“This page regularly offers ideas for books or stories or works in other media, from those who can’t act upon them. In all cases they are offered in the hopes that these worthy projects will find their way to someone with the time and wherewithal to pursue them. Send yours to ideas@believermag.com.” The Believer

“New research suggests that petulant behavior could actually be due to normal brain ‘remodeling’ that occurs during adolescence.” Psychology Today

says Canadian aid worker:

“Tens of thousands of children in war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo are being slaughtered, raped or enslaved to fight in rebel armies in what aid agencies are calling one of the largest humanitarian emergencies in the world.

‘The situation is nothing short of genocide, with over three million people killed since 1998 – many of these women and children,’ says David Agnew, president of UNICEF Canada, who just returned to Toronto from a week in the central African country.

Agnew said the deaths do not represent only those killed directly in battle, but also millions who died in massacres or from disease and hunger.” canadaeast.com [via walker]

Isn’t there enough natural wealth or geopolitical advantage to justify a Bush cabal ‘humanitarian’ intervention in the DRC?

An FmH reader sent me this blink to her son’s website, for any hoops fans out there. Alex says, “I just turned 10 years old on June 20th and some people call me the world’s youngest blogger. I will share my feelings and opinions about my favorite sport, basketball.” His mother says,

If he could get into the NBA now, he would. But if he doesn’t make it, perhaps he’ll turn out to be a sports writer. Alex provides his insight into the game, the players and some NBA history. Please check it out. He loves to hear from people.

Best of luck, Alex. The future looks bright for you…

“When the 317,647 ballots in MoveOn.org’s online Democratic primary were totaled Friday afternoon, none of the other eight candidates came close to Howard Dean. With nearly 44 percent of the virtual vote, Dean fell short of the majority necessary to garner MoveOn’s influential endorsement and the millions in campaign cash that would likely come with it. But as the clear victor in a cluttered field of contenders, he proved, at the very least, that he is the top pick of well-educated, cyber-savvy Democratic activists who are registered with MoveOn, an organization that claims 1.4 million members in all. Behind Dean in the Internet voting were Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, with around 24 percent, and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., with a disappointing 15.7 percent.” Salon

“Want to become a world champion TTT player? Check out this guide (pdf) which should give you everything you need.”

the great Iraqi Gold Rush is on, and who should be there at the front of the line, right along with Halliburton and Bechtel, but our old friends at WorldCom, perpetrator of the largest accounting fraud in American history.” — Molly Ivins, syndicated

“Slung below its equally innovative mothership dubbed White Knight, SpaceShipOne rides above planet Earth, photographed during a recent flight test. SpaceShipOne was designed and built by cutting-edge aeronautical engineer Burt Rutan and his company Scaled Composites to compete for the X Prize. The 10 million dollar X prize is open to private companies and requires the successful launch of a spaceship which carries three people on short sub-orbital flights to an altitude of 100 kilometers — a scenario similar to the early manned spaceflights of NASA’s Mercury Program. Unlike more conventional rocket flights to space, SpaceShipOne will first be carried to an altitude of 50,000 feet by the twin turbojet White Knight and then released before igniting its own hybrid solid fuel rocket engine. After the climb to space, the craft will convert to a stable high drag configuration for re-entry, ultimately landing like a conventional glider at light plane speeds.” Astronomy Picture of the Day

“An area slightly smaller than Massachusetts was cut down last year.” LA Times

North America’s first legal safe-injection site for addicts will open later this year in Vancouver under a federally funded mandate that will help protect IV drug users from overdoses and diseases spread by needle-sharing. Can you imagine such a compassionate approach south of the border?

(John) Walters, the White House Director of National Drug Control Policy, said in a telephone interview Thursday the program shows an appalling indifference to addiction.

“Drug abuse is a deadly disease,” Walters said. “It’s immoral to allow people to suffer and die from a disease we know how to treat.”

He also called the concept “a lie,” saying “there are no safe injection sites.”

This comes on the heels of Canada’s decriminalization of the possession of small amounts of marijuana, another move that met with irritation from the people in Washington who feel it will jeopardize homeland security®.

“In his dissent from the Supreme Court’s historic decision in the Texas sodomy case, angry Antonin Scalia was right about one thing: The next step is gay marriage.” — Andrew Sullivan, Salon

Aaron Swartz describes a new Google program in which you place some HTML on your site which causes your readers’ browser to request ads from Google. Google, having analyzed your site, sends ads it thinks are particularly relevant to your content. In return for letting Google do this on your site, you get paid 50 cents every time one of your readers clicks on an ad. If you have a weblog or other website and are curious as to what ads Google would think are relevant to your content, Swartz has a gadget on his site that will tell you.

Swartz says that he made $100 from the program in one day and argues that this system might make small ‘labor of love’ weblogs viable. Nota bene: I won’t be implementing this system. This labor of love is a freebie for you.

“I was preparing for an international trip, and I thought, ‘what can I do to tell as many people as possible in other countries that many Americans vehemently disagree with the policies of our own government?‘ So I made this shirt, and various wonderful people translated it into all of the official UN languages, Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Spanish, and Russian. Buy one for your own international travels. A domestic version (US$16), without English, is also available for those who want to make a statement, but not to monolingual locals.”

deserving of a ‘standing’ ovation KFOR.com

Yes. There’s no reason for Bush-bashers to choose between the two.

…Can a false statement be a lie if the speaker is unaware it is a lie?… Why is the speaker unaware that his statement is a lie? In Bush’s case, the answer is painfully obvious. It’s because Bush is a functionally not-bright man. As Chatterbox has explained elsewhere, it’s impossible to tell—and, ultimately, of little interest—whether Bush lacks the necessary mental equipment, or whether he’s simply incurious. The end result is the same. Even Bush’s allies concede that Bush is strikingly ignorant. In the July Vanity Fair, Sam Tanenhaus quoted Richard Perle as saying that when he first met Bush, it was “clear” that “he didn’t know very much.” Perle went on to argue (with what he failed to recognize as condescension) that Bush is an eager pupil. But there isn’t much evidence to support even that.

It’s often said that Bush has the virtue of self-awareness, that he knows what he doesn’t know. That’s probably true. But if it is true, then Bush really oughtn’t to go around making sweeping statements that he hasn’t made any effort to verify. When these statements turn out to be untrue, Bush’s feigned certainty alone justifies calling these statements lies. — Timothy Noah, Slate chatterbox

“…will open Friday for anyone who wants to block sales calls.

Officials at the registry also announced a number of new regulations today, including a requirement that telemarketers transmit their telephone numbers to caller-ID devices and that they have a live operator on the line within two seconds of the consumer’s picking up the phone.

Online registration will be available at www.donotcall.gov, officials said. The trade commission has staggered phone registration to handle the large volume of calls expected. Residents of states west of the Mississippi, including Minnesota and Louisiana, may register by phone starting Friday at 12:01 a.m.. The entire country will be able to register by phone as of July 7. The phone number is (888) 382-1222. The registry will go into effect Oct. 1.” NY Times

‘cuts heart attacks by 80%’:

“A once-a-day pill for everyone over 55 could undo some of the ill-effects of our sedentary, high-cholesterol, western lifestyle and slash the rate of strokes and heart attacks by more than 80%, doctors said yesterday.

The bold concept of the Polypill, made of a combination of six different drugs, was launched in the British Medical Journal by its inventors with the claim that it could have ‘a greater impact on the prevention of disease in the western world than any other known intervention’.

The editor of the Journal, Richard Smith, piled on the hyperbole, writing that: ‘It’s perhaps more than 50 years since we published something as important as the cluster of papers from Nick Wald, Malcolm Law and others.'” Guardian/UK

Curiously, the Guardian article does not go into precise detail about the proposed content of the PolyPill. This Washington Post article does:

The pill would include aspirin because it has been shown to reduce the risk for heart attacks, probably by limiting the formation of dangerous blood clots. It would also include the nutrient folic acid, which reduces a substance in the blood known as homocysteine, which has been strongly linked to heart disease.

Including one of the cholesterol-lowering drugs, known as statins, which millions already use safely, would be crucial. And finally, the polypill would include three different types of blood-pressure lowering drugs at half the usual doses. It would use three so that each could be given at the lower dose, minimizing side effects like lethargy.

All the components could be used in generic form, minimizing the cost, Wald said.

Under the proposal, the drug would be given to anyone with a known risk factor for cardiovascular disease and everyone age 55 and older, the age when most people begin to develop cardiovascular disease, Wald said. One of the most controversial aspects is that the pill would be given to people without first testing their blood pressure or cholesterol levels.

