About FmH

70-something psychiatrist, counterculturalist, autodidact, and unrepentent contrarian.

"I still think the world is ending, but perhaps a bit slower than I thought."

Posted on 30 Mar 04 by FmH

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The Age profiles Art Spiegelman’s new work and its reception: “Spiegelman’s role as a staffer at (The New Yorker) became decidedly precarious when the editors saw the working drawings for his new book, In The Shadow of No Towers, which illustrates his emotional and political confusion since September 11.

‘The work is on my feelings towards the hijacking and then the hijacking of the hijacking by the Government. I’m not so sure The New Yorker is being complacent. I’m sure I’d be welcomed back once I had found the right medication.’

Spiegelman’s new book is sure to cause as much, if not more, ruckus as MAUS. It depicts a government out of control, or, more chillingly, totally in control. ‘They had an agenda already on their mind before September 11,’ he says. ‘Drying up funds for health and education and moving the funds upward to the rich, all made more implementable by the war in Iraq.’

Works in progress from The Shadow of No Towers were roundly rejected when he first showed them to publications in New York. They finally found a home in a Jewish newspaper in Manhattan, The Forward.

‘They are a peculiar format,’ he says. ‘They’re broadsheet, colour works.’ MAUS was black and white in paperback format. ‘I’ve finally got them placed in The London Review of Books, Liberation in France, Die Zeit in Germany and La Republica in Italy. So I’ve found my own coalition of the willing.'” [via walker]

Customer Disservice

Posted on 29 Mar 04 by FmH

These Days, Consumers May as Well Keep Their Complaint To Themselves: “But wait a minute. Wasn’t it only a few years ago that Americans were seeing in practically every ad, every TV commercial that the customer was number one, that ‘service is our middle name?’ Didn’t Nordstrom, the upscale department store with a mythic service reputation, have every retailer quaking in his Ferragamos?

That was then, and this is now, say those whose job it is to pay attention to the passing parade. Service was a fine buzzword when the economy was soaring; came the downturn and customer service came close to getting squeezed out of the corporate budget. ‘It’s a frustration,’ said customer service consultant Tschohl, ‘because corporate America is not spending any money to train its staff.'” —Washington Post

RIP Jan Berry, at 62

Posted on 29 Mar 04 by FmH

Pioneer of Surf Music Sound, Dies: Jan was half of ‘Jan and Dean’ along with Dean Torrance. I think Jan and Dean’s “Little Old Lady from Pasadena” may have been the first single I saved up my $.50/week allowance to buy. In a life-imitates-art tragedy, Jan suffered a head injury in 1966 when he crashed his speeding Corvette that largely ended his (and Dean’s?) career. By that time my tastes were migrating further north to a preoccupation with Bay Area psychedelia but I never ceased to get a thrill from the falsetto trill of “two girls for every boy…” [Surf music hasn’t really stood the test of time, but should I be embarrassed to say?] —New York Times

‘Lunatic’ Asteroid?

Posted on 29 Mar 04 by FmH

“The Earth has only one true Moon, but astronomers have found that we also have a ‘quasi-moon’ – a travelling companion through space that is circling the Earth while actually orbiting the Sun.

The object, the only quasi-moon discovered so far, is an asteroid called 2003 YN107 which circles the Sun in an orbit almost identical to Earth’s, but follows a corkscrew path that from time to time means that it appears to orbit Earth.” —New Scientist

Buckyballs cause brain damage in fish

Posted on 29 Mar 04 by FmH

“Nanoparticles cause brain damage in fish, according to a study of the toxicity of synthetic carbon molecules called ‘buckyballs’.

The soccer-ball-shaped molecules show great promise in nanotechnology. But the preliminary study raises the possibility that nanomaterials could cause significant environmental harm, although much further work is needed to establish the extent of this risk.” —New Scientist

Abridged too far

Posted on 29 Mar 04 by FmH

“I went to the library to get my daughter The Wind in the Willows. What I found was a happy-face, Disney-esque conspiracy to rob the classics of children’s lit of their drama, their passion and their soul.” —Hilary Flower, Salon

How to Fix Your CD Player

Posted on 29 Mar 04 by FmH

“Every year countless CD players get junked because of one simple and easily-fixed problem: they fail to ‘find’ CDs placed in them or they skip. Both of these faults are commonly caused by a misaligned read head.

In this article I provide details of a simple method which I have successfully applied to a number of ailing CD players. I hope that some of you will find it useful and that it will reduce the number of these devices that end up in the trash.” —kuro5hin

The Height Gap

Posted on 29 Mar 04 by FmH

Why Europeans are getting taller and taller — and Americans aren’t. “Like many biases, this one has a certain basis in fact. Over the past thirty years, a new breed of ‘anthropometric historians’ has tracked how populations around the world have changed in stature. Height, they’ve concluded, is a kind of biological shorthand: a composite code for all the factors that make up a society’s well-being. Height variations within a population are largely genetic, but height variations between populations are mostly environmental, anthropometric history suggests. If Joe is taller than Jack, it’s probably because his parents are taller. But if the average Norwegian is taller than the average Nigerian it’s because Norwegians live healthier lives. That’s why the United Nations now uses height to monitor nutrition in developing countries. In our height lies the tale of our birth and upbringing, of our social class, daily diet, and health-care coverage. In our height lies our history.” —New Yorker [via walker]

Of Mice and Men:

