“Some scientists hope blueberry burgers will be coming to a restaurant, supermarket or school cafeteria near you.

Al Bushway, a food scientist at the University of Maine, says his lab has been stirring blueberry puree or blueberry powder into beef, chicken and turkey patties. The researchers are trying to boost the nutritional value of burgers and help farmers improve their berry sales.

Blueberries add cancer-fighting antioxidants to the patties and may slightly reduce the fat content of burgers.” Salon

Past becomes present:

“The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art is a sprawling complex of old brick mill buildings given new life while retaining a sense of history: Layers of paint, for instance, were deliberately left intact as a visual echo of the past.

For this year’s big show at MASS MoCA, ”Yankee Remix,” nine artists browsed though the archives and storage of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, borrowed a wide array of artifacts, and wove these fragments of history into new installations. It’s another case of reviving the past, drawing it into the present.” Boston Globe

I was at MassMoCA last weekend and was not nearly as impressed by this exhibit as the reviewer. However, Robert Wilson’s overwhlmingly powerful, magical, disturbing reconceptualization of the Stations of the Cross needs to be seen.

And here’s another renovated factory space serving up outsized art for the Northeast. Boston Globe

No, due to wildlife: “Colorado authorities joined their colleagues in Utah on Friday in blaming 45 Denver-area cat slayings in the past year on wildlife, ending weeks of suspicion that budding psychopaths and devil worshippers were killing the pets.” azcentral [via Daily Rotten]

Car Crash Reveals Racist Church: “A car crash this week in a town near New Orleans revealed that a building thought to be a home improvement business was actually a white supremacist church, police said on Friday.

The vehicle smashed into the brick storefront in Chalmette, Louisiana, after colliding with two other cars and came to rest amid stacks of racist books and pamphlets, including Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, they said.

A sign proclaimed the building the ‘Southern Home Improvement Center,’ said Lt. Mike Sanders of the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff’s Department, but investigators found out it was the New Christian Crusade Church and headquarters of the Christian Defense League.” Reuters You’ve got to admire their logic — church as “home improvement”?

‘An audio tape purportedly from top al Qaeda official Ayman al-Zawahri warned the United States on Sunday it would pay a high price if it harmed detainees at a U.S. base in Cuba, saying the “real battle” had not yet begun.’ Reuters

And: Afghan Political Violence on the Rise: “Instability in South Grows as Pro-Taliban Fighters Attack Allies of U.S.-Led Forces” Washington Post

“Only future historians will be able to sort out the Iraq war’s ultimate validity. It is too late or too early for the rest of us.” — Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times op-ed

“Maybe the president and his swaggering circle should think about a “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” makeover.” — Maureen Dowd, NY Times op-ed

Why are Liberian soldiers wearing fright wigs?: “Few things exemplify the chaos of Liberia more than the sight of doped-up, AK-47-wielding 15-year-olds roaming the streets decked out in fright wigs and tattered wedding gowns. Indeed, some of the more fully accessorized soldiers in Charles Taylor’s militia even tote dainty purses and don feather boas. Why did this practice begin and what is the logic behind it?” Slate [via walker‘s uncanny eye for such stuff!]

A reader asked me what I thought about Peter Breggin’s longstanding critique of modern psychiatric practice, as reflected in this review of one of his recent books. My first reaction was, “Oh, no, Breggin again.” I have such difficulty with his argument with psychiatry (and such curiosity about what personality factors and life experiences congealed as such rabid fervor in him) that I usually just dismiss him. But (sigh) this reader, concerned by the antimedication arguments here, asked for a response.

