“Good-natured Gina, the veterinarian and ‘Sesame Street’ neighbor for nearly two decades, semi-nude and in bed with a man? A mobster just out of prison, no less.” — Yahoo! News

The story that ‘so deserves to be a scandal’: “The civics lesson of the Iran-Contra scandal was simple: No matter how powerful or well-intentioned, presidents cannot secretly fund wars without the consent of Congress. But according to Bob Woodward’s new book, President Bush apparently never learned that axiom. And now, Congress must demand answers.

Woodward alleges that in July 2002, the president secretly began to finance the war in Iraq with no authorization from Congress. He says $700 million was siphoned from operations against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and into planning an Iraq invasion. The president allegedly took the money from one of the two supplemental spending bills passed after September 11 and left lawmakers ‘totally in the dark.'” — David Sirota (director of strategic communications at the Center for American Progress and former chief spokesman for Democrats on the U.S. House Appropriations Committee) The American Prospect

“A serving US soldier calls for the end of an occupation based on lies: For the past six months, I have been participating in what I believe to be the great modern lie: Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

—Tim Predmore, Guardian.UK

“Things are looking very bad for Fallujah. The various mujaheddin factions, who may have agreed to a truce just so that the siege of Fallujah would be partially lifted and the road to the hospital opened, obviously had no intention of handing over all their weapons (or even just the ‘heavy’ ones). That demand by the Americans was basically the demand to win the battle without fighting it.

Since Fallujah will not capitulate, apparently, Bush and his advisers decide this weekend whether to bombard the hell out of it. Here’s a fascinating quote from the Times article:

‘It’s clear you can’t leave a few thousand insurgents there to terrorize the city and shoot at us,’ one senior official involved in the discussions said in an interview on Saturday. ‘The question now is whether there is a way to go in with the most minimal casualties possible.’

It should be clear to anyone with basic knowledge of the situation and with no ideological axe to grind who the few thousand people terrorizing the city are. They’re the ones that have assaulted it with tanks, AC-130 gunships, F-16’s, and snipers, not the ones who have been defending it from assault.

Based on everything that’s happened so far, the mindless desire for revenge and for showing military supremacy will triumph and the attack will be launched. As Bush said, ‘America will never be run out of Iraq by a bunch of thugs and killers.’ This is the kind of nonsense every colonial army has put out against its opponents — as Henry Liu points out in the Asia Times, the British general at the battle of Bunker Hill, Thomas Cage, called the American rebels thugs and tax evaders.

Sheikh Ahmed Abdel Ghafur Samarra’i, during Friday prayers at a prominent Baghdad mosque, said, ‘We will not allow the shedding of Iraqi blood. If you strike again, the whole of Iraq, from north to south, from east to west, will become Fallujah,’ a sentiment virtually every Iraqi I’ve spoken with would agree with.

A bad moon is rising. Since Bush is so fond of the Bible (it was apparently his favorite book as a child), he should read that part about sowing the wind.

It would be nice if this time there were protests before the assault instead of after.” — Rahul Mahajan, Empire Notes (Amsterdam)

“Drug companies have deliberately suppressed evidence that many antidepressants are unsuitable or even dangerous for children, according to psychiatrists and child health experts.

Researchers uncovered unpublished data about clinical trials of the most popular antidepressants on the market, known as selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which raise serious doubts about prescribing them to children.

Published studies have so far indicated that the benefits have outweighed risks for all five drugs studied – Prozac, the brand name for the drug fluoxetine, paroxetine, sertraline, citalopram, and venlafaxine.

But the review published today in medical journal the Lancet showed this was true of only one, the leading brand, Prozac. The others at best were not proven to help children and at worst linked to an increased risk of suicide or suicidal thoughts.” —Guardian.UK

Readers of FmH will know that I have been preoccupied with developments in this area in the weblog. The Lancet article (only an abstract of which is online) makes it clear that evidence of antidepressant efficacy in children only exists for fluoxetine. But reportage lumping the ineffectiveness of the other antidepressants so blithely with the imputation of their dangerousness is unwarranted and irresponsible. Adverse outcomes to antidepressant therapy in both children and adults are a function of the way they are marketed and prescribed rather than their physiological effects on the patients who take them. ‘It’s a poor workman who blames his tools’, the saying goes, which seems to be one of our society’s pervasive pathologies of thought as exemplified in jumping so uncritically on this particular bandwagon. I do find it plausible that, in the wake of various difficulties in extending their customer base to the fertile untapped area of treating children, the pharmaceutical giants probably suppress evidence that these medications are ineffective in children, but several factors come into play in a complicated way in assessing their efficacy:

• childhood depression is difficult to diagnose
  
• it is dicey to do medication trials on minors, so the data is quite limited compared to that we have with adult subjects
  
• while physicians are not duty-bound to use medications for only FDA-approved indications, extrapolation of adult efficacy data to children may not be warranted, since children are (neurologically, physiologically, developmentally), it goes without saying, not just ‘small adults’
  
• in general, negative studies are more difficult to publish in scientific journals than those which demonstrate a beneficial effect
  

Furthermore, it pays to be reminded that even a positive result, a ‘statistically significant’ beneficial effect of a drug on a target symptom, may not represent a clinically significant benefit. A couple of points’ worth of improvement on some clinical rating scale may not mean the patient feels or functions appreciably better. There are certainly good arguments not to consign “depressed” children to medication right off the bat, but they have very little to do with the dangerousness of the drugs.

There is, however, one sense in which I think these drugs are sometimes indubitably ‘dangerous’. In the rush to pharmacological treatment, we do not spend enough time thinking about the negative impact on one’s self-image of being offered a medication. Psychiatrists are usually preoccupied with the flip side of this coin, exploring the reluctance of patients to accept the medical model for their mental health problems and the potential benefits of medication therapy. For example, I hear myself asking patients fairly often something along the lines of, “If you were told you had diabetes, would there be any moral failing in taking medication to do the job your body’s own insulin was not doing well at?” But persuading someone that they need medication can also unintentionally convey messages such as they are defective, have no responsibility for their behaviors, do not have to participate in thinking about the origins of their problems or how to cope differently. The impact these messages can have is especially formative when the patient is a child. It is quite tricky, and not at all trivial, to be at the interface of treating with medication and working on self-conception, as a psychotherapeutically-informed psychopharmacologist should be…

What We Owe to Parents: “How public policy can support the hard work of raising children. — Anne Alstott”

in Boston Review

End of the Wild: “The extinction crisis is over. We lost. — Stephen M. Meyer”

in Boston Review

Reason and Terror: “Has 9/11 made it hard to think straight? — Diego Gambetta”

in Boston Review

Pound Ascendant: “Ezra Pound’s Poems and Translations and The Pisan Cantos — Marjorie Perloff”

in Boston Review

“The deputy leader of Bradford (UK) council has resigned after he made a Nazi-style salute and commented ‘Sieg Heil’ to a German-born councillor during a meeting.

