Not that more is necessarily better…

“People should not use mobile phones outdoors during thunderstorms because of the risk of being struck by lightning, doctors said on Friday. They reported the case of a 15-year-old girl who was using her phone in a park when she was hit during a storm. Although she was revived, she suffered persistent health problems and was using a wheelchair a year after the accident.” (Wired News) I am not sure I can take this warning, which is all over the net this week, at face value. It brings to mind all the discussion about not using your cell phone at a gas station because of the risk of sparking, which seems at least remotely plausible. In contrast, the operative principle in the current warning, if it is credible at all, would seem to be “leave your cell phone home.” If a cell phone is going to attract a lightning strike, it would seem to be an issue of whether it is on your person at all rather than whether you were operating it to make a call or not. (Although, on second thought, could there be an effect from its relative height when you have it up to your face during a call rather than stored in your pocket, your waist or wherever?) But I digress; more important, do cell phones inherently attract lightning strikes at all? If there are any readers out there who are telecommunication engineers, earth scientists or physicists, maybe you can comment on whether carrying a device with an antenna makes one inherently more of a target for lightning, or whether the cell phone use of the unfortunate young woman mentioned in the article was “correlation, not causation.”

And: Cell phone signals excite brain: study: “Cell phone emissions excite the part of the brain cortex nearest to the phone, but it is not clear if these effects are harmful, Italian researchers reported on Monday.

Their study, published in the Annals of Neurology, adds to a growing body of research about mobile phones, their possible effects on the brain, and whether there is any link to cancer.” (Yahoo! News)

I knew this would happen (New York Times ) when I heard Bush was going to Hungary for the commemoration. Any global enemy will do for those who define themselves by whom they hate, and the neocons have been looking for the next opportunity since the collapse of Communism and the end of the Cold War. Forget oil-based conspiracy theories about what fuels the WoT®, it is a reflection of these people’s impoverished psyches, not their impoverished bank accounts.

i.e. Voice Phishing (WebSense)

Tired of seeing him mooch for months, café calls the police and he is charged with theft of services. (Yahoo! News)

Some of the valedictories in the media for Michael Gerson, as he leaves the Bush administration, characterize him as a “speechwriter turned policy advisor” to the president. I haven’t followed his career all that closely but, if that is an accurate description of his trajectory in the Bush administration, it strikes me as particularly apt. Speechwriting and policy-making are very different things in most administrations, Bush, however, is a man whose rationale for a decision never goes beyond merely stating with those beady mock-earnest eyes and folksy drawl that he is sure it is the best choice. Convincing the nation of the wisdom of a policy is supposed to rest entirely on conveying the depth of his conviction. This is the problem with faith-based decision-making; he doesn’t have a clue that policy-making consists of anything more than the slick delivery. So who better to make policy than his chief speechwriter?

Unfortunately, Gerson was considered the chief architect of compassionate conservatism and the ‘conscience’ of the White House to some… so I am afraid we will have to consider him a failure as a policy maker.

Jay Leno: “President Bush’s number one speech writer, a man named Michael Gerson, resigned yesterday after seven years writing speeches for the President. It’s already having an effect on Mr. Bush. Like, after turning in his resignation, Mr. Bush wished him the goodest of luck.”

For my northern hemisphere readers, the longest day and the zenith of the Sun’s power. At Midsummer, the Mother Goddess is heavily pregnant and the God is at the peak of his manhood. This is the second time the Oak King and the Holly King do battle. This time, the Holly King is victorious.

I am not saying anything brilliant in asking what in the world a US regime that abrogates treaties and standards for the humane treatment fo our prisoners of war enemy combatants could expect?

