Author Archives: FmH

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About FmH

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

Orwell Strikes Again

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“The White House altered documents regarding the nations involved in the so-called “Coalition of the Willing” that aided the US invasion of Iraq.

A University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign political science professor says he found that the White House had modified elements of its website dealing with the coalition and in some cases deleted key documents in the public record.

At the onset of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the White House released a list of the nations participating in the coalition, an important part of Bush Administration PR efforts, as the war was not UN-endorsed. Over a period of years, however, the original releases were modified to account for the diminishing number of nations.

Two releases were deleted from the White House website entirely, the professor says.

“I think that it raises the question of whether or not we can trust the government to maintain public records of things that were said or done that later prove embarrassing,” Illinois political science professor Scott Althaus said.”

via The Raw Story.

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Suit contesting Obama’s citizenship heads to Supreme Court

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Barack Obama 44th President of The United Stat...

“The U.S. Supreme Court will consider Friday whether to take up a lawsuit challenging President-elect Barack Obama’s U.S. citizenship, a continuation of a New Jersey case embraced by some opponents of Obama’s election.

The meeting of justices will coincide with a vigil by the filer’s supporters in Washington on the steps of the nation’s highest court.

The suit originally sought to stay the election, and was filed on behalf of Leo Donofrio against New Jersey Secretary of State Nina Mitchell Wells.

Legal experts say the appeal has little chance of succeeding, despite appearing on the court’s schedule. Legal records show it is only the tip of an iceberg of nationwide efforts seeking to derail Obama’s election over accusations that he either wasn’t born a U.S. citizen or that he later renounced his citizenship in Indonesia.”

via Chicago Tribune.

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Poor Children’s Brain Activity Resembles That Of Stroke Victims, EEG Shows

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‘Previous studies have shown a possible link between frontal lobe function and behavioral differences in children from low and high socioeconomic levels, but according to cognitive psychologist Mark Kishiyama, first author of the new paper, “those studies were only indirect measures of brain function and could not disentangle the effects of intelligence, language proficiency and other factors that tend to be associated with low socioeconomic status. Our study is the first with direct measure of brain activity where there is no issue of task complexity.”

Co-author W. Thomas Boyce, UC Berkeley professor emeritus of public health who currently is the British Columbia Leadership Chair of Child Development at the University of British Columbia (UBC), is not surprised by the results. “We know kids growing up in resource-poor environments have more trouble with the kinds of behavioral control that the prefrontal cortex is involved in regulating. But the fact that we see functional differences in prefrontal cortex response in lower socioeconomic status kids is definitive.”

Boyce, a pediatrician and developmental psychobiologist, heads a joint UC Berkeley/UBC research program called WINKS – Wellness in Kids – that looks at how the disadvantages of growing up in low socioeconomic circumstances change children's basic neural development over the first several years of life.

“This is a wake-up call,” Knight said. “It's not just that these kids are poor and more likely to have health problems, but they might actually not be getting full brain development from the stressful and relatively impoverished environment associated with low socioeconomic status: fewer books, less reading, fewer games, fewer visits to museums.” ‘

via Science Daily.

R.I.P. Forrest J Ackerman

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Sci-Fi’s No. 1 Fanboy Dies at 92: Ackerman was the beloved founder and editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, which was one of my mainstays throgh my childhood from as soon as I was allowed to watch monster movies. Some say he was the inventor of the term sci-fi.

BBC.

Free Public WiFi?

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“Have you seen this wireless network? I see it *everywhere*, and it’s so suspicious because it’s always ad-hoc (meaning broadcasting from a computer rather than a regular access point). I imagined for a long time it was part of a virus; it waits for someone to connect, redirects to a page that exploits some hole in Internet Explorer, scrapes your hard disk and sends your social security number to Russia, sets itself up as “Free Public WiFi”, repeat.

After seeing it for the thousandth time at the train station Philadelphia yesterday I decided to look it up. Turns out it’s not a virus (at least not in the usual sense) but rather an interesting fuckup on Microsoft’s part, with viral consequences.” [Read on for the explanation…]

via JSTN.

Self-Embedding Disorder: NOT

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This is a newly-coined term appearing in a press release by the Radiological Society of North America to describe a form of self-injurious behavior, with which we psychiatrists are (unfortunately) far too familiar already. Placing foreign bodies such as hairpins and straightened paper clips into self-inflicted wounds and embedding them under the skin is, admittedly, a new trend in self-abuse, if we can believe the radiologists, whose press release describes the safety and efficacy of minimally-invasive image-guided treatment for the extraction of such objects. However, there is no need for a new diagnosis. Indeed, self-injuriousness in general is not an illness, or a diagnosis, unto itself, but rather a symptom of a variety of diagnoses. A fortiori for a particular kind of self-injuriousness. This illustrates one of the epistemological confusions plaguing the system for diagnosing behavioral problems, and is a perfect example of the needless proliferation of diagnostic categories.

Via The Neurocritic (By the way, I think the Neurocritic piece meant to discuss “foreign bodies”, not “foreign bodes”.)

The Five Stages of Collapse

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I-35W Bridge Collapse(6)

Dmitry Orlov: “Hello, everyone! The talk you are about to hear is the result of a lengthy process on my part. My specialty is in thinking about and, unfortunately, predicting collapse. My method is based on comparison: I watched the Soviet Union collapse, and, since I am also familiar with the details of the situation in the United States, I can make comparisons between these two failed superpowers.”

Via Energy Bulletin via the null device. Orlov describes five stages of collapse — financial, commercial, political, social and cultural, and places the progress of the collapse of the US on that map.

The coming neurological epidemic

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“Biochemist Gregory Petsko makes a convincing argument that, in the next 50 years, we'll see an epidemic of neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer's, as the world population ages. His solution: more research into the brain and its functions. He also shares a few simple things we can do for ourselves to keep our brains healthy. (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 3:46.)”

via TED.

An impact he could never appreciate

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‘Henry G. Molaison, 82, of Windsor Locks, CT died on Tuesday. He is known in the medical and scientific literatures as “the amnesic patient, H.M.” He was born in Manchester, CT and graduated from East Hartford High School. In 1953, he underwent an experimental brain operation at the Hartford Hospital to relieve his seizure disorder. Immediately after the operation, Mr. Molaison showed a profound amnesia, which became the topic of intense scientific study for more than five decades. From age 27 on, he was unable to establish new memories for events in his everyday life and to acquire general information about the world in which he lived. His memory impairment was “pure” and not accompanied by intellectual or personality disorders. For this reason, and because the operation has not been repeated, he is the most widely studied and famous case in the neuroscience literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. Mr. Molaison's contributions to knowledge about memory have been groundbreaking, and researchers worldwide are in his debt.’

via Vivienne Ming, Ph.D..

Company tries to get gun classed as medical device

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Derringers are small and can be easily concealed.

