“Britain is likely to be plunged into an ice age within our lifetime by global warming, new research suggests.
A study, which is being taken seriously by top government scientists, has uncovered a change ‘of remarkable amplitude’ in the circulation of the waters of the North Atlantic.” —Independent.UK
Kevin Phillips, turncoat. —Salon Books
“The reward mechanism involved in addiction appears to regulate lifelong social or pair bonds between monogamous mating animals, according to a Center for Behavioral Neuroscience (CBN) study of prairie voles published in the January 19 edition of the Journal of Comparative Neurology. The finding could have implications for understanding the basis of romantic love and disorders of the ability to form social attachments, such as autism and schizophrenia.” EurekAlerts!
The ‘skeptical inquirer’ of modern medicine, Dr. Jerome Groopman, investigates how much crisis counseling after a trauma helps… or hurts in The New Yorker. (As usual, I advise anyone interested in this article to read it soon, as it is my experience that New Yorker articles go into the bit bucket in relatively short order…) He gives a good overview and history of the prevailing paradigm, ‘critical incident stress debriefing (CISD),’ in which I am trained and have practiced. He rightly points out the ways in which the process was misused in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks — among them mandatory rather than voluntary debriefing, the inclusion of people with little or no direct traumatization, and corporate (public relations, do-goodism, preventing absenteeism and avoiding liability) rather than compassionate motives. Recently, the first systematic research has shown that rapid crisis interventions are ‘inert’ in terms of preventing the development of PTSD in those exposed to massive traumas. Indeed, by encouraging sufferers to open up instead of seal over, it may promote PTSD sxs. The question is whether, as the paramedic-turned–psychologist developer of CISD suggests, these botched results arise only from misapplication of his paradigm.
I personally think, and the data supports this notion, that most people exposed to trauma are resilient and recover over time with their own strengths, and that misguided attempts to keep their wounds open and raw can indeed do harm rather than good. A smaller percentage of people do not recover and will eventually need extended psychological support because they develop the post-traumatic stress syndrome. It is doubtful whether these people can be identified in advance and singled out for early intervention, and even more doubtful whether preemptive intervention works.
To understand this issue, one has to understand the current concept of ‘trauma’ and the psychiatric politics behind it. (Groopman does not, or chooses not to discuss any insights he may have in this area, perhaps because of their ‘political incorrectness’. Groopman is a hematologist/oncologist; I have considered writing to him suggesting that he collaborate with a well-versed psychiatrist if his medical musings turn to issues in mental health treatment in the future…) The modern notion of trauma is much obliged to the historical coalescence of the women’s movement and the exposure of the ugly secret of rampant sexual abuse with the interests of a small number of psychiatrists working with the mental health issues of returning Vietnam veterans. Because treatment and study of these two populations is of necessity retrospective (the trauma has long since passed by the time the suffer annoounces her/himself), a third stream of data was fused into this notion of trauma, the prospective study of the course of post-traumatic reactions in those exposed to overwhelming solitary traumatic events such as natural disasters, plane crashes and crimes ranging from rapes to genocide. (One of the most famous trauma researchers made her name by getting in only months after they were freed to study a group of 23 schoolchildren in Chowchilla, California, who had been the victims of a 1976 hijacking, kidnapping and imprisonment.) Although, by and large, the research has supported the notion that trauma symptoms and resiliency depend on one’s prior constitution and resources, this has been obscured by lumping so many heterogeneous types of experience together as trauma. It has further been obscured by the feminist-inspired political correctness of insisting that all inappropriate sexual contact is victimization and that victimization explains mental health symptoms in many women. The idea that sexual victimization is not the fault of the victim turns inexorably (and wrongly) into the notion that the sufferer’s personal characteristics are irrelevant to the development of the post-traumatic symptoms.
Thus, in some clinical circles, patients are diagnosed as trauma victims (or ‘survivors’) at the drop of a hat, all trauma victims are said to have PTSD (regardless of whether they demonstrate the symptoms which define the syndrome or not), and careers of victimhood and chronicity are rationalized and excused zealously. And this is without even even talking about the induction of ‘false memories’, in which so-called ‘suppressed memories of trauma’ which may never have happened are ‘uncovered’ enthusiastically by mental health practitioners on the trauma bandwagon, shaping and explaining everything.
So two of the covert, probably erroneous foundations on which the CISD gospel has rested is are a vague, imprecise notion of what constitutes traumatic exposure and the politically correct notion that all those exposed to trauma will go on to develop symptoms. Thus relatively little attention has been paid until very recently to the notion that it may only be the particularly vulnerable who will succumb to their traumatic stress.
The wastebasket notion of trauma is so maddeningly imprecise that it obscures many clinically crucial distinctions among ‘trauma sufferers’. Let me highlight just a few:
Despite the influx of counselors into New York after Sept. 11th (from personal experience, I know that many of them were employed ministering to so-called “secondary victimization” suffered by the first wave of helping professionals!), most New Yorkers received no psychological attention. And, contrary to predictions, there really was no phenomenon of massive psychological distress, Groopman observes and, as I have above, concludes “that the debriefing industry is predicated on a false notion: that we are all at high risk for P.T.S.D. after exposure to a traumatic event.” More useful is immediate “psychological first aid”, Groopman says. A number of my CISD-trained colleagues, in fact, went to New York as part of the ‘post-trauma industry’. Those who found themselves most useful, according to discussions I have had with them, did not however do CISD, but rather other kinds of mental health intervention such as grief counseling for those who had lost family members, and assisting and empowering those entitled to relief benefits to navigate through the red tape of securing these entitlements. Similarly, Groopman cites examples of proponents of CISD who, in the wake of their experiences after Sept. 11th, have turned away from that paradigm.
The psychotherapy of those who have complicated PTSD in earnest (with a legitimate traumatic antecedent, usually a protracted period of exposure to inescapable brutalization by others; and the scientifically described symptom complex) is painstaking, complicated and protracted. An early stage is giving the sufferer a name and a description for what they are undergoing. I do believe that counseling those exposed, truly exposed (and participating of their own accord), to traumatic events to recognize the symptoms of PTSD they might develop or may already have developed — by which time they would have declared their vulnerability, and it would be too late to depend on preemption — is a more useful model for early intervention, predicated neither on the notion that we are all vulnerable nor on the mistaken belief in its preventive efficacy.
Groopman turns later in the article to the very important and often-neglected topic of the neuroscience of the trauma reaction. In vulnerable individuals, evidence suggests that the physiology of their stress causes the memories of the trauma to actually be encoded differently in the brain, so that they are both less accessible and cause more enduring distress. Classical ‘talking therapy’, especially long after the fact, is not very useful in undoing these neurally encoded trauma residues. Groopman describes work being done in very different, promising, neuroscientifically informed trauma treatment.
“After Howard Dean’s unexpected defeat last week in Iowa, public attention
has focused on his temper, his character, and that guttural Tyrannosaurus
bellow of his not-quite-a-concession speech. But Dean’s views on Americans’
privacy rights may be a superior test of his fitness to be president.” —Declan McCullagh, CNET News
A very small part, to be sure, but an encouraging step: “A federal judge has declared unconstitutional a portion of the USA Patriot Act that bars giving expert advice or assistance to groups designated foreign terrorist organizations.
The ruling marks the first court decision to declare a part of the post-Sept. 11 anti-terrorism statute unconstitutional, said David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor who argued the case on behalf of the Humanitarian Law Project.” —My Way News
“John Kerry has surged into first place here, proving his oft-repeated contention that he is a “good closer.” Kerry has long said that he is a great fighter. If he completes his miraculous comeback to win the Democratic nomination, he will indeed have the fight of his life on his hands — against his own legislative record.” Everyone talks about his flip-flop on the invasion of Iraq but it goes much deeper than that.
Today’s Kerry excoriates Attorney General John Ashcroft for violating American civil liberties with his evil tool, the Patriot Act. “We are a nation of laws and liberties, not of a knock in the night,” Kerry huffs. “So it is time to end the era of John Ashcroft. That starts with replacing the Patriot Act with a new law that protects our people and our liberties at the same time.” Maybe Kerry should have thought about that before voting for the Patriot Act in 2001 — since laws and liberties are pretty important and all.
Back before he had to worry about competing with one Howard Brush Dean, Kerry was positively delighted by the Patriot Act. “It reflects,” he said on the Senate floor, “an enormous amount of hard work by the members of the Senate Banking Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee. I congratulate them and thank them for that work.” While supportive of “sunset” provisions in the bill, Kerry pronounced himself “pleased at the compromise we have reached on the anti-terrorism legislation.” These are not the words of a man about to help inaugurate an era of brown-shirt law enforcement. —Rich Lowry, National Review
Since we are so obsessed with “electability”, let us recall that Kerry as Democratic Presidential candidate would be going up against the most ruthless and deep-pocketed Republican election machine (otherwise know as “the administration”) of the last century. Bush, at least, is a consistent liar.
