Adbuster‘s ‘Unswooshers’

“Submit a slogan for a billboard near Wal-Mart’s headquarters and learn about other action opportunities.” (Campaign for America’s Future)

Glowing meat alarms Australians: “Australians have been told there is no need to panic after a recent ‘glow-in-the-dark pork chop’ scare.” A caller to a Sydney radio show raised the spectre of radioactive meat but authorities say the glow is called by Pseudomonas fluorescans. a species of bacteria which naturally inhabit the pork chops. However, proliferation of the bacteria occurs when it is stored at an improper temperature, so it can be an indication that it is going off. (BBC)

It is a little bit of a sensationalization of what the group wants, but the UPI says:

Researchers call for better ways to identify highly infectious individuals.: 80% of the contagion in a pandemic will be spread by 20% of the infected individuals — so-called ‘superspreaders.’ (Nature)

Glacial lakes in the Himalayas are filled to the brim and poised to overflow due to increased glacial melt from global warming. The short-term danger of too much water coming out of the Himalayas, however, will give way in the long run to reduced runoff from shrunken glacial volumes. As meltwater dries up, some of the world’s mightiest rivers whose headwaters are on the spine of the world — the Indus, the Yellow, the Mekong — will shrink to trickles. Drinking and irrigation water for hundreds of millions of people will disappear. (Guardian.UK)

Related:

The big thaw

“Greenland’s glaciers have begun to race towards the ocean, leading scientists to predict that the vast island’s ice cap is approaching irreversible meltdown.” (Independent.UK)

pdf document: Doesn’t anyone at the patent office read these before granting patterns to someone who is either a liar, a hoaxer or seriusly deluded? “Quantized vortices of lattice ions project… a gravitomagnetic field that forms a spacetime curvature anomaly.” [via Interesting People listserv]

Gene turn-off makes meek mice fearless — Deactivating the gene for a brain protein called stathmin makes lab mice more fearless and less quick to learn fear responses to stimuli associated with painful outcomes. The protein destabilizes microtubule structures that help maintain neuronal connectedness. It is thought that such disruption is a basic prerequisite for learning, which occurs through the creation of new neural connections. Thus, mice that lack the protein do not learn to fear as easily. However, in case you were wondering about the obvious, the study suggests that they do not experience interference with other learning experiences because stathmin is largely restricted to the amygdala, where the fear response is thought to be controlled. The researchers said that the fearless mice were, for example, able to learn to navigate through a maze as well as control animals. How convenient to have a protein specific to the learning processes around fear. (There must have been some intelligent design, don’t you think??!! [grin]) (New Scientist)

There are evident implications for humans, if stathmin has the same role in our brain. I doubt, however, that other learning is so distinct from learning the fear response in humans. In the complex learning process that psychotherapy patients undergo in my field, for example, optimal learning is associated with an optimal level of anxiety. If anxiety is reduced too much, there is no motivation to learn, while if it is excessive, the organism is too overwhelmed to acquire, integrate and make available new information. Disrupting the ability to learn to fear certain experiences, I fear, would in humans disrupt overall learning efficiency.

Moreover, the brain’s fear circuitry is absoutely central and phylogenetically ancient. I would imagine we don’t have a clue how much else in CNS function would be disrupted if we found a way to disable stathmin in humans.

A fearless human being without much capacity to incorporate new learning might not be a problem for some, however. The military might very much like to fund some research into deactivating stathmin in humans, to prevent the fear response from paralyzing soldiers in combat. I imagine that Pentagon officials would not lose sleep at night if new learning — thinking for oneself — were concomitantly inhibited in its recruits. How much thought does one need just to follow orders? As the US’s wars get more and more dubious, it becomes harder to fight them with thoughtful people with even the slightest capacity for questioning authority. With the egregious futility adn duplicity of the invasion of Iraq, the Bush regime may have broken the bank at attracting recruits. (One can only hope.)