“A US company claims to have received federal approval to market a 9-mm handgun as a medical device and hopes the US government will reimburse seniors who buy the $300 firearm. But the US Food and Drug Administration says there are currently no formal designations of the gun as a medical device.

Called the Palm Pistol, the weapon is designed for people who have trouble firing a normal handgun due to arthritis and other debilitating conditions.”

via New Scientist.

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Justices Take Case on President’s Power to Detain

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“The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to decide the most fundamental question yet concerning executive power in the age of terror: Can the president order the indefinite military detention of people living in the United States?

The case concerns Ali al-Marri, the only person on the American mainland being held as an enemy combatant, at the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. Mr. Marri, a citizen of Qatar, was legally in the United States when he was arrested in December 2001 in Peoria, Ill., where he was living with his family and studying computer science at Bradley University.

Eighteen months later, when Mr. Marri was on the verge of a trial on credit card fraud and other charges, President Bush declared him an enemy combatant, moving him from the custody of the Justice Department to military detention. The government says Mr. Marri is a Qaeda sleeper agent sent to the United States to commit mass murder and disrupt the banking system.

The case, which will probably be argued in the spring, will present the Obama administration with several difficult strategic choices. It can continue to defend the Bush administration’s expansive interpretation of executive power, advance a more modest one or short-circuit the case by moving it to the criminal justice system.”

via New York Times.

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The Lie We Love

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“Westerners have been sold the myth of a world orphan crisis. We are told that millions of children are waiting for their “forever families” to rescue them from lives of abandonment and abuse. But many of the infants and toddlers being adopted by Western parents today are not orphans at all. Yes, hundreds of thousands of children around the world do need loving homes. But more often than not, the neediest children are sick, disabled, traumatized, or older than 5. They are not the healthy babies that, quite understandably, most Westerners hope to adopt. There are simply not enough healthy, adoptable infants to meet Western demand—and there’s too much Western money in search of children. As a result, many international adoption agencies work not to find homes for needy children but to find children for Western homes.”

via Foreign Policy.

The Mumbai Strategy

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Guy Sorman: “The Mumbai terrorist attacks have opened a new chapter in the war against terrorism. They remind us that Islamic radicalism owes more to classic Leninist thinking than to the Koran…

Before the attacks, India and Pakistan were on the verge of concluding an alliance against their de facto common enemy, Islamic radicalism, under the guidance of the American government. In reviving Indians’ fears that they were once again under attack from Pakistani security forces, the Mumbai atrocities may well disrupt the projected alliance. Further, the attack on Mumbai took place in advance of decisive provincial elections in India: vociferous Hindu nationalist parties will undoubtedly exploit anti-Muslim feelings for political gain. The timing of the Mumbai attack, like that of al-Qaida’s Madrid bombing in 2003, confirms the broader Islamist-terror movement’s sophisticated strategy.”

via City Journal.

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He’s Not Black

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Maria Arana: “He is also half white.

Unless the one-drop rule still applies, our president-elect is not black.

We call him that — he calls himself that — because we use dated language and logic. After more than 300 years and much difficult history, we hew to the old racist rule: Part-black is all black. Fifty percent equals a hundred. There's no in-between.

That was my reaction when I read these words on the front page of this newspaper the day after the election: “Obama Makes History: U.S. Decisively Elects First Black President.”

The phrase was repeated in much the same form by one media organization after another. It's as if we have one foot in the future and another still mired in the Old South. We are racially sophisticated enough to elect a non-white president, and we are so racially backward that we insist on calling him black. Progress has outpaced vocabulary.

To me, as to increasing numbers of mixed-race people, Barack Obama is not our first black president. He is our first biracial, bicultural president. He is more than the personification of African American achievement. He is a bridge between races, a living symbol of tolerance, a signal that strict racial categories must go.”

via Washington Post op-ed.

Housekeeping

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Jerry asked: “Are you changing your blog format daily?” Yeah, playing around with different “themes”. It is so easy, virtually one-click, now that I’m using WordPress. I’m only doing it while I search for the ‘perfect’ setup, then I hope it’ll be static, in case it’s disorienting to my readers. Comments?

Strange Experiments Create Body-Swapping Experiences

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Art´s imagery of humanoid

“Scientists now have manipulated people’s perceptions to make them think they have swapped bodies with another human or even a “humanoid body,” experiencing the sensations that the other would feel and giving the illusion of being inside the other’s body.

The bizarre achievement hearkens to body swaps portrayed on numerous TV shows and movies such as Freaky Friday and All of Me.

In real life, the cognitive neuroscientists at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet succeeded in making subjects perceive the bodies of mannequins and other people as their own. The illusion also worked even when the two people differed in appearance or were of different sexes. It also worked whether the subject was immobile or was making voluntary movements. However, it was not possible to fool the subjects into identifying with a non-humanoid object, such as a chair or a large block.”

via LiveScience

‘I See Dead People’

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“The dead stay with us, that much is clear. They remain in our hearts and minds, of course, but for many people they also linger in our senses—as sights, sounds, smells, touches or presences. Grief hallucinations are a normal reaction to bereavement but are rarely discussed, because people fear they might be considered insane or mentally destabilised by their loss. As a society we tend to associate hallucinations with things like drugs and mental illness, but we now know that hallucinations are common in sober healthy people and that they are more likely during times of stress.”

via Scientific American

The Rotting, City-Sized Pile of Texan Waste

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Bruce Sterling: “A 30-mile scar of debris along the Texas coast stands as a festering testament to what state and local officials say is FEMA's sluggish response to the 2008 hurricane season. (((Okay, great, blame the feds, but what about the next storm surge?)))

Two and a half months after Hurricane Ike blasted the shoreline, alligators and snakes crawl over vast piles of shattered building materials, lawn furniture, trees, boats, tanks of butane and other hazardous substances, thousands of animal carcasses, and perhaps even the corpses of people killed by the storm.

State and local officials complain that the removal of the filth has gone almost nowhere because FEMA red tape has held up the cleanup work and the release of the millions of dollars that Chambers County says it needs to pay for the project.”

via Beyond the Beyond – Wired Blogs

Grand chieftain of anthropology lives to see his centenary

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Claude Lévi-Strauss

“France celebrated the 100th anniversary yesterday of the birth of one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. This was not just a centenary. It was a genuine birthday. Claude Lévi-Strauss, the father of structuralism and modern anthropology, born on 28 November 1908, is still alive. His work, after going out of fashion several times, is more alive than ever.”

via The Independent

As an undergraduate studying social anthropology at the height of the romance with structuralism, I got lost in Levi-Strauss and ultimately disenchanted, when papers I wrote doing structuralist analysis of myths and other cultural phenomena were praised even though in my heart I thought what I had written was gobbledigook… that you could get away saying anything in a structural analysis if you knew how to couch it. I do think The Savage Mind is a paradigm-changing masterpiece, showing that other cultures’ ways of making sense of the world partake as much as ours do of ‘scientific method.’ But delving deeper into structuralism was my first experience of that ’emperor-has-no-clothes’ feeling about a venerated discipline that I have had so often about cornerstones of post-modernism. (Perhaps I shouldn’t be admitting this; perhaps it means I didn’t really understand structuralism, but in that case neither did those grading my papers, did they?)

