essentially in realtime [via b0ing b0ing]

On average, one of them has been raped. women’s enews

New Tarantino Film to Be Released in 2 Parts: “Miramax Films will take the unusual and potentially risky move of releasing Kill Bill, the much-anticipated Quentin Tarantino martial arts action-adventure film, as two movies, the first to open in the fall. Miramax will in effect be taking a three-hour film with a 200-page script and turning it into a serial.” NY Times

Anonymous Blog Cracks Window Into Hasidic Community: “Yeedel, as we’ll call him, writes an anonymous weblog (or ‘blog’), a kind of online diary, under the pen name Hasidic Rebel. His comments, first posted in February, range from musings about the Hasidic lifestyle to stinging indictments of the community.

Anonymous blogs like Yeedel’s are set to become a lot more secure—and maybe a lot more common—with the release in August of a new application called Invisiblog. Fusing existing privacy technologies with a tool for blogging, the software makes it far easier to broadcast in secret.” Village Voice

Related: The Jewsweek Sizzlin’ 60 (actually 52.5) [thanks to walker]

.

It seems FmH provokes strongly divided feelings. To judge, at least, from the, admittedly unscientific, ratings I’ve been receiving at BlogHop and EatonWeb, which for some godforsaken reason I just decided to check in on.

At the former, while 46% of respondents ‘love it’ or rate it ‘good’, an almost equivalent 38% feel it ‘sucks’ or ‘hate it’. And on EatonWeb, it gets an average rating of 2 out of 5. I would have thought there would be a strong selection bias in favor of loyal readers voting. Since I don’t think people with a negative reaction to FmH hang out here very often, the fact that passersby took the time to register their negative opinions suggests to me that their feelings are very vehement and FmH is strong medicine.

One could speculate that it is my in-your-face political sentiments that mightily offend a considerable segment of the reading public. But I suspect there is an element for some of revulsion about:

• my tortured ponderous prose style,
• my self-conscious cocky opinionation about even the nonpolitical topics over which I shoot my mouth off
  

  (I recall a reader comment once several months ago to the effect that “…your narcissism is showing; think I’ll take a month off…”. Other readers have often flamed those who post critical comments here, but that has usually been only when they seriously misunderstand my points and need indelicate correction. No one countered the “narcissism” comment this time, although perhaps it was just that the Enetation commenting system was unreliable around then?? [grin])

• the clumsy lack of sophistication of my web design,
• and, yes, probably even the slow load times

I’ve gleaned from some of the negative ratings that people don’t like ‘linklogs’ anymore. I like the balance of posting links and whipping up commentary that I do, and it is not likely to change much. The height of appreciation for and notice of FmH came during the post-9/11 period, when I was at the height of fevered obsessional linking. Hey, I needed to read alot about what was going on and how people were reacting; I shared the links. Simply that, more than anything else, is what I’m doing here, and it is in the plain, original tradition of the early weblogs — a timely log of one’s websurfing, with more or less elaborate comments.

I have long commented on how static my readership is. It is uncanny; every weekday, I get 350-400 visits according to my counters, no matter what. It jumps briefly to 500-600 when FmH gets linked to in some major medium, such as the recent Le Monde mention; then it returns to the 350-400 of you. Are we in a rut together, or is it devoted and loyal readership? How can we tell? One of the interesting things at the EatonWeb page is a lengthy and growing list of ‘similar’ weblogs, although I’m not sure what the criteria for similarity are. Check them out, most are unfamiliar to me. Although I venture to say I wouldn’t find most of them so ‘similar’, you regular readers might find they exercise the same muscles in you that FmH does. Don’t rest on your laurels with FmH. In a world where everyone “blogs” (as you know, I pronounce that word with some disdain), will FmH remain relevant and viable? FmH’s ecological niche may fill, with co-evolvers or predators. With the explosive growth of weblogging, there’s plenty of room for evolution of your tastes. Take a look. Then, if you will, come back and challenge me with whatever you’ve found out there.

But, not to forget, I’m thankful for all of you who continue to stomach me. I’m a big fan of yours.

And if you’re one of those, masochistic or otherwise, who comes back to FmH again and again because you love to hate me, I would love to hear from you, I really would. I’m thankful you’re here too, although puzzled by it. Post a comment here, or write me. Anonymously if you wish. It’ll be fun.

A Rugged Drink for a Rugged Land: If you are a devotée of Scotch single malt whiskeys (I gravitate to the smoky, peaty Islay malts), you will probably find this elementary. If you are wondering what all the fuss is about, it is a fine introduction. I do quibble with one paragraph:

Most Scots and connoisseurs from other countries drink blends, which are generally less expensive, if they want to mix their whiskey with water or soda in a predinner drink, and take their single malts neat, either before, during or, most commonly, after dinner, like Cognac or Calvados. The addition of ice to a blend is tolerated as an American eccentricity; the addition of ice to a single malt is treated as near-sacrilege. NY Times

At the risk of sounding somewhat scurrilous (but, I might add, totally reverent), I might ask — why dilute at all, predinner or not, if, as I agree, it being a shame to adulterate a single malt, one is obligated to drink a blended whiskey if one is taking it with water or soda? [props to Abby]

“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

Woman charged with poisoning 5-week-old granddaughter with salt: “A woman has been charged with poisoning her 5-week-old granddaughter by pouring salt into the infant’s formula, authorities said.

Police said that Merry Long, 43, poured about two cups of salt into a can of powdered baby formula because she was angry at her son and his girlfriend, who is the child’s mother.” San Francisco Chronicle [This could instead have been a part of the ‘Annals of Depravity’ Dept., of course. The ‘Hell Readies a Room’ designation, by the way, is courtesy of Mark Morford, who writes the hilarious ‘Morning Fix’ e-column at SF Gate. I find nothing hilarious about this item, however, in case you wondering.]

How About a Conspiracy Theory? – A BuzzFlash reader wonders, could the Court be helping Bush look more centrist to win the 2004 election? Is that why Rehnquist and O’Connor might be postponing their rumored retirements from this year until Bush’s second term?

