Update:
The 22-year-old student tearfully admitted he made the story up to his history professor, Dr. Brian Glyn Williams, and his parents, after being confronted with the inconsistencies in his account. ” (SouthCoastToday )
The work bolsters the validity of a longstanding hypothesis that the human brain takes itself back to the state it was in when a memory was first formed.” (LiveScience)
Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the book through the UMass Dartmouth library’s interlibrary loan program. The student, who was completing a research paper on Communism for Professor Pontbriand’s class on fascism and totalitarianism, filled out a form for the request, leaving his name, address, phone number and Social Security number. He was later visited at his parents’ home in New Bedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the professors said.
The professors said the student was told by the agents that the book is on a ‘watch list,’ and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further. ” (South Coast Today)
However, a followup on librarian.net reports that the UMass Dartmouth library denied passing on any interlibrary loan data to the Feds. And on David Farber’s Interesting People listserv, one of the student’s professors quoted in the article denied that the story is true. An email to the reporter of the story has so far gone unanswered…
The Los Angeles Times dissects the New York Times’ delay in breaking the spying scandal/ In case there was any doubt, the NYT did have the story by the time of the 2004 Presidential election.
Here’s why: the dynamic of a typical Bush scandal follows familiar contours…
1. POTUS circumvents the law – an impeachable offense.
2. The story breaks (in this case after having been concealed by a news organization until well after Election 2004).
3. The Bush crew floats a number of pushback strategies, settling on one that becomes the mantra of virtually every Republican surrogate. These Republicans face down poorly prepped Dem surrogates and shred them on cable news shows.
4. Rightwing attack dogs on talk radio, blogs, cable nets, and conservative editorial pages maul Bush’s critics as traitors for questioning the CIC.
5. The Republican leadership plays defense for Bush, no matter how flagrant the Bush over-reach, no matter how damaging the administration’s actions to America’s reputation and to the Constitution. A few ‘mavericks’ like Hagel or Specter risk the inevitable rightwing backlash and meekly suggest that the president should obey the law. John McCain, always the Bush apologist when it really comes down to it, minimizes the scandal.
6. Left-leaning bloggers and online activists go ballistic, expressing their all-too-familiar combination of outrage at Bush and frustration that nothing ever seems to happen with these scandals. Several newspaper editorials echo these sentiments but quickly move on to other issues.
7. A few reliable Dems, Conyers, Boxer, et al, take a stand on principle, giving momentary hope to the progressive grassroots/netroots community. The rest of the Dem leadership is temporarily outraged (adding to that hope), but is chronically incapable of maintaining the sense of high indignation and focus required to reach critical mass and create a wholesale shift in public opinion. For example, just as this mother of all scandals hits Washington, Democrats are still putting out press releases on Iraq, ANWR and a range of other topics, diluting the story and signaling that they have little intention of following through. This allows Bush to use his three favorite weapons: time, America’s political apathy, and make-believe ‘journalists’ who yuck it up with him and ask fluff questions at his frat-boy pressers.
8. Reporters and media outlets obfuscate and equivocate, pretending to ask tough questions but essentially pushing the same narratives they’ve developed and perfected over the past five years, namely, some variation of ‘Bush firm, Dems soft.’ A range of Bush-protecting tactics are put into play, one being to ask ridiculously misleading questions such as ‘Should Bush have the right to protect Americans or should he cave in to Democratic political pressure?’ All the while, the right assaults the ‘liberal’ media for daring to tell anything resembling the truth.
9. Polls will emerge with ‘proof’ that half the public agrees that Bush should have the right to ‘protect Americans against terrorists.’ Again, the issue will be framed to mask the true nature of the malfeasance. The media will use these polls to create a self-fulfilling loop and convince the public that it isn’t that bad after all. The president breaks the law. Life goes on.
10. The story starts blending into a long string of administration scandals, and through skillful use of scandal fatigue, Bush weathers the storm and moves on, further demoralizing his opponents and cementing the press narrative about his ‘resolve’ and toughness. Congressional hearings might revive the issue momentarily, and bloggers will hammer away at it, but the initial hype is all the Democratic leadership and the media can muster, and anyway, it’s never as juicy the second time around…
Rinse and repeat.
It’s a battle of attrition that Bush and his team have mastered. Short of a major Dem initiative to alter the cycle, to throw a wrench into the system, to go after the media institutionally, this cycle will continue for the foreseeable future.” (Salon Premium)
The memorandum, released yesterday by the National Archives, made recommendations concerning a lawsuit against former Attorney General John N. Mitchell over a wiretap he had authorized without a court’s permission in 1970. The government was investigating a plot to destroy underground utility tunnels in Washington and to kidnap Henry A. Kissinger, the national security adviser.