Posted on 29 Mar 04 by FmH

New York Times: Why Test Animals to Cure Human Depression? With the recent furor about whether antidepressants can promote suicide, why not test them on animals to find a more definitive answer? The answer illustrates some fundamental differences between drug development in the rest of medicine and that in psychiatry, which treats ‘higher’ cognitive functions that by and large have no direct analogues in laboratory animals. For example, there really is not a good ‘animal model’ for human depression, which involves feelings of guilt and worthlessness that have no animal analogue of which we are aware. Indeed, after the serendipitous discovery that some compounds alleviated depression, animal testing was developed to help speed the discovery of subsequent antidepressants. All tests that assay antidepressant effectiveness in animals rely on one aspect of depression, of controversial value, which is called “learned helplessness” and is based largely on the work of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman. Essentially, animals treated with compounds that turn out to have human antidepressant properties struggle longer before giving up in any of several paradigms in which they are made helpless to fend off an adverse stimulus. Seligman insists that the antidepressant amelioration of learned helplessness represents a good animal analogue of depression and its treatment despite significant differences the actions of these compounds have in animals as opposed to humans, such as rapidity of onset and regions of the brain affected. Indeed, animals do not at all have a well-developed prefrontal cortex, that most recently evolved and most human of brain regions where the cognitive aspects of the depressive experience such as worthlessness, self-reproach and, yes, probably the helplessness and hopelessness reside. So it may be the case with antidepressants, as I have argued with other classes of psychoactive drug discovery driven by animal testing, that depending on such an imperfect ‘animal model’ restricts us to discovering only a small and imperfect subset of potentially therapeutic substances. [It is even worse with animal screening of potential antipsychotic medications; the target symptoms watched for are side effects, virtually ensuring that antipsychotic medications that were discovered with the aid of animal testing will be poorly tolerable!] One thing is certain with respect to depression at least; there is no ‘animal model’ for suicidal self-destruction per se, and thus no way to screen our medications for promotion of suicide, as the recent concerns emphasize. But since, as FmH readers know, I do not believe antidepressants actually promote suicide at all, not to worry about the lack of an animal test… [In a psychopharmacological stand-up comedy routine, the comedian would have Eli Lilly asserting that they had definitively proven that Prozac does not promote suicide, since no laboratory rats killed themselves after receiving large doses of the antidepressant…]

Stumbling Down the Road

Posted on 28 Mar 04 by FmH

Keep your eyes on the counter at the bottom of the lefthand sidebar if you are interested in milestones. Sometime in the next two weeks or so, the half-millionth visitor will register on the meter. Thank you for all your attention, and onward toward a million. Wiill it take another 4 1/2 years, do you suppose?

Beware! Carbohydrates will ruin your health

Posted on 28 Mar 04 by FmH

Dave Barry: “I probably shouldn’t admit this to you younger readers, but when my generation was your age, we did some pretty stupid things. I’m talking about taking CRAZY risks. We drank water right from the tap. We used aspirin bottles that you could actually open with your bare hands. We bought appliances that were not festooned with helpful safety warnings such as, ‘DO NOT BATHE WITH THIS TOASTER.’

.

But for sheer insanity, the wildest thing we did was – prepare to be shocked – we deliberately ingested carbohydrates.” —International Herald Tribune [via walker]

Modern Ruins

Posted on 28 Mar 04 by FmH

Phillip Buehler: “I photograph modern ruins because I find it disturbing to find familiar objects and technology to be abandoned. I’m reminded that nothing is permanent, that everything is always in a state of transition. And we see ourselves in our own transitions, sometimes too focused on where we’re going to notice and appreciate where we are.

I created this homepage so I could gather people’s stories and recollections about these modern ruins when they were alive as well as to help me better understand why people are fascinated them. I’ve included them throughout the site. If after visiting you have something to say, please send me e-mail or sign my guestbook.” [via Viridian mailing list]

Beware! Carbohydrates will ruin your health

Posted on 28 Mar 04 by FmH

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But for sheer insanity, the wildest thing we did was – prepare to be shocked – we deliberately ingested carbohydrates.” —International Herald Tribune [via walker]

Hard-Disk Risk

Posted on 27 Mar 04 by FmH

Declan McCullagh makes a hobby of buying used hard drives to see what data has not been erased from them. For example,

“I took the drives home and started my own forensic analysis. Several of the drives had source code from high-tech companies. One drive had a confidential memorandum describing a biotech project; another had internal spreadsheets belonging to an international shipping company.

Since then, I have repeatedly indulged my habit for procuring and then analyzing secondhand hard drives. I bought recycled drives in Bellevue, Wash., that had internal Microsoft e-mail (somebody who was working from home, apparently). Drives that I found at an MIT swap meet had financial information on them from a Boston-area investment firm. Last summer, I started buying drives en masse on eBay…

Much of the data we found was truly shocking. One of the drives once lived in an ATM. It contained a year’s worth of financial transactions—including account numbers and withdrawal amounts—from a organization that had a legal requirement to not divulge such information. Two other drives contained more than 5,000 credit card numbers—it looked as if one had been inside a cash register. Another had e-mail and personal financial records of a 45-year-old fellow in Georgia. The man is divorced, paying child support and dating a woman he met in Savannah. And, oh yeah, he’s really into pornography.” —CSO

…And it is so easy to completely wipe a disk irretrievably.

Boo-Boos in Paradise

Posted on 27 Mar 04 by FmH

“David Brooks is the public intellectual of the moment. But our writer found out he doesn’t check his facts…” —Phillymag.com

Top doc backs picking your nose and eating it

Posted on 27 Mar 04 by FmH

“Innsbruck-based lung specialist Prof Dr Friedrich Bischinger said people who pick their noses with their fingers were healthy, happier and probably better in tune with their bodies.

He says society should adopt a new approach to nose-picking and encourage children to take it up.

Dr Bischinger said: ‘With the finger you can get to places you just can’t reach with a handkerchief, keeping your nose far cleaner.

‘And eating the dry remains of what you pull out is a great way of strengthening the body’s immune system.

‘Medically it makes great sense and is a perfectly natural thing to do. In terms of the immune system the nose is a filter in which a great deal of bacteria are collected, and when this mixture arrives in the intestines it works just like a medicine.

‘Modern medicine is constantly trying to do the same thing through far more complicated methods, people who pick their nose and eat it get a natural boost to their immune system for free.'” —Ananova [via dangerousmeta]

Can the revulsion that this image causes most people be explained entirely in terms of their socialized manners? Given the evidence that the emotion of disgust serves an important evolutionary purpose (BBC), could there be an evolved disincentive to picking one’s nose, in contrast the the advantages touted here??

F u t u r e M e . o r g

Posted on 27 Mar 04 by FmH

Send an email to yourself — or anyone else, for that matter — to arrive at a specified date in the future. [via boing boing]

Bush League Follies

Posted on 27 Mar 04 by FmH

As BillMon points out, the latest Rasmussen Presidential Tracking Poll, from a pollster who some have seen as biased toward the Republicans, puts Kerry at 46% and Bush at 45%. Meanwhile, Rumsfeld is singing out of the other side of his mouth these days (Village Voice), testifying to the 9-11 commission that the 9-11 attacks were a law enforcement issue and not under the mandate of the Dept. of Defense, which defends the US against threats outside our borders. So where does that leave the administration’s ignoring all the pleas in late 2001 to treat bin Laden’s actions as crimes rather than acts of war, and arrest and try him rather than bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age? And, of course, there’s Condoleeza Rice, who sings out of both sides of her mouth at the same time. And The New York Daily News reports that Richard Clarke turned the Bushies’ best week, when they “had John Kerry on the run” into one in which they are scrambling to spit the crow out of their mouths. Discrediting and refuting Clarke are now apparently the White House’s sole preoccupation. It seems to me that this puts the final nail in the coffin of the President’s claims to be a ‘war president’, which would depend on uniting the country behind his vision and leadership no matter how unpopular the decisions he had to make rather than descending to pitiful, politicized squabbling which divides the country further. But you already knew that…

The New York Times reports we are fashioning a legal subterfuge to keep US forces in control of the security situation after the June 30th deadline to hand over responsibility to the Iraqis. And the Washington Post has dismal reports on the level of the morale of US troops in Iraq.

