Intel-based Mac boots Windows XP

Via the null device, this Guardian piece about the latest rock revival genre: soft rock, believe it or not.

Okay, the joke is funny, but the more intriguing discussion in this old CNN article is about cultural differences in what is found to be funny, especially between American and European humor:

I had previously blinked to the world’s funniest joke article but revisited it after reading this recent Ask MetaFilter thread asking people to post their funniest joke that is not offensive to any class of people. Some of them are to laugh out loud over.

What is to become of NPR now that it has some resources? (New York Times )

Intel-based Mac boots Windows XP

Place a link to this page full of nonexistent email addresses somewhere on your web page and help defeat spambots.

“Lawyers for two airlines being sued by 9/11 victims prompted a federal attorney to coach witnesses in the Zacarias Moussaoui death penalty trial so the government’s case against the al-Qaida conspirator would not undercut their defense, victims’ lawyers allege.” (Free Republic)

“Watch in amazement as this GIF that Russ prepared shows Bush’s approval ratings plunge lower and lower month by month. ” (Daily Kos)

Andy Budd’s ingenious implementation of iTunes’ smart playlists:

A new CD release of Edward Elgar’s music conducted by the composer includes a 1933 overture in “accidental stereo”.

(Some of these findings, of course, support the old assertion that ignorance is bliss. Given that the study deems around one third of the American public truly happy, what does that say about the American ignorance quotient??)

Does rodent brain study point to a candidate model for ’cause’ of Alzheimer’s disease? The derivative of amyloid-beta precursor protein (APP), which is linked to the “plaques” and “neurofibrillary tangles” that are characteristic of the Alzheimer’s brain, is well on the way to meeting Koch’s postulates, the formal requirements that allow us to say that a substance has a causal role in a disease. First, it is found regularly in the brains of animals affected with a form of memory loss that is considered an animal model of Alzheimer’s. It is not found in the brains of unaffected animals. When extracted from affected brains and given to healthy animals, they develop signs of memory loss. And the same protein appears in human brains. The mild cognitive deficits which precede the development of fullblown Alzheimer’s dementia could be caused by this protein demonstrated to cause transient memory deficits in rodents. It might be the first step in the cascade of changes to brain proteins that underlie the degenerative process in Alzheimer’s. If this finding is borne out, it holds out the promise of early detection of the Alzheimer’s disease process before dramatic cognitive deficits develop. Identification of the protein could also lead to the development of medications which block its actions or vaccines to immunize patients against the development of Alzheimer’s. (MedPage Today)

“Democratic senators, filing in for their weekly caucus lunch yesterday, looked as if they’d seen a ghost.” — Dana Millbank (Washington Post)

A controversial new theory depicts pregnancy not as a harmonious relationship between the pregnant mother and the fetus she is carryng but as a struggle over the nutrients she will provide.

Haig argues that evolutionary selection should favor fetuses the invasiveness of whose sprouting placental blood vessels is more effective in wresting nutrients from their hosts, while mothers who restrain the incursion to have several successful pregnancies to spread their genes would similarly have an advantage. This theory appealingly explains the baffling condition of late-pregnancy high blood pressure called pre-eclampsia, which affects around 6% of pregnancies, as an extreme version of this struggle in which the fetus causes maternal hypertension to pump more blood in through the relatively low-pressure placenta. But be sure to read to the end of the article for the even more intriguing discussion of how this maternal-fetal conflict, played out in the arena of control of fetal gene expression, may shape the offspring’s behavior and social functioning postnatally.

Will ’round things out’ with a moment of observance a little after 1:59 this afternoon. And it is also Einstein’s birthday.

“…[T]he theory put forth in Freakonomics examined why crime had fallen all over the country, not just in New York, and one of the many arguments against “broken windows” as a major cause was the fact that such innovative policing wasn’t being practiced elsewhere—and yet crime was falling in those places as well. A smaller point to also consider: Gladwell left out one other major reason that, according to Levitt’s research, crime did begin to fall in the 1990’s: the waning of the violent crack trade.”

