This page does simultaneous Yahoo! and Google searches on your search term and compares the relevance of the results graphically. Not for use as your everyday search interface, but interesting.

“At the same time your brain is deciding if a sentence or phrase makes grammatical sense, it’s also assessing the truth of the statement. That’s the conclusion of a study appearing in the March 18 issue of Science online.

To see how your brain deals with untrue statements and sentences that just don’t make sense, researchers from the Netherlands used two different brain-scanning technologies to determine which areas of the brain were activated for each circumstance.

‘Semantic interpretation and sentence verification are done in parallel,’ says the study’s lead author, Peter Hagoort, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Nijmegen and the director of the F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.” —Yahoo! News

A theory of acne as an evolutionarily significant, high-order psychoneuroimmune interaction timed to cortical development with a crucial role in mate choice. Abstract: “Adolescent acne is considered from the perspective of evolutionary psychology with an emphasis on a role in mate choice. The fact that acne, which is almost universal and not a true infection, is (1) initiated at puberty by the action of pubertal hormones on likely distinct, pro-acne follices, and (2) typically resolves in one’s early twenties when prefrontal cortex development is complete, suggests that the condition’s timeframe is meaningful. Acne’s conspicuous localization on the face, and its ability to elicit reflexive disgust and avoidance in observers, suggests a possible role in sexual selection. The pathophysiology of acne is reviewed, and the suggestion made that, far from being a disease, adolescent acne is a normal physiological process – a high-order psychoneuroimmune interaction – that functions to ward off potential mates until the afflicted individual is some years past the age of reproductive maturity, and thus emotionally, intellectually, and physically fit to be a parent.” —Medical Hypotheses I love these evolutionary biology speculations!

James Gleick with a good summary of the issues: “…So Jeff Burgar, accused cybersquatter, speaks for many Internet users when he views Icann and WIPO as defenders of the corporate trademark establishment. ”It’s a business,” he said. ”The arbitration process is geared to take domain names from one party and give them to another” — from the have-nots, he means, to the haves. ”The arbitrators are almost all of them attorneys who have a vested interest in looking out for big business or celebrities.”

To cope with the dynamic, entangled, variegated nature of our information-governed world, perhaps the law just needs to relax — loosen the cords, instead of tightening them. A system based on property rights in names may be the wrong approach. The principle people really care about is authenticity and truthfulness. The law needs to prevent miscreants from pretending to be people they’re not or from passing off spurious products — but that is all…

Namespaces will collide. Let them. ” —New York Times

…Just Barely: “My feeling is pretty much the way it was in the year 2000. I admire Ralph Nader and Denis Kucinich very much, and insofar as they bring up issues and carry out an educational and organisational function – that’s important, and fine, and I support it.

However, when it comes to the choice between the two factions of the business party, it does sometimes, in this case as in 2000, make a difference. A fraction.

That’s not only true for international affairs, it’s maybe even more dramatically true domestically. The people around Bush are very deeply committed to dismantling the achievements of popular struggle through the past century. The prospect of a government which serves popular interests is being dismantled here. It’s an administration that works, that is devoted, to a narrow sector of wealth and power, no matter what the cost to the general population. And that could be extremely dangerous in the not very long run.” —Guardian.UK

Commentary is rife about Richard Clarke’s revelations about the Bush administration’s preparedness for terrorism and its response to the Sept. 11th attacks in the 60 Minutes interview with Lesley Stahl, and in his forthcoming book. Choice soundbite:

“I find it outrageous that the President is running for re-election on the grounds that he’s done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it.”

Clarke originally thought Donald Rumsfeld must be joking when, immediately after the Sept. 11th attacks, he pressed for the bombing of Iraq because there was a dearth of appetizing targets in Afghanistan. The president and his puppeteers continued to bully Clarke and other security analysts to bring back analysis suggesting an Iraqi link and reject the absence of any such evidence.

“The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, ‘I want you to find whether Iraq did this.’ Now he never said, ‘Make it up.’ But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.

“I said, ‘Mr. President. We’ve done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There’s no connection.’

“He came back at me and said, “Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection.’ And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report.”

Clarke continued, “It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, ‘Will you sign this report?’ They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, ‘Wrong answer. … Do it again.’

It is clear by now to anyone who wants to look that increasingly prominent criticism of the administration’s self-fulfilling prophecy approach to national security, and its outright lying, is coming from across the ideological spectrum and hardly motivated for political gain. BillMon expands on Clarke’s neo-con bona fides in his reflections on the 60 Minutes interview. It is insurmountably evident that it was not intelligence failure but, simply, the President’s men knowing what they wanted to hear and rejecting all contrary feedback because of an unshakeable commitment to invading Iraq, that determined the administration’s defining foreign policy direction. The administration damage control so far has been to claim that Clarke is describing conversations that never happened — despite CBS News having corroborating witnesses — and to accuse him of “auditioning for a job in the Kerry campaign” — as if he would have to lie to get that door opened for him.

