“In the rancorous debate over euthanasia, assisted suicide and other ways for terminally ill patients to end their lives, doctors note that one option is always legal: a sane, alert person can simply refuse to eat or drink.

It is an option rarely taken, but now the first survey of nurses whose patients took it has contradicted the popular assumption that such a death is painful and gruesome. Almost all the 102 Oregon nurses surveyed said their patients who refused water and food had died ‘good deaths,’ with little pain or suffering, generally within two weeks.

The study, which appeared last week in The New England Journal of Medicine — by coincidence, the same week that The British Medical Journal devoted an entire issue to studies on death and dying — raises difficult questions for those on both sides of the debate. Its authors hesitated to publish it for fear of encouraging suicides.” NY Times [via dangerousmeta]

“‘I believe marriage is between a man and a woman, and I think we ought to codify that one way or another,’ Bush told reporters at a White House news conference. ‘And we’ve got lawyers looking at the best way to do that.'” CNN

BushCo must think the impact in terms of delivering fundamentalist votes to him in ’04 will outweigh the loss of votes from the 10% of the American population who he is telling don’t have the right to marry the person of their choice. And however many others, not gay themselves, who happen to agree that they should have that right. But then again, those are by and large votes he lost already a long time ago, so maybe there’s nothing lost in their opinion. But, as Nick Gillespie reminds us at Hit & Run,

As liberals gear up to bash Bush for his reactionary thinking on this point, they ought to remember the actions of the only twice-elected Democrat president since FDR. When Bill Clinton signed The Defense of Marriage Act in September 1996–an act specifically intended to foreclose state recognition of same-sex marriages–he noted that he had “long opposed governmental recognition of same-gender marriages.”

“US leaders now see themselves as priests of a divine mission to rid the world of its demons.” — George Monbiot, Guardian/UK

“Former Vice-President Al Gore is coming under pressure from political supporters and friends to jump into the 2004 presidential campaign even though he ruled himself out in December…

(A) former DNC official, who was active in Gore’s 2000 campaign, said his prediction of another Gore campaign is based on more than a hunch. But he declined to offer specific evidence.

He believes, as other Gore confidants do, that the political climate has changed significantly since December, making Bush more vulnerable to defeat in his bid for a second term.

“Things have dramatically changed since his announcement,” said the official.

“Bush has lied to the country, no one is articulating a foreign policy that’s resonating.” ” The Hill

I pointed last week to the North American counterpart of this gallery of images from Japanese psychiatric medication advertisements [props to b0ing b0ing]. I find them far more disturbing and, at times, inexplicable than their North American congeners.

Psychologists’ puzzlement at why yawning is contagious is at an end. A new study in Cognitive Brain Research finds that it is correlated with people’s empathic ability. The 40-60% of who do not catch yawns appear to be the ones with the least ability to put themselves in others’ shoes in other regards.

Contrary to the folk wisdom that it precipitates a deep breath to counteract oxygen decrement, yawning does not appear to have a physiological function. It may have evolved primarily as a social clue —

Contagious yawning may have helped our ancestors coordinate times of activity and rest. “It’s important that all group members be ready to do the same thing at the same time,” Ronald Baenninger, who has studied yawning at Temple University in Philadelphia, says. Guardian/UK

[I must be really empathic; I yawned just reading the article about contagious yawning.]

Adam Phillips’ revealing new edition of Freud: “…(W)hat does it mean to read Freud as literature rather than as theory? The first books in the New Penguin Freud, published in June, offer some answers. Significantly, the series has started not with major theoretical works like The Interpretation of Dreams or anthropological ones like Totem and Taboo. Instead, the first four books are concrete, practical, and anecdotal: The Schreber Case, The ‘Wolfman’ and Other Cases, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Together, they suggest four ways of approaching Freud as literature.” Slate

Telling Them Can Reveal a Lot: “…(L)ying is much too interesting to be left just to the mercy of moral examination. Lies may not be as sexy or revelatory as dreams, but they can tell us a lot about the psychology of their owners.

There may be nothing uniquely human about deception: some experts say chimpanzees can fake out rivals. But lying requires something special that, so far, seems the sole province of humans: a theory of mind. To lie effectively, one has to have a notion that other people have minds and can be deceived.” — Richard A. Friedman, MD, NY Times

Even bacteria seek each other out, according to a new study. EurekAlert!