Will We Say ‘Never Again’ Yet Again?

Posted on 27 Mar 04 by FmH

“The perennial refrain about genocide is sounding hollow as 1,000 black Africans are being killed by the Arab-dominated Sudanese government every week.” —Nicholas Kristof, New York Times op-ed

The Brain? It’s A Jungle In There

Posted on 27 Mar 04 by FmH

The immensity of Dr. (Gerald) Edelman’s project — explaining the development of the human mind — overwhelms. Yet his ideas about how consciousness arises from the firings of neurons begin to seem eminently plausible because something similar seems to be happening in the hum and current of your own brain, in the excited state brought on by Dr. Edelman’s voluble mixture of calculation, charisma, enterprise and brilliance.” —New York Times

Court Opens Door To Searches Without Warrants

Posted on 27 Mar 04 by FmH

“It’s a groundbreaking court decision that legal experts say will affect everyone: Police officers in Louisiana no longer need a search or arrest warrant to conduct a brief search of your home or business.

Leaders in law enforcement say it will provide safety to officers, but others argue it’s a privilege that could be abused.

The decision was made by the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. Two dissenting judges called it the ‘road to Hell.’

The ruiling stems from a lawsuit filed in Denham Springs in 2000.

New Orleans Police Department spokesman Capt. Marlon Defillo said the new power will go into effect immediately and won’t be abused.” —New Orleans Channel

It is inconceivable to me that this decision will stand on review by a higher court. It is unbelievable to me what abuses some try to push through…

For stargazers, 5 planets offer rare show at dusk

Posted on 25 Mar 04 by FmH

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“Five planets are arrayed across the evening sky in a spectacular night show that won’t be back for another three decades.

For the next two weeks, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn — the five closest planets — should be easily visible at dusk, along with the moon.

‘It’s semi-unique,’ said Myles Standish, an astronomer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. ‘They’re all on the same side of the sun and stretched across the sky and that’s what is kind of pretty’…

Stargazers should look to the western horizon just after sunset. Mercury, Venus, Mars and Saturn will be lined up in the sky with Jupiter close to the eastern horizon. They will span about 135 degrees. Saturn will be almost directly overhead.” —Houston Chronicle [via dangerousmeta]

Dick Clarke Is Telling the Truth –

Posted on 25 Mar 04 by FmH

Why he’s right about Bush’s negligence on terrorism: “I went to graduate school with Clarke in the late 1970s, at MIT’s political science department, and called him as an occasional source in the mid-’80s when he was in the State Department and I was a newspaper reporter. There were good things and dubious things about Clarke, traits that inspired both admiration and leeriness. The former: He was very smart, a highly skilled (and utterly nonpartisan) analyst, and he knew how to get things done in a calcified bureaucracy. The latter: He was arrogant, made no effort to disguise his contempt for those who disagreed with him, and blatantly maneuvered around all obstacles to make sure his views got through.

The key thing, though, is this: Both sets of traits tell me he’s too shrewd to write or say anything in public that might be decisively refuted.” —Fred Kaplan, Slate

‘September 11th Should Have Been Stopped’

Posted on 25 Mar 04 by FmH

‘No one anticipated the kinds of strikes that took place in New York and at the Pentagon.’ – ‘The 9/11 Debate,’ Washington Post editorial, 03-24-04

That line from the Washington Post has been repeated ad nauseam by other newspapers, and across radio and television. It has achieved the status of bedrock conventional wisdom, of something axiomatic. These statements are a paraphrase of National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who said on May 17th, 2002, ‘I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile – a hijacked airplane as a missile.’

This kind of thinking elevates the attacks to something mythical, a magic trick, an act of God that no mere mortal could possibly have interfered with or anticipated. In fact, it was an operation planned for years by men who left clear tracks. As such, it could have been stopped. It should have been stopped. Saying so, however, interferes with the cultivation of a national attitude of vengeful victimhood, an attitude the Bush administration is actively promoting for its own benefit and political protection. Surely we were victims of terrorism on September 11, but was this unavoidable? Are the Washington Post, Condoleezza Rice and others correct in stating that no one anticipated these kinds of attacks?

The facts say no. —William Rivers Pitt, truthout

I agree with Pitt but only in a limited sense. Administration pronouncements about how 9-11 could not have been anticipated are certainly self-serving knee-jerkism but only a detailed examination of the thesis that its perpetrators ‘left clear tracks’ could convince me, and that has not yet been done for all the fog of hyperbole. No matter how inept (and as you know I will stand by my assertion that he is the most inept ill-qualified president of the postwar era at least) a president Bush is, it is inconceivable to me that he is not correct in defending himself by saying that if he had known, he would have acted. A comprehensive examination of the adequacy of the administration’s threat assessment and prioritization must be done but, the evidence aside, the insistence that of course Bush knew something ahead of time on which he did not act strikes me equally as knee-jerkism, premature and automatic. It makes me quite uncomfortable how little in the service of a reasoned political critique of the Bush administration it is.

The old saw about 20/20 hindsight should certainly be invoked here. Clearly those who claim they warned Bush and his cabal to pay more attention to al Qaeda turned out to be right; but, if it had turned out to have been ETA or Hezbollah or the IRA or the Jewish Defense League that was behind the WTC attack, so too someone would probably come out of the woodwork with a credible claim that they had voiced a warning in advance. Let’s not rush to assert that an administration should have paid more attention to any particular threat assessment simply because it turned out after the fact to have been correct. That is why the more profound aspect of Richard Clarke’s revelations is not the part about how he warned Bush to focus on al Qaeda but the portrait of the relentlessness with which Bush and his handlers pushed for the Iraq connection, pushed pitifully to hear only what they wanted to hear. As I have said over and over again, the dysadministration gets away with something if they succeed in persuading us that they made correct judgments with faulty intelligence. The distortions were not in the data they were being fed but in their consumption of it. The ‘failure of intelligence’ was not at Foggy Bottom but inside the craniums of those in the West Wing. Their threat assessment was done not by analysis of the intelligence data but by wish fulfillment, plain and simple.

