The International Space Station passes through the New York night sky.
“I tried (you only really get one try) to get a picture. Not great, but it’s that faint streak going vertically in the middle… [ISO 50 (that was the mistake), 165 seconds, f/11, 20mm]”
heroin
As reported in a 2000 review paper on trends in NYC heroin adulterants:
Acetaminophen (Analgesic)
Aminopyrine (Anti-inflammatory)
Amitryptaline (Anti-depressant)
Antipyrine (Body water measurement)
Benzoczine (Anesthetic)
Caffeine (Stimulant)
Cocaine (Stimulant)
d-metamphetamine (Stimulant)
Diphenhydramine (Anti-histamine)
Doxepin (Anesthetic)
Ephedrine (Stimulant)
Lidocaine (Anesthetic)
Hydroxyzine (Anxiety medication)
Methylparben (Chemical preservative)
Methocarbamol (Muscle relaxant)
Nabumetone (Arthritis treatment)
Nicotinamide (Coenzyme)
Phenylbutazone (Anti-inflammant)
Phenylpropanlamine (Dexatrim / caffeine)
Potassium chloride (Potassium supplement
Rocaine (Local anesthetic)
Propoxyphene (Analgesic – Darvon)
Sodium Bicarbonate (Acid indigestion)
Quinine (Malaria treatment)
Theophylline (Bronchial dialator)
Thiamine (Dietary supplement)
Thiopental (Barbiturate)
Thioridazine (Nausea medication)
Tripolidine (Allergy medication)
Disodium ethylenediame tetraacetic (Chelating agent for metals)
The study notes that the most common non-dope ingredients in street heroin are lactose, milk sugar, sucrose, cellulose, mannitol and other inert ingredients, but there is an increasing trend for heroin to contain psychoactive chemicals or additional substances to alter its effect through changing how it is absorbed into the body.
Interestingly, the paper also notes that professional heroin cutters are expensive, charging up to $20,000 for a kilo of heroin. This is likely due to the skill and knowledge needed to select ingredients that will have certain effects, which can be different for ‘smokers’, ‘snorters’ and ‘injectors’.
Ingredients that affect the vaporisation point of heroin will be more important for smokers, while adulterants that increase absorption through the nasal passages will obviously be more important for snorters.
For injectors, cutters need to be able to select ingredients that aren’t going to gum up needles or cause too much damage to the users’ veins.
Additionally, some ingredients are added purely for their psychoactive effect to give a different experience and ‘brand’ the dope.
However, owing to the cost of a professional cutter, some dealers just cut it themselves with whatever they think is reasonable, meaning all kinds of potentially fatal ingredients end up in the average bag of smack.”
Via Mind Hacks
‘A Florida teenager who used a webcam to live-stream his suicide Wednesday was reportedly encouraged by other people on the Web site, authorities told ABCNews.com.
Authorities say approximately 1,300 people watch as the boy takes his life.
"People were egging him on and saying things like 'go ahead and do it, faggot,' said Wendy Crane, an investigator at the Broward County Medical Examiner's office.
Abraham Biggs, 19, of Pembroke Pines, Fla., had been blogging on an online body-building message board and had linked to his page on Justin.tv, a live video streaming Web site, where the camera rolled as he overdosed on prescription pills, according to Crane.
Biggs, who had reportedly been discussing his suicide on the forums, also posted a suicide note on a body-building forum, which has since been taken down, in which he wrote, "I hate myself and I hate living." ‘
via ABC News
“In a report, published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, Anne Cleary of Colorado State University says deja vu may occur when aspects of a current situation resemble aspects of previously occurring situations — the more overlap between the elements of the new and old situations the stronger the feeling of familiarity”
via UPI
I haven’t read the research paper; just this account in the popular press. But it seems problematic. Most people I know can tell the difference between a deja vu experience and something reminding them of something from the past. The first response when something feels familiar is to ask what it could possibly be reminiscent of. The deja vu experience is so uncanny precisely because of that distinction — the nature of the situation promoting the sense of familiarity is one in which, after consideration, you know it cannot possibly be reminiscent of anything. It is more likely the case that deja vu represents a malfunction of the machinery of recognition or familiarity in the brain, in which the sensation of familiarity is too readily activated in inappropriate (i.e. novel) situations. This occurs, for example, in temporal lobe epilepsy, because the abnormal electrical activity autonomately activates areas of the brain associated with memory and recognition without the usual input. The research referenced here seems to misunderstand a fundamental aspect of deja vu, in short. This is my take on contemporary psychological research alot of the time. Hmmm, doesn’t that sound familiar?
Trader shoots himself on stock exchange floor (BrisbaneTimes)
“Alaska Governor Sarah Palin pardoned a turkey Thursday ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday but another turkey didn’t fare as well.
Warning: video could be disturbing to viewers
The governor was being interviewed by a local television news station while the work of the Triple-D Farm and Hatchery continued. That’s when Governor Palin found herself in a less than desirable spot for the interview.
Just minutes after pardoning one turkey, a farm worker began processing another turkey just a few feet behind her, plainly visible in the background of the video.”
via kare11.com | Twin Cities [thanks, walker]
In an abbreviated version of the argument they expound in their book The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Misery Into Depressive Disorder, psychologists Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield say that the epidemic of depression arises from changes in the definition of the disorder, and specifically the loss of context. There is a bereavement exclusion but it is the only place where psychiatrists recognize that there is a difference between a ‘normal’ reaction to a painful loss and a depressive disorder. In fact, in my training, the ‘naive’ comment, “You would be sad too if that was going on in your life” was presented derisively as the caricature of ignorance about depression. The ‘bible’ of psychiatric diagnoses, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), currently in its fourth edition, devalued the time-honored recognition by physicians that the context in which symptoms arose was an important considderation in determining whether what the person was experiencing was normal. This goes hand in hand with other pressures in my field to medicalize and pathologize normal emotional reactions, of which I have written with concern here in the past.
