Well, no one knows for sure: “Unbeknown to most people there is not a single accepted way of telling the time, but several different scales running concurrently. The differences are usually small, but the scales can be as much as 30 seconds apart and the gap between them is growing steadily.” Guardian/UK

…to get into wireless networking, if ever: “JustDeals.com is offering the D-Link AirPlus DI-614 2.4GHz 802.11b 22Mbps Wireless Cable/DSL Router for $28.95, $6 off their regular price. Use coupon code ‘DI614’ to get the discount. The router has a built-in 4-port switch, advanced firewall features with parental controls, and is compatible with XBoxLive and Playstation 2. It’s the best current price we’ve seen. Coupon expires 8/11/03.” [via b0ing b0ing]

One of my readers says that the sidebar element overlaps the main text when this page is viewed in Safari, although not in Mozilla for Mac. Any other Mac users there noticing anything funny? Anyone have any idea why this should be happening? Does it depend on the type size at which you view the page? This might make certain elements too wide to fit within the contraints of the sidebar but I don’t understand why it would overlay the entire sidebar on the main text area. If I blow up the type size in Mozilla under Windows, the browser I use, I can get certain lines in the sidebar, such as the “How to get here: gelwan.com/followme.html” line, to extrude themselves, for example.

Is it something to do with the most-recently added graphic in the sidebar, the “Don’t Tread on Others” item? Is there some CSS element I’m using that Safari doesn’t like? Is this Safari’s problem or mine? (You don’t have to answer that one; I know, I know…).

Am I a standout in the ineptitude of my attempt at CSS-based layout? It is hard to imagine other people’s pages don’t have similar difficulty, but maybe I’m a real outlier. Maybe you can’t really do this stuff yourself unless you’re a web design professional. Me, I just stay up to all hours of the night tinkering with the design of the page, essentially by trial and error (lots of both…), after a day of seeing patients and putting my children to bed.

Sorry for the frustrated outburst. I just want to keep reading FmH a pleasurable, easy experience for all of you out there regardless of platform. We just went around last month on the issue of the page’s slow load time (which I hope is improved now) and now this. Any suggestions would be appreciated (except returning to table-based layout).

The fractured and stately English spoken by top Indians: “Welcome to the wonderful world of Hinglish, a Hindu-inspired dialect that pulsates with energy, invention and humour.” The Spectator/UK

I have a different take on ‘Hinglish’. As an extensive traveller on the Indian subcontinent in years past, I consider it to be a tortured tongue, painful not so much to listen to — it is indeed elegantly and whimsically spoken — but (since I believe that our language shapes, constrains and facilitates what we can think, or at least think easily) because I have found the circumlocutions of Hinglish to be indicative of a cultural thought disorder, a cultural schizophrenia, the keenest manifestation of the torment of an entire civilization from having English colonial morés grafted over them. I cannot help wondering why it is not as embarrassing and painful to contemporary Indians as as Stepin Fetchit is to modern African American sensibilities. And whether The Spectator finding it so endearing is not a residue of the cultural-imperialist attitude.

Although the White House has already issued denials, The Washington Post is reporting that “Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, have signaled to the White House that they intend to step down even if President Bush is reelected, setting the stage for a substantial reshaping of the administration’s national security team that has remained unchanged through the September 2001 terrorist attacks, two wars and numerous other crises.”

Of course, it is to spend more quality time with their families, rather than because of any compunctions about how they are being used by the Administration for morally repugnant foreign policy ends. The debate about whether Powell in fact has any such compunctions (I am of the persuasion that he does, compromising his good soldiering and getting him in trouble with the Wolfowitz clique from early on; the only thing that saved him this long is that we’ve been at war and he takes his obligation to his commander-in-thief too seriously to sow more open seeds of discord in wartime) may be settled if he accepts the enormous advances he’ll undoubtedly be offered to write his “kiss-and-tell” memoirs soon after his departure rather than continuing to protect BushCo’s vested interests by waiting.

In any case, can you envision what foreign policy will be like under Condoleeza Rice, such a handmaiden of America’s most important interests that she has a supertanker named after her? On the other hand, Paul Wolfowitz is the other leading contender according to Beltway buzz, and Newt Gingrich is interpreted by some to be actively campaigning for the job as well. Thank heaven Bush’s reelection no longer looks like a shoo-in. Now go do something about it.

“A National Academy of Sciences study validates long-held doubts about the reliability of polygraphs. So why does the government still rely on them to screen applicants for jobs?” Boston Globe Magazine

“Psychiatrists agree now on a point that was long debated: Suicide can run in families. They do not know, however, how this risk is transferred from one family member to another — whether it is ”learned” behavior, passed on through a grim emotional ripple effect, or a genetic inheritance, as some scientists theorize. But new research published this week in the American Journal of Psychiatry prepares ground for a genetic search, suggesting that the trait that links high-suicide families is not simply mental illness, but mental illness combined with a more specific tendency to ”impulsive aggressiveness.”” Boston Globe It appears obvious to me it is not simply a matter of biology or upbringing; we’re supposed to be way beyond that sort of dichotomous thinking by now. I have seen multi-suicide families where it seems a matter of unconscious identification or even conscious emulation, others where the biological depression-plus-impulsive-aggressive-proneness model makes the most sense, but usually it appears they work in tandem — some balance between being genetically vulnerable and having your thoughts shaped by the belief that it is your destiny to die by your own hand.

“After more than a decade of working behind layers of front companies and in hidden laboratories, Iran appears to be in the late stages of developing the capacity to build a nuclear bomb.” Boston Globe

Aroma-added packaging aims to allure you: “What smells good, sells. This well-known fact is pushing marketers – and the military – to inject scents into its food containers.” Christian Science Monitor If you consider with revulsion every such insidious advance in big business’ ability to take manipulation of your hearts and minds to unprecedented heights, consider the possibilities for ‘culture-jamming’ aromatic packaging. Easily, powerfully, unforgettably.

“Washington hopes to ease foreign-policy woes in the Middle East by wooing hearts and minds with a new Arabic-language radio network, satellite TV channel and glossy monthly magazine. It’s the funky side of the war on terror… (Toni) Braxton is in a new kind of army, standing at attention with Celine Dion, Eric Clapton, Ace of Base and the rapper Coolio, making up a Trojan-horse brigade drafted to seduce young Arab adults into admiring the United States.” The Globe and Mail Offensive indeed!

The solar system has come down to earth among the potato fields of northern Maine

So now this town of fewer than 10,000 souls, tucked into the far reaches of way northern Maine, really is located on the far side of the moon.

To be precise, it stands 1 mile north of planet Earth. This, of course, assumes you are calculating via the Maine Solar System Model, which places Earth and its moon next to Percy’s Auto Sales down along Route 1.

The Maine Solar System Model?

Absolutely. A community endeavor four years in the making before its completion in June, the MSSM is a three-dimensional roadside scale model of the solar system, stretching from the Northern Maine Museum of Science in Presque Isle 40 miles southward to the hamlet of Houlton. The scale is 93 million to 1; the Earth is 93 million miles from the sun, so here the model of the Earth is 1 mile from the sun. A wooden arch and wall painting at the museum, almost 50 feet in diameter, represents the sun, while Pluto, which takes some finding at the Houlton Information Center, is a 1-inch sphere. The other eight planets in this no-budget, grass-roots creation sit atop poles strung out along sparsely populated Route 1. Mercury is an accurately painted billiard ball at Burrelle’s Information Services. Saturn is a sphere with 10-foot-wide rings custom-made of steel, foam, and fiberglass that rises majestically across the highway from Carol Reeves’s house. And so it goes through five communities, a line of heavenly bodies standing tall among the gently rolling potato fields. Boston Globe

Here’s an interactive model diagramming the superimposition of the solar system on the map of that part of Maine.

And here’s a solar system model meta-page. (“Making scale models of the solar system is a useful way to learn about it. Here are various related pages.”)

A History of Teeth: “Psychically, metaphorically, evolutionarily, teeth go way down and way back and carry multiple, paradoxical meanings. The tale of teeth is the ultimate oral history, and if it is only by coincidence that tooth rhymes with truth, the words still make a pretty good team.” NY Times

Two Views: “In this two part series, Ian Williams argues that progressives should not allow Bush’s misappropriation of humanitarian intervention to force them to abandon a principle that is both moral and urgently required. John R. MacArthur counters that liberals have long been lobbying for interventions that would override international law.” AlterNet

Wanna Bet? “Outraged by the Pentagon’s plan to create a futures market for terrorist attacks, a group of academics is setting up a futures market for predicting what the White House is up to.” Wired

Leaning on media outlets not to carry Democratic-sponsored ad on the WMD deception:

“Apparently the Bushites think that ‘Irony’ is the name of a far off planet, for they never seem able to see it in their own work.

Irony is George W standing adamantly against affirmative action, oblivious to the obvioius fact that he’s the privileged poster-child of America’s aggressive affirmative action program for the rich.

But one of the latest actions by the Bushites proves that they couldn’t find irony if we let them use the Hubble Telescope. It came in the form of a threatening letter sent to Wisconsin TV stations by the Republican Party’s top lawyer, Caroline Hunter. It seems that these stations were airing an ad produced by the Democratic Party, that calls for a bipartisan independent investigation of the false information used by Bush and the White House to mislead the American people about the supposed ‘imminent threat’ posed by weapons of mass destruction they claimed were in Iraq.

The lawyer’s letter to the TV stations demanded that they not air this ad because – get this – she blithely says that stations have ‘no right to willfully spread false information in a deliberate attempt to mislead the American people.'” — Jim Hightower

Related: UNC catches flak from right-wing for asking incoming freshmen to read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

“Founded in 1996, the Terrorism Research Center, Inc. (TRC) is an independent institute dedicated to the research of terrorism, information warfare and security, critical infrastructure protection, homeland security, and other issues of low-intensity political violence and gray-area phenomena. The TRC represents a new generation of terrorism and security analysis, combining expertise with technology to maximize the scope, depth and impact of our research for practical implementation.