“Daniil Kharms (1905-42)

mainly made a living writing children’s books in Leningrad. He also wrote poems and absurd short stories, often published in underground magazines, after the avant-garde literary societies that Kharms was associated with were banned by the Stalin regime.

In 1931 Kharms was convicted of anti-Soviet activity and spent a year in prison and exile in Kursk. In 1937 his children’s books were confiscated by the authorities, and deprived of his main source of income Kharms was often on the brink of starvation in the following years. He continued to write short, grotesque stories, which weren’t published, but merely stored in Kharms’ desk drawer.

In August 1941, shortly before the terrible siege of Leningrad, Kharms was arrested a second time, accused of ‘spreading defeatist propaganda’. During the trial Kharms was declared non compos mentis and was incarcerated in a military prison. In February 1942, while Leningrad was ravaged by famine, Kharms starved to death in prison.”

The site links to a collection of Kharms’ absurd short stories; here’s a sample:

Blue notebook no. 2

Once there was a redheaded man without eyes and without ears. He had no hair either, so that he was a redhead was just something they said.

He could not speak, for he had no mouth. He had no nose either.

He didn’t even have arms or legs. He had no stomach either, and he had no back, and he had no spine, and no intestines of any kind. He didn’t have anything at all. So it is hard to understand whom we are really talking about.

So it is probably best not to talk about him any more.

“a-gelwan: To stupefy, astonish; stupefacere, consternare: ‘-Ðá wearþ ic agelwed’, ‘then I was astonished’, Bt. 34, 5; Fox 140, 9.” Online Anglo-Saxon Dictionary – Bosworth and Toller

Teen is sentenced in “bum stomping”:

“A teenager has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for the beating death of a homeless man in an attack he and his friends called ‘bum stomping.’

Daniel Ennis, 18, who was sentenced Friday, pleaded guilty in May to second-degree murder in the death of Gerald Joseph Holle, a 55-year-old transient living under a bridge.

Prosecutors said the attack was an effort by Ennis and his friends to ‘clean up’ their neighborhood by beating homeless men until they died or left the area.

(…)

The deaths were among a series of attacks on homeless men in 2001 in which three were killed and five others were hospitalized.” CNN

Try Bananaslug: “BananaSlug was designed to promote serendipitous surfing: finding the unexpected in the 3,083,324,652 web pages indexed by Google. Directed Google searches return pages most relevant to your search term, based on the pages’ popularity on the Web. You may never see some of the pages way down the list that are relevant or interesting, but off the beaten path.

So we give you a little boost. We ‘seed’ your search with another word, chosen at random, and this accidental encounter results in pages you may have overlooked. What, if anything, do all the results have in common? You tell me!” [via b0ing b0ing]

by Gary Snyder. Why? Just because we were overdue for some Snyder on FmH, and this is particularly apt for these times. It was composed in 1969 as a handout for attendees of a Wilderness Conference in San Francisco and released with a ‘copyleft’ license stating “may be reproduced free forever”:

Once in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago, the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infanite Void gave a discourse to all the assembled elements and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings, the flying beings, and the sitting beings – even the grasses, to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from a seed, assembled there: a Discourse concerning Enlightenment on the planet Earth

‘In some future time, there will be a continent called America. It will have great centers of power called such as Pyramid Lake, Walden Pond, Mt. Rainier, Big Sur, Everglades, and so forth; and powerful nerves and channels such as Columbia River, Mississippi River, and Grand Canyon. The human race in that era will get into troubles all over its head, and practically wreck everything in spite of its own strong intelligent Buddha-nature.’

‘The twisting strata of the great mountains and the pulsings of volcanoes are my love burning deep in the earth. My obstinate compassion is schist and basalt and granite, to be mountains, to bring down the rain. In that future American Era I shall enter a new form; to cure the world of loveless knowledge that seeks with blind hunger: and mindless rage eating food that will not fill it.’

And he showed himself in his true form of

SMOKEY THE BEAR

A handsome smokey-colored brown bear standing on his hind legs, showing that he is aroused and watchful.

Bearing in his right paw the Shovel that digs to the truth beneath appearances; cuts the roots of useless attach- ments, and flings damp sand on the fires of greed and war;

His left paw in the mudra of Comradly Display-indicating that all creatures have the full right to live to their limits and that of deer, rabbits, chipmunks, snakes, dandelions, and lizards all grow in the realm of the Dharma;

Wearing the blue work overalls symbolic of slaves and laborers, the countless men oppressed by a civilization that claims to save but often destroys;

Wearing the broad-brimmed hat of the west, symbolic of the forces that guard the wilderness, which is the Natural State of the Dharma and the true path of man on Earth:

all true paths lead through mountains-

With a halo of smoke and flame behind, the forest fires of the kali-yuga, fires caused by the stupidity of those who think things can be gained and lost whereas in truth all is contained vast and free in the Blue Sky and Green Earth of One Mind;

Round-bellied to show his kind nature and that the great earth has food enough for evryone who loves her and trusts her;

Trampling underfoot wasteful freeways and needless suburbs, smashing the worms of capitalism and totalitarianism;

Indicating the task: his followers, becoming free of cars, houses, canned foods, universities, and shoes, master the Three Mysteries of their own Body, Speech, and Mind; and fearlessly chop down the rotten trees and prune out the sick limbs of this country America and then burn the leftover trash.

Wrathful but calm. Austere but Comic. Smokey the Bear will Illuminate those who would help him; but for those who would hinder or slander him…

HE WILL PUT THEM OUT.

Thus his great Mantra:

Namah samanta vajranam chanda maharoshana Sphataya hum traks ham mam

‘I DEDICATE MYSELF TO THE UNIVERSAL DIAMOND BE THIS RAGING FURY BE DESTROYED’

And he will protect those who love the woods and rivers, Gods and animals, hobos and madmen, prisoners and sick people, musicians, playful women, and hopeful children:

And if anyone is threatened by advertising, air pollution, television, or the police, they should chant SMOKEY THE BEAR’S WAR SPELL:

DROWN THEIR BUTTS

CRUSH THEIR BUTTS

DROWN THEIR BUTTS

CRUSH THEIR BUTTS

And SMOKEY THE BEAR will surly appear to put the enemy out with his vajra-shovel.