“People will post pictures with their credit cards but with the name and number greyed out,” said Stefan Savage, a professor at the University of California, San Diego who helped develop the software. “They should have the same sensitivity with their keys.” ‘
via MSNBC
Pyridostigmine
“The Gulf War illness was real and was caused by pyridostigmine bromide pills taken by U.S. troops to neutralize the effects of nerve gas attacks and by exposure to neurotoxic insecticides, according to a VA advisory panel.”
via MedPage Today
Ilan Goldenberg:
“Al Qaeda’s narrative is now under siege and it’s clearly uncertain about how to react. The election of the first African American President, one with a Muslim father, flies in the face of this narrative. It shows America as an open and tolerant society – not the oppressive empire Al Qaeda would like to portray. In fact, the overwhelmingly positive international reaction to Obama’s election is proof of the the threat Al Qaeda faces. ..
Thus, it’s not surprising that Zawahiri has resorted to calling Obama a “house negro” to try and paint him as just another American President. But this is clearly more a defensive and weak message than effective propaganda that might actually work.”
via Huffington Post
“…a slick right wing site that claims the liberal media and ignorant voters are the only reason a guy with “limited experience, extreme liberal positions and radical political alliances could be elected President.” Are you serious? African chanting to start a video attacking Obama?! And then interviews with a handful of Obama supporters to “prove” they are ignorant? Why don’t we interview the millions of Americans who think Obama is a Muslim to prove the media has a right wing bias? Ignorance has no party allegiance.”
On Facebook, an "Impeach Barack Obama" group has attracted more than 700 members”
via Seth Breitbart
Sam Smith:
via Undernews
According to British psychologist Daniel Freeman, nearly one in four Londoners regularly have paranoid thoughts. Freeman is a paranoia expert at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College and the author of a book on the subject.
Experts say there is a wide spectrum of paranoia, from the dangerous delusions that drive schizophrenics to violence to the irrational fears many people have daily.
“We are now starting to discover that madness is human and that we need to look at normal people to understand it,” said Dr. Jim van Os, a professor of psychiatry at Maastricht University in the Netherlands…”
via Las Vegas Sun
Other midnight regulations in the works include
Most regulations are subject to public input; such is the sense of urgency that the Administration has brought to the task of despoliation that the Interior Department completed its “review” of two hundred thousand public comments on the endangered-species rules in just four days, a feat that, one congressional aide calculated, required each staff member involved to read through comments at the rate of seven per minute. “So little time, so much damage” is how the Times recently put it.”
via The New Yorker
Ganzfeld experiment
This is a special issue on the ‘Neuropsychology of Paranormal Experiences and Beliefs’
Contents include:
Highlights include:
Maureen Dowd:
If she became secretary of state, she would be getting the job despite her husband — and because of her own transformation in the primaries from a legacy applicant to a scrappy one.”
via NY Times op-ed
via UKImageHost
“Over the summer, a wrangle between eminent psychiatrists that had been brewing for months erupted in print. Startled readers of Psychiatric News saw the spectacle unfold in the journal’s normally less-dramatic pages. The bone of contention: whether the next revision of America’s psychiatric bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, should be done openly and transparently so mental health professionals and the public could follow along, or whether the debates should be held in secret.
One of the psychiatrists (former editor Robert Spitzer) wanted transparency; several others, including the president of the American Psychiatric Assn. and the man charged with overseeing the revisions (Darrel Regier), held out for secrecy. Hanging in the balance is whether, four years from now, a set of questionable behaviors with names such as “Apathy Disorder,” “Parental Alienation Syndrome,” “Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder,” “Compulsive Buying Disorder,” “Internet Addiction” and “Relational Disorder” will be considered full-fledged psychiatric illnesses.
This may sound like an arcane, insignificant spat about nomenclature. But the manual is in fact terribly important, and the debates taking place have far-reaching consequences.”
That’s the startling and reassuring discovery by Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth, who analyzed an astonishing 323 resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006.”
via Green Change
“But somehow, it all gets twisted around and, next thing you know, somebody’s spouting off some nonsense about, ‘God says I have to kill this guy, God wants me to kill that guy, it’s God’s will,'” God continued. “It’s not God’s will, all right? News flash: ‘God’s will’ equals ‘Don’t murder people.'” ‘
via The Onion
…[B]efore he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.
For all the perquisites and power afforded the president, the chief executive of the United States is essentially deprived by law and by culture of some of the very tools that other chief executives depend on to survive and to thrive. Mr. Obama, however, seems intent on pulling the office at least partly into the 21st century on that score; aides said he hopes to have a laptop computer on his desk in the Oval Office, making him the first American president to do so.” (New York Times )
“The latest TV show planned for US cable network FOX has the working title of Smile, You’re Under Arrest, and involves wanted criminals being tricked into elaborate fantasy scenarios, at the end of which they are arrested.
One of three set-ups just shot in Arizona features the cops luring a criminal to a movie set with the promise of making him an extra and paying him a couple hundred dollars. An elaborate film set is staged and filming begins on a faux movie. The set-up continues as the director then gets mad at the lead actor, fires him and replaces him with the law-breaking extra.
The scene escalates with the fake director introducing the mark to a supposed studio mogul and continuing to create this dream-comes-true sequence. Finally, all the participants are revealed as officers of the law, and the criminal is apprehended (before signing waivers to let the footage be used in the show).
“If it were a regular person you’d feel bad for them, but they are all wanted by the law,” Darnell says. “It’s Cops as comedy and no one’s ever tried it before.”
How did FOX manage to get a police department to divert resources to such a programme? Well, the department involved is the Maricopa County Sherriff’s Office, run by Sherriff Joe Arpaio, whose spectacularly harsh treatment of offenders has made him the darling of America’s more brutally-minded. And now FOX, who are no strangers to brutality, are going to make him more of a star. Perhaps watching Jack Bauer torture Arabs doesn’t do it any more or something.