This site is the on-line portal to our terrorism knowledgebase, a dynamic relational database of public domain and proprietary content. Navigate the site by either selecting the area of interest from the navigation bar or by searching for specific keywords.”

“After more than a year of complaints by some US anti-war activists that they were being unfairly targeted by airport security, Washington has admitted the existence of a list, possibly hundreds or even thousands of names long, of people it deems worthy of special scrutiny at airports.

The list had been kept secret until its disclosure last week by the new US agency in charge of aviation safety, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). And it is entirely separate from the relatively well-publicised ‘no-fly’ list, which covers about 1,000 people believed to have criminal or terrorist ties that could endanger the safety of their fellow passengers.” Independent/UK

“A close aide to Saddam Hussein says the Iraqi dictator did in fact get rid of his weapons of mass destruction but deliberately kept the world guessing about it in an effort to divide the international community and stave off a U.S. invasion.

The strategy, which turned out to be a serious miscalculation, was designed to make the Iraqi dictator look strong in the eyes of the Arab world, while countries such as France and Russia were wary of joining an American-led attack. At the same time, Saddam retained the technical know-how and brain power to restart the programs at any time.

U.S. defense officials and weapons experts are considering this guessing-game theory as the search for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons continues. If true, it would indicate there was no imminent unconventional weapons threat from Iraq, an argument U.S. President George W. Bush used to go to war.” Taiwan News

This update on the mysterious disease of which I wrote yesterday describes the fifteen cases as separated in time — “three fell gravely ill with pneumonia in March, three more in April, two in May, three again in June and four in July, according to the army.” — and space — “according to the defence officials, the pneumonia has afflicted soldiers deployed in various parts of Iraq and belonging to different units” — , to answer some of my questions. al jazeerah.info

Ben Kerschberg’s Blog on Mental Health:

Ben Kerschberg is a graduate of Yale Law School and the University of Virginia. Since graduating from law school, he has clerked for a federal court of appeals judge, practiced law, and worked as an industry analyst for a public software company in Silicon Valley… He will spend the next two years as a Fellow at Yale Law School, where he hopes to write a book about the manner in which American society stigmatizes mental illness.

Ben Kerschberg knew at age seven that he would one day attempt suicide. … It was not an idea he toyed with. He just knew. And he was right.

In (his book) Piercing The Veil, Kerschberg takes us with unflinching candor on a journey that begins in his sophomore year of college, when he suffers the first of a series of repeated and calamitous nervous breakdowns precipitated by daily suicidal ideations. His lifetime battle with his inner demons culminates, at age 30, in a failed suicide attempt and hospitalization in a psychiatric institution. His astonishing tale opens the eyes of those who have never suffered from mental illness and empowers those who have but feel that their truth must be bottled, corked, and sealed with wax. At times disarmingly funny, but more often poetically tragic, Kerschberg’s account breaks onto the scene with a powerful voice that will leave people reaching out to their friends and loved ones.

The weblog is a labor of love, doing a good job covering mental health-related media items. I haven’t looked at the book but it is available for free download here.

“The funeral touched off an

‘They know when I’m lying and when I’m not…’: “So after he drifted into a neighbor’s room the other day to visit a friend who is also a convicted child molester, he quickly reported to his landlady that he had spied a tiny photograph of a blond girl. A day later, corrections officers who work closely with the landlady searched the room and confiscated a huge stash of pornographic pictures and videos, a miniature Barbie doll and a stack of photographs of children.

Within hours (his) neighbor was under arrest for violating the conditions of his probation and was on his way back to jail.” NY Times

“If you’re going to be a Master of the Universe in London, you’d better watch your manners. At least that’s the message from an English court.” NY Times

The curator of European decorative arts at the Art Institute of Chicago says that Dan Brown’s New York Times bestselling thriller, which “unabashedly adapts Leonardo’s art and theories, which he says on his Web site he researched extensively, to his own fictional requirements”, doesn’t have much of a clue. NY Times

“The tangled relationship of art, illusion and the marketplace being what it is — an ongoing melodrama, set to the strains of keening violins — it so happened that 250 tuxedoed, gowned and bejeweled members of the patronage class showed up for an Italianate palace ball one night this spring at a defunct train station in a Jersey City marsh. Guests were met at the gate by a young man in a pleated skirt, pointy black slippers and a frilly blouse under a gold brocaded vest, who bowed theatrically and said, ”Buona notte, signori e signore.” The title of the ball was Palazzo di Cremona, and the domed terminal of the Central Railroad of New Jersey was done up for the evening with garlands of citrus leaves and blood oranges. Three former governors of New Jersey were present, along with Paolo Bodini, mayor of Cremona, Italy, a 2,300-year-old town north of Milan. Cremona occupies a status among violin aficionados akin to that of Detroit among car buffs, having been the ground on which such violin-making luminaries as Niccolo Amati, Giuseppe Guarneri and, above all, Antonio Stradivari thrived. Mayor Bodini was a guest of the evening’s honorees, an elderly couple named Evelyn and Herbert Axelrod, who had gained vast wealth by addressing themselves to the needs of caretakers of guppies, goldfish, parakeets, lizards, gerbils and the like, and who elicited, throughout the evening, comparison to the beneficent Medicis of Florence.” NY Times Magazine

Terry Gross’ interview with Vernor Vinge for NPR’s Fresh Air: “The author of 16 books of science fiction, he gained a cult following for his early role in writing about cyber-culture and the Internet. His new book Across Realtime, came out earlier this year. He talks about the difficulty of writing science fiction when technology out dates itself as rapidly as it does.” Realmedia/Windows Media

Der Spiegel interviews George Akerlof, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics. “Past administrations from the time of Alexander Hamilton have on the average run responsible budgetary policies. What we have here is a form of looting.”

Recent Decisions on Gays, Affirmative Action Does Not Outweigh ‘Dubious Rulings,’ She Says. Washington Post

on the Down Low: “To their wives and colleagues, they’re straight. To the men they have sex with, they’re forging an exuberant new identity. To the gay world, they’re kidding themselves. To health officials, they’re spreading AIDS throughout the black community.” NY Times Magazine

“The man who performed a shrinking trick on previous versions of Windows claims today that he’s reduced Win95 to under 10MB.

Windows 95, he says, works in real (safe) mode and doesn’t require the registry but simply SYSTEM.INI.

Nor, he says, does it need a swap file to run and it can be run from a RAMdisk using a free utility.

He claims that the 10MB version of Windows 9X will support multiple MS DOS Windows, and he claims that it can be shrunk even further.” The Inquirer

“Some scientists hope blueberry burgers will be coming to a restaurant, supermarket or school cafeteria near you.

Al Bushway, a food scientist at the University of Maine, says his lab has been stirring blueberry puree or blueberry powder into beef, chicken and turkey patties. The researchers are trying to boost the nutritional value of burgers and help farmers improve their berry sales.

Blueberries add cancer-fighting antioxidants to the patties and may slightly reduce the fat content of burgers.” Salon

Past becomes present:

“The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art is a sprawling complex of old brick mill buildings given new life while retaining a sense of history: Layers of paint, for instance, were deliberately left intact as a visual echo of the past.

For this year’s big show at MASS MoCA, ”Yankee Remix,” nine artists browsed though the archives and storage of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, borrowed a wide array of artifacts, and wove these fragments of history into new installations. It’s another case of reviving the past, drawing it into the present.” Boston Globe

I was at MassMoCA last weekend and was not nearly as impressed by this exhibit as the reviewer. However, Robert Wilson’s overwhlmingly powerful, magical, disturbing reconceptualization of the Stations of the Cross needs to be seen.

And here’s another renovated factory space serving up outsized art for the Northeast. Boston Globe

No, due to wildlife: “Colorado authorities joined their colleagues in Utah on Friday in blaming 45 Denver-area cat slayings in the past year on wildlife, ending weeks of suspicion that budding psychopaths and devil worshippers were killing the pets.” azcentral [via Daily Rotten]

Car Crash Reveals Racist Church: “A car crash this week in a town near New Orleans revealed that a building thought to be a home improvement business was actually a white supremacist church, police said on Friday.

The vehicle smashed into the brick storefront in Chalmette, Louisiana, after colliding with two other cars and came to rest amid stacks of racist books and pamphlets, including Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, they said.

A sign proclaimed the building the ‘Southern Home Improvement Center,’ said Lt. Mike Sanders of the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff’s Department, but investigators found out it was the New Christian Crusade Church and headquarters of the Christian Defense League.” Reuters You’ve got to admire their logic — church as “home improvement”?

‘An audio tape purportedly from top al Qaeda official Ayman al-Zawahri warned the United States on Sunday it would pay a high price if it harmed detainees at a U.S. base in Cuba, saying the “real battle” had not yet begun.’ Reuters

And: Afghan Political Violence on the Rise: “Instability in South Grows as Pro-Taliban Fighters Attack Allies of U.S.-Led Forces” Washington Post

“Only future historians will be able to sort out the Iraq war’s ultimate validity. It is too late or too early for the rest of us.” — Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times op-ed

“Maybe the president and his swaggering circle should think about a “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” makeover.” — Maureen Dowd, NY Times op-ed

Why are Liberian soldiers wearing fright wigs?: “Few things exemplify the chaos of Liberia more than the sight of doped-up, AK-47-wielding 15-year-olds roaming the streets decked out in fright wigs and tattered wedding gowns. Indeed, some of the more fully accessorized soldiers in Charles Taylor’s militia even tote dainty purses and don feather boas. Why did this practice begin and what is the logic behind it?” Slate [via walker‘s uncanny eye for such stuff!]

