One more in a series of warmongers who repent and advocate for peace and disarmament as they grow older and wiser. I wish there were a way they could come to their senses when they still had any real influence.

Sorry, I don’t read the rightwing weblogs these days. I long ago concluded that there is little possibility of dialogue or reconciliation across the schismatic culture war, and that I don’t really need to study them to know the enemy any better. But now, through boing boing, I learn that Steve Silberman’s Wired article on George Lucas’ life after Star Wars has the conservative webloggers going ballistic, especially his supposed esteem for Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 911. Oddly enough, notes Silberman, most of the reactions to Lucas do not provide a link to his article but suggest the Lucas’ views exist out in some disembodied ether… like, maybe, The Force?

Book Review: Parallel Worlds: The Science of Alternative Universes and Our Future in the Cosmos by Michio Kaku:

If continued trials are positive, “this is going to be a revolution in acute stroke”, says a neuroscientist commentator.

As I predicted yesterday, inappropriate analogies to Terry Schiavo and allusions to his having been, in the words of his treating physician, “close to the persistent vegetative state”, are now emerging. Although I emphasize that I have no firsthand knowledge of his condition other than what I am reading, subsequent descriptions of Mr. Herbert’s condition over the last decade in the article suggest that he has always continued to show evidence of consciousness even though cognitive functions such as memory and language had been markedly damaged by the oxygen deprivation his brain suffered in his accident in 1995. This is a more crucial detail of his case than the more ‘sexy’ one the Times coverage is focusing upon, the admittedly fascinating Rip van Winkle-like drama of the information overload he will suffer, if he remains alert, in taking in all that has happened in both his personal life and the larger world over a missed decade. [Inexplicably, the Times‘ hyperbole in that sphere focuses on things like the Buffalo Bills’ performance over the intervening decade rather than, oh say, 9-11…]

According to the Times coverage, Mr. Herbert’s awakening may relate to a recent change in the cocktail of medications he has been taking.

Realize that a psychopharmacologically based approach to altering his level of consciousness necessitates that there was a substrate of brain activity there to modify with medications! This is quite distinct from a persistent vegetative state, in which bodily functions such as respiration and circulation persist in the absence of demonstrable brain activity.

Mistrial in Lynndie England trial: The judge said England could not plead guilty to conspiracy to commit a crime after the defense brought previously convicted co-conspirator Charles Graner on the stand and he portrayed leashing naked Iraqi prisoners and posing for photos with them as standard military procedure and a training exercise. Graner’s testimony was supposedly an effort to convince the judge to be lenient in sentencing England but, if taken to mean that England thought her actions were in response to a legitimate order, it undercuts the basis for her plea bargain, which depended on a knowing admission of guilt.

The judge had earlier been impatient with other defense tactics seemingly undercutting England’s guilty plea. Graner had previously indicated to reporters that he was disappointed with England’s plea and that he would have preferred to see her fight the charges. It is hard to know whether Graner’s performance on the stand was a defiant unilateral action on his part or an aspect of a defense strategy.

This is all set against a backdrop of soap opera melodrama, with Graner supposedly having fathered England’s baby and having gone on to marry another of the GIs accused in the Abu Ghraib abuses. Gleefully reported juicy detail: England suggested that a courtroom artist sketching Graner yesterday should have included the “horns and goatee.”

My first reaction, echoing a friend’s comments to me yesterday, was that it used to be that people either this hapless or this sociopathic (I’m referring here to both England and Graner) couldn’t get into the military… and they had joined long before the current enlistment crisis the military is facing.

But we are taking our eyes off the target, I remind myself, in focusing on this melodrama. The real issue is the core barbarity and absurdity of US military adventurism in the Bush-era ‘war on terror’ (WoT®) creating the inevitability of incidents like Abu Ghraib. So even if the recruiters signing up the Englands and Graners weren’t desperately facing the quota pressures they are several years later, it served the Pentagon’s purposes not to look too closely at the intelligence, the motivations or the moral fitness of the people they were letting in. Again, as my friend commented to me, “It’s harder to get a job at MacDonald’s.” Let us hope the judge’s rejection of England’s guilty plea is seen for what it, wittingly or unwittingly, really is — an indictment of the real chief co-conspirators here, the Sanchezes, the Bushes and the Rumsfelds.

Its routine inclusion in multivitamins aside, many health-conscious people have deliberately added folate supplement to their diets because of evidence that it has cardiovascular benefits. This is in addition to its established benefit in averting certain birth defects in the developing embryo when taken by women in pregnancy.

One of my favorite physician writers, Sherwin Nuland (How We Die) shares my malaise about the increasing penetration of ‘evidence-based medicine’ into medical practice. EBM is the slavish practice of basing medical decision-making only on the odds established by peer-reviewed research studies. It is all the buzz, and is especially amenable to the managed-care bureaucrats interested in denying reimbursement for healthcare itnerventions that aren’t ‘cost-effective’ or ‘proven.’ Evidence-based medicine, and the ‘treatment algorithms’ that accompany it, largely cripple what used to be one of the central intellectual tasks of the physician — being an intelligent consumer of the medical literature and a creative, indeed artistic, synthetist of research findings with one’s own clinical experience and the more anecdotal wisdom of one’s colleagues.

There are so many flaws with this way of doing business that I cannot begin to enumerate them in any better way than Nuland has done here. Just as consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, the belief in ‘objectivity’ is sometimes little more than the last resort of the uncreative, the subjectively challenged. The practice of medicine has been considered an art as well as a science; imagine if artists in other fields were constrained to produce only the types of art the market researchers had ‘proven’ would sell to the masses, or the cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists had ‘proven’ would activate the proper aesthetic centers in the brain as measured by PET scan or fMRI?

The so-called objectivity of medical research is a misnomer in many ways, among them the prejudiced opinions about what is worthy of publication of the academic journal editors and referees; the bias in favor of positive findings at the expense of negative, refutory research results; and the increasing fist-in-glove control of the research industry by the pharmaceutical industry. (Slate)

And, no, just to head off the inevitable Rabid Right take on this, his recovery has absolutely no bearing on Terry Schiavo’s case. You heard it here first.

The New York Times review of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival draws interesting parallels between the shape of a festival and the metaphysics of our technologically-mediated listening habits: