Evolutionism Propaganda: “…The truth has finally come out: Apple Computers promote Godless Darwinism and Communism.” [courtesy of Abby] Update: It appears that this was too outrageous to be true. Thanks, Timothy, for reporting it turns out to be a hoax by the folks at http://www.chickenhead.com, who also did http://www.whitehouse.org.

Powerful photo: ‘…(P)araplegics from the Lives in the Balance group “hang” around Thursday, April 18, 2002 during a demonstration to urge the Senate not to ban therapeutic cloning for stem cell research. The group believes that while Congress debates the issue, their lives and the lives of millions of Americans are “hanging in the balance.” ‘ Yahoo! News [thanks to Thomas Brock]

Mozilla support for Blogger Pro has happened, Ev announces…

A Pill to Stretch Your Day: Modafinil (marketed under the name Provigil, short for prolonged vigilance) is a medication approved for narcolepsy (a disorder in which the regulation of alertness falls victim to sudden ‘sleep attacks’) but which, as the name implies, promotes vigilance and combats sleepiness under any circumstances. It is inherently different from caffeine, amphetamines and other psychostimulants which ‘jazz up’ the entire nervous system (whose effectiveness is accompanied by side effects such as jitteriness and muscle tension, a ‘crash’ as their effect wears off, and addictiveness). Modafinil seemingly restricts its actions to the reticular activating system, the part of the brain which keeps us awake and alert, and there does not appear to be ‘rebound’ fatigue or sleepiness when a dose wears off or withdrawal if a user is deprived of it after a period of consistent use.

Its maker is seeking approval for treatment of fatigue and somnolence caused by other medical conditions. The military is, predictably, quite interested in this drug for personnel on longhaul missions where sustained alertness and cognitive efficiency for long periods of time is required. Because somnolence or fatigue is a common side effect of medications used to treat severe psychiatric illnesses, and often limits patient acceptance of necessary medications, many psychiatrists are investigating its potential as a counteractive. Of course, the buzz is about using it in intentional sleep deprivation. I’ve seen a number of webloggers only semi-facetiously avowing, “That’s for me!” in pointing to this LA Times piece. If you thought the ‘cosmetic psychopharmacology’ revolution of ‘Prozac Nation’ was profound, wait until you see what impact this and similar medications coming down the pike might have!

But (as is the rule when you read about newly-developed psychoactive medications), you’ll soon enough find statements to the effect that “nobody really knows how this works” or what the long term consequences — of the medication per se, or of the prolonged sleep deprivation it may be used to facilitate — are. And the effects of the drug in unbalancing an essentially ‘normal’ brain (with regard to somnolence and alertness) may be inherently different from its effects in bringing an ‘unbalanced’ brain back into balance e.g. in narcolepsy, just as (I have long maintained) the effects of stimulants in rebalancing attentional processes in the unbalanced brain of a patient with ADHD are inherently different from their effects in unbalancing a ‘normal’ brain when used recreationally. I’m reminded of a prophetic science fiction story I read what must have been forty years ago in which a man submits to an experiment with a machine that eliminates his need to sleep. Predictably, it is not as pleasant as he had expected and, when he pleads with the investigator to terminate the experiment, things come to a horrific crash. [Does this description ring any bells with anyone?]

I’ve also seen some of the same webloggers who are clamoring for modafinil hoping they can use the recently-publicized ‘magnetic thinking caps’ to expand their cognitive skills to savant-like levels. But scroll back several days in FmH to read my comments on transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) for some hints as to the price one has to pay…

Richard Reeves: Why Bush will be a one-term president

This was a day in the life of the president of the United States, Thursday, April 18, 2002:

• The circumstances of endless savagery in the Middle East forced him to look into a television camera and tell the world that Ariel Sharon (news – web sites) is “a man of peace.”
• Halfway around the world, on the West Bank, the U.N. peace envoy to the Middle East, a Norwegian hardly given to flamboyant language, one of the first outsiders to inspect Mr. Sharon’s recent work, looked into other cameras and said: “Horrifying, horrifying … Israel has lost all moral ground in this conflict.”
• In Kabul and Washington, members of the forces commanded by President Bush (news – web sites) had to face the cameras and apologize for the killing of Canadian soldiers, our best friends, by American bombs in yet another friendly-fire incident of the kind that punctuates long-distance, high-tech warfare.
• On Capitol Hill, it was Democrats who commanded the cameras, exulting in easily defeating Bush’s most important energy initiative, the drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
• Back on television, the president gave a lecture to the elected president of Venezuela, an incompetent, if charismatic, lefty named Hugo Chavez, who had been overthrown two days before with some help and cheers from the right-wingers running the middle levels of the Bush State Department. Bush warned Chavez that he better do more of what we consider the right things, or we’ll get his army after him again.
• Up the road in New Jersey, which happened to be one of the 13 original United States, the federal Justice Department (news – web sites) issued directives to prevent the state from releasing the names of hundreds of people who have been held in five Jersey jails without charges for as long as seven months. The order from “Justice” reads: “It would make little sense for the release of potentially sensitive information to be subject to the vagaries of the laws of various states within which these detainees are housed or maintained.” Meaning no disrespect, I seem to remember we fought a revolution to protect the vagaries of state laws.
• In England — now I remember that’s who we fought the revolution against — the ambassador from our favorite oily medieval monarchy, Saudi Arabia, has published poems he wrote about “God’s Martyrs,” the killers of Americans and Israelis at the World Trade Center and in shopping malls and restaurants.
• Back close to home, The Washington Post is beginning to publish photographs of Taliban prisoners in liberated Afghanistan (news – web sites). They are starving. Teen-agers are weighing in at less than 100 pounds. Are they bad guys? Probably. But they look like Auschwitz. What the hell is going on out there?
• And meanwhile, the president’s men and women are on the Hill testifying that such things as workplace injuries can more effectively be controlled by filing lawsuits than by rules and regulations. That may be true, but only if the injured are both rich and graduates of Harvard Law School.

That really is what it is like to be president of the United States. The job is so much more than one man can ever conceive of, much less “handle,” because all of these things are happening at the same time. And in some way, George W. Bush, former slacker, will have to do something about each of them. You can already see that in his face. It is not blank anymore.

[The blink is courtesy of BookNotes; I can only echo Craig’s comment, “Please God, let it be so…”]

It’s Chirac vs. the far right Le Pen in the runoff for France’s presidency. Tweedledum and Tweedledee Chirac and Lionel Jospin split the reasonable vote and gave the bigots second place. The Age [via dev.null]

A Different Voice Comes to Public Radio: ‘NPR’s newest news program, “The Tavis Smiley Show,” is the first predominantly African-American-oriented series in the network’s 33-year history.’ NY Times

Critic Jon Pareles raves about Wilco’s new recording, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. NY Times

Was Arafat the Problem? Those who despair at how far away from the Camp David accords we’ve drifted often conclude that Arafat, in rejecting Ehud Barak’s “so generous” proposals, was never really interested in a negotiated, two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Writing in Slate, Robert Wright (author of The Moral Animal and Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny) looks more closely at Arafat’s comportment at Camp David and Taba, and the supposed generosity of the Israeli offers, and finds this position insupportable (although it does appear to hinge abit much on an epiphany of dubious significance he recounts having in a conversation with Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek). Arafat’s failing has not been to be too aggressive, Wright says, but to lack the creative vision as a leader to steer his people effectively to a land-for-peace compromise. Succinctly echoed by Mitsu at Synthetic Zero: “What the Palestinians need is either Gandhi or Nelson Mandela. What they have is Zelig” ? By 2000, when Barak had allowed Sharon to visit Haram al-Sharif, igniting the intifada, and it was increasingly clear he would be succeeded by Sharon (and Clinton likewise by the hands-off stance of the Bush administration), it was probably too late.

