Doctors Without Borders: “The humanitarian crises that the media isn’t covering, but should be.” (via Utne Reader)

“Scientists from across the world gathered Monday to hammer out the final details of an authoritative report on climate change that is expected to project centuries of rising temperatures and sea levels unless there are curbs in emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that trap heat in the atmosphere.” (New York Times) The central consensus is that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are reaching twice preindustrial levels as a result of human activities, and that this will result in a 3-8 degree (F) increase in ambient temperatures. Where the consensus founders is on the extent of sea level rise and coastal impact. Some climate scientists fear that existing models are too conservative, in light of recent findings about the instability of Antarctic and Greenland ice caps. Competing agendas have led to leaks of information from the upcoming reports designed to be either as frightening or reassuring as possible. (Which would you rather hear?)

Wake up and smell the coffee, Nancy: ‘In an interview, Pelosi also said she was puzzled by what she considered the president’s minimalist explanation for his confidence in the new surge of 21,500 U.S. troops that he has presented as the crux of a new “way forward” for U.S. forces in Iraq.

“He’s tried this two times — it’s failed twice,” the California Democrat said. “I asked him at the White House, ‘Mr. President, why do you think this time it’s going to work?’ And he said, ‘Because I told them it had to.’ ” ‘ (The Politico) When has Bush’s rationale for any Presidential decision ever gone beyond groundless confidence and infantile willfulness?

In the wake of the insurgent downing of a Blackwater helicopter and the execution-style killing of its crew hours before the State of the Union address, Democracy Now! interviews Jeremy Seahill, author of a forthcoming book profiling Blackwater . Does Bush’s call for a troop surge obscure a more substantial but undeclared private mercenary surge in Iraq?

“The attempts of brain damage victims to imagine falter thanks to an inability to marshal the places of the past.” (Scientific American) Bilateral damage to the hippocampus is known to cause amnesia. Now a study from the University of London found deficiencies in the abilities of five amnesiac men, compared with matched subjects, to imagine. It points to a greater role for the hippocampus in adding a temporal dimension to our experience; without its functions we exist in a timeless present. It makes a sort of sense that if you cannot have the experience of remembering a time gone by, you cannot imagine a time when the present moment will have passed. And one FmH reader [thanks, Joel] noted the resonance with T.S. Eliot:

And right action is freedom
From past and future also. (The Dry Salvages)

Steve Silberman:

In a major scoop, Silberman, who has become one of the best-informed and best-sourced reporters about neuroscience and medical topics, exposes an epidemic of multiply resistant Acinetobacter baumannii infecting wounded troops in the ‘evacuation chain’ from field hospitals in Iraq through medevac facilities to civilian hospitals in Europe and the US; it has already spread to civilian patients in those hospitals. Although the US government long maintained that the organism originated in Iraqi soil and infected soldiers wounded by IEDs, it is clear that the real culprits are the unsterile conditions and unrestrained use of broad-spectrum state-of-the-art antibiotics in US field hospitals in Iraq. Silberman does a good job of laying out the factors that continue to prevent an effective response to these issues. These include, of course, Rumsfeld’s doctrine of fighting the war on a shoestring and the military’s misuse of medical resources to keep casualties on the front lines as long as possible.

Silberman’s story is one of the Huffington Post’s “most huffed stories.” Huffit is HuffPo’s new Digg-like feature in which readers register which stories they feel are most newsworthy.

Multiply-resistant strains of bacteria are becoming a fact of life. As a physician working in a medical hospital, I am dealing with increasing regularity with patients with MRSA or C. difficile. The situation is only going to become worse as resistant bacteria’s sharing of drug resistance genes (a process which Silberman aptly likens to sharing open source software code) accelerates and we enter a fallow period in antibiotic development. There has always been an ‘arms race’ (another apt metaphor) between infectious disease organisms and medical tactics, and medicine is losing out. Could the Iraq war end up playing a major role in the end of the era of medical ascendancy over infectious disease?

After a patient who had had a stroke that damaged his insula readily and abruptly quit smoking, researchers at the University of Iowa looked at a number of other stroke victims and found that those with insular damage often quit smoking effortlessly and suddenly. (Forbes)

The emerging neurobiology of addictions (both behavioral and substance) emphasizes a two component system, one of which controls cravings and the other the satisfaction or reward associated with the addictive behavior. Separate and complementary interventions target these two components; for example, the concurrent use of the medications acamprosate and naltrexone to assist relapse prevention in recovering severely alcohol-dependent patients. The insula seems to be instrumental to the craving component.

