When contemplating war, beware of babies in incubators: “The babies in the incubator story is a classic example of how easy it is for the public and legislators to be misled during moments of high tension. It’s also a vivid example of how the media can be manipulated if we do not keep our guards up.” On the CS Monitor [via Walker]

Iraq Said Likely to Have Bioweapons

“Despite its denials, Iraq probably possesses large stockpiles of nerve agents, mustard gas and anthrax, former U.N. inspectors say.”

On AP World News

Iraqi Hospital Prepares for War

“Dr. Luay Qasha is preparing for a U.S. attack on Iraq by turning the basement of his Baghdad children’s cancer hospital into a bomb shelter – stocking enough food, medicine and water for 500 people.”

On AP World News

Inspectors Step Up Iraq Preparation

“U.N. weapons inspectors are stepping up preparations for a possible return to Iraq, seeking new sources for satellite photos, scouting laboratories to test samples, and pressing friendly governments for more intelligence reports.”

On AP World News

U.S. Steps Up War of Nerves in Skies over Iraq

“The United States is intensifying air operations over Iraq in a war of nerves which military experts said on Saturday appears designed to show resolve and confuse Baghdad over a strike date.”

On Yahoo! News – Most-emailed Content

Disarm Iraq Quickly, Bush to Urge U.N.

“President Bush plans to tell world leaders at the United Nations next week that unless they take quick, unequivocally strong action to disarm Iraq, the United States will be forced to act on its own, senior administration officials said yesterday.”

On Washington Post: Front Page

Lauren Bush Falls Ill at Arab-Look Fashion Show

“A stomach bug rather than diplomatic jitters kept President Bush’s niece Lauren from modeling an Arabic-inspired collection at a fashion show in Barcelona, fashion house Toypes said on Friday.”

On Yahoo! News – Most-emailed Content

Plans for Iraq Attack Began on 9/11

On CBS News [via Red Rock Eaters]

Jets Bomb Key Iraqi Air Base

In The Scotsman [via Red Rock Eaters]

<a href=”http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0906/p01s02-wosc.htm

“>History of deceptive claims about Iraq

In CS Monitor [via Red Rock Eaters]

Dissenters fault reactions to attacks:

Over the course of the year, the few audible voices that publicly questioned the quasi-official narrative of Sept. 11 have been ridiculed and criticized, often harshly.

But now, a year after the attacks, a handful of scholars is once again suggesting that there are other ways of looking at what happened last year, that perhaps the attacks weren’t so shocking and the response not so justifiable.

”We academics are paid to sit on our butts and think, and yet we mainly underwrite the sentimentalities that the culture desires when we’re supposed to be telling the truth,” said Stanley M. Hauerwas, a prominent professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School. ”I find the lack of dissenting voices to the current outrage of Americans about September the 11th, and the resulting attack on Afghanistan, to be absolutely horrendous.”

Hauerwas and Frank Lentricchia, a professor of literature and theater studies at Duke, have edited a new collection of writings, Dissent from the Homeland: Essays After September 11, that is being published on Wednesday, Sept. 11, in a special edition of The South Atlantic Quarterly. In the journal, 18 theologians, philosophers, and literary critics speak out against the war on terrorism, led by the two Duke professors, who complain in an introductory note that ”this war has … seen the capitulation of church and synagogue to the resurgence of American patriotism and nationalism.” Boston Globe

Richard Reeves thinks President Bush is Losing It:

Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, writing in The Washington Post last Thursday under the headline “On Invading Iraq: Less Talk, More Unity,” warned the Bush administration that too many official voices are saying too many contradictory things about Iraq. “Loose lips sink ships,” he said, and they could sink the administration’s war plans, too.

That advice may be too late for Mr. Bush. In exactly one year, the president and his men have managed to divide a nation unified by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The administration’s obsession with deposing Saddam Hussein looks to be one of the stupidest efforts to manipulate public opinion in the country’s democratic history.

Over the past year, when I have criticized the president, my mail has shifted from about 20-to-1 calling me a traitor to about 10-to-1 complimenting me for my obvious common sense. I realize that those numbers indicate I may be preaching to a liberal choir, but the change is striking. And I see the same thing happening on the letters page of journals with a far greater reach than my voice.

Stopping the inanity of a strike against Iraq, of course, cannot be achieved in the letters columns unless the tide of shifting public opinion it reflects has an impact. Do you really believe that Bush’s offer to confer with the Congress before starting a war will make his zealots any less emboldened to do whatever they want regardless of what anyone else thinks? The war probably won’t be stopped without a massive civil disobedience effort on the scale of anti-Vietnam War protests, and I see no signs that anyone is doing that preemptively. Maybe several years into the quagmire…

Waist Deep in the Big Muddy



It was back in nineteen forty-two,

I was a member of a good platoon.

We were on maneuvers in-a Loozianna,

One night by the light of the moon.

The captain told us to ford a river,

That's how it all begun.

We were -- knee deep in the Big Muddy,

But the big fool said to push on.



The Sergeant said, "Sir, are you sure,

This is the best way back to the base?"

"Sergeant, go on! I forded this river

'Bout a mile above this place.

It'll be a little soggy but just keep slogging.

We'll soon be on dry ground."

We were -- waist deep in the Big Muddy

And the big fool said to push on.



The Sergeant said, "Sir, with all this equipment

No man will be able to swim."

"Sergeant, don't be a Nervous Nellie,"

The Captain said to him.

"All we need is a little determination;

Men, follow me, I'll lead on."

We were -- neck deep in the Big Muddy

And the big fool said to push on.



All at once, the moon clouded over,

We heard a gurgling cry.

A few seconds later, the captain's helmet

Was all that floated by.

The Sergeant said, "Turn around men!

I'm in charge from now on."

And we just made it out of the Big Muddy

With the captain dead and gone.



We stripped and dived and found his body

Stuck in the old quicksand.

I guess he didn't know that the water was deeper

Than the place he'd once before been.

Another stream had joined the Big Muddy

'Bout a half mile from where we'd gone.

We were lucky to escape from the Big Muddy

When the big fool said to push on.



Well, I'm not going to point any moral;

I'll leave that for yourself

Maybe you're still walking, you're still talking

You'd like to keep your health.

But every time I read the papers

That old feeling comes on;

We're -- waist deep in the Big Muddy

And the big fool says to push on.



Waist deep in the Big Muddy

And the big fool says to push on.

Waist deep in the Big Muddy

And the big fool says to push on.

Waist deep! Neck deep! Soon even a

Tall man'll be over his head, we're

Waist deep in the Big Muddy!

And the big fool says to push on!



Words and music by Pete Seeger (1967)

TRO (c) 1967 Melody Trails, Inc. New York, NY

“Some people have a rare disorder — Munchausen’s — in which they deliberately cause illness in others, and then use the illness to get sympathy and medical attention. Most cases involve mothers who hurt their own children, but a new report shows that people with this illness may also hurt their pets.” Reuters Health

[Addendum: Hal is of course completely correct to note that Munchausen’s Syndrome is the name of the condition where you induce illness in yourself for the gratification the medical attention provides. It is “Munchausen’s by proxy” when you do it via your child or your pet.]

BLTC Research was founded in 1995 to promote paradise-engineering. We are dedicated to an ambitious global technology project. BLTC seek to abolish the biological substrates of suffering. Not just in humans, but in all sentient life.

Absurdly fanciful? No. The blueprint for a Post-Darwinian Transition is conceptually simple, technically feasible and morally urgent.

At present, life on earth is controlled by self-replicating DNA. Selfish genes ensure that cruelty, pain, malaise are endemic to the living world.

Yet all traditional religions, all social and economic ideologies, and all political parties, are alike in one respect. They ignore the biochemical roots of our ill-being. So the noisy trivia of party-politics distract us from what needs to be done.

Fortunately, the old Darwinian order, driven by blind natural selection acting on random genetic mutations, is destined to pass into evolutionary history.

For third-millennium bioscience allows us to:

• rewrite the vertebrate genome
  

• redesign the global ecosystem
  

• deliver genetically pre-programmed well-being

Biotechnology can make us smarter, happier – and nicer. Post-Darwinian superminds can abolish “physical” and “mental” pain altogether.

Get Your War on by David Rees, scheduled for November 2002 release as a book! Powell’s Books

Love Letters in Ancient Brick by George Herrimam:

The greatest comic strip of all-time. In a 1999 special issue, The Comics Journal named George Herriman’s Krazy Kat as “the greatest comic strip of the 20th Century.” In 2002, Fantagraphics embarked on a publishing plan to reintroduce the strip to a public that has largely never seen it: this volume is the second of a long-term plan to chronologically reprint strips from the prime of Herriman’s career, most of which have not seen print since originally running in newspapers 75 years ago. Each volume is edited by the San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum’s Bill Blackbeard, the world’s foremost authority on early 20th Century American comic strips, and designed by Jimmy Corrigan author Chris Ware. In addition to the 104 full-page black-and-white Sunday strips from 1927 and 1928 (Herriman did not use color until 1935), the book includes an introduction by Blackbeard and reproductions of rare Herriman ephemera from Ware’s own extensive collection, as well as annotations and other notes by Ware and Blackbeard. Krazy Kat is a love story, focusing on the relationships of its three main characters. Krazy Kat adored Ignatz Mouse. Ignatz Mouse just tolerated Krazy Kat, except for recurrent onsets of targeting tumescence, which found expression in the fast delivery of bricks to Krazy’s cranium. Offisa Pup loved Krazy and sought to protect “her” (Herriman always maintained that Krazy was genderless) by throwing Ignatz in jail. Each of the characters was ignorant of the others’ true motivations, and this simple structure allowed Herriman to build entire worlds of meaning into the actions, building thematic depth and sweeping his readers up by the looping verbal rhythms of Krazy & Co.’s unique dialogue. As Lingua Franca once wrote, “Herriman was a rare artist who bridges the gap between high and low culture. His surrealistic strip was admired by popular entertainers like Walt Disney and Frank Capra yet also had a highbrow fan club that included E. E. Cummings, Willem de Kooning, and Umberto Eco”…

[…and me. — FmH] Powell’s Books

Declan McCullagh: “The danger of Congress being unusually profligate in discarding both money and Americans’ privacy is especially real right now. First, it’s an election year. Second, the war on terror has eliminated most of the usual obstacles to fiscal extravagance. Third, the Bush administration seems determined to reduce Americans’ protections against government snooping–all in the name of protecting America from terrorists.” C/Net

With Towers Gone, Area May Be Vulnerable to Lightning: “The issue received little attention after Sept. 11, in part because New York had so few storms this year. But on Aug. 2, when an unusually powerful thunderstorm struck, a 25-year-old Manhattan man was struck and killed by a bolt of lightning on the roof of a six-story apartment building on Broome Street, on the edge of Chinatown.” NY Times

Maureen Dowd: ‘As crazy Al Haig said Sunday on Fox, Bush 43 “has to be careful of the old gang. These are the people that created the problems in the first place by not handling Saddam Hussein correctly. . . . I’m talking about the previous administration and their spokesmen, Jim Baker, Scowcroft, and a very wise daddy who’s not talking at all and he shouldn’t.”

