If this is true, Jason Leopold of truthout has a scoop, in reporting that Fitzgerald told Rove attorneys he had 24 hours to get his affairs in order. As of this posting, any other references on the web to a Rove indictment are just citing Leopold. If Rove is served, can a Presidential pardon be far behind?

Update, also from Leopold:

Rove informs White House He Will Be Indicted: “Karl Rove told President Bush and Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, as well as a few other high level administration officials, within the last week that he will be indicted in the CIA leak case and will immediately resign his White House job when the special counsel publicly announces the charges against him, according to people knowledgeable about these discussions.” (truthout)

The Age [thanks to acm] takes an in-depth look at modafinil — the first eugeroic (“good wakefulness”) drug, which puts us on a new threshold in psychopharmacology. This drug promotes quiet wakefulness and seems to allow the body to get away with prolonged sleep deprivation seemingly without paying the price, and its enormous popularity makes the intended recipients — patients with medical conditions disturbing wakefulness, such as narcolepsy — a minute proportion of its actual users.

Although the ‘balance’ in the article consists of the comments of only one nay-sayer, I agree in finding it hard to understand how such a core biological necessity as restorative sleep, which has been rigidly conserved in evolution, can be cheated substantially without any biological or psychological consequences.

We think this medication is a dopamine reuptake blocker, but why it does not appear to induce the jangly tension that other dopaminergic stimulants such as the amphetamines do, why it does not induce tolerance (the need for larger and larger doses to produce the same effect over time) and dependency (a withdrawal reaction and rebound symptoms after it is stopped) with prolonged use, as do other dopaminergic drugs, is not at all clear. Of course, it has not been used long enough by a large enough number of people for us to be confident that its long term effects are already apparent. Yet, as the author puts it, we are too far down the path to the “24-hour society”, in which wakefulness is cool and sleep is not, to stop this juggernaut, its coming competitors and its flipside companions, the newer better sleep aids.

Targeting Myspace and social networking sites (CNET News ). Schools and libraries would have to render the sites inaccessible to minors under a new bill (backed by Dennis Hastert and so having a high likelihood of passage), the Deleting Online Predators Act. As Declan McCullagh points out, not only sites that let users create public “Web pages or profiles” but those that offer discussion boards, chat rooms or email services. It could target any weblog that allows public comments and discussion, for example.

Among other issues Hacking considers is why autism is being diagnosed more often; what it means for a diagnosis to be in vogue; and how autism might be a key to understanding the human mind. Is autism that one recovers from, or an autistic-spectrum disorder with preservation of intellect, somewhere in the spectrum of the same neurobiological condition, or something different?

“Grisly figures from the first systematic survey of early Neolithic British skulls reveal that life then was no rural idyll.” (New Scientist) Muggings were rife, deaths from assault-related head injuries a common cause of death. In and of itself this information is not telling, but it certainly does some harm to the myth of the Neolithic pastorale and the notion that scourges such as war and crime are products of the rise of the city-state, domestication and agriculture, and social class distinctions.

The news broke after an anonymous source with direct knowledge of the arrangement tipped the press that the phone companies had been turning over the records to the NSA. Let us hope this is, at minimum, a “growing impediment” to Hayden’s confirmation, as Dianne Feinstein put it.

Jesse Kornbluth is not apologetic for being ‘shrill’ and ‘partisan’, as accusers complain:

My sentiments exactly.

“…[M]ost dolphins recognized names — their signature whistles — even when emitted without inflection or other vocal cues. More than that, two dolphins may refer to a third by the third animal’s name…” (Yahoo! News) That last fact, for me, crosses the line to convince me that these are true names rather than just learned behavioral cues to a specific other individual’s presence.

New study endorses medication’s efficacy. In a complex design in which it was compared with behavioral treatment/counseling and acamprosate, another medication marketed for relapse prevention in alcoholism, the opiate blocker Revia (naltrexone) gets the nod as helpful. I use this medication for this purpose but have always puzzled about various aspects of how it works if it does.

First of all, as an endogenous opiate blocker, it supposedly blocks some of the activity of the internal reward system and thus diminishes the satisfaction connected with alcohol abuse. But why does it not block most satisfaction in the person’s life if that is the case? There is nothing specific about the effects of alcohol on the endogenous reward system; it responds generically to rewards.