A reader asked me what I thought about Peter Breggin’s longstanding critique of modern psychiatric practice, as reflected in this review of one of his recent books. My first reaction was, “Oh, no, Breggin again.” I have such difficulty with his argument with psychiatry (and such curiosity about what personality factors and life experiences congealed as such rabid fervor in him) that I usually just dismiss him. But (sigh) this reader, concerned by the antimedication arguments here, asked for a response.

As the reviewer encapsulates it, this book “neatly summarizes many of the best arguments against biological psychiatry”, and that is precisely the problem. They are simply arguments against, with no balanced deliberations. Breggin feels it is a mistake to view depressed feelings as a disease; in doing so, he is reacting to an outmoded version of psychiatric theory which had not demonstrated the structural and functional brain changes we now can see in untreated severe depression. Admittedly, the dividing line between ‘normal’ depressed feelings — which are a part of everyone’s mood variations — and the pathological process is difficult to draw, but that is the challenge every mental health practitioner faces, some better than others at refraining from pathologizing the ‘normal variants’ but on everybody’s minds. I actually join Breggin in criticizing those of my colleagues who have lost their perspective on the distinction completely, and the trend toward what Peter Kramer MD (in Listening to Prozac) has called ‘cosmetic psychopharmacology’, which has its sources in both conceptual confusion on the part of prescribers and the vested interests in the field which want to widen the scope of permissible prescribing targets. But to castigate the entire field for the excesses of its least perspicacious would deprive those clearly suffering from a correctable physiological disturbance bringing them ongoing distress and dysfunction (which worsens if not treated) a scientific and systematic approach to alleviating their suffering.

I would also join Breggin in his criticism of those for whom medication is the end-all of their treatment attack, but, again, that is not the norm in the field. It is well acknowledged that the best treatment approach to most mental illnesses such as, say, depression as Breggin discusses it here, is a combination of therapy and medication, so much so that a non-medical therapist who fails to recognize the indications for medication and make the recommendation to her/his severely depressed patient can be sued for malpractice. I like to tell my patients that medication is like a bicycle — the most efficient human-powered vehicle to get from point A to point B, but you still have to pedal. The analogy only goes so far, however, because when you get there there is still much more work to do when and if you dismount.

Breggin also faults the field for the fact that we do not know how medications work on a cellular level; this is true. But is naive to assert that all the speculation about how the medications work is designed solely to promote the drugs. We know the medications work, empirically; people feel better and get better when they are treated with them, as established (contrary to breggin’s assertion) by countless studies meeting the gold standard of scientific method — the double-blind placebo-controlled methodology. There are examples throughout medical science of medications being used because they have been shown to be beneficial, while the explanation of their mechanism remains purely speculative. The dirty secret for all of medicine is that the emperor often has no clothes when s/he speaks authoritatively in certainties about the mechanism of action of the magic bullets s/he dispenses. Arguably, healing, no matter in what medical subspecialty, depends in large measure on what has been called the priestly function of the physician, enlisting the supplicant by authority and charisma into a shared belief system which mobilizes the patient’s own mind’s and body’s best resources for the restoration of their health — with physiological help from medication effects.

The mechanisms of most drugs that affect complex physiological systems such as the cardiovascular are, on some level, opaque to analysis, although Breggin is right to be more troubled about the issue with neuroscience and psychiatry than with other medical fields. He ignore two simple facts with the most profound significance. First, in brain disease, the affected organ is the very same one that is the vehicle for perceiving and describing the dysfunction, unlike what patients can tell us relatively unimpeded when their heart, lungs or abdominal organs are malfunctioning. Secondly, by and large (this is not fully true, but enough for my argument here) there is no animal model for human consciousness, so experimental methods to establish pathophysiology or the effects of medication upon that pathophysiology are inherently impossible. There is no adequate animal model for any psychiatric disease for that reason, researchers’ arguments to the contrary. So, Dr. Breggin, the brain will always be a black box. But that doesn’t mean we have no way of knowing how effective our treatment approaches are; don’t confuse the two different epistemological realms.

His next point, that the psychiatric drugs “impair our emotional awareness and our intellectual acuity”, and thus “impede the process of overcoming depression”, that that is all they do, is patently absurd. But the crux of the argument comes in his next assertion, that “If a drug has an effect on the brain, it is harming the brain,” i.e. that psychiatric drugs are, plain and simple, poisons. In particular, he works himself into a fever pitch about imagined “potential hazards” of SSRIs for which there is no substantiation. And to claim that “there are so many… that no physician is capable of remembering all of them” (and thus no patient adequately informed by their physician) makes me glad he does not himself use his medical license to treat patients, with such seemingly scarce memory capacity. As readers of FmH know, I have discussed at length the bogus claim that SSRIs provoke or worsen suicidality, or promote interpersonal violence. Breggin would do well to criticize careless use by inattentive or undertrained personnel, as I have written, but not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. His argument is rife with misinformation, distortion and selective attention to prove an a priori conclusion, and logical and epistemological fallacies. His constituency is the rather small absolutist anti-psychiatry movement, the members of which it shold be pointed out have mostly been motivated to object to not antidepressants but antipsychotic medications, for which the evidence of damaging effects, impairing judgment, equivocal effctiveness, and use as tools of social oppression has far more ‘teeth’ than anyone reasonable asserts for antidepressants.

I think there is a role in the psychiatric profession for a histrionic gadfly like Breggin (just as there is a role in the medical debate over assisted suicide for Jack Kevorkian!), if his polemic forces a reexamination and acknowledgement of the grain of much exaggerated truth at its core. But his irresponsible reductionism and overgeneralization leave him without the credibility to take his role responsibly. I’ll go back to just dismissing him, I suppose. As Malcolm Lowry once said, “How many wolves do we feel on our heels, while our real enemies go in sheepskin?”

A reader asked me what I thought about Peter Breggin’s longstanding critique of modern psychiatric practice, as reflected in this review of one of his recent books. My first reaction was, “Oh, no, Breggin again.” I have such difficulty with his argument with psychiatry (and such curiosity about what personality factors and life experiences congealed as such rabid fervor in him) that I usually just dismiss him. But (sigh) this reader, concerned by the antimedication arguments here, asked for a response.

As the reviewer encapsulates it, this book “neatly summarizes many of the best arguments against biological psychiatry”, and that is precisely the problem. They are simply arguments against, with no balanced deliberations. Breggin feels it is a mistake to view depressed feelings as a disease; in doing so, he is reacting to an outmoded version of psychiatric theory which had not demonstrated the structural and functional brain changes we now can see in untreated severe depression. Admittedly, the dividing line between ‘normal’ depressed feelings — which are a part of everyone’s mood variations — and the pathological process is difficult to draw, but that is the challenge every mental health practitioner faces, some better than others at refraining from pathologizing the ‘normal variants’ but on everybody’s minds. I actually join Breggin in criticizing those of my colleagues who have lost their perspective on the distinction completely, and the trend toward what Peter Kramer MD (in Listening to Prozac) has called ‘cosmetic psychopharmacology’, which has its sources in both conceptual confusion on the part of prescribers and the vested interests in the field which want to widen the scope of permissible prescribing targets. But to castigate the entire field for the excesses of its least perspicacious would deprive those clearly suffering from a correctable physiological disturbance bringing them ongoing distress and dysfunction (which worsens if not treated) a scientific and systematic approach to alleviating their suffering.

I would also join Breggin in his criticism of those for whom medication is the end-all of their treatment attack, but, again, that is not the norm in the field. It is well acknowledged that the best treatment approach to most mental illnesses such as, say, depression as Breggin discusses it here, is a combination of therapy and medication, so much so that a non-medical therapist who fails to recognize the indications for medication and make the recommendation to her/his severely depressed patient can be sued for malpractice. I like to tell my patients that medication is like a bicycle — the most efficient human-powered vehicle to get from point A to point B, but you still have to pedal. The analogy only goes so far, however, because when you get there there is still much more work to do when and if you dismount.

Breggin also faults the field for the fact that we do not know how medications work on a cellular level; this is true. But is naive to assert that all the speculation about how the medications work is designed solely to promote the drugs. We know the medications work, empirically; people feel better and get better when they are treated with them, as established (contrary to breggin’s assertion) by countless studies meeting the gold standard of scientific method — the double-blind placebo-controlled methodology. There are examples throughout medical science of medications being used because they have been shown to be beneficial, while the explanation of their mechanism remains purely speculative. The dirty secret for all of medicine is that the emperor often has no clothes when s/he speaks authoritatively in certainties about the mechanism of action of the magic bullets s/he dispenses. Arguably, healing, no matter in what medical subspecialty, depends in large measure on what has been called the priestly function of the physician, enlisting the supplicant by authority and charisma into a shared belief system which mobilizes the patient’s own mind’s and body’s best resources for the restoration of their health — with physiological help from medication effects.

The mechanisms of most drugs that affect complex physiological systems such as the cardiovascular are, on some level, opaque to analysis, although Breggin is right to be more troubled about the issue with neuroscience and psychiatry than with other medical fields. He ignore two simple facts with the most profound significance. First, in brain disease, the affected organ is the very same one that is the vehicle for perceiving and describing the dysfunction, unlike what patients can tell us relatively unimpeded when their heart, lungs or abdominal organs are malfunctioning. Secondly, by and large (this is not fully true, but enough for my argument here) there is no animal model for human consciousness, so experimental methods to establish pathophysiology or the effects of medication upon that pathophysiology are inherently impossible. There is no adequate animal model for any psychiatric disease for that reason, researchers’ arguments to the contrary. So, Dr. Breggin, the brain will always be a black box. But that doesn’t mean we have no way of knowing how effective our treatment approaches are; don’t confuse the two different epistemological realms.