“Sometime in the next few days or weeks, one of the world’s most comprehensive online reference sites will publish its 200,000th article. More accurately, one of the site’s contributors will publish the article.
Wikipedia, an encyclopedia created and operated by volunteers, is one of the most fascinating developments of the Digital Age. In just over three years of existence, it has become a valuable resource and an example of how the grass roots in today’s interconnected world can do extraordinary things.” —Dan Gillmor
That Gibberish in Your In-Box May Be Good News: “If you could sit back with Zen-like detachment and observe the dross piling up in your electronic mailbox, the spam wars might come to seem like a fascinating electronic game. Like creatures running through a maze with constantly shifting walls, spammers dart and weave to sneak their solicitations past ever wilier junk mail filters. They are organisms, or maybe genomes, grinding out one random mutation after another, desperately trying to elude the Grim Reaper…
Dispiriting as it is to start the morning with a hundred of these orthographic monsters crouching in your in-box, there is reason to take heart. Measured in bits and bytes, the sheer volume of spam may not have diminished. But advanced filtering software, which learns to recognize the mercurial traits of junk e-mail, is having an effect. The spammers’ messages are becoming harder and harder to decipher. Sense is inevitably degenerating into nonsense, like a pileup of random mutations in an endangered species gasping its last breaths.
Earlier this month, when Internet experts met in Cambridge, Mass., for the 2004 Spam Conference (available as a Web broadcast at spamconference.org), they showed just how far the science of spam fighting has come. For all the recent talk of suing spammers and compiling a national do-not-spam list, most speakers were putting their hopes in technological, not legal solutions. The federal government’s new junk e-mail law, the Can Spam Act, barely rated a mention.” —New York Times
“Does a Rembrandt portrait or a van Gogh still life press some special buttons in every human being’s brain? Will a red painting speak to us in ways a blue one never could? Are we wired in ways that make every one of us enjoy a smiling bust and shiver at a frowning one?
And if our brains determine how art works on us, what does that tell us about art, or us — could studying the way we’re wired determine crisply that the ‘Mona Lisa’ is truly great, or do we need some history to tell us how a complex painting speaks, or not, to all its different viewers?
The Third International Conference on Neuroesthetics, subtitled ‘Emotions in Art and the Brain,’ was held earlier this month at the Berkeley Art Museum and tried to get a start at least on answering such questions. It was a showcase for the progress that’s been made in figuring out what goes on in the brain when art is seen or made.” —Washington Post
More on the neurology of creativity, with the complementary (and at least as interesting) question of that is happening when one has an aesthetic experience. However, the article ends with the same question I have — why assume there is just one sort of aesthetic experience and any uniformity to the neurology behind it?
“His Dark Materials, which began as a trilogy of young-adult novels with extravagant themes but humble commercial expectations, has turned into a serious international phenomenon and bestowed on its author the sort of celebrity that prompted him to move to a house with an unlisted address. The books, luminous adventures that address life after death, religious faith and the complicated intermingling of good and evil, have been translated into 37 languages and sold more than 7 million copies in Britain and the United States alone.” —New York Times
“Low-budget thriller Primer and music documentary Dig! have won the two top prizes at the Sundance Film Festival.” —BBC
Hollywood gives awards voters star treatment:
“What is the Hollywood Foreign Press Association? Though the group claims to represent the world media that connect Hollywood to its vast international audience, few of the world’s most prominent publications are members. Correspondents for Le Monde, The Times of London and Yomiuri Shimbun are not members.
Some major publications, including the Italian newspaper La Repubblica and the German newspaper Stern, are represented, but the association has repeatedly rejected applications from prominent foreign publications while accepting freelancers for small publications in Bangladesh and South Korea. Members need write only four articles a year to maintain active membership. The group accepts a maximum of five new members a year, and each member must be accepted unanimously. Last year, three members of the association died, but it accepted only one new member, Margaret Gardiner, who writes for South African publications.
There is little question that members of the association would get little attention if they did not have the Golden Globes.” —Chicago Tribune
Not that critics for the ‘major publications’ are the only ones entitled to their opinions…
It’s gibberish: “t is covered with drawings of fantastic plants, strange symbols and naked women.
Its language is unknown and unreadable, though some believe it bears a message from extraterrestrials. Others say it carries knowledge of a civilisation that is thousands of years old.
But now a British academic believes he has uncovered the secret of the Voynich manuscript, an Elizabethan volume of more than 200 pages that is filled with weird figures, symbols and writing that has defied the efforts of the twentieth century’s best codebreakers and most distinguished medieval scholars.” —Observer.UK
The ‘blood libel’: “For hundreds of years, it’s been said that Jews kill Christian children and drain their blood for ritual purposes. Why has this myth persisted for so long?” —BBC News Magazine
![//graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/01/24/arts/Keeshan2184.jpg' cannot be displayed]](https://i0.wp.com/graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/01/24/arts/Keeshan2184.jpg "R.I.P. Bob Keeshan")
“Bob Keeshan, who delighted millions of children and their parents for three decades as television’s gentle, patient Captain Kangaroo and before that as the original Clarabell the Clown on the old ‘Howdy Doody Show,’ died yesterday in Vermont, his family said in a statement to The Associated Press. He was 76.” —New York Times
Scores of cheeseburgers, hundreds of fries and dozens of chocolate shakes later, the formerly strapping 6-foot-2 New Yorker – who started out at a healthy 185 pounds – had packed on 25 pounds.
But his supersized shape was the least of his problems.
Within a few days of beginning his drive-through diet, Spurlock, 33, was vomiting out the window of his car, and doctors who examined him were shocked at how rapidly Spurlock’s entire body deteriorated…Spurlock charted his journey from fit to flab in a tongue-in-cheek documentary, which he has taken to the Sundance Film Festival with the hopes of getting a distribution deal.
Super Size Me explores the obesity epidemic that plagues America today – a sort of Bowling for Columbine for fast food. ” —New York Post
Final Days: A new program pairs volunteers with people with terminal illnesses who would otherwise die alone. The program in New York was started by a childbirth maven who, inspired by Dr. Sherwin Nuland’s reflections on death, wondered why there should not be ‘midwives’ to accompany people’s departure from the world as there are to accompany their entry. “There’s no rental agency for friends, for when you’re sick and staring death in the face.” —New York Times
“Workers at the only U.S. factory for dismantling nuclear weapons risked an explosion this month by taping together broken pieces of high explosive being removed from the plutonium trigger of an old warhead, federal investigators said.
The unorthodox handling of the unstable explosive increased the risk that the technicians would drop it and set off a ‘violent reaction,’ the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board said Tuesday in a letter to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham.” —CNN
It is worth pointing out that we are talking about the risk of a nuclear explosion here; that is the ‘potentially unacceptable consequence’ federal investigators cite. Another in a series of stories illustrating that our weapons are too dangerous to be managed by human beings, in the face of our inevitable fallibility and stupidity. (I’ll refrain from beating a dead horse with a gratuitous reference to the ‘WMD-is-us’ theme here…)
Correspondent with street cred James Fallows (former Presidential speechwriter) annotates the speech. —The Atlantic Monthly I admit this was the only way I could bring myself to dip into the State of the Union Address, as I am so unable to stomach Bush’s disingenuousness and distortion.
Final Days: A new program pairs volunteers with people with terminal illnesses who would otherwise die alone. The program in New York was started by a childbirth maven who, inspired by Dr. Sherwin Nuland’s reflections on death, wondered why there should not be ‘midwives’ to accompany people’s departure from the world as there are to accompany their entry. “There’s no rental agency for friends, for when you’re sick and staring death in the face.” —New York Times
WorldChanging is reporting that Whole Earth Review has gone belly up. From where I sit, I can look at a complete collection lined up on my bookshelf — I have been a subscriber since issue #1 nearly three decades ago. My first reaction was to be devastated but, in truth, it has been a shadow of its inspiring self in recent issues and its role supplanted by other (mostly web-based) resources. Its last in a series of invaluable lessons to readers like me, perhaps, is challenging us to let go of it gracefully as it passes like all things do.
“Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.”
In a little known policy, Wal-Mart and its subsidiary Sam’s Club locks workers in overnight. Contrary to company denials, it is often the case that no one on the premises has a key and workers are threatened with being fired if they use the fire exits for any reason other than a fire — including a medical emergency or a wife going into labor at home. Company spokespeople say the policy is employed at perhaps ten percent of its stores in high-crime areas to protect store employees; affected workers dispute this and say it is used to reduce employee pilferage and slack time. Managers who promise to come in at any time to unlock the doors in an emergency are often unavailable when the need arises. While Wal-Mart says the practice of overnight lock-ins is not unusual in the large retail segment, its competitors and retail sector analysts say no one else does it. Of note, the company apparently began to make sure managers with keys were on duty overnight after the Times started to investigate the matter. — New York Times
Combine this with other Wal-Mart’s employee tactics, like taking out accidental death insurance on employees without their consent, and tell me if this is a place you really want to patronize regardless of the potential savings.
