[This is an expanded and hopefully more coherent version, with the obvious advantages of some hindsight, of the nascent and inchoate reactions to Cheney’s ‘blunder’ I scribbled yesterday morning. — FmH] Of course the White House played the joke angle on Cheney’s shooting of his hunting partner. It was just a ‘minor’ load of buckshot birdshot and it caused just a ‘minor’ heart attack. If someone had written fiction revolving around the accidental shooting victim suffering a cardiac event, we would consider it too implausible to believe, an old-fashioned clumsy deus ex machina plot device. Just when the v.p. thought it was safe to come out of the brush and take his licks for “peppering” his friend in the face with a little birdshot, the guy has the nerve to have some cardiac ischemia and make it impossible to trivialize the event.

This was no trivial flesh wound, however, if the blast impelled a shotgun pellet all the way to the heart! And we have a White House so obsessed with secrecy and covering its tail that neither Cheney nor Bush made a public statement about the vice president’s crime until Cheney’s flip and blasé remarks on Wednesday. No wonder Scott McClellan was abit testy having sole accountability. What a lousy job, having to defend this dysadministration’s egregious failures! It is of course a tried and true administration tactic, with the footprint of Karl Rove all over it, to shift the blame onto the press for being too interested in an official’s failings, and to obscure the difference between prompt and full disclosure and the Bush cabal’s pitiful excuse for public relations. Sympathetic observers style Cheney as some sort of hero for not being responsive to the dictates of public opinion and not knwtowing to the press. In reality, he betrays his utter contempt for any accountability. “L’état, c’est moi” indeed.

As Sidney Blumenthal (who authored one of the best recent dissections of Cheney’s reign) points out in radio interviews since the shooting, the handling of this event is emblematic of the pathology in the way this administration, and particularly Cheney, exercises power. Blumenthal marvels at the fact that Cheney misled not only the press and the public but the White House as well. (Not that Bush would have done anything about it if he had learned the truth in a timely fashion…) If Bush were anything other than an ineffectual and clueless puppet, he would realize, in the light of this incident if he has not seen it before, that he is treated with contempt by his Shadow President and puppeteer-in-chief.

Another tried and true Rove tactic, of course, is to blame the victim. McClellan tried, obviously given his talking points. Unfortunately, even the hunting lobby, no enemy of the G.O.P., has put a stop to that with an outpouring of straight talk about the responsibilities of the gun user. Clearly, Cheney has no more attention or concern for the rules of gun handling than he does for the rules of anything else. For those who opine that this was “just an accident” and “not a crime”, my nonlegal opinion is that it fits the bill of criminal negligence, although it is somewhat a moot point given how unlikely it is that a prosecutor, a judge or a jury in the state of Texas would try or convict him.

Of course the real reason there was no notification to the press or local authorities until the next day, despite the v.p.’s paltry excuses about how he had no press attaché with him, was probably the scramble there on the ranch to get everyone’s stories in line and confer with Rove about how best to spin it. I imagine Cheney did his best to get someone else to take responsibility but did not succeed. And I imagine he had to wait for his blood alcohol level to zero out before he gave permission to his Secret Service blockade to allow local law enforcement through. The lady certainly did protest too much that there was “no alcohol involved” (later amended to “just one beer”). I found myself fantasizing that Armstrong had to call the local paper to tip them off about the event to preempt Cheney’s bullying everyone to tell a different version of the story, although most people think it was some sort of closing ranks. Blumenthal points out that both Rove and Cheney owe their fortunes to the Armstrong dynasty by the way — Rove’s original Texas consulting work having been bankrolled by Katherine Armostrong’s father, and Cheney being hired into Hallibutron by her mother.

Miguel wrote to point out that WTO Director-General: Pascal Lamy started a weblog/diary with links to a public commenting forum. So far, there are entries from the Ministerial Conference in Hong Kong in December. While some of the comments are merely ingratiating compliments to Lamy, there seems a nascent attemtp to get a dialogue going on the limitations of what the WTO can do; Lamy has acknowledged his frustrations.

