I’ve had a longstanding romance with gadgets. The way I’m counting, I have owned, used or had an intimate relationship with 42 of these 100 at one time or another. And how was it for you? (Mobile PC)

Clicking on the title, I looked forward to reading a perspective that shared my concerns about how progressives had handled themselves in ’04. I agree with him that many of those with a true progressive agenda who threw their lot in with the Democrats are guilty of losing their nerve and not holding Kerry accountable to leftist ideals. The left “…muzzled itself at election time, accommodating the Democrats’ move to the right precisely when people are most tuned in to politics”.

But Harrison goes further. He utterly rejects the logic of Anyone but Bush and minimizes the differences between Bush and Kerry. As someone who was passionate about the necessity of Anyone but Bush, I find it outrageous that Harrison does not seem to find it conceivable that people could both find the lesser-of-evils vote necessary and palatable in 2004 and be committed to and working toward a politics that transcends the two-party system in the longer term. This sort of holier-than-thou, patronizing arrogance of a certain kind of ur-leftist, refusing to compromise on principle, was the downfall of the left in decades past. It is an attitude which will not be its salvation now.

Moreover, Harrison writes as if he invented the notion that there is little to choose between the Demublicans and the Republocrats. I was proud of saying, up until Bush emerged as the Republican candidate in the lead-up to the 2000 election, that I was above electoral politics and that one’s choice in the presidential election could not make much of a difference. Many people had a similar conversion. The weakness of the Democrats’ ability to appeal to the left is that too many people whose inherent decency and morality put them above politics have to be enlisted. It was a triumph, not a disgrace, that these people were successfully mobilized in 2004. It was their conscience — not some conspiracy to quash third parties among the wing of the military-industrial complex that controls the Democratic Party machine — that recruited them to oppose Bush in 2004.

Harrison also ignores the fact that many were initially drawn in by Kucinich and Dean, whose names do not even appear in the essay because they would be awkward contradictions to his thesis. A politics of exuberant grassroots progressivism almost hijacked the Democratic Party in 2004 before it flagged and people made their conscientious lesser-of-evils choice. And it seems to me that the struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party between those who feel it loses because it is not enough Republican-like and those who feel it is because it is too much so is not yet over.

In attacking the logic of Anyone but Bush, Harrison asks us if we suppose the Republicans will mount anyone less heinous in future years, and whether the “strategic” vote for Kerry will become a pattern every four years required by equivalent emergencies. His main concern is that this will forestall the effort to build a political alternative, i.e. a third party movement. It may well, for the near term. The Republican “emergency” is of course not Bush; he is the front man for a neo-conservative agenda of dismantling the social progress of the last century or so. It is an ongoing emergency that will continue to require realpolitikal compromises for a great while before we can rely on the upwelling of a Third Wave. Those of us who are disgusted with the current shape of the Democratic Party are at the same historical point as the reactionaries who felt betrayed by the Republican Party in the mid-60’s. How they responded was to carefully and methodically lay the groundwork for the hijacking of that party over the next twenty to forty years. Progressives can count on needing nothing less than an equivalent effort. In the meanwhile, there will probably be alot of Gore- and Kerry-like insipid, co-opted Democrats for whom many find it necessary to hold their noses and vote (for example [ugghh] Hilary Clinton in ’08?). Harrison argues that the last vestiges of difference between the parties, e.g. support for abortion rights, will almost inevitably evaporate over the continuing Republican onslaught of the next decade or so. This ignores the likelihood that defense of abortion rights may be a moot point long before the Democrats have to concede that plank in their platform, as Bush stacks the judicial system with reactionaries who will dismantle progressive velues by coup and not just slow attrition. This was what the Anybody but Bush vote was trying to forestall.

Harrison also feels blaming the American people for the choice 51% of them made is ‘blaming the victim’ and that it is a mistake to conceive of the electorate as permanently reactionary. He has the sort of naive faith in The People that I have seen in decades past, in defiance of the evidence, mostly in the dogmatic Marxist Left: ” …(T)he people we want to reach, the vast majority, having no fundamental stake in the perpetuation of the existing system, are capable of grasping the reality that they are plundered, exploited, and ideologically manipulated in the interests of a ruthless elite.” But the theoreticians of the left have always understood that overcoming the False Consciousness by which the ruled are made to feel that the rulers’ interests are their own is no trivial matter. His solution to turn mass consciousness around is “hard campaigning by an independent left,” with the emphasis on independent. Harrison feels, quite ridiculously, that beginning to model opposition to the Democrats now will align “millions of Americans who are sick of wars, insecurity, declining wages, worsening schools, racism, and homophobia and long for peace, equality, and social justice” behind a third party. He suggests that a declaration of independence by the left is the only thing that would avert a grim future.