“Deconstructing the most sensationalistic recent findings in Human Brain Imaging, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Psychopharmacology“. Recent discussions about the fMRI lie detection hullabaloo and the neurological correlates of empathy, among others.

According to US District Judge Leonie Brinkema, it may be “very difficult for this case to go forward” after prosecution lawyers admitted they had coached prospective witnesses in direct defiance of her order that they be shielded from any advance exposure to trial proceedings. She said she had “never seen such an egregious violation of a rule on witnesses” and considered, at the least, excluding the seven witnesses involved, who prosecutors say are “half of the government case.” She could also bar the government from seeking the death penalty, which would automatically end the trial and impose a sentence of life without parole on Moussaoui (given his guilty plea), pending a likely government appeal. The judge also indicated that she might reconsider a defense motion for a mistrial on an unrelated issue. Brinkema has been courageously independent-minded from the first in the face of US attempts to trample on his defendent rights. Brinkema also put the Church of Scientology in its place in a momentous 1996 decision.

Think the web is colorblind? Think again [via Bill Hooker]

Lamentation that Milosevic cheats history (CNN ) by dying with no verdict in his $200-million, five-year war crimes trial. Nuremburg was concluded in less than a year. Critics have been frustrated that the prosecutors lumped together the atrocity charges against Milosevic from Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, and that he was allowed to be his own defense attorney and use the trial as his bully pulpit.

Milosevic’s was the second death in recent days of a Serbian in custody in the Hague, and questions abound about whether he suicided (Yahoo! News) and about his longstanding fears (BBC )his food was being poisoned. His post-mortem (with a Serbian pathologist in attendance) takes place today.

Not that the conclusion of the trial would have prevented this, but dying without a verdict against him facilitates his celebration as a hero by ultra-nationalist Serbian elements, even while many Serbians are relieved at his passing. Milosevic has always justified his barbarity as a defense against the victimization of Serbia; if there is widespread sympathy in Serbia for the notion that his death had something to do with maltreatment by the authorities in the Hague, it will become less likely that Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic will ever be extradited for their war crimes.

Nevertheless, most of the world will not grieve the passing of a genocidal monster who blackened the pages of 20th century European history (New York Times ).

If you knew your hereditary makeup predisposed you to increased cardiac risk from your caffeine consumption, would you cut back?

“If you don’t believe you’ll have a good memory when you get older, then you might as well forget about this article.” (Yahoo! News)

I am not sure about the relevance to evolutionary research. The family has a hereditary cerebellar ataxia which makes normal balance impossible. In effect, they represent not where humans are coming from but, with the right mutations impairing brain function, where we’are going to…

Not clear if he disappeared to an earthly destination or otherwise…

Drug companies, as opposed to healthcare agencies, are starting to offer case management to patients (New York Times ), since it is so much in their financial interests that patients continue on their medications as long as possible.

Just as it is so much the function of pharmaceutical company drug representatives to spin the advantages of their products to susceptible doctors, will these case managers begin spinning clinical updates on their patients to their attending physicians in the service of getting the patients on higher doses or longer durations of their companies’ prescriptions?

Lamentation that Milosevic cheats history (CNN ) by dying with no verdict in his $200-million, five-year war crimes trial. Nuremburg was concluded in less than a year. Critics have been frustrated that the prosecutors lumped together the atrocity charges against Milosevic from Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, and that he was allowed to be his own defense attorney and use the trial as his bully pulpit.

Milosevic’s was the second death in recent days of a Serbian in custody in the Hague, and questions abound about whether he suicided (Yahoo! News) and about his longstanding fears (BBC )his food was being poisoned. His post-mortem (with a Serbian pathologist in attendance) takes place today.

