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Dec. 8 (Bloomberg) -- An Illinois man was arrested and charged with planning a terrorist attack in a shopping mall three days before Christmas. Derrick Shareef, 22, of Rockford, Illinois, was arrested as he tried to acquire hand grenades he planned to explode Dec. 22 in the city's CherryVale Mall, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said today in Chicago. Shareef is a self-described American convert to Islam who said he wanted to ``commit violent jihad,'' authorities said. ``While these are very serious charges, at no time was the public in any imminent peril,'' Fitzgerald said. Shareef was charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and attempting to destroy or damage a building by fire or explosion. He may face a life sentence on conviction, Fitzgerald said at a press conference. Rockford, 90 miles northwest of Chicago, is the third- largest Illinois city, with a population of more than 150,000, its Web site says. Shareef was arrested Dec. 6 as he met with an undercover agent with whom he was to trade a set of stereo speakers for four hand grenades and a handgun, according to a statement by Fitzgerald and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Robert Grant, who heads the FBI's Chicago office, described Shareef's plan as ``relatively unsophisticated'' at a press conference after the court proceeding. Watched for Months Grant said the FBI watched Shareef for several months. He told an unnamed FBI informant that he ``wanted to commit violent jihad against civilians as well as other crimes to obtain funds to further his goals of violent jihad,'' according to a sworn statement by FBI agent Jared Ruddy attached to the criminal complaint. Possible targets included public buildings, including the DeKalb County, Illinois, courthouse, Grant said. Shareef visited the mall twice to determine its suitability as a target and plan his escape, Grant said. And just so there's no question about whether this was religiously motivated or not: Having settled on that target, Shareef began a ritual purification process that included having his body shaved and videotaping a message for use in case he didn't survive his attack, the government said. ``I am from America, and this tape is to let you guys know, who disbelieve in Allah, to let the enemies of Islam know and to let the Muslims alike know that the time for jihad is now,'' Shareef said on the tape, Ruddy's statement said. Labels: deinstitutionalization Labels: global warming Labels: global warming Labels: global warming
Never forget!
I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win
I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
Sorry, high pressure isn't included.
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Amitai Etzioni's Blog
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Michael Williams -- Master of None
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A Group Blog By Iraqis
THE MESOPOTAMIAN: TO BRING ONE MORE IRAQI VOICE OF THE SILENT MAJORITY TO THE ATTENTION OF THE WORLD
Specializing in discussions of discrimination and affirmative action
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Michelle Malkin's blog
Impearls: a blog as electic and interesting as mine
Proving that the United States military does more than kill people and break things.
May not agree with this group on everything, but stopping the ACLU is high on my list
A conservative/moderate black blogger.
Another sensible American
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Maggie's Farm: Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
A blog dedicated to "Documenting Saddam Hussein's support of Terrorism"
The blog of one of my fellow bloggers on the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog
J. Norman Heath's Blog--a circus rigger and Second Amendment scholar (really!)
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Things Not To Leave Behind When You Commit A Crime
You know not to leave fingerprints. But that's not so easy, when you leave a finger:Memphis robbery detectives Tuesday charged a man they say literally fingered himself for a violent home invasion robbery.
Slow learner, I guess.
Terence Stewart, 28, is wanted for four counts of aggravated robbery, four counts of attempted aggravated robbery and burglary in the Nov. 4 break-in at a home on the 3000 block of Dothan.
During the robbery, the tip of Stewart's right trigger finger was cut off by one of the victims wielding a sword.
The fingertip was large enough and in good enough condition for crime scene detectives to get a clear print, which matched immediately to Stewart, police said.
Stewart's prints were on file for his arrest in 1996 for breaking into the homes of Hispanic victims and robbing them at gunpoint. Early on Nov. 4, eight men sleeping inside the home on Dothan were awakened by the sound of the door being kicked in by two robbers and several gunshots.
It does sound like it might a bit difficult to insist that he wasn't there--both fingerprints and DNA. If only there were a security camera running as well...
The robbers pistol-whipped Guillermo Tovar Sr. and left him unconscious on a couch while they robbed the other seven men.
Tovar regained consciousness as the robbers were exiting and swung into action.
