Review of The Illusion of Conscious Will

by Daniel M. Wegner: “Conscious will plays a special role in Western moral thinking. Although we may blame each other for negligence and other sins of omission, acts stemming from conscious decisions are considered to be paradigmatically subject to moral evaluation. In his latest book, Harvard psychologist Daniel M. Wegner tries to undermine the very notion that what we experience as conscious will has any real control over our behavior.

Wegner’s approach is stalwartly empirical. Some reviewers have celebrated him for snatching the issue of conscious will from the hands of benighted philosophers, and for bringing the cool light of experimental research to bear on issues that have traditionally been the subject of futile speculation. Actually, Wegner’s relationship to the philosophical tradition is more complicated. On the one hand, he is fully aware that his ideas hearken back to the thought of the great 18th century Scottish philosopher, David Hume. On the other hand, as I will argue below, Wegner does not fully develop the ethical consequences of his theory.” Human Nature Review 2003 3:360-362 This philosophical trend to reconceptualize consciousness as an outgrowth of mechanistic processes and, as here, an illusion, goes fist-in-glove with the changes in psychiatric paradigm I discuss below.

“The complex of problems falling under the ‘levels of selection’

rubric includes an intriguing mix of empirical, conceptual and

philosophical issues. Roughly speaking, the key question concerns the

level of the biological hierarchy at which natural selection occurs.

Does selection act on organisms, genes, groups, colonies, demes,

species, or some combination of these? Evolutionary biologists and

philosophers of biology have devoted considerable attention to this

question over the last forty years, so much so that in some quarters

the debate is now regarded as stale. Despite this perception, recent

years have in fact seen interesting and important new work on the

levels of selection, some of which has significantly re-defined the

terms of the traditional debate. This paper aims to introduce the

reader to these new developments.” — Samir Okasha, Human Nature Review 2003 3:349-356

by Jeffrie Murphy: “We have all been victims of wrongdoing. Forgiving that wrongdoing is one of the staples of current pop psychology dogma; it is seen as a universal prescription for moral and mental health in the self-help and recovery section of bookstores. At the same time, personal vindictiveness as a rule is seen as irrational and immoral. In many ways, our thinking on these issues is deeply inconsistent; we value forgiveness yet at the same time now use victim-impact statements to argue for harsher penalties for criminals. Do we have a right to hate others for what they have done to us? The distinguished philosopher and law professor Jeffrie Murphy is a skeptic when it comes to our views on both emotions. In this short and accessible book, he proposes that vindictive emotions (anger, resentment, and the desire for revenge) actually deserve a more legitimate place in our emotional, social, and legal lives than we currently recognize, while forgiveness deserves to be more selectively granted. Murphy grounds his views on careful analysis of the nature of forgiveness, a subtle understanding of the psychology of anger and resentment, and a fine appreciation of the ethical issues of self-respect and self-defense. He also uses accessible examples from law, literature, and religion to make his points. Providing a nuanced approach to a proper understanding of the place of our strongest emotions in moral, political, and personal life, and using lucid, easily understood prose, this volume is a classic example of philosophical thinking applied to a thorny, everyday problem. ” amazon.com

“How many stories are there to tell in the world?

One school of thought holds that there are just 10 archetypal tales around which novelists spin more or less elegant variations. I remember being persuaded, years ago, that there were as few as seven basic plots at the heart of our literature, or was it three?

Cinderella (rags to riches) is certainly one. The Odyssey (the hero’s return home) is another. That was recently the inspiration for Charles Frazier’s bestselling Cold Mountain. And the plot of Beowulf is the same as the plot of Jaws (a monster terrorises a seaside community and is eventually overcome by a local hero). I could go on: no doubt well-informed Observer readers will think of others. Did somebody mention Jung?” Guardian/UK

Colorado Attorney’s Motion Gives the Definitive History: “Yes, five months remain in the year, but we’re ready to announce the winner of the prestigious 2003 Legal Document of the Year award. The below motion was filed earlier this month in connection with a criminal charge filed against a Colorado teenager. The boy’s troubles started when he was confronted at school by a vice principal who suspected that he had been smoking in the boys bathroom. When presented to the principal, the kid exploded, cursing the administrator with some variants of the ‘F’ word. For his outburst, the boy was hit with a disorderly conduct rap, which was eventually amended to interfering with the staff, faculty, or students of an educational institutional. Faced with what he thought was a speech crime, Eric Vanatta, the teen’s public defender, drafted the below motion to dismiss the misdemeanor charge. The District Court document is an amusing and profane look at the world’s favorite four-letter word, from its origins in 1500 to today’s frequent use of the term by Eminem, Chris Rock, and Lenny Kravitz. The criminal charge, Vanatta argued in the motion, was not warranted since the use of the popular curse is protected by the First Amendment. TSG’s favorite part of the motion is the chart comparing Google results for the ‘F’ word and other all-American terms like mom, baseball, and apple pie.” The Smoking Gun

“Does this sound like ‘the Next Reagan,’ as some people are calling Arnold? Hardly. This guy may be the next actor elected governor of California, but that’s where the similarity between him and Ronaldus Magnus end.” Rush Limbaugh is disturbed, in a much-linked-to piece, that Arnold idn’t really a conservative. Now I feel much better.

“Excessive Internet use that harms personal relationships or affects work performance could be classified as a new psychiatric disorder that could effect businesses, researchers at University of Florida said.” This is, simply, ridiculous. Internet addiction is real, surely, but there is no need for a separate category of illness; it fits somewhere in the already well-elaborated constellation of impulsive, addictive and compulsive behaviors. The five proposed diagnostic criteria — excessive involvement in the activity, inability to cut down despite trying, neglect of other obligations, significant relationship discord as a result of the activity, and excessive thoughts or anxiety about it when not involved in the activity — are a strong parallel of the screening criteria many psychiatrists use for alcoholism, for example.

And while we’re at it, here’s another gripe about their criteria. They propose the acronym MOUSE to represent the five factors, as follows — “More than intended time spent online; Other responsibilities neglected; Unsuccessful attempts to cut down; Significant relationships discord; Excessive thoughts or anxiety when not online.” Cute, media-friendly, but the most useless acronym I have ever heard (as someone who loves to invent and impart to my students acronyms for things like diagnostic criteria or treatment approaches…), since the words represented by the letters of the acronym (in bold above) are utterly uninformative. More what? Unsuccessful at what? Significant what? You get the picture. Contrast, for example, one of the most famous acronyms in psychiatric teaching. SIGECAPS, whcih every student learns and remembers, represents the diagnostic criteria for major depression, and each letter stands for something unique, specific and memorable — sleep, interest, guilt, energy, concentration, appetite, psychomotor disturbance, and suicidality.

Garret Vreeland points to this Los Angeles Magazine portrait of Mickey Kaus. Garret focuses largely on one aspect of the piece, which portrays Kaus as loving the fact, now he’s transformed himself into a ‘blogger’ for Slate, that he can go back and correct a mistake before most of his readers have ever noticed that he made it. I agree with Garret’s position on this one, that our credibility depends on the open acknowledgement of our fallibility. While I’ll go back and correct a spelling error or some awkward phraseology in a post after I read it later, or add to it, if I want to correct an error of fact or a clumsy opinion I owe it to my readers to say that is what I’m doing.

This issue was really only a miniscule part of the article on Kaus, though. The writer focuses with the most awe on Kaus’ ‘liberal iconoclasm’, and this is what troubles me more than his creation of an armor of infallibility. Robert Scheer, who loves to snipe at Kaus, is quoted as saying,

“The problem with Kaus is, I don’t know what real-life experience he’s got. He’s someone wet behind the ears, who doesn’t get into the streets too often to see how things play out. I think neoliberals have ruined the Democratic party. What is neoliberalism but the urge to ape neoconservatism? Why not join the other side?”

and Kaus himself admits it is more fun to lambast the Democrats than the Republicans. He justifies this by saying that the Republicans are beyond reforming, so he is going after the party — “trying to perfect it”, as he puts it in his hauteur — that has a chance of “accomplishing what you want.” He does it so well that his progressivism isn’t often much in evidence in his column. “I want to say something nobody else is saying yet is also true,” he says, creating the impression that he’ll thus be a contrarian for controversy’s sake alone. The infallibility issue that Garret raises thus begins to look like the tip of the iceberg when considering whether you can trust Kaus.

Colorado Attorney’s Motion Gives the Definitive History: “Yes, five months remain in the year, but we’re ready to announce the winner of the prestigious 2003 Legal Document of the Year award. The below motion was filed earlier this month in connection with a criminal charge filed against a Colorado teenager. The boy’s troubles started when he was confronted at school by a vice principal who suspected that he had been smoking in the boys bathroom. When presented to the principal, the kid exploded, cursing the administrator with some variants of the ‘F’ word. For his outburst, the boy was hit with a disorderly conduct rap, which was eventually amended to interfering with the staff, faculty, or students of an educational institutional. Faced with what he thought was a speech crime, Eric Vanatta, the teen’s public defender, drafted the below motion to dismiss the misdemeanor charge. The District Court document is an amusing and profane look at the world’s favorite four-letter word, from its origins in 1500 to today’s frequent use of the term by Eminem, Chris Rock, and Lenny Kravitz. The criminal charge, Vanatta argued in the motion, was not warranted since the use of the popular curse is protected by the First Amendment. TSG’s favorite part of the motion is the chart comparing Google results for the ‘F’ word and other all-American terms like mom, baseball, and apple pie.” The Smoking Gun

Sean at Inert Ramblings wrote to point out that lots of people have been receiving the stranded time traveller’s lament for years. Sean, within striking distance, actually went to the dropoff point in Woburn, MA as stipulated and found alot of odd behavior going on.

Lost his head for a moment; and so did I.

Abstract: “Wellness and justice have attracted recent attention in psychology. Both within our discipline and within society at large, more needs to be done to elucidate the link between the two while taking into account the role of power and context. We suggest that wellness is achieved by the balanced and synergistic satisfaction of personal, relational, and collective needs, which, in turn, are dependent on how much justice people experience in each domain. We explore how affective, polarized, acquired, situated and invested cultural distortions misrepresent the two realms as isolated from each other. To help counter these negative outcomes, we propose psychopolitical literacy and psychopolitical validity. The more youth are exposed to these antidotes, the better equipped they will be to resist cultural distortions and enhance both wellness and justice.” — Isaac Prilleltensky and Dennis R. Fox, Journal of Community Psychology (in press)

The story I’ve posted below about the disappearance of the Boeing 727 from Angola prompted the following comment, which I thought should be brought forward to the main page here. I hasten to add that I make no claims for its veracity:

Yes, I am Joseph B. Padilla, SR. I live in Pensacola, Florida – U.S.A. I am the Brother of Ben Charles Padilla Jr. He is suspected to be the Pilot of the Missing Boeing 727 Plane that left the Airport in Angola on May 25 2003. I am trying to reach news organizations to help me locate anyone that has seen or heard anything about this missing plane or my brother.

I appeared on ABC’s , Good Morning America alone with my Sister Benita Padilla-Kirkland on June 19 2003 in hopes to get the story out and to Locate my brother. We both also appeared on CNN’s Morning show, American Morning on June 24 2003. Can you please help me by broadcasting a story or by your website news or newspaper? I have alot of information about the disapearance of the plane and my brother. You can contact me at : 850-944-9688 or either by e-mail – padilla1956@cox.net. I hope that you will give me your help in hopes that someone seeing the story will either know something about the dissappearance of the plane and my brother or know someone that does.