Not that the conclusion of the trial would have prevented this, but dying without a verdict against him facilitates his celebration as a hero by ultra-nationalist Serbian elements, even while many Serbians are relieved at his passing. Milosevic has always justified his barbarity as a defense against the victimization of Serbia; if there is widespread sympathy in Serbia for the notion that his death had something to do with maltreatment by the authorities in the Hague, it will become less likely that Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic will ever be extradited for their war crimes.

Nevertheless, most of the world will not grieve the passing of a genocidal monster who blackened the pages of 20th century European history (New York Times ).

You wear them during the nighttime only. They reshape the cornea to reduce the refractive error. Your vision is normalized during the day after you take them out.

After reading about the discovery of a previously unknown asteroid impact crater in Egypt, an Egyptian a Spanish websurfer decides to check it out in Google Earth. In short order, he finds two other previously undiscovered impact craters.

“A motorist was trapped in his car driving at almost 130mph for 60 miles after the accelerator jammed.” (Telegraph.UK) He said he could not turn off the ignition because the power steering would have been disabled.

A few points. Every month from here on out might be a “new low”, it strikes me. And what are the American people waiting for to recognize that the Iraqi civil war is already happening??

Roy Haynes: Attention Getter, on the Beat and Off. Basie was The Man… (New York Times )

According to this Washington Post piece, a majority of Americans think Muslims are disproportionately prone to violence, says a new WaPo-ABC News poll of a thousand random respondents. Racial profiling has won; media coverage and political leaders focus only on extremists and terrorists and the sheeple eat it up.

Malcolm Gladwell responds to those dying to know what he really thinks of Freakonomics, a book for which he wrote a glowing cover blurb. He finds the freakonomic analysis “occasionally frustrating,” he says. His pet peeve is Levitt and Dubner’s highly-touted explanation of the surprise drop in crimes rates in major American cities in the ’90’s in terms of the legalizaiton of abortion. In his own book, Tipping Point, he had favored the so-called Broken Windows theory, in short that crime drops when there are more police on the streets.

Forget for a moment that, in this post, he waffles abit about whether Levitt and Dubner are even conceding or disputing the Broken Windows theory. In the end, he resolves the conflict by appealing to the notion that economic and psychological explanations of behavior do not contradict but complement each other.

Either this is a sophisticated argument that somehow lost me, or it is simplistic, vague and unsatisfying. I suspect the latter. Social scientists have expended endless energy trying to parse the complicated interactions of sociocultural and psychological influences on human behaviors. Gladwell’s assertion that he ‘likes’ psychological explanations better is both abit shamefaced to the extent that he concedes their reductionism, and abit uninsightful about what he himself is up to. Economic explanations inevitably have recourse to the psychological as they dissect how an incentive turns into a motivation. And certain psychological motivations, of course, relate to ‘economic’ incentives. Gladwell’s quibble over how they differ in explaining falling crime rates doesn’t really resolve anything…

And:

The cracks in ‘broken windows’

“A crime-fighting theory that says stopping major crimes begins with stopping small ones has influenced policing strategies in Boston and elsewhere since the 1980s. But scholars are starting to question whether fixing broken windows really fixes much at all.” (Boston Globe) Progressive academic critics seem particularly eager to dismantle ‘broken windows’; finding the war on quality-of-life crime a thinly veiled war on minorities. Champions of ‘broken windows’, notably the egotistical William Bratton, accuse critics of ‘broken windows’ of an anti-cop bias.

The daughter of one of my close friends just generated a scheme to take her dad on a cross-country bicycle trip. I have done a number of long-distance tours in New England and Europe over the years, and have always wanted to go transcontinental but there is no way to carve out the time and the respite from my responsibilities. Jim did it; he and Kate started out yesterday from San Diego on the ride of their lives, and my heart is with them on the road. I will be following their progress through their weblog of the journey, to which the link above points; I look forward to Jim’s articulate and reflective writing.

