Monthly Archives: February 2010

Killer Whale Attack: The Cove star calls for federal investigation of SeaWorld

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The Cove (film)

‘There’s an eerily timely connection between the death of SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau, 40, who was killed Wednesday by the killer whale she was training, and the documentary The Cove, which is the frontrunner to win the Oscar for best documentary feature next Sunday, March 7. The documentary is about dolphins that are slaughtered by fishermen outside a town in Japan after they are rejected by aquatic theme park operators looking for the next dolphin star. The film’s main subject, Ric O’ Barry, trained the famous dolphin Flipper, but has since dedicated his life to freeing dolphins and other sea mammals from theme parks. Today, O’ Barry and David Phillips, of the Earth Island Institute, released a statement about Brancheau’s death, and called for a federal investigation into SeaWorld’s actions surrounding the tragedy.

“It was with great sadness that we learned of the death of Dawn Brancheau, who by all accounts was a loving and talented caretaker for Tilikum (Tilly), the killer whale who took her life at SeaWorld Orlando just days ago,” the said in a statement. “Along with sadness of this tragic event we can’t help feeling anger toward those who insist upon exhibiting these wild creatures in habitats that can drive them to violence. Dependent on sonar/sound to navigate their vast ocean homes, dolphins and whales are in constant state of distress living in cramped pools, bombarded by noise, stressed by food deprivation and forced to perform…” ‘ (EW.com)

I’ve just seen The Cove, which is not to be missed, a damning indictment of an annual Japanese dolphin capture and slaughter the Japanese have gone to great lengths to conceal from the world.

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The Philosophy of Punk Rock Mathematics

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Euclid, Greek mathematician, 3rd century BC, a...

“It is this:

1) People use the average Joe’s poor mathematics as a way to control, exploit, and numerically fuck him over.

2) Mathematics is the subject in which, regardless of what the authorities tell you is true, you can verify every last iota of truth, with a minimum of equipment.

Therefore, if you are concerned with the empowerment of everyday people, and you believe that it’s probably a good idea to be skeptical of authority you could do worse than to develop your skills at being able to talk math in such a way that anyone can ask questions, can express curiosity, can imagine applying it in the most weird-ass off-the-wall ways possible.

This does not entirely mesh well with the actual practice of learning mathematics, because that is mostly time spent alone or in small groups being very very confused almost all the time, but it’s still the bullseye I keep in mind.” — Tom Henderson (Technoccult).

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The Narcissus Society

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“…Thrown together for two weeks at Brooklyn Supreme Court with 22 other jurors, I was struck by how rare it is now in American life to be gathered, physically, with an array of other folk of different ages, backgrounds, skin colors, beliefs, faiths, tastes, education levels and political convictions and be obliged to work out your differences in order to get the job done.

…

America could use more of that kind of experience. As it is, everyone’s shrieking their lonesome anger, burrowing deeper into stress, gazing at their own images — and generating paralysis.” — Roger Cohen (New York Times op-ed)

The Surreal World of Chatroulette

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Una webcam

Image via Wikipedia

“Nothing can really prepare you for the latest online phenomenon, Chatroulette. The social Web site, created just three months ago by a 17-year-old Russian named Andrey Ternovskiy, drops you into an unnerving world where you are connected through webcams to a random, fathomless succession of strangers from across the globe. You see them, they see you. You talk to them, they talk to you. Or not. The site, which is gaining thousands of users a day and lately some news coverage, has a faddish feel, but those who study online vagaries see a glimpse into a surreal future, a turn in the direction of the Internet.” (New York Times )

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80 Extreme Advertisements

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Of course, an industry that survives only if it captures your attention almost instantaneously will have its extremes. These are ads that conceptually or visually shock. Since the ad industry are today’s de facto experts in the collective unconscious, this can be read as a catalogue of many or most* of the dominant categories of revulsion and offensiveness to which we respond. (*To my knowledge, no one has used goatse imagery in advertising…) (Onextrapixel).

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Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead

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“The Grateful Dead Archive, scheduled to open soon at the University of California at Santa Cruz, will be a mecca for academics of all stripes: from ethno­musicologists to philosophers, sociologists to historians. But the biggest beneficiaries may prove to be business scholars and management theorists, who are discovering that the Dead were visionary geniuses in the way they created “customer value,” promoted social networking, and did strategic business planning.” (The Atlantic, March 2010).

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The Death of Fiction?

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from darkness into the light... [08/52]

“After more than a century of founding and subsidizing literary magazines as a vital part of their educational missions, colleges and universities have begun off-loading their publications, citing overburdened budgets and dwindling readership. Despite the potentially disastrous consequences to the landscape of literature and ideas, it’s increasingly hard to argue against. Once strongholds of literature and learned discussion in our country, university-based quarterlies have seen steadily declining subscriber bases since their heyday a half-century ago—and an even greater dent in their cultural relevance.” (Mother Jones)

John R. Bowen: Nothing To Fear

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LONDON - JULY 11: A lady passes through a tim...