My only question is why CBS News really had to pose its headline as a question.

“Terrorists Say They Need Bush’s ‘Idiocy’ To Wake Up Islamic World” —The Omaha Channel

I heard about this from a friend but didn’t believe it could be anything but a liberal ‘troll’. However, lo and behold, it is real; one of our august representatives in Congress, Ron Lewis (R.-KY), with 19 co-sponsors, has introduced a bill to allow Congress to reverse the judgments of the United States Supreme Court. Lewis makes no bones about the fact that the impetus for

“the modest solutions I intend to set forth, stem from the November ruling

by the Massachusetts Supreme Court to allow same-sex marriages and the

subsequent rulings on the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act

that have followed. America’s judicial branch has become increasingly overreaching and disconnected from the values of everyday Americans… The recent actions taken by courts in Massachusetts and elsewhere are demonstrative of a single branch of government taking upon itself the singular ability to legislate. These actions usurp the will of the governed by allowing a select few to conclusively rule on issues that are radically reshaping our nation’s traditions.”

There does not appear to have been much note of this idiotic example of conservative ‘thought’ (quotation marks are necessary, yes) in the weblogging world. I don’t know if that it is because it is beneath the radar, if everyone has already judged it beneath their dignity to comment on, or because it is clear that the bill, now in commmittee, will go nowhere. But shouldn’t there be an test on fundamental Constitutional principles or something before a cretin like Lewis gets to sit in Congress or propose a bill? You can look at Rep. Lewis’ voting history here but why bother? You know already what you will find. [thanks, Steve]

“Besides standard CD releases, the Grateful Dead is finalizing a deal with Apple’s I-Tunes to make every live note they’ve ever recorded available for download.

‘Everything, sooner or later, will end up being released on the Web,’ Weir says. ‘What we wanna do is digitize our entire catalog, our entire collection of tapes . . . and make that stuff available. I think I-Tunes is up to that.’

The band has recorded all of its live shows since the late ’60s, at first ‘just so we could listen back, see what it sounded like and make any changes.

‘Or if, for instance, we were jamming and something fell together, some little plum came through the sky and landed onstage, it didn’t get lost. We could go back and maybe make a song out of it,’ Weir says.

And compared to most music at I-Tunes, the Dead’s jams are a bargain, he says with a laugh.

‘At 99 cents a tune, it’s a pretty decent price, because most of our tunes are pretty long.'” —Rocky Mountain News

“Hate the small fixed size fonts being used on so many web pages these days? Here are a couple of bookmarklets so you can increase (or decrease, by the way) the size (and text size) of any page you visit. (Sorry–only works in IE.) Bookmarklets are javascript routines you place in your IE Favorites. To use them, you just click on them in your Favorites and they run the script. You install them in your Favorites by right clicking on them, and choosing “ADD TO FAVORITES” from the menu.” —Sam-I-Am

“That’s what President Bush shot back at me when I told him what I thought of his performance. As November approaches, I have to thank him for pointing me toward exactly the right question.” —Bill Hangley Jr. Salon

New massive subatomic particle created: “A new type of exotic particle appears to have been created fleetingly at an accelerator in Germany, reveal physicists.

The particle, comprised of five quarks, is only the second type of ‘pentaquark’ seen since the first was reported in summer 2003. And already its properties are puzzling theorists.” —New Scientist

“The discovery of a new class of monkey virus jumping into humans has reinforced claims that HIV came from bushmeat hunting.

It also suggests that viruses jump species much more often than thought – raising the risk that new viral diseases will eventually develop in humans.

The simian foamy viruses newly found in the bushmeat hunters by US and Cameroonian scientists are probably harmless, but follow up studies are planned to check whether they spread between people or cause disease.” —New Scientist

Mass rape atrocity in west Sudan: ‘More than 100 women have been raped in a single attack carried out by Arab militias in Darfur in western Sudan.

Speaking to the BBC, the United Nations co-ordinator for Sudan, Mukesh Kapila, said the conflict had created the worst humanitarian situation in the world.

He said more than one million people were affected by “ethnic cleansing”.

He said the fighting was characterised by a scorched-earth policy and was comparable in character, if not in scale, to the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

“It is more than just a conflict. It is an organised attempt to do away with a group of people,” he said.’ —BBC

Why would the world community not intervene in this human devastation?

The Socratic Shrink: “On a recent Manhattan morning, with a cold wind slashing off New York Harbor, Lou Marinoff took the granite steps of the federal courthouse two at a time — brown eyes fierce, ivory white skin offsetting his dark beard, a Russian fur hat making him the very picture of the engaged intellectual. A tenured philosophy professor at City College of New York and the author of The Big Questions: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life and of the international best seller Plato, Not Prozac! Applying Eternal Wisdom to Everyday Problems, Marinoff is the world’s most successful marketer of philosophical counseling. A controversial new talk therapy, philosophical counseling takes the premise that many of our problems stem from uncertainties about the meaning of life and from faulty logic.” —New York Times Actually, there appears to be nothing new and very little controversial except perhaps the notion that a professor of philosophy is pushing this as a narcissistic marketing trend. Existential influences on psychoanalytic psychotherapy are as old as the discipline, and every psychology student knows of the contributions of Fromm and Frankl. And cognitive approaches which explore and address faulty logic are time-honored, arguably stemming from Albert Ellis.

