“A group of more than two dozen House of Representatives Democrats on Monday said they had introduced a resolution urging President Bush to fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.” Yahoo! News

“An attempt by developing countries to put management of the internet under United Nations auspices is likely to be shelved at next month’s world information summit in Geneva – but the issue is now firmly on the international agenda, summit sources say.” Financial Times

“If only such largesse flowed to all of us. ‘Fair compensation’ is a relative term, yet HR consultants and executive headhunters agree some jobs command excessive pay that can’t be explained by labor supply-and-demand imbalances.” —Chris Pummer, CBS

…When They Were Your Age

Make them think your Windows XP computer is running Longhorn! Be the first on your block!

“Ten British people have put their names forward to become the first in the world to undergo a face transplant…

Teams on both sides of the Atlantic are now confident they have the skills to attempt the operation.

Surgeons insist the procedure, which involves transplanting an entire face from a corpse to a living person, will only be available for patients with the most severe facial disfigurements – and not as a cosmetic vanity treatment.” —This Is London

“A quasi-religious cult is using the Internet to recruit teenagers who are encouraged to act as werewolves, howl at the moon and eat raw meat.

Counsellors at the Cult Information Hotline have received several complaints about the group, which has more than 50 members throughout Queensland.” —news.com.au

“Malcolm McLaren, the subculture hacker who created the Sex Pistols, discovers the new underground sound. It’s called chip music. Can you play lead Game Boy?” —Wired

“Israel stands today at an important crossroads, trying to decide which of three roads it will travel.

If it chooses one road, the United States will be able to walk proudly alongside Israel as its friend, ally and, if necessary, its protector against any that threaten its security.

But if Israel chooses either of the remaining two routes, it will repudiate the shared values and strategic interests that have united Israelis and Americans for decades. Those Americans who count themselves as friends of Israel have an obligation to make that danger clear. “

If a two-state, land-for-peace, solution is defunct, Israel is poised to commit either to expulsion or apartheid-like disenfranchisement of the Palestinians. — Jay Bookman, Atlanta Journal-Constitution [via CommonDreams]

“The big papers are taking President Bush’s Middle East speech seriously, so far. They’ve noted his rhetoric seems to challenge 50 years of symbiotic coddling of non-democratic Middle East regimes, justified up to now on the argument of pursuing our national interests. As Robin Wright of The Washington Post notes, there will be no further entertainment of the once-convenient notion of ‘Islamic exceptionalism’—where Islam was assumed to be incompatible with democratic government and therefore excused from otherwise universal human and political rights standards.

Privately, many will point to the surreal moment in the speech, made November 6 at the National Endowment for Democracy, where he described the principles for “successful societies” with a list of everything his administration has done to weaken American democracy at home. Sadly, Bush’s double standards and Animal Farm rhetoric are no longer big news.

But the flaw in his argument—revealing an intentional deception—is.” —Patrick Doherty, TomPaine.com

TB drug plus virtual reality relieves fear of heights. “A common antibacterial drug has helped phobics to overcome their fear of heights. Combined with standard behavioural therapy, D-cycloserine (DCS) speeded recovery fourfold compared with therapy alone.” A report from the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans. —Nature

“Setting the stage for a historic clash between presidential and judicial authority in a time of military conflict, the Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide whether prisoners at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are entitled to access to civilian courts to challenge their open-ended detention.” —azcentral

“She Doesn’t Look Disabled. Some Doctors Believe Her Condition Isn’t Real. But for the Author, Fibromyalgia Makes Every Day a Struggle.” —Washington Post As a psychiatrist who has long had an interest in controversial syndromes on the boundary of mental health and other fields of medicine, I have written on, taught about and treated fibromyalgia and “fibromyalgia” since it first came on the radar screens. There is a “real” syndrome but I believe it is also necessary to put the diagnosis of some, perhaps most, sufferers in quotes; the central triad of symptoms — debilitating chronic muscle pain, fatigue, and sleep disorder — can represent either a physical ailment or somatization, i.e. the physicalization of essentially mental distress.

