The twelve original, ‘official’ cards were released monthly during 2000-2001. During 2001-2003, the original twelve cards have been joined by twenty ‘bootleg’ cards made by fans. Why not view a random card?”
I’ve just read a book called At Hell’s Gate: A Soldier’s Journey from War to Peace. It’s a memoir by Claude Anshin Thomas. At 17, he enlisted in the Amy and volunteered for service in Vietnam. His commanders told him he was bringing peace, but what he mostly did is kill:
…nearly every day that I was in Vietnam I was in combat. One of the many decorations I received was the Air Medal. To get an air medal, you must fly 25 combat missions and 25 combat hours. By the end of my tour, I had been awarded more than 25 air medals. That amounts to somewhere in the neighborhood of 625 combat hours and combat missions. All of those combat missions killed people….by the time I was first injured in combat (two or three months into my tour), I had already been responsible for the deaths of several hundred people.
When he came home, Thomas was still driven by rage. He joined the anti-war movement. He took drugs. He drank. He wanted to die. Then he cleaned up. But he was still tormented. Fortunately, he was invited to a retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh. Odd, he thought–my countrymen reject me, and yet this Vietnamese accepts me.
When Thich Nhat Hanh entered the room, Claude Thomas began to cry. ‘I realized for the first time that I didn’t know the Vietnamese in any way than as my enemy, and this man wasn’t my enemy.’
The first great lesson of this book is something Thich Nhat Hanh tells the veterans: ‘You are the light at the tip of the candle. You burn hot and bright. You understand deeply the nature of suffering.’
And then–and this is the part that has had me reeling for weeks–Thich Nhat Hanh goes on:
He told us that the nonveterans were more responsible for the war than the veterans. That because of the interconnectedness of all things, there is no escape from responsibility. That those who think they aren’t responsible are the most responsible.
Consider that: ‘Those who think they aren’t responsible are the MOST responsible.’
That’s every minister who presides over a service without mentioning Iraq. Every shopper who’s ‘in the holiday spirit’ and doesn’t want to be brought down by death and dying. Every parent who fails to talk about Iraq with the kids.
That’s you. And you. And you. And, sometimes, me. And that is why–even if I’m just touching base with the choir–I need to talk about this stinking war until, finally, we get it to stop.” (beliefnet via walker)
A scathing e-mail from the head of MoveOn’s political action committee to the group’s supporters on Thursday targets outgoing Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe as a tool of corporate donors who alienated both traditional and progressive Democrats.” (Associated Press )
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Mental Notes is a weblog by a Texas psychiatrist. In his sidebar, he has compiled a list of other weblogs by psychiatrists. In addition to listing mine, here are his other links:
I have browsed them a little. It should not surprise you that they are quite diverse from both stylistic and content perspectives. Other than for completeness’ sake, some would never belong on any self-respecting blogroll of mine. Several are eloquent and fascinating. Please consider sending me any other links to psychiatrists’ weblogs you find, so I can keep the list up to date.
Here’s what Donna Wentworth says in a recent post to her Copyfight weblog:
Here is what I have said from the inception of FmH:
Early on, when it still seemed necessary to explain to people what this weblogging stuff was all about, this was on the main page of FmH. Now the link takes you to my “About FmH” page. My usage of the term was already old by 2001 when I revisited it in response to a reader’s question.
You will notice that I use ‘blink’ simply as a contraction of web+link, while Wentworth is making more of a distinction between the one-liners and the extended weblog entries. Perhaps she was not reading weblogs when almost all blinks were one-liners and weblogs were exactly that — annotated logs of one’s websurfing, so that others in your social circle could see what was interesting you. That’s what I saw when I woke up to the weblog phenomenon over the latter half of 1999, and that was the nature of the weblogs that directly inspired me — honeyguide, camworld, rebecca’s pocket, and the late lamented robot wisdom, for instance. While there were also online diaries or journals as well, the two phenomena did not converge for awhile longer. It was a long time before I dared to think readers would be receptive to any post longer than about a three-sentence paragraph.
The only notice my usage of the term ‘blink’ got was a peevish comment once on MetaFilter from someone who found it too cutesy. (I can no longer find it by searching MeFi, alas.) I couldn’t take too much umbrage at him, however, because his dig at me was in the context of trashing the fact that the word ‘weblog’ had universally been replaced by ‘blog’, a phenomenon about which I share his disdain. [I know, I know, I’m not being consistent. Maybe if ‘blink’ became overwhelmingly popular, I wouldn’t like it either. Story of my life… — FmH] And no one has even deigned to notice that I proposed using it as a verb as well.
Since to my knowledge the usage of ‘blink’ has so thoroughly failed to take hold, I wonder how in the world Bruce Umbaugh recognizes I should get the credit.
“When someone famous or otherwise notable dies, The Memory Hole often files a FOIA request for his or her FBI file. We post the ones we receive, but not everyone has a file. Mainly for the aid of other researchers, this page contains a running list of deceased people who are not the subject of a file, according to the FBI’s FOIA office.” (Memory Hole via pas-au-delà) [It’s a short list. — FmH]
Most of you have heard by now of the story of the potential oil spill from the breakup of a disabled Malaysian freighter in the Aleutians yesterday, and the Coast Goard helicopter crash during the attempt to rescue the stranded crew. I first heard coverage of this on NPR and puzzled over the name of the island where the calamity has ensued — Unalaska. At first I could not figure out, literal me, why they kept referring to this as an Alaskan story if it happened at an Un-Alaskan location. Does anyone know how Unalaska came by its name?
My prayers go out, by the way, for rapid containment of the oil spill. From what I understand, No. 6 fuel oil is nasty stuff, and there are 500,000 gallons of it on the foundering ship.
According to a federal hazardous materials fact sheet, the type of bunker oil on the ship is “a dense, viscous oil … (that) usually spreads into thick, dark colored slicks” when it is spilled on water.
“It’s a lot of heavy oil,” said Gary Folley with the state DEC. “What makes this one, I think, different, is the fact that if it does hit the beach … it’s an extremely difficult place to get to. It is chock full of sensitive areas and wildlife. There are no roads.” ” (Anchorage Daily News )
Another fascinating fact I learned in the NPR coverage was that the nearby town, Dutch Harbor AK, is apparently the US’ largest producer of processed seafood products (like the fish that goes into fast food fish sandwiches).
Babs’ 9-year-old daughter, Bana, was the first to approach the body, followed by Babs’ mother, Alpha, 43. Bana sat down, held Babs’ hand and stroked her mother’s stomach. Then she sat down and laid her head on Babs’ arm.
…Babs had an incurable kidney condition and was euthanized Tuesday. Keepers had recently seen a videotape of a gorilla wake at the Columbus, Ohio, zoo and decided they would do the same for Babs. Gorillas in the wild have been known to pay respects to their dead, keepers said.” (CNN via adam)
Adam, in sending me this poignant story, mentioned other anecdotes he has seen establishing that animals grieve their dead companions. This search (Google ) will be revealing if you want to pursue it further (although, sorry, because of the syntax I used, it includes some items about grieving for departed animals as well as grieving by animals). Some of what I find poignant in this article, however, lies in the anthropocentric attitude it betrays. An earlier version of the article actually had it in the headline; now it was altered (because of such criticism, I wonder??) but it is still the premise of the article that it is acceptable that the zoo keepers decided to allow the gorillas to mourn their loss. I know that in this instance, since Babs was euthanized, they had to deliberately determine to bring the body back into the gorillas’ enclosure for that purpose, but should it really be a matter for our discretion whether the animals we steward are allowed to grieve?
