Beginning in 2006, Microsoft says it will ship with its operating system and other software products six brand new typefaces created especially for extended on-screen reading.” (Poynter Online)
With increasing vigor, evangelical groups that are part of the base of conservative support for leading Republicans are campaigning for laws that would reduce carbon dioxide emissions, which scientists have linked with global warming.” (New York Times )
Since this advocacy is a searing indictment of the Bush administration’s fiddling-while-Rome-burns, the IRS had better investigate pulling these evangelicals’ tax-exempt status!
If the Guardian‘s rendition is accurate, this sounds absurd. The inventor, after all, is a “Harvard University medic who also studied electrical engineering at (M.I.T.)…” (“I’m not a physicist, I just play one for the venture capitalists…”) The fact that his ‘hydrino’ violates basic tenets about the alllowable quantum states of electrons sugggests to Mills that quantum theory must be wrong. Although I would not think this would find many advocates, Mills claims to have independent confirmation of his theory and the invective is flying. What fun; I think we have just seen the beginnings of a monumental pissing contest between supporters and detractors in the physics community.
Of course the investors Mills claims to have interested are a different matter — all weighing in on just one side of the controversy. Money certainly shapes wishful thinking in the oddest, most tortured ways. I predict those who supported Mills’ claims are going to be massively chagrined people one day in the not too far distant future… and with far less in their bank accounts than otherwise.
“All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena risks losing its tax-exempt status because of a former rector’s remarks in 2004.” First of all, this takes outrageous and egregious license with the tax regulations prohibiting tax-exempt organizations’ advocacy for particular candidates or involvement in political campaigns. The sermon, just before the 2004 election, told no parishioner whom to vote for but clearly asserted that opposition to the war in Iraq was a Christian value that Jesus would have espoused. Second, of course, the church is singled out from among the multitudes in which antiwar sentiments are preached, perhaps because the sermon received conspicuous coverage in the Los Angeles Times at the time? Finally, I daresay that the IRS has not gone after the tax-exempt status of the myriad fundamentalist, evangelical and other conservative churches which have far fewer compunctions against direct solicitation of their congregants’ votes for Bush than liberal churches have against soliciting votes for his opponents. (Los Angeles )Times
‘Surprising’ results of a survey presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Chest Physicians this week in Montreal indicate that there is a widespread misconception that nicotine causes cancer and that this interferes with efforts to stop smoking.
The investigator asserts that switching to “light” cigarettes on the basis of the belief that it will lower nicotine intake and thus reduce cancer risk is specious reasoning, since the carcinogens and other toxins are in the cigarette smoke and not the nicotine. But I don’t get it; it seems to me smokers switching to “light” cigarettes are doing the right thing even if it is for the wrong reason. Despite the mistaken belief that “light” means low-nicotine, doesn’t it indicate low tar and thus less carcinogens? Or is that just a marketing ploy without scientific basis?
In any case, the current study authors point out a more pertinent problem with the mistaken belief that it is the nicotine that causes cancer risk — smokers trying to quit will not use the nicotine patch. And it occurs to me that there is yet another reason why smoking “light” cigarettes would probably backfire. In the psychology of addiction, the belief that you have switched to a more benign product paradoxically encourages increased consumption, often to an extent that more than counteracts the risk reduction of having switched. This happens with food (“It’s ‘lo-cal’, I can have a little bit more…”) and alcohol (“I don’t drink the hard stuff anymore, just beer, so I’m okay…”) as well.
[thanks, Marla]
Reclusive novelist dies at 79: “(The French Lieutenant’s Woman) and works such as The Collector, and the self-consciously allusive and playful The Magus (he described it to his wife as ‘a young person’s book’), have been widely influential. According to John Mullan, professor of English at University College London, Fowles established that: ‘A highly literary novel could also be a potential bestseller … he offered readers literary pleasure as well as the voltage they expected from contemporary fiction.'” (Guardian.UK)
Indeed, when one studies the indictment, and carefully reads the transcript of the press conference, it appears Libby’s saga may be only Act Two in a three-act play. And in my view, the person who should be tossing and turning at night, in anticipation of the last act, is the Vice President of the United States, Richard B. Cheney.” (FindLaw’s Writ)
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…(I)n the world of performance art, where transience was an integral part of some of the best-known work from the 1960’s and 70’s, “the idea of replaying pieces as if from an orchestral score has usually been seen, if at all, as heresy.” (New York Times )
Although this turns out to be about something more proasic, upon seeing the title I thought the Times Magazine was proclaiming the overthrow of the theory that literary works are ‘intelligently designed.’ But, oh, postmodernism has already dismantled that notion, I guess.
`
…(I)n the world of performance art, where transience was an integral part of some of the best-known work from the 1960’s and 70’s, “the idea of replaying pieces as if from an orchestral score has usually been seen, if at all, as heresy.” (New York Times )
| Today is the four hundredth anniversary of the ambitious but abortive Gunpowder Plot. I’ll be going out with friends to light a bonfire tonight. “Although Guy Fawkes’ actions have been considered acts of terrorism by many people, cynical Britons… sometimes joke that he was the only man to go to Parliament with honourable intentions.”