Egocentrism and the web: a recent study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that, although people think they have correctly interpreted the tone of emails they receive 90% of the time, they have only random odds (50/50%) of being right. And people think that the tone they intend to use in sending a message will be sensed correctnyl by the receiver around 80% of the time. The researchers suggest that this is because of ‘egocentrism’:

A better term, I think, is ‘subjectivity’. Perception is inevitably shaped by our mindset and expectations. Communicationon the web is quite prone to this trap, it seems. First of all, it is usually pithy and condensed, leaving fewer clues from context. It is a tenet of communication theory that redundancy improves the signal-to-noise ratio, yet those who include more explicit statements of their emotional state (which I find prescient anticipation of the fact that their tone would otherwise be opaque to their readers), such as smileys or written interjections such as “[grin]”, are considered kitschy. Keep watch — the temptation to add these extra clues varies inversely with the average size of a message, being greatest in instant messaging and SMS. In conditions of decreased certainty about the intentions of a stranger interacting with you, it makes evolutionary sense to assume hostility and respond defensively.

Web communication may be more susceptible to this problem for another reason. It is a stereotype of social psychology, although I believe it, that women are on the whole more sensitive nuanced communicators; web communication on the whole has been dominated by males. And recall the speculation several years ago that geekiness is a watered-down version of Asperger’s Syndrome? This is the autistic-spectrum disorder which comes without intellectual impairments and is characterized by some or all of the following: impairment in nonverbal behaviors and gestures to regulate social interaction; impairment in age-appropriate peer relationships; lack of social or emotional reciprocity; restricted, repetitive or stereotypical behavior patterns; etc. This might be a neurological basis for the predominant insensitivity to nonverbal factors in composing and interpreting web communications. (Wired News via walker)

As a friend wrote me today, you really can’t make this stuff up. (Reuters)

In western countries, it is usually no safer than tap water but can cost 10,000 times more. The energy consumption, raw materials for the petroleum-based plastic bottles in which it is sold, and transportation costs associated with its production induce massive costs. Bottling water for export has also actually induced water shortages in some regions of the developing world. And increasingly, the bottled-water market has been taken over by the multinational beverage corporations. Even if you started drinking bottled water back when it was “spring water”, don’t imagine it is anymore. Much bottled water started out as tap water, often with minerals of dubious value added. In many places, the quality of drinking water is regulated more stringently than that of the bottled water people drink instead. A fool and his money are soon parted, the saying goes. If you are concerned about the health or the taste of your home water, a far better solution is at-home filtration; a matter of true trickle-down economics, it seems to me. (Yahoo! News)

A seven-year study of aspartame (NutraSweet) comes down on the side of cancer risk. Unlike prior aspartame studies, Dr Morando Soffritti’s group from Bologna used dosage ranges in rats which, mg. per kg. were in the range of what a heavy diet soda drinker might consume… and these resulted in increased rates of leukemias, lymphomas and other tumors, although the New York Times piece does not say how much the relative risk was increased. Predictably, the Calorie Control Council — an artificial-sweetener industry trade group with the manufacturers’ interests, not those of consumers of low-calorie foods, at heart — objects. One of their points is that the rats exposed to the aspartame had been allowed to live until their natural deaths, longer than the two-year standard established by the United States government’s National Toxicology Program, so the cancers could have been from causes other than the aspartame. Pretty absurd objection, first, because I am confident that the methodology compared cancer rates with known background rates in rats. And many studies which are investigating subtly-developing delayed effects will appear to have negative findings if the duration of the study is arbitrarily limited.

The Soffritti study was motivated by inadequacies in the original pharmaceutical industry studies of the ’70’s used to establish the safety of the additive. Incidentally, for a decade encompassing much of the approval process for aspartame, Searle was headed by none other than Donald Rumsfeld. The FDA had found that the Searle studies had been so poorly conceived and executed that it had asked the Justice Dept. to open a grand jury investigation into whether they were fraudulent. Lo and behold, Samuel Skinner, the U.S. attorney handling the investigation, was hired by a law firm which had a plum contract with Searle and later appointed George W. Bush’s transportation secretary. The deputy who handled the investigation after Skinner left was also hired by the same law firm. A grand jury has never been convened. An independent panel reviewing Searle’s own data concluded that one of the studies had shown an increased incidence of brain tumors in rats fed aspartame and suggested that approval of the additive be withheld pending further studies. They were overruled by an FDA commissioner who granted approval to aspartame a short while after his appointment. Shortly after, he left and joined the public relations firm which represented Searle. But the Calorie Control Council says it is absurd to think that Searle was trying to influence government regulation with lucrative job offers. Looking at one five-year period of aspartame studies in medical journals, one critic found that, while 74 of 74 industry-funded studies found that the additive is safe, 84 of 92 independently funded articles identified health concerns.