Getting better with age… at 95: “A handful of major composers have had Indian summers – Verdi and Haydn wrote masterpieces in their 70s and 80s – but (Elliott) Carter’s tenth decade of creativity is unprecedented in the history of music…
Carter has lived in America nearly all his life, and in the same apartment since the mid-1940s. But his dogged refusal to bend to the whims of the culture around him makes him a strangely isolated figure in Manhattan. His music is performed much more often in Europe than in America – his only opera, composed in 1998, has never been staged in the US – and he finds himself at odds with the compositional trends that have come and gone in New York.” — Guardian.UK
Man fails in effort to create his own 10-year old Manchurian Candidate: “Chartiers Township police Chief James Horvath said he couldn’t believe what he was hearing: an audio recording of a man encouraging his 10-year-old stepson to kill his 4-year-old brother.
David Winniewicz, 36, of 130 Poplar Court, Houston, was arrested Wednesday on charges including criminal solicitation to commit homicide for making the audiotape and playing it as the 10-year-old slept, in an apparent attempt to plant a subliminal message in the boy’s mind.”
Paul Krugman: “Fortune magazine rightly declared paperless voting the worst technology of 2003, but it’s not just a bad technology —it’s a threat to the republic.” — New York Times
“Tracks from Bob Marley’s early years, never before released, will be issued this spring, Universal Music said on Thursday…
More than 200 tracks, recorded between 1967 and 1972, feature a young Marley with street attitude, influenced by the American civil rights movement and beginning to explore Rastafarianism. The first release, a three-CD set, is planned for March.” — New York Times
Michael Kinsley: The Compassion Puzzle: “When Bush started calling himself a ‘compassionate conservative’ during the 2000 campaign, critics dismissed this as an oxymoron — or ‘baloney’ to use the technical term. It seemed like an especially brazen example of the near-universal politicians’ vice of trying to have it both ways (and, more important, letting the voters have it both ways).
Supporters said: No, compassionate conservatism represents a real philosophy of government. It bears some relation to ‘national-greatness conservatism,’ another concept being promoted around that time. Both terms were intended to retrofit Reagan-style conservatism (which did not turn out to be an inexorable machine of history) for political terrain transformed by Bill Clinton. The idea was that a nation is more than just a collection of individuals after all. National goals such as promoting moral values domestically and American values abroad are okay.” — Washington Post op-ed
Contradicting Bush’s Optimism: “CIA officers in Iraq are warning that the country may be on a path to civil war, current and former U.S. officials said Wednesday, starkly contradicting the upbeat assessment that President Bush gave in his State of the Union address.
The CIA officers’ bleak assessment was delivered verbally to Washington this week, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the classified information involved.” Knight-Ridder [via CommonDreams]
Meanwhile: Bush: “Don’t Change Leaders in Mid-War”: “President Bush, focusing on a subject sure to be prominent in his re-election campaign, said Thursday his administration is notching successes in the war against terrorism but will not let up while danger lingers.” Salon News Of course, another way to put this is, “…not let up while my tenure in the White House depends on it”?
“Five times this month, the vote of one Supreme Court justice would have stopped the execution of a convicted killer who claimed it was unconstitutionally cruel to use chemicals to carry out a death sentence.
The executions went forward, even though four of the nine high court justices wanted to grant at least a temporary reprieve. The 5-4 votes, all announced without comment by any of the justices, are the latest illustration of the deep rift on the court over capital punishment.” Salon
“A new report by researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston has found little evidence to support a widely held belief about clinical trials of experimental cancer treatments: that patients who enroll in them fare better than those who do not.” —New York Times
NASA unable to communicate with Mars rover: “The Spirit rover has stopped transmitting data from Mars, NASA mission controllers said Thursday, but there were signs it is still operating at a basic level.” —CNN
Margaret Cho answers ‘Michael’. Hilarious, although it will be wasted on ‘Michael.’ —Margaret Cho’s Blog [via walker]
Thomas Friedman sees the Iowa results as a vindication of support for the Iraq incursion by ‘liberal hawks’, like his unrepentent self, whom he calls ‘Blair democrats.”
God bless the Democratic Party’s primary voters in Iowa. They may have rescued our chances of succeeding in Iraq and even winning the war of ideas within the Arab-Muslim world. Go Hawkeyes!
How so? Well, it seems to me that Iowa Democrats, in opting for John Kerry and John Edwards over Howard Dean, signaled (among other things) that they want a presidential candidate who is serious about fighting the war against the Islamist totalitarianism threatening open societies.—New York Times op-ed
…and Wondering if China Might Reach Them First: Competition for power and prestige with China and other aspiring world powers might be another impetus for Bush’s highly-touted (but largely empty) space initiative, as if cynics don’t have enough reason to dismiss it already as an election-year ploy. —New York Times
“‘I never thought I would get 10 years for having consensual sex with a classmate,’ Mr. Dixon said, in a telephone interview on Wednesday from prison. ‘I thought I was going to get convicted of statutory rape and go home that day.'” —New York Times
“Adding to the debate over using antidepressant drugs for depressed teenagers and children, a group of prominent researchers issued a report yesterday saying that Zoloft and similar medicines did not increase children’s suicide risk.
The group, drawn from members of the American College of Neuro- psychopharmacology, also found that the drugs were effective in treating children’s depression.” —New York Times As readers of FmH know, the backlash against the antidepressants has been one of my pet peeves, and I have long felt that the risks of undertreating major depression far outweigh the risks of the antidepressants. Recently, the consensus has been that Big Bad Pharma has concealed evidence of mrobidity and mortality associated with these cash-cow medications. But, while I am no fan of the pharmaceutical industry, I do not think they are so nefarious — mostly because it would not be good for business. This study echoes a FDA review panel’s 1991 finding putting to rest worries that Prozac increased suicidality. Most of those raising concerns about SSRI-induced suicide (and, for that matter, violence and homicide, which in several highly-publicized lawsuits have also been associated with drugs of this class) arise from anecdotal associations. Pooled data ends up showing no statistical correlation. The current committee echoes my belief that most SSRI-associated suicide comes from undermanagement by the prescribing doctor (because of the pharmaceutical companies’ marketing strategy, this is increasingly a primary care doctor rather than a psychiatric specialist) and trivialization of the treatment of an urgent and dangerous condition. Paying adequate attention to:
is what is called for, rather than throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
New report commissioned by the Dutch government cites ethnic ghettos and ‘sink schools’ —Sydney Morning Herald [via walker]. This is a simmering social problem throughout Western Europe, fueling the appeal of xenophobic right-wing parties in a number of European nations. The Dutch contended with the fiery Pim Fortuyn until his assassination two years ago, and Jean-Marie Le Pen‘s worrisome showing in the last French election has been widely covered as has the resurgent German skinhead movement. Especially with the demonization of Islam since 9-11, hateful eyes are turned on ethnic minorities who are often Arabic. Many trace the origins of the problem to the ‘guest worker’ policies by which Western European nations imported Eastern European, Middle Eastern and North African laborers during boom times. As the economies have contracted, support for immigrant labor policies has waned and the guest workers have been seen as competing with indigenous job-seekers. American interest in this problem has been stoked by Bush’s recent immigration policy reforms which some characterize as the tantamount to turning illegal immigrants into a ‘guest worker’ underclass similar to the discredited European one.
Greg Palast: “You said it … and then that little tongue came out; that weird way you stick your tongue out between your lips like the little kid who knows he’s fibbing. Like a snake licking a rat. I saw that snakey tongue dart out and I thought, ‘He knows.’
And what you know, Mr. Bush, is this: you’ve ordered this testing to hunt down, identify and target for destruction the hopes of millions of children you find too expensive, too heavy a burden, to educate…
You know and I know that this is not an educational opportunity program – because you offer no opportunities, no hope, no plan, no funding. Rather, it is the new Republican social Darwinism, educational eugenics: Identify the nation’s loser-class early on. Trap them, then train them cheap. The system will provide the new worker drones that will clean the toilets at the Yale alumni club, to punch the McDonald’s cash registers color-coded for illiterates, to pamper the winner-class on the higher floors of the new service economy order. ” —Guerilla News Network
‘Hey People It was Only a Tower and I Swear by God that They [the U.S.] are the Ones Who Pulled It Down’. “”Kharittat Al Tariq’ (Road Map) is the name of the song which gives voice to widespread views in the Egyptian street regarding the September 11th events and the U.S. – Iraq standoff. The song talks about the road map and includes quotes from U.S. President George W. Bush about the plan’s implementation. The song goes on to describe how America is the spitting image of Israel and it carries out its desires, making the world into a ‘jungle.’ But it does not stop at that point. Abd Al-Rahim goes on to boldly sing that the USA is the perpetrator of the September 11th attacks.