His next point, that the psychiatric drugs “impair our emotional awareness and our intellectual acuity”, and thus “impede the process of overcoming depression”, that that is all they do, is patently absurd. But the crux of the argument comes in his next assertion, that “If a drug has an effect on the brain, it is harming the brain,” i.e. that psychiatric drugs are, plain and simple, poisons. In particular, he works himself into a fever pitch about imagined “potential hazards” of SSRIs for which there is no substantiation. And to claim that “there are so many… that no physician is capable of remembering all of them” (and thus no patient adequately informed by their physician) makes me glad he does not himself use his medical license to treat patients, with such seemingly scarce memory capacity. As readers of FmH know, I have discussed at length the bogus claim that SSRIs provoke or worsen suicidality, or promote interpersonal violence. Breggin would do well to criticize careless use by inattentive or undertrained personnel, as I have written, but not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. His argument is rife with misinformation, distortion and selective attention to prove an a priori conclusion, and logical and epistemological fallacies. His constituency is the rather small absolutist anti-psychiatry movement, the members of which it shold be pointed out have mostly been motivated to object to not antidepressants but antipsychotic medications, for which the evidence of damaging effects, impairing judgment, equivocal effctiveness, and use as tools of social oppression has far more ‘teeth’ than anyone reasonable asserts for antidepressants.

I think there is a role in the psychiatric profession for a histrionic gadfly like Breggin (just as there is a role in the medical debate over assisted suicide for Jack Kevorkian!), if his polemic forces a reexamination and acknowledgement of the grain of much exaggerated truth at its core. But his irresponsible reductionism and overgeneralization leave him without the credibility to take his role responsibly. I’ll go back to just dismissing him, I suppose. As Malcolm Lowry once said, “How many wolves do we feel on our heels, while our real enemies go in sheepskin?”

“You don’t have to be a Negro to be an Uppity Negro, although it certainly helps.

The Uppity Negro not only speaks truth to power, they speak truth and self-serving lies and deny that the person they’re addressing even has power to begin with.

The Uppity Negro challenges the validity of the hierarchies which lie at the heart of our supposedly egalitarian society.

But mostly, the Uppity Negro likes starting shit for the fun of it.

There’s some people where, if they aren’t pissed off at you, you must be doing something wrong.

You, my overworked, underappreciated, overeducated, underpaid apprentice, you too carry within you the possibility of Uppity Negritude.

Embrace it.”

Battle spreads to Wisconsin:

“At a Duluth, Minn., Target store parking lot in July, hostilities between motorists burnishing ‘IXOYE’ fish and ‘Darwin’ fish broke into open conflict after years of angry gestures and cutting one another off in traffic.
‘One of the Christians said something about Darwin being a drunken, godless fool, and someone on the other side said Jesus was gay, and that pretty much did it,’ said a bystander holding ice to a bruise she’d suffered on her head in the ensuing melee. Six cars were damaged and the ground was littered with broken, silver shards of plastic, the remains of so-called ‘message fish.’…

“It was pretty vicious,” said Bill Henley, who witnessed a parking lot attack by ‘IXOYE’ guerillas in Racine. “They waited until the parking lanes were clear and then swooped in, shooting out the windows and tires of any car with the Darwin fish, and even cars with bumper stickers that said ‘The goddess is alive’ or ‘Practice random acts of kindness.'”

Darwin-istas retaliated by bashing in windshields of cars bearing stickers that read “It’s a CHILD, not a CHOICE,” “My boss is a Jewish carpenter,” and for good measure, any mini-van with a “My child is an honor student at …” sticker.” Lark News [via walker]

Also in Lark News:

• Assemblies of God commits entire 2004 evangelism budget to converting Madonna
• Rapture joke provokes heart attack

“Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was so outraged at the anti-communism of film star John Wayne that he plotted to have him murdered, according to a new biography of the American icon.

John Wayne – The Man Behind the Myth, by British writer and actor Michael Munn, says there were several attempts in the late 1940s and early 1950s to kill the man known to audiences around the world as Duke.” theage.com.au

“Ban the RIAA from our sites to show our disgust with the tactics they’re using to stop music sharing. And Techfocus has also supplied an htaccess file that does just that. All you’ve got to do is upload it to your site…” [via Shell Extension City]

US Debates Bid to Kill Hussein and Avoid Trial:

“Senior Bush administration officials are debating whether to order military commanders to kill rather than capture Saddam Hussein to avoid an unpredictable trial that could stir up nationalist Arab sentiments and embarrass Washington by publicizing past US support for the deposed Iraqi dictator, according to defense and intelligence officials.

One worry is that a host of embarrassing charges might be leveled at the United States. Washington supported Hussein’s regime during Iraq’s war against Iran between 1980 and 1988 — including providing satellite images of Iranian military formations — at a time when Iraqi forces used chemical weapons against troops and civilians.

Trying Hussein before an Iraqi or international criminal court would present an opportunity to hold the Ba’ath Party regime accountable for its repression and murder of thousands of people over the past three decades.

Iraq’s new US-backed Governing Council said this week it wants to try Hussein in an Iraqi court, something the occupation authority there has said it supports. The New York Times, citing unnamed State Department officials, reported today that the administration favors creating a tribunal of Iraqi judges to try Hussein for crimes against humanity if he is caught.

But as US troops step up the hunt for Hussein near his hometown of Tikrit, the prospect of an open trial that puts him on a public stage has given pause to some in the administration, according to government officials with knowledge of the high-level meetings. Among those said to have taken part in the discussions are Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.” Boston Globe [via CommonDreams]

Of course, Saddam trial or not, it is too late to avoid inflaming Arab sentiment Independent/UK.

Also:

Killing Saddam: A Summer Blockbuster: “The inevitable assassination of Saddam Hussein will be a public spectacle intended to reassure an insecure America — but it won’t end the guerrilla war in Iraq.”

The Iraqi people… are seen by the Pentagon as the frightened villagers in The Wizard of Oz. Once they sing “Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead,” they will shake off their fears and sign up for their duties in the new order: to work happily for Bechtel and Halliburton and start policing their malcontents. — Tom Hayden, AlterNet

This, of course, has a relationship to the Administration’s assumption that the American people have a short memory and have all but forgotten our failure to find the last global terrorist villain, Osama bin Laden. The New Yorker

Readers of FmH know I harp on this theme. Now I can point to somebody else making the same point.

“Only about 40 percent of people in treatment for depression get adequate care, according to a survey of more than 9,000 Americans that was sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health and released last week…

Dr. Ronald Kessler, a professor of health care policy at Harvard who was the lead author of the study, says a crucial problem is that general medical doctors tend to be the first line of defense against mental disorders as well as physical ones. Because they are not as well informed about depression as mental health specialists, he said, they are more likely to undertreat it — prescribing either too little medication or an inappropriate one, like an anti-anxiety drug.

These general practitioners, typically family doctors and internists, treat 70 percent of the people who seek help for depression, according to other research. And more of them are treating depression now than a decade ago, Dr. Kessler said, because the newer antidepressants — selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors — are safer and easier to prescribe than older drugs.

‘The companies that make these drugs are providing more educational material to general medical doctors,’ he said.”

Psychiatrists interviewed for this article hastened to add that they were not maligning their primary care colleagues’ abilities to treat all depression, but that severe or complicated cases should be referred to psychiatrists or psychologists. This, of course, leaves open the question of whether there would be adequate recognition of these critical cases.

“Most patients don’t come in and say, `I feel sad or depressed,’ ” he said. “They emphasize complaints like fatigue or insomnia or other physical manifestations of depression.”

Primary care MDs are generally more comfortable talking about these physical symptoms and may not get to the emotional crux of the matter. Engaging someone to talk about something uncomfortable in a comprehensive way is a skill and an art honed by the training and experience unique to mental health practitioners, as is adequate experience in psychopharmacology.

The article suggests that some managed care plans have some recognition of the problem and are reducing or eliminating reimbursement for primary care doctors to treat depression, forcing patients to be referred out to specialists. Frankly, I haven’t seen this happening in my part of the country. The rationale I hear over and over again from general practitioners to justify their reluctance to refer their patients out to mental health specialists is that it is ‘stigmatizing’ to the patients. I think this is largely a self-serving assumption on their part, and that they rarely broach the subject to assess their patient’s attitude. And, even if so, the doctor’s role in such a situation should more properly be an educational one, to advocate that their patient do the uncomfortable thing in their longterm best interest. After all, a large part of a doctor’s time is already spent educating patients to do things that initially strike them as unpleasant, uncomfortable or unpopular. But the major ‘training’ around treatment of depression the general practitioners are receiving these days are the pharmaceutical industry pitches persuading them of how easy depression is to treat with just a few swipes of the pen to prescribe a modern antidepressant. The industry knows that psychopharmacologically sophisticated psychiatrists are less likely to be pushed around by the ‘latest and greatest’ marketing claims (although, I hasten to add, readers will recognize that I have written with alarm about how busy psychiatrists have not been immune either from the tendency to stop educating themselves except via pharmaceutical representatives), so it is in their powerful vested interests to maintain the status quo. So primary care MDs will continue to treat depression; they will just avoid using the billing codes for emotional disorders if the patient’s insurance will not reimburse for that category of treatment. And if the insurance will not support a longer office visit for psychotherapy or counseling, the primary care MD will attempt to treat without that.

2 killed, more than a dozen others affected. The ill are being evacuated to a military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, where the second victim died on July 12th from multi-organ failure after falling ill with a ‘flu-like’ illness. Other victims are on respirators. Military scientists have ruled out the SARS virus as the cause. Many of those affected worked in the same engineering battalion in Baghdad, conducting ‘cleanup operations’. The dead soldier, a heavy equipment operator for the engineering battalion, had just returned froma four-day mission in the desert when he complained of feeling ill and went to lie down in his tent, where other soldiers found him comatose within hours. Although the soldier’s skeptical family were initially told their son had died of ‘pneumonia’, an earlier version of the story had military doctors saying that an unknown toxin was to blame and had quickly attacked his muscles, liver and kidneys. Environmental and epidemiological studies are proceeding.