Sometimes the Supreme Court amazes me in its equity and fairness when I least expect it, such as this victory for people being allowed to do whatever they want when they are minding their own business and not impinging on anyone else. This was a 6-3 ruling with only the most unreasonable — Rehnquist and Scalia — and unqualified, braindead — Thomas — dissenting. Pathetic, repugnant attempt at counterargument from the state of Texas: “Texas defended its sodomy law as in keeping with the state’s interest in protecting marriage and child-rearing. Homosexual sodomy, the state argued in legal papers, ‘has nothing to do with marriage or conception or parenthood and it is not on a par with these sacred choices.'” Salon

Related: Sometimes even Texas can get it right: “FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — A jury took less than an hour Thursday to convict a former nurse’s aide of murder for hitting a homeless man with her car, driving home with his mangled body lodged in the windshield and leaving him to die in her garage.” Salon

The defense had argued that this was an accident instead of the pitiless, depraved, wanton destruction of a human life it was.

“Asked to name a linguist, most people come up with Chomsky or Pinker. But Larry Trask – an expert on Basque – deserves to be famous too.:

He’s working now on an etymological dictionary of Basque: his web page contains a trenchant denunciation of all the things that people believe about the language:

‘please note: I do not want to hear about the following: Your latest proof that Basque is related to Iberian/Etruscan/Pictish/Sumerian/ Minoan/Tibetan/Isthmus Zapotec/ Martian. Your discovery that Basque is the secret key to understanding the Ogam inscriptions/the Phaistos disc/ the Easter Island carvings/the Egyptian Book of the Dead/the Qabbala/the prophecies of Nostradamus/your PC manual/the movements of the New York Stock Exchange. Your belief that Basque is the ancestral language of all humankind/a remnant of the speech of lost Atlantis/the language of the vanished civilization of Antarctica/ evidence of visitors from Proxima Centauri. I definitely do not want to hear about these scholarly breakthroughs.’ “

Guardian/UK

William Gibson wishes George Orwell a happy hundredth birthday.

It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret.

In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did.

I say “truths,” however, and not “truth,” as the other side of information’s new ubiquity can look not so much transparent as outright crazy. Regardless of the number and power of the tools used to extract patterns from information, any sense of meaning depends on context, with interpretation coming along in support of one agenda or another. A world of informational transparency will necessarily be one of deliriously multiple viewpoints, shot through with misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories and a quotidian degree of madness. We may be able to see what’s going on more quickly, but that doesn’t mean we’ll agree about it any more readily.

Orwell did the job he set out to do, did it forcefully and brilliantly, in the painstaking creation of our best-known dystopia. I’ve seen it said that because he chose to go there, as rigorously and fearlessly as he did, we don’t have to. I like to think there’s some truth in that. But the ground of history has a way of shifting the most basic of assumptions from beneath the most scrupulously imagined situations. Dystopias are no more real than utopias. None of us ever really inhabits either — except, in the case of dystopias, in the relative and ordinarily tragic sense of life in some extremely unfortunate place.NY Times op-ed

20 questions: “Is there power? Health care? How many troops remain? How many people died? In Baghdad,… some lingering questions about the aftermath of the war in Iraq”. The Globe and Mail [thanks, walker]

A sneak preview of the president’s 2004 campaign: “Presumably by accident, somebody left a live prototype of President Bush’s 2004 campaign site on the Web for a few hours today. (It’s locked up behind a password now, so all links in this item are to snapshots Slate took earlier.)” Slate chatterbox. Pitiful, superficial and arrogant is how this beta preview seems to me.

‘The once frowned-upon practice is no longer the exception but the rule,’ , argues Saul Bellow’s son, a writer himself. His upcoming book, In Praise of Nepotism: A Natural History argues that the US is undergoing a revival of the ‘hereditary principle’ — to put it more bluntly, nepotism — in areas as diverse as business, sports, entertainment, the arts, and politics.

Sean Lennon and Jakob Dylan have record contracts. Laila Ali is a boxer. Sofia and Roman Coppola make movies. Their cousin Nicolas Cage is an Oscar-winning leading man. Michael Douglas, the scion of another Hollywood acting clan, appears in his latest film, It Runs in the Family, alongside his father, mother and son. Susan and Ben Cheever write fiction.

For the first time in 20 years, a Ford – William Clay Ford Jr. – is in charge of Ford Motor Co. And presiding at the White House is a man whose father once held the position, too. (At The New York Times, the job of publisher has been reserved forthe job of publisher has been reserved for family members for more than a century.) International Herald Tribune

Does someone succeed in the profession of their accomplished forebears because their name brings added value in that field; because they are assumed in some sort of genetic paradigm to have more of the “right stuff” and thus given an ‘in’; or because they do in fact have some heritable endowment in areas pertinent to success in that field? Bellow feels the ‘new nepotism’ is only partially the social fiction it was in days of old, instead tempered by meritocratic factors, and that this paradigm should be considered a ‘great achievement’ of our society.

This is Bellow’s provocatively contrarian claim: Today’s nepotism is good because it combines an admirable devotion to family with a principled commitment to merit. Having the right blood ties might win you entrée in your chosen field, but if you fail to perform, you’re unlikely to last. Or as Bellow serenely put it: “A famous name gets your foot in the door, but if the door slams on your face, it’s you who says ouch.”

Others noting the dynastic trend have been less sanguine about it. Even, lo and behold, Andrew Sullivan, pondering the Bush succession, worried that the only other nations that have recently passed power from father to son have been North Korea, Syria and Jordan.

[Let us hope Michael Powell does not have a future in the Dept. of State…]

Related:

At least 17 senators and 11 members of the House have children, spouses or other close relatives who lobby or work as consultants, most in Washington, according to lobbyist reports, financial-disclosure forms and other state and federal records. Many are paid by clients who count on the related lawmaker for support. LA Times

What do Fascism’s belligerent founding father and our own democratically elected Prime Minister have in common? “Every now and again, as I wander about town, my mind drifts from Mussolini and Fascism, the subject in hand, to another matter: Tony Blair and New Labour. Odd, but I cannot help noticing that Blair and Mussolini have rather a lot in common. I am not saying that Blair has consciously copied Mussolini. But Blair, probably without even realising it, does seem to have imbibed quite a few things from the Duce.” Independent/UK

“George W Bush is generally regarded as a mangler of the English language. What is overlooked is his mastery of emotional language — especially negatively charged emotional language — as a political tool. Take a closer look at his speeches and public utterances, and his political success turns out to be no surprise. It is the predictable result of the intentional use of language to dominate others.” — Renana Brooks, a clinical psychologist who researches the use of language for power and persuasion, writing in The Nation [via AlterNet]

“Senior figures in the intelligence community and across Whitehall briefed the former international development secretary Clare Short that Tony Blair had made a secret agreement last summer with George Bush to invade Iraq in February or March, she claimed yesterday.

In damning evidence to the foreign affairs select committee, Ms Short refused to identify the three figures, but she cited their authority for making her claim that Mr Blair had actively deceived the cabinet and the country in persuading them of the need to go to war.” Guardian/UK This, to hearken back to Michael Kinsley’s comments about the search for the Weapons of Mass Distraction, is a more profound reason the question of whether we were lied to on that score is irrelevant. The real deceit was much more pervasive — the entire administration charade about deciding whether to go to war was a waltz around a foregone conclusion.

“A funny thing happened on the way to World War III. It looks increasingly unlikely that any justice will soon leave, analysts say.

Some court watchers have long suggested it was a near certainty that Chief Justice William Rehnquist and perhaps Justice Sandra Day O’Connor would announce their retirements by late June. But other legal scholars have been just as sure that the justices are staying put. That view has gained momentum among court watchers in recent weeks.” Christian Science Monitor

“Did a meteor over central Italy in AD 312 change the course of Roman and Christian history?

A team of geologists believes it has found the incoming space rock’s impact crater, and dating suggests its formation coincided with the celestial vision said to have converted a future Roman emperor to Christianity.

It was just before a decisive battle for control of Rome and the empire that Constantine saw a blazing light cross the sky and attributed his subsequent victory to divine help from a Christian God.

Constantine went on to consolidate his grip on power and ordered that persecution of Christians cease and their religion receive official status.” BBC News

“Brain imaging confirms that some individuals really are more sensitive to pain than others, report researchers from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in this week’s on-line edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

‘We have all met people who seem very sensitive to pain as well as those who appear to tolerate pain very well,’ said Robert C. Coghill, Ph.D., lead investigator. ‘Until now, there was no objective evidence that could confirm that these individual differences in pain sensitivity are, in fact, real.'” EurekAlert!