He grabbed a sword from under the couch, and struck at one of the robbers' guns just as he was about to fire.
Tovar's swipe took off the gunman's right trigger finger, which was left behind when the robbers ran out.
Robbery Det. Michael Rosario and the Crime Scene Investigations unit gathered their bloody evidence off the floor.
The tip was inked and printed, and run through the AFIS (automatic fingerprint identification system), where it touched off a perfect match.
Police said they have been looking for Stewart ever since the fingertip pointed his way.
For good measure the fingertip has been sent off for DNA analysis that will be used to confirm the identity of the robber.
Thanks to Arms and the Law for the pointer.
Digital SLR Hunting
A reader recommended that I look at the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ30S camera, which has a 12x optical zoom and eight megapixels--and without any lens moving back and forth. It is a very impressive camera, especially for the price. Unfortunately, it is a fixed lens--at least according to everything that I have read. Since one of my objectives is to do astrophotography, having the ability to remove the lens and use the telescope as the big glass is very important.
I'm leaning towards the Pentax K100D, which is only a 6.1 megapixel camera, but the price is right, even with an 18-55mm zoom lens included. The K10D, which is the 10.2 megapixel big brother, is attractive--but I notice some discussion of problems with cameras above eight megapixels having relatively high image noise levels. To correct this problem, some camera makers are using fairly aggressive algorithms for smoothing out the noise--and images are often a bit less sharp than you would otherwise expect. I haven't seen any criticism of the Pentax K10D on this score, but then again, it hasn't been out very long, and I have not seen many detailed reviews of the K10D yet. (There is this short one.) It isn't like 6.1 megapixels is low resolution.
Another advantage of the K100D over the K10D is the batteries: the K100D uses 4 AA batteries, while the K10D uses a specific and apparently somewhat expensive Li-ion battery. If you ever run out of charge on the rechargeable AA batteries with the K100D, no matter where you are, you can buy some AA alkalines to hold you for a few hours.
One other advantage of the K100D--you can set the "film" speed as high as ISO 3200, while the K10D is limited to ISO 1600. For astrophotography, this is an advantage.
One nice thing about both the K100D and K10D is they have clever combined "shake reduction"--something rather reduces camera motion while taking a picture with a mechanism that at the same time shakes dust off the sensor. Both are good things; figuring out how to get them both into a single mechanism is even more clever!
One question that I have which I suspect some of you know will be able to answer: I notice that a lot of lens are described as AF, which I am pretty sure from context means "autofocus." If a lens is offered that is described as "Pentax AF," I would assume that this means that the K100D's autofocus will operate the lens? I have a marvelous telephoto lens for my Pentax film camera that I am hoping to use, but it is pretty obviously not autofocus.
Be Grateful Some of the Bad Guys Are Idiots
This terrorist wannabe, for example, arrested in Rockford, Illinois:
There's an understatement for you! This idiot thought he was going to trade stereo speakers for hand grenades and a handgun?
Hmmm. I think I am beginning to see some pattern between terrorist attacks on the U.S. and the belief system of those performing those terrorist attacks. But maybe that's just a coincidence.
Accurate, But Misleading
Quite a number of people point out the dramatic decline in mental hospital patients from the 1950s to the 1970s, with the implication that the large homeless mentally ill population is the result of this:As the state mental hospital population dropped from 550,000 in 1995 to less than 170,000 in the 1970s, changes have occurred, but problems remain, such as homelessness and jails as an alternative to hospitals.
Keep in mind that the population of the U.S. rose dramatically during that period--which makes the decline even more dramatic.
There is truth to the claim that deinstitutionalization played a major role in creating the problem of mentally ill homeless people wandering our cities, begging, digging through trash cans for food, screaming at people that aren't there, but those numbers are a bit misleading.
It turns out there were several groups present in mental hospitals in the 1950s that were not there in the 1970s, for a variety of reasons that I wasn't expecting.
Now, there were psychotics who were deinstitutionalized and returned to the community that managed to do okay--although the best example seems to be in Vermont, which had no urban centers at the time. It is clear from the reading that I am doing that deinstitutionalization was a great tragedy for many psychotics who were deinstitutionalized in the 1960s and 1970s--and for many psychotics who were never hospitalized because of the changes in the civil commitment laws--but numbers like the one that I quote above are somewhat misleading.
