Probably only of interest, but definitely of urgent concern, to anyone who has ever attempted to drive in downtown Boston, even before the Big Dig era:

Cow path tale is pure bull: “The layout of Boston’s streets is so helter-skelter because they are founded on the lines of meandering cow paths.

Fact or fiction?

Fiction.

The cow path fable is one of Boston’s biggest and most enduring myths, according to William Fowler, director of the Massachusetts Historical Society, who urged drivers not to blame cows for our dysfunctional roadways.

The birth of Boston’s roadways was simply unorganized, he said; people built houses where they pleased, and roads emerged among them without the benefit of urban planners.” — Boston Globe

“Good-natured Gina, the veterinarian and ‘Sesame Street’ neighbor for nearly two decades, semi-nude and in bed with a man? A mobster just out of prison, no less.” — Yahoo! News

The story that ‘so deserves to be a scandal’: “The civics lesson of the Iran-Contra scandal was simple: No matter how powerful or well-intentioned, presidents cannot secretly fund wars without the consent of Congress. But according to Bob Woodward’s new book, President Bush apparently never learned that axiom. And now, Congress must demand answers.

Woodward alleges that in July 2002, the president secretly began to finance the war in Iraq with no authorization from Congress. He says $700 million was siphoned from operations against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and into planning an Iraq invasion. The president allegedly took the money from one of the two supplemental spending bills passed after September 11 and left lawmakers ‘totally in the dark.'” — David Sirota (director of strategic communications at the Center for American Progress and former chief spokesman for Democrats on the U.S. House Appropriations Committee) The American Prospect

“A serving US soldier calls for the end of an occupation based on lies: For the past six months, I have been participating in what I believe to be the great modern lie: Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

—Tim Predmore, Guardian.UK

“Things are looking very bad for Fallujah. The various mujaheddin factions, who may have agreed to a truce just so that the siege of Fallujah would be partially lifted and the road to the hospital opened, obviously had no intention of handing over all their weapons (or even just the ‘heavy’ ones). That demand by the Americans was basically the demand to win the battle without fighting it.

Since Fallujah will not capitulate, apparently, Bush and his advisers decide this weekend whether to bombard the hell out of it. Here’s a fascinating quote from the Times article:

‘It’s clear you can’t leave a few thousand insurgents there to terrorize the city and shoot at us,’ one senior official involved in the discussions said in an interview on Saturday. ‘The question now is whether there is a way to go in with the most minimal casualties possible.’

It should be clear to anyone with basic knowledge of the situation and with no ideological axe to grind who the few thousand people terrorizing the city are. They’re the ones that have assaulted it with tanks, AC-130 gunships, F-16’s, and snipers, not the ones who have been defending it from assault.

Based on everything that’s happened so far, the mindless desire for revenge and for showing military supremacy will triumph and the attack will be launched. As Bush said, ‘America will never be run out of Iraq by a bunch of thugs and killers.’ This is the kind of nonsense every colonial army has put out against its opponents — as Henry Liu points out in the Asia Times, the British general at the battle of Bunker Hill, Thomas Cage, called the American rebels thugs and tax evaders.

Sheikh Ahmed Abdel Ghafur Samarra’i, during Friday prayers at a prominent Baghdad mosque, said, ‘We will not allow the shedding of Iraqi blood. If you strike again, the whole of Iraq, from north to south, from east to west, will become Fallujah,’ a sentiment virtually every Iraqi I’ve spoken with would agree with.

A bad moon is rising. Since Bush is so fond of the Bible (it was apparently his favorite book as a child), he should read that part about sowing the wind.

It would be nice if this time there were protests before the assault instead of after.” — Rahul Mahajan, Empire Notes (Amsterdam)

“Drug companies have deliberately suppressed evidence that many antidepressants are unsuitable or even dangerous for children, according to psychiatrists and child health experts.

Researchers uncovered unpublished data about clinical trials of the most popular antidepressants on the market, known as selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which raise serious doubts about prescribing them to children.

Published studies have so far indicated that the benefits have outweighed risks for all five drugs studied – Prozac, the brand name for the drug fluoxetine, paroxetine, sertraline, citalopram, and venlafaxine.