Secondly, addictive behaviors pretty quickly pass beyond the stage of being rewarding; most people persist in abusing addictive drugs because they would be sick or in distress if they stopped. How would a reward blocker matter in such a case? I know I am speaking pretty schematically here, but I need to have some conviction I understand how a medication is supposed to work on a neurochemical basis before I will recommend it to my patients. That is partly because I believe that any medication works less well, or not at all, if the user does not have a belief in its effectiveness. In psychiatric treatment, where most classes of medications were discovered serendipitously and explanations derived after the fact, that is a particular problem.

The effects of naltrexone are modest at best; several studies have found that, while as in this study it was better than acamprosate, the combination of the two is far better than either alone in reducing the frequency and severity of alcoholic relapses. And the benefits usually are more robust in more severe alcoholism.

“Britain’s state-financed dental service, …stretched beyond its limit, no longer serves everyone and no longer even pretends to try.” (New York Times )

And neither, for that matter, does the United States’! None of my MassHealth (the version of Medicaid here) patients have any dental benefits, and it is getting more and more difficult to find even emergency services for them. From time to time, the underlying reason why someone presents to me with a mental health problem such as despondency or suicidality, alcohol or drug abuse (which MassHealth still pays for) is agonizing dental disease. When I can arrange to treat the ‘root cause’ [pun intended], it is only because I have begged and pleaded, calling in a favor from a dentist or dental surgeon colleague. More often, regrettably, the patient leaves the psychiatric service in as much mouth pain as when they came in, my efforts to go beyond merely patching them up to no avail. But I guess that is no different from many of the insoluble socioeconomic problems that are the real foundations of some of the mental illnesses I try to treat.

Addendum: Walker pointed me toward a particularly apt quote from Malcolm Gladwell’s <a href=”http://www.gladwell.com/2005/2005_08_29_a_hazard.html
” title=””>”The Moral Hazard Myth”:

I can’t help thinking that part of the impetus to accept moderation instead of abstinence comes from the growing prominence of pharmacological approaches to addiction which either moderate the desire or reward; or substitute a ‘more benign’ addiction for a more destructive one.

While the article does not detail what those advances in the understanding of consciousness are, my guess is that they relate to functional brain imaging of conscious mental activity. Nevertheless, I doubt that we will see surgeons obtaining PET scans or fMRIs of patients under general anaesthesia on the operating room gurney anytime soon. Consciousness researchers and surgeons couldn’t be further apart in the medical realm, methinks…

Some procedures are done under ‘conscious sedation,’ either because they are painfree or because they can be done with regional anaesthesia such as a nerve block. In some neurosurgical procedures, it is necessary that the patient be able to carry out actions on command to make sure that the surgeons are not messing about with the wrong parts of the brain.

But to be immobilized, conscious and feeling the pain of the surgical incisions would be the ultimate torture, to my mind. I have never seen or heard an interview with a patient who has been through that, but thinking about it inspires the kind of visceral horror that I imagine motivated those who fought for the abolition of vivisection.

In his first new album in six years, which the New York Times reviewer describes as “an ambitious and challenging work full of sonic experimentation and oblique lyrics”, Paul Simon is found working with Brian Eno.

New study endorses medication’s efficacy. In a complex design in which it was compared with behavioral treatment/counseling and acamprosate, another medication marketed for relapse prevention in alcoholism, the opiate blocker Revia (naltrexone) gets the nod as helpful. I use this medication for this purpose but have always puzzled about various aspects of how it works if it does.

First of all, as an endogenous opiate blocker, it supposedly blocks some of the activity of the internal reward system and thus diminishes the satisfaction connected with alcohol abuse. But why does it not block most satisfaction in the person’s life if that is the case? There is nothing specific about the effects of alcohol on the endogenous reward system; it responds generically to rewards.

Secondly, addictive behaviors pretty quickly pass beyond the stage of being rewarding; most people persist in abusing addictive drugs because they would be sick or in distress if they stopped. How would a reward blocker matter in such a case? I know I am speaking pretty schematically here, but I need to have some conviction I understand how a medication is supposed to work on a neurochemical basis before I will recommend it to my patients. That is partly because I believe that any medication works less well, or not at all, if the user does not have a belief in its effectiveness. In psychiatric treatment, where most classes of medications were discovered serendipitously and explanations derived after the fact, that is a particular problem.

The effects of naltrexone are modest at best; several studies have found that, while as in this study it was better than acamprosate, the combination of the two is far better than either alone in reducing the frequency and severity of alcoholic relapses. And the benefits usually are more robust in more severe alcoholism.