Tory Simon Cooke, deputy chairman of the of Bradford metropolitan district council, made the gesture to Labour councillor Lynne Joyce following a speech by her on community safety last Wednesday.” —Guardian.UK

Coming as it does on top of the much-reported incident last week in which a right-wing English tabloid publisher similarly strutted around the room deriding representatives of a German publishing group with whom they were engaged in business negotiations, one wonders whether the thin veneer of European unity can contain such persistent simmering ignorant hatred. In neither incident did the object of such ‘veneration’ respond with anything but incredulity, apparently. How does it read in Germany? It has been my impression that only when pressed deeply does the Nazi legacy resonate with any pain in the current generation-after-the-postwar-generation there; the rise of Hitler is usually thought of as something that happened to some other people far away. Literature and film, like My Hitler or Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which suggest the need for deeper German self-examination on the issue of receptivity to fascism are considered quite provocative. What goes around comes around, however; shouldn’t the Germans have their own measure of contempt for British ‘fascist’ toady-ism embodied in the invasion of Iraq?

“How does Woodward do it? …Hard work and long-time connections are only part of the story. It’s clear that doors were opened to Woodward as he did his research. Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, argues that, flattered by Woodward’s last book, “Bush at War,” which portrayed the president in a positive light, Bush gave Woodward enormous access and encouraged others to do so.

“Woodward has never had such access as to the Bush White House. Period,” says Mr. Blumenthal. “They believed this was going to be extremely positive. They were expecting an almost official book which would depict Bush as a strong leader at war. and they wanted to get it ‘just right.’ ” — Christian Science Monitor In other words, he played Bush for the fool he is?

“Marchers Champion Reproductive Rights, Opposition to Bush” — Washington Post Yes, but: if the WaPo persists in calling it a women’s march, does it mean they haven’t gotten the point? The fight for reproductive rights is a major front in the War on Terrorism … the terrorism of the Bush dysadministration against human needs. As such, it is everyone’s issue, not a ‘women’s issue’.

“Comet Bradfield (C/2004 F4), which flew by the Sun on April 17th, is emerging now from the Sun’s glare. Look for it rising in the eastern sky just before dawn. The comet is barely visible to the naked eye, but it’s a beautiful sight through binoculars.” — spaceweather.com

Louisiana May Ban Low-Slung Pants: “People who wear low-slung pants that expose skin or ‘intimate clothing’ would face a fine of up to $500 and possible jail time under a bill filed by a Jefferson Parish lawmaker.” [via walker]

Why Bush is Spending So Much on Nuclear Weapons: “There is no nuclear arms race going on now. The world no longer offers many suitable nuclear targets. President Bush is trying to persuade other nations—especially “rogue regimes”—to forgo their nuclear ambitions. Yet he is shoveling money to U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories as if the Soviet Union still existed and the Cold War still raged.

These are the findings of a virtually unnoticed report written by weapons analyst Christopher Paine, based on data from official budget documents, and released earlier this month by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The report raises anew a question that always springs to mind after a close look at the U.S. military budget: What the hell is going on here? Specifically: Do we really need to be spending this kind of money on nuclear weapons? What role do nuclear weapons play in 21st-century military policy? How many weapons do we need, to deter what sort of attack or to hit what sorts of targets, with what level of confidence, for what strategic and tactical purposes?” — Fred Kaplan, Slate

Get a free cone 12-8pm Tues April 27th at any Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream and register to vote at the same time. Then get a free scoop 6-10pm Wed April 28th at any Baskin-Robbins; for every scoop they give out, they will make a contribution to a program that buys books for children in need.

Reconditioned 40-hr TiVos are $99. If you watch any television at all, you should not waver about picking one up at this price. A DVR will tame and humanize your television viewing experience more than any other innovation except not watching at all…

“A South African man survived an 18-floor plunge from a Cape Town hotel room and was well enough to call out to amazed rescuers, police said on Thursday.

Nicholas du Plooy broke both arms and a leg and also injured his neck late on Tuesday after he toppled out of a 19th-floor window at the Cape Town Ritz Hotel late on Tuesday…

Police said they believed du Plooy’s plunge was accidental but would not speculate on the circumstances. “There’s no foul play suspected. The guy just fell out of the window,” police spokeswoman Priscilla Ndongeni said.” — Yahoo! News It may be an urban legend, but a certain degree of intoxication may contribute to avoidance of injury by keeping one loose and relaxed. Of course, it may also contribute to the tendency to fall in the first place.

“Turmeric allows a critical protein to take its rightful place on cell surfaces and

“The world’s first conviction using “familial searching” to track a suspect via a relative’s DNA is made in the UK” — New Scientist

“Rats exposed to a sonata had greater expression of several genes involved in stimulating and changing the connections between brain cells” — New Scientist

Jane Ridley reviews The Stolen Woman by Pat Shipman: “The Victorian traveller Florence Baker is a splendid subject for a book. Her father was an officer in the Transylvanian army who was taken prisoner by the Turks after the Hungarian revolution of 1848 and converted to Islam. Florence was orphaned at the age of four and raised in an Ottoman harem.” — Telegraph.UK

Going on the offensive isn’t shocking any more: “The song currently at number one in the UK is either called I Don’t Want You Back (if you listen to DJs introduce it on the radio) or Fuck It (if you read the title on the posters all over the country). If you were actually to hear the record on the radio, it would sound something like ‘Uh-t, I don’t want you back.’

It is, to all intents and purposes, a rather sweet-sounding, heartbroken ballad of rejected love by young Irish American singer Eamon Doyle, except that he pulls no verbal punches in telling the girl who done him wrong where to get off.

This is, of course, the modern way. It may not be big and it may not be clever, but it sells records.

The prevalence of swearwords in modern pop has led to the rise of ‘radio friendly’ versions of singles, in which obscenities are muted, leaving only either the initial consonant or an isolated vowel.

When swearing is the very point of a record, this approach results in a quite bizarre stop-start patchwork of noise and silence. Perhaps this is a cunning marketing ploy.” — Telegraph.UK

Theater Review: Assassins: A Demon Gallery of Glory Hounds: “More than a decade after they first surfaced to critical shudders and head-scratching, the unhappy have-nots of “Assassins” — the glitteringly dark musical by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman about Americans who dream of killing their country’s presidents — have finally made it to Broadway.” — New York Times

“Kerry is stuck between politics and truth. After all, it is Kerry’s bravery as a soldier fighting the mistaken war, not his bravery as a veteran opposing it, that helps him in his bid for the presidency. ” — Jonathan Schell, AlterNet

Also: All Profile, No Courage: “This JFK needs to decide what defines him and his campaign—and soon.” — Doug Ireland, TomPaine.com

“UN reporter Ian Williams exposes how the neocons are trying to turn an Iraq scandal over the oil-for-food program into a reason why the UN should stay out of Iraq.” Democracy Now!

“You might find an answer in an essay by the late, great paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, titled ”Why No One Hits .400 Anymore.” ” — NY Times Magazine

Who wants a DVD player that automatically deletes all the juicy bits of movies? One guess: “This is what is happening. This is the happy godlike agenda of Utah’s ClearPlay, a twee and shrill little corporation that has taken it upon itself to sit around the cube farm all day and watch countless Hollywood flicks and zap out any and all icky violent suggestive material in, say, ‘Lost In Translation.’ For your protection. How kind.” — Mark Morford, SF Chronicle

“Webjay.org, a new site, helps uncover links to songs by making it easy for users to create and share playlists of songs on the Web. When you click on a playlist, the site assembles the links into a seamless radio show that you can listen to without any messy downloading. Think of it as a mix tape you can share and change at will.