I was pointed to this story from The Daily Rotten, which notes that the troops were working near the Baghdad International Airport and posits “a hypothetical cargo shipment from the United States which killed these soldiers. So perhaps we’re back on schedule to “discover” WMDs any day now.”

Update:

Two soldiers died, 10 recovered, and three remained hospitalized as of Friday, spokeswoman Lyn Kukral said. Most were in the Army, but at least one was a Marine.

So far, officials have identified no infectious agent common to all the cases. Officials said there was no evidence that any of the cases were caused by exposure to chemical or biological weapons, environmental toxins [emphasis added — FmH] or SARS.

Most of the cases were in Iraq and occurred after the U.S.-led invasion began March 20, although some were among other troops deployed to the region in support of the campaign.

Though 15 cases were considered serious, about 100 cases have been diagnosed since March 1 among troops that began deploying late last year to the Persian Gulf area. The Olympian (WA)

Relative to the conspiracy theory, there is no information about how closely the fifteen core cases were associated in time or space; is that information being suppressed? If these severe cases were from a native contaminant, we would probably have heard about it from the dysadministration as triumphal proof that they had finally found evidence of chemical or biological agents in Iraq. That we haven’t heard that suggests the possibility, as the Daily Rotten suggested, that the US has something to hide in the incident. Is a specific incident of toxic exposure being diluted by being lumped together with more disparate mystery illnesses of a broader range of severity and geographic distribution? Certainly, it is accepted epidemiological practice to examine the broadest possible range of cases to attempt to establish commonalities in a mystery outbreak, but it is also a great way to hide a problem in plain sight, as the saying goes.

“Created in 1935, the Federal Writers’ Project gave rise to a generation of novelists, including John Cheever, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston.”

NY Times

Latest example of electronic convergence merges digital camera, ‘net, and refrigerator. Electrolux is designing a system that automatically takes a picture of the contents every time you close your refrigerator door, and uploads it to a web server. If you’re at the store and don’t remember whether you’re out of, say, cheese, use your mobile phone or PDA to wirelessly browse to the latest photo and scan what you’ve got in the fridge at home. I think it is overkill, of course; my own digital approach to shopping is to make a shopping list on my Palm device before I leave the house, scanning the innards of the refrigerator in real time. You might say it is so passé to use a text-based method when I could have a GUI at my fingertips for the task, but hey, what can I say?

If it were to become widespread, what was beginning to worry me about this Electrolux system (although I feel a whole lot better having heard that John Poindexter was axed from DARPA) was the possibility that the authorities would obtain an archive of the old photos from my fridge — likely that Electrolux would leave them a back door into the web server — and be able to derive a running catalogue of my family’s food consumption patterns. They might even find some — gasp! — Middle Eastern food in there from time to time, not to mention Korean cuisine. From how quickly it disappeared, the feds could surmise the relish with which we ate it, from which they could naturally draw the most damaging conclusions about our political leanings. But one potential advantage of the system far outweighs even the most egregious potential privacy violations. It will settle once and for all the burning controversy about whether the light inside the fridge stays on when you close the door. There really is no other way. electricnews.net

And while we’re on the topic of useless gadgetry, here’s a company that sells mice with built-in fans to keep your hand from getting hot and sweaty during your websurfing. I could make a facetious comment about how, depending on the content of your surfing, your hand might get most hot and sweaty when it leaves your mouse for locations further south… but I won’t.

On the other hand (sorry), when the price comes down somewhat, I want one of these.

Top Five Most Commonly Diagnosed Cancers in the U.S. by Ethnic Group, 1995-1999 North American Association of Central Cancer Registries

Refusing help, woman gives birth aboard T (which is Bostonese for streetcar or subway):

“A 42-year-old Braintree woman gave birth to a baby boy while standing on an inbound Red Line train yesterday morning, refusing help from stunned passengers who heard her moan and seconds later looked down to find her baby on the floor…

” ‘Thanks for your concern, we’re OK,’ ” she said, according to Chris Chin of Duxbury. Standing 4 feet away from Judge, Chin said, he saw her tie the umbilical cord in a knot and wrap the baby in a silk scarf. ”She cradled the baby in one arm and grabbed the handrail with the other and continued to ride the T and stare out the window.”

…At one point, Judge took some nearby newspapers and placed them on the floor to soak up the blood. Some witnesses heard Judge apologize for the mess.

After leaving the train and heading for the stairs up to the station’s main lobby, witnesses said, the placenta fell to the platform. Judge turned around, grabbed the afterbirth, put it in her shoulder bag, and headed upstairs. ” Boston Globe

Authorities, witnesses, and press are puzzled by the woman’s refusal of help (what could anyone do, it strikes me?) and she is currently undergoing a psychiatric evaluation. The baby appeas to be doing fine.

Stereo Images — or one might call it simulated stereo — by having the left and right images rapidly alternate in an animated .gif. Sort of as if you’re looking at the scene while an earthquake passes through, but it does create the 3D effect. [via Random Walks]

“Harsher sentences do not deter people from committing crimes, says a new report by University of Toronto criminologists.

One of the objectives of sentencing under the Canadian Criminal Code is to attempt to deter people from committing crimes, says U of T professor Anthony Doob, who authored the report, Sentence Severity and Crime: Accepting the Null Hypothesis. ‘The implication of the law is that harsher sentences will make us safe but our research findings suggest this isn’t true.’

Doob and post-doctoral fellow Cheryl Webster examined literature and studies on the deterrent impact of sentences in the U.S., Canada, England and Australia over the past 30 years. They found that the majority of studies suggest harsher sentences do not reduce crime. ‘It’s not the penalty that causes people to pause before they commit a crime; it’s the likelihood of being apprehended,’ says Doob.

Instead of using harsher crimes to discourage people from breaking the law, he says more resources are needed for social and educational programs for children and youth at various stages in their lives. ‘Programs that help kids to thrive in school are good educational investments but they’re also good crime prevention investments.'” EurekAlert!

“John Poindexter, the retired Navy admiral who spearheaded two sharply criticized Pentagon projects, intends to resign from his Defense Department post within weeks, a senior U.S. defense official said on Thursday.

‘It’s my understanding that he … expects to, within a few weeks, offer his resignation,’ the official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters.

Poindexter was involved with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s abandoned futures-trading market for predicting assassinations, terrorism and other events in the Middle East, and earlier with the so-called Total Information Awareness program that drew fire from civil rights groups.” Reuters As little as I will shed a tear for the departure of this repugnant and arrogant man, it should be realized that this is only another in a series of straw men who are taking the fall for BushCo’s impaired judgment.

Jewish Groups Against Pipes’ Nomination: “A broad coalition of Jewish peace groups today called upon President Bush to withdraw his controversial nomination of Daniel Pipes to the Board of Directors of the United States Institute of Peace.

The Jewish peace groups also lauded the decision of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee last week to table a scheduled vote on Pipes’ nomination to the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum, a rightwing think tank based in Philadelphia, and a prolific author of articles depicting Islam as a danger to Western civilization and to Jews in particular. Pipes has referred to

Muslim immigrants as ‘brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene.’ In another article, he wrote that ‘all immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.'” CommonDreams [via walker]

“When Vice President Dick Cheney comes out of seclusion to brand critics ‘irresponsible,’ you know the administration is running scared… With the administration taking the heat on 9/11, the vice president is once again making wildly unsubstantiated claims about Iraqi WMD.” AlterNet

“In the rancorous debate over euthanasia, assisted suicide and other ways for terminally ill patients to end their lives, doctors note that one option is always legal: a sane, alert person can simply refuse to eat or drink.

It is an option rarely taken, but now the first survey of nurses whose patients took it has contradicted the popular assumption that such a death is painful and gruesome. Almost all the 102 Oregon nurses surveyed said their patients who refused water and food had died ‘good deaths,’ with little pain or suffering, generally within two weeks.

The study, which appeared last week in The New England Journal of Medicine — by coincidence, the same week that The British Medical Journal devoted an entire issue to studies on death and dying — raises difficult questions for those on both sides of the debate. Its authors hesitated to publish it for fear of encouraging suicides.” NY Times [via dangerousmeta]

“‘I believe marriage is between a man and a woman, and I think we ought to codify that one way or another,’ Bush told reporters at a White House news conference. ‘And we’ve got lawyers looking at the best way to do that.'” CNN

BushCo must think the impact in terms of delivering fundamentalist votes to him in ’04 will outweigh the loss of votes from the 10% of the American population who he is telling don’t have the right to marry the person of their choice. And however many others, not gay themselves, who happen to agree that they should have that right. But then again, those are by and large votes he lost already a long time ago, so maybe there’s nothing lost in their opinion. But, as Nick Gillespie reminds us at Hit & Run,

As liberals gear up to bash Bush for his reactionary thinking on this point, they ought to remember the actions of the only twice-elected Democrat president since FDR. When Bill Clinton signed The Defense of Marriage Act in September 1996–an act specifically intended to foreclose state recognition of same-sex marriages–he noted that he had “long opposed governmental recognition of same-gender marriages.”

“US leaders now see themselves as priests of a divine mission to rid the world of its demons.” — George Monbiot, Guardian/UK

“Former Vice-President Al Gore is coming under pressure from political supporters and friends to jump into the 2004 presidential campaign even though he ruled himself out in December…

(A) former DNC official, who was active in Gore’s 2000 campaign, said his prediction of another Gore campaign is based on more than a hunch. But he declined to offer specific evidence.

He believes, as other Gore confidants do, that the political climate has changed significantly since December, making Bush more vulnerable to defeat in his bid for a second term.

“Things have dramatically changed since his announcement,” said the official.

“Bush has lied to the country, no one is articulating a foreign policy that’s resonating.” ” The Hill

I pointed last week to the North American counterpart of this gallery of images from Japanese psychiatric medication advertisements [props to b0ing b0ing]. I find them far more disturbing and, at times, inexplicable than their North American congeners.