I half-wonder whether this is part of a strategy leading up to Arpaio getting on the Republican Presidential ticket for 2012. There were rumours that FOX was going to buff Sarah Palin’s image by giving her a national TV talk show, though if she looks too much like damaged goods, they could want another conservative firebrand who appeals to the culture-war conservatives.”
via The Null Device
“For Beatles fans across the world it has gained near mythical status. The 14-minute improvised track called ‘Carnival of Light’ was recorded in 1967 and played just once in public. It was never released because three of the Fab Four thought it too adventurous.
The track, a jumble of shrieks and psychedelic effects, is said to be as far from the melodic ballads that made Sir Paul McCartney famous as it is possible to imagine. But now McCartney has said that the public will have the chance to judge for themselves.”
via The Observer
Plankton, bats, primates, fungi and bees – which species would have the greatest impact on our planet if it were lost? Five experts set out their case public debate in London next Thursday
via Guardian.UK
“A small tribe of Indians in Paraguay who have had virtually no contact with the outside world won a legal battle this week when rights groups stopped a Brazilian company from continuing to bulldoze the forest to clear land for cattle ranches.
About 2,000 members of the Ayoreo ethnic group live in 13 settlements in Bolivia and Paraguay.
About 2,000 members of the Ayoreo ethnic group live in 13 settlements in Bolivia and Paraguay.
The Totobiegosode tribe, said to number no more than 300, is the last group of uncontacted Indians in South America outside the Amazon River basin, indigenous rights groups say.
The Totobiegosode, who are part of the larger Ayoreo ethnic group, are nomadic Indians who hunt and fish, as well as gather fruit and honey and cultivate small temporary plots during the rainy season. They live communally, four to six families to a dwelling, in the dense forests of northwestern Paraguay.”
via CNN
“A spur-of-the-moment decision to buy a wolf cub changed Mark Rowlands’s life. From that moment on he found human company never quite matched up.”
via Telegraph.UK
William Gibson
“These days, science can be stranger than science fiction, and mainstream literature is increasingly futuristic and speculative. So are the genre’s days numbered? We asked six leading writers for their thoughts on the future of science fiction, including Margaret Atwood, William Gibson and Kim Stanley Robinson.”
via New Scientist
“The lolcats, the Internet’s most famous felines, may be hilarious. But in their yearning, I see nothing less than the tragedy of the human condition.” — Dixit Jay
via Salon
The Large Hadron Collider/ATLAS at CERN
“The multiverse is no longer a model, it is a consequence of our models.”
~Aurelien Barrau, particle physicist at CERN
via Daily Galaxy
‘ “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it. It’s dead, that’s what’s wrong with it.”
For those who believe the ancient Greeks thought of everything first, proof has been found in a 4th century AD joke book featuring an ancestor of Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch where a man returns a parrot to a shop, complaining it is dead.
The 1,600-year-old work entitled “Philogelos: The Laugh Addict,” one of the world’s oldest joke books, features a joke in which a man complains that a slave he has just bought has died, its publisher said on Friday.
“By the gods,” answers the slave’s seller, “when he was with me, he never did any such thing”
In a British comedy act Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketch, first aired in 1969 and regularly voted one of the funniest ever, the pet-shop owner says the parrot, a “Norwegian Blue,” is not dead, just “resting” or “pining for the fjords.” ‘ (Reuters)
…to you, the FmH readers. Follow Me Here… is nine years old today, and many happy returns to you.
. And here is a PDF of the actual questionnaire. (CNN)
Eight women representing prominent mental diagnoses in the nineteenth century.
Health Professionals Fear Web Sites That Support Theories on Mind Control (New York Times ). The internet may have fundamentally changed the experience of those who believe they are stalked or persecuted. Sites filled with stories from people calling themselves victims of “mind control” or “gang stalking” offer support and validation, in contrast to the isolation and pejoration with which they were treated in the pre-internet era. Many mental health professionals are alarmed that such sites encourage delusional thinking. The growth of such a community of sufferers with shared beliefs presents a fundamental challenge to the definition of delusions, as beliefs that are at odds with those shared by one’s culture or subculture.
The interest of law enforcement and government agencies in covert surveillance, mind-control and chemical interrogation techniques (cf. MK-ULTRA)is enough evidence to encourage such beliefs, and their dismissal by health professionals and others is seen as evidence of a cover-up of the truth.
However, others who see the isolation and quiet torment in which people with psychotic disorders live feel that the growth of a supportive community could be a good thing. In my own work with patients who believe they are subject to mind control or gang stalking, I do not find confronting and contradicting their beliefs is effective. In fact, I am sensitive to the ways in which it perpetuates the violence and persecution that has been done to them by other powerful individuals in their lives. Treatment, the aim of which after all is to relieve suffering, cannot be done in an intellectually dishonest way in which one acts out a charade of sharing the patient’s beliefs. But treatment must be experienced as a safe place in which to have one’s thoughts, whether agreed with or not. Contrary to the opinion of one psychiatrist interviewed for this article, who says that but for these internet sites reinforcing the thinking, it would fade away because never validated, the essence of delusional thinking is that it is logically self-validating. The sufferer has constructed an airtight explanation for disturbing experiences and perceptions they have, an explanation which is not falsifiable. Its assertions are self-fulfilling. That is the logic and, if you will, the beauty of delusional thinking. In my experiences, such thinking is not malleable and precisely does not fade away. To attempt to confront it is to invalidate the person in front of you, doing profound existential violence to an already quite vulnerable person. This is the essence of what I have always taught my students as a core approach to a psychotic individual.
