“The crack investigative reporter tells Salon about a disastrous battle the U.S. brass hushed up, the frightening True Believers in the White House, and how Iran, not Israel, may have manipulated us into war… In a new book, Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, Hersh expands upon his work in the New Yorker to contribute new insights and revelations.”

“The study of over 2,000 men over 71 found those who walked least had almost twice the risk of developing dementia than those who walked the most.” (BBC)

Anti-Bush US troops in Iraq: “Though military personnel lean conservative, some vocally support Kerry – or at least a strategy for swift withdrawal.” (Christian Science Monitor)

Tapped, the weblog over at The American Prospect, is reporting that:

I am particularly buoyed to see them using Lakoff’s — shall we say? — neurolinguistic programming techniques in crafting their message.

In what has been called the largest parapsychological experiment to date, psychologist Stanley Krippner and associates explored ESP and the dream phase of sleep with the assistance of the audience of a famous Grateful Dead concert in Port Chester NY in 1971. (Journal of the American Society of Psychosomatic Dentistry and Medicine) Krippner, who was at that time the head of the renowned Dream Laboratory at New York’s Maimonides Medical Center, is an illustrious psychologist who has been uncommonly unafraid of anomalous experiences and altered states of consciousness. The Dead were apt collaborators in an investigation of telepathy given the uncanny and unparalleled psychic amalgamation they achieved in their playing (and, some would say, achieved with their audiences as well), especially at the further reaches of their jams. (“We’re not in the entertainment business, we’re in the transportation business. We move minds.” — Mickey Hart) You can also read about the studies here (Fortean Times).

The late, great social psychologist Stanley Milgram is well-known for several famous psychological experiments, about which I have written here from time to time. In one, he investigated how obedient subjects would be when, misled to believe they were experimenters, they were asked to inflict escalating pain on a supposed subject who was really a confederate of the researchers. (This has been described as the “How good a Nazi are you?” experiment and is one of the ‘great psychological experiments of the twentieth century’ described by psychiatrist and NY Times writer Lauren Slater in her controversial book of last year, Opening Skinner’s Box.) Another of Milgram’s studies established the renowned ‘six degrees of separation’ principle of social connectivity.

Thanks to several FmH readers who pointed me to this article from The New York Times. Milgram also sent his graduate students out onto the New York City subways with a simple directive — that they ask seated passengers for their seats. It was readily established that the proportion of recipients of such a request who would agree to give up their seat to an able-bodied stranger was surprisingly high, but the focus of the study was turned on its head in a fascinating way when it became apparent how difficult and anxiety-provoking the task was for the student investigators, some of whom became physically ill from the stress of doing so. Surprised at this, Milgram did it himself and confirmed how awful it made him feel. He speculated that one cause of the malaise may have been an unconscious need to be infirm to justify the request for a seat. I suspect that it is nearer to the truth to say that some of his investigators were experiencing viscerally the stress of violating what was apparently such a powerful unspoken social norm. Two NY Times reporters recently replicated this scenario and found that there has been no change in New Yorkers’ willingness to yield their seats upon request.

The discomfort it causes to make such a request dramatizes how differently wired the self-centered sociopaths among us must be, experiencing no compunctions as they routinely violate others’ rights in far more profound ways than depriving them of a subway seat.

Many hopeful people are looking to the debates to give Kerry a decisive push against Dubya. Ezra Klein tells us how to have faith:

The Democrats have taken the ‘gender gap’ advantage for granted in the last few elections, but Kerry’s lead among female voters is fading. Speculation is that women have been put off as Kerry has tried to project strength on foreign policy. He has squandered a natural advantage on such issues as abortion rights and benefits parity by softpedaling.

Kerry may feel he has more to lose with swing voters than he has to gain with women by advertising his stand on abortion. His largely male group of advisors has prevented him from taking a more vocal position, apparently feeling the women’s vote was a given. (LA Times)

Michael Chiklis as the Thing; ought to be something to see. (Yahoo! News)