“You don’t have to be a Negro to be an Uppity Negro, although it certainly helps.

The Uppity Negro not only speaks truth to power, they speak truth and self-serving lies and deny that the person they’re addressing even has power to begin with.

The Uppity Negro challenges the validity of the hierarchies which lie at the heart of our supposedly egalitarian society.

But mostly, the Uppity Negro likes starting shit for the fun of it.

There’s some people where, if they aren’t pissed off at you, you must be doing something wrong.

You, my overworked, underappreciated, overeducated, underpaid apprentice, you too carry within you the possibility of Uppity Negritude.

Embrace it.”

Battle spreads to Wisconsin:

“At a Duluth, Minn., Target store parking lot in July, hostilities between motorists burnishing ‘IXOYE’ fish and ‘Darwin’ fish broke into open conflict after years of angry gestures and cutting one another off in traffic.
‘One of the Christians said something about Darwin being a drunken, godless fool, and someone on the other side said Jesus was gay, and that pretty much did it,’ said a bystander holding ice to a bruise she’d suffered on her head in the ensuing melee. Six cars were damaged and the ground was littered with broken, silver shards of plastic, the remains of so-called ‘message fish.’…

“It was pretty vicious,” said Bill Henley, who witnessed a parking lot attack by ‘IXOYE’ guerillas in Racine. “They waited until the parking lanes were clear and then swooped in, shooting out the windows and tires of any car with the Darwin fish, and even cars with bumper stickers that said ‘The goddess is alive’ or ‘Practice random acts of kindness.'”

Darwin-istas retaliated by bashing in windshields of cars bearing stickers that read “It’s a CHILD, not a CHOICE,” “My boss is a Jewish carpenter,” and for good measure, any mini-van with a “My child is an honor student at …” sticker.” Lark News [via walker]

Also in Lark News:

• Assemblies of God commits entire 2004 evangelism budget to converting Madonna
• Rapture joke provokes heart attack

“Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was so outraged at the anti-communism of film star John Wayne that he plotted to have him murdered, according to a new biography of the American icon.

John Wayne – The Man Behind the Myth, by British writer and actor Michael Munn, says there were several attempts in the late 1940s and early 1950s to kill the man known to audiences around the world as Duke.” theage.com.au

“Ban the RIAA from our sites to show our disgust with the tactics they’re using to stop music sharing. And Techfocus has also supplied an htaccess file that does just that. All you’ve got to do is upload it to your site…” [via Shell Extension City]

US Debates Bid to Kill Hussein and Avoid Trial:

“Senior Bush administration officials are debating whether to order military commanders to kill rather than capture Saddam Hussein to avoid an unpredictable trial that could stir up nationalist Arab sentiments and embarrass Washington by publicizing past US support for the deposed Iraqi dictator, according to defense and intelligence officials.

One worry is that a host of embarrassing charges might be leveled at the United States. Washington supported Hussein’s regime during Iraq’s war against Iran between 1980 and 1988 — including providing satellite images of Iranian military formations — at a time when Iraqi forces used chemical weapons against troops and civilians.

Trying Hussein before an Iraqi or international criminal court would present an opportunity to hold the Ba’ath Party regime accountable for its repression and murder of thousands of people over the past three decades.

Iraq’s new US-backed Governing Council said this week it wants to try Hussein in an Iraqi court, something the occupation authority there has said it supports. The New York Times, citing unnamed State Department officials, reported today that the administration favors creating a tribunal of Iraqi judges to try Hussein for crimes against humanity if he is caught.

But as US troops step up the hunt for Hussein near his hometown of Tikrit, the prospect of an open trial that puts him on a public stage has given pause to some in the administration, according to government officials with knowledge of the high-level meetings. Among those said to have taken part in the discussions are Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.” Boston Globe [via CommonDreams]

Of course, Saddam trial or not, it is too late to avoid inflaming Arab sentiment Independent/UK.

Also:

Killing Saddam: A Summer Blockbuster: “The inevitable assassination of Saddam Hussein will be a public spectacle intended to reassure an insecure America — but it won’t end the guerrilla war in Iraq.”

The Iraqi people… are seen by the Pentagon as the frightened villagers in The Wizard of Oz. Once they sing “Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead,” they will shake off their fears and sign up for their duties in the new order: to work happily for Bechtel and Halliburton and start policing their malcontents. — Tom Hayden, AlterNet

This, of course, has a relationship to the Administration’s assumption that the American people have a short memory and have all but forgotten our failure to find the last global terrorist villain, Osama bin Laden. The New Yorker

Readers of FmH know I harp on this theme. Now I can point to somebody else making the same point.

“Only about 40 percent of people in treatment for depression get adequate care, according to a survey of more than 9,000 Americans that was sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health and released last week…

Dr. Ronald Kessler, a professor of health care policy at Harvard who was the lead author of the study, says a crucial problem is that general medical doctors tend to be the first line of defense against mental disorders as well as physical ones. Because they are not as well informed about depression as mental health specialists, he said, they are more likely to undertreat it — prescribing either too little medication or an inappropriate one, like an anti-anxiety drug.