This has been known for a long time in psychological circles, and it is merely the self-anointed but misguided role of mental health providers as arbiters of thought and vanquishers of mental illness that prevents our acceptance of immutable delusional thinking. My uncle, the psychologist Milton Rokeach, wrote in his 1964 book The Three Christs of Ypsilanti of an experiment in which he brought together three psychiatric patients each of whom believed he was Christ… sort of meeting irresistible force with immovable object. He hoped that the coexistence of logically incompatible beliefs would correct the delusions. He later wrote that he regretted the experiment, because as it turned out all that it had done had been to vastly amplify the distress and confusion of the three subjects.
In addition to my uncle, several of my mentors and teachers were influential in grappling with how to situate themselves properly with respect to the challenging beliefs of their patients, if they were neither to fraudulently say they agreed nor to contradict by brute force. R.D. Laing took a radical stance of refusing to make distinctions between ‘patients’ and ‘treaters’ as arbiters of the truth. This is an incredibly useful position to take, although I think Laing went too far in that the relationship is inherently asymmetrical; the patient is the one who comes to us with suffering, seeking guidance and succor. Leston Havens devoted himself to the technical craft of finding language and therapeutic stance that would allow the therapist to situate him- or herself as an ally, rather than an opponent, of people so difficult to ally with. John Mack’s work with alien abductees exemplified finding a way to be helpful with a subset of those sufferers whose beliefs are so at odds with prevailing notions.
It has been an area of my own fascination, teaching and research to watch how the lay public’s knowledge and beliefs about mental health issues are spread in the popular media, word of mouth and, more recently, the internet. These means of communication are not a cause of mental illness, but clearly important variables in shaping it. I wonder, WWLD (what would Laing do?) with the internet?
Drummer in the Jimi Hendrix Experience Dies at 62 (New York Times obituary)
“An internet blogger and a writer who disguised an attack on Burma’s dictator in the form of a love poem were among dozens of activists sentenced to draconian jail terms as the junta ordered a fresh crackdown on dissidents.
Nay Myo Kyaw, 28, who wrote blogs under the name Nay Phone Latt, was sentenced to 20 years and 6 months in jail by a court in Rangoon. The poet, Saw Wai, received a two-year sentence for an eight-line Valentine’s Day verse published in a popular magazine.” (Times of London)
“The president-elect of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, says he wants to buy a new homeland for his people.
He says that the gradual rise in sea levels caused by global warming means the Maldives islanders may eventually be forced to resettle elsewhere.
The Maldives is the lowest nation in the world. Its highest land is little more than two metres above sea level.
The United Nations estimates that sea levels may rise globally by nearly 60 centimetres this century.” (BBC)
The parody announced the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as progress toward reversing global warming and U.S. economic woes.
The activists behind the parody publication said they handed out 1.2 million copies of the 14-page paper, which was dated July 4, 2009.” (Wired News )
“Silent Soldiers on a silver screen
Framed in fantasies and dragged in dream
Unpaid actors of the mystery
The mad director knows that freedom will not make you free
And what’s this got to do with me
I declare the war is over
It’s over, it’s overDrums are drizzling on a grain of sand
Fading rhythms of a fading land
Prove your courage in the proud parade
Trust your leaders where mistakes are almost never made
And they’re afraid that I’m afraidI’m afraid the war is over
It’s over, it’s overAngry artists painting angry signs
Use their vision just to blind the blind
Poisoned players of a grizzly game
One is guilty and the other gets the point to blame
Pardon me if I refrainI declare the war is over
It’s over, it’s overSo do your duty, boys, and join with pride
Serve your country in her suicide
Find the flags so you can wave goodbye
But just before the end even treason might be worth a try
This country is to young to dieI declare the war is over
It’s over, it’s overOne-legged veterans will greet the dawn
And they’re whistling marches as they mow the lawn
And the gargoyles only sit and grieve
The gypsy fortune teller told me that we’d been deceived
You only are what you believeI believe the war is over
It’s over, it’s over”
— Phil Ochs (December 19, 1940–April 9, 1976)
"We found a unique approach for delivering drugs to the brain," says William A. Banks, M.D., professor of geriatrics and pharmacological and physiological science at Saint Louis University. "We're turning off the guardian that's keeping the drugs out of the brain." (EurekAlert)
“If we are going to bail out Detroit, the deal has to be based on meeting the new fuel economy standards of 35 mpg by 2020, and meeting them increasingly with hybrids. The deal has to be for multiple plug-in hybrid car models. And most important, the deal has to include a management team that is wholly committed to that inevitable transition, a team that will not waste a penny of the taxpayer-funded bailout lobbying against the even tougher standards and regulations that will be needed to avoid the harsh consequences of global warming and peak oil.
This isn’t socialism. And it isn’t nationalization of the auto industry. It is immunization of the auto industry against the seemingly fatal disease of mental decay. And it is immunization of the nation against far graver threats. Indeed, the potential risks the bankruptcy of Detroit poses pale in comparison with the all-but-certain risks of continuing on our path of ever greater oil consumption and ever greater greenhouse gas emissions.” — Joseph Romm (Salon )
“The next first lady is an accomplished lawyer. But with the media focused on her clothes and family, Bamalot is starting to look a lot like Camelot.” (Salon )
“…[S]weeping theory of brain development would change the way mental disorders like autism and schizophrenia are understood“. Essentially, the authors argue, it is competition between genes inherited from the parents which tips brain development in one way or another. A predominance of paternal genes confers autistic traits while a predominance of maternal genes a vulnerability to psychotic experience.
The article goes a little overboard in calling this “perhaps [psychiatry’s] grandest working theory since Freud”, which IMHO remains to be seen.
How Obama’s Election will Change Hip-Hop (NPR Music )
“It’s only been a week since the defeat, but the battle lines have already been drawn in the fight over the future of conservatism.
In one camp, there are the Traditionalists, the people who believe that conservatives have lost elections because they have strayed from the true creed. George W. Bush was a big-government type who betrayed conservatism. John McCain was a Republican moderate, and his defeat discredits the moderate wing.