President Carter writes an op-ed piece in today’s Times that captures the growing sense that Israel must return to its pre-1967 borders as a means to peace. He suggests joint administration of East Jerusalem and ducks the infamous issue of the ‘right of return’ to Palestinian lands inside the borders of Israel. He suggests that the US leverage the Israelis with the threat of withholding aid and enforcing a strict interpretation of the legal requirement that all US arms supplied to Israel be used for strictly defensive purposes. But he sidesteps the issue above of how Arafat might lead the Palestinians to accept less than their most intransigent segment demands, or control the factions that will never accept Israel’s right to exist.

Mozilla 1.0 Release Candidate 1 has just been released. Now if only Ev Williams would enable Mozilla access to Blogger Pro, I could stop using M$IE again…

Environmentalists are rejoicing as Senate Rejects Bush Drilling Plan [Associated Press] but beware, it was only because Republicans couldn’t muster the 2/3’s majority necessary to break a Democratic filibuster. Administration spokesperson warns that the fight will go on, and the project will probably become a high-priority reality if the Republicans regain control of the Senate in the midterm elections this fall. [Guardian UK] Of course, the Administration’s incoherent rhetoric attempting to link energy independence to the War-on-Terrorism® aside, the fist-in-glove relationship between the Administration and the energy industry is blatantly obvious, as highlighted in this double dose from the April 20th New York Times:

Bush Policies Have Been Good to Energy Industry
High Administration Officials Have Links to Energy Industry

And here, highlighted by the New York Times as well, is an oxymoron if I ever heard one — the ‘Task Force on Energy Project Streamlining’ is headed by the chairman of the ‘Council on Environmental Quality’ at the White House. Especially in the Rockies, these administration lackeys of the energy conglomerates have their eyes on numerous other sites on public land for giveaways:

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska was not the only place where the Bush administration was hoping to find more oil. It is also encouraging drilling at more than 50 new sites in the lower 48 states, particularly in the Rocky Mountains.

The energy bill passed last year by the House includes a provision directing the administration to make it easier for oil and gas companies to obtain federal leases and permits to drill for oil and gas. That version will have to be reconciled with the Senate’s.

The Bureau of Land Management is considering dozens of projects across the West. In addition, President Bush set up a task force last May to examine how to streamline the permit and leasing process. In doing so, Mr. Bush said that the “increased production and transmission of energy in a safe and environmentally sound manner is essential to the well-being of the American people.”

Another reason to watch the midterm Senate elections carefully, if you had any doubts…

Environmentalists are rejoicing as Senate Rejects Bush Drilling Plan [Associated Press] but beware, it was only because Republicans couldn’t muster the 2/3’s majority necessary to break a Democratic filibuster. Administration spokesperson warns that the fight will go on, and the project will probably become a high-priority reality if the Republicans regain control of the Senate in the midterm elections this fall. [Guardian UK] Of course, the Administration’s incoherent rhetoric attempting to link energy independence to the War-on-Terrorism® aside, the fist-in-glove relationship between the Administration and the energy industry is blatantly obvious, as highlighted in this double dose from the April 20th New York Times:

Bush Policies Have Been Good to Energy Industry
High Administration Officials Have Links to Energy Industry

And here, highlighted by the New York Times as well, is an oxymoron if I ever heard one — the ‘Task Force on Energy Project Streamlining’ is headed by the chairman of the ‘Council on Environmental Quality’ at the White House. Especially in the Rockies, these administration lackeys of the energy conglomerates have their eyes on numerous other sites on public land for giveaways:

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska was not the only place where the Bush administration was hoping to find more oil. It is also encouraging drilling at more than 50 new sites in the lower 48 states, particularly in the Rocky Mountains.

The energy bill passed last year by the House includes a provision directing the administration to make it easier for oil and gas companies to obtain federal leases and permits to drill for oil and gas. That version will have to be reconciled with the Senate’s.

The Bureau of Land Management is considering dozens of projects across the West. In addition, President Bush set up a task force last May to examine how to streamline the permit and leasing process. In doing so, Mr. Bush said that the “increased production and transmission of energy in a safe and environmentally sound manner is essential to the well-being of the American people.”

Another reason to watch the midterm Senate elections carefully, if you had any doubts…

Paul Krugman: Wealth Versus Health: “Last year the administration claimed that it could easily cut taxes without tapping the Social Security surplus. Those claims were false, but Sept. 11 provided cover: who cares about lockboxes when we’re in pursuit of evildoers?” NY Times

Lying, then and now: “What you can learn about a president from how he chooses to deceive you.” MSNBC

U.S. Children Getting Majority Of Antibiotics From McDonald’s Meat [joke] The Onion [via Red Rock Eaters]

A special issue of the British Medical Journal is devoted to the growing problem of ‘medicalisation’ — the burgeoning tendency to treat personal and social problems as if they were diseases or medical conditions. For example, one feature article deals with the important role of the drug companies in this process — The pharmaceutical industry and disease mongering:

‘There’s a lot of money to be made from telling healthy people they’re sick. Some forms of medicalising ordinary life may now be better described as disease mongering: widening the boundaries of treatable illness in order to expand markets for those who sell and deliver treatments. Pharmaceutical companies are actively involved in sponsoring the definition of diseases and promoting them to both prescribers and consumers. The social construction of illness is being replaced by the corporate construction of disease…

Disease mongering can include turning ordinary ailments into medical problems, seeing mild symptoms as serious, treating personal problems as medical, seeing risks as diseases, and framing prevalence estimates to maximise potential markets.’ British Medical Journal [thanks, Adam]

Incisive medical commentator Dr Michael Fitzpatrick, author of the 2000 book The Tyranny of Health: doctors and the regulation of lifestyle, many of whose views I share, responds to the BMJ‘s handling of ‘medicalization’ in Spiked!:

Many have welcomed this as a sign that the medical profession is waking up to the problems resulting from the spread of medical influence over wider and wider areas of life. A closer look reveals that the leading journal of British medicine is in a state of confused introspection rather than engaged in serious questioning of current trends in practice.

The feature that won wide attention was the BMJ’s list of the Top 20 ‘non-diseases’ – everyday problems that GPs are increasingly expected to deal with in their surgeries today. In fact, this feature reveals the journal’s difficulty with the subject of medicalisation.

The list includes boredom, bags under the eyes, big ears, grey hair, ugliness, freckles (indeed these are all in the Top 10). Now in my 20 years as a doctor, nobody has ever presented any of these as symptoms, never mind believing them to be diseases. The list does not seem to work as a joke – it also includes problems such as loneliness and unhappiness, which though not very amusing, do commonly bring people into doctors’ surgeries. Number 18 is pregnancy, which is perhaps the only condition in the list which could be considered a normal human experience that doctors have a tendency to treat as a disease. The Top 20 feature manages both to trivialise medicalisation while also avoiding the real issues at stake.

The BMJ’s Top 20 leaves out a wide range of conditions that in recent years have come under the medical umbrella, yet many would consider to be ‘non-diseases’. These include ME/chronic fatigue syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, whiplash, repetitive strain injury; syndromes such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder or social phobias; addictions to alcohol and drugs, and also to nicotine and gambling; teenage pregnancy, domestic violence, bullying. It is perhaps not surprising that the BMJ doesn’t consider these conditions within the framework of medicalisation: many have been promoted in recent issues of the BMJ.

It’s no accident that many of Fitzpatrick’s ‘top 10’, similar to the list I might make (my concerns with some of these conditions will be familiar to consumers of FmH as well as my academic teaching), are dealt with within my own specialty of psychiatry, since psychiatry is all about problems arising from the ways we see ourselves and the world. After a brief detour through the curious issue of the BMJ‘s resurrection of Ivan Illich and his Medical Nemesis, Fitzpatrick goes on to show how the BMJ critique misses the point, tries to be too facetious by half, and lacks a coherent critical viewpoint.