Neuroscientists have long relished studying patients with circumscribed lesions in specific brain areas, to see which functions those areas subsume. Far more precise knowledge can be derived than the newer brain imaging techniques to study regional activation during certain mental tasks.

Rarely Seen Sea Monster Captured, Then, Following Script, Dies: “Yet another rare-freaky sea creature has made a rare-freaky video appearance — courtesy Japanese marine researchers — before being promptly declared dead.” (New York Times )

A report from Cambridge University researchers suggests that people lease clothes instead of buying them, in light of the resource impact of the textile industry. New York Times readers respond. The point seems to be to encourage reuse rather than discarding clothes. If leasing caught on, it would essentially be a piece of jiu jitsu to achieve an expansion of the second-hand clothes market. My guess is that tying the concept of leasing to the resource reuse meme will actually do little to promote it, given the intimate relationship most people have with their clothing. A P.R. campaign about the ludicrousness of buying clothes in response to everchanging notions of style foisted on consumers by the clothing industry (whether we are talking about high-end couturiers or The Gap), rather than durability and serviceability, would be energy better spent. Along with this should come efforts to encourage donation of used clothes or even the implementation of frank recycling systems similar to those in place for other resource-intensive genres of waste.

Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center was overrun by the most disruptive and extensive of an increasing number of pseudo-epidemics caused by faith in rapid screening tests that ultimately turn out to be false positives — sensitive but not particularly specific.

The so-called epidemic of pertussis at Dartmouth turned out to be a spate of run-of-the-mill respiratory infections. Specific, but slower, tests failed to find any pertussis in any of the affected individuals. Proponents of the rapid tests argue that there is no way to be prepared for a potentially devastating pandemic without the risk of false positives from the rapid tests.

Researchers at Duke University have shown with functional MRI that the degree of activation of the posterior superior temporal sulcus [PSTS], a brain region activated when people observe others’ actions but not perform them themselves, correlated with personality ratings of subjects’ degree of altruism. (Hindustan Times ) This has some relationship to the ‘mirror neurons’ with which I have been fascinated and about which I have written repeatedly in FmH, which I think of as the neurophysiological basis for interpersonal empathy and — to extrapolate — socialization.

The capacity to have an interior experience upon watching someone else’s behavior similar to the experience of performing that behavior yourself may be a basis of the sense of inherent congruence between others’ feelings and thoughts and our own, the ability to have a so-called ‘theory of mind’, which is an important developmental achievement for humans. As suggested in the article, this body of work may help explicate the neural basis for certain conditions, in which I am interested in my work as a clinical psychiatrist, in which the capacity for empathy or mutuality break down, such as antisocial personality disorder or autistic spectrum disorders. (I am overwhelmed by the incident at Lincoln-Sudbury [MA] High School, down the road from my hospital, last Friday in which a student with a mild autistic-spectrum condition stabbed another student, apparently unknown to him, to death in one of the school restrooms.)

Here is what you come up with if you search on PSTS and ‘mirror neurons’ together. Two good starting point reviews of the nascent field of social cognitive neuroscience, which is built on these and similar observations and speculations, are these papers by Rebecca Saxe of MIT (Current Opinion in Neurobiology) and the Friths of London (Science). And, while I was browsing related materials, I came upon this paper by Chatterjee (Journal of Medical Ethics), which you might find intriguing if you are interested in this area at all.

Hillary runs for the White House as ‘new Thatcher’ (Sunday Times of London) and Bob Harris finds her ‘unelectable, and rightly so’.

or are right-wing demagogues killing two Democratic birds with one stone? (Media Matters)

According to a poll… by Fox News of all people… More Americans Dislike Bush Than … Cheney! (TPMCafe)

“Doomsday Clock” Moves Two Minutes Closer. Since 1947, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has graphically gauged the world’s proximity to nuclear devastation with its famous clock, which edged as close as 3 minutes to midnight during the era of US and Soviet arms development and testing; and as far away as 15 minutes to the hour, after the nuclear test ban treaty. Now the clock edges two minutes closer to doomsday. “Reflecting global failures to solve the problems posed by nuclear weapons and the climate crisis, the decision by the BAS Board of Directors was made in consultation with the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors, which includes 18 Nobel Laureates.”