A retired CIA case officer gives some gratuitous and unsolicited advice to General Hayden (Foreign Policy Research Institute)

“Bush’s determination to impose his own reading of new laws amounts to a power grab and subverts the US constitution” (Guardian.UK)

“Bush’s determination to impose his own reading of new laws amounts to a power grab and subverts the US constitution” (Guardian.UK)

How to build it

Luckily the children survived with only minor injuries (excluding their psychological traumatization, of course), while their mother died. Unlike the husband’s heinous endangerment of his children, the charge of ‘promoting a suicide attempt’ seems arbitrary and dubious, to my way of thinking. I wonder how often people are prosecuted on this charge, and how often a conviction is obtained. My suspicion is that that law is being misapplied beyond its original purpose of preventing Kevorkian-like assisted suicides, although I acknowledge that I do not know all the details of this case.

In my work as a clinical psychiatrist, frequently treating people hospitalized after suicide attempts, I often see situations in which (even excluding the egregious instances in which angry bystanders have goaded a person threatening suicide to “go ahead and do it”) a family member or other close associate has failed to prevent or discourage an attempt in someone who in 20/20 hindsight they might have had reason to believe was suicidal. People go out and leave a depressed person alone; they try less hard than they can to get the affected person into mental health treatment; they do too little to prevent access to alcohol or other disinhibiting substances that make suicide more likely, or they fail to prevent access to lethal means used to make an attempt. They fail to do enough to reassure a person fearful of abandonment or vulnerable to criticism or self-reproach. Are they to blame in those instances? By definition, psychiatrist Leston Havens once observed, suicide comes when least expected.

Arguably, no one besides a health professional has a responsibility to prevent another’s suicide, it seems to me, and no one, including a health professional, has an obligation to foresee the unforeseeable. Assessing suicide risks is one of the most challenging aspects of mental health work, requiring sophistication, experience, aplomb… and the ability to bear being wrong. Those of us who full well have an obligation to prevent suicide know that it is not a matter of if, but merely of when, we will fail to do so. Can we expect members of the lay public to unambiguously assess when someone close to them represents a true threat?

And where exactly do we draw the line? Is there a specific moment when the need to walk on eggshells around the vulnerable individual kicks in? Suicide often — although not invariably — occurs in an interpersonal context; should there be a moral obligation to conduct ourselves so no potentially vulnerable person around us is ever emotionally hurt by us? In an ideal world, perhaps, but not in the world I live in.

Update: more details in this New York Times article, including the following:

There was evidence that Sandra Day O’Connor was against this finding but the case was reargued after Alito’s confirmation and the decision reached by a 5-4 vote. I agree with Breyer’s dissenting opinion that, if evidence of an illegal search is still admissible, the knock-and-announce rule becomes entirely moot: “…[T]he court destroys the strongest legal incentive to comply with the Constitution’s knock-and-announce requirement. And the court does so without significant support in precedent.”

It also seems, as critics propose, that this is a serious and wrong-headed overall challenge to the protections of the Fourth Amendment, that we are seeing the beginning of the end of the exclusion of illegally obtained evidence. In this case, the argument goes, it is unfair to exclude the evidence obtained without knock-and-announce because the evidence would still have been found if the police had waited a few moments longer; and also that the right being protected was a trivial one when weighed against the adverse consequences of the exclusion of incriminating evidence. This ignores the fact that rule of law is not based on how well the end justifies the means in any given instance, but on the overriding importance of a consistent principled stance that transcends the individual case at hand.

How does it feel to have a Court where Anthony Kennedy is the new swing vote between, on one side, Roberts-Alito-Scalia-Thomas and, on the other, Ginsburg-Souter-Breyer-Stevens?

You may not remember her; I do, both because her 1964 murder outside her apartment block had a profound effect on psychology and because, at the time, I was a 12-year old living less than a mile from where it happened. The story has it that her murder was witnessed by 38 neighbors, none of whom called the police, supposedly because each thought another would do so. It is the basis for the well-known psychological principle of the ‘bystander effect’ in which individual responsibility is diffused by experiencing an event as part of a crowd. Now, Mind Hacks describes a revisionist history of what really happened.

No surprises in this Pew Research Center survey. We should probably stop talking about “countries closely allied” with the US; it is only their governments that support US hegemonism, not thier people.