The pathologically blunt General Haig simply spit out what other conservatives imply: Daddy wimped out in Iraq and Junior has to fix it.’ NY Times op-ed

Russia Scraps Space Plans of Pop Star: “The Russian Aviation and Space Agency has scrubbed Lance Bass, of the pop group ‘N Sync, from its passenger list for an October flight to the International Space Station.” NY Times

“Call it gourmet cuisine’s dirty little secret: A lot of it is fake.” MSNBC [via Walker]

Fat tissue has a daily life of its own with previously unknown neural connections to the brain’s biological clock. The discovery adds to a new view that the biological clock regulates not only behavior, but also the body’s main organs and that, in turn, those organs can “talk back” to the brain. BioMedNet [requires free registration]

Experts Declare Story Low on Saturated Facts: “Last month, a provocative article argued that a low- fat diet may be responsible for America’s obesity epidemic — and that high-fat may be healthier. The problem: a lot of good science suggests otherwise.” Washington Post [via Plastic [via Walker]]

Diverse psychiatric/neurobiological speculations from Medical Hypotheses:

• Did schizophrenia change the course of English history? The mental illness of Henry VI:
  

  Henry VI, King of England, at age 19 founded Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge. At 31 he had a sudden, dramatic mental illness in which he was mute and unresponsive. Before, he had been paranoid, grandiose, and indecisive. Henry’s story illustrates how schizophrenia can devastate individuals and families and change the course of history and yet it raises questions about how achievement and illness are related… Medical Hypotheses

• 
  
  Mind from genes and neurons: a neurobiological model of Freudian psychology :
  

  
  A hypothetical neurobiological model of Freud’s architecture of the mind is presented in an attempt to unify concepts and data derived from molecular biology (e.g., genomic imprinting), systems neuroscience (e.g., neuroanatomochemical circuitries), evolutionary psychology (e.g., human mating strategies), and Freudian psychology… Medical Hypotheses

• 
  Pneumoobstruction of the tracheobronchial tree as a hypothetical cause of balbuties :
  

  
  The occurrence of balbuties is a common phenomenon. Balbuties is defined as frequent repetition and lengthening of syllables and words, alternatively frequent halting with pauses impairing the rhythmic flow of speech. Balbuties may have a negative influence upon the psychic as well as social development of an individual … Medical Hypotheses

• 
  Thinking outside the synapse:
  

  
  Bridging the gap between the parallel, distributed processing of groups of neurons and the serial, integrated processing of higher cognitive functions is a difficult hallenge. One possible mechanism originates in the shared space of the extracellular compartment. The opening and closing of ion channels in this space produce mechanical waves, presumably in the ultrasonic range. If the broadcast signals are selectively received by target neurons, then several cognitive abilities readily emerge, including learning, memory, pattern recognition, and problem solving… Medical Hypotheses

This is a statement of conscience against the War on Terrorism® and the domestic repression that have followed 9-11. It is quite abit broader than the simple statement I invited you to join in below

, declining to be a part of any consensus the Administration might think it has to attack Iraq:

‘Not in Our Name’ “… will be published in the New York Times in September. The New York Times ad will feature those names with the greatest potential to have an impact on public opinion, but we will make every effort to list everyone who contributed to the ad. In addition, the ad will also refer people to the web site where the name of every signer

will be available.” Here is the original Guardian UK story on the statement

. Here is the text of the statement

, which begins:

Let it not be said that people in the United States did nothing when their government declared a war without limit and instituted stark new measures of repression.

The signers of this statement call on the people of the U.S. to resist the policies and overall political direction that have emerged since September 11, 2001, and which pose grave dangers to the people of the world.

We believe that peoples and nations have the right to determine their own destiny, free from military coercion by great powers. We believe that all persons detained or prosecuted by the United States government should have the same rights of due process. We believe that questioning, criticism, and dissent must be valued and protected. We understand that such rights and values are always contested and must be fought for.

We believe that people of conscience must take responsibility for what their own governments do — we must first of all oppose the injustice that is done in our own name. Thus we call on all Americans to RESIST the war and repression that has been loosed on the world by the Bush administration. It is unjust, immoral, and illegitimate. We choose to make common cause with the people of the world…

Click here to add your name

to the endorsers. This conscientious stand, for me, is one of the most pertinent and urgent ways to celebrate the year’s anniversary of the terrorist attacks. Consider using the yellow graphic above on your webpage as an anchor pointing to the NION project, as I have.

I already blinked to this AdBusters project, prozacspotlight.org but Richard DeGrandpre’s “Lilly Suicides” essay has just been reprinted on AlterNet. Rebecca Blood pointed me to the article, soliciting my comments. Here goes:

There are three distinct problems here. The first is what Prozac and the other SSRIs actually do in the way of worsening people’s agitation, and what that might lead to in behaviors. The second is the corporate response. And the third is the societal attitude toward the issue. [To get what I’m saying here fully, you should have read the ‘Lilly Suicides’ article already…]

Clinicians have never been unclear about the adverse effects of the SSRIs and the care required to manage them properly. It is pretty certain that they can cause akathisic restlessness and agitation. At its worst it is pretty much excruciating torture, although that degree of akathisia is very very rare – perhaps just enough to account for the handful of well-publicized cases the article and others like it refer to? I’ve treated literally thousands of patients with SSRIs, was part of the pre-marketing clinical trials for Prozac before its approval and release, etc. i.e., I’ve been using these meds since the mid-80’s, and I’ve never seen a patient agitated enough to want to jump from heights or compelled to jump in front of traffic. It is usually more like a bad case of the jitters from, e.g., too much caffeine. It certainly is true, as the Healy study whose description starts out the AlterNet article indicates, that this effect is a physiological reaction to the drug even when given to a healthy nondepressed subject, but it is not clear to me what the “dangerously agitated and suicidal” impact he describes Zoloft as having on two of his volunteers actually means in clinical rather than histrionic terms. I’m dubious without more detail.

Nevertheless it is notable to me that so many of the gruesome suicides, or murder-suicides, noted in the article occur just after  the patient has been put on the drug, and before its antidepressant benefits can accrue. It seems you have a situation of adding agitation on top of preexisting depression during this initial period of drug use. The depression itself might not have been severe enough to make the patient suicidal, but patients may interpret the new-onset painful agitation pessimistically — as is the case in depression — as a worsening of their illness and more evidence that their recovery is hopeless. This was a big problem when the SSRIs were first introduced in the late ’80’s. They were not yet considered “first-line” antidepressants and were often reserved for use with the most desperately ill depressed patients who had previously failed all the preexisting classes of antidepressant medication. All their hopes were riding on the new drugs, and the prescribing doctors were swept up in the ‘hype’, as is the case whenever a supposed breakthrough class of medication is introduced. (There’s a joke in psychiatry, indeed throughout medicine, about how we should “use it or lose it”, i.e. hurry up and prescribe new drugs before the bloom is off the rose and they lose the benefit of everyone’s blind enthusiasm toward them… which really does, through the placebo effect, make them more effective at the outset…) So when such patients don’t get better on SSRIs any more than they did on their previous antidepressants, they are more and more despondent. Their last, best hope has failed them… Now I know that’s not the typical story in the AlterNet article, but it does illustrate the expectancy effect.

Moreover, the side effects of an SSRI are worst in the first few days of use, before the body acclimatizes to the medication. They are exacerbated by introducing the drug in too abrupt a fashion rather than easing the dosage up gradually. Finally, the “jolt” the patient gets from starting the antidepressant may provide the energy for them to act on a plan they were too listless to implement up to that point.

The agitation caused by starting SSRI treatment is not usually so severe, emergent and abrupt that it cannot be anticipated, prevented, and treated with careful attentive treatment. Such prudent care is lacking in the modern treatment environment for a number of reasons. First, ‘managed care’ pressures doctors to achieve results rapidly, which translates into starting the drugs at too high a dose and increasing the dosage too frequently. Seond, ‘managed care’ translates into pressure to spend too little time with patients, or to see them too infrequently. Finally, as I never hesitate to point out, a coalescence of pharmaceutical-marketing and ‘managed-care’ influences have caused prescribing to shift more and more to the primary care MDs, family practitioners, internists, etc., rather than the psychiatrists, IMHO creating even less adequate care than the psychiatrist would have given in the equivalent situation. This is not always the case; several of the AlterNet vignettes were of people treated by psychiatrists, but it contributes…

There are also several other adverse effects of SSRIs (and all other antidepressants) which are alluded to in the article but which are a different risk than akathisia. First, the SSRIs produce part of their beneficial effect, I and a subset of psychiatrists are convinced, by a sort of therapeutic numbing. If the medication works, things just don’t get to you so much, your skin is thicker in a way. Now this is abit reductionistic I know, but, physiologically, this is probably a function of the drug’s actions in damping down the function of parts of the frontal lobes. Because the frontal lobes also control inhibitions, it is possible that in some cases the “frontal lobe apathy” they create, particularly if exaggerated, could remove inhibitions against impulsive and even heinous acts; this would be especilly true for people who are motivated, and stopped from acting up, by concern about people’s opinions or reactions. With the SSRIs, one could care less, so to speak. One does care less…

Another adverse effect of the SSRIs and all other antidepressants is the induction of mania. A depressed patient may always be an ‘undeclared’ manic depressive (bipolar), which is an accident waiting to happen if you give an antidepressant. It can’t be avoided; you can only discover their bipolar tendencies when their first antidepressant treatment makes them manic — which is a different form of disinhibition, hyperactivity and agitation than akathisia, but can result in the similar dangerous behaviors. The Forsyth vignette in the article, in which one day he feels better than good and the next commits a “maniacal” act, may actually be a “manic”, as in bipolar illness, act.

Finally, SSRIs, and other antidepressants, can also induce psychosis, or unmask it in a depression that was already headed in a “psychotic depression” direction. You get that feeling in murder-suicides — that the reasoning it takes to decide to kill your family or spouse as well as yourself is often delusional rather than just depressed. As the author describes the Forsyth murder-suicide, these were “senseless acts that were simply unimaginable to those who knew (him).”

By the way, one added reason for a rate of suicide 5-6 times that of the tricyclics, the older class of antidepressants, was not only the contributions I’ve mentioned above to an attitude of laxity in prescribing the SSRIs, but that there had been an attitude of hypervigilance with the tricyclics. This is for one simple reason : overdose. While SSRI overdose is trivial from the point of view of medical complications, and nonlethal, tricyclic overdoses KILL, because they have direct effects on cardiac conduction. Prescribers of tricyclics were never lulled into the false sense of security they were to have with the SSRIs.

