From Cuba with Tension “After the rousing success of the Buena Vista Social Club, its

backers debate what’s next for the music of Havana… The era

of old-timers doing recycled Cuban standards may be over…” LA Times

Shark Victim Off Ventilator. Jessie Arbogast is breathing on his own and responding to voice commands. As someone said, “Go, Jessie!”

Ira Einhorn Cuts Throat in Bid to Beat Extradition. Long saga appears to be drawing to a close with the extradition decision; Einhorn fled the US in 1981 when just about to go on trial for the 1977 murder of his girlfriend Holly Maddux, whose bludgeoned body was hidden in a trunk for eighteen months before its discovery. He was since convicted in absentia and received a life sentence; he was located living in France in 1997. Einhorn maintains his innocence, saying he was framed for the murder because of his political activism. Maddux’s sister says, “It’s vintage Einhorn. I did not think he would go quietly. But I must admit, I never thought of this one.” Yahoo/Reuters

Naked Man with No Product Waggles his Dotcom: ‘A fictional brand that offers no product has managed to fool more

than 1,500 people into responding to its ads… The ad showed a naked man leaping around in a black rubber ring,

surrounded by the words “sing, laugh, drive, sleep, eat, breathe, cry,

but do it with joy”.

Nothing else was offered by way of explanation as to what the

company offered apart from a URL, http://www.withjoy.co.uk, and a phone

number.

But this wasn’t part of a dotcom scam, rather an “experiment” by UK

newspaper The Guardian to demonstrate the scary power of

branding.’ The Register

Senate Backs Ban On New Drilling, Mining In National Monuments: “The Democratic-led Senate voted

Wednesday to bar coal mining and oil and gas

drilling on pristine federally protected land in

the West, dealing a fresh blow to President

Bush’s energy production plans. The 57-42 roll

call aligned the Senate with the House, which voted last month to ban

mineral extraction from the monuments after Democrats there won

support from moderate Republicans.:

Driving Meditation by Thich Nhat Hanh. Tricycle

Three gems I got to from this week’s Spike Report: Emmanuelle Richard writes in Online Journalism Review that media coverage of the porn industry is rife with stereotype and inaccuracy. (Freelancer Richard’s weblog, by the way, is handsome and worth a visit if you read French.) A New York Times piece details the Chinese culinary practice of eating dogs. The article is not for the squeamish animal lover, but then, comments one Chinese interviewee, the same might be said of eating beef these days. Another New York Times selection describes the sensitive subject of interviewing subjects to gather data for their obituaries. Lots of witticism in the face of mortality.

One of my readers is the inspired artistic presence behind these sites. She writes:

*The Museum of Depressionist Art* specializes in the art of the

Depressionist school, which most other museums reject as being too

miserable, dejected and hopeless to warrant space on a wall. Depressionism,

according to the landmark Johnson & Jansen “Big Book o’ Art Stuff,” is not

limited to a single place or time. Instead it reflects the low point of an

otherwise highly regarded artist’s career.

*The Gallery of the Unidentifiable* is an independently operated wing of the

Museum of Depressionist Art. Its collection is famous for having not a

single identifiable artist (and in some cases, art form) in it, to

commemorate the uncertain origins of its benefactors, Gladys Dwindlebimmers

Ralston and her husband Abercrombie.

*Dear Aunt Nettie* is a daily advice column from the world’s oldest living

Internet guru. She lives and publishes her work from “Living Dead ‘R Us”

retirement home.

I heard Douglas Rushkoff mention this on NPR today. For rapidly-loading, graphics-free content surfing, MyMobileStuff: A Directory of Palm and Pocket PC Friendly Web Sites is a list of text-only web pages (business, entertainment, living, news and media, reference, sports and recreation, technology, travel) made for WAP devices but entirely suitable for desktop-based browsing. Almost makes it feel like the early days of the web again. Here, for example, is The New York Times’ top stories page in this format.

Addendum: Random Walks‘ Adam Rice writes to point out that “www.plinkit.com is another site full of links to lynx- and handheld- friendly

sites.”

Ex-Beatle Harrison: “I feel fine”; being treated for lung cancer. CNN [via nextdraft] And students sitting for their final-year exam in English at Cambridge University were asked, as part of a compulsory paper on tragedy, to analyze a Bee Gees lyric. Defensive, the chairman of the examination board says he saw references in the ‘text’ that the Bee Gees themselves hadn’t appreciated. “The line… where he sings ‘the feeling’s gone and you can’t go on’ is a fair

summary of the end of King Lear.”

The PerfectBook Machine. A $30,000 machine which prints, binds and spits out a book on order in minutes from a digital file, and can be run by “a distracted teenager”, may put everyone in the world within several miles of every book ever written. Boon or boondoggle?

More pithy eye-opening observations, this time on the seeming banality of an outdoor weekend, from NextDraft: “There has been a long tradition of public displays of

sportsmanship from Presidents. Golf seems to have

become the sport of choice. It makes sense. You don’t

want to see your President get smoked by someone else

over the weekend, and golf is always perceived more

as a match between the course and the person. The question

is usually ‘how’d you do’ and opposed to ‘who won?’. And

everyone who has hit the links (from beginners to pros)

has experienced golf’s wrath. Hit a golf ball into the trees

and feel our solidarity. Hit a tennis ball over the fence,

and hear our laughter.

During the Sunday morning talk shows, the pundits explained

that George W’s golf and fishing outings were part of an effort

to reconnect with the American people and pump up those poll

numbers. Does this stuff really work? “Oh my god,” the American

voter exclaims, “He holds his rod just like I do!” Want to connect

with the American people? Order way too much Chinese food, lay

on the couch in the Oval office, play video games and complain

about work all weekend.”

Witches Upset by Broomstick Style: “…Warner Bros has had a spell cast on it for showing

apprentice wizard Harry Potter riding his broomstick with the brush part at the

back.

A high priest of British White Witches said broomsticks should be ridden the other way round, and

has wished for the film to do badly at the box office until the studio admits it got it wrong.”

Sons and Lovers: a neo-Darwinian theory of the leisure class.

President George W. Bush has fathered two children, both of them daughters. Former president Bill Clinton has fathered a single child, also a daughter. That makes the forty-second and forty-third commanders in chief somewhat anomalous by historical standards. Of the 150 children sired by previous U.S. presidents, 90 were male and only 60 female. That’s three boys for every two girls. Now, this could be a statistical fluke, like flipping a coin 150 times and getting 90 or more heads. But such an outcome is observed very rarely, less than 1 percent of the time—unless, of course, the coin is biased.

American presidents are not the only elite group to produce

markedly more sons than daughters; the same goes for European

aristocracies and royal families. (Ditto, in the animal kingdom, for

socially dominant Peruvian spider monkeys and well-fed

opossums.) For oppressed groups, the situation is just the

opposite: In racist societies, the subject races tend to have slightly

more daughters than sons.

A fascinating hypothesis; that the needs of social dominance can find a way to be biologically expressed in the alteration of the sex ratio. It deserves to be pondered carefully with our dawning ability to exert much more deliberate, and potentially insidious, control over the sex of our offspring. Lingua Franca

“The systems to take care of the most severely mentally ill kids are completely broken.”

Children Trapped by Gaps in Treatment of Mental Illness

The 16-year-old girl had needed help, no question. She was throwing chairs, she was taking rides from strangers, she was acting

suicidal. Finally, she ended up in a psychiatric hospital, where, her mother says, the staff effectively saved her life, stabilized her, worked on her bipolar

disorder.

But once in, the girl could not get out. Not for months after the staff thought she was ready to go. No matter how she cried. She had joined the ranks of

thousands of mentally ill children and teenagers in the country who, doctors, advocates and officials say, are trapped in psychiatric hospitals and in other

institutions for lack of treatment programs outside.

…There are the children who must wait for hours in emergency rooms while in full-blown psychiatric crises. There are the “boarder kids,” children stuck for

days or weeks — or in extreme cases, months — in pediatric wards because there is no place for them in a psychiatric ward or hospital.

There are the “wait-listed kids,” waiting months for outpatient therapy or case management. And there are the “stuck kids” themselves, usually about 100

of them at any time in the state, according to official figures, who are ready for discharge from psychiatric hospitals but cannot leave for lack of outside

treatment programs.

At the hospital I direct, here in Massachusetts, the state most well-endowed in the United States with mental health professionals per capita, we have “stuck kids”

occupying 10-15 of our 42 child and adolescent beds at any one time, waiting for a place to go long after stabilized, for as long as 18 months at the extreme.