Here is what I have so far about the story. As in the begining as I told ABC News on The Good Morning America Show that I appeared on in New York, I thought that the Boeing 727 Plane had been sitting there in Angola for 14 months unattended to and not maintained. Now, I have found out that My Brother, Ben Charles Padilla, Jr. had been in Angola for 2 months overseeing a crew of aircraft mechanics re-working the plane from one end to the other. A B-Check was done and it was found to be fine. I talked to the owner of the plane, Mr. Maury Joseph, which is also the owner of Aerospace Sales And Leasing in South Florida. I too live in florida, Pensacola, Fl. and my brother too was born and raised here. Maury Joseph told me that he was there in Angola two weeks before the disappearance to see how things were going with the re-build of the 727 and also talked to my brother 2 days before the plane became missing and he had sent my brother $43,000.00 for him to pay the fees to the airport there in Angola. My brother paid the airport and faxed Maury Joseph the reciept, This is what Maury Joseph told me this past friday night during our two and a half hour phone conversation.

My brother was also incharge of the hiring of a pilot and co-pilot. He was to be the Flight Engineer for the flight out of Angola for the repossession of the Boeing 727 plane. My brother is not licensed to fly a 727 and never has flown an aircraft this large. He is a Licensed Aircraft Mechanic, Flight Engineer, and Pilot of smaller airplanes. I was told that he had took the plane out to the end of the runway and ran the engines up to check to see how they performed. I feel that when my brother was checking the engines, someone was on the plane and hijacked him. My brother isn’t a criminal nor has never done any wrong doings. Maury Joseph told me that he trusts my brother and doesn’t believe the reports of my brother stealing the plane. Maury Joseph also told me that he had talked to the Airport there in Angola and had found out that the control tower had radioed the 727 and told them as they were headed out to the runway to take off, that they didn’t have clearance nor permission to take off and the tower never recieved a response from the 727.

I talked to my brother Ben Padilla, Jr. back in either Jan. or Feb. and we talked about the Sept. 11 2001 ordeal and he himself told me that if this sort of thing ever happend to him, that he would down the plane in a New York Second. So, with that said I really believe my brother was hijacked and taken prisonier and held against his will and possibly was killed. My mother had a heart attack on Mothers day and my brother was e-mailed about this and he responded to the e-mail he recieved from another brother of ours and told him that he would contact us as soon as he could and we haven’t heard anything from him. So, that tells me that something isn’t right since he would of contacted the family about our mother.

I have talked to the FBI and State Department in Washington, D.C. and all they are willing to tell me is that they have not found my brother nor the plane. So, I am tring to search for any information that I can get thru news organizations. I find alot of stories on the internet and try to get any of the news organizations to run this story. I also include a couple of pictures of my brother so incase anyone knows anything or has seen him before, to please contact me. I am including in this e-mail 2 pictures of him incase you run this story inwhich I hope you do. I would like to include my e-mail address and phone number incase some one reads or sees this that they can contact me.

My phone number is, 850-944-9688 and my e-mail address is, padilla1956@cox.netOur family has already lost 2 siblings and can not bear to lose another one. I would appreciate any help you can give me. If you need any additional information, Please don’t hesitate to contact me. Thank you so much for your time.

Joseph B. Padilla, SR.

Mr. Padilla’s brother has posted a similar message elsewhere on the net, and the way it is worded is somewhat suggestive of boilerplate. I certainly hope his brother shows up safe and sound somewhere. If you are interested, have the means and think it would be useful, consider helping this family out by reposting or pointing to this post. Is it getting much coverage in the conventional press, has anyone noticed?

A Google search reveals that there is an FBI Most Wanted poster seeking information about the whereabouts of Ben Charles Padilla here:

“Law enforcement officials believe that Ben Charles Padilla may have been on board the plane at the time it disappeared. The FBI is interested in locating Padilla, as he may have information as to the whereabouts of the plane.”

(This is the real FBI site, isn’t it?)

“Making a major foray into partisan politics, multibillionaire George Soros is committing $10 million to a new Democratic-leaning group aimed at defeating President Bush next year.

Soros, who in the past has donated on a smaller scale to Democratic candidates and the party, pledged the money to a political action committee called America Coming Together, spokesman Michael Vachon said Friday.

The group plans a $75 million effort to defeat Bush and ‘elect progressive officials at every level in 2004,’ targeting 17 key states: Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

‘The fate of the world depends on the United States, and President Bush is leading us in the wrong direction,’ Soros said in a written statement. ‘ACT is an effective way to mobilize civil society, to convince people to go to the polls and vote for candidates who will reassert the values of the greatest open society in the world.'” ABC [thank you, Richard]

A federal judge sentenced a man to a year in prison Monday for creating an anarchist Web site with links to sites on how to build bombs. CNN

While a recent legal ruling to which I blinked here promised some protection to webloggers against libel actions arising simply from their linking to defamatory material, the implications of this ruling for webloggers and, in general, for freedom of expression may go a long way in the other direction. Do webloggers have to take care not to link to advocates of subversion on the web at all?

Digital Cameras Go Disposable, and for $11 a pop. PC World

“Harvard Law School is planning to put more than a million documents from the Nuremberg trials on the Internet, allowing ready access to records of hearings into the war crimes of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.” Newsday

This is, believe it not, billed as part VII of a series. It is a post-poem itself, a string of word-things sparyed at us: “…(T)he post-post poets write the real stuff, the basics, the poem without the baggage of meaning and connection, the liberated poem itself, stripped and streaking down the freeway, no claim on your time or attention longer than the time it takes to watch one run by. Was it human? Was it naked? Did it wave? Was it a prank? What college is it from? What were those word-things it sprayed at us?” Web Del Sol

The whys and wherefores of ‘releasing a salty, protein-rich fluid from the lacrimal apparatus, improvising adjustments in the muscles of facial expression, adding a few non-specific and incomprehensible vocalisations, and convulsively inhaling and exhaling air with spasms of the respiratory and truncal muscle groups.’ FT Magazine

Feds: Hijackers Crashed Flt. 93 on 9/11: “A Sept. 11 hijacker in the cockpit of United Airlines Flight 93 instructed terrorist-pilot Ziad Jarrah to crash the jetliner moments before it slammed into a Pennsylvania field because of a fierce passenger uprising in the cabin, recently disclosed testimony by the FBI (news – web sites) director shows.

The theory described by FBI Director Robert Mueller, based on the government’s analysis of cockpit recordings, discounts the popular perception of insurgent passengers grappling with terrorists inside the cockpit, trying to seize the plane’s controls, immediately before the crash.” Yahoo! News

Schwarzenegger’s much-touted candidacy to replace embattled Gray Davis seems at first nothing so much as unbelievable, even after Reagan. It is ludicrous and contemptible that, recalling a governor for his supposed failings at complex budgetary management, the people of California would put an actor (if you can call him that) with absolutely no fiscal experience into the role, for no reason other than his hyped-up celebrity. But actors have long been in bed with politicians — in Schwarzenegger’s case, literally. And in a media-driven political landscape where voters have an MTV depth-of-attention and passively pliable hero worship, it makes a strange kind of sense. An actor’s skills — playing a role, making the unbelievable believable, banking on charisma that has nothing to do with real human worth — are increasingly indistinct from those of a political leader. The lines are divorced from reality and their only goal is to spin a yarn convincingly out of whole cloth. Political campaigns have long since stopped being run as anything other than media events. Fitting that his candidacy was announced on late-night TV. But then I knew what a turn for the worst we had taken when Clinton showed up as a saxophone-toting guest on one or the other of them.

It is no wonder Reagan is revered, in the circles of his constituents, as a great, heroic and successful President; he was the perfect blank screen on which to project their hopes and agendas and, as is Dubya by reason of his dim-wittedness, a perfect front man for the scriptwriters behind the scenes, especially by the beginning of his second term when he already suffered the early manifestations of Alzheimer’s dementia. It remains to be seen if Schwarzenegger is as much of an infinitely malleable cipher. Fortunately, governator or not, he cannot become President on Constitutional grounds because he is not native-born… or will a rising cachophonous chorus of American celebrity-worship demand that that be changed as well?

As Gray Davis sits stunned by how likely it is now looking that he will lose the governor’s mansion, public discussion suggests that the recall process may set a wonderful populist precedent. Politicians may start to fear, the argument goes, that if they do not do their job well, they may lose their position. The ideal of serving at the people’s pleasure will have some teeth to it. I fear the opposite consequence; that the last vestiges of potentially responsible governanace are dropping to the need to pander to least-common-denominator popularity polls. The only saving grace may be, I hope against hope, that the ludicrousness of giving the governor’s mansion to the Terminator may become so emblematic of the decline of American politics that it catalyzes a backlash.

I’m noticing the inflammatory Right starting to relish rubbing our noses in the Schwarzenegger candidacy. James Taranto’s obsequious Opinion Journal piece from the WSJ has him offending European sensibilities because he is a flamboyant macho American and, to boot, an American by choice. And Lileks bleats (he takes pleasure in calling it that himself; nothing like disarming the critics who would shut you up by shoving your own foot as deep as you can down your own throat) about how it will revitalize politics by enlightening the celebrity worshippers to some new possibilities. Lileks is not opposed to admitting that the appearance of likeability and trustworthiness in an otherwise unqualified candidate are the only things Arnold has going for him, but then I suppose that should be no surprise from people who worship George W. Bush.

Addendum: Although so far emanating from people who know enough to be embarrassed, and therefore couched as tongue-in-cheek, the cries to amend the Constitution to allow a Predator presidency have begun:

It drove the Angry Left nuts when Dubya baited the US military’s honey-trap by telling would-be terrorists in Iraq to “bring ’em on” — Dubya’s Texas drawl simply ruled when delivering that line. But The Terminator can deliver not only an ominous accent but a physical presence that bodes major mayhem. Certainly Dubya, Arnold, and Clint Eastwood-as-Dirty-Harry collectively comprise the “Axis of Righteous Über-Taunters,” or at least the “Masters of Super-Menacing Sound-Bites.” I very much want our President to be someone who can, when appropriate, take a blunt, pithy, and aggressive phrase, and then deliver it into the CNN microphones in just the utterly convincing way that will turn it into the shrieking, bed-wetting #1 cause of recurring nightmares for even non-English speakers like Osama bin Ladin.

This is consistent with my longstanding claim that Bush’s inarticulateness has been a major part of his appeal to the idiot fringe of the Right.

The new 15th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style is out this month, making heads swoon in some circles. I think it an equally important gauge of the evolution of living English — the written side in this case — as the more-often-discussed changes in successive editions of the OED are for the spoken side. The tension between de facto usage patterns and prescriptive rules is such fun to watch if you don’t take either one as your ultimate touchstone.

“Blocking the formation of neurons in the hippocampus blocks the behavioral effects of antidepressants in mice, say researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Their finding lends new credence to the proposed role of such neurogenesis in lifting mood. It also helps to explain why antidepressants typically take a few weeks to work, note Rene Hen, Ph.D., Columbia University, and colleagues, who report on their study in the August 8th Science.” EurekAlert!