Now those who recite this Sutra and then try to put it in practice will accumulate merit as countless as the sands of Arizona and Nevada.

Will help save the planet Earth from total oil slick. Will enter the age of harmony of man and nature. Will win the tender love and caresses of men, women, and beasts. Will always have ripened blackberries to eat and a sunny spot under a pine tree to sit at.

AND IN THE END WILL WIN HIGHEST PERFECT ENLIGHTENMENT

…thus we have heard…”

“Melancholic depressed patients who are 40 years or older, especially men, appear to show a superior response to the tricyclic antidepressant drug (TCA) nortriptyline, whereas younger patients, especially women, show a superior response to the serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) fluoxetine.

SSRIs and TCAs appear to be equally effective in adults with major depression, however, some studies suggest that TCAs may be superior to SSRIs in depressed patients with melancholic features.”

I am among a subset of psychiatrists who have suspected that the SSRIs are less robust for the most severe forms of depression and that we have lost something from our therapeutic armamentarium in the last decade’s almost total shelving of the tricyclics. In meeting the pharmaceutical companies’ goal of broadening the market for antidepressants, we have lost depth of efficacy in the most serious cases. The study’s finding of the superiority of SSRIs in younger patients, especially women, is a reflection of the fact that depression in the latter demographic is more often the smouldering, chronic atypical kind associated with personality disorders than the acute melancholic episode of devastating severity.

“The downside of a cleaner environment is found in the empty palms of tourists on the long stretches of Cape Cod beaches: There is hardly any sea glass, those muted shards rubbed smooth by endless waves.” Boston Globe Having spent time already this summer on the Cape with two beachcombing children, I had noticed this and wondered if my perception was accurate.

While P2P filesharers locked in an ongoing PR battle against the RIAA are making much of the finding that they are among the heaviest CD buyers in the market, it doesn’t follow that downloading boosts sales of recordings. It strikes me that there’s an easy rejoinder from the music industry. ‘Of course you buy alot, we know you’re interested in music, duh, but you don’t buy as much as you used to or as much as you would if you couldn’t download,’ they might say. Music swappers are more credible, IMHO, when they justify what they’re doing by anti-profit (the record industry appropriates the fruits of artists’ labor; information wants to be free, the rapacious pricing policy of the industry is what is responsible for declining music sales, not us, etc.) rather than disingenuous pro-profit arguments, whatever you think of the merits of the arguments.

“Pop music, Broadway and even opera have succumbed to over-amplification. Listeners are fleeing into the night.” Los Angeles Times

“Creative genius and crime express themselves early in men but both are turned off almost like a tap if a man gets married and has children, a study says.

Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, compiled a database of the biographies of 280 great scientists, noting their age at the time when they made their greatest work.

The data remarkably concur with the brutal observation made by Albert Einstein, who wrote in 1942: ‘A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so.’

‘Scientific productivity indeed fades with age,’ Dr Kanazawa says.

‘Two-thirds (of all scientists) will have made their most significant contributions before their mid-30s.’

But, regardless of age, the great minds who married virtually kissed goodbye to making any further glorious additions to their CV.

Within five years of making their nuptial vows, nearly a quarter of married scientists had made their last significant contribution to history’s hall of fame.

‘Scientists rather quickly desist (from their careers) after their marriage, while unmarried scientists continue to make great scientific contributions later in their lives,’ says Dr Kanazawa.

The energy of youth and the dampening effect of marriage, he adds, are also remarkably similar among geniuses in music, painting and writing, as well as in criminal activity.”

This methodology is unable to determine causality, of course. The conclusion that marriage dampens creativity is unwarranted. It is equally plausible that ‘geniuses’ don’t contemplate settling down until they are slowing their pace, if ever.

Previous studies have documented that delinquents are overwhelmingly male, and usually start out on the road to crime in their teens.

But those who marry well, subsequently stop committing crime, whereas criminals at the same age who remain unmarried tend to continue their unlawful careers.

Should we say, “…criminals at the same age who tend to continue their unlawful careers remain unmarried”?

Warning; severe reductionism follows:

Dr Kanazawa suggests “a single psychological mechanism” is responsible for this: the competitive edge among young men to fight for glory and gain the attention of women.

That craving drives the all-important male hormone, testosterone.

Dr Kanazawa theorises after a man settles down, the testosterone level falls, as does his creative output. ABC News

Hypertags, small electronic tags using infrared signals, can be discreetly attached to information display surfaces such as billboards or walls, to enable mobile-phone or PDA users to receive small amounts of data by pointing and clicking. Wired News Promoters of the technology envision sending URLs where the user could access digital content such as background nformation on an art exhibit, further information on an advertised product, local sightseeing information, further information on an advertised product, direct access to a film’s webpage, further information on an advertised product, get the drift? If this catches on, I predict that the almost endless interesting, innovative and really useful applications (off the top of my head, how about sites to find further information on health conditions or prescription drugs? hypertags on buses or trains sending you someplace to get updated schedule information? directions from central directories to particular locations in large complexes such as university campuses?) will be swamped by the crass pedestrian ones even much more quickly than they came to be on the Internet. On the other hand, I don’t ever foresee wanting to do much surfing on my cellphone or even my PDA. No matter how gorgeous the color, the form factor is inimical to web-browsing and only slightly more useful with “clipped” content. While it wouldn’t be realtime, about the best use I imagine for hypertags would be to dump the collected URLs from my phone or my PDA onto a desktop system later on, for further investigation on a reasonable display.