“…Artery-opening methods, like bypass surgery and stents, the widely used wire cages that hold plaque against an artery wall, can alleviate crushing chest pain. Stents can also rescue someone in the midst of a heart attack by destroying an obstruction and holding the closed artery open.

But the new model of heart disease shows that the vast majority of heart attacks do not originate with obstructions that narrow arteries.

Instead, recent and continuing studies show that a more powerful way to prevent heart attacks in patients at high risk is to adhere rigorously to what can seem like boring old advice — giving up smoking, for example, and taking drugs to get blood pressure under control, drive cholesterol levels down and prevent blood clotting.” —New York Times

I heard about this from a friend but didn’t believe it could be anything but a liberal ‘troll’. However, lo and behold, it is real; one of our august representatives in Congress, Ron Lewis (R.-KY), with 19 co-sponsors, has introduced a bill to allow Congress to reverse the judgments of the United States Supreme Court. Lewis makes no bones about the fact that the impetus for

“the modest solutions I intend to set forth, stem from the November ruling

by the Massachusetts Supreme Court to allow same-sex marriages and the

subsequent rulings on the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act

that have followed. America’s judicial branch has become increasingly overreaching and disconnected from the values of everyday Americans… The recent actions taken by courts in Massachusetts and elsewhere are demonstrative of a single branch of government taking upon itself the singular ability to legislate. These actions usurp the will of the governed by allowing a select few to conclusively rule on issues that are radically reshaping our nation’s traditions.”

There does not appear to have been much note of this idiotic example of conservative ‘thought’ (quotation marks are necessary, yes) in the weblogging world. I don’t know if that it is because it is beneath the radar, if everyone has already judged it beneath their dignity to comment on, or because it is clear that the bill, now in commmittee, will go nowhere. But shouldn’t there be an test on fundamental Constitutional principles or something before a cretin like Lewis gets to sit in Congress or propose a bill? You can look at Rep. Lewis’ voting history here but why bother? You know already what you will find. [thanks, Steve]

My admiration for Ed Fitzgerald’s political commentary grows the more I read his unfutz. He was an early commenter to FmH and after 9-11 invited me onto a small mailing list where he and similarly thoughtful friends conducted always high-quality considerations of the urgent events of the day. Regrettably, largely because of the energy I devote to FmH, I was more of a lurker than a contributor to his mailing list.

I particularly like his dissection of the possibilities of an ‘October surprise’ from the administration. He is not talking about the often-mentioned theory that they have bin Laden in custody already and will trot him out to the world just in time to influence the vote; Ed thinks the evidence is pretty good that bin Laden is already dead (I have more doubts). What Ed considers are reports in recent weeks that the US has been stealthily shipping long-range missile parts into southern Iraq. At least some of the weapons are of the vintage of the ’80’s armaments the US supplied to Iraq during its conflict with Iran. The obvious implication is that the administration plans some dramatic revelation in the face of mounting criticism about the absence of WMD in Iraq and the upcoming trial of Saddam Hussein.

How reliable the source of this report is remains to be seen but, as Ed notes, it pays to keep our collective eyes open for corroboration. Ed argues that the bump in public approval from such a ‘discovery’ would be small and ephemeral. I hope this is the case, given that it is an entirely plausible thing to expect of the Bush administration. However, the calculus Ed uses to reach the conclusion that the ‘WMD putsch’ would be a bust for the Bush Leaguers is anything but a sure bet. He relies on an analysis of the sequentially smaller bumps in public approval Bush has gotten from each of the recent milestones in the WoT®, against a baseline of mounting public disapproval. My answer is that you can’t handicap the whims of the electorate and that the vagaries of the next seven months could well prime the pump for such a potential coup. So I join Fitzgerald in suggesting the Democrats be very very prepared for the potential ‘discovery’ of WMD around Basra after Labor Day.

By the way, since admiration is often transitive, I should mention that Billmon, of whom Ed Fitzgerald is very fond, has apparently gotten too popular for his own good. His ISP has just informed him, he lets readers know, that he will have to start paying for his bandwidth, presumably because of how much he uses these days; [That’s why I keep FmH under the radar (grin). — ed.] he estimates it is going to run him $3,000/year, which could force him out of the business, to our great loss. He has put up a tip jar on his site and is probably among those most deserving of some assistance from inquiring minds among the weblog-reading public. He’s right; this may indeed be the future of weblogging.