Idaho Unemployment Rate Rises...
To the horrifying 3.3 per cent!A one-tenth of a percentage point spike in Idaho's jobless rate for November was helped along by the loss of 750 jobs in the state's construction sector.
Idaho Commerce and Labor said the construction jobs lost last month came on the heels of 720 industry positions cut in October.
Because of the November losses, the state jobless rate increased to 3.3 percent last month. The Treasure Valley rate increased two-tenths of a percentage point to 2.9 percent.
Good News in Ohio
Governor Taft vetoed the pre-emption bill that would strike down all local restrictive gun control measures. The Ohio House overrode his veto--and there's a good chance that the State Senate will do likewise:COLUMBUS — The Ohio House on Thursday afternoon voted 71-21 to override Gov. Bob Taft's veto of a gun bill Thursday morning.
Seven state representatives either were absent or opted not to vote. No debate preceded the vote.
Sixty votes were needed in the House and 20 are needed in the Senate to override a veto. The Senate meets again on Tuesday, but it's unclear if or when it might take an override vote.
"We've made every reasonable compromise at every step of the way to avoid the veto showdown," said Ken Hanson, legislative chair for the Buckeye Firearms Association.
Toby Hoover of Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence said, "We're grateful to him (Taft) and it looks like he's leading the way to make sure home rule stays in Ohio."
The Ohio Constitution gives cities and villages "home rule" powers to self-govern as long as local laws don't conflict with the state's general laws.
This gun bill makes some modifications to the state's 3-year-old conceal-and-carry law, but it strips cities of the power to regulate firearms issues and negates 80 local laws covering issues such as banning the sale of assault weapons and holding adults liable when they allow children access to weapons.
Competition Coming For Windows
A reader pointed me to this article about HP's plans to certify SuSE Linux for their laptops:Hewlett-Packard has no plans to preload versions of the upcoming Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 10 on PCs but will certify the operating system.
I must confess that while Microsoft Windows XP seems to be pretty stable, I wouldn't mind seeing a Linux variant putting some cost and disk space pressure on Windows. I am a little surprised to see that my 100 GB hard disk seems to have about 20 GB of Windows and associated applications. (Admittedly, a lot of it seems to be games that HP installed with it--at least those can be removed easily enough.)
Plans call for HP to certify SLED 10 for select notebooks—including the nx6310, nx6320, nc6320, nc2400, nx6315 and nx6325 models—before year's end, a spokeswoman for HP said in response to questions from CRN.
She said HP doesn't plan to offer Linux as a preload on business notebooks thus far, but added that the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company is actively assessing the market for Linux clients and sees much potential for SLED 10.
Novell is set to launch SLED 10 next month. The OS contains as many standard desktop features as Microsoft's forthcoming Windows Vista but takes up a fraction of the hard-disk space and costs about $50 per seat—several hundred dollars less than current Microsoft operating systems. Novell also has said it plans to bundle the OpenOffice suite of productivity software with SLED 10.
What Next? Hiring Prostitutes to Reduce Prison Rape?
Whenever I say to myself that you can't top the idiocy of the Democrats, you find an example like this from Canada's Liberal Party:OTTAWA, Dec 4 (Reuters Life!) - Canada is scrapping a pilot program that provided tattoos for prisoners in an effort to stop the spread of diseases such as hepatitis and AIDS, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said Monday.
Yeah, yeah, I know, if the prisoners weren't using dirty needles, they wouldn't be spreading hepatitis and AIDS. But is it really necessary for the government to provide the tattoos? Couldn't they just allow them access to bleach?
The program, set up by the previous Liberal government, offered free tattoos to prisoners in six of Canada's 58 federal prisons. The Liberals lost in January to the right-wing Conservatives, who promised to crack down on crime.
"Our government will not spend taxpayers' money on providing tattoos for convicted criminals," Day said in a statement.
"Our priority is to have an effective federal corrections system that protects Canadians, while providing inmates with access to acceptable health care and treatment programs."
More Gun Control Laws: When Will This Madness End?