Christian Perring, a philosopher, reviews Advancing DSM: Dilemmas in Psychiatric Diagnosis. Edited by Katherine A. Phillips, Michael B. First, and Harold Alan Pincus.:

Those interested in the philosophy of psychiatry will find much food for thought in the chapter by Wakefield and First, “Clarifying the Distinction Between Disorder and Nondisorder.” They explain that it is important to distinguish between mental disorders and other conditions including normal intense emotional reactions, social deviance, personal unhappiness, lack of fit between an individual and a specific social role or relationship or environment, and socially disapproved or negatively evaluated behavior in general.

This is especially motivated by concerns within the psychiatric profession and the general public that mental disorders are being overdiagnosed, and ordinary human problems are being medicalized. They call this the false-positives problem, and they spell out the wide range of clinical, research and social concerns that it raises. They examine the strengths and weaknesses of the current DSM-IV-TR definition, which have been discussed at length elsewhere.

Unsurprisingly, the authors are inclined to adopt Wakefield’s well-known “harmful dysfunction” account of mental disorder. It is disappointing that they scarcely mention the existence of a considerable body of literature that finds serious flaws in this account, although they do address some general sorts of concerns that have been raised. They suggest however, that the false-positives problem stems not so much from the defects of the current definition but rather a failure to abide by that definition in the DSM criteria sets. They examine a number of different cases to illustrate their claim here. For example, DSM-IV-TR would count someone who had just lost their job and had experienced 2 weeks of depressed mood, diminished pleasure in usual activities, insomnia, fatigue, and a diminished ability to concentrate on work tasks as having major depression. Wakefield and first argue that such symptoms are a normal reaction to such a loss, and do not give reason to believe that there is a psychological dysfunction. They argue that the criteria for adjustment disorder, substance abuse, acute stress disorder, conduct disorder and separation anxiety are also overinclusive, counting as mental disorders conditions that do not involve internal dysfunctions of individuals.

Wakefield and First also point out that the attempt to reduce false positives through requiring that symptoms be “clinically significant” is unhelpful because it is circular — the whole point of a definition of mental disorder is to explain the meaning of what should count as clinical significance, and so it cannot simply appeal to such a notion in its definition. They suggest that definitions of mental disorder should attempt to focus on the essence of the dysfunction that is the cause of the mental disorder.

Furthermore, they emphasize that there is a dysfunction when a person’s symptoms do not match the context. As they explain, “A dysfunction exists when a person’s internal mechanisms are not able to function in the range of environments to which they were designed to respond. Thus, one can construct a test for dysfunction by specifying an environment in which the function is designed to manifest itself; if the function is not manifested in that environment, there is likely a dysfunction” (p. 51).

Wakefield and First’s call to bring the DSM criteria for mental disorders in line with the DSM definition of mental disorder is certainly to be welcomed. It is likely that their emphasis on clarifying the distinction between normal reactions and internal dysfunctions could lead to improved formulations of psychiatric criteria in many cases. However, their reliance on a concept of dysfunctional mechanisms within a person, often supported by reference to functions of internal mechanisms as set out by evolutionary psychology, is problematic. As many critics have pointed out, evolutionary psychology is in no position to give us a clear picture of what counts as normal function, and it is debatable whether it ever will be. Furthermore, even if we did could use evolutionary psychology for this purpose, there are reasons whether it is appropriate to use the standards of evolutionary fitness for survival in conditions that existed long before the creation of any human civilizations of the last our thousand years for our standards of normality in the twenty-first century. (This point applies as much to standards of physical health as is does to mental health.)

Many will worry that the desire for DSM to clothe itself in the garb of scientific respectability will result in smuggling in a host of ideological and normative assumptions under the guise of scientific objectivity. A strong case can be made that rather than basing criteria for mental disorder on dubious science or pseudoscience, we be better served by encouraging an open public discussion of the normative bases of our psychiatric categories and with the aim of reaching broad agreement.

Happy Birthday, Ambrose Bierce

Bierce’s father had the largest library in the county, and when Bierce dropped out of high school—he was not one for groups—he spent much time there. It is hard to disagree with a recent biographer who sees the library as having saved Bierce from being the serial killer type, or having turned him into the prose version of it.

The cap to Bierce’s legendary life is the drama of his mysterious death: at age seventy-one, he perhaps died while attempting to get close to Pancho Villa’s army in Mexico, perhaps as a suicide in the Grand Canyon. Either theory might convey the impression that the cynicism by which Bierce won fame also killed him.

Today in Literature

You already are,” argues Andy Clark in his new book, Natural-Born Cyborgs. canada.com

This story from the Washington Post contributes further to the impression that the administration believes Saddam Hussein survived this spring’s U.S. invasion. Anonymous administration sources confirmed that a U.S. strike last week on a fleeing Iraqi three-vehicle convoy near the Syrian border led to DNA testing of the remains to see if Hussein was among them. Pentagon sources were somewhat cagey but acknowledged that there had been good intelligence that “one or more high-value targets” might be found in the convoy. Sovereignty be damned: U.S. forces reportedly followed the convoy into Syria before destroying it there.

“You’re 40, happily married – and then you meet your long-lost brother and fall passionately in love. This isn’t fiction; in the age of the sperm donor, it’s a growing reality: 50% of reunions between siblings, or parents and offspring, separated at birth result in obsessive emotions. Last month, a former police officer was convicted of incest with his half-sister – but should we criminalise a bond hardwired into our psychology? ” Guardian/UK

“Characters from Irish soap operas and The Simpsons have been used in ESRC-funded research into how we get to learn people’s faces.

Observations during the 1970s of witnesses mis-remembering unfamiliar people from crime scenes has led to a lot of investigation into face recognition over the years. Today’s rapidly increasing use of CCTV images makes the subject as topical as ever.

Previous research has shown that comparing images of unfamiliar faces to see whether they show the same person is highly prone to error, even when the pictures are high quality and the faces are shown at the same time to avoid relying on memory. By contrast, recognising familiar faces can be highly accurate, even when the image quality is extremely poor.

The aim of a new study led by Professor Vicki Bruce, now at Edinburgh University, was to investigate how faces become familiar to us.” EurekAlert!

“Language can help to shape the way we think about the world. Richard Dawkins welcomes an attempt to raise consciousness about atheism by co-opting a word with cheerful associations“:

My favourite consciousness-raising effort is one I have men tioned many times before (and I make no apology, for consciousness- raising is all about repetition). A phrase like ‘Catholic child’ or ‘Muslim child’ should clang furious bells of protest in the mind, just as we flinch when we hear ‘one man one vote’. Children are too young to know their religious opinions. Just as you can’t vote until you are 18, you should be free to choose your own cosmology and ethics without society’s impertinent presumption that you will automatically inherit your parents’. We’d be aghast to be told of a Leninist child or a neo-conservative child or a Hayekian monetarist child. So isn’t it a kind of child abuse to speak of a Catholic child or a Protestant child? Especially in Northern Ireland and Glasgow where such labels, handed down over generations, have divided neighbourhoods for centuries and can even amount to a death warrant? Guardian/UK

New York Times commentary by Dr. Peter Kramer, psychiatrist and author of Listening to Prozac: Patients are beginning to treat depression with respect. Whether their doctors are ready to do so is less clear.

… A study in the current issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association finds that almost six in 10 Americans who suffer depression seek treatment in a given year. A decade ago, the figure was one in three.

But the researchers found that only about 40 percent of patients received what standard guidelines consider ‘minimally adequate medical treatment.’ Those criteria call for a month of antidepressants monitored in four office visits or eight half-hour counseling sessions.

There is a long tradition in general medicine of ignoring or undertreating depression. But a second article in JAMA suggested reasons that the pattern may change. That report described the largest study of psychotherapy ever conducted, sponsored by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

The study is a response to evidence, developed over the past decade, that depression, like diabetes and hypertension, is a risk to the heart. By middle age, studies show, depression triples or quadruples the risk of cardiac death. The most acute danger comes in the wake of heart attacks. After a first attack, depression raises the risk of recurrence dramatically. NY Times

Kramer discusses the intimate relationship — probably far more complex than you would have expected — between depression and cardiac disease in some detail. Antidepressants likely reduce cardiovascular morbidity and mortality by a combination of mechanisms both related to and distinct from their antidepressant actions.

Quite rightly. But, on the other hand, at this year’s American Psychiatric Association annual meeting, I noticed a new marketing trend in the big pharmaceutical companies’ exhibit booths. And, whenever I notice a new marketing trend in pharmaceuticals, I assume it has much much more to do with preserving or enlarging profits than with scientific accuracy… Increasingly, the promotional gospel is that depression is a systemic disease rather than simply one of the mind. Emphasizing its connection with bodily fatigue, chronic pain, gastrointestinal distress, immune dysfunction, cardiovascular effects etc., while probably scientifically accurate, seem to serve primarily profit-making goals for their manufacturers by enhancing the likelihood that an antidepressant will be prescribed in a given instance.