“A new film by Mel Gibson, to be released next year, depicts Jesus’ last few hours. Jews and Catholics are raising concerns about its potential for stoking anti-Semitism.” Christian Science Monitor

“The downside of a cleaner environment is found in the empty palms of tourists on the long stretches of Cape Cod beaches: There is hardly any sea glass, those muted shards rubbed smooth by endless waves.” Boston Globe Having spent time already this summer on the Cape with two beachcombing children, I had noticed this and wondered if my perception was accurate.

It is a perennial complaint about FmH that it loads very slowly. It has been suggested that I put fewer days’ worth of items on my front page. What do you think? Please take a short readers’ poll. I’d like to see all potential responses by Sunday, July 27, and thank you in advance for your input. You can view the results to date here.

“He’s known as the anti-war candidate whose appeal is to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and some Republicans say if Howard Dean gets the nomination, President Bush will be a sure bet to win a second term.

Not so fast, say some moderate congressional Democrats who would be affected if Dean is at the top of the ticket. He also supports gun rights, the death penalty and a balanced budget.

Republicans and even some moderate Democrats have portrayed Dean as the next George McGovern, who won the 1972 Democratic nomination by appealing to anti-war liberals only to get trounced by a sitting Republican president, Richard Nixon. But behind Dean’s liberal image is his record as Vermont governor of reforming welfare, slashing state spending and cutting taxes for businesses.” Salon

to log onto nearest computer: “Computer scientists at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, wanted to make it easier for staff to log onto networked computers. So they came up with SoundHunters, a program that recognises someone’s voice or laughter and works out which computer is nearest to them. It could then be used to automatically log them on to the computer.” New Scientist

“Human brains are wired to underestimate the amount of force exerted on other people, a study of ‘tit-for-tat’ experiments has revealed.

As well as qualifying the teary ‘she hit me harder’ playground argument and explaining why we can’t tickle ourselves, the discovery may provide insight into some self-delusional symptoms of schizophrenia.” New Scientist

“Criminal charges were dropped against a man whose defense lawyer claimed that drinking jasmine tea made him temporarily insane before he smashed his way into a neighbor’s house and chased the woman with a dagger.” Salon

“Germaine Greer deliberately provokes controversy with the cheapest trick. If there’s a taboo left, she’ll break it, and since one of the few remaining taboos in Western liberal democracies is pedophilia, that’s the arena she’s most recently entered.

Her upcoming glossy book, The Boy, full of pictures of ‘ravishing’ pre-adult boys with hairless chests, wide-apart legs and slim waists, is an ‘art book’, Greer, 64, told this newspaper last week.” Sydney Morning Herald

“In recent weeks, the search for Hussein and dozens of his senior associates and mid-level loyalists has intensified here in his home province of Salahuddin, northwest of Baghdad. Spurred by reports from local informants and intercepted telephone conversations, some U.S. officials say they now believe that the fugitive former president and his closest henchmen may be filtering back here for the protection afforded by a vast network of tribal and family connections.

Almost every raid, officers say, turns up new scraps of evidence — photos, documents with satellite telephone numbers, fake identity cards. Informants — ranging from powerful sheiks to poor farmers — whisper tips, often risking lives and livelihoods. U.S. intelligence units glean tidbits from telephone intercepts, aerial surveillance and gumshoe detective work.” Washington Post

Santa Rosa teacher gave assignment: “A political science instructor at Santa Rosa Junior College is being investigated by the Secret Service for telling his students to compose an e- mail to an elected official that included the words ‘kill the president, kill the president,’ a school administrator said Wednesday.” San Francisco Chronicle The teacher could not be reached for comment, but an administrator at the school explained it had been intended as an “experiential exercise that would instill a sense of fear so they would have a better sense of why more people don’t participate in the political process,” an explanation that does not make much sense to me.

I wonder, if widely blinked to in weblogs, if this item might swamp the Carnivore system (if that’s the one that’s watching all our internet traffic for naughty buzzwords).

Related:

“White House officials discovered a stowaway on a chartered plane for reporters covering President Bush’s Africa trip, and the man was detained by Ugandan authorities.

The Secret Service was notified by a White House aide that the man, who was not identified, had joined the reporters on Friday and flew with them to a compound in Entebbe where the president had several events, said deputy Secret Service director Mark Sullivan.

The United Airlines Boeing 747 carried reporters, photographers, camera crews, White House staff and Secret Service agents. The man, who carried no weapons and had no passport or other identification, boarded in Pretoria, South Africa, and flew to Bush’s next stop, in Entebbe, where he was detained.

The man was shouting as he was led away. ” Salon

Iraq war may have made terror threat worse:

“One of the world’s leading terrorism experts Wednesday told the panel investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that the U.S. invasion of Iraq may have worsened the threat of terrorism.

Prof. Rohan Gunaratna, giving evidence at a public hearing of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also criticized the failures of intelligence and policy he said had turned Afghanistan into a ‘terrorist Disneyland,’ and allowed al-Qaida and other terror groups ‘a free reign.’

Asked by panel member Max Cleland, the war-wounded Vietnam veteran and former Democratic Georgia senator, to comment on the impact of the U.S. military campaign in Iraq, Gunaratna said that deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein — on the run with nothing to lose but with money and possible biological or chemical weapons — might be a bigger threat now than before.” UPI

or a Cultural Collage?: “The Wall Street Journal reported the probable borrowings on Tuesday as front-page news. After recent uproars over historians and journalists who used other researchers’ material without attribution, could it be that the great songwriter was now exposed as one more plagiarist?” NY Times

Well, somebody had to… NY Times Bush tries to have the best of both worlds. With a fallguy in place, he wasted no time announcing that he considered the uranium issue closed (Salon). With his bullying and stonewalling ways with the press, I’m sure any reporter who tries from here on to bring up the issue at any of the infrequent press conferences Bush deigns to give will be ignored or chastised. Yet Bush has complete confidence in Tenet and the CIA (Salon); no heads have to roll… because, in reality, Bush clearly wasn’t troubled by the deception. Yet, hopefully, the credibility gap over the uranium issue won’t stop here (NY Times editorial) and, in any case, is the tip of the iceberg about mounting disillusionment with the Bush agenda (Washington Post) and the baldfaced deception used to promulgate it.