Five ‘X-Files’ to go – Is the truth really out there? “Too bad all signs point to Chris Carter, the show’s creator, reneging on — or at least drastically fudging on — a promise he made when he decided to pull the plug on the show: to wrap up as many of the myriad loose ends as possible.” SF Gate As one of the only two things on commercial television (the other was Homicide) I had any compulsion to watch over the last decade, this might have distressed me if (a) the show hadn’t become such an unwatchable parody of itself in the last few seasons — even before the cast changeover; and (b) it was even barely plausible that Carter could wrap up the loose ends, which it isn’t. The scriptwriters’ greatest skill, with regard to the central conspiracy theme, has been obfuscation, leaving such a tangled web of self-contradiction that no resolution is even remotely possible. (“I want to believe” indeed…) The only things left to hope are that cocky Chris Carter has learned a lesson from all this, and that the anticipated return of David Duchovny’s Fox Mulder in the last episode (yes, I’ll watch if I can, for old times’ sake…) will not be a painful embarrassment.  

Many thanks for the numerous birthday wishes, in email and on your own weblogs, I’ve gotten in response to my Thursday post that I’ve hit the big five-oh. I’m especially appreciative to higgy, whose offers me (and everyone) constructive ways to celebrate one’s 50th.

“The Molecular Expressions Pharmaceuticals Collection contains over 100 drugs that have been recrystallized and photographed under the microscope. Many of these are presented here and we hope that you enjoy your visit.” From Bruce Sterling, who asks, “Do drugs look anything like the way drugs feel?” Some of these are quite beautiful. You can download a Windows screensaver of these images too.

Microsoft mockup of a possible 3D successor interface for its OS. The desktop is replaced with “an entire office with an unlimited number of desktops. The screen becomes a long gallery with paintings on the walls that represent different tasks, and the user moves quickly and easily from one to another with a simple series of mouse and keyboard commands. We tried to make the illusion appeal to the lessons in navigating physical space that we learned as children, so that people would “get” the system intuitively without having to learn or adjust to it.”

Deep Linking Returns to Surface:

“Hyperlinks, the little bits of code that quickly whisk Web surfers from one site to another, may soon be forced to detour around legal and technical “No Trespassing” signs.

Most at risk of running headlong into virtual blockades are the “deep links” that bypass another site’s front page, leading users directly to specific content. Legal experts say that deep linking can violate U.S. and European copyright and trademark laws.” Wired

Kazaa Lite: No Spyware Aftertaste: “Kazaa users, angered by the network’s inclusion of secretly embedded spyware, can now connect to the peer-to-peer network using a hacked version of the application called Kazaa Lite.” Wired

Survival’s campaign for the Bushmen of Botswana

In case any FmH readers were wondering how I’ve come by my opinionated gall, it may have something to do with the fact that I turn 50 years old today. (Others may be thinking I probably shouldn’t be doing this at my age…)

And my son turns eight today…

Judge Blocks U.S. Bid to Ban Suicide Law: ‘A federal judge in Oregon yesterday rejected an effort by the Justice Department to block the state’s assisted suicide law. In a decision sharply critical of Attorney General John Ashcroft, the judge said Mr. Ashcroft lacked the authority to decide “what constitutes the legitimate practice of medicine.” ‘ NY Times

Here’s a Number That Will Reduce You to Tears : “Okay, ready for the number? 2,587.” Washington Post

Rumsfeld Dismisses Report of Bin Laden Escape:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Wednesday dismissed a report that a U.S. decision not to put ground troops at Tora Bora last year let Osama bin Laden escape.

Rumsfeld bridled when asked whether U.S. Afghanistan war commander Army Gen. Tommy Franks had made a major mistake in his approach to the Tora Bora campaign, as alleged by unnamed U.S. government sources in a Washington Post story.

“My view of the whole thing is that until the lessons learned are known and have been developed — they’re still being worked on — I wouldn’t be able to answer a question like that, and it impresses me that others can from their pinnacles of relatively modest knowledge,” Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon briefing.

(This amounts to saying “I won’t know until I know (if ever)”, of course.)

Rumsfeld said he never has had any conclusive evidence of the whereabouts of bin Laden, whom the United States holds responsible for fatal Sept. 11 attacks at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania. “We have seen repeated speculation about his possible location,” Rumsfeld said. “But it has obviously not been verifiable. Had it been verifiable, one would have thought that someone might have done something about it.”

(It’s either ineptitude or ineptitude, it appears. We either had no idea where he was or, if we did, bungled it. Choose your poison…) Yahoo! News

Here’s the April 17th Washington Post story to which Rumsfeld is reacting: U.S. Concludes Bin Laden Escaped at Tora Bora Fight

Ex-Afghan King Makes Historic Return: “The historic return of the 87-year-old Zahir Shah, as an ordinary citizen who will not take back the throne, placed the ailing former monarch into a possibly significant political role. Yahoo! News

“Oxfam’s Make Trade Fair campaign is calling on governments, institutions, and multinational companies to change the rules so that trade can become part of the solution to poverty, not part of the problem.

We are targeting them with a report which analyses international trade rules, and presents a powerful case for change. We know that real change will only come when large numbers of people demand it – in rich countries as well as poor.

We want to work with the many organisations and individuals around the world who are already campaigning to ensure that trade makes a real difference in the fight against poverty. Together, we aim to build the kind of movement that has brought an end to apartheid, banned the use of landmines, and made real progress in reducing Third World debt.”

Farewell, Furrowed Brow — “In an age of image manipulation, what will be the political impact of the erasure of expression from the American face?” — William Safire, NY Times

“Men were pronounced economically and evolutionarily finished in the late 1990s.

But Charlotte Allen says that manhood is back in fashion“, especially since Sept. 11th:

Remember Brenda Berkman? You probably don’t, unless you’re a hard-line feminist or you live in New York City. In 1978 or thereabouts, Berkman filed a class-action sex discrimination lawsuit against the New York Fire Department, complaining that she and several other women couldn’t pass the physical fitness section of the city’s employment examination for aspiring firefighters. In 1982, in response to Berkman’s suit, a federal judge ordered the city to lower the physical standards, and Berkman and about forty other women who were now able to pass the new and easier test went ahead with their firefighting training. The overwhelming majority of them dropped out, deciding that they didn’t really want to be New York City firefighters after all. Since 1982, the city’s graduating classes for firefighters have contained only one or two wo-men each and, out of a force of about eleven thousand, there are currently fewer than thirty women.

After her hire, Berkman and some of her cohorts engaged in nearly two decades of guerrilla warfare against their male coworkers. The women charged that the men were committing a catalogue of horrors and hate crimes against them, including rape, tire-slashing, death threats, tear-gas assaults, urinating into women’s boots, and leaving a female firefighter alone in a burning house. None of these charges quite made it to the courts, or even to the serious union administrative stage. But they were reported in rich and credulous detail by feminist journalists and historians (one of them called physical fitness a “social construct”), and Berkman became a heroine on the websites of the National Organization for Women and groups of that ilk. She also became something of a political activist, snagging an appointment as a White House fellow during the Clinton years, and last summer she publicly backed Democrat Mark Green’s unsuccessful candidacy for mayor of New York.

