The CIA World Factbook field listing of territorial and border disputes. [via robot wisdom]

For those of you who remain in the newer-is-better school of software use, this entry at The Digital Music Weblog may make you think for a moment before reflexively installing iTunes 5.0 over your 4.x version.

Given that euthanasia is illegal in Louisiana, the paper has concealed the names of the doctor. Morphine in escalating doses is often given as a ‘comfort measure’, even if it hastens the end, when a patient’s death is judged to be inevitable and imminent. In this case, however, the imminence and inevitability may have been a function of the government failure to respond to the disaster promptly. Would you have done differently under the circumstances?

The following was sent by Tobias Wolff to his father, Robert Paul Wolff, professor in the Afro-American Studies Department at UMass Amherst, and contains an eyewitness account of two paramedic friends of Tobias who were trapped in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It is being forwarded around through email channels.

Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2005 11:07 PM
Subject: Saramago’s Blindness Revisited — an eyewitness account from New Orleans

Hurricane Katrina — Our Experiences (Larry Bradshaw, Lorrie Beth Slonsky)

Two days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the Walgreen’s store at the corner of Royal and Iberville streets remained locked. The dairy display case was clearly visible through the widows. It was now 48 hours without electricity, running water, plumbing. The milk, yogurt, and cheeses were beginning to spoil in the 90-degree heat. The owners and managers had locked up the food, water, pampers, and prescriptions and fled the City. Outside Walgreen’s windows, residents and tourists grew increasingly thirsty and hungry.

The much-promised federal, state and local aid never materialized and the windows at Walgreen’s gave way to the looters. There was an alternative. The cops could have broken one small window and distributed the nuts, fruit juices, and bottle water in an organized and systematic manner. But they did not. Instead they spent hours playing cat and mouse, temporarily chasing away the looters.

We were finally airlifted out of New Orleans two days ago and arrived home yesterday (Saturday). We have yet to see any of the TV coverage or look at a newspaper. We are willing to guess that there were no video images or front-page pictures of European or affluent white tourists looting the Walgreen’s in the French Quarter.

We also suspect the media will have been inundated with “hero” images of the National Guard, the troops and the police struggling to help the “victims” of the Hurricane. What you will not see, but what we witnessed,were the real heroes and sheroes of the hurricane relief effort: the working class of New Orleans. The maintenance workers who used a fork lift to carry the sick and disabled. The engineers, who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators.

Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, “stealing” boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters. Mechanics who helped hot-wire any car that could be found to ferry people out of the City. And the food service workers who scoured the commercial kitchens improvising communal meals for hundreds of those stranded.

Most of these workers had lost their homes, and had not heard from members of their families, yet they stayed and provided the only infrastructure for the 20% of New Orleans that was not under water.

On Day 2, there were approximately 500 of us left in the hotels in the French Quarter. We were a mix of foreign tourists, conference attendees like ourselves, and locals who had checked into hotels for safety and shelter from Katrina. Some of us had cell phone contact with family and friends outside of New Orleans. We were repeatedly told that all sorts of resources including the National Guard and scores of buses were pouring in to the City. The buses and the other resources must have been invisible because none of us had seen them.

We decided we had to save ourselves. So we pooled our money and came up with $25,000 to have ten buses come and take us out of the City. Those who did not have the requisite $45.00 for a ticket were subsidized by those who did have extra money. We waited for 48 hours for the buses, spending the last 12 hours standing outside, sharing the limited water, food, and clothes we had. We created a priority boarding area for the sick, elderly and new born babies. We waited late into the night for the “imminent” arrival of the buses. The buses never arrived. We later learned that the minute the arrived to the City limits, they were commandeered by the military.