Once again, busybodies can't leave well enough alone:PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - A tiny town in western Pennsylvania could ask all of its residents to own guns, if a proposal under consideration on Wednesday wins approval from local officials.
Under the proposed law, residents of Cherry Tree, Pennsylvania, would be asked to own guns and know how to use them. Cherry Tree, some 70 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, has about 400 residents.
The town council was scheduled to vote on the proposed "Civil Protection Ordinance" on Wednesday evening.
Introduced last month by resident Henry Statkowski, the measure recommends that "all heads of households maintain a firearm along with ammunition."
In written comments, Statkowski said homeowners have a right and a responsibility to defend against intruders rather than calling police and waiting for help to arrive.
The Nasty Jokes Can Start Now
The news story starts: Condoms designed to meet international size specifications are too big for many Indian men....
That's as much of the story as I will quote here.
More About Global Warming
There's a fascinating item here about prehistoric climate change--and how dramatically many of these changes took place, without any smokestacks or other signs of the evils of American Kapitalism that seems to bother a lot of the global warming crazies:Approximately 12,800 years ago, as the climate was warming following the Earth's last glacial maximum ("ice age"), an abrupt transition to cold conditions occurred, during which the surface temperature of the Northern Hemisphere dropped precipitously [nearly 27ºF (15ºC) in Greenland, for example] in a series of abrupt, decadal-scale jumps, some of which involved temperature changes on the order of 5ºF (3ºC). This abrupt climate cooling is known as the "Younger Dryas" event. Once the abrupt transition to a colder climate had occurred, the Northern Hemisphere, especially Europe and Greenland, experienced considerably colder conditions lasting about 1,300 years. Other parts of the world were affected as well. The termination of this cold event around 11,500 years ago occurred as an even more abrupt warming, most of which took place in a single 5-year period. The entire transition to a warmer, more modern climate took no more than 40 years. During this transition, snow accumulation in Greenland doubled in a single 3-year period, with 90% of that increase occurring in a single year. This abrupt transition to a warmer world led to a three-fold drop in wind-blown sea salt, a seven-fold drop in wind-blown dust, and a climate warming of 9-18ºF (5-10ºC) in Greenland, all in less than a decade. Within 30 years following this transition to a warmer climate, atmospheric methane (another greenhouse gas) levels increased, as a result of the creation of more wetlands globally. Conversely, the climate cooling associated with the onset of the "Younger Dryas" event resulted in a loss of wetlands worldwide, and a drop in the concentration of atmospheric methane. Numerous climate records from other parts of the world confirm these abrupt climate events recorded in the Greenland ice cores, and extend the signature of these events to other regions of the globe.
Now, that page is warning of the danger of how suddenly the climate could change as a result of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW)--but it is also demonstrates that sudden catastrophic climate change took place when the highest technology on the planet was probably the bone needle. There's an awful of certainty being expressed about things for which no certainty exists--and where the climatological records suggests that our actions, relative to the planet as a whole, are about as significant as urinating into an oncoming hurricane.
The Iraqi Survey Group's Recommendations...
Hey, maybe this bunch really knows what they are doing, but I find it interesting that people who have served two tours of duty in Iraq, like this guy, aren't too impressed:The Iraq Survey Group’s findings or rather, recommendations are a joke and could have only come from a group of old people who have been stuck in Washington for too long. The brainpower of the ISG has come up with a new direction for our country and that includes negotiating with countries whose people chant “Death to America” and whose leaders deny the Holocaust and call for Israel to be wiped from the face of the earth. Baker and Hamilton want us to get terrorists supporting countries involved in fighting terrorism! If I am the only one who finds something wrong with that then please let me know because right now I feel like I am the only person who feels this way.
...
We cannot appease our enemies and we cannot continue to cut and run when the going gets tough. As it stands in the world right now our enemies view America as a country full of queasy people who are inclined to cut and run when things take a turn for the worse. Just as the Tet Offensive was the victory that led to our failure in Vietnam our victories in Iraq now are leading to our failure in the Middle East. How many more times must we fight to fail? I feel like all of my efforts (30 months of deployment time) and the efforts of all my brothers in arms are all for naught. I thought old people were supposed to be more patient than a 24 year old but apparently I have more patience for our victory to unfold in Iraq than 99.9 percent of Americans. Iraq isn’t fast food-you can’t have what you want and have it now. To completely change a country for the first time in it’s entire history takes time, and when I say time I don’t mean 4 years.