And then there’s all the breathless reporting on the possibility that Pakistani forces fighting al Qaeda in the autonomous tribal region may have surrounded Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s number-two man and arguably more important to al Qaeda strategizing than its figurehead. In any case, claims that al-Zawahiri was close to capture appear to be so much hot air. Josh Marshall discusses how much egg this all leaves on CNN’s face. Marshall thinks it is too big a coincidence that the Pakistani engagement came right after Colin Powell’s visit to Islamabad, proposing that that would make Pakistan anxious to show the US what a good job they are doing rooting out al Qaeda from its refuges. If so, Powell’s visit was the icing on the cake rather than the cause. It is more likely this action is Pakistani payment of the debt they owe the US after getting a ‘bye’ on their nuclear proliferation activities from the Bush administration. We allowed Musharraf to blame it on a ‘straw man’ (whom, moreover, he pardoned) when all the evidence says it was a widespread conspiracy within upper-echelon Pakistani circles. I wrote a couple of months ago about speculation that the price the US would exact from Pakistan would be to allow a US military operation to look for bin Laden’s forces, which would be a high price indeed in terms of threatening Musharraf’s shaky hold on power by inflaming Pakistani nationalist sentiments. Pehaps he has lobbied hard to have us let him do it instead; if so, how long will we let the Pakistani charade that they are on the verge of hard-fought dramatic success go on? Or perhaps this is an agreed-upon prelude to the US operation.

Country Joe McDonald proudly collects on his website adaptations of his “Fixin’ to Die Rag” for just about every political crisis since Vietnam. For example:

“And it’s one, two, three,

What are we searching for?

George said it, it must be true.

I believe in W.

And it’s five, six, seven,

Tell me who I should hate.

There’s no need to wonder why,

‘Cause Presidents never lie.”

Refresh your memory; here’s the original (in RealAudio).

1:

D

Come on all of you big strong men,

G

Uncle Sam needs your help again.

D

He’s got himself in a terrible jam

G

Way down yonder in Vietnam

E7 A

So put down your books and pick up a gun,

D G

We’re gonna have a whole lotta fun.

Chorus:

A7 A#7 D

And it’s one, two, three,

D7 G

What are we fighting for?

D

Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,

G

Next stop is Vietnam;

A7 A#7 D

And it’s five, six, seven,

D7 G

Open up the pearly gates,

E A

Well there ain’t no time to wonder why,

D G

Whoopee! we’re all gonna die.

2:

D

Come on generals, let’s move fast;

G

Your big chance has come at last.

D

Gotta go out and get those reds —

G

The only good commie is the one that’s dead

E7 A

You know that peace can only be won

D G

When we’ve blown ’em all to kingdom come.

[Chorus]

3:

D

Come on Wall Street, don’t move slow,

G

Why man, this is war au-go-go.

D

There’s plenty good money to be made

G

Supplying the Army with the tools of the trade,

E7 A

Just hope and pray that if they drop the bomb,

D G

They drop it on the Viet Cong.

[Chorus]

4:

D

Come on mothers throughout the land,

G

Pack your boys off to Vietnam.

D

Come on fathers, don’t hesitate,

G

Send your sons off before it’s too late.

E7 A

You can be the first one on your block

D G

To have your boy come home in a box.

[Chorus]

And: ‘In 1970, Pete Seeger recorded a ‘lost’ version of “Fixin’ to Die Rag” for a 45 release. At least a few advance DJ copies were produced; McDonald reproduces one on his website. “But something went wrong. The details are unclear, but Pete did mention once that the distributors refused to handle it. It was never released, and shortly afterward Pete left Columbia, his longtime label.

Now for the first time since the 70s, you can hear this lost recording (RealAudio too) .”

And: Country Joe was sued by the daughter of the late New Orleans jazz trombonist Kid Ory after she obtained the rights to her father’s famous “Muskrat Ramble” in the late ’90’s; she claimed “Fixin’ to Die” was an infringement on her father’s song. ‘Kid Ory died in 1973 but Babette says his dying request was that she “nail that bastard, McDonald” because he hated the song’s anti-war stance and profane lyrics.’ Until the suit was resolved, Joe stopped performing the song on stage after being warned that doing so could subject him to a $150,000 fine. He eventually prevailed, largely on the basis of the doctrine of laches, which I understand as the legal principle that it is negligent to wait too long to assert a legal right. Not to mention the dubious musicological proposition of Ory’s rights to the song, a New Orleans jazz staple, in the first place, as well as the doctrine of fair use, as well as the arguable lack of similarity of the two songs (even though McDonald has acknowledged “Muskrat Ramble” as an influence on “FtDR”).

“The U.S.-led authority in Iraq plans to spend as much as $100 million over 14 months to hire private security forces to protect the Green Zone, the four-square-mile area in Baghdad that houses most U.S. government employees and some of the private contractors working there.