The credibility of the diagnosis in a particular cse is established by the story and also the examination, in that the pain can be reproduced by palpation by a knowledgable examiner (usually a rheumatologist) of several dozen ‘trigger points’ in the muscle of whose existence or location the patient was unaware. While this is a controversial finding, I believe the research showing chemical and microscopic structural changes in biopsied muscle fibers in affected areas. Given the strong emotional component to the disorder, one way to think about its etiology is that people who are prone to experience stress as muscle tension are somehow chronically damaging their muscles, perhaps because the blood flow to chronically tense muscles is altered. I have also been impressed by the evidence that an added mechanism is in play. Impairment of the normal nighttime phased secretion of growth hormone from the pituitary gland given the altered sleep pattern in emotional distress, especially depression, may be important. GH is crucial to the repair of normal daily wear and tear in muscle fibers throughout the body; sleep deprivation causes muscle aches even in people who do not have fibromyalgia.

But, because I believe this syndrome has its origins in emotional distress and is a condition in which the physical manifestations come to predominate, it is attractive to many other emotionally distressed individuals who prefer to see their problems in physical rather than psychological terms, who are invested in an outmoded dichotomy and not open to a mind-body interactional perspective. Now granted, I work in a psychiatric setting and so my sample is skewed. But, for every legitimate fibromyalgia case I have seen, two or three young women come my way with chronic depression, complications of a trauma history, and/or borderline personality disorder (a triad of overlapping but not synonymous concerns) who are hell-bent on having fibromyalgia as the explanation of their social and occupational dysfunction instead.

Why am I making such an issue of this? Physicians and other clinicians who jump on the bandwagon of a sexy and faddish novel diagnosis ‘enable’ the dysfunction of such patients in a number of ways in which their patients are unconsciously invested, including suppporting disability claims and maintaining these patients (who may be prone to substance abuse as part of their psychiatric disturbance) on narcotic painkillers and addictive muscle relaxants for their supposed “fibromyalgia”. Many physicians are not open to examining their own “enabling”, since patients are uniformly appreciative of this kind of service, and we all like to please our patients. Legitimizing the disorder in such cases is a disservice to such patients, pandering to their unconscious maneuvering to look everywhere but at their own responsibility for their behavior patterns. By displacing them from a focus on their real concerns, such treatment prevents such patients from developing effective coping strategies that would alleviate or control distress in a lasting way and perpetuates their maladaptive way of doing business with the world instead.

Furthermore, fibromyalgia illustrates a more general phenomenon seen with controversial and murkily-defined syndromes. It remains a ‘wastebasket’ diagnosis, a syndrome diagnosed by clinical impression rather than diagnostic tests. If we lump together a heterogeneous cast of characters only a subset of whom have the “true” disorder, research efforts to characterize the processes behind it and clinical efforts to find effective treatments are compromised by the dilution of any relevant results in the mixed sample. In a vicious circle, the harder the condition is to characterize correctly, the harder it will be to characterize correctly. The more it attracts people for maladaptive reasons, the more it will continue to do so.

Paul Krugman: “Yesterday’s absurd conspiracy theory about the Bush administration has a way of turning into today’s conventional wisdom. Remember when people were ridiculed for claiming that Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, eager to fight a war, were hyping the threat from Iraq?

Anyway, many analysts now acknowledge that the administration never had any intention of pursuing a conventionally responsible fiscal policy. Rather, its tax cuts were always intended as a way of implementing the radical strategy known as ‘starve the beast,’ which views budget deficits as a good thing, a way to squeeze government spending. Did I mention that the administration is planning another long-run tax cut next year?

Advocates of the starve-the-beast strategy tend to talk abstractly about ‘big government.’ But in fact, squeezing government spending almost always means cutting back or eliminating services people actually want (though not necessarily programs worth their cost). And since it’s Veterans Day, let’s talk about how the big squeeze on spending may be alienating a surprising group: the nation’s soldiers.” —New York Times op-ed

Doggy cool: “They are the latest must-have accessory for the pampered pet: sunglasses for dogs.

Owners anxious that their pet should be at fashion’s cutting edge will have a choice of frames, lenses and colours to match any outfit that their dog may be wearing. Top of the range is a chrome frame with blue reflective lenses.” —The Age [via walker]