They are trying to raise money for the Jimmy Fund, a Boston-based cancer charity with a long relationship with cyclists-for-a-cause. If you are inspired to do so, consider sponsoring them with a pledge per mile. You will find a link at their site.

Paul Krugman and Robin Wells, writing in The New York Review of Books, offer a primer on the origins and dimensions of the ‘crisis’, a suggestion (what else? a single-payor system) and an analysis of the likelihood of significant reform.

Kenneth Turan on why Brokeback was beaten out for best picture by Crash. Turan feels the answer is homophobia:

He whines about Crash ‘s being positioned to be a spoiler:

I think it is simpler than that. Brokeback Mountain was recognized for its courageousness — that is why Ang Lee got the director’s award — but Crash was, dramaturgically and cinematographically, just a better, more complicated and ultimately more interesting and more satisfying film. Does that make me a homophobe? If you’ve got a pet issue, you are always going to accuse those who don’t share your passion of (a) not getting it; (b) being prejudiced against it; and (c) being pretentious and superficial for championing a competing issue. It is just not that often that issues are pitted against one another competitively (as the Oscars are wont to do; or should I say, as pundits commenting on the Oscars are wont to do?). We don’t get anywhere debating the relative merits of striking blows against homophobia or racism, and let’s not confuse values with artistic merit (as the Oscars, or the critics, are wont to do). Furthermore, isn’t it after all reductionistic to distill either of these films down to their emblematic issue? A given film looks at human complexity, pathos and motivation more or less successfully regardless of which scenario is the occasion.

Moronic religious fundamentalist opposition to inoculating girls against the strain of human papilloma virus that causes cervical cancer. (BeliefNet thanks to walker)

Wired News:: “…[A]s spies go, George Smiley cold-cocks James Bond every time.”

The reason I clicked on the headline was that I thought it would turn out that it was Bush’s smarmy hypocrisy in visiting a Gandhi memorial, given the blood on his hands from thousands of Iraqi and U.S. dead, which had to be purified away. The priests did the right thing for the wrong reason if they thought it was the dogs who tainted the site.

Wired News:: “…[A]s spies go, George Smiley cold-cocks James Bond every time.”

I entered a post about this phenomenon several years ago; it has taken off since then. The preliminary rounds are finished and you can now participate in a global vote to christen the new seven wonders of the world, from among 21 finalists. There is only one U.S. candidate left in the running, the Statue of Liberty. The whole thing, of course, has no pretense to balance, since voting is restricted to those cognoscenti with internet access. But have at it… How many of these places have you visited? (I count twelve for myself.)

Pay Too Much and You Raise the Alarm (Providence Journal)

“Backyard astronomers, grab your telescopes. Jupiter is growing a new red spot.” (NASA)

Link to an ad Microsoft later pulled about this secret project that has been a matter of speculation for some time. Perhaps to be unveiled tomorrow at the Redmond TechFest. The video shows a range of things this device can do; it might just be the laptop killer my palmtop devices have not turned out to be.

Related: What if Microsoft marketed the iPod?

“…The first case was reported in Europe of a cat dying from the deadly strain of bird flu” (Ireland Online ) as H5N1 continues its westward trek across Europe. The housecat was thought to have eaten an infected bird. Panicky advice to keep your housecats indoor results, prompted by fears that infected cats might be a medium in which the virus mutates to a pandemic strain. Certainly we live in closer proximity to our housecats than to avian vectors in the West, except on poultry farms.

Visual passwords may be a better way to log onto websites than textual ones. Here’s a demonstration.

Related? Unlock your door with a sequence of knocks.

Link to an ad Microsoft later pulled about this secret project that has been a matter of speculation for some time. Perhaps to be unveiled tomorrow at the Redmond TechFest. The video shows a range of things this device can do; it might just be the laptop killer my palmtop devices have not turned out to be.

Related: What if Microsoft marketed the iPod?