Although it is not exactly clear that the mental activity detected represents images flashing through the monkeys’ brains, it is suggestive of being a precursor of conceptual representation and thus closer to human thought than many had appreciated. The human ability for empathy for others of our kind is built on our capacity for a ‘theory of mind’; we can conceive of the mental experiences that must go through another’s mind based on our sense of congruence with our own inner experiences, to which we have introspective access. Does this study help us to conceive better of what must be going through a monkey’s mind under certain circumstances, implying that we can begin to have a theory of monkey mind and thus a more empathic connection to our primate cousins than otherwise?
… Rumsfeld yesterday told U.S. soldiers in Kuwait who are part of the military coalition in neighboring Iraq that “you have to go to war with the Army you have.” He was replying to Army Specialist Thomas Wilson, who asked, “Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?”” Bloomberg
By the way. if Spec. Wilson is, as described in press coverage, “a disgruntled soldier,” there were hundreds or thousands gathered to hear Rumsfeld. What most of the media clips of this interchange did not include was the rousing wolf-whistles and cheers that went up from the assembled masses in response to his insolent question.
Unicef’s flagship annual study showed more than one billion children are being denied the healthy and protected upbringing promised by the UN’s 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. Researchers found one in six (90 million) children is severely hungry, one in seven (270 million) has no healthcare at all and the report shows that nearly half of the 3.6 million people killed in war since 1990 have been children.” The Scotsman
“The barriers that are meant to be protecting the world against killer diseases and nuclear war are crumbling, warns a high-powered report to the United Nations.” (New Scientist)
A Sentence: “Millions of inscrutable e-mail messages are clogging corporate computers by setting off requests for clarification, and many of the requests, in turn, are also chaotically written, resulting in whole cycles of confusion.” (New York Times )
In fact, recent studies suggest that help for at least some aftereffects of intoxication may not be too much to ask for.” (New York Times )
Life Imitates Spam? (New Scientist)
It was then that a physicist named John Schwarz jumped up on the stage during a cabaret at the physics center here and began babbling about having discovered a theory that could explain everything. By prearrangement men in white suits swooped in and carried away Dr. Schwarz, then a little-known researcher at the California Institute of Technology.
Only a few of the laughing audience members knew that Dr. Schwarz was not entirely joking. He and his collaborator, Dr. Michael Green, now at Cambridge University, had just finished a calculation that would change the way physics was done. They had shown that it was possible for the first time to write down a single equation that could explain all the laws of physics, all the forces of nature – the proverbial ‘theory of everything’ that could be written on a T-shirt.
And so emerged into the limelight a strange new concept of nature, called string theory, so named because it depicts the basic constituents of the universe as tiny wriggling strings, not point particles.” (New York Times )
In the ascendency of evolutionary psychology, recent decades have clarified how much influence one’s hereditary endowment exerts over behavioral factors. The current study focuses on socially responsible behavior, a.k.a. “being nice”, and finds the expected hereditary effect but also a robust influence of upbringing (New Scientist).
Does this surprise anyone, that one’s upbringing and, perhaps even more important, peer influences can affect one’s social competencies or kindness regardless of what temperamental variables one has inherited? The article phrases things interestingly in talking about genes for socially responsible behavior. Usually, it is expresed in the converse manner, that genes influence antisocial behavior or delinquency. Is this just a matter of semantics, or of the glass being half full vs. half empty? It seems to me something basic is at stake in conceptualizing what is commonly referred to as “human nature.” Are we inherently ‘good’, with flaws or lacks in our genetic makeup necessary to cause us to act in an antisocial manner? Or does it take something specific in our constitution to influence us to behave in a prosocial manner? Furthermore, there are implied notions of social structure in deciding what is antisocial. Prosocial behavior, as the evolutionary biologists grapple with it, has several distinct components that have to be explained separately. First there is cooperation and mutuality; it is rather easy to see how that conveys a selective advantage. But quite distinct from that as a foundation of the social contract is altruistic behavior (Google ), which has presented more of a challenge to explain evolutionarily.
I am actually surprised that a critic of the study is quoted as being surprised by the finding of an environmental impact on prosocial behavior. He comments that, if true, this is different from other personality variables. But it seems to me that prosociality or antisociality is not a personality variable, i.e. not a temperamental factor. It is rather, fundamentally, a way of behaving or a set of behaviors. It may be shoddy thinking to equate ‘niceness’ with social responsibility. Furthermore, antisocial behavior may not actually always be related to not being ‘nice’. The neurocognitive machinery for empathy may have alot to do with it as well or instead, and it is not a given that empathy and ‘niceness’ or kindness are conflated.
“The finding may explain why teenagers act compulsively and take more risks. It has been seized on by campaigners who want to ban the death penalty for under-18s in the US.” (New Scientist) Of course, the fact that teenagers have difficulty envisioning the consequences of their actions is no news to a parent or a teacher of one…
Such destruction has been caused by over-fishing in the marine environment and only massive protected zones, where all fishing is banned, will allow the sea’s damaged areas to recover, members of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution said.” (Independent.UK)
Responsible Chefs Urge Consumers to Choose ‘Good’ Fish:
Yesterday’s message from the Royal Commission on environmental pollution could not be clearer. At a time when we want to eat more fish and, in particular, oily fish, as part of a healthy diet, there is now unprecedented alarm at the over-fishing of many of these species and the devastating effects of industrialised trawling on the environment. The days when the north Atlantic and the North Sea provided all the cod and plaice we could ever want to eat have long gone, possibly never to return.” (Independent.UK)
This is what you won’t see in the paper.
This is what you won’t see on CNN or on MSNBC or CBS News or on any major media Web site anywhere and especially no goddamn way ever in hell will you see it within a thousand miles of Fox News.
You aren’t supposed to see. You aren’t supposed to know. You are to remain ignorant and shielded, and, if you’re like most Americans, you have been very carefully conditioned to think Bush’s nasty Iraq war is merely this ugly little firecracker-like thing happening way, way over there, carefully orchestrated and somewhat messy and maybe a little bloody but mostly still patriotic and good and necessary and sponsored by none other than God his own angry Republican self.” — Mark Morford (San Francisco Chronicle )
The FCC crackdown on media indecency is fueled by a dramatic increase in public concern, right? The statistics would seem to say so, but apart from the public outcry after the Janet Jackson NFL debacle, more than 98% of indecency complaints to the FCC in the past two years have been from one advocacy group, the Parents’ Television Council. (Media Week) Should we let, essentially, 23 people dictate the ‘community decency standards’ by which the FCC is supposed to be governed?
They wish.
Disclaimer alert: Such lists mean absolutely nothing. There’s no mathematical formula based on sales, spins, notes, chords or the strength of the drugs the artists had or hadn’t taken while recording. These are totally subjective decisions made by a bunch of writers and editors.
So invite people over and argue until you can’t talk. Sever friendships, get divorced, write the kids out of the will. But in the long run, none of it matters. Because we’re all right. And we’re all wrong.
But really — what were these people thinking?” (San Jose Mercury News)
The Rolling Stone list is here
It will make a person uninterested in fattening foods, they have heard from news reports and word of mouth. Weight will just melt away, and fat accumulating around the waist and abdomen will be the first to go. And by the way, those who take it will end up with higher levels of H.D.L., the good cholesterol. If they smoke, they will find it easier to quit. If they are heavy drinkers, they will no longer crave alcohol.