By day 4 our hotels had run out of fuel and water. Sanitation was dangerously abysmal. As the desperation and despair increased, street crime as well as water levels began to rise. The hotels turned us out and locked their doors, telling us that the “officials” told us to report to the convention center to wait for more buses. As we entered the center of the City, we finally encountered the National Guard. The Guards told us we would not be allowed into the Superdome as the City’s primary shelter had descended into a humanitarian and health hellhole.

The guards further told us that the City’s only other shelter, the Convention Center, was also descending into chaos and squalor and that the police were not allowing anyone else in. Quite naturally, we asked, “If we can’t go to the only 2 shelters in the City, what was our alternative?” The guards told us that that was our problem, and no they did not have extra water to give to us. This would be the start of our numerous encounters with callous and hostile “law enforcement”.

We walked to the police command center at Harrah’s on Canal Street and were told the same thing, that we were on our own, and no they did not have water to give us. We now numbered several hundred. We held a mass meeting to decide a course of action. We agreed to camp outside the police command post. We would be plainly visible to the media and would constitute a highly visible embarrassment to the City officials. The police told us that we could not stay. Regardless, we began to settle in and set up camp. In short order, the police commander came across the street to address our group. He told us he had a solution: we should walk to the Pontchartrain Expressway and cross the greater New Orleans Bridge where the police had buses lined up to take us out of the City.

The crowed cheered and began to move. We called everyone back and explained to the commander that there had been lots of misinformation and wrong information and was he sure that there were buses waiting for us. The commander turned to the crowd and stated emphatically, “I swear to you that the buses are there.”

We organized ourselves and the 200 of us set off for the bridge with great excitement and hope. As we marched pasted the convention center, many locals saw our determined and optimistic group and asked where we were headed. We told them about the great news. Families immediately grabbed their few belongings and quickly our numbers doubled and then doubled again. Babies in strollers now joined us, people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers and others people in wheelchairs. We marched the 2-3 miles to the freeway and up the steep incline to the Bridge. It now began to pour down rain, but it did not dampen our enthusiasm.

As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander’s assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.

We questioned why we couldn’t cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.

Our small group retreated back down Highway 90 to seek shelter from the rain under an overpass. We debated our options and in the end decided to build an encampment in the middle of the Ponchartrain Expressway on the center divide, between the O’Keefe and Tchoupitoulas exits. We reasoned we would be visible to everyone, we would have some security being on an elevated freeway and we could wait and watch for the arrival of the yet to be seen buses.

All day long, we saw other families, individuals and groups make the same trip up the incline in an attempt to cross the bridge, only to be turned away. Some chased away with gunfire, others simply told no, others to be verbally berated and humiliated. Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the City on foot.

Meanwhile, the only two City shelters sank further into squalor and disrepair. The only way across the bridge was by vehicle. We saw workers stealing trucks, buses, moving vans, semi-trucks and any car that could be hotwired. All were packed with people trying to escape the misery New Orleans had become.

Our little encampment began to blossom. Someone stole a water delivery truck and brought it up to us. Let’s hear it for looting! A mile or so down the freeway, an army truck lost a couple of pallets of C-rations on a tight turn. We ferried the food back to our camp in shopping carts.

Now secure with the two necessities, food and water; cooperation, community, and creativity flowered. We organized a clean up and hung garbage bags from the rebar poles. We made beds from wood pallets and cardboard. We designated a storm drain as the bathroom and the kids built an elaborate enclosure for privacy out of plastic, broken umbrellas, and other scraps. We even organized a food recycling system where individuals could swap out parts of C-rations (applesauce for babies and candies for kids!).

This was a process we saw repeatedly in the aftermath of Katrina. When individuals had to fight to find food or water, it meant looking out for yourself only. You had to do whatever it took to find water for your kids or food for your parents. When these basic needs were met, people began to look out for each other, working together and constructing a community.

If the relief organizations had saturated the City with food and water in the first 2 or 3 days, the desperation, the frustration and the ugliness would not have set in.

Flush with the necessities, we offered food and water to passing families and individuals. Many decided to stay and join us. Our encampment grew to 80 or 90 people.