Pain in the eye of the beholder

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How do you quantify pain?How do you quantify pain?

“It goes without saying that we are capable of noticing changes to our bodies, but it’s perhaps less obvious that the way we perceive our bodies can affect them physically. The two-way nature of this link, between physicality and perception, has been dramatically demonstrated by a new study of people with chronic hand pain. Lorimer Moseley at the University of Oxford found that he could control the severity of pain and swelling in an aching hand by making it seem larger or smaller.”

via Not Exactly Rocket Science

UFO enthusiasts call on Obama to release X-Files

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Baptism Of Christ By Aert De Gelder

“UFO enthusiasts are pressing Barack Obama to release classified documents about sightings of alien spacecraft, encouraged by support from within the President-Elect’s own White House team.”

via Telegraph.UK

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Anatomic Basis for Being Change-Friendly

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‘…[P]eople who actively seek lifestyle changes may have a more developed connection between two specific brain areas: the hippocampus, a site for storing and retrieving new and old memories, and the ventral striatum, a reward system which is responsible for those carpe diem moments, said researcher Dr. Bernd Weber of the Life & Brain Center at the University of Bonn in Germany. Turns out, if the hippocampus identifies an experience as new, it then relays signals to the striatum to release neurotransmitters which lead to positive feelings.

"The strength of the connection is positively correlated to novelty seek[ers] …’

via Yahoo! News

Why All the Focus on Failed States?

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“In a 2007 study on international state building, Ulrich Schneckener draws a clear distinction between failed states and failing states. Failing states like Colombia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Georgia, and Nigeria are unable to completely control their territories, but they still deliver public services to the majority of the population and have some degree of political legitimacy. In failed states, however, none of the functions mentioned above is effectively performed. The most prominent example of a failed state is Somalia. Although I acknowledge that the breakdown of regional security might have serious repercussions on international security, I argue that ultimately, it is the failing state, not the failed state, that encourages international terrorism and organized crime. The failed state, in contrast, poses more threats to regional security than to international security.” — Stefan Mair, Director of Studies at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs

via Harvard International Review

What the data miners are digging up about you

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“In today's technological world we leave electronic traces wherever we go, whether shopping online or on the high street, at work or at play. That data is the raw material for a new industry of number crunchers trying to explain and influence human behaviour, as Stephen Baker explains in his new book The Numerati.”

via New Scientist

The Intellectual Decline of the Presidency

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Bush is my Hero

John McWhorter on Elvin Lim’s The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush:

“…[This] is not one more rant about the limited cognitive abilities of George W. Bush but a brisk, methodical deconstruction of ‘the relentless simplification of presidential rhetoric in the last two centuries and the increasing substitution of arguments with applause-rendering platitudes, partisan punch lines and emotional and human interest appeals.’ “

via FIRST THINGS: A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life

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Patternicity

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Finding Meaningful Patterns in Meaningless Noise: Historian of science and Skeptics Society foun...Michael Shermer

Michael Shermer: “…whenever the cost of believing a false pattern is real is less than the cost of not believing a real pattern, natural selection will favor patternicity.”

via Scientific American

By the way, I am enamored of the term apophenia for this phenomenon. Patternicity seems too cutesy. As a psychiatrist specializing in the treatment of psychosis, I think apophenic thinking is at the heart of the paranoid process and one of the core disturbances in schizophrenia. But Shermer’s argument that natural selection will favor patternicity when it has the best adaptive cost undercuts his crusade against irrational belief, doesn’t it? As I have previously pointed out in discussions of apophenia, finding patterns (in the sense of “believing superstitions“) has helped human groups to survive.

Spectacular Conjunction

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“Dec. 1st is the best night of all. The now-15% crescent Moon moves in closer to form an isosceles triangle with Venus and Jupiter as opposing vertices. The three brightest objects in the night sky will be gathered so tightly together, you can hide them all behind your thumb held at arm’s length.

The celestial triangle will be visible from all parts of the world, even from light-polluted cities. People in New York and Hong Kong will see it just as clearly as astronomers watching from remote mountaintops. Only cloudy weather or a midnight sun sorry Antarctica can spoil the show.

Although you can see the triangle with naked eyes–indeed, you can’t miss it—a small telescope will make the evening even more enjoyable. In one quick triangular sweep, you can see the moons and cloud-belts of Jupiter, the gibbous phase of Venus 69% full, and craters and mountains on the Moon. It’s a Grand Tour you won’t soon forget.”

via NASA (thanks, abby)

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Sophisticated Attacks, but by whom?

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Now all the talk starts about who the attackers were. The “Deccan Mujahedeen”, a reference to the Deccan plains of the south of India, took responsibility. They are a previously unknown group and the pundits are “unclear whether it’s a real group or not”, etc. RAND corporation terrorism “experts” debate whether they style and targets suggest linkage to al Qaeda. Everyone opines that the degree of sophistication and coordination point to a broader organization behind the perpetrators. Discussion ensues about which precedent attack patterns can be discerned blended in the event.

This all seems so absurd to me, as it has ever since 9/11. Just as, during the Cold War, all our boogeymen were “Communists”, now we need desperately to figure out what the “al Qaeda” ties are. The most obvious, disastrous, consequence of that type of limited thinking was of course to justify the criminal invasion of Iraq but the fundaments of our approach to terrorism are shot through with this kind of thinking. There are (always, everywhere) a plethora of angry locally-rooted groups willing to sow terror with violent acts, and whether they have the “fingerprint” of al Qaeda or not does not determine whether they proclaim themselves to be allied with the supposed aims of al Qaeda. You choose the boogeyman you want to be as a function of what will have the maximum desired impact, and your victims choose the boogeyman they want to see to help them comprehend the incomprehensible. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. As I have already said, that is really all that “al Qaeda” is. The War on Terror is a war against smoke and mirrors. Pitiful how comforted we are by the meaningless exercise of giving a name to our terrors, even though it dies nothing constructive to help protect us.

via New York Times

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‘Typealyzer’ on FmH

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This is derived from an analysis of the content of FmH, knowing nothing else about me:

“The analysis indicates that the author of http://followmehere.com is of the type: INTP (“The Thinkers”), the logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.”

via Typealyzer

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The Meaning of Psychological Abnormality

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Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorderADHD

Distinguished developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan argues that the current spate of childhood mental health diagnoses such as ADHD and bipolar disorder do not represent biological diseases but rather convenient explanations that get us off the hook by covering up social problems. He discusses social trends that may account for childhood behavioral difficulties.

via Cerebrum

I agree that childhood disorders are overdiagnosed and that, in general, we are in an era of overmedicalization of behavioral problems for a variety of reasons, not the least of them being the influence of Big Pharma. I hope no one thinks any longer that psychiatric diagnoses are immutable gospel truths. From revision to revision, the nomenclature changes. The boundaries of what is considered psychopathology expand and contract (in this era, mostly expand) and the internal pigeonholes are everchanging. Our research practices, supposed to contribute to “evidence-based” medical reasoning, compound the errors, because drug companies have a subtle and not-so-subtle vested interest in the results, they fund much of it, and there is an inherent bias against the publication of negative or disconfirmatory results.