The White House said yesterday that the issues discussed in that memorandum were not the same as those posed by President Bush’s orders to the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on international communications without warrants.” (New York Times )
…the lady doth protest too much.
The NSA, with help from American telecommunications companies, obtained access to streams of domestic and international communications, said the Times in the report late Friday, citing unidentified current and former government officials.” (New York Times ) via Yahoo!)
For centuries, doctors followed Hippocrates’ injunction to hold out hope to patients, even when it meant withholding the truth. But that canon has been blasted apart by modern patients’ demands for honesty and more involvement in their care. Now, patients may be told more than they need or want to know. Yet they still also need and want hope.
In response, some doctors are beginning to think about hope in new ways. In certain cases, that means tempering a too-bleak prognosis. In others, it means resisting the allure of cutting-edge treatments with questionable benefits.” (New York Times )
On one side is the national-security camp, made even more numerous by loyalty to a wartime president. On the other are the small-government civil libertarians who have long held a privileged place within the Republican Party but whose ranks have ebbed since the 2001 terrorist attacks.
The surveillance furor, at least among some conservatives, also has heightened worries that the party is straying from many of its core principles the longer it remains in control of both the White House and Congress.
Conservatives have knocked heads in recent months over the administration’s detainment and treatment of terrorist suspects, and as recently as yesterday over provisions of the Patriot Act. Strains also have grown among conservatives over government spending and whether to loosen U.S. immigration rules.
But the current debate over using the National Security Agency for domestic surveillance — which the administration has defended as legal and necessary — hit a rawer nerve because it pits national-security concerns against a core constitutional right, in this case, the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures.” (Wall Street Journal)
“Study supports move to make professionalism a requirement for graduating from medical school” (EurekAlert) The study examined 235 graduates since 1970 of three medical schools who later underwent disciplinary action by their state medical boards in forty states; they were compared with matched gradautes from the same medical school classes who had not been sanctioned. Unprofessionalism in medical school was much more highly correlated with later disciplinary action than measures of academic performance. The strongest correlate of later disciplinary action was irresponsibility in attendance or patient care as a medical student. I don’t actually find this to be a surprising result. The cultural context of the study is more interesting.
I have noted through my years in the profession that accusing a physicial of “unprofessional” conduct is virtually the most stinging rebuke you can proffer (and, in the interest of full disclosure, I can say that I have been on the receiving end of it from time to time…). Healthcare professionals are conditioned to use that term for its button-pushing power as an insult with a power I would venture to say is unparallelled in any other profession. I think this has something to do with the longstanding notion that being a physician was a cultural signifier of a certain kind of character. Unfortunately, I think this is an outmoded meme and that there is nothing particularly more upstanding about the character of physicians these days than representatives of other professions anymore. Unscrupulousness, money-grubbing, laxity, predatory behavior and profiteering are as incident in the medical field as anywhere else, albeit much more disturbing when you are literally putting your life in someone’s hands. I think this is in large part the basis for the public contemptuousness toward doctors as a profession these days.
In this sense, the researchers’ interest is an anachronism. Cynical me, while I agree that reforming medical school curriculum to stress professionalism would be a worthy goal, I am skeptical about the suggestion carrying any weight or attracting much of a constituency among medical educators and medical school policy-makers in 21st century medical education. It is even less likely that some standard of professionalism — or character — might become a medical school graduation criterion. And, even if the assessment of professionalism were a goal to which there was an interest in aspiring, it would be especially worrisome if, as the article suggests, some attempt was made to operationalize it — ‘that standardized methods should be implemented for both assessing the personal qualities of medical school applicants and predicting their performance.’
I am not sure if the researchers realize how profoundly their results represent an impeachment of one of the current core methods of assessing character and professionalism (at both the levels of getting into medical school and of looking for one’s first job in medicine (“residency”) after graduating from medical school) — the letter of recommendation. As someone who has served on medical school and residency admission committees and been involved in the hiring of physicians, I have found the consideration of reference letters to be a vacuous exercise, both because the substance of what is written is so stereotyped, platitudinous and vague, and because the candidate exercises so much control over the sources of their letters. Even ambivalent letters which attempt to signal concerns about candidates do so obscured behind euphemism and buzzword that is difficult to decode unambiguously. (Here is a tongue-in-cheek but sadly all-too-true, guide to decoding letters of reference, although not specific to medical aspirants.)
Medical reference writers employ a sort of gentlemen’s code akin to the deference which European aristocrats were constrained to show to one another in public merely because of their membership in the noble class. Sniping, backbiting and criticism occurred only behind the scenes and only in a manner that could be protected by plausible deniability. For all the pride that physicians supposedly take in their professionalism, their nobility,, it has not extended to the responsible exercise of the art of recommendation. Perhaps there ought to be a module on writing references in the medical school curriculum?