“One important aspect of the celebration is certainly venting! Shouting into the nights air is a wonderful release and an important part of the celebration through the centuries. There is something magic and healing about noise — cannons, bells and chants. Divide the group and assign each a different chant. Let them compete for noise and drama. Great fun. The chants are important aspects of freedom of espression and freedom to hold one’s own beliefs. Like much of that which is pure celebration chants need not be considered incantations or wishes of ill will at all times. Taken with the rest of celebration they contribute to a much more abstract whole where fun is the primary message for most.”
Here is a collection of verse in celebration of Guy Fawkes Day. |
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British Medical Journal article on the anatomy and medical complications of sword swallowing. [via boing boing]
The winged creatures enter people’s homes at night and suck blood from the youngsters’ face or fingers. The Brazilian authorities attribute the large proportion of children attacked – 18 of the 23 killed were minors – to the fact that youngsters sleep more soundly than adults and are less likely to be disturbed by the bats.” (New Scientist)
Thirty-four percent of Americans reported at least one of four types of medical errors in the past two years. These included receiving a wrong drug, incorrect treatment, incorrect test results, and delayed test results.” (MedPage Today)
The girl, part of an elite high school chemistry club, reportedly admired British serial killer Graham Young and kept severed animal body parts including a cat’s head in her bedroom.” (The Age)
Why thank you, Daniel…so flattered!
[Two male professors, it should be noted!]
Only a handful of the nostrums of evolutionary psychology survive Shibley Hyde’s scrutiny. It’s true that women can’t throw things as hard or as far; they do not masturbate nearly as much, and are not up for casual shagging to the same degree; and they physically attack others dramatically less often. Taken overall the study shows that, to a very large degree, in terms of gender difference, we do start as blank slates, and it provides one of the strongest ever scientific foundations for equal-sex social policies. But then how could we ever have doubted it?” (Mail & Guardian)
Related:
And:
Related?
Neandertal, who looked very human but was burly and stocky, developed a far less sophisticated culture than Cro-Magnon, the first modern humans in Europe, who emerged about 40,000 years ago. Cro-Magnon apparently existed alongside Neandertal, but no one knows whether they made contact or not, either culturally or sexually. After a 200,000-year run, Neandertal vanished.
No one can say for sure what distinguished Neandertals from modern humans, but Computational Physics and Engineering Division researcher Jerry Dobson has a theory. In an article soon to be published in the Geographical Review, he suggests that Neandertals may have been iodine deficient. A single genetic difference in the thyroid gland, which controls iodine extraction from food, could account for many other differences in bone structure and body shape.
The bones of Neandertal (the spelling scholars prefer over Neanderthal) were first unearthed in Germany but since have been found in inland areas throughout Europe and Western Asia. They reveal numerous similarities to modern humans who suffer from iodine deficiency disorder—in its most severe form, cretinism.
“Distinctive Neandertal traits—overall body proportions, heavy brows and muscles, dental development and wear and propensities for degenerative joint diseases—are identical to those of modern humans suffering from cretinism,” Dobson says. “Whether it was biological—a genetically restricted ability to process iodine—or pathological—a dietary deficiency—I can’t say.”
From /. pointers to a radio remake of the famous H.G. Wells Mercury Theatre show from 1938, performed by members of the Star Trek Cast. The server is overwhelmed, but for this week only the show is apparently being streamed at http://www.scpr.org/programs/latw/. (via walker)
Do we know when others think that we are difficult? (Conscious Cogn.) [Well, I’m sure I would know if anyone thought I was difficult — not that anyone does, of course — but the problem is that nobody I think is difficult seems to recognize that the problem is them, not me!]
A Review of Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind by David Livingstone Smith” (Human Nature)
Vatican disdains anti-scientific ‘fundamentalism’?? (Yahoo! News)
‘These are the most exciting data I’ve ever collected,’ Carnegie Mellon psychologist Jennifer Lerner told a gathering of science writers here last month.” (Yahoo! News)
Thank you, George Bush, for nearly six years of unremitting contempt.
The so-called ‘black sites’ — which were so covert that only a handful of government officials even knew about them until today — operated over the past four years in eight different countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several Eastern European states, according to a story first reported today in the Washington Post.
…”The one overriding reason for such a facility is to torture those in detention,” said Mark Garlasco of Human Rights Watch. “So that they are away from any prying eyes from the public and from the media.”
…A former intelligence official said one reason this story was likely leaked to the press is because some CIA officers don’t believe the program is sustainable and could harm the United States’ reputation.” (ABC News via Noah)
Well, here you go.” (Salon)
The action came as the government reported that the number of people who are hungry because they can’t afford to buy enough food rose to 38.2 million in 2004, an increase of 7 million in five years. The number represents nearly 12 percent of U.S. households.