…But many medical researchers say not so fast. While rimonabant may be intriguing, these experts say, the mythology in the making is hardly justified by what is known so far.
There are no published studies from clinical trials to justify any of the claims for what some patients are already calling a miracle drug. The data that the company has presented indicate that rimonabant is about as effective for weight loss in obese people as two other drugs already on the market. Nor are there any clinical tests to indicate how or whether it would work in people who are only moderately overweight, hoping to lose a few pounds after the holidays.” (New York Times )
Nursing home residents take large numbers of prescription drugs, an average of eight a day. But many have physical disabilities and brain disorders that impair their memory and judgment. So they cannot easily shop around for insurance plans to find the best bargains on their drugs, as other Medicare beneficiaries are supposed to do.” (New York Times )
This is a commentary in Roanoke VA’s newspaper by poet Colleen Redman, whose poem My President Bush Dream appeared here on FmH last month.
In fact, a new Harris Poll indicates that one in five Americans doesn’t believe the election was legitimate. The number of skeptics would probably be higher if more people were aware of the scope of voting irregularities that occurred. Unfortunately, the corporate-owned media have mostly fallen in line with the ‘powers that be,’ just as they did in the run-up to the war (something a few major newspapers later apologized for).” [more]
Mary Anderson said she placed her father’s ‘ghost’ on the online auction site after her son, Collin, said he was afraid the ghost would return someday. Anderson said Collin has avoided going anywhere in the house alone since his grandfather died last year.
In a description titled “This isn’t a joke,” Anderson told Collin’s story on eBay:
“I always thought it was just normal kid fears until a few months ago he told me why he was so scared. He told me ‘Grandpa died here, and he was mean. His ghost is still around here!'”
Lest the boy’s fears scare off potential bidders, Anderson added, “My dad was the sweetest most caring man you’d ever meet.” ” (Yahoo! News)
The author may be forgiven for her Proustian aspirations (or was the title the responsibility of her editor??); her article grapples with one of the unappreciated distressing issues of modern life, with which I have been struggling both professionally and personally.
A writer working on a book about mid-life memory and memory loss, she goes on to note that the embarrassment and inconvenience of these “senior moments” hide a more primitive emotion of fear that they are a portent of further memory loss to come, and of “decades of dependence, of life with a diminished mind trapped in a still vigorous body.” Now in my early fifties and having the same changes in my memory, I resonate with this. And as a psychiatrist caring for patients who have descended into the deep memory loss of Alzheimer’s and other dementias, I am even more spooked on a daily basis. Even though I can, intellectually, quote you the statistics, it is difficult not to be viscerally misled by the skewed sample of aging I see in my work. And so are my patients. Those who, even though not profoundly demented, are experiencing some memory difficulty inevitably ask me, “Doc, please tell me, is it Alzheimer’s?” (or, as one patient put it to me recently, “…Oldtimer’s?) But most of us do not even whisper these unspoken fears or, if we do, we frame them as humorous.
The author suggests that, in this ‘information age’, memory loss and lack of easy access to your own databank feel like more of a vulnerability than they were in the past. I find this dubious, however, since self-knowledge has always been the essential human attribute and awareness of its impairment likely to have been distressing since the origin of consciousness. However, the information we must coordinate and access in modern life may arguably be more diverse and voluminous than in ‘the old days.’ This may be in part the price we pay for the breakdown of community and family stability in the modern world — there is less of the routine, unchanging, the comfortably familiar to tether us. In that sense, experiences may tax memory more than they would have done for our forebears of one or two generations previous. What counterbalances this, however, is the evidence that mental activity ‘exercises’ memory and keeps it strong; that intellectually active individuals develop dementia at a lower rate than the intellectually stultified casualties of modernity. (Recall the research finding about aging nuns who do crossword puzzles?)
Another sense in which the information age is a hedge against memory loss, of course, is technological aids. Both in my professional and my personal life, there is less trivial data I have to remember as long as I can carry around my laptop or my PDA or access an internet search engine. I am reminded of a vignette in one of the Sherlock Holmes novels in which, if I remember it correctly (grin — forgive me! In an essay about memory loss, it is hard not to be self-referential!), he is annoyed that Watson has told him that the earth orbits the sun because the fact, useless to his daily life, takes up valuable space in his memory. Although there is no evidence that human memory has a fixed capacity that can get filled to the brim, this is an instinctual reaction, and one which is reinforced by the electronic memory metaphor. In this sense, I have at times sardonically referred to my PDA as a peripheral brain and think in terms of dumping off less essential data to this peripheral storage. This works better for some forms of data than others. For example, just considering the two most common functions of the PDA, no matter how completely my appointment schedule is entered into my PDA’s calendar, unless I am going to have alarms going off all the time I have to keep some notion of the shape of my day in mind. On the other hand, between the contact lists on my PDA and my cellphone, I no longer have more than a handful of phone numbers memorized. It sometimes seems that I am well on the way to the obsolescence of the ten-digit phone number (and why not? Who accesses websites by their IP addresses?). Of course, there is nothing unique about using a PDA for this purpose. I relied on my Daytimer for a decade or so before I got my first handheld (an HP 95LX, if memory serves). In a more recent and profound change, with the instant information access of the internet, my peripheral brain in a broader sense now be said to be embodied by a weblike network extending around the world. Could the legacy of the ‘information age’ be that memory is becoming a property of the hive mind instead of the individual?
The essayist interviews Oliver Sacks about why we are so bothered by memory lapses. Sacks points out that it also has much to do with our personality style. Someone who prides themselves on control and order may be less tolerant than someone more “easygoing”, he observes. I am certainly in the former category, so much dependent on my intellectual functions for my self-valuation that it is difficult for me to recognize that anyone could be “easygoing” about their mental capacities! (That may go a long ways in explaining why I have so much difficulty with George Bush…) For a moment, the essayist feels reassured, that her memory loss is normal, and all she has to do is get used to it.
The article makes some important stipulations about the multifaceted nature of memory function and dysfunction. Memory for names, words, facts, for procedural capabilities (“how-to memory”), prospective obligations, are all differently mediated and differentially susceptible to impairment. Perhaps because she is a writer, she pays far less attention to an entire other realm, nonverbal memory, equallly complex and in parallel with the verbal. I wonder — is the fact that I often find the face or the voice of someone I meet familiar because I have reached a point in fifty-plus years of encounters that everyone is virtually certain to remind me of someone else? or is it more that I can no longer retrieve the nonverbal memory behind the sensation of familiarity with as much precision as I once could?