The N.S.A. is Listening: an animated editorial cartoon from Newsday by Walt Handelsman.

And:

Is NSA eavesdropping legal?

Judge may decide : “The National Security Agency’s domestic spying program faces its first legal challenge in a case that could decide if the White House can order eavesdropping without a court order.” (ZDNet)

Guantanamo suicides ‘acts of war’. That’s the take of the US military commander of the illegal detention center at Guantanamo, commenting on the two Saudi and one Yemeni prisoners supposedly found hanged in their cells the same night. This is so nonsensical it defies any scrutiny. That is, if you even believe they were suicides. It makes for an unbelievable coincidence that there were three on the same night… unless there was a conspiracy, either on the part of the detainees or on their watchers. The only thing that puzzles me is why the US even announced these deaths, since our regime is no better than other tyrannical regimes that create ‘disappeared’ people without a trace. (BBC)

The N.S.A. is Listening: an animated editorial cartoon from Newsday by Walt Handelsman.

And:

Is NSA eavesdropping legal?

Judge may decide : “The National Security Agency’s domestic spying program faces its first legal challenge in a case that could decide if the White House can order eavesdropping without a court order.” (ZDNet)

Forensic Specialists to Examine Al – Zarqawi : an attempt is being made to reconstruct the last moments of his life and the exact manner in which he died, after US spokespeople change their story. Also, an Iraqi man living next to the bombing site told AP that neighbors put an injured man resembling al Zarqawi in an ambulance, but that U.S. soldiers took him out of the ambulance and beat him to death. A Pentagon spokesman said he was “unaware of the claim”. (New York Times )

The Tech That Took Out Zarqawi: “New sensors and weapons, high-tech surveillance drones and better training have resulted in a minor revolution of which the Zarqawi attack is just one result.” (DefenseTech)

This is the study that is getting alot of popular press. I am glad to see the research team acknowledge that the diagnostic category will expand or contract depending on how broad or narrow the inclusion criteria are; you know that all ‘official’ psychiatric diagnosis is done essentially by checklist. Research psychiatrists just want to know if a given subject qualifies ‘in’ or ‘out’. In contrast, we clinicians are interested in whether it is meaningful to understand a person in terms of a given diagnosis in relation to their difficulties in living. One of the consequences of the ascendency of research-driven diagnostic classification is to ignore this contextual issue. For this reason, we should take with more than a grain of salt all the studies that come out loudly trumpeting the fact that this disorder or that is much more prevalent than we had suspected. Moreover, many psychaitric diseases are not a matter of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ as much as they are a matter of degree, and ctieria such as how angry a person is surely exist on a continuum. But in current diagnosis, you’ve either got it or you haven’t. That just doesn’t make sense in thinking about people and individual variability.

Which brings me to my next point, regarding the widely varying notions of ‘prevalence’. For example, a broad definiition of intermittent explosive disorder (IED) entails at least three rage attacks during one’s lifetime; the narrow one at least three such attacks during the same year. Just consider how intuitively different those two definitions are!

And that’s just the systematic type of diagnosis. As readers of FmH know, one of my pet peeves is ‘intuitive’ diagnosis. If diagnosis by criteria divorced from life context is meaninglessly overinclusive, consider how many people yet will receive a diagnostic label iwhen it is done because they ‘feel’ like they have a disorder to the examining clinician. Consult a mental health professional because you are upset about an anger outburst you just had toward your family member, perhaps present with an angry ‘feel’, and risk the IED diagnosis. ADHD is perhaps the modern example par excellence of this problem. As readers of FmH know, I consider the ‘epidemic’ of ADHD in our society largely a result of brain-dead, meaningless diagnosis by feel, from the hip, by fad, by bandwagon, by naiveté..

Although it may be welcome for justifying coverage of care from a third party payor, there are profound consequences to receiving a needless diangosis, to start with in terms of needless or harmful medication prescribing. In addition, carrying around a label has weighty influences both on self-concept and on how others both in the healthcare and social services sectors and in the general public conceive of you. (It would be a different polemic to go off on the unfairness of stigmatization of psychiatric patients; suffice it to say that it is real and prevalent). How we understand our society as well is altered by altered notions of the prevalence of disorders such as IED.