From a woman with a battery powered radio we learned that the media was talking about us. Up in full view on the freeway, every relief and news organizations saw us on their way into the City. Officials were being asked what they were going to do about all those families living up on the freeway? The officials responded they were going to take care of us. Some of us got a sinking feeling. “Taking care of us” had an ominous tone to it.

Unfortunately, our sinking feeling (along with the sinking City) was correct. Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming, “Get off the fucking freeway”. A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water.

Once again, at gunpoint, we were forced off the freeway. All the law enforcement agencies appeared threatened when we congregated or congealed into groups of 20 or more. In every congregation of “victims” they saw “mob” or “riot”. We felt safety in numbers. Our “we must stay together” was impossible because the agencies would force us into small atomized groups.

In the pandemonium of having our camp raided and destroyed, we scattered once again. Reduced to a small group of 8 people, in the dark, we sought refuge in an abandoned school bus, under the freeway on Cilo Street. We were hiding from possible criminal elements but equally and definitely, we were hiding from the police and sheriffs with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill policies.

The next days, our group of 8 walked most of the day, made contact with New Orleans Fire Department and were eventually airlifted out by an urban search and rescue team. We were dropped off near the airport and managed to catch a ride with the National Guard. The two young guardsmen apologized for the limited response of the Louisiana guards. They explained that a large section of their unit was in Iraq and that meant they were shorthanded and were unable to complete all the tasks they were assigned.

We arrived at the airport on the day a massive airlift had begun. The airport had become another Superdome. We 8 were caught in a press of humanity as flights were delayed for several hours while George Bush landed briefly at the airport for a photo op. After being evacuated on a coast guard cargo plane, we arrived in San Antonio, Texas.

There the humiliation and dehumanization of the official relief effort continued. We were placed on buses and driven to a large field where we were forced to sit for hours and hours. Some of the buses did not have air-conditioners. In the dark, hundreds if us were forced to share two filthy overflowing porta-potties. Those who managed to make it out with any possessions (often a few belongings in tattered plastic bags) we were subjected to two different dog-sniffing searches.

Most of us had not eaten all day because our C-rations had been confiscated at the airport because the rations set off the metal detectors. Yet, no food had been provided to the men, women, children, elderly, disabled as they sat for hours waiting to be “medically screened” to make sure we were not carrying any communicable diseases.

This official treatment was in sharp contrast to the warm, heart-felt reception given to us by the ordinary Texans. We saw one airline worker give her shoes to someone who was barefoot. Strangers on the street offered us money and toiletries with words of welcome. Throughout, the official relief effort was callous, inept, and racist. There was more suffering than need be. Lives were lost that did not need to be lost.

[thanks, walker]

Jurors familiar with the glitzy triumphs of the t.v. forensic investigators are no longer impressed with the tentativeness of real scientific testimony. And criminals are becoming savvy to ways to avoid leaving damning evidence at the scene of their crimes.

I am reprinting in full this entry from the excellent Mind Hacks weblog, describing a conference raising most of the challenges to contemporary psychiatric diagnosis that I have come to myself in my career:

“We reveal some of what vendors are keeping mum, such as: You never have to pay full price, extended warranties rarely pay for themselves, and the big sites do have customer service numbers.” (PCWorld via walker)

Happy birthday, Yma Sumac, “she has a panther and a nightingale in her throat.”

I had independently begun to use the word fema’ed with my friends in related but simpler ways. It’s mostly used as an adjective, and I predict a glorious future in the vernacular: (1) A situation can be fema’ed, in a sense that will replace snafu’ed or fubar. (2) A person can be fema’ed. “I’m fema’ed” will replace I’m up the creek without a paddle, I’m screwed or I’m totally fucked. To anticipate some of your objections, I am of course not talking about the sexual act here, but rather some of the less pretty things people frequently do to one another.