The author goes on to describe her pursuit of a comprehensive neuropsycholigical evaluation of her memory difficulties which confirms that she has some deficits worse than those considered typical for her age range. One of the specialists she confers with pushes the hypothesis that such complaints often relate to mild traumatic brain injuries. She scoffs at first but realizes on reflection that, between childhood horseback riding and horseplay with her brother, she has certainly shaken her brain around abit. In reality, head trauma preferentially affects attentional processes, but the results are often mistaken for memory difficulty. Separate from memory function and equally complex, the machinery for attention is crucial. To recall something, one must not only store it effectively and access it efficiently on demand but must pay attention — which involves focusing, filtering out the competing and the extraneous, efficiently shifting when demanded, etc. etc. — to it sufficiently to acquire the memory in the first place. Looking back at my discussion above of the relationship between memory problems and the conditions of modernity, it is strikingly evident how susceptible attentional processes are to interference by the constant datastream overload to which modern life subjects us. Furthermore, there is some evidence that attentional processes are quite vulnerable to other erosions of our information-processing capacities by modern life which are more of a neurochemical, organic nature, e.g. due to accumulating environmental toxins and dietary effects. In this light, I have long felt that the attention deficit disorder concept — with which I have been clinically involved since it was recognized in its modern sense around two decades ago — is so overly broad as to be clinically meaningless. While there is a real entity of ADHD that involves physiological and neurochemical dysfunction in the brain’s attentional circuitry, most of the patients diagnosed with this disorder or ‘recognizing’ it in themselves are really just at sea with the information processing demands of their lives. (Not to mention those for whom it is merely a pretext, consciously or unconsciously, to earn a stimulant prescription — which, by the way, will help almost anyone feel and function better, ADHD or not, although in a self-fulfilling-prophecy manner, benefit from a stimulant will often ‘confirm’ the diagnosis in the mind of the patient or the prescribing clinician.)
The issue of head traumas is critical, in my opinion, and often neglected. Whenever I see the dramatic cognitive deficits that occur after serious head traumas — e.g. in a fall or a motor vehicle accident, or the even more dramatic entity of dementia pugilistica after the repeated blows to the head incurred in prizefighting — I wonder about the cumulative effects of more subtle, easily overlooked knocks to the head I would venture to say we all incur throughout life. Think about it; how many times have you hit your head, even without loss of consciousness or even “seeing stars”? There is a selection bias here; if a neuropsychologist presses you to recall childhood head trauma, memory will usually serve. This would be a very very difficult hypothesis for which to design a research protocol (since you cannot very well follow a population prospectively for the thirty or forty years necessary; and even if you had the will and the funding to do so, most mild head traumas go unnoticed and leave no telltale signs on imaging or lab studies) but I am convinced of the likelihood that cumulative mild head trauma is very important to deficits in cognitive functioning. I was knocked senseless at least a number of times during my youth playing touch football (no helmet), being body-checked or tackled during steal-the-flag or ring-o-levio [does anyone know what that is anymore?], taking a spill off my bicycle or while skiing (no helmet), or wrestling with my brother. Call me paranoid if you will, but I have told my children, for example, not to ‘head’ the ball when they play soccer. We are born with a fixed number of neurons, and conserving them is one of the unrecognized priorities of modern life, it seems to me. As the author’s consultant suggests, direct knocks to the head might not even be necessary to experience brain damage. Rapid acceleration-deceleration and rotational torque on the brain can also be injurious. Are we ‘moderns’ more frequently doing things to the CNS that outstrip its evolutionary protections? Think of the reports, for example, on the nasty G-shock to which the brain is subjected during roller coaster rides.
The author does a good job of reconciling herself to the alarming reality of her memory difficulties and why their onset and recognition took the course they did. She shares the experience that my wife and many of the women friends with whom she has compared notes have had, in noticing some cognitive derangement dating from pregnancy and childbirth. This is likely due to the combination of hormonal effects on the brain during pregnancy and the novel demands on attention caused by the life-changing arrival of an infant. The author was prescribed stimulant medication, and she considers in a sophisticated way the costs one pays both personally and more existentially for treating such ‘deficits’.. Ultimately, she is challenged to ask whether one can do other than pathologize and attempt to remediate age-related changes in memory function:
Perspective, insight, acceptance, wisdom with age — perhaps one of the other things we have lost with the erosion of the social, community and family fabric in the 20th century has been a place for these.
Lost time reclaimed, indeed. Syncronistically, while I was posting this piece about the loss of one’s past, Mark Wood was linking here to this piece that reminds us about the flipside of timelessness in psychopathology, the loss of one’s future:
Severe anxiety and depression blot out time, annihilate the future. Or, as Minkowski proposes, it may be that the disturbance of the patient in relation to time, his inability to “have” a future, gives rise to his anxiety and depression. In either case, the most painful aspect of the sufferer?s predicament is that he is unable to imagine a future moment in time when he will be out of the anxiety or depression.
It is important to note the potential usefulness of psychedelic studies for treatment of an existential crisis such as depression or anxiety — because these are times when hopefulness and the meaning of life wane. It seems that — through their “unbinding” effect on time perception — psychedelics open new temporal possibilities that can motivate the person to take a new look at the future value and meaning of life.
Intriguing as this suggestion to use psychedelic time dilatation properties to address this futurelessness, the conception is not new. Freud’s dictum a century ago that the goal of psychoanalysis was not to turn unhappiness to happiness but rather to turn neurotic unhappiness to normal everyday unhappiness largely rested upon restoring a patient’s future to them. A teacher of mine, the late, consummate psychologist John Perry, put it only slightly differently when he described the alleviation of suffering achieved in psychotherapy as largely being to persuade a suffering patient that s/he is not in Hell but merely Purgatory. The fires burn just as hot in Purgatory, he would say, the only distinction being whether you know your stay there is time-limited and not eternal damnation.
In a case to be argued on Monday, the court appears poised to deliver another rebuke.
Lawyers for a Texas death row inmate, Thomas Miller-El, will appear before the justices for the second time in two years. To legal experts, the Supreme Court’s decision to hear his case yet again is a sign of its growing impatience with two of the courts that handle death penalty cases from Texas: its highest criminal court, the Court of Criminal Appeals, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans. Perhaps as telling is the exasperated language in decisions this year from a Supreme Court that includes no categorical opponent of the death penalty.” (New York Times )
Rather, it is often portrayed abroad as a distraction from more critical issues – as an American attempt to impose a bellicose culture, driven by the cultivation of fear, on a world still taken with the notion that the cold war’s end and technology’s advance have opened unprecedented possibilities for dialogue and peace.” — Roger Cohen (New York Times op-ed)
Nothing you didn’t already realize.
Related:
Yes, Al Qaeda was once centralized, structured and powerful, but that was before the U.S. pulverized its camps and leadership in Afghanistan.
In other words, this battle in the war on terror might already be over. It’s as an ex-CIA agent once said: “I quit the agency at the end of the Cold War because I was tired of politicians making me describe the Soviet Union as a 20-foot giant — when it was really only a dwarf.”” (LA Times)
I have long felt that the threat presented by al Qaeda is specious and that, moreover, the organization does not exist in any real sense except in the minds of the terror-obsessed Bush administration, which is interested in a perpetual Orwellian war against an illusory opponent. Al Qaeda is now a franchise brand name many unaffiliated or, at best, informally connected disgruntled groups or individuals use to add cachet to the threats they are interested in advertising.
Mary Anderson said she placed her father’s ‘ghost’ on the online auction site after her son, Collin, said he was afraid the ghost would return someday. Anderson said Collin has avoided going anywhere in the house alone since his grandfather died last year.
In a description titled “This isn’t a joke,” Anderson told Collin’s story on eBay:
“I always thought it was just normal kid fears until a few months ago he told me why he was so scared. He told me ‘Grandpa died here, and he was mean. His ghost is still around here!'”
Lest the boy’s fears scare off potential bidders, Anderson added, “My dad was the sweetest most caring man you’d ever meet.” ” (Yahoo! News)
Not to mention Marion Jones and all the rest of them, although there will be the most anguish about the sullying of the Great American Pastime. The author points out that the steroid scandal is really about denial. Readers of FmH know that my diffidence about spectator sports may disqualify me as an expert commentator on this issue, but these are my sentiments exactly. And, to further place things in a broader context:
![//us.news1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/afp/20041203/thumb.sge.lqz63.031204203229.photo00.photo.default-370x275.jpg' cannot be displayed]](https://i0.wp.com/us.news1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/afp/20041203/thumb.sge.lqz63.031204203229.photo00.photo.default-370x275.jpg "Smart mine THIS!?")