Pitt implies that an attitude of ‘vengeful victimhood’ is the inevitable result of the notion that the attacks were unavoidable. I love the phrase; it is a pithy encapsulation of an attitude our government actively cultivates for its political and strategic advantage. But it arises from a deeper pathology than merely having been hit by a sneak attack. Those most taboo of taboo assertions in the fall of 2001 about how it was our fault we were attacked had nothing to do with the triviality of failing to notice the activities of a ‘sleeper cell’ of twenty Islamic young men and everything to do with remaining blissfully ignorant about the impact of our arrogant contemptuous enraging exploitative swagger on the world stage, the perversion of everything respectful and life-enhancing we could have been doing with our status as sole superpower.

Not every country surviving a major trauma becomes a vengeful victim with unbound rage and self-justified entitlement. It is arguable that the US did not do so after Pearl Harbor (although there are similar assertions that the administration then could have anticipated the Japanese attack but chose not to to advance its own agenda). And, although there are pitfalls in likening the national psyche to individual psychology, not every victim of abuse enters into a career of self-justified rageful victimhood. Those who do are in my field often called ‘borderlines’ (i.e. they are diagnosed as suffering from borderline personality disorder; link goes to the official diagnostic criteria), perhaps the most malignant, vexacious type of patient treated in the mental health field. Because of research establishing a tentative correlation in some cases, it has become fashionable to automatically attribute all borderline personality disorder to early trauma, which tends to create a self-fulfilling legacy and an ongoing legitimization of the patient’s rageful acting-out. This is a disservice to both trauma victims and borderline personalities. Once this tack has been taken in the patient’s psychotherapy, it becomes very difficult to undo the tenacious effect it has upon the patient’s self-conception to get to something that could be more helpful to them. The simple-minded equation of victimhood with a disorder of ragefulness, entitlement and impulsivity also leaves no room for the very important and largely undone research on the sources of resiliency — why some — many — victims of traumatic abuse do not go on to such lives of victimhood and psychopathology.

The study of the individual’s adaptation also shows us that it is an entirely natural response to overwhelming trauma to develop so-called magical thinking. It is comforting, and offers important aid in coping, to believe that, if one had been a little bit better in seeing them coming, there were warning signs that could have led to early recognition of the abuse and the possibility of effective evasive action. This pathological omniscience lets the victim feel that the next time they will do better at protecting themselves, an important prerequisite for continuing to function. Unfortunately, while it serves this interim coping purpose, ultimately the victim has to be disabused of the notion that they can anticipate and avoid all potential future threats. In the long run, it leads to much more realistic allocation of one’s resources to embrace the notion that life is contingent and not everything is controllable. Shifting back to the level of the national psyche, we see the administration in the throes of this type of ‘homeland security’ magical thinking about threat anticipation and avoidance, which is an enormous drain of resources and energy and largely a waste in terms of any real gains in security.

So the progressive insistence that Bush knew and did nothing is a dangerous rush to judgment compounded of one part knee-jerkism and one part magical thinking in response to overwhelming trauma. It does little if anything to further responsible criticism of the dysadministration, comprehensive appraisals of what precipitated Sept. 11th, or rational security considerations for the future.

Automatic Mix Tape Generator

Posted on 24 Mar 04 by FmH

“Here’s the deal: You send us a style, genre, word, phrase, emotion, or whatever else, and if one of our mix tape robots fancies your suggestion, that crazy set of circuits might just make a mix tape out of it — well, at least a tracklisting for a mix tape out of it.” —tinymixtapes.com

Sludge in the ’70s

Posted on 24 Mar 04 by FmH

“What did Shrub and his gang listen to while still dancing on saloon tables and driving while blind?” —The Village Voice

Petaphilia

Posted on 24 Mar 04 by FmH

The Great American Man-Dog Marriage Panic: “I’ve never had sex with a dog. He wouldn’t respect me in the morning. But I have lusted in my heart for certain canines, and apparently I’m not alone. Lots of people yearn to marry their best friend, or so many opponents of gay marriage seem to believe.

“Why can’t we have marriages between people and pets?” the bishop of Brooklyn recently remarked. “I mean, pets really love their masters”—and, let’s face it, the feeling is usually mutual. Was the bishop being fanciful or does he really think America will go to the dogs if gays are allowed to wed? Only his confessor knows, but for what it’s worth, this is a major clerical fixation, and not just among Catholic prelates. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson have warned that gay rights will lead to bestiality. I hadn’t realized that so many men of God are worried about folks helping sheep through the fence.” —Richard Goldstein, The Village Voice

Weapons of Mass Sedition

Posted on 24 Mar 04 by FmH

“Can a sacred music festival lure us away from violence and toward reason?” —The Village Voice

‘The Complete Opportunist’

Posted on 24 Mar 04 by FmH

John Kerry was on the radar screen of the Nixon White House as a major concern as he became a vocal leader of the antiwar movement in 1971. Nixon made Charles Colson his pointman in attempts to discredit Kerry, whom they found a hypocritical ‘opportunist’ because he opposed the war even though he was monied and connected, unlike the grungy disreputable prototypical Viet Vet Against the War. They set up a pro-war veteran, John O’Neill, to counter Kerry’s impact, and arranged for a debate between the two on the Dick Cavett Show. Joe Haldeman predicted that Kery would run for office one day. “It’s said that when Kerry ran for Congress in 1972, as Haldeman had predicted, Nixon stayed up late on Election Night until he knew for sure that Kerry had been defeated”. —NewsMax [thanks, abby]

(April 28, 1971) President Richard M. Nixon takes a call from his counsel, Charles Colson:

“This fellow Kerry that they had on last week,” Colson tells the president, referring to a television appearance by John F. Kerry, a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

“Yeah,” Nixon responds.

“He turns out to be really quite a phony,” Colson says.

“Well, he is sort of a phony, isn’t he?” Nixon says.

Yes, Colson says in a gossiping vein, telling the president that Kerry stayed at the home of a Georgetown socialite while other protesters slept on the mall.

“He was in Vietnam a total of four months,” Colson scoffs, without mentioning that Kerry earned three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and a Bronze Star, and had also been on an earlier tour. “He’s politically ambitious and just looking for an issue.”

“Yeah.”

“He came back a hawk and became a dove when he saw the political opportunities,” Colson says.