Unless you operate on a child’s fantasy level taking your parents’ reassurances that the police and firemen will always protect you and should always be trusted, it seems as if considering the possibility of the incapacitation of local emergency personnel would be basic to any disaster response plan!

Rothstein claims that with the Enlightenment the notion that natural disasters represented the justice of the gods and thus sustained the moral order faded, replaced by an amoral randomness and the challenge of understanding causality in natural science terms. He is on more dicy ground in suggesting that the political blame game in the aftermath of the Gulf Coast disaster represents the emergence of a new theodicy which explains why bad things happen to good, or at least innocent, people in terms of the failures of their political leaders.

I have difficulty with this assertion on several grounds. First, this is not a new theme. Only the fundamentalist crazies have been blaming the victims for the human devastation of Katrina, but the myth of the Fisher King, the ruler whose personal moral failure lays waste to the country he rules, is archetypal (and has, BTW, long formed the mythic justification for regicide).

Secondly, we continue to conceive of the impact of public policy decisions as being in the realm of natural causality, not some separate and rarefied moral sphere. The abandonment of wetlands protection, the diversion of public preparedness resources to a specious terrorist threat, the gutting of public works funding for flood protection projects, and the abandonment of the urban poor (in New Orleans and everywhere else) to their own resources are rational, if reprehensible, causal factors for the magnitude of the catastrophe in New Orleans.

But perhaps there is a sense in which this disaster, like others, does represent a human moral failing — that of hubris. Our conceit in insisting on living on lowlying hurricane-ridden coasts, in wildfire and mudslide zones, on earthquake fault lines, on flood plains, at the mercy of increasingly vigorous weather caused by manmade precipitants of climate change, is a moral decision, and should be made deliberately, recognizing that it relies on our dubious interminable belief that we can live at odds with nature and can vanquish natural forces no matter what their fury. Increasingly, that ‘war with nature’ requires the protection of massive public expenditure and institutional support to be sustainable. People need to wake up to realize that, in voting as they did in the last two presidential elections for an administration that inherently believes government should have no role in protecting its citizens against larger forces, they have voted against the safety they need to continue to inhabit dubious environmental niches.

Happy birthday, Sonny Rollins! (PopMatters)

The Michael Larsen incident: a fascinating read. [thanks, abby]

Rove orchestrates a response comprising by-now familiar elements:

The deadliest, costliest and most intense tropical cyclones 1851-2004 (NOAA via unfutz)

“Horse group: FEMA chief had to be `asked to resign'” (Boston Herald)

It is not clear how, but in an ‘intriguing parasitic strategy’, the parasitic Nematomorph hairworm ‘hijacks’ the brain of the grasshoppers and crickets inside which it grows when it is time for it to transform into an aquatic adult. The worm produces proteins which directly affect its insect host’s CNS to make the land-dwelling host behave in ways it would never ordinarily do, by seeking out and plunging into water. This allows the mature hairworm to emerge and swim away to find a mate, leaving the insect host dead or dying in the water. (New Scientist) I know, not everything is a political parable, but although it is certainly a fascinating story in its own right, it it also an apt description of what the parasites in the White House are doing to the body of the U.S.

“Disabled scientist Professor Stephen Hawking is using a hi-tech gadget to communicate by blinking because his deteriorating health limits movement.” (BBC)

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who cuts a fine media figure these days, thinks he might be a target for elimination because of the choice words he has had for George Bush and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco. Hey, so what if it’s from World Net Daily? It’s a great story.

Video: Distraught Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu threatens to punch out the President. (onegoodmove)

One of my long-term favorite weblogs has always had been an authentic New Orleans voice. One of the first places to which I turned for a real perspective on Katrina when I came out of the woods at the end of the week and learned what had happened while my family and I were out of range of news updates. I am very glad all of Chuck Taggart’s family are safe and sound and that his voice has not been silenced by the catastrophe.