And: Bush CIA Pick is Domestic Spying Advocate (New York Times )

“Despite a troubled history, police across the nation are keeping tabs on ordinary Americans” (US News)

“Jews in particular need to be aware of the gift Brown has given, in all innocence, to anti-Semites.” (The Jewish Week thanks to walker)

FmH was ‘today’s blog’ a couple of days ago at Interrupting Gelastic Jew:

Actually, although I am no less dripping with contempt for Bush and Co., it seems to me I am venting it much less here these days. It is pretty well established that he is the worst president in recent history, if not in the history of the American presidency. I am far more concerned about, and contemptuous of, the sheeplike and cowardly electorate who elected him nearly elected him twice and demoralized by the futility of influencing the voters’ receptivity to be sold down the river by such an obvious scam artist.

In my earlier post on sudoku below, I referred to Brian Hayes’ column on the mathematical concepts behind it. Here is Hayes’ American Scientist essay:

A tour of 20th-century musical composition by The New Yorker‘s music critic, Alex Ross. (The Rest Is Noise)

An Indie-Rock Festival With Room for Madonna: “This was an indie-rock festival, 94 acts on five stages, and the operation was delicate: a sleek round of commerce for the taste-making class. Yet Madonna and Kanye West played here this year, and they encountered even more love than the alternative-rock groups that are at the heart of this festival.” (But, rumor has it (HuffPo ), Madonna altered the lyrics of one of her songs to tell her audience to go to Texas and “suck George Bush’s dick…”, although discreet asterisks were used in the reportage…)

Philip Weiss’ answer to the critics of Walt and Mearsheimer: “Given the paper’s parentage, the ferment over it raises political questions. How did these ideas get to center stage? And what do they suggest about the character of the antiwar intelligentsia?” (The Nation)

Add your name to Juan Cole’s petition: “This petition calls on the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations to forthrightly condemn the castigation of Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt as anti-Semites for their academic paper, ‘The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy.'”

(The Huffington Post)

“The Saddest Thing I Own invites people everywhere to share the saddest thing they own. What are these sad things? What makes things sad? Do things start off sad? Do some sad things begin as happy things that then become sad? Are some things only sad because for some sad reason we kept them? Are some things just plain sad no matter what? This is what we want to know.” [via boing boing]

Theresa has been keeping this running list; proof that many write with no ‘malice of forethought’. (Making Light)

“The Vatican stepped up its offensive against The Da Vinci Code on Friday when a top official close to Pope Benedict blasted the book as full of anti-Christian lies and urged Catholics to boycott the film.” (Yahoo News) Okay, I’ll admit it now, I’ve finally read the book, and am looking forward to the film. From the trailers I have seen, it looks to be a pretty literal adaptation. My work as an anthropological researcher with the modern-day Maya of southern Mexico when I was a college undergrad showed me firsthand how grafting Christianity on top of indigenous spiritual beliefs as a way of getting its soul-saving foot in the door inherently co-opted those beliefs. So the broad thrust of Brown’s thesis about the Christian Church’s relationship with the ‘pagan’ beliefs it supplanted makes sense to me, as does the Church’s investment in maintaining the paradigm in the face of the current challenge. Should be fun to watch all the hubhub, as it was with the Last Temptation film some years ago.

And:

The Priory of Sion

“Ed Bradley decided to find out for himself whether or not the Priory of Sion, which is central to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code was a real organization or not.” (CBS 60 Minutes thanks to walker)

The New York Times uses Google Maps for a visual display of homicide locations in New York City over the past three years. Figure out the safest places to live in the City. Wow, nothing within a large radius of the block on which I grew up in Queens. Nothing within a mile radius or so of my best friend’s home on the Upper West Side. And nothing within a several-block radius of my brother and his wife’s home in the West Village (although he was attacked twice on his street in the last five years…)

A related article describes other findings of the Times’ analysis of the murder details.

“Over the last several decades, a small group of researchers has tried to understand how a minority of maltreated children exceed expectations.” (New York Times Magazine) A good overview of a neglected topic championed by a few. “Mental health’ research is far better at looking at the pathology, but common sense says you can’t explain why someone falls victim to suffering until you compare them with those who escape that outcome.

The study was co-funded by the NIMH and Eli Lily, the manufacturer of the antipsychotic drug used in the study. This study seems to support the notion that early detection and treatment halts disease progression. However, the low completion rate among recruited subjects prompts the obvious question — is there some correlation between the potential for early stabilization and the wherewithal to hang in there with the study. Are the counterexamples simply washing out?

A new study demonstrates the first sucessful vaccine treatment of the deadly hemorrhagic Marburg disease in monkeys. Marburg is a close relative of the gruesome and untreatable Ebola virus. (New Scientist) It should not be surprising that the research was conducted at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Will we one day in a battlefield situation see the Pentagon immunize our own fighting forces against hemorrhagic fever and somehow arrange for their opponents to be infected?