“Sure,” Nixon responds. “Well, anyway, keep the faith.”

The tone was sneering. But the secretly recorded dialogue illustrates just how seriously Kerry was viewed by the Nixon White House. Some of these conversations have not been previously publicized, and Kerry said he had never heard them until they were provided by a reporter.

Day after day, according to the tapes and memos, Nixon aides worried that Kerry was a unique, charismatic leader who could undermine support for the war. Other veteran protesters were easier targets, with their long hair, their use of a Viet Cong flag, and in some cases, their calls for overthrowing the US government. Kerry, by contrast, was a neat, well-spoken, highly decorated veteran who seemed to be a clone of former President John F. Kennedy, right down to the military service on a patrol boat. —Boston Globe

(January 24, 2004) Bush Official Uses Nixon Tactics to Smear John Kerry: “In 1971, the Nixon White House tried to discredit John Kerry by telling President Nixon that John Kerry was sleeping in a Georgetown home while other veterans protesting the war slept in tents on the National Mall. Yesterday, before a conference hosted by a conservative PAC headed by a former Nixon aide, Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie repeated the same smear, nearly verbatim, in a desperate attempt to discredit John Kerry again, this time as his campaign to remove Gillespie’s boss from the White House is gathering strength.”

Clickback America

Posted on 24 Mar 04 by FmH

Reject George Bush’s Credit. “By racking up the highest deficit in American history (half a trillion this year alone!) Bush has asked every American for a $4,500 loan that WE are going to have to pay back in taxes later. As current and future taxpayers, this hits young Americans particularly hard. Send George Bush a note rejecting his request for credit and letting him know that prioritizing the war in Iraq and his tax-cuts-for-the-wealthy above our future is unacceptable. When you do, $1 will be contributed to the MoveOn.org Voter Fund.”

Whose agenda is it anyway?

Posted on 24 Mar 04 by FmH

Balance has long been an issue in public broadcasting, but the debate flares when some see a conservative push as a shove.: “Perennially cash-strapped public television producers and filmmakers would ordinarily be thrilled that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting recently unveiled a long-awaited initiative to fund $20 million worth of documentaries on post-Sept. 11 terrorist attack themes. Instead, a recent forum in New York where the organization’s executives explained more precisely what kinds of programs they are seeking for ‘America at a Crossroads’ turned into a shouting and name-calling session.

One producer drew sustained applause from many of the 275 or so attendees for complaining that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was ‘asking me to do the bidding of the Pentagon.’ An employee of the National Black Programming Consortium noted ‘this whole thing stinks,’ as he criticized a focus on the ‘Anglo-American world order’ by an expert panel of white men who were brought in to suggest documentary topics.” — LA Times. Wasn’t the enormous Kroc bequest supposed to insulate CPB against pandering to the powers that be out of fears for their fiscal solvency?

Related? NPR News Is Replacing Morning Host: “Morning radio will soon lose one of its most familiar news anchors. Bob Edwards, who for nearly 25 years has greeted millions of weekday listeners with the distinctive and richly toned opener “This is `Morning Edition’ from NPR News,” is being replaced as host of that flagship morning program. The decision was made by NPR management as part of an effort to update its programming.” — New York Times. And ‘updating its programming’ is a euphemism for what precisely??

Greenhouse gas level hits record high

Posted on 24 Mar 04 by FmH

“The level of the major greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, in the Earth’s atmosphere has hit a record high, US government scientists have reported.

The new data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also suggest that the rate of increase of the gas may have accelerated in the last two years. Carbon dioxide emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, are thought to be a principle cause of global warming.” — New Scientist

Why curry can leave you feeling off-colour

Posted on 24 Mar 04 by FmH

“More than half the curry houses tested in a trading standards survey were using illegal levels of three potentially harmful colourings in chicken tikka masala.

The study… showed that of 102 curry houses tested, only 44 kept their use of colourings within legal limits. One restaurant was found to be using four times the legal limit in its dish.

The chef James Martin, who spoke at the publication of the survey report, blamed the “English palate” for the high levels of tartrazine (E102), sunset yellow (E110) and ponceau 4R (E124) in the nation’s most popular curry. The colourants have been identified as possible sources of hyperactivity, asthma and cancer.

He said that public perceptions about curry would have to be changed if standards were to be improved.” — Times of London

Of God and the Flag

Posted on 24 Mar 04 by FmH

William Safire: “The only thing going for this time-wasting pest who’s hoping to strike ‘Under God’ from the Pledge of Allegiance is that he’s right.” — New York Times op-ed

R.I.P. Sydney Carter

Posted on 23 Mar 04 by FmH

‘The Lord of the Dance’ is gone at 88: “Sydney was a folk poet, a holy sceptic and an iconoclastic theologian – that last description would both bemuse and please him – in the amateur tradition of the folk movement, deconstructing the theology of the academic establishment and bringing it to life. He played a leading role in the folk revival of the 1960s and 70s, and it was then that he wrote most of his songs, composed both to please and to shock. Life, as he embraced it, was for dancing.

…When, in 1999 the mists of Alzheimer’s disease began to close in, Sydney’s second wife, Leela, lovingly cared for him and interpreted him to others. The past gradually receded into the strange land of lost memory. His friend Rabbi Lionel Blue wrote that now “our only contact is a thin thread of memory and his songs. I start singing them, and he joyfully joins in – and I leave him as he continues singing.”

More than 30 years ago, Sydney had written his own epitaph:

Coming and going by the dance, I see

That what I am not is a part of me.

Dancing is all that I can ever trust,

The dance is all I am, the rest is dust.

I will believe my bones and live by what

Will go on dancing when my bones are not.” —Guardian.UK [via walker]

Lord of the Dance
by Sydney Carter

I danced in the morning when the world was begun

I danced in the stars & the Moon & the Sun

I came down from Heaven & I danced on Earth

At Bethlehem I had my birth:

Dance then, wherever you may be

I am the Lord of the Dance, said He!

And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be

And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said He!

(…lead you all in the Dance, said He!)

I danced for the scribe & the pharisee

They would not dance & they wouldn’t follow me

I danced for Peter & for James & John

They followed me & the Dance went on:

Dance then, wherever you may be

I am the Lord of the Dance, said He!

And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be

And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said He!

(…lead you all in the Dance, said He!)

I danced on the Sabbath & I healed the lame

The holy people said it was a shame!

They whipped me & stripped me & hung me high

And left me there on a cross to die!

Dance then, wherever you may be

I am the Lord of the Dance, said He!

And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be

And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said He!