Webjay already features several thousand playlists linking to more than 30,000 tracks, according to the site’s founder, Lucas Gonze, a programmer in Brooklyn. ‘The point is to find cool unknown songs and to encourage people to share what they find,’ he said. The playlists are varied and idiosyncratic, ranging from old radio shows and techno music to ‘Society 78’s from Stalin-era U.S.S.R.'” — New York Times

“Webjay.org, a new site, helps uncover links to songs by making it easy for users to create and share playlists of songs on the Web. When you click on a playlist, the site assembles the links into a seamless radio show that you can listen to without any messy downloading. Think of it as a mix tape you can share and change at will.

Webjay already features several thousand playlists linking to more than 30,000 tracks, according to the site’s founder, Lucas Gonze, a programmer in Brooklyn. ‘The point is to find cool unknown songs and to encourage people to share what they find,’ he said. The playlists are varied and idiosyncratic, ranging from old radio shows and techno music to ‘Society 78’s from Stalin-era U.S.S.R.'” — New York Times

Google Search: “mini-me”. I first took notice of the term last week; now I see it everywhere.

…that, with an impending alteration to their rocket engines, our ICBM’s meet EPA guidelines and will not pollute the atmosphere when launched against any future adversary in a nuclear war.

I wrote a reminiscence of the “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die-Rag” here just last month, with an update on what Country Joe McDonald has been up to (for those few of you who were still, if ever, wondering). Now comes word that, “…reconstituted with four of the legendary group’s original five members, the new Country Joe Band has just begun to tour. When I saw them perform, midway through April, the music was as tightly effusive as ever, with poetic lyrics mostly brought to bear on two perennials: love and death.” — Norman Solomon, CommonDreams […and a great big ‘Fish Cheer’ to you and yours, President Bush.]

Now I know I posted a disdainful item about the 23/5 meme down below. This variant, proposed on Incoming Signals, seems more interesting:

“Take the nearest six to ten books from your shelf.

Open them to page 23, and find the fifth sentence.

Write down those sentences and arrange them to form a short story.

Post the text in your journal along with these instructions.”

Incoming Signals links to several of the results submitted to them. However, it strikes me that most of the participants have ignored the instruction to use the books nearest at hand and gone, instead, for those that will impress most.

¹For those who don’t know, here is the explanation of the term “exquisite corpse”:

Among Surrealist techniques exploiting the mystique of accident was a kind of collective collage of words or images called the cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse). Based on an old parlor game, it was played by several people, each of whom would write a phrase on a sheet of paper, fold the paper to conceal part of it, and pass it on to the next player for his contribution.

“One of the standard arguments against grade inflation is that inflated grades convey less information about students’ performaces to employers, graduate schools, and the students themselves.

In light of the grade inflation debate at Princeton, I decided to apply information theory, a branch of computer science theory, to the question of how much information is conveyed by students’ course grades. I report the results in a four-page memo, in which I conclude that Princeton grades convey 11% less information than they did thirty years ago, and that imposing a 35% quota on A-level grades, as Princeton is proposing doing, would increase the information content of grades by 10% at most.” — Edward W. Felten, Freedom to Tinker

“Doctors or other health care providers could not be disciplined or sued if they refuse to treat gay patients under legislation passed Wednesday by the Michigan House.

The bill allows health care workers to refuse service to anyone on moral, ethical or religious grounds.

The Republican dominated House passed the measure as dozens of Catholics looked on from the gallery. The Michigan Catholic Conference, which pushed for the bills, hosted a legislative day for Catholics on Wednesday at the state Capitol.

The bills now go the Senate, which also is controlled by Republicans.

The Conscientious Objector Policy Act would allow health care providers to assert their objection within 24 hours of when they receive notice of a patient or procedure with which they don’t agree. However, it would prohibit emergency treatment to be refused.”

I am not surprised that a state legislature beholden to far-right religious fanatics would pass such legislation, but as a physician I assert that any health care professional who declines to provide service to someone because of the patient’s religious or sexual preferences should have an ethics complaint filed against them with their state licensing board. This should happen again and again, for every infringement, until the burden of responding to so many complaints is untenable for the subject and the licensing board of the state that passed such inane legislation. And I will join Atrios in pledging to be part of a network to ‘out’ any healthcare provider who avails themselves of the protections of this bill, for purposes both of public shaming and boycotting their business and hopefully impacting them significantly where it hurts.

“A majority of Americans still believes Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with al-Qa’ida and that Iraq either had weapons of mass destruction or a programme for developing them, according to a new opinion poll.

The poll, conducted by the University of Maryland, showedmost respondents were unaware of the testimony of David Kay, the administration’s chief weapons inspector, that he had found no weapons, or that of Richard Clarke, the former counter-terrorism tsar whose book Against All Enemies has been the talk of Washington.” — Independent.UK Well, it is said that a people gets the government they deserve. The only problem is that I and my family have to live with it.

Pentagon Ban on Pictures of Dead Troops Is Broken: “The Pentagon’s ban on making images of dead soldiers’ homecomings at military bases public was briefly relaxed yesterday, as hundreds of photographs of flag-draped coffins at Dover Air Force Base were released on the Internet by a Web site dedicated to combating government secrecy.

The Web site, the Memory Hole (www.thememoryhole.org), had filed a Freedom of Information Act request last year, seeking any pictures of coffins arriving from Iraq at the Dover base in Delaware, the destination for most of the bodies. The Pentagon yesterday labeled the Air Force Air Mobility Command’s decision to grant the request a mistake, but news organizations quickly used a selection of the 361 images taken by Defense Department photographers.” — New York Times.

Pentagon angered by photos from military mortuary — CNN.

Woman loses her job over coffins photo: “A military contractor has fired Tami Silicio, a Kuwait-based cargo worker whose photograph of flag-draped coffins of fallen U.S. soldiers was published in Sunday’s edition of The Seattle Times.”

“A White House spokesman… said on Friday that President Bush had seen photographs of the coffins of service members killed in Iraq arriving at Dover Air Force Base that were made public on Thursday and agreed with the Pentagon that releasing the photographs was wrong.” — New York Times

This is not a partisan issue. While the Memory Hole is certainly on the progressive end of the spectrum, Tami Silicio reportedly supported the invasion of Iraq, yet felt that honoring the war dead by having her photo published was worth risking her job. (According to the editor at The Seattle Times responsible for the decision to publish the photo — a “no-brainer” from a journalistic standpoint, he said — they had about a week’s discussion with Silicio before reaching a final decision, among other things reviewing the consequences she might suffer for her action.) Quite simply, the controversy ought to be not about the publication of the photos but about the dysadministration’s policy of not allowing publicity about the war dead. The Bush spokesperson’s argument about respecting the privacy of the grieving families is self-serving and disingenuous, no matter where you are on the political spectrum. Bush had no difficulty invading the privacy of the grieving families who lost loved ones in the WTC attack for his ad campaign, as Ted Koppel reminded us on Nightline last night [thanks, abby]. No individual family’s privacy is invaded by iconic depictions of flag-draped coffins, and families of the war dead have been grateful for the reverent way in which these powerful images have finally come to view.

Teacher accused of ordering student thrown from window: “A teacher at a Newton County school has resigned after officials say she admitted she told two students to throw a 14-year-old girl from a classroom window.” — USAToday

“Thursday’s New York Times misidentified GOP Senate candidate Pete Coors as a Ku Klux Klan member who murdered a black sharecropper.