Psychologists’ puzzlement at why yawning is contagious is at an end. A new study in Cognitive Brain Research finds that it is correlated with people’s empathic ability. The 40-60% of who do not catch yawns appear to be the ones with the least ability to put themselves in others’ shoes in other regards.

Contrary to the folk wisdom that it precipitates a deep breath to counteract oxygen decrement, yawning does not appear to have a physiological function. It may have evolved primarily as a social clue —

Contagious yawning may have helped our ancestors coordinate times of activity and rest. “It’s important that all group members be ready to do the same thing at the same time,” Ronald Baenninger, who has studied yawning at Temple University in Philadelphia, says. Guardian/UK

[I must be really empathic; I yawned just reading the article about contagious yawning.]

Adam Phillips’ revealing new edition of Freud: “…(W)hat does it mean to read Freud as literature rather than as theory? The first books in the New Penguin Freud, published in June, offer some answers. Significantly, the series has started not with major theoretical works like The Interpretation of Dreams or anthropological ones like Totem and Taboo. Instead, the first four books are concrete, practical, and anecdotal: The Schreber Case, The ‘Wolfman’ and Other Cases, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Together, they suggest four ways of approaching Freud as literature.” Slate

Telling Them Can Reveal a Lot: “…(L)ying is much too interesting to be left just to the mercy of moral examination. Lies may not be as sexy or revelatory as dreams, but they can tell us a lot about the psychology of their owners.

There may be nothing uniquely human about deception: some experts say chimpanzees can fake out rivals. But lying requires something special that, so far, seems the sole province of humans: a theory of mind. To lie effectively, one has to have a notion that other people have minds and can be deceived.” — Richard A. Friedman, MD, NY Times

Even bacteria seek each other out, according to a new study. EurekAlert!

On the other hand, on the subject of ritual abuse (see item below on ‘false memory”), “A gang of suspected people traffickers which is believed to have smuggled a Nigerian boy into a Britain for a ritualistic killing was arrested during a series of raids in London on Tuesday.

Among the evidence seized by detectives was an animal skull with a nail driven through its head, which may have been used in a ‘black magic’ ceremony. One line of inquiry being investigated is that members of the gang had the boy murdered to bring the criminal enterprise good luck – a procedure that has taken place in West African in the past.” New Zealand Herald

Graduate student Susan Clancy, as it transpired, had no idea what she was getting herself into, wading into the middle of perhaps the hottest controversy in decades in academic psychology when she joined the psychology department at Harvard eight years ago and decided to study “recovered memories”.

At one end of the field of ”trauma memory” were people like her new professors and future co-authors, the clinical psychologist Richard McNally and the cognitive psychologist Daniel Schacter, chairman of the Harvard psychology department and one of the world’s leading experts on memory function. At the other end were Harvard-affiliated clinicians, including Judith Herman, Bessel van der Kolk and Daniel Brown, whose scholarly writing on the psychological effects of trauma remains highly influential.

What the two sides disagree on is whether painful memories of traumatic events can actually be repressed — completely forgotten — and then ”recovered” years later in therapy. Many clinicians say yes: it is how we instinctively protect ourselves from childhood recollections that would otherwise be too dire to bear. Most cognitive psychologists say no: real trauma is almost never forgotten; full-blown, traumatic memories dredged up decades later through hypnosis are almost invariably false.

Clancy decided to do laboratory studies of memory functions in those reporting recovered memories. After listening to the histories her subjects reported, she could not help feeling that they had an air of confabulation about them. In the most extreme cases — the rash of reports of Satanic ritual abuse of a decade or so ago — it has become well-accepted that there can be frankly “false memories.” Clancy guessed that there were a category of people who were psychologically prone to creating false memories and who might demonstrate this tendency in standard laboratory testing of their memory function. In fact, subjects who claimed to have recovered memories of previously repressed abuse were more prone to false memories on her tests than control subjects, and were more prone than subjects who had been incontrovertibly abused and had always remembered, never repressed, memories of that abuse.

The research was criticized by both academic and lay opponents of false memory, the most extreme equating her findings with “cheer(ing) on child molesters” or concluding she was probably a child abuser herself. (Freud was assumed in some circles to have harbored, or perhaps acted upon, incestuous fantasies toward his daughter for revising his earlier theory in which he had taken at face value the memories of his female hysterical patients that they had been victims of incest to conclude that these were fantasies.)

Because of the controversy that surrounded the implications as to the veracity of memories of abuse, Clancy abandoned studying that group in favor of one whose memories are considered to be incontrovertibly fantasies — those claiming to have been abducted by aliens. (Ironically, both her opponents’ ‘camp’ [Judy Herman, Bessel van der Kolk and Dan Brown] vis à vis recovered memories, and the foremost — or perhaps only — academic proponent of alien abduction, John Mack, were/are based at the Cambridge Hospital Dept. of Psychiatry of Harvard Medical School… where I did my training and had my first faculty position. All four were esteemed senior colleagues and friends of mine, despite my clear sympathies in their opponents’ camps on these central issues.) In bowing to the pressure of political correctness by suspending her study of abuse survivors, she thought she could still make a crucial scientific contribution around her hypothesis that there are ‘false-memory-prone’ individuals, further study of whom might help us to understand more about the phenomenon.

But Clancy was in for quite a surprise, as her findings were savaged by the alien abduction proponents as well. ”I can entertain the possibility that there are other life forms out there without accepting your story that a spaceship picked you up!” she was driven in exasperation to reply to one grilling on a talk radio show. Her mistake seems to have been her confidence that there can ever be a consensus that anything no matter how outlandish, particularly in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, can be beyond controversy.

Ten years from now, Susan Clancy may remember 2003 as a year of agreeable spadework in the trenches of academic inquiry. But if she does, it will be a false memory. The truth is that Clancy’s research, which she hoped might mend fences — at least partly vindicating both sides’ positions — has managed to tick off just about everyone: sexual-abuse survivors, therapists, experiencers, even a creationist or two.

Daniel Brown, the trauma therapist, is convinced that there’s a ”political agenda” to Clancy’s abduction study. As he told one reporter, ”It’s all about spin.” Her own brother — a corporate lawyer for a top New York firm — has ripped into her about the abduction study for assuming outright that none of the abductions occurred.

One of the more telling critiques of Clancy’s work came from people who felt it undermined the admissibility of recovered memories of torture in international war crimes tribunals. Perhaps in penance, Clancy getting out of the frying pan of Cambridge academic controversy to take a visiting professorship at the Harvard-affiliated Central American Business Administration Institute in Managua, Nicaragua, where she will study the effects of “verifiable life-threatening events: diseases, hurricanes, land mines.” Time will tell whether this is indeed an escape route from the flames… NY Times Magazine

Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, excerpt:

“‘Many assumptions about politics were destroyed along with the World Trade Center, and Borradori seized the opportunity to ask Habermas and Derrida how their theories fared. These men represent two central strands of European philosophy—the one building on Enlightenment notions of universal rationality, the other suspicious of the commitments often hidden in its language. . . . But Habermas sees the outbreak of terror mainly as a failure of communications, and Derrida sees it above all as a failure to develop a concept of world hospitality to replace what he thinks is the outmoded Christian notion of a toleration that is really only charity. Despite their theoretical convictions, they seem here to see the problems more as philosophical than as a failure to integrate economics and the social sciences or develop a strategy against misery and poverty.”

And: The mixed-up debate over the new European patriotism:

“The Iraq War has made for some strange bedfellows, in philosophy no less than in politics. On May 31, Jrgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida issued a joint declaration, ”After the War: The Rebirth of Europe,” in Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and France’s La Libration. In it, the great theoretician of communication and consensus and the doyen of deconstruction put aside their considerable intellectual differences to call for a unified European response ”to balance out the hegemonic unilateralism of the United States.” But what they were really after was the creation of ”a European identity,” a sense of patriotism to rival that which, for better or worse, has dominated the United States since Sept. 11.” Boston Globe

Blissed Psychedelic Freaks Bequeath Skykissing Guitars to Industrial Autopsy Aesthetes:

“Thesis: Industrial music, in its original late-’70s incarnation, was the second flowering of an authentic psychedelia. (‘Authentic’ meaning non-revivalist, untainted by nostalgia). There was the same impulse to blow minds through multimedia sensory overload (the inevitable back-projected, cut-up movies behind every industrial performance—attempts at “total art” only too redolent of 1960s happenings and acid-tests). And industrial, like psychedelia, believed “no sound shalt go untreated”; both adulterated rock’s “naturalistic” recording conventions with FX, tape splices, and dirty electronic noise.” The Village Voice

“When the World Transhumanist Association met for a conference at Yale last month, they discussed the future rights of those who will be half-man, half-machine. Erik Baard looks at uploading consciousness, bio-Luddites, and that nagging question: Who are we? ” The Village Voice

“Take a snapshot of philosophy in Britain today, and you’ll get a picture that is recognizable not only to North American philosophers but also to academics in other disciplines in the humanities. Many agree that the field is becoming more diverse, more interdisciplinary, and more relevant to the concerns of wider society. Look closer, however, and the British philosophical landscape is significantly different from that in North America. Examining these differences is instructive, not only for philosophers but for anyone working in the humanities, and perhaps for some of their scientific colleagues as well.” The Chronicle of Higher Education

“General John Abizaid, the new commander of Centcom, on July 16 became the first senior US official to acknowledge that what the coalition faces in Iraq is a ‘classical guerrilla campaign’.

A study on guerrilla warfare in Iraq by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think-tank, blames bad planning by the US administration and the low priority given to ‘conflict termination’ and nation-building strategies by the Pentagon.

CSIS military specialist Anthony Cordesman says the US has not learned the lessons of past conflicts, that ‘even the best military victories cannot win the peace’.