You heard it here first; we are in the midst of a fundamental paradigm shift reconceptualizing how psychiatric medications work and, by extension, the nature of psychiatric disease. For more than fifty years, since the advent of the modern psychopharmaceutical age, mechanisms of action of these drugs have been conceived of in terms of their effects on neurotransmitters at the synapses between neurons. This filtered down to the lay public as the “chemical imbalance” notion of psychiatric illness. As my diatribe here about Peter Breggin’s diatribe against biological psychiatry last week suggests, this model for psychiatric illness and drug action has not lent itself readily to empirical validation and the CNS remained a black box. As far as it has gone and as far as it has been believed, the neurotransmitter theories of mental illneess have functioned in the same way that mythology does. I don’t mean that this is useless, but it has no ready answers to the agnostics’ challenges.

But I suggested that Breggin’s critique was a straw man agrument, railing against a reductionist and outmoded version of psychiatric knowledge without much relationship to contemporary findings. Findings like the one discussed in this news item take us into a realm where we understand that structural, as well as functional, changes in numbers, connectivity and vitality of neurons in specfic brain regions underpin psychaitric conditions, and that the medications known to be effective against those diseases can be demonstrated to protect against or reverse those neuronal-structural changes. Even Breggin suggested that he might be persuaded by pretty pictures demonstrating the reality of psychiatric illness.

This is true not only for depression and antidepressants, as discussed in this study, but for other major mental illnesses as well. In schizophrenia research, for example, a new focus has emerged in the last decade or so on the neurotransmitter NMDA, now considered a widespread and crucial excitatory agent in the brain but virtually unstudied just several decades before when I went to medical school. NMDA is important not only in the classical neurotransmitter sense (of its level of activity underlying the functional state of various neuronal circuits in the brain) but because it is an “excitotoxin”, causing neuronal injury. There are ways in which life stresses injure or destroy neurons, and there are ways in which health-promoting activities (medications but also exercise, stress reduction, nutrition, rest, etc.) protect against or reverse such damage, visibly, demonstrably. The perennial tortured efforts to bridge the longstanding gulf between the physiological and the psychological in psychiatry by suggesting pie-in-the-sky models of how experience might be transduced into brain changes are finally bearing empirical fruit, and with that advance will fall the last vestiges of the artificial distinctions betwen brain and mind.

Better Ebola Vaccine for Monkeys Offers Hope for Humans:”Federal scientists have developed a fast-acting, single-shot vaccine that makes monkeys immune to the Ebola virus six times as fast as an earlier version.

If the same approach works in humans, it could control or prevent outbreaks of the rare infection that causes high fever, severe pain, bleeding from the eyes and usually death within a few days.” NY Times

“This website features a series of drawings made by children who were abducted by aliens for the alien purpose of creating a new race of alien/human hybrids. The drawings show different aspects of the alien abduction phenomenon and include cruel medical procedures performed on children, children boarding alien spacecraft with other aliens, children playing with alien/hybrid children so the alien/hybrids can learn how to be human, and children being taken by aliens against their will, and the types of aliens encountered by the abducted children.

The pictures were drawn by children who successfully resisted the aliens by using a ‘thought screen helmet’ which blocks the telepathic control aliens have over humans. The helmet is a leather hat lined with eight sheets of Velostat, an electrically conductive plastic used to prevent static electricity damage to electronic components. The girl in this photo has two other cloth hats lined with Velostat which she wears to school. ” — Mike Menkin

“The missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have embarrassed the Bush administration, which had assured the world they would be about as hard to find as moisture in Seattle. But the controversy has had one clear benefit to the president: distracting the American people from an even bigger fraud.” Chicago Tribune Chapman reminds us that not only were there no WMD but there was no connection to the WoT®.

Don’t listen to me condemning Bush for bequeathing to my children a legacy of renewed nuclear terror we were, hearteningly, just getting out from underneath. Listen to someone who knows. “Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba said the United States worshipped nuclear weapons as ‘God’ and blamed it for jeopardizing the global nuclear non-proliferation regime.” CommonDreams

Related: Nicholas Kristof: ‘Blood on Our Hands’:

Tomorrow will mark the anniversary of one of the most morally contentious events of the 20th century, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. And after 58 years, there’s an emerging consensus: we Americans have blood on our hands.

There has been a chorus here and abroad that the U.S. has little moral standing on the issue of weapons of mass destruction because we were the first to use the atomic bomb. NY Times op-ed

And while we’re on the topic of the Bush regime’s crimes against humanity (no, it is not me who is being incendiary; read on): Military — Officials confirm dropping firebombs on Iraqi troops; results are ‘remarkably similar’ to using napalm.

“American jets killed Iraqi troops with firebombs – similar to the controversial napalm used in the Vietnam War – in March and April as Marines battled toward Baghdad.

Marine Corps fighter pilots and commanders who have returned from the war zone have confirmed dropping dozens of incendiary bombs near bridges over the Saddam Canal and the Tigris River. The explosions created massive fireballs.” Sign On San Diego

During the military action against Iraq, I posted an item about the suspicion that this was happening and of official denials.

”

Don’t want the government to know where you are? Throw away your cell, stop taking the subway, and pay the toll in cash.”

What your salesman probably failed to tell you—and may not even realize—is that an E911-capable phone can give your wireless carrier continual updates on your location. The phone is embedded with a Global Positioning System chip, which can calculate your coordinates to within a few yards by receiving signals from satellites. GPS technology gave U.S. military commanders a vital edge during Gulf War II, and sailors and pilots depend on it as well. In the E911-capable phone, the GPS chip does not wait until it senses danger, springing to life when catastrophe strikes; it’s switched on whenever your handset is powered up and is always ready to transmit your location data back to a wireless carrier’s computers. Verizon or T-Mobile can figure out which manicurist you visit just as easily as they can pinpoint a stranded motorist on Highway 59.

So what’s preventing them from doing so, at the behest of either direct marketers or, perhaps more chillingly, the police? Not the law, which is essentially mum on the subject of location-data privacy. As often happens with emergent technology, the law has struggled to keep pace with the gizmo. No federal statute is keeping your wireless provider from informing Dunkin’ Donuts that your visits to Starbucks have been dropping off and you may be ripe for a special coupon offer. Nor are cops explicitly required to obtain a judicial warrant before compiling a record of where you sneaked off to last Thursday night. Despite such obvious potential for abuse, the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, the American consumer’s ostensible protectors, show little enthusiasm for stepping into the breach. As things stand now, the only real barrier to the dissemination of your daily movements is the benevolence of the telecommunications industry. A show of hands from those who find this a comforting thought? Anyone?

— Brendan Koerner, Legal Affairs [via Politech]

Plane in terrorism scare turns up sporting a respray: For some reason, this ongoing story has captivated the attention of myself and several friends. Thanks, A., for sending me the link to this update.

“A Boeing 727 cargo plane which caused panic among US intelligence agencies after mysteriously disappearing from Angola’s main airport turned up last week in Guinea, the Guardian can reveal.

The plane, which was feared to be in the hands of international terrorists, was spotted on June 28 in Conakry, Guinea’s capital, by Bob Strother, a Canadian pilot. It had been resprayed and given the Guinean registration 3XGOM. But at least the last two letters of its former tail-number, N844AA, were still showing.

The plane, which was recently converted into a fuel tanker, was said to be owned by a member of West Africa’s Lebanese business community, and was being used to shuttle goods between Beirut and Conakry, according to Mr Strother.

‘There’s absolutely no doubt it’s the same aircraft, the old registration is clearly visible,’ said Mr Strother by phone from Conakry. ‘Whoever owns it must have some important friends to get it re-registered in two days: going by the book, the whole process usually takes a couple of months.’

Western intelligence agencies were said to be scouring Africa’s clear skies and mouldering runways for the missing tanker, fearing that it could easily be aimed at an American or British embassy on the continent. Yet an American official in the region said this was the first he had heard of the plane since its disappearance from Angola’s capital, Luanda, on May 25.” Guardian/UK

Hello,

I’m a time traveler stuck here in 2003. Upon arriving here my dimensional warp generator stopped working. I trusted a company here by the name of LLC Lasers to repair my Generation 3 52 4350A watch unit, and they fled on me. I am going to need a new DWG unit, prefereably the rechargeable AMD wrist watch model with the GRC79 induction motor, four I80200 warp stabilizers, 512GB of SRAM and the menu driven GUI with front panel XID display.

I will take whatever model you have in stock, as long as its received certification for being safe on carbon based life forms.

In terms of payment:

I dont have any Galactic Credits left. Payment can be made in platinum gold or 2003 currency upon safe delivery of unit.

INSTRUCTIONS MUST BE FOLLOWED EXACTLY:

Please transport unit in either a brown paper bag or box to below coordinates on Wednesday August 6th at (exactly 5:00pm) Eastern Standard Time on the dot. A few minutes prior will be ok, but it cannot be after. If you miss this timeframe please email me. I will not be there prior to 4:45pm EST, so do not transport before then.

Item is to be delivered at (out of service tennis court) located at: Latitude N 42.47935 & Longitude W 071.17355 and the Elevation is 119.

WARNING: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO TRANSPORT ITEM BY REGULAR MEANS OF TELEPORTATION. THEY ARE MONITORING AND WILL REDIRECT THE SIGNAL!!

I DO NOT CARE HOW YOU HAVE TO GET IT HERE, JUST DO IT IN A WAY THAT NO SPYING EYES WILL POSSIBLY BE ABLE TO REDIRECT THE TRANSFERENCE. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOU BE ABLE TO MONITOR THE TRANSFER.

HOW ARE YOU GOING TO SEND IT SO THAT THEY CANNOT REDIRECT IT??? If in doubt do not transport actual unit until your method of transfer can be confirmed as a success. You just might need to send a intergalactic courier to deliver item safely to me. If so be VERY careful at how they approach me IN MY WHITE CAR.

After unit has been delivered please email me at: info@federalfundingprogram.com

with payment instructions. Do not reply directly back to this email.

Thank You

Anyone out there who might help this unfortunate individual out? Who knows to what location the specified latitude and longitude point? [Is this a troll for whatever is at federalfundingprogram.com?]

How George W. Bush Won the 2004 Presidential Election:“Purging voter lists is just the beginning: the U.S. has embraced a form of electronic voting that is unreliable, unverifiable and funded by the radical Christian right.” — Sandeep Atwal, infernalpress.com (“No Smoking Gun, But Plenty of Bullets on the Floor”).

One of those (obviously the best informed, and putting me right in my unlettered place) who wrote back to comment on my post about tortured Indian English [making me thankful I read FmH’s comments section] was Nancy Gandhi, a weblogger who characterizes herself as “an outsider in Chennai”, in Tamil Nadu, southern India [I didn’t know mapquest did India! — FmH]. Under the Fire Star is her exotic, rich and enriching weblog, largely observing Indian culture. I gather she is an expat westerner; she does not directly tell much about herself. You get to know her through her exquisite eye, but are left longing for an “about me” page, something (anything) of a narrative about what she is doing in Chennai and how she came to be there. Would love to learn the significance of the weblog’s title as well. I speculate as to whether she is married to Ramesh Gandhi, to whose web page she offers a link. In any case, drink deeply, and drift back through her several months’ archives. And here is a catalogue of Indian webloggers, if you wish to drink more broadly.