Interesting broadening of their considerations to include the dangers posed by climate change, another global catastrophe paralleling the effects of a thermonuclear exchange, but not as far afield as it might seem, given that the devastating changes of ‘nuclear winter’ would envelop the earth after a nuclear war. Here’s a timeline of the advances and retreats of the minute hand over the past 60 years of the nuclear era.

Interestingly, the propagandistic Voice of America covers the BAS announcement. I suppose it is because the BAS decision focuses heavily on the nuclear threats posed by those the U.S. so needs to demonize, Iran and North Korea as well as the extant Soviet arsenal, thus allowing obliviousness to the fact that the US has always represented the preeminent nuclear threat to the world.

(Washington Post)

Philosophers/physicists have long drawn parallels between information theory and quantum theory. The contention that the physical world is built, ultimately, of information — that the distinction between the world and information about the world is murky — has troubled me, until I read this description of Viennese physicist Anton Zeilinger’s explanation of quantum mechanics.

Researchers identify one of the important molecular constituents of the long term potentiation process thought to underlie the deposition of memories. This has potentially monumental implications, although the reporting is restrained. (New Scientist)

With the arrival of a film adaptation of Perfume, discussion of so-called ‘unfilmable’ novels is burgeoning. Here is Screenhead‘s list of the supposedly hardest novels to film, for example, and here a discussion from Time Out London. But the adaptability of a novel is only a problem if one somehow believes that the book and the film are in some sense the same thing; this is usually the same mindset whose grasp of a work of art goes no further than what it is ‘about’; in the case of narrative arts what story they tell and visual arts what they show.

I thought the twentieth century was all about art transcending the denotative and freeing us to have a more complicated reaction to a work of art, experiencing a complex and subtle interplay between what we think and feel in the encounter. We grasp this in Literature 101 and Film 101 early in our college education, it seems to me. The experience of reading a book and that of seeing a film, even if they have the same title and even the same plot, are intrinsically and irreconcilably distinct. (In fact, one might argue, so are two different film adaptations of the same story!)

A ‘faithful’ adaptation of a novel will become a ‘movie’, not a film, which an audience receives merely as a good yarn and whose reaction begins and ends with how ‘awesome’ it was or not.

Addendum: as a counterpoint, I just came across this line from a London Review of Books review of The Prestige, based on a novel I had enjoyed several years ago.

What follows is a list of vendors with links to their 2007 DST fixes. (edgeblog)

Astronomy Picture of the Day, January 9: “The brightest comet in decades is unexpectedly now visible. The most optimistic predictions have Comet McNaught (C/2006 P1) shortly becoming one of the brightest comets of the past century. For the next few days, its short tail and bright coma can be spotted with the unaided eye close to the Sun and near the horizon in both evening and morning skies. “

A little New York Times reading this morning:

With all the furor about the Bush administration’s preoccupation with Iraq’s nonexistent ‘weapons of mass destruction’, and with Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, let us not forget that the major proponent of WMD in our time has been the U.S. One of the most egregious historical legacies of the Bush administration will be its reversal of the world’s nuclear stability. Now we learn that it will be announcing this week a major step forward in the building of the first new nuclear warhead in nearly two decades. continuing its single-minded destabilization of the ‘arms race’. Yes, the new weapon would not add to, but replace, existing nuclear armaments, but as an untested and, some say, risky hybrid incorporating elements from competing designs it will require costly refurbishment of the nation’s entire nuclear weapons manufacturing edifice and seems likely — probably by design — to force an end to the U.S. moratorium on nuclear weapons testing to make sure the new design works. As with most of its follies these days, the administration insults our intelligence, justifying this boondoggle by invoking the War on Terror® — that it is necessary to make our arsenal more secure from theft by terrorists. (Are we now to believe that assurances about the last generation’s nuclear security measures were lies?)

…and We Might Not. Now I’m a psychiatrist, and sometimes I even call myself a neuropsychiatrist, but don’t waste my time with this pitifully reductionist take on an act of heroism:

And especially when you are going to end up with a conclusion acknowledging how little you’ve really ‘explained’:

Dr. Ronald Pies’ sensitive reflection on a patient’s humble gift to her psychiatrist. (New York Times )

Utterly fascinating feature about a new Japanese fad and what it says about the essence of play. I got this from kottke’s assemblage of his best links of the year.

