Daily Archives: 15 Jun 06

Grim View of a Nation at the End of Days

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Dark Ages America, by Morris Berman reviewed: “This is the sort of book that gives the Left a bad name.

In Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire, the cultural historian Morris Berman delivers a vituperative, Spenglerian screed that makes Michael Moore seem like a rah-rah American cheerleader: a screed that describes this country as ‘a cultural and emotional wasteland,’ suffering from ‘spiritual death’ and intent on exporting its false values around the world at the point of a gun; a republic-turned-empire that has entered a new Dark Age and that is on the verge of collapsing like Rome.” (New York Times )

Study Reveals Biochemical Signature Of Cocaine Craving In Humans

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“‘Drug craving triggered by cues, such as the sight, smell, and other sensory stimuli associated with a particular drug like cocaine, is central to addiction and poses an obstacle to successful therapy for many individuals,’ says NIDA Director Nora D. Volkow, lead author on the study and former Associate Laboratory Director for life sciences research at Brookhaven Lab. ‘Today we can actually see increases in specific brain activities that are linked to this experience. If we can understand the mechanisms related to cue-induced craving, we can develop more effective treatment strategies to counteract it.'” (ScienceDaily)

Remembering Kitty Genovese

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You may not remember her; I do, both because her 1964 murder outside her apartment block had a profound effect on psychology and because, at the time, I was a 12-year old living less than a mile from where it happened. The story has it that her murder was witnessed by 38 neighbors, none of whom called the police, supposedly because each thought another would do so. It is the basis for the well-known psychological principle of the ‘bystander effect’ in which individual responsibility is diffused by experiencing an event as part of a crowd. Now, Mind Hacks describes a revisionist history of what really happened.

The Mark of the Bust

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“Recent large increases in foreign official holdings indicate that foreign private investors see fewer attractive places to put their money in the American economy. They could presage a significant fall in the price of American assets, stocks (witness the recent drops in American stock markets) and bonds and real estateand all, and a hard landing for a world economy still floating on the crest of cheap credit.” — Martin Mayer, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution and author of The Fate of the Dollar (New York Times op-ed)

Global Image of the U.S. Is Worsening, Survey Finds

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“As the war in Iraq continues for a fourth year, the global image of America has slipped further, even among people in some countries closely allied with the United States, a new opinion poll has found.” (New York Times )

No surprises in this Pew Research Center survey. We should probably stop talking about “countries closely allied” with the US; it is only their governments that support US hegemonism, not thier people.