The contradiction in Harrison’s thinking is to argue that, within the Democratic party, there is no hope to avoid the co-optation of progressive values by an inescapable False Consciousness, while at the same time arguing that in the broader plane of the electorate such co-optation to Republican ideals could be readily countered by some sort of vigorous movement to raise mass consciousness. He faults those of us who thought the electorate should have known better than to vote for Bush, but is contemptuous of progressive Democrats — the constituency his argument needs — because he thinks they should have known better than to vote for Kerry. He holds progressives to a higher standard of political enlightenment than he does the electorate while arguing that those he criticizes are guilty of a failure of faith in the electorate.

Remember my first posts after the 2004 Bush victory, in one of which I described the relevance of the stages of mourning? I know I talked about my reluctance to leave the anger stage, but this is ridiculous. Harrison is contemptuous of: the Kerry campaign, Democratic party hacks, progressives within the Democratic party, the Greens, other existing attempts at third party movements, Nader’s ineptitude, most of the Left. The only people for whom no scorn is reserved are the Bush folks and the folks who elected him.

Jimmy Carter was the only US president to have qualified in submarines.This news release from the Dept of Defense crows over the upcoming commissioning of the newest nuclear attack sub in the US fleet in his name.

I wonder, however, if Carter will welcome this, or if the US Navy would take note if he did not. The peace and disarmament movement has always been graced by the ‘conversion’ of former heads of state and senior military officers. It is an often-observed phenomenon that, once freed of the pressures of their leadership positions which do not allow them to take a position of conscience, they can be exceedingly persuasive opponents of their country’s potential to unleash mass destruction, having once had their finger on the trigger. I am not certain that the statesman-like Nobel Peace Prize winner Carter has joined those who are freed to become anti-militarists — perhaps some of you readers know — but I assume so, given his outspoken post-presidential diplomatic and humanitarian concerns. The article mentions that Rosalynn and Amy Carter will participate in the launch of the USS Carter, but mention of the ex-president’s intention to attend is conspicuous for its absence.

Even the most modern of these monstrous weapons, armed with MIRVed ICBMs with massive warheads tactical Cruise missiles, are outmoded relics of the Cold War, designed to fight a war too terrible to comprehend against an enemy who no longer represents a threat. The press release boasts that the USS Carter is the largest submarine in its class, with “enhanced payload capacity” and advances enabling it to “develop and test a new generation of weapons.” It is an obscenity to build these things, an obscenity to rob legitimate human needs of the cost of building this thing, an obscenity to reactivate the nuclear arms race and reverse the previous decade’s progress in averting the nuclear threat as the Bush administration is doing, and an obscenity to name this WMD after the American president who most nearly deserves being called a peacemaker. His values are as antithetical to the aims and means of the current administration as can be. It is an obscenity to unleash this against the world in my name as an American citizen as well.

Besides, I thought we did not commemorate the famous by naming monumental works after them while they are still alive. The first time I saw that principle violated was with Reagan, but he was effectively gone for many years before his physical demise, as his Alzheimer’s Disease took his mind.

It brings up a related concern. Will there be any antiemetic strong enough for how I feel when they start naming things after George W. Bush?

This anguished piece from the New York Times Magazine by a California writer about his son’s devastation by methamphetamine addiction ends on a hopeful note, but just barely. As someone who treats detoxing substance users on my psychiatric hospital unit, it is useful for me to have a window into the experience at least some of their loved ones might have. When my ability to be compassionate to one of my patients is frayed, one of the mantras I use to get back to where I want to be in caring for them is to remind myself that this is someone’s son or daughter, that this patient was once a babe in arms cuddled and loved by some mother or father.

But it also makes me desperate to go and hug my sleeping children, still too young to have been exposed to drugs, and never let go.

Here we go again. I have written extensively in FmH in the past about scurrilous and scientifically unwarranted attempts to link antidepressant use to violent crimes. This case invloves a minor, and is fueled by the FDA’s recently mandating a ‘black box warning’ that antidepressants may cause increased suicide risk in children. The defense, contending that sertraline (Zoloft) transformed ‘a “nice, shy Christian boy” to a violent predator’, is attempting to use an “involuntary intoxication” defense, which requires

Antidepressants can rarely induce acute mania, sometimes psychotic, which can possibly meet these criteria, but short of that I cannot think of a way in which an antidepressant can ‘intoxicate’ or obscure distinguishing right from wrong. Adverse events occurring while someone is being treated with an antidepressant are far far more likely to be consequences of the patient’s underlying psychological distress than the effects of the drug. The scurrilous publicity to the contrary steers many patients, or parents of minor patients, away from agreeing to urgently needed and hugely effective therapeutic options for their suffering.

I have nothing but contempt for the stupidity of the missile defense program and nothing but smug satisfaction and relief when I hear about these test failures. Here’s to the status quo!