Far too little outrage was inspired by Saddam Hussein’s hanging. (New York Times ) Despite the heinousness of his crimes, his execution should have inspired widespread repugnance from the civilized world (as the invasion of Iraq should have in the first place). Mockery that his trial was, he will never stand trial for his major crimes against humanity. Insult was added to injury by setting the killing on the eve of Id al-Adha. All in all, this is entirely in the spirit of unilateralism by the US and its Iraqi puppets, and its historical significance is likely to be an inflammatory one.

This is a reprise and an amplification of a New Year’s Day post from FmH in years past:

Years ago, the Boston Globe ran a January 1st article compiling folkloric beliefs about what to do, what to eat, etc. on New Year’s Day to bring good fortune for the year to come. I’ve regretted since — I usually think of it around once a year (grin) — not clipping out and saving the article. Especially since we’ve had children, I’m interested in enduring traditions that go beyond getting drunk [although some comment that this is a profound enactment of the interdigitation of chaos and order appropriate to the New Year’s celebration — FmH], watching the bowl games and making resolutions.

A web search brought me this, less elaborate than what I recall from the Globe but to the same point. It is weighted toward eating traditions, which is odd because, unlike most other major holidays, the celebration of New Year’s in 21st century America does not seem to be centered at all around thinking about what we eat (except in the sense of the traditional weight-loss resolutions!) and certainly not around a festive meal. But…

“Traditionally, it was thought that one could affect the luck they would have throughout the coming year by what they did or ate on the first day of the year. For that reason, it has become common for folks to celebrate the first few minutes of a brand new year in the company of family and friends. Parties often last into the middle of the night after the ringing in of a new year. It was once believed that the first visitor on New Year’s Day would bring either good luck or bad luck the rest of the year. It was particularly lucky if that visitor happened to be a tall dark-haired man.

“Traditional New Year foods are also thought to bring luck. Many cultures believe that anything in the shape of a ring is good luck, because it symbolizes “coming full circle,” completing a year’s cycle. For that reason, the Dutch believe that eating donuts on New Year’s Day will bring good fortune.

“Many parts of the U.S. celebrate the new year by consuming black-eyed peas. These legumes are typically accompanied by either hog jowls or ham. Black-eyed peas and other legumes have been considered good luck in many cultures. The hog, and thus its meat, is considered lucky because it symbolizes prosperity. Cabbage is another ‘good luck’ vegetable that is consumed on New Year’s Day by many. Cabbage leaves are also considered a sign of prosperity, being representative of paper currency. In some regions, rice is a lucky food that is eaten on New Year’s Day.”

The further north one travels in the British Isles, the more the year-end festivities focus on New Year’s. The Scottish observance of Hogmanay has many elements of warming heart and hearth, welcoming strangers and making a good beginning:

“Three cornered biscuits called hogmanays are eaten. Other special foods are: wine, ginger cordial, cheese, bread, shortbread, oatcake, carol or carl cake, currant loaf, and a pastry called scones. After sunset people collect juniper and water to purify the home. Divining rituals are done according to the directions of the winds, which are assigned their own colors. First Footing:The first person who comes to the door on midnight New Year’s Eve should be a dark-haired or dark-complected man with gifts for luck. Seeing a cat, dog, woman, red-head or beggar is unlucky. The person brings a gift (handsel) of coal or whiskey to ensure prosperity in the New Year. Mummer’s Plays are also performed. The actors called the White Boys of Yule are all dressed in white, except for one dressed as the devil in black. It is bad luck to engage in marriage proposals, break glass, spin flax, sweep or carry out rubbish on New Year’s Eve.”

Here’s why we clink our glasses when we drink our New Year’s toasts, no matter where we are. Of course, sometimes the midnight cacophony is louder than just clinking glassware, to create a ‘devil-chasing din’.

In Georgia, eat black eyed peas and turnip greens on New Year’s Day for luck and prosperity in the year to come, supposedly because they symbolize coppers and currency. Hoppin’ John, a concoction of peas, onion, bacon and rice, is also a southern New Year’s tradition, as is wearing yellow to find true love (in Peru, yellow underwear, apparently!) or carrying silver for prosperity. In some instances, a dollar bill is thrown in with the other ingredients of the New Year’s meal to bring prosperity. In Greece, there is a traditional New Year’s Day sweetbread with a silver coin baked into it. All guests get a slice of the bread and whoever receives the slice with the coin is destined for good fortune for the year. At Italian tables, lentils, oranges and olives are served. The lentils, looking like coins, will bring prosperity; the oranges are for love; and the olives, symbolic of the wealth of the land, represent good fortune for the year to come.