So much for the effects of the drugs. On to the manufacturers’ stances. I believe the thrust of the article, that the corporations pursued a substantial coverup of the adverse effects and adverse outcomes from their medications. Lilly probably would have gone under if Prozac tanked, for example. It represented a third of the company’s revenue for many of its years, and it has not come up with a really viable successor cash cow. So every day that it postponed any threat to Prozac’s profitability was another good day for the company. Ironically, the evidence of the coverup — the appearance of guilt, etc. — is what is damning, not the data on the drugs’ effects. The damage awards and culpability findings are all going to revolve around the contention that the companies should have known, did know, should have warned, did not warn, with due diligence. As I’ve stated above, I don’t really think these companies are marketing truly dangerous drugs that inherently hurt just to enhance their coffers. Properly managed and prescribed, the SSRIs have been breakthroughs in depression treatment, with relatively minor prices to pay — the akathisia risk and, as I wrote last week, the discontinuation syndrome (esp. with Paxil) — if doctors are experienced, aware, and have the time to follow patients on these drugs with due care. If Lilly and other co’s hadn’t spent more than a decade fighting their rearguard action, lawsuits would probably not be able to reach the “deep pockets” of the pharmaceutical industry and would have stopped where they ought to — with the individual prescribing clinician, as malpractice actions. And the standard for malpractice is whether there was negligence and whether that negligence caused a forseeable and avoidable harm. Stupid greedy Lilly, Glaxo, etc. etc…

Finally, societal attitudes. Look at the article; the author thirsts for a righteous story around the size of the Karen Silkwood or Erin Brockovich sagas (“a final conclusion seems unavoidable: that next to Big Tobacco and the marketing of cigarettes, the selling of the SSRIs is perhaps the deadliest marketing scandal of the 20th century. “). Glory calls! One example is calling akathisia “the most terrifying potential side effect” of these drugs. It simply is not that terrifying! The article also extrapolates from an estimate that only 1% of serious side effects are ever reported to the manufacturers’ surveillance programs to conclude that the number of Prozac-related suicides must be 100x greater than the incidents on record. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics… Additionally, to make the Case of the Evil Corporations more dramatic, the crusaders lump together various physiological reactions to the medications and diverse adverse outcomes in a manner which is all too plausible to an uncritical and psychopharmacologically nonastute public, neatly fitting deep-seated biases against psychiatric drugs and the stigma of mental illness.

And by the way, the introduction of newer antidepressants which no longer work via a solely serotonergic mechanism has absolutely nothing to do with the liabilities of the SSRIs, unlike the author’s contention in the final paragraph. Medications that work by a serotonin-based mechanism alone are just not suitable for everyone or everything… which is the market the pharmaceutical companies want to capture…

“As the anniversary of Sept. 11 approaches, terror-related urban legends are running rampant.” Don’t drink Coke after Labor Day

, by the way… Salon [thanks, Walker!]

A compendium of recent ‘weird news’ of various ilks:

• Man faints each time alarm clock or doorbell rings. He is now finally cured

  Madville

• Love your kids? Prove it by beating them!

  Madville

• The finest hackers in the land can’t work for the FBI even if they want to because of the agency’s physical fitness requirements

  Madville

• 8-Year-Old Drives 20 Miles

  “An 8-year-old foster child clad only in pajamas stole a pickup truck and went on a 20-mile drive to visit his family, police said.”
  

  Yahoo! News: Strange News – AP

• Inventors create condom which can be fitted in three seconds

  Madville

• Couple Bed Down in Shop for Art’s Sake

  “A naked couple has taken to bed in the front window of a London art gallery for a week in the name of art and to promote safe sex.”
  

  Yahoo! News: Oddly Enough [Shades of Lennon and Ono?]

• Relief as the Cows Upstairs Move Out

  “A Turkish woman has begun selling the cows she kept in upstairs apartments in the city of Trabzon, to the relief of her neighbors.”
  

  Yahoo! News: Oddly Enough

• Girl breaks legs four times a day for four months to try to grow to be air hostess. Grows four inches to 5ft 1 inch. Airlines demand 5ft 2ins. Ouch!

  Madville

• Woman rushes husband to hospital. On arrival, hospital tells her to call 911 instead

  Madville

Advisory Panel Says Administration Should Decide Soon Between Just Two Plans: “The previously undisclosed recommendation, which came last month from a group of prominent defense experts under the auspices of the Defense Science Board, puts added pressure on the administration to begin defining an actual missile-defense architecture. It reinforces complaints among some in Congress, the defense industry and elsewhere about the lack of specificity in an administration plan that involves as many as eight different approaches for knocking down long-range missiles.” San Jose Mercury News The NMD debacle was lost to public scrutiny (along with much else the Administration is quietly pursuing) after 9-11, but it remains on the agenda, to our peril.

Commanders Want Elite Units Freed From Qaeda Hunt: ” Some senior officers in the Joint Special Operations Command have concluded that Mr. bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, was probably killed in the American bombing raid at Tora Bora last December, officials said. They concluded that he died in a bombing raid on one of several caves that had been a target because American intelligence officials believed they housed Qaeda leaders. ” NY Times

It is a nation of nothing but poetry . . .



It is a nation of nothing but poetry

The universities are sties   John Wieners

has suffered the most   Catholics

have a shame of the body   The soul

lives in the body until it escapes   Main Street High Street Court

where my auto

threw itself over

the crosswalk   The sign read



your body

is to drop

its load



                   Your body

is a holy

thing



                Your body

is a wave

of Ocean



                        Your eyelids

will reveal your soul, your mouth will

                                                                  your clothes will fall

as you do



November

1962

[info.chymes.org

]

Charles Olson: “It was very beautiful the way the fierceness of Pound has settled down into a voiceless thing which only responded twice to me…”

“Clemenceau famously declared that war is too important to be left to the generals. It’s a no-brainer to see that war is too important to be left to the likes of Bush… ” Robert Higgs, Senior Fellow in Political Economy at The Independent Institute and editor of The Independent Review, is concerned that

President George W. Bush has been reading a book. At least, he claims to have been reading one. I know what you’re thinking, but the First Shrub swears that he has been reading more than just the funny papers lately. We’d all be better off, however, if he had stuck to the comics.

In an interview with an Associated Press reporter, Bush said that on his vacation he had been reading a recently published book by Eliot A. Cohen, The Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime. Cohen is a well-known neocon war-hawk and all-around armchair warrior who professes “strategic studies” at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and, in his spare time, ponders mega-deaths (his own not included) with other lusty members of the Defense Policy Board. The quintessential civilian go-getter, he never met a war he didn’t want to send somebody else to fight and die in.

The Supreme Command consists of case studies of how four “statesmen” — Abraham Lincoln, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, and David Ben-Gurion — successfully managed to make their generals act more vigorously than those officers really wanted to act. By spurring their too-timid generals, these four micro-managing commanders-in-chief supposedly got superior results from their war-making efforts. The common soldiers who were fed into the consuming maw of war under these worthies might have given us a different opinion, but dead men don’t make good critics.

So what are we to make of Bush’s reading of this book, assuming that he really has been reading it? The short answer is that this is not good news for the world. Such reading seems calculated to bend the president’s mind, never a mighty organ in any event, toward thinking of himself in Lincolnian or Churchillian terms. Indeed, those of us who have had the stomach to observe his public strutting and puffing since September 11 might have suspected that his juvenile sensibilities would be drawn all too readily toward such a grandiose self-conception. After all, does he but speak, and mighty armadas are launched on a global war against evil? AlterNet [thanks, Walker]

Caffeine ‘lotion’ protects against skin cancer. The experiments were done with mice; human trials are pending. “Although caffeine itself filters out UV, (the researcher) thinks the main effect of the substance is biological, triggering cancerous but not healthy cells to wither and die through a process called apoptosis. But how caffeine selectively targets cancerous cells is not known. Despite the success of the tests in mice, (the author) warns people against smearing their bodies with coffee or tea potions..” New Scientist

Years ago, a medical resident friend of mine died of disseminated testicular cancer for which he had rejected medical treatment in favor of the Gerson Diet, which relied heavily on raw vegatable and fruit juices but also on coffee enemas. As usual, extraordinary claims were made by proponents, and maybe the claims will turn out not to have been so misguided if caffeine turns out to be a robust anti-carcinogen, if it works systemically as well as cutaneously, etc. etc. From my vantage point at the time, however, it was a tragic direction for a father of two young children to take at a time when his cancer would have been readily treatable and was not rethought by him until it was far too advanced to salvage anything with conventional treatment. During medical school, I’d been one of those who had constantly harried the professors with disciplined skepticism about the dominant paradigms in medicine and polemicized about ‘complementary pathways’. But watching him die was one of the things that embittered me toward alternative medicine (especially when used in an alternative rather than a complementary fashion to conventional allopathic techniques) and emboldened me to start confronting the unsystematic, flaky thoughtlessness with which many evaluate their options when facing important medical decisions.

Row erupts over danger of ecstasy:

Warnings that ecstasy causes long-term brain damage are premature because the supporting evidence is too weak, say three psychologists… (T)he claims echo a New Scientist report in April. They appear in a review of ecstasy research in The Psychologist, the journal of the British Psychological Society.

But their criticisms are robustly challenged in the same publication by mainstream ecstasy researchers. “It’s insane to propose that ecstasy is not damaging” in the long term says Andy Parrott of the University of East London.

New Scientist

Radio emerges from the electronic soup: “A self-organising electronic circuit has stunned engineers by turning itself into a radio receiver”, says this highly-blogged article in New Scientist

Thank heaven I didn’t try to sumarize my life’s hidden story in five words, as the newest weblog conceit goes, before leuschke skewered the idea… although I wouldn’t’ve been able to, and I’m sorry for those who can.

“Fatigue can refer to a subjective symptom of malaise and aversion to activity or to objectively impaired performance. It has both physical and mental aspects. The symptom of fatigue is a poorly defined feeling, and careful inquiry is needed to clarify complaints of “fatigue,” “tiredness,” or “exhaustion” and to distinguish lack of energy from loss of motivation or sleepiness, which may be pointers to specific diagnoses… ” A review of the concept and medical implications, in the British Medical Journal Sharpe and Wilks 325 (7362): 480

…but can you avoid it? The Register

Nat Hentoff on General Ashcroft’s Detention Camps:

Now more Americans are also going to be dispossessed of every fundamental legal right in our system of justice and put into camps. Jonathan Turley reports that Justice Department aides to General Ashcroft “have indicated that a ‘high-level committee’ will recommend which citizens are to be stripped of their constitutional rights and sent to Ashcroft’s new camps.”

It should be noted that Turley, who tries hard to respect due process, even in unpalatable situations, publicly defended Ashcroft during the latter’s turbulent nomination battle, which is more than I did.

Again, in his Los Angeles Times column, Turley tries to be fair: “Of course Ashcroft is not considering camps on the order of the internment camps used to incarcerate Japanese American citizens in World War II. But he can be credited only with thinking smaller; we have learned from painful experience that unchecked authority, once tasted, easily becomes insatiable.”

Turley insists that “the proposed camp plan should trigger immediate Congressional hearings and reconsideration of Ashcroft’s fitness for important office. Whereas Al Qaeda is a threat to the lives of our citizens, Ashcroft has become a clear and present threat to our liberties.”