As seems to have been the case with many of his admirers, I devoured Lovecraft’s work most recently as an adolescent. I went a little overboard; I have first editions of most of his books, and they are virtually the only first editions I have ever collected. It sometimes takes hyperbole to inspire a jaded modern sensibility with the delicious experience of the weird and the horrible. I much prefer Lovecraft’s way of doing it than, say, the Halloweens and Friday the 13ths that pass for horror these days. They play very differently on the emotion of disgust, and with absolutely no irony. Besides, the adjective eldritch seems to have been made specifically for him.

But the evidence is not merely anecdotal! Most psychiatrists are familiar with the neuropsychiatric changes the drug causes, and the psychiatric literature is rife with reports.

This is the essay by Ward Churchill about Sept. 11th that caused him to resign under fire as chair of the department of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado. It has been intolerable to the jingoists ever since Sept. 11th and clearly remains so to suggest what is self-evident — that terrorist attacks against the US have some relationship to our arrogant swagger on the world stage.

Churchill, a Native American with an acute sensitivity to historic abuses committed in the name of American values, was certainly tactless in using one form of hyperbole that is taboo in public discourse — likening US militarism against the third world to Nazi genocide. (It remains a virtually unquestioned kneejerk assertion that no other evil is commensurate with Nazi evil. This acts, conveniently, to place the demons outside ourselves and obviate the need to examine our own baser tendencies.)

But Churchill is not exactly, or not only, saying that the American regime is like the Nazis. I read his point as more profound, more disquieting and more accurate. Churchill asks Americans to see that, if we held the average German citizen accountable for going along with the tyranny of the Nazi regime, we must necessarily examine our own complicity in the crimes against humanity that continue to be committed by the Bush regime. It speaks to the parallels that Churchill is drawing that he apparently could not make this point any more freely in the U.S. than a critic of the Nazis could have in Germany of the 1930’s or 1940’s. At least we don’t use concentration camps yet.

“The first true colour image of Saturn reveals that the ringed planet is not the silver orb visible from Earth but a deep shade of blue.” (news.com.au)

Skeptics claim there will always be a world event that can be used to explain an observed spike on the machine. Investigators should be ‘blind’ to the output of the ‘oracle’ during a given period of time until they decide which world events they predict should have registered on it. Then analyze the data. The built-in defense of the true believers is that paranormal phenomena evaporate under too much scientific scrutiny; here is a case in which the scrutiny could be far after the fact. Oh, but wait, if ‘sensitives’ can sense the future, they might sense that scrutiny coming from the future too…

The Republican aganda is really an extreme form of social Darwinism in which we owe nothing to those, domestic or foreign, who are less ‘fit’. By fit, of course, the president and his cronies mean well-connected to a revenue stream and to opportunities to plunder. This is most clear on the domestic front, where the welfare state is being dismantled — hey, America is the Land of Oppurtunuhty, it is not our fault if some people are too stupid to take advantage. But the same sentiment, as well as other time-honored American traditions like xenophobia, invests the Republican attitude to the unfortunates abroad.

And this from professed Christians? They ignore this passage in scripture, I am sure:

This smacks abit too much of Marx’s cornerstone of socialist ideology, “…from each according to his ability, to each according to his need…”

Dan Hartung is back. Lake Effect was one of the best, first weblogs I read regularly, and kept reading it until it dribbled out of existence. Dan always had a way of thinking through clearly, often to the conclusion that the emperor had no clothes. When I did not agree with him, that was a sign I ought to listen to his argument harder. As the introductory posts in his new weblog reveal, he has been through some difficult changes since he stopped posting to Lake Effect. Stilicho comes online with the hope — and the promise — of reclamation. I wish him well and I will be reading…

A new day at Salon

This more sophisticated approach would avoid Kafkaesque situations like the recent case in which a mentally retarded convicted murderer was said to have had his intellectual development so stimulated by working with his defense attorneys on the appeals of his death sentence that he was no longer below the IQ threshold for execution.

Eric Alterman reviews the gyrations the press must go through to meet the obligation they seem to feel to do dignified reporting about a passel of snakeoil salesmen:

The media and weblog nation are all over this massive study showing that students neither understand nor value their First Amendment rights. Many are drawing the wrong conclusion from this if they are primarily finding fault with the young people’s indifference or incomprehension. The more important finding is that the ignorance and apathy are directly related to the unwillingness of schools to teach the importance of free speech. But what do you expect? What proportion of American schools have caved on daring to teach evolution, for example? Besides, students have less free speech rights than almost any segment of society, so what do you expect them to learn?

I have been paying alot of attention recently to one inescapable fact. Denizens of the United States are the only people deluding themselves into believing that the United States is still the best place to live. In many of the respects that matter, quality of life is far better in the United States of Europe than it is here. ThisNew York Review of Books essay reviewing recent books on the theme by T. R. Reid, Jeremy Rifkin and Timothy Garton Ash manages to capture the essence of the debate. And you can’t simply dismiss it as typical NYRB America-bashing.