“Islam, [numerous recent books] argue, has shocked Europeans, the shock comes from Islamic values, and the clash is unlikely to subside. These three themes—Islamic shock, value conflict, and unending struggle—evoke Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations,” but with added urgency: Muslims are now on the wrong side of the Huntingtonian line. We need to take this argument seriously and understand what is wrong with it. And—to cut right to the chase—it is wrong on every detail that matters.” (Boston Review).

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In case you thought V-Day was just about hearts and flowers

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NEW ORLEANS - APRIL 12: Playwright Eve Ensler ...

V-Day is a global movement [founded by writer and performance artist Eve Ensler] to stop violence against women and girls. V-Day is a catalyst that promotes creative events to increase awareness, raise money and revitalize the spirit of existing anti-violence organizations. V-Day generates broader attention for the fight to stop violence against women and girls, including rape, battery, incest, female genital mutilation FGM and sexual slavery.Through V-Day campaigns, local volunteers and college students produce annual benefit performances of The Vagina Monologues, A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and A Prayer, and screenings of V-Day’s documentary Until The Violence Stops, to raise awareness and funds for anti-violence groups within their own communities. 2009 V-Day events had the option to introduce a new V-Day theatrical event, Any One Of Us: Words From Prison, which reveals the connection between women in prison and the violence that often brings them there. This new event brings forth raw voices of fierceness and honesty written by women from prisons across the nation and performed by local women. In 2009, over 4200 V-Day benefit events took place produced by volunteer activists in the U.S. and around the world, educating millions of people about the reality of violence against women and girls.

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What Came ‘Before’ the Big Bang?

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Leading Physicist Presents a Radical Theory: “String theorists Neil Turok of Cambridge University and Paul Steinhardt, Albert Einstein Professor in Science and Director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science at Princeton believe that the cosmos we live in was actually created by the cyclical trillion-year collision of two universes (which they define as three-dimensional branes plus time) that were attracted toward each other by the leaking of gravity out of one of the universes.” (Daily Galaxy)

Feckless Hypocrisy Dept.

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United States President Barack Obama signs int...

Are GOPers Deliberately Lying About the Stimulus? “At the White House this week, the main narrative in the press room was this: Has President Barack Obama lost the message war over the $862 billion stimulus? Noting the one-year anniversary of the enactment of that legislation, reporters again and again asked press secretary Robert Gibbs some version of this question. What could the guy say? Especially when the answer is yes. He’s not going to concede the White House got its clock cleaned by the feckless congressional Republicans on this front — even though public opinion polls apparently show that there’s only person in the entire United States of America who believes the Recovery Act has created jobs. So Gibbs repeatedly said that it’s understandable that at a time of nearly 10 percent unemployment most Americans are skeptical that Obama’s stimulus package did much good — no matter that economists widely credit it for spurring part of the recent economic growth and that it’s darn obvious that the package did fund private sector projects that spawned jobs and that it prevented teachers, firefighters, cops, and others from being canned.

Still, Gibbs couldn’t escape the journos who were fixated on this political story and who wanted to squeeze an admission of defeat out of the White House. There’s nothing wrong with a who’s-up/who’s down story. After all, a White House is responsible for implementing and promoting its policies. But there was a bigger story at hand: not who won the battle of the stimulus, but who was right?” (Politics Daily)

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Why is the Obama Administration Rolling Over on This One?

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Seal of the Central Intelligence Agency of the...

DOJ Review Finds No Misconduct by Memo Authors (New York Times ). The egregious misconduct of Jay Bybee and John Yoo, two DOJ attorneys under Bush, who essentially green-lighted the Bush administration’s torture practices by some legal sleight-of-hand, should have lost them their licenses, as an earlier DOJ review had established. But it has been overruled by a new finding by a senior DOJ lawyer that it was merely ‘bad judgment’. As you know, Obama has already proclaimed that CIA interrogators who relied on the memo to guide their interrogation practices will not be prosecuted, save for ongoing criminal investigations into a handful of cases in which prisoners died during interrogation.

President Obama campaigned on a pledge to abolish waterboarding but left it open whether there would be consequences to the Bush torturers. I would love to get an insider’s views on the wheeling and dealing that must have happened in the back rooms of Washington to make this one go away. In my opinion, ceding the moral high ground on this one ought not to be an acceptable price paid in the interest of bipartisanship! Senator Patrick Leahy is not amused, however, and plans to conduct hearings on the matter next week.