Some have worried since the ’50’s about the increasing efficiency and subtlety of mind control and the growing ability of powerful governments to turn their citizens into ‘a nation of sheep.’ Plausible deniability is being perfected. Since the Cold War, I have said that the US is not freer than, say, the Soviet Union was. It is just that its efforts to control its citizens (until the Bush dysasdministration’s transparent, egregious and clumsy lies, which rival those of the rather unsubtle Soviet regime) have been more subtle and refined, more difficult to counter, recognize or talk about.

But until now they have remained largely in the realm of propaganda and spin through media manipulation and co-optation of the educational system, etc. Except for small pilot programs like MK Ultra, we have yet to see it exercised on a direct neural basis, unless you believe the folks who walk around in tinfoil hats. And some say that even those are part of a government conspiracy!

I love it that FmH shares a birthday with this fine weblog. Many happy returns of the day to Kevin and a question to you: did you think when you started GitM that you would still be around at the six-year point?

from Sam Jordison, author of the recent The Joy Of Sects – An A-Z of Cults, Cranks and Religious Eccentrics. The list starts out with Mark Twain’s neglected Roughing It, with its portrait of the early Mormon Church. (Anyone interested in the topic has either already read, or is obliged to, Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, which is not on Jordison’s list.) A couple of these caught my eye and have to go on my to-read list:

(Parenthetically, I don’t think The Da Vinci Code really belongs on the Top 10 anything list! Jordison includes it, even though he says, “I hate this book almost as much as I love it. It’s literary crack cocaine – reading it does you no good at all, but you just can’t stop.”.) (Guardian.UK via walker)

“The practice does more than just make you feel good, it makes you perform better – and alters the structure of your brain.” (New Scientist)

And: “The drug ecstasy reduces the brain’s defences, reveals a new study of rats, leaving it vulnerable to invasion by viruses and other pathogens.” (New Scientist)

The double standard that underlies our torture policies. David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center writing in Slate, succinctly dissects the mockery Bush & Co. make of human rights with the U.S.’ policy on detention of foreign combatants without protection of law. Even torture apart, the central ploy, holding foreign nationals abroad so as to claim theat the U.S. constitution does not apply, makes no sense. We find humanity through the encounter with the alien, who deserves our consideration simply because he or she is human, nthing more. If we dehumanize the alien, we cannot be anything but, in the literal sense of the word, inhuman ourselves. The Republican ethos, I am convinced, is incapable of embracing humanity because it is fundamentally an appeal to tribal identity which is deeply encoded, I am convinced, in the neuroevolution of our social brains. Progressive ecumenism represents a moral imperative transcending our tribal xenophobia and the demonization of the Other. The culture war being waged now is literally one between our finer and our baser natures, and Guantanamo and the other extrajudicial detention facilities of the Bush administration are the frontlines of our battle to remain human, in all that that may potentially mean in the 21st century.

Digby agrees:

Follow Me Here… is six years old today.

Update: Thanks to Blogger; publishing didn’t work today, preventing me from publishing this post in time for the anniversary. “001 java.net.SocketTimeoutException: Read timed out.” And thanks to all my readers for putting up with, among other things, six years of intermittent Blogger crump-outs! Many happy returns.

The double standard that underlies our torture policies. David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center writing in Slate, succinctly dissects the mockery Bush & Co. make of human rights with the U.S.’ policy on detention of foreign combatants without protection of law. Even torture apart, the central ploy, holding foreign nationals abroad so as to claim theat the U.S. constitution does not apply, makes no sense. We find humanity through the encounter with the alien, who deserves our consideration simply because he or she is human, nthing more. If we dehumanize the alien, we cannot be anything but, in the literal sense of the word, inhuman ourselves. The Republican ethos, I am convinced, is incapable of embracing humanity because it is fundamentally an appeal to tribal identity which is deeply encoded, I am convinced, in the neuroevolution of our social brains. Progressive ecumenism represents a moral imperative transcending our tribal xenophobia and the demonization of the Other. The culture war being waged now is literally one between our finer and our baser natures, and Guantanamo and the other extrajudicial detention facilities of the Bush administration are the frontlines of our battle to remain human, in all that that may potentially mean in the 21st century.