As the reviewer encapsulates it, this book “neatly summarizes many of the best arguments against biological psychiatry”, and that is precisely the problem. They are simply arguments against, with no balanced deliberations. Breggin feels it is a mistake to view depressed feelings as a disease; in doing so, he is reacting to an outmoded version of psychiatric theory which had not demonstrated the structural and functional brain changes we now can see in untreated severe depression. Admittedly, the dividing line between ‘normal’ depressed feelings — which are a part of everyone’s mood variations — and the pathological process is difficult to draw, but that is the challenge every mental health practitioner faces, some better than others at refraining from pathologizing the ‘normal variants’ but on everybody’s minds. I actually join Breggin in criticizing those of my colleagues who have lost their perspective on the distinction completely, and the trend toward what Peter Kramer MD (in Listening to Prozac) has called ‘cosmetic psychopharmacology’, which has its sources in both conceptual confusion on the part of prescribers and the vested interests in the field which want to widen the scope of permissible prescribing targets. But to castigate the entire field for the excesses of its least perspicacious would deprive those clearly suffering from a correctable physiological disturbance bringing them ongoing distress and dysfunction (which worsens if not treated) a scientific and systematic approach to alleviating their suffering.

I would also join Breggin in his criticism of those for whom medication is the end-all of their treatment attack, but, again, that is not the norm in the field. It is well acknowledged that the best treatment approach to most mental illnesses such as, say, depression as Breggin discusses it here, is a combination of therapy and medication, so much so that a non-medical therapist who fails to recognize the indications for medication and make the recommendation to her/his severely depressed patient can be sued for malpractice. I like to tell my patients that medication is like a bicycle — the most efficient human-powered vehicle to get from point A to point B, but you still have to pedal. The analogy only goes so far, however, because when you get there there is still much more work to do when and if you dismount.

Breggin also faults the field for the fact that we do not know how medications work on a cellular level; this is true. But is naive to assert that all the speculation about how the medications work is designed solely to promote the drugs. We know the medications work, empirically; people feel better and get better when they are treated with them, as established (contrary to breggin’s assertion) by countless studies meeting the gold standard of scientific method — the double-blind placebo-controlled methodology. There are examples throughout medical science of medications being used because they have been shown to be beneficial, while the explanation of their mechanism remains purely speculative. The dirty secret for all of medicine is that the emperor often has no clothes when s/he speaks authoritatively in certainties about the mechanism of action of the magic bullets s/he dispenses. Arguably, healing, no matter in what medical subspecialty, depends in large measure on what has been called the priestly function of the physician, enlisting the supplicant by authority and charisma into a shared belief system which mobilizes the patient’s own mind’s and body’s best resources for the restoration of their health — with physiological help from medication effects.

The mechanisms of most drugs that affect complex physiological systems such as the cardiovascular are, on some level, opaque to analysis, although Breggin is right to be more troubled about the issue with neuroscience and psychiatry than with other medical fields. He ignore two simple facts with the most profound significance. First, in brain disease, the affected organ is the very same one that is the vehicle for perceiving and describing the dysfunction, unlike what patients can tell us relatively unimpeded when their heart, lungs or abdominal organs are malfunctioning. Secondly, by and large (this is not fully true, but enough for my argument here) there is no animal model for human consciousness, so experimental methods to establish pathophysiology or the effects of medication upon that pathophysiology are inherently impossible. There is no adequate animal model for any psychiatric disease for that reason, researchers’ arguments to the contrary. So, Dr. Breggin, the brain will always be a black box. But that doesn’t mean we have no way of knowing how effective our treatment approaches are; don’t confuse the two different epistemological realms.

His next point, that the psychiatric drugs “impair our emotional awareness and our intellectual acuity”, and thus “impede the process of overcoming depression”, that that is all they do, is patently absurd. But the crux of the argument comes in his next assertion, that “If a drug has an effect on the brain, it is harming the brain,” i.e. that psychiatric drugs are, plain and simple, poisons. In particular, he works himself into a fever pitch about imagined “potential hazards” of SSRIs for which there is no substantiation. And to claim that “there are so many… that no physician is capable of remembering all of them” (and thus no patient adequately informed by their physician) makes me glad he does not himself use his medical license to treat patients, with such seemingly scarce memory capacity. As readers of FmH know, I have discussed at length the bogus claim that SSRIs provoke or worsen suicidality, or promote interpersonal violence. Breggin would do well to criticize careless use by inattentive or undertrained personnel, as I have written, but not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. His argument is rife with misinformation, distortion and selective attention to prove an a priori conclusion, and logical and epistemological fallacies. His constituency is the rather small absolutist anti-psychiatry movement, the members of which it shold be pointed out have mostly been motivated to object to not antidepressants but antipsychotic medications, for which the evidence of damaging effects, impairing judgment, equivocal effctiveness, and use as tools of social oppression has far more ‘teeth’ than anyone reasonable asserts for antidepressants.