The cuts, approved by the Republican-controlled committee on a party-line vote, are part of an effort by the House GOP to curb federal spending by $50 billion. The food and agriculture cuts would reduce spending by $3.7 billion, including $844 million on nutrition, $760 million on conservation and $212 million on payments to farmers.
‘The fact is, our country is going broke,’ said Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio. ‘We’re spending money we don’t have and passing it onto our kids, and at some point, somebody’s got to say, `Enough’s enough.”” (Yahoo! News via walker)
Perhaps Bush is too embarrassed…or is that an emotion in his repertoire?
But is an all-out fight over Alito going to be good for the Democrats? Ed Fitzgerald has a good discussion of the concerns that the Republicans may circle the wagons around this issue. He quotes Publius: “Court fights are necessarily culture war fights, and polarization along culture war lines are usually better for conservatives.” Has current Republican fractiousness and vulnerability been overestimated? Are Democrats now well-situated to rout the Republicans in the 2006 mid-term elections and how does that weigh in the balance against the damning legacy of stacking the Supreme Court with the stuff of Bush’s wet dreams and our worst nightmares? Fitzgerald reassures us that most people don’t pay much attention to the Supreme Court and the far-off Washington battle would not be likely to have any effect on the elections. I tend to agree; when has the American electorate ever made an informed choice based on the truly important issues? On the other hand, both the nature and the timing of the nomination suggest it may not have as much to do with leaving a legacy of conservative pain for future generations — Bush has, after all, not been one with much capacity for deferred gratification or a vision that extends beyond the confines of his paltry field of view — as it does beginning his comeback, reuniting Republicans (who are uniformly laudatory about the nomination, rightwingnut or not) and diverting attention from Plamegate and the Iraq debacle.
New York Times editorial (goes without saying):
Where were you in ’72?
Specifically, what were the circumstances of Alito getting a coveted slot in the Army Reserves that year, while the Vietnam War was still raging? Is Alito yet another ‘chickenhawk’ who avoided the war and now will be deciding on life-or-death cases involving our young men and women fighting in Iraq and elsewhere today?” (Attytood)
Der Spiegel examines the online obituaries of numerous suicide bombers now available at Islamist “martyr sites.”
A reprise of my Hallowe’en post of past years:
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It is that time of year again. What has become a time of disinhibited hijinx and mayhem, and a growing marketing bonanza for the kitsch-manufacturers and -importers, has primeval origins as the Celtic New Year’s Eve, Samhain (pronounced “sow-en”). The harvest is over, summer ends and winter begins, the Old God dies and returns to the Land of the Dead to await his rebirth at Yule, and the land is cast into darkness. The veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead becomes frayed and thin, and dispossessed dead mingle with the living, perhaps seeking a body to possess for the next year as their only chance to remain connected with the living, who hope to scare them away with ghoulish costumes and behavior, escape their menace by masquerading as one of them, or placate them with offerings of food, in hopes that they will go away before the new year comes. For those prepared, a journey to the other side could be made at this time. It is fortunate that Hallowe’en falls on a Monday this year, as there is evidence that the pagan festival was celebrated for three days.
With Christianity, perhaps because with calendar reform it was no longer the last day of the year, All Hallows’ Eve became decathected, a day for innocent masquerading and fun, taking its name Hallowe’en as a contraction and corruption of All Hallows’ Eve. All Saints’ Day may have originated in its modern form with the 8th century Pope Gregory III. Hallowe’en customs reputedly came to the New World with the Irish immigrants of the 1840’s. The prominence of trick-or-treating has a slightly different origin, however.
The custom of trick-or-treating is thought to have originated not with the Irish Celts, but with a ninth-century European custom called souling. On November 2, All Souls Day, early Christians would walk from village to village begging for “soul cakes,” made out of square pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes the beggars would receive, the more prayers they would promise to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors. At the time, it was believed that the dead remained in limbo for a time after death, and that prayer, even by strangers, could expedite a soul’s passage to heaven.
Jack-o’-lanterns were reportedly originally turnips; the Irish began using pumpkins after they immigrated to North AMerica, given how plentiful they were here.
The Jack-o-lantern custom probably comes from Irish folklore. As the tale is told, a man named Jack, who was notorious as a drunkard and trickster, tricked Satan into climbing a tree. Jack then carved an image of a cross in the tree’s trunk, trapping the devil up the tree. Jack made a deal with the devil that, if he would never tempt him again, he would promise to let him down the tree.
According to the folk tale, after Jack died, he was denied entrance to Heaven because of his evil ways, but he was also denied access to Hell because he had tricked the devil. Instead, the devil gave him a single ember to light his way through the frigid darkness. The ember was placed inside a hollowed-out turnip to keep it glowing longer.
Folk traditions that were in the past associated wtih All Hallows’ Eve took much of their power, as with the New Year’s customs about which I write here every Dec. 31st, from the magic of boundary states, transition and liminality.