In my own field of psychiatry, many practitoners feel that aspartame exacerbates mood and anxiety disorder symptoms and that treatment is easier if it is eliminated from the patient’s diet. Aspartame is made up of the two amino acids phenylalanine and aspartic acid, the former of which is speculated to upset neurotransmitter balance. The carcinogenicity studies speculate that the morbidity and mortality may be accounted for by the metabolism of aspartame to methanol and thence to the known carcinogen formaldehyde.

The abstract and full text of the Soffritti study are available here, from Environmental Health Perspectives.

Laura Bush, fed her lines on ABC News, responded that yes, indeed, Hilary Clinton’s criticism of her husband was “out of bounds”. She suggested Clinton exercise somewhat more empathy in light of her own experience as First Lady. What disingenuous hypocrisy. Susan G’s commentary on Daily Kos just about says it all:

Laura Bush, fed her lines on ABC News, responded that yes, indeed, Hilary Clinton’s criticism of her husband was “out of bounds”. She suggested Clinton exercise somewhat more empathy in light of her own experience as First Lady. What disingenuous hypocrisy. Susan G’s commentary on Daily Kos just about says it all:

‘“Psychiatric drugs restored Nia’s sanity and destroyed her beauty, and she doesn’t mind.” This narrative co-authored by a young psychiatrist depicts the poignancy of a 17 year-old young woman whose tormenting psychotic symptoms are treated with the antipsychotic drug olanzapine at the price of obesity. The psychiatrist is concerned, makes an unsuccessful attempt to switch the patient to a different antipsychotic drug, resulting in a reemergence of her symptoms, and reluctantly resumes the use of the olanzapine. He feels the patient is caught in a Faustian dilemma of being either ‘beautiful and mad’ or ‘fat and sane.’ This article is being savaged around the web as an illustration of the psychiatrist’s sexist attitude and a reflection of society’s prejudicial attitude about obesity. As a psychiatrist, I am feeling a wee bit defensive, and, with all due respect and support for the senses in which “fat is” indeed “a feminist issue”, I feel that is not a fair characterization of the article or its point.

First, let me say that the authors can certainly be faulted for the flavor of salivating over the young woman’s beauty, but they are partially depicting the way others in her life saw her. The psychiatrist, in puzzling over her Faustian tradeoff, is not so much imposing his feelings about the value of her physical attractiveness as he is curious about the fact that, when she responds to the medicine and puts the weight on, she does not seem to be bothered. The feminist critics assume that that is because her beauty is unimportant to her compared to her sanity, and fault the psychiatrist for being unable to accept that. But to my reading, he is troubled not by the fact that she accepts her weight gain but that she does not notice it.

The author may not have articulated it all that well, but speaking for him it seems that the issue is really that the impoverishment in schizophrenic illness is largely about a growing impairment in social reciprocity and empathic connection with others. One’s feelings about one’s attractiveness are essentially reactions, for better or worse, to an awareness of how others see us. It has been called The Gaze, the way men have of turning a woman into an object, a body. Consciousness-raising about fat and body image requires first that one be aware that one is reacting in a fixed way to societal attitudes and that one has the choice not to any longer. One has to be aware of The Gaze to protest against the objectification. But the faculties of social awareness and social discretion progressively wither as schizophrenic illness progresses. (That is why so much of the illness involves social inappropriateness or bizarreness, with apparent disregard for the effect one is having on others around one. Despite their characterization as irreverent and courageous icons unconcerned with the morés of society and willing to be iconoclasts, schizophrenics are not making a deliberate defiant countercultural statement, they are not being heroes in subverting the dominant paradigms of their society. They are hurting unbearably. They cannot help being unconcerned with social norms because their faculties for interpersonal perception and conformity with norms are progressively deteriorating. Most of them would like nothing better than to fit in. Was it James Joyce who said that the difference between his thought processes and those of his schizophrenic daughter were like the difference between swimming in a strong current and drowning in it?) The psychiatrist, seeing the patient’s apparent indifference to her weight gain, goes the distance in wondering if she is really as better as she is said to be, in the sense I have just laid out, not the sexist one.