“The United States brushed aside a call from 144 countries party to an international treaty banning landmines to join the deal, saying its military responsibilities prevented such a step.
Instead, the State Department defended Washington’s record as a leading supporter of global demining initiatives and efforts to promote the use of so-called ‘smart mines’ which deactivate themselves after a period of time to prevent them from causing permanent danger.” (Yahoo! News)
After the company, Skyscape, sent e-mails to their subscribers asking for used handhelds on December 1 — on occasion of World AIDS (news – web sites) day — they received between 40 and 50 devices in 48 hours, Skyscape’s R. J. Mathew told Reuters Health.
…The company plans to load what Mathew calls the ‘gold standard’ in textbooks on to the devices, enabling doctors to carry the latest information at all times. Software allows doctors to look up particular diseases, getting treatment guidelines and relevant information about drugs, including dosages and possible interactions with other medications, Mathew explained.
…People who want to donate their used handhelds can go to www.skyscape.com/AIDSDAY to find out how, Mathew said. Generally, he asks that the devices be no more than 3 years old, and in working condition.
According to Skyscape, 7 million Americans replace an old PDA every year.” (Yahoo! News)
It’s difficult to think of a place, in our 21st century, left to pioneer. For Americans, right now, that would be Libya, a complicated and confounding land on the North African coast, opened in February after 23 years of a travel ban tighter than Cuba’s.” (New York Times )
An update on a chilling effect [via walker]
Wonkette loves Hardball‘s Chris Matthews puttin’ the screws to Jerry Falwell:
Although I also find it delicious to catch someone in the logical fallacy of their bigotry, the sad truth is that making coherent sense is not important to this type of thinking.
Such an interstellar ballet would explain many mysteries of the outer solar system – including the strange behavior of the recently discovered Sedna, the system’s most distant known object, which occupies a strange elongated orbit far beyond Pluto.” (New York Times )
French New-Wave Filmmaker Dies at 71. (New York Times ) De Broca’s 1966 King of Hearts, an antiwar twist on the time-honored theme of the inmates running the asylum, was a constant presence in my life, having an engagement at Cambridge’s Central Square Cinema in the ’70’s of more than five years in length. The City of Cambridge ought to do something to commemorate his passing; and now is a particularly apt time for a revival of the film.
By 2000, the Defense Department had been short-changed by an estimated $426 billion over actual requirements during the previous decade, mostly in deferred or cancelled procurement. Despite hefty increases in defense spending since then, the Defense Department and White House have grossly underestimated the actual costs for prosecuting the war in Iraq, allowing the dangerous trend to continue despite the apparent infusion of new funding.
It is not difficult to find evidence of the looming crisis in major defense program activities. As I noted in an article about the Navy several months ago (Navy’s Newest Heads for Troubled Waters, DefenseWatch, Aug. 28, 2004), barring a turnabout in new ship construction rates, the sea service is vanishing before our very eyes as the size of the fleet steadily declines from about 300 ships to a projected level of 120 in the next two decades.
My colleague, Senior Editor Paul Connors, revealed this summer a future massive downsizing of Air Force tactical aviation driven by the same budget pressures (Smaller Fighter Force On The Way, DefenseWatch, July 14, 2004). And it’s impossible to write about the Army or its reserve components nowadays without tripping over the multiple problems of deployment “overstretch” and unit manning woes that have occurred by shoving a 10-division ground force into a 20-division wartime operational requirement.
What is distressing to realize is that no one — the DoD civilian leadership, Joint Chiefs of Staff, congressional defense committees or even the White House — is taking this problem seriously. That is because correcting the lag in procurement, closing the end-strength personnel gap, and covering all wartime operating costs will require an order of magnitude increase in defense spending.” — Ed Offley (DefenseWatch)
Of course, while some will see this as an argument for massive increases in defense spending, it is much more an indictment of the Bush cabal’s military adventurism. The emphasis on the ‘deferred or cancelled procurement’ of the previous decade, which is intended to castigate the Clinton administration, made sense in a world where, for a brief period, capping the insanity of continued Pentagon spending became policy.
“The use of misleading information as a military tool sparks debate in the Pentagon. Critics say the practice puts credibility at stake,” says the LA Times And what credibility, pray tell, does the US have left to lose?
Stop wondering whether civil war will erupt in Iraq. It already has. Yglesias:
Most news accounts portrayed the fighting in Mosul — the result of an insurgent counteroffensive in the wake of the American assault on Fallujah — as part of a conventional narrative of insurgents versus combined U.S. and Interim Government forces. The reality is rather more troubling.
… (The fight) … was not between an American-backed government and anti-government rebels. It was, rather, a simple fight between Sunni Arabs and Kurds with ostensible agents of the Interim Government on both sides.” (The American Prospect )
“The 20 Best North American Districts, Downtowns, and Neighborhoods” (Project for Public Spaces (PPS))
Fimoculous gears up for its usual effort compiling best-of-the-year lists. Readers of FmH will recall that I love these lists, but it does not appear necessary to duplicate his effort.
But even though Hubble has looked 95 percent of the way back to the beginning of time, astronomers agree that’s not far enough.” (NASA — Hubblesite)
For those of you who watch Jeopardy! (I don’t, and could care less about gameshows, although throughout my life people have urged me to try to get to be a contestant on one of these things), I guess it is big news that Ken Jennings finally loses tonight and, as this Washington Post story puts it, loses on some rather mundane questions. But it is equally big news, it seems, that the news was leaked. kottke even had an audio clip of the crucial segment of the show, although he has taken it down under a cease-and-desist order. And, finally, it is also news how much of a relief it appears to be to Jeopardy!‘s host Alex Trebek that the mighty is fallen and he gets to be the star again.
“Net users are getting the chance to fight back against spam websites. Internet portal Lycos has made a screensaver that endlessly requests data from sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail. Lycos hopes it will make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers soar by keeping their servers running flat out. The net firm estimates that if enough people sign up and download the tool, spammers could end up paying to send out terabytes of data.
…The list of sites that the screensaver will target is taken from real-time blacklists generated by organisations such as Spamcop. To limit the chance of mistakes being made, Lycos is using people to ensure that the sites are selling spam goods.
As these sites rarely use advertising to offset hosting costs, the burden of high-bandwidth bills could make spam too expensive…” (BBC) In other words, a DDoS attack on spammer sites…
Thill is Salon‘s columnist on independent publishing. He starts a recent column with this wrap-up of the post-election state of affairs in Bushland, which strikes me as a concise summary statement for anyone who has had their head buried under the pillows for the past month:
Bush is, without a doubt, the worst president America has ever had, something it should have been able to figure out if it weren’t so deeply involved in the alternate reality fed to it by the scandal-ridden New York Times, bankrupt network television, MTV, and so-called news outlets like CNN, MSNBC and Fox. He should have had his ass handed to him in a gold-encrusted box with a forwarding address in Crawford, Texas, plastered across it.