Namedropper that I am, I need to mention that the lead researcher, Charles Czeisler, was a friend of mine in college whose career of preeminence in the biology of sleep regulation and circadian rhythms I have followed with interest. The value of melatonin as a sleep aid has long been equivocal, which I think has two explanations. First, since it is sold as a dietary supplement rather than a medication, there is no quality control about the dosage or bioavailability of the active ingredient in the melatonin you buy.

Secondly, the way it works essentially involves resetting your internal clock, telling your body it is time to go to sleep. Quite simply, melatonin will not be of much use helping a person whose sleep difficulty does not relate to a circadian rhythm problem. The current study, in which thirty-six healthy participants spent three weeks living in soundproof rooms with no time clues and were put on a 20-hour sleep-wake cycle in place of the usual 24-hour cycle, showed melatonin’s efficacy in re-entraining the body’s sleep schedule. This has most relevance to shift-workers who sleep during the daylight hours and to jetlagged travellers out of synch with their new timezones, situations in which I have recommended melatonin in the past.

Walker sent me a pointer to this post from Steve Sailer’s weblog, in which he highlights a comment about the number of Mormon medical students one of his readers encountered, and how they are all so much cut from the same cloth. But there’s alot more in Steve’s post. First of all, the reader’s comment was in response to a parallel observation Steve had made about ‘Mormon Hollywood’ and in particular the ‘Mormon humor’ in the film Napoleon Dynamite (which I haven’t seen). Steve talked about the number of people in the screening laughing at jokes he didn’t get. Is the popularity of …Dynamite planting some sort of Mormon meme in teenage culture, as he implies. And I wish he had given us an example of a Mormon joke, since I would have been one of those in the audience who were clueless, I imagine.

The reader concerned about the Mormons in his medical school observes that he is encountering them everywhere in the medical world. He was beginning to surmise that the straight arrow Mormon lifestyle lent itself to a professional career path and that there are just too many professionals in Utah to hope to get a good job. That and the fact that Mormon families are having more children than the rest of the U.S. population is leading to pressure toward a diaspora of Mormons. The commenter concludes that,

“Everyone knows about the large number of Jews and Indians in medicine, but in a few years there will be a massive number of these guys too. And you probably won’t even notice it because they’ll be unassuming Northern European average white guys with nondescript last names like “Smith” and “Young.””

Now I know that Mormonism originated back east but I don’t see much evidence of it here in New England, which I assumed was because our provincialism and liberality were less hospitable ground for them. In particular, I haven’t encountered many Mormons in the academic or medical world (except for the anthropologist who was my undergraduate thesis advisor, but he was an anomaly in many ways). Could it be that they just fly below the radar, as the commenter suggests? What are your experiences with whether you notice them among you in the settings you haunt? Do I have any readers who would identify themselves as Mormons and could comment on this? I read Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven several years ago and found it a terrifying revelation about Mormonism in America, but it was focused on the fundamentalist Mormons and radical polygamists much more than the proliferating mainstream of the faith. That new HBO series (which does not seem worth watching) sounds like sitcom-level voyeurism into the polygamous lifestyle rather than much insight into the sociological phenomenon. What say you? And don’t forget to comment on what “Mormon humor” might be…

See for yourself: Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.”

Excerpt: “The greatest thing about this man is he’s steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man’s beliefs never will. As excited as I am to be here with the president, I am appalled to be surrounded by the liberal media that is destroying America, with the exception of Fox News. Fox News gives you both sides of every story: the president’s side, and the vice president’s side.”

The classic, Atlantic City-based version of the game will apparently still be sold as well.

Two problems with Morris’ thesis. First, BushCo is incapable of responding effectively to a crisis, and in particular the windfall giveaway to their sponsors in the oil sector is not a trend they can buck.

Second, Bush’s rebound strategy is probably already being planned, and it will likely have more to do with engineering an ‘October surprise’ to shore up his anti-terrorist credibility. Whether that entails provoking a Tonkin-like act of Iranian aggression against US intersts which would call for massive retaliation and muster jingoistic sentiment; or — not too outlandish to rule out — facilitating a well-timed terrorist attack on U.S. soil, it will allow the Shrub an ludicrous and outrageous opportunity to try and look decisive (you know his ‘decisive monkey’ scowl?) and shore up Republican prospects.