A New Year’s meal in Norway also includes dried cod, “lutefisk.” The Pennsylvania Dutch make sure to include sauerkraut in their holiday meal, also for prosperity.

In Spain, you would cram twelve grapes in your mouth at midnight, one each time the clock chimed, for good luck for the twelve months to come. The U. S. version of this custom, for some reason, involves standing on a chair as you pop the grapes. In Denmark, jumping off a chair at the stroke of midnight signifies leaping into the New Year. In Rio, you would be plunging into the sea en masse at midnight, wearing white and bearing offerings.

In China, papercuttings of red paper are hung in the windows to scare away evil spirits who might enter the house and bring misfortune. In Thailand, one pours fragrant water over the hands of elders on New Year’s Day to show them respect.

Elsewhere: pancakes for the New Year’s breakfast in France; banging on friends’ doors in Denmark to “smash in” the New Year; going in the front door and out the back door at midnight in Ireland; making sure the first person through your door in the New Year in Scotland is a tall dark haired visitor. Water out the window at midnight in Puerto Rico rids the home of evil spirits. Cleanse your soul in Japan at the New Year by listening to a gong tolling 108 times, one for every sin. It is Swiss good luck to let a drop of cream fall on the floor on New Year’s Day.

Some history; documentation of observance of the new year dates back at least 4000 years to the Babylonians, who also made the first new year’s resolutions (reportedly voews to return borrowed farm equipment were very popular), although their holiday was observed at the vernal equinox. The Babylonian festivities lasted eleven days, each day with its own particular mode of celebration. The traditional Persian Norouz festival of spring continues to be considered the advent of the new year among Persians, Kurds and other peoples throughout Central Asia, and dates back at least 3000 years, deeply rooted in Zooastrian traditions.Modern Bahá’í’s celebrate Norouz (“Naw Ruz”) as the end of a Nineteen Day Fast. Rosh Hashanah (“head of the year”), the Jewish New Year, the first day of the lunar month of Tishri, falls between September and early October. Muslim New Year is the first day of Muharram, and Chinese New Year falls between Jan. 10th and Feb. 19th of the Gregorian calendar.

The classical Roman New Year’s celebration was also in the spring although the calendar went out of synchrony with the sun. January 1st became the first day of the year by proclamation of the Roman Senate in 153 BC, reinforced even more strongly when Julius Caesar established what came to be known as the Julian calendar in 46 BC. The early Christian Church condemned new year’s festivities as pagan but created parallel festivities concurrently. New Year’s Day is still observed as the Feast of Christ’s Circumcision in some denominations. Church opposition to a new year’s observance reasserted itself during the Middle Ages, and Western nations have only celebrated January 1 as a holidy for about the last 400 years. The custom of New Year’s gift exchange among Druidic pagans in 7th century Flanders was deplored by Saint Eligius, who warned them, “[Do not] make vetulas, [little figures of the Old Woman], little deer or iotticos or set tables [for the house-elf] at night or exchange New Year gifts or supply superfluous drinks [another Yule custom].” (Wikipedia)

The tradition of the New Year’s Baby signifying the new year began with the Greek tradition of parading a baby in a basket during the Dionysian rites celebrating the annual rebirth of that god as a symbol of fertility. The baby was also a symbol of rebirth among early Egyptians. Again, the Church was forced to modify its denunciation of the practice as pagan because of the popularity of the rebirth symbolism, finally allowing its members to cellebrate the new year with a baby although assimilating it to a celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus. The addition of Father Time (the “Old Year”) wearing a sash across his chest withthe previous year on it, and the banner carried or worn by the New Year’s Baby, immigrated from Germany. Interestingly, January 1st is not a legal holiday in Israel, officially because of its historic origins as a Christian feast day.

Auld Lang Syne (literally ‘old long ago’ in the Scottish dialect) is sung or played at the stroke of midnight throughout the English-speaking world (although I prefer George Harrison’s “Ring Out the Old”). Versions of the song have been part of the New Year’s festivities since the 17th century but Robert Burns was inspired to compose a modern rendition, which was published after his death in 1796.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and days of auld lang syne?
For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and days of auld lang syne?
And here’s a hand, my trusty friend
And gie’s a hand o’ thine
We’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet
For auld lang syne

However you’re going to celebrate, my warmest wishes for the year to come… and eat hearty! [thanks to Bruce Umbaugh for research assistance]

Far too little outrage was inspired by Saddam Hussein’s hanging. (New York Times ) Despite the heinousness of his crimes, his execution should have inspired widespread repugnance from the civilized world (as the invasion of Iraq should have in the first place). Mockery that his trial was, he will never stand trial for his major crimes against humanity. Insult was added to injury by setting the killing on the eve of Id al-Adha. All in all, this is entirely in the spirit of unilateralism by the US and its Iraqi puppets, and its historical significance is likely to be an inflammatory one.