On the other hand, let us not throw the baby out with the bathwater. We should be long past the need to debate nature vs. nurture in mental ilness, social context vs. biology. There are of course contributions of both, and Dr Kagan’s argument should not be seen as dismissing the biological bases of behavioral problems whole hog. I do agree with him, vehemently, though, that overdiagnosis and overattribution is rife, and that it is obscene when you look at the major consequences, the pathologizatioon and the foisting of enormous volumes of medication on our children and youth. A good psychiatrist’s role should be as much to take patients off medication as to get them on it.

See also:

Atlas of True(?) Names

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“As reported by Der Spiegel and picked up by the New York Times blog The Lede, two German cartographers have created The Atlas of True Names, which substitutes place names around the world with glosses based on their etymological roots…”

via Language Log

Obituary: End of an aura

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bushThe Bush administration ends January 20th, and Ann Wroe will miss Dubya’s flaring nostrils.

‘With Jimmy Carter it was the teeth, big, straight and white as a set of country palings. With Richard Nixon it was the eyebrows, surely brooding on Hell. Abe Lincoln had the ears (and the beard, and the stove-pipe hat); Bill Clinton had a nose that glowed red, almost to luminousness, as his allergies assailed him. But George Bush’s most extraordinary feature was his nostrils, and they will be missed.

It is not just that they were large, and lent his face a certain simian charm. They were also uncontrollable. When the rest of the presidential body was encased in a sober suit, and the rest of the presidential face had assumed an expression appropriate to taking the oath of office, or rescuing banks, or declaring to terrorists that they could run but they couldn’t hide, the nostrils would suddenly flare and smirk, as if Mr Bush was about to burst out with something outrageous or obscene, or flash a high-five, or hail his deputy chief of staff as “Turd blossom”.’

via The Economist

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Alone Together

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Under neon loneliness...

“Manhattan is the capital of people living by themselves. But are New Yorkers lonelier? Far from it, say a new breed of loneliness researchers, who argue that urban alienation is largely a myth.”

via New York Magazine

The author argues that loneliness is relative. Just as widows do better in a housing development with alot of widows, people living alone do better in New York, with the largest proportion of single-person households in any major city (around 1:2). And suicide rates, which since Emile Durkheim‘s classic sociological study Suicide have been tied to loneliness and isolation, run at a lower rate in New York than other urban areas.

America’s Anthropological President

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Barack Obama and Maya Soetoro w...Barack Obama and Maya Soetoro with their
mother Ann Dunham and grandfather Stanley Dunham
in Hawaii (early 1970s).

‘Ruth Behar, a filmmaker, poet, and anthropologist based at the University of Michigan, offers an interesting take on the fact of Obama’s anthropological matrilineage — and uses that fact to make a policy plea:

“The fact that Barack Obama’s mother was a cultural anthropologist has been noted with curiosity and amusement. A few commentators dismiss her anthropology credentials by describing her as part of a radical American fringe, while others represent her favorably, but as ‘unconventional’, ‘free-spirited’, or ‘bohemian’. That reputation is based on her two brief (and interracial) marriages and her wanderings through Javanese villages in an era when the stay-at-home mom was the public model of the American mother. Many now find it difficult to comprehend her passion for her adopted culture and her desire to live for years among the subjects of her research and advocacy work, though what she did was nothing out of the ordinary within anthropology.

“As a cultural anthropologist, I think Obama’s family background is something to celebrate. But even more important, I think the time is ripe for cultural anthropology to become a fundamental part of American education and public culture. Anthropology needs to be taught alongside math, science, language arts, and history as early as elementary school and definitely throughout the high-school years. Its insights about the perils of ethnocentrism, racialization, and exoticized stereotypes need to become part of our everyday vocabulary.” ‘

via Chronicle of Higher Education

Did his mother’s anthropological roots contribute to Barack Obama’s thoughtfulness and genuinely multiracial embrace? Arguably; and I agree with the implication that anthropology, often dissed as the stepchild social science because of its jargon, politicization and general self-indulgence, should be a core part of education, given its potential to impart cultural sensitivity and an appreciation of relativism. My undergraduate degree was in social anthropology (as I have written here before I was lucky enough to live in several indigenous cultures doing ethnographic fieldwork for my undergraduate thesis) and I think it has shaped my thinking in a pivotal way, informing my cosmology, spirituality, epistemology, and politics as well as my practice of psychiatry (which in some ways I approach as a cross-cultural exercise).

Lebensraum, 21st Century Style

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Seoul is a leading financial center in Asia an...Seoul, Korea

“Rich countries launch great land grab to safeguard food supply: Rich governments and corporations are triggering alarm for the poor as they buy up the rights to millions of hectares of agricultural land in developing countries in an effort to secure their own long-term food supplies.

The head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, Jacques Diouf, has warned that the controversial rise in land deals could create a form of “neo-colonialism”, with poor states producing food for the rich at the expense of their own hungry people.

Rising food prices have already set off a second “scramble for Africa“. This week, the South Korean firm Daewoo Logistics announced plans to buy a 99-year lease on a million hectares in Madagascar. Its aim is to grow 5m tonnes of corn a year by 2023, and produce palm oil from a further lease of 120,000 hectares (296,000 acres), relying on a largely South African workforce. Production would be mainly earmarked for South Korea, which wants to lessen dependence on imports.”

via Guardian.UK

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Holocaust: Get Over It

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Masada, Southern Israel 1978Masada, Southern Israel 1978

Israel is “held hostage by memory” and should get over the Holocaust, a former speaker of the Knesset says. In a column and a new book, he says Israelis are so bent on “never again” becoming victims that they’ve become blind to injustice or suffering that does not involve Jews. What about Israel’s humanistic founding values?

via Los Angeles Times

I rebelled against the Judaism I was taught in my youth precisely because of the meaninglessness of a religious identity that, as far as I could see, was grounded on nothing but having been victimized.

Hubble Captures Stunning Views of Mammoth Stars I

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“In this image released by NASA, a dust ring, seen in red, surrounds the star Fomalhaut. The star resides at the center of the image and is not visible to the human eye in this image. The Hubble telescope discovered the fuzzy image of a new planet, known as Fomalhaut b, which appears as no more than a white speck in the lower right portion of the dust ring that surrounds the star.”

via ABC News

Florida Gay Adoption Ban overturned

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Gay Adoption Map North AmericaGay Adoption Map, North America

A Miami judge ruled to permit a gay couple to adopt their two foster children, finding that the 30+-year ban on gay couples adopting in Florida violated their right to equal protection under the law. “Expert” testimony from a psychologist on the instability of homosexuals and the poor outcomes when they raise children was deemed not credible. This is not the first gay adoption that has been permitted in Florida in contravention of the state law, but in the previous case the state decided not to contest the ruling. In the current case, the attorney general has already indicated that Florida will appeal. The wingnuts are already talking about “a classic case of judicial activism,” which is a four-letter word.

via Florida Baptist Witness

FDA Scientists Revolt Against Corrupt Food and Drug Administration Officials

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An overview of the structure of DNA.