The Coors campaign found the error ‘so outrageous it’s kind of funny,’ said spokeswoman Cinamon Watson.

‘It could have been worse,’ she joked. ‘Pete could have been identified as John Kerry.'” — Rocky Mountain News

Slate reads Plan of Attack so you don’t have to.

Amazon.com: Books: The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating:

“An audacious chef whose St. John restaurant in London draws legions of fans, Henderson is a staunch proponent of using virtually the entirety of any plant or animal being served up. Harking back to the days when very little went to waste, he practices what he preaches with such victuals as Rolled Pig’s Spleen, Duck’s Neck Terrine and Roast Woodcock, which is cooked with innards and head intact, the latter providing a bit of ‘delicious brains.’ Henderson recommends the use of a disposable Bic razor for depilating the primary ingredient in Crispy Pig Tails. And then there’s Warm Pig’s Head, which extreme chef Anthony Bourdain describes in his introduction as ‘so Goddamn amazing that it borders on religious epiphany.’ Here, too, are four recipes for lamb’s brains, a commodity that Henderson admits is illegal in both the U.S. and England. Home chefs will encounter difficulties in obtaining other ingredients as well. Blood Cake and Fried Eggs calls for a quart of fresh pig’s blood, and Soft Roes on Toast requires delicate white sacs of herring semen.” — Amazon [via boing boing]

Related: Disgust:

“Test your sensitivity to disgust and take part in a real science experiment. It has 20 questions and should take between 5-10 minutes. The questionnaire is split into two sections. Section one consists of 19 questions. Section two consists of a single vote. It was developed by Dr Val Curtis of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.” — BBC

Rebecca Blood links to a number of pieces about adult ADHD, IMHO mixing the wheat with the chaff with regard to an issue about which there is as much chaff as wheat. As an adult psychopharmacologist, I tracked from early on the emergence of the idea that ADHD, previously thought of as a condition of childhood, persists into adulthood, and was referred numerous people interested in being evaluated for ADHD. As Thomas Spencer MD notes in one of the quotes Rebecca reprints, ADHD is one of the most dramatic examples of a condition defined so vaguely, broadly and imprudently that not only do millions of people believe they have it but millions qualify for the diagnosis. I groaned when a freelance journalist described his idiosyncratic and unscientific take on ADHD in a 1987 New York Times Magazine piece which basically used the diagnosis to explain away his lifelong underachievement. I have spluttered ever since, as certain unscrupulous psychiatrists, including John Ratey and Ned Hallowell here in Cambridge (shamelessly marketing their ‘Harvard Medical School’ affiliations), have made a lucrative cottage industry in mass market fiction books, workshops, consulting work and media appearances from fueling the idea that this diffusely defined ADHD (“driven to distraction”, the title of the US News series to which Rebecca links, is the title of the first of their enormously successful books) applies to nearly everyone, and have gone on to describe other ‘shadow syndromes’ that are, similarly, versions of established psychiatric diagnoses so watered down as to similarly apply to virtually everybody.

This is such a travesty of my sense of what psychiatry is supposed to be, in which a diagnosis is a distinction that makes a difference. However, it is consistent with the medicalization of daily life and the era of cosmetic psychopharmacology, which has completely buried the distinctions between normal variants and pathology in the notion that personality can (and should) be hacked and tweaked… regardless of the consequences to the human soul. Many of my assessments consisted in trying to persuade people who thought they had they syndrome that they really did not, by stringent criteria and my attempt to ferret out what might be going on in their brain physiology and chemistry. Many were disappointed, some more legitimately than others. (Of course, the issue is complicated by the fact that the treatment of choice has been any of a variety of stimulant drugs. Needless to say, stimulants make most people feel better and more productive, so stimulant response does not confirm the diagnosis.)

Strattera, by the way, the new medication mentioned in Rebecca’s excerpts (a non-stimulant; actually a sort of antidepressant) sales of which reportedly topped $370 million last year, is largely useless in clinical practice, regardless of what the pharmaceutical-industry-funded research protocols show. (They demonstrate distinctions which do not make a difference.) And the Dore program, which claims to “rewire the distracted mind”, is pure hokum utterly inconsistent with any neuropsychological understanding of attention and its neural control. “Exercises to stimulate the cerebellum???!!” If it works, it is because of the powerful influence of wishful thinking and the charisma of its sales staff, IMHO.

“I’ve watched in horror as, one after another, my friends and associates fell victim to the latest plague to sweep through our online world: the ‘page 23, sentence 5’ virus. I still don’t understand its power to overwhelm even the seemingly most resistant”. — Phil Ringnalda. I never posted any ‘page 23, sentence 5’ material on FmH, I can say in my morally superior way. When I saw evidence of the meme on Blogdex, I opened some favorite books I had on hand but, frankly, sentence 5 on page 23 was utterly uninteresting to post.

“(These) exhibits… feature artifacts related to various censorship incidents from modern times. Many highlight a couple of often-overlooked aspects of censorship:

• It is the packaging of musical products – rather than the “controversial” lyrical content within – that has often provided busybody “moral guardians” with the easiest avenue of attack against artists whose ideas (or existence) they object to.
• And, it is the corporate music biz itself – rather than the traditional “usual suspects” (parents, preachers, principals, & police) – that does most of the “reining in” of today’s artists.” [via dangerousmeta]

“The Internet is seething with political vitriol, with so many partisan message boards, niche political sites and Weblogs. But the public’s taste for ideological journalism might be more for theater than for closing itself to opposing viewpoints.” — Online Journalism Review

If you are interested in language usage, this is a weblog written by a number of linguists, mostly talking among themselves.

I am not familiar with any of the contributors except Geoff Nunberg, the linguistic commentator on NPR’s Fresh Air, from whose on-air column today about weblogging I learned about LanguageLog. Nunberg mentions that he is new to weblogging (which he persists, unquestioningly and annoyingly, in calling “blogging”) and can’t get the tone right; unlike his NPR commentaries, his weblog entries sound pedantic to him. He thinks his problem is that he tries to be reportorial but, lo and behold, he realizes, weblogging isn’t exactly like journalism! It is clear that he is new to “blogging”, since he still struggles with exactly what it is and what tone he should adopt, unlike most of us who have long since given up that struggle. Nunberg also completely misses the historical boat, getting caught up in a debate about which luminary’s claim that their print column — Mickey Kaus, Camille Paglia, or even Herb Caen — was the first “blog” is correct. This obfuscation of the differences between a ‘column’ and a weblog undoes some of his earlier struggles in the commentary to define exactly what is distinctive about a weblog. He is too caught up, as one might expect of a linguist rather than a more broadly-based media commentator, on ‘tone’ and word choice to notice that the weblogging medium is as much or more defined by temporal dimensions such as immediacy and transiency or my favorite parameter, ‘granularity’. Nunberg also commits the cardinal sin of invoking the ‘blogosphere’ concept, by the way.

All that about Nunberg is a tangent; there is much stimulating linking, observing and commenting at LanguageLog.

“Exhumations, DNA testing of historical figures draw interest, but ethics are questioned“. — The Scientist

Cloning is not Copying: “Unfortunately, the idea of clones as copies has found a prominent place in our cloning conversations. Ian Wilmut, who headed the team that cloned Dolly the sheep, used the term early and often as he sought to demonstrate his revulsion at the idea of human reproductive cloning – at ‘copying people’.