The idea behind ducking, dooking or bobbing for apples seems to have been that snatching a bite from the apple enables the person to grasp good fortune. Samhain is a time for getting rid of weakness, as pagans once slaughtered weak animals which were unlikely to survive the winter. A common ritual calls for writing down weaknesses on a piece of paper or parchment, and tossing it into the fire. There used to be a custom of placing a stone in the hot ashes of the bonfire. If in the morning a person found that the stone had been removed or had cracked, it was a sign of bad fortune. Nuts have been used for divination: whether they burned quietly or exploded indicated good or bad luck. Peeling an apple and throwing the peel over one’s shoulder was supposed to reveal the initial of one’s future spouse. One way of looking for omens of death was for peope to visit churchyards
The Witches’ Sabbath aspect of Hallowe’en seems to result from Germanic influence, and fusion with the notion of Walpurgisnacht. (Familiar with the magnificent musical evocation of this, Mussorgsky’s Night on Bare Mountain?) Although probably not yet in a position to shape mainstream American Hallowe’en traditions, Mexican Dia de los Muertos observances have started to contribute some delightful and whimsical iconography to our encounter with the eerie and unearthly as well.
What was Hallowe’en like forty or fifty years ago in the U.S. when, bastardized as it has become with respect to its pagan origins, it retained a much more traditional flair? For my purposes, suffice it to say that it was before the era of the pay-per-view ‘spooky-world’ type haunted attractions and its Martha Stewart yuppification with, as this irreverent Salon article from several years ago [via walker] puts it, monogrammed jack-o’-lanterns and the like. Related, a 1984 essay by Richard Seltzer, frequently referenced in other sources, entitled “Why Bother to Save Hallowe’en?”, argues as I do that reverence for Hallowe’en is good for the soul.
…(D)on’t just abandon a tradition that you yourself loved as a child, that your own children look forward to months in advance, and that helps preserve our sense of fellowship and community with our neighbors in the midst of all this madness.”
That would be anathema to certain segments of society, however. Hallowe’en certainly inspires a backlash by fundamentalists who consider it a blasphemous abomination. ‘Amateur scholar’ Isaac Bonewits details academically the Hallowe’en errors and lies he feels contribute to its being reviled. Some of the panic over Hallowe’en is akin to the hysteria, fortunately now debunked, over the supposed epidemic of ‘ritual Satanic abuse’ that swept the Western world in the ’90’s.
The horror film has become inextricably linked to Hallowe’en tradition, although the holiday itself did not figure in the movies until John Carpenter took the slasher genre singlehandedly by storm. Googling “scariest films”, you will, grimly, reap a mother lode of opinions about how to pierce the veil to journey to the netherworld and reconnect with that magical, eerie creepiness in the dark (if not the over-the-top blood and gore that has largely replaced the subtlety of earlier horror films).
In any case: trick or treat!
![//www.blitz21.com/frankenstein/castle.jpg' cannot be displayed]](https://i0.wp.com/www.blitz21.com/frankenstein/castle.jpg "Castle Frankenstein")
The real one, near Darmstadt, Germany, said to be the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, including photos. And here you can listen (Real Player) to the famous 1952 ‘Frankenstein prank’ in which something was waiting for an Armed Forces reporter who visited the crypt under the castle on Halloween night. [via boing boing]
Renaissance paintings photoshopp’d to add monsters (Worth1000.com via boing boing)
Der Spiegel examines the online obituaries of numerous suicide bombers now available at Islamist “martyr sites.”
Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians have built a powerful position within the Republican Party and no Republican, including Bush, can afford to ignore their views.” (Reuters)
Bush himself appears to have had an obsession with restoring family honor by avenging the slight to his father produced by Saddam’s remaining in office after the Gulf War. Cheney was interested in the benefits of a war to the oil industry, and to the military-industrial complex in general. It seems likely that the Iraq war, which produced billions in no-bid contracts for the company he headed in the late 1990s, saved Halliburton from bankruptcy. The evangelicals wanted to missionize Iraqis. Karl Rove wanted to turn Bush into a war president to ensure his reelection. The neoconservatives viewed Saddam’s Iraq as a short-term danger to Israel, and in the long term, they hoped that overthrowing the Iraqi Baath would transform the entire Middle East, rather as Kamal Ataturk, who abolished the offices of Ottoman emperor and Sunni caliph in the 1920s, had brought into being a relatively democratic Turkey that was allied with Israel. (This fantastic analogy was suggested by Princeton emeritus professor and leading neoconservative ideologue Bernard Lewis.) This transformation would be beneficial to the long-term security of both the United States and Israel.
None of these rationales would have been acceptable across the board, or persuasive with Congress or the American public, so the various factions focused on the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately for them, this rationale was discovered to be a mirage. And in the course of trying to punish those who were pointing out that the emperor had no clothes — or, in this case, that the dictator had no weapons of mass destruction — Cheney and Bush’s underlings went too far. Ironically, their attempt to silence critics succeeded only in turning a harsh light on their own actions and motivations.” (Salon)
Lawyers in the case said Mr. Fitzgerald had misgivings about whether he could prove that Mr. Rove had deliberately sought to mislead investigators about his conversation with a reporter. Allies of Mr. Bush said the expectation within the White House was that Mr. Rove would not be charged although he had received no official word of being cleared.” (New York Times )
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Relief workers were only a few days away from grounding the vital helicopter fleet which is the only way to get help quickly to the remote mountain villages flattened by the October 8 quake, which killed more than 54,000 people, one U.N. official said.