The Green Zone is now guarded primarily by U.S. military forces, but the Coalition Provisional Authority wants to turn much of that work over to contractors to free more U.S. forces to confront a violent insurgency. The companies would employ former military personnel and be responsible for safeguarding the area for the first year after political authority is transferred to an interim Iraqi government on June 30.” —Washington Post

In other words, the US administration is paying the CPA to hire mercenaries to take the place of US troops in guarding our interests in Baghdad. I doubt it has as much to do with freeing up US forces to fight the insurgency elsewhere in Iraq as it does with facilitating the extrication of the US military from the quagmire in advance of the US presidential election. Not only will the administration be able to claim that the country had been pacified enough to allow withdrawals but the deaths of hired guns, some of them non-American, would be more palatable to the American electorate than ongoing troop losses. I also wonder if it also has something to do with the US not being accountable if the foreign fighters do not respect the same rules of engagement by which the US military is supposedly bound. Given plummeting morale and enthusiasm among US occupation forces, the mecenaries might be, shall we say, abit more vociferous against the rebels. [Do merciless and mercenary have the same etymological roots?

Related? I am sure you have seen the reports that the Bush campaign is essentially hiring mercenaries for domestic work as well [via Daily Kos]

“(S)uicide among Iraq war soldiers, 29 cases by recent count, says volumes about drooping troop morale and raises further doubts about how accurately the toll on service members is being measured and how much more they will bear.

Demands are sharpening for release of an Army Surgeon General’s report about the prevalence of depression and suicide among service members stationed in Iraq and Kuwait. In February, an Army trainee stationed in North Carolina, Jeremy Hinzman, sought refugee status in Toronto as a conscientious objector, raising the prospects of an organized exodus of AWOL service members north of the border. And questions are ricocheting among grieving relatives in small-town America about the loss of loved ones.” —In These Times

Nat Hentoff: “At last, this essential American music gets a museum.” —WSJ Opinion Journal

Are they following Spain out of the ‘Coalition of the Willing‘ ‘Coalition of the Previously Willing’? —Yahoo! News

My first thought — how in the world can Bush get away with a statement like this. ” ‘I think if you’re gonna make an accusation in the course of a presidential campaign, you ought to back it up with facts,’ Bush said Tuesday…”, referring to Kerry’s comment that a number of world leaders want him to supplant Bush. —CNN My second thought — Oh, my God, Bush still actually believes he is the truthteller around here. Quickly followed by — And so does much of the electorate, with no substantial challenge from the press… Give as much as you can to:

• the Kerry campaign
  
• the DNC
  
• MoveOn

“The Iraq on the Record report, prepared at the request of Rep. Henry A. Waxman, is a comprehensive examination of the statements made by the five Administration officials most responsible for providing public information and shaping public opinion on Iraq: President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.

This Iraq on the Record database identifies 237 specific misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq made by these five officials in 125 public appearances in the time leading up to and after the commencement of hostilities in Iraq. The search options on the left can be used to find statements by any combination of speaker, subject, keyword, or date.

The Special Investigations Division compiled a database of statements about Iraq made by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary Powell, and National Security Advisor Rice. All of the statements in the database were drawn from speeches, press conferences and briefings, interviews, written statements, and testimony by the five officials.

This Iraq on the Record database contains statements made by the five officials that were misleading at the time they were made. The database does not include statements that appear in hindsight to be erroneous but were accurate reflections of the views of intelligence officials at the time they were made.”

“The worst news for George W. Bush in today’s New York Times had nothing to do with John Kerry or Iraq.

It came instead in two stories about oil, one on the front page and the other in the world business section. Oil-fueled inflation played a major role in bringing down Ford and Carter; it is likely to do the same for Bush. ” —Bad Attitudes

…I’m Passive-Aggressive. “…(W)hile ‘passive-aggressive’ has become a workhorse phrase in marriage counseling and an all-purpose label for almost any difficult character, it is a controversial concept in psychiatry.” (New York Times) Dropped from the latest iteration of the ‘official bible’ of diagnoses in psychiatry, the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-IV, because it is too common, too diffuse, to narrow, too variable, etc. etc., those who examine passive-aggressive behavior are divided even about the basics — is it immature or quite adaptive, in other words is it good or bad? It is worth noting that one of the sources for the terminology was the military, denoting a sort of passive obstructionism to discipline and demands noticed during World War II. Passive aggression, as I see it, forms the centerpiece of resistance to arbitrary and illegitimate authority, either in the political or the interpersonal sphere, in situations where outright defiance cannot be afforded. I often worry that our society is anger-averse, and all vociferous differences of opinion are labelled unreasonable and those who express them considered aggressors. This has several consequences — passive compliance; the aforementioned passive aggression; a widespread confusion between anger, which is a vehement expression of one’s wish that another change, and rage, which is undirected raw emotion waiting to attach to a target in order to be released; and outbursts of virulent rage, such as the euphemistic “going postal” and increasingly common incidents of deadly assaults in the workplace, malls and schools. Not to mention the likelihood that the American public will be rolling over and taking whatever the Bush administration dishes out for the next four years.