Hentoff concludes, aptly:

Meanwhile, as the camps are being prepared, the braying Terry McAuliffe and the pack of Democratic presidential aspirants are campaigning on corporate crime, with no reference to the constitutional crimes being committed by Bush and Ashcroft. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis prophesied: “The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people.” And an inert Democratic leadership. See you in a month, if I’m not an Ashcroft camper. Village Voice

Spellbound: “Every September, the office of the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee in Cincinnati issues a crisp new edition of Paideia, a comic-size booklet that lists thousands of obscure words that will appear in spelling bees across the country over the coming year — words that any competitive speller in America should know cold. Most families wait for their Paideia to arrive at school; but serious devotees know when the advance audio version of Paideia will go up on the Scripps Howard Web site. On that day each year, the Goldsteins of West Hempstead, N.Y. — Amy, Ari, J.J. and Amanda, along with their parents, Jonathan and Mona — assemble like the Von Trapps in a thunderstorm. The whole family squeezes into Amy’s bedroom and fires up the computer, and the familiar, baronial voice of the National Spelling Bee pronouncer, Alex J. Cameron, carefully enunciates each new addition to the list — aition, campanile, kittel, giaour. Each Goldstein sits with pen and paper in hand, as still and focused as a game-show contestant, and spells the words, one by one. It takes hours.” NY Times Magazine

Why the President Can’t Lose in November: “It sounds so Machiavellian, even treasonous, that no one at the White House would dare endorse such an outcome — at least not in public.

But many prominent Republicans, including some of President Bush’s most faithful backers, are convinced that the most certain way for Mr. Bush to continue to rise politically, and ultimately win re-election in 2004, is for Republicans to, well, lose in November.” NY Times That, and to have been the sitting President during an unprecedented terrorist attack…

Long Bets: This offshoot of the Long Now Foundation — the clock people, Danny Hillis, Stewart Brand, etc. — is intended “to improve long-term thinking. Long Bets is a public arena for enjoyably competitive predictions, of interest to society, with philanthropic money at stake. The foundation furnishes the continuity to see even the longest bets through to public resolution. This website provides a forum for discussion about what may be learned from the bets and their eventual outcomes.” Even odds, yes/no questions of societal or scientific importance are posed to thinkers who designate a charity to receive the proceeds of their bet if they win. “Set up as a form of giving, Long Bets engages long-term thinking and long-term responsibility in even more ways.”

Bets start at $1000, so that some of the yield from investing the money can go to the cost of “maintaining institutional and technical continuity to keep track of Long Bets and manage the whole service over decades and centuries…” The project was launched prominently in the April 2002 Wired magazine issue with some interesting bet subjects posed by Wired editors to celebrity bettors.

Here

are the recorded bets to date; “you can read the arguments written by each bettor in favor of their position, participate in discussion and place parallel bets.” Bets listed to date have terms ranging between 5 years and 148 years, although there’s one about whether the universe will eventually stop expanding with a ‘?’ listed for its duration. (Years have fto have ive digits to deal with the Y10K problem.)

When black holes meet: ‘When two galaxies collide, massive black holes in their respective centers fuse in a dramatic flourish that creates a telltale “X” mark, according to astronomers. Jets from the core of radio galaxy NGC326 …seem to have abruptly switched direction, a possible sign of a black hole merger.

The conclusion offers strong support to the theory that the gravitationally powerful black holes merge when galaxies crash into one another.’ CNN

What Charlie Haden may still love most: a pretty song: This Boston Globe

review of a recent performance by the beloved and lyrical 65-year old bassist catalogues his recent health misfortunes:

Despite his youthful appearance and impressive stamina, Haden has had a rough time lately, and the facial expressions might reflect or relieve his pain. A few years ago, he had back surgery, necessitated by decades of bending over his bass, at an almost perfectly perpendicular angle, to hear the notes more clearly. While in the hospital, he nearly died of pneumonia.

Shortly after, he and his wife, the singer Ruth Cameron, were attacked by a Rottweiler outside their home in Malibu. The dog bit Haden on his left hand, between the thumb and forefinger. He underwent extensive physical therapy and couldn’t play for three months.

”It still hurts,” Haden says, especially when he moves his hand up and down the neck of the bass, which he does most of the time.

Then there’s his longtime bout with tinnitus, which causes ringing in his ears, and hyperacusis, which heightens the perceived volume of sounds. He’s learned to ignore the ringing, and surrounds himself with plexiglass when he plays with horns or drums.

Doctors have told him he shouldn’t play at all anymore. ”But I’ve got to pay the mortgage,” Haden says in his soft, slightly high-pitched voice. ”And” – he pauses – ”I’ve got to play.”

On the heels of the ‘Target “BB” ‘ story below comes this:

Jewish groups have expressed outrage that a British company is selling sport shoes with the same name as the Nazi nerve gas used to kill millions of Jews in the Holocaust.

Umbro, the firm that outfits the English national soccer side, said it was an “unfortunate coincidence” that its Zyklon shoe, on sale since 1999, bore the name of the poison gas Zyklon B.

Crystals of Zyklon B were dissolved in gas chambers at the death camps to produce the poison the Nazis used to exterminate millions of Jews and members of other minorities during World War Two. Reuters

The company says the shoes will be renamed or withdrawn. The name appears on the box but not the shoe itself, so it looks likely they will allow already-shipped stocks to remain in stores without modification.

When black holes meet: ‘When two galaxies collide, massive black holes in their respective centers fuse in a dramatic flourish that creates a telltale “X” mark, according to astronomers. Jets from the core of radio galaxy NGC326 …seem to have abruptly switched direction, a possible sign of a black hole merger.

The conclusion offers strong support to the theory that the gravitationally powerful black holes merge when galaxies crash into one another.’ CNN

Ambient Findability “I want to be able to find anything, anywhere, anytime.

What’s surprising is how close we are to making this impossibly strange dream a reality. Ambient interfaces, sensors and small tech are about to intertwingle the physical and virtual worlds in shocking ways that will make history of the Diamond Age.” [via Tomalak]

Youngsters in the mood to spurn the trombone: “Musicians and teachers say the future of several instruments is at risk as pupils choose cheaper options.” Other instruments including the bassoon and the double bass — in fact, the entire bass range of the orchestra, the largest and thus most expensive instruments — are also “endangered.” The British government is planning a rescue campaign. Guardian UK [via Spike]

How Deadheads ruined the Grateful Dead — Marc Weingarten reviews Dead publicist and family member Dennis McNally’s A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead:

At first, it felt like a rear guard action — fighting for community in a socially fragmented era. But it curdled into the last refuge for musical conservatism and complacency, and it seemed to destroy the band’s work ethic. McNally glancingly makes reference to this dark side of the Deadhead phenomenon: “Like all fans … they could become tediously obsessed with the object of their joy,” he writes.

…What had begun as an inclusive rallying point for outcasts became a provincial closed society. Deadheads were supposed to represent enlightened musical inquiry, but instead, as McNally points out, they ignored adventurous opening acts and lifted lyrics out of context…

Thematic content hardly mattered to the loyalists any more; the band’s canon instead became a series of dramatic gestures, well-timed downshifts, and dance cues. Safe within the fuzzy bubble of Deadhead-land, the band coasted for years on end, but no matter how negligent or desultory the performance, they always had the Deadheads to fall back on. Of course the Dead loved the support — they never had to work hard to earn it.

With nothing to strive for and no musical goals to attain, the band lapsed into a creative torpor for the last 15 or so years of its career, even resurrecting itself this summer for another go-round without Garcia. If McNally’s book teaches us anything, it’s that, for a band with a prodigious drug and alcohol habit, the Deadheads’ unquestioning faith was perhaps its most dangerous narcotic. Slate

Exactly! This nails two of the painful core aspects of my experience as a fan, at times fanatic, of the Grateful Dead — how insufferable the fans were and unbearable the Dead show ‘scene’ became; and how inexorably the music turned from transcendent and ecstatic to plodding noodling, an imitation of its former genius — and shows exactly how they were causally linked.

Ironic. Non-Deadheads could never understand the appeal at all (“Either you’re on the bus or off the bus…”). Uncritically, vacuously, reverent Deadheads, on the other hand, could never understand how I could bring myself to stop going to the shows or why, as a tape trader with thousands of hours of the Dead’s music (listening to the best of which still brings me a visceral pleasure comparable only to the most brilliant improvisational jazz performances or passages of Mozart), I would turn my nose up at anything after, oh, 1977 or 1978 or so. Many never conceptualized the Dead as having a decline or downfall or, if they did, placed it more than a decade later and attributed it to Garcia’s health problems and/or his heroin addiction. Most never saw the decay of the ‘scene’.

Not Buddhists I guess… blind to the core lesson about the impermanence of all things, and the source of suffering in that impermanence. Nothing to that point had brought that home to me as my relationship with the Dead’s music and the bitterness of my struggle to give up my attachment, then watch the Dead and the scene plod on painfully, embarrassingly, for two more decades. And they’re still not finished — each of the surviving bandmembers’ bands, and their intermittent reunion attempts since Garcia’s death, are pitiful attempts to regain the glory and bask in the fans’ adulation without ever doing anything new musically.

Poll shows free speech support down: “Support for the First Amendment has eroded significantly since Sept. 11 and nearly half of Americans now think the constitutional amendment on free speech goes too far in the rights it guarantees, says a poll released Thursday.

The sentiment that the First Amendment goes too far was already on the rise before the terrorist attacks a year ago, doubling to four in 10 between 2000 and 2001.” Sacramento Bee

James Bamford, author of Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security

Agency, writes:

Washington Bends the Rules ‘Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.” So begins “The Trial,” Franz Kafka’s story of an ordinary man caught in a legal web where the more he struggles to find out what he did wrong, the more trapped he becomes. “After all,” says Kafka’s narrator, “K. lived in a state governed by law, there was universal peace, all statutes were in force.”

With increasing speed, the Justice Department of Attorney General John Ashcroft is starting to resemble the “always vengeful bureaucracy” that crushed Josef K. Recently, in two federal cases, the Justice Department argued that it is within the president’s inherent power to indefinitely detain, without any charges, any person, including any United States citizen, whom the president (through the Justice Department) designates an “enemy combatant.” Further, the person can be locked away, held incommunicado and denied counsel. Finally, Mr. Ashcroft argues that such a decision is not subject to review by federal or state courts. This situation is beyond even Kafka, who in his parable of punishment and paranoia at least supplied Josef K. with an attorney.’ NY Times op-ed

‘Called a Sensing Diagnostic Module, the electronic “brains” behind an airbag were developed by General Motors and are now manufactured by its spin-off company Delphi at an electronics plant in Kokomo, Ind. GM’s air bags are made in Vandalia at Delphi’s Interior & Lighting Systems plant and are later hooked up to the black boxes on assembly lines for GM and other auto companies.

Since 2000, it’s become possible with the right computer decoding software to retrieve and read information stored in the SDM’s electronic memory. Though GM designed the sensing modules to capture information about accidents that could be studied for ways to make cars safer, police and insurance investigators discovered that the data can also be used to help make a case about who caused the accident.’ Dayton Daily News

William Safire on journalistic integrity and how Bloomberg caved to Lee Kuan Yew, the dictator of Singapore.

“… Autocratic regimes professing to be democracies have been known to use their judiciary systems to jail or bankrupt dissidents and intimidate resident reporters. Electronic media professing to practice journalism have been known to trade their integrity for global access. Where is the greater corruption?