”Hey people it was only a tower and I swear by God that they are the ones who pulled it down.’ Abd Al-Rahim further sings that they purposely did it to make people think that Arabs and Muslims are terrorists and were behind that disaster. Now the U.S. can do what it pleases to the Arab world since everyone thinks they are to blame.” —MEMRI [via walker]
Back Words
by Andrew Sullivan: “Bush could have laid out an agenda for the future last night.
Instead, he dwelled on the battles of the last three years.”
This is not Reaganism. It isn’t Gingrichism. It’s Big Government Moral Conservatism: fiscally liberal and socially conservative. It will please the hard right and the base. And it will alienate libertarians and moderates. It struck me as a speech that comes out of a political cocoon, from a president who doesn’t grasp that he is in fact politically vulnerable, and who intends to run not on what he plans for the future but on what he has done in the past. That’s a high-risk strategy. We won’t know how high a risk until the Democrats produce a nominee.
Sick Joke
by Jonathan Cohn: “Bush’s heath insurance proposals were a hodgepodge of unserious
retreads…The ideas are so unserious they’re barely worth considering, except insofar as they demonstrate just how far out of touch this White House really is.”
Offensive Stance
by Michael Crowley: “Far from rising above the fray of the campaign, Bush used last
night’s speech to define his Democratic opponents in the most
unflattering ways possible.”
Marriage of Convenience
by Michelle Cottle: “Bush’s new marriage initiative is unlikely to work. Then again,
it’s not supposed to.”
…(C)heap-ass, feel-good initiatives aimed at promoting strong marriages–all in the name of happier, healthier children, of course–are something only the most amoral neo-Marxist feminazi could object to. Who cares if the programs actually work? Nearly all of us can agree that they should work–that it would, on the whole, be a positive thing if somehow they could work. And, in an election year, that kind of broad consensus is as good as gold.
Mickey Kaus:
“The Kerry victory in Iowa reminds me, not unsurprisingly, of Gary Hart’s come-from-behind victory in New Hampshire in 1984. At the time I was working for the presidential campaign of Sen. Ernest Hollings. I’d written a profile of Hart a year earlier and decided that while somebody like Hart was the ideal Democrat, Hart himself was too strange, and his judgment too suspect, for him to be president. .. (T)he rest of the campaign did more or less correspond to a scenario in which Democrats found out more about Hart and decided ‘on second thought, no.’
I expect a similar scenario to unfold with John Kerry. The idea of John Kerry is appealing. The reality is less so (and a lot more less so than was the reality of Hart). As the primaries proceed, my guess is voters will learn more about Kerry and his support will fade…
I don’t want to commit–or rather, by predicting Kerry’s quick demise, I’ve already committed–what a Slate colleague calls the Howell Raines Fallacy, the assumption that the great and good American people, in their wisdom, will inevitably come to agree with you (or, in Raines’ case, the New York Times editorial page). It’s an easy fallacy for a democrat to slide into…” —Slate
I agree that the reality of Kerry (and I have been watching him for awhile, as the junior senator from my state about whose Presidential aspirations the Mass. media have been filled for a long time) lacks something. Who was it? Maybe Steve Gilliard, who said succinctly, “There’s just no there there.” But he is not the candidate; Kaus’ ’62-38 defeat’ line is, as usual for him, pure contrarian, but he is serving a useful function in pointing out that a bandwagon effect around the results of the byzantine Iowa caucus would be, to say the least, ill-advised and premature. And in warning the Democrats not to take any support for granted.
Washington Post news analysis: “Dean’s vaunted grass-roots movement, which fueled the former Vermont governor’s rise to the top of the Democratic field with money and energy in 2003, failed its first test at old-fashioned politics, falling far short of the bold claims of its architects.” Organized labor, the “backbone of the Democratic Party’s get-out-the-vote machinery”, did not deliver for its chosen candidate, Richard Gephardt, either. Someone commented that Iowa did not ‘do its job’ either; instead of winnowing the field, there are now arguably four viable candidates going into New Hampshire. A protracted battle which fails to coalesce behind a clear frontrunner presents the obvious risk of giving Bush a long unbroken period to be Presidential and appear above the fray of his opponents’ petty squabbling, and destroying any possibility the Democrats might have of recovering from this obscenely drawn out primary season to mount an effective effort at toppling Bush (in an equally obscenely drawn out campaign season). Iowa is being read as showing that Dean’s opposition to the Iraq war was not enough to make him seem electable; if this is the case, is this going to be another election in which no clear delineation of positions on issues differentiates the Demublican from the Republicrat?
If it was being the frontrunner that was Dean’s downfall, he might actually do better without that big fat bullseye painted on his back, however. He still has considerable assets in organization, endorsements (are many senior Democratic statesmen left with egg on their faces now?) and funding to bring to the campaign. It is beginning to be the conventional wisdom, however, in the aftermath of Iowa that he is ‘self-destructing’ because of his temperament. A more charitable perspective sees these same temperamental variables as evidence of passion and candor in the service of ideals, but it is clear that there is little charity in this mean season. It may also be that this is a particularly bad time for an upstart who bases his campaign on differentiating himself from Washington ‘insiders.’ In this first Presidential election since 9-11, the public may not be willing to risk going with an outsider.
Mental Muscles of Steel — read FmH.
Rebecca Blood linked to “books too good to put down”; this, a librarian and mother’s compilation of books to read aloud, “books that you need a child on your lap to fully appreciate”, is one of the subsections. I believe that, even on my deathbed, one of the things I will recall with the greatest relish is the unending pleasure of reading to my children (and hopefully theirs). Try it out…
Josh Marshall is reporting that Dean has crashed and burned in Iowa. (Obviously,) more later…
Amy’s Robot sez, in exploring the historical significance of the Iowa caucuses: “Oh, well, maybe the Democrats will have better luck in 2036 when the government considers legalizing the Democratic party again.”
“On Jan. 2nd, 2004, NASA’s Stardust spacecraft approached Comet Wild 2 and flew into a storm. Flurries of comet dust pelted the craft. At least half a dozen grains moving faster than bullets penetrated Stardust’s outermost defenses. The craft’s 16 rocket engines struggled to maintain course while a collector, about the size of a tennis racquet, caught some of the dust for return to Earth two years hence.
All that was expected.
Then came the surprise. It happened when Stardust passed by the core of the comet, only 236 km distant, and photographed it using a navigation camera. The images were intended primarily to keep the spacecraft on course. They also revealed a worldlet of startling beauty.” —NASA
Yes, milk…: “It is the only substance designed specifically by evolution to nourish mammals, and scientists have recently become aware of its various, long-term health-promotional features.
A recent conference on the future uses of milk was told about research showing how proteins in it lower blood pressure, prevent cancer and improve immune function. Milk has also been shown to speed the uptake of hard-to-absorb nutrients such as iron, promote the growth of good stomach bacteria, fatten infants without generally turning them obese and, in its cheese form, act as kind of natural tooth-decay inhibitor.
‘The problem is that we don’t know in molecular detail how milk is able to provide most of these benefits,’ Prof. German says. ‘Without knowing these, it is impossible to manage them.’
And thus was born the idea for the Milk Genome Project.” —Globe and Mail
An exquisite Oliver Sacks essay summarizes current approaches to the problem of consciousness and the emerging consensus that it represents the melding of a “collection of moments”, in both a personal and a physiological sense, into an illusion of continuity. —The New York Review of Books
Related? What has been described as the ‘narrativist orthodoxy’, that the self is constructed out of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, is disputed by philosopher Galen Strawson in a review of preeminent cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner’s Making Stories.
“Is the narrativity view a profound and universal insight into the human condition? It’s a partial truth at best, true enough for some, completely false for others. There is a deep divide in our species. On one side, the narrators: those who are indeed intensely narrative, self-storying, Homeric, in their sense of life and self, whether they look to the past or the future. On the other side, the non-narrators: those who live life in a fundamentally non-storytelling fashion, who may have little sense of, or interest in, their own history, nor any wish to give their life a certain narrative shape. In between lies the great continuum of mixed cases.” —Guardian.UK
He suspects that only ‘narrative types’ believe in the ‘narrativist orthodoxy. As a psychotherapist (although also, I concede, obviously a narrative type), I doubt it. The premise of the work I do every day depends on helping people reshape the stories they tell about themselves and in turn the notion that ‘narrative truth’ is different than ‘historical truth’ about one’s life (if, in fact, one can ascertain what the ‘historical truth’ is, which I profoundly doubt). Strawson has a distorted notion of ‘the narrativity view’, characterizing it as “the ethical-psychological hypothesis that we are, and ought to be, constantly engaged in making a tale out of ourselves and our lives.” But the idea that our identity is a product of the stories we tell about who we are does not demand constant or conscious engagement in the process! Even those who have no interest in their history or in giving their lives a certain narrative shape are bound by the stories they tell to constitute themselves; only they are not conscious of it, of the contingent nature of their beliefs about who they are, as the ‘narrators’ are. If Strawson claims that this is not so, he will have to mount a more far-reaching challenge to the notion of the unconscious itself, which he has not done. Even if Freud was wrong about the nature of the dynamics that underlies unconscious process, the discovery of the unconscious is arguably what has made self-reflection possible and is the basis for all self-reflective efforts to reshape onself. There are several frames of reference — the Buddhist, the orthdox behaviorist, and the neurocentric — in which self-consciousness is either an illusion or an epiphenomenon, but except for radical adherents of such paradigms, ‘narrators’ and ‘non-narrators’ alike have a remarkably similar commonsense notion of the ‘self’ at the core of their identity.