Digby agrees:

A Marine inquires about ordering in bulk, describing how spraying fluorescent silly string into a darkened room lets you spot tripwires on boobytraps with ease. (Cockeyed)

And: How much silly string can you get out of a can?

Another in the occasional series of articles to which I link about the execrable penetration of reductionism, popularization, pseudoscience, marketing and profiteering into what I do, the care of urgently ill and suffering psychiatric patients. Let me emphasize, however, that I don’t post this stuff to call into the question the enterprise of treating depression, but rather our explanations for what we are doing when we do so. Others have written that antidepressants are no better than placebo, and (believe me) I know fervently that the placebo effect plays a great role in any healer’s repertoire. But it is also indubitably clear that medication treatment makes a great deal of difference — sometimes, literally, a life-or-death difference — in severely mentally ill patients. As readers of FmH know, I think claims to the contrary often relate to the expansion of the definition of medication-responsive conditions in the past few decades, driven by market pressures rather than empirical evidence.

In observance of Kurt Vonnegut’s 83rd birthday, a consummate collection of tidbits from the master modern aphorist by a consummate fan. Thanks, Ed, for introducing me to this apocryphal (but likely from Vonnegut) notion that we should more properly think of the year as having six seasons instead of four.

Nature Neuroscience has a new weblog which promises to be more interactive and speculative than its companion peer-reviewed scientific print journal. One of the interesting early posts is about natalizumab. Seemingly the most effective drug ever developed against multiple sclerosis, the drug has been pulled from the market because of an indubitable but inexplicable link to the development of the devastating brain disease PML. For those of you interested in such things, the post discusses an intriguing hypothesis about how matalizumab might potentiate PML.

Not a bad day at the polls. Despite Ken Mehlman’s attempt to spin them off, the two Democratic gubernatorial wins do seem like a rebuke to the Bushites, especially Virginia, where Bush made a last-minute campaign stop. Kilgore might have been thinking of that as the kiss of death when he woke up a loser this morning.

Perhaps more enjoyable was that the pro-‘Intelligent’ Design Dover, PA school board was roundly turned out of office. (CBS News) And I was very entertained watching all the Schwarzenegger ballot initiatives getting shot down. I share Rafe Coburn‘s disappointment, however, that the ballot question in support of taking legislative redistricting out of the hands of the politicians was rejected, notwithstanding the fact that Democrats opposed it. In my book, gerrymandering is a central challenge to the claim that the U.S. is a democratic state at all, and it has reached epic proportions.

Should all right-minded liberals give generously to the Scooter Libby Defense Fund? Perhaps a vigorous and spirited defense of Libby might go after the real culprits for whom he might have no love lost after being compelled to take the fall? (New York Times )

And:

“Even if the vice president himself is not indicted, imagine the questions he might be asked, under oath, in Libby’s case.” — Sidney Blumenthal (Salon)

Since this advocacy is a searing indictment of the Bush administration’s fiddling-while-Rome-burns, the IRS had better investigate pulling these evangelicals’ tax-exempt status!

If the Guardian‘s rendition is accurate, this sounds absurd. The inventor, after all, is a “Harvard University medic who also studied electrical engineering at (M.I.T.)…” (“I’m not a physicist, I just play one for the venture capitalists…”) The fact that his ‘hydrino’ violates basic tenets about the alllowable quantum states of electrons sugggests to Mills that quantum theory must be wrong. Although I would not think this would find many advocates, Mills claims to have independent confirmation of his theory and the invective is flying. What fun; I think we have just seen the beginnings of a monumental pissing contest between supporters and detractors in the physics community.