And finally, overinclusive diagnosis is horrible for psychiatric research. As I have often written, if the members of a diagnostic category are neurochemically and physiologically diverse (i.e. if they really do not have the same disease process on a biological level), there is no chance that biological research, e.g. medication trials, will reach any meaningful conclusions. The more you look, the more diffuse it gets. And the more diffuse, the more meaningless.

Philosopher of mind Susan Blackmore explains why what goes on in our heads is a continuing puzzle. A quick and dirty summary of current debates about the ‘hard problem’ of the nature of consciousness, the holy grail of cognitive neuroscientists and philosophers of mind. (Independent.UK)

“Understanding consciousness may be easier than we thought” — MIT philosopher Alex Byrne (Boston Review via Mind Hacks)

“Writing your internet business plan, but suffering from writers block? Use this handy tool to break the deadlock and write like a pro!”

Tom D’Antoni: Thank you, Ann Coulter : “Big Annie is a national treasure. She has helped define Republicans as cruel bigots, haters whose evil is unsurpassed in American life. It’s not something I made up. It’s something she brays and sprays every time she opens her mouth.”

Chris Durang: Ann Coulter – Tipping Point?

Russell Shaw: Ann Coulter, “Bitch” Is Too Kind a Word For You

Kathy Griffin To Al Roker: “I’d Like To Go After Ann Coulter, I Saw That Nut-Bag On The Show”… (HuffPo)

Here is a summary table of the features of a dozen of these critters.

A blogger alliance formed to promote Torture Awareness Month, June 2006.

Should you remove ‘quakers’ before grinding your coffee beans? (bookofjoe)

The quest for a bigger and better high has led to the addition of fentanyl, a potent synthetic opiate painkiller, to street heroin. Dealers are giving it out for free to show how potent it is, leaving scores of their customers overdosed and dead in several American cities where it has been reported, notably Detroit and Chicago. Police are conflicted about warning addicts about the dangerous combination for fear of providing free advertising for the dealers. No one knows how the fentanyl has hit the streets or where it comes from. (Washington Post)

…He Jumps Into Cage And Declares “God Will Save Me, If He Exists”…

“The Pentagon’s move to omit a ban on prisoner humiliation from the basic guide to soldier conduct faces strong State Dept. opposition.” (LA Times) And we’ve seen how potent State Dept. opposition can be!

“After a 40-year virtual ban on research involving psychedelic drugs, scientists look anew at their potential in treating pain and anxiety“. This Boston Globe piece highlights the resurgent interest in psychedelics for therapeutic purposes. Current research includes claims that the powerful South American hallucinogen ibogaine is a quick fix for addictions and that MDMA (Ecstasy) can ease a fearful and pain-ridden dying.

The occasion for the Globe‘s interest is a research grant awarded to Harvard psychiatrist John Halpern, which the article observes

“…represents a chance to reduce the stigma hanging over the field. Back in the 1960s, Harvard professor Timothy Leary helped spur the backlash against psychedelic drugs with ethically questionable experiments and by advocating recreational LSD use to ”turn on, tune in, drop out.” Halpern, by contrast, is a respected researcher…”

This in my opinion is an irresponsible attack on Harvard faculty colleagues Leary and Richard Alpert, who were interested in systematic disciplined use of LSD as a learning tool. Mind expansion with psychedelics was never promoted as “recreational” as much as profoundly exploratory and revelatory. It is absurd to blame the victims — who were drummed out of academia — for the prejudicial backlash against hallucinogenic drugs, given the fundamental challenge they represented to the dominant paradigms.