As I have often written here, for the past several decades they have attempted, and largely succeeded, in enlisting internists and other primary care specialists as prescribers of psychoactive drugs, displacing mental health specialists to the detriment of the patients and then ignoring the contribution of that trend to the adverse outcomes. This effort will be facilitated if non-psychiatric practitioners are persuaded to conceptualize their patient’s depression as a physical disease, and if they can envision prescribing an antidepressant as potentially addressing their patients’ vague bodily complaints they find so vexing and time-consuming a part of a primary care practice.

In addition to facilitating the shift of antidepressant prescribing to non-psychiatric practitioners, this emphasis on depression as a physical ailment can be expected in a similar manner to shift the overall response to depression toward the medication solution and away from non-medical solutions such as psychotherapy… or simply adequate time and attention in the busy internist’s schedule.

I am not suggesting that Kramer is a knowing tool of the pharmaceutical industry. But if the zeitgeist is changing we ought to recognize the full range of contributing influences.

“United States military commanders say foreign fighters are being actively recruited by loyalists to Saddam Hussein to join the resistance against American forces in Iraq, posing a new challenge to efforts to stabilize the country.” NY Times Several comments. First of all, this is predictable spin from an administration that wants to cast Iraq as part of a global terrorist conspiracy against us and is turning its sights to Syria, Iran and other demonized Islamic regimes. And, furthermore, it is an argument that clings to the pitiful fiction that we have ‘liberated’ the country and that, left to its own sentiments without the influence of ‘Baathist’ and “fundamentalist’ agitators, the Iraqis would be fawning all over their country’s liberators rather than killing them at an average rate of one American soldier a day NY Times.

Secondly, why in the world would we be surprised that our actions in Iraq recruited legions to the global fight against the American infidels or that they have failed to cease hostilities with the fall of Baghdad? Given that they had no loyalty to Saddam per se in the first place? Shouldn’t an effective American occupation have anticipated the need to close the porous boundaries if (as Maj. Gen. William Webster, deputy commander of the allied land command, is quoted as saying in a recent interview) “you have got Baath Party and regime loyalists west and northeast of the city who are calling buddies in foreign countries and getting fighters to come across the border” ?

“Why are we even bothering to keep looking for those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? At this point, what difference does it make whether we find them or not? Trying to find them serves two ostensible purposes: One is to prevent them from being used, and the other is to settle the argument about whether they exist. But neither purpose really applies any longer.” — Michael Kinsley, Slate

Kinsley argues that the people who would care that we were lied to about the justification for the war are already convinced. The bulk of the American public do not need proff, giving Bush a pass on this one. Even the administration has been retreating from the pretext, now saying the war was justified on purely humanitarian grounds.

I do differ from Kinsley on his other point, which is the irrelevancy of stopping any existing weapons from being used. He argues that without Saddam Iraq is not the rogue state we have to fear most, and there are other dangerous states out there more prone to use WMD against the civilized world. Now, I don’t believe the weapons were ever there, but if they were this argument would not hold water. Given the chaos that reigns in Iraq under US occupation, finding any WMD would matter not so much because there are government elements that represent a threat as because of the risk of diversion to unscrupulous — or even merely ignorant — elements. How can this risk be ignored given the (underreported) story last week from the Iraqi nuclear power facility at xxxx that radioactive uranium unguarded by occupying forces was dumped out onto the ground so the looters could use the barrels for food storage?

Kinsley’s essay veers off in a different direction, however, after considering these points. He wonders, as has been one of my recent preoccupations, why Americans are so ready to believe in WMD. I do agree that the phrase itself has become an incantation (‘”Weapons of mass destruction” are to George W. Bush what fairies were to Peter Pan. He wants us to say, “We DO believe in weapons of mass destruction. We DO believe. We DO.” ‘). Because he believes the debate is irrelevant, he is amazed how rarely people say they don’t know whether Iraq had WMD, the only correct answer. He seems to fault the confident naysayers like myself along with the credulous swallowers of every Bush lie, before wandering off into some unintelligible meditation on how many martinis it takes a pundit to form an opinion and how certain one has to be to believe anything. I suppose his point is to criticize pundit culture, but is he talking about the standards we ought to apply to political commentators or to the rest of us? It is a different but no less opinionated conceit, in a sense, to be the pundit of radical skepticism; I’m not sure the resurrection of the Know-Nothing Party is the answer for the crisis in political polarization in the U.S. today.

“You’re 40, happily married – and then you meet your long-lost brother and fall passionately in love. This isn’t fiction; in the age of the sperm donor, it’s a growing reality: 50% of reunions between siblings, or parents and offspring, separated at birth result in obsessive emotions. Last month, a former police officer was convicted of incest with his half-sister – but should we criminalise a bond hardwired into our psychology? ” Guardian/UK

Jack Balkwill:

“I am the one who took his place in Vietnam, so I should know.

Corporate media have convinced the masses of a fictitious warrior Bush, who is a hero. This has been effective, as a neighbor recently told me that “If Gore had been elected, he wouldn’t have had the guts to attack Iraq.” My heart sank when I heard that, as I cannot fathom how it “takes guts” to order bombs to be dropped on children. Only cowards can do such things. Cowards who desert from war themselves while insisting that the working class bleed and die for the excesses of their national security state.

(…)

The Democrats seem unable to locate an issue with which to oppose Bush, most having voted for everything he’s requested to date. May I suggest the truth? The single image Bush has promoted is flag-waving hero of the Republic. The evidence proves he is a coward.” Liberal Slant

Of course, this is just more preachng to the choir…

Now I’m sure he is a man of the people. Salon

“Sen. Orrin Hatch’s Web woes just won’t go away. Until Friday, a link on the conservative Republican’s website led to a pornographic site.

As previously reported, Hatch’s website used unlicensed software for its menu system.

Earlier in the week, Hatch (R-Utah) suggested in Congress that people who steal copyright works off the Internet should have their computers automatically destroyed. Under such a scheme, Hatch’s own website servers probably would have qualified for the punishment.” Wired

“A study of mercury levels in the baby hair of children who were later diagnosed with autism has produced startling results. The babies had far lower levels of mercury in their hair than other infants, leading to speculation that autistic children either do not absorb mercury or, more likely, cannot excrete it.” New Scientist

Mark Glaser’s Guide to the Blogosphere: “This past year has seen the world of Weblogs, aka the blogosphere, grow in power and stature, if not to the general public, then to the other media. So we’ve created a graphical depiction of what I believe to be the most influential blogs, pushing the direction of media coverage and perhaps even public policy.” Online Journalism Review

An Academic Field’s Take on Race Stirs Interest and Anger: “The privilege walk was part of a course in whiteness studies, a controversial and relatively new academic field that seeks to change how white people think about race. The field is based on a left-leaning interpretation of history by scholars who say the concept of race was created by a rich white European and American elite, and has been used to deny property, power and status to nonwhite groups for two centuries.

Advocates of whiteness studies — most of whom are white liberals who hope to dismantle notions of race — believe that white Americans are so accustomed to being part of a privileged majority they do not see themselves as part of a race.” Washington Post

“J. K. Rowling is an Inkling. That’s the well-argued thesis of John Granger’s fine book The Hidden Key to Harry Potter. Granger demonstrates the absurdity of the claim that Harry Potter is anti-Christian. And even if you’ve never worried about charges brought by misguided fundamentalists, The Hidden Key will substantially augment your understanding of what’s really at stake in Harry’s adventures.

The Inklings were originally a group of Oxford dons who wrote Christian fiction. The most famous of them are J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Lord of the Rings and the Narnia series never mention Christianity overtly, and in Tolkien’s books, religion itself is absent from the plot. Yet these mythopoeic books aim to ‘baptize the imagination’ of the reader — to teach her the importance of fighting for the right, no matter how powerful the forces of evil may appear.” National Review [via walker]

For those who follow the various series of children’s fantasies attracting attention these days, I found the following interesting:

The villain in Chamber of Secrets is Gilderoy Lockheart — the gilded, or false, king (“roi” in French) with a “locked heart.” Lockhart, best-selling author of a string of false books, is, Granger suggests, modeled on Philip Pullman, the militant atheist and best-selling real-life author of the Dark Materials children’s series — books that were written as a deliberate refutation of (C.S. Lewis’) Narnia.

U.S. Experts Say:

American intelligence analysts now believe that Saddam Hussein is much more likely to be alive than dead, a view that has been strengthened in recent weeks by intercepted communications among fugitive members of the Saddam Fedayeen and the Iraqi intelligence service, according to United States government officials.

The officials said the recently obtained intelligence had re-intensified the search for Mr. Hussein along with his sons, Uday and Qusay. The search is being led by Task Force 20, a secret military organization that includes members of the Army’s highly specialized Delta Force and of the Navy’s elite counterterrorism squads, with support from the Central Intelligence Agency.