I wrote several weeks ago about psychologist Lauren Slater’s new book, Opening Skinner’s Box –

Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century. In a fascinating chapter about David Rosenhan’s “On Being Sane in Insane Places”, psychiatrist Robert Spitzer, the ‘godfather’ of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the Bible of psychiatric classification, is the subject of some very unflattering description. It appears that Slater has taken on a very formidable opponent; Spitzer has put his response to her portrayal of him in the public domain on the evolutionary psychology listserv. If Slater chooses to defend herself, we may be in for a monumental scientific-literary catfight. Be sure not to miss Spitzer’s final paragraph.

Robert L. Spitzer, M.D.

Professor of Psychiatry

Chief, Biometrics Research Department

Unit 60, 1051 Riverside Drive

New York State Psychiatric Institute

College of Physicians & Surgeons of Columbia University

New York, N.Y. 10032

Tel: (212) 543-5524

Fax: (212) 543-5525

E-mail: RLS8@COLUMBIA.EDU

February 21, 2004

Drake Mc Feely,

President, WW Norton & Company

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC.

500 Fifth Avenue

New York, N.Y. 10110

Dear Mr. Mc Feely,

In the third chapter of Lauren Slater’s new book, Opening Skinner’s Box –

Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century, she has extensive

quotes from a telephone conversation that we had several years ago. Several

colleagues who have read the book have asked me if the quotes are accurate,

since they found it hard to believe that I had actually made so many

outrageous statements. The quotes of me that appear in the book are either

outright fabrications or represent what Slater imagines I could or would

say.

It is of note that Slater could have – but did not – record our

conversation.

Here are some of the statements that Slater claims I made and why I am sure

I never made them.

Spitzer pauses. “So how is David Rosenhan?” he finally asks. “Actually, not

so good,” I say. “He’s lost his wife to cancer, his daughter Nina in a car

crash. He’s had several strokes and is now suffering from a disease they

can’t quite diagnose. He’s paralyzed.” That Spitzer doesn’t say, or much

sound, sorry when he hears this reveals the depths to which Rosenhan’s study

is still hated in the field, even after 30 years. “That’s what you get,” he

says, “for conducting such an inquiry.” (p. 68)

I never said this. I would certainly not have gloated over Rosenhan’s

illness.

Spitzer says: “The new classification system of the DSM is stringent and

scientific.” (p. 80)

You can search all of the many papers I have written about DSM-III. I have

never said it was “scientific” or “stringent.” DSM-III facilitates

scientific study but it makes no sense to say that it is itself

“scientific.” “Stringent” is a word I never use and incorrectly

characterizes DSM-III.

“I’m telling you, with the new diagnostic system in place, Rosenhan’s

experiment could never happen today. It would never work. You would not be

admitted and in the ER they would diagnose you as deferred.”. “No,” repeats

Spitzer, “that experiment could never be successfully repeated. Not in this

day and age.” (p. 80)

I would never have referred to Rosenhan’s study as an “experiment” nor would

I talk about it being “successfully repeated.” Slater seems to be saying

that I claimed that now, with the DSM, psychiatrists would not diagnose a

pseudopatient as having a mental disorder. I would not make such a claim. If

there were no reason to suspect the pseudopatient of malingering, I guess

that most psychiatrists now would also make an incorrect diagnosis – just as

the psychiatrists in Rosenhan’s study did. It would not make sense for me to

have made a blanket prediction (twice!) that it could never happen now.

Since DSM-III was published in 1980, why would I have referred to it as “the

new diagnostic system?”

This is a serious matter. As a reputable publisher you have an obligation to

investigate this matter and take appropriate action to stop these damaging

misrepresentations by your author.

I am enjoying reading Slater’s book, Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir (Penguin

Books, 2000). I am up to the part where she describes how she went through a

period of her life when she was a compulsive liar.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Robert L. Spitzer, M.D.

Professor of Psychiatry

Elizabeth Loftus, the subject of another of Slater’s chapters, has also written to Slater’s publisher claiming misrepresentation:

University of California – Irvine

IRVINE, CALIFORNIA 92697-7085

Elizabeth F. Loftus, Ph.D.

Distinguished Professor

Psychology & Social Behavior

Criminology, Law & Society

(949) 824-3285 (TEL)

(949) 824-3002 (FAX)

E mail: eloftus@uci.edu

February 21, 2004

Drake McFeely,

President, WW Norton & Company

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC.

500 Fifth Avenue

New York, N.Y. 10110

dmcfeely@wwnorton.com

Dear Mr. McFeely,

I am writing to inform you about a number of factual errors and serious

misrepresentations in Lauren Slater’s book Opening Skinner’s Box: Great

Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century. Her Chapter 8, entitled

“Lost in the Mall”, is about my research. The chapter is riddled with

errors – some minor but others extremely serious. Moreover, quotes are

attributed to me that I have never said, nor would ever say. Here is a

sampling of some of Slater’s errors:

p. 183: Slater quotes me as saying that Ted Bundy

“was wrongly identified in

a kidnapping charge.”