What are noctilucent clouds? “Good question. They hover near the edge of space, glowing electric blue. Some scientists think the clouds are seeded by space dust and fed by rocket exhaust. Others suspect they’re a telltale sign of global warming. Whatever causes these mysterious clouds, they are lovely, and summer is a good time to look for them. Check our gallery of recent sightings.” NASA

These are a relatively recent phenomenon, first seen in 1885 about two years after the Krakatoa eruption, which filled the atmosphere with volcanic ash worldwide., making sunsets so spectacular that evening skywatching became a popular pastime.

“Ever wanted your own first class stamps? Well now you can with Stamp It Out!

Creating your own stamps is free and easy. All you need to do is tell us which image you would like on your stamps and we’ll create them for you.” Obviously, these are illegal if used in place of official postage. But you political subversive or artistic types might want to affix them alongside a ‘real’ stamp.

MEART – The Semi Living Artist “is a geographically detached, bio-cybernetic project exploring aspects of creativity and artistry in the age of biological technologies and the future possibilities of creating semi living entities. It investigates our abilities and intentions in dealing with the emergence of a new class of beings (whose production may lie far in the future) that may be sentient, creative and unpredictable. Meart takes the basic components of the brain (isolated neurons) attaches them to a mechanical body through the mediation of a digital processing engine to attempt and create an entity that will seemingly evolve, learn and become conditioned to express its growth experiences through ‘art activity’. The combined elements of unpredictability and ‘temperament’ with the ability to learn and adapt, creates an artistic entity that is both dependent, and independent, from its creator and its creator’s intentions.

MEART is assembled from:

‘Wetware’ – cultured neurons from embryonic rat cortex grown over the Multi Electrode Array

‘Hardware’ – the robotic (drawing) arm

‘Software’ – that interfaces between the wetware and the hardware”

Common Errors in English from a persnickety (by his own admission) professor of English (“I’m just discussing mistakes in English that happen to bother me. “):

“Here we’re concerned only with deviations from the standard use of English as judged by sophisticated users such as professional writers, editors, teachers, and literate executives and personnel officers. The aim of this site is to help you avoid low grades, lost employment opportunities, lost business, and titters of amusement at the way you write or speak.

But isn’t one person’s mistake another’s standard usage?

Often enough, but if your standard usage causes other people to consider you stupid or ignorant, you may want to consider changing it. You have the right to express yourself in any manner you please, but if you wish to communicate effectively, you should use nonstandard English only when you intend to rather than fall into it because you don’t know any better.”

Bienvenue, welcome to readers pointed here from Le Monde‘s “Sur le Net” listing, which describes FmH as “un répertoire de textes glanés en ligne par un psychiatre éclectique.”

U.S. report on 9/11 to be ‘explosive’: “Government errors, Saudi ties to terrorists among highlights.” The Miami Herald

On the occasion of a new documentary about the subject, philosopher of medicine Carl Elliott writes in Slate about apotemnophilia. “The victims of a growing mental disorder are obsessed with amputation.” Apotemnophilics at times succeed in obtaining a medically unjustified amputation of a healthy limb either from a sympathetic surgeon or after intentionally damaging a limb so badly that it must be amputated. I reflected here on Elliott’s earlier thoughtful overview of the phenomenon, A New Way to be Mad, published in The Atlantic Monthly in December 2000, which he says inspired the documentary film.

The phenomenon is of course of interest for its — shall we say — titillating gruesomeness, but for Elliott and myself another concern revolves around the significance of the attempt to make it, or the presumption that it is, a psychiatric disorder. Should it be considered so? And if so, is it its own category of disorder or should it be considered a manifestation of another, already recognized, class of disorder? Elliott notes that it is usually treated as if it is a paraphilia or displaced sexual disorder, because “many wannabes are attracted to the idea of themselves as amputees, and some are attracted to other amputees.” But, in the absence of a body of clinical experience with apotemnophilics, it is not clear to me that those who would like to see themselves with amputees are the same as those who would like to see themselves as amputees. Perhaps it is heterogeneous? If a disorder, is it closer to a body image disorder? In body dysmorphic disorder, the individual insists that one of their bodily features is misshapen or grotesque (although others do not perceive it in that way) and may seek surgical correction. Some BDD is psychotic (delusional) in degree and improves with treatments such as antipsychotic medication. And some psychotics under the influence of other kinds of delusions mutilate or injure themselves as well, sometimes grotesquely — I have seen enucleations, castrations and, yes, amputations of a hand, an arm or a leg.

Furthermore — how akin to gender identity disorder is it, and how deep may the analogy go to sufferers’ seeking sex reassignment surgery in that condition? Is it a type of obsessive compulsive disorder? Broadly speaking, compulsions are of two sorts, those which are experienced as distressing by the affected individual, who attempts to resist complying with them; and those which are not resisted and mostly cause distress only to those surrounding the individual. What relationship might it bear even to Munchausen’s Disease, in which an individual simulates or creates a medical condition in themselves presumably for the sympathy and support they aspire to?

Or is apotemnophilia on a continuum with other body modifications or mutilations — scarification, piercing, tattooing — we do not usually consider evidence of psychiatric disorders? If you come away from the film about apotemnophilics experiencing them sympathetically no matter how difficult you find it to understand their desires, will your sympathy be for them as mentally disordered and distressed or as oppressed by a society that does not allow them the gratification of desires which are not understood and sometimes abhorred but which do no harm to anyone else?

Elliott is interested in, as he puts it, “why so many people have begun to use the tools of medicine for purposes other than curing illness, such as self-improvement and self-transformation”, and I share that interest especially as it applies to the appropriation of growing dimensions of distress by psychiatry and the expanding notion of the indications for psychopharmaceutical treatment.

Obviously, if the boundary between curing illness and self-improvement is a murky and shifting one, then so will be the definition of illness. Elliott observes that it is well-known to historians of medicine that illnesses come and go, and he lists a number of conditions once seen as rare or nonexistent but then ballooning in popularity:

“social anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder, gender identity disorder, multiple personality disorder, anorexia, and chronic fatigue syndrome.”

