Bush makes this clumsy denial just like he told us all how reprehensible leaks are. Furthermore, ‘speculative’ predictions do not necessarily prove false.

Fred Kaplan decodes our options as follows (highly telescopic; read the article):

“So-called near-death experiences — the widely reported sensations, in times of peril, of floating above the body, seeing a white light, and having a sensation of peace — may be related to poorly regulated arousal systems in the brain, according to researchers here.” (MedPage Today) Yes, I think it would be fair to call near-death a state of poorly-regulated arousal…

The article makes much of the fact that most people today know the word is derogatory but few feel it is vulgar, being largely ignorant of its origin as a term for a condom. I was amazed to find that the Oxford English Dictionary dates the term back only to 1967, with the first noted use to mean ‘despicable’ in 1971. I was a child in the late ’50’s and early ’60’s experimenting, as we all did unless we were brought up in the finest homes, with vulgarity and scatology, and already back then calling someone a ‘scumbag’ brought that frisson of using a forbidden word otherwise reserved for c-words, s-words, b-words and f-words. Maybe it took awhile to diffuse across the Atlantic, although it has always been my impression that British vulgarity is far more colorful and evocative than the somewhat sad, pitiful hackneyed version in the U.S.

In any case, there is ongoing debate about whether dictionaries should reflect common usage or define normative usage; whichever it is, most dictionary entries on ‘scumbag’ these days have the disparaging but not the vulgar connotation (good thing, because otherwise would we find the word in the dictionary at all?). And so it goes with most vulgarity? It feels as if something is lost when saying ‘fuck’ does not bring on a little shiver blending daring, delight and alarm.

On the other hand, I have wondered if this is not a benefit of the sexual revolution, in a sense. If sex is less shameful, do sexual connotations (and references to other bodily functions) become less disparaging? Since people need expletives, in a sense, could it be that the pejorative connotations of f-words, c-words etc. are more highly conserved than the sexualized flavor? In being wistful about the thrill of uttering a forbidden word, and in conveying the same attitude to my children, am I showing my stripes as a ‘prude’??

More: People interested in this issue would do well to browse through the contents of Maledicta, ‘the international journal of verbal aggression’, available here.

Readers of FmH know that, as a psychiatrist, I am deeply concerned about the travesty we have made of diagnosis, largely driven by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). There are many reasons it is flawed, but one of the most important is how far away the basis of classification it shapes is from person-centered knowledge. Now the disenfranchised wing of the profession of psychiatry, the psychoanalytically-driven proponents of the talking cure, fire back, with The Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (PDM), a personality-based system of diagnosis and classification. Given their relative lack of power in Western psychiatry in the 21st century, I doubt it will go far, but it is a welcome effort, and I have placed my pre-order.

A number of webloggers have already linked to this sensible primer by Leslie Harpold. I imagine it is because we recognize our having lost this gracious art ourselves and feeling moved to reclaim it?

Seymour Hersh, one of our most important intelligence assets, writes in the New Yorker on Bush administration plans for the coming war with Iran. A series of quiet meetings have begun and the Iraq situation is being replicated in that only the converted are being preached to and Bush comes out of it taking the lack of dissent as encouragement. Ahmadinejad is routinely demonized as a ‘Hitler’ by this administration which does not know the meaning of the word diplomacy. Prejudice, hysteria, xenophobia and bellicosity have taken the place of any coherent threat assessment about how soon Iran could attain nuclear weapons capacity and what kind of danger that would represent. Just as in the buildup to the Iraq invasion, analysis of intelligence is being bypassed and raw data cherrypicked to fit preconceived agendas. For example, much is being made of supposed Teherani contacts of A.Q.Khan, the proliferation-mongering so-called ‘father of the Pakistani atomic bomb’ now under house arrest in Islamabad. It is unlikely the U.S. will allow the I.A.E.A., U.N. regulatory processes, and European diplomatic efforts to move forward any more than we did before moving on Iraq.

Covert teams of US forces are on the ground in Iran, Hersh reports, and the Air Force is drawing up target lists for a massive air campaign, the aim of which is regime change. The air force has begun flying simulated bombing missions which have all the earmarks of nuclear weapons delivery. Hersh argues that the dispersal and burial of Iranian nuclear facilities combined with the lack of intelligence about which surface manifestations hide strategic resources makes the use of the ‘bunker-busting’ nuclear weapons all but inevitably necessary. Since a prolonged bombing campaign based on a principle of attrition would likely provoke Muslim anger and retaliatory strikes against U.S., Israeli and other European interests around the world, a decisive strike that decapitates Iranian assets in one fell swoop becomes more likely in this messianic vision. Furthermore, we certainly do not have the resources for a prolonged ground war, making a definitive first strike the only feasible option. But there are apparently serious misgivings even among the Joint Chiefs of Staff about planning for the nuclear option. Opponents are shouted down and some are thinking of resigning, which will of course solidify the hardline stance in the administration.