Of course the investors Mills claims to have interested are a different matter — all weighing in on just one side of the controversy. Money certainly shapes wishful thinking in the oddest, most tortured ways. I predict those who supported Mills’ claims are going to be massively chagrined people one day in the not too far distant future… and with far less in their bank accounts than otherwise.

“All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena risks losing its tax-exempt status because of a former rector’s remarks in 2004.” First of all, this takes outrageous and egregious license with the tax regulations prohibiting tax-exempt organizations’ advocacy for particular candidates or involvement in political campaigns. The sermon, just before the 2004 election, told no parishioner whom to vote for but clearly asserted that opposition to the war in Iraq was a Christian value that Jesus would have espoused. Second, of course, the church is singled out from among the multitudes in which antiwar sentiments are preached, perhaps because the sermon received conspicuous coverage in the Los Angeles Times at the time? Finally, I daresay that the IRS has not gone after the tax-exempt status of the myriad fundamentalist, evangelical and other conservative churches which have far fewer compunctions against direct solicitation of their congregants’ votes for Bush than liberal churches have against soliciting votes for his opponents. (Los Angeles )Times

‘Surprising’ results of a survey presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Chest Physicians this week in Montreal indicate that there is a widespread misconception that nicotine causes cancer and that this interferes with efforts to stop smoking.

The investigator asserts that switching to “light” cigarettes on the basis of the belief that it will lower nicotine intake and thus reduce cancer risk is specious reasoning, since the carcinogens and other toxins are in the cigarette smoke and not the nicotine. But I don’t get it; it seems to me smokers switching to “light” cigarettes are doing the right thing even if it is for the wrong reason. Despite the mistaken belief that “light” means low-nicotine, doesn’t it indicate low tar and thus less carcinogens? Or is that just a marketing ploy without scientific basis?

In any case, the current study authors point out a more pertinent problem with the mistaken belief that it is the nicotine that causes cancer risk — smokers trying to quit will not use the nicotine patch. And it occurs to me that there is yet another reason why smoking “light” cigarettes would probably backfire. In the psychology of addiction, the belief that you have switched to a more benign product paradoxically encourages increased consumption, often to an extent that more than counteracts the risk reduction of having switched. This happens with food (“It’s ‘lo-cal’, I can have a little bit more…”) and alcohol (“I don’t drink the hard stuff anymore, just beer, so I’m okay…”) as well.

[thanks, Marla]

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…(I)n the world of performance art, where transience was an integral part of some of the best-known work from the 1960’s and 70’s, “the idea of replaying pieces as if from an orchestral score has usually been seen, if at all, as heresy.” (New York Times )

Although this turns out to be about something more proasic, upon seeing the title I thought the Times Magazine was proclaiming the overthrow of the theory that literary works are ‘intelligently designed.’ But, oh, postmodernism has already dismantled that notion, I guess.

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…(I)n the world of performance art, where transience was an integral part of some of the best-known work from the 1960’s and 70’s, “the idea of replaying pieces as if from an orchestral score has usually been seen, if at all, as heresy.” (New York Times )

British Medical Journal article on the anatomy and medical complications of sword swallowing. [via boing boing]

Why thank you, Daniel…so flattered!

[Two male professors, it should be noted!]

Related:

Beauty is Not in the Eye of the Beholder

And:

Questioning Beauty

Related?

From /. pointers to a radio remake of the famous H.G. Wells Mercury Theatre show from 1938, performed by members of the Star Trek Cast. The server is overwhelmed, but for this week only the show is apparently being streamed at http://www.scpr.org/programs/latw/. (via walker)

Do we know when others think that we are difficult? (Conscious Cogn.) [Well, I’m sure I would know if anyone thought I was difficult — not that anyone does, of course — but the problem is that nobody I think is difficult seems to recognize that the problem is them, not me!]

A Review of Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind by David Livingstone Smith” (Human Nature)