He attempts to generalize about these conditions that:

“…(t)his is not simply because people decided to “come out” rather than suffer alone. It is because all mental disorders, even those with biological roots, have a social component. While these new conditions are very different from one another, they share several important features.

• First, the conditions are usually backed by a group of medical or psychological defenders whose careers or reputations depend on the existence of the disorder and who insist that the condition is real.
  
• Second, there is usually no hard data about the causes or the mechanism of the condition.
  
• Third, no independent lab tests or imaging devices are available to provide objective confirmation of the diagnosis, which is usually made solely on the basis of the narratives and behavior of their patients.
  
• Finally, there is often (but not always) a treatment for the condition even in the absence of knowledge about its causes and mechanism.”

The phenomenon of faddish diagnoses in psychiatry has been one of my pet interests, about which I have written, taught and lectured since soon after my training. I would quibble with the list of conditions Elliott includes but more significantly with his attempt to generalize about the phenomenon. Elliott may be, to paraphrase his first point above and turn it back on him, staking his credibility on the existence of shared generalities among a group of phenomena he insists is homogeneous but may not be.

First, a contribution of equal importance to the medical/psychological practitioners’ insistence on the reality of these diagnoses is often the incredible appeal they have to classes of patients who are deeply motivated to have them. There may be a core of ‘legitimate’ sufferers the class of whom becomes broadened by others’ insistence on joining that class. This in turn may obscure the ability, when the supposed class of sufferers are studied, to find the hard data, the lab or imaging abnormalities that could definitively define the condition. In a sense, the core findings are diluted beyond statistical significance by the influx of wannabes to the class.

Often, in particular, the controversial syndromes are on the borderline between psychiatry and other medical areas (consider attention deficit [neurology], fibromyalgia [rheumatology], TMJ [orthopedics or dentistry], hypoglycemia [endocrinology], spastic colon [gastroenterology], chronic fatigue [originally considered to be chronic Epstein-Barr virus infection]) and relate to shifting conceptions on the part of both medical science and the lay public about the mind-body boundary. Certain classes of patients have long been interested in having their distress defined “medically” instead of “mentally”, to whatever extent the zeitgeist draws a distinction. This, of course, bears on Elliott’s third point, that the diagnosis “is usually made solely on the basis of the narratives and behavior of … patients.” This is no less true of the vast majority of ‘legitimate’ psychiatric disorders; the CNS is still a black box. No definitive tests or imaging studies exist for any psychiatric disorder. The more important thing about the faddish or dubious diagnoses may be, in a way, how similar they are to, rather than how different from, the universe of the rest of psychiatric diagnoses.

And Elliott’s fourth generalization too is true of most psychiatric diagnosis as well — that there is often “a treatment for the condition even in the absence of knowledge about its causes and mechanism.” For example, the universe of psychiatric patients began to be ‘carved up’ differently between those with schizophrenia and manic depression (bipolar disorder) after the arrival in the early ’50’s of lithium carbonate on the scene as a treatment for the latter, and again after the entrée of chlorpromazine (Thorazine), the first of the so-called antipsychotic medications. More recently, I have written here in the past about the much-observed (and ongoing) redefinition of the scope of antidepressant-responsive conditions after the introduction of Prozac in the early ’80’s ushered in the SSRI era and made antidepressant prescribing so much easier. One may argue that the most important influence of new drug developments on diagnosis is exerted via the pharmaceutical companies’ inexorable marketing pressures, or it may be the prescribers’ pull to the novelty of new agents. In any case, in deriving principles that apply generally to psychiatric diagnosis, Elliott has failed to identify what may be distinctive about or explanatory of the controversial diagnoses.

Furthermore, one must not focus on the social factors in the rise of a diagnosis to the exclusion of the medical-scientific ones. Disparate diagnoses may balloon through their own unique balance between being better recognized (it was there, but we didn’t see it before), being reclassified (it was there but we referred to it as or lumped it in with something different before) or being created (it wasn’t there until people began to shape their behaviors to the newly-promulgated definition). It’s like the old joke about the umpires and the strike — “I calls ’em as they are”; “I calls ’em as I sees ’em”; and “They ain’t strikes ’til I call ’em.”

To return to apotemnophilia, it is not clear where it will fit with these other faddish diagnoses, but we will probably get an opportunity to see, as interest in it appears to be burgeoning, both among the wannabes and among clinicians.

Here is a site to which Elliott points from “a group of medical, psychological and psychiatric professionals committed to increasing the knowledge about this disorder, particularly within the medical and psychological communities”; they propose renaming it Body Integrity Identity Disorder. Elliott is troubled by his observation that mental health practitioners have so far proposed no treatment other than surgery. He seems to consider this a failing in the face of an obvious mental disturbance. I would suggest an alternate explanation. Psychiatrists and other therapists are more accustomed than the lay public to nonjudgmental toleration of a wide variety of unconventional and disturbing thoughts , beliefs and feelings in their patients. As bizarre and gruesome as the apotemnophilic’s desires are, while they are not easily understood they may be more tolerable to the mental health practitioner sitting with the patient than to others. (I have never sat with a patient with this preoccupation myself; I don’t know.) These patients, not believing they have a psychiatric disturbance, will probably present only rarely if ever for a mental health consultation. They may not be treatable when they do present, since psychiatric treatment cannot be compelled against one’s will unless a person is so disturbed that they represent an imminent danger to themselves or others, no matter how bizarre we find their symptoms. Most psychiatric practitioners are respectful of that constraint. But if a sufferer presents acknowledging their distress and its psychiatric nature and voluntarily seeking treatment, I would wager that few psychiatrists would be at a loss to treat them in any one of a variety of ways depending on how they formulated the individual case, perhaps along one of several hypotheses I suggested above about where BIID/apotemnophilia may fit; or others.The number of psychiatrists who would send such a patient for surgical intervention would, I would venture to say, be vanishingly small. Perhaps, if the condition does burgeon in popularity to an extent that mainstream surgeons (rather than the apparently marginal characters who seem to be performing the bulk of the amputations these days) have to pay attention to it, psychiatric evaluation and clearance will become as de rigeur before surgery as it has become for gender transition surgery.