Postscript: Nancy Gandhi writes back to say, in part:

“Under the Fire Star refers to Agni Nakshetram, ‘fire

star’, the astrological period ruled by the fire-god

Agni, which is traditionally the hottest time of the

year here. It’s always hot — I feel that Agni should

by rights rule the entire year.”

Well, no one knows for sure: “Unbeknown to most people there is not a single accepted way of telling the time, but several different scales running concurrently. The differences are usually small, but the scales can be as much as 30 seconds apart and the gap between them is growing steadily.” Guardian/UK

…to get into wireless networking, if ever: “JustDeals.com is offering the D-Link AirPlus DI-614 2.4GHz 802.11b 22Mbps Wireless Cable/DSL Router for $28.95, $6 off their regular price. Use coupon code ‘DI614’ to get the discount. The router has a built-in 4-port switch, advanced firewall features with parental controls, and is compatible with XBoxLive and Playstation 2. It’s the best current price we’ve seen. Coupon expires 8/11/03.” [via b0ing b0ing]

One of my readers says that the sidebar element overlaps the main text when this page is viewed in Safari, although not in Mozilla for Mac. Any other Mac users there noticing anything funny? Anyone have any idea why this should be happening? Does it depend on the type size at which you view the page? This might make certain elements too wide to fit within the contraints of the sidebar but I don’t understand why it would overlay the entire sidebar on the main text area. If I blow up the type size in Mozilla under Windows, the browser I use, I can get certain lines in the sidebar, such as the “How to get here: gelwan.com/followme.html” line, to extrude themselves, for example.

Is it something to do with the most-recently added graphic in the sidebar, the “Don’t Tread on Others” item? Is there some CSS element I’m using that Safari doesn’t like? Is this Safari’s problem or mine? (You don’t have to answer that one; I know, I know…).

Am I a standout in the ineptitude of my attempt at CSS-based layout? It is hard to imagine other people’s pages don’t have similar difficulty, but maybe I’m a real outlier. Maybe you can’t really do this stuff yourself unless you’re a web design professional. Me, I just stay up to all hours of the night tinkering with the design of the page, essentially by trial and error (lots of both…), after a day of seeing patients and putting my children to bed.

Sorry for the frustrated outburst. I just want to keep reading FmH a pleasurable, easy experience for all of you out there regardless of platform. We just went around last month on the issue of the page’s slow load time (which I hope is improved now) and now this. Any suggestions would be appreciated (except returning to table-based layout).

The fractured and stately English spoken by top Indians: “Welcome to the wonderful world of Hinglish, a Hindu-inspired dialect that pulsates with energy, invention and humour.” The Spectator/UK

I have a different take on ‘Hinglish’. As an extensive traveller on the Indian subcontinent in years past, I consider it to be a tortured tongue, painful not so much to listen to — it is indeed elegantly and whimsically spoken — but (since I believe that our language shapes, constrains and facilitates what we can think, or at least think easily) because I have found the circumlocutions of Hinglish to be indicative of a cultural thought disorder, a cultural schizophrenia, the keenest manifestation of the torment of an entire civilization from having English colonial morés grafted over them. I cannot help wondering why it is not as embarrassing and painful to contemporary Indians as as Stepin Fetchit is to modern African American sensibilities. And whether The Spectator finding it so endearing is not a residue of the cultural-imperialist attitude.

Although the White House has already issued denials, The Washington Post is reporting that “Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, have signaled to the White House that they intend to step down even if President Bush is reelected, setting the stage for a substantial reshaping of the administration’s national security team that has remained unchanged through the September 2001 terrorist attacks, two wars and numerous other crises.”

Of course, it is to spend more quality time with their families, rather than because of any compunctions about how they are being used by the Administration for morally repugnant foreign policy ends. The debate about whether Powell in fact has any such compunctions (I am of the persuasion that he does, compromising his good soldiering and getting him in trouble with the Wolfowitz clique from early on; the only thing that saved him this long is that we’ve been at war and he takes his obligation to his commander-in-thief too seriously to sow more open seeds of discord in wartime) may be settled if he accepts the enormous advances he’ll undoubtedly be offered to write his “kiss-and-tell” memoirs soon after his departure rather than continuing to protect BushCo’s vested interests by waiting.

In any case, can you envision what foreign policy will be like under Condoleeza Rice, such a handmaiden of America’s most important interests that she has a supertanker named after her? On the other hand, Paul Wolfowitz is the other leading contender according to Beltway buzz, and Newt Gingrich is interpreted by some to be actively campaigning for the job as well. Thank heaven Bush’s reelection no longer looks like a shoo-in. Now go do something about it.

“A National Academy of Sciences study validates long-held doubts about the reliability of polygraphs. So why does the government still rely on them to screen applicants for jobs?” Boston Globe Magazine

“Psychiatrists agree now on a point that was long debated: Suicide can run in families. They do not know, however, how this risk is transferred from one family member to another — whether it is ”learned” behavior, passed on through a grim emotional ripple effect, or a genetic inheritance, as some scientists theorize. But new research published this week in the American Journal of Psychiatry prepares ground for a genetic search, suggesting that the trait that links high-suicide families is not simply mental illness, but mental illness combined with a more specific tendency to ”impulsive aggressiveness.”” Boston Globe It appears obvious to me it is not simply a matter of biology or upbringing; we’re supposed to be way beyond that sort of dichotomous thinking by now. I have seen multi-suicide families where it seems a matter of unconscious identification or even conscious emulation, others where the biological depression-plus-impulsive-aggressive-proneness model makes the most sense, but usually it appears they work in tandem — some balance between being genetically vulnerable and having your thoughts shaped by the belief that it is your destiny to die by your own hand.

“After more than a decade of working behind layers of front companies and in hidden laboratories, Iran appears to be in the late stages of developing the capacity to build a nuclear bomb.” Boston Globe

Aroma-added packaging aims to allure you: “What smells good, sells. This well-known fact is pushing marketers – and the military – to inject scents into its food containers.” Christian Science Monitor If you consider with revulsion every such insidious advance in big business’ ability to take manipulation of your hearts and minds to unprecedented heights, consider the possibilities for ‘culture-jamming’ aromatic packaging. Easily, powerfully, unforgettably.

“Washington hopes to ease foreign-policy woes in the Middle East by wooing hearts and minds with a new Arabic-language radio network, satellite TV channel and glossy monthly magazine. It’s the funky side of the war on terror… (Toni) Braxton is in a new kind of army, standing at attention with Celine Dion, Eric Clapton, Ace of Base and the rapper Coolio, making up a Trojan-horse brigade drafted to seduce young Arab adults into admiring the United States.” The Globe and Mail Offensive indeed!

The solar system has come down to earth among the potato fields of northern Maine

So now this town of fewer than 10,000 souls, tucked into the far reaches of way northern Maine, really is located on the far side of the moon.

To be precise, it stands 1 mile north of planet Earth. This, of course, assumes you are calculating via the Maine Solar System Model, which places Earth and its moon next to Percy’s Auto Sales down along Route 1.

The Maine Solar System Model?

Absolutely. A community endeavor four years in the making before its completion in June, the MSSM is a three-dimensional roadside scale model of the solar system, stretching from the Northern Maine Museum of Science in Presque Isle 40 miles southward to the hamlet of Houlton. The scale is 93 million to 1; the Earth is 93 million miles from the sun, so here the model of the Earth is 1 mile from the sun. A wooden arch and wall painting at the museum, almost 50 feet in diameter, represents the sun, while Pluto, which takes some finding at the Houlton Information Center, is a 1-inch sphere. The other eight planets in this no-budget, grass-roots creation sit atop poles strung out along sparsely populated Route 1. Mercury is an accurately painted billiard ball at Burrelle’s Information Services. Saturn is a sphere with 10-foot-wide rings custom-made of steel, foam, and fiberglass that rises majestically across the highway from Carol Reeves’s house. And so it goes through five communities, a line of heavenly bodies standing tall among the gently rolling potato fields. Boston Globe

Here’s an interactive model diagramming the superimposition of the solar system on the map of that part of Maine.

And here’s a solar system model meta-page. (“Making scale models of the solar system is a useful way to learn about it. Here are various related pages.”)

A History of Teeth: “Psychically, metaphorically, evolutionarily, teeth go way down and way back and carry multiple, paradoxical meanings. The tale of teeth is the ultimate oral history, and if it is only by coincidence that tooth rhymes with truth, the words still make a pretty good team.” NY Times

Two Views: “In this two part series, Ian Williams argues that progressives should not allow Bush’s misappropriation of humanitarian intervention to force them to abandon a principle that is both moral and urgently required. John R. MacArthur counters that liberals have long been lobbying for interventions that would override international law.” AlterNet

Wanna Bet? “Outraged by the Pentagon’s plan to create a futures market for terrorist attacks, a group of academics is setting up a futures market for predicting what the White House is up to.” Wired

Leaning on media outlets not to carry Democratic-sponsored ad on the WMD deception:

“Apparently the Bushites think that ‘Irony’ is the name of a far off planet, for they never seem able to see it in their own work.

Irony is George W standing adamantly against affirmative action, oblivious to the obvioius fact that he’s the privileged poster-child of America’s aggressive affirmative action program for the rich.

But one of the latest actions by the Bushites proves that they couldn’t find irony if we let them use the Hubble Telescope. It came in the form of a threatening letter sent to Wisconsin TV stations by the Republican Party’s top lawyer, Caroline Hunter. It seems that these stations were airing an ad produced by the Democratic Party, that calls for a bipartisan independent investigation of the false information used by Bush and the White House to mislead the American people about the supposed ‘imminent threat’ posed by weapons of mass destruction they claimed were in Iraq.

The lawyer’s letter to the TV stations demanded that they not air this ad because – get this – she blithely says that stations have ‘no right to willfully spread false information in a deliberate attempt to mislead the American people.'” — Jim Hightower

Related: UNC catches flak from right-wing for asking incoming freshmen to read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

“Founded in 1996, the Terrorism Research Center, Inc. (TRC) is an independent institute dedicated to the research of terrorism, information warfare and security, critical infrastructure protection, homeland security, and other issues of low-intensity political violence and gray-area phenomena. The TRC represents a new generation of terrorism and security analysis, combining expertise with technology to maximize the scope, depth and impact of our research for practical implementation.

This site is the on-line portal to our terrorism knowledgebase, a dynamic relational database of public domain and proprietary content. Navigate the site by either selecting the area of interest from the navigation bar or by searching for specific keywords.”

“After more than a year of complaints by some US anti-war activists that they were being unfairly targeted by airport security, Washington has admitted the existence of a list, possibly hundreds or even thousands of names long, of people it deems worthy of special scrutiny at airports.

The list had been kept secret until its disclosure last week by the new US agency in charge of aviation safety, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). And it is entirely separate from the relatively well-publicised ‘no-fly’ list, which covers about 1,000 people believed to have criminal or terrorist ties that could endanger the safety of their fellow passengers.” Independent/UK

“A close aide to Saddam Hussein says the Iraqi dictator did in fact get rid of his weapons of mass destruction but deliberately kept the world guessing about it in an effort to divide the international community and stave off a U.S. invasion.