I have been fascinated and disturbed by the fact that the price paid for the reduction in battlefield mortality brought about by new body armor and combat medical intervention and evacuation techniques has been far more soldiers surviving with horrendous injuries to unprotected parts of their bodies such as limbs, and with horrendous acute and chronic pain. In a fascinating and disquieting Wired piece, Steve Silberman grapples with these implications as he profiles a pioneer of a revolutionary new anaesthetic pain relief technique known as continuous peripheral nerve block. I read this piece in the print edition of Wired and was impatient for it to appear online so I could blink to it.

The media and weblog nation are all over this massive study showing that students neither understand nor value their First Amendment rights. Many are drawing the wrong conclusion from this if they are primarily finding fault with the young people’s indifference or incomprehension. The more important finding is that the ignorance and apathy are directly related to the unwillingness of schools to teach the importance of free speech. But what do you expect? What proportion of American schools have caved on daring to teach evolution, for example? Besides, students have less free speech rights than almost any segment of society, so what do you expect them to learn?

[Click on the photo…] (CNN [thanks, Seth])

I have heavily edited this passage, but if you aren’t already familiar with it, you owe it to yourself to click here to read the unedited original. You may be amazed*.

*(or at least nostalgic)

“Some moments become lasting recollections while others just evaporate.” What makes the difference, and how? (Scientific American)

“America’s largest brewing company, Anheuser-Busch, released its latest product last week — a beer that contains caffeine.” (Washington Post)

And: related story from The Guardian.

“Many say the possibility of military conflict between the United States and Iran, which Washington believes seeks to develop nuclear weapons, is now growing. While verbal warfare between Washington and Tehran is nothing new, international pundits point to a number of recent developments, large and small, that suggest rhetorical bombshells could give way to the real thing.” (Washington Post) Are the American people going to let the Bush dysadministration open the next front in the imperial neverending war? You bet they are; 42% and counting already in support, and the propaganda blitz hasn’t even started yet. If you oppose this expansion of American aggression, the time is now to begin building effective opposition to the war machine.

I am glad someone got around to doing a mainstream profile of Sasha Shulgin, not that he is exactly going to be a darlng of the New York Times cognoscenti who will have read about him this weekend in the magazine section. Shulgin is the Johnny Appleseed of psychedelics, having seeded the mental landscape with hundreds of phenethylamines and tryptamines he has known and loved, all with the knowledge and even the esteem of the Food and Drug Authority. He is fond of saying that he has never done anything illegal, since his compounds only find their way to Schedule I long after he has synthesized (and he, his wife and his small study group have dosed themselves with) them. The tide may be turning, however. Schedule I is supposed to be for substances with abuse potential and no redeemable medical value, which is of course in the eye of the beholder. Recently Shulgin’s faith in the value of psychedelics has gotten perhaps its first mainstream chance of vindication, with FDA approval of several research studies into psychedelic-assisted treatments. MDMA, the unique and exciting ’empathogen’ for which he is perhaps the best known, got hijacked as the raver’s choice partying drug, of course, but seems to have particularly important therapeutic uses. Of course, that is what a cadre of dedicated psychonauts originally thought about LSD too — that it was a tool for serious intrapsychic exploration rather than a playtoy.

The article uses a curious incident to describe the origins of Shulgin’s interest in pharmacology, a 1944 incident in which he fell into a stupor after drinking a glass of orange juice the crystals at the bottom of which he was convinced were a sedative, although they turned out to have been undissolved sugar. Curious, because this incident depicts an important aspect of drug study but one for which Shulgin is not particularly known — the effect of expectancy in producing effects. One of my psychiatric mentors, the late Dr. Norman Zinberg, was fond of insisting that the experience of a drug was compounded of Drug, Set and Setting (the name of one of his most famous books) — the pharmacology of the substance, the mental expectations of the user, and the context in which it is taken. Shulgin’s interest has focused almost exclusively on Drug, although as the MDMA detour indicates, the effects one gets when one uses a substance with a thoughtful deliberative exploratory set and setting will probably be quite different from its use as a club drug.

This is an unusually sober appraisal of a controversial figure from the mainstream press. Research on the morbidity and mortality of Shulgin compounds is touched upon soberly, without the histrionics that usually suffuse such discussions. The author is circumspect about what he describes as Shulgin’s “fervent libertarianism with which he has inoculated himself against any sense of personal guilt” for the negative consequences of the use of drugs he has discovered. And, I know, I know, it is only fair to include the obligatory critique from representatives of the mainstream psychiatric establishment. But the comments from emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto Vivian Rakoff are particularly lame. He scoffs at the notion that a drug can create a revelatory moment. “Every few years, something comes along that claims to be what Freud called the ‘royal road to the unconscious’.” Well, correct me if I’m wrong, but I am not aware of that phrase being evoked at any time since Freud used it around a century ago in reference to dreams; it has certainly not been used in reference to psychedelics, as far as I know. And one would be hard-pressed to dismiss out of hand the claims that psychedelic exploration could be revelatory given that the rigorous research has not heretofore been allowed. Still, the classicist got in his Freud reference, even if he misused the allusion prejudicially. Hey, come to think of it, psychoanalytic techniques have not proven themselves the royal road to the unconscious they were supposed to be, when subjected to empirical research.