(…lead you all in the Dance, said He!)

I danced on a Friday when the sky turned black

It’s hard to dance with the devil on your back

They buried my body & they thought I’d gone

But I am the Dance & I still go on!

Dance then, wherever you may be

I am the Lord of the Dance, said He!

And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be

And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said He!

(…lead you all in the Dance, said He!)

They cut me down but I leap up high

I am the Life that will never never die!

I’ll live in you if you’ll live in Me

I am the Lord of the Dance, said He!

Dance then, wherever you may be

I am the Lord of the Dance, said He!

And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be

And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said He!

October Surprise?

Posted on 20 Mar 04 by FmH

My admiration for Ed Fitzgerald’s political commentary grows the more I read his unfutz. He was an early commenter to FmH and after 9-11 invited me onto a small mailing list where he and similarly thoughtful friends conducted always high-quality considerations of the urgent events of the day. Regrettably, largely because of the energy I devote to FmH, I was more of a lurker than a contributor to his mailing list.

I particularly like his dissection of the possibilities of an ‘October surprise’ from the administration. He is not talking about the often-mentioned theory that they have bin Laden in custody already and will trot him out to the world just in time to influence the vote; Ed thinks the evidence is pretty good that bin Laden is already dead (I have more doubts). What Ed considers are reports in recent weeks that the US has been stealthily shipping long-range missile parts into southern Iraq. At least some of the weapons are of the vintage of the ’80’s armaments the US supplied to Iraq during its conflict with Iran. The obvious implication is that the administration plans some dramatic revelation in the face of mounting criticism about the absence of WMD in Iraq and the upcoming trial of Saddam Hussein.

How reliable the source of this report is remains to be seen but, as Ed notes, it pays to keep our collective eyes open for corroboration. Ed argues that the bump in public approval from such a ‘discovery’ would be small and ephemeral. I hope this is the case, given that it is an entirely plausible thing to expect of the Bush administration. However, the calculus Ed uses to reach the conclusion that the ‘WMD putsch’ would be a bust for the Bush Leaguers is anything but a sure bet. He relies on an analysis of the sequentially smaller bumps in public approval Bush has gotten from each of the recent milestones in the WoT®, against a baseline of mounting public disapproval. My answer is that you can’t handicap the whims of the electorate and that the vagaries of the next seven months could well prime the pump for such a potential coup. So I join Fitzgerald in suggesting the Democrats be very very prepared for the potential ‘discovery’ of WMD around Basra after Labor Day.

By the way, since admiration is often transitive, I should mention that Billmon, of whom Ed Fitzgerald is very fond, has apparently gotten too popular for his own good. His ISP has just informed him, he lets readers know, that he will have to start paying for his bandwidth, presumably because of how much he uses these days; [That’s why I keep FmH under the radar (grin). — ed.] he estimates it is going to run him $3,000/year, which could force him out of the business, to our great loss. He has put up a tip jar on his site and is probably among those most deserving of some assistance from inquiring minds among the weblog-reading public. He’s right; this may indeed be the future of weblogging.

And then there’s all the breathless reporting on the possibility that Pakistani forces fighting al Qaeda in the autonomous tribal region may have surrounded Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s number-two man and arguably more important to al Qaeda strategizing than its figurehead. In any case, claims that al-Zawahiri was close to capture appear to be so much hot air. Josh Marshall discusses how much egg this all leaves on CNN’s face. Marshall thinks it is too big a coincidence that the Pakistani engagement came right after Colin Powell’s visit to Islamabad, proposing that that would make Pakistan anxious to show the US what a good job they are doing rooting out al Qaeda from its refuges. If so, Powell’s visit was the icing on the cake rather than the cause. It is more likely this action is Pakistani payment of the debt they owe the US after getting a ‘bye’ on their nuclear proliferation activities from the Bush administration. We allowed Musharraf to blame it on a ‘straw man’ (whom, moreover, he pardoned) when all the evidence says it was a widespread conspiracy within upper-echelon Pakistani circles. I wrote a couple of months ago about speculation that the price the US would exact from Pakistan would be to allow a US military operation to look for bin Laden’s forces, which would be a high price indeed in terms of threatening Musharraf’s shaky hold on power by inflaming Pakistani nationalist sentiments. Pehaps he has lobbied hard to have us let him do it instead; if so, how long will we let the Pakistani charade that they are on the verge of hard-fought dramatic success go on? Or perhaps this is an agreed-upon prelude to the US operation.

All the Fixins’

Posted on 20 Mar 04 by FmH

Country Joe McDonald proudly collects on his website adaptations of his “Fixin’ to Die Rag” for just about every political crisis since Vietnam. For example:

“And it’s one, two, three,

What are we searching for?

George said it, it must be true.

I believe in W.

And it’s five, six, seven,

Tell me who I should hate.

There’s no need to wonder why,

‘Cause Presidents never lie.”

Refresh your memory; here’s the original (in RealAudio).

1:

D

Come on all of you big strong men,

G

Uncle Sam needs your help again.

D

He’s got himself in a terrible jam

G

Way down yonder in Vietnam

E7 A

So put down your books and pick up a gun,

D G

We’re gonna have a whole lotta fun.

Chorus:

A7 A#7 D

And it’s one, two, three,

D7 G

What are we fighting for?

D

Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,

G

Next stop is Vietnam;

A7 A#7 D

And it’s five, six, seven,

D7 G

Open up the pearly gates,

E A

Well there ain’t no time to wonder why,

D G

Whoopee! we’re all gonna die.

2:

D

Come on generals, let’s move fast;

G

Your big chance has come at last.

D

Gotta go out and get those reds —

G

The only good commie is the one that’s dead

E7 A

You know that peace can only be won

D G

When we’ve blown ’em all to kingdom come.

[Chorus]

3:

D

Come on Wall Street, don’t move slow,

G

Why man, this is war au-go-go.

D

There’s plenty good money to be made

G

Supplying the Army with the tools of the trade,

E7 A

Just hope and pray that if they drop the bomb,

D G

They drop it on the Viet Cong.

[Chorus]

4:

D

Come on mothers throughout the land,

G

Pack your boys off to Vietnam.

D

Come on fathers, don’t hesitate,

G

Send your sons off before it’s too late.

E7 A

You can be the first one on your block

D G

To have your boy come home in a box.

[Chorus]

And: ‘In 1970, Pete Seeger recorded a ‘lost’ version of “Fixin’ to Die Rag” for a 45 release. At least a few advance DJ copies were produced; McDonald reproduces one on his website. “But something went wrong. The details are unclear, but Pete did mention once that the distributors refused to handle it. It was never released, and shortly afterward Pete left Columbia, his longtime label.