Talking doesn’t solve anything with a crazed people, bullets do and we need to be given a chance to work our military magic. Like I told a reporter buddy of mine: War sucks but a world run by Islamofacists sucks more.
You Never Know How Accurate Newspaper Accounts Like This Are...
But my, it is very interesting, and if correct, it implies that the best hope of curing various cancers is figuring out how to kill specifically cancer stem cells. Even a million fully differentiated cancer cells apparently won't cause cancer when placed into the body, but perhaps as few as 1000 cancer stem cells will.
Michael Williams brought this to my attention, and has a very nice summary of what the article's content signifies for treatment of cancer.
What I find quite interesting is that the Canadian cancer researchers, not having access to vast quantities of money, had to concentrate on an area where money wasn't so critical--and may have ended up with the most important solution, long-term:Since U.S. President Richard Nixon declared “war on cancer” in 1971, estimates suggest the United States has spent, if adjusted for inflation, about $200-billion (U.S.) on cancer research.
Something to think about, the next time that the left starts whining about the cheapskates not wanting to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on whatever is today's crisis du jour.
“We never had those deep pockets,” said Dr. Bernstein of the CIHR. While the Americans had the means to make large cancer-cell lines and carpet-bomb them with various anti-cancer agents to see if they could spot a winner, the Canadians contented themselves to look at less expensive questions.
“By not having those resources, we had to do something to get a big bang for a smaller buck,” he said, “so we started looking at cell populations in a cancer.”
Dr. Till agrees with the assessment: “We couldn't afford the brute force of just testing any old molecule that looked interesting. We had to use our wits a bit more.”
Maybe I've Identified a New Business Opportunity
I have about reached the limits of my patience trying to get installers of photovoltaic and wind generator systems to return my calls. At this point, I think I've contacted at least six different "businesses" over the last year, and not a single one ever bothers to return my calls. I am forced to conclude that:
1. They have so much business that they can't be bothered to call back another customer.
2. They are making so much money at this that they don't need to make any more money.
Here's the market opportunity: Site surveys for photovoltaic and wind generator use. I think my current location gets enough wind to justify putting up a wind generator. I don't know for sure, because I don't know what the average and peak wind speeds are. My guess is that the peak wind speed is 60 mph or better, and average wind speed might be as much as 8-10 mph. Because electricity produced by a wind generator goes up with the square of the wind speed, it is possible for a site with a very high peak wind speed--and a relatively low average wind speed--to produce more electricity than a site with a constant but slow wind.
There are a variety of companies that produce weather stations that let you download the recorded weather information, including wind speed. I was hoping to find someone that was interested in renting me one, or charging me to do a survey, but no such luck, at least in the Boise area.
Photovoltatics would seem like an easy item to do a site survey for: bring in a small photovoltaic panel, and leave it set up for a week (in winter, of course, when sun angle and clouds are at their worst). Once it then needed is an A-to-D converter that allows me to digitize the output of the panel, sampling it every five minutes or so. This would make it possible to calculate the actual output, and scale accordingly to a larger panel.
If you have a suggestion on how to do this without having to leave a computer hooked up at a remote site for a week, I'm all ears.
UPDATE: I found an interesting article on inexpensive datalogging for photovoltatics in the sample issue of Home Power magazine.
Why Did Liquid Water Just Show Up On Mars?
This report indicates that NASA is now pretty sure that liquid water on the Martian surface is recent--not billions of years ago, or millions of years ago--but in the last seven years:Ending a debate that began more than a decade ago, NASA announced today that water does indeed flow on Mars. The agency is calling the discovery one of its most significant to date.
Hmmm. Mars is also suffering from global warming. Do you suppose maybe some of the frozen subsurface water is being to melt? Quick, alert Al Gore!
"We had evidence that water had flowed across the surface of Mars billions of years ago," said Ken Edgett of the Malin Space Sciences System. "But we can say that liquid water is present on Mars right now."