“On this day in 1873 Paul Verlaine shot Arthur Rimbaud in a Brussels hotel, wounding him in the wrist. Although not yet two years old, their relationship was in such sexual, emotional, financial and absinthe confusion that no specific motive seems relevant, but the Belgian courts were determined to convict Verlaine of assault, and gave him the maximum two-year sentence. Rimbaud’s attempts to testify on Verlaine’s behalf, and then to withdraw charges, were ignored; condemnations from Verlaine’s jilted wife were entertained, as were political charges relayed from Paris. Given even greater sway was the report of the police doctors; this attested, in great anatomical detail, ‘that P. Verlaine bears on his person traces of habitual pederasty, both active and passive.’ The police reports on Rimbaud also suggest that, for reasons of rhyme or lifestyle, everyone would have been happier if the two poets had managed to kill each other…” Today in Literature

“Once thoroughly bipartisan, the debate in Washington over how to reduce the flow of bulk e-mail is now pitting Democrats against Republicans–a development that threatens to complicate enactment of laws regulating spam.” — Declan McCullagh, CNET News

“…(T)he Canadian government concluded that entertainment system wiring may have caused or contributed to a fire that sent a Swissair jet into the ocean near Nova Scotia in 1998, killing all 229 aboard. The Canadian Transportation Safety Board said an entertainment system wire or another wire short-circuited, creating a fiery electric arc that ignited acoustic insulation blankets.

Despite intense scrutiny after the Swissair accident, in-flight entertainment systems continue to malfunction, and U.S. airlines are still being ordered to modify some systems.

A USA Today analysis found that since the Swissair accident, U.S. airlines have sent the Federal Aviation Administration 60 ‘service difficulty reports’ about in-flight entertainment systems, many involving fire, smoke or sparks. Airlines are required by the FAA to report within 72 hours each ‘failure, malfunction or defect’ that endangers an aircraft’s safe operation.

Pilots and flight attendants have voluntarily reported to another government database 20 incidents of entertainment system problems. It’s unknown how many of those incidents are also included in the service difficulty reports…

Manufacturers insist that the most sophisticated entertainment systems, as well as older ones, are safe and meet FAA standards. They blame the type installed on Swissair, which was banned a year after the crash, for giving everyone in the industry a bad name.

That system, built by a Phoenix company now out of the airline business, was put on to replace an existing system and pioneered interactive entertainment at each seat. But, as a USA TODAY investigation found in February, it was improperly designed, installed and certified by contractors without adequate FAA oversight. The General Accounting Office and the Transportation Department’s inspector general recently began investigating the matter.

Other systems, though, have had problems since the Swissair accident. Safety experts say the number of service difficulty reports about entertainment system problems endangering passenger safety during the past two years could far exceed the 60 received by the FAA.

“The 60 reports are probably just the tip of the iceberg,” says Alex Richman, whose company, AlgoPlus Consulting, analyzes FAA data for some aircraft operators. “More incidents probably go unreported than are reported.”” USA Today

even when holding harmless objects:

“Blacks more likely to be shot than whites even when holding harmless objects

Given only a fraction of a second to respond to images of men popping out from behind a garbage dumpster, people were more likely to shoot blacks than whites, even when the men were holding a harmless object such as a flashlight rather than a gun.

The finding comes from a study that is to be published this week in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. The research used a virtual reality simulation and was prompted by a number of mistaken shootings of unarmed blacks by police officers in recent years. It was directed by Anthony Greenwald, a University of Washington psychologist who examines the unconscious roots and levels of prejudice.” EurekAlerts!

‘They lied.’ “The U.S. may have found the smoking gun that nails the culprit responsible for the Iraq war. Unfortunately, it’s in Dick Cheney’s office.” — Robert Scheer, Salon

The Politics of Fat: “Anti-tobacco lawyer John Banzhaf is presently building more solid test cases against food corporations for knowingly selling products that are injurious to consumers’ health. Banzhaf will send a letter to McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried Chicken this month, demanding that they label their food as containing substances that may be as addictive as nicotine.

At the same time, there is talk of imposing a ‘fat tax’ and/or forcing manufacturers to put health warnings on certain foods, similar to the warnings on tobacco products. McDonalds is apparently feeling the pressure. They have recently issued a request to their meat suppliers to reduce the quantity of antibiotics in their meat, perhaps a pre-emptive measure, intended to demonstrate concern about the health impact of their products in case of future lawsuits.” AlterNet

“The government’s roundup and detention of U.S. citizens and immigrants perceived to be Arab, South Asian, or Muslim is likely fostering discrimination and prejudice above and beyond the impact of 9-11, say social psychologists.

The violent attacks of September 11 and their aftermath have created a real-world experiment for social scientists who usually develop their theories in university labs. Their research, much of which is still in progress, shows that the more positively people feel toward their country, the more likely they are to hold anti-Arab prejudices. Taken with statistical evidence of hate crimes and job discrimination, the new research suggests that while the shock of the attacks sparked bigotry against those associated in American minds with Islam, subsequent sweeping crackdowns, such as the government roundup and detention of Muslims, are sending ‘social signals’ that are worsening the biases.” The Village Voice

“A single viral protein causes behavioural changes in mice similar to those experienced by people with mental illness, reveals a study by Japanese researchers.