I think there is a role in the psychiatric profession for a histrionic gadfly like Breggin (just as there is a role in the medical debate over assisted suicide for Jack Kevorkian!), if his polemic forces a reexamination and acknowledgement of the grain of much exaggerated truth at its core. But his irresponsible reductionism and overgeneralization leave him without the credibility to take his role responsibly. I’ll go back to just dismissing him, I suppose. As Malcolm Lowry once said, “How many wolves do we feel on our heels, while our real enemies go in sheepskin?”

A reader asked me what I thought about Peter Breggin’s longstanding critique of modern psychiatric practice, as reflected in this review of one of his recent books. My first reaction was, “Oh, no, Breggin again.” I have such difficulty with his argument with psychiatry (and such curiosity about what personality factors and life experiences congealed as such rabid fervor in him) that I usually just dismiss him. But (sigh) this reader, concerned by the antimedication arguments here, asked for a response.

As the reviewer encapsulates it, this book “neatly summarizes many of the best arguments against biological psychiatry”, and that is precisely the problem. They are simply arguments against, with no balanced deliberations. Breggin feels it is a mistake to view depressed feelings as a disease; in doing so, he is reacting to an outmoded version of psychiatric theory which had not demonstrated the structural and functional brain changes we now can see in untreated severe depression. Admittedly, the dividing line between ‘normal’ depressed feelings — which are a part of everyone’s mood variations — and the pathological process is difficult to draw, but that is the challenge every mental health practitioner faces, some better than others at refraining from pathologizing the ‘normal variants’ but on everybody’s minds. I actually join Breggin in criticizing those of my colleagues who have lost their perspective on the distinction completely, and the trend toward what Peter Kramer MD (in Listening to Prozac) has called ‘cosmetic psychopharmacology’, which has its sources in both conceptual confusion on the part of prescribers and the vested interests in the field which want to widen the scope of permissible prescribing targets. But to castigate the entire field for the excesses of its least perspicacious would deprive those clearly suffering from a correctable physiological disturbance bringing them ongoing distress and dysfunction (which worsens if not treated) a scientific and systematic approach to alleviating their suffering.

I would also join Breggin in his criticism of those for whom medication is the end-all of their treatment attack, but, again, that is not the norm in the field. It is well acknowledged that the best treatment approach to most mental illnesses such as, say, depression as Breggin discusses it here, is a combination of therapy and medication, so much so that a non-medical therapist who fails to recognize the indications for medication and make the recommendation to her/his severely depressed patient can be sued for malpractice. I like to tell my patients that medication is like a bicycle — the most efficient human-powered vehicle to get from point A to point B, but you still have to pedal. The analogy only goes so far, however, because when you get there there is still much more work to do when and if you dismount.

Breggin also faults the field for the fact that we do not know how medications work on a cellular level; this is true. But is naive to assert that all the speculation about how the medications work is designed solely to promote the drugs. We know the medications work, empirically; people feel better and get better when they are treated with them, as established (contrary to breggin’s assertion) by countless studies meeting the gold standard of scientific method — the double-blind placebo-controlled methodology. There are examples throughout medical science of medications being used because they have been shown to be beneficial, while the explanation of their mechanism remains purely speculative. The dirty secret for all of medicine is that the emperor often has no clothes when s/he speaks authoritatively in certainties about the mechanism of action of the magic bullets s/he dispenses. Arguably, healing, no matter in what medical subspecialty, depends in large measure on what has been called the priestly function of the physician, enlisting the supplicant by authority and charisma into a shared belief system which mobilizes the patient’s own mind’s and body’s best resources for the restoration of their health — with physiological help from medication effects.