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People treat one another better in nice-smelling rooms

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Visions. Mason's Wife. Surrealism . Nellie Vin

New Research: “The mere scent of a clean-smelling room can take people down a virtuous road, compelling them to choose generosity over greed and charity over apathy. Meanwhile, the darkness of a dimmed room or a pair of sunglasses can compel people towards selfishness and cheating.” (Not Exactly Rocket Science)

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Democrats and Republicans Can Be Differentiated by Their Faces

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WASHINGTON - APRIL 28: U.S. Sen. Arlen Specte...

Abstract: “Here we found that individuals’ political affiliations could be accurately discerned from their faces. In Study 1, perceivers were able to accurately distinguish whether U.S. Senate candidates were either Democrats or Republicans based on photos of their faces. Study 2 showed that these effects extended to Democrat and Republican college students, based on their senior yearbook photos. Study 3 then showed that these judgments were related to differences in perceived traits among the Democrat and Republican faces. Republicans were perceived as more powerful than Democrats. Moreover, as individual targets were perceived to be more powerful, they were more likely to be perceived as Republicans by others. Similarly, as individual targets were perceived to be warmer, they were more likely to be perceived as Democrats.” (PLoS ONE).

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R.I.P. Fred Morrison

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Creator of Frisbee Dies at 90: “Walter Fredrick Morrison, who at 17 sent the lid of a popcorn tin skimming through the air of a California backyard and as an adult remade the lid in plastic, in the process inventing the simple, elegant flying disc known today as the Frisbee, died Tuesday at his home in Monroe, Utah. He was 90.” (New York Times obituary)

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Revising Book on Disorders of the Mind

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List of psychiatric medications

FmH readers know of my preoccupation with psychiatric diagnosis, its follies and abuses, about which I am more likely to rant here than any other topic (other than George W. bush and his administration). Today, the American Psychiatric Association posted on the web the details fo the next proposed revision, version V, to the DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), which is the ‘bible’ of accepted psychiatric diagnoses and their criteria. DSM-V is currently scheduled to come out in 2013 after a period of public comment on the revisions and several years of field trials. The release date has already been pushed back because of controversy about the proposals and the revision process, some of which is pointed to in this NYTimes.com piece.Several different things happen in these revisions. First, the universe of existing mental illnesses is reparsed and some of the afflicted end up going into different pigeonholes. By and large, this is a trend I welcome, as the new distinctions made, and the old distinctions collapsed and erased, appear to be generally in line with the clinical experience of frontline practitioners like myself who spend all our time actually treating the mentally ill. Some of my pet peeves, like the overdiagnosis of attention deficit disorder, of childhood bipolar disorder, and of posttraumatic stress disorder, may be improved. As Gregory Bateson defined it, information is a “difference that makes a difference”, and some of the refined distinctions here will of course be more useful to psychiatric research than to practice, but by and large I find them meaningful.

However, the other thing that goes on from revision to revision of the DSM is a proliferation of diagnoses, leading to a relentless expansion of the scope and incidence of mental disorders among the population. This is what has been referred to as the medicalization of ‘normal’ human variability and of personality differences. If a broader net is cast and more people are diagnosable with mental disorders, you can imagine some of the consequences, which include the increasing use of medications for more and more benign variations; changes in social stigmatization; insurance reimbursement for various states of distress; and various diminished responsibility defenses in criminal proceedings. More profoundly, we are rewriting the concepts of personal responsibility and autonomy and the balance between free will and determinism.

I already have far too much work to do to welcome such a broader net, but then again I don’t make a fortune on the basis of how many prescriptions are written. (Estimates are that anywhere from 50-70% of those working on the revisions derive substantial income or research funding from the pharmaceutical industry.)

Tonight, because one of their reporters has been a reader of FmH, I was interviewed by the BBC about my impressions about the DSM-V proposals. It remains to be seen whether I gave them any juicy quotes they can use.

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Blame the childish, ignorant American public—not politicians—for our political and economic crisis

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WASHINGTON, D.C. - JANUARY 20: Crowds look at...

Jacob Weisberg: “In trying to explain why our political paralysis seems to have gotten so much worse over the past year, analysts have rounded up a plausible collection of reasons including: President Obama’s tactical missteps, the obstinacy of congressional Republicans, rising partisanship in Washington, the blustering idiocracy of the cable-news stations, and the Senate filibuster, which has devolved into a super-majority threshold for any important legislation. These are all large factors, to be sure, but that list neglects what may be the biggest culprit in our current predicament: the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.” Slate Magazine

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Phil Agre found

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In November, I wrote about his disappearance. As someone who was a participant in and subscriber to his ‘Red Rock Eaters’ mailing list for the duration, I wanted to repost the missing person’s alert about him to spread the word. He was certainly someone who would know how to drop off the grid if he wished to, but I worried, as did many, that something more dire had happened to him.Now the UCLA police dept. posts this update (pdf).

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