A parallel way to understand the schizophrenic process is that the person comes to treat herself and her body as an object. How can a woman rebel against societal objectification if the disease is doing it to her?

One further point should be made. The reason for the prescriber to be leery of the effect a medication like olanzapine has, especially on a young adult, extends far beyond the vanity issue of body weight. The newer antipsychotics were developed to be “cleaner” medications free of many of the side effects of the prior generation of medications for psychotic illness. And, indeed, they do largely avoid the older drugs’ longlasting and disfiguring neurological side effects. But it became evident that many of the so-called benign newer drugs caused a rash of effects of which weight gain is just the tip of the iceberg. These include glucose intolerance, the development or acceleration of diabetes, lipid and triglyceride disturbances, and cardiac and endocrine complications. The article does a disservice by anguishing only over the patient’s weight gain, too inarticulately to convey a more thorough and sophisticated range of concerns, and leaving itself open to being a straw man for a well-intentioned but misguided feminist outcry.

Finally, the psychiatrist considers only a rather limited set of options for treating the young woman. There are other medications and other strategies that stand a chance of combining effective treatment response with avoidance of the metabolic effects the olanzapine had caused. On the other hand, there is an inescapable sense, for anyone who has practiced medicine for any length of time, that there is no free lunch. Treatment choices are almost always nuanced and poignant cost-benefit decisions without unambiguous answers for either the patient or the prescriber. That is where I thought the article in question was going when I began to read it. Sadly, it missed the opportunity to get that deep. (Prospect)

Listen carefully to this, it is confirmationof what I have been saying all along. The dysadministration has largely succeeded, by repeating the lie often enough, in convincing the public that it was faulty intelligence about WMD that led us to war, and that it was the intelligence establishment’s failure. In reality, the intelligence analysts were marginalized and Cheney heard just what he wanted to hear and ignored the rest. I am no fan of the U.S.’s covert intelligence agencies, but in this case they are the aggrieved victims and honest speakers of truth to power. The real purpose of Porter Goss’ housecleaning at the CIA is to prevent some renegade career intelligence officers from turning their dirty tricks on the Bush Cabal in retaliation, and they would be justified to do so.

The download site appears to be overloaded, but here is a mirror, and here is another. This is really a buggy pre-release but you might be interested anyway.

Compare this situation to that of antidepressants. On the basis of histrionics and flawed research design, the FDA urged that they not be used in children and mandated the dreaded ‘black box warning’ on the drugs’ prescribing information. I am not sure, but I fear these actions have had a discernible chilling effect on antidepressant prescribing rates, because doctors will be skittish about prescribing them to even urgently depressed patients, some whose lives are in jeopardy from their mental state.

Stimulants, on the other hand, are superfluously prescribed for a condition that is vastly, epidemically, overdiagnosed in a loosey-goosey, unsystematic, irresponsible way. Unlike antidepressants, anyone almost anyone prescribed a stimulant like Ritalin or Adderall, ADHD or not, will feel better and the shoddy diagnosis becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because a medication is seen to have caused improvement. Again, unlike antidepressants, the drugs have enormous potential for abuse, diversion to the street trade, and addictiveness, because they feel so good to use. Tolerance accelerates use and creates escalating need for higher and higher doses over time. And the cardiovascular consequences, including sudden death, are far from trivial risks.

So one class of drugs with serious dangers prescribed for too little reason to far too many people, for which a ‘black box warning’ would almost surely be a public policy step in the right direction, and have the desireable effect of diminishing the volume of prescriptions, is given a free pass, while the applicability and acceptability of another urgently needed class of drugs for a life-threatening illness is hobbled needlessly. No matter how large the denominator, 51 deaths from stimulants certainly represents a much higher rate of morbidity/mortality than attributable to the antidepressants, and an effect magnified by the diminished necessity for and benefit of stimulants as compared to antidepressants.