It becomes clear late in the essay why Strawson is afraid of the unconscious. He seems profoundly alarmed at the prospect that the truth about one’s life may inevitably be relative, as this concluding passage from the essay shows:
It is well known that telling and retelling one’s past leads to changes, smoothings, enhancements, shifts away from the facts; and recent research has shown that this is not just a human foible but a neurophysiological inevitability. Every conscious recall brings an alteration, and the implication is plain: the more you recall, retell, narrate yourself, the further you risk moving away from accurate self-understanding, from the truth of your being. Sartre is wrong to say that storying oneself is a universal trait, but he’s right that it is extremely common, and he is surely right, contrary to the tide of current opinion in the humanities, that the less you do it the better.
He has little to offer in the face of this profound alarm except unreasoned faith that there must be a non-narrative truth about our lives if we only we will refrain from departing from that truth by reshaping it. You would think that a philosopher would have greater tolerance for a notion such as the impossibility of objectivity, and something more reasoned to offer in the face of such a threat.
Two medical marijuana patients face potential life sentences on federal drug charges after being turned over by local authorities. The two men, both 53, have doctor’s recommendations to grow and consume medical marijuana under California’s 1996 Compassionate Use Act (Prop. 215). The prosecutor diverted the defendants’ attorneys by taking them out of the courtroom for a conference, only to announce that she was dropping the state charges because at that moment they were being taken into custody in the courtroom on a federal indictment. On the other hand, the raid on their home had netted more than 60 lbs. of marijuana, leading authorities to doubt they fell within the personal use provisions of California’s law. The defendants, however, argue that the case was turned over to federal jurisdiction when it became clear that the state prosecutor was losing the case in court. —AlterNet
“Today, more than twice as many young people apply to MTV’s ‘Real World’ show than to Harvard… Clearly, to a post-cold-war generation of Americans, the prospect of living under surveillance is no longer scary but cool.” —New York Times By and large, are the people alarmed by the erosion of our privacy the same ones who are appalled by reality television? They coalesce in me, for one; I have never watched, and never will, any reality t.v. (and I would not even if I were more than the minimal t.v. viewer that I am). I am reminded of the adage that people get the leaders they deserve.
How do the members of a string quartet play together and tour together year in, year out, without killing each other? Is it the sheer delight of a dream job or a constant indulgence in masochism? Is there a relationship between the quality of the music and the quality of the relationships among the quartet members? Cellist David Waterman spills the beans. —Guardian.UK Knowing little about the inner workings of quartets, I have been fascinated by the simple fact of the longevity of many of the groupings, and wondered if quertets stay together for decades because they are illustrious, or become illustrious because of their longevity.
“The number of people downloading music illegally surged a month after recording companies began suing hundreds of music fans, a marketing research firm said Thursday.
The number of U.S. households downloading music from peer-to-peer networks rose 6 percent in October and 7 percent in November after a six-month decline, according to a study of computer use in 10,000 U.S. households conducted by The NPD Group.” —Wired
“As baseball tries to figure out what to do with its degenerate superstar, Pete Rose, it ought to take a look at how art museums conduct business…
Museums make no moral judgment about their artists. Just imagine the personal lives of the artists who are represented at museums. We know Jackson Pollock was a drunk. We know Picasso had no regard for women artists, and he said women were either “goddesses or doormats.” Heck, if you believe Patricia Cornwell’s recent book, museum-worthy artist Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper.
But museums know they shouldn’t be presenting the artists as good people, only their work as beautiful or important.”
Spalding Gray’s disappearance and the suspicions that he has suicided prompt a reexamination of the notion of the tormented artist. Are writers more prone to depression, or do we just hear about it? “No one ever hears about melancholic farmers; they don’t publish their stories.” Are tormented souls more likely to become artists? In the celebrated study of the issue, venerable psychiatrist Nancy Andreason found that mood disorders were far more prevalent among Iowa Writers’ Workshop participants than the general public. The direction of the causal link, however, remains puzzling despite being pondered at length by mental health experts. Ny own perspective is that both mood disorders (mania and depression) and thought disorders (schizophrenia and other psychoses) decrease rather than stimulate functionality and output in most sufferers, at least the ones I treat. Art by tortured souls is likely to be despite rather than due to their torment and represents the triumph of their other gifts over their suffering. Creative output may be a a strategy to bind and cope with distress in some instances… or in most, which is why the cost-cutting measure I see in most systems of mental health care delivery of eliminating art therapy as a treatment modality is so painful to watch. Not only may the artist have a transformative relationship to her distress but to her culture, that she is in a sense of but not in — making a metastatement on cultural and social norms, morés and suppositions. Mental illness too can be considered from the standpoint not of intrapsychic but sociocultural alienation and distress, so that the relationship between creativity and madness must be considered from that sphere as well. Is societal alienation and disengagement from cultural norms a cause or a consequence of mental illness? Another thing often debated without a simple answer… I also think it is naive to speak generically of ‘creativity’ as if there were only one kind. Psychological studies of intelligence have veered off from the classical notion of a unitary intelligence to the idea of a multiplicity of discrete intellectual (and emotional) skills. Similarly, I think, with creative abilities. Different forms of creativity will, almost inevitably, have differing relationships with psychological torment and cultural alienation. Addendum: John Perry Barlow, a friend of Spalding Gray, contemplates the likelihood he is gone.
Harvard animal cognition expert Marc Hauser and associates tout the results of this recent study of theirs as identifying a ‘fundamental bottleneck on animal thought’, explaining why humans can string sentences together and other animals cannot. In the paradigm, monkeys read simple sentences would look at the speaker when the sentence was ungrammatical. However, with more complex sentence structures such as ‘if…then’ constructions, they could not tell the difference between what was well-formed and ill-formed grammatically. But does this really explain anything about the origins of the fundamental differences between how humans and other animals communicate with one another? Not that I can see — it is just one reflection of the difference in the level of complexity of the symbolic manipulation different species are capable of, along with other differences cited in the article, such as capacity for abstract representation (which seems to me a more fundamental difference, although admittedly related to capacity for complex grammatical structures) and potential vocabulary size. It might be illuminating to use fMRI, a technology of which FmH readers know I am quite fond, to watch what is happening in animal ‘language processing’ as it compares with human. —Yahoo! News
Stephen Hawking’s children are seeking the second police investigation in four years based on fears he is being abused recurrently by 53-year old second wife Elaine, his former nurse (and previously married to the man who made him his renowned voice synthesizing machinery) for whom he left his first wife, mother of his children, in 1990. The 62-year old Hawking has periodically presented to the emergency ward of his local hospital with mysterious injuries about which he refuses to elaborate and has threatened police investigating such concerns with harassment suits. Last summer, someone left Hawking stranded in his wheelchair in his garden on the hottest day of the year. He suffered heatstroke and sunburn at that time. He is now hospitalized with an unrelated pneumonia but reportedly shows evidence of fresh bruising. Police are waiting to interview him. His children and his adoring private duty nurses suggest his injuries may represent ‘Munchausen’s by proxy’, a psychiatric condition in which someone induces medical problems in another to draw attention and sympathy to themselves. —Mirror.co.uk
Those diagnosed with Munchausen’s by proxy are generally reviled for harming those dependent upon them. often their children, for twisted needs; I think of them as the ‘short eyes’ of the mental health field. The article notes that Hawking’s spurned first wife Jane ‘was left with a deep loathing of Elaine, who she describes as “manipulative” ‘. What is conspicuously missing from the article is any detail about Elaine’s comportment and what secondary gain she might derive from harming Hawking, if she is. In the absence of such detail, I am left wondering if the somewhat gratuitous mention of Munchausen’s is anything more than a disparaging epithet (which is certainly one of the ways we see psychiatric diagnoses bandied about in this society!) from a family with apparent enmity for her. If it is she who is harming him, it might more prosaically be considered a case of spousal abuse; Hawking’s offense at the investigations and insistence that his private life is his own affair are more consistent with the typical battered spouse syndrome than Munchausen’s by proxy, where the abuse is more subtle, simulates medical conditions rather than overt ‘torture’, and the victim is not aware that something is being done to them (if they really suspect Munchausen’s. for example, they should investigate whether the victimizer has in some subtle way induced the pneumonia rather than, more clumsily, bumps and bruises…). Sordid and tragic in either case. Of note, in my state of Massachusetts at least there exists a disabled person’s protection commission which is empowered to investigate allegations of abuse regardless of the victim’s wishes, in recognition of the often complicated allegiance the victim has to her/his abuser. In a better-safe-than-sorry manner, the threshold for involving the DPPC is quite low. Can British readers of FmH tell me if similar protections of disabled and dependent exist in the UK?