Mice regrow hearts, amputated limbs and damaged organs. The self-healing strain of mice could regenerate any damaged body part except the brain. Scientists at the Wistar Institue, a US biomedical research center, serendipitously discovered the regenerating ability of the strain of mice when the identification holes they punch in the ears of the mice healed without a scar. The ability seems to be controlled by about a dozen genes, comparable genes to which are “almost certain” to exist in humans. When fetal cells from the self-healing strain were transferred to other mice, the recipients too acquired the ability to regenerate. To my knowledge, this is the first demonstration of this phenomenon, well-known in less complex vertebrates, in a mammalian species. (The Australian)

Mithras’ Fables of the reconstruction has this acerbic roster. I have one quibble, however. Jeff Jarvis (“Buzzmachine”) doesn’t just hate liberals and Democrats, he hates whomever doesn’t reflect his grandeur. Mithras is right about the essential ludicrousness of a man whose basis for punditry rests on being a TV Guide writer. ` [via Just Between Strangers]

Designer models interpret Alice in Wonderland, as photographed by Annie Liebovitz. [via boing boing]

Great if you are a tightrope walker with an accelerated aging syndrome. (New Scientist)

It’s not the ’70’s again; it’s always been the ’70’s, but it took a long time for people like Brooks to notice.

My family and I will be off in parts unknown, and I will be away from the keyboard, through Labor Day, so no new posts here until then. Enjoy the rest of your summer and, as always, thank you for your patronage.

Thompson is not much of a diagnostician, and he legitimizes alot of his psychiatric namecalling by invoking the deprecated psychoanalyst Justin Frank, author of Bush on the Couch, who many of us feel violated an ethical canon of the field by diagnosing sight unseen (although I feel the the potential impact of the President’s mental stability or lack thereof on every living soul on the planet makes him fair game in a different way even than other public figures whose behavior is under scrutiny). Thompson’s other claim to the authority to bandy about the labels is his own status as a recovering alcoholic with 11 years sobriety. (“I know all too well the symptoms that Dr. Frank describes and, after watching Bush for the past several years, I have to, unfortunately, agree with him.”) Diagnostic acumen apart, if Bush’s behavior is really as Thompson’s putative White House sources describe it, we had better hope he is being attended to by a good psychopharmacologist. Not that we would ever know, since evidence bearing on the President’s mental health is a state secret, unlike the public status of the results of his annual physical. I would argue that the public has even more of an abiding interest in knowing about the President’s mental health than his physical, and that, if there is not, there ought to be some sort of periodic checkup in this sphere as well, the results being made public. (Bush’s own white paper on reforming the mental health delivery system in the United States, which I read in detail and wrote about in FmH last year, comes close to suggesting a mandatory annual mental health checkup for every citizen, in the interpretation of some, by the way…) Of course, someone as beady-eyed, petty and defensive as Dubya (and, uhh, that’s no psychiatric diagnosis, in case you were wondering) would take exception to such a requirement and fire any White House mental health professional who took their job responsibilities too seriously.

Review of Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens by Susan Clancy. Harvard University Press, $22.95:

I wrote about this story when it first broke in May and felt that the British mental health system was markedly remiss in terms of the lack of resources they devoted to his care. For someone the only clue to whose mysterious identity was that he appeared to be a composer and performer of captivating piano music to be treated by a staff whose knowledge of music could be summed up in statements like “I know it’s classical music, that’s all” (to paraphrase) and then to be transferred for internal reasons to a facility that did not even have a piano appalled me.

Now, at least according to a pulp tabloid ‘exclusive’, mental health treaters are reduced to name-calling. ‘Fakery’ is not a useful term to employ in this situation. We use the term “malingering” in psychiatry when a person deliberately, with conscious decision and purpose, simulates psychiatric symptoms for specific advantage. But it is a very difficult diagnosis to make, and one of last resort, even acknowledging that someone who malingers will always have the healthcare system (that is biased in favor of taking patients’ displays or reports of their distress at face value) over a barrel.