Again, I can’t speak with enough urgency about the necessity for everyone to read the Hersh article and related coverage of what we are planning in Iran. Reach your own conclusions about whether this seems the urgent threat I feel it is. If you believe so, it is time to come together in a massive new movement focused on stopping the administration madmen from a course of action that will result in a nuclear strike on Iran. If we think the world as we knew it ended on Sept. 11, 2001, just wait; could the confrontation be coming as soon as this summer, to help the Republicans out in the November midterm elections? Or certainly before the fall of 2008.

Throughout my life, I have been much more or an activist (literal meaning: “one who is active“, right?) than during the mounting outrages of the Bush years, despite my growing conviction this administration’s insanity presents the greatest threat to life as we know it that I have seen in my lifetime. Somehow I justified my complacency by saying that my weblogging activities are a sufficiently potent form of activism, spreading the word (yeah, right to my all of 300 or so daily visitors??). But none of the righteous weblogging indignation of a community of writers far more articulate and passionate than I am stopped the tragic debacle of the destruction of Iraq. Part of the problem is how inured we have become to the outrages of the Bush era as they have accumulated unceasingly. But the outrages to which we are ramping up now are transcendent, and now is the time for far more. What can you, we, do to make sure the administration does not pursue this mad course of action?

“The Pentagon wants to deploy a host of exotic new weapons systems. Critics say too much of this costly hardware is designed to fight the wrong war.” (Popular Mechanics)

“(as judged by notoriety, absurdity, and number of people duped)” (The Museum of Hoaxes) The article also has a link to this page, about speculation about the origins of April Fool’s Day. An interesting theory connects it to the calendar reform in 16th century Europe. Those who declined to switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, and thus continued to celebrate the new year at the end of March instead of the newly decreed day of January 1st, were supposedly subject to ridicule and practical jokes at that time.

The surfacing of the ‘Gospel of Judas’ may or may not rock Christianity:

Critics dismiss the new document as a Gnostic text written so long after the fact that it can have no claim to accuracy. This will only ring true for those who try to sort Biblical text into the manmade and the revelatory, excluding the former and attempting to base their faith on the promise of the latter. I have always found that a tragic flaw in true believers. A central fact about Christianity is the lack of contemporaneous documentation; everything known about Jesus is retrospective, and all historical texts have a viewpoint and an agenda. It also seems to me that this has some relationship to the core tension between the concepts of Jesus as a man and as God made flesh.

The notion of the ‘good Judas’ is not at all unfamiliar. I first encountered it for example in Kazantzakis’ stunning Last Temptation of Christ (the novel, not necessarily the film…), which may be why in my mind the notion of Jesus asking Judas to take on the role of the betrayer is indelibly wedded to the notion of Christ’s humanity. I think it is likely that this concept, indeed this document, is not so much being freshly discovered as it is emerging from centuries of suppression by the orthodoxy. And what agendas underlie its reemergence? The National Geographic Society is rumored to have paid $1 million for the publication rights…

[And, no, I have no idea how this ties in with Dan Brown’s ideas, which I have not read…]

A number of webloggers have already linked to this sensible primer by Leslie Harpold. I imagine it is because we recognize our having lost this gracious art ourselves and feeling moved to reclaim it?

Wouldn’t the sentence “I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and and and and and Chips in my ‘Fish and Chips’ sign” have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and and, and and and and, and and and and, and and and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?

If you didn’t already have enough reasons to avoid soft drinks (Yahoo! News)

In addition to my longstanding RSS feed, I have just set up a prettier FeedBurner feed here.

…Preventing Human-to-Human Transmission (Scientific American)

Mind Hacks comments on a strange Guardian story of a man who is still ‘a wreck’ seven years after he stopped his nine-year binge on MDMA (XTC; Ecstasy).

It reveals some of the methodological problems in establishing how harmful MDMA is, since (a) we may not be entitled to extrapolate from extreme use to more moderate recreational use; (b) one has to rule out that observed effects are from the MDMA rather than any concurrent use of other substances. But the most telling point is their last one — “what kind of man would take 40,000 ecstasy pills?”

