely”. The US denies that this has anything to do with India’s decision not to send an army division to augment the occupation — oops, liberation — forces. LA Times It reminds me of an old joke we used to make during the Nixon administration about how the President’s father should have been the one to pull out.

Perry Warns:

Former defense secretary William Perry warned that the United States and North Korea are drifting toward war, perhaps as early as this year, in an increasingly dangerous standoff that also could result in terrorists being able to purchase a North Korean nuclear device and plant it in a U.S. city.

‘I think we are losing control’ of the situation, said Perry, who believes North Korea soon will have enough nuclear warheads to begin exploding them in tests and exporting them to terrorists and other U.S. adversaries. (…)

Only last winter Perry publicly argued that the North Korea problem was controllable. Now, he said, he has grown to doubt that. “It was manageable six months ago if we did the right things,” he said. “But we haven’t done the right things.”

He added: “I have held off public criticism to this point because I had hoped that the administration was going to act on this problem, and that public criticism might be counterproductive. But time is running out, and each month the problem gets more dangerous.” Washington Post

And:

North Korean officials told the Bush administration last week that they had finished producing enough plutonium to make a half-dozen nuclear bombs, and that they intended to move ahead quickly to turn the material into weapons, senior American officials said today.

The new declaration set off a scramble in American intelligence agencies — under fire for their assessment of Iraq’s nuclear capability — to determine if the North Korean government of Kim Jong Il was bluffing or had succeeded in producing the material undetected. NY Times

“Mars is heading for its closest encounter with Earth in over 50,000 years. Although Mars and Earth continue in their normal orbits around the Sun, about every two years Earth and Mars are on the same part of their orbit as seen from the Sun. When this happens again in late August, Mars will be almost as near to the Sun as it ever gets, while simultaneously Earth will be almost as far from the Sun as it ever gets. This means that now is a great time to launch your space probe to Mars. Alternatively, these next few months are a great time to see a bright red Mars from your backyard. Mars is so close that global features should be visible even through a small telescope. Look for Mars to rise about 11 pm and to remain the brightest red object in the sky until sunrise. Mars will rise increasingly earlier until its closest approach in late August. Mars was captured above rising through Arch Rock in California, USA.” Astronomy Picture of the Day