William Safire tells us how to watch the State of the Union address in an election year, rightly pointing out it will be the campaign event of the week. —New York Times op-ed What he doesn’t acknowledge is that it will be Bush’s (or, more properly, the Bush speechwriters’) last SotUA.
A book of bad words (1996; out of print, but still available from Maledicta Press): “This entertaining and informative book is a compendium of colorful language in all its forms. A clever mixture of scholarly and popular, witty and serious essays and glossaries, it features insults, slurs, curse words, and blasphemous expressions from dozens of languages and cultures, including the worst Catalan, Italian, and Russian insults and blasphemies, medieval vulgarities, filthy limericks, slang terms for private parts, and thousands of other ribald delights.”
A book of bad words (1996; out of print, but still available from Maledicta Press): “This entertaining and informative book is a compendium of colorful language in all its forms. A clever mixture of scholarly and popular, witty and serious essays and glossaries, it features insults, slurs, curse words, and blasphemous expressions from dozens of languages and cultures, including the worst Catalan, Italian, and Russian insults and blasphemies, medieval vulgarities, filthy limericks, slang terms for private parts, and thousands of other ribald delights.”
Smiley’s (Anti-American) People:
“Anyone can see what happened in Iraq. It was nothing more than a war of colonial conquest fought for oil, ‘dressed up as a crusade for Western life and liberty,’ and its authors were ‘a clique of war-hungry Judeo-Christian geopolitical fantasists who hijacked the media and exploited America’s post-9/11 psychopathy.’
These words are spoken in John Le Carré’s new novel ‘Absolute Friends” (Little, Brown, 2004). And although it is usually philistine and unfair to blame a novelist for what his fictional creations say, in this case the speaker expressing those opinions is plainly a point-of-view character – there is a vein of anti-Americanism running through his novels from nearly 40 years ago – and the opinions are shared by plenty of Europeans, the English among them.” —New York Times
‘If only it were true!’, says Max Boot about claims that the Bush administration is pursuing a neoconservative foreign policy:
“The influence of the neoconservative movement (with which I am often associated) supposedly comes from its agents embedded within the U.S. government. The usual suspects are Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense; Douglas Feith, under secretary of defense for policy; Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff; Elliott Abrams, the National Security Council staffer for Near East, Southwest Asian, and North African Affairs; and Richard Perle, a member of the Defense Policy Board. Each of these policymakers has been an outspoken advocate for aggressive and, if necessary, unilateral action by the United States to promote democracy, human rights, and free markets and to maintain U.S. primacy around the world.
While this list seems impressive, it also reveals that the neocons have no representatives in the administration’s top tier. President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice: Not a neocon among them.” — Max Boot, Foreign Policy
Boot says the notion is superficially appealing because of the coalescence of Bush’s Iraq agenda and neo-con aims. But he doubts we will pursue a similar course with North Korea, Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. IMHO, the argument destroys some ‘straw-man’ myths about the neo-conservative conspiracy (like the ‘Jewish’ innuendoes) without substantively addressing their ideological influence on US policy.
Swedish study finds ‘unambiguous link between microwave radiation from GSM phones and brain damage in rats. —Popular Science
“So far, Bigfoot has been a big mystery but that could soon change if two researchers in Redwood City, California, get a big hand from the public.
This spring, C. Thomas Biscardi and Peggy Marx are planning an expedition to an area near Mt. Shasta, California, that is reportedly home to as many as 500 Bigfoot creatures.
Biscardi estimates the Sasquatch search will take three months and cost at least $1.5 million so he’s hoping corporate America will foot what is expected to be a big Bigfoot bill.
He figures an SUV manufacturer or a charter airline are natural sponsors and hopes to sell the Discovery Channel on the idea of televising the search as the ‘ultimate reality show.'”
Imam Convicted for Advice on How to Beat Wives: “A Spanish court sentenced Egyptian-born imam Mohamed Kamal Mustafa, 44 to 15 months in prison Wednesday for writing a book instructing husbands how to beat their wives without leaving bruises.” —Yahoo!
Brain Sandwiches Still on Some Menus: “Fear of mad cow disease hasn’t kept Cecelia Coan from eating her beloved deep-fried cow brain sandwiches.
She’s more concerned about what the cholesterol will do to her heart than suffering the brain-wasting disease found in a cow in Washington state.
‘I think I’ll have hardening of the arteries before I have mad cow disease,’ said Cecelia Coan, 40, picking up a brain sandwich to go at the Hilltop Inn during her lunch hour. ‘This is better than snail, better than sushi, better than a lot of different delicacies.'” —Yahoo!
“If you liked the Florida recount, you’ll love the Iowa caucuses.” —William Saletan, Slate
“An obsession with the devil, born out of personal experience, explains why so many fundamentalist Christians believe that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were working together.” —Salon
“In an extraordinary Supreme Court filing, five military lawyers equate Bush’s denial of legal rights to the Guantanamo Bay detainees to King George’s oppression of the American colonists.” —Salon
“‘It’s like a game of Russian roulette,’ said one of my friends whose son is serving in Iraq. ‘Every day we wonder if our luck will hold out, or if today is the day we take the hit.’ ” —AlterNet
One thing I have recently noticed is that US news sources reporting on the death often say that a vehicle ‘ran into a roadside bomb’ or something similar. To me, this suggests accidentally hitting a buried hazard along the lines of a landmine left over from hostilities, while in reality we are talking about a deliberate attack by resistance fighters who have placed the device and I presume are waiting in the vicinity to detonate it as a US convoy passes. Similarly, when a helicopter or aircraft goes down, one has to get into the heart of the story for confirmation that it had been fired upon. Is this an unconscious softpedaling of the daily enmity the US faces? Reading European coverage of the same incidents, words are far less minced.
Related: US Soldiers’ Suicide Rate is Up in Iraq:
“Suicide has become such a pressing issue that the Army sent an assessment team to Iraq late last year to see if anything more could be done to prevent troops from killing themselves. The Army also began offering more counseling to returning troops after several soldiers at Fort Bragg, N.C., killed their wives and themselves after returning home from the war.
Winkenwerder said the military has documented 21 suicides during 2003 among troops involved in the Iraq war. Eighteen of those were Army soldiers, he said.
That’s a suicide rate for soldiers in Iraq of about 13.5 per 100,000, Winkenwerder said. In 2002, the Army reported an overall suicide rate of 10.9 per 100,000.
The overall suicide rate nationwide during 2001 was 10.7 per 100,000, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” —Yahoo!
“It’s been a rocky year for Poetry magazine after the magazine learned it was bequeathed $100 million. “Poetry’s first order of business was to form a foundation to satisfy IRS regulations. But later developments seemed not just to suggest growing pains but to hint at the old adage that money ruins everything.” —Christian Science Monitor
Local NPR Member Stations Still Need Help: ‘Yes, National Public Radio just got a gift of $200 million. But “the truth is that the Kroc gift will have no effect on the financial needs or the fundraising efforts of NPR’s 750 member stations. Instead of receiving financial support from NPR, these stations have to pay for NPR programming.” And the gift might even have a negative impact as donors assume public radio is now awash in cash.’ —Christian Science Monitor
“For the first time in the UK an orchestra will be performing John Cage’s silent work 4’33” on the radio. Cage’s seminal work, 4’33”, which consists of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence, will be the highlight of a concert on Radio 3 at 7.25pm. In readiness for the performance, Radio 3 bosses will have to switch off their emergency back-up system – designed to cut in when there is an unexpected silence on air.” —The Scotsman
NASA is orphaning the Hubble space telescope by halting shuttle flights necessary for periodic maintenance even before Bush’s new space initiative phases out the shuttle vehicle six years from now. Among Hubble’s achievements, according to this BBC rundown:
- Gave us the age of the Universe
- Provided proof of black holes
- Gave first views of star birth
- Showed how stars die
- Caught spectacular views of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9’s collision with Jupiter
- Confirmed that quasars are galactic nuclei powered by black holes
- Gathered evidence that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating
Since the new Bush plan is a virtually unfunded mandate to NASA to replace valuable space science with vote-getting glitz (space activity is concentrated in two states with fat pots of electoral votes, Florida and Texas), it is unclear if the successor to the telescope, scheduled for a 2011 launch, will ever be produced.