Intercepts of credible communications indicating that he is alive and must be protected have fueled this speculation. It is felt that if alive he would likely stay in Iraq rather than attempt to flee. Chalabi said more than a week ago that Saddam is in a loyalist area of Iraq with a remnant of his private fortune, offering bounties on American soldiers’ heads, but this was largely laughed off at the time. Could the continued loss of an average of one American soldier a day be contributing to a reevaluation of this intel, along with the inability to find any definitive physican evidence of his demise in the sites of our attempted assassinations?

Related: Captured Official Is Said to Tell U.S. Hussein Survived: ” top lieutenant to Saddam Hussein has also told American interrogators that he had fled to Syria with Saddam Hussein’s sons after the conflict.” NY Times

“Pfc. Jessica Lynch did not mow down Iraqis until her ammo ran out, was not shot and apparently was not plucked from behind enemy lines by U.S. commandos braving a firefight. It looks as if the first accounts of the rescue were embellished, like the imminent threat from W.M.D., and like wartime pronouncements about an uprising in Basra and imminent defections of generals. There’s a pattern: we were misled…

None of this is to put down Private Lynch… Ms. Lynch is still a hero in my book, and it was unnecessary for officials to try to turn her into a Hollywood caricature. As a citizen, I deeply resent my government trying to spin me like a Ping-Pong ball…

The Iraqis misused our prisoners for their propaganda purposes, and it hurts to find out that some American officials were misusing Private Lynch the same way.” —Nicholas Kristof, NY Times op-ed

TV graphic labels Bush ‘professional fascist’: “A graphic on an evening news broadcast identifying President Bush as a ‘professional fascist’ has touched off confusion, apologies and an investigation.

The estimated 360,000 viewers of New Zealand’s TV3 news program last night were ‘surprised and confused’ by the graphic, which was supposed to promote an upcoming weather report, the New Zealand Herald said.”

“The United States says it is working with African governments to try to find a stolen passenger jet that it fears may end up being used by terrorists.” BBC Several days ago, there seemed to be some premature reassurance about the whereabouts of this jet, but concerns have reemerged. Of course if it becomes too difficult to hijack a commercial flight, stealing a vulnerable jet from the ground becomes an attractive option.

In Spike War, Lee Takes Lead: ‘TNN has argued that the new name was inspired by the verb “spike” as opposed to the name “Spike.” “From day one, when we came up with the name ‘Spike,’ it was always thought of as an action word,” a spokesman said.

Nevertheless, network president Albie Hecht said in a round of press interviews in early April that Lee, as well as other figures such as director Spike Jonze, had at least partially inspired the name.’ Newsday

Silly headline but an important finding: “In today’s issue of the journal Nature, a 40-person research team describes in detail the ‘male-specific region’ of the Y, which makes up 95 percent of the stubby chromosome. The portrait they paint is of a Yoda-like entity that has physically shriveled over the eons but nevertheless has found a way to keep its unique powers.

Specifically, the Y chromosome has evolved a way to correct harmful mutations — or preserve and promote useful ones — without the benefit of having a nearly identical partner with which to trade DNA, as all other chromosomes do.

Study of the Y’s newly revealed genetic contents may eventually shed light on such broad mysteries as why male fetuses are more vulnerable and why men generally do not live as long as women. It may also help physicians better understand the cause and diversity of male infertility.” Washington Post

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix goes on sale tonight at 12:01, a fitting kickoff to the summer vacation season in my family, with the solstice upon us and school having ended for my 9-year-old son yesterday afternoon. He and I will be at the Children’s Bookstore for the Harry Potter gala tonight, culminating in a 12:01 trip to the cash register.

One of my recurring pleasures since the first Harry Potter book came out has been that we have read them aloud together, feverishly at times. But my son gingerly approached me this morning and let me know that he wants to read the book himself this time, he hopes I don’t mind. His rationale is that he will be able to read it more rapidly not having to wait for the limited evening-times we have to read together. The Artemis Fowl series, which we are reading aloud together, will go on hold (as Lord of the Rings did once, to my amazement, at my son’s receipt of a previous Potter release). There certainly is something bittersweet in this rite of passage. [Not to mention I will have to wait for him to be done with it before I can read it!]

Will the massive tome be worth the three-year wait? Literary critic Harold Bloom predicted the series will have no lasting appeal because it is atrocious writing. I have wondered whether, because of the phenomenal success of her film contracts and other tie-ins (Rowling is highly touted as now having a net worth greater than the Queen of England) the books would increasingly sacrifice subtlety for cinematic appeal. And, finally, I have misgivings about the remarkable growth in length from tome to tome (at this rate, the seventh book will have to appear in two volumes, someone quipped). Only exceptional books avoid collapsing under the weight of their own verbosity at this length; among recent ones, Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, which I recommend to everyone as an engrossing and complex read, comes to mind. What could Rowling possibly have to say that would take more than 800 pages?

This book is such a potential bonanza for its publisher (if not booksellers, although on the basis of HPOP alone, it is reportedly like Christmas rush at amazon.com this week) that I am not sure I trust the gushing early reviews that have appeared today. But they are suggesting that Rowling’s writing has grown in nuance and sophistication as well as mere voluminousness. The book reportedly has a far broader geographic and emotional scope. This adolescent Potter, having grown a year from each volume to the next, is manifestly a much more tormented and angst-ridden character than the innocent wizard discovering his power and heroism my son and I had previously gotten to know. It would have been fun to read aloud and discuss with a quick-minded 9-year-old something with this depth…

As everybody knows by now, a major character is rumored to die in this novel. Rowling has undoubtedly made it difficult for Harry to bear, but my son and his peers have a good idea, from the buzz on the street, who it is and are prepared for the death, they say. Perhaps this too will be an important rite of passage experienced through the literary lens…

“Real indigenous democracy does not seem to fit American plans for post-war Iraq – at least for now. Paul Bremer, the American proconsul, has said on the record that elections in Iraq are ‘premature’ – that’s how he justified his personal ban, last Saturday, on the election for governor of the holy city of Najaf, which was supposed to take place this coming Saturday and for which local political parties had been preparing for over a month. Bremer invoked technicalities, saying ‘there’s no electoral law’, ‘no ballot boxes’ and ‘no procedure’ in place. Bremer, a Pentagon favorite, former Henry Kissinger collaborator and specialist in counter-terrorism, has no Middle East – or democratic – experience.” Asia Times [thanks, walker]

Walker sent a link to this Seattle Catholic article, seeking refutations. I’ll forward them along if you send them to me here.

It is disturbing that many Catholics have adopted a philosophical preference for Islam over Judaism. Furthermore, in some instances, some prominent Catholics have even made the unfortunate suggestion that there is much commonality between the true Faith and the religion of Islam.

I have to believe that in doing so, they have little or no idea what Islam preaches or how its followers manifest their faith in the real world. It’s time for an expose of what the Koran and Islamic Law actually teach, and how that teaching is applied by its proponents.

It is not enough to simply say that life for Moslem girls is harsh and leave it at that. Catholics must come to some understanding of what life is really like for young girls in Islamic countries, so no reputable Catholic may ever again make the absurd claim of commonality between the Mohammedan religion and the one, true Catholic Faith.

The article goes on to characterize Islam as supporting forced genital mutilation of women, protection of men who violate women, ‘institutionalized pedophilia’ and ‘slavery’. [As contrasted with American Catholicism’s institutionalized pedophilia and protection of men who violate boys?] The logical fallacy of condemning Islam for what happens in Islamic nations goes entirely unexamined…

FDA Statement Regarding the Anti-depressant Paxil for Pediatric Population: “The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said today it is reviewing reports of a possible increased risk of suicidal thinking and suicide attempts in children and adolescents under the age of 18 treated with the drug Paxil for major depressive disorder (MDD). Although the FDA has not completed its evaluation of the new safety data, FDA is recommending that Paxil not be used in children and adolescents for the treatment of MDD. There is currently no evidence that Paxil is effective in children or adolescents with MDD, and Paxil is not currently approved for use in children and adolescents. Other approved treatment options are available for depression in children.” Also: Questions and Answers on Paxil. FDA/Center for Drug Evaluation and Research

“American troops today admitted they routinely gun down Iraqi civilians – some of whom are entirely innocent.

As distrust of the invading forces increases amongst the local population US soldiers said they have killed civilians without hesitation, shot injured opponents and abandoned them to die in agony.” Mirror.co.uk via Tom Tomorrow Read the unabashed merciless quotes from one Specialist Corporal Michael Richardson, and then keep telling me how little moral responsibility the grunts on the front lines have for their actions.