Scrutinizing before-and-after photographs obtained by the Mars Global Surveyor (see below), NASA identified evidence of new deposits in two of Mars' tens of thousands of gullies--formations that scientists say have formed over the last seven years and could have only been formed by a flowing liquid. Their morphology, color and location led to the conclusions NASA revealed today.
More seriously: astronomers have been looking for evidence of water on Mars as long as we've been observing it with telescopes and space probes. I'm not surprised that we never saw any evidence through telescopes (I can tell you some frustrating stories about why Mars is such a difficult target), but we've been putting probes on the surface and in orbit around Mars for more than 30 years. And we are just beginning to get clear evidence of liquid water in the last seven years!
Oh yes, that article had one amusing typo:In addition to revealing evidence that liquid water flows on Mars, the agency unveiled images from the Mars Global Surveyor that are helping scientists understand the rate of steroid impact on the planet's surface.
First Barry Bonds, now Mars!
Everyone Knows That There's a Consensus About Global Warming & Hurricanes...
But you will probably be surprised to find what it is. Here is the consensus statement issued by the World Meteorological Organization's International Workshop on Tropical Cyclones-VI (IWTC-VI) Participants:1. Though there is evidence both for and against the existence of a detectable anthropogenic signal in the tropical cyclone climate record to date, no firm conclusion can be made on this point.
Oh, not what you were expecting? The mainstream media are so intent on promoting the environmentalist cause that they are simply not going to publish anything about this statement. After all, you might not panic.
2. No individual tropical cyclone can be directly attributed to climate change.
3. The recent increase in societal impact from tropical cyclones has largely been caused by rising concentrations of population and infrastructure in coastal regions.
4. Tropical cyclone wind-speed monitoring has changed dramatically over the last few decades, leading to difficulties in determining accurate trends.
5. There is an observed multi-decadal variability of tropical cyclones in some regions whose causes, whether natural, anthropogenic or a combination, are currently being debated. This variability makes detecting any long-term trends in tropical cyclone activity difficult.
6. It is likely that some increase in tropical cyclone peak wind-speed and rainfall will occur if the climate continues to warm. Model studies and theory project a 3-5% increase in wind-speed per
degree Celsius increase of tropical sea surface temperatures.
7. There is an inconsistency between the small changes in wind-speed projected by theory and
modeling versus large changes reported by some observational studies.
8. Although recent climate model simulations project a decrease or no change in global tropical
cyclone numbers in a warmer climate, there is low confidence in this projection. In addition, it is unknown how tropical cyclone tracks or areas of impact will change in the future.
9. Large regional variations exist in methods used to monitor tropical cyclones. Also, most regions have no measurements by instrumented aircraft. These significant limitations will continue to make detection of trends difficult.
10. If the projected rise in sea level due to global warming occurs, then the vulnerability to tropical cyclone storm surge flooding would increase.
Roger Pielke, Jr. at the University of Colorado's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research has more.
There is a very important comment over there by someone named Jim Clarke that very concisely captures the core problem:In the 1960’s, it became fashionable to look upon the success of western civilization as a problem. The generation that fostered this idea was the most privileged generation of all time. They did not struggle to survive to adulthood, or to be educated or to be fed. Perhaps it is because they did not earn their well-being that they began to feel a little guilty about it. I really do not know, but there is no doubt that a certain loathing of ‘industrial man’ became imbedded in Western Culture. This is particularly true in the modern environmental movement, which has influenced all of us with a view that humanity is the enemy of an otherwise idyllic natural world.
As we examine the science concerning climate change, we find many plausible explanations for the real world data, and many value judgments required to build the modeling data. If we start with the assumption that nature is in harmony and that humans disrupt that harmony, then all our judgments will be influenced by that assumption.
Climate proxies and methods that show little climate change before the industrial revolution will be favored over the much greater numbers that show a more variable climate in the past. Less accurate surface temperature readings of today will be favored over the more accurate satellite data, because the surface data supports the underlying assumption more effectively. If there are 3 or 4 peer reviewed values for the direct forcing of increasing CO2, the larger value will be chosen for the GCMs. If the cosmic ray theory does a better job of explaining observations, it will not be considered viable because it goes against the cultural assumption that humans are screwing up the planet.