But he didn’t, and the reason is very simple. The Democrats thought they could run with the same lame-ass, lesser-evil strategy they employed in 2000. Problem was, they weren’t the lesser evil. John Kerry voted for this baseless war in Iraq, and Democratic knuckleheads like Jamie Rubin, as Arianna Huffington recently pointed out, were even crowing about how the patrician patsy probably would have invaded Iraq anyway, even though the WMD that Colin Powell staked — and lost — his reputation on never materialized. Hey, can you pass that peace pipe?
Bush, true to character, didn’t waste a moment in making his agenda for the next four years obvious to anyone paying attention (not that too many were, or are). Immediately after Kerry conceded, Bush talked — in exquisitely blatant language, for those few linguists left alive — of ‘capital’ he wanted to ‘spend’ before proceeding to bomb the living crap out of Fallujah, something he didn’t dare do when the election was afoot. Then Arafat kicked the bucket (nice timing!), erasing another roadblock in the neocon foreign policy. Then Bush made Powell’s emasculation official by dumping him for Condi Rice, an unusually close confidant who once accidentally called Bush her husband. Then partisan hack Porter Goss became the CIA’s top dog, and made his first order of business a memo that demanded unconditional participation with the administration. Then Bush’s party circled the wagons around Tom DeLay, deciding to ignore whatever the Texas courts decided on the corrupt politician’s future. Spot a pattern?”
The rightwing Army Radio commentator Uri Orbach found the incident disturbingly reminiscent of Jewish musicians forced to provide background music to mass murder. ‘What about Majdanek?’ he asked, referring to the Nazi extermination camp. The critics were not drawing a parallel between an Israeli roadblock and a Nazi camp. Their concern was that Jewish suffering had been diminished by the humiliation of Mr Tayem.
Yoram Kaniuk, author of a book about a Jewish violinist forced to play for a concentration camp commander, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper that the soldiers responsible should be put on trial ‘not for abusing Arabs but for disgracing the Holocaust’.” (Guardian.UK)
Many sushi eating subcultures have developed outside of Japan, particularly in the United States. This document was prepared with input from the author’s Japanese friends and acquintances. When a custom is discussed this HOWTO chooses the ‘Japanese way’ of doing things over ‘the local way’.”
My mistake, however, arose from a different, and much more modern circumstance. Medicine in the 21st century is a contact sport. It hurts. We have developed an assaultive, physical, even brutal approach to diagnosing illnesses and treating people: chemotherapy, surgery, biopsies, transplants. All for the better, most would argue, but literally a painful way to proceed. Once it was the awful taste of syrupy medicine; now it is the pain of a spinal tap.
And this creates the following conundrum: Even when someone is quite ill, the doctor can’t worry about hurting the person or the person’s feelings. Sorry, but the next biopsy or the next surgery or the next awful test must be done. Trying to soften the blow in the name of friendship invites disaster. Stated another way, a better question to ask your doctor is: ‘What would you do if it were a total stranger?'” (New York Times )
[Oxymoron: medical skepticism about a profitable procedure?]
… In Ohio, the secretary of state in charge of the elections process was co-chairman of the Bush campaign in the state. He obstructed the vote count systematically — for instance, by demanding that provisional ballots without birth dates on their envelopes be thrown out, even though there is no requirement for that in state law. He also required that provisional ballots be cast in a voter’s home precinct, ensuring that there would be no escape from long lines. Republicans fielded thousands of election challengers to Democratic precincts, mainly to try to intimidate black voters and to slow down the voting process. A recount, demanded and paid for by the Green and Libertarian parties, has been stalled in court, so that it won’t possibly upset the certification of Ohio’s electoral votes.” — James Galbraith (Salon)
I told them that I cannot take the Fox distortion and biased presentation of the news any longer and that they ought to inform their sponsors that there are millions like me. I can’t tell you the immense satisfaction I gained from becoming Foxless in America. I am asking you to follow me in this protest and let it be heard by all that want to control what we all see and hear. This could be a way to have your voice heard-Become Foxless in America. We can start a movement if each of you send this email to all the others you know who are fed up with Fox News.
With all the furor last month about the size of Dick Cheney’s organ, is Junior now trying to horn in on the act? In this photo, by the way, crafty Vladimir Putin appears to see what is going on…
The movements of the Gulfstream 5 leased by agents from the United States defence department and the CIA are detailed in confidential logs obtained by The Sunday Times which cover more than 300 flights.
Countries with poor human rights records to which the Americans have delivered prisoners include Egypt, Syria and Uzbekistan, according to the files. The logs have prompted allegations from critics that the agency is using such regimes to carry out “torture by proxy” — a charge denied by the American government.” (Times of London)
Also coverage from the Boston Globe and The Australian.
I have never travelled to China. When I dropped out and vagabonded around the world in the early ’70’s, I applied for visas to enter China at every consulate in every Asian country I passed through, but since I was hitchhiking and could not afford an organized tour they never gave me a second glance… More recently, especially as a member of the adoption community, a disproportionate number of my friends have travelled there. Still, it is hard to disabuse oneself of the stereotype of a primitive country full of throngs of bicycle riders in Mao jackets, struggling to modernize with the thinnest of veneers of glitz thrown over the poverty.
From one perspective at least, not so. These are ten small innovations in daily life the author, who I gather is a Toronto business writer, loved. (Globe and Mail via workopolis via Electrolite) Many of them exploit the technological advances of the ‘information age’ we find mundane and ineluctable in the West but which in China are implemented in ways whose thoughtfulness is arresting… and seemingly easy to do.
I know the constraints imposed by the newspaper column format, but I was left hankering for more than ten examples, and for some deeper implications. Given the less incremental — ‘leapfrogging’ is the term always used to describe the Chinese process — manner in which information processing and communications technology are being introduced in China, I wonder to what extent there is central planning of technology adoption, sort of like an official Media Lab for the country? (It strikes me it would be a fun job to have…) In the West, it is harder to see us implementing such simple exploits in convenience when they offer no competitive advantages to the profiteers who run our lives.
Also, shouldn’t China be considered a laboratory for observing the impact of rapid technological change on social structure? A goodly number of the items on Jan Wong’s list are particularly conveniences for the more urban and urbane, the traveller, the foreign visitor, shopping, attending cultural events, eating out, navigating the big cities by car. How do they impact the run-of-the-mill Chinese in day-to-day life? And how will they spread to the provinces, as cellphone coverage has?
With all the furor last month about the size of Dick Cheney’s organ, is Junior now trying to horn in on the act? In this photo, by the way, crafty Vladimir Putin appears to see what is going on…
It was a flamboyant first, from any judicial bench: a ruling in rhyme which parodied the best loved song ever written by the late Beatle, George Harrison: ‘Something’, with a sleight-of-hand reference to While My Guitar Gently Weeps.
And it was apparently appropriate, since the defendant in the case was none other than Gil Lederman – the doctor who once treated Harrison himself, and won infamy by asking the dying Beatle to sign a guitar which was later subject to a legal dispute.
‘Something in the folks he treats …’ began the judge’s ruling.” (Guardian.UK)
Never mind that the judge ruled in favor of the doctor, and seems to be crassly playing on Harrison’s memory for personal glory just as the doctor had done.
Yes, I want to get almost the entire Republican side of the House of Representatives to bend its ethics rules just for me. I want to be able to twist the arms of House Republicans to repeal a rule that automatically requires party leaders to step down if they are indicted on a felony charge – something a Texas prosecutor is considering doing to DeLay because of corruption allegations.
But most of all, I want to have the gall to sully American democracy at a time when young American soldiers are fighting in Iraq so we can enjoy a law-based society here and, maybe, extend it to others. Yes, I want to be Tom DeLay. I want to wear a little American flag on my lapel in solidarity with the troops, while I besmirch every value they are dying for.