“If ‘strategic hamlet’ and ‘counterinsurgency’ are coming back into use in talking about the situation in Iraq, can ‘quagmire’ be far behind?” AlterNet

“So far, Americans are giving Bush a pass about the lies used to justify the Iraq war. But will fear, ignorance and faith in the president’s integrity keep him Teflon-coated forever?” Salon

“Where would we be without Valium? Certainly not in Nutley, New Jersey, savoring the soft Klonopin light of a warm spring day. Nutley, ten minutes west of the Lincoln Tunnel, is home to the corporate campus of the Roche pharmaceutical company, which a couple of weeks ago threw a birthday party for Valium and its inventor, Dr. Leo Sternbach. Valium was turning forty; Sternbach, ninety-five. Both are diminished but are still going strong.” New Yorker Talk of the Town

“The US government can forcibly administer mind-altering drugs to render criminal defendants competent to stand trial, but only under certain limited circumstances.

In a case with potential implications for those opposed to conventional medical care, the US Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 Monday that the government’s interest in bringing defendants to trial outweighs an individual’s decision to be free from forced medication.” Christian Science Monitor

If you scan the press coverage of this Supreme Court decision, you will find two distinctly different takes on it. One emphasizes that the Court upheld forced medication; the other that such stringent restrictions were placed on it. The ruling is a victory for the defendant in the case, although it dismisses the notion that there is a fundamental right under the Constitution to refuse treatment. A lower court ruling forcing the defendant to take medications against his will to restore his competency to stand trial was vacated and the court was instructed to reconsider the case with the toughter criteria, which he is not likely to meet.

The criteria are as follows:

• “First, the court must find important government interests are at stake.
• Second, it must conclude that involuntary medication will significantly further those government interests.
• Third, the court must conclude that involuntary medication is necessary to further those interests.
• And fourth, it must conclude that administration of the drugs is medically appropriate in light of the patient’s best medical interests.
• The justices also noted that a court must find administration of the drugs is substantially unlikely to have side effects that will significantly interfere with a defendant’s ability to assist in his or her defense at trial.”

While the majority opinion by Justice Breyer cautions that the permissible instances for forced medication may be rare, I am not so sure. Arguably, the government will argue that “important interests” will be met simply by restoring comeptency and allowing someone to be brought to trial, for most crimes even if not for this one. Involuntary medication will usually, if not invariably, be seen as the most expedient if not the only way, and inherently medically appropriate, to further such an objective. I am not saying I agree with construing things in that way, but I predict that is how the criteria will be applied.

The case at hand was one of a dentist indicted for Medicaid fraud who refused to take medication for a mental illness — diagnosed as delusional disorder, persecutory type — which rendered him incompetent to stand trial, i.e. unable to collaborate with his attorney in defending himself (likely because he was too paranoid to trust his lawyer). The article comments:

(The) case is unique in that the court determined he was legally incompetent to stand trial but he was nonetheless competent to make his own medical decisions. In addition, the appeals court ruled that he did not pose a danger to himself and others.

This, however, is really not so surprising, since competency is always determined relative to some particular sphere of functioning. Traditionally, courts have had more stringent criteria for finding someone incompetent to make decisions about bodily integrity or sanctity than competency in other spheres. And dangerousness and competency are totally distinct concepts. Although the patient was incompetent, he was not dangerous to self or others, and the Court suggests that in the absence of a burden to protect him or society, the state’s interest, merely to bring him to trial and prosecute for fraud, was not a compelling one and that it was wrong to force him on that account to take medication.

Hospital said to seek help on Virgin image:

Overrun with worshipers praying before a likeness of the Virgin Mary in a third-story window, Milton Hospital officials have asked the Archdiocese of Boston to caution people against placing faith in the image, a church official confirmed yesterday.

Word of the likeness, which hospital officials say is made by a chemical deposit inside a sealed window, began to spread last week. Over the weekend, more than 25,000 people crowded onto the grounds to see it, officials said.

(…)

A church official said the hospital has asked the archdiocese for help in cautioning people against placing faith in the image. In the past, church leaders have been reluctant to comment one way or the other on such phenomena. Boston Globe

The sheer number of devout visitors hoping to pray before the apparition has edged out parking spaces for staff and patients with healthcare needs and made it impossible to keep that sector of the hospital clean. But a further danger is that the Blessed Mother seems to be interfering in healthcare policy:

Among the theories was that Mary had come to warn Milton Hospital not to join with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. In February, the two announced they had formed a clinical affiliation. Milton Hospital does not perform abortions.

Nick Gillespie in Reason:

Teutonic-style outrage over the infinitely exploding amount of spam – unsolicited bulk emails – has officially replaced weapons of mass destruction and even monkeypox as the leading threat to all that is good and decent about life in these United States. …

In the current climate – which includes various pending and sure-to-be-useless legislative fixes – isn’t anyone brave enough to say something good about spam? Well, I am. I love spam – and not only because I just placed an order for a guaranteed system that will enlarge my penis so that I can use it to clean my septic tank while playing solitaire with a deck of Iraq’s Most Wanted cards. (As long as I’m sharing, I should mention that I only paid $59.99 for all this, using the same unsecured credit card that allowed me to take advantage of Mr. Kwame Ashantee’s generous and urgent invitation to invest heavily in the Ghana Gold and Diamond Mining Corporation. As a highly valued early investor, I also received 30 lbs. of herbal Viagra and refinanced my mortgage at the absolute lowest rate of negative 3.4 percent. Who said the Internet hasn’t delivered the goods?)

Gillespie goes on to cite the entertainment value of the spam he receives, opening a window on an alternative universe he would not otherwise know existed. But his main point is that legislative approaches to controlling spam are going to be ineffective. Since spam transcends national boundaries, no jurisdiction can effectively regulate it. Furthermore, spam is in the eye of the beholder. For these reasons, the only approaches that stand a chance of working are decentralized ones that empower the end-user. And that Gillespie finds worth appreciating. [Of course, this argument is a little like the one saying you should bang your head against the wall because it feels so good when you stop… — FmH]

A reader commenting on his article makes another point in favor of spam, claiming; that it is a great guarantor of personal privacy, making it much harder for the information-awareness Carnivores of the world trying to monitor the email traffic of strangers to recognize what is relevant. I don’t agree with this argument at all, though. Even if 90% of the email traffic is at some point spam, this would just make the surveillance effort more demanding; not impossible. The extra filtering is just an inevitable cost of doing business, but not a prohibitive one.

“The development of colour vision may have lead to Old World primates, and hence their human descendants, to lose their ability to detect pheromones, suggests a new genetic study. Pheromones are highly specific scent molecules that many animals rely upon to find and assess a potential mate.” The study establishes that the genetic emergence of full color vision in Old World primates coincided roughly with the shutoff of the pheromone signal transduction pathway, around 23 million years ago. How the switch to a visually-based approach to mate-selection conferred a selective advantage is a matter of speculation; it may relate to the ability to see color from a safer distance. New Scientist

Exotic Pets Come Bearing Exotic Germs : “Epidemiologists can be such killjoys. Consider, for instance, Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, who has been publicly denouncing prairie dogs since 1997. A prairie dog in a burrow is one thing, but a prairie dog in the house makes Dr. Osterholm a bit edgy.” NY Times

“Behind the rhetoric — and behind the veil of secrecy, invoked in the name of national security but actually used to prevent public scrutiny — lies a pattern of neglect, of refusal to take crucial actions to protect us from terrorists. Actual counterterrorism, it seems, doesn’t fit the administration’s agenda.

Yesterday The Washington Post printed an interview with Rand Beers, a top White House counterterrorism adviser who resigned in March. “They’re making us less secure, not more secure,” he said of the Bush administration. “As an insider, I saw the things that weren’t being done.” Among the problem areas he cited were homeland security, where he says the administration has “only a rhetorical policy”; failure to press Saudi Arabia (the home of most of the Sept. 11 terrorists) to take action; and, of course, the way we allowed Afghanistan to relapse into chaos.” — Paul Krugman, NY Times op-ed

“…(T)hough national support for capital punishment may be softening, this does not mean that fewer people will be sentenced to die in prison.” NY Times

Firm Finds Way to Keep Lost Dogs on Leash: “Japan’s largest home and office security provider Secom Co Ltd thinks it can offer the paranoid pet owner a little peace of mind.

Secom said Monday it plans to unleash a new service later this month to track missing dogs, using satellite-based global positioning systems (GPS) and mobile phone networks… The technology used by Secom is an extension of a similar service offered since April 2001 for tracking young children, the elderly and missing automobiles.” Yahoo! News

‘The apparent benefit “can be entirely attributed to measurement error,” said researcher Paul T. Williams, a biostatistician in the Life Sciences Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.’ AP/Salon

“Bill Clinton won the youth vote. Al Gore split it with George Bush. Will Democrats realize they must embrace pop culture, not demonize it, to win back the White House?”