2-3 months is not unusual. The problem grows faster than grandstanders like the state’s commissioner of mental health, quoted in this New York

Times article, can throw money at it, proclaiming “an overall crisis in mental health” and citing a shortage in psychiatric staffing and numbers of child and

adolescent psychiatric beds in the state. She dances neatly around one of the real issues, the impact of managed care, perhaps because of the need

to maintain good relations with the succession of draconian, for-profit contractors to which the state has sold out the management of the Medicaid benefits

that fund so much of child treatment. “Private managed care, experts say, tends to reduce coverage for mental health, and parents often wait too long before

seeking help. In some states, managed care programs for children covered by public money have so cut the amount of treatment received that state

governments have abandoned the programs.” The contraction in numbers of hospital beds is a direct result of the reductions in reimbursement levels, making

it impossible for hospitals to cover the expense of providing the care — whether for-profit or nonprofit. Paradoxically, length of stay increases and

quality of care decreases as inpatient mental health care becomes more severely managed; hospitals cutting staffing levels in the interests of

economizing and increasing workloads of professional staff such as social workers and psychiatrists translates directly into inefficiency of treatment. Direct

care staff are really the ‘stone from which no blood can be gotten.’

While the article also cites demographic shifts (the ‘boomlet’ in adolescent

population), it misses a more important change in societal attitude — a conceptual problem which, IMHO, is the most important sense in which “the

systems to take care of the most severely mentally ill kids are completely broken.” Child and adolescent mental health care resources are more and more

wasted — yes, I know, a stark word — on social control of behavior and conduct problems rather than ‘true’ mental illness, in what I feel is a displacement of

responsibility for the failures of other segments of society — social service agencies, the educational system, the legal-judicial system and, most important,

parental responsibility. The psychiatric profession, perhaps to protect and expand its market niche in the era of managed care. colludes and enables this

process willingly or inadvertently via the increasing medicalization of these problems. (now, as an aside, this, as detailed in the National Post, is not what I would propose as an alternative…) We ‘bless’ these conditions with diagnostic labels, thus making them

reimbursable. To wit:

the official codification of diagnoses such as “oppositional-defiant disorder” and “conduct disorder” for what are essentially bad

behavior;

the increasing treatment of adolescent substance abuse as a mental illness;

the overdiagnosis of ‘trauma’ and ‘post-traumatic stress’ in

the aftermath of virtually any disturbing childhood events;

the supposition that there is a mental illness whenever an adolescent has made a suicide

gesture, and the vastly broadened notion of what constitutes a suicide gesture;

the expansion of the diagnosis of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity

disorder) from a meaningful indicator of dysfunction in the machinery and physiology of directing and sustaining attention to a meaningless label for any

unruliness or distractibility; and

recent efforts to expand beyond anything reasonable the boundaries of the domain of adolescent bipolar disorder.

Wouldn’t you assume, as does the author of this New York Times article unquestioningly, that this surely represents ‘true’ mental illness in need of

medical care? You’d be wrong. Adolescent psychiatric ‘experts’ are trying dogmatically to re- educate the rest of us to the fact that adolescent mania has

been underrecognized because it looks nothing like adult mania; with handwaving and smoke and mirrors, any mood instability or lability is now seen as

such.

I used to lecture medical students and psychiatric residents about the conceptual bases of psychiatry, flooring all but the most sophisticated with the assertion that

diagnostic categories, rather than being etched in stone, are built on shifting sands. There have been marked differences, both over time and from culture to culture or

even region to region, in the numbers of ‘official’ diagnoses, the extent of what is included in each. The flavor of the moment in categorization — whether you

want to be a ‘lumper’ or a ‘splitter’, to see similarities or differences, whether (to paraphrase Gregory Bateson) a given distinction makes a difference — changes over

time and place as well as with the individual predilection of the diagnostician. For something to shape up as a meaningful diagnostic category, it ought to have an accumulation of evidence along some or all of the following lines:

homogeneity of presentation;

consistent neuroanatomic or physiological alteration (as indicated by psychological test results, laboratory measures and/or

alterations in functional or structural imaging);

consistent longitudinal course over the affected individual’s life cycle;

consistent comorbidities, or associations with other conditions

heritable characteristics;

consistency of responses to therapeutic measures

Done properly, categorization based on such factors does not lead to circular definition. Done sloppily, it almost always does. The most profound example of that in

psychiatry is the way in which diagnostic categories tend to proliferate as new types of medications, or new applications for existing medications, are found. If you

define your disease states merely on the basis of what works to treat them, you’re in for conceptual trouble and confusion. The classic case was the vast expansion in

the numbers of people diagnosed with manic- depression (bipolar disorder) after the introduction of lithium in the late ’60’s. You might argue that this is innocent; all

of a sudden, because an effective treatment existed, it became useful and important to make the diagnosis (à la Gregory Bateson’s “distinction that makes a

difference” notion). I would argue that it’s often a far more malignant pathology in our reasoning, more akin to Molière’s pontificating physician in Le

Malade Imaginaire who thinks he’s explained something meaningful when he says that the opium poppy makes its user sleepy because it contains

(drumroll) ‘a dormative principle‘! And, while we’re at it, keep in mind the ‘use it or lose it’ phenomenon in medical care. Because of initial enthusiasm and

self-fulfilling prophecy, after a new therapeutic breakthrough is introduced, it quickly amasses an impressive track record. Its touted efficacy spreads by anecdote and

word of mouth. Later, when gold standard placebo-controlled double-blind studies with large enough numbers of subjects to be statistically significant are conducted,

results are never so impressive…

More recently, pharmaceutical-driven circularity in the definition of diagnostic categories has vastly expanded beyond the lithium example. Is it ADHD because it

‘responds’ to a psychostimulant? Nearly anyone will feel an enhanced sense of wellbeing and increased cognitive efficiency with this class of drugs. Is it a depressive

disorder because it ‘responds’ to an SSRI antidepressant? The quintessential ‘cosmetic psychopharmacology’ class of drugs, there are benefits to epiphenomena such

as emotional reactivity and irritability in most, even psychiatrically well, users. Is it an anxiety disorder because it ‘responds’ to an anxiolytic? By no means. And, back

to adolescent bipolar disorder, there is little or no evidence that patients so diagnosed will turn into adult bipolars; little or no evidence that adolescent mania and adult

mania are comingled in family trees; and little or no demonstrated consistent biochemical abnormality characterizing members of the class. Can you say they have a

disease because they seem to respond to the medications that are used to treat bipolar mood swings? No, because the ‘mood stabilizers’ — which by now have grown

beyond lithium to include a variety of anticonvulsant drugs — will dampen the intensity of most emotional turmoil and instability, nonspecifically!

Now, don’t misunderstand, I’m not trying to be a diagnostic nihilist here. No, wait, maybe I am; the more and more I pry up the rocks and peer underneath, the more

I see the bugs in the field… But, usually, I think there is a careful way to do diagnosing that remains meaningful and — this is the ultimate

point, isn’t it? — has therapeutic utility in helping our afflicted patients. Our truly afflicted patients.

Okay, I’ll get off my soapbox now… for the moment.

“There were two mysteries. The first was how he went on so long lying like this, and the second was why

people did not suspect anything.” Discovering the Facts of a Man Who Lived a Monstrous Fiction — The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous

Deception reviewed:

On Jan. 9, 1993, in a small French

town, a respected doctor named

Jean-Claude Romand killed his wife and

their two children and then drove a few

miles to his parents’ home and killed them.

Tried and convicted by a French court, he

was given a life sentence.

Emmanuel Carrère, a French novelist and

screenwriter, was fascinated by the case,

not because of the murders but because Mr.

Romand was not a doctor and had invented

his entire life. It was a lie that he lived for

18 years. New York Times

People say they are unique but don’t seem to believe it,

study finds. “Your mother always told you you’re special,” said Joachim Krueger,

associate professor of psychology and human development, and the

study’s lead researcher, “but subconsciously you do not believe it.”

Of course, conception of self and balace of uniqueness and uniformity will vary culturally. Cornell cross-cultural psychology researcher Dr Qi Wang at Cornell, for example,

focus(es) on the

development of autobiographical memory. Has conducted

comparative studies with participants from American and

Asian cultures on adults’ childhood recollections, children’s

autobiographical reports, and parent-child conversations

about the shared past. These studies have illustrated how

constructions of the self differ across cultures as a function

of the social orientations, cultural values, and narrative

environments in which children are raised. In turn, such

differences in self-construction have powerful effects on the

contents and long-term accessibility of autobiographical

memories. In extending this line of inquiry, current studies

examine the impact of self-concept, gender-role, emotional

situation knowledge, and family narrative practices on

autobiographical remembering, addressing both

cross-cultural differences and within-cultural variations.