I tried to reach the C.E.O. of Bloomberg, Lex Fenwick, but he dove under his desk. The founder, one Michael Bloomberg, is no longer with the firm and left no forwarding address. ” NY Times

Where’s Warren? Warren Anderson, that is, who ran Union Carbide in 1984 at the time of the Bhopal disaster in India and who has since disappeared from view. Protesters in India and worldwide seeking justice for victims are putting the heat on the Indian government, which is vacillating about whether it will bring murder charges against Anderson or let him slide with a misdemeanor negligence charge. It appears, naturally, that it is pressure from the US government (” How hard would it be to find Anderson if the US authorities really wanted to track him down? “) and Dow Chemicals (which has taken over the assets of Union Carbide) to preserve business arrangements that is leading to the Indian government’s ambivalence. Greenpeace

A Democratic Editorial Website from Manhattan:

“My work reflects the three-hundred year American tradition of the guaranteed Constitutional right of “free speech” utilized by political satirists of the loyal opposition for centuries. As a progressive liberal Democrat, I am dedicated to returning Congress to Democrat control in c.2002, and returning the White House to a fairly elected Democrat by the American people in c.2004!

I am a fine artist who lives and works in New York City . The material I publish is my original content. This site is a unique political concept, because you are FREE to COPY and EMAIL my toons for personal use as a Democrat activist tool.”

Cultural Software: A New Theory of Ideology, by J.M. Balkin, ‘explains ideology as a result of the cultural evolution of bits of cultural knowhow, or memes. It is the first book to apply theories of cultural evolution to the problem of ideology and justice.’

“For nearly a century the Wisconsin Historical Society has documented the major sociopolitical issues and movements in the United States, as well as the state of Wisconsin. It has often been the first and sometimes the only repository to recognize the value of documenting these movements. Today our holdings are the largest in the nation. From our beginnings as the first institution to collect labor and working class history, we have continued to identify and document the major issues of the day throughout the twentieth century: socialism, communism, anarchism, Social Security and entitlements, welfare rights, civil liberties and free speech, civil rights, anti-Vietnam War, the New Left, student activism, GI rights and resistance, community organizing, the battle over reproductive rights and right to life, and the contemporary peace and justice movement. Within Wisconsin we have also documented the battle against nuclear power, environmental activism, the women’s movement, and the Native American treaty rights controversy.” [via wood s lot]

‘Attacking leftist Gush Shalom activists for threatening to extradite Israeli air force pilots to the international court at the Hague for alleged war crimes, IAF Commander Major General Dan Halutz has urged brining the activists to trial.

“What I have to say about those people is this: we live in a democratic country, and expressing an opinion is always allowed, but betrayal is not allowed,” Halutz told Ha’aretz in an interview. When asked if he suggests placing the Gush Shalom activists on trial on charges of treason, he replied, “The proper offense as defined by law should be found, and they should be tried in Israel.” ‘ Ha’Aretz [via Scoop]

Robert Scheer: “Doomed by the incoherence

of a foreign policy defined largely by biblical notions of the struggle between good and evil, the Bush administration thrashes about in its hunt for the devil. Sadly, all that has produced are shopworn enemies that were once our surrogates in battles we would rather forget.” Los Angeles Times [via Common Dreams]

The Vietnam Folly Calls Out to Us as War Fever Burns:

Stanley I. Kutler, author of The Wars of Watergate (1992): “Bush II is considering the necessity of an invasion of Iraq and the toppling of its regime. Where is the debate? Absent any real dissent, we have a lethal combination of inertia, intimidation and political impotence, all combining to cast an illusion of overwhelming consensus.” Los Angeles Times

Please consider joining me in a simple dissenting act. Place this consensus-busting graphic someplace on your webpage or distribute it to others to do so:

Airlines Stop Baggage Questions ABC. It took them this long to figure out that the questions would be ineffective at deterring terrorism because villains would (gasp!) not answer truthfully.

Target issues nationwide alert to recall clothing with insignia 88: ‘Target Corp. is recalling baseball caps and shorts from all of its stores after a California customer realized symbols printed on the clothing are a code for ”Heil Hitler.”

The caps and shorts are imprinted with ”eight eight” and ”88.” Among white supremacists, that stands for ”Heil Hitler” because H is the eighth letter of the alphabet.’ Boston Globe

“Microsoft is finishing work on an update to its Windows XP operating system, clearing the way for public release of the software within the next few days, sources say.

The software giant periodically issues free updates, known as service packs, in order to fix bugs or revamp security software. The Windows XP update is unique, however, because it adds a new control for setting default middleware–such as Web browser and media player software–as required by Microsoft’s pending antitrust settlement with the Justice Department and nine of the 18 states that sued the company.” C/Net

Talk Therapy Can Change Brain Chemistry: “The studies show that pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy can produce remarkably similar effects on functional brain activity. But does that mean that antidepressants and psychotherapy are really equivalent?” NY Times

… Zap!

Paxil, the world’s best-selling antidepressant, has become the target of growing complaints that stopping the drug causes severe side effects ranging from flu-like symptoms to electric-shock-like sensations in the brain that patients have labeled the “zaps.” This marks the first time that one of the new generation of antidepressant medications, often described as non-habit-forming, has been accused of being addictive.

The patient complaints, which previously circulated chiefly on electronic bulletin boards and specialized Web sites, became more public last week when a federal judge in California ordered the drug’s maker, GlaxoSmithKline, to pull TV ads that boast the drug is “not habit-forming.” The judge later put that ruling, which said the ads may have underplayed the drug’s possible role in causing withdrawal symptoms, on hold. Washington Post

This is a fascinating and far from clearcut controversy. There is no disagreement between the drug’s critics and defenders about whether the discontinuation symptoms exist, but a war of words about what to call them (and to some extent a dispute, in which I side with the unfortunate users, about how severe and uncomfortable the discontinuation symptoms are). The gist of the manufacturer’s argument is that ‘discontinuation symptoms’ are different from ‘withdrawal’ and ‘addictiveness’, that there are other classes of medication whose abrupt discontinuation causes medical symptoms which we do not call addictive — e.g. steroids or certain blood pressure medications. The Food and Drug Administration sides with them in these objections.

As critical psychiatrist Joseph Glenmullen (who was a former trainee of mine with whom I usually disagree, and whose book Prozac Backlash I have dismissed in these pages as overblown grandstanding) says, ‘dependency’ arises when the cells of the body “were making adaptation to living with the drug 24 hours a day”. ‘Withdrawal’ is the body’s reaction to suddenly missing the drug once it has become so adapted to having it around. While a hard-and-fast mind-body distinction is no longer easy to make without backsliding to an archaic dualistic position, we usually reserve the term ‘withdrawal’ for those drugs whose discontinuation syndrome has a subjective component of mental distress (so Glaxo’s comparison with beta blocker antihypertensives, whose ‘discontinuation syndrome’ is rebound hypertension, is a specious one…).

So any class of medication taken on a consistent maintenance basis, which produces a physiological adaptation to having it around in the body, fits the bill as ‘dependency-inducing.’ From among dependency-inducing classes of medication, it is the medications in that class that exit the body rapidly on abrupt cessation of use that provoke withdrawal reactions. Hence Paxil, but not Prozac or Zoloft, among SSRI antidepressants; Xanax or alcohol but not Librium, Ativan, Klonopin or Valium from among the sedatives (surprised at my lumping alcohol in there? It is ‘cross-tolerant’ with the class of sedative anti-anxiety medications, called benzodiazepines, to which these others belong, acting on the same pathways in the brain…) ; heroin, morphine, oxycodone etc. but not methadone or buprenorphine among the opiate painkillers… The more-slowly-eliminated medications in each class allow the body to “de-adapt” gradually to their falling concentrations after cessation of use; they ‘self-taper’ after stopped. In fact, we usually treat dependency on a medication with the substitution of a longer-acting ‘cross-tolerant’ drug in the same class, e.g. methadone detox from heroin dependency, Librium or Ativan detox from alcohol dependency, Klonopin detox from Xanax dependency, etc. The substitution of the longer-acting drug, and its slow taper, will let the body down more easily and mitigate if not eliminate the withdrawal or discontinuation reaction. (This raises the question of whether it would be easier for people to stop Paxil by substituting one of the other, more slowly eliminated, SSRIs, and then tapering that instead, over the ensuing 5-10 days.).

But we usually mean something more than physiological dependency, and the potential to cause physiological withdrawal upon discontinuation, when we call a medication ‘addictive’ or habit-forming’ . These are certainly button-pushing words in our social context, and I believe it was proper for the judge to stay his own ruling to ponder this further. An addictive drug is one which produces a psychological as well as a physiological dependency; whose cessation induces cravings for renewed use as well as withdrawal symptoms; whose self-administration is reinforced by the positive subjective state each dose induces; and seeking and administering which comes to assume a disproportionate role in the user’s psyche, behavior and lifestyle. Addictive drugs are are also ‘abusable’, i.e. used recreationally rather than merely therapeutically, and often in escalating doses. This latter has both a physiological component — because dependency-inducing drugs also induce physiological tolerance to their effects — and a psychological one, to obtain a more extreme or more long-lived alteration. I think it is clear that Paxil — or SSRIs, from this point of view — should not properly be called ‘addictive’ in an sense similar to the opiates, alcohol, or the benzodiazepines. While psychological dependency — especially in the sense of ‘cosmetic psychopharmacology’, the term coined by Peter Kramer in Listening to Prozac to describe the potential of this class of drugs to improve temperament even in the absence of frank depression or any of the other indications for which the SSRIs are used — occurs, Paxil-seeking does not dominate anyone’s lifestyle, there is no street trade in the drug, taking a single dose is not mood-altering or euphoriant and thus not self-reinforcing, there are no temptations to escalate dose to intensify the experience and no cravings after stopping its use.

What is at stake if such a loaded word as ‘addictive’ is implied, I believe imprecisely and improperly, to the SSRIs? I certainly don’t care about protecting Glaxo’s market share or cash flow, but I do worry about needless restrictions on the efficacy or accessibility of my pharmacopoeia. Even long before concerns about Paxil became known, the first question patients to whom I have proposed an antidepressant often ask me is whether it is “addictive.” Furthermore, even drugs which assuredly are addictive in one setting — the street — can be used under medical supervision in a controlled way that does not promote or provoke abuse, dependency or withdrawal. Narcotic analgesics are the perfect example. Seriously distressed people who could benefit from or even require an SSRI for their relief or recovery may be needlessly dissuaded from its use by such concerns.

Whether we call SSRIs addictive or not, and I hope I have made it clear I think we should not, avoidance of this and other complications of their use requires skillful prescribing and attentiveness. As usual, I argue that many of the complications of psychotropic medication use, especially SSRIs, arise from marketing pressures which have led to these medications being prescribed by internists, primary care doctors and doctors in other, non-psychiatric, specialties who do not have the expertise or time to manage patients on these drugs with the care they deserve.