As Goldberg points out — and no other political pundit, to my knowledge, has noticed this — in 1996, Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole by 19 points among voters under 24. In 2000, George W. Bush and Gore were dead even in that age group, a total of about 9 million votes. Restore even half of Clinton’s ’96 edge with youth, and the result of the election is clearly different, with or without the much-debated Nader factor.

— Andrew O’Hehir, Salon

wrote of unusual sex objects: feet. “William A. Rossi, 92, a podiatrist whose masterwork ”The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe ” elicited laughs from laymen and knowing nods from shoe salesmen, died Saturday at his home in Marshfield.” Boston Globe

Despite Rupert Murdoch and the soft-porn tabloid dailies, ‘the spectrum of thought (in the British print media) ranges so wide that a progressive-minded American might be tempted to take up residence here.

In comparison, the leading “liberal” dailies across the Atlantic – the New York Times and the Washington Post – are mouthpieces of corporate power and U.S. empire. If the Times and the Post were being published in London, then British readers would consider those newspapers to be centrist or even conservative.’ AlterNet

“Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o’er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably. I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the ends of his legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a’.

Won’t you come to Sandymount,

Madeline the mare?

Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. Acatalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the mare.

Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see.

See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.”

from ‘Proteus’ (Ulysses, chapter 3)

Class actions to end: “In the past, most class action suits were filed through state courts. In some of the better-known cases, against cigarette and later gun manufacturers, actions swept across states to become a tidal wave of litigation.

A case has recently been won in Madison, Illinois, against Philip Morris, where a judge awarded plaintiffs $12 billion after finding that the cigarette-maker failed to inform consumers that ‘light’ brands were no less harmful than full-tar cigarettes.

But the House of Representatives has voted by 253 to 170 to thwart the vast majority of class action suits in state courthouses, limiting all but the smallest claims to federal courts, where the big companies, say citizens’ groups, find it easier to delay the progress of suits and ‘shop’ for courts more favourable to their interests.” Guardian/Observer

If you are curious about how your representative voted, here’s the roll call. If you are curious about whom this will benefit, look no further than tto the fact that big business is jubilant about taking its business to the federal courts, the same ones the Republicans are packing with right-wing extremists even as they complain there is a partisan crisis in the judicial confirmation process. The GOP will talk all about tort reform, stopping giveaways to bottom-feeding lawyers (arguably the pot calling the kettle black, I would say, although trial lawyers are a perennial favorite GOP target.) and unclogging the courts of frivolous lawsuits, but the real agenda is clear and is of a piece with most of Bush’s domestic policy. Can you spell g-i-v-e-a-w-a-y? The Senate still has to approve this before it will become law. That’s the Republican-controlled Senate. Democrats: can you spell f-i-l-i-b-u-s-t-e-r (although several Democratic Senators have already lined up behind the bill)? And don’t even get me started on what the Bill Frist is trying to do to the cloture rule…

In one of the most successful efforts to rein in the fast-rising cost of Medicaid, the government health plan for the poor, states are limiting which drugs doctors can prescribe for Medicaid patients.

Two years ago, only three states had authorized the use of lists of preferred drugs for such patients; since then, 19 other states have done so, though not all their programs are up and running, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

(…)

Preferred drug lists steer doctors away from some of the most expensive drugs and toward different, less expensive ones that the state deems equally effective, a practice that many private insurance companies and employee health plans have adopted and that is being considered by Congress as part of a government-subsidized drug benefit for 40 million Medicare recipients. Such limits have persuaded pharmaceutical companies to lower the cost to states of some medicines. Doctors who want to deviate from the list must get prior approval, a process whose difficulty varies widely from state to state… NY Times

My state, Massachusetts, is phasing in these controls for MassHealth, its version of Medicaid, and dealing with the prior approval process is arduous enough that it is, within the first month, rapidly reshaping prescribing practices of myself and the colleagues with whom I am talking about the situation. It becomes essentially a case not of ‘preferred’ drugs but mandated ones.

Isn’t this good, you might ask? The cost-containment effort focuses on the impact on the pharmaceutical industry which, it is true, has a captive market for its newest and most expensive medications. But it is the Medicaid patients, not the companies, which are suffering from this regulation, which deprives them of significantly better medications and makes the cost criterion more important than the efficacy or tolerability one. The mental health medications are not at all the focus of the article — all about arthritis and gastroesophageal reflux — but, at least in Massachusetts, are a major focus of these Medicaid cost containment initiatives. As a psychopharmacologist, I can tell you that the list of mental health drugs a Medicaid patient will end up on is arbitrarily, ludicrously limited. We are rapidly moving toward a two-tier medical system in which those who are poor receive significantly poorer care with virtually no one speaking for them and for whom clinical factors have been virtually neutralized as the decisive factors in their physician’s prescribing choice.

The type of statistical studies showing that, across the population, drug X is as effective as drug Y for a given symptom or disease have nothing to say about the art of prescribing for the individual patient with his or her own unique physiology and treatment history, yet that type of study is the basis for the prescribing restrictions. Especially in mental health care, there has been an explosion in new drug development in the past two decades. While, as I have frequently written here, some of it has been motivated purely by the pharmaceutical industry’s efforts to invent a new twist that will allow them to keep proprietary control over an innovation for the forseeable future, innovation it is — new drugs in the antidepressant, antipsychotic and mood stabilizer areas are truly significantly better, and patients on them feel better and do better than on the medications of a generation before whose toll on the body was often worse than the symptoms they were meant to treat. The new Medicaid restrictions do not, to be fair, roll us back all the way to the prior generation, but they do attempt to level the distinctions among the newer drugs, ignoring the subtleties that make for successful prescribing.

The solution, it seems to me, is for the states to take on the pharmaceutical industry and force concessions with respect to their pricing policy, which gouges us all, much in the way activists are going after the obscenity of big pharma’s profiteering on AIDS medications. Attempting to mandate a state-sponsored boycott of their most expensive products will not achieve this. It ends up being just another way in which this society, which should properly be judged by the way it cares for its most unfortunate and least able, comes up wanting.

Trailers were not WMD labs:

A British inquiry into two truck-trailers found in northern Iraq has found they are not mobile germ warfare labs, the Observer reported yesterday. Instead, they were for the production of hydrogen to fill weather balloons.

A British scientist and biological-weapons expert, who examined the trailers in Iraq, told the London-based weekly: “They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories.

“You could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were: facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.”

The Observer reported the British sold Iraq an artillery-balloon system in 1987. Hydrogen-filled balloons, filled and launched from a mobile platform, are used for determining wind speed and direction at altitude to help in targeting artillery. The Globe and Mail [props to cs]

“One in three U.S. children born in 2000 will become diabetic unless many more people start eating less and exercising more, a scientist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns. The odds are worse for black and Hispanic children: nearly half of them are likely to develop the disease…” CNN [via walker]

Rebecca Blood is concerned about what she refers to as the ‘echo chamber’ effect in weblogging, particularly of the politically flavored sort. She’s eloquent about her concerns:

…(T)hink about it: do you regularly read (and, if you are a weblogger, link to) articles and weblogs you think are dreck? Do you link to flames? Do you link to articles you find to be simply nonsensical?

I’m not talking so much about the tendency of some people to use their weblogs to put forth a political agenda at any cost; my concern is that it’s easy for the rest of us, unconsciously and quite conscientiously, to gravitate to comfortable views of the world.

The important point for bloggers is, if you don’t link to it, it is invisible from your corner of the Web. A group of bloggers that uniformly dismisses or ignores certain points of view, effectively removes them from the discourse. More importantly, the sense of pervasive shared opinion created by that clustering creates a false sense of majority. If you are interested in uncovering the truth, you won’t find it this way. If you are interested in affecting public discourse, watch out–you may gain ascendency in certain circles, but you’re just as likely to marginalize yourself instead.

She differs with those — she cites AKMA, for example — who find the restriction in one’s circle of sources and links a matter of conscious choice. “It’s usually completely unintentional.” In my case, it is quite deliberate, and I’m left wondering, with all due respect to her perspicacity about weblogging, why it is she is so concerned about confirmation bias if it is intentional. I know there is some difference of opinion in the weblog community about this, but IMHO weblogging is not journalism, and objectivity is not necessarily the virtue to which we should aspire in order to appeal to, or be of service to, our readers. In fact, as I do not hesitate to say I was quite flattered by, Rebecca included me in her book as ‘a weblogger with strong voice’ … and, by extension, strong and confident opinions. Certainly, I would not be so obstreperous if I worried more about marginalizing myself, and I sometimes do lament the fact that I am preaching to the converted, but usually I feel more that I’m writing and linking for a like-minded community, and playing a role in building and strengthening that constituency (or at least entertaining it!).