But the review published today in medical journal the Lancet showed this was true of only one, the leading brand, Prozac. The others at best were not proven to help children and at worst linked to an increased risk of suicide or suicidal thoughts.” —Guardian.UK

Readers of FmH will know that I have been preoccupied with developments in this area in the weblog. The Lancet article (only an abstract of which is online) makes it clear that evidence of antidepressant efficacy in children only exists for fluoxetine. But reportage lumping the ineffectiveness of the other antidepressants so blithely with the imputation of their dangerousness is unwarranted and irresponsible. Adverse outcomes to antidepressant therapy in both children and adults are a function of the way they are marketed and prescribed rather than their physiological effects on the patients who take them. ‘It’s a poor workman who blames his tools’, the saying goes, which seems to be one of our society’s pervasive pathologies of thought as exemplified in jumping so uncritically on this particular bandwagon. I do find it plausible that, in the wake of various difficulties in extending their customer base to the fertile untapped area of treating children, the pharmaceutical giants probably suppress evidence that these medications are ineffective in children, but several factors come into play in a complicated way in assessing their efficacy:

• childhood depression is difficult to diagnose
  
• it is dicey to do medication trials on minors, so the data is quite limited compared to that we have with adult subjects
  
• while physicians are not duty-bound to use medications for only FDA-approved indications, extrapolation of adult efficacy data to children may not be warranted, since children are (neurologically, physiologically, developmentally), it goes without saying, not just ‘small adults’
  
• in general, negative studies are more difficult to publish in scientific journals than those which demonstrate a beneficial effect
  

Furthermore, it pays to be reminded that even a positive result, a ‘statistically significant’ beneficial effect of a drug on a target symptom, may not represent a clinically significant benefit. A couple of points’ worth of improvement on some clinical rating scale may not mean the patient feels or functions appreciably better. There are certainly good arguments not to consign “depressed” children to medication right off the bat, but they have very little to do with the dangerousness of the drugs.

There is, however, one sense in which I think these drugs are sometimes indubitably ‘dangerous’. In the rush to pharmacological treatment, we do not spend enough time thinking about the negative impact on one’s self-image of being offered a medication. Psychiatrists are usually preoccupied with the flip side of this coin, exploring the reluctance of patients to accept the medical model for their mental health problems and the potential benefits of medication therapy. For example, I hear myself asking patients fairly often something along the lines of, “If you were told you had diabetes, would there be any moral failing in taking medication to do the job your body’s own insulin was not doing well at?” But persuading someone that they need medication can also unintentionally convey messages such as they are defective, have no responsibility for their behaviors, do not have to participate in thinking about the origins of their problems or how to cope differently. The impact these messages can have is especially formative when the patient is a child. It is quite tricky, and not at all trivial, to be at the interface of treating with medication and working on self-conception, as a psychotherapeutically-informed psychopharmacologist should be…

What We Owe to Parents: “How public policy can support the hard work of raising children. — Anne Alstott”

in Boston Review

End of the Wild: “The extinction crisis is over. We lost. — Stephen M. Meyer”

in Boston Review

Reason and Terror: “Has 9/11 made it hard to think straight? — Diego Gambetta”

in Boston Review

Pound Ascendant: “Ezra Pound’s Poems and Translations and The Pisan Cantos — Marjorie Perloff”

in Boston Review

“The deputy leader of Bradford (UK) council has resigned after he made a Nazi-style salute and commented ‘Sieg Heil’ to a German-born councillor during a meeting.

Tory Simon Cooke, deputy chairman of the of Bradford metropolitan district council, made the gesture to Labour councillor Lynne Joyce following a speech by her on community safety last Wednesday.” —Guardian.UK

Coming as it does on top of the much-reported incident last week in which a right-wing English tabloid publisher similarly strutted around the room deriding representatives of a German publishing group with whom they were engaged in business negotiations, one wonders whether the thin veneer of European unity can contain such persistent simmering ignorant hatred. In neither incident did the object of such ‘veneration’ respond with anything but incredulity, apparently. How does it read in Germany? It has been my impression that only when pressed deeply does the Nazi legacy resonate with any pain in the current generation-after-the-postwar-generation there; the rise of Hitler is usually thought of as something that happened to some other people far away. Literature and film, like My Hitler or Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which suggest the need for deeper German self-examination on the issue of receptivity to fascism are considered quite provocative. What goes around comes around, however; shouldn’t the Germans have their own measure of contempt for British ‘fascist’ toady-ism embodied in the invasion of Iraq?

“How does Woodward do it? …Hard work and long-time connections are only part of the story. It’s clear that doors were opened to Woodward as he did his research. Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, argues that, flattered by Woodward’s last book, “Bush at War,” which portrayed the president in a positive light, Bush gave Woodward enormous access and encouraged others to do so.

“Woodward has never had such access as to the Bush White House. Period,” says Mr. Blumenthal. “They believed this was going to be extremely positive. They were expecting an almost official book which would depict Bush as a strong leader at war. and they wanted to get it ‘just right.’ ” — Christian Science Monitor In other words, he played Bush for the fool he is?

“Marchers Champion Reproductive Rights, Opposition to Bush” — Washington Post Yes, but: if the WaPo persists in calling it a women’s march, does it mean they haven’t gotten the point? The fight for reproductive rights is a major front in the War on Terrorism … the terrorism of the Bush dysadministration against human needs. As such, it is everyone’s issue, not a ‘women’s issue’.