These general practitioners, typically family doctors and internists, treat 70 percent of the people who seek help for depression, according to other research. And more of them are treating depression now than a decade ago, Dr. Kessler said, because the newer antidepressants — selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors — are safer and easier to prescribe than older drugs.

‘The companies that make these drugs are providing more educational material to general medical doctors,’ he said.”

Psychiatrists interviewed for this article hastened to add that they were not maligning their primary care colleagues’ abilities to treat all depression, but that severe or complicated cases should be referred to psychiatrists or psychologists. This, of course, leaves open the question of whether there would be adequate recognition of these critical cases.

“Most patients don’t come in and say, `I feel sad or depressed,’ ” he said. “They emphasize complaints like fatigue or insomnia or other physical manifestations of depression.”

Primary care MDs are generally more comfortable talking about these physical symptoms and may not get to the emotional crux of the matter. Engaging someone to talk about something uncomfortable in a comprehensive way is a skill and an art honed by the training and experience unique to mental health practitioners, as is adequate experience in psychopharmacology.

The article suggests that some managed care plans have some recognition of the problem and are reducing or eliminating reimbursement for primary care doctors to treat depression, forcing patients to be referred out to specialists. Frankly, I haven’t seen this happening in my part of the country. The rationale I hear over and over again from general practitioners to justify their reluctance to refer their patients out to mental health specialists is that it is ‘stigmatizing’ to the patients. I think this is largely a self-serving assumption on their part, and that they rarely broach the subject to assess their patient’s attitude. And, even if so, the doctor’s role in such a situation should more properly be an educational one, to advocate that their patient do the uncomfortable thing in their longterm best interest. After all, a large part of a doctor’s time is already spent educating patients to do things that initially strike them as unpleasant, uncomfortable or unpopular. But the major ‘training’ around treatment of depression the general practitioners are receiving these days are the pharmaceutical industry pitches persuading them of how easy depression is to treat with just a few swipes of the pen to prescribe a modern antidepressant. The industry knows that psychopharmacologically sophisticated psychiatrists are less likely to be pushed around by the ‘latest and greatest’ marketing claims (although, I hasten to add, readers will recognize that I have written with alarm about how busy psychiatrists have not been immune either from the tendency to stop educating themselves except via pharmaceutical representatives), so it is in their powerful vested interests to maintain the status quo. So primary care MDs will continue to treat depression; they will just avoid using the billing codes for emotional disorders if the patient’s insurance will not reimburse for that category of treatment. And if the insurance will not support a longer office visit for psychotherapy or counseling, the primary care MD will attempt to treat without that.

2 killed, more than a dozen others affected. The ill are being evacuated to a military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, where the second victim died on July 12th from multi-organ failure after falling ill with a ‘flu-like’ illness. Other victims are on respirators. Military scientists have ruled out the SARS virus as the cause. Many of those affected worked in the same engineering battalion in Baghdad, conducting ‘cleanup operations’. The dead soldier, a heavy equipment operator for the engineering battalion, had just returned froma four-day mission in the desert when he complained of feeling ill and went to lie down in his tent, where other soldiers found him comatose within hours. Although the soldier’s skeptical family were initially told their son had died of ‘pneumonia’, an earlier version of the story had military doctors saying that an unknown toxin was to blame and had quickly attacked his muscles, liver and kidneys. Environmental and epidemiological studies are proceeding.

I was pointed to this story from The Daily Rotten, which notes that the troops were working near the Baghdad International Airport and posits “a hypothetical cargo shipment from the United States which killed these soldiers. So perhaps we’re back on schedule to “discover” WMDs any day now.”

Update:

Two soldiers died, 10 recovered, and three remained hospitalized as of Friday, spokeswoman Lyn Kukral said. Most were in the Army, but at least one was a Marine.

So far, officials have identified no infectious agent common to all the cases. Officials said there was no evidence that any of the cases were caused by exposure to chemical or biological weapons, environmental toxins [emphasis added — FmH] or SARS.

Most of the cases were in Iraq and occurred after the U.S.-led invasion began March 20, although some were among other troops deployed to the region in support of the campaign.

Though 15 cases were considered serious, about 100 cases have been diagnosed since March 1 among troops that began deploying late last year to the Persian Gulf area. The Olympian (WA)

Relative to the conspiracy theory, there is no information about how closely the fifteen core cases were associated in time or space; is that information being suppressed? If these severe cases were from a native contaminant, we would probably have heard about it from the dysadministration as triumphal proof that they had finally found evidence of chemical or biological agents in Iraq. That we haven’t heard that suggests the possibility, as the Daily Rotten suggested, that the US has something to hide in the incident. Is a specific incident of toxic exposure being diluted by being lumped together with more disparate mystery illnesses of a broader range of severity and geographic distribution? Certainly, it is accepted epidemiological practice to examine the broadest possible range of cases to attempt to establish commonalities in a mystery outbreak, but it is also a great way to hide a problem in plain sight, as the saying goes.

“Created in 1935, the Federal Writers’ Project gave rise to a generation of novelists, including John Cheever, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston.”

NY Times