But people cannot be copied. Our mirror image will never come to life on our side of the looking glass. Reconstructing a new person using a single cell taken from a progenitor would duplicate only the genome. The clone would be a later-born identical twin. While the copying metaphor may lend itself more readily to clones than twins because, sequentially, the clone follows the progenitor, the term is as misleading applied to one as it is to the other. Perhaps the most profound and pernicious of the misunderstandings about cloning is that genetic identity is equivalent to personal identity.” —Guardian.UK

“So while the national headlines recently trumpeted good news about STDs—herpes rates fell significantly throughout the 1990s, especially among young people—the local, untold story was scarier. An all but banished disease was making a serious comeback—and it wasn’t the only one. “The fact of the matter is we have seen increases in gonorrhea, chlamydia, and syphilis,” says Blank. The health department doesn’t keep tabs on herpes cases, but the tracking of these other STDs paints a dark picture. Last year, there were 35,000 cases of chlamydia, a key cause of infertility. Girls between 10 and 14 years old account for a small but fast-growing fraction of that number. And while the national gonorrhea rate went down between 1999 and 2001, it went up slightly in the city in the same period, with cases almost doubling in girls between 10 and 14.

But at the center of heightened concern about the rising tide of STDs is syphilis, which Blank calls “the high-profile disease of the day.”” — Village Voice

“The kids who survived the worst school massacre in U.S. history have graduated, and some of them have even forgiven. But many of their parents have not.” — Salon

“As more Americans die in Iraq and evidence piles up that the president rushed into war, even his right-wing allies are turning on him. Has the White House reached the tipping point?” — Joe Conason, Salon

“The brainpower of young women who are lacking in iron can be markedly boosted by taking supplements of the mineral, suggests a new study.

Even women who were just modestly iron deficient did much worse on attention, memory and learning tests than those with enough iron in their blood, found the study by researchers at Pennsylvania State University in the US.” — New Scientist

World’s marine life is getting sicker: “A new study provides the first solid evidence that creatures from turtles to sea urchins are getting more diseases, more often.” — New Scientist

Denis Dutton on Peter Jackson and Lord of the Rings: “Personally, I think the New Zealand government should bring back knighthoods just to give him one. So when I add that the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy is, as a work of cinematic art, ham-fisted, shallow, bombastic, and laughably overrated, don’t get me wrong. I’m not knocking Jackson and his hard-working team. The larger issue is Hollywood and the degraded state of big-budget movies.” — Los Angeles Times

Actually, It May Become Worse — Robert Freeman, CommonDreams

Environmental ‘Nobel Prizes’ Announced: “The Goldman Environmental Prize recognizes the perseverance – and the very concrete accomplishments – of grassroots activists throughout the world. The prize is considered by many to be environmentalism’s highest honor, established in 1990 by Richard and Rhoda Goldman (Richard Goldman founded Goldman Insurance Services in San Franciso, and Rhoda Goldman was a descendant of jeans-maker Levi Strauss). Winners are nominated annually by environmental organizations, and chosen by a panel of former prizewinners and other activists. Each winner or team of winners receives a no-strings-attached award of $125,000. This year’s crop was honored in a ceremony in San Francisco on April 19.

Below is a list of the winners followed by the first in a series of interviews with the 2004 Goldman winners discussing their victories and defeats, their plans for the future, and their mystifying, inspiring optimism. ” — AlterNet

“Bob Woodward’s new book depicts a president who shuns responsibility, critical thinking and self-doubt, and instead mistakes stubbornness for leadership.” — AlterNet

‘Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the U.S. has promised President George W. Bush the Saudis will reduce oil prices before this November’s election to help the U.S. economy, according to Bob Woodward, author of a new book about the Iraq war.

Oil prices are “high, and they could go down very quickly,” Woodward said last night in an interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes.’

“That’s the Saudi pledge,” said Woodward. “Certainly over the summer or as we get closer to the election they could increase production several million barrels a day and the price would drop significantly.” ‘ — Bloomberg

“In 1997, psychology professor and spiritual leader Ram Dass suffered a stroke that left him with expressive aphasia and partial paralysis. The Independent Lens feature ‘Ram Dass: Fierce Grace’ (Tuesday night on PBS; check local listings) begins with Ram Dass coping with the physical and emotional challenges of his stroke, but the film quickly expands into a wider examination of his life’s work. While you might think you’d be nothing but amused by a documentary in which interviewees stare directly into the camera and say things like ‘You can’t buy into someone else’s trip,’ and ‘He brought me to my guru. How can you ever repay that?’ in fact, this film is remarkably moving. From his pre-Maharaji days as Harvard professor Richard Alpert to his ‘Be Here Now’-era group meditations on his father’s farm, each step of Ram Dass’s journey is handled with such patience and compassion, it’s impossible not to get caught up in the emotional momentum of the film. And when Ram Dass meets with the girlfriend of a murdered activist, their conversation is at once so devastating and so inspiring, you won’t be able to get it out of your mind for days.

Most of all, though, the film bears witness to the ego’s struggle with aging. ‘This isn’t who I expected to be,’ Ram Dass explains. ‘This is all new because my expectations of me didn’t have this stroke in it.’ By humbly presenting us with his own challenges, Ram Dass does a great service in helping us prepare for those times when our plans get derailed and our lives suddenly don’t live up to our expectations.” — Salon Arts [via walker]

“In 1997, psychology professor and spiritual leader Ram Dass suffered a stroke that left him with expressive aphasia and partial paralysis. The Independent Lens feature ‘Ram Dass: Fierce Grace’ (Tuesday night on PBS; check local listings) begins with Ram Dass coping with the physical and emotional challenges of his stroke, but the film quickly expands into a wider examination of his life’s work. While you might think you’d be nothing but amused by a documentary in which interviewees stare directly into the camera and say things like ‘You can’t buy into someone else’s trip,’ and ‘He brought me to my guru. How can you ever repay that?’ in fact, this film is remarkably moving. From his pre-Maharaji days as Harvard professor Richard Alpert to his ‘Be Here Now’-era group meditations on his father’s farm, each step of Ram Dass’s journey is handled with such patience and compassion, it’s impossible not to get caught up in the emotional momentum of the film. And when Ram Dass meets with the girlfriend of a murdered activist, their conversation is at once so devastating and so inspiring, you won’t be able to get it out of your mind for days.

Most of all, though, the film bears witness to the ego’s struggle with aging. ‘This isn’t who I expected to be,’ Ram Dass explains. ‘This is all new because my expectations of me didn’t have this stroke in it.’ By humbly presenting us with his own challenges, Ram Dass does a great service in helping us prepare for those times when our plans get derailed and our lives suddenly don’t live up to our expectations.” — Salon Arts [via walker]

Your tax dollars hard at work: I have no convictions about the veracity and no knowledge about the origins of this powerfully affecting mpeg video. I received a link to it from a friend, who had received it from someone else, with the message,

“It is Pentagon footage of US Apache helos taking out a group of Iraqis

planting a road side bomb. It is from a distance of approximately two

miles, in the dark of night, using infrared.

The Iraqis can neither see no hear their impending fate. Turn on the

speakers so you can hear the commander.”

Anyone with familiarity or opinion about this should leave comments below, please. Exploring the homepage where it is contained is completely unrevealing.