Those interested in taking this issue further should dip into Shulgin’s two self-published memoirs/manuals, PiHKAL and TiKHAL, or the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics site.

“Antonin Scalia for chief justice. Seriously.” Nicholas Thompson, senior editor of Legal Affairs, argues in Slate that Scalia would not be a bad idea for the next chief justice. He argues that Scalia really isn’t half-bad on some issues; that the elevation to chief justice wouldn’t worsen his impact on the issues where he is a reactionary, e.g. a woman’s right to choose, because the chief justice’s job doesn’t mean that much anyway — while the chief justice has a slightly taller soapbox to preach from, he still only votes once; and because shrewd Democrats could horsetrade for his elevation and get an associate justice who is middle-of-the-road in return. Thompson’s central argument is that Scalia is smart and that his overarching ideology is “legal clarity.” The only attractive component of this argument, for me, is the idea of Democrats leveraging a moderate onto the court in return for Scalia’s promotion. But I have no confidence either in them pulling the weight to be able to pull it off, or in Bush and Co. letting it happen.

“Antonin Scalia for chief justice. Seriously.” Nicholas Thompson, senior editor of Legal Affairs, argues in Slate that Scalia would not be a bad idea for the next chief justice. He argues that Scalia really isn’t half-bad on some issues; that the elevation to chief justice wouldn’t worsen his impact on the issues where he is a reactionary, e.g. a woman’s right to choose, because the chief justice’s job doesn’t mean that much anyway — while the chief justice has a slightly taller soapbox to preach from, he still only votes once; and because shrewd Democrats could horsetrade for his elevation and get an associate justice who is middle-of-the-road in return. Thompson’s central argument is that Scalia is smart and that his overarching ideology is “legal clarity.” The only attractive component of this argument, for me, is the idea of Democrats leveraging a moderate onto the court in return for Scalia’s promotion. But I have no confidence either in them pulling the weight to be able to pull it off, or in Bush and Co. letting it happen.

“The universe is destined to end. Before it does, could an advanced civilisation escape via a ‘wormhole’ into a parallel universe? The idea seems like science fiction, but it is consistent with the laws of physics and biology.

I don’t know how much national attention this case is getting, but we are all over it here in Boston. There has, of course, already been alot of litigation arising from the Church sexual abuse scandal, but this one is a criminal trial, and I am of two minds about it. While sexual abusers should be held responsible and punished for their actions, the prosecution here is basing their case on an unreliable and suspect accuser, several other of Shanley’s alleged victims having withdrawn from the case in the weeks before the trial. While victims of abuse become chronically psychiatrically troubled, so too do suggestible psychiatrically troubled individuals sometimes ‘become’ victims of abuse in their minds and the minds of caregivers, prosecutors and others who have zealous investments in the reality of abuse. While traumatic memories are stored in a dissociated way, protectively inaccessible to the victim until recovered, it is also demonstrable that ‘recovered memories’ can be fictitious after-the-fact creations. Human memory is malleable and, in some instances, how convincing it is is matched by how unreliable it is. I wonder if we are going to see a monumental battle of expert witnesses around the recovered memory issue in the current case. The proponents of the view that these recovered memories are false and the adherents to the trauma model are often zealots who clash as cataclysmically — and unproductively — as any do when they argue about matters of faith. Shanley and his accuser will likely become damaged icons for polemical positions in a prodigious battle played out in the Cambridge courtroom.

Visions of hell from Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and the like. Some find them ironic; that caricaturing the torments of hell made them less terrifying. Not I; these have always been the pure stuff of nightmare to me.

People are invited to send in postcards revealing their secrets, usually (but not invariably) shameful ones. A gallery of these postcards is posted here. Some of the secrets people keep are fairly predictable, but in other cases I am amazed about what people torture themselves over. I was intrigued by the Apologies Project of years past, which started before the weblogging phenomenon as a telephone answering system but made the transition to a weblog. People, as in PostSecret, anonymously reported a shameful secret they were harboring about how they had treated another, but the point was to render an apology. This served more of a purpose, IMHO, than simply posting the secret, although it is even more useful, of course, to face the person you have wronged without concealing your identity. I suppose these anonymous modes of expiation take their cue from the Catholic confessional. I am not a Catholic; if you believe in sin and the theological God, can you make amends with God for your sins without making amends with the person you have wronged?

“The Animaris Rhinoceros Transport is a type of animal with a steel skeleton and a polyester skin. It looks as if there is a thick layer of sand coating the animal. It weighes 2. tons, but can be set into motion by one person. It stands 4.70 meters tall. Because of its height it catches enough wind to start moving.