“Can social scientists redefine the “war on terror”?” George Packer writes in The New Yorker about a new breed of cultural anthropologists who bring their analysis to bear on the current climate of ‘Islamic insurgency’, arguing that it is not ideology but social networking factors which recruit. “All fifteen Saudi hijackers in the September 11th plot had trouble with their fathers…” The thesis is succinctly put this way: “There are elements in human psychological and social makeup that drive what’s happening. The Islamic bit is secondary. This is human behavior in an Islamic setting. This is not ‘Islamic behavior’.” The social scientists, who are pitching their potential contribution to the ‘global counterinsurgency’ effort, argue the intimate need to understand local social particulars to win the ‘battle for hearts and minds.’ The US is actually serving the insurgents’ purposes by trumpeting a global ‘war on terror’, offering an inherently appealing global cause to new recruits. This is no surprise to those who have long understood how it was the Bush administration’s efforts which gave the Iraqi resistance common cause with the jihadists, or turned ‘al Qaeda’ into a franchised brand name for disparate insurrectionists throughout the Islamic world. The article likens Iraq in the context of the global counterinsurgency effort to Vietnam in the context of the Cold War, of course. The US took a long time to understand that the Cold War was only to a small proportion a military conflict or conflicts and in vast preponderance a propaganda battle.

However, I am not sure that social science substantially informed our Cold War struggle either. I was a student of ethnography and cultural anthropology in the early ’70’s before I went to medical school and became a psychiatrist; the article helped me to understand in a new way the relationship between the growing irrelevance of cultural anthropology and our defeat in Vietnam. No administration has ever embraced one of the corollaries of the light that cultural relativism can bring to bear on our understanding of ideological battles — that, if not a Manichaean battle between Good and Evil, the superiority of either side is all relative, all in the eye of the beholder. There may actually be less to choose between the two sides than the ideologues would have us believe; it is inherent that we demonize the opponent in protracted conflicts, as we did in the Cold War and are doing again. The jaded secret agent literary genre so well represented by Le Carré and, currently The Good Shepherd (although the Matt Damon character never seems to get the message despite the ongoing tutorial he is receiving from his Soviet adversary), reflected this relativistic, amoral moral calculus best. So, although I suppose it represents semantic progress to call what is happening now a global counterinsurgency struggle rather than a global war on terror (WoT®), I am troubled that this new anthropological insight seems to be being pitched as an improvement to our propaganda battle rather than helping us disengage from — and transcend — the fray.

Although Packer tries hard to read between the lines, social scientists who want to consult to the administration are of course averse to criticizing their potential bosses. There are indeed several statements in the piece to the effect that there are no prospects for a new mindset until Bush is out of office — as if anyone had any doubts on that score. It is not surprising that Bush thinks like that — let’s start, for example, with the fact that his alcoholism reflects a cognitive style in large proportion based on the effort to reduce diverse and nuanced problems to one one-size-fits-all solution. IMHO, the more important contribution social scientists could make would be to understand how such a rigid worldview as Bush’s could ever have become dominant and been allowed, unchallenged, to make such a dismal global mess of things.

This 403 — Web Page Not Found — page is a clever collection of pointers to post-apocalyptic films and books (a genre I used to think was fiction). I don’t even recall what page I was looking for when I was redirected to this.

For personal reasons I can’t go into here, FmH will be on indefinite hiatus. I’m not yet prepared to say that I am hanging up my keyboard but I can’t say when, if, I will resume posting. Readers who would like to be updated on any changes in the status of FmH can write me at “FmH at gelwan dot com” with the subject line “FmH updates” and I will add your name to a list of those I keep informed. I’m sorry I just can’t elaborate further at this point, despite the esteem and appreciation in which I continue to hold my readers.

For personal reasons I can’t go into here, FmH will be on indefinite hiatus. I’m not yet prepared to say that I am hanging up my keyboard but I can’t say when, if, I will resume posting. Readers who would like to be updated on any changes in the status of FmH can write me at “FmH at gelwan dot com” with the subject line “FmH updates” and I will add your name to a list of those I keep informed. I’m sorry I just can’t elaborate further at this point, despite the esteem and appreciation in which I continue to hold my readers.