I have never said that Bundy was wrongly identified.

During his trial I pointed to some of the difficulties with the

identification. However, I never said he was wrongly identified.

p. 184: Slater quotes me as saying that 25% of the sample is a

“statistically significant minority.”

I have called this figure a

significant minority of the sample, but would never say something so

scientifically improper as to call it a “statistically significant

minority.”

p. 184: I am also astounded that Slater would refer to my sometime co-author

and ex-husband, Professor Geoffrey Loftus, as “Gregg.” One would think that

someone who sets out to publicly explain and review a scientific literature

would be familiar with the names of its major contributors. Lest you think

that this sloppiness with names is an isolated case, let me quote from a

published review of Slater’s book in the London Mail on Sunday (February

15, 2004):

“It does not boost one’s confidence in her judgment, for instance, that

within the space of two lines she manages to spell the names of two famous

psychologists wrong: Thomas Szasz she spells ‘Sasz’ and R. D. Laing she

spells ‘Lang’. She also writes ‘per se’ as ‘per say’, which makes you wonder

if she knows what it means.”

p. 185: I did not claim that George Franklin’s daughter went to

“some

new-age therapist who practiced all sorts of suggestion.”

I did not make

subjects in the lab think that red signs were yellow. I did not say, as to

Eileen Franklin’s memories,

“Untrue. All these details Eileen later read

about in newspaper reports.”

The details included in Eileen Franklin’s

account were in fact available in newspapers, television accounts, and other

public places. As to where she might have been exposed to them I cannot say,

since I never interviewed her.

p. 191: Slater has a long quote attributed to me that uses words that I

would never have said. It beings:

“The real facts are sometimes so subtle

as to defy language.”

– I’m not ever sure I can even figure out what this

means.

p. 192: Slater refers to

“the woman who yelled ‘whore’ [at me] in the

airport a few years back”.

No woman has ever yelled “whore” at me in an

airport.

p. 192: Slater refers to

“the egged windows of her home, the yolks drying to

a crisp crust”

. No one has ever egged my home or its windows.

p. 193: Slater’s account of the Paul Ingram case is sloppy to the point of

leaving the reader with completely incorrect impressions. For example,

Slater writes of me

“when she heard about this case, and the kind of

questioning Ingram underwent. She got in touch with her friend and cult

expert Richard Ofshe, who trundled down to see Paul in his jail cell.”

Contrary to the impression conveyed by these words and those that follow,

namely that I had played some role in connecting Ofshe with Ingram, or in

Ingram’s subsequent decision to recant his confession, the truth of the

matter is that Ofshe had been working on the Ingram case and meeting with

Ingram in his jail cell, and Ingram had recanted his confession, years

before I had ever met Dr. Ofshe or had become involved with the Ingram case

at all. I first became interested in the case years after these events

occurred, when a television reporter who was suspicious about the case asked

me to help examine transcripts. Dr. Ofshe, and not I, deserves the sole

credit for his innovative work in this case.

p. 196: Slater makes a point of the fact that

“..by the end of the

interview, I know not only Loftus’s shoe size but her bra size too.”

The

reason Slater knows that is that she explicitly asked me for each of those

pieces of information. It makes me wonder what questions she asked of her

other interviewees.

p. 202: Slater claims that I slammed the phone down on her. I have no

recollection of ever slamming the phone down on anyone, let alone her. If

there was an accidental disconnection that occurred I would have explained

or apologized.

As you will become aware when you hear from other scientists and scholars,

there are additional serious factual and scholarly errors in other chapters

of Slater’s volume. Historically, W.W. Norton’s publications have been known

for matching the highest standards of factual accuracy of any scholarly

publisher, but I worry that lately these standards may have slipped. Could

you either confirm that my impression is accurate, or else let me know what

steps Norton will be taking to correct the factual error it has published in

Slater’s volume?

Sincerely,

Elizabeth Loftus, Ph.D.

The press fails the first test of the 2004 general election campaign: “When the Bush campaign unveiled an ad called ‘100 Days,’ it was a shot across the press’ bow: if we put up an ad with an utter fabrication in it, will you call us on it? They got a clear answer: NO. Bush and Kerry both now understand that the press has given them permission to lie.” —Paul Waldman, The Gadflyer

A popquiz; identify the source of the included quotes. Here’s the punchline — they are all empty platitudes from the 2000 Republican Party Platform. “In light of the behavior and policy choices of the Bush Administration in the nearly four years since the platform was written, most are laughable.” —Thomas Schaller, The Gadflyer

The Gadflyer is

a new progressive Internet magazine. As the name implies, The Gadflyer will be provocative, critical, and iconoclastic. It will cover politics and public affairs from a fresh perspective, offering journalism, analysis, and commentary from a new generation of writers. The Gadflyer will bring together the brightest young progressive voices to provide unique and compelling stories that can be found nowhere else.