Update: FDA Panel Recommends Warning on ADHD Drugs (New York Times )

Hume argues that Western societies encourage “all manner of groups to seek special status by defining themselves as victims and developing a heightened sense of grievance… Being offended or excluded in some way becomes a shortcut to claiming moral authority and demanding apologies and redress…” Hume suggests that the cartoons — admittedly offensive but obscure — were a convenient target for those looking for an occasion to become outraged.

And the protests have drawn their strength from the defensive reactions of the West. The reprinting of the cartoons in other European media, spun as arising from solidarity with the Danish paper, is less a principled stand on behalf of free speech than “another claim for victim status, this time on behalf of journalists.”

The opposing stance in the West, that of a politically correct condemnation of the offensiveness of the caricature, on the other hand, gives legitimacy to the protestors and actually fans the flames. Freedom of speech is not true freedom if only inoffensive speech is free, although on the other hand freedom does not oblige us to offend at any opportunity. Hume attempts to draw some distinctions, which I think don’t really work, about when it is worthwhile to be offensive, as opposed to merely frivolous or gratuitous: “For us, the right to be offensive is about the freedom to express ideas and opinions in which you believe, regardless of whether they offend existing orthodoxies or sensibilities. Cartoons like these, however, simply seem to cause offence as an end in itself.” In a sense, if we are to defend as fundamental the right of others to say things we do not like, far be it for us to judge if they are “just to offend” or said from conviction.

Islamic protestors have frequently drawn a contrast between the European toleration or (as it is viewed in more paranoid circles) encouragement of the anti-Muslim cartoons and the taboo against expressions of anti-Semitism. In the West, restriction of free speech, as e.g. prosecution of hate speech, has often been based on the principle that certain speech crosses the line to become action (“crying ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater”). The history of persecution of Jews, including the West, means that anti-Semitic speech credibly creates a present danger of inciting violence. Especially in a society in which disenfranchised people seek opportunities to parlay trumped-up charges of victimhood into the advantages of the aggrieved, attempting to apply that litmus test seems worthwhile. I hope I am not being ethnocentric in saying that I am not sure the ridiculous Danish cartoons pass the test. I am closer to feeling, however, that some of the Islamic reaction does.

Related: “Iran’s largest selling newspaper announced today it was holding a contest on cartoons of the Holocaust in response to the publishing in European papers of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed.” (news.com.au)

Lots of punditry here on the wiretap hearings, but it seems to me it obscures rather than clarifies the crucial facts. Torturer-General Gonzales spent most of his time on the stand not answering questions about the wiretapping program. He echoed Bush’s stance of being largely uninterested in seeking additional authority for the administraiton’s illegal actions. Everyone at the hearings was eager to establish that we are interested in knowing what is said if ‘U.S. persons’ are talking to foreign terrorists. While the Senate is certainly offended that they have been out of the loop on this, there seemed nonetheless to be offers on the table to extend additional authority to the administration if they would ask for it.

So why does the Bush cabal prefer to do it illegally? It seems clear that it has something to do with avoiding scrutiny or accountability of any kind, and precisely the desire not to have to report to the legislative or judicial branches. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that that is because the scope of the program is far broader than what they are willing to cop to. Perhaps we are seeing only the tip of the iceberg. Here’s hoping there are more leaks waiting to be sprung…

What is Google Maps blacking out in this satellite image?

And:

Media largely ignored Fitzgerald revelation that White House may have destroyed emails

Although gender inequality is of course still rampant if you bother to look, many who were not around for the women’s movement Friedan was pivotal in jumpstarting in the ’60’s have no context to appreciate the extent it reversed the egregious sexism previously built into the American social fabric. That the gains women have made remedying oppression since the ’60’s are taken for granted these days is a testimony to the now-unsung enormity of the movement’s achievements. Much as a fish is not aware of the water, feminist issues now fade into the background rather than remaining a foreground struggle — for better and worse.