…The Animaris Rhinoceros Transport is a direct descendant of the Animari or Beach Animals. For fourteen years Theo Jansen has been working on creating a new life-form. These creatures consist of walking skeletons made out of yellow electricity tubes. These skeletons are wind powered. Over the years an evolution has occurred, which can be seen in the succeeding generations. Eventually he wants to put these animals on the beach where they will lead their own lives.

The Animaris Rhinoceros Transport is an offshoot of the Beach Animal evolution. It is equipped with passanger seating and can be used for transport. As a car is a transport vehicle to the horse and an airplane is a transport vehicle to the bird, so is the Animaris Rhinoceros Transport a transport vehicle to the Animaris (latin name for Beach Animal, see www.strandbeest.com). It is meant for crossing the tundra. Due to the fact that one must wait until strong wind comes from the right direction, living quarters must be made in the animal to make travel agreeable.”

(Be sure to download the short filmclip of the rhinoceros ambulating to get the full impact.)

And <a href=”http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66356,00.html

” title=””>here is a Wired article on Theo Jansen’s work. [thanks, abby]

A great piece about what was perhaps my favorite CD of 2004, The Arcade Fire’s Funeral. (The Village Voice)

Here is who is doing it:

And here is some of what they are doing:

And here is how it may play itself out:

Hersh doesn’t make this up, and I’m damned if I know why there has not already been an attempt on his life because of the secret administration hit list I am certain he is on.

If you read the mozillaZine feedHouse weblog, you will see one announcement after another. Why doesnt’ Google just come right out and take the Mozilla Project in-house lock stock and barrel?

Related? The Fifty Most Loathsome People of the Year, according to The Beast.

This item has a particular puissance for me here in Boston, where there is mounting community concern over Boston University’s plan to build a Biosafety-Level-4 laboratory in a crowded urban neighborhood, especially after the recent news that three BU researchers were infected with a lethal strain of tularemia they mistakenly thought was harmless. And this was reportedly not the first biosafety lapse at the BU lab. Proponents of highly risky science have always argued by cost-benefit ratio, but even if we can be assured that the probability of a risk is vanishingly low, aren’t there cases in which the potential magnitude of a disaster is almost infinitely high? In other words, when does the product of a number whose limit is zero and another whose limit is infinity tend toward zero, and when toward infinity? Moreover, the probability of risk often, to my mind, relies on the hubristic assumption that people and procedures can be infallible, when thre reality is quite the contrary — time and again, it seems, if a mistake can occur, it will.

Over the past year or so, German pranksters have placed miniature American flags in 2-3000 piles of dog excrement in public parks in what has been construed as a graphic protest against US policy in Iraq and, more recently, against Bush’s reelection. Police seek to catch the culprits red-handed (or… would it be brown?) even though “legal experts say there is no law against using faeces as a flag stand and the federal constitution is vague on the issue.” (Ananova)

Boing Boing’s David Pescovitz comments on an Ananova story about a man who has puzzled medical experts by being unable to sleep for the past twenty years. There are a series of follow-up posts listing novels about insomniac characters (many of whom seem to be private eyes). I would love to see some more detailed medical investigation of real-world insomniacs. Although the ultimate necessity of spending an average of a third of our lifespan asleep remains a mystery, we are garnering knowledge about the variety of necessary functions it serves, both in terms of cognitive housekeeping and tissue repair and restoration of physiological equilibrium. How does this guy function, on both interpersonal, psychological, and physiological levels?

I’m not sure, in any case, about the veracity of the Ananova story, given that there’s a machismo about not sleeping (perhaps because sleeplessness turns us into the worst caricature of macho??) and I often run into people who boast that they need less sleep than the rest of us. There is something culturally consonant about sleep deprivation, too, as society is more and more frenetic and productivity-driven. Performance in many fields (especially medicine; more about that below) seems to be measured at least partly by how long and how far and how fast one can go on. People in general sleep less than they used to, and we are intrigued by ‘alertness agents’ like modafinil (about the value of and concerns about which I have written here), which appear to treat fatigue and compensate for sleep deprivation with fewer consequences than stimulants of the amphetamine family.