The Gadflyer will be unabashedly progressive, but not doctrinaire; pugnacious, but not shrill; lively and entertaining, but substantive. [thanks, dennis]

As ongoing FmH readers know, I try and follow the doings of the proto-fascist far right closely. A friend just let me know I had missed a piece in The New Yorker last month by David Grann called “The Brand”, which profiles the behind-bars doings of the Aryan Brotherhood. [You have seen what is apparently a minor league rendition of the Aryan Brotherhood’s prison activities if you have ever watched the HBO series Oz.] Here is, however, a New Yorker Online interview with Grann which gives the gist.

Prosecutors call the Aryan Brotherhood the most murderous criminal organization in the US. It has a system of selecting only the most cunning and vicious members to become “made” men, much like the Mafia. And most of its criminal activities remain unknown because they happen behind bars and most of their victims are themselves convicts without much of a constituency outside the prisons. The Brand controls an underground economy whose dimensions are remarkable in extent; Grann quotes an inmate’s estimate that 40% of the convicts at Leavenworth are shooting heroin, for instance. The money flow is hard to trace, for one thing because payments are made by money orders to designees on the outside. Communication about criminal activities uses sophisticated codes, invisible ink and rhyming schemes that strike me as similar to Cockney rhyming slang. Gang leaders are quite intelligent and well-read although self-educated, with philosophical tastes running to Sun Tzu and Nietzsche. There are many stories of prisoners’ abilities to charm women on the outside into remarkably loyal if somewhat exploitative relationships with them.

Grann reflects on how difficult something like The Brand is to stop, fluorishing as it does in maximum security where participants have nothing to lose and are already accustomed to the use of drastic means to achieve their ends. Grann seems to think these are clever people with a native intelligence that impresses him as much as it is frightening to contemplate. It is interesting to speculate on whether this parallel value system is something they develop once incarcerated or bring into prison with them from society; Grann observes that some convicted of less violent crimes such as drug dealing or bank robbery are transformed into the type of conscienceless killers in The Brand by prison socialization. He describes, seemingly sympathetically, the conviction of some in the penal system that their fearful power can only be broken by draconian measures including much more massive deprivations of their rights behind bars and the use of the death penalty against their leaders.

I really do think that the crucial question is the one above about the extent to which the mentality of The Brand is imported into the prison from the streets as opposed to being bred by the social structure behind bars. It certainly takes some critical mass and a self-sustaining process within the confines of a concentrated setting. Another matter of obvious concern is the relationship between the ostensible ideology of race hatred, that may first attract people to ultraright-wing groups such as what I understood the Aryan Brotherhood to be, and the unabashed thuggism of The Brand. One certainly has to wonder if the nation that already locks up a higher proportion of its adult male population than any other First World country is breeding this lawlessness, and whether there would be blowback from tightening the screws further. Why should we worry about these developments, happening as they do behind the impermeable barriers of maximum security? Will we be chastened only if the fiction that we can segregate the lawlessness effectively behind bars is given the lie by The Brand extending its reach to outside criminal activity with similar impunity?

‘R’-rated advertisement requires broadband connection and is definitely not worksafe. [via Dave Farber’s Interesting People mailing list]

“For centuries, doctors have recognized women’s vulnerability to depression and proposed a variety of explanations. The female of the species, with her ‘excitable nervous system,’ was thought to wilt under the strain of menstruation and childbirth, or later, the pressures of work and family.

But researchers are now constructing more scientific theories to explain why women are nearly twice as likely as men to become depressed. Social bias and women’s higher rates of physical and sexual abuse and poverty, experts say, clearly play a role. But scientists are also studying genes that may predispose girls and women to the disorder.” — New York Times

Pretty soon, you’ll be able to get broadband Internet over your power lines. Maybe you already can.” — Slate

This one is personal; you have probably never heard of him unless you were at Harvard and maybe not even then, unless you were involved with the msnamed Bureau of Study Counsel, which does much more than (or, to put it differently, anything but) study counsel, as is true of many university counseling agencies these days.

My clinical interests, which eventually led to my career in psychiatry, emerged early. I was lucky enough to have been able to make arrangements (unconventional and perhaps usually ill-advisedly premature during one’s undergraduate training) to include an intensive clinical piece as an ongoing independent study. I am saddened to learn of the death of the inspirational man who was my tutor and mentor for this course of study, Kiyo Morimoto, who quietly but incontrovertibly shaped my humanism, passion and humor in my field*. You can read the obituary summarizing an inspiring and heartwarming life here. — Boston Globe

*In the same breath, I cannot fail to mention the incomparable, passionate Carol Cole and the late John Perry.