Couples With Right Chemistry Have Love Down to a Science

For three decades, relationship research psychologists have been able to

pinpoint behaviors in couples that lead to successful, fulfilling and enduring

relationships and conversely, behaviors that are corrosive, insidious and deleterious

to the bonds of love.

Over the last dozen years, such relationship data have spurred an explosion of

therapeutic approaches, relationship education courses and 911-emergency-like

interventions for the divorce-bound. There is a kind of science to staying in love,

many psychologists and therapists agree, concrete ways to invigorate a couple’s

bond and to inoculate couples against the predictable lows and endemic conflicts

of long-term love.

But these efforts stand little chance if a couple doesn’t have chemistry,

psychologists Janice R. Levine and Howard J. Markman write in Why Do Fools

Fall in Love?, a collection of essays written by leading

relationship researchers and psychologists pondering the mysteries of love. LA Times

Is Environment Triggering Male Reproductive Problems? “Doctors and scientists are almost certainly missing evidence that adverse

environmental factors may be responsible for an increase in a range of

problems in male reproductive health, according to a leading Danish fertility

expert.” UniSci

The people’s Net: Douglas Rushkoff says “the Internet is back. That’s right: alive and well. Not slumping or waning, slowing up or winding down. It may be a little shell-shocked, but that’s only because it’s just won a war.” Yahoo!

Keep Barney Pure: “B*rney may be a dinosaur who chants about hugs and love, but his lawyers aren’t afraid to

get nasty when protecting their plump, purple trademark.

In the last few weeks, a law firm representing Lyons Partnership — which owns the rights to B*rney — has

stepped up its efforts to yank hundreds of humor sites poking fun at the children’s cartoon character that

so many Internet users love to hate.” Wired It’s extremely curious to me why B*rney almost universally inspires such a visceral revulsion among so many, myself among them. Before I had children, I’d never seen B*rney and was only aware of its existence from the disdain showered on it on the ‘net, e.g. in usenet groups with names like alt.tv.barney.kill.kill.kill or the like. As cynical as I fancy myself to be about conformity, I could dismiss the phenomenon as being like schoolyard teasing, jumping on the bandwagon to hate someone that everybody else with nothing better to do loved to hate. You know, the kind of thing to which the proper rejoinder is, “Get a life.”

But more recently, as a parent who begrudges my children very little that I notice delighting them, I still can’t sit in the same room when Barney comes on. My son’s B*rney stage, partly because of his parents’ discouragement, was quite brief, but my daughter is smackdab in the middle of being enthralled by him and it shows no sign of slowing. The closest I can come to understanding my contempt is that it’s about the enraging, smarmy falsity of the good feelings both B*rney and his cast of fixed-plastic-smile kids have. I imagine it’s similarly painful for them. How I long for a repeat of that fabled children’s television scandal in which a microphone gets accidentally left on and the character’s candid expression of disdain forever dethrones him!

It fascinates me that grownups — but unfortunately not the legions of entranced children — can universally detect such falsity and react with such visceral pain to it. Seems built in; wonder what the evolutionary psychologists would have to say about the adaptive value to social interaction of having such a “bullshit meter.”

And can you imagine how twisted into knots might be the innards of the recent law-school graduate waking up each morning to remember that his firm’s assignment has given him a full-time career made out of defending the B*rney trademark?

CorpWatch, until recently known as the Transnational Research & Action Center (TRAC),

… counters corporate-led globalization through education and activism. We work to foster democratic control

over corporations by building grassroots globalization–a diverse movement for human rights, labor rights and

environmental justice.

For the past four years San Francisco-based CorpWatch has been educating and mobilizing people through the CorpWatch.org website

and various campaigns, including the Climate Justice Initiative and the UN and Corporations Project.

And the unrelated Corporate Watch, the epigram on whose website is from Utah Philips, “The earth is not dying. It is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses,”

… is a radical research and publishing group, based in Oxford, UK. It was set up in late 1996 to support

activism against large corporations, particularly multinationals. As a radical group, we are reliant on support from

individuals and groups who want to help further our aims.

Web-myth debunker’s life threatened by Steve

Gibson Groupie: “Techno-myth debunker Rob Rosenberger has received a death

threat as a reward for his efforts to expose GRC.com founder Steve

Gibson’s recent rants on the Win-XP raw-socket terror for the

rubbish that they are.” The Register

Mean Cuisine: Alice Waters, doyen of American chefs, takes on the President, and prompts this essayist to opine: “Gone is the Joy of Cooking. Today’s celebrity chefs

are serving up a menu of global doom and politically

twisted snobbery.” Washington Monthly [thanks, Walker]

The ‘Agony and the Ecstasy’ Dept.: A weblogger whose work I follow recently published some somewhat cryptic comments about reforming his approach in response to some perceived criticism about his weblog persona. To my gratitude, when I wrote him wondering how it might bear on what I’m doing here, he amplified privately to me not only to reassure me but to give me the blow-by-blow. Turns out there’s this phenomenon in which webloggers who read one another regularly enough allude (usually critically) to one another’s posts in a kind of call-and-response dance across the weblogging universe. Certainly, there’s alot of room for interpretation, but my friend’s email to me — full of links to these other bloggers’ posts — makes it clear he hasn’t just been being paranoid or overreading them. There’s just too much circumstantial evidence and temporal coincidence. He’s keeping his sense of humor about it, because as he points out his respondents are such clever writers.

I’ve been blissfully ignorant of this undercurrent in the weblogging world, partly because FmH is more about the world than the world of weblogging. I’ve never joined the cliques — you know, commenting on what the major weblogging players, referred to by their first names only, are saying or feeling. And partly, it’s because I don’t read the A-listers enough to see any correlation between any aspersions they may be casting and anything I’ve posted, even if they are there…which they probably aren’t, because they probably don’t read me, regularly if at all, either (I don’t study my referral logs very obsessively…). In fact, I have enough trouble keeping up with explicit mentions of FmH, like the recent one I noticed and responded to in Lynnette Millett’s Medley or the nod I got in David Anderson’s Metaforage. It seems many webloggers who’ve been at it long enough, each in our own way, are struggling with how thoughtful we are, or ought to be, in our work. I see it as a part of the maturational process for the weblogging medium. My friend’s email to me sees this same struggle reflected in the oft-noted recent trend of many quality bloggers to attenuate or suspend their posting activity. (Hopefully some of the more creative ones are “woodshedding” and not just hanging up their holsters.) That was what my exchange with Lynnette was about:

I feel my weblogging is more “on” when I can give you my own take on things, and most

of the posts at FmH to which readers respond are those, rather than the ones I excerpt or

point to without exposition. I sometimes barrage you with alot of frantic webclipping,

and I often feel I’d rather slow it down and be more thoughtful.

But — who was it who said something like “The perfect is the enemy of the good”? — I like how I’m doing this well enough, and it’s to be hoped you do too.

What I’m after here boils down to asking you this: if you’re out there reflecting on what I’m doing here at FmH, any cryptic animadversions are going to go right over my literal-minded head. Please let me know directly. I welcome your constructive criticism about content, form*, or even personality [grin]. And though I appeared to agree with another weblogger (whom I quoted over in my sidebar as saying, “If

anyone’s offended by anything on this

site then please do notify me

immediately. I like to keep track of

those times when I get something

right”), my reply will probably not be arch or coy. And, to you, my esteemed and anonymous weblogging colleague who it seems recently went through the long night of the blogging soul, consider yourself appreciated and supported, if I may so presume…
_______________________

*In fact, you’re welcome to explore the code for this page and tear it apart critically, if your HTML skill is less brain-dead than mine is [grin].

Addendum: Thought I’d share what another friend, and trusted critic, said about the above post after its initial appearance earlier tonight:

This evening’s post and extended thoughtful description of a somewhat

personal interaction seemed outside the general bounds of your site. It

smacked of a much more outwardly personal site than you have been running

(at least it’s not a webcam of your office). This is not necessarily bad,

though your personal-ity and thoughts and philosophies are painted more

interestingly (and maybe objectively) through your blogged items.