‘A group of scientists working in the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health division has revolted against the corrupt managers of its own department, accusing them of committing crimes by claiming, “There is extensive documentary evidence that managers at CDRH have corrupted and interfered with the scientific review of medical devices.”

The letter from the FDA’s own scientists goes on to say, “It is evident that managers at CDRH have deviated from FDA’s mission to identify and address underlying problems with medical devices before they cause irreparable harm, and this deviation has placed the American people at risk.” ‘

via Natural News

Wall of shame, psychiatric version

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{{w|Skeletal formula}} of {{w|risperidone}}. C...Risperidone

These are some of the most influential men in psychiatry. Trainees have been taught to reference their journal articles as authoritative. And, I believe, this is just the tip of the iceberg:

Related:

Five Physics Lessons for Obama

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Chandra X-ray image of the supernovas remnant ...

“Everyone expects the U.S. president to know the difference between Sunni and Shiite, or understand the causes of the financial meltdown. But in today’s high-tech world, many critical issues have more to do with electrons than economics. Here are five short physics lessons for President-elect Obama from the author of Physics for Future Presidents.”

via Foreign Policy

Pro-Life = Pro-Choice?

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The New York Times cover page from January 23,...Roe v. Wade headline, 1973Hendrik Hertzberg:

“…here is Kathryn Jean (K-Lo) Lopez, head honcha of National Review Online, explaining why Governor Palin is her leader:

What is it about Sarah?

For many folks on the Right, she represented an influx of social conservatism in the campaign. All she had to do was arrive at the scene with her son Trig to demonstrate her pro-life bona fides. Some estimated 90 percent of Americans faced with the knowledge that they might give birth to a child with Down Syndrome wouldn’t have made the choice she and her husband, Todd, did to let the child live.

I detect some assumptions here. (1) Palin’s carrying Trig to term was a choice. (2) The choice was hers and her husband’s to make, not God’s or the government’s. (3) She deserves praise for having chosen the choice she chose.

But if Palin (and Lopez) were truly “pro-life”—if they truly believed that abortion, especially elective abortion in the first trimester, is murder or at least unjustifiable homicide—then having Trig was not a choice. It was a simple matter of obedience to God’s law, which is infinitely more sacrosanct than man’s law. Palin no more deserves praise for it than I deserve praise for not having lately gunned down any friends, colleagues, or strangers.

What this demonstrates is that even in the minds of anti-abortion zealots, abortion is now implicitly viewed in the same light as divorce: an unfortunate choice, a reprehensible choice, a choice that may even contravene the will of God, but still a choice. And, again implicitly, the choice that Sarah Palin had every right to make. In both directions.

This is why, even if Roe v. Wade is eventually overturned, it will always be legal to get an abortion somewhere in the United States of America.”

via The New Yorker

Why mailmen don’t deliver the mail

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Ma and Gary

“The recent discovery in Bonny Doon, Calif., of a former mail carrier’s old stash was not exactly unprecedented. There’s also the recent arrest of a Detroit postal carrier who squirreled away 9,000 pieces of mail into a storage locker, a work dodge worthy of a Seinfeld plot. A week earlier, a postman was nailed for hoarding 27,000 letters in Leeds, England; the week before that revealed a postal hoarder with 20,000 letters in Frankfurt, Germany. (“[He] didn’t deliver mail addressed to himself either,” a police statement dryly noted.) And all of them were dwarfed by the North Carolina postman who admitted in August to filling his garage and burying in his backyard nearly a tractor trailer’s worth of undelivered junk mail.”

via Slate

Fossils Are Fine; a Live Beastie Is Better

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Neanderthal

“A researcher at Pennsylvania State University, Stephan Schuster, said in the journal Nature last week that he might be able to regenerate a mammoth from ancient DNA for just $10 million. Given that Chicago’s Field Museum, with the help of McDonald’s and Walt Disney, recently paid $8.36 million for an especially fine Tyrannosaurus rex fossil, Dr. Schuster should be able to sell a pack of live mammoths to zoo managers around the world.

For making the past come alive, a mammoth is a good start, but it’s just a hairy elephant. What other extinct species would be good to have around again? Herein, a wish list.

via NY Times

Christians AGAINST Cartoons!

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A clay animation scene from a Finnish TV comme...A friend (thanks, julia), who herself happens to be a cartoonist, forwarded a link to this site to me and also mentioned she knows the writer of Pharyngula and had sent it his way. (Coincidentally, Pharyngula is on my reading list and I had already seen the blink to the CAC site there.) With Pharyngula having a much larger readership than FmH (or at least a more vocal readership), there have been in excess of a hundred comments to the post over there. Like my take on it, opinion is running in favor of its being a parody. Especially telling is that one reader tracked down the registered owner of the CAC domain and reports that it belongs to an animation studio! In any case, I learned a new, very useful, concept from the comments — Poe’s Law.

It’s beginning to feel alot like Christmas…

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Best of 2007…and the end-of-year best-of lists are starting to appear. I won’t even try to point to individual lists because in this weblogging era so many come tumbling out every day. The best aggregators are Largehearted Boy, for music, and Fimoculous, for everything. If you like that sort of thing, bookmark them and check back with them frequently, as they do obsessional running updates from now into early next year.

This Is Change?

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U.S. President Geo...

Jeremy Scahill: 20 Hawks, Clintonites and Neocons to Watch for in Obama’s White House

via AlterNet

How much solace, and for how long, will we continue to take from the ‘better than Bush’ sentiment?

How to Run a Con

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La ragazza con la valigia. Verso il '68.

“The key to a con is not that you trust the conman, but that he shows he trusts you. Conmen ply their trade by appearing fragile or needing help, by seeming vulnerable. Because of THOMAS, the human brain makes us feel good when we help others–this is the basis for attachment to family and friends and cooperation with strangers. “I need your help” is a potent stimulus for action.”

via Psychology Today

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Candace Gingrich: A Letter to My Brother Newt Gingrich

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Former Republican Spea...

“Dear Newt,

I recently had the displeasure of watching you bash the protestors of the Prop 8 marriage ban to Bill O’Reilly on FOX News. I must say, after years of watching you build your career by stirring up the fears and prejudices of the far right, I feel compelled to use the words of your idol, Ronald Reagan, “There you go, again.”