The strategy, which turned out to be a serious miscalculation, was designed to make the Iraqi dictator look strong in the eyes of the Arab world, while countries such as France and Russia were wary of joining an American-led attack. At the same time, Saddam retained the technical know-how and brain power to restart the programs at any time.

U.S. defense officials and weapons experts are considering this guessing-game theory as the search for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons continues. If true, it would indicate there was no imminent unconventional weapons threat from Iraq, an argument U.S. President George W. Bush used to go to war.” Taiwan News

This update on the mysterious disease of which I wrote yesterday describes the fifteen cases as separated in time — “three fell gravely ill with pneumonia in March, three more in April, two in May, three again in June and four in July, according to the army.” — and space — “according to the defence officials, the pneumonia has afflicted soldiers deployed in various parts of Iraq and belonging to different units” — , to answer some of my questions. al jazeerah.info

Ben Kerschberg’s Blog on Mental Health:

Ben Kerschberg is a graduate of Yale Law School and the University of Virginia. Since graduating from law school, he has clerked for a federal court of appeals judge, practiced law, and worked as an industry analyst for a public software company in Silicon Valley… He will spend the next two years as a Fellow at Yale Law School, where he hopes to write a book about the manner in which American society stigmatizes mental illness.

Ben Kerschberg knew at age seven that he would one day attempt suicide. … It was not an idea he toyed with. He just knew. And he was right.

In (his book) Piercing The Veil, Kerschberg takes us with unflinching candor on a journey that begins in his sophomore year of college, when he suffers the first of a series of repeated and calamitous nervous breakdowns precipitated by daily suicidal ideations. His lifetime battle with his inner demons culminates, at age 30, in a failed suicide attempt and hospitalization in a psychiatric institution. His astonishing tale opens the eyes of those who have never suffered from mental illness and empowers those who have but feel that their truth must be bottled, corked, and sealed with wax. At times disarmingly funny, but more often poetically tragic, Kerschberg’s account breaks onto the scene with a powerful voice that will leave people reaching out to their friends and loved ones.

The weblog is a labor of love, doing a good job covering mental health-related media items. I haven’t looked at the book but it is available for free download here.

“The funeral touched off an

‘They know when I’m lying and when I’m not…’: “So after he drifted into a neighbor’s room the other day to visit a friend who is also a convicted child molester, he quickly reported to his landlady that he had spied a tiny photograph of a blond girl. A day later, corrections officers who work closely with the landlady searched the room and confiscated a huge stash of pornographic pictures and videos, a miniature Barbie doll and a stack of photographs of children.

Within hours (his) neighbor was under arrest for violating the conditions of his probation and was on his way back to jail.” NY Times

“If you’re going to be a Master of the Universe in London, you’d better watch your manners. At least that’s the message from an English court.” NY Times

The curator of European decorative arts at the Art Institute of Chicago says that Dan Brown’s New York Times bestselling thriller, which “unabashedly adapts Leonardo’s art and theories, which he says on his Web site he researched extensively, to his own fictional requirements”, doesn’t have much of a clue. NY Times

“The tangled relationship of art, illusion and the marketplace being what it is — an ongoing melodrama, set to the strains of keening violins — it so happened that 250 tuxedoed, gowned and bejeweled members of the patronage class showed up for an Italianate palace ball one night this spring at a defunct train station in a Jersey City marsh. Guests were met at the gate by a young man in a pleated skirt, pointy black slippers and a frilly blouse under a gold brocaded vest, who bowed theatrically and said, ”Buona notte, signori e signore.” The title of the ball was Palazzo di Cremona, and the domed terminal of the Central Railroad of New Jersey was done up for the evening with garlands of citrus leaves and blood oranges. Three former governors of New Jersey were present, along with Paolo Bodini, mayor of Cremona, Italy, a 2,300-year-old town north of Milan. Cremona occupies a status among violin aficionados akin to that of Detroit among car buffs, having been the ground on which such violin-making luminaries as Niccolo Amati, Giuseppe Guarneri and, above all, Antonio Stradivari thrived. Mayor Bodini was a guest of the evening’s honorees, an elderly couple named Evelyn and Herbert Axelrod, who had gained vast wealth by addressing themselves to the needs of caretakers of guppies, goldfish, parakeets, lizards, gerbils and the like, and who elicited, throughout the evening, comparison to the beneficent Medicis of Florence.” NY Times Magazine

Terry Gross’ interview with Vernor Vinge for NPR’s Fresh Air: “The author of 16 books of science fiction, he gained a cult following for his early role in writing about cyber-culture and the Internet. His new book Across Realtime, came out earlier this year. He talks about the difficulty of writing science fiction when technology out dates itself as rapidly as it does.” Realmedia/Windows Media

Der Spiegel interviews George Akerlof, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics. “Past administrations from the time of Alexander Hamilton have on the average run responsible budgetary policies. What we have here is a form of looting.”

Recent Decisions on Gays, Affirmative Action Does Not Outweigh ‘Dubious Rulings,’ She Says. Washington Post

on the Down Low: “To their wives and colleagues, they’re straight. To the men they have sex with, they’re forging an exuberant new identity. To the gay world, they’re kidding themselves. To health officials, they’re spreading AIDS throughout the black community.” NY Times Magazine

“The man who performed a shrinking trick on previous versions of Windows claims today that he’s reduced Win95 to under 10MB.

Windows 95, he says, works in real (safe) mode and doesn’t require the registry but simply SYSTEM.INI.

Nor, he says, does it need a swap file to run and it can be run from a RAMdisk using a free utility.

He claims that the 10MB version of Windows 9X will support multiple MS DOS Windows, and he claims that it can be shrunk even further.” The Inquirer

“Some scientists hope blueberry burgers will be coming to a restaurant, supermarket or school cafeteria near you.

Al Bushway, a food scientist at the University of Maine, says his lab has been stirring blueberry puree or blueberry powder into beef, chicken and turkey patties. The researchers are trying to boost the nutritional value of burgers and help farmers improve their berry sales.

Blueberries add cancer-fighting antioxidants to the patties and may slightly reduce the fat content of burgers.” Salon

Past becomes present:

“The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art is a sprawling complex of old brick mill buildings given new life while retaining a sense of history: Layers of paint, for instance, were deliberately left intact as a visual echo of the past.

For this year’s big show at MASS MoCA, ”Yankee Remix,” nine artists browsed though the archives and storage of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, borrowed a wide array of artifacts, and wove these fragments of history into new installations. It’s another case of reviving the past, drawing it into the present.” Boston Globe

I was at MassMoCA last weekend and was not nearly as impressed by this exhibit as the reviewer. However, Robert Wilson’s overwhlmingly powerful, magical, disturbing reconceptualization of the Stations of the Cross needs to be seen.

And here’s another renovated factory space serving up outsized art for the Northeast. Boston Globe

No, due to wildlife: “Colorado authorities joined their colleagues in Utah on Friday in blaming 45 Denver-area cat slayings in the past year on wildlife, ending weeks of suspicion that budding psychopaths and devil worshippers were killing the pets.” azcentral [via Daily Rotten]

Car Crash Reveals Racist Church: “A car crash this week in a town near New Orleans revealed that a building thought to be a home improvement business was actually a white supremacist church, police said on Friday.

The vehicle smashed into the brick storefront in Chalmette, Louisiana, after colliding with two other cars and came to rest amid stacks of racist books and pamphlets, including Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, they said.

A sign proclaimed the building the ‘Southern Home Improvement Center,’ said Lt. Mike Sanders of the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff’s Department, but investigators found out it was the New Christian Crusade Church and headquarters of the Christian Defense League.” Reuters You’ve got to admire their logic — church as “home improvement”?

‘An audio tape purportedly from top al Qaeda official Ayman al-Zawahri warned the United States on Sunday it would pay a high price if it harmed detainees at a U.S. base in Cuba, saying the “real battle” had not yet begun.’ Reuters

And: Afghan Political Violence on the Rise: “Instability in South Grows as Pro-Taliban Fighters Attack Allies of U.S.-Led Forces” Washington Post

“Only future historians will be able to sort out the Iraq war’s ultimate validity. It is too late or too early for the rest of us.” — Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times op-ed

“Maybe the president and his swaggering circle should think about a “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” makeover.” — Maureen Dowd, NY Times op-ed

Why are Liberian soldiers wearing fright wigs?: “Few things exemplify the chaos of Liberia more than the sight of doped-up, AK-47-wielding 15-year-olds roaming the streets decked out in fright wigs and tattered wedding gowns. Indeed, some of the more fully accessorized soldiers in Charles Taylor’s militia even tote dainty purses and don feather boas. Why did this practice begin and what is the logic behind it?” Slate [via walker‘s uncanny eye for such stuff!]

A reader asked me what I thought about Peter Breggin’s longstanding critique of modern psychiatric practice, as reflected in this review of one of his recent books. My first reaction was, “Oh, no, Breggin again.” I have such difficulty with his argument with psychiatry (and such curiosity about what personality factors and life experiences congealed as such rabid fervor in him) that I usually just dismiss him. But (sigh) this reader, concerned by the antimedication arguments here, asked for a response.

As the reviewer encapsulates it, this book “neatly summarizes many of the best arguments against biological psychiatry”, and that is precisely the problem. They are simply arguments against, with no balanced deliberations. Breggin feels it is a mistake to view depressed feelings as a disease; in doing so, he is reacting to an outmoded version of psychiatric theory which had not demonstrated the structural and functional brain changes we now can see in untreated severe depression. Admittedly, the dividing line between ‘normal’ depressed feelings — which are a part of everyone’s mood variations — and the pathological process is difficult to draw, but that is the challenge every mental health practitioner faces, some better than others at refraining from pathologizing the ‘normal variants’ but on everybody’s minds. I actually join Breggin in criticizing those of my colleagues who have lost their perspective on the distinction completely, and the trend toward what Peter Kramer MD (in Listening to Prozac) has called ‘cosmetic psychopharmacology’, which has its sources in both conceptual confusion on the part of prescribers and the vested interests in the field which want to widen the scope of permissible prescribing targets. But to castigate the entire field for the excesses of its least perspicacious would deprive those clearly suffering from a correctable physiological disturbance bringing them ongoing distress and dysfunction (which worsens if not treated) a scientific and systematic approach to alleviating their suffering.

I would also join Breggin in his criticism of those for whom medication is the end-all of their treatment attack, but, again, that is not the norm in the field. It is well acknowledged that the best treatment approach to most mental illnesses such as, say, depression as Breggin discusses it here, is a combination of therapy and medication, so much so that a non-medical therapist who fails to recognize the indications for medication and make the recommendation to her/his severely depressed patient can be sued for malpractice. I like to tell my patients that medication is like a bicycle — the most efficient human-powered vehicle to get from point A to point B, but you still have to pedal. The analogy only goes so far, however, because when you get there there is still much more work to do when and if you dismount.