He writes: ‘Unless this situation changes soon, and radically, the United States may end up fighting a third Gulf war against the Iraqi people . . . It is far from clear that the United States can win this kind of asymmetric war.'” Financial Times

“This report is intended to provide accurate information to U.S. servicemen and women stationed in Iraq. Our pledge to you is that this report will contain only fact. We will not embellish. This is the straight story. Please forward throughout the ranks.”

“President Bush and his Republican Party are facing a political backlash from an unlikely group – retired veterans.

Normally Republican, many retired veterans are mad that Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress are blocking remedies to two problems with health and pension benefits. They say they feel particularly betrayed by Bush, who appealed to them in his 2000 campaign, and who vowed on the eve of his inauguration that ‘promises made to our veterans will be promises kept.'” San Jose Mercury

Poetry website goes from bad to verse: “A new program allows a poem to evolve, to see if people can collectively create attractive verse – the early signs are not pretty.” New Scientist

The Last Word: “Christopher Alexander, an architect who was born in Vienna, raised in England and now lives in California, … something of a prophet without honor in his own profession, …produces the kind of books every serious reader should wrestle with once in a while: fat, challenging, grandiose tracts that encourage you to take apart the way you think and put it back together again. Depending on whom you talk to, they’re either canonical or completely off the reservation; among architects, he has some devoted followers and plenty of scornfully dismissive critics, particularly among the champions of the avant-garde. A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building, two seminal works he wrote with five colleagues, have continued to sell well since they were first published in the 1970’s, but despite his position as emeritus professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, their influence on his profession (outside the continuation of some of his ideas in the New Urbanism movement) has faded. Instead, laypeople use A Pattern Language to design their own homes, and The Timeless Way of Building has been a major influence on, of all things, a school of software engineering called object-oriented programming.” NY Times

Pentagon Prepares a Futures Market on Terror Attacks: “The Pentagon office that proposed spying electronically on Americans to monitor potential terrorists has a new experiment. It is an online futures trading market, disclosed today by critics, in which anonymous speculators would bet on forecasting terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups.

Traders bullish on a biological attack on Israel or bearish on the chances of a North Korean missile strike would have the opportunity to bet on the likelihood of such events on a new Internet site established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The Pentagon called its latest idea a new way of predicting events and part of its search for the ‘broadest possible set of new ways to prevent terrorist attacks.’ Two Democratic senators who reported the plan called it morally repugnant and grotesque. The senators said the program fell under the control of Adm. John M. Poindexter, President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser.” NY Times

“They are called smart pills or brain boosters or, to use the preferred pharmaceutical term, cognitive enhancers.

But whatever the name given to compounds created to prevent or treat memory loss, drug companies and supplement producers — eager to meet the demands of a rapidly growing market — are scrambling to exploit what they view as an enormous medical and economic opportunity.

…

Much of the excitement among pharmaceutical companies, which have dozens of drugs in development, stems from advances in clarifying some of the brain processes and biochemical pathways that can hinder or help memory storage and retrieval, said Dr. Paul R. Solomon, a professor of psychology at Williams College…

But it will probably be at least five years before any of those drugs meet the standards for approval by the Food and Drug Administration, researchers said.

Clearly, the market for memory enhancers is growing with the aging of the population.

Dr. Steven T. DeKosky, a professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, says he has noticed a marked increase in anxiety among baby boomers, who are watching their parents descend into Alzheimer’s and hoping that new medicines will help them avoid the same fate…

Even among those who are already suffering memory loss, Alzheimer’s is far from the only source. An estimated four million Americans have it, but millions more suffer from other disorders that can lead to dementia, including Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, stroke, head trauma and schizophrenia.

Experts estimate that an additional four million people have a syndrome called mild cognitive impairment, which may progress to Alzheimer’s. People with the impairment can function on their own but have gaps in their memories.” NY Times

“An internet resource on psychical research and survival after death”.

The International Survivalist Society was founded 11th April 2002 by Thomas M. Jones of the UK and David Duffield of the US. It cooperates with several distinguished psychical researchers and parapsychologists across the globe and is independent of any other organisation.

The ISS has four primary aims. These are:

• 1. To disseminate the scientific case for survival after death. This is achieved through the ISS website.
• 2. To achieve an intellectual balance in mainstream media outlets and to be given equal time and space to put forth the scientific case for survival after death.
• 3. To campaign against misinformation and inaccuracy. High-profile critics often give misleading and inaccurate accounts of survival research, often of a discrediting nature. The ISS demands that the media report objectivity, fairly and without bias.
• 4. To provide a valuable and comprehensive research tool for both lay-persons and academics. This is achieved by publishing a vast quantity of eminent survivalist material from the most distinguished scientists in the field.

We often collaborate with a network of researchers, academics and scientists who share our aim to promote the scientific case for survival after death.

as Instruments of Both Spiritual and Scientific Exploration: John Horgan, a freelance writer and author of The End of Science and The Undiscovered Mind:

“…This trend is unfolding worldwide. I just attended a conference in Switzerland at which scholars presented findings on the physiological and psychological effects of drugs such as psilocybin, LSD and MDMA (Ecstacy). At the meeting, I met an American chemist who had synthesized a new compound that seems to induce transcendent experiences as reliably as LSD does but with a greatly reduced risk of bad trips; a Russian psychiatrist who for more than 15 years has successfully treated alcoholics with the hallucinogen ketamine; and a German anthropologist who touts the spiritual benefits of a potent Amazonian brew called ayahuasca. Long a staple of Indian shamans, ayahuasca now serves as a sacrament for two fast-growing churches in Brazil. Offshoots of these churches are springing up in the U.S. and Europe.

Several non-profit groups in the U.S. are attempting to rehabilitate the image of psychedelic drugs through public education and by supporting research on the drugs’ clinical and therapeutic potential. They include the Heffter Institute, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico; the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), based in Florida; and the Council on Spiritual Practices in San Francisco.” The Edge

“Julian Barbour, a theoretical physicist, has worked on foundational issues in physics for 35 years. He is responsible for a radical notion of “time capsules which explain how the powerful impression of the passage of time can arise in a timeless world”… Cosmologist Lee Smolin notes that Barbour has presented ‘the most interesting and provocative new idea about time to be proposed in many years. If true, it will change the way we see reality. Barbour is one of the few people who is truly both a scientist and a philosopher.'” The Edge

of whom I was aware as a member of the Edge community, visited FmH after a search engine pointed him to a reference I made to him. He signed my guest book appreciatively, which pointed me to his homepage. Pickover, according to his Edge biography, is a research staff member at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center, in Yorktown Heights, New York. He is the holder of more than a dozen patents dealing with computer interfaces, and he has written some twenty books on a broad range of topics, including Time : A Traveler’s Guide, Surfing Through Hyperspace : Understanding Higher Universes in Six Easy Lessons, Black Holes : A Traveler’s Guide, Future Health : Computers and Medicine in the 21st Century, Keys to Infinity, The Science of Aliens, The Paradox of God and the Science of Omniscience; Calculus and Pizza: A Math Cookbook for the Hungry Mind.

“Pickover’s primary interest is in finding new ways to expand creativity by melding art, science, mathematics, and other seemingly disparate areas of human endeavor”. He is the Brain-Boggler columnist for Discover Magazine; an associate editor for Computers and Graphics, Computers in Physics, and Theta (Math); and on the editorial boards of Odyssey, Idealistic Studies, Leonardo, Speculations in Science and Technology and YLEM. His site is a somewhat overwhelming departure gate for endless flights on the frontiers of science, philosophy, fringe studies, art and culture. Go.

“Concerned that information about your file-sharing username may have been subpoenaed by the RIAA? Check here to see if your username or IP address is on one of the subpoenas filed with the D.C. District Court. This information is drawn from the court’s publicly available PACER database and will be updated when that system is updated.

For more information on limiting your liability, check out How Not to Get Sued by the RIAA for File Sharing (and other Ideas to Avoid Being Treated Like a Criminal).” Electronic Frontier Foundation

“Concerned that information about your file-sharing username may have been subpoenaed by the RIAA? Check here to see if your username or IP address is on one of the subpoenas filed with the D.C. District Court. This information is drawn from the court’s publicly available PACER database and will be updated when that system is updated.

For more information on limiting your liability, check out How Not to Get Sued by the RIAA for File Sharing (and other Ideas to Avoid Being Treated Like a Criminal).” Electronic Frontier Foundation

Hussein Bodies Shown to Skeptical Iraqis NY Times; Arabs ‘shocked but convinced’ Ireland On Line; Hussein Photos Don’t End Doubts Detroit Free Press.

US Under Fire for Displaying Photos:

The U.S. decision to allow TV journalists to film the bodies of what it says of deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s two sons was harshly criticized by law experts, human rights advocates and media specialists Friday, July25 .

“The release of the bodies in public acts in contravention of the Second Geneva Convention, which provides protection to the war casualties,” international law professor in Cairo university Abdulla Al-Ashaal told IslamOnline.net.

“The Convention stipulated that war deaths should not be mutilated,” Ashaal said.

For human rights experts, allowing journalists to air the graphically depicted mangled bodies did not take them by surprise, since the U.S. occupation forces had committed many of such large-scale violations before and after rolling into Baghdad on April9 .

Hard to determine if this was a calculatd affront on the US’s part or a typically culturally insensitive blunder like all the others that leave us scratching our heads about why we are hated:

In the Arab world, moral prospective of releasing dead bodies in a battered state is almost a taboo given its contradiction with a wide religious belief that death should be treated with sanctity.