If I can’t be Tom DeLay, then I want to be one of the gutless Republican House members who voted to twist the rules for DeLay out of fear that ‘the Hammer,’ as they call him, might retaliate by taking away a coveted committee position or maybe a parking place.” — Thomas Friedman (New York Times op-ed)
I get flagged for extra security every time I buy a one-way ticket, which seems particularly lame. Doesn’t the T.S.A. realize that a careful terrorist plotter like Mohammed Atta could figure this out and use his Saudi charity money to pop for round trips even if the return portion gets wasted?
In two articles in The Times, Joe Sharkey has chronicled the plaints of women angry about new procedures in airport security that have increased both the number and intensity of the airport pat-down, or ‘breast exam,’ as one woman put it.” — Maureen Dowd, (New York Times op-ed)
…It’s beginning to look a lot like Groundhog Day. Ever since 22 percent of the country’s voters said on Nov. 2 that they cared most about “moral values,” opportunistic ayatollahs on the right have been working overtime to inflate this nonmandate into a landslide by ginning up cultural controversies that might induce censorship by a compliant F.C.C. and, failing that, self-censorship by TV networks. Seizing on a single overhyped poll result, they exaggerate their clout, hoping to grab power over the culture.” — Frank Rich (New York Times )
The story of Amgen’s drug shows the clash between the faith of patients and the cold logic of science and business. At a time when public debate is focused on whether unsafe drugs like Vioxx are remaining on the market too long, this story shows patients who are more than willing to accept risks to get a drug. Their willingness also raises an ethical question: If a company stops developing a drug for safety or efficacy reasons, is it obligated to continue supplying it to patients from its clinical trials?” (New York Times )
If your children don’t come home saying, ‘Evolution is totally cool!’ then they are probably receiving science instruction from a teacher who doesn’t think evolution is totally cool. Even if their teacher believes (as almost half of Americans do) that humans were created by a god within the last 10,000 years, his or her job is to teach evolution enthusiastically and without even a hint of tentativeness. Talk to your kids, and encourage them to ask questions during class.”
…In a nutshell, Roach’s argument is that America’s record trade deficit means the dollar will keep falling. To keep foreigners buying T-bills and prevent a resulting rise in inflation, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan will be forced to raise interest rates further and faster than he wants. The result: U.S. consumers, who are in debt up to their eyeballs, will get pounded.” (Boston Herald)
Last month, doctors at the Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin in Wauwatosa, a suburb of Milwaukee, put the critically ill girl into a drug-induced coma and gave her antiviral drugs, although it is not clear which, if any, of the four medicines contributed to her surprising recovery.
Dr. Charles Rupprecht of the disease control agency called the recovery ‘historic.’ But even the doctors who took care of the girl said the result would have to be duplicated elsewhere before the therapy could be considered a cure or a treatment.” (New York Times )
“On January 20th, George Bush will pledge to uphold the Constitution. Our goal is to recruit 100,000 new ACLU supporters by that day to proclaim ‘I refuse to surrender my freedom‘ by taking this simple pledge:
‘I pledge to join with over 400,000 ACLU members and supporters to help ensure that the President, his administration, and our leaders in Congress fulfill their duty to preserve, protect, and defend our Constitution.
By reaffirming my commitment to the American values of justice and liberty for all, I am enlisting in a powerful movement to defend our freedoms against assaults on our civil liberties.'”
This is doing the rounds:
Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s Law. I have learned a great deal from you and understand why you would Propose and support a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage. As you said “in the eyes of God marriage is based between a man a woman.” I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination… End of debate.
I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some other elements of God’s Laws and how to follow them.
1. Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can’t I own Canadians?
2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanness – Lev.15: 19-24. The problem is how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.
4. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord – Lev.1:9. The problem is, my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
5. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2. clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself, or should I ask the police to do it?
6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination – Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don’t agree. Can you settle this? Are there ‘degrees’ of abomination?
7. Lev.21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle-room here?
8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev. 19:27. How should they die?
9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev.19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? Lev.24:10-16. Couldn’t we just burn them to death at a private family affair, like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)
I know you have studied these things extensively and thus enjoy considerable expertise in such matters, so I am confident you can help.
Thank you again for reminding us that God’s word is eternal and unchanging.
[Feel free to copy this, paste into a blank email message, and send here.]
is an incredible 3D animated creation myth being entirely created by solo animation and sound artist Andy Murdock (a longtime FmH reader) at home. A new LOR Quicktime and DVD release is out; it can be viewed only several clicks away from the page at this link. LOR, a work in progress, will eventually be a feature length film. Unfortunately, I found viewing it a work in progress as well. With a DSL connection, I could get neither part I or part II to play all the way through without freezing (using the Quicktime plug-in in either IE6 or Mozilla). It would be better if Andy would let us download the .mov files and play them offline.
Here is an interview with Andy Murdock.
Addendum: Here, courtesy of Andy, is a link to download the film if you are having trouble with streaming.
Sometimes Reality Has the Last Laugh. (The Specious Report [via walker])
Think your job is bad? Try these. (But they probably don’t want to do what you do any more than you want to do what they do.) (Popular Science)
Think again, says Edward Champion:
The PATRIOT Act authorizes the Department of Justice (and its related entities) to keep track of booklists that citizens check out at libraries or buy from bookstores, presumably based on the silly logic that anyone who reads A Catcher in the Rye (which would include a sizable cluster of high school students) is going to transform overnight into Mark David Chapman.
But Google Scholar fits the bill so exactly that one wonders what relationship the company might have with the government. If Google’s infamous cookie (which resides on a system until 2037) remains in play through Google Scholar, the big question is why does Google need this data? To service its users or to profit while compromising an individual’s privacy? What happens when a teenager trying to come to terms with his sexual orientation looks for a book on the subject to see if his urges are biologically normal? None of these very sizable concerns is addressed in the FAQ. ” (Return of the Reluctant )
What do you want to talk about?
Literary Luddites Unite! “A computer program known as Brutus.1 is generating brief outbursts of fiction that are probably superior to what many humans could turn out.”
(New York Times )
Arguing that it was unreasonable to expect the same agency that approves drugs to ‘also be committed to actively seek evidence to prove itself wrong,’ the editors of The Journal of the American Medical Association recommended that the nation consider establishing an ‘independent drug safety board’ to track the safety of drugs and medical devices after they were approved and in widespread use.” (New York Times )
I said this last week in my response to FDA officer David Graham’s criticisms of the agency.
Redesigned by Rockwell Partners, the store will offer 65,000 square feet of catnip for children and all but the most Scrooge-like of grownups. Tons of plush – an F. A. O. hallmark – is to be expected. But the look of the store will be totally new. Like a child mindful of the countdown to Christmas, F. A. O. Schwarz has cleaned up its act.” (New York Times )
Negotiators Add Abortion Clause to Spending Bill. The language buried deep inside the new piece of legislation expands various protections to doctors and healthcare institutions which refuse to give patients access to abortion counselling or abortion procedures.
Senate majority leader Frist, interviewed today, gave lip service to being outraged someone had slipped this into the omnibus spending package, but pleaded ignorance about who could have made the edit. Given the way legislators approach their jobs, it could very well have gone unnoticed until the bill is passed. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D.-Cal.) vowed to use ‘procedural tactics’ to slow Senate business to a crawl if the clause was not removed from the bill.