In the interest of conceptual precision, we should avoid loaded buzzwords whose main use is to manipulate popular misconceptions to fill the pockets of ‘ambulance-chasing’ law firms…

“Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist for more than 40 years, is upset with his profession, saying it has lost its way. In a series of books, he has been trying to shake it up …”

Q. How would you reorganize medical training so that you’d attract better and more students to your speciality?

A. I’d tell them that they have a chance to work on one of the last great medical frontiers, which psychiatry could be. This is a field where they’ll have license to talk about psychology and physiology and philosophy, all together. Where else can you do that? NY Times

Craig’s BookNotes should really be renamed Bushwatch (if there weren’t already a weblog by that name), to judge by recent content. Here are some of the best:

• Jim Carroll: Inarticulate and Proud of It: Carroll is a passionate, articulate Boston Globe columnist whose sentiments and concerns consistently echo mine:
  

  In the beginning, the justification for ”regime change” in Baghdad was entirely a matter of the threat Hussein represents but no more. Now the justification includes protecting the integrity of threat. We have to go to war now because we said we would. Language is no longer an expression of purpose but the shaper of purpose.

  The United States, in fact, is in a crisis of language. This is what it means to have a president who, proudly inarticulate, has no real understanding of the relationship between words and acts, between rhetoric and intention. [via CommonDreams]

• United We Dance
  
• Bush says Musharraf is ‘Tight with Us’: In marvelling at Musharraf’s power grab last week, I wondered at official U.S. reaction. Here it is:
  

  Bush promised to be in touch with Musharraf “in more ways than one” about his decision to amend Pakistan’s constitution and greatly expand his authority. But he said he is not inclined to pull his support from Musharraf because the Pakistani leader has lent vital help to the U.S. effort to nab Taliban and al-Qaida fugitives who fled to his country from Afghanistan. Salon

• The Western White House: ” Located in the remote, charming hamlet of Crawford, Texas, the Western White House is a modest and photogenic reflection of the Bush family’s folksy, down-home authenticity…” [more]

James Ridgeway: “The word in Washington is that Bush will invade Iraq right after the

fall congressional elections, just in time to get the war out of the way

before his own presidential campaign swings into gear.” Village Voice via AlterNet

The year of eating dangerously: ” My guests are innocently perusing the menu at Legal Sea Foods. One orders the spiced shrimp special, another the salmon. Little do they know! I whip out my handy Audubon Society Seafood Wallet Card and promptly inform them of their grievous crimes against the denizens of the deep. Shrimp and salmon both fall in the Audubon card’s ”red zone,” meaning ”most problematic” for consumption. Why?: Boston Globe

• Notebook overhaul on the horizon: “Five years from now, the desktop will probably look pretty much like it does today, but the notebook will likely be smaller and lighter, capable of making cellular calls on its own and running on methanol. Component development projects under way portend fairly substantial changes in notebook design, according to executives and analysts. Fuel cells and battery enhancements, which will let notebooks run three to 10 times longer without a recharge, will begin to appear by late 2004.” C/Net
  
• The laptop? The deck: ‘Then, in that classic wonk moment, you pull your Global Civil Society Designer Laptop from your ballistic-nylon shoulder bag and you boot it up. “Whoa!” is the instant response from a stunned and impressed public. “Where’d you get *that*?” “Oh, this? We’ve *all* got these now! They’re *everywhere!*”

  But it isn’t really a laptop per se. It’s more like your portable office network. Or maybe it’s more like a collection of PDAs. Let’s call it a Deck (as in a deck of cards…)’ nonsensical

Declan McCullagh: Media chief decries Net’s moral fiber: ‘The president of media giant News Corp. warns that the Internet has become a “moral-free zone

,” with the medium’s future threatened by pornography, spam and rampant piracy.

Speaking Tuesday at an annual conference organized by the Progress & Freedom Foundation, Peter Chernin decried the “enormous amount” of worthless content online. He also predicted that without new laws to stave off illicit copying, News Corp.’s vast library of movies may never be made available in digital form.’ C/Net

Declan McCullagh: RIAA asks Verizon for name of P2P subscriber: “In what may become a new legal front in its war against online copying, the Recording Industry Association of America has asked a federal court for help in tracing an alleged peer-to-peer pirate.

On Tuesday, the RIAA asked a federal judge in Washington, D.C., for an order compelling Verizon Communications to reveal the name of a customer accused of illegally trading hundreds of songs. Citing privacy concerns and potential legal liability, Verizon has refused to comply with a subpoena the RIAA sent last month.” C/Net

Also:“The U.S. Department of Justice is prepared to begin

prosecuting peer-to-peer pirates, a top government official said on Tuesday.

John Malcolm, a deputy assistant attorney general, said Americans

should realize that swapping illicit copies of music and movies is a

criminal offense that can result in lengthy prison terms.” C/Net

Yahoo agrees to China censorship

The aspiration to a borderless Internet has fizzled along with technology stock prices. Commercial Web sites are eagerly recreating real-space national boundaries in cyberspace, so that they run Japanese ads for people who log on in Japan and German ones for Germans. National regulators are tightening control, asserting their right to tax e-commerce sites in their countries and the right to “wiretap” e-mail with suspected criminal connections. For the most part, this is good: There’s no reason why societies that choose to ban child pornography in real space should decide that the same material in cyberspace is fine, or why bricks-and-mortar stores should pay sales taxes while clicks-and-mortar stores escape them. But this principle can sometimes go too far. It’s ironic that the latest company to cross the line is none other than Yahoo. Washington Post editorial

“Airport security screeners may soon try to read the minds of travelers to identify terrorists.

Officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have told Northwest Airlines security specialists that the agency is developing brain-monitoring devices in cooperation with a commercial firm, which it did not identify.

Space technology would be adapted to receive and analyze brain-wave and heartbeat patterns, then feed that data into computerized programs “to detect passengers who potentially might pose a threat,” according to briefing documents obtained by The Washington Times.”

Offender Supervision with Electronic Technology

(.pdf)

The document is designed to help readers understand

and appreciate the process needed to incorporate and

implement electronic supervision strategies within

justice system programs. It was developed for agency

staff that want either to introduce electronic

supervision as a new program component or enhance

the use of electronic supervision that has already

been implemented. The document is divided into five

sections, and by reading each of these sequentially,

the steps for developing or enhancing electronic

supervision strategies will be apparent.

American Probation and Parole Association [via Politech]

Disputed Air ID Law May Not Exist: “A recent lawsuit filed by Electronic Frontier Foundation founder John Gilmore against U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, United Airlines and several others challenges the requirement that airline flyers present government-issued identification in order to travel within the United States.

The suit claims unpublished federal regulations have created an “internal passport” for Americans in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

As it turns out, there may be no such law on the books. Instead, carefully worded rules and statements allow airlines to make it seem that way. Under current federal regulations, they’re only required to ask for ID, not to make it a condition of travel.” Wired

Dennis Fox: “Why are corporations working so hard to impose high-stakes standardized testing on the nation’s public schools?“

Cities Die. Should New York Be the First to Clone Itself?: New York’s race to preserve its architectural DNA. Village Voice

Palm admits color flaw in m130: “Palm’s low-end color device, the m130, has been advertised as 16-bit color supporting 65,000 colors. Now it turns out that, well, it isn’t, and it doesn’t.” infoSync

Rock’s fifty greatest meltdowns Rolling Stone

Many thanks to David Walker, rapidly assuming the role of an unofficial auxiliary FmH editor for the number of blinks he sends me, for the following list, reprinted in its entirety, of what captivated during my week away:

• followup on the MIT blackjack team profiled in Wired
  
  kottke.com
  
• recruiting the leading minds of computer science into “the industrial revolution of biology”

  Wired

• Born Digital
  
  : a special report on the ‘children of the digital revolution’. Wired

• report about Robert Blake’s celebrity status in the LA jail where he is being held after charged with his wife’s murder. E! Online
• Calvin Trillin wonders if wine connoisseurs can really tell ’em apart
  
  The New Yorker
  
• boing boing‘s
  
  blink to writer John M. Ford’s 110 one-line “stories” about being in NYC on 9-11
  
  
• “America may want to rethink a system that creates so many hardened criminals” The Economist
  
• Ambushed on “Donahue”! Salon. “A defender of video games is given the trash talk-show treatment. Here’s what he really wanted to say.”
  
• “How NPR’s online executive producer turned the nation’s top public network into an Internet player.” Business 2.0
• Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka, interesting blog found via Robot Wisdom with which I hadn’t been familiar
• null device‘s take on the ‘Florida faith-based spanking’ travesty I wrote about below
• 
  
  null device‘s take on Turkmenistan’s madman leader Niyazov, whose effort to rename a month of th year in his own honor I wrote about last week
  
  
• Jamie Lee Curtis turns traitor, as noted on Supermodels are Lonelier Than You Think (SALTYT)
• Russian authorities enjoin a St. Petersburg hospital from psychosurgery as addiction treatment Plastic

• Rafe Colburn links to a 8/16 article from Army Times “that includes a lot more detail about the rigged Millenium Challenge 02 wargame”; he’d been skeptical when he’d only read about it in The Guardian. [I love to blink to The Guardian, as I suppose readers have gleaned… — FmH] rc3
  
• kottke’s comments on hearing James Gleick discuss what the Internet has done to journalism. Gleick doesn’t much like weblogs, kottke observes, and he offers this Steven Levy observation in a Newsweek piece about “Living in the Blog-osphere” in counterpoint:
  

  “Even the various computer-generated lists that purport to probe what’s happening on Planet Blog don’t go beyond the 10,000 or so most popular ones, rated by the numbers of links to and from the various sites. But the bigger story is what’s happening on the 490,000-plus Weblogs that few people see: they make up the vast dark matter of the Blog-osphere, and portend a future where blogs behave like such previous breakthroughs as desktop publishing, presentation software and instant messaging, and become a nonremarkable part of our lives.”

  As one of the 490,000, I agree…

• Not clear what David is pointing to in the null device
  
  ‘s 08/23 archives
  
  , but if I had to guess I’d cast my vote for the pointer to this fascinating Ohio.com story
  
  about a European skeptic’s investigation of “the story of a man who appeared suddenly on the streets of New York City in 1950, bearing the property and identity of a man who had vanished in 1876”

I recall my panic when I took a vacation after the first few months of FmH’s existence about whether there would be any readers left when I returned two weeks later. I approached each of several friends from the blogiverse about having them keep up the blog as a guest editor during my absence. Ultimately, I rejected the idea — I’m too much of a control freak about FmH, I guess — and it certainly seems that it remains interesting enough for many of you to remember to come back after a week or two when it hasn’t been refreshed, and for others of you to think of me, by collecting pertinent blinks, while I’m away. Again, I’m indebted, David. Keep sending me those pointers!

Thanks to Alwin Hawkins, a fellow health professional weblogger, for sending me this blink.

‘A tiny particle found in the spinal fluid of schizophrenia patients is baffling doctors who cannot work out what it is.

The Swedish researcher involved has even suggested it might be “a new form of life”, although other experts say this is unlikely.