However, I realize that you may have been a little preoccupied lately with planning your resurrection as the savior of your party, so I thought I would fill you in on a few important developments you might have overlooked…”

via Huffington Post

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The Secret

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Anna as Denise Levertov

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don’t know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even

what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can’t find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.

— Denise Levertov

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged

ISS over NYC, 11/21/08 by abby

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The International Space Station passes through the New York night sky, 11-21-08.

The International Space Station passes through the New York night sky.

My friend abby said:

“I tried (you only really get one try) to get a picture. Not great, but it’s that faint streak going vertically in the middle… [ISO 50 (that was the mistake), 165 seconds, f/11, 20mm]”

Adultery for heroin users

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Heroinheroin

“A list of ingredients found by chemical analysis that have been used to cut street heroin sold in New York City from 1991 to 1996.

As reported in a 2000 review paper on trends in NYC heroin adulterants:

Acetaminophen (Analgesic)
Aminopyrine (Anti-inflammatory)
Amitryptaline (Anti-depressant)
Antipyrine (Body water measurement)
Benzoczine (Anesthetic)
Caffeine (Stimulant)
Cocaine (Stimulant)
d-metamphetamine (Stimulant)
Diphenhydramine (Anti-histamine)
Doxepin (Anesthetic)
Ephedrine (Stimulant)
Lidocaine (Anesthetic)
Hydroxyzine (Anxiety medication)
Methylparben (Chemical preservative)
Methocarbamol (Muscle relaxant)
Nabumetone (Arthritis treatment)
Nicotinamide (Coenzyme)
Phenylbutazone (Anti-inflammant)
Phenylpropanlamine (Dexatrim / caffeine)
Potassium chloride (Potassium supplement
Rocaine (Local anesthetic)
Propoxyphene (Analgesic – Darvon)
Sodium Bicarbonate (Acid indigestion)
Quinine (Malaria treatment)
Theophylline (Bronchial dialator)
Thiamine (Dietary supplement)
Thiopental (Barbiturate)
Thioridazine (Nausea medication)
Tripolidine (Allergy medication)
Disodium ethylenediame tetraacetic (Chelating agent for metals)

The study notes that the most common non-dope ingredients in street heroin are lactose, milk sugar, sucrose, cellulose, mannitol and other inert ingredients, but there is an increasing trend for heroin to contain psychoactive chemicals or additional substances to alter its effect through changing how it is absorbed into the body.

Interestingly, the paper also notes that professional heroin cutters are expensive, charging up to $20,000 for a kilo of heroin. This is likely due to the skill and knowledge needed to select ingredients that will have certain effects, which can be different for ‘smokers’, ‘snorters’ and ‘injectors’.

Ingredients that affect the vaporisation point of heroin will be more important for smokers, while adulterants that increase absorption through the nasal passages will obviously be more important for snorters.

For injectors, cutters need to be able to select ingredients that aren’t going to gum up needles or cause too much damage to the users’ veins.

Additionally, some ingredients are added purely for their psychoactive effect to give a different experience and ‘brand’ the dope.

However, owing to the cost of a professional cutter, some dealers just cut it themselves with whatever they think is reasonable, meaning all kinds of potentially fatal ingredients end up in the average bag of smack.”

Via Mind Hacks

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Florida Teen Live-Streams His Suicide Online

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‘A Florida teenager who used a webcam to live-stream his suicide Wednesday was reportedly encouraged by other people on the Web site, authorities told ABCNews.com.

Authorities say approximately 1,300 people watch as the boy takes his life.

"People were egging him on and saying things like 'go ahead and do it, faggot,' said Wendy Crane, an investigator at the Broward County Medical Examiner's office.

Abraham Biggs, 19, of Pembroke Pines, Fla., had been blogging on an online body-building message board and had linked to his page on Justin.tv, a live video streaming Web site, where the camera rolled as he overdosed on prescription pills, according to Crane.

Biggs, who had reportedly been discussing his suicide on the forums, also posted a suicide note on a body-building forum, which has since been taken down, in which he wrote, "I hate myself and I hate living." ‘

via ABC News

Deja vu tied to familiarity with past

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The human brain

“In a report, published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, Anne Cleary of Colorado State University says deja vu may occur when aspects of a current situation resemble aspects of previously occurring situations — the more overlap between the elements of the new and old situations the stronger the feeling of familiarity”

via UPI

I haven’t read the research paper; just this account in the popular press. But it seems problematic. Most people I know can tell the difference between a deja vu experience and something reminding them of something from the past. The first response when something feels familiar is to ask what it could possibly be reminiscent of. The deja vu experience is so uncanny precisely because of that distinction — the nature of the situation promoting the sense of familiarity is one in which, after consideration, you know it cannot possibly be reminiscent of anything. It is more likely the case that deja vu represents a malfunction of the machinery of recognition or familiarity in the brain, in which the sensation of familiarity is too readily activated in inappropriate (i.e. novel) situations. This occurs, for example, in temporal lobe epilepsy, because the abnormal electrical activity autonomately activates areas of the brain associated with memory and recognition without the usual input. The research referenced here seems to misunderstand a fundamental aspect of deja vu, in short. This is my take on contemporary psychological research alot of the time. Hmmm, doesn’t that sound familiar?

Related:

Palin’s turkey pardon interview too grisly for some

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Thanksgiving dinner FOR the turkeys, part 1

“Alaska Governor Sarah Palin pardoned a turkey Thursday ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday but another turkey didn’t fare as well.

Warning: video could be disturbing to viewers

The governor was being interviewed by a local television news station while the work of the Triple-D Farm and Hatchery continued. That’s when Governor Palin found herself in a less than desirable spot for the interview.

Just minutes after pardoning one turkey, a farm worker began processing another turkey just a few feet behind her, plainly visible in the background of the video.”

via kare11.com | Twin Cities [thanks, walker]

An Epidemic of Depression?

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baldclutchIn an abbreviated version of the argument they expound in their book The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Misery Into Depressive Disorder, psychologists Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield say that the epidemic of depression arises from changes in the definition of the disorder, and specifically the loss of context. There is a bereavement exclusion but it is the only place where psychiatrists recognize that there is a difference between a ‘normal’ reaction to a painful loss and a depressive disorder. In fact, in my training, the ‘naive’ comment, “You would be sad too if that was going on in your life” was presented derisively as the caricature of ignorance about depression. The ‘bible’ of psychiatric diagnoses, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), currently in its fourth edition, devalued the time-honored recognition by physicians that the context in which symptoms arose was an important considderation in determining whether what the person was experiencing was normal. This goes hand in hand with other pressures in my field to medicalize and pathologize normal emotional reactions, of which I have written with concern here in the past.

via Psychiatric Times

How a camera can ‘steal’ your keys

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What's On Your Keys?

‘Scientists in California have developed a software algorithm that automatically creates a physical key based solely on a picture of one, regardless of angle or distance. The project, called Sneakey, was meant to warn people about the dangers of haphazardly placing keys in the open or posting images of them online.