‘When the money runs out, the choppers stay on the ground and that’s what’s going to start happening in the next couple of days,’ Robert Smith told a Geneva news conference a day after a major conference failed to produce significant cash.
The United Nations aimed to raise $550 million at Wednesday’s conference. It got a meager $16 million.” (Yahoo! News)
The Guardian calls it “a new low” in Bush’s presidency as he “reluctantly” accepts Miers’ withdrawal from consideration for the Supreme Court in the face of overwhelming pressure from within the Republican Party. And it is the week of the 2000th US military casualty in Iraq… and of Hurricane Fitzgerald! But let us put a stop right here to this being characterized as a surprise or Washington being stunned. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to see this coming, and I blinked to the rumor that Miers’ nomination would tank awhile ago.
The dysadministration presented the Miers withdrawal as a way of avoiding a looming constitutional crisis over Senatorial demands for papers on Mier’s work as White House counsel that the president considers privileged — documents senior members of the Senate Judiciary Committee said no one had requested. A transparent lie if we have ever seen one from this cabal.
Bush will likely hurry to name a new candidate to distract attention as rapidly as possible from expected Treasongate indictments, and of course he already has a thoroughly vetted shortlist left over from the Roberts and Miers deliberations. If Bush was scraping the bottom of the barrel with Miers, what lies ahead? Although many progressives are jubilant, that old saw about being careful what you wish for may apply, and Bush’s troubles with the Right are likely to be far easier to fix than our contempt for him from the Left. As someone said, the next nominee may make “Robert Bork look like Thurgood Marshall,” especially if Bush bows to the pressure to pander this time to the Reactionary Right that did the Miers bid in. Some are suggesting that the Miers nomination was a Machiavellian plot engineered by Rove to fail so that he could push through someone further to the Right with less of a fight. It has also been speculated that, with Rove distracted by his own difficulties, the Miers nomination is what you get when Bush runs the show himself, a caricature of pure cronyism divorced from qualifications.
As far as the reactionary bona fides of the next nominee go, Bush may be a little damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. Tim Grieve, considering to whom the president might turn next, opbserves that he can’t nominate Gonzales, who has the same privilege problem that Miers had from his legal work for the White House. He cannot turn to a middle-of-the-roader who would infuriate the Right wingnuts further. Has Bush exhausted his stock of women willing to fall on their swords for the man they love? Does he have the political capital to push through someone contentious? The dysadministration strategy in its last few nominations has been to both select candidates on the basis of opacity about their personal stances on partisan issues and to train them intensively to stonewall in the face of confirmation scrutiny. This obviously backfired with Miers, who was such a cipher that those concerned about her ideology could imagine the worst and those concerned about her qualifications would surely come up wanting. Legal analysts suggest Bush will abandon the search for someone who is not already a judge, and that he is looking for lightning to strike twice with another John Roberts clone, equally prepared to stonewall in front of the Judiciary Committee.
Any Bush signals to the Right that he has finally found the cojones to advance an ideologue and risk the fight he has not had the stomach for recently will give the Democrats the ammunition to raise principled objections… if they have the stomach for the fight. If the Democrats are emboldened enough by the freefall in Presidential fortune, perhaps the “nuclear option” lies ahead after all! One crafty way Bush might just squeak past this would be to appoint a current or former Senator, who might mobilize whatever vestiges of bipartisanship and civility remain in the Senate toward a colleague.(How about Orrin Hatch? At least it would get him out of the Senate…)
In any case, the Left can breathe a momentary sigh of relief that the Right scuttled Miers’ chances. It is now likely that Sandra Day O’Connor will still be on the bench when the Supreme Court considers three abortion-related cases on Nov. 30th.
Related: the New York Times summarizes other webloggers’ reactions to Miers’ withdrawal here.
…Biff’s silver Audi is not the only car in town with an overly sensitive alarm. In fact, you hear them so often these days that the original intent — to protect the vehicle from theft — is a joke. The car alarm has become just another part of the cacophony of city life; if anybody notices it at all, it’s out of irritation, not concern. If I were stealing a car and the alarm went off, I’d just continue doing my thing until it was time to drive away. If a cop happened by, he’d just threaten me with a ticket for noise pollution anyway.” (Wired News)
![//theworld.com/~emg/uploaded_images/voice2004-737704.jpg' cannot be displayed]](https://i0.wp.com/theworld.com/~emg/uploaded_images/voice2004-737704.jpg "Village Voice at fifty")
The Village Voice turns fifty, and here is a gallery of memorable front pages from its lifespan. I started reading the Voice almost forty years ago, so this is the gallery of my coming of age.