“South Africa will be very interested in the Israeli disengagement plan published yesterday. The political, military, and economic aspects of the plan for the Gaza Strip and the enclave in the northern West Bank are amazingly similar to the homelands, one of the last inventions of the white minority in South Africa to perpetuate its rule over the black majority.” — Haaretz

“The crowd that gathered on Halloween night in 1964 to hear Bob Dylan play New York City’s Philharmonic Hall had no idea what storms lay ahead“. Review of ‘The Bootleg Series Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964 Concert at Philharmonic Hall’.

” ‘I heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world.’ That line, from ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,’ one line from a song in which, said its composer, Bob Dylan, each line could stand as a separate song, describes what you hear on the newest release in Dylan’s ongoing Bootleg Series.” — Charles Taylor, Salon

What story you choose to believe about antidepressants reveals a deeper truth about who you are. —Reason

“Local governments are refusing to comply with the Patriot Act” —Elaine Scarry, Professor of Values at Harvard University, Boston Review

“The idea that human beings are endowed with a special faculty for reasoning about other minds fits into a much wider and older tradition of debate about the origin of all concepts, especially relatively complex ones. Most psychologists would grant that some basic perceptual primitives—for example, color, sound, and depth—are derived from the physical world by dedicated innate mechanisms in the mind. But where do more abstract concepts come from—concepts such as house, belief, or justice? How, for example, does a child originally learn that other people have beliefs?” —Rebecca Saxe, Boston Review

“A couple of decades ago, in fact, physicians prescribed tests and treatments for their patients without serious inquiry into what their patients wanted.

Sometimes doctors did not even inform patients of their diagnoses, for fear that the news would be too much for them to handle.

But times have changed, and many experts now contend that the best treatment differs from patient to patient based on the patient’s values. For example, a man who cares little about the risk of impotence is better suited to surgical treatment of his prostate cancer than a man who highly values sexual function.

Trying to keep up with the times, I explained that it was not my decision to make. It depended on what he felt about the risks and benefits of his alternatives, I said. He became even more confused.” —New York Times

Boy killed by father’s dogs

“CHARLOTTE, North Carolina (AP) — An 8-year-old boy was mauled to death by his father’s four pit bulls, and prosecutors were considering charges against the father ranging from child neglect to murder.” —CNN

Juan Cole:

“The credibility of the US in the Middle East as a broker is finished, kaput, nada, zero. And the problem is that there is no other credible broker.

You know, my colleague Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University got slammed by the Neocons for having predicted that the Arab street would come out during the Gulf War and threaten the region with instability. Actually, there were huge demonstrations, especially in North Africa. But his critics pointed out that there were no real changes as a result. The power of the urban crowd in the Middle East cannot be sneezed at (see: the Islamic Revolution in Iran, 1978-79). But it is true that most governments in the Middle East have muddled through even if they have been associated with unpopular US or Israeli policies.

Rashid was right, though, about the danger of doing things that cause anger to fester in large numbers of people. And, it occurs to me that the very inability of those huge crowds to change anything (or even to go to the streets in most countries of the region, given the controls put in place by the secret police) gave rise to the frustrations that eventuated in the wave of terrorism we are now seeing. That is, the Arab street has not so much admitted defeat as ramified, into radical social movements with a religious cast, and (on the part of a small number of the really angry and frustrated) into terrorist cells.” —Informed Consent

I have been tracking the phenomenon by which the social censorship after 9-11 of any comments suggesting that the US was anything other than an innocent victim is finally showing its age. Vigilante arbiters of public opinion scoured the media for anyone hinting at what, for me was and is as plain as the noses on our faces — that the US with its cocky, arrogant swagger and disdain for world consensus has engendered the hatred that came back at us in spades on 9-11. And the Bush administration’s prosecution of the WoT® has continued to fulfill the prophecy. Although Cole is careful here to place his comments only in the context of the current Iraqi Intifada and the Bush endorsement of Sharon’s unilateral ‘solution’ to the Palestinian conflict (“Sharon and Bush just painted big red targets on us all”), it is clear he is joining the ranks of those uttering the forbidden thought.

So, we’re all preoccupied with how Google wants to store and index all your life’s email for you; now Amazon wants to store and index your search history for you, for better or worse. A beta of the new A9.com search portal went live yesterday. Some of its more interesting features, if you use your amazon.com log-in and accept cookies:

• Each entry in the results page of your search includes a notation of the date and time you last clicked on that link.
• There’s a tab to simultaneously show you the results of the same query performed on Amazon’s book database.
• Most Google search syntax works.
• If you rerun a search you have previously done, the results page tells you which hits are new.

If you want to search in privacy, you can use generic.a9.com instead, which promises not to recognize a9 or amazon cookies. John Battelle discusses some of the implications of the ‘history server ‘ concept here.

World’s Fastest Shoelace Knot, claims Ian, at his shoelace site.

“Science-fiction author Neal Stephenson’s latest 800-page dispatch, The Confusion, arrived in stores this week. But Stephenson fans hoping for another brain-wracking, cryptographic puzzle to solve will find a surprise instead: A central scene in the book provides a long, detailed description of the mechanics of 17th-century bills of exchange. Pivotal themes in the book involve the emergence of a cashless market at Lyon, France, and Sir Isaac Newton’s 30-year stint at England’s national mint.

The Confusion, which consists of two 400-page novels interleaved (literally ‘con-fused’) with one another, is the second of three volumes in The Baroque Cycle, a nearly 3,000-page opus that fictionalizes the exploits of Newton and the Royal Society of scientists to which he belonged.

In an interview with Wired News, Stephenson, who rose to fame on cyberpunk-themed novels including Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, said his interest in money and markets dates back to 1994, a time when crypto hackers and Citicorp/Citibank CEO Walter Wriston were equally likely to expound on the concept of money as an information technology.”

Can the Rights of People Simply Disappear by Presidential Order? “What does it mean when the President of the United States can on his own designate a citizen in the U.S. as an ‘enemy combatant,’ and order the military to hold that person incommunicado, indefinitely, and without charges? The U.S. Supreme Court is now deciding whether the courts even have the right to question the President’s action.

What does it mean when the U.S. military internationally can literally snatch people off the street, designate them as ‘enemy combatants,’ and assert that they are beyond the reach of either U.S. or international law? Many are transported to a facility under total U.S. control and funded by Congressional appropriations, where they are held incommunicado, indefinitely, without charges and some are threatened with trials before a military commission that falls short of basic standards of justice.

If the Supreme Court upholds these actions, it will condone the President’s claim of virtually unlimited ‘wartime powers’ without a formal declaration of war by the Congress, and with no or extremely limited oversight by the courts or the Congress.

On April 20 the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the President’s alleged right to create a ‘law free zone’ at the Guantanamo detention center in Cuba. And on April 28, the Court will hear oral arguments on the President’s asserted right to designate citizens as ‘enemy combatants,’ hold them at the U.S. Navy base in Charleston, SC, and deny them the ability to challenge the lawfulness of their detention.

We believe that the President cannot be allowed to create a ‘legal Black Hole’ into which people are dropped with no recourse to the courts or to international law. Among us we hold many varied views on how and why this situation has arisen and what is ultimately needed to ensure justice. But we all agree that this dangerous new presidentially-designated category of ‘enemy combatants’ who have no legal rights is unjust, illegal, and immoral, and cannot be allowed to stand.