“People will post pictures with their credit cards but with the name and number greyed out,” said Stefan Savage, a professor at the University of California, San Diego who helped develop the software. “They should have the same sensitivity with their keys.” ‘

via MSNBC

The Cure Was Worse than The Disease

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PyridostigminePyridostigmine

“The Gulf War illness was real and was caused by pyridostigmine bromide pills taken by U.S. troops to neutralize the effects of nerve gas attacks and by exposure to neurotoxic insecticides, according to a VA advisory panel.”

via MedPage Today

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What Zawahiri’s Message Says About Obama and Al Qaeda

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Ilan Goldenberg:Ayman Al-Zawahiri

“Al Qaeda’s narrative is now under siege and it’s clearly uncertain about how to react. The election of the first African American President, one with a Muslim father, flies in the face of this narrative. It shows America as an open and tolerant society – not the oppressive empire Al Qaeda would like to portray. In fact, the overwhelmingly positive international reaction to Obama’s election is proof of the the threat Al Qaeda faces. ..

Thus, it’s not surprising that Zawahiri has resorted to calling Obama a “house negro” to try and paint him as just another American President. But this is clearly more a defensive and weak message than effective propaganda that might actually work.”

via Huffington Post

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‘How Obama Got Elected’

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“…a slick right wing site that claims the liberal media and ignorant voters are the only reason a guy with “limited experience, extreme liberal positions and radical political alliances could be elected President.” Are you serious? African chanting to start a video attacking Obama?! And then interviews with a handful of Obama supporters to “prove” they are ignorant? Why don’t we interview the millions of Americans who think Obama is a Muslim to prove the media has a right wing bias? Ignorance has no party allegiance.”

via BuzzFeed via walker

Related:

‘python bites fence’ photo

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“Had previously seen this photo on TV but only recently found a version on the web. Apparently, the 4-m-long snake – which had recently eaten a female impala – is dead and died after trying to pass through the electric fence it is ‘attacking’. This all happened on Silent Valley Ranch in the Waterberg mountains of South Africa. A few photos exist showing people touching the dead snake, and it was cut open to reveal the impala inside [go here], so despite my initial scepticism I currently think all of this is true… Incidentally, rock pythons do sometimes swallow male impala, horns and all. What happens then? The antelope’s horns may fatally pierce the stomach and body wall (Mattison 1995), but such piercings are not always fatal: remarkably, the injuries may heal after the offending horns drop off as the prey’s body decomposes inside the snake (Isemonger 1962).”

via Tetrapod Zoology (ScienceBlogs)

The New Post Racial Politics

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Sam Smith:

“With the resignation by Obama of his Senate seat we now find ourselves with our first black president-elect and not one black senator. If the Senate was representative of our national demographics, there would be 12 black senators. Over the past century there have been 78 years without a black senator. A reminder that breaking the glass ceiling does not necessarily unlock the doors.”

via Undernews

Paranoia on the rise, experts say

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Paranoia

“Paranoia, once assumed to afflict only schizophrenics, may be a lot more common than previously thought.

According to British psychologist Daniel Freeman, nearly one in four Londoners regularly have paranoid thoughts. Freeman is a paranoia expert at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College and the author of a book on the subject.

Experts say there is a wide spectrum of paranoia, from the dangerous delusions that drive schizophrenics to violence to the irrational fears many people have daily.

“We are now starting to discover that madness is human and that we need to look at normal people to understand it,” said Dr. Jim van Os, a professor of psychiatry at Maastricht University in the Netherlands…”

via Las Vegas Sun

Midnight Hour

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“Bush has entered into his own midnight period, and it promises to be a dark time indeed. Among the many new regulations—or, rather, deregulations—the Administration has proposed are rules that would:

  • make it harder for the government to limit workers’ exposure to toxins,
  • eliminate environmental review from decisions affecting fisheries,
  • and ease restrictions on companies that blow up mountains to get at the coal underneath them.

Other midnight regulations in the works include

  • rules to allow “factory farms” to ignore the Clean Water Act,
  • rules making it tougher for employees to take family or medical leave
  • and rules that would effectively gut the Endangered Species Act.

Most regulations are subject to public input; such is the sense of urgency that the Administration has brought to the task of despoliation that the Interior Department completed its “review” of two hundred thousand public comments on the endangered-species rules in just four days, a feat that, one congressional aide calculated, required each staff member involved to read through comments at the rate of seven per minute. “So little time, so much damage” is how the Times recently put it.”

via The New Yorker

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Cortex, Volume 44, Issue 10 (November-December 2008)

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Example of a subject in a Ganzfeld experiment.Ganzfeld experiment

This is a special issue on the ‘Neuropsychology of Paranormal Experiences and Beliefs’

Contents include:

  • The paranormal mind: How the study of anomalous experiences and beliefs may inform cognitive neuroscience (Peter Brugger, Christine Mohr)
  • Visual attentional capture predicts belief in a meaningful world (Paola Bressan, Peter Kramer, Mara Germani)
  • Sentences with core knowledge violations increase the size of N400 among paranormal believers (Marjaana Lindeman, Sebastian Cederström, Petteri Simola, Anni Simula, Sara Ollikainen, Tapani Riekki)
  • Apophenia, theory of mind and schizotypy: Perceiving meaning and intentionality in randomness (Sophie Fyfe, Claire Williams, Oliver J. Mason, Graham J. Pickup)
  • Believing in paranormal phenomena: Relations to asymmetry of body and brain (Günter Schulter, Ilona Papousek)
  • Paranormal experience and the COMT dopaminergic gene: A preliminary attempt to associate phenotype with genotype using an underlying brain theory (Amir Raz, Terence Hines, John Fossella, Daniella Castro)
  • Event-related potential correlates of paranormal ideation and unusual experiences (Alex Sumich, Veena Kumari, Evian Gordon, Nigel Tunstall, Michael Brammer)
  • The transliminal brain at rest: Baseline EEG, unusual experiences, and access to unconscious mental activity (Jessica I. Fleck, Deborah L. Green, Jennifer L. Stevenson, Lisa Payne, Edward M. Bowden, Mark Jung-Beeman, John Kounios)
  • Ganzfeld-induced hallucinatory experience, its phenomenology and cerebral electrophysiology (Jirí Wackermann, Peter Pütz, Carsten Allefeld)
  • Magical ideation and hyperacusis (Stéphanie Dubal, Isabelle Viaud-Delmon)
  • Psychological aspects of the alien contact experience (Christopher C. French, Julia Santomauro, Victoria Hamilton, Rachel Fox, Michael A. Thalbourne)

Highlights include:

  • part of the variance of strength of belief in paranormal phenomena can be explained by patterns of functional hemispheric asymmetry that may be related to perturbations during fetal development
  • an inconclusive attempt to correlate a specific phenotype concerning paranormal belief with a dopaminergic gene (COMT) known for its involvement in prefrontal executive cognition and for a polymorphism that is positively correlated with suggestibility.
  • a study concluding that (a) religious people have a stronger belief in meaningfulness of coincidences, indicative of a more general tendency to maintain strong schemata, and that (b) this belief leads them to suppress, ignore, or forget information that has demonstrably captured their attention, but happens to be inconsistent with their schemata.
  • electrophysiological findings suggesting that paranormalideation may be associated with alteration in contextual updating processes, and that nusual experiences may reflect altered sensory/early-attention (N100) mechanisms.
  • EEG patterns of subjects with high levels of belief in paranormal phenomena and more frequent unusual experiences were similar to those found in schizophrenic-spectrum disorders.
  • People reporting contact with aliens (‘Experiencers’), compared with matched controls, were found to show higher levels of dissociativity, absorption, paranormal belief, paranormal experience, self-reported psychic ability, fantasy proneness, tendency to hallucinate, and self-reported incidence of sleep paralysis.
Related:

Team of Frenemies

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Maureen Dowd:

“Running for the Senate and the presidency, Hillary felt entitled to get money, endorsements and support because she was the wife of Bill Clinton — and at times the victim of Bill Clinton.