Addendum: [thanks, Charles]
The (Seattle) Stranger‘s Dan Savage bats down the theory, raised in a New York Times article, that the purchase by the New Times may spell trouble for the ‘anti-establishment’ Voice and its siblings. Savage pointed out that the Village Voice‘s various owners have at one point or another included the following: investment bankers Goldman Sachs, Weisspeck & Greer, and Canadian Imperial; pet-food magnate and billionaire investor Leonard Stern; and the piece de resistance, ‘right wing whack-job’ Rupert Murdoch.
‘With its purchase by New Times, the VVM chain will be owned by a smaller, more anti-establishment corporation than it has been in years,’ Savage concluded.
Not so fast, says San Francisco Bay Guardian Editor and Publisher Bruce Brugmann, whose paper first reported on negotiations between the two companies back in May… [more]” (Editor & Publisher)
Are you interested in the nature and meaning of psychosis? This is an abstract of a study which compared the frequency, distress and intrusiveness of anomalous perceptual experiences in 336 subjects from the general population and 20 psychotic inpatients. 11% of the population sample scored above the mean of the psychotic patients’ sample. A factor analysis of the population data suggested three clusters — one involving “clinically psychotic-like” phenomena; one attributable to temporal lobe epilepsy and other seizure-like processes; and a third “chemosensation” cluster largely involving olfactory and gustatory anomalous experiences. This suggested to the authors ‘that there are multiple contributory factors underlying anomalous perceptual experience and the “psychosis continuum.” ‘
I beg to differ. They are really not demonstrating any “psychosis continuum,” since they use ‘psychosis’ as a wastebasket term synonymous with anomalous perceptual experience. All they are demonstrating is how virtually meaningless it is to talk about psychosis in that way, and that is why their headline finding — that a proportion of the general population score higher on their measure than those hospitalized for psychosis — is less surprising than it sounds. If you lump together a heterogeneous grouping of patients with ‘psychosis’, only some of them will be off the charts in terms of anomalous perceptual experiences, because having anomalous perceptual experiences is only one way of being psychotic. Yes, some psychotics have hallucinations, in which they cannot assess the reality or meaning of various perceptual experiences they are having. But others’ psychoses consist primarily of a disturbance in the content of their thought, i.e. so-called delusional thinking. Finally, some people are considered psychotic because of a disturbance in the form, not the content, of their thought processes, with profoundly disorganized, fractured, incoherent and illogical reasoning.
Patients with diverse disturbances of their mental processes and brain function may be given the same psychotic diagnosis despite the fact that they are probably undergoing very distinct disease processes, psychological or neurophysiological alterations. For example, considering the quintessential psychotic disorder, schizophrenia, different thinkers have defined it differently based on different clusters of core symptoms (among them Kurt Schneider, responsible for the so-called “Schneiderian signs” alluded to in this article). They are all talking about schizophrenia but probably pointing at different schizophrenics.
Moreover, we have come to realize that none of these supposedly defining core symptom clusters are pathognomonic of schizophrenia per se and they can occur in many other psychotic illnesses — mania, psychotic depression, organic psychotic disorders including those arising in epilepsy, toxic and metabolic psychoses, etc. — as well.
Now we reach the next juncture, in which it is suggested that the same anomalous experiences occur in a population without psychiatric diagnosis as well. First of all, that may not be strictly true. Most epidemiological studies have found a significant incidence of psychiatric illness, undiagnosed, in a randomly selected population at large. It is a truism that only the mental health profession thinks that it treats most of the mental illness in the population.
If the authors are suggesting that what really distinguishes a psychiatric patient from a member of the general population undergoing anomalous perceptual experience is how much distress the experience causes and what sort of sense the person can make of their experience, they are coming closer to my notion of what the core deficits are in psychotic experience. As I see it, these embody fundamental disturbances in the sense of the self, its boundaries, and its relationship to the world beyond those boundaries. Such disturbances render anomalous experiences utterly incomprehensible and terrifying, literally unendurable. Even perceptual experiences which others of us might consider not the least bit anomalous but rather ordinary cannot be made sense of if you do not know if they are coming from within you or outside yourself, whether they are providing information about your internal or the external environment, whether they are shared by others or uniquely experienced by yourself, etc. etc.
In a sense, this study is illustrative of all that is wrong with modern psychiatry. Yes, psychiatry is supposed to inhabit the province of subjective experience. But a descriptive focus on symptoms alone defines nothing when the self is written out of the equation.
Explore, if you will, the world of E-Prime. Arising from the thinking of Alfred Korzybski and the International Society for General Semantics which he founded, E-Prime consists of the subset of the English language left after expunging it of the use of the verb ‘to be’ in its two major functions of connoting identity (“I am a weblogger”) and predication (“I am nice”). Proponents feel that these uses of ‘to be’ cause major confusion of thought and consequent social problems. To start with, consider how the use of the same verb for identity and predication readily obscures the distinction between opinion and fact. Moreover, it readily lends itself to stereotypy and inflexibility.