To regain power, the Traditionalists argue, the G.O.P. should return to its core ideas: Cut government, cut taxes, restrict immigration. Rally behind Sarah Palin.
…The other camp, the Reformers, argue that the old G.O.P. priorities were fine for the 1970s but need to be modernized for new conditions. The reformers tend to believe that American voters will not support a party whose main idea is slashing government. The Reformers propose new policies to address inequality and middle-class economic anxiety. They tend to take global warming seriously. They tend to be intrigued by the way David Cameron has modernized the British Conservative Party…” — David Brooks (New York Times op-ed)
Berlusconi
Hersh has long been one of my heroes.
Mouse embryonic stem cells
Utterly delightful. Many of the examples in the US, however, seem frivolous — even embarrassing — in comparison to those of the rest of the world. See what you think. (Village of Joy)
The great hierarchy of verbal fatigue includes:
Until I actually saw the Northern Lights in the flesh, I had always wondered about their 3-dimensional structure, sensing that 2-d photos do not do them justice. Now, a team has made a 3-d film (the kind you watch with those red and green goggles) of “the largest thing on earth you can visualize in 3-d”, filming at -40F with two cameras twenty miles distant in Lapland.
View a video on the expedition, with some footage from the film, here. (New Scientist)
The McCain campaign aides complained about the $150,000 that the Republican National Committee had spent on Ms. Palin’s clothes, the way a Canadian comedian was able to embarrass the campaign by calling her and pretending to be the president of France, and the political ambitions she seemed to harbor beyond 2008.
By the end of the week, their complaints had escalated considerably, with Fox News quoting unnamed McCain campaign officials as saying that Ms. Palin had not known that Africa was a continent, not a country, and claiming that she did not know which countries were covered by the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Ms. Palin told reporters in Alaska that the anonymous criticism was “cowardly,” and that she had discussed the campaign’s position on Nafta at her debate prep sessions.
“I remember having a discussion with a couple of debate preppers,” she said. “So if it came from one of those debate preppers, you know, that’s curious. But having a discussion about Nafta — not, ‘Oh my goodness, I don’t know who is a part of Nafta.’ ”
“So, no, I think that if there are allegations based on questions or comments that I made in debate prep about Nafta, and about the continent versus the country when we talk about Africa there, then those were taken out of context,” Ms. Palin said. “And that’s cruel and it’s mean-spirited, it’s immature, it’s unprofessional, and those guys are jerks, if they came away with it taking things out of context and then tried to spread something on national news. It is not fair and not right.” ‘ (New York Times )
[Thank heavens they were wrong when they predicted that we were not going to have Sarah Palin to kick around anymore after the election. If she did not exist, The Onion would have had to invent her.]
In 1997, I traveled to Alabama to work as an expert psychiatric witness in the appeal of a death sentence of a young African American man convicted of a 1988 murder. I interviewed him extensively on Death Row and travelled to his childhood home in rural Alabama to build a psychological history of him from interviews with family and those who had known him as a child and youth. My profiling and testimony helped to establish that he had been horrendously abused throughout his childhood, that the pertinence of the abuse should have been considered as a mitigating factor in his sentencing, and that his original defense team’s failure to do so constituted ineffective assistance of counsel.
The judge who heard my testimony in the appeal ran his courtroom, his own personal fiefdom, like a burlesque show. He had been the trial judge in the original murder trial and had overruled the jury’s recommendation of a lesser sentence to impose the death penalty. Now here he was hearing an appeal of his own malfeasance and impaired judgment, and you could see how seriously he would take this unpleasant duty. At the appeal, I recall a group of Harvard Law students sitting in the courtroom observing the trial, shaking their heads in disbelief and scribbling furiously in their notebooks example after example of his outrageous courtroom behavior and abuse of the rule of law. The judge referred to me derisively as “post traumatic syndrome man” and my conclusions as “post traumatic syndromes, whatever that is” (yes, grammatically challenged as well), after I had spent two days painstakingly explaining the psychiatric facts and conclusions at a level any ignoramus could understand. When he was informed that my testimony was complete, he commented, “For the record, good.” Needless to say, he denied the appeal.
I was never informed by the defense team (his case is now being handled by different counsel), but this evening, while surfing the web, I happened upon the news that the judge’s ruling has just been overturned, the appeals court finding that he had failed to appropriately consider the psychological evidence presented at the earlier appeal. After twenty years, his death sentence has been vacated.
For those of you who enjoy legalese, you can find the text of the ruling here (pdf). You can read about the horrific details of the crime and the see the total travesty made of the defendant’s rights in the Alabama judicial system. While I have consulted on other death penalty appeals, this was the only case in which I was on the stand and certainly the only three-ring circus I have attended in which a man’s life was at stake. If you use your pdf reader’s search facility to look for instances of “Gelwan” in the ruling, you will find more detailed reference to my work and my testimony on the case. It is one of the things I have done in my life of which I am most proud, and I am ecstatic to learn about this ruling. It could just as easily have been the case that I never found out.
[Does anyone have any references to Barack Obama’s position on the death penalty? — FmH]
Below, some key excerpts — including:
Andy Borowitz: ‘Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska has reached out to President-elect Obama’s transition team to indicate her interest in being named “ambassador to the nation of Africa,” the governor confirmed today.
Gov. Palin said that although she had planned to continue in her position in Anchorage, she was willing to leave the governorship “because Africa is just such a darned important country.”
“I have always been very, very interested in the nation of Africa, partly because of it being located where it is,” she said. “If you are standing in Africa and you look real close, you can see South Africa.”
She added that she had received phone calls encouraging her to vie for the post, including one from French president Nicholas Sarkozy.
In other news from the Palin family, Bristol Palin’s fiancé Levi Johnston said he was “totally stoked” about Tuesday night’s election returns, calling the results “definitely a game-changer for me.”