My family and I are leaving for distant lands. I will be away from keyboard and monitor for the rest of February. FmH will resume posts as of March 1st.

It often seems that some of the most compelling stories break while I am away from the media and the web. (Let us hope we have not nuked Iran by the time I return.) Please feel free to email me links to anything that pops up before I’m back, especially anything you think I might want to comment on here.

Enjoy the rest of February; see you soon.

[This is an expanded and hopefully more coherent version, with the obvious advantages of some hindsight, of the nascent and inchoate reactions to Cheney’s ‘blunder’ I scribbled yesterday morning. — FmH] Of course the White House played the joke angle on Cheney’s shooting of his hunting partner. It was just a ‘minor’ load of buckshot birdshot and it caused just a ‘minor’ heart attack. If someone had written fiction revolving around the accidental shooting victim suffering a cardiac event, we would consider it too implausible to believe, an old-fashioned clumsy deus ex machina plot device. Just when the v.p. thought it was safe to come out of the brush and take his licks for “peppering” his friend in the face with a little birdshot, the guy has the nerve to have some cardiac ischemia and make it impossible to trivialize the event.

This was no trivial flesh wound, however, if the blast impelled a shotgun pellet all the way to the heart! And we have a White House so obsessed with secrecy and covering its tail that neither Cheney nor Bush made a public statement about the vice president’s crime until Cheney’s flip and blasé remarks on Wednesday. No wonder Scott McClellan was abit testy having sole accountability. What a lousy job, having to defend this dysadministration’s egregious failures! It is of course a tried and true administration tactic, with the footprint of Karl Rove all over it, to shift the blame onto the press for being too interested in an official’s failings, and to obscure the difference between prompt and full disclosure and the Bush cabal’s pitiful excuse for public relations. Sympathetic observers style Cheney as some sort of hero for not being responsive to the dictates of public opinion and not knwtowing to the press. In reality, he betrays his utter contempt for any accountability. “L’état, c’est moi” indeed.

As Sidney Blumenthal (who authored one of the best recent dissections of Cheney’s reign) points out in radio interviews since the shooting, the handling of this event is emblematic of the pathology in the way this administration, and particularly Cheney, exercises power. Blumenthal marvels at the fact that Cheney misled not only the press and the public but the White House as well. (Not that Bush would have done anything about it if he had learned the truth in a timely fashion…) If Bush were anything other than an ineffectual and clueless puppet, he would realize, in the light of this incident if he has not seen it before, that he is treated with contempt by his Shadow President and puppeteer-in-chief.

Another tried and true Rove tactic, of course, is to blame the victim. McClellan tried, obviously given his talking points. Unfortunately, even the hunting lobby, no enemy of the G.O.P., has put a stop to that with an outpouring of straight talk about the responsibilities of the gun user. Clearly, Cheney has no more attention or concern for the rules of gun handling than he does for the rules of anything else. For those who opine that this was “just an accident” and “not a crime”, my nonlegal opinion is that it fits the bill of criminal negligence, although it is somewhat a moot point given how unlikely it is that a prosecutor, a judge or a jury in the state of Texas would try or convict him.

Of course the real reason there was no notification to the press or local authorities until the next day, despite the v.p.’s paltry excuses about how he had no press attaché with him, was probably the scramble there on the ranch to get everyone’s stories in line and confer with Rove about how best to spin it. I imagine Cheney did his best to get someone else to take responsibility but did not succeed. And I imagine he had to wait for his blood alcohol level to zero out before he gave permission to his Secret Service blockade to allow local law enforcement through. The lady certainly did protest too much that there was “no alcohol involved” (later amended to “just one beer”). I found myself fantasizing that Armstrong had to call the local paper to tip them off about the event to preempt Cheney’s bullying everyone to tell a different version of the story, although most people think it was some sort of closing ranks. Blumenthal points out that both Rove and Cheney owe their fortunes to the Armstrong dynasty by the way — Rove’s original Texas consulting work having been bankrolled by Katherine Armostrong’s father, and Cheney being hired into Hallibutron by her mother.