“The Bush administration’s idea of spending $1.5 billion promoting marriage is one of those rather expensive but basically symbolic gestures that presidents like to make in election years. Mr. Bush’s advisers may also hope that it will divert social conservatives from pressing for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriages. But as meaningless sops to powerful voting blocs go, this one is particularly cruel.” —New York Times editorial
Looks like a brazen giveaway to his faith-based friends to me. However, they are not completely buying it. —New York Times
Update on the ‘liberal hawks’ ‘ ‘reconsideration’ of the invasion of Iraq. Christopher Hitchens remains incredibly misguided, arguing that we have no choice but to pursue foreign policy by the ‘presumption of guilt’; excusing the flow of body bags home to the US with a brief nod to ‘utilitarianism’ (dismissing concerns about the fiscal cost of bogging down in the morass in the same breath), lulling himself with the conviction that bin Laden is already dead and arguing inanely that “you could have genuine inspections only by way of regime change”, a quote out of context by which he dishonors the persecuted whistleblower weapons expert Dr. David Kelly. He says the Kenneth Pollack’s candid reappraisal of his support for the war, the only really thoughtful reassessment in this Slate dialogue, does not ‘affect the essential case’ in the least, poor soul.
Meanwhile, Paul Berman reiterates with the fervor of the zealot how he is the only one who sees the broader and deeper picture.
I fear the worst for the famed, wry monologist who has been reported missing by his wife after failing to return from a walk in New York. The 62-year old Gray has been depressed since suffering a head injury in a 2001 auto accident and underwent psychiatric hospitalization in October 2002 after being talked down from a contemplated jump from a bridge. His mother apparently suicided when she was around his age.
(Many do not appreciate that, after a head trauma, a stroke or other brain insult, depression is not only common but recalcitrant, as it is not simply an emotional reaction to the demoralizing injury but often an ‘organic’ effect on the brain’s function. Not only the mood change but a deterioration in control over impulsive behavior, including self-destructive impulses, is often seen.)
From Garret: “Time for me to repeat my seasonal plea — have mercy on those without shelter. Extra blankets, clothes you might have. I used to purchase a “Happy Meal”? when returning from my own lunchtime in NYC [during the infamous Reagan years] and hand it to the first homeless person I would meet. Your “doggie bag” is a prime candidate for immediate donation. The homeless tend to be very appreciative of this gesture.
In this case [45-below wind chill?], there may be no other succour but to get the persons in shelter. If you see a homeless individual trying to tough it out, I would advise calling the police or other emergency service to have them take the individual to a shelter.” —dangerousmeta!
Bush makes a mockery of the memory of Dr. King on the seventy-fifth aniversary of his birth. The President’s perfunctory appearance at Dr. King’s grave allows him to get the federal government to pick up the considerable tab for the $2,000-a-plate Republican fundraiser in Atlanta. Civil rights leaders are outraged at the poor taste of pairing the two events.
Every president since Ronald Reagan has come to Atlanta, the birthplace of Dr. King, to lay a wreath at his grave. When President Clinton came in 1996, he received a standing ovation. But this presidential visit will be different. It seems to have lifted the lid on long-simmering anger many blacks feel toward Mr. Bush. Some Bush policies, including tax cuts mainly benefiting those with higher incomes and cutting back on welfare-type programs, have alienated black voters, analysts say. —New York Times
New Book Suggests Biases Are Widespread: “Men are better suited for math and science than women. Whites have more positive feelings toward other whites than blacks. The young are preferred over older people.
These are just a few of the biases discussed by social psychologists Mahzarin R. Banaji and Thierry Devos in their article, ‘Implicit Self and Identity’, published in The Self: From Soul to Brain, Volume 1001 of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Based on a recent Academy conference, the book offers the latest research from 16 experts in the areas of neuroscience, cognitive science, social and developmental psychology, anthropology, philosophy and theology. Their article is one of many that examine how the neurological aspects of our unconscious selves influence our explicit, psychological, social and spiritual selves.” —New York Academy of Sciences press release
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Orang-utans ‘may die out by 2025’: “The orang-utan, Asia’s ‘wild man of the forests’, could disappear in just 20 years, a campaign group believes.
WWF, the global environment network, says in the last century the number of apes fell by 91% in Borneo and Sumatra.
Globally, it says, there were thought to be somewhere between 45,000 and 60,000 orang-utans as recently as 1987.
But by 2001 that number had fallen by virtually half, to an estimated 25,000- 30,000 of the animals, more than half of them living outside protected areas.” —BBC
“Millions of harassed workers could have their worst fears confirmed about their bosses thanks to a new test to weed out the ‘corporate psycho’…
Two of the world’s leading experts on psychopathy have developed a new 107-point questionnaire to identify which desks those smooth-talking ‘snakes in suits’ might be hiding behind.” —BBC
Roger L. Simon:
“At the present moment, the Democratic Party seems to be headed over a cliff at ninety miles an hour. With Bush already sitting on extremely high poll numbers and the domestic and foreign situations breaking his way, the Democrats have two of their worst candidates in recent memory in the frontrunner positions—Howard Dean and Wesley Clark. They are particularly bad in the Internet Age.
What, you say, Howard Dean is bad on the Internet? He was and is the master of online fundraising and the first to recognize the power of blogs. Yes, indeed! But that’s only part of the story. And it’s not the more important part. The Internet is the greatest memory device we have ever had. It stores virtually everything for instant access—it’s very difficult to hide what you have said. Bloggers and others will dig it out and force the media to publicize it.
This is exceptionally dangerous for Dean who has defined himself and staked his nomination on being the Most Antiwar Candidate, when, among other things, quite a short time ago he was not. Today we see via Instapundit that Dean wrote a letter to Clinton advocating Milosevic be forcibly removed for humanitarian reasons, something he appears to have rejected for Saddam, even though the Iraqi leader was vastly more awful. Dean even advocated, in the case of Milosevic, going it alone without the United Nations.”
This is the flip side of the issue I discussed in my post below about the liberal hawks’ reconsiderations of their support for the Iraqi invasion. One and all, as the other rationales they supported evaporate, console themselves with the rote line about how we eliminated a heinous genocidal dictator without examining the moral ambiguities of that stance — which genocidal regimes are worst? where does one draw the line between those we are compelled to depose and those we tolerate? how much failure of diplomatic efforts, containment, and international cooperation is enough? how preemptive, as opposed to reactive, can an effort to remove a dictator be and be justified? how unilateral? who gets to decide? Can Dean bring coherent focus and intelligent discussion to these questions, now that he has been ‘outed’ on the issue (if you accept Reynolds’ take on it), and in so doing definitively articulate the differences between his foreign policy and the Bush regime’s?
Yes, that is billion. “The worldwide sale of ring tones, which started as a marketing gimmick for music labels and mobile phone companies, is roughly equivalent to 10 percent of the $32.2 billion global music market.” —CNN
John Brockman poses this year’s question to the luminaries of The Edge community: What’s your law?:
“There is some bit of wisdom, some rule of nature, some law-like pattern, either grand or small, that you’ve noticed in the universe that might as well be named after you. Gordon Moore has one; Johannes Kepler and Michael Faraday, too. So does Murphy.
Since you are so bright, you probably have at least two you can articulate. Send me two laws based on your empirical work and observations you would not mind having tagged with your name. Stick to science and to those scientific areas where you have expertise. Avoid flippancy. Remember, your name will be attached to your law.”
164 respondents to date. Unfortunately, Brockman exhorted his contributors not to be flippant in formulating their laws. This largely excluded the ironic and cynical and with that, IMHO, an important segment of observations about how the universe works.
Nicholas Humphrey
Humphrey’s Law of the Efficacy of Prayer:
In a dangerous world there will always be more people around whose prayers for their own safety have been answered than those whose prayers have not.
[Think about it.]
… or else. —BBC
First fullscreen high resolution Quicktime VR from Mars. Needs to be seen!
Salon excerpts the December 2003
Strategic Studies Institute report, Bounding the Global War on Terrorism by Jeffrey Record, a Vietnam veteran, author and professor in the Department of Strategy and International Security at the U.S. Air Force’s Air War College in Montgomery, Ala. Record says that conflating al-Qaida and Iraq, and setting the impossible goal of ending terrorism, ‘violates fundamental strategic principles’ — and could strain the U.S. military to the breaking point.
The author examines three features of the war on terrorism as currently defined and conducted: (1) the administration’s postulation of the terrorist threat, (2) the scope and feasibility of U.S. war aims, and (3) the war’s political, fiscal, and military sustainability. He believes that the war on terrorism–as opposed to the campaign against al-Qaeda–lacks strategic clarity, embraces unrealistic objectives, and may not be sustainable over the long haul. He calls for downsizing the scope of the war on terrorism to reflect concrete U.S. security interests and the limits of American military power.
