Armchair Musings

rel="tag">Naomi Klein's href="http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine" rel="tag">Shock Doctrine is a powerful piece of work.  I became aware of it after a tip from a href="http://www.quirkynomads.com/wpt/">reader.  I saw the video "trailer" for the book, and knew I had to blog about it.  But it has taken some time to pull my thoughts together.   Ms. Klein has written a book about a theory of economic change, as proposed by the free-market advocate href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman" rel="tag">Milton Friedman in the 20thcentury.  She ties this theory to the…
In the most recent debate among Presidential hopefuls in the Democratic Party, there was an exchange regarding the so-called "ticking bomb" question.  The question itself, and the way it was handled, reveals shortcomings in the way we evaluate our candidates. TIM RUSSERT: I want to move to another subject, and this involves a comment that a guest on Meet the Press made, and I want to read it as follows: “Imagine the following scenario. We get lucky. We get the number three guy in al-Qaeda. We know there’s a big bomb going off in America in three days, and we know this guy knows where it is.…
The implantable cardioverter defibrillator is a device placed under the skin, near the heart.  It delivers an electric shock to the heart when a dangerous abnormal rhythm is detected.  As you might suspect, it hurts when this shock occurs (doctors call it a " href="http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/542830">short-duration nociceptive stimulation").  Also as you might expect, it can create a great deal of anxiety. Persons with ICDs are liable to be shocked at any time, with no warning at all.   There's an evidence-based review of the subject that is openly available at Current Psychiatry…
I was prompted to rant again about health insurance, after reading a post at Blogcritics.  The author was highly critical of the href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/25/AR2007092501474.html">SCHIP proposals.   href="http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/09/25/185410.php">SCHIP: It's for the Insurance Companies, Not the Children Written by Dave Nalle Published September 25, 2007 Whenever someone in government makes a proposal and says it's 'for the children' you know you're about to be screwed. The 'for the chidren' argument is one of pure emotion and…
CNN has an interesting article on the safeguarding of href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium">highly enriched uranium.  A reporter was allowed to accompany a mission in Viet Nam to remove some cold war era highly enriched uranium from a US-built/USSR-fueled nuclear reactor.  It is kind of neat to read about, in part because the whole thing was secret until the mission was completed.   The author, Jill Dougherty, was even allowed to handle one of the fuel rods. She mentions that, so far, 442 kilograms of fresh HEU has been secured from 11 countries.  She adds that the job is…
There may be another crisis brewing in health care finance.  In the early 2000's, health insurance premiums were increasing by ~10% per year.  The increase in premiums was greater than the increase in health care costs.   Why would insurance premiums go up faster than health care costs? It is because health insurance companies make most of their money from investments ( href="http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=29450&ref=rellink">1).  In the early 2000's, their investments (along with everyone else's) were not doing so well. Of course nobody knows if the sturm und drang…
I happened to run across a couple of articles pertaining to cultural influences on mental health.  Neither presented modern first-world culture in a positive light. The two articles are: href="http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/abstract/191/50/s71">Schizophrenia outcome measures in the wider international community; and rev="review" href="http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/164/8/1173">A Longitudinal Study of the Use of Mental Health Services by Persons With Serious Mental Illness: Do Spanish-Speaking Latinos Differ From English-Speaking Latinos and Caucasians? You…
The New York Times contained two statements, in different contexts, that say opposite things.  The first appears in their "most blogged" box.  It is from July 15: href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/15/business/15gilded.html?ex=1342152000&en=b93e1c0193b4182c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss">The Richest of the Rich, Proud of a New Gilded Age By LOUIS UCHITELLE Published: July 15, 2007 ...These days, Mr. Weill and many of the nation’s very wealthy chief executives, entrepreneurs and financiers echo an earlier era — the Gilded Age before World War I — when powerful…
This afternoon, I had the pleasure of hearing href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Goodman" rel="tag">Amy Goodman interview href="http://scienceblogs.com/intersection/about.php">Chris Mooney about the subject of his new book, href="http://scienceblogs.com/intersection/2007/07/storm_world_tour_beginsweather.php" rel="tag">Storm World.   It was a segment from href="http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/11/1343232&mode=thread&tid=25">Democracy Now!  I won't trouble you with a synopsis, you can watch/hear/read it yourself: Listen to href="http://play.…