The silence over this perilous issue must be broken, and public opposition must be manifested. Join us in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on April 20 and April 28 to declare a resounding NO! Legally permitted, non-violent demonstrations will occur on both days from 9:30 am to 12:30 pm with a program of speakers beginning at 11:am.” —Not In Our Names

“Mafia boss Vito Corleone, as played by Marlon Brando in The Godfather, has been named the greatest movie character of all time by US film critics.

Sixteen film experts voted for the most memorable characters in cinema for US magazine Premiere.

Fred C Dobbs from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre came second with Gone With the Wind‘s Scarlett O’Hara third.” —BBC

Rollicking anecdotes about the consequences of this dramatic species of credulity. —Wired

“An intriguing development on the Nabokov front, a crypto-scandal widely reported in Europe, but not much here: Lolita is causing trouble again. At least, that’s been the way it’s been portrayed in the European press, which has overheatedly raised the specter of “plagiarism”: Did Vladimir Nabokov lift the controversial plot, indeed the very name of Lolita, from a 1916 German short story called “Lolita”?

But more interestingly, there are fascinating implications for understanding Pale Fire, which followed Lolita seven years later. And then there’s “cryptomnesia.” —Ron Rosenbaum, New York Observer

The Science Fiction Museum frames the past and present of glitzy and gritty futures. ‘Seattle sci-fi insiders call it “Siffumhoff”: Paul Allen’s new Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. When it opens in June, it will be more commonly known as SFM. Right now it’s under noisy construction in the Blue Potato section of EMP—the space formerly occupied by the Funk Blast ride at Experience Music Project. “All of these cases are just gonna be filled!” exults the jovially ursine Greg Bear, raising his voice above the shrieking saws and banging hammers inside the Potato. He is SFM’s board chairman, an adviser to Microsoft and the CIA, and a quintuple Nebula-winning author. “E.T. has just arrived. We’re gonna have the Alien Queen [from Aliens], all 18 feet of her, kinda hunkered down.” Since the case is 12 feet high, she’ll be crouched as if to pounce and devour visitors. Expect Harrison Ford’s Blade Runner spinner car, but not Anakin Skywalker’s podracer—it was too big. “Probably the centerpiece is Spacedock—you’re gonna have 25 spaceships from films and books . . . all lined up in glorious 3-D!” Viewers will be able to manipulate the digital models in virtual space, compare them for size, armaments, fuel capacity, top speed. “You’re in the viewport of the space station, and you’ll be watching Rama,” Arthur C. Clarke’s alien spacecraft, “90 kilometers long, the size of an asteroid!”’ —Seattle Weekly: News

Bill McKibben: “Modern environmentalism can fairly be described as an American invention. It got its rhetoric from John Muir, its fighting savvy from David Brower, its sense of the world from Rachel Carson, and its institutional framework from the Congress of the Nixon years, which bowed before the loud will of the American people in the years after Earth Day I. The rest of the industrialized world followed, its NGOs patterned on the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth, its laws modeled on ours. We paved the road; we drove innovation.

So it is odd for American environmentalists to look up now and realize that we no longer play a leading role of any kind. If you spend much time at international conferences, you see that we are no more the center of gravity, the fount of new ideas. Long before President Bush ditched the Kyoto treaty, we were drifting toward the back of the pack.” —TomPaine.com

Erika Shuch stretches to tell macabre tale: “‘Sweeney Todd’ redux this isn’t; Shuch uses the metaphor of consumption to investigate all forms of desire. Jesse Howell and Jennifer Chien retread the ‘eat me’ exchange as a tentative sexual proposition: ‘It’s gonna hurt. … It’s not safe,’ they warn. An ensemble dance to the old standard ‘All of Me’ takes on sinister shadings with the lines ‘take my lips … take my arms.’ Love appears ultimately a matter of consensual pain and unsatisfied appetites as Howell roams the stage like a rabid dog, begging, ‘Do you trust me?'” —SF Chronicle

“‘Unrealistic’ war game pooh-poohed before 9/11” —Guardian.UK

Kerry campaign, county Democratic Party condemn ad: “The ad says of Rumsfeld, ‘We should put this S.O.B. up against a wall and say, ‘This is one of our bad days,’ and pull the trigger.’

The ad was placed by the St. Petersburg Democratic Club in last week’s issue of The Gabber, a weekly community newspaper based in Gulfport, next to St. Petersburg on Florida’s Gulf Coast.” —CNN

“For 120 days in 2002, a colossal wildfire scarred a half-million acres of Southern Oregon and Northern California, leaving behind a charred landscape that has turned into fertile soil for a conflict over how to manage the public forests.

The Forest Service’s plan for a large salvage logging operation on the site of wildfire, called the Biscuit fire, is reopening old wounds and threatens to undercut the shaky truce between environmentalists and the timber industry.” —New York Times

Who calls the shots in an outsourced war? —Salon

Mark Daims reviews The Epidemic: The Rot of American Culture, Absentee and Permissive Parenting, and the Resultant Plague of Joyless, Selfish Children: “Robert Shaw, a child and family psychiatrist, feels that today’s parents have been misled by parenting gurus into doubting their own instincts – instincts which he feels are their best guide. He is so alarmed by current parenting practices and the effects they will have on the coming generation that he describes his book as less of a parenting ‘How to’ book and more of a call to action. Children raised without discipline and moral leadership become selfish or worse. An ‘endless parade of childrearing experts’ confuse parents with contradictory and often counterproductive advise. This overabundance of advice can leave parents stressed and unsure about how to act. By not acting, the author cautions, parents also affect the child; as one paragraph heading states, ‘We determine our children’s future.’ Parents are ultimately responsible for their children, parents instinctively know best and they have an often overlooked parenting expert always at hand. ‘You have a live-in parenting expert who shows you every day the effects of what you are doing: your child. Anything that is not going well with your child is a sign that your parenting practices are not working.'” —Human Nature Reviews

“If confirmed, our Universe is curved like a Pringle potato chip, shaped like a horn, and named after a Star Trek character” —New Scientist

“Girl chimps are faster and smarter at getting to grips with tools used to eat termites, echoing learning differences in human children” —New Scientist

“A large trial proves it can help prevent the horror of patients feeling pain while being paralysed by anaesthetics.” —New Scientist

Heart attack survivors half as likely to suffer further attacks if they have love and friends: “A new study shows that if you had a heart attack and survived it, your chances of having another attack within a year are halved if you have close friends and/or relatives who love you (in comparison to patients who do not have close friends and loving relatives).” —Medical News Today

‘Bin Laden’ offers Europe truce:

“Arab networks air a tape in which the al-Qaeda leader allegedly offers Europe a truce if it ‘stops attacking Muslims’.” [Note that the BBC puts ‘Bin Laden’ in quotes, hedging their bet about whether he remains alive.]

U.K. and Italy Reject Purported Bin Laden Tape’s Truce Offer —Bloomberg

Italian hostage is killed in Iraq:

“Italy is shocked by the killing of an Italian security contractor in Iraq – the first confirmed hostage death.” —BBC

“President Bush’s embrace yesterday of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to unilaterally disengage from the Palestinians carries potential political benefits for Bush —Washington Post but also potential risk for his foreign policy.” —New York Times

William Saletan on Bush’s incredible definition of credibility:

One thing is for certain, though, about me, and the world has learned this: When I say something, I mean it. And the credibility of the United States is incredibly important for keeping world peace and freedom.