The effects of the protein, produced by a common pathogen called the Borna disease virus (BDV), may help scientists understand how viruses could contribute to psychiatric disease in humans.” New Scientist

In humans, evidence of infection with BDV is found in a vastly higher proportion of severely mood-disordered individuals than healthy controls. A ‘hit’ by being infected with BDV at crucial stages of CNS development appears necessary for the behavioral consequences. BDV affects not the neurons themselves but their support cells, the glia, disruption of whose functions disturb normal neural connectivity. That being said, it is a stretch to say that the behavioral changes seen in the mice in this study, in which a gene for a BDV protein was inserted into the genome and expressed in the mice’s CNS, are an analogue of human mental illness. All that can be said is that they produce generic behavioral changes. They are not a model for any specific human psychiatric disease, which is perhaps fitting, because no one can yet figure out with which human psychiatric disease BDV is supposed to be associated.

The Bush administration acknowledged for the first time yesterday that President Bush should not have alleged in his State of the Union address in January that Iraq had sought to buy uranium in Africa to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program.

The statement was prompted by publication of a British parliamentary commission report, which raised serious questions about the reliability of British intelligence that was cited by Bush as part of his effort to convince Congress and the American people that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction program were a threat to U.S. security.” Washington Post

I never even logged the news about the British parliamentary commission report. Ho hum — the intelligence used to convince the public was unreliable. The current item, on the other hand, is noteworthy because of the underlying, arrogant assumption that the time is right to deflect further criticism by admitting the deception… a safe assumption given that the White House has surely noticed there has been not one — count ’em, not one — bit of serious political fallout from the lies.

This study is by my medical school thesis advisor who was ahead of the game when I studied with her in the early ’80’s and now, twenty years later, continues to make groundbreaking contributions in the neural basis of child developmental difficulties. Two Types of Brain Problems Are Found to Cause Dyslexia:

One group appeared to have what the researchers called a ‘predominantly genetic type’ of dyslexia.

These students had gaps in the neural circuitry that the normal readers used for the basic processing of sound and language, but had learned to enlist other parts of the brain to compensate for the difficulty. They still read slowly but can comprehend what they read.

The second group had what the researchers called a ‘more environmentally influenced’ type of dyslexia. Their brains’ system for processing sound and language was intact, but they seemed to rely more on memory than on the linguistic centers of the brain for understanding what they were reading. These students had remained persistently poor readers, scoring poorly on speed as well as comprehension.

The two groups of poor readers were from similar socioeconomic backgrounds and had comparable reading skills when they began school, according to the study, which was published this month in the journal Biological Psychiatry.

But there were two differences: the students who compensated for their problems tended to have higher overall levels of learning abilities, and the students whose problems persisted were twice as likely to attend what the researchers called disadvantaged schools. NY Times

The central, and surprising finding here, is that the neural systems that subsume reading ability are intact in those with the persistently poorest reading performance. This is, essentially, an example of this society’s over-medicalization of social problems, leading to the misdirection of resources. Those with neurally based, probably genetically mediated, dyslexia will recruit compensatory brain circuitry to compensate for the deficits. Their brains will light up differently than a non-dyslexic’s on functional MRI scanning (fMRI) during reading tasks, and they will process more slowly, but they can read and comprehend, probably needing very little intervention. On the other hand, the persistently poor readers (my guess is that these are those most likely to be labelled as “dyslexics” in the classroom) might not properly deserve to be labelled with a medical diagnosis improperly imputing a neurological basis to their difficulties. Their brain lights up the same as a ‘normal’ reader’s on fMRI. They appear to have suffered for the lack of stimulation of their reading skills and the educational resources to compensate for lacking that headstart. The overreliance on memory — in other words, rote processes — is not the pathology, but the attempted compensation. If you lack the skills to figure out a new word, all you can do is try to recognize it from a repertoire of previously memorized ones. Unfortunately, the challenges of anything but simple children’s books swamp the capacity to read by rote.

In essence, most of the weighty reading problems in our society should probably not be called dyslexia in the medical, DSM-IV sense, although I suppose we might return to the literal meaning of the words, “impaired reading,” without implication of neurological deficit attached. While the study is extremely valuable, it is arguably one that points to the obsolescence of its own methods. Instead of throwing diagnostic labels, neurological consultations and fMRIs at these children, we should be throwing early intervention and other educational resources at disadvantaged children in whose social niches reading is undervalued and which are second-tier participants in society because of their seriously limited literacy skills.

Of course, equally or more absurd, even if the implications of Shaywitz’s study are taken to heart, and we stop diagnosing them as “dyslexics”, anyone who can’t attend to and comprehend the information presented to them in school these days for whatever reason gets diagnosed with “attention deficit disorder” instead (or in addition to dyslexia) and has stimulants thrown at them. Don’t get me started commenting on this harebrained craze.

Of course, learning can be neurochemically enhanced (New Scientist), but does that mean it should be?

Their Own Mental Health: “…(T)he medical profession, (15) authors contend in a recent article in The Journal of the American Medical Association, has been slow to accept that depression and other mental disorders are illnesses like any other, at least when they occur in its own members.

Many doctors fail to seek treatment for psychiatric conditions out of fear that doing so will damage their careers. And those who do get treatment can suffer very real professional penalties…

In the journal article, (the authors) , who gathered last October to discuss doctors’ mental health at a workshop convened by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, noted that the profession’s sluggishness in addressing the issue stands in contrast to its involvement in other public health problems.” NY Times

Neat segue to: Artist, Heal Thyself (and Then Everybody Else) NY Times

or just stupider? Boston Globe

Photojournalists Eye the War: “View hundreds of photos of the Iraq war and listen to 24 photojournalists describe the events.” Washington Post

What historian Charles G. Sellers said about Polk’s determination to go to war with Mexico remains true today: ‘The sobering fact is that. . . our representative institutions seem incapable of restraining a determined President from an unwisely aggressive foreign policy.’ — Joan Hoff, Research Professor of History at Montana State University and author of Nixon Reconsidered, Progressive Review

“The world is mourning the death of N!xau, southern Africa’s shy Khoisan (Bushman)….

N!xau, the star of the block-buster The Gods must be Crazy and the sequel, will be buried on July 12 in a tiny cemetery of his people at Tsumkwe in northern Namibia, where they live in the veld. He was found dead after going to look for wood.” News24, South Africa