I will be away from the computer, in parts unknown, and not posting until September. I hope FmHers enjoy the rest of your summer! Thanks for your continued readership.

I will be away from the computer, in parts unknown, and not posting until September. I hope FmHers enjoy the rest of your summer! Thanks for your continued readership.

FDA approves viruses as food additive. They will supposedly kill most of the bacteria that cause food-borne illnesses. (CNN)

Sad reflection on the treatment of the Maori that, despite as many towns in which this street name exists, only one town council is acknowledging and fixing the problem…

Here’s a question I just posted to “Ask MetaFilter” about a minor, but vexing, problem I have. It is sometimes maddening to be a nonprogrammer and know how simple this would be to solve if I could write trivial code. FmH readers are welcome to take a stab at this one too…

Best advertising use of squid yet [requires Flash]

Claims for alternative and complementary remedies in healthcare have always been undercut by the fact that, whatever they are, they are not shown effective in double blind placebo-controlled studies, the touchstone of clinical research. Adherents have often reached to outlandish and tortured explanations of why the failure of empirical validation is irrelevant, often using quasi-mystical pseudoscientific applications of quantum uncertainty. Here we learn that, because of quantum entanglement, the placebo and the active treatment get enmeshed, as do the observer/investigator and the experimental subjects. So there is no such thing as either placebo-controlled or double-blind, Virginia. (Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine – 12(3):271)

“Caroline has helpfully decreed that the name of the recent quasi-terrorist non-event is The Exploding Shampoo Plot. It’s a fine memorable descriptive name. Everyone should use it.” (Making Light)

The study, authored by Bruce Dohrenwend from Columbia University and associates, and published in Science, cross-referenced veterans’ combat records against claims of disability, based on data the Veterans’ Administration had collected to search for fraudulent claims. There has long been a sense that the reported prevalence of PTSD in Vietnam veterans was implausibly high. Some studies place the rate above 30% despite the fact that only an extimated 15% of Vietnam-era veterans saw frontline combat. The new study estimates the overall prevalence rate at around 19% instead. It agrees with earlier studies estimating that half of diagnosed PTSD sufferers remain disabled by their symptoms.

However, for several reasons we should not leap to the conclusion that the overdiagnosis was the fault of exaggerated or fraudulent claims, although I am sure that veterans’ anger at their abandonment by American society upon their return certainly fueled an attitude in some of exploiting the disability system. It is ridiculous to say that war traumatizes only those who saw grunt combat. This first of ‘modern wars’ did not have conventional front lines or easy ways of distinguishing enemy combatants from civilians (as in Iraq). As the study authors point out in rejecting the idea that veterans have consistently exaggerated their claims, there was broad traumatic exposure to ambushes and shellings as well as treating casualties. Also, this was the first war with a high degree of efficient depersonalized remote-control killing by carpet bombing, which traumatizes participants and observers in a different but often no less profound way. As in the Iraqi action, a widespread sense of cynical disaffection and betrayal by their country came with the realization that the war was based on disingenuous intentions and lies and that the soldiers were cannon fodder for immoral and misguided old men.

But there are other reasons that previous estimates about the prevalence of PTSD have been inflated. First of all, as readers of FmH have heard me opine before, the label is often applied in a fast and loose manner rather than diagnosed by rigorous criteria. There really is a disease state that arises from exposure to overwhelming trauma threatening one’s survival or bodily integrity or that of those around you, with lasting psychological and physiological damage and substantial resulting impairment of functioning, sometimes for the rest of the sufferer’s life. But it takes an experience outside the pale of what can reasonably be expected in human experience, and outside of the stress parameters our nervous systems evolved to cope with. It does not happen after any ol’ upsetting experience. So I place the fault for the overdiagnosis of PTSD as much on the shoulders of naive and unsystematic practitioners as I do with exaggerating complainants (whether we are talking about combat trauma or alleged sexual abuse victims, the other segment of the society with epidemic PTSD diagnosis rates). Dohrenwend’s group applied tight criteria in making the diagnosis, which I favor. Furthermore, the study also, quite rightly, excluded trauma disability claims in veterans which originated with events prior or subsequent to their military service, e.g. devastating auto accidents etc.