Then this thing called September 11 happened. Independent Women’s Forum

“New research suggests that teenage romance may have a profound influence on depression later in adolescence. In a small sample of eleventh grade girls, the risk of becoming depressed later in adolescence was related to the quality of the girls’ first romantic relationship, reported researchers… The results are based on a survey of 54 girls that focused on their current levels of depression, their age during their first romantic relationship, and the amount of intimacy and companionship they felt from that relationship. The authors found that girls who felt they had a less than ideal relationship based on measures of intimacy and companionship were more likely than others to be depressed during their late adolescence.” Yahoo! News

The Inner Savant: Physicist Allan Snyder’s new theory about the origins of the skills of autistic savants, covered here in this article from Discover, challenges the prevailing consensus that they are based on compulsive learning. He suggests that we may all have such latent abilities, but that it is some of the higher-order cognitive abilities we use most of the time, and in which people with autism are deficient, that interfere with the efficiency and rapidity of the brain’s natural processing powers. Some aspects of the theory account for thought-provoking phenomena — that there are cases of the spontaneous development of savant capacities after blows to the head; and that the deterioration of executive functions seen in frontotemporal dementia — which has an early, profound effect on linguistic competencies such as the naming of objects — can prompt the emergence of new interests and skills in music and art. By the way, I blinked to the BBC’s report of these findings in March, 2001.

Snyder is using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to “temporarily (inhibit) neural activity” and stimulate the development of such nonverbal skills in nonautistic individuals; a reader asked me what I thought of the plausibility and risks of such a practice. Its plausibility will, of course, have to be established by more extensive double-blind and placebo-controlled clinical trials (the control subjects receiving sham TMS). TMS, which has attracted both research and incipient clinical attention over the past decade, does affect brain functioning in profound ways, and is being investigated as a treatment tool for a variety of CNS dysfunctions, especially depression. But, if it works to develop ‘savant-like’ skills, I suspect that conceptualizing it as ‘turning off’ certain frontotemporal regions and releasing untapped brain potential will turn out to be a hopelessly reductionistic oversimplification. The brain remains a ‘black box’; when we see a manipulation work (a psychoactive drug, electroconvulsant therapy, hypnosis, psychoanalysis, or TMS…), we spin yarns about what must be going on inside the box to account for it, beautiful theories — beautiful because they compellingly enlist us in believing in their explanatory power (until challenged by a counterexample), not necessarily because they have any relationship to reality. I would particularly like to see functional MRI (fMRI) studies addressing exactly what changes to cortical activity occur in subjects receiving TMS. 

My greatest concern about TMS emanates from this rudimentary oversimplification about how it works and what it is doing in the brain. We have no way of knowing its longterm consequences, and the literature (which I have recently reviewed) is not extensive enough a body of knowledge to draw any reassuring conclusions. While several series have reported negative findings, there are case reports suggesting the induction of both absence (petit mal) and generalized (convulsive) seizures, the development of persistent memory deficits, and the induction of mania with repetitive TMS (rTMS). Most animal studies have failed to demonstrate tissue changes in lab animals exposed to TMS, but there is one study demonstrating brain damage in rats. Hearing loss in rabbits has been reported. Hormonal changes and changes in EEG brainwave recording indicative of alterations in brain function have not been found. You can do your own Medline search if you want to pursue this further. Here is similar BBC coverage of Allan Snyder and the ‘thinking cap’.

There are, of course, other techniques that arguably ‘turn off’ aspects of cortical functioning to defeat our conscious brain’s interference with more innate instinctual abilities. I’m reminded of the simple but powerful techniques for developing artistic skills pioneered in Betty Edwards’ 1989 book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. It appears from the article that similar techniques are being used by Snyder’s research group, seemingly uncredited to Edwards. Certain meditative and biofeedback techniques may also be analogous.

“The rise of the “nobody” memoir: ‘This spring there are more memoirs than last spring by, for want of a better term, “nobodies,” those who are neither generals, statesmen, celebrities nor their kin. So many have appeared as to elicit a parody of the genre—Daniel Harris’s A Memoir Of No One in Particular: In Which Our Author Indulges in Naive Indiscretions, A Self-Aggrandizing Solipsism, and An Off-Putting Infatuation with His Own Bodily Functions.‘ Lorraine Adams shares my opinion of that epitome of the genre (and darling of many of the weblogging set), Dave Eggers, ” whose Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is a pony-wide micron-deep curl of a pseudo-Joycean memoir about the death of his parents (almost at the same time!) and his raising (at the age of 21!) his brother (only 7!).”

To more carefully analyze the nobody memoir, I developed a taxonomy of sorts, and determined, after entering more than 200 memoirs into a spreadsheet, that almost every “nobody” memoir sorts into three types. The largest by far is the childhood memoir—incestuous, abusive, alcoholic, impoverished, minority, “normal,” and the occasional privileged. The second largest type is the memoir of physical catastrophe—violence, quadriplegia, amputation, disease, death. The third is mental catastrophe—madness, addiction, alcoholism, anorexia, brain damage.

My spreadsheet is more interesting for what it lacks. There are no memoirs of falling in love, marriages, weddings. There are no memoirs, as yet, of middle age. There are extremely few memoirs of careers. There are no memoirs of crimes. (The Son of Sam law effectively smothered that.) Memoirs of parenting are essentially memoirs of childhood, but only certain kinds—the impossible teenager, the child injured by genetic defects, disease, or accident. Abusive parents, sexual molesters, pedophiles—none have written memoirs. There are memoirs by teenage prostitutes, but not johns. There are memoirs by battered wives, but not batterers. There are no memoirs of revenge. There are no memoirs of jealousy. The prison memoir—a tradition still viable—is a disappearing species. The African-American memoir—while alive in the hands of Debra Dickerson or Henry Louis Gates—has tapered off from a heyday bookended by slave narratives and Nathan McCall’s Makes Me Wanna Holler. Washington Monthly

The Day Is Past and Gone: “The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater was once a vanguard of modern dance. Now it is a mouthpiece for identity politics.” — Jennifer Homans The New Republic (long)

No Sales Depression

“After more than a year’s delay, (Wilco)’s fourth album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, will be released April 23. But impatient fans have not had to wait: Wilco offered the album for free on the Web six months ago, and it has since been vigorously traded on peer-to-peer networks, making it the best test to date of the Internet’s culpability in the current record-industry slump. If the album sells despite having been released online, the industry could lose its favorite scapegoat–and have to focus attention on other explanations for the current listless state of CD sales.” The New Republic

Scientists warn of Himalayan floods:

‘More than 40 lakes high in the Himalayas, formed from rapidly melting glaciers, are expected to burst their banks in the next five years, sending millions of gallons of water and rock cascading on to settlements in the valleys below, scientists warned yesterday.

The lakes are growing larger and more unstable as rising temperatures in the world’s highest mountain range, caused by global warming, lead to “a geological crisis”, the scientists say.’ Guardian UK

US ‘gave the nod’ to Venezuelan coup — “The Bush administration was under intense scrutiny yesterday for its role in last weekend’s abortive coup in Venezuela, after admitting that US officials had held a series of meetings in recent months with Venezuelan military officers and opposition activists.” Not surprising; the only question is whether it was just a wink and a nod, or more substantive encouragement and assistance. Guardian UK

“A woman describes her ecstatic conversion to Christian fundamentalism and her slow, difficult journey out again” — review of This Dark World by Carolyn S. Briggs:

Briggs is also refreshingly open about the ways in which her faith was somewhat childlike and oversimplified: “I worried that God was mocked in some way every time I did not obey Him. And the opposite was true as well. Every time I obeyed God, the angels would fall at His feet in adoration. (‘Oh, God, you are truly great. Even Carolyn obeys you!’) I imagined the cosmos swirling about me, all eyes on the little gladiator of faith.” Salon

Via Declan McCullagh’s PoliTech mailing list, the news that a patent has been issued for “a method of swinging on a swing… in which a user … induces side to side motion by pulling alternately on one chain and then the other. The patent description includes this gem: “Lastly, it should be noted that because pulling alternately on one chain and then the other resembles in some measure the movements one would use to swing from vines in a dense jungle forest, the swinging method of the present invention may be referred to by the present inventor and his sister as “Tarzan” swinging. The user may even choose to produce a Tarzan-type yell while swinging in the manner described, which more accurately replicates swinging on vines in a dense jungle forest. Actual jungle forestry is not required.”