There is also a separate but related allure of the wee small hours per se. I guess it is true of many children who are curious about what mysterious and magical things might happen after they are asleep, as I was. There was always a frisson, when I went to the zoo or the natural history museum, at seeing the somehow more eerie nocturnal creatures. And, in the 1931 film, one of my childhood favorites, Dracula’s ecstatic celebration of “the children of the night” as the air was suffused with the distant howls of wolves always sent a delicious chill up my spine. I began trying to stay up late as soon as I could tell time. I would sneak my transistor radio — if any of you know what those were — into bed and put it under my pillow (it was especially exciting when I finally got an earphone for it) and try to stay awake to break the magical barrier of midnight; it was a long time before I succeeded. Since then, I have always been a night owl, as you can tell from the timestamps on many of my posts here at FmH. I have never gotten over the romance of the middle of the night, both the stillness and aloneness, the cold hard clarity of a world reduced by starlight and moonlight to nocturnal hues, and the seedy quality of the covert activities that transpire, in reality or imagination, in the dark, beyond the ring of illumination thrown by our streetlights. Many of the insomniac characters in literature seem to enjoy walking deserted city streets in the middle of the night, and so too did I. There is an element of transgressing boundaries, the thrill of doing something forbidden, in being up when no one else is, when no one is supposed to be. One of the subliminal attractions of being sleeepless may also be that one challenges the Big Sleep, pushing to transgress the ultimate boundary at the end of life. It is a medical truism, by the way, that Death comes for people disproportionately in the wee hours. Perhaps I have always wanted to be staring her in the eye when she arrives. Sensuality, too, if of course intimately associated with the nocturnal.

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” Warren Zevon and others have said. One can cheat death too by packing more into life, I have thought, by spending more of one’s living hours as waking hours. For most of my life, I felt that I did not have the time to waste on sleeping, and (here comes that macho boast?) felt that I could get away for many days running with shorting myself on sleep if there was something compelling to read, write or watch instead. There is a sort of machismo associated with being able to function while sleep-deprived during medical training, when the sleep deprivation is, of course, outrageous and, I am convinced, gratuitous. Training directors, or caricatures of them, supposedly reason that decision-making skills are shaped, and character built, by sleep deprivation, and that “if it was good enough for me when I trained, it’s good enough for the new generation of whiners.” When there is an egregious medical error, like that which caused the celebrated death of Libby Zion in New York some years ago, there is anguished handwringing about the liability and morbidity caused by our proclivity for sleep-depriving medical house officers making life-or-death decisions, but it never seems to change anything. The real incentive the system has to make residents do round-the-clock shifts, of course, is not a training need at all; it is the easiest way to use the indentured servitude of medical residency to meet the manpower needs of a modern healthcare facility.

My acceptance of sleep deprivation during my medical school years had an added momentum, though. When I went through medical school, I was hellbent on not ‘becoming’ a doctor, in the sense of that being all there was to my identity forever after. It needed to be just one of the things I did in my life, not my defining attribute. That created an added impetus to stay up late to do other things after keeping up with the literature in my field, writing consultation reports, etc. And after my wife and I started a family, I also took to my parenting responsibilities by carving out the wee small hours for my other pursuits after a full day of being present and active as a father as well as a doctor.

There is an intimate relationship between sleep disruption and depression, as we know in psychiatric practice. Depressions come in sleepless and hypersomnic varieties. Part of the difference is surely biological, but people are also built differently in terms of their characteristic coping strategies. Some people are escapists, and may sleep more in an effort to avoid distress. (They also seem to be the ones, in my experience, who can can entertain thoughts of suicide for the purposes of relief or escapism, among the various purposes that suicide can serve in my patients’ psyches.) But, even for people who try to use sleep as an escape mechanism, I have long suspected that sleep can promote depression, and there is a body of literature supporting me, even speculating that some sort of depressogenic neurochemical is produced during sleep. Depressed patients often feel most depressed upon awakening and their mood improves as the day proceeds (so-called “diurnal mood variation”). If they take a daytime nap, they often face another period of renewed depression after they get up from the nap. Even if it is not biological, you can imagine how difficult it is to face depressing realities immediately upon awakening from a period of blissful ignorance. The possibility that sleep promotes depression has led to speculation that some people may be sleep-depriving themselves as a sort of inadvertent self-medication for depressive tendencies. In other words, is the sleeplessness of some depressions a consequence of, or an attempt at compensation for, the depressed mood? Noting that I tend to push my bedtime further when my mood is bluer, I have wondered as well. It may also be that those are the times it is more urgent to do more for myself.

It took me literally several decades to realize that burning the candle at both ends was making me far more impatient and irritable than I needed or wanted to be, and that sleep-depriving myself was not a free lunch. This dawned on me at approximately the same time as, studying the physiological necessity of sleep and the psychiatric consequences of sleep disruption, I began to take note of medical research showing that sleep deprivation shortened organisms’ lifespans. So, ironically, cheating death by shoe-horning more wakefulness into a fixed lifetime turns out not to be as simple as I had assumed. Of course, it is also well-known that sleep deprivation reduces cognitive efficiency in certain empirically measurable respects. So even if one is up more, one may end up paying for that quantity of waking hours with quality. Moreover, I realized, sleep deprivation is cumulative; the commonsense notion that you can pay back your deficit by ‘sleeping in’ the next weekend doesn’t work. If you are supposed to sleep eight hours a night, let’s say, you can’t go three nights in a row with four hours a night and then erase the damage with a twenty-hour night’s sleep.