The mechanisms of most drugs that affect complex physiological systems such as the cardiovascular are, on some level, opaque to analysis, although Breggin is right to be more troubled about the issue with neuroscience and psychiatry than with other medical fields. He ignore two simple facts with the most profound significance. First, in brain disease, the affected organ is the very same one that is the vehicle for perceiving and describing the dysfunction, unlike what patients can tell us relatively unimpeded when their heart, lungs or abdominal organs are malfunctioning. Secondly, by and large (this is not fully true, but enough for my argument here) there is no animal model for human consciousness, so experimental methods to establish pathophysiology or the effects of medication upon that pathophysiology are inherently impossible. There is no adequate animal model for any psychiatric disease for that reason, researchers’ arguments to the contrary. So, Dr. Breggin, the brain will always be a black box. But that doesn’t mean we have no way of knowing how effective our treatment approaches are; don’t confuse the two different epistemological realms.

His next point, that the psychiatric drugs “impair our emotional awareness and our intellectual acuity”, and thus “impede the process of overcoming depression”, that that is all they do, is patently absurd. But the crux of the argument comes in his next assertion, that “If a drug has an effect on the brain, it is harming the brain,” i.e. that psychiatric drugs are, plain and simple, poisons. In particular, he works himself into a fever pitch about imagined “potential hazards” of SSRIs for which there is no substantiation. And to claim that “there are so many… that no physician is capable of remembering all of them” (and thus no patient adequately informed by their physician) makes me glad he does not himself use his medical license to treat patients, with such seemingly scarce memory capacity. As readers of FmH know, I have discussed at length the bogus claim that SSRIs provoke or worsen suicidality, or promote interpersonal violence. Breggin would do well to criticize careless use by inattentive or undertrained personnel, as I have written, but not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. His argument is rife with misinformation, distortion and selective attention to prove an a priori conclusion, and logical and epistemological fallacies. His constituency is the rather small absolutist anti-psychiatry movement, the members of which it shold be pointed out have mostly been motivated to object to not antidepressants but antipsychotic medications, for which the evidence of damaging effects, impairing judgment, equivocal effctiveness, and use as tools of social oppression has far more ‘teeth’ than anyone reasonable asserts for antidepressants.

I think there is a role in the psychiatric profession for a histrionic gadfly like Breggin (just as there is a role in the medical debate over assisted suicide for Jack Kevorkian!), if his polemic forces a reexamination and acknowledgement of the grain of much exaggerated truth at its core. But his irresponsible reductionism and overgeneralization leave him without the credibility to take his role responsibly. I’ll go back to just dismissing him, I suppose. As Malcolm Lowry once said, “How many wolves do we feel on our heels, while our real enemies go in sheepskin?”

“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

Latest example of electronic convergence merges digital camera, ‘net, and refrigerator. Electrolux is designing a system that automatically takes a picture of the contents every time you close your refrigerator door, and uploads it to a web server. If you’re at the store and don’t remember whether you’re out of, say, cheese, use your mobile phone or PDA to wirelessly browse to the latest photo and scan what you’ve got in the fridge at home. I think it is overkill, of course; my own digital approach to shopping is to make a shopping list on my Palm device before I leave the house, scanning the innards of the refrigerator in real time. You might say it is so passé to use a text-based method when I could have a GUI at my fingertips for the task, but hey, what can I say?

If it were to become widespread, what was beginning to worry me about this Electrolux system (although I feel a whole lot better having heard that John Poindexter was axed from DARPA) was the possibility that the authorities would obtain an archive of the old photos from my fridge — likely that Electrolux would leave them a back door into the web server — and be able to derive a running catalogue of my family’s food consumption patterns. They might even find some — gasp! — Middle Eastern food in there from time to time, not to mention Korean cuisine. From how quickly it disappeared, the feds could surmise the relish with which we ate it, from which they could naturally draw the most damaging conclusions about our political leanings. But one potential advantage of the system far outweighs even the most egregious potential privacy violations. It will settle once and for all the burning controversy about whether the light inside the fridge stays on when you close the door. There really is no other way. electricnews.net

And while we’re on the topic of useless gadgetry, here’s a company that sells mice with built-in fans to keep your hand from getting hot and sweaty during your websurfing. I could make a facetious comment about how, depending on the content of your surfing, your hand might get most hot and sweaty when it leaves your mouse for locations further south… but I won’t.