Supreme Court Strikes Down Ban on Virtual Child Pornography: “The Supreme Court struck down a law banning virtual child pornography Tuesday, ruling that the First Amendment protects pornography or other images that only appear to depict real children engaged in sex.

The 6-3 ruling is a victory for both pornographers and artists such as moviemakers, who argued that a broad ban on simulated child sex could make it a crime to depict a sex scene like those in the recent movies Traffic or Lolita.

The court said language in a 1996 child pornography law was unconstitutionally vague and far-reaching.” NY Times

Researchers find 3,600-mile ant supercolony:

A supercolony of ants has been discovered stretching thousands of miles from the Italian Riviera along the coastline to northwest Spain.

It’s the largest cooperative unit ever recorded, according to Swiss, French and Danish scientists, whose findings appear in Tuesday’s issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The 3,600-mile colony consists of billions of Argentine ants living in millions of nests that cooperate with one another.

Normally, ants from different nests fight. But the researchers concluded that ants in the supercolony were all close enough genetically to recognize one another, despite being from different nests with different queens. CNN

Amid the ruins of Jenin, the grisly evidence of a war crime Independent UK; Jenin camp situation ‘horrendous’ BBC News; UN rights body slams Israel for ‘mass killings’ of Palestinians Ha’Aretz

Black Death and plague ‘not linked’. A US research team studied church records and other documents from the UK and concludes that, although it had similar symptoms, the Black Death was not a rat-borne disease but some organism spread by human-to-human contact. The plague was not accompanied by the enormous die-offs of rats which have historically accompanied epidemics of bubonic plague, and its pattern of geographic spread along roadways and waterways was not impeded by the kinds of geographic barriers to rodent movement. People died too rapidly for the infectious agent to be something that would first have to establish itself at high prevalence in the wild rodent population before spilling over to humans in a locality. BBC

“Maybe it’s time to burn our tax returns…” — Jacob Lerner Common Dreams

Why the West is turning on Israel:

As we have argued elsewhere on spiked, Western society today is infected by a powerful sense of self-loathing and a rejection of its own political, social and economic achievements. Those sentiments are no more progressive when aimed against Israel as a symbol of the West, than when they are directed in an irrational campaign against, say, GM crops or the literature of Dead White Males.

The fact that we feel sympathy and solidarity with the plight of the Palestinians is no reason to endorse many of the reactionary arguments now masquerading as anti-imperialism. Populist anti-Israeli rhetoric is cheap, but it offers no solutions – especially when it ends with a demand for even more Western intervention in the affairs of the Middle East. The long-suffering peoples of the region deserve better than this moralistic posturing. — Mick Hume spiked!

Is Bush the Antichrist?

You see, one of the chief characteristics of the coming antichrist is that he appears “as an angel of light.” Therefore, an obvious reprobate such as Bill Clinton is immediately disqualified. The antichrist, by very definition, is a master deceiver. He must be someone who appears as good and benevolent. The bite is in his tail not in his tongue. In reality, Bush’s angelic persona makes him much more dangerous than bad boy Billy.

Christian Dogs and Politicians:

“In his famous essay, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell wrote that “political chaos is connected with the decay of language.” His argument was that democratic politics become corrupt if not impossible when words lose their common meaning and no one knows for sure what is being said. When this happens, political hacks and even tyrants are able to take advantage of a confused electorate and to foist on the people policies that they might not otherwise approve.” The Vocabula Review

“You may not realize it, but you are constantly bombarded by both spoonerisms and malapropisms. You’ll hear or read them in newspapers, magazines, the electronic media — and the local café or street corner. They are the quirks of our language. When you spot them, grin and bear it!” The Vocabula Review

President Bush, April 4: “Enough is enough.”

President Bush, April 6: “Withdraw without delay.”

President Bush, April 8: “I meant what I said.”

‘You have to give President Bush credit. Whereas politicians are known for saying whatever it takes to win over a crowd or sway a voter, Bush’s vernacular is consistently simple, even when he’s on the international stage addressing something as complex and awful as the current Israeli/Palestinian nightmare. That he has nothing of substance to say is beside the point. To his credit, he uses language and tone that most of us can relate to.

Unfortunately, it’s the language and tone people use when talking to their dogs.’ — David Turnley AlterNet

Saudi diplomat’s poem for killers

Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Britain has written a poem praising Palestinian suicide bombers that was published yesterday in a mass market Arabic daily.

The news is likely to strain relations between the oil rich Gulf state and the United States after Ghazi Algosaibi also used the poem to criticise America and said the White House was ‘filled with darkness’.

Algosaibi, a well-known poet and writer, had his latest work published in Arabic on the front page of the London-based al-Hayat newspaper. He has been Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Britain for more than a decade and was once quoted as saying: ‘Poetry is the soul of the Arabs.’ Guardian UK

Tape of US hijacker aired:

Arabic satellite channel Al Jazeera has broadcast a tape that appears to show one of the 11 September hijackers reading his last will and testament. The channel also aired a brief clip of wanted Saudi dissident Osama Bin Laden, who is shown kneeling beside his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, as al-Zawahri praises the actions of the bombers.

The channel identifies the hijacker as Ahmad al-Haznawi al-Ghamdi, a name which closely resembles that of Ahmed al-Ghamdi, who was on Flight 175 that crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.

Al-Jazeera said the footage – which it says it checked thoroughly before broadcast – showed for the first time that the hijackers knew that they were on a suicide mission. BBC

Home phones get hip, high-tech: the makers of cordless phones are very worried about the consumer trend toward junking your landline in favor of cellular-only. Industry observers say they’ll continue to up the ante in terms of design, technology and features. CNET

Does it work? This compilation

of reviews (from an NBC affiliate in Abilene,

Texas) of those too-good-to-be-true gadgets sold only in late-night TV ads evaluates their amazing! fantastic! performance claims.

Israel’s Security Requires a Sturdy Fence. Ehud Barak, Israel’s 1999-2001 prime minister: “Israel’s strategy should be based on three pillars: a tough campaign against terror, an open door for resumption of negotiations and physical disengagement from the Palestinians.” NY Times op-ed

Is it just the mood I’m in, or was there a particular richness in today’s New York Times? Blinking to Times articles kept me busy all morning; sort of like the old days when my family would curl up with the print edition of the Sunday Times most of the morning…

The Cleanup: “There are Israelis who disagree with this rapid-recovery policy, who argue that the lack of memorials to the victims of terrorism, the speed with which the physical scars are plastered over, have the effect of minimizing the horror, of robbing each event of its awful specificity. But the policy is designed to deliver a message to Israelis as well, one both subtle and disturbing. In a land caught in a seemingly ceaseless cycle of revenge and counterrevenge, where the attacks of one side beget an immediate response from the other, the cleanup crews at sites like the Park Hotel send an implicit warning: Don’t mourn too long for this attack; gird yourself for those to come.” NY Times Magazine

Final Chapter: “A year ago, (Carol) Shields was given a rare opportunity. Say you’re a novelist, one of the few who have managed to have it all ways: honored by prize committees, respected by critics, admired by your fiction-writing peers, yet no stranger to the best-seller list. You are given a diagnosis that is the equivalent of a death sentence. The talk is of months, not years. You prepare yourself to say goodbye, and then your doctors decide to try an experimental treatment. Somehow it works, and at least temporarily all bets are off. You have a surge of what feels like pure adrenaline. Incredibly, another novel seems possible. What kind of book do you write?” NY Times

Alternative Medicine Is Finding Its Niche in Nation’s Hospitals. Regardless of your feelings about the validity of the practices, it seems clear that what is driving this phenomenon is market pressure rather than medical efficacy. NY Times

Finding the Stuff of Art in the Gutter:

Walking on the Lower East Side of Manhattan six years ago, Tom Fruin noticed a yellow plastic drug baggie. Curious, he picked it up, thinking that as an artist he could do something with it.