This paper claims that using “E-Prime in Negotiation and Therapy” can challenge dogmatic viewpoints, clarify confusion, and defuse conflict in daily life. I don’t conduct myself as a strong proponent of E-Prime in my life; awkward circumlocutory constructions arise whenever I try to write in that way. But the difficulty in using it perhaps speaks to how early in our lives the associated thought patterns were ingrained. Language doesn’t determine what we can and can’t think, but it does readily shape what can be thought with ease as opposed to with difficulty, IMHO. Does the challenge involved in thinking ‘outside this box’ perhaps indicate the importance of doing so? The blinks above have plenty of further links if you want to explore your identifications and predications more thoroughly.
In the great tradition of US covert combat violating international boundaries and trampling the rights of neutral parties, US forces in Iraq are increasingly engaging Syrian border forces. We have “pursued insugents” into Syrian territory; there have been Syrian casualties. Although this will never be admitted, I am sure this is by design and not an inadvertent blunder by MBM (Man’s Best Military ®). It is likely US special forces are involved in covert operations in Syrian territory.
It is said that the US dysadministration will not commit itself to toppling Bashir Assad for fear of who might replace him. That is certainly more likely to be a surmise — or wishful thinking? — by the press than a clear indication of dysadministration thinking, though, which doesn’t usually involve such foresight or acumen and which has ongoingly demonstrated that it has learned nothing from the debacle in Iraq. Why, then, rattle sabres with an outraged insistence on action in the face of the Hariri assassination report and the overblown and disingenuous focus on Syria as a supposed source of, and a safe haven for, foreign jihadist insurgents? This is clearly a pretext for US military adventurism and an excuse for utter US failure (which is mostly said by critics to be a failure of our counterinsurgency measures, but the real failure was, of course, creating and perpetuating the conditions for insurrection and civil war by our invasion and occupation!). The real “jihadist extremists” spreading their ignorant and dangerous fanatical faith are the neocons running US foreign policy.
DeLoy Bateman, a high school science teacher here who left the church several years ago, says his daughter’s marriage was recently broken up by church leaders. She was ordered to become the bride of her father-in-law, a man twice her age, Mr. Bateman says.
‘This just makes me want to cry,’ said Mr. Bateman, a lifelong resident of Colorado City. ‘They tore up this marriage and ordered her to have sex with this older man. I’ve lost my daughter and her children to this church. I have to stand outside on the sidewalk and beg if I want to see my grandchildren.’
Other residents and investigators tell similar stories about the church, which continues operating under the direction of its absolute leader, Warren Jeffs, in spite of his being one of the country’s most-wanted fugitives, indicted on sexual abuse charges along with eight of his chief followers.” (New York Times via abby)
This brings up to date a story that forms one of the centerpieces of the Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer’s terrifying exposé of extremist Mormon fundamentalism. If you think you know the depths of the America you live in, reading Krakauer’s book may change your mind.
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‘What I’m hearing from patients is that they don’t really much use these handouts that are stapled to the bag,’ said Dr. Ruth Parker, an internist who treats patients at the large public hospital associated with Emory University in Atlanta. ‘What they will sometimes do is look at the label.'” (New York Times )
BTW, I heard that Bill O’Reilly said something on his radio show along the lines of, “The bombings will continue as long as the American presence does.” Although he was saying it to attempt to inure the public to the continuing death toll until we “complete our mission” (as Dubya always puts it) it is actually, precisely, an argument for the opposite, of course. And it also eerily reminiscent of that old saw about how “the beatings will continue until morale improves”…
His authoritarian decrees, on this and other topics, have prompted shock, fear and even ridicule, but a scientific study released in September by seven United Nations agencies and the World Bank more or less agreed with him.
It concluded that Chernobyl’s lasting effects on health and the environment had not proved as dire as first predicted. It recommended that the authorities in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus take steps to reverse psychological trauma caused by Chernobyl, encouraging investment and redevelopment.
Lands where agriculture was banned or severely restricted can be safe for growing crops again, the report said, using techniques to minimize the absorption of radioactive particles into produce.” (New York Times )
Jazz Singer and Pianist Is Dead at 71: “Shirley Horn was a unique singer, with one of the slowest deliveries in jazz and a very unusual way of phrasing, putting stress on certain words and letting others slip away.” (New York Times )
Rocket guidance engineer and sometime science-fiction writer Will McCarthy has figured out the science of how the dead might walk again, and he is not talking about Wade Davis’ type of zombies, who aren’t really dead. [via the null device]
In Lifes’s Little Annoyances, Ian Urbina chronicles the lengths to which some people will go when they have endured their pet peeves long enough and are not going to take it any more.”
In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: “What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.
“Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.”” (Financial Times)
The brave ACLU clients involved in this 21st Century version of the Scopes Trial are making a difference not just in their communities, but are influencing a nationwide debate that is about more than just science education – it is about the role of religion on our society and our government.
…Take the Inuit word for June, qiqsuqqaqtuq. It refers to snow conditions, a strong crust at night. Only those traits now appear in May. Shari Gearheard, a climate researcher from Harvard, recalled the appeal of an Inuit hunter, James Qillaq, for a new word at a recent meeting in Canada.