And so, again, we face the age-old psychiatric equivalent of the chicken and the egg question. Does drug use per se cause the psychopathology (on any of a number of measures) found in substance abusers; or does the psychopathology come first? Durng my residency, I remember one year during which I was supervised by two senior luminaries of psychiatry whose offices were at opposite ends of the corridor I inhabited. The late Norm Zinberg claimed that the psychological alterations were results of the ‘drug, set and setting’ of the drug user; and Ed Khantzian claimed that much of drug abuse was ‘self-medication’, knowingly or unknowingly, of an underlying mental disorder, and thus that the drug abuse could be stabilized or prevented by treatment of the underlying condition. A corollary of this was the ‘drug of choice’ hypothesis, which said that one gravitated to a particular preferred drug in accordance with the nature of one’s underlying diagnosis. Being literally (and memorably) caught in the middle, I sometimes think that my real psychiatric training that year consisted in learning how to be diplomatic, synthetic and integrative in the face of these insistent, and mutually incompatible, didactic stances…. [Here, by the way, Khantzian writes a brief remembrance of Zinberg…]

Related: The Trip of a Lifetime: a new generation researches the medical benefits of the deprecated hallucinogenic drug LSD. (BBC)

Benetton’s magazine Colors has a special issue on the treatment of mental illness around the world. Ignore their pompous commentary and focus on the striking photographs.

Camera connected directly into optic nerves; “I just call myself the robo-chick…”

Firefox Past 10 Percent Share (BetaNews)

Within three years, 95% of the state’s uninsured will have health coverage under the provisions of the bill! Of course, the biggest political compromise required to get the bill through was the obvious one — it bypasses a single-payor system and perpetuates the historical accident by which health coverage in the US has been largely an employee benefit. The bill establishes a per-employee penalty for any employer that does not provide health insurance for its employees, which as I understand it will subsidize the state free-care pool. Political maneuvering has whittled the size of the penalty down from a proposed $800 to only $295 a year, and Romney (who has line-item veto power on budget measures) says he will excise that provision all together, although that is a line item veto that the legislature will override.

Chronological Oddity to Hit Digital Clock (Yahoo! News)

The Ultimate Consequences of Bush’s Coming War Crimes: “I recoil from my own logic. No sane person can look at the possibility of such horrors and not shiver with revulsion. But recent history shows that there are no sane people making these decisions. When sanity again prevails in the White House, I will gladly dismiss the unthinkable as impossible. For now, I fear Armageddon.” — Jon Steinberg (Raw Story) The short version: Iranian military capabilities would make an American fleet sitting ducks. We need to question our assumption that even Bush is not crazy enough not to find that a deterrent, though. Given his administration’s inherent immorality, its need for a war to resurrect jingoistic support, belief in preemption and Manichaean convictions about the Axis of Evil,

The only preemptive power the American people have would be an explosive antiwar outburst dwarfing the Vietnam-era movement, encompassing all outraged right-thinking Americans and bringing the war machine to a halt with acts of resistance, disobedience and rage. Before it is too late. Do we have it in us?

My webhost changed a security setting that broke Blogger’s publishing efforts for the past two days. Finally tracked down the problem, and regular updates should now resume…

A book review by Malcolm Gladwell (The New Yorker).

Walt and Mearsheimer singled out Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz as an apologist for the ‘Israel Lobby.’ Dershowitz’s response, in part, was to smear them for using quotes he says were drawn from Neo-Nazi hate sites (New York Sun). Dershowitz is not saying they originate with neo-Nazis, just that they are ‘commonly found’ there. I don’t know how he knows it, but he insists that “…[the authors] cite them to the original sources, in order to disguise the fact that they’ve gotten them from hate sites.” The fact that David Duke lauds the paper, as the Sun delights in publicizing, tars with the same brush. Of course, the London Review of Books, which published Walt and Mearsheimer’s article, has to defend itself against accusations of anti-Semitism (Guardian.UK )as well.

As FmH readers will discern, I have become unbearably bored by coverage of what is wrong with American foreign policy. Enough already; it does no good, even if the damnable public opinion polls establish to their heart’s content that the public have finally turned against the Iraqi debacle (and, BTW, there is far less evidence that the public are seriously questioning the broader premise of the War onTerror® as a whole…), there seems to be no way that translates into stopping the killing.

I normally derive a great deal of satisfaction from saying ‘I told you so’ [hint: FmH’s archives go back to November, 1999] but am suffused with impotent rage that no one was listening even to far more cogent voices than mine who were horrified from the moment it was clear what a central role imperious bullshitting bullying adventurism would play in the Bush administration’s gameplan.

What’s wrong with the psyche of the American people for swallowing all the pig swill for so long is an immensely more relevant question, especially because they are about to do it again.

“Imagine the tallest 25 buildings in the world all in one skyline… here they are complete with a key on what’s what in scale standing alongside each other.” Click on the image to enlarge it.

Wikipedia runs down the notable net hoaxes of the day.

Wikipedia runs down the notable net hoaxes of the day.