“Publishing photos of mutilated corpses is haram (Forbidden), under the Islamic Law or Sharia,” said Mohamed Emara, a prominent moderate Islamic scholar. Islam Online, UK

Rumsfeld Glad He Released Grisly Photos Reuters; On TV, a sharp divide over the display Washington Post. With Photos US Buries Old Dilemma:

This squeamishness about violent death is a relatively modern sensibility. Highwaymen and bandits were once drawn and quartered, and hung in pieces at country crossroads as a cautionary display. In the modern West, however, the industrialisation of death has been coupled with a curious reluctance to display photographic evidence of what that industrialisation means. The photos of Pearl Harbor show no American dead. The government banned publication of any photos of dead US servicemen until more than two years into WW-II. ‘‘Eventually they decided this was dishonest and released three photos from Buna Beach in New Guinea,’’ said historian and critic Paul Fussell. ‘‘The pictures of the dead didn’t show any faces.’’ Fussell acknowledged the photos did at least show bodies, but said, ‘‘Unless you show guts hanging like Christmas decorations, you’re not showing what war is about.’’ Indian Express

“Important for the Iraqis to see them’:

Rumsfeld said it was crucial to convince skeptical Iraqis that two of the most vicious characters in their father’s regime were gone. And he said the decision was consistent with the terms of the Geneva Convention, which prohibits the display of enemy bodies for purposes of curiosity.

It was also likely a sign that Washington’s credibility on the streets of Iraq had badly eroded and a signal the Bush administration was aggressively trying to stem the daily attacks on their soldiers — attacks that spiked upward after Uday and Qusay Hussein were slain by U.S. troops in Mosul in a four-hour firefight Tuesday.

When enemies of the United States have paraded American casualties in past conflicts, it has provoked rage here, most recently when Rumsfeld himself was angered when Iraqis allowed television to film dead Americans and PoWs cowering in fear after their capture in the early stages of the war in March. Toronto Star

It is distasteful gloating, equivalent to the Iraqi release of the bodies of US troops killed in the invasion which the US condemned as a lurid indecency and a violation of the human rights of the war victims. We don’t get to be the arbiters of right and wrong, applying our own relativism whenever it is convenient. The hypocrisy, which is probably Rumsfeld’s to own, stands naked for the world to see along with the photos, and is equally abhorrent. When we violate the Geneva Convention, the higher purpose by which we claim to justify it makes us unfettered by moral niceties. Oh, but that’s the story of the entire invasion of Iraq, isn’t it? Consider the other convenient effects of the timing of the killings and the furor over the photos and ponder whether it was a calculated effort to divert attention from the mounting “Bush lied” furor; his plummeting approval in the polls; the damning Congressional report on 9-11 The Nation

concluding, among other points, that Iraq of course had nothing to do with al Qaeda UPI

; and the brewing scandal about the administrations redaction of parts of the report that would be ‘too upsetting’ to our friends the Saudis. And whether the pitiful minds in the White House actually believed it would halt the rising tide of killings of the occupying American forces NY Times.

Now it’s right war, wrong reason: “A school of thought is emerging that Saddam Hussein was not so much covering up his possession of banned weapons as his lack of them.” — Daniel Schorr, NPR’s senior news analyst writes in the Christian Science Monitor. Was Hussein’s lack of cooperation with UN weapons inspectors an attempt at keeping up the pretense of having WMD as a deterrent against hostile neighbors such as Iran and the Kurds?

Republicans fret about impact of Iraq, economy on Bush’s standing

For the first time since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, rank-and-file Republicans say they are worried about President Bush’s re-election chances based on the feeble economy, the rising death toll in Iraq and questions about his credibility.

“Of course it alarms me to see his poll figures below the safe margins,” said Ruth Griffin, co-chair of Bush’s 2000 campaign steering committee in New Hampshire. “If he isn’t concerned, and we strong believers in the Bush administration aren’t concerned, we must have blinders on.”

Poor Republicans may be destined to have more sleepless nights if they believe everything they read in the polls…

Also: National Hispanic group says Bush administration has disappointed Latinos [thanks, Ray]

“The Secret Service used ‘profoundly bad judgment‘ in seeking to question a Los Angeles Times cartoonist over a political cartoon depicting a man pointing a gun at President Bush, a senior House Republican said Tuesday.” Ironically, the cartoonist is apparently a Bush sympathizer not threatening but commisserating with the President’s current political woes, according to This Modern World, which I thank for this blink.

“A vegetarian ‘ape-diet’, based on the foods our simian cousins eat, is as effective in lowering cholesterol as an established cholesterol-lowering drug, reveals a new study. High cholesterol levels increase the risk of cardiovascular disease.

The key components of the ape diet are plant sterols, found in plant oils and enriched margarines, viscous fibre, found in oats, barley and aubergine, and soy protein and nuts.

People with raised cholesterol following this primitive diet had their levels of bad cholesterol slashed by about a third – the same reduction provided by the statin drug, lovastatin.

…(H)umans may be evolutionarily adapted to the diet, which is similar to that eaten by gorillas and orangutans.”

New Scientist

“A new genetic study deals a blow to claims that humans reached America at least 30,000 years ago – around the same time that people were colonising Europe.

The subject of when humans first arrived in America is hotly contested by academics.

On one side of the argument are researchers who claim America was first populated around 13,000 years ago, toward the end of the last Ice Age. On the other are those who propose a much earlier date for colonisation of the continent – possibly around 30,000-40,000 years ago.” BBC

“

Rosy cheeks seem to be crucial in the dating game, for monkeys at least.

Females of a common primate, the rhesus macaque, prefer males with red faces, a study has shown.

It signals high levels of testosterone which, in many male animals, mean a healthy immune system and good genes.

A rosy glow might also act as a similar cue in humans, say British researchers.” BBC

Paul Krugman, on the New York Times op-ed page, reminds us that intelligence analysts protested being asked to cook the books by BushCo way back last fall; they are now vindicated, as are the military professionals who expressed doubts about whether the resources committed to the Iraqi war could manage the post-invasion circumstances. Military experts say our military strength elsewhere in the world has been weakened by the extent of our forces deployed in Iraq; that the war will seriously impact future recruiting; and that our unilateralism has already made erstwhile allies run for cover as we ask for assistance in occupied Iraq or elsewhere. The dysadministration response to those who notice that the Emperor has no clothes is to smear them. Krugman notes,

“…if we’re going to talk about aiding the enemy: By cooking intelligence to promote a war that wasn’t urgent, the administration has squandered our military strength. This provides a lot of aid and comfort to Osama bin Laden — who really did attack America — and Kim Jong Il — who really is building nukes.”

He finishes up with a kicker about the Wilson affair, concluding,

We’ve just seen how politicized, cooked intelligence can damage our national interest. Yet the Wilson affair suggests that the administration intends to continue pressuring analysts to tell it what it wants to hear.

From John Robb’s Weblog, I’m learning a little — enough to scratch my head about whether this is interesting at all — about this new class of apps that promise, as Robb describes it, to “provide a PC-based organizational system for all the digital data a person accumulates during a lifetime… (to) make sense of the gobs of information we are going to store in our 1 Tb computers in 2006…” There’s MyLifeBits, for PCs, which is from Microsoft and which Robb suggests will be seriously flawed by being inflexible and monolithic. DevonThink, so far only for OSX, is a “freeform database with a browser interface that organizes your local data by similarity” and looks pretty interesting to him. And then there’s Dashboard, about which all the recent buzz is about.

I’ll surely investigate this phenomenon further, but for now I’m dubious about their usefulness to me. Maybe I need to get the terabyte hard drive first or progress further along the continuum to benign senescent forgetfulness (in which case a terabyte-range handheld PC will be more useful to me than a desktop, of course). Robb suggests these will be great for webloggers but I suspect he doesn’t mean my style of weblogging.

As Robb asks, “what do we call this category of software” anyway? And, other than the amount of their muscle, how is it different from the heavily-indexed freeform databases (like Ask Sam) or the index-based PC explorers (like Lotus Magellan) I’ve made use of in my remote past? Here are Dashboard‘s stabs at answers to both of those questions:

The dashboard is a piece of software which performs a continous, automatic search of your personal information space to show you things in your life that are related to whatever you happen to be doing with your computer at the time.

While you read email, browse the web, write a document, or talk to your friends on IM, dashboard does its best to proactively find objects that are relevant to your current activity, and to display them in a friendly way.

We call the dashboard an “association engine.”

Part of my hesitancy is about that “friendly way”. I’d be relieved if I didn’t find it intrusive and annoying, even if my machine’s performance didn’t take a hit. I sound like the computerist version of a luddite, I realize, but I’m reminded of that old Twilight Zone episode in which the aliens arrive promising all sorts of boons to humanity. At the end, just as the world’s leaders are about to place their fate entirely in the hands of the aliens, our hero runs up breathlessly to announce that he has just finished translating the aliens’ handbook, To Serve Man. “It’s a cookbook!!” he stammers.

is here. What’s New?

The American Gallery of Psychiatric Art [via dublog]

“But why did Kelly have to die?” Guardian-Observer/UK

Cast your vote here:

I want my representative in the U.S. House of Representatives to vote to impeach President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard B. Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, and Attorney General John D. Ashcroft for high crimes and misdemeanors, and to have the case prosecuted and tried in the U.S. Senate.

a nation that commits political assassinations to get a better hand from a deck of playing cards. CNN No matter how despicable these brothers were, think of what you become if you rejoice at their deaths. And what the detestable leadership of our country has become, to conduct regime change by smart bomb, with no scruples, and with lie after lie to have their way, the ends justifying the means, with no hesitation about the cost to our souls.

Ray at Bellona Times asks:

‘I can’t decide whether the inability to distinguish either “apologizing” or “taking responsibility” from “making excuses” is a characteristically American trait or more generally human. Introspection is no help. Please advise.’

Aaron Lazare, psychiatrist and Chancellor/Dean, University of Massachusetts Medical School, dissects the essence of a well-formed apology:

“One of the most profound interactions of civilized people is the offering and acceptance of apologies. Some apologies have the power to heal and restore damaged relationships, avoid or undo vengeance and grudges, and diminish guilt and shame. Failing to apologize or offering faulty apologies may lead to strained or broken relationships, grudges, and even vengeance.” [more] For A Change