“We have now moved to the stage in brain studies when we can profitably start asking questions

about subjective mental states.” Why we all like Picasso —

“It’s all about brain wiring. Beauty leaves a physical imprint of its passage through the brain, and new research has shown that

certain brains may be more receptive to it than others… Neuroesthetics, an entirely new field of scientific inquiry, has jump-started a debate about the

neurological basis of art by raising new questions about vision, genetics and beauty and their

commingled relationships.” Here’s where the claims get abit overblown, IMHO: “(A California neurologist) says his rules can predict which art movements will succeed. Furthermore, a computer can be programmed to follow these rules,

and use them to distinguish art from junk, or to produce original pleasing images. (He) stops short of claiming that

neurology will allow machines to create works of human-like creative genius.” [mercifully] National Post

From Need to Know: banner ads so inappropriate their bona fides are suspect.

Betting on beaming: Palm hopes infrared stations expand audience for PDAs. I saw these, installed but nonfunctional, at busstop shelters on a trip to NYC last month and thought they were a fantastic idea for those of us who haven’t gone wireless — to download area streetmaps, guides to eateries, local attractions, etc. They’d be very useful at conferences. Now, how to filter out the inevitable ads and other lame non-content they’re likely to send my way. SF Chronicle

Betting on beaming: Palm hopes infrared stations expand audience for PDAs. I saw these, installed but nonfunctional, at busstop shelters on a trip to NYC last month and thought they were a fantastic idea for those of us who haven’t gone wireless — to download area streetmaps, guides to eateries, local attractions, etc. They’d be very useful at conferences. Now, how to filter out the inevitable ads and other lame non-content they’re likely to send my way. SF Chronicle

Betting on beaming: Palm hopes infrared stations expand audience for PDAs. I saw these, installed but nonfunctional, at busstop shelters on a trip to NYC last month and thought they were a fantastic idea for those of us who haven’t gone wireless — to download area streetmaps, guides to eateries, local attractions, etc. They’d be very useful at conferences. Now, how to filter out the inevitable ads and other lame non-content they’re likely to send my way. SF Chronicle

Squirrelly Goetz gunning for NYC mayoralty: “Bernhard Goetz, the New York City vigilante who shot four black teenagers on a subway train in

1984, launched his campaign to replace Rudolph Giuliani as mayor by releasing a picture of himself

cuddling a squirrel.” National Post

What Is The Next Big Idea? Buzz Is Growing for Empire; this densely-argued book about globalization by a literature professor at Duke may fit the bill as the basis for the heavily-sought-after Next Big Theory for the humanities. Should we call it “empirical theory”, though? New York Times [via MetaFilter]

Wilderness and the Hyperreal: “Faking nature? So what? Isn’t human intervention the best path to

the sacred and preservation?” — Peter Warshall Whole Earth Review

Via boing boing, scans of covers of 76 editions of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds and an explanation of why. Makes more sense to me than, for example, the man who claims he’s building a collection of moist towelettes. [via Spike Report]

Betting on beaming: Palm hopes infrared stations expand audience for PDAs. I saw these, installed but nonfunctional, at busstop shelters on a trip to NYC last month and thought they were a fantastic idea for those of us who haven’t gone wireless — to download area streetmaps, guides to eateries, local attractions, etc. They’d be very useful at conferences. Now, how to filter out the inevitable ads and other lame non-content they’re likely to send my way. SF Chronicle

Putting a face on child mental illness: “A child is more likely to suffer from a mental illness

than from leukemia, diabetes and AIDS combined in

the United States–a sad truth that parents and

educators often overlook. But a new art exhibit is

helping to change that by increasing knowledge

about and awareness of child mental illnesses.” APA [American Psychological Association] Monitor

Short Bouts of Exercise Boost Mood, Energy Level. Are you convinced yet? Similar findings, if you need them, dribble out every few months. Yahoo!

Tales from the Underground: on extremophiles, “microorganisms that not just tolerate, but

demand, conditions that would seem to make life impossible… (and) may have cousins on Mars… David Wolfe, a Cornell

professor, considers the extremophiles he describes in the following passage (excerpted from his book) as just a small

part of the vast flora and fauna to be found underground.” BioMedNet [requires free registration] via Red Rock Eaters

Google Zeitgeist: “For both breaking news and obscure

information alike, people around the world

search on Google at http://www.google.com. With a

bit of analysis, this flurry of searches often

exposes interesting trends, patterns, and

surprises.”

According to Phil Agre’s compilation, Bush is a laughingstock:

Green Bush fails to fluorish. “Americans seem to have noticed that the US

president’s performances as an international

statesman have been rather amateurish.” The Guardian

Hard evidence suggests that, in contrast to Bush’s overblown gladhanding of Putin at their summit last month, Putin thinks the naive American is ripe for the picking. The Guardian

“Barring a well-handled international crisis that rallies the country to his side, Bush is likely to be, at best, a 50-something president when it comes to approval ratings.” E.J. Dionne, Washington Post

President Bush risks becoming, well, another President Bush. Wall Street Journal

Fourth of July remarks (which I transcribed here yesterday, below) reveal The Second Boomer President, a narcissist who can’t see past himself New York Times

Research suggests virus is factor in mental illness: “What if mental illness is catching?

Although it sounds far-fetched and remains controversial, this theory got

another boost from a study published last week in the journal Molecular

Psychiatry. Using a new diagnostic tool to screen blood for a pathogen

known as the Borna virus, a team of German researchers from major

academic institutions found that it infects up to 30 percent of healthy

people and up to 100 percent of people with severe mood disorders.” Charlotte Observer

Study Finds Two Types of Crime-Linked Brain Disorder: “Several studies have linked a form of mental illness called organic

brain syndrome with an increased likelihood of committing crimes, but the results of new research

suggest that the association between crime and the mental illness is not as straightforward as some

experts have thought.

Male criminals with organic brain syndrome display different patterns of criminal behavior

depending on how old they are when first arrested, researchers report.” I’ve long been interested in the relationship between neurobehavioral disorders and violent and criminal behavior, and this is not a surprising finding to me. Ethologists feel there are essentially two patterns of animal violence. Predatory violence is self-interested, purposeful, self-protective, and without physiological signs of arousal. Affective violence, with arousal, is reactive and often undirected. Essentially, this represents the cataclysmic activation of the so-called “fight or flight response.”

Some neuropsychiatrists, like myself, are convinced that the human analogy holds up. The predators are the sociopaths. They are canny about being caught and not picking on someone their own size, are remorseless and their preying on others is for self-gain. Affective violence with intense arousal, on the other hand, is often reactive and impulsive. The pureyor of this type of violence is not motivated by self-interest; the violence is not instrumental and often not very focused. Moreover, the perpetrator may not exercise the judgment to protect themself against the consequences of their actions (either physical injury or social/legal consequences). They are often overcome by remorse after their ‘storm-like’ eruption of violence, as if it had been ego-alien to their usual sense of themselves. The compelling picture is one of a defect in normal inhibitory function — often abetted by the use of disinhibiting substances (e.g. the diagnostic entity of ‘pathological intoxication’, the ‘violent drunk’ to the extreme) — and loss of control.

Evidence in both animal and human studies suggests different neural circuitry controls each type of aggressive behavior, and that sociopaths often have normal-looking and -functioning brains when studied neuropsychologically. I think that what the current study calls “early starters” have what we call a sociopathic or antisocial personality organization which allows them to violate the rights of others with impunity and without compunction. The “late starters” represent those whose organic brain condition has damaged their inhibitory neural circuitry (usually but not always associated with the frontal lobe), loosening their impulse control. Why, then, in this study, is organic brain damage found in the “early”, sociopathic type of criminals too? Probably because a career of antisocial behavior often involves brain-damaging substance abuse (one of the diagnostic criteria for antisocial personality disorder) and other causes of personal injury as consequences, rather than causes. In fact, the current study demonstrated that the “early starters” were more likely to abuse drugs.

The conclusions of the study are also consistent with my way of thinking about this: ‘The findings may have important implications for the treatment of criminal behavior, (the study’s author) noted.

“The antisocial behavior of late starters can be thought of as the result of a disease and may be

responsive to medication or behavioral training programs.”

In contrast, she said, the antisocial behavior of early starters is often long-lasting and stable and

may be extremely difficult to modify.’