This patient’s actions over the ensuing months in the hospital themselves would seem to confirm, rather than disconfirm, that he is quite disturbed. Naive untrained staffs in mental health facilities often try to sort patients with disturbing behaviors into those who “can’t help it” and those who are “doing it deliberately” (so does the legal system when dealing with deranged behavior, trying to determine whether someone is “not guilty by reason of insanity” or “criminally responsible”) instead of realizing that there are all sorts of gradations of intentionality and all sorts of disturbances of the will. Instead of thinking about suing him for wasting their time, officials should examine their own seeming ineptitude in embodying that naiveté and in not getting to the bottom of this sooner. “Physician, heal thyself”, the saying goes, and also “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

Discussion thread on The Onion‘s A.V. Club site about what movies people have walked out of. In almost each instance, they should’ve known better than to go to those dogs in the first place. Most are apologetic defensive about their choices and they deserve to be.

(It is real.) (World Wide Words)

Click here for larger version. (Harper’s via walker)

An Evolutionary Perspective (Human Nature)

Just changed and upgraded my iPod’s battery. Trepidations about popping the case, but an easy five-minute procedure. Painfree. Cute little 40-gig drive inside. If that ever failed, it would be deadly easy to replace too. Does anyone know if there is a program to format a naked drive for an iPod? If so, it would be easy to upgrade to a larger drive as well if a person wanted to, for example to clog the iPod up with podcasts as well as music…

And: Army Planning for Four More Years in Iraq (Yahoo! News)

Although this Leaf Chronicle article stays superficial (the lead is about whether the residents mind being called hippies), it is a good update on what has happened to The Farm, an enormous intentional community in Summertown, Tennessee started in 1970 and going through changes but still going strong. I have long had an interest in what they were doing and spent some time visiting there during the summer of 1980 when I was a medical student volunteering in rural Tennessee as part of the Appalachian Student Health Coalition. The Farm was already legendary in countercultural circles by that time. However, I had lost touch with what was happening there in the last decade or so and, frankly, expected it not to have survived. Good to hear otherwise.

How can it be, however, that the article mentions the spiritual godfather of The Farm, Stephen Gaskin, only once, and spiritual godmother Ina May Gaskin not at all? Her midwifery values were at the core of The Farm’s philosophy and activities. It was well-known that down-and-out expectant mothers from anywhere could come there to give birth and, if I remember correctly, have their children raised there instead of aborting their pregnancies. I wonder where Ina May and Stephen are. Stephen Gaskin, if he is still alive, is 70 now. This online resumé has not been been updated since 1995, but I noted his presence on the scene as recently as 2000 in FmH, when I linked to this R.U. Sirius interview with Gaskin. Gaskin was desultorily seeking the Green Party nomination during the 2000 Presidential campaign. Unfortunately, Sirius asked Gaskin little else about what he was up to back then, preferring to gossip with him about how much pot Al Gore smoked.

Here is a Smart Communities Network entry for The Farm with more details about what they are up to. Again, there is little mention of the Gaskins except in a historical vein. Could they have parted ways with The Farm community or departed the planet? Do any FmH readers know?

Part of the triviality of the Leaf Chronicle article lies in its focus on The Farm’s drift toward some private ownership of property from its stringently communitarian beginnings. Mainstream press coverage of intentional communities has always focused (often triumpally) on this prevalent trend as if it is proof of failure (and somehow a part of the global defeat of Communism?) when in reality it is merely an epiphenomenon of the ongoing compromises and struggles needed to balance right livelihood and principled vision on the one hand with accommodating to the pressures of the real world on the other. What would have been more appropriate would have been a greater focus on the good works of what was and is, after all, an idealistic community which has done an enormous amount to put its principles into action! One aspect of The Farm’s activities which drew my attention was the Plenty Project, a Gaskin-led charity bypassing government structures to offer direct international development assistance, including (if I remember correctly) owning their own freighter to ship relief aid, building materials, grain and seed, farming implements etc. abroad. Plenty International’s website was updated as recently as the tsunami disaster of last winter. It appears as if its scope has, not surprisingly, narrowed, but not its vision.