Breggin also faults the field for the fact that we do not know how medications work on a cellular level; this is true. But is naive to assert that all the speculation about how the medications work is designed solely to promote the drugs. We know the medications work, empirically; people feel better and get better when they are treated with them, as established (contrary to breggin’s assertion) by countless studies meeting the gold standard of scientific method — the double-blind placebo-controlled methodology. There are examples throughout medical science of medications being used because they have been shown to be beneficial, while the explanation of their mechanism remains purely speculative. The dirty secret for all of medicine is that the emperor often has no clothes when s/he speaks authoritatively in certainties about the mechanism of action of the magic bullets s/he dispenses. Arguably, healing, no matter in what medical subspecialty, depends in large measure on what has been called the priestly function of the physician, enlisting the supplicant by authority and charisma into a shared belief system which mobilizes the patient’s own mind’s and body’s best resources for the restoration of their health — with physiological help from medication effects.

The mechanisms of most drugs that affect complex physiological systems such as the cardiovascular are, on some level, opaque to analysis, although Breggin is right to be more troubled about the issue with neuroscience and psychiatry than with other medical fields. He ignore two simple facts with the most profound significance. First, in brain disease, the affected organ is the very same one that is the vehicle for perceiving and describing the dysfunction, unlike what patients can tell us relatively unimpeded when their heart, lungs or abdominal organs are malfunctioning. Secondly, by and large (this is not fully true, but enough for my argument here) there is no animal model for human consciousness, so experimental methods to establish pathophysiology or the effects of medication upon that pathophysiology are inherently impossible. There is no adequate animal model for any psychiatric disease for that reason, researchers’ arguments to the contrary. So, Dr. Breggin, the brain will always be a black box. But that doesn’t mean we have no way of knowing how effective our treatment approaches are; don’t confuse the two different epistemological realms.

His next point, that the psychiatric drugs “impair our emotional awareness and our intellectual acuity”, and thus “impede the process of overcoming depression”, that that is all they do, is patently absurd. But the crux of the argument comes in his next assertion, that “If a drug has an effect on the brain, it is harming the brain,” i.e. that psychiatric drugs are, plain and simple, poisons. In particular, he works himself into a fever pitch about imagined “potential hazards” of SSRIs for which there is no substantiation. And to claim that “there are so many… that no physician is capable of remembering all of them” (and thus no patient adequately informed by their physician) makes me glad he does not himself use his medical license to treat patients, with such seemingly scarce memory capacity. As readers of FmH know, I have discussed at length the bogus claim that SSRIs provoke or worsen suicidality, or promote interpersonal violence. Breggin would do well to criticize careless use by inattentive or undertrained personnel, as I have written, but not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. His argument is rife with misinformation, distortion and selective attention to prove an a priori conclusion, and logical and epistemological fallacies. His constituency is the rather small absolutist anti-psychiatry movement, the members of which it shold be pointed out have mostly been motivated to object to not antidepressants but antipsychotic medications, for which the evidence of damaging effects, impairing judgment, equivocal effctiveness, and use as tools of social oppression has far more ‘teeth’ than anyone reasonable asserts for antidepressants.

I think there is a role in the psychiatric profession for a histrionic gadfly like Breggin (just as there is a role in the medical debate over assisted suicide for Jack Kevorkian!), if his polemic forces a reexamination and acknowledgement of the grain of much exaggerated truth at its core. But his irresponsible reductionism and overgeneralization leave him without the credibility to take his role responsibly. I’ll go back to just dismissing him, I suppose. As Malcolm Lowry once said, “How many wolves do we feel on our heels, while our real enemies go in sheepskin?”

A reader asked me what I thought about Peter Breggin’s longstanding critique of modern psychiatric practice, as reflected in this review of one of his recent books. My first reaction was, “Oh, no, Breggin again.” I have such difficulty with his argument with psychiatry (and such curiosity about what personality factors and life experiences congealed as such rabid fervor in him) that I usually just dismiss him. But (sigh) this reader, concerned by the antimedication arguments here, asked for a response.

As the reviewer encapsulates it, this book “neatly summarizes many of the best arguments against biological psychiatry”, and that is precisely the problem. They are simply arguments against, with no balanced deliberations. Breggin feels it is a mistake to view depressed feelings as a disease; in doing so, he is reacting to an outmoded version of psychiatric theory which had not demonstrated the structural and functional brain changes we now can see in untreated severe depression. Admittedly, the dividing line between ‘normal’ depressed feelings — which are a part of everyone’s mood variations — and the pathological process is difficult to draw, but that is the challenge every mental health practitioner faces, some better than others at refraining from pathologizing the ‘normal variants’ but on everybody’s minds. I actually join Breggin in criticizing those of my colleagues who have lost their perspective on the distinction completely, and the trend toward what Peter Kramer MD (in Listening to Prozac) has called ‘cosmetic psychopharmacology’, which has its sources in both conceptual confusion on the part of prescribers and the vested interests in the field which want to widen the scope of permissible prescribing targets. But to castigate the entire field for the excesses of its least perspicacious would deprive those clearly suffering from a correctable physiological disturbance bringing them ongoing distress and dysfunction (which worsens if not treated) a scientific and systematic approach to alleviating their suffering.

I would also join Breggin in his criticism of those for whom medication is the end-all of their treatment attack, but, again, that is not the norm in the field. It is well acknowledged that the best treatment approach to most mental illnesses such as, say, depression as Breggin discusses it here, is a combination of therapy and medication, so much so that a non-medical therapist who fails to recognize the indications for medication and make the recommendation to her/his severely depressed patient can be sued for malpractice. I like to tell my patients that medication is like a bicycle — the most efficient human-powered vehicle to get from point A to point B, but you still have to pedal. The analogy only goes so far, however, because when you get there there is still much more work to do when and if you dismount.

Breggin also faults the field for the fact that we do not know how medications work on a cellular level; this is true. But is naive to assert that all the speculation about how the medications work is designed solely to promote the drugs. We know the medications work, empirically; people feel better and get better when they are treated with them, as established (contrary to breggin’s assertion) by countless studies meeting the gold standard of scientific method — the double-blind placebo-controlled methodology. There are examples throughout medical science of medications being used because they have been shown to be beneficial, while the explanation of their mechanism remains purely speculative. The dirty secret for all of medicine is that the emperor often has no clothes when s/he speaks authoritatively in certainties about the mechanism of action of the magic bullets s/he dispenses. Arguably, healing, no matter in what medical subspecialty, depends in large measure on what has been called the priestly function of the physician, enlisting the supplicant by authority and charisma into a shared belief system which mobilizes the patient’s own mind’s and body’s best resources for the restoration of their health — with physiological help from medication effects.

The mechanisms of most drugs that affect complex physiological systems such as the cardiovascular are, on some level, opaque to analysis, although Breggin is right to be more troubled about the issue with neuroscience and psychiatry than with other medical fields. He ignore two simple facts with the most profound significance. First, in brain disease, the affected organ is the very same one that is the vehicle for perceiving and describing the dysfunction, unlike what patients can tell us relatively unimpeded when their heart, lungs or abdominal organs are malfunctioning. Secondly, by and large (this is not fully true, but enough for my argument here) there is no animal model for human consciousness, so experimental methods to establish pathophysiology or the effects of medication upon that pathophysiology are inherently impossible. There is no adequate animal model for any psychiatric disease for that reason, researchers’ arguments to the contrary. So, Dr. Breggin, the brain will always be a black box. But that doesn’t mean we have no way of knowing how effective our treatment approaches are; don’t confuse the two different epistemological realms.

His next point, that the psychiatric drugs “impair our emotional awareness and our intellectual acuity”, and thus “impede the process of overcoming depression”, that that is all they do, is patently absurd. But the crux of the argument comes in his next assertion, that “If a drug has an effect on the brain, it is harming the brain,” i.e. that psychiatric drugs are, plain and simple, poisons. In particular, he works himself into a fever pitch about imagined “potential hazards” of SSRIs for which there is no substantiation. And to claim that “there are so many… that no physician is capable of remembering all of them” (and thus no patient adequately informed by their physician) makes me glad he does not himself use his medical license to treat patients, with such seemingly scarce memory capacity. As readers of FmH know, I have discussed at length the bogus claim that SSRIs provoke or worsen suicidality, or promote interpersonal violence. Breggin would do well to criticize careless use by inattentive or undertrained personnel, as I have written, but not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. His argument is rife with misinformation, distortion and selective attention to prove an a priori conclusion, and logical and epistemological fallacies. His constituency is the rather small absolutist anti-psychiatry movement, the members of which it shold be pointed out have mostly been motivated to object to not antidepressants but antipsychotic medications, for which the evidence of damaging effects, impairing judgment, equivocal effctiveness, and use as tools of social oppression has far more ‘teeth’ than anyone reasonable asserts for antidepressants.

I think there is a role in the psychiatric profession for a histrionic gadfly like Breggin (just as there is a role in the medical debate over assisted suicide for Jack Kevorkian!), if his polemic forces a reexamination and acknowledgement of the grain of much exaggerated truth at its core. But his irresponsible reductionism and overgeneralization leave him without the credibility to take his role responsibly. I’ll go back to just dismissing him, I suppose. As Malcolm Lowry once said, “How many wolves do we feel on our heels, while our real enemies go in sheepskin?”

“You don’t have to be a Negro to be an Uppity Negro, although it certainly helps.

The Uppity Negro not only speaks truth to power, they speak truth and self-serving lies and deny that the person they’re addressing even has power to begin with.

The Uppity Negro challenges the validity of the hierarchies which lie at the heart of our supposedly egalitarian society.

But mostly, the Uppity Negro likes starting shit for the fun of it.

There’s some people where, if they aren’t pissed off at you, you must be doing something wrong.

You, my overworked, underappreciated, overeducated, underpaid apprentice, you too carry within you the possibility of Uppity Negritude.

Embrace it.”

Battle spreads to Wisconsin:

“At a Duluth, Minn., Target store parking lot in July, hostilities between motorists burnishing ‘IXOYE’ fish and ‘Darwin’ fish broke into open conflict after years of angry gestures and cutting one another off in traffic.
‘One of the Christians said something about Darwin being a drunken, godless fool, and someone on the other side said Jesus was gay, and that pretty much did it,’ said a bystander holding ice to a bruise she’d suffered on her head in the ensuing melee. Six cars were damaged and the ground was littered with broken, silver shards of plastic, the remains of so-called ‘message fish.’…

“It was pretty vicious,” said Bill Henley, who witnessed a parking lot attack by ‘IXOYE’ guerillas in Racine. “They waited until the parking lanes were clear and then swooped in, shooting out the windows and tires of any car with the Darwin fish, and even cars with bumper stickers that said ‘The goddess is alive’ or ‘Practice random acts of kindness.'”

Darwin-istas retaliated by bashing in windshields of cars bearing stickers that read “It’s a CHILD, not a CHOICE,” “My boss is a Jewish carpenter,” and for good measure, any mini-van with a “My child is an honor student at …” sticker.” Lark News [via walker]

Also in Lark News:

• Assemblies of God commits entire 2004 evangelism budget to converting Madonna
• Rapture joke provokes heart attack

“Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was so outraged at the anti-communism of film star John Wayne that he plotted to have him murdered, according to a new biography of the American icon.