However, it could mean that doctors have a reliable test for schizophrenia.’ BBC

The ‘new form of life’ angle, the more sensationalistic aspect of this news, should be placed in the context of the continuing British preoccupation with BSE (“mad cow disease”), caused by miniscule nonviral, nonbacterial communicable (but by no stretch of the imagination living!) protein particles known as prions. However, I’m among those who find this analogy implausible for schizophrenia, which has none of the epidemiology of an infectious disease. If these mystery particles are real, they are more likely a byproduct than a cause of the pathological process in the schizophrenic brain. And that’s a great big “if” — the history of schizophrenia research is rife with the ‘discovery’ of putative markers for the disease in blood, urine or cerebrospinal fluid which have uniformly turned out to be artifacts. I’d love to read the scientific paper on this finding (from Neuroscience Letters; here’s the abstract

but the full text requires a subscription), rather than rely on the popular press, which does not even indicate if the study was done in a “double blind” fashion.

It seemed abit unreal that not much worth noting had happened while I was media-less last week, then I find out that Abu Nidal is dead in Bagdhad, where he was staying for the past several months as a guest of the Iraqi government while he reportedly underwent treatment for skin cancer. Confused reports suggest he committed suicide “when confronted by Iraqi agents about his anti-government activities”, namely reported contacts with anti-Saddam elements in Syria and Jordan. However, “sources in Abu Nidal’s group said on Monday that he shot himself because he was suffering from cancer and was addicted to painkillers.” Ever vigilant for a WoT®-serving soundbite, Administration mouthpiece Ari Fleischer commented:

“Abu Nidal is one of the most craven and despicable terrorists in the world, who is responsible for killing at least 900 people in 20 different countries. The fact that Iraq gave safe haven to Abu Nidal demonstrates the Iraqi regime’s complicity in global terror. He will not be missed.” Guardian UK

However, not content with this level of complicity, the hawkish Telegraph UK reports that

“While in Baghdad, Abu Nidal, whose real name was Sabri al-Banna, came under pressure from Saddam to help train groups of al-Qa’eda fighters who moved to northern Iraq after fleeing Afghanistan. Saddam also wanted Abu Nidal to carry out attacks against the US and its allies. When Abu Nidal refused, Saddam ordered his intelligence chiefs to assassinate him. He was shot dead last weekend when Iraqi security forces burst into his apartment in central Baghdad.”

Abit too neat, tying up Palestinian terror, Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda in one tidy package and delivering them to the WoT®-meisters, it seems. How would we ever know if it is true?

This National Geographic Magazine feature on meerkats is getting alot of linkage. “Welcome to the strange social life of one of Africa’s most beloved carnivores.” Replete with cute pictures [and no references to the O’Reilly Network…]

‘Thank You for Financing Global Terror’: “Make a subtle-but-powerful statement about the connection between rampant fuel consumption in the United States, and the financing of terrorists (and their families) by oil-producing nations, particularly America’s ‘ally’, Saudi Arabia.” Subvert Press

Are We? “A recent Newsweek article claimed that a half-million blogs populate the Net. But weblog software companies and industry experts say many new journals are authored by the same people who’ve abandoned older ones, just as AOL users stop using screen names they’ve outgrown.” Wired

New from McDonald’s: the McAfrika burger :

McDonald’s has been accused of extreme insensitivity after releasing a new sandwich called the “McAfrika” in Norway, one of the world’s richest countries, at a time when 12 million people are facing starvation in southern Africa.

The launch of the new hamburger has infuriated the Norwegian equivalent of Christian Aid and the Norwegian Red Cross and generated a storm of bad publicity for the American fast-food giant. Guardian UK

Musharraf Grants Self Broad Powers

Despite widespread criticism, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf unilaterally amended the Pakistani constitution Wednesday, granting himself sweeping powers – including the right to dissolve parliament – and extending his term in office.

“Pakistan is passing through a very crucial transitional period,” Musharraf told reporters in announcing his decision to implement the amendments, which were first unveiled in June. “We are taking Pakistan from democratic dictatorship to elected democracy. I want to introduce a sustainable democratic order.” Lycos News [thanks, Abby]

Is this not getting more airplay because of the Administration’s investment in downplaying this inevitable price of holding together the ludicrous WoT® coalition? Has there been any U.S. official reaction to these moves?

“Osama bin Laden voodoo doll:

• Hang him from the rear-view mirror
  

• Shave him
  

• Dress him in women’s clothing
  

• Tie him to your front grill or dangle him from your car trunk
  

• Give him to your dog You call the shots!”

[Also available: a mother-in-law doll and an ex-husband doll.] And, on the subject of dolls, look at these monsterdolls by marthasue

.

What’s a nice boy like David Rees doing with a cult hit comic strip like “Get Your War On”? The Independent Weekly [thanks, David]

‘“Manuscript Found in Zaragoza,” based on a 200-year-old novel by a Polish count, tells the tragicomic tale of the seduction of an 18th-century Spanish-German soldier by a pair of Muslim princesses. Like so many Romantic adventurers and Western fictional heroes, from Lord Byron to Kit in Paul Bowles’s novel The Sheltering Sky, the protagonist is drawn into a sensuous and illusory dreamscape that ultimately leads to his destruction. Directed by one of Spain’s most renowned playwrights, Francisco Nieva, the play has been adapted by him from a book of the same name written by Jan Potocki, a Polish ethnographer and historian, between 1797 and 1815.’ NY Times Arts & Leisure [via Abby]

I saw the labyrinthine, phantasmagorical The Saragossa Manuscript

, a 1965 Polish film from the same source (of which this article makes no mention) directed by Wojciech Has (1925-2000), in the ’70’s when I was in college. Although abit rococo, its complex structure of dreams inside stories inside reveries inside fables, which left the audience reeling and laughing in confusion, haunted me for several decades during which I had lost track of its title and could find no further information about it. Even posting queries on the internet when it became viable a decade later was without results, until I happened to read in the mid-’90’s

that it was reputed to be Jerry Garcia’s favorite film

and that, along with Coppola and Scorsese, he was funding its restoration to its original 175-min. length — in the process learning its name again. The restored version premiered at the New York Film Festival in the fall of 1997, with a posthumous dedication to Garcia. I finally obtained a video copy around two years ago. Potocki’s book has recently reappeared in print, prompted by the revival of the film.

Probably because both films were most suitable for midnight viewing and, if you weren’t in an altered state of mind going into them you would be upon emerging, I often think of Alexandro Jodorowsky’s 1970 El Topo

(“What it all means isn’t exactly clear, but you won’t forget it. “) — anyone else remember this? — in the same vein. Funny, this Bright Lights Film Journal piece on The Saragossa Manuscript leads off with a reference to the latter.

There are rumors, by the way, that

Jodorowsky is working on a sequel to El Topo

with Johnny Depp annd Marilyn Manson in the cast. Here’s a pre-release flyer. Other Jodorowsky ( “I ask of film what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs”) trivia:

• he studied mime with Marcel Marceau
• he ‘signed on to direct a French-American production of Dune, which was to star his son Brontis, Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí and Gloria Swanson. The screenplay he wrote, by some accounts, could have been made into a 12- to 16-hour film. The financial backers pulled out in 1976.’ Dune was of course, disappointingly, made by David Lynch in 1984…
• he ‘was also reported to have scouted locations in Tangier in the mid-80’s with William S. Burroughs for a film of Naked Lunch that was never made’

‘“Manuscript Found in Zaragoza,” based on a 200-year-old novel by a Polish count, tells the tragicomic tale of the seduction of an 18th-century Spanish-German soldier by a pair of Muslim princesses. Like so many Romantic adventurers and Western fictional heroes, from Lord Byron to Kit in Paul Bowles’s novel The Sheltering Sky, the protagonist is drawn into a sensuous and illusory dreamscape that ultimately leads to his destruction. Directed by one of Spain’s most renowned playwrights, Francisco Nieva, the play has been adapted by him from a book of the same name written by Jan Potocki, a Polish ethnographer and historian, between 1797 and 1815.’ NY Times Arts & Leisure [via Abby]

I saw the labyrinthine, phantasmagorical The Saragossa Manuscript

, a 1965 Polish film from the same source (of which this article makes no mention) directed by Wojciech Has (1925-2000), in the ’70’s when I was in college. Although abit rococo, its complex structure of dreams inside stories inside reveries inside fables, which left the audience reeling and laughing in confusion, haunted me for several decades during which I had lost track of its title and could find no further information about it. Even posting queries on the internet when it became viable a decade later was without results, until I happened to read in the mid-’90’s

that it was reputed to be Jerry Garcia’s favorite film

and that, along with Coppola and Scorsese, he was funding its restoration to its original 175-min. length — in the process learning its name again. The restored version premiered at the New York Film Festival in the fall of 1997, with a posthumous dedication to Garcia. I finally obtained a video copy around two years ago. Potocki’s book has recently reappeared in print, prompted by the revival of the film.

Probably because both films were most suitable for midnight viewing and, if you weren’t in an altered state of mind going into them you would be upon emerging, I often think of Alexandro Jodorowsky’s 1970 El Topo

(“What it all means isn’t exactly clear, but you won’t forget it. “) — anyone else remember this? — in the same vein. Funny, this Bright Lights Film Journal piece on The Saragossa Manuscript leads off with a reference to the latter.

There are rumors, by the way, that

Jodorowsky is working on a sequel to El Topo

with Johnny Depp annd Marilyn Manson in the cast. Here’s a pre-release flyer. Other Jodorowsky ( “I ask of film what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs”) trivia:

• he studied mime with Marcel Marceau
• he ‘signed on to direct a French-American production of Dune, which was to star his son Brontis, Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí and Gloria Swanson. The screenplay he wrote, by some accounts, could have been made into a 12- to 16-hour film. The financial backers pulled out in 1976.’ Dune was of course, disappointingly, made by David Lynch in 1984…
• he ‘was also reported to have scouted locations in Tangier in the mid-80’s with William S. Burroughs for a film of Naked Lunch that was never made’

Madame Jujujive from Everlasting Blort

sent me this, as a backdrop to my post Shaming Young Mothers

last week: Earlier Regier article had same message: ‘Florida’s new child welfare chief, who denied last week writing a controversial 1989 essay that condoned spanking even if it produces bruises or welts, wrote another article for a magazine that encouraged the use of ”manly” discipline, and quoted from the Bible: “Smite him with the rod.” The article, which bears Jerry Regier’s name alone, appeared in the July-August 1988 issue of Pastoral Renewal, a religious magazine no longer published. The article is titled “The Not-So-Disposable Family.” ‘ The Miami Herald

Not to mention this:

White House to push “embryo adoption” plan

: ‘Abortion rights advocates worry that the program lays the legal groundwork for considering embryos human beings with full legal rights. Using the term “adoption” rather than “donation” makes it appear that the program views embryos as children, said Kate Michelman, president of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League.’ Salon [thanks, Julie!]

Online advice columns are not usually something I read, or point to, but this blink

was sent to me — without further explanation — by a reader, responding to my invitation to fill my mailbox with URLs while I was away from my surfing last week. Here’s the crux of the mission statement of the columnists, couched in terms of drawing an interesting distinction [emphasis added — FmH]: The difference between Dear Abby, Ann Landers, and Wayne & Tamara.

Wayne and Tamara realized …how often Abby and Ann Landers dodge the question. Those two columnists, 82-year-old twin sisters, are each in their fifth decade of syndication. When they began writing, “see a counselor” may not have occurred to some people. These days it’s a way of avoiding an answer.