Of course there are implications from this study for the estimated rates of combat trauma with which Iraq veterans will come home, and planning for mental health services for them. Despite my pet peeve about ‘formal’ PTSD being overdiagnosed in modern American mental health practice, the numbers of those returning from the Middle East who will be psychically devastated and their ability to function in civilian society impaired will be more extensive, not less, than the services the Veterans’ Administration has planned to provide. The debate over the legitimacy and extent of the PTSD diagnosis should not mislead us into thinking that only those with ‘official’ PTSD need services. Let us hope the sophists do not use this study to justify withholding any chances of recovery and resumption of civilian functioning to tens of thousands of decommissioned soldiers returning from the Middle Eastern actions.

Ghost Riding the Whip: “…leaving the wheel of a moving car and walking, running, or dancing beside it….” (ABC News)

New York Times news analysis: “The fate of the cease-fire may lie in whether the Lebanese regard the conflict as a victory or blame Hezbollah for the destruction.” And which do you suppose is more likely? Here is an interactive map of the toll of the war day-by-day.

More on Morgellons , the ‘internet syndrome’ about which I wrote a derisive piece in May. This caught my attention:

I suspected that Leitao’s vested interest in the condition might have aspects other than the quest for scientific truth, and so it seems does her board.

The article also has some discussion suggesting that forensic lab analysis of the strange fibers, which sufferers report sprout from their skin in the condition, do not match any common fibrous materials. This stands at odds with other sources I have reviewed, as I mentioned in the May post.

“Homegrown U.K. terror is a growing threat, multicultural ‘tolerance’ can’t combat it, and the war in Iraq will only make it worse.” — Andrew Brown (Salon)

And: Inside the Iraqi Forces Fiasco: “The U.S. effort to train Iraqi forces — and bring our troops home — is mired in bureaucratic mismanagement, inept recruits and astonishing shortages of equipment.” (Salon)

Eat turmuric, avoid Alzheimers. I love curry; I may be doing my brain alot of good. On the other hand, I have hayfever; my brain may be in trouble. (New Scientist)

Seymour Hersh on the real reasons for US support of the Israeli air war. Essentially, given that Iran has helped Hezbollah with underground munitions installations and ‘hardening’ of targets, this may be a practice run for the US preemptive strike on Iranian buried weapons complexes, Hersh says. And all evidence indicates that the plans for this strike on Hezbollah were drawn up, with US knowledge, support and probably assistance, long before the kidnapping of the two Israeli soldiers which sparked off the conflict.

The dysadministration feels they will advance both its simple-mindedly conceived goal of democratization in the Middle East and the TWoT® (timeless war on terror). There have been cross-border incidents before; the kidnapping of the soldiers just happened at the right time, which also seems to have had some relationship to Hamas’ inching closer to resuming terrorist activity, feeling that their transition to a legitimate political force was not going well and that they were losing standing with the Palestinian people.

A major bombing campaign targeting Lebanese civilian infrastructure was supposed to turn the Lebanese Sunnis and Christians against Hezbollah, an idea similar to one US scenario for an air war against Iran. Interestingly, Hersh notes, the war in Kosovo was closely studied as a model for their Lebanon scenario as well.

Intelligence about Israel and Hezbollah, according to Hersh’s sources, is being ‘manhandled’ in the same way that the Bush administration distorted pre-war intelligence about Iraq to suit its preordained purposes. The strength of Hezbollah’s resistance, and the miscalculation of its resources, may or may not be a setback for US neocon hopes against Iran. More likely, the lesson, like all other recent lessons, will never be grasped by the hardliners. There is evidence that Cheney believes the war against Hezbollah is working and should not be halted. In the post-Iraq era, however, as Hersh’s article ends, one cannot avoid considerably less unanimity of outlook, and more fractiousness, either within the US administration, between the US and Blair’s UK, or within Blair’s government. This parallels a similar process within Israeli debate. (The New Yorker)

The article cites research suggesting that a high proportion of so-called ‘sinus headache’ sufferers may really have migraines. If migraines are more common than recognized, is there a spectrum of severity from the utterly disabling attacks which most of us understand as migraines to something in the milder, merely inconveniencing, range, akin to a common tension headache? I know that the vast majority of the chronically depressed women, especially the personality-disordered ones, I see in my psychiatric practice, no matter what the severity or frequency of their headaches, have either been diagnosed with migraines or adopt that label themselves. Should there be a severity criterion for diagnosing someone with a migraine?

Do human intestinal microorganisms make their hosts fat? (New York Times Magazine)