“The election of Barack Obama means different things to different people,” he said. “To me, it means freedom, dude!”‘ (Huffington Post)
“Your earnest, self-important prattle has gotten on Gen X nerves for decades. But now we finally get it.”
‘Sorry. No column today. The keyboard is not responding. History is a page being turned. Three words on the screen: “Yes we can.” While it is impossible to joke with genocide or disaster, it is equally impossible to joke with an event that makes you weep for joy. The first worldwide good news since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 needs more than a pirouette or an amused wink. At this moment – but for how long ? – we can say with far more conviction than on 11 September 2001 : we are all Americans.’ — Robert Solé (Le Monde Opinions via julia)
Bill Clinton’s departure
“Barack Obama argued for months that victory for his opponent would be akin to a third term for President Bush. But as he embarks on his own presidency, Mr. Obama faces the challenge of building an administration that does not look like a third term for former President Bill Clinton“. (New York Times )
“CNN's holographic election coverage is fancy pantsy, but how did they manage to send 3D 360 degree footage of virtual correspondent Jessica Yellin from Chicago all the way to the station's election center in NY? As Arthur C. Clarke says, Magic. A magic made possible from technology Vizrt and SportVu with the help of forty-four HD cameras and twenty computers. Here are the details.” (Gizmodo)
Voters in Arizona and Florida passed amendments to their states’ constitutions enshrining discrimination against LGBT people and denying marriage, and in some cases civil unions or domestic partnerships as well, to same-sex couples. Proposition 8 in California still remains too close to call. (HRC)
By morning light after last night’s dancing in the streets, I am clearly happy but, I need some help, I am also worried. The commentators are talking about how this election has redrawn the electoral map, obviating the red/blue state distinction with which we have grown so comfortable. But Obama is far from the consensus president. The popular vote was much closer to 50/50% than the electoral college results reflected. That is going to make for an awful lot of disenfranchised voters, as Obama hinted at in his victory speech when he spoke of his aspirations to be the President of the people whose vote he had not yet earned.
I recall the vehemence of my feeling, the past eight years, that Bush was not my President, my hopes that the rest of the world understood the distinction between the U.S.’s government and its people, my desire to apologize for our having elected Bush and inflicted him on the world. I fear that 50% of the public may have even more intense sentiments that Obama is not their President. The Republican electorate has been intensely indoctrinated for the past eight years (at least) by the RNC’s appeal to narrow tribal identity. As I have written in the past, I think this is a hardwired part of human nature, an evolutionary consequence of millennia of human organization into small social bands. We are not really adapted to larger societies (as Freud too suggested in Civilization and Its Discontents) and our better natures have always struggled against the ongoing inherent tendency to xenophobia. Republican campaigning, especially under Karl Rove, made a malignant and insidious appeal to this prejudice and fear of the ‘different’, to which a sizable part of the electorate responds instinctually. Obama’s differentness, then, will I fear mobilize a virulent response against not just racial and ethnic minorities but other ‘different’ lifestyle choices, gender preference cohorts, immigrants and minority religious groupings. A minority President further disenfranchises the middle-American demographic. (I noted with relief that Obama was behind a bulletproof shield in Grant Park last night. I am not alone in being concerned for his personal safety and that of his family.)
The shrinking Republican constituency will be if anything a more rabid Right, with the departure of the moderate middle. I fear we will see not a reign of national unity and conciliation but one of accentuating polarization and renewed Culture War. While McCain was quite personally restrained in his race-baiting, he certainly did nothing to discourage his supporters’ xenophobia, as was evident in the audience ‘s catcalls when he mentioned Obama’s name in his concession speech and call for conciliation last night. The bigots and the fundamentalists, who never realized they were pansies of the grandiose world-domination dreams of the Neocons, are I fear a monster without a head.
And I worry that Obama was, in a sense, elected by accident. The coalition he built, from a combination of his charismatic appeal to our yearning for Camelot again on the one hand and on the other his hard-boiled South Side Chicago capacity to build a highly efficient political machine, was one of people of color, the young, the poor, and the highly educated affluent liberals. But what tipped the scales was the serendipitous eruption of the financial crisis, driving a substantial proportion of the middle class, fearful about their earning power, their job security and their shrinking equity, into the Obama camp. I fear it is not a natural coalition, and it will fall apart as the economy continues in crisis. The marginal respond to Obama’s inspiring message of hope, but the middle responds to the condition of its pocketbook and bank balance. And can anyone really deliver on promises to remedy our economic woes, unless it is by a fundamental dismantling of the debt-driven pyramid scheme that is the foundation of American prosperity?
Whoever was to assume office under the current circumstances would face daunting, unenviable challenges. I fear that history will not be kind to the President elected in 2008, nor will the Republicans remind the public how much of the mess was inherited from the previous decade of execrable ineptitude. Is Obama likely to disappoint in other spheres too? Certainly, he warned us in his victory speech that he will not be a ‘perfect’ President. Will we be able to stand the compromises he must make to extricate us from the obscene war in Iraq? The fact that it will not be achieved with any elegance or rapidity? Certainly, from the moment he assumes office, he will have restored an enormous amount of the goodwill of the world toward the United States and inspired an enormous amount of the hopes of the developing world. He certainly will not squander that goodwill and hope in the way that Bush has been so adept at doing. But China and Russia are looming presences especially to an economically vulnerable U.S. And, historically, those regimes have gotten along better with rigid and mistrustful Republican administrations than conciliatory collaborative ecumenical Democratic ones.