Lest you think this was an isolated transgression of legislative ethics, there’s this:
Josh Marshall is all over the story of who’s trying to pull the wool over our eyes on this one.
In an open letter on his weblog, Kevin Sites agonizes over his videotaping of the Marine killing of the wounded Iraqi in the mosque:
The pistachio problem is solved: “A new gadget uses the distinctive pings made by bouncing nuts to sort the open shells from the uncrackable closed ones.” (New Scientist)
Q: So, has success changed you?
A: Yeah, it’s changed me. You know how when you’re eating pistachios and you find one that’s hard to get the shell open? Well, I don’t bother with them anymore.— Bob Weir [thanks, Paul]
Enforcement of Civil Rights Law Declined Since ’99, Study Finds (New York Times)
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Today, from a distance, I saw you
walking away, and without a sound
the glittering face of a glacier
slid into the sea. An ancient oak
fell in the Cumberlands, holding only
a handful of leaves, and an old woman
scattering corn to her chickens looked up
for an instant. At the other side
of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times
the size of our own sun exploded
and vanished, leaving a small green spot
on the astronomer’s retina
as he stood on the great open dome
of my heart with no one to tell.— Ted Kooser
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These are difficult to believe but they are real. Read more about them here and here. [thanks to rebecca blood]
“The Book Review recently asked a handful of poets and critics to respond to this question: What book of poetry, published in the last 25 years, has meant the most to you personally — the book you have found yourself returning to again and again? We asked them not to select reissues, or volumes of a poet’s ”selected” or ”collected” work. Here are their responses…” (New York Times [thanks to wood s lot])
Being educated is the first step toward political change. But the next step requires doing something.
BlogPac.org is that next step — a group of bloggers not content to simply write words or read them, but eager to take action on the pressing issues of our day. We will not sit idly by and merely chatter as everything we care about burns. And you join us in our efforts.
…We need to recognize as a party that we are at war for our survival, one they started. We must become not more liberal or conservative, right or left. We must become more partisan. We must become dedicated to rediscovering our core principles, and stopping the strip mining of democracy they are intent on foisting upon us.
Blogpac is dedicated to turning our party into an institution that can return cannon fire, immediately and everywhere, using the internet, TV, online campaigns, and media pressure. We will fund not liberals or conservatives, but political street fighters. For starters, we ran online ads in 2004, and built EnjoyTheDraft.com, and IraqDraft.com. Now it’s time to really get down to business.”
While, as my posts reacting to the election defeat indicate, I agree that this is a time for, figuratively if not literally, street-fighting, I hope that stridency like this does not herald a return to the rhetoric of certain segments of the ’60’s movement who were intent on being radicaler-than-thou and dismissive of anyone who did not conform their activities to their notion of what was to be done. I personally think, in contradistinction to the lead-in above, that writing a weblog is a valid part of ‘taking action on the pressing issues of our day’ and may even qualify as ‘street fighting.’ Of course, it can also be simply intellectual masturbation. The danger is that empty lip service to being a change agent may actually help bolster the status quo. Please help me to maintain an honest distinction.
“BloggerCorps matches bloggers with activists and non-profit groups who want to blog and need help getting started….
The authors (a wide-ranging group comprised mainly of bloggers, activists, and tech organizations who work with non-profits) will post announcements on behalf of organizations who need help starting blogs or building blogging communities. The posts will be categorized according to the organization’s geographical location, and in some cases its main focus issue. Bloggers interested in helping that particular organization can express their interest in the comments section attached to that post. The organization will then decide which of the volunteers it wants to follow up with. All arrangements will be made directly between organizations and bloggers. Bloggercorps will not mediate. We are not raising money to put people on planes so in most cases the idea is to match organizations located in a particular place with bloggers living in the same place. If situations arise in which organizations cannot find volunteers living in their area, we may be able to point them to foundations or philanthropic organizations who might be in a position to help fund travel for blogger-volunteers. But we won’t do your fundraising work for you.
Sounds like a wonderful idea; count me in. Although FmH is primitive from a coding standpoint, I have been doing this for long enough to understand the mechanics.
French zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans coined the term cryptozoology in the late 1950s to describe the study of unverified animals that turn up in sighting reports, explorers’ accounts, archeological artifacts, and folklore. Back in 1993, The Scientist reported that cryptozoologists, the scientists who try to track down previously undescribed animals, were becoming an endangered species (The Scientist, 7[1]:1, Jan. 11, 1993). Practitioners found it hard to get funding and were scorned by colleagues, our story said, meaning that only a few dozen active investigators were left worldwide.
But now, from Sweden, comes word that the outcome may not be so terminal after all. ‘On January 1, 2005, GUST [Global Underwater Search Team] of Motala, Sweden, is starting the world’s first school for cryptozoologists,’ writes Jan Sundberg in an E-mail to The Scientist.
GUST was founded in 1997 with the aim of looking for lake monsters such as Nessie in Scotland, Storsie in central Sweden, and Selma in southern Norway. The organization’s course will include six months of theory and one week of practical search in Lake Vattern, Sweden, says Sundberg, who is the group’s expedition leader.
‘You will learn how cryptozoology emerged, what it’s said to be, and what it means to you,’ Sundberg says. ‘You will also learn how international cryptozoologists work, how you spread the knowledge about it, and what use it could be to you.'” (The Scientist)
The Massachusetts senator told FOX News’ senior correspondent Geraldo Rivera that he believes he lost because the tape may have scared the American electorate.” (FOXNews)
I still wonder why there has been no serious discussion of the possibility that the tape was a Bush administration concoction given its convenient timing, its anonymous origins, and its congruence with the Republican fear-based campaign techniques. I raised the possibility that it was the often-touted ‘October surprise’ in my initial reactions to its appearance.
“Scientific experiments claiming that distant intercessory prayer produces salubrious effects are deeply flawed…” — Michael Shermer (Scientific American) Whenever I link to one of Shermer’s profoundly skeptical observations, I get at least several angry responses from readers who dismiss my thinking as being hopelessly limited. I don’t mind; I think that this is an especially important time to subject faith to reasonable examination. Readers of FmH will know that I hardly limit myself to what is “scientifically” proven; I think scientific knowlege is a socially conditioned belief system like any other, producing important distortions and limitations in our understanding of reality. There are many sources of light that project the flickering shadows on the wall of the cave.
I tend to believe most paranormal phenomena involve a balance of a basis in fact and a basis in human credulousness. I agree with Shermer that distance prayer is one of the more in-credible claims from a scientific perspective, but also with the claims of adherents that such phenomena may not be amenable to scientific examination. However, I think most paranormal phenomena are ultimately comprehensible as manifestations of intuition. We have ways of knowing things about which we know very little, yet they are ultimately comprehensible mental faculties. Empathic resonance and mind-body connectivity go a long way to understanding “extrasensory” perceptions. My difficulty with fitting distance healing into this perspective is that the recipient does not know s/he has been prayed for. I have the same difficulty with the studies several decades ago that claimed to show that therapeutic touch made a difference to plant growth.
And, as a reader commented to me in a private email (entitled “not an angry response”), distance prayer may be more beneficial for the sender than the recipient, but that it is nothing to scoff at because it increases the sender’s compassion. Most of the most meaningful spiritual practice is dedicated to cultivating compassion, no matter in which system it is embedded. And that, by the way, is why Bush’s brand of faith-based evangelism is not by any stretch of the imagingation a valid spiritual position.