One sentence stayed in her mind: “June isn’t really June any more.” ” (New York Times )
And: Bird flu has taken another human life. A Thai man is the 67th victim as the H5N1 strain of the influenza virus crawls from Asia to Europe and toward Africa. More ominous yet, an Indonesian cluster of infection in the same family suggest the possibility that the feared mutation allowing human-to-human transmission, the precondition for the pandemic, has occurred. This Reuters piece is a good summary of the current epidemiological status of the viral threat.
Kunjilal Malviya, 75, who lives in Sehara village, about 125 miles south of state capital Bhopal, was meditating in his house after announcing he would die on Thursday.” (Reuters)
Update: He’s still here. (Reuters)
NGC 1097, a spiral galaxy about 45 million light years from Earth, glows relatively brightly at its centre. That suggests a black hole is devouring surrounding stars and gas there, but the light’s glare has overwhelmed any detailed images of the process.
Now, astronomers have used one of the VLT’s four 8-metre telescopes to take near-infrared images of matter whirling towards the galaxy’s heart.” (New Scientist)
according to the Boston Globe. How many have you seen? How do you sleep at night?
In an interview, Alan M. Levine, secretary of the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration, estimated that no more than 5 percent of Medicaid recipients would hit their annual limits. At that point, Mr. Levine said, ‘the health plan will still be responsible for providing services to the consumer, but the state’s reimbursement would be limited to that amount.’
Asked whether the beneficiary would be responsible for paying costs beyond the limit, he said: ‘That can happen today. There are arbitrary limits and caps embedded in the state Medicaid program, limits on home health services, doctors’ visits, prescription drugs.’
For each beneficiary, Florida will pay a monthly premium to a private plan. Insurance plans will be allowed to limit ‘the amount, duration and scope’ of services in ways that current law does not permit.” (New York Times )
The Dateline report, broadcast on Wednesday night, said US soldiers burnt the bodies for hygiene reasons but then a US psychological operations unit broadcast a propaganda message on loudspeakers to Taliban fighters, taunting them to retrieve their dead and fight.” (theage.com.au)
Interesting controversy rages around plans for the Dalai Lama to address the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting about the research in which he is collaborating on the cognitive effects of meditation practice. Over five hundred researchers have signed a petition urging the lecture be canceled, fearing the loss of credibility to the field because “it will highlight a subject with largely unsubstantiated claims and compromised scientific rigor and objectivity.” Supporters of the Dalai Lama say that many of the petitioners are of Chinese descent and motivated politically. As a college undergraduate thirty years ago, I was a research assistant to then-graduate student Richard Davidson in his fledgling research into the psychological effects of meditation. Davidson is now the Dalai Lama’s major neuroscientist collaborator and the object of the petitioners’ discontent, partly because he is a meditator himself or, as one of the drafters of the petition puts it, a “declared believer playing a dual role as advocate and researcher,” a characterization which Davidson, quite rightly in my estimation, considers overblown.
Of Jakob Nielsen’s Top Ten Weblog Design Mistakes, I estimate that I commit at least 5.5. Another, his no. 8, “forgetting that you are writing for your future boss,” I also commit but does not concern me in the least.
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Larry Johnson gossips that 22 inndictments may be being looked at. (No Quarter)
Sources close to the investigation say a senior Cheney aide is cooperating with the prosecutor, says The Raw Story.
“…Sparked by today’s Washington Post story that suggests Vice President Cheney’s office is involved in the Plame-CIA spy link investigation, government officials and advisers passed around rumors that the vice president might step aside and that President Bush would elevate Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice,” as reported in US News & World Report.
Is Colin Powell implicating Cheney? (The Agonist)
Why stop there? Unsurprisingly, Bush knew: “An angry President Bush rebuked chief political guru Karl Rove two years ago for his role in the Valerie Plame affair, sources told the (New York Daily News).”
But Ed Fitzgerald predicts: “To sum it up: There will be indictments, some people who have done wrong things will be prosecuted, other people who did wrong things will skate, the administration will not be taken down, or neutered. Bush and Cheney will still be in power, somewhat weakened, perhaps, and missing the talents of some of their people, but still running the country.” [thanks to richard for the image from 2politicaljunkies.com]
Mapping Where You Think You Live: “A website called CommonCensus.org is hoping to shed some light on how Americans perceive their surroundings.” (Wired News)
Suspected Cluster of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) cases. This sporadic prion disease is similar to vCJD, variant CJD, which is contracted by eating beef infected with the agent of ‘mad cow disease’ (BSE; bovine spongiform encephalopathy), but the etiology is unknown. It is not clear if this is really a ‘cluster’; while the diagnosis can only be definitively established via autopsy, only five of the nine suspect cases were autopsied because of a reluctance to handle affected brain tissue, and the final verdict is not in from tests of the tissue of those who did have the autopsies. It is not clear to me how geographically close the cases were and it would certainly be interesting to see what epidemiological features they shared, if any. Could it be a statistical anomaly?
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