As much as the election represents a challenge to the Right, it will also fundamentally shake up the worldview of progressives, who have functioned best when in opposition, defensive and elitist. How to conceive of the electorate as something other than the customary lumpenproletariat which does not know their best interests? Certainly, I am ecstatic that the empowerment and enfranchisement of new constituencies in American society is a genie that once unleashed cannot be put back in the bottle. Maybe, indeed, it is nothing but my own inability to be comfortable in any role apart from that of a disenfranchised sputtering curmudgeon which leads me, in a sort of covert wish fulfillment, to predict that such gloom and doom will come out of Obama’s election. I would look forward to being proven wrong. Comments?
Today we’re delighted to announce that we’ve settled that lawsuit and will be working closely with these industry partners to bring even more of the world’s books online. Together we’ll accomplish far more than any of us could have individually, to the enduring benefit of authors, publishers, researchers and readers alike.
It will take some time for this agreement to be approved and finalized by the Court. For now, here’s a peek at the changes we hope you’ll soon see.”
(Ansel Adams Picture of the Day)
“Otherworldly Chanteuse Dies at 86. Yma Sumac, a Peruvian singer who burst on the American scene in the 1950s in a tornado of exotic publicity with a voice that glided preternaturally across four octaves, leading her to top record charts, fill nightclubs and become a cult heroine, died Saturday in Los Angeles. She was 86.” (New York Times obituary)
“Electoral Projections Done Right”
Please enter some comments to this or another post. I would like to be sure that the WordPress commenting system is working correctly for me. Thanks in advance…
George W. Bush Approval/Disapproval Ratings
A Sunday visit to the megachurch that praised George W. Bush suggests that its political end of days is near. (Salon News)
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Anti-Guantanamo activist Clive Stafford Smith says Bush missed his chance to hand the election to McCain if he had had self-professed 9/11 mastermind and Guantanamo detainee Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on trial during the campaign season.
But this is not what the Administration chose to do. Rather, for their first three candidates in commissions, the Pentagon chose two juveniles (Omar Khadr and Mohammed Jawad) and an alleged al Qaeda chauffeur (Salim Hamdan). It was inexplicable, akin to skipping over Herman Goering for the first trial at Nuremburg, and choosing a member of the Hitler Youth.
The Bush Administration marched to the beat of its own bizarre drummer, from one misjudgment to the next. (New York Post )
McCain gets mad|angry (Google Search)
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‘My theme is ‘Halloween in the Time of Cholera,” collector Steven Martin told Wired.com in an e-mail interview. ‘The idea being that people back then were probably on a more intimate level with death — and that would have affected the way they celebrated Halloween.'”
“But one vestige of his yet-to-be-past self nagged at him — his Harvard Law School diploma. It stood, a symbolic barrier, between him and freedom. “Sometimes,” he decided, “you just need to say goodbye to your past in order to move forward.” So goodbye he said, in much the same way that a spurned spouse says goodbye to memories of a former lover. He set it on fire.
Not only did he incinerate his Harvard degree, but he captured the conflagration on video, describing it on his blog and posting it to YouTube. “In the end,” he writes, “it was just a piece of paper. Nothing more. I would rather live my life on my own terms than be a person that needs a piece of paper to justify their own worth.” I suspect a few folks in Harvard’s alumni-development office will be hot under the collar when they see Jack’s video. But one lesson every Harvard Law grad can learn from watching Jack’s act of career-defiance is that these things are not all that easy to burn.’ (Legal Blog Watch)
This has raised a hornets’ nest of controversy, with people holding forth with much sound and fury – and often signifying nothing. So I want to ask what, if anything, the teaching of this long-dead economist has to offer us today.
John Maynard Keynes, born in 1883, died in 1946; present at the Versailles negotiations in 1919; Britain’s representative at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944; father of the two key institutions of the post–war monetary order, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; author of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money; and, most importantly, the origin of the adjective “Keynesian”.
This is a word which has all but lost its original meaning. Like fascist, or feminist, it began describing a set of beliefs, but it has become a term of abuse or approbation, wielded by those who have, for the most part, not the faintest idea of what it actually means. So I want to give my version of “Everything you wanted to know about Keynes and were afraid to ask.” I think I can reduce Keynes’ view to seven essential propositions…” (Telegraph.UK<)
A number of mysteries remain.” (Economic Principals)
A reprise of my annual Halloween post:
It is that time of year again. What has become a time of disinhibited hijinx and mayhem, and a growing marketing bonanza for the kitsch-manufacturers and -importers, has primeval origins as the Celtic New Year’s Eve, Samhain (pronounced “sow-en”). The harvest is over, summer ends and winter begins, the Old God dies and returns to the Land of the Dead to await his rebirth at Yule, and the land is cast into darkness. The veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead becomes frayed and thin, and dispossessed dead mingle with the living, perhaps seeking a body to possess for the next year as their only chance to remain connected with the living, who hope to scare them away with ghoulish costumes and behavior, escape their menace by masquerading as one of them, or placate them with offerings of food, in hopes that they will go away before the new year comes. For those prepared, a journey to the other side could be made at this time. It is fortunate that Hallowe’en falls on a Friday this year, as there is evidence that the pagan festival was celebrated for three days.
With Christianity, perhaps because with calendar reform it was no longer the last day of the year, All Hallows’ Eve became decathected, a day for innocent masquerading and fun, taking its name Hallowe’en as a contraction and corruption of All Hallows’ Eve. All Saints’ Day may have originated in its modern form with the 8th century Pope Gregory III. Hallowe’en customs reputedly came to the New World with the Irish immigrants of the 1840’s. The prominence of trick-or-treating has a slightly different origin, however.
The custom of trick-or-treating is thought to have originated not with the Irish Celts, but with a ninth-century European custom called souling. On November 2, All Souls Day, early Christians would walk from village to village begging for “soul cakes,” made out of square pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes the beggars would receive, the more prayers they would promise to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors. At the time, it was believed that the dead remained in limbo for a time after death, and that prayer, even by strangers, could expedite a soul’s passage to heaven.