John Wayne – The Man Behind the Myth, by British writer and actor Michael Munn, says there were several attempts in the late 1940s and early 1950s to kill the man known to audiences around the world as Duke.” theage.com.au

“Ban the RIAA from our sites to show our disgust with the tactics they’re using to stop music sharing. And Techfocus has also supplied an htaccess file that does just that. All you’ve got to do is upload it to your site…” [via Shell Extension City]

US Debates Bid to Kill Hussein and Avoid Trial:

“Senior Bush administration officials are debating whether to order military commanders to kill rather than capture Saddam Hussein to avoid an unpredictable trial that could stir up nationalist Arab sentiments and embarrass Washington by publicizing past US support for the deposed Iraqi dictator, according to defense and intelligence officials.

One worry is that a host of embarrassing charges might be leveled at the United States. Washington supported Hussein’s regime during Iraq’s war against Iran between 1980 and 1988 — including providing satellite images of Iranian military formations — at a time when Iraqi forces used chemical weapons against troops and civilians.

Trying Hussein before an Iraqi or international criminal court would present an opportunity to hold the Ba’ath Party regime accountable for its repression and murder of thousands of people over the past three decades.

Iraq’s new US-backed Governing Council said this week it wants to try Hussein in an Iraqi court, something the occupation authority there has said it supports. The New York Times, citing unnamed State Department officials, reported today that the administration favors creating a tribunal of Iraqi judges to try Hussein for crimes against humanity if he is caught.

But as US troops step up the hunt for Hussein near his hometown of Tikrit, the prospect of an open trial that puts him on a public stage has given pause to some in the administration, according to government officials with knowledge of the high-level meetings. Among those said to have taken part in the discussions are Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.” Boston Globe [via CommonDreams]

Of course, Saddam trial or not, it is too late to avoid inflaming Arab sentiment Independent/UK.

Also:

Killing Saddam: A Summer Blockbuster: “The inevitable assassination of Saddam Hussein will be a public spectacle intended to reassure an insecure America — but it won’t end the guerrilla war in Iraq.”

The Iraqi people… are seen by the Pentagon as the frightened villagers in The Wizard of Oz. Once they sing “Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead,” they will shake off their fears and sign up for their duties in the new order: to work happily for Bechtel and Halliburton and start policing their malcontents. — Tom Hayden, AlterNet

This, of course, has a relationship to the Administration’s assumption that the American people have a short memory and have all but forgotten our failure to find the last global terrorist villain, Osama bin Laden. The New Yorker

Readers of FmH know I harp on this theme. Now I can point to somebody else making the same point.

“Only about 40 percent of people in treatment for depression get adequate care, according to a survey of more than 9,000 Americans that was sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health and released last week…

Dr. Ronald Kessler, a professor of health care policy at Harvard who was the lead author of the study, says a crucial problem is that general medical doctors tend to be the first line of defense against mental disorders as well as physical ones. Because they are not as well informed about depression as mental health specialists, he said, they are more likely to undertreat it — prescribing either too little medication or an inappropriate one, like an anti-anxiety drug.

These general practitioners, typically family doctors and internists, treat 70 percent of the people who seek help for depression, according to other research. And more of them are treating depression now than a decade ago, Dr. Kessler said, because the newer antidepressants — selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors — are safer and easier to prescribe than older drugs.

‘The companies that make these drugs are providing more educational material to general medical doctors,’ he said.”

Psychiatrists interviewed for this article hastened to add that they were not maligning their primary care colleagues’ abilities to treat all depression, but that severe or complicated cases should be referred to psychiatrists or psychologists. This, of course, leaves open the question of whether there would be adequate recognition of these critical cases.

“Most patients don’t come in and say, `I feel sad or depressed,’ ” he said. “They emphasize complaints like fatigue or insomnia or other physical manifestations of depression.”

Primary care MDs are generally more comfortable talking about these physical symptoms and may not get to the emotional crux of the matter. Engaging someone to talk about something uncomfortable in a comprehensive way is a skill and an art honed by the training and experience unique to mental health practitioners, as is adequate experience in psychopharmacology.

The article suggests that some managed care plans have some recognition of the problem and are reducing or eliminating reimbursement for primary care doctors to treat depression, forcing patients to be referred out to specialists. Frankly, I haven’t seen this happening in my part of the country. The rationale I hear over and over again from general practitioners to justify their reluctance to refer their patients out to mental health specialists is that it is ‘stigmatizing’ to the patients. I think this is largely a self-serving assumption on their part, and that they rarely broach the subject to assess their patient’s attitude. And, even if so, the doctor’s role in such a situation should more properly be an educational one, to advocate that their patient do the uncomfortable thing in their longterm best interest. After all, a large part of a doctor’s time is already spent educating patients to do things that initially strike them as unpleasant, uncomfortable or unpopular. But the major ‘training’ around treatment of depression the general practitioners are receiving these days are the pharmaceutical industry pitches persuading them of how easy depression is to treat with just a few swipes of the pen to prescribe a modern antidepressant. The industry knows that psychopharmacologically sophisticated psychiatrists are less likely to be pushed around by the ‘latest and greatest’ marketing claims (although, I hasten to add, readers will recognize that I have written with alarm about how busy psychiatrists have not been immune either from the tendency to stop educating themselves except via pharmaceutical representatives), so it is in their powerful vested interests to maintain the status quo. So primary care MDs will continue to treat depression; they will just avoid using the billing codes for emotional disorders if the patient’s insurance will not reimburse for that category of treatment. And if the insurance will not support a longer office visit for psychotherapy or counseling, the primary care MD will attempt to treat without that.

2 killed, more than a dozen others affected. The ill are being evacuated to a military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, where the second victim died on July 12th from multi-organ failure after falling ill with a ‘flu-like’ illness. Other victims are on respirators. Military scientists have ruled out the SARS virus as the cause. Many of those affected worked in the same engineering battalion in Baghdad, conducting ‘cleanup operations’. The dead soldier, a heavy equipment operator for the engineering battalion, had just returned froma four-day mission in the desert when he complained of feeling ill and went to lie down in his tent, where other soldiers found him comatose within hours. Although the soldier’s skeptical family were initially told their son had died of ‘pneumonia’, an earlier version of the story had military doctors saying that an unknown toxin was to blame and had quickly attacked his muscles, liver and kidneys. Environmental and epidemiological studies are proceeding.

I was pointed to this story from The Daily Rotten, which notes that the troops were working near the Baghdad International Airport and posits “a hypothetical cargo shipment from the United States which killed these soldiers. So perhaps we’re back on schedule to “discover” WMDs any day now.”

Update:

Two soldiers died, 10 recovered, and three remained hospitalized as of Friday, spokeswoman Lyn Kukral said. Most were in the Army, but at least one was a Marine.

So far, officials have identified no infectious agent common to all the cases. Officials said there was no evidence that any of the cases were caused by exposure to chemical or biological weapons, environmental toxins [emphasis added — FmH] or SARS.

Most of the cases were in Iraq and occurred after the U.S.-led invasion began March 20, although some were among other troops deployed to the region in support of the campaign.

Though 15 cases were considered serious, about 100 cases have been diagnosed since March 1 among troops that began deploying late last year to the Persian Gulf area. The Olympian (WA)

Relative to the conspiracy theory, there is no information about how closely the fifteen core cases were associated in time or space; is that information being suppressed? If these severe cases were from a native contaminant, we would probably have heard about it from the dysadministration as triumphal proof that they had finally found evidence of chemical or biological agents in Iraq. That we haven’t heard that suggests the possibility, as the Daily Rotten suggested, that the US has something to hide in the incident. Is a specific incident of toxic exposure being diluted by being lumped together with more disparate mystery illnesses of a broader range of severity and geographic distribution? Certainly, it is accepted epidemiological practice to examine the broadest possible range of cases to attempt to establish commonalities in a mystery outbreak, but it is also a great way to hide a problem in plain sight, as the saying goes.

“Created in 1935, the Federal Writers’ Project gave rise to a generation of novelists, including John Cheever, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston.”

NY Times

Latest example of electronic convergence merges digital camera, ‘net, and refrigerator. Electrolux is designing a system that automatically takes a picture of the contents every time you close your refrigerator door, and uploads it to a web server. If you’re at the store and don’t remember whether you’re out of, say, cheese, use your mobile phone or PDA to wirelessly browse to the latest photo and scan what you’ve got in the fridge at home. I think it is overkill, of course; my own digital approach to shopping is to make a shopping list on my Palm device before I leave the house, scanning the innards of the refrigerator in real time. You might say it is so passé to use a text-based method when I could have a GUI at my fingertips for the task, but hey, what can I say?

If it were to become widespread, what was beginning to worry me about this Electrolux system (although I feel a whole lot better having heard that John Poindexter was axed from DARPA) was the possibility that the authorities would obtain an archive of the old photos from my fridge — likely that Electrolux would leave them a back door into the web server — and be able to derive a running catalogue of my family’s food consumption patterns. They might even find some — gasp! — Middle Eastern food in there from time to time, not to mention Korean cuisine. From how quickly it disappeared, the feds could surmise the relish with which we ate it, from which they could naturally draw the most damaging conclusions about our political leanings. But one potential advantage of the system far outweighs even the most egregious potential privacy violations. It will settle once and for all the burning controversy about whether the light inside the fridge stays on when you close the door. There really is no other way. electricnews.net

And while we’re on the topic of useless gadgetry, here’s a company that sells mice with built-in fans to keep your hand from getting hot and sweaty during your websurfing. I could make a facetious comment about how, depending on the content of your surfing, your hand might get most hot and sweaty when it leaves your mouse for locations further south… but I won’t.

On the other hand (sorry), when the price comes down somewhat, I want one of these.

Top Five Most Commonly Diagnosed Cancers in the U.S. by Ethnic Group, 1995-1999 North American Association of Central Cancer Registries

Refusing help, woman gives birth aboard T (which is Bostonese for streetcar or subway):

“A 42-year-old Braintree woman gave birth to a baby boy while standing on an inbound Red Line train yesterday morning, refusing help from stunned passengers who heard her moan and seconds later looked down to find her baby on the floor…

” ‘Thanks for your concern, we’re OK,’ ” she said, according to Chris Chin of Duxbury. Standing 4 feet away from Judge, Chin said, he saw her tie the umbilical cord in a knot and wrap the baby in a silk scarf. ”She cradled the baby in one arm and grabbed the handrail with the other and continued to ride the T and stare out the window.”

…At one point, Judge took some nearby newspapers and placed them on the floor to soak up the blood. Some witnesses heard Judge apologize for the mess.

After leaving the train and heading for the stairs up to the station’s main lobby, witnesses said, the placenta fell to the platform. Judge turned around, grabbed the afterbirth, put it in her shoulder bag, and headed upstairs. ” Boston Globe

Authorities, witnesses, and press are puzzled by the woman’s refusal of help (what could anyone do, it strikes me?) and she is currently undergoing a psychiatric evaluation. The baby appeas to be doing fine.

Stereo Images — or one might call it simulated stereo — by having the left and right images rapidly alternate in an animated .gif. Sort of as if you’re looking at the scene while an earthquake passes through, but it does create the 3D effect. [via Random Walks]

“Harsher sentences do not deter people from committing crimes, says a new report by University of Toronto criminologists.

One of the objectives of sentencing under the Canadian Criminal Code is to attempt to deter people from committing crimes, says U of T professor Anthony Doob, who authored the report, Sentence Severity and Crime: Accepting the Null Hypothesis. ‘The implication of the law is that harsher sentences will make us safe but our research findings suggest this isn’t true.’