And how about the prediction and prevention of violence that may be associated with a neurobehavioral disorder? “The ability of psychiatrists to predict which patients may become violent is no longer science fiction, some experts say. Conducting interviews

that focus on certain factors in a person’s history and using new measurement tools allow psychiatrists to make reasonably accurate short-term

predictions about violence risk.” Psychiatric News It’s important to clarify, however, that short-term risk prediction is imprecise and clinicians cannot be held to a standard, IMHO, of liability for failing to have a crystal ball. The talk reported on here is, to my way of thinking, merely commonsense with prudent clinical practice thrown in for good measure. The greatest risk factor in violence prediction is, of course, a history of previous violence. Other factors to assess include ‘criminal history, possession of a gun, history of

multiple psychiatric admissions, the presence of violence fantasies, and sexually aggressive behavior or fantasies about

such behavior,… a first criminal

arrest occurring at a young age; being a male under age 40; a history of cruelty to animals, firesetting, or reckless driving;

viewing oneself as a “victim”; being very resentful of authority; and a lack of compassion and empathy for others.’ Commonsense, no? With a little bit of circularity thrown in — defining a person as violence-prone if they have evidence of a condition one of whose defining factors is violence…

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall. ” Just a quick note on the Condit front. The story

that’s only starting to get a touch of play in the

reporting is how much orchestration is taking

place on the part of the public relations

operatives working for the Levy family.

One hesitates to use the loaded word

‘orchestration’ since these people are

desperately trying to find out what happened to

their daughter; and the chances of finding a

happy answer seem bleak. Still it’s a point worth

noting since it speaks to a broader issue of how

the media functions today, and specifically how

this story is being advanced.” Dribs and drabs of daily information to keep the pressure on Condit — like today’s news from Levy’s aunt that Levy had confided that she was having an affair with Condit to her.

Close Encounter of the Stellar Kind: “The unassuming star centered in this sky view will one day be our next door stellar neighbor. The faint 9th magnitude red dwarf, currently 63

light-years away in the constellation Ophiucus, was recently discovered to be approaching our Solar System. Known in catalogs of nearby stars as Gliese (Gl)

710 it is predicted to come within nearly 1 light-year of the Sun … about 1.5 million years from now. At that distance this star, presently much too faint to be

seen by the naked eye, will blaze at 0.6 magnitude – rivaling the apparent brightness of the mighty red giant Antares. Ultimately Gliese 710 poses no direct

collision danger itself although its gravitational influence will likely scatter comets out of the Solar System’s reservoir, the Oort cloud, sending some inbound.” Astronomy Picture of the Day

Still waiting for the return of lake effect.

Love the title of this essay, for which the author is apologetic in her introduction: The Reasons for the Unexpected Difficulties of Modern Life: “Memetic parasitism may explain why our species has been

acting so strangely over the past 10,000 years.” Bears some similarities to Daniel Quinn‘s thinking (Ishmael and, more expositorily, The Story of B) and Why Things Bite Back: technology and the revenge of unintended consequences by Edward Tenner.

Lara Croft: The Guardian’s guide to the cyber-shoot-’em-up in links.

Recovery team to leave to raise sunken Russian sub. Footnote to a poignant story. The Guardian UK

Richard Dawkins: the prophet of reason: ‘”Anyone would think I was the only atheist around,” says Richard Dawkins, in tones of mildly frustrated grievance. He isn’t, of course, but if you happen to be

in the market for an atheist, there’s little doubt that the Charles Simonyi Professor in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University is the market

leader – a Rolls-Royce of anti-clerical argument, whose contradictions and counter-propositions slam shut with a perfectly engineered thunk. “… I have respect for religious people in so far as they are asking important questions. They want to know why we exist and why the world exists, and they

don’t just want to know who’s going to win Wimbledon and what’s for dinner. And to that extent I have great respect. But I get irritated at the way those

deep and fundamental and mysterious questions are hijacked – because I think that science can answer most of them, if not all of them.” ‘

Indeed, Dawkins has some (I hesitate to use the term) spiritual kin. John Diamond ‘died four months ago, around 30,000 words

into Snake Oil, which here shows all the promise of a majestic

polemic against the idiocies, wishful thinking and deception —

self- and otherwise — which make up “alternative” (to what?)

medicine, a.k.a. “complementary” (to what?) medicine… The six extant chapters of Snake Oil are filled with splendid

blasts against homeopaths, aromatherapists, iridologists, crystal

healers, reflexologists and plant-remedialists, who, says

Diamond: “make perfect sense on a sort of

flowers-are-harbingers-of-good level which wouldn’t have

grasped the public imagination quite so forcefully, I imagine, if

(Dr Bach had) used 38 types of spider to produce the Bach

Spider Remedies.”

Yet these attacks are incidental at this stage, the blows of a

fighter knocking aside importunate schnorrers as he climbs into

the ring.

The battle to be fought in that ring is nothing less than the fight

for scientific reason against deluded sentimentality (or, in some

cases, cynical exploitation of the sick, the hopeless and the

desperate). When national newspapers devote whole pages to

alternativists puffing blatant quackery without even printing a

warning at the top of the page (“What follows is of the same

degree of intellectual probity as the fashion pages”); when our

cultural and political infrastructure still stumbles about in a

wilfully benighted scientific illiteracy, the battle is one which

needs to be fought.’ from one of those cranky curmodgeons at The Times of London

Abuddhas memes pointed me to this essay by Prof. Hugo de Garis (director of the Starbrain artificial brain project in Brussels) which was solicited for but not used by The New York Times as an op-ed piece. Building Gods or Building Our Potential Exterminators:

‘Robot artificial intelligence is evolving a million times faster than human intelligence. This is a consequence of Moore’s law which states that the electronic

performance of chips is doubling every year or so, whereas it took a million years for our human brains to double their capacities… (I)t is not surprising that someone like me is preoccupied with the prospect of

robot intelligence surpassing the human intelligence level… (N)ot only do I believe that artificial brains could become smarter than human

beings, I believe that the potential intelligence of these massively intelligent machines (which I call “artilects” (artificial intellects) could be truly trillions of trillions

of trillions of times greater… These artilects could

potentially be truly god like, immortal, have virtually unlimited memory capacities, and vast humanly incomprehensible intelligence levels.

I foresee humanity splitting into two major ideological, bitterly opposed groups over the “species dominance” issue, i.e. should humanity build artilects or not… As the planet’s pioneering brain builder, I feel a terrible burden of responsibility towards the survival of the human species and the creation of godlike

artilects, because I am part of the problem. I am quite schizophrenic on this point. I would love to be remembered after I’m gone as the “father of the

artificial brain”, but I certainly don’t want to be seen in future historical terms as the “father of gigadeath”… The decision to build artilects or not will be the toughest decision that humanity will ever have to make. Personally, I’m glad to be alive now. As I said in a

recent European Discovery Channel documentary on my work and ideas, “I fear for my grandchildren. They will see the horror, and they will be destroyed

by it”.’

His presentation of his ideas is abit too intertwined with his narcissism — understandable that the NYT killed the piece — but provocative.

NextDraft — “Written by award-winning writer

Dave Pell, it’s informative, it’s pithy, it’s funny,

it’s available, it’s decent looking, it practices

safe newsletter.” Daily weblog-like commentary on news across a spectrum of categories — “politics, pop culture, business” — with plenty of links, but “newsletter” because each day’s post replaces the previous on the webpage. You can subscribe for daily delivery of a text version by email. Dave argues that it’s perfect preparation to break into the know-it-all clique at the dinner parties or the water cooler. He damns himself with faint praise, however; be sure to scroll down to the bottom of his content for a longer more reflective essay. Today, for example, it’s on “one of those stories that

erase all cynicism and simply make one wonder at

human spirit and innovation” — the breakthrough TV ad for a running shoe which features Jami Goldman, world-class runner with two prosthetic legs. “Equal opportunity exploitation”, he says but hastens to add he does not necessarily mean that critically.

Dave, like myself, went to the Graduate School of Education at Harvard in a former life, but he did it to teach while I used it to springboard to medical school and psychiatry. Nevertheless, he says he’s “generally an advocate of psychotherapy (see only tangentially related link here Psychiatric News), but not opposed

to medication when symptoms dictate.” Unlike me, he went into the business world and probably got rich at least once; this site, which lists some of his recent business commentary articles, pegs him as the managing partner of an investment firm who “has invested in and advised more than

thirty internet start-ups.” He also writes davenetics, a daily briefing for internet professionals.

Here’s one of Dave’s nextdraft links, with too enticing a kicker to pass up reprinting: 43 celebrates 55 with 41. CNN

I happened upon this reflective site which bears “comments on current ideas and events” by Virginia Postrel, author of The Future and its Enemies. Right now, for example, she has her reproving ruminations on A.I., a lament for the passing of Apple’s G4 Cube (“What is the value of stunning design in what I argue… is a new age of aesthetics?”), a reflective exploration of reactions to the Yates ‘postpartum-depression’ child murders, and some thoughts on digital copycats (“Is plagiarism by professionals [as opposed to term-paper ‘writers’] more common in the digital age — or is it just easier to catch and easier to protest?”).