He did. Over the next 18 months, Mr. Fruin, 27, who lives in Brooklyn, collected almost 3,000 drug bags from around the city. They were plastic or glassine, some clear, others solid-colored or patterned, and they ranged from pinkie-nail-size crack bags to credit-card-size marijuana packets. He sewed them together into a quilt that sold for $20,000.

These days, collectors are snapping up Mr. Fruin’s works faster than he can make them. His first solo show, at the Stefan Stux Gallery in Chelsea last year, sold out. Almost all of the 19 quilts in his second solo exhibit, “Cultural Narcotics: The Straight Dope,” were already sold when the show opened at Stux on March 30. The buyers included the actor Willem Dafoe, who paid $30,000 for a piece.

Depicting Nothing but Itself:

‘(Barnett Newman’s) reputation as a major American painter, the textbook view today, didn’t take hold until the 1960’s. Younger artists like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Frank Stella and Richard Serra, whose works Newman didn’t even necessarily regard as related to his own, began to describe his art as crucial to them. But even then, showing at the Guggenheim in 1966 his “Stations of the Cross,” a seemingly plain group of 14 raw canvases with a few black lines, Newman was mostly lambasted.’

Hidden Lessons — Walter Kirn: “Do we really want the sort of citizens that high schools with random drug testing will turn out?”

IRS Erroneously Paid Slavery Credits. I love this one. There’s a scam going around telling African American taxpayers that, for a fee, they can get tax credits or refunds as reparations for slavery. Last year more than 77,000 tax returns made a claim for these funds. Here’s the funny part: the IRS actually paid out around $30 million in such claims, even though no such claim is supported in the tax code. “Most of the mistaken payments were for about $43,000, a figure Essence magazine suggested in 1993 as the updated value of 40 acres and a mule, which some freed slaves were given under an order by a Union general during the Civil War. …Starting Monday, the IRS will be begin levying a $500 fine on taxpayers who do not withdraw the claim if they have been caught.” Associated Press …Does this suggest that it’s that easy for anyone to get away with a substantial claim for a nonexistent tax credit?

[My apologies to non-U.S. readers. You may not know that this is Tax Weekend (as I’ve begun to see it referred to), just before the April 15th deadline for Americans to file their income tax return for 2001. Without the pleasure of making the acquaintance of the intricacies of the U.S. tax code, you probably fail to comprehend either how  a farce such as the above could occur or why it would be so amusing. As a matter of fact, I may have only non-U.S. readers this weekend, as the rest of you frantically labor to finish your returns…]

In a Forceful Speech, Gore Criticizes Administration. ‘ORLANDO, Fla., April 13 — Declaring that “here in America, patriotism does not mean keeping quiet,” former Vice President Al Gore re-emerged today at the scene of the 2000 electoral crisis, forcefully — and noisily — taking on President Bush on tax cuts, the environment and other issues.’ Still blowing both ways; he couldn’t have sounded more like the gracefully defeated candidate rallying behind the president in his post-Sept 11 comments; now he reinvents himself once again when the occasion suits him.

Israel’s Security Requires a Sturdy Fence. Ehud Barak, Israel’s 1999-2001 prime minister: “Israel’s strategy should be based on three pillars: a tough campaign against terror, an open door for resumption of negotiations and physical disengagement from the Palestinians.” NY Times op-ed

Dutch doctor identifies a post-orgasmic syndrome “A Dutch doctor said Friday he is studying a rare new syndrome among middle-aged men who complain of flu-like symptoms for up to a week after having an orgasm. Marcel Waldinger, head of the department of psychiatry and neurosexology at Leyenburg Hospital in The Hague, said he planned to publish a report on “post-orgasmic illness syndrome” in the U.S. Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy this month.” CNN

Sins of Petition: “how the Left got tricked into opposing cloned embryo research”. — Chris Mooney The American Prospect

Therapeutic cloning should not be banned: “We the undersigned recognize that the cloning of cells offers scientists the chance to advance medical research and perhaps one day treat devastating illnesses such as juvenile diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s by replacing lost or debilitated cells.

Congress should not outlaw this research despite recent pressure from various political factions. Nor should Congress impose a moratorium on this research, which would have the effect of halting the advances that are currently being made…” Sign the petition online if you agree. The Franklin Society

On Death’s Trail, a Detective Larger Than Life: “Once someone has seen Dr. Pornthip Rojanasunand, 47, the country’s most famous pathologist, on television or on the cover of one of her best-selling books, it is impossible to forget her. She may be the strangest looking woman in Thailand. Outlandish outfits. Platform shoes. Hair that seems to say, “Surprise!” in orange, rust, scarlet, mauve, chestnut. And, most unnerving, an absolutely straight face… Almost single-handedly she has expanded the nearly nonexistent field of forensic pathology, has belatedly introduced DNA testing to Thailand and has brought some order to the procedures of her calling, detective work on the dead.” NY Times [thanks, Abby]

Review of professor of geohazards (sic) Bill McGuire’s A Guide to the End of the World, “hysterical account of our planet’s future…” New Scientist

Florida Marine Research Institute update on the ‘blackwater event’ offshore in southwestern Florida (turns out it is a nontoxic algae bloom).

Hubble Astronomer Creates Spectacular Galaxy Collision Visualization for the National Air and Space Museum. Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)

Lara Croft Auction: “The original Lara Croft outfit will be auctioned for charity on eBay.co.uk.

Bidding will commence at 12:00 Noon (GMT) on the 26th of April 2002 and last for 10 days.” Proceeds benefit UNICEF.

Easy theft: radioactive bomb parts Christian Science Monitor

Hawaii’s Wake:

‘A warm “counter current” rushes toward Hawaii all the way from Asia — one result of the island’s surprisingly-long wake. The current traces a watery highway that likely helped ancient mariners settle the islands of the Pacific, including Hawaii itself.’ NASA

Bush “deepening U.S. ties with countries that commit human-rights abuses”. Maryland sunspot.net op-ed [via Red Rock Eaters]

“Bush arming troops to protect Occidental Petroleum in Colombia.” MSNBC/Newsweek [via Red Rock Eaters]

Update on Astrobiology: “Just three weeks before E.T. flew back into movie theaters to celebrate his 20th anniversary, a group of interdisciplinary scientists, science fiction authors, teachers, and others interested in the real quest for extraterrestrial life assembled in the Silicon Valley for the 19th annual CONTACT conference.” The Scientist [requires free registration]

Sorting the chimps from the men:

“A team of molecular biologists have taken a step towards defining what makes us human. It is not so much our differing gene sequences that distinguish us from our primate cousins, but how active those genes are, the team has discovered.

Chimp and human genomes vary by only 1.3 per cent and only a tiny fraction of this actually affects genes. The new research shows how variation in the amount of product of a gene may be as significant to our recent evolution as structural changes.

The greatest changes in gene expression have been in the brain, say the researchers, perhaps explaining why human mental capabilities have evolved so rapidly.” New Scientist

“The new science of artificial societies suggests that real ones are both more predictable and more surprising than we thought. Growing long-vanished civilizations and modern-day genocides on computers will probably never enable us to foresee the future in detail—but we might learn to anticipate the kinds of events that lie ahead, and where to look for interventions that might work.” The Atlantic

Drug firms hype disease as sales ploy, industry chief claims: ‘A senior pharmaceutical company executive says estimates of the prevalence of diseases are often exaggerated.

Using the example of his company’s promotion of “social phobia,” Fred Nadjarian, managing director of Roche in Australia, said: “The marketing people always beat [hype] these things up. It’s just natural enthusiasm.”