There are literally hundreds of assumptions that go into the AGW theory and in every case, values are arbitrarily chosen that support the underlying cultural assumption. All of these decisions have been thoroughly rationalized, but the pattern is becoming unmistakable obvious. The Stern report is another classic example of this pathological, cultural, self loathing. There is really no other explanation for the mass behavior we are currently observing.
If it is not reversed, the decline of Western Civilization is inevitable.
Something Spread By Email That Is Actually True!
I checked it out with Snopes.com and the IRS web site. There is a $30 to $60 refundable tax credit available on your 2006 federal income tax, on line 71. You just need to know to claim it.
Since it is a refundable tax credit, you can even claim this if you aren't filing a tax return:For those people who do not otherwise have to file a tax return, there is a new simple form (1040EZ-T) that can be used to get this refund.
LED Replacements for Mini-Maglites
You may be aware that LEDs are fast replacing conventional incandescent light bulbs in an enormous number of applications: tail lights; stoplights; flashlights. They are more energy efficient, and more durable, especially with respect to shock.
My wife and I both carry the Mini-Maglite with us--a compact, high quality metal flashlight--and one that makes a somewhat useful improvised defensive weapon, when swung down hard on an assailant. (Yes, you could use the lanyard loop at the end of the flashlight, and hook two of them together to make a nunchaku--but that would be a felony in California and a number of other states, so you didn't hear it from me!)
The bulbs on these don't last forever--they are somewhat fragile. So when I realized that the spare bulb in the tailpiece had now been used on both of these Mini-Maglites, I decided to look for a replacement. It turns out that I could do that--but there is now an LED replacement for it. This is one of the vendors that sells the TerraLux MicroStar1, a replacement unit that they claim is brighter than the factory incandescent bulb, will last for 18 continuous hours on 2 AA batteries, and has a 20,000 hour LED lifetime. I've ordered two sets, one for mine, and one for my wife. I'll let you know if it really does what it claims.
It is does, I'll buy the version for the big Maglites as well, where they claim 4x as bright, and 25x longer battery life.
Who's Sneaking Around My Back Door?
One of these tracks is the feral cat that drives Tater Tot into rages of territoriality--but what's the other? We've seen none of our neighbor dogs up here. Is that a coyote track, or a fox track?
Click to enlarge
Nice To Be Recognized
The Associated Students of Boise State University (ASBSU) has a little event each year where they identify the best teacher in each of the colleges and honor them--something that is entirely student driven. My wife was one of the nominees--which kind of surprised her, since this is the first semester she has taught there--so we were invited to a very little event at BSU.
Anyway, she didn't win in her division, but it was still nice to be one of the teachers that had made such an impression on her students.
Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge
To my surprise, the dinner was actually pretty impressive, considering the inherent limitations of buffet serving of meals. The raspberry vinegarette salad dressing was better than I expected; the chicken satay skewers were a little bland, but the peanut sauce solved that; the prime rib was flavorful, although the horseradish sauce was a little lackluster.
Anyway, the VP from the Idaho Statesman gave the primary speech of the evening which was almost completely irrelevant to the evening. She was speaking about the importance of the First Amendment, increasing secrecy of the government, and so on--pretty typical liberal speech, and one that seemed barely aware that some of the fight about press freedom vs. government secrecy has some credible arguments on both sides.
She seemed especially disturbed at how few young people even know what the First Amendment protects, so I went over to her after the event to let her know that this ignorance is a bit broader than just the First Amendment, and gave some examples of gross historical ignorance that my wife and I have seen lately that worry us greatly. I ended up having a nice chat with BSU President Kustra about this, and managed to somehow slip in the idea that they really ought to offer Constitutional History again. (Not that my motivations are selfish, or anything.)
I Love It! The "ACLU Solstice Barn"
You can see it here. Conservative students at the University of Texas decided that putting a creche would rile up the left, so they put up an "ACLU Solstice Barn" instead, with Gary & Joseph (not Mary & Joseph):The three Wise Men in the display were Lenin, Marx and Stalin, McDonald told WND, because ACLU founder Roger Baldwin, while leading the organization, was a backer of Soviet-style communism.