It is no surprise, either, that psychedelic research got quickly assimilated to the social change movement which was simultaneously mounting equally profound challenges in areas including sexuality, peace, freedom and social structure. It really was a long time ago, and perhaps younger observers can be forgiven if some of the more dramatic manifestations of change in the ’60’s and early ’70’s are seen only as foolish and absurd when decontextualized as they so often are. Forget the times and you forget the real reasons no one is talking about changing society through psychedelics today. Some would say that the backlash has been utterly successfully in making us forget and decontextualize. As I wrote in the despairing days after Bush was returned to the White House for a second term in 2004, the only effective way I could see to speak truth to that obscene power was to create a fullscale countercultural backlash again, not a challenge narrowly confined to the political process.

It would be interesting to know if it is the Globe reporter’s take, or Dr. Halpern’s political attempt to distance himself from his forebears. An organization that closely and responsibly tracks these issues is the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS. In this article, MAPS founder Rick Doblin similarly distances himself from Leary’s position that psychedelic use will change society. I suppose that, in the Age of Bush, it would be hard enough getting dispassionate research funded without appearing to be an advocate. So Leary ends up being a convenient straw man.

Conservative British psychiatrist and curmudgeon Theodore Dalrymple (which I have just learned is the pseudonym of Anthony Daniels (Wikipedia )) writes in the Wall Street Journal that he is not impressed about the difficulties of withdrawing from narcotics:

I largely agree that withdrawal from opiates is highly overrated, and that addicts have a hard time being honest with those of us to whom they come for assistance. However, I am not sure, except for sampling errors introduced by the fact that Dalrymple works in the penal system, how he quickly makes the leap from their histrionics, manipulativeness and inadequacy to any conclusions about criminality. It is probably what stops him from being more compassionate toward these unfortunate individuals who have so little in the way of coping mechanisms that they have reduced all the diversity of life’s challenges to one — copping their drug and feeding their jones — and, correspondingly, pitifully, all life’s distress to one mind-numbing feeling of unrequited craving.

“Emotions, Like Germs, Are Easily Transmissible. The Trick Is Passing and Receiving the Right Ones” (Washington Post). Emotional contagion occurs in milliseconds, entirely beyond our awareness. We unconsciously mimic the facial expressions, posture and gestures — body language — to which we are exposed; the phenomenon can be gauged experimentally by measuring the tone of the muscles of facial expression, for example. Incremental changes in these muscles may help trigger the associated emotion in the bearer. Modulation of speech tone is also matched and mimicked. Of course, some people are better than others at infecting those around them with their moods, and others are more sensitive to people’s emotions. The article does not mention the mirror neuron concept, one of the darling new paradigms of neuropsychology (which I have followed and written about here for several years), which almost certainly underlies and shapes this emotional contagion. It makes sense that a mechanism for emotional contagion developed, given the adaptive value of the role it plays in social cohesion. This also bears a relationship to why it is largely unconscious and automatic, and why it operates most strongly in our most intimate social contexts. That does not mean, of course, that those aware of the infectious nature of their moods cannot attempt to exercise some control. (However, beware the new light this casts on Machiavelli’s dictum that, if you cannot both be loved and feared, it is better to be feared than loved.)

On the surface of it, despite the need for Bush to appeal to his base as his ratings plummet, it is an odd time for a renewed stand on the sanctity of marriage, just when speculation is mounting about marital tension in the White House over his supposed affair with Condoleezza Rice. But, since the man does not understand the meaning of the word hypocrisy, he may feel that now is a particularly good time for that very reason…

I am using the latest Windows version of iTunes (6.042) under WinXP SP2. Apart from those of you who are going to advise me to deal with my frustration by moving to Linux or MacOS, I am interested on feedback on the following scenario.

My iTunes library is around 6000 songs. Recently, I found a wonderful program that satisfied my obsessional needs to attach album art to each and every cut in my collection. The latest version of this program, iArt, has the added ability to go through my library and build a list of those songs which have multiple pieces of artwork attached to them, which is an annoying problem with iTunes that needlessly increases the storage space of the songs both on my desktop computer and on my iPod. So I went through that list and deleted the extraneous duplicate artwork. It turns out that 1800 of my songs had had multiple pictures attached to them (!), so I ended up saving between 2-3 gigs of space on both my hard drive and my iPod.