The candid comments come as the pharmaceutical industry intensifies its push to loosen European regulations on direct-to-consumer promotions involving both “disease awareness campaigns” and straight advertisements for drugs.’ British Medical Journal US drug marketing is far ahead of European wit respect to this inflationary trend, which is not surprising given that direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical marketing is way ahead here.

Mozilla poised for revival: “Mozilla is an unlikely candidate for a comeback, given that it is barely sliding out of the box.

But a comeback is exactly what the open-source project hopes to pull off in the next few weeks, when the Netscape Communications-backed effort releases the first official version of its Web browser. After four years in development, the pending event has renewed excitement in a project that once was hailed as a possible Microsoft killer–only to tumble into obscurity after lengthy delays.” CNET

When Dad Marches to a Terrifying Drummer: “Frailty, which opens today in the New York metropolitan region, is the directorial debut of Bill Paxton, who stars as Dad. It is a meditation on faith of several different kinds. Religious faith and a belief in the miraculous is one. Faith in oneself and one’s convictions is another. But by far the most important and troubling faith the movie explores is the instinctive faith children place in their parents.

Mr. Paxton’s Dad may be the most terrifying father to appear in a horror film since Jack Nicholson went crazily homicidal in The Shining. But at moments, he is also one of the most caring and solicitous. Intensely devoted to his sons, he is a proud and protective father so long as they follow his agenda.” NY Times

The Hole in the Reactor: Incredible revelations from the former director of the Union of Concerned Scientists about how the Atomic Energy Commission did business in the face of known doubts about reactor safety:

It’s appropriate now, I think, several years after his death, to identify the Deep Throat who helped acquaint Henry Kendall and me with the problems in American nuclear power plants. In 1974, at the Cosmos Club in Washington, Kendall and I were handed a briefcase full of papers by John F. O’Leary, the director of licensing of the A.E.C. He believed in nuclear energy, he said, but only if it were done right. And it wouldn’t be unless more details of the problems got out and better regulation was demanded. We studied the papers and distributed them to journalists. Major reports ran in the national press. Maintenance, quality control, equipment testing and inspection — these had been described as bywords of nuclear safety. But most nuclear plants, according to the commission’s own internal audits, were failing badly on all counts.

When we asked O’Leary how he could possibly sign off on more and more plant licenses, he offered his personal rationale: Things would leak before they broke. There would be some warning, and the surrounding area could be evacuated in time.

The Bush Doctrine, R.I.P.

‘As a statement of principle set forth by an American chief executive, the now defunct Bush Doctrine may have had a shelf life even shorter than Kenny Boy’s Enron code of ethics. As a statement of presidential intent, it may land in the history books alongside such magisterial moments as Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 pledge not to send American boys to Vietnam and Richard Nixon’s 1968 promise to “bring us together.”

(…) But even as he fudges his good/evil categorizations when it comes to Mr. Arafat and other players he suddenly may need in the Middle East, it’s not clear that Mr. Bush knows that he can no longer look at the world as if it were Major League Baseball, with every team clearly delineated in its particular division. “Look, my job isn’t to try to nuance,” he told a British interviewer a week after the Passover massacre in Netanya. “My job is to tell people what I think. . . . I think moral clarity is important.”

Mr. Bush doesn’t seem to realize that nuances are what his own administration is belatedly trying to master — and must — if Colin Powell is going to hasten a cease-fire in the Middle East. Mr. Bush doesn’t seem to know that since the routing of the Taliban his moral clarity has atrophied into simplistic, often hypocritical sloganeering. He has let his infatuation with his own rectitude metastasize into hubris. ‘ NY Times

Similar opinions from the blessed Molly Ivins: The moral simplifier: “Bush is ill-suited for a peacekeeping role in the Middle East.” workingforchange [thanks, Adam]

Renegade View on Child Sex Causes a Storm: “When the University of Minnesota Press agreed more than a year ago to publish a book called Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex, it was clear that it would be controversial.” Written as an attack on the abstinence-only school of sex education, it has been roundly criticized as an apologia for pedophilia, which it does not in fact endorse. But, arriving in the midst of the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal, it has prompted attacks on its publisher which has responded by agreeing to an unprecedented review of the way it selects books for publication. Civil libertarians are alarmed at the implications for publishing. NY Times

An editorial from The New Republic: Fog of War:

“The occasion for the American flailing is Israel’s antiterrorist operation in the West Bank, which the United States cannot but support in principle but is failing to support in practice. What Israel calls Operation Defensive Shield is in no significant way different from what the United States called Operation Enduring Freedom, except that it is even more urgent, since the killers in the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and Haifa and Netanya and Afula come from next door. But suddenly the United States is treating Israel’s campaign of self-defense as just a huge strategic headache. In the weeks after the destruction of the World Trade Center, the joke made the rounds that Ariel Sharon had called George W. Bush to counsel restraint, but the joke is no longer funny.”

Compare and contrast: Word Play: all wars against terrorism are not the same by Peter Beinert, editor of The New Republic:

“Does Israel have the same right to defend itself against suicide bombers in Tel Aviv as the United States has to defend itself against suicide hijackers in New York? Is an attack on the Indian parliament as evil as an attack on Congress? Absolutely. But the question isn’t moral; it’s strategic. And strategically, Israel’s and India’s wars against terrorism differ radically from America’s because Israel and India aren’t merely fighting a terrorist network; they’re fighting a people. And a people can be militarily occupied, but they can’t be militarily crushed. The moral right to respond to terror with single-minded, overwhelming force doesn’t make such a response successful. And in the end, if a government’s response to terror doesn’t stop future terror, the moral clarity it provides is cold comfort indeed.”

The Man Who Isn’t There: review of Laurent Cantet’s film L’Emploi du Temps (Time Out), “very loosely based on the notorious real-life escapades of one Jean-Claude Romand, who spent 18 years pretending to work for the World Health Organization in Geneva, and then, when discovered, murdered his family.” I wrote about this chilling case when Emmanuel Carrère’s book about Romand, The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception, came out several years ago.

“Observations of two stars, one unusually small and the other unusually cold, have led astronomers to think they are seeing evidence of a new form of matter and a new kind of star, one possibly made of elementary particles known as quarks and denser than any cosmic object other than a black hole.” NY Times

War Crimes Tribunal Becomes Reality, Without U.S. Role:

“More than half a century after it was proposed in the ruins of World War II, the world’s first permanent court for the prosecution of war criminals and dictators became a reality today as the United States stood on the sidelines in strong opposition.

The treaty that established the court, which is expected to take shape in The Hague over the next year, went into effect after the 60th nation had ratified it. The court closes a gap in international law as the first permanent tribunal dedicated to trying individuals, not nations or armies, responsible for the most horrific crimes, including genocide and crimes against humanity.

Until now, just ad hoc courts like the Nuremberg trials after World War II and the Balkans tribunal that is now sitting in judgment on Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president, have done that work.” NY Times

Malcolm Gladwell: The curious irrationality of airport security: “What all this demonstrates is the folly of a system focused primarily on the detection of weapons. The hardest task facing any would-be terrorist is not getting his weapon on the plane. That’s just a game of hide-and-seek, and the seeker’s odds in that situation are never particularly good. The real problem for the terrorist is getting himself onto the plane. People about to commit violent acts make mistakes. They get nervous. They have to construct elaborate cover stories for themselves and fall back on training that may have been conducted months or even years before in a country far away.” Slate

The Swastika and the Crescent: “In the wake of Sept. 11, new light is thrown on the international ties increasingly linking Muslim and neo-Nazi extremists.” Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report [thanks, Alwin]

High-Tech Futures: “how ‘hard sf’ keeps the science in science fiction.” — Charles Sheffield, physicist and sf writer. Washington Post

Your analyst, my matchmaker: I can only echo what Spike said in sending me a pointer to this item. Holy moly! Eligible New Yorkers currently in therapy can hire psychoanalysts as matchmakers, at $2,000 a whack. Your therapist — in all true, gruesome candor — reveals your personality styles, neuroses, defenses and styles of self-deception to other participating therapists, they find a suitable match on that basis, and you discuss how the arranged relationship is going in your therapy. The self-serving rationale of Frederick Levenson, the analyst organizing this service is that only people who are in therapy are self-observant, and smart, enough to be good romantic prospects, and that only having your therapist present your attributes avoids the dishonest self-promotion people do when dating under their own steam.