One of the other skills I developed as a medical resident on call was the ability to rapidly return to sleep after I had dealt with a challenge in the middle of the night. It was never as extreme for me as for some of my colleagues, however, who could seemingly conduct their on-call duties without waking up fully at all. One of my friends, a surgical resident, eventually learned that she was managing many of her patients’ problems — always clinically appropriately, to hear her tell it — over the phone in the middle of the night without remembering what she had done when her surgical team did morning rounds on the patients the next day. She finally arranged for the hospital operator who paged her to listen in on the calls and take notes about what orders she issued. She would swing by the switchboard in the morning, before rounds, and use the notes as a cribsheet when reporting on the care she had given the night before. (I don’t know if this was a liability or an adaptive strategy to her work as a surgeon; she has since gone into a different field of medicine. Dream on…)

So now I want to sleep more. Now that I realize it is not necessarily desireable to short myself so much on sleep, when I am awakened in the middle of the night by my beeper going off from the hospital, I want to get back to sleep again as soon as I have dealt with the call. But, in middle age, I am finding, ironically, that I can no longer get back to sleep rapidly. If I am awakened, I am typically going to be up for at least a couple of hours. Of course, I could do something boring and soporific with the time, to hasten my return to sleep, but it still sticks in my craw to waste wakefulness. So some of the middle-of-the-night FmH entries you will see these days are, in a sense, under duress. Enjoy them anyway; I do. I still do some of my clearest thinking in the holy stillness, or at least so I imagine.

Andrew Sullivan on Abu Ghraib:

I had missed this essay, originally published on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. I have long been a proponent of a take similar to Sullivan’s about how the rhetoric about the war and the duplicitous shaping — from the top — of the American attitide about Iraqis, terrorists, and other poorly differentiated spooks created a culture in which these atrocities could happen. I differ with Sullivan on one account, which is his assertion that those who “unwittingly made this torture possible” were not as guilty as those who inflicted it. First of all, it is hard for me to see how it was “unwitting.” And secondly, decisions from the president and the upper echelon of his administration henchmen not only “made the torture possible” but essentially mandated it. Early in the essay, Sullivan is unsure whether to take solace in the fact that the torture occurred in a free society where the chilling evidence of it was able to come to light.

I am afraid that the pieties about the persistence of freedom in America are gross self-deception. Free expression and inquiry are the merest, illusory, window-dressing on a society that permits such atrocity as a matter of policy, fails to make a meaningful inquiry into or condemnation of the abuses, and reelects those responsible, enabling them to claim a ‘mandate’ for business as usual. What did the American people do other than stand by and shake their heads in the face of the war crimes committed in their name, and allow ourselves to be sated by the punishment of some sacrificial lambs? The failure to make the atrocities, and the similar demonization of those we hold prisoner in Guantanamo, Afghanistan (and God knows what other places around the world we have not even heard of), a core campaign issue was scandalous. The moral failures involved must be kept in the forefront of American consciousness if those who act in our name are to be prevented from permitting and encouraging further atrocities.

Not one damn mention of his name here today, you will notice.

Circadiana is a new weblog devoted to sleep and chronobiology, for your late might surfing enjoyment. [via MetaFilter]

Salon‘s reviewer finds Gladwell’s Blink more entertaining than important. I beg to differ; this is sort of like how hypnotism, while elucidating profound and basic principles of human cognition and volition, has often been thought of as a mere parlor game. The extent to which we can stand to learn alot about our implicit assumptions, about how we often make decisions on very different bases than we think we do, and how we can learn to accept and utilize such intuitions, cannot be underestimated. An important segment of the review, for example, is a convincing argument, supported by much social psychological research (perhaps my social psychologist friend Dennis Fox will have some amplifying comments if he reads this on his return from the Middle East), that our racial biases go deeper than we suspect, even if we are convinced we are not racist. (Of course, although it has social psychological implications, at base this is a cognitive-psychological exploration.)

As walker reminded me, there is a website where you can take Implicit Assumption Tests to root our your hidden biases and automatic preferences, but be careful. For those who, unlike mental health professionals, have not embraced the idea of the ubiquity of unconscious influences on our perceptions, appraisals and choices, it can be quite alarming to recognize how far away from the ideal of rationality and control over our thinking we really operate. That is the impact I hope Gladwell’s book may have, now that he is a hip sexy trendsetter author.

…and it’s orange! (Yahoo News!)

“Ever wonder what happened to: Eddie The Eagle? The chick who shot Andy Warhol? That ‘Mikey’ kid from the Life Cereal commercial? Well you’ve come to the right place, this is where we track the has-beens, the flash-in-the-pans and those pseudo-celebrities who were all too annoying during their 15 measly minutes.”

Our government becomes more and more an outlandish caricature of a ludicrous semblance of a contemptible simulacrum of democratic process. [Sorry, I seem to be compelled to use the same adjectives over and over again. Probably the only one in the previous sentence that doesn’t really apply is ‘democratic’…]