Miguel wrote to point out that WTO Director-General: Pascal Lamy started a weblog/diary with links to a public commenting forum. So far, there are entries from the Ministerial Conference in Hong Kong in December. While some of the comments are merely ingratiating compliments to Lamy, there seems a nascent attemtp to get a dialogue going on the limitations of what the WTO can do; Lamy has acknowledged his frustrations.

Egocentrism and the web: a recent study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that, although people think they have correctly interpreted the tone of emails they receive 90% of the time, they have only random odds (50/50%) of being right. And people think that the tone they intend to use in sending a message will be sensed correctnyl by the receiver around 80% of the time. The researchers suggest that this is because of ‘egocentrism’:

A better term, I think, is ‘subjectivity’. Perception is inevitably shaped by our mindset and expectations. Communicationon the web is quite prone to this trap, it seems. First of all, it is usually pithy and condensed, leaving fewer clues from context. It is a tenet of communication theory that redundancy improves the signal-to-noise ratio, yet those who include more explicit statements of their emotional state (which I find prescient anticipation of the fact that their tone would otherwise be opaque to their readers), such as smileys or written interjections such as “[grin]”, are considered kitschy. Keep watch — the temptation to add these extra clues varies inversely with the average size of a message, being greatest in instant messaging and SMS. In conditions of decreased certainty about the intentions of a stranger interacting with you, it makes evolutionary sense to assume hostility and respond defensively.

Web communication may be more susceptible to this problem for another reason. It is a stereotype of social psychology, although I believe it, that women are on the whole more sensitive nuanced communicators; web communication on the whole has been dominated by males. And recall the speculation several years ago that geekiness is a watered-down version of Asperger’s Syndrome? This is the autistic-spectrum disorder which comes without intellectual impairments and is characterized by some or all of the following: impairment in nonverbal behaviors and gestures to regulate social interaction; impairment in age-appropriate peer relationships; lack of social or emotional reciprocity; restricted, repetitive or stereotypical behavior patterns; etc. This might be a neurological basis for the predominant insensitivity to nonverbal factors in composing and interpreting web communications. (Wired News via walker)

As a friend wrote me today, you really can’t make this stuff up. (Reuters)

In western countries, it is usually no safer than tap water but can cost 10,000 times more. The energy consumption, raw materials for the petroleum-based plastic bottles in which it is sold, and transportation costs associated with its production induce massive costs. Bottling water for export has also actually induced water shortages in some regions of the developing world. And increasingly, the bottled-water market has been taken over by the multinational beverage corporations. Even if you started drinking bottled water back when it was “spring water”, don’t imagine it is anymore. Much bottled water started out as tap water, often with minerals of dubious value added. In many places, the quality of drinking water is regulated more stringently than that of the bottled water people drink instead. A fool and his money are soon parted, the saying goes. If you are concerned about the health or the taste of your home water, a far better solution is at-home filtration; a matter of true trickle-down economics, it seems to me. (Yahoo! News)

A seven-year study of aspartame (NutraSweet) comes down on the side of cancer risk. Unlike prior aspartame studies, Dr Morando Soffritti’s group from Bologna used dosage ranges in rats which, mg. per kg. were in the range of what a heavy diet soda drinker might consume… and these resulted in increased rates of leukemias, lymphomas and other tumors, although the New York Times piece does not say how much the relative risk was increased. Predictably, the Calorie Control Council — an artificial-sweetener industry trade group with the manufacturers’ interests, not those of consumers of low-calorie foods, at heart — objects. One of their points is that the rats exposed to the aspartame had been allowed to live until their natural deaths, longer than the two-year standard established by the United States government’s National Toxicology Program, so the cancers could have been from causes other than the aspartame. Pretty absurd objection, first, because I am confident that the methodology compared cancer rates with known background rates in rats. And many studies which are investigating subtly-developing delayed effects will appear to have negative findings if the duration of the study is arbitrarily limited.