And that was where the problem began. I have my iPod set to auto-synchronize every time it is plugged into its cradle. But despite numerous attempts, with reboots of both the desktop and the iPod, the attempt to update more than 1800 songs would crash somewhere around the 700th file, giving me a message along the lines of, “The instruction at xxxxxx referenced memory at yyyyyy. The memory could not be ‘read’.” One of the problems was that, with the synchronization process crashing, those 1800 songs were erased from my iPod (or at least their index entries were) and, no matter how I tried, could not be resynch’ed onto the iPod.

To jump to the punchline, I finally solved this by changing the synchronization method from automatic to manual; building four or five playlists of around 400 songs each from the group of 1800 (fortunately, you can sort your iTunes library by last modified, so all the songs whose artwork I had modified last night were grouped together at the top of the sort), and synchronizing the missing songs by dragging these smaller playlists onto the iPod one by one.

So the problem was solved (the only abiding annoyance being that, after I changed back to automatic synchronization, the blinking “do not disconnect” message on the iPod screen now never goes away, even when synchronization has completed, until I reboot the iPod), but it leaves me with three questions. (1) what would someone have done who knows less than I do how to problem-solve such a scenario? I wouldn’t even bother calling Apple phone support (or any other phone support, for that matter), since I know all they would have told me would be to uninstall and reinstall iTunes; wipe the iPod clean and start from scratch; and finally, if that didn’t work, to reinstall Windows XP. I was worried about wiping the iPod and starting from scratch because it seemed that this was an issue of iTunes’ synchronization system choking on a certain volume of data, and of course I would expect it to choke around 700 songs if it were trying to transfer my entire library. One can never get access to anyone by calling tech support who really knows the innards of the program and can talk as intelligently as an intelligent and curious consumer would like, it seems to me.

(2) What woudl someone have done who knows more than I do how to problem-solve such a scenario? Some of you readers out there must have some thoughts, or even some similar experiences.

(3) Why does this particular Microsoft error message put the word “read” in quotation marks? What exactly is so ironic about the concept of trying to ‘read’ memory??

“Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki lashed out at the American military on Thursday, denouncing what he characterized as habitual attacks by troops against Iraqi civilians.” (New York Times ) The tip of the iceberg turned out to be just the tip of the tip. First we had isolated torture of enemy combatants by rogue underlings, then it was a persistent pattern of torture of detainees around the globe, then an isolated massacre of civilians by rogue troops, finally a habitual pattern of gratuitous violence. Little else should have been expected given the xenophobic contemptuous arrogant imperialist culture of the American projection of force in dealing with Iraq and the Mideast. It is shaped by and emanates from the top. My country, ’tis of thy people, you’re dying.

Addendum: Robert Fisk echoes my theme: “Could Haditha be just the tip of the mass grave?… [P]art of the problem is that we never really cared about Iraqis.”

And retired Army General John Batiste, on CNN, insists that Haditha, Abu Ghraib etc. arise from Rumsfeld’s bad judgment in managing the war effort in 2003-04. A Pulitzer Prize winning former Toledo Blade reporter and co-author of Tiger Force, discussing parallels between Haditha and My Lai, tells Der Spiegel that “I hope the investigation goes up the food chain.” An increasing number of politicians are clamoring for the investigation of the massacre to go all the way to the top.

In other words, Bush is inept at getting his story straight with his new spokesperson in important regards. Snow reported that the new treasury secretary was hired five days before Bush had stopped denying rumors that the old one was going. And even more serious discrepancies exist about the ‘party line’ on when Bush knew of the massacre at Haditha.

The only results anyone is going to see from wearing these tights is their marketers laughing all the way to the bank. Not only is caffeine not a weight loss agent (if it were, I would be carrying far fewer kilos by now); not only is the transdermal absorption claim dubious; but, if so, I don’t think the metabolic effects would be localized to the thighs.