Welcome to Overlawyered.com: “Overlawyered.com explores an American legal system that too often turns litigation into

a weapon against guilty and innocent alike, erodes individual responsibility, rewards

sharp practice, enriches its participants at the public’s expense, and resists even modest

efforts at reform and accountability.”

Andrew Sullivan has an interesting essay on the ‘gotcha’ attitude in contemporary journalism and politics. Here’s the denouement:

“… critics are increasingly leery of taking on politicians for

deep, real reasons and try to nail them for minor ones instead. Is Michael Portillo

gay? Did Karl Rove sell his Intel stock in time? How much did Hillary Clinton pay

for her New York office? Did George W. Bush once get busted for DUI? How

much did Bill Clinton pay for his haircut on the LAX runway? Did former President

Bush really not know what a checkout scanner was? Did Al Gore say he invented

the Internet? Did Clarence Thomas rent porn videos? At best, these issues

illustrate deeper worries about the people involved. But such worries would be

better expressed directly. Let’s discuss whether Portillo is too liberal; Rove, too

close to corporate America; or the Clintons, deeply corrupt; and so on. These are

the real issues and the real scandals. Too often, the mini-distractions are simply

ways to wound people for partisan or personal gain.

The same goes for administration nominees. I think New York Senator Charles

E. Schumer was on the mark when he argued this week in The New York Times

that the Democrats should scrutinize Bush’s judicial appointees’ ideology rather

than look for petty little scandals or minor gaffes in their paper trails. Perhaps it’s

because, as a culture, we have grown so leery of wholesale demonstrations of

ideology–everyone’s for bipartisanship now–that we often miss the ideological

forest for the ethical trees. I’m not saying we should ignore petty instances of

corruption. I’m saying they have become the central way we debate our

differences. This doesn’t merely trivialize our politics. It robs it of real meaning.”

Hard to believe some White House intern was allowed to post this transcript of Duh-bya’s unrehearsed July 2nd Remarks During Visit to the Jefferson Memorial on the White House website:

Q: What does the 4th mean to you, Mr. President?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, it’s an unimaginable honor to be the President

during the 4th of July of this country. It means what these words say, for

starters. The great inalienable rights of our country. We’re blessed with such

values in America. And I — it’s — I’m a proud man to be the nation based

upon such wonderful values.

I can’t tell you what it’s like to be in Europe, for example, to be talking

about the greatness of America. But the true greatness of America are the

people. And it’s another reason we’re here, is to be able to say hello to

some of our fellow Americans who are here to celebrate.

Who’s Really President? Rove or Cheney?

This week has

brought more

conflicting evidence. Rove has almost single-handedly

blocked the administration from permitting stem-cell research.

Most Americans, Health and Human Services Secretary

Tommy Thompson, and lots of top Republican politicians say

it’s a scientific and ethical good. Rove says it could alienate

Catholic voters. Cheney, meanwhile, rushed back to the

office a day after heart surgery, a frantic return that confirmed

the Democratic suspicion that the White House—and

President Bush—would collapse without him. Slate

It’s Raining Tigers and Dragons in the Land of Film: “In the copycat

world of cinema, it was inevitable that

someone would try to replicate the success

of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang

Lee’s romantic martial arts epic.

But as film buyers from around the world

gathered here last week for the Hong Kong

International Film and Television Market,

they gaped at the shamelessness of the

efforts to imitate the film.” New York Times

Petulant Clown Prince ‘may take his ball and go home if he doesn’t get his way’: With a ten-point drop in his approval ratings and the defection of moderate Republicans on the healthcare reform bill, as well as a looming defeat in the campaign reform struggle, and his failure to get European leaders to love him, to change their minds on the Kyoto accords or to embrace NMD on his first overseas trip,

Bush “continues to send a signal that, ‘I’m going to do what I want to do, and if

nobody likes it, I’m going to go back to Crawford’,” ( LATimes political writer Ronald) Brownstein wrote, quoting (a)

lobbyist. Presumably, Bush would serve out his four-year term

before returning to his ranch.

Republicans present these “back to Crawford” threats as a sign of Bush’s principled

leadership, but the warnings could sound to others like a petulant child vowing to take

his ball and go home if he doesn’t get his way.

Some might see a tinge of megalomania – or at least conceit – in the threat, as if Bush

thinks he is so vital to the nation that his departure in a huff must be avoided at all costs.

This attitude has shown through in other recent remarks in which he expresses unbridled

confidence in his skills as president, including his presumed ability to judge the character

of other leaders he barely knows. Consortium News

[If the consequences weren’t so dangerous, we could dismiss W. as merely pitiable and laughable.]

Several new books make it clear that the Supreme Court’s notorious Bush vs. Gore ruling “wasn’t as bad as it seemed at the time. It was worse.” In order of increasing bombastics:

Sunstein and Epstein’s The Vote, a collection of essays by legal scholars from the left and right, demonstrates “how weak, cramped and unconvincing the arguments made by the majority’s defenders are. Not a single writer

finds himself able to defend the ruling in its entirety, and some of the concessions they make are huge.”

Alan Dershowitz’s Supreme Injustice argues that the Court violated the judicial oath of impartiality. Heads should roll.

And “Vincent Bugliosi’s The Betrayal of America is prime porterhouse. Bugliosi asserts

that the majority justices are common criminals.” Salon

Intern Opportunities: “Whether interning in Modesto, Merced, or Washington D.C., working in one of Rep. Condit’s offices can be an extremely rewarding

experience.”

‘Life imitating art’ dep’t.: ‘Sopranos’ actor arrested on robbery charge. CNN

A new kind of drive-by shooting:

It is hard to reconcile traffic camera tickets with a free society. There is no due process and

no right to confront your accuser. Imaginative police chiefs are already coming up with new

uses for the technology. Tampa, Florida’s Ybor entertainment district has 36 mounted

cameras that can capture images of up to eight people at a time and compare them with a

computer database filled with the facial features of people wanted on active warrants.

What’s next? Cameras to catch those smoking, using cell phones or not wearing seat belts?

We’re all for traffic enforcement, but there is a danger that this technology could ultimately

be used to monitor the comings and goings of citizens. Wall Street Journal opinion

Notion of nice heads for new extremes: “A raft of civility laws, hyper-tactful public officials, and “behave yourself!” warnings to Seattle

Mariners fans are among the signs that leave some residents wondering if Seattle is evolving into

America’s Singapore, where gum chewing can bring a $6,000 fine, and everyone is always nice – or

does hard time.” Christian Science Monitor

Sleepwalk theory on man found hanged; “…might have hanged himself while

dreaming about a death scene from the film

Schindler’s List, an inquest was told yesterday.

Michael Cox, 37, had been a sleepwalker since

childhood and often dreamed about films he had just

watched, the hearing was told. He was found dead

at home a few days after telling a friend he would

watch the holocaust movie, which has a hanging

scene at its climax.” Telegraph UK

Sweet Nothings Are Better Heard in the Left Ear: “Lovers take heed. If you are going to whisper sweet nothings to your sweetheart, make sure it is through the left ear. …Study (shows) that emotional words got through to people better when spoken through the

left ear, not the right.”

“She doesn’t fear anything. Rabid dogs sit next to her and calm down.” Indian Guru Seeks to Love the World Personally:

“From dawn to late at night people stream toward her.

One-by-one they place their heads on her breast or belly or shoulder for a hug. She pats them on

the back, chucks their chins, listens to their woes, smoothes their hair, smiles broadly and whispers

heartfelt blessings into their ears, sometimes drying their tears.

Rapidly growing in popularity and a sought-after guest, Amma, 46, goes where she is summoned

and does not publicize her visits. She stays where people offer lodging, asks for nothing, eats little

and spends up to 18 hours a day — rarely moving from her seat — hugging, praying for, and

blessing anybody and everybody who comes to her.” Reuters [via Robot Wisdom]

Thanks to higgy, who points to Lew Welch’s Ring of Bone:

I saw myself

a ring of bone

in the clear stream

of all of it

and vowed

always to be open to it

that all of it

might flow through

and then heard

“ring of bone” where

ring is what a

bell does

Echelon Furor Ends in a Whimper: “In the end, a year of hard work boils down to this: Echelon exists and the

Europeans don’t like it, but there isn’t much they can do except wring their hands in impotent fury as the

Americans continue spying on whomever they please.” Wired [via Progressive Review] And here’s a Wired news collection, Privacy Matters.