The Soffritti study was motivated by inadequacies in the original pharmaceutical industry studies of the ’70’s used to establish the safety of the additive. Incidentally, for a decade encompassing much of the approval process for aspartame, Searle was headed by none other than Donald Rumsfeld. The FDA had found that the Searle studies had been so poorly conceived and executed that it had asked the Justice Dept. to open a grand jury investigation into whether they were fraudulent. Lo and behold, Samuel Skinner, the U.S. attorney handling the investigation, was hired by a law firm which had a plum contract with Searle and later appointed George W. Bush’s transportation secretary. The deputy who handled the investigation after Skinner left was also hired by the same law firm. A grand jury has never been convened. An independent panel reviewing Searle’s own data concluded that one of the studies had shown an increased incidence of brain tumors in rats fed aspartame and suggested that approval of the additive be withheld pending further studies. They were overruled by an FDA commissioner who granted approval to aspartame a short while after his appointment. Shortly after, he left and joined the public relations firm which represented Searle. But the Calorie Control Council says it is absurd to think that Searle was trying to influence government regulation with lucrative job offers. Looking at one five-year period of aspartame studies in medical journals, one critic found that, while 74 of 74 industry-funded studies found that the additive is safe, 84 of 92 independently funded articles identified health concerns.

In my own field of psychiatry, many practitoners feel that aspartame exacerbates mood and anxiety disorder symptoms and that treatment is easier if it is eliminated from the patient’s diet. Aspartame is made up of the two amino acids phenylalanine and aspartic acid, the former of which is speculated to upset neurotransmitter balance. The carcinogenicity studies speculate that the morbidity and mortality may be accounted for by the metabolism of aspartame to methanol and thence to the known carcinogen formaldehyde.

The abstract and full text of the Soffritti study are available here, from Environmental Health Perspectives.

Laura Bush, fed her lines on ABC News, responded that yes, indeed, Hilary Clinton’s criticism of her husband was “out of bounds”. She suggested Clinton exercise somewhat more empathy in light of her own experience as First Lady. What disingenuous hypocrisy. Susan G’s commentary on Daily Kos just about says it all:

Laura Bush, fed her lines on ABC News, responded that yes, indeed, Hilary Clinton’s criticism of her husband was “out of bounds”. She suggested Clinton exercise somewhat more empathy in light of her own experience as First Lady. What disingenuous hypocrisy. Susan G’s commentary on Daily Kos just about says it all:

‘“Psychiatric drugs restored Nia’s sanity and destroyed her beauty, and she doesn’t mind.” This narrative co-authored by a young psychiatrist depicts the poignancy of a 17 year-old young woman whose tormenting psychotic symptoms are treated with the antipsychotic drug olanzapine at the price of obesity. The psychiatrist is concerned, makes an unsuccessful attempt to switch the patient to a different antipsychotic drug, resulting in a reemergence of her symptoms, and reluctantly resumes the use of the olanzapine. He feels the patient is caught in a Faustian dilemma of being either ‘beautiful and mad’ or ‘fat and sane.’ This article is being savaged around the web as an illustration of the psychiatrist’s sexist attitude and a reflection of society’s prejudicial attitude about obesity. As a psychiatrist, I am feeling a wee bit defensive, and, with all due respect and support for the senses in which “fat is” indeed “a feminist issue”, I feel that is not a fair characterization of the article or its point.

First, let me say that the authors can certainly be faulted for the flavor of salivating over the young woman’s beauty, but they are partially depicting the way others in her life saw her. The psychiatrist, in puzzling over her Faustian tradeoff, is not so much imposing his feelings about the value of her physical attractiveness as he is curious about the fact that, when she responds to the medicine and puts the weight on, she does not seem to be bothered. The feminist critics assume that that is because her beauty is unimportant to her compared to her sanity, and fault the psychiatrist for being unable to accept that. But to my reading, he is troubled not by the fact that she accepts her weight gain but that she does not notice it.