True this is a widespread and growing problem, but there is another far more common internet contribution to drug abuse. As a physician used to the considerations that go into prescribing a controlled substance for a patient, it took me a long while to wrap my head around the new reality — quite simply, the lack of a prescription is no longer a barrier to obtaining virtually any controlled substance, as you might suspect from the spam mail that fills your inboxes. It has reached the point where the only substance abusers coming into our emergency room for detox who need to buy their drugs on the street are the ones unresourceful enough not to have an internet connection and a credit card to order by mail.

Although this piece in The Boston Herald, this city’s conservative tabloid daily, has a bemused, if not derisive tone about the Brookline decision, this is the thing that small towns throughout the country need to start doing. In a curious sidelight, the local media has reported that Barney Frank, our congressional representative and no progressive slouch, had responded by saying (to paraphrase the reportage) that this is not an issue that should be decided by public opinion. Of course that is exactly how we are supposed to be governed. Frank was being taken sloppily out of context; he was responding to the impotence of the Congress to act, frustrated that public opinion alone does not seem to be making a difference in countering the reign of terror from the Oval Office. In fact, he himself called long ago for an impeachment investigation.

Related: Same theme of growing rage against the war and repudiation of our dysadministration. Massive volatile antiwar protests against Iraq-bound war supplies shipments escalate at the Port of Olympia, Washington State, as described in this coverage from The Olympian of an underreported event. As I have commented before, we need to highlight these upwellings wherever they occur, to hasten our arrival at the popular sentiment tipping point.

Was he a modern human with microcephaly instead? (New Scientist)

A team of scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories on Long Island claims that fluoxetine (Prozac) works by stimulating the proliferation of progenitor nerve cells in a part of the brain called the dentate gyrus. (BBC) Discovering that the medication has this action is a long way, however, from proving that that is how it treats depression. Psychiatric medications cause many brain changes and it is difficult to pinpoint which cause their clinical benefits, which are epiphenomena, and which are consequences of the fact that the patient gets better. The article alludes to a very important fact — for this to be an explanation of how antidepressants cure depression, it would have to be shown to be a mechanism of action common to all medications that have similar antidepressant efficacy. That research remains to be done. The consensus is, however, moving away from a neurotransmitter theory of depression and of how antidepressants work to one based on, essentially, tissue repair, as we appreciate that episodes of depression actually cause physical damage to the brain from, among other things, its exposure to chronically high levels of stress hormones.

…myself among them.

Publius understands the political and social preferences of white social conservatives on a host of issues in terms of a fundamental cognitive or cultural difference from their opponents:

Coincidentally enough, an FmH reader just posted a comment to my item on the National Reviews rock’n’roll list wondering about the seemingly fundamental Republican trait of “insisting that everything and everyone is really just like they are but won’t admit it.” How would I diagnose that, the commenter asked. Parochialism frames the answer succinctly, as Publius typified it.

Actually, this strikes me as similar to something I have been saying for awhile now about the essential Republican appeal to tribalism, which I find is an ingrained or, one might even say, innate human predilection. Here is what I said in August, 2005:

In other words, progressives rise against their base, reptilian, parochial tribal insticts, while conservatives indulge in them… and cannot conceive of the possibility of not doing so.

As suggested by Ed Fitzgerald at unfutz, you should check this list of medical doctors who do not believe in Darwinism. Finding your practitioner on the list should probably be grounds to start looking for someone new to take care of your medical needs. Funny, I was just talking to one of my colleagues on the medical staff of my hospital about a renowned specialist on our staff who guiltily shares with trusted confidantes that he is a non-Darwinist believer in ‘intelligent design.’ We were wondering whether he could really do a good job weighing the benefits of antibiotic treatment of his patients against the risk of breeding resistant strains.After all, it takes a conviction in natural selection, competitive fitness, etc…

The egg really came first! (Times of London)

At Least 16 Civilians Are Killed by US Airstrikes In Afghan Fighting (Washington Post)