One of The Farm’s offshoots, the Ecovillage Network of North America, “an effort to link a wide variety of green communities, Eco-City projects and ecovillages, and to encourage a transition from the traditional Western consumer lifestyle to one of sustainable development,” sounds interesting.

Related: The Hippie Origins of PCs, a mini-review of What the Dormouse Said by John Markoff:

Alan B. Scrivener begins by reflecting on Charles Dodson / Lewis Carroll:

“Humpty Dumpty: [Having just proved it is 364 times better to celebrate your un-birthday] There’s glory for you!

Alice: I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory.’

Humpty Dumpty: Of course you don’t — ’till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’

Alice: But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument.’

Humpty Dumpty: When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.

Alice: The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things.

Humpty Dumpty: The question is which is to be the master — that’s all.”

An Evolutionary Perspective (Human Nature)

I am relieved that the evictions from Gaza have been achieved so much more rapidly and efficiently than had been expected. As a child growing up Jewish, I recall my visceral revulsion about the culture of victimization that seemed to be the sole source of Jewish identity in the secular Jewish community to which I was exposed. It was important to remain a Jew, the message went, because these were the people who had endured such perennial anti-Semitic persecution and its apotheosis in the Holocaust. I thought it was pitiful that that was all there was to modern Jewish identity and I questioned whether that was a sufficient way of being Jewish.

Of course it wasn’t sufficient, and it isn’t really all there is to being a secular Jew in the contemporary world, but it seemed so. I have been reminded of that pitiful victim stance by some of the shrill extremist settlers’ outcries this week. “How can a Jew do this to a Jew?” “We have nowhere to go, we’ll be homeless!” And, predictably, the ultimate perversion of the memory of the Holocaust, “The Israeli government is treating us just like Hitler did.” I am grateful this particularly egregious sentiment will fade from the front page.

Most group hatred seems based on a tribal mentality in which core identity is maintained by desperate measures to distinguish insiders from outsiders, like from unlike, by construing the foreign as dangerous. This may be hardwired into human neurobiology and is inherently at odds with a world in which we commune with those who are heterogeneous. Those who appeal to our tribal instincts — which, by the way, is the unconscious message upon which the American Republican party’s appeal is built, I am convinced — are appealing to our basest, most reptilian perversion of the yearning for community which functions as little more than a justification for continuing violence and victimization.

Cindy Sheehan describes her June 2004 meeting with Bush. Valuable to have a description of this pitiful deficient and inherent deceitful little man first hand, since his handlers usually do such a good job keeping him away from anyone perceptive.

However, her observations stand in stark contrast to how she described her meeting before her current media visibility:

You can get the download here.

Have you ever wanted to search back for something you read in the past on FmH? Many of the site-specific search strategies don’t work because Follow Me Here doesn’t have its own domain and gelwan.com, which you may use to get here (http://gelwan.com/followme.html) is just a virtual domain pointing to http://theworld.com/~emg. So Atomz, which I used to use here, has stopped indexing FmH posts properly. You could use the syntax that limits Google’s search to one domain by adding “site:theworld.com” into your search box, but you would have to wade through content at all the other pages hosted by The World which are not mine, since all FmH posts are at http://theworld.com/~emg/ and you can’t put a subdomain (i.e. you can’t use “site:theworld.com/~emg”) into Google’s ‘site:’ specifier, only a top-level domain. But, duh, I just realized there is a simple solution. Putting “~emg site:theworld.com”, along with your search phrase, into the box, works fine.