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">We are most accustomed to seeing power generation windmills on dry land, here in the USA.  In Europe, some are on land and some are offshore.  They generally are considered eyesores.  Myself, I think they are beautiful.  I love to see them up on a ridge, turning away, churning out megawatts for our energy-hungry populace. Would I want one in my back yard?  Sure.  In fact, there is a fair probability that I will put one there, if it won't alienate my neighbors too much. But there's the rub.  Despite the fact that I think they are aesthetically pleasing…
This is kind of a rambling rehash of an old href="http://corpus-callosum.blogspot.com/2004/03/multidrug-resistant-tb-lessons-about.html">post.  But it turns out to be topical now.  What is more it illustrates some interesting points about evolution: some obvious, others subtle.  One thing is shows very nicely is that once nature solves a problem, the same solution keeps cropping up in other places.   On March 16, 2004, the World Health Organization released a report on multidrug-resistant tuberculosis.  This is a serious problem, especially in the former Soviet states of eastern Europe…
This is not exactly news, but it is nice to have some specifics that put the issue in perspective.   href="http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-execpay10jun10,0,3379172.story?coll=la-home-center">CEOs' compensation can significantly impact shareholder value By Kathy M. Kristof, Times Staff Writer 1:11 PM PDT, June 9, 2007Compared with the pay of celebrity chief executives such as Oracle Corp.'s Larry Ellison, the $7.3 million in total compensation pulled down last year by Synnex Corp. CEO Robert Huang is practically paltry. But set against the tech-product distributor's fiscal 2006…
I am on call today, so I am about to go in to the hospital for a full day of work.  But while drinking my coffee I encountered an article that I need to get back to.  Maybe some of you could take a look at it too, if you have subscriber or academic access to Science. href="http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/316/5827/996">Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg Science 18 May 2007: Vol. 316. no. 5827, pp. 996 - 997 DOI: 10.1126/science.1133398Resistance to certain scientific ideas derives in large part from assumptions and biases…
This is in response to a href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/05/childhood_ptsd.php#comment-439606">comment from a prior post.  There are a few related questions here. Can preemies develop PTSD, can they be labeled with PTSD, if they can get PTSD is it fundamentally the same as it is in adults, and if it is different, should we call it something else???? The comment was left by Stacy, the author of a blog, href="http://thepreemieexperiment.blogspot.com/">The Preemie Experiment.  I spent a bit of time on href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi">Medline…
Each of the major papers has to choose one story to have the most prominent headline.  Today, USA Today chose this one: href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-05-17-gas-prices_N.htm"> href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-05-17-gas-prices_N.htm">Drivers cut back — a 1st in 26 years By Paul Overberg and Larry Copeland, USA TODAYThe average American motorist is driving substantially fewer miles for the first time in 26 years because of high gas prices and demographic shifts, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal highway data... The growth in miles driven has…
Often, on this blog, I've ranted about the risks that our government, and our corporate citizens, e.g. pharmaceutical companies, expose us to on a daily basis.   Perhaps it would be good to put some of those risks in perspective.  That is, to compare the risks of various medications to others risks that we take on a routine basis.  In the May/June issue of the journal, Health Affairs, there is an article on the subject.  The full thing is behind a pay wall, but we'll get to the heart of the matter anyway. href="http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/26/3/636">What's More…
(Note: if the accent marks look weird, set your browser to view character encoding as Unicode (UTF-8))One of the problems with the href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders">Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is that there is no clear rationale for the division of problems into Axis I vs. Axis II disorders.  It is assumed, sometimes, that Axis I disorders are "biological" and Axis II disorders are "psychological."   Legend has it that the division arose directly from the conflict between psychodynamically-oriented…
OK, I turned on the TV, in all its 12-inch glory, and watched href="http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/watch.html">the show.  It is as good as any articles of impeachment will ever be.   Money quotes, from the href="http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/transcript1.html">transcript: BILL MOYERS: It didn't make sense to Simon that the dictator would trust islamic terrorists. BOB SIMON: Saddam as most tyrants, was a total control freak. He wanted total control of his regime. Total control of the country. And to introduce a wild card like Al Qaeda in any sense was just something he…
For some, cognitive dissonance is a way of life.
I know people come here to read about psychiatry, mental health, neuroscience, and political/social issues related to those topics.  No, scratch that, I have not idea why people come here.  But this post is straight politics.  Well, it's politics and a little sociological musing and opinion. The cartoon came in an email from the left-leaning Center for American Progress.  They rarely send me anything, so I figure they figure this is a big issue.  The cartoon is window dressing.  The article they link to is not.   href="http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/03/now_you_tell_us.html"…