“That’s the summation President Bush delivered as he wrapped up his press conference Tuesday night. It’s the message he emphasized throughout: Our commitment. Our pledge. Our word. My conviction. Given the stakes in Iraq and the war against terrorism, it would be petty to poke fun at Bush for calling credibility ‘incredibly important.’ His routine misuse of the word ‘incredible,’ while illiterate, is harmless. His misunderstanding of the word ‘credible,’ however, isn’t harmless. It’s catastrophic.

To Bush, credibility means that you keep saying today what you said yesterday, and that you do today what you promised yesterday.” —Slate

And: Bush Makes Three Mistakes While Trying to Cite One: “While struggling unsuccessfully this week to think of a single mistake he has made since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, President Bush committed three factual errors about weapons finds in Libya, the White House said on Wednesday.” —Yahoo! News

Also: Standing Firm: “So far, Bush has the upper hand in this argument. Even as he and John Kerry muddle toward an awkward role for the United Nations in Iraq, Bush is doing so while maintaining the appearance of certitude about his course. Meanwhile Kerry hasn’t figured out how to define a clear alternative. Unlike his bold (but all too brief) call to honor the democratic process in Haiti, Kerry is trying to have it every which way but sideways on Iraq. Unfortunately, that sliver of Americans in the confused middle on this election are more likely to be swayed by certitude than caution. And you can’t beat something with nothing.” Micah L. Sifry is a senior analyst with Public Campaign. He is the author of Spoiling For A Fight: Third-Party Politics In America, (Routledge, 2002) and the web log www.iraqwarreader.com, and recently co-edited The Iraq War Reader: History, Documents, Opinions (Touchstone, 2003) —TomPaine.com

End Insurance Discrimination: “Although bipartisan support for the Wellstone Mental Health Equitable Treatment Act (S. 486) is strong and growing, Senate leaders have reneged on their commitment and are blocking the bill from a vote on the floor of the Senate. We must speak louder, and with greater determination, than the insurance industry! Tell our representatives to honor the promises made last year.

The Paul Wellstone Mental Health Equitable Treatment Act would close loopholes in federal law by requiring group health plans to stop using arbitrary limits on mental health parity benefits different from those used with medical and surgical benefits. With 69 co-sponsors, this legislation is sure to pass if brought to a vote.

It’s up to us to keep the pressure on those key senators that have the power to allow a vote. Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH), chair of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and Senate Majority Leader Dr. Bill Frist (R-TN) need to hear from us, and they need to hear from their fellow senators.” —ActForChange

In some ways, Kill Bill is the apotheosis of cross-fertilization between Eastern and Western popular cinema culture. New York Times reviewer Dave Kehr dissects his references and influences, some obscure and others (like his homages to Sergio Leone and John Ford) obvious. The deeper you look, the more impressed you are with Tarantino as an iconographer (much as Lucas’ Star Wars series did for a previous generation) but there is something smirking, sarcastic and arch about his references. As a longtime devotee of the samurai and spaghetti western genres (moreso than kung fu films), I would rather see the originals. Those generes have gotten stale, true, but if Tarantino is their heir, I am uncomfortable with the direction in which he is taking it. Off to rent some Sonny Chiba films…

‘The drug industry lobbying group PhRMA published a new Web site aimed at helping poor people get discounted or free drugs offered by the drug companies.

The drug companies have been under fire in the U.S. Congress and the media for fighting efforts to import low-cost prescription drugs from other countries, notably Canada.

The Internet site, at http://www.helpingpatients.org, promises “one-stop-shopping” for various patient assistance programs, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America said.’

“What really goes on in the back rooms of car dealerships across America?

What does the car salesman do when he leaves you sitting in a sales office and goes to talk with his boss?

What are the tricks salespeople use to increase their profit and how can consumers protect themselves from overpaying? ” —Edmunds

“The bestseller at the center of a national debate on America’s security, ‘Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror,’ may soon be hitting the silver screen.

Sony Pictures has optioned the film rights to former counterterrorism official Richard Clarke’s book, which questions the country’s readiness to address potential terrorist threats before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to the Hollywood Reporter.” —Yahoo! News

Air Marshal Leaves Gun in Airport Restroom: “A federal air marshal accidentally left her gun in a restroom beyond the security checkpoints at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, officials say.

The weapon was discovered by a passenger who alerted an airline employee.” —Yahoo! News

Jesus As You Like Him: “When Mel Gibson responded to critics of his blockbuster The Passion of the Christ by saying they had a ‘problem with the four Gospels,’ not with his film, he was staking a claim to authenticity: My Jesus is the real one, not yours.

But it’s not just Mel. Everyone claims their Jesus is the ‘real’ one, the only authentic Christ unperverted by secular society or religious institutions. The best-selling fiction book The Da Vinci Code, which posits among other things that Jesus fathered a child by Mary Magdalene, styles itself as a fact-based account of the ‘real’ Jesus, who has been covered up by a Vatican conspiracy. Academics who seek evidence for the Jesus of history attempt to peel away layers of the Gospel narratives until the genuine Jewish prophet is revealed. Nowadays, even nonbelievers assert a superior understanding of who the actual Jesus really was and what he stood for.

Why can everyone from atheists to Zoroastrians lay claim to knowledge of the real Jesus? Because there are so many of him. The New Testament itself presents multiple Jesuses, not just among the four competing Gospel accounts but within each Gospel as well: Baby Jesus, Teacher Jesus, Miracle Worker Jesus, to name only three.” —Chris Suellentrop, Slate

Anti-Semitism at Easter linked to conflicting biblical messages about violence: ‘Drawing on modern psychological concepts like post-traumatic stress disorder, a Queen’s University researcher concludes that today’s religious strife may have a direct link to the violence of the Easter story and the crucifixion.

The traditional Christian interpretation of the violent death of Jesus on the cross contains an unresolved conflict that has inflamed anti-Semitism in the past, and may be contributing to religious hostility today, says Queen’s Religious Studies Professor William Morrow, a specialist in biblical literature with research interests in violence and religion.

Dr. Morrow analyzes ancient biblical texts in light of contemporary concepts about the effects of violence, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and vicarious trauma.

“There are distinct risks when the violence of the Easter story is emphasized, as it is in Mel Gibson’s new film, The Passion of the Christ,” says Dr. Morrow. “It is naïve to think that a focus on the brutality of the crucifixion will have no negative effects on a culture that is still basically shaped by the Christian myth.” In fact, some recent expressions of anti-Semitism in North America can be associated with Gibson’s film, he notes.’

In past seasons, I enjoyed the group of psychoanalysts who commented on each week’s episode. Now it’s “Mob Experts on The Sopranos“, a group of crime reporters. On the latest episode:

“Can The Sopranos get any darker without turning the lights out completely? This Peter Bogdanovich-directed episode was as unremittingly depressing as anything on television (and mainstream film, for that matter). Six Feet Under seems like Three’s Company by comparison. David Chase is giving us nothing to grab hold of: For some reason, I found Carmela’s father’s silence in the face of his daughter’s despair to be one of the bleakest moments of all.” —Slate

Is anybody watching this? What do you think?

“Using your cellphone’s camera to snap the nearest building allows remote servers to determine your precise position”. —New Scientist