The full text (PDF) can be downloaded here.
“Now, you might expect a poetic epiphany out of me at this point. Or failing that, to get drunk and/or make a fool of myself with an absurdly young woman. Isn’t that what poets do? Not at all, at least not these days. Poets teach and drive Corollas with 150,000 miles on them and take their children to Suzuki violin lessons. If one of them succeeds in cornering you at a party, God forbid, he will probably tell you about his health plan and 401k. Even your accountant is more interesting, and presumably less neurotic and self-involved. This is not an entirely new phenomenon. Years and years ago the brilliant and iconoclastic old Bay Area poet and reprobate Kenneth Rexroth noted that ‘most poets are so square they have to walk around the block to turn over in bed.'” —August Kleinzahler, Slate
In a potentially important conversation, Slate editor Jacob Weisberg brings together Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, Fred Kaplan, George Packer, Kenneth M. Pollack, Jacob Weisberg, and Fareed Zakaria, proposing they reappraise their support for the invasion of Iraq in light of the bankruptcy of the WMD argument and the morass of the occupation. The conversation promises to continue, but here are some tidbits from the first installment.
Weisberg:
“This was elective surgery, and we had a pretty good idea what the surgeon’s limitations were. The choice wasn’t between an invasion led by George W. Bush and an invasion led by a president who would make an eloquent case to the world and build a credible global coalition. The alternatives were Bush’s flawed war or no war. So, the question I’m asking myself now is whether the marvelous accomplishment of deposing and capturing Saddam justifies costs that I really ought to have expected.”
Pollack:
“I think the events of the last 12 months have also indicated that containment was doing both better than we believed, and worse. On the one hand, the combination of inspections and the pain inflicted by the sanctions had forced Saddam to effectively shelve his WMD ambitions, probably since around 1995-96. On the other hand, the behavior of the French, Russians, Germans, and many other members of the United Nations Security Council in the run-up to the war was final proof that they were never going to do what would have been necessary to revise and support containment so that it might have lasted for more than another year or two.”
[I think Pollack is right here that containment was working better than we believed, but his argument about the intransigence of the rest of the world “to do what would have been necessary” founders on the fact that their noncooperation was largely in response to Bush’s arrogant disdain for them.]
Pollack continues:
“If I had to write The Threatening Storm over again I certainly would not have been so unequivocal that war was going to be a necessity. However, I still would have pointed out that there was a strong case for removing Saddam’s regime…”
[The strong case is of course based on the humanitarian rationale, and the pat assertion that the Iraqis are ‘better off now’ is the fallback position of every hawk and erstwhile hawk. There are two problems with this. First, it leaves unexamined the legitimate question of whether the Iraqis are really going to be better off with the American oppressors who lack the political will, the moral committment or the financial resources to embark on the necessary nation-building efforts. Secondly, there is the hypocrisy of the continuing policeman-and-liberator-of-the-world noblesse oblige stance being imposed on the rest of the world unwillingly and selectively, only when it jibes with US strategic interests and empire-building aspirations. You cannot argue for the moral necessity of removing Saddam to respond to the suffering of the Iraqi people without a cogent explanation of why you feel no similar obligation to remove every other despicable despot, especially when you did not start making that argument until the Bush regime mobilized for the invasion.]
Thomas Friedman:
“The real reason for this war — which was never stated — was to burst what I would call the “terrorism bubble,” which had built up during the 1990s.
This bubble was a dangerous fantasy, believed by way too many people in the Middle East. This bubble said that it was OK to plow airplanes into the World Trade Center, commit suicide in Israeli pizza parlors, praise people who do these things as “martyrs,” and donate money to them through religious charities. This bubble had to be burst, and the only way to do it was to go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something — to let everyone know that we, too, are ready to fight and die to preserve our open society. Yes, I know, it’s not very diplomatic — it’s not in the rule book — but everyone in the neighborhood got the message: Henceforth, you will be held accountable.”
[Paul Berman as well, whom I will not dignify by including a tidbit, spouts his usual venom about radical Islam being the newest face of the 20th-century problem of ‘mass totalitarian movements’, which justifies the WoT® in terms little more cogent than Dubya’s own in arguing that we must fight them because they ‘hate freedom.’ Berman concedes that, in this installment of the conversation, he has not tied that argument to the necesssity of the Iraqi invasion. Let us hope his argument is less fatuous as they continue…]
George Packer:
“Before the war, no one could know what kind of political psychology we would find once the seal of Saddam’s tyranny was broken. It turns out that Iraqis are a lot less grateful, a lot more suspicious and even conspiratorial, than the advocates of liberation predicted. The moral self-congratulation we saw in this country in early 2003 went a long way toward damaging the prospects of a decent postwar. Totalitarianism didn’t make Iraqis better people or readier to govern themselves democratically — exactly the opposite. The margin for error was almost zero: The American occupation had about two weeks to get things right after the fall of Baghdad in order to set in motion a process that had any near-term chance of success, and it got everything wrong.”
“The sometimes uneasy relationship between African-Americans and the Democratic Party flashed into the open on Sunday, when Sharpton attacked front-runner Howard Dean at an Iowa debate for his failure to hire any blacks to a cabinet-level position during his 10 years as governor of Vermont. It was the campaign’s other African-American candidate, former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, who came to Dean’s defense, scolding Sharpton for instigating a ‘racial screaming match.’
In some regards, the Sharpton-Dean-Braun exchange captured the divided and unpredictable mood of African-American voters as the primary season heads toward its first votes. Thus far, little attention has been focused on African-American support, given the intense focus by the candidates and the media on the contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, two states with negligible black populations.” —Salon
Sharpton’s playing the race card is business as usual for him; he has always been a petty demagogue seeking otherwise unwarranted credibility and respect on an affirmative action basis. I would venture to say that Dean’s lack of cabinet-level black appointments in Vermont reflects nothing more than the fact that the state is lily-white, without significant African Americans in politics at all. Correct me if I am wrong…
“A virus found in the common cold may be a new weapon in the fight against deadly melanomas, Australian researchers say.
The extraordinary development came after Australian scientists found skin cancer cells died when injected with coxsackie A21 – a common air-borne virus associated with the common cold.
Researchers said the discovery could be used as a stand-alone therapy or incorporated into conventional radiation and chemo-therapeutic strategies as an effective “three-pronged attack” on melanoma. ” —News.com.au
New software has `no boundaries or rules’: “A few hundred thousand lines of computer code could revolutionize the way people interact with computers, say its unlikely inventor and his backers.” Can anyone make heads or tails of this description? I can’t for the life of me envision how this would work or whether it would be the big deal this puff piece says it is:
The software, called “No Boundaries Or Rules,” or NBOR, includes an intuitive user interface for writing, drawing, compiling multimedia presentations and other PC tasks. It allows real-time collaboration and sends large files over the Internet at lightning speed.
The cornerstone of NBOR is “Blackspace,” software for word processing, desktop publishing, slideshow presentation, graphics, drawing, animations, audio, photo cropping, instant messaging and real-time conferencing.
Opening Blackspace results in a blank canvas where users arrange text or create sophisticated visual displays with only a few clicks and drags of a mouse — without ever using the pull-down menus, icons, margins, tabs and fonts of Microsoft Word and other current word processing systems.
Canvases can be saved as common document titles — such as schoolreport.doc — or as a symbol, such as a star, logo, photo or dot. Instead of sending all the data over the Internet, the creator can send the symbol alone.
If the recipient has NBOR, he need only click on the symbol and the complete file will rebuild itself in the recipient’s Blackspace, thanks to 500,000 lines of complicated code that Jaeger and eight developers abroad spent two years writing. —SF Chronicle
“Preservative chemicals found in samples of breast tumours probably came from underarm deodorants, UK scientists have claimed.
Their analysis of 20 breast tumours found high concentrations of para-hydroxybenzoic acids (parabens) in 18 samples. Parabens can mimic the hormone estrogen, which is known to play a role in the development of breast cancers. The preservatives are used in many cosmetics and some foods to increase their shelf-life.” —New Scientist
“Madonna’s love for Wes Clark prompts a short history of celeb campaign endorsements — featuring gratuitous sex and drug references and the use of ‘dialogue’ as a verb!” —Salon
Britain’s ‘Dr. Death’ Serial Killer Found Hanged. Harold Shipman, the infamous British family doctor who spent twenty years of quiet family practice coldly and systematically killing at least 215 of his patients (and was only found out because one of his victims had been so grateful for his care that she had left her wealth to him in her will, which was challenged by her daughter) was found hanged in his cell in an English prison. Shipman refused to confess to the murders or reveal his motives, and reaction from the families of some of his victims is to feel profoundly cheated that he “took the easy way out” without talking about his crimes. —New York Times