My reactions, as a psychiatrist? It’s a no-brainer; this is reprehensible, both in terms of its grandiose claim to omniscience, its exploitative opportunism, and the damage it does to patient autonomy and growth. I think there are grounds to report these people to their profession’s board of ethics, in fact! I’m not alone in these misgivings, of course; the article does a good job of collecting critical quotes. Put succinctly by therapist Jane Greer — organizing your patient’s life for them “is contrary to the notion of therapy, which is teaching patients how to take care of themselves.” Not explored in the article, but worth asking, is how to think about the patients who resort to this service — helpless victims at the mercy of their transference to their analysts or pitifully collusive in their own failure to grow up?

This dating service phenomenon does not stand in isolation, but should probably be seen as part of the more general societal trend away from genuine autonomy as a value. For example, consider the increasingly popular new ‘helping profession’ called life coaching whose practitioners explicitly frame their role as not refraining from telling their clients what to do. It’s not therapy, but… Dr. Levenson, making more of a mockery of his psychoanalytic credentials then he did by authoring the ludicrously titled but similarly exploitative-sounding self-help book, The Anti-Cancer Marriage: Living Longer Through Loving, would be well advised to hang out a ‘life coaching’ shingle instead, but then he couldn’t charge his outrageous Manhattan analytic fees to mess with his clients’ minds, could he? The New York Observer

Here’s a Google search for Levenson. Don’t get me started on how irresponsible it is considered in the medical field to blame cancer patients for their malignancies by unproven innuendoes that their unresolved emotional issues (what? which they can only deal with by paying those Manhattan analytic fees to Levenson and his ilk?) cause or enhance their tumor growth. But, then, he’s not a member of the medical profession after all, he’s a Ph.D. psychologist. (Recall my diatribe several weeks ago when psychologists received prescribing privileges in New Mexico?) It’s a different discussion altogether, but traditional psychoanalytic training institutes, elitist though it may be considered to be, restricted their membership to medical doctors, i.e. psychiatrists. In response, we’ve seen in the last decade the traditional psychoanalytic establishment pit against the explosive growth of alternative psychoanalytic institutes with fewer restrictions on admission criteria, such as the one with which Levenson is associated. Controversy over such populism has torn the field of psychoanalysis asunder, as documented in Janet Malcolm’s eloquent coverage of the discipline in the New Yorker a decade or so ago, for example. Would it strike you that analysts like Levenson are an argument for a return to far more stringent gatekeeping standards on the profession?

Nigeria E-Mail Suckers Exist: “The Nigerian letter fraud, which asks you for access to your bank

account, has been around for two decades and is now proliferating on

the Internet. And last year, some people actually lost big bucks.” Wired

The Fully Immersive Mind of Oliver Sacks: Steve Silberman writes a beautiful, detailed portrait of erudite neurologist Oliver Sacks on the occasion of the publication of his memoir Uncle Tungsten. The picture of a complex, quirky, intense, cherubic polymath that emerges makes me even more envious than I would have been already that Sacks allowed someone to ‘hang out’ with and write about him for essentially the first time.

Silberman zeroes in on Sacks’ impact in “rescuing the clinical anecdote from the margins of medical practice” and taking our ministrations to our patients beyond mere diagnosis (which Sacks and I agree should be more like the starting point — rather than the ending point it so often is in modern medical practice — in appreciating the person, and their dignified struggle, behind the affliction). In relating Sacks’ interest in descriptive narrative to his lifelong literary aspirations (according to Silberman, one of the things that drew Sacks to the Bay Area in the early ’60’s was the presence of English poet Thom Gunn), I wondered whether Silberman had discreetly refrained from speculating on the extent to which Sacks’ direction had been influenced by something abit more personal. Silberman has previously written about Asperger’s Syndrome for Wired; Sacks of course wrote a memorable and loving depiction of Temple Grandin, a woman with Asperger’s, in the title chapter of his An Anthropologist on Mars; this conjunction may account for Silberman’s acute but nonjudgmental sensitivity to Sacks’ own interpersonal quirkiness. Although I doubt that Sacks himself has Asperger’s and in any case one cannot presume to diagnose sight unseen, it may be that his preoccupation with case history functions as a way to attempt to connect to mysteries of human interaction and meaning that elude him from a position on the sidelines.

Silberman alludes to what appears to be a central mystery in Sacks’ life — his transformation from passionate student of the natural sciences to medical humanist. Is Sacks simply unrevealing — he’s stated he doesn’t plan a memoir similar to Uncle Tungsten of the ‘next phase’ — or himself uninsightful about this? Silberman finds that Sacks is only now turning his case study method to his own mind, although an early Sacks work Silberman doesn’t mention, A Leg to Stand On, explores the internal experience of a neurological calamity that befell Sacks himself in exactly the ways he does for others in Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat or Anthropologist…. The accident and Sacks’ way of processing it may have been formative as well.

Readers of FmH would expect that I would find this article fascinating. Except for the ‘geek-syndrome’ sideline, and some brief allusions to Sacks’ take on mind-as-computer metaphor, it is not clear to me how appealing this would be to typical Wired readers, however. It seems much more like a New Yorker piece; perhaps we’ll be seeing Silberman’s articulate prose there… Related: Here is Oliver Sacks’ own website.

$1 million for science to discover God’s plan — “Can science divine the hand of God in the universe?

Investment tycoon Sir John Templeton wants to know, and he’s paying a total of $1 million to 15 scientists to look for a purpose in the cosmos.

The scientists, many with international reputations, have spent their careers studying the Big Bang, the origin of stars and galaxies, the fundamental physical constants, and the origin of life.

But the money gives the opportunity to focus on the question that intrigues Templeton, as it has philosophers and astronomers for centuries: Is the universe the product of design or accident?” Philadelphia Inquirer

St. John’s wort ineffective for depression: “The largest clinical trial performed to date on the popular herbal supplement St. John’s wort (Hypericum perforatum) has found it to be no more effective than placebo for the treatment of a moderately severe form of major depression, according to researchers at Duke University Medical Center. Major depression, also called major depressive disorder, is one of the most common forms of depression.” EurekAlert!

Recreating the Big Bang: “Physicists are hoping that the experiments will give an insight into the elusive Higgs boson, the particle that is thought to give everything mass.” BBC

A tour through the wreckage of the former Soviet Union:

“Ten years after the collapse of communism, the only functioning former Soviet republic is Estonia. A wry and learned tour through the wreckage of what used to be the Soviet Union.” The New Republic

R.U. Sirius wonders: “On 10/11, I posted an article called Ignore the War: A Personal Declaration of Deep Neutrality on Disinfo.com. Most of it was written before the current US bombing raids on Afghanistan. Part of it was written just after it started.

People ask me if I’m still neutral. I might have done better to call it a personal declaration of uncertainty. I could have avoided those nasty emails accusing me of being Swiss. But yes, I am still in a state of uncertainty. In fact, when I wrote the piece, I felt nearly apologetic for not being able to choose whether to be a dove or a hawk. But after awhile, I realized it’s the people who are so fuckin’ sure they know what’s going on and what to do about who are straight up nuts!” The Thresher