Neil Young’s ‘Impeach the President’ Lyrics: “When ‘Living with War’ starts streaming on www.neilyoung.com on Friday, my guess is the servers will overheat. The real test will come next week, when the album is available for downloading on several sites.

For now, though, here are the lyrics many parents are going to be hearing their kids singing in the next few days. Young has been clever enough to write the catchiest protest song since Country Joe and the Fish’s anti-Vietnam ditty, “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die.”

Here, for the first time, the lyrics to Neil Young’s “Let’s Impeach the President”:

Let’s impeach the president for lying
And leading our country into war
Abusing all the power that we gave him
And shipping all our money out the door

He’s the man who hired all the criminals
The White House shadows who hide behind closed doors
And bend the facts to fit with their new stories
Of why we have to send our men to war

Let’s impeach the president for spying
On citizens inside their own homes
Breaking every law in the country
By tapping our computers and telephones

What if Al Qaeda blew up the levees
Would New Orleans have been safer that way
Sheltered by our government’s protection
Or was someone just not home that day?

Let’s impeach the president
For hijacking our religion and using it to get elected
Dividing our country into colors
And still leaving black people neglected

Thank god he’s cracking down on steroids
Since he sold his old baseball team
There’s lot of people looking at big trouble
But of course the president is clean

Thank God”

Update: stream the song here.

“We didn’t invite them”, says one Shiite legislator close to the prime minister-designate. (Los Angeles Times)

Acts of civilly disobedient nonviolent resistance to the war effort and militarism should always, IMHO, be highlighted and publicized widely. Spread the news.

Aggregating the aggregators.

English language hits 1 billion words: “A massive language research database responsible for bringing words such as ‘podcast’ and ‘celebutante’ to the pages of the Oxford dictionaries has officially hit a total of 1 billion words, researchers said Wednesday.” (Fresno Bee)

“There’s something to be said for working smarter, and not harder, and humans have been looking for—and finding—loopholes to enable it for centuries. A look at some of our most celebrated loophole practitioners, and their tales.” (The Morning News thanks to walker)

But a polarizing debate rages around the meaning and the validity of IAT findings.

Me, I’m perfectly happy with my binocular vision contact lens system. No bifocals or reading glasses even though I am both presbyopic and myopic.

The recent discovery of the new planet Sedna provides tantalising evidence.

Modern technology is helping parents in Asia indulge in a hideous practice – killing off their girl children. It’s never been easier to identify a female foetus and abort it.:

Scott McClellan Steps Away: “‘McClellan, Bush, Cheney, and Rove proved there were other ways. Replace news management with press nullification. Drop the persuasion model, in favor of the politics of assent. Choose non-communication to demonstrate that you ought not to be questioned (it only helps our enemies.)'” — Jay Rosen (PressThink)

The columnist starts out positing that Lara Croft brings horny adolescent male ogling to its quintessence, but ends up proposing a considerably stranger notion of How Lara Croft Steals Hearts:

Republicans to Bush: Dump Cheney for Condi: “Republicans are urging President George W Bush to dump Dick Cheney as vice-president and replace him with Condoleezza Rice if he is serious about presenting a new face to the jaded American public.

They believe that only the sacrifice of one or more of the big beasts of the jungle, such as Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, will convince voters that Bush understands the need for a fresh start.

The jittery Republicans claim Bush’s mini-White House reshuffle last week will do nothing to forestall the threat of losing control of Congress in the November mid-term elections.” (Times of London)

Related: Consider a Condi Rice wall poster to celebrate your support of dumping Cheney and Rummie?

And: Why stop at vice president?

Republicans to Bush: Dump Cheney for Condi: “Republicans are urging President George W Bush to dump Dick Cheney as vice-president and replace him with Condoleezza Rice if he is serious about presenting a new face to the jaded American public.

They believe that only the sacrifice of one or more of the big beasts of the jungle, such as Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, will convince voters that Bush understands the need for a fresh start.

The jittery Republicans claim Bush’s mini-White House reshuffle last week will do nothing to forestall the threat of losing control of Congress in the November mid-term elections.” (Times of London)

Related: Consider a Condi Rice wall poster to celebrate your support of dumping Cheney and Rummie?

And: Why stop at vice president?

Social Networks Protect Against Alzheimer’s (ScienceDaily)

Brain training can change autistic behaviour (New Scientist)

Christopher de Bellaigue is the author of In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran.

“In 2005 I heard that… “ (London Review of Books)

As someone who has shaved only three times in the last thirty years (on Jan. 1, 1981; Jan. 1, 1991; and Jan. 1, 2001), I am envious that I will likely not be partaking in the phenomenon of the Epicurean shave…