Doob and post-doctoral fellow Cheryl Webster examined literature and studies on the deterrent impact of sentences in the U.S., Canada, England and Australia over the past 30 years. They found that the majority of studies suggest harsher sentences do not reduce crime. ‘It’s not the penalty that causes people to pause before they commit a crime; it’s the likelihood of being apprehended,’ says Doob.

Instead of using harsher crimes to discourage people from breaking the law, he says more resources are needed for social and educational programs for children and youth at various stages in their lives. ‘Programs that help kids to thrive in school are good educational investments but they’re also good crime prevention investments.'” EurekAlert!

“John Poindexter, the retired Navy admiral who spearheaded two sharply criticized Pentagon projects, intends to resign from his Defense Department post within weeks, a senior U.S. defense official said on Thursday.

‘It’s my understanding that he … expects to, within a few weeks, offer his resignation,’ the official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters.

Poindexter was involved with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s abandoned futures-trading market for predicting assassinations, terrorism and other events in the Middle East, and earlier with the so-called Total Information Awareness program that drew fire from civil rights groups.” Reuters As little as I will shed a tear for the departure of this repugnant and arrogant man, it should be realized that this is only another in a series of straw men who are taking the fall for BushCo’s impaired judgment.

Jewish Groups Against Pipes’ Nomination: “A broad coalition of Jewish peace groups today called upon President Bush to withdraw his controversial nomination of Daniel Pipes to the Board of Directors of the United States Institute of Peace.

The Jewish peace groups also lauded the decision of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee last week to table a scheduled vote on Pipes’ nomination to the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum, a rightwing think tank based in Philadelphia, and a prolific author of articles depicting Islam as a danger to Western civilization and to Jews in particular. Pipes has referred to

Muslim immigrants as ‘brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene.’ In another article, he wrote that ‘all immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.'” CommonDreams [via walker]

“When Vice President Dick Cheney comes out of seclusion to brand critics ‘irresponsible,’ you know the administration is running scared… With the administration taking the heat on 9/11, the vice president is once again making wildly unsubstantiated claims about Iraqi WMD.” AlterNet

“In the rancorous debate over euthanasia, assisted suicide and other ways for terminally ill patients to end their lives, doctors note that one option is always legal: a sane, alert person can simply refuse to eat or drink.

It is an option rarely taken, but now the first survey of nurses whose patients took it has contradicted the popular assumption that such a death is painful and gruesome. Almost all the 102 Oregon nurses surveyed said their patients who refused water and food had died ‘good deaths,’ with little pain or suffering, generally within two weeks.

The study, which appeared last week in The New England Journal of Medicine — by coincidence, the same week that The British Medical Journal devoted an entire issue to studies on death and dying — raises difficult questions for those on both sides of the debate. Its authors hesitated to publish it for fear of encouraging suicides.” NY Times [via dangerousmeta]

“‘I believe marriage is between a man and a woman, and I think we ought to codify that one way or another,’ Bush told reporters at a White House news conference. ‘And we’ve got lawyers looking at the best way to do that.'” CNN

BushCo must think the impact in terms of delivering fundamentalist votes to him in ’04 will outweigh the loss of votes from the 10% of the American population who he is telling don’t have the right to marry the person of their choice. And however many others, not gay themselves, who happen to agree that they should have that right. But then again, those are by and large votes he lost already a long time ago, so maybe there’s nothing lost in their opinion. But, as Nick Gillespie reminds us at Hit & Run,

As liberals gear up to bash Bush for his reactionary thinking on this point, they ought to remember the actions of the only twice-elected Democrat president since FDR. When Bill Clinton signed The Defense of Marriage Act in September 1996–an act specifically intended to foreclose state recognition of same-sex marriages–he noted that he had “long opposed governmental recognition of same-gender marriages.”

“US leaders now see themselves as priests of a divine mission to rid the world of its demons.” — George Monbiot, Guardian/UK

“Former Vice-President Al Gore is coming under pressure from political supporters and friends to jump into the 2004 presidential campaign even though he ruled himself out in December…

(A) former DNC official, who was active in Gore’s 2000 campaign, said his prediction of another Gore campaign is based on more than a hunch. But he declined to offer specific evidence.

He believes, as other Gore confidants do, that the political climate has changed significantly since December, making Bush more vulnerable to defeat in his bid for a second term.

“Things have dramatically changed since his announcement,” said the official.

“Bush has lied to the country, no one is articulating a foreign policy that’s resonating.” ” The Hill

I pointed last week to the North American counterpart of this gallery of images from Japanese psychiatric medication advertisements [props to b0ing b0ing]. I find them far more disturbing and, at times, inexplicable than their North American congeners.

Psychologists’ puzzlement at why yawning is contagious is at an end. A new study in Cognitive Brain Research finds that it is correlated with people’s empathic ability. The 40-60% of who do not catch yawns appear to be the ones with the least ability to put themselves in others’ shoes in other regards.

Contrary to the folk wisdom that it precipitates a deep breath to counteract oxygen decrement, yawning does not appear to have a physiological function. It may have evolved primarily as a social clue —

Contagious yawning may have helped our ancestors coordinate times of activity and rest. “It’s important that all group members be ready to do the same thing at the same time,” Ronald Baenninger, who has studied yawning at Temple University in Philadelphia, says. Guardian/UK

[I must be really empathic; I yawned just reading the article about contagious yawning.]

Adam Phillips’ revealing new edition of Freud: “…(W)hat does it mean to read Freud as literature rather than as theory? The first books in the New Penguin Freud, published in June, offer some answers. Significantly, the series has started not with major theoretical works like The Interpretation of Dreams or anthropological ones like Totem and Taboo. Instead, the first four books are concrete, practical, and anecdotal: The Schreber Case, The ‘Wolfman’ and Other Cases, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Together, they suggest four ways of approaching Freud as literature.” Slate

Telling Them Can Reveal a Lot: “…(L)ying is much too interesting to be left just to the mercy of moral examination. Lies may not be as sexy or revelatory as dreams, but they can tell us a lot about the psychology of their owners.

There may be nothing uniquely human about deception: some experts say chimpanzees can fake out rivals. But lying requires something special that, so far, seems the sole province of humans: a theory of mind. To lie effectively, one has to have a notion that other people have minds and can be deceived.” — Richard A. Friedman, MD, NY Times

Even bacteria seek each other out, according to a new study. EurekAlert!

On the other hand, on the subject of ritual abuse (see item below on ‘false memory”), “A gang of suspected people traffickers which is believed to have smuggled a Nigerian boy into a Britain for a ritualistic killing was arrested during a series of raids in London on Tuesday.

Among the evidence seized by detectives was an animal skull with a nail driven through its head, which may have been used in a ‘black magic’ ceremony. One line of inquiry being investigated is that members of the gang had the boy murdered to bring the criminal enterprise good luck – a procedure that has taken place in West African in the past.” New Zealand Herald

Graduate student Susan Clancy, as it transpired, had no idea what she was getting herself into, wading into the middle of perhaps the hottest controversy in decades in academic psychology when she joined the psychology department at Harvard eight years ago and decided to study “recovered memories”.

At one end of the field of ”trauma memory” were people like her new professors and future co-authors, the clinical psychologist Richard McNally and the cognitive psychologist Daniel Schacter, chairman of the Harvard psychology department and one of the world’s leading experts on memory function. At the other end were Harvard-affiliated clinicians, including Judith Herman, Bessel van der Kolk and Daniel Brown, whose scholarly writing on the psychological effects of trauma remains highly influential.

What the two sides disagree on is whether painful memories of traumatic events can actually be repressed — completely forgotten — and then ”recovered” years later in therapy. Many clinicians say yes: it is how we instinctively protect ourselves from childhood recollections that would otherwise be too dire to bear. Most cognitive psychologists say no: real trauma is almost never forgotten; full-blown, traumatic memories dredged up decades later through hypnosis are almost invariably false.

Clancy decided to do laboratory studies of memory functions in those reporting recovered memories. After listening to the histories her subjects reported, she could not help feeling that they had an air of confabulation about them. In the most extreme cases — the rash of reports of Satanic ritual abuse of a decade or so ago — it has become well-accepted that there can be frankly “false memories.” Clancy guessed that there were a category of people who were psychologically prone to creating false memories and who might demonstrate this tendency in standard laboratory testing of their memory function. In fact, subjects who claimed to have recovered memories of previously repressed abuse were more prone to false memories on her tests than control subjects, and were more prone than subjects who had been incontrovertibly abused and had always remembered, never repressed, memories of that abuse.

The research was criticized by both academic and lay opponents of false memory, the most extreme equating her findings with “cheer(ing) on child molesters” or concluding she was probably a child abuser herself. (Freud was assumed in some circles to have harbored, or perhaps acted upon, incestuous fantasies toward his daughter for revising his earlier theory in which he had taken at face value the memories of his female hysterical patients that they had been victims of incest to conclude that these were fantasies.)

Because of the controversy that surrounded the implications as to the veracity of memories of abuse, Clancy abandoned studying that group in favor of one whose memories are considered to be incontrovertibly fantasies — those claiming to have been abducted by aliens. (Ironically, both her opponents’ ‘camp’ [Judy Herman, Bessel van der Kolk and Dan Brown] vis à vis recovered memories, and the foremost — or perhaps only — academic proponent of alien abduction, John Mack, were/are based at the Cambridge Hospital Dept. of Psychiatry of Harvard Medical School… where I did my training and had my first faculty position. All four were esteemed senior colleagues and friends of mine, despite my clear sympathies in their opponents’ camps on these central issues.) In bowing to the pressure of political correctness by suspending her study of abuse survivors, she thought she could still make a crucial scientific contribution around her hypothesis that there are ‘false-memory-prone’ individuals, further study of whom might help us to understand more about the phenomenon.

But Clancy was in for quite a surprise, as her findings were savaged by the alien abduction proponents as well. ”I can entertain the possibility that there are other life forms out there without accepting your story that a spaceship picked you up!” she was driven in exasperation to reply to one grilling on a talk radio show. Her mistake seems to have been her confidence that there can ever be a consensus that anything no matter how outlandish, particularly in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, can be beyond controversy.

Ten years from now, Susan Clancy may remember 2003 as a year of agreeable spadework in the trenches of academic inquiry. But if she does, it will be a false memory. The truth is that Clancy’s research, which she hoped might mend fences — at least partly vindicating both sides’ positions — has managed to tick off just about everyone: sexual-abuse survivors, therapists, experiencers, even a creationist or two.

Daniel Brown, the trauma therapist, is convinced that there’s a ”political agenda” to Clancy’s abduction study. As he told one reporter, ”It’s all about spin.” Her own brother — a corporate lawyer for a top New York firm — has ripped into her about the abduction study for assuming outright that none of the abductions occurred.

One of the more telling critiques of Clancy’s work came from people who felt it undermined the admissibility of recovered memories of torture in international war crimes tribunals. Perhaps in penance, Clancy getting out of the frying pan of Cambridge academic controversy to take a visiting professorship at the Harvard-affiliated Central American Business Administration Institute in Managua, Nicaragua, where she will study the effects of “verifiable life-threatening events: diseases, hurricanes, land mines.” Time will tell whether this is indeed an escape route from the flames… NY Times Magazine