If she became secretary of state, she would be getting the job despite her husband — and because of her own transformation in the primaries from a legacy applicant to a scrappy one.”

via NY Times op-ed

Wrangling over psychiatry’s bible

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Light bedtime reading

“Over the summer, a wrangle between eminent psychiatrists that had been brewing for months erupted in print. Startled readers of Psychiatric News saw the spectacle unfold in the journal’s normally less-dramatic pages. The bone of contention: whether the next revision of America’s psychiatric bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, should be done openly and transparently so mental health professionals and the public could follow along, or whether the debates should be held in secret.

One of the psychiatrists (former editor Robert Spitzer) wanted transparency; several others, including the president of the American Psychiatric Assn. and the man charged with overseeing the revisions (Darrel Regier), held out for secrecy. Hanging in the balance is whether, four years from now, a set of questionable behaviors with names such as “Apathy Disorder,” “Parental Alienation Syndrome,” “Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder,” “Compulsive Buying Disorder,” “Internet Addiction” and “Relational Disorder” will be considered full-fledged psychiatric illnesses.

This may sound like an arcane, insignificant spat about nomenclature. But the manual is in fact terribly important, and the debates taking place have far-reaching consequences.”

via Los Angeles Times

Related:

Choose nonviolence — it works best

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“Nonviolent resistance is not only the morally superior choice. It is also twice as effective as the violent variety.

That’s the startling and reassuring discovery by Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth, who analyzed an astonishing 323 resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006.”

via Green Change

God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule

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A Palestinian...

‘ “I tried to put it in the simplest possible terms for you people, so you’d get it straight, because I thought it was pretty important,” said God, called Yahweh and Allah respectively in the Judaic and Muslim traditions. “I guess I figured I’d left no real room for confusion after putting it in a four-word sentence with one-syllable words, on the tablets I gave to Moses. How much more clear can I get?”

“But somehow, it all gets twisted around and, next thing you know, somebody’s spouting off some nonsense about, ‘God says I have to kill this guy, God wants me to kill that guy, it’s God’s will,'” God continued. “It’s not God’s will, all right? News flash: ‘God’s will’ equals ‘Don’t murder people.'” ‘

via The Onion

Say Goodbye to BlackBerry?

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BlackBerry user Dou...

If Obama Has to, Yes He Can. ” ‘Sorry, Mr. President. Please surrender your BlackBerry.’ Those are seven words President-elect Barack Obama is dreading but expecting to hear, friends and advisers say, when he takes office in 65 days.

…[B]efore he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.

For all the perquisites and power afforded the president, the chief executive of the United States is essentially deprived by law and by culture of some of the very tools that other chief executives depend on to survive and to thrive. Mr. Obama, however, seems intent on pulling the office at least partly into the 21st century on that score; aides said he hopes to have a laptop computer on his desk in the Oval Office, making him the first American president to do so.” (New York Times )

Smile, You’re Under Arrest

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America's Meanest Sheriff

“The latest TV show planned for US cable network FOX has the working title of Smile, You’re Under Arrest, and involves wanted criminals being tricked into elaborate fantasy scenarios, at the end of which they are arrested.

One of three set-ups just shot in Arizona features the cops luring a criminal to a movie set with the promise of making him an extra and paying him a couple hundred dollars. An elaborate film set is staged and filming begins on a faux movie. The set-up continues as the director then gets mad at the lead actor, fires him and replaces him with the law-breaking extra.

The scene escalates with the fake director introducing the mark to a supposed studio mogul and continuing to create this dream-comes-true sequence. Finally, all the participants are revealed as officers of the law, and the criminal is apprehended (before signing waivers to let the footage be used in the show).

“If it were a regular person you’d feel bad for them, but they are all wanted by the law,” Darnell says. “It’s Cops as comedy and no one’s ever tried it before.”

How did FOX manage to get a police department to divert resources to such a programme? Well, the department involved is the Maricopa County Sherriff’s Office, run by Sherriff Joe Arpaio, whose spectacularly harsh treatment of offenders has made him the darling of America’s more brutally-minded. And now FOX, who are no strangers to brutality, are going to make him more of a star. Perhaps watching Jack Bauer torture Arabs doesn’t do it any more or something.

I half-wonder whether this is part of a strategy leading up to Arpaio getting on the Republican Presidential ticket for 2012. There were rumours that FOX was going to buff Sarah Palin’s image by giving her a national TV talk show, though if she looks too much like damaged goods, they could want another conservative firebrand who appeals to the culture-war conservatives.”

via The Null Device

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McCartney wants world to hear ‘lost’ Beatles epic

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“For Beatles fans across the world it has gained near mythical status. The 14-minute improvised track called ‘Carnival of Light’ was recorded in 1967 and played just once in public. It was never released because three of the Fab Four thought it too adventurous.

The track, a jumble of shrieks and psychedelic effects, is said to be as far from the melodic ballads that made Sir Paul McCartney famous as it is possible to imagine. But now McCartney has said that the public will have the chance to judge for themselves.”

via The Observer

Uncontacted Amazonian tribe victor in legal battle it didn’t file

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“A small tribe of Indians in Paraguay who have had virtually no contact with the outside world won a legal battle this week when rights groups stopped a Brazilian company from continuing to bulldoze the forest to clear land for cattle ranches.

About 2,000 members of the Ayoreo ethnic group live in 13 settlements in Bolivia and Paraguay.

About 2,000 members of the Ayoreo ethnic group live in 13 settlements in Bolivia and Paraguay.

The Totobiegosode tribe, said to number no more than 300, is the last group of uncontacted Indians in South America outside the Amazon River basin, indigenous rights groups say.

The Totobiegosode, who are part of the larger Ayoreo ethnic group, are nomadic Indians who hunt and fish, as well as gather fruit and honey and cultivate small temporary plots during the rainy season. They live communally, four to six families to a dwelling, in the dense forests of northwestern Paraguay.”

via CNN

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