Update: Actually, and I can’t figure out why, you do much better if you use The World’s parent domain, std.com. For example, I get 13 hits if I search in Google for “Iraq ~emg site:theworld.com” but 53 hits if I search for “Iraq ~emg site:std.com”. I get 18 hits on “Bush ~emg site:theworld.com” but 61 for “Bush ~emg site:std.com.” This is even though DNS translation of std.com and theworld.com (and world.std.com) all go to the same IP address. Next question: I’m sure I have referred to Iraq in more than 53 posts here, and Bush more than 61 times (even if you allow for the fact that I usually use an epithet instead of his proper name…). Anyone able to illuminate me on any of this?

Heart Disease: “Death rates from heart disease in New York City are among the highest recorded in the country, and no one quite knows why.”

WWASS? (What would Andrew Sullivan say?)

Donald Berwick recognised by the Queen. I know I am usually expressing cynical sentiments about the state of modern healthcare and its practitioners; you may be pleased to know I recognize that there are exceptions. I’ve just read Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains and am tremendously inspired by Paul Farmer’s work; with his quirkiness and idiosyncracy, he’s no saint but perhaps the closest one can come in the modern world. Although I have never run across his work before, here is another Boston-area physician, Donald Berwick, who seems to be doing real good. If not sainthood, at least knighthood…

A review of philospher Michael Lynch’s True to Life: why truth matters:

Lynch argues that we should be far more concerned that we are slipping in our commitment to truth.

“An increasingly popular movement in the visual arts prides itself on picturing everything that is the raw, untutored, and irrational. ” (WBUR) I don’t know about popular, but I have long been an observer and sometimes collector of raw art, in part because of my work as a psychiatrist. One idea in art brut is that the often compulsive and spontaneous artistic production of “outsiders” (i.e. those disconnected from exposure to the artistic conventions of the cultural mainstream, and certainly untutored in artistic technique, including the mentally ill and developmentally disabled) has an often overwhelming power and pathos, as well as a grace and subtlety, of unmediated and unshaped expressiveness. By the way, if you are ever in Lausanne, do not miss a trip to the Collection de l’Art Brut, the museum of outsider art started by Jean Dubuffet.

The Milky Way is a rare and beautiful barred spiral, not one of those more common ordinary spiral galaxies it has always been thought to be, according to a new survey of the starts at the center of our galaxy. Will proponents of intelligent design take heart?

“Tim Wilson said he and his wife did not know their daughter had been engaging in the practice.” (The Kansas City Channel) Sorry to be callous, I know it is tragic and I am sorry for her parents’ loss, but the practice seems so… stupid!

Deep within this C/NET article on Salon’s fiscal woes, however, is an even more troubling comment from its new CEO about plans that Salon itself will change from “something akin to a print magazine with articles posted online to a more interactive Web site.”

…since it is The Guardian reporting that:

(If you’re supposedly Papally infallible, why do you need to ask for immunity, by the way??)

It seems that nearly everything London officials said to excuse the Tube killing of Charles De Menezes was a misrepresentation, according to docuemnts and photographs leaked to ITV. (“They all look alike…”)

Venerable, vibrant and thoughtful veteran weblog returns with a new design. Welcome home, Lyn!

Thanks to acm for pointing me toward this This Modern World piece setting Michelle Malkin’s words against themselves, one self-contradiction after another. Malkin is right up there with Coulter on my list of blithering idiots we love to hate.

Portrait of Spanish animation artist Carlos Grangel, the hand behind the brush on Tim Burton’s upcoming Corpse Bride, which my family and I are awaiting enthusiastically. (New York Times )

Portrait of Spanish animation artist Carlos Grangel, the hand behind the brush on Tim Burton’s upcoming Corpse Bride, which my family and I are awaiting enthusiastically. (New York Times )

Firing ranges can have more wildlife than national parks. (Nature) More mind-bending arguments along the lines of the rest of today’s posts — that everything bad is good for you and vice versa.