Now for the first time since the 70s, you can hear this lost recording (RealAudio too) .”

And: Country Joe was sued by the daughter of the late New Orleans jazz trombonist Kid Ory after she obtained the rights to her father’s famous “Muskrat Ramble” in the late ’90’s; she claimed “Fixin’ to Die” was an infringement on her father’s song. ‘Kid Ory died in 1973 but Babette says his dying request was that she “nail that bastard, McDonald” because he hated the song’s anti-war stance and profane lyrics.’ Until the suit was resolved, Joe stopped performing the song on stage after being warned that doing so could subject him to a $150,000 fine. He eventually prevailed, largely on the basis of the doctrine of laches, which I understand as the legal principle that it is negligent to wait too long to assert a legal right. Not to mention the dubious musicological proposition of Ory’s rights to the song, a New Orleans jazz staple, in the first place, as well as the doctrine of fair use, as well as the arguable lack of similarity of the two songs (even though McDonald has acknowledged “Muskrat Ramble” as an influence on “FtDR”).

Skinner’s Box is a Pandora’s Box

Posted on 18 Mar 04 by FmH

I wrote several weeks ago about psychologist Lauren Slater’s new book, Opening Skinner’s Box –

Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century. In a fascinating chapter about David Rosenhan’s “On Being Sane in Insane Places”, psychiatrist Robert Spitzer, the ‘godfather’ of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the Bible of psychiatric classification, is the subject of some very unflattering description. It appears that Slater has taken on a very formidable opponent; Spitzer has put his response to her portrayal of him in the public domain on the evolutionary psychology listserv. If Slater chooses to defend herself, we may be in for a monumental scientific-literary catfight. Be sure not to miss Spitzer’s final paragraph.

Robert L. Spitzer, M.D.

Professor of Psychiatry

Chief, Biometrics Research Department

Unit 60, 1051 Riverside Drive

New York State Psychiatric Institute

College of Physicians & Surgeons of Columbia University

New York, N.Y. 10032

Tel: (212) 543-5524

Fax: (212) 543-5525

E-mail: RLS8@COLUMBIA.EDU

February 21, 2004

Drake Mc Feely,

President, WW Norton & Company

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC.

500 Fifth Avenue

New York, N.Y. 10110

Dear Mr. Mc Feely,

In the third chapter of Lauren Slater’s new book, Opening Skinner’s Box –

Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century, she has extensive

quotes from a telephone conversation that we had several years ago. Several

colleagues who have read the book have asked me if the quotes are accurate,

since they found it hard to believe that I had actually made so many

outrageous statements. The quotes of me that appear in the book are either

outright fabrications or represent what Slater imagines I could or would

say.

It is of note that Slater could have – but did not – record our

conversation.

Here are some of the statements that Slater claims I made and why I am sure

I never made them.

Spitzer pauses. “So how is David Rosenhan?” he finally asks. “Actually, not

so good,” I say. “He’s lost his wife to cancer, his daughter Nina in a car

crash. He’s had several strokes and is now suffering from a disease they

can’t quite diagnose. He’s paralyzed.” That Spitzer doesn’t say, or much

sound, sorry when he hears this reveals the depths to which Rosenhan’s study

is still hated in the field, even after 30 years. “That’s what you get,” he

says, “for conducting such an inquiry.” (p. 68)

I never said this. I would certainly not have gloated over Rosenhan’s

illness.

Spitzer says: “The new classification system of the DSM is stringent and

scientific.” (p. 80)

You can search all of the many papers I have written about DSM-III. I have

never said it was “scientific” or “stringent.” DSM-III facilitates

scientific study but it makes no sense to say that it is itself

“scientific.” “Stringent” is a word I never use and incorrectly

characterizes DSM-III.

“I’m telling you, with the new diagnostic system in place, Rosenhan’s

experiment could never happen today. It would never work. You would not be

admitted and in the ER they would diagnose you as deferred.”. “No,” repeats

Spitzer, “that experiment could never be successfully repeated. Not in this

day and age.” (p. 80)

I would never have referred to Rosenhan’s study as an “experiment” nor would

I talk about it being “successfully repeated.” Slater seems to be saying

that I claimed that now, with the DSM, psychiatrists would not diagnose a

pseudopatient as having a mental disorder. I would not make such a claim. If

there were no reason to suspect the pseudopatient of malingering, I guess

that most psychiatrists now would also make an incorrect diagnosis – just as

the psychiatrists in Rosenhan’s study did. It would not make sense for me to

have made a blanket prediction (twice!) that it could never happen now.

Since DSM-III was published in 1980, why would I have referred to it as “the

new diagnostic system?”

This is a serious matter. As a reputable publisher you have an obligation to

investigate this matter and take appropriate action to stop these damaging

misrepresentations by your author.

I am enjoying reading Slater’s book, Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir (Penguin

Books, 2000). I am up to the part where she describes how she went through a

period of her life when she was a compulsive liar.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Robert L. Spitzer, M.D.

Professor of Psychiatry

Elizabeth Loftus, the subject of another of Slater’s chapters, has also written to Slater’s publisher claiming misrepresentation:

University of California – Irvine

IRVINE, CALIFORNIA 92697-7085

Elizabeth F. Loftus, Ph.D.

Distinguished Professor

Psychology & Social Behavior

Criminology, Law & Society

(949) 824-3285 (TEL)

(949) 824-3002 (FAX)

E mail: eloftus@uci.edu

February 21, 2004

Drake McFeely,

President, WW Norton & Company

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC.

500 Fifth Avenue

New York, N.Y. 10110

dmcfeely@wwnorton.com

Dear Mr. McFeely,

I am writing to inform you about a number of factual errors and serious

misrepresentations in Lauren Slater’s book Opening Skinner’s Box: Great

Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century. Her Chapter 8, entitled

“Lost in the Mall”, is about my research. The chapter is riddled with

errors – some minor but others extremely serious. Moreover, quotes are

attributed to me that I have never said, nor would ever say. Here is a

sampling of some of Slater’s errors:

p. 183: Slater quotes me as saying that Ted Bundy

“was wrongly identified in

a kidnapping charge.”

I have never said that Bundy was wrongly identified.

During his trial I pointed to some of the difficulties with the

identification. However, I never said he was wrongly identified.

p. 184: Slater quotes me as saying that 25% of the sample is a

“statistically significant minority.”