This foreground awareness — “consciousness-raising” — was undergone and undertaken by men who were supportive of the feminist movement too, and it had a central role in redefining masculinity and modulating the destructive influence of testosterone in our society. As the women’s movement has faded into the background a generation later, this effect on men and maleness is going by the boards as well, I fear. As someone who tries to raise his son without his falling into conventional male stereotypes, even in a liberal community, it often feels like bucking a trend.

Friedan, it seems, grew to feel that the women’s movement was being hijacked by man-hating elements. From my perspective as someone who was a part of it, the consciousness-raising of the ’60’s or ’70’s male with feminist sensibilities inherently required a self-effacing and self-critical stance. This was supposed to be encouraged, supported and welcomed by women in the movement, but it made for a great deal of vulnerability to anti-male elements. In a curious way, this went some distance toward standing the old social order on its head, replacing the traditional oppression and self-loathing of women in our society with oppression and self-loathing of men, which I guess was the point for some. It seems to me that this played a great role in alienating male sympathizers and stemming the tide of the reform of maleness that many saw as a crucial part of the women’s movement.

Some in the movement, those with whom Friedan eventually broke, would of course disagree that the reform of male consciousness was germane at all, putting it that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” (to continue with the fish motif). There’s that self-effacement again — having to correct myself if I dare to suggest that the feminist movement was as important to me as it was to women, needing to reassure that I don’t belong to the ‘Virginia Slims’ contingent of the movement threatening to co-opt it with a conventional male powerplay…

My fellow weblogger at Medley was lucky enough (?) to be called by a Democratic Party fundraiser at a crucial juncture:

Everything you ever wanted to know (Ted Bunn, Berkeley Cosmology)

Nature vs. Nurture in Music Recommenders. I recently wrote a post on FmH in response to reports about new software algorithms to pigeonhole the formal qualities of pieces of music to make recommendations based on analytic conclusions about your tastes. In short, I stated that a more subtle, sophisticated and ultimately more pleasing recommendation engine already existed — social recommenders like last.fm (audioscrobbler), which I use, which point you to new music based on the listening experience of a body of users whose tastes are similar to yours. Here is a more elaborate discussion of the strengths and weaknessess of the two approaches, which weblogger Steve Krause neatly contrasts as ‘nature vs. nurture.’

Readers will notice that I had no commentary on the State of the Union. My reasoning is much the same as Ed’s. He and I share the dubious distinction, it seems, of being quite opinionated authors of weblogs with very small audiences and no broader notice (sorry, Ed!), a situation accentuating the concern about preaching to the choir. The polarization of the weblogging world, moreover, is just mirroring the process in society as a whole. Timothy Leary once said something like, “You are only as young as the last time you changed your mind.” However, call it arrogant or closeminded if you like, but I believe in my opinions, and I am confident that those who share my viewpoint have a monopoly on balance, as Ed defines it — maximal truth and minimal misinformation. Although I am sure the right wingnuts feel the same, I have no insecure need to entertain their madness politely. As someone once said, my mind isn’t so open that any ol’ thing can fly in.

Just as I become viscerally ill if I have to listen to Dubya for more than a soundbite’s worth of tortured incoherency, illogic and deception, I am relieved that I am barely exposed, except in the odd comment here and there, to rightwing dissent against my views (although, in another sense, I miss it, since, to coin a saying, the contempt of the contemptible is a compliment). I would love to hear if readers have any counterexamples of recent meaningful exchange across the ideological gulf, in the weblogging sphere or elsewhere — where they are listening to each other or perhaps (shudder) even influencing each other’s viewpoints…

Addendum: Dennis Fox responds, in part:

Read the entire post.

Concern in the Republican ranks?? So what do the Republicans do about it? They give you a new boss who’s the same as the old boss, just billing him as a ‘fresh face’ and a reformer. Boehner (and don’t you dare pronounce it ‘boner’) just weeks ago refused to give back #30,000 he had received from the Indian tribes at Abramoff’s behest; he was distributing checks from the tobacco lobby to members of Congress on the floor several years ago; and he is so intimately connected to the lobbyists that he sleeps with one. When René Magritte captured the essence of surrealism by hanging a picture of a pipe with the legend “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”, he created a profound sense of disquiet. When the Republicans do it, it is business as usual.