A Saucer From Mars? Nope, Canada. A new book details a secret ’50’s U.S.-Canadian project to develop a flying saucer. Bill Zuk, the Winnipeg-based historian who wrote Avrocar: Canada’s Flying Saucer, wants the two surviving prototypes repartiated back to Canada from American museums. Wired

Annals of the Invasion of Privacy (cont’d.): Nowhere left to hide. “Whether you’re in jail or at the supermarket, your image

might be shown on the Net, and there’s not a thing you can do about it.” Salon

“Michael S. Joyce is an ultraconservative ideologue. For years, prior to

his recent retirement, he headed” the Milwaukee-based Harry and Lynde Bradley Foundation, “one of the most effective right-wing

foundations in America. Joyce recently answered President Bush’s call to

resuscitate his floundering faith-based initiative. If anyone is up to that task,

it’s Joyce.”

(Bradley) Foundation support for conservative writers included

grants to: Dinesh D’Souza for The End of Racism, a revisionist view of the

history of slavery and racism in America; Charles Murray for The Bell Curve,

an argument for the genetic inferiority of blacks; David Brock for The Real

Anita Hill “which characterized Anita Hill as ‘slightly nutty slightly slutty'”

(Brock repudiates the book in the August issue of Talk magazine); and

Christina Hoff Sommers for Who Stole Feminism. Tompaine.com

Pig Treatment Used to Treat Mentally Ill People

A mineral supplement developed for calming

aggressive pigs has been modified to treat children and adults with

serious mental disorders, a Canadian scientist said on Tuesday.

The concoction of minerals, initially dismissed by the scientific

establishment as “snake oil,” was developed by the owner of an

animal feed company in Canada to help a friend with children

suffering from severe psychological disorders.

David Hardy used his knowledge of animal nutrition to create the

treatment made up of 36 components, most of them minerals, and

the effects on the children were dramatic enough to encourage him to

develop it further.

While stressing the research was preliminary, a leading pediatrician

from Alberta Children’s Hospital in western Canada said it was

convincing enough to conquer her skepticism. Reuters

First Artificial Intelligence to Undergo Formal Human Psychological Evaluation: “For the first time a standard psychological test known as the

MMPI-2 (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) used by clinicians world wide in the

evaluation and treatment of adults will be administered to a machine based artificial personality.

GAC (Generic Artificial Consciousness) – pronounced ‘Jack’ – is the artificial personality being

developed at the Mindpixel Digital Mind Modeling Project (www.mindpixel.com) with the

collaboration of nearly 40,000 internet users from more than 200 countries worldwide. GAC will be

evaluated using the MMPI-2 over the next several months to assess it’s learning of human consensus

experience from the Mindpixel project’s large and diverse group of users from many different

cultures. The test will be supervised and interpreted by Dr. Robert Epstein, one of the world’s

leading experts on human and machine behavior.”

Fireworks leave polluting afterglow; happy Independence Day. “The spectacular fireworks that mark

public events like the Olympics and the

new millenium, leave a nasty afterglow of

the air pollutant ozone according to new

research.”

Emotional controversy (as emotional as it gets in the sober letters column of the Journal of the American Medical Association) over a study reporting that St John’s Wort was ineffective for the treatment of major depression.

Review of Nell Casey (ed.)’s Unholy Ghost: writers on depression:

This powerful collection of reflections on depression includes some well-known authors,

such as Ann Beatie, Susanna Kaysen, and William Styron, but for the most part the less

well-known writers outshine the big names. Possibly that is because editor Nell Casey

had more influence over the less prestigious writers, and encouraged them to crystallize

their ideas. Nearly all of these pieces are new, while a few have been printed

previously in magazines, and just two are extracts from previously published books. All

the authors have been in close contact with depression, either personally or though

helping a family member deal with a crisis. The experience of these writers gives their

contributions authority and depth, and their ability to reflect on this experience makes

this collection both thoughtful and moving.

There’s a common misconception (which I encounter all the time in contending with the families, spouses, employers and friends of the depressed people I treat) that clinical depression is just like the ‘down’ times that the rest of us experience. Untold fractiousnessness and second-level suffering results from the message to the depressed patient that they should just “snap out of it” by “force of will” and “get on with their life”, and the like. For those tolerant of a literary approach, this book is the best antidote I’ve found (I used to recommend William Styron’s Darkness Visible, which is excerpted in this anthology.) to give the skeptic some perspective on the qualitatively distinct suffering of a person in the throes of a deep depression.

Consider this, poet Jane Kenyon’s “Having it Out with Melancholy”, especially the brutal, starkly riveting stanza 7 whose central image has burned its way indelibly into my consciousness since I first encountered this poem many years ago:

If many remedies are prescribed

for an illness, you may be certain

that the illness has no cure.

–A. P. CHEKHOV, The Cherry Orchard

1 FROM THE NURSERY

When I was born, you waited

behind a pile of linen in the nursery,

and when we were alone, you lay down

on top of me, pressing

the bile of desolation into every pore.

And from that day on

everything under the sun and moon

made me sad — even the yellow

wooden beads that slid and spun

along a spindle on my crib.

You taught me to exist without gratitude.

You ruined my manners toward God:

“We’re here simply to wait for death;

the pleasures of earth are overrated.”

I only appeared to belong to my mother,

to live among blocks and cotton undershirts

with snaps; among red tin lunch boxes

and report cards in ugly brown slipcases.

I was already yours — the anti-urge,

the mutilator of souls.

2 BOTTLES

Elavil, Ludiomil, Doxepin,

Norpramin, Prozac, Lithium, Xanax,

Wellbutrin, Parnate, Nardil, Zoloft.

The coated ones smell sweet or have

no smell; the powdery ones smell

like the chemistry lab at school

that made me hold my breath.

3 SUGGESTION FROM A FRIEND

You wouldn’t be so depressed

if you really believed in God.

4 OFTEN

Often I go to bed as soon after dinner

as seems adult

(I mean I try to wait for dark)

in order to push away

from the massive pain in sleep’s

frail wicker coracle.

5 ONCE THERE WAS LIGHT

Once, in my early thirties, I saw

that I was a speck of light in the great

river of light that undulates through time.

I was floating with the whole

human family. We were all colors — those

who are living now, those who have died,

those who are not yet born. For a few

moments I floated, completely calm,

and I no longer hated having to exist.

Like a crow who smells hot blood

you came flying to pull me out

of the glowing stream.

“I’ll hold you up. I never let my dear

ones drown!” After that, I wept for days.

6 IN AND OUT

The dog searches until he finds me

upstairs, lies down with a clatter

of elbows, puts his head on my foot.

Sometimes the sound of his breathing

saves my life — in and out, in

and out; a pause, a long sigh. . . .

7 PARDON

A piece of burned meat

wears my clothes, speaks

in my voice, dispatches obligations

haltingly, or not at all.

It is tired of trying

to be stouthearted, tired

beyond measure.

We move on to the monoamine

oxidase inhibitors. Day and night

I feel as if I had drunk six cups

of coffee, but the pain stops

abruptly. With the wonder

and bitterness of someone pardoned

for a crime she did not commit

I come back to marriage and friends,

to pink fringed hollyhocks; come back

to my desk, books, and chair.

8 CREDO

Pharmaceutical wonders are at work

but I believe only in this moment

of well-being. Unholy ghost,

you are certain to come again.

Coarse, mean, you’ll put your feet

on the coffee table, lean back,

and turn me into someone who can’t

take the trouble to speak; someone

who can’t sleep, or who does nothing

but sleep; can’t read, or call

for an appointment for help.

There is nothing I can do

against your coming.

When I awake, I am still with thee.

9 WOOD THRUSH

High on Nardil and June light

I wake at four,

waiting greedily for the first

note of the wood thrush. Easeful air

presses through the screen

with the wild, complex song

of the bird, and I am overcome

by ordinary contentment.

What hurt me so terribly

all my life until this moment?

Along these lines, you might be interested in The Literature, Arts, & Medicine Database, a multi-institutional project initiated in the summer of 1993 at the New York University School of

Medicine — an annotated bibliography of prose, poetry, film, video and art which is being developed as a dynamic,

accessible, comprehensive resource in Medical Humanities, for use in health/pre-health and liberal arts settings.

Health effects, reproductive issues and effects on short-term memory from caffeine; an excerpt from Weinberg and Bealer’s The World of Caffeine: the science and culture of the world’s most popular drug (Routledge, 2001).