I have called this figure a

significant minority of the sample, but would never say something so

scientifically improper as to call it a “statistically significant

minority.”

p. 184: I am also astounded that Slater would refer to my sometime co-author

and ex-husband, Professor Geoffrey Loftus, as “Gregg.” One would think that

someone who sets out to publicly explain and review a scientific literature

would be familiar with the names of its major contributors. Lest you think

that this sloppiness with names is an isolated case, let me quote from a

published review of Slater’s book in the London Mail on Sunday (February

15, 2004):

“It does not boost one’s confidence in her judgment, for instance, that

within the space of two lines she manages to spell the names of two famous

psychologists wrong: Thomas Szasz she spells ‘Sasz’ and R. D. Laing she

spells ‘Lang’. She also writes ‘per se’ as ‘per say’, which makes you wonder

if she knows what it means.”

p. 185: I did not claim that George Franklin’s daughter went to

“some

new-age therapist who practiced all sorts of suggestion.”

I did not make

subjects in the lab think that red signs were yellow. I did not say, as to

Eileen Franklin’s memories,

“Untrue. All these details Eileen later read

about in newspaper reports.”

The details included in Eileen Franklin’s

account were in fact available in newspapers, television accounts, and other

public places. As to where she might have been exposed to them I cannot say,

since I never interviewed her.

p. 191: Slater has a long quote attributed to me that uses words that I

would never have said. It beings:

“The real facts are sometimes so subtle

as to defy language.”

– I’m not ever sure I can even figure out what this

means.

p. 192: Slater refers to

“the woman who yelled ‘whore’ [at me] in the

airport a few years back”.

No woman has ever yelled “whore” at me in an

airport.

p. 192: Slater refers to

“the egged windows of her home, the yolks drying to

a crisp crust”

. No one has ever egged my home or its windows.

p. 193: Slater’s account of the Paul Ingram case is sloppy to the point of

leaving the reader with completely incorrect impressions. For example,

Slater writes of me

“when she heard about this case, and the kind of

questioning Ingram underwent. She got in touch with her friend and cult

expert Richard Ofshe, who trundled down to see Paul in his jail cell.”

Contrary to the impression conveyed by these words and those that follow,

namely that I had played some role in connecting Ofshe with Ingram, or in

Ingram’s subsequent decision to recant his confession, the truth of the

matter is that Ofshe had been working on the Ingram case and meeting with

Ingram in his jail cell, and Ingram had recanted his confession, years

before I had ever met Dr. Ofshe or had become involved with the Ingram case

at all. I first became interested in the case years after these events

occurred, when a television reporter who was suspicious about the case asked

me to help examine transcripts. Dr. Ofshe, and not I, deserves the sole

credit for his innovative work in this case.

p. 196: Slater makes a point of the fact that

“..by the end of the

interview, I know not only Loftus’s shoe size but her bra size too.”

The

reason Slater knows that is that she explicitly asked me for each of those

pieces of information. It makes me wonder what questions she asked of her

other interviewees.

p. 202: Slater claims that I slammed the phone down on her. I have no

recollection of ever slamming the phone down on anyone, let alone her. If

there was an accidental disconnection that occurred I would have explained

or apologized.

As you will become aware when you hear from other scientists and scholars,

there are additional serious factual and scholarly errors in other chapters

of Slater’s volume. Historically, W.W. Norton’s publications have been known

for matching the highest standards of factual accuracy of any scholarly

publisher, but I worry that lately these standards may have slipped. Could

you either confirm that my impression is accurate, or else let me know what

steps Norton will be taking to correct the factual error it has published in

Slater’s volume?

Sincerely,

Elizabeth Loftus, Ph.D.

As ongoing FmH readers know, I try and follow the doings of the proto-fascist far right closely. A friend just let me know I had missed a piece in The New Yorker last month by David Grann called “The Brand”, which profiles the behind-bars doings of the Aryan Brotherhood. [You have seen what is apparently a minor league rendition of the Aryan Brotherhood’s prison activities if you have ever watched the HBO series Oz.] Here is, however, a New Yorker Online interview with Grann which gives the gist.

Prosecutors call the Aryan Brotherhood the most murderous criminal organization in the US. It has a system of selecting only the most cunning and vicious members to become “made” men, much like the Mafia. And most of its criminal activities remain unknown because they happen behind bars and most of their victims are themselves convicts without much of a constituency outside the prisons. The Brand controls an underground economy whose dimensions are remarkable in extent; Grann quotes an inmate’s estimate that 40% of the convicts at Leavenworth are shooting heroin, for instance. The money flow is hard to trace, for one thing because payments are made by money orders to designees on the outside. Communication about criminal activities uses sophisticated codes, invisible ink and rhyming schemes that strike me as similar to Cockney rhyming slang. Gang leaders are quite intelligent and well-read although self-educated, with philosophical tastes running to Sun Tzu and Nietzsche. There are many stories of prisoners’ abilities to charm women on the outside into remarkably loyal if somewhat exploitative relationships with them.

Grann reflects on how difficult something like The Brand is to stop, fluorishing as it does in maximum security where participants have nothing to lose and are already accustomed to the use of drastic means to achieve their ends. Grann seems to think these are clever people with a native intelligence that impresses him as much as it is frightening to contemplate. It is interesting to speculate on whether this parallel value system is something they develop once incarcerated or bring into prison with them from society; Grann observes that some convicted of less violent crimes such as drug dealing or bank robbery are transformed into the type of conscienceless killers in The Brand by prison socialization. He describes, seemingly sympathetically, the conviction of some in the penal system that their fearful power can only be broken by draconian measures including much more massive deprivations of their rights behind bars and the use of the death penalty against their leaders.

I really do think that the crucial question is the one above about the extent to which the mentality of The Brand is imported into the prison from the streets as opposed to being bred by the social structure behind bars. It certainly takes some critical mass and a self-sustaining process within the confines of a concentrated setting. Another matter of obvious concern is the relationship between the ostensible ideology of race hatred, that may first attract people to ultraright-wing groups such as what I understood the Aryan Brotherhood to be, and the unabashed thuggism of The Brand. One certainly has to wonder if the nation that already locks up a higher proportion of its adult male population than any other First World country is breeding this lawlessness, and whether there would be blowback from tightening the screws further. Why should we worry about these developments, happening as they do behind the impermeable barriers of maximum security? Will we be chastened only if the fiction that we can segregate the lawlessness effectively behind bars is given the lie by The Brand extending its reach to outside criminal activity with similar impunity?

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