I have no difficulty screening out and ignoring opinions I am confident by this point in my moral and intellectual development are patently absurd, misguided and morally bankrupt because they diverge too much from my own well-defined and strongly circumscribed viewpoint. Making them effectively invisible from my point of view is not a concern. From my beleaguered progressive perspective, the reality of the political ‘dreck’ on the right is in our face, increasingly so, every day. And, so, there is no danger in being deluded into believing my opinions represent the majority. Rather, one of the sole comforts in a world in which George Bush has an almost-70% approval rating is knowing there are some out there who disagree with the bandwagon. I would submit that that is very different from being close-minded, which is what Rebecca seems to be fretting about. Indeed, I would turn her litmus test —

…(I)s what you’re talking about important? The more important you think it is, the more important it probably is to consider the opinions of those who have thought about the same subject and drawn a different conclusion…

— on its head. The more important an opinion is — e.g., recently, the irrationality and immorality of the Iraqi invasion — the less obliged I feel I am to listen to the nonsense coming from the other side of the argument. The weblog is not, for me, the vehicle to work out my position on such an issue; it is the consequence of having already worked it out for myself, long ago. “My mind isn’t so open that it’ll admit any ol’ thing”, someone once said.

Longtime FmH readers will recall my agonizing at times in the past that there is little opportunity in the weblogging world for dialogue with those who believe very differently from me. Both I and the political sphere have moved beyond that concern which, in retrospect, has come to seem naive on my part, given the reality of polarization in the weblogging community and the larger political spectrum. I’m not, for instance, interested in reconciliation and reasonable exchanges with the Bush ideologues; we can’t argue about our respective religions. My constituency is the vociferous opposition which I can, hopefully, play a role in growing.

Now don’t get me wrong (Rebecca or anyone else) — it would be nice if our ‘democracy’ were a civil place where breathtakingly rhetorical debates still took place. It saddens me that that is long gone in the globalized, conglomerate-media, petty-demagogue party politics of the late 20th and at least early 21st century western world. We have betrayed the possibilities of being at our best in that way, and civility and thoughtful debate will not reclaim those aspirations. It is within smaller communities — both real, local geographics ones and the virtual assemblages of like-minded people on the net — that that is still possible, and within realistic functioning communities I have far less difference of opinion with you. What disagreement there is, I hasten to add, certainly leaves room for thoughtful dialogue on these issues — I’d welcome your comments.

“From buying organic to taking the bus, Leo Hickman is trying to adopt a more ethical lifestyle – and he’s writing a book about the process. But he needs your help…” Guardian/UK [via rebecca’s pocket]

“One in three U.S. children born in 2000 will become diabetic unless many more people start eating less and exercising more, a scientist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns. The odds are worse for black and Hispanic children: nearly half of them are likely to develop the disease…” CNN [via walker]

a virtual tour of Highgate Cemetery.

an online presence of the inspired artist of the twisted aphorism, Jenny Holzer.

“Not just obits of great statesmen and celebrities, but great obituaries of regular people,” from Brooke Biggs of Bittershack renown.

Aerial Photographs of the California Coastline: “Welcome to the website of the California Coastal Records Project. Our goal is to create an aerial photographic survey of the California Coast and update it on a periodic basis.” You can zoom in on each of the detailed photographs. I am reading a novel that takes place along the northern California coast; I can follow the action photo by photo. In fact, you can zoom in so much that Barbra Streisand is trying to sue for invasion of privacy to suppress photographs of her estate. [thanks, abby]

“Yesterday in Kennebunkport, Maine, President Bush managed to tip over a Segway while attempting to ride it — despite the fact that the recently invented motorized scooters are equipped with tilt sensors and five high-tech gyroscopes, which are supposed to prevent them from tipping over. So how did Bush manage to nearly fall flat on his face? The American Prospect

in NYC at the IBM Building Atrium (590 Madison Avenue at 56th Street), May 10 – July 31, 2003: “…(F)olks (3 at a time) are led into the large tear drop shaped work of art within which they’ll enjoy an interactive experience. Within the fiberglass sculpture are Technogel seats on which the visitors will relax and watch a 7 minute projection on the domed ceiling above. Each viewer wears a set of electrodes, which gather brainwave data. This information is instantly transformed into visual imagery, in real time correspondence with the actual activity of the brain, and projected onto the screen.”

Do you believe this is a frequently asked question? [via danelope]

“The humble slug may not be considered the most popular or attractive of creatures. But one gastropod in particular was responsible for establishing the most important precedent in legal history.” The Scotsman

‘Dual source’ caused Aids-like virus:

A genetic study of SIV – the Aids-like virus that infects monkeys – suggests that HIV – the virus that causes Aids in humans – came about through the combination of two viruses in chimpanzees.

Chimps could have been infected by other SIV-type viruses when they preyed on monkeys.

The study confirms what has been established about the origin of Aids: it emerged from the forests of western Africa some time in the last century.

Humans caught it from chimpanzees when they ate them as food, or became exposed to their blood in rituals. BBC

Person-to-person cases of monkeypox suspected: A nurse and a medical assistant in Wisconsin who cared for patients with monkeypox infections have come down with symptoms suggestive of the disease, and so has the boyfriend of the medical assistant, raising concerns about person-to-person transmission in this less virulent ‘cousin’ of smallpox. Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Debates about the possible efficacy of smallpox inoculation aginst the spread of the disease are beginning. Discussion of the nontrivial risks of the inoculation, which had been couched in terms of the theoretical risk of a bioterrorist attack with the smallpox virus, must now be reframed in terms of a real, although lesser, threat situation.

Note, as well, that the monkeypox infection shares with most recent emergent diseases the fact that its origins were in a jump from an animal reservoir. Along with HIV (as discussed above), the SARS virus, Ebola and related hemorrhagic fevers, Hantavirus share that characteristic as well. With the control of infectious diseases being the medical success story of the 20th century, it might make sense that the most significant disease challenges leap out of the dark at us in this manner. On the other hand, does preoccupation with ‘sexy’ novel infections divert our attention from real public health emergencies of much wider scope, such as HIV/Aids, antibiotic-resistant strains of more common ‘bugs’, and the resurgence of tuberculosis and STDs (where the issue is more one of the political will to allocate resources properly rather than the scientific know-how to address the disease process)?

Happy birthday, Willy.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Are you paraskevidekatriaphobic? While the word apparently dates from 1992, the phenomenon has a long heritage. According to one source, 17 to 21 million Americans, 8% or so of our population, are affected to one extent or another, and it costs the U.S. economy up to $750 million in lost revenues annually. —Why? —How? The Guardian and Salon also have something to say on this matter.

Related:

Here’s a quiz to see how superstitious you are. Its queries include a number of superstitions I had not even been aware existed.

“Ghosts are the mind’s way of interpreting how the body reacts to certain surroundings, say UK psychologists.

Dr Wiseman’s team used hundreds of volunteers

A chill in the air, low-light conditions and even magnetic fields may trigger feelings that “a presence” is in a room – but that is all they are, feelings.

This explanation of ghosts is the result of a large study in which researchers led hundreds of volunteers around two of the UK’s supposedly most haunted locations – Hampton Court Palace, England, and the South Bridge Vaults in Edinburgh, Scotland.” BBC

[British psychologist Wiseman was also the one who recently reprised Stanley Milgram’s ‘six degrees of separation’ experiment, about which I wrote below.]

CamWorld Turns Six; one of my early weblogging inspirations. Many happy returns.

“A body is found in the frozen North Dakota woods. The cops say the dead Japanese woman was looking for the $1m she saw buried in the film Fargo. But the story didn’t end there.” Guardian/UK

But When?

“In a marriage of science and art, three astronomers have pinpointed the precise time and date of a painting by Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh based on calculations of the moon’s position in the picture.

Van Gogh’s painting depicts a field of haystacks in Provence, France, with a bright orange orb partially showing over a bluff. The vivid picture was known to have been painted sometime in the summer of 1889, toward the end of the most productive, but troubled, period of the artist’s life.” Wired

“…(M)oves are afoot to redesign that most sacred of British hallmarks – the union flag.

A campaign is being launched to modernise the red, white and blue flag by adding a touch of black to reflect multicultural Britain in the 21st Century.

The proposed new flag (see above) is the work of Nigel Turner, an enthusiastic fan of the UK’s transformation into a multiracial society over the past 50 years.” BBC

“International Business Machines Corp. and German chipmaker Infineon Technologies AG said they have made an important step toward developing a new kind of memory that could enable computers to boot up instantaneously.” CNN

“The idea that water retains a memory of substances once dissolved in it is generally ridiculed, but not in a new scientific paper …” New Scientist