On the other hand (sorry), when the price comes down somewhat, I want one of these.

Top Five Most Commonly Diagnosed Cancers in the U.S. by Ethnic Group, 1995-1999 North American Association of Central Cancer Registries

Refusing help, woman gives birth aboard T (which is Bostonese for streetcar or subway):

“A 42-year-old Braintree woman gave birth to a baby boy while standing on an inbound Red Line train yesterday morning, refusing help from stunned passengers who heard her moan and seconds later looked down to find her baby on the floor…

” ‘Thanks for your concern, we’re OK,’ ” she said, according to Chris Chin of Duxbury. Standing 4 feet away from Judge, Chin said, he saw her tie the umbilical cord in a knot and wrap the baby in a silk scarf. ”She cradled the baby in one arm and grabbed the handrail with the other and continued to ride the T and stare out the window.”

…At one point, Judge took some nearby newspapers and placed them on the floor to soak up the blood. Some witnesses heard Judge apologize for the mess.

After leaving the train and heading for the stairs up to the station’s main lobby, witnesses said, the placenta fell to the platform. Judge turned around, grabbed the afterbirth, put it in her shoulder bag, and headed upstairs. ” Boston Globe

Authorities, witnesses, and press are puzzled by the woman’s refusal of help (what could anyone do, it strikes me?) and she is currently undergoing a psychiatric evaluation. The baby appeas to be doing fine.

Stereo Images — or one might call it simulated stereo — by having the left and right images rapidly alternate in an animated .gif. Sort of as if you’re looking at the scene while an earthquake passes through, but it does create the 3D effect. [via Random Walks]

“Harsher sentences do not deter people from committing crimes, says a new report by University of Toronto criminologists.

One of the objectives of sentencing under the Canadian Criminal Code is to attempt to deter people from committing crimes, says U of T professor Anthony Doob, who authored the report, Sentence Severity and Crime: Accepting the Null Hypothesis. ‘The implication of the law is that harsher sentences will make us safe but our research findings suggest this isn’t true.’

Doob and post-doctoral fellow Cheryl Webster examined literature and studies on the deterrent impact of sentences in the U.S., Canada, England and Australia over the past 30 years. They found that the majority of studies suggest harsher sentences do not reduce crime. ‘It’s not the penalty that causes people to pause before they commit a crime; it’s the likelihood of being apprehended,’ says Doob.

Instead of using harsher crimes to discourage people from breaking the law, he says more resources are needed for social and educational programs for children and youth at various stages in their lives. ‘Programs that help kids to thrive in school are good educational investments but they’re also good crime prevention investments.'” EurekAlert!

“John Poindexter, the retired Navy admiral who spearheaded two sharply criticized Pentagon projects, intends to resign from his Defense Department post within weeks, a senior U.S. defense official said on Thursday.

‘It’s my understanding that he … expects to, within a few weeks, offer his resignation,’ the official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters.

Poindexter was involved with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s abandoned futures-trading market for predicting assassinations, terrorism and other events in the Middle East, and earlier with the so-called Total Information Awareness program that drew fire from civil rights groups.” Reuters As little as I will shed a tear for the departure of this repugnant and arrogant man, it should be realized that this is only another in a series of straw men who are taking the fall for BushCo’s impaired judgment.

Jewish Groups Against Pipes’ Nomination: “A broad coalition of Jewish peace groups today called upon President Bush to withdraw his controversial nomination of Daniel Pipes to the Board of Directors of the United States Institute of Peace.

The Jewish peace groups also lauded the decision of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee last week to table a scheduled vote on Pipes’ nomination to the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum, a rightwing think tank based in Philadelphia, and a prolific author of articles depicting Islam as a danger to Western civilization and to Jews in particular. Pipes has referred to

Muslim immigrants as ‘brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene.’ In another article, he wrote that ‘all immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.'” CommonDreams [via walker]

“When Vice President Dick Cheney comes out of seclusion to brand critics ‘irresponsible,’ you know the administration is running scared… With the administration taking the heat on 9/11, the vice president is once again making wildly unsubstantiated claims about Iraqi WMD.” AlterNet