The author may not have articulated it all that well, but speaking for him it seems that the issue is really that the impoverishment in schizophrenic illness is largely about a growing impairment in social reciprocity and empathic connection with others. One’s feelings about one’s attractiveness are essentially reactions, for better or worse, to an awareness of how others see us. It has been called The Gaze, the way men have of turning a woman into an object, a body. Consciousness-raising about fat and body image requires first that one be aware that one is reacting in a fixed way to societal attitudes and that one has the choice not to any longer. One has to be aware of The Gaze to protest against the objectification. But the faculties of social awareness and social discretion progressively wither as schizophrenic illness progresses. (That is why so much of the illness involves social inappropriateness or bizarreness, with apparent disregard for the effect one is having on others around one. Despite their characterization as irreverent and courageous icons unconcerned with the morés of society and willing to be iconoclasts, schizophrenics are not making a deliberate defiant countercultural statement, they are not being heroes in subverting the dominant paradigms of their society. They are hurting unbearably. They cannot help being unconcerned with social norms because their faculties for interpersonal perception and conformity with norms are progressively deteriorating. Most of them would like nothing better than to fit in. Was it James Joyce who said that the difference between his thought processes and those of his schizophrenic daughter were like the difference between swimming in a strong current and drowning in it?) The psychiatrist, seeing the patient’s apparent indifference to her weight gain, goes the distance in wondering if she is really as better as she is said to be, in the sense I have just laid out, not the sexist one.

A parallel way to understand the schizophrenic process is that the person comes to treat herself and her body as an object. How can a woman rebel against societal objectification if the disease is doing it to her?

One further point should be made. The reason for the prescriber to be leery of the effect a medication like olanzapine has, especially on a young adult, extends far beyond the vanity issue of body weight. The newer antipsychotics were developed to be “cleaner” medications free of many of the side effects of the prior generation of medications for psychotic illness. And, indeed, they do largely avoid the older drugs’ longlasting and disfiguring neurological side effects. But it became evident that many of the so-called benign newer drugs caused a rash of effects of which weight gain is just the tip of the iceberg. These include glucose intolerance, the development or acceleration of diabetes, lipid and triglyceride disturbances, and cardiac and endocrine complications. The article does a disservice by anguishing only over the patient’s weight gain, too inarticulately to convey a more thorough and sophisticated range of concerns, and leaving itself open to being a straw man for a well-intentioned but misguided feminist outcry.

Finally, the psychiatrist considers only a rather limited set of options for treating the young woman. There are other medications and other strategies that stand a chance of combining effective treatment response with avoidance of the metabolic effects the olanzapine had caused. On the other hand, there is an inescapable sense, for anyone who has practiced medicine for any length of time, that there is no free lunch. Treatment choices are almost always nuanced and poignant cost-benefit decisions without unambiguous answers for either the patient or the prescriber. That is where I thought the article in question was going when I began to read it. Sadly, it missed the opportunity to get that deep. (Prospect)

Listen carefully to this, it is confirmationof what I have been saying all along. The dysadministration has largely succeeded, by repeating the lie often enough, in convincing the public that it was faulty intelligence about WMD that led us to war, and that it was the intelligence establishment’s failure. In reality, the intelligence analysts were marginalized and Cheney heard just what he wanted to hear and ignored the rest. I am no fan of the U.S.’s covert intelligence agencies, but in this case they are the aggrieved victims and honest speakers of truth to power. The real purpose of Porter Goss’ housecleaning at the CIA is to prevent some renegade career intelligence officers from turning their dirty tricks on the Bush Cabal in retaliation, and they would be justified to do so.

The download site appears to be overloaded, but here is a mirror, and here is another. This is really a buggy pre-release but you might be interested anyway.