Rep. Charles Rangel (D.-NY): “If there’s one thing that George Bush has done that we should never forget, it’s that for us and for our children, he has shattered the myth of white supremacy once and for all…” (New York Sun, 9/23/05, via micheline)

And:

…and that’s only the beginning…

Links:

• Albert’s AOL homepage
• Fascism in America: Are We There Yet? (Counterpunch, 2005)
• The Black Panther Party’s Take on Stew

Project Censored‘s “I Want to Know” Project (via Common Dreams)

Emphasis added; it is disingenuous to bill this trend as a defeat for anti-Americanism, as the italicized sentence concedes. Anti-Americanism is alive and well, in Canada, Germany and the rest of the world, with few exceptions. The proximal cause of contemporary anti-Americanism is the Bush regime, after the preceding decade of benevolence and goodwill the U.S. and the rest of the world enjoyed. The real defeat of anti-Americanism will be to turn the Republicans out of office in the U.S.

The point of signing the petition, of course, is that you will get endless political spam from the Kerry organization. But you can put his address in the junkmail filter, of course.

“…A free, open source, interactive hypnosis program… It includes features such as voice recognition, speech synthesis, subliminal messages, completely customizable scripts (featuring a unique scripting language), videos, audio, and lots more. Its purpose is to simulate a real hypnosis session as much as possible.”

I woke up this morning wondering how a Hamas government is ever going to convene in one room, given the likelihood that Israeli intelligence efforts would be devoted to finding out the place and time of such a gathering for — shall we say? — undiplomatic purposes.

The discovery of mirror neurons is centrally important to the understanding of the neural basis of the social brain, of empathy and interpersonal perception, as embodied in the “theory of mind” concept. Mirror neurons are crucially important to, as Ramachandran puts it,

The essay is badly edited; for example, Ramachandran is quoted as referring to mirror neurons as ‘Dalai Llama (sic) neurons’; and later refers to ‘starving pheasant’ when I am sure he intended ‘starving peasant’. Also, take a look at the vignette of the ‘brain in the vat’ Ramachandran poses at the end of the essay, and see if you don’t think it has already been better put by the Wachowski brothers in The Matrix, as the dilemma of the ‘red pill’ vs. the ‘blue pill’, such powerful shorthand that it has entered the pop-culture vernacular wholesale.

Earlier versions of this story led with Kerry’s reported vow to filibuster, but that may have been wishful thinking on the media’s part. Kerry does not now appear so determined. The cloture vote and consequent confirmation are a much more anticlimactic way to go, and much more inevitable, given the loyal opposition’s spineless posturing (in an anatomical sense an oxymoron, but let’s not let that stop the Democrats).

And this is news? …by which I mean, shouldn’t it have been this way all along? It dramatizes how utterly inaccessible this administration has been to the public and the execrable state of American “democracy.” Lest you think this represents a significant change, however, keep in mind that, even if questions are not prescreened, the audiences allowed into his personal appearances are… (Yahoo! News)

…and biologist PZ Myers, self-professed “godless liberal” whose weblog Pharyngula is attracting alot of complimentary attention, is not happy. He does make a stab at characterizing the logical fallacies in Vonnegut’s recent statements on NPR in support of intelligent design, but the piece starts with a long preface lamenting Vonnegut’s apparent cognitive decline, as if that were the real explanation for his blasphemy.

If one is to be critical of Vonnegut’s unreasonableness, one must do it in a reasonable manner. Myers is flirting with ad hominem-ism and undercutting his own position here, IMHO. Although I think it is clear that I am across the culture-wars divide from those who profess to creationism, I also know that it is sometimes from reasoned faith. To refute intelligent design, one must engage with the more thoughtful adherents rather than just ridicule the least reasoned arguments.

Moreover, it is often said that people become more like themselves as they decline cognitively. One would be hard pressed to suggest that Vonnegut took a new unreasonable position as he aged. Even a beloved author may have opinions at odds with those of readers who cherish his work, it goes without saying. Vonnegut had a term for that; don’t you suppose he would call the community of Vonnegut fans a granfalloon?