If, like the great

majority of people in the world, you use caffeine regularly, you are faced with

a complex, confusing, and often apparently contradictory cacophony of

traditional and contemporary claims about its effects on human health. … In

the last half of the 20th century, an explosion of general medical knowledge

and a large number of controlled experiments have shed scientific light on

many of caffeine’s effects. It has been often and truly said that caffeine is

the most studied drug in history. Yet, because of its nearly universal use, the

variety of its modes of consumption, its presence in and effects on nearly all

bodily systems, and its occurrence in chemically complex foods and

beverages, together with the complexity of the social and psychological

factors that shape its use, caffeine may also be one of the least adequately

understood. Tompaine.com

Both intrusive parenting and children’s scatological preoccupations are going high-tech.

It’s the thirtieth anniversary of Jim Morrison’s death; now he’s back. Jerry Garcia’s already returned.

UFO Cult May Sue U.S. FDA Over Human Cloning: “Brigitte Boisselier, a French biochemist who belongs to the international Raelian Movement, told

Reuters on Tuesday that her company Clonaid still plans to produce a cloned child within the next

year despite a recent crackdown by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.”

Oxy Craze Makes Way to Cities. Are the media discovering a scourge, fabricating or fantasizing about one, or helping to precipitate it?

Ky. Patient Gets Artificial Heart. Near death without it, the titanium and plastic device which is expected to extend his life by around a month is the first self-contained artificial heart without external connections. The heart allows a patient to pursue normal activity up through moderate exercise. About half of people awaiting heart transplant die before a suitable donor heart is available. The expectation is that this patient will die with the artificial heart.

Israeli target (lower right)?

State nixes GPS highway robbery. “There is no legal ability for them to charge a penalty when there has

been no damage,” says the State of Connecticut’s Department of Consumer Protection, ordering the auto rental company to cease and desist and refund penalties to customers who have complained. Surprising ruling. As outrageous as I think the auto rental company’s practice is (was), the renter did sign a contract agreeing to it. The consensus was that he would lose in court. The Register

Ford Wants to Send Drivers of Sport Utility Vehicles Back to School. Now Ford says it’s not Firestone’s fault, not Ford’s fault, but the fault of the SUV driver?? New York Times

Congressman Is Accused of Asking Woman to Lie. Condit’s web of apparent lies around the Chandra Levy disappearance, regarding which he is officially “not a suspect,” deepens. What’s that funny smell? New York Times

Wood Products to Have Arsenic Label: I’ve previously written about the first inklings of danger to children from playing around climbing structures made from treated lumber. Now “consumer warning labels will start appearing

this fall on nearly all the treated lumber in the United States, warning

about an arsenic-laced preservative being used to protect the wood

from decay and insect damage… Also Tuesday, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (news – web

sites) took a first step toward possibly banning CCA-treated wood

from playground equipment. It also is commonly used in the making

of decks, railings, picnic tables, fences, posts and docks.” AP

“How easily could a hacker bring the world to a standstill?” The Doomsday Click — “It didn’t

take long for me to see what computer-security experts have known for

years: any fool can enter, alter, and destroy even the most seemingly

impregnable Web sites…. It’s not even against the

law. You don’t have to know how to write, or even understand, the code

to wreck it. ” The New Yorker

Justice O’Connor Questions Death Penalty, “add(s) her voice to the growing chorus of skepticism about the administration of capital punishment in the United States.” Washington Post

Reformed snorer is ambivalent after uvulectomy. Washington Post

A Preliminary Survey of Rhinotillexomania in an Adolescent Sample: “Rhinotillexomania is a recent term coined to describe compulsive nose picking. There is little world literature on nose-picking behavior in the

general population…

Conclusion: Nose picking is common in adolescents. It is often associated with other habitual behaviors. Nose picking may merit closer epidemiologic and

nosologic (sic) scrutiny.” Journal of Clinical Psychiatry

He’s Your Inspiration, Not Mine. The Spike Report discussed this important Washington Post op-ed piece by Kathi Wolfe. Blind herself, Wolfe says that Erik Weihenmayer’s feat as the first blind man to climb Everest, and other sagas of superfeats by the disabled, are not welcome and make life harder for the less able. “One of us bursts onto the cultural radar screen as a superhero, and all of us are expected to perform amazing feats. It’s hard to say which stereotype is more annoying: the disabled as helpless victims or as superheroes.” Realistic stories about the less able are excluded bythe ubiquity of “supercrips” .

News Analysis: Critics of Health Industry Shaped Debate on Patients’ Rights. Good news in the struggle against ‘managed care’, an issue close to my heart. And, in case you were curious, for me and most doctors I know it’s not an issue of chafing under restrictions to our earning power, but — really — advocacy for our patients, plain and simple. A ‘patients’ bill of rights’ passed the Senate Friday and looks likely to have enough support in the Republican House as well, despite Li’l George’s scramble on behalf of the industry. Health care reform advocates’ crucial step appears to have been to succeed in driving a wedge between the insurance companies and their traditional allies the employers by immunizing the latter against the lawsuits to which the former will be susceptible. Pitiable contradictions in the HMOs’ arguments are apparent. New York Times

U.S. Charges Internet Operation Was a Huge Scam:

The fantasy world is so detailed that, in one

instance, the government was struggling to

cash a $9 million check posted in the English

case, only to find that the bank on which the

check was drawn did not exist. And then

there are the bizarre individuals connected

to the case, like the purported financier who

claims to be in radio contact with a 9-foot-6

extraterrestrial circling the earth in a

spaceship.

“When you look at what went on here, you

have to willingly suspend any sense of

reality,” said J. Chris Condren, an Oklahoma lawyer appointed by a federal

court as a receiver for EE-Biz. New York Times

Napster Temporarily Halts Service For Upgrade: “Embattled online music service Napster began shutting users

out of its song-swap system this weekend unless they downloaded the

latest version of its software using audio fingerprinting technology, a

spokesman for the company said on Monday. ‘All previous versions

of Napster have been disabled. We’re making this change as part of

our ongoing effort to comply with the court’s orders,’ a message

posted Friday on its website said.”

Trimble’s exit takes Ulster to the brink. Sadly, it appears the Northern Ireland peace process has collapsed; if Trimble thinks his resignation will pressure the IRA to decommission its weapons as it so far appears to have failed to do, it seems very unlikely. The Guardian UK Here’s a BBC timeline of the peace process since the 1998 Good Friday accords, and websites for Sinn Fein and the Ulster Unionists.

And, while we’re at it, the fragile truce in the Mideast, surely a castle built on sand if ever there was one, totters in the face of the ongoing violence. Sometimes my head hurts from all our collective thinking about who’s right and who’s to blame in this strife. It’s just so unbearably sad that we keep doing this to ourselves. In retrospect, the prospects for peace in these festering hotspots always amounted to hope against hope. To paraphrase Pete Seeger, however, the reason to go on when things are hopeless is only that we may be wrong.

Graphic summary of the international war crimes indictment against Slobodan Milosevic from the Washington Post. The devil is in the details; 500 individuals whose massacre he and top aides ordered during the Serbian conflict against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo are named. And Q & A about the legal process in The Hague, where Milosevic refused to legitimize the proceedings by entering a plea, from the BBC.

Report: Danger Lurks in Shark’s Fin Soup — “Sharks are more dangerous dead than alive, experts said on Tuesday,

warning of serious health risks posed by Asia’s love affair with soup made from their fins… Levels of(mercury) found in sharks’ fins for sale in Thailand were as much as 42

times more than safe limits for humans.”

Astronomers Find Solar System Body. Kuiper Belt objects began to be discovered only a decade ago, but they are the most abundant large objects in the solar system. Now one of the largest, rivalling Pluto’s moon Charon in size, has been found. Understanding the nature of the Kuiper Belt has led to the recent debates about whether it is proper to continue to consider Pluto to be a planet. If it is, this discovery indicates that other ‘planets’ may lurk out beyond awaiting discovery. AP

Uploading Life: Send Your Personality to Space. Sociologist W.S. Bainbridge, observing that the prospects for enhanced space exploration are waning, proposes founding a cosmic civilization without flying human bodies to the further reaches of the galaxy. If we start archiving personalities, it’s a good bet the technology for high-fidelity reanimation — into humans, clones, cyborgs, robots or other lifeforms suitable for the alien environments in which they find themselves — will develop. We should begin sending such ‘Starbase archives’ throughout the galaxy. “By offering the stars to people living today, the second wave of the spaceflight movement would

be spurred into being, Bainbridge said. The future demands a powerful, motivational force to

create interplanetary and interstellar civilizations, he said, and a new spaceflight social movement

can get us moving again.” Others propose merely disseminating our genetic code and a way to cultivate life on its arrival elsewhere.