Jack-o’-lanterns were reportedly originally turnips; the Irish began using pumpkins after they immigrated to North AMerica, given how plentiful they were here.
The Jack-o-lantern custom probably comes from Irish folklore. As the tale is told, a man named Jack, who was notorious as a drunkard and trickster, tricked Satan into climbing a tree. Jack then carved an image of a cross in the tree’s trunk, trapping the devil up the tree. Jack made a deal with the devil that, if he would never tempt him again, he would promise to let him down the tree.
According to the folk tale, after Jack died, he was denied entrance to Heaven because of his evil ways, but he was also denied access to Hell because he had tricked the devil. Instead, the devil gave him a single ember to light his way through the frigid darkness. The ember was placed inside a hollowed-out turnip to keep it glowing longer.
Folk traditions that were in the past associated wtih All Hallows’ Eve took much of their power, as with the New Year’s customs about which I write here every Dec. 31st, from the magic of boundary states, transition and liminality.
The idea behind ducking, dooking or bobbing for apples seems to have been that snatching a bite from the apple enables the person to grasp good fortune. Samhain is a time for getting rid of weakness, as pagans once slaughtered weak animals which were unlikely to survive the winter. A common ritual calls for writing down weaknesses on a piece of paper or parchment, and tossing it into the fire. There used to be a custom of placing a stone in the hot ashes of the bonfire. If in the morning a person found that the stone had been removed or had cracked, it was a sign of bad fortune. Nuts have been used for divination: whether they burned quietly or exploded indicated good or bad luck. Peeling an apple and throwing the peel over one’s shoulder was supposed to reveal the initial of one’s future spouse. One way of looking for omens of death was for peope to visit churchyards
The Witches’ Sabbath aspect of Hallowe’en seems to result from Germanic influence, and fusion with the notion of Walpurgisnacht. (Who knows the magnificent musical evocation of this, Mussorgsky’s Night on Bare Mountain?) Although probably not yet in a position to shape mainstream American Hallowe’en traditions, Mexican Dia de los Muertos observances have started to contribute some delightful and whimsical iconography to our encounter with the eerie and unearthly as well.
What was Hallowe’en like forty or fifty years ago in the U.S. when, bastardized as it has become with respect to its pagan origins, it retained a much more traditional flair? For my purposes, suffice it to say that it was before the era of the pay-per-view ‘spooky-world’ type haunted attractions and its Martha Stewart yuppification with, as this irreverent Salon article from last year [via walker] puts it, monogrammed jack-o’-lanterns and the like. Related, a 1984 essay by Richard Seltzer, frequently referenced in other sources, entitled “Why Bother to Save Halloween?”, argues as I do that reverence for Halowe’en is good for the soul.
…(D)on’t just abandon a tradition that you yourself loved as a child, that your own children look forward to months in advance, and that helps preserve our sense of fellowship and community with our neighbors in the midst of all this madness.”
That would be anathema to certain segments of society, however. Halloween certainly inspires a backlash by fundamentalists who consider it a blasphemous abomination. ‘Amateur scholar’ Isaac Bonewits details academically the Halloween errors and lies he feels contribute to its being reviled. Some of the panic over Hallowe’en is akin to the hysteria, fortunately now debunked, over the supposed epidemic of ‘ritual Satanic abuse’ that swept the Western world in the ’90’s.
The horror film has become inextricably linked to Hallowe’en tradition, although the holiday itself did not figure in the movies until John Carpenter took the slasher genre singlehandedly by storm. Googling “scariest films”, you will, grimly, reap a mother lode of opinions about how to pierce the veil to journey to the netherworld and reconnect with that magical, eerie creepiness in the dark (if not the over-the-top blood and gore that has largely replaced the subtlety of earlier horror films).
In any case: trick or treat!
Related:
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I’ve blinked to this before, in prior years. These are this year’s winning microphotographs in Nikon’s annual contest. Stunningly beautiful and revelatory.
Jazz and Rock Keyboardist Dies at 74: “Mr. Saunders made some of his most notable music in the 1960s and ’70s when he teamed up with Garcia, the Grateful Dead’s lead guitarist and singer. The Jerry Garcia & Merl Saunders Band recorded two albums in the 1970s, and the two played together on an array of projects until Garcia’s death in 1995.” (New York Times obituary)
“Republican infighting has already begun and the person and politics of Sarah Palin are at the heart of the feuding” — Gerard Baker (Times.UK opinion)
Vanity Fair magazine and the National Security News Service claim to have knowledge “developed from first-hand sources” of a car crash that involved then-Lt. McCain at the main gate of a Virginia naval base in 1964, according to legal filings. The incident has been largely, if not entirely, kept from the public. And in documents suing the Navy to release pertinent information, lawyers for the NS News Service allege that a cover-up may be at play.” — Sam Stein (Huffington Post)
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It’s a Halloween sky show.
On Oct. 31st, the crescent Moon will sneak up on Venus for a close encounter of startling beauty. The gathering is best seen just after sunset when the twilight is pumpkin-orange and Halloween doorbells are chiming in earnest. Venus hovers just above the southwestern horizon, the brightest light in the sky, while the exquisitely slender Moon approaches just a few degrees below…” (NASA)
According to proponents, you possess a secret arsenal of psychological defenses designed to keep your death anxiety at bay (and to keep you from ending up in the fetal position listening to Nick Drake on your iPod). My writing this article, for example, would be interpreted as an exercise in “symbolic immortality”; terror management theorists would likely tell you that I wrote it for posterity, to enable a concrete set of my ephemeral ideas to outlive me, the biological organism. (I would tell you that I’d be happy enough if a year from now it still had a faint pulse.)
Yet a small number of researchers, including me, are increasingly arguing that the evolution of self-consciousness has posed a different kind of problem altogether. This position holds that our ancestors suffered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal, and it’s this hiccup of gross irrationality that we have unmistakably inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start.” (Scientific American Mind)
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