The Mitchells decided they would answer each letter in a way that gives the writer deeper understanding. As they often say, their aim is to help people become students of relationships, so they can answer their own questions.

At the time, Tamara remarked, “We need to give each person a direct answer,” and that is how the column became “Direct Answers from Wayne & Tamara

.”

Let’s examine this a little, because IMHO in setting up on the one hand Abby and Ann and on the other ‘counseling’ as straw men, the Mitchells hoist themselves on their own petard of self-contradiction and self-condemnation. Through the unlikely vehicle of an advice-to-the-lovelorn column mission statement, they unveil some deeply held misconceptions they share with the public about the facilitation of personal change. I know, I know, I may be giving this alot more significance than it deserves, but it’s a vehicle, so bear with me…

The term ‘counseling’ — and I hope I’m qualified to have an opinion on this because I took a master’s degree in counseling psychology before I went on to medical school and my subsequent psychiatric training — denotes an ill-defined wastebasket profession-without-portfolio in a permanent identity crisis. Arising from ‘guidance counseling’, it remains caught betwixt and between the effective change agency techniques to which I would refer as ‘therapy’ or ‘psychotherapy’ and the well-meaning handholding, advice-giving and ‘direct answers’ that have no place in therapy but are suitable to coaching, career or guidance counseling… or advice columns. People hang out ‘counseling’ shingles aspiring to do therapy, but do not necessarily have the experience, qualifications, training, or in some cases the sophistication to do so, and their profession does not provide the gatekeeping, quality control, suypervision or rigorous foundations of any of the pathways to a ‘real’ psychotherapy career. The public at large does not understand this distinction. People increasingly use the terms ‘counseling’ and ‘therapy’ interchangeably and increasingly go to ‘counselors’ rather than ‘therapists’ never knowing their potential to be shortchanged — caveat emptor!. [This is partly due to the progressive erosion of support for psychotherapy — for meaningful change — in the funding of mental health in the modern managed healthcare environment.This, however, is a subject for a different diatribe, and a fit I throw here in FmH fairly frequently at that.] I don’t mean, BTW, to disparage the endeavors of any of you readers who describe your professional activities as ‘counseling’; you are probably very good and very effective at what you do; in some cases, I would say you are good therapists, but note I said “not necessarily” above…

The Mitchells don’t understand the distinctions either. They appear not to recognize that their stated goals of providing ‘deeper understanding’, ‘ to help people become students of relationships, so they can answer their own questions’ are precisely the aims of any competent psychotherapy relationship. Then they go on in the very next paragraph to contradict these stated ideals with the conceit of concluding they should provide ‘direct answers’. Uhhh, this would seem to be inimical with helping people answer their own questions, wouldn’t it be? It is certainly the case in bad counseling, it may be the case in all counseling, but is not at all the case in a psychotherapy relationship that facilitating change is invalidated by the client’s tendency to ‘avoid an answer’, as the Mitchells ignorantly characterize it. If change were easy, it would be easy. There would be no grace or art to therapy if there were not a universal human tendency to avoid changing. Working with such resistance — usually in ways so subtle they are never noticed — is the constant subtext of the therapy process and the central skill of forming the therapeutic alliance and facilitating change. It involves grappling with one of the central existential paradoxes all good therapists embrace but the Mitchells seemingly do not grasp — that giving a ‘direct answer’ to someone ‘avoiding answers’ prevents, not facilitates, therapeutic progress. Quite simply, an answer that you do not discover for yourself does not stick to the bones.

To amplify on this abit, here’s how psychotherapy works, regardless of theoretical school. You can skip this paragraph if you want; it is not essential for the argument of the rest of this post; if you read it, please forgive me for oversimplifying abit…:

Distress is largely caused by characteristic ways of doing business with the world that are experienced by the client as inevitable and automatic. Therapy is a relationship enough like every other relationship in the client’s life that they enter into it in the same characteristic ways of doing business. Yet it is different from every other relationship in one crucial respect. The therapist is not only a participant in the relationship but a trained observer of it as well, with the aim of enlisting the client to become an observant participant-observer as well, and the skill to do so. The therapist’s finely honed ability to sort out what is the therapist’s own contribution from that of the client, so that the latter can be an object of study unimpeded; and to gently and subtly overcome the client’s instinctual resistance, allows them to gradually begin to experience their ways of doing business as discretionary instead of inevitable. With the freedom to do things differently comes the ability to avoid recreating one’s characteristic ways of creating distress. The therapeutic relationship can be a ‘laboratory’ for empirical trials of doing things differently which, when solidified, can be implemented in the ‘real’ world. Disparate theoretical schools of therapy differ in whether they involve any explicit discussion of what is happening in the therapeutic relationship — ‘analysis’ — and the balance between discussion of what’s happening ‘in the room’ vs. outside ‘in the world’ the rest of the week; in the relative emphasis placed on present- vs. past-centered, or emotional vs. cognitive, paradigms for describing how one does business. Those differences, however, are IMHO just window-dressing — the ‘hooks’ that enlist the client in the essential participant-observation process. If this process happens in untutored ‘counseling’, it happens inadvertently, instinctively, certainly not explicitly. And, of course, it never happens in advice columns…

So should we not have advice columnists? Certainly not those who do not know their own constraints! It is probably a stretch to tout Ann Landers and Dear Abby as paradigmatic change agents — and I have never been a close enough observer of their columns to know — but their ‘dodging the question’, as the Mitchells put it, is in this sense almost surely much closer to effective therapy — and certainly to recognizing their own limits — than the grandiosity of Wayne and Tamara’s ‘direct answers’. Pitiful… [And what’s up with their innuendoes about A. and A.’s five decades each of experience, syndicated or not??]

Okay, enough, I’ll stop here. The reader who sent me the blink was probably recommending these guys anyway…

“If you don’t see it for yourself, you might not believe it.

A grey blob oozes down the side of a laboratory beaker. It’s heading for the table, but before it gets there a low hum fills the air. Someone just switched on an electromagnet. The goop stiffens, quivers, then carries on oozing only after the hum subsides.” NASA

Sight Unchanged: “In an era when best-of lists and expert polls have degenerated into promotional devices, one poll still has a grip on the imaginations of film aficionados the world round. Every 10 years, Sight & Sound, a venerable British film magazine, asks hundreds of prominent critics and directors to list their 10 favorite films of all time. The first Sight & Sound poll was held in 1952, in the midst of the postwar burgeoning of film consciousness; the survey quickly became an institution, eagerly awaited and endlessly handicapped. The 2002 edition

of the Top 10 poll is now online at the Sight & Sound Web site, with 253 individual lists to pore over.

What makes this poll more compelling than others is that it purports to be a snapshot of the evolving film canon. The 10-year interval between surveys is just enough time for taste to change in the world of film criticism, which has undergone several great upheavals in the 50 years since the poll’s inception… [more

] Slate

Review of Sam Jones’ 2002 I Am Trying to Break Your Heart : “Intending to shoot a documentary about the making of critical fave Wilco’s newest album, Sam Jones found himself handed — gift-wrapped with a bow on top — a classic three-act narrative, replete with surprise turns, stunning rejections, and an emblematic clash with Corporate Rock.” PopMatters

[via Pélican

]

Nicholas Kristof: “Perhaps not since a tribal council in Pakistan ordered a woman to be gang-raped in June has a government treated women with such contempt.” NY Times op-ed

“We believe that [the compound] will replace aspirin and similar drugs in most applications primarily because of a lack of toxic side effects…”

‘Researchers are developing a marijuana-derived synthetic compound to relieve pain and inflammation without the mood-altering side effects associated with other marijuana based drugs.

…The compound, called ajulemic acid, has produced encouraging results in animal studies of pain and inflammation. It is undergoing tests in a group of people with chronic pain and could be available by prescription within two to three years, the researchers say.’ EurekAlert!

I thought of adding a flip comment to the effect that removing the ‘mood-altering side effects’ would take all the fun out of it. On reflection, though, that’s a serious objection; the ‘therapeutic dissociation’ caused by marijuana use is surely an important component of its use in clinically challenging distress such as chronic pain or severe nausea. I would be surprised if, barring that effect, any new drug would be a significant enough advance over existing antiinflammatory medications.

Urge “Drug Czar” Walters to End Relationship with Beer Promoter: ‘The Office of the “Drug Czar” is partnering with Anheuser – Busch beer sponsored NASCAR racer Jimmy Spencer on “anti-drug” messages to America’s youth. This sends a confusing message to kids while legitimizing alcohol as a sponsor of sporting events. Tell John Walters, Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, to end this partnership that sends the wrong message “Don’t Do Drugs, But Beer is OK!” ‘ Action Network

Richard Reeves: “Can perp walks save America from itself? Can perp walks save President Bush from himself and his friends?” Yahoo! News

Scientists Find Signs Big Meteor Hit Earth 3.5 Billion Years Ago:

‘The heat would have killed all single-cell microbes, the only life on Earth at the time, on land and in the upper ocean, which would have boiled into steam. The impact appears to have sent giant tsunamis coursing around the world’s oceans, scouring the early continents.

“The only thing that would have survived would have been bacteria in the deep ocean,” said Dr. Gary R. Byerly, a professor of geology at Louisiana State and the lead author of the article.’ NY Times

Nicholas Kristof: “Perhaps not since a tribal council in Pakistan ordered a woman to be gang-raped in June has a government treated women with such contempt.” NY Times op-ed

I’m off on vacation for a week, sans web access (sans electricity, in fact!). FmH won’t be updated until the 24th or 25th. Consider using the time you would have spent reading FmH to discover a new weblog or two; click on something unfamiliar in my ‘blogroll’ in the left sidebar…

And please

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“The president has merely been using firefighters and their families for one big photo opportunity… We will work actively to not grant him another photo op with us.”

‘The International Association of Fire Fighters voted unanimously on Wednesday to boycott a national tribute to firefighters who died on Sept. 11, in an angry response to U.S. President George Bush’s rejection of a bill that included $340 million to fund fire departments.

Bush is expected to speak at the Oct. 6 ceremony in Washington D.C., where the National Fallen Fire Fighters Foundation is hosting its annual tribute to those who died in the line of duty during the prior year.

The ceremony will honor 343 firefighters who died responding to the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, as well as about 100 others who also died in the year.

The IAFF, the umbrella organization for the nation’s professional firefighter unions, is enraged by the president’s rejection of a $5.1 billion appropriations bill that included $150 million for equipment and training grants requested by some of the nation’s 18,000 fire departments.

It also include $100 million to improve the communications systems for firefighters, police officers and other emergency personnel as well as $90 million for long-term health monitoring of emergency workers at the Ground Zero site where New York’s World Trade Center towers once stood.’ Reuters [via Paul Randall]

‘Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), the sometime actor who once said that life in Washington made him “long for the sincerity and realism of Hollywood,” is negotiating to join the cast of “Law & Order” this fall, Hollywood sources report.

Thompson, the first sitting senator to have a lead role in a TV series, is slated to play a newly named district attorney and boss of Executive Assistant DA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) and Assistant DA Serena Southerlyn (Elisabeth Rohm).’ Washington Post [via Spike]