A reader also reminds me:
As director of the ACLU in 1934, Baldwin wrote an article entitled "Freedom in the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R." in which he said "the Soviet Union has already created liberties far greater than exist elsewhere in the world." He later moderated his views but maintained a commitment to socialism.
The scene also featured a "terrorist shepherd" with a suicide-bomber belt and an angel with Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi's face, using a photograph of the soon-to-be speaker of the House from San Francisco. The Marx figure is holding a book with the title "Child Porn."
"The ACLU and other left-wing extremist groups are working diligently to destroy Americans' rights to the free expression of religion," said the Young Conservatives' Executive Director Joseph Wyly.And don't forget to send a Christmas or Hanukkah Card to the ACLU headquarters in NYC. There is a nation-wide campaign afoot, and just imagine their pleasure at having several million envelopes arrive in December, each of which must be opened, because any one might contain a donation. What a nice drain on resources.
Make sure that you use a completely boring business sized envelope. We wouldn't want to spoil their fun!
ACLU
125 Broad Street, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10004
It used to be when I received fundraising solicitations from Handgun Control, Inc. that included a business reply envelope that they would get their envelope back with all the materials inside--plus as much lead shot as I could get into the envelope, just to drive up the postage that they had to pay for it. Obviously, without ACLU business reply envelopes, this approach doesn't accomplish much--but I suppose at some point, disposing of all that lead shot might create some problems for ACLU with whatever environmental laws New York City has....
Why Calculators Shouldn't Be Introduced in the Math Classroom Too Early
Joanne Jacobs in guest-blogging about education issues over at Volokh Conspiracy, and points to some sad indications that some of those who are becoming teachers, or who supervise teachers, shall we say, are in over their heads:Are graphing calculators introduced too early? Most of the would-be math teachers in ed class thought so, reports "John Dewey." Then a contrarian classmate spoke up.
One of the comments on that entry, however, really captures what's wrong with premature use of calculators: . . . he really couldn’t see what cognitive value of teaching students the procedure for multiplying 36 x 7 when calculators were available. I was unable to keep my mouth shut. “Don’t you think that students need an understanding of basic procedures and that place value is an important concept?” “Why?” he remarked and went on to the uselessness of learning long division at which I drew the line and said “How can you say that? Don’t you think the distributive property is worth talking about?”
“Who cares?” he pointed out.
"Dewey" is planning to retire from his job and start a second career as a math teacher.
In Portland, the student representative to the school board objects to the new constructivist math curriculum based on CPM textbooks. The curriculum director responded:
"In the past you just had a calculator, a book," (Marcia) Arganbright said. "This has strings and blocks and hooks and rubber bands, it's more like a lab."
Ah, the good old days when students just had a calculator and a book.To anyone who is pro-calculator:
Does anyone wonder why so many of the engineering jobs are going overseas? It isn't just lower labor costs. (Some of the projections I've seen indicate that Shanghai will be even with Idaho on software engineering costs by 2009.) It is that we have a generation growing up that seems to be increasingly incapable of some very basic skills. Just for fun, watch what happens when you hand someone at a cash register two dollar bills, a nickel, and two pennies for a $1.87 purchase if they have already punched in $2.00. I've had a few register jockeys who had no problem with it--and a lot more who were obviously suffering math panic.
When I was student teaching, I observed a student in a remedial pre-algebra course use a calculator to solve the following problem:
1x9=
It gets worse.
He pressed the keys and got the answer. Three times. He thought something was wrong with his calculator because the number you get after you press "=" should be different than the number that was there before you pressed the "=". He finally realized his mistake.
He was 14.
More On "Flying While Muslim"
Nice piece in the Wall Street Journal by the sister of one of the pilots killed on 9/11, pointing out the dishonesty of the mainstream news media in how they covered the non-flying imams news, with these memorable paragraphs:Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Those are the words that started it all. Six bearded imams are said to have shouted them out while offering evening prayers as they and 141 other passengers waited at the gate for their flight out of Minneapolis International Airport. It was three days before Thanksgiving. Allahu Akbar: God is great.
I can see why Muslims resent being lumped in with crazy people that just happened to be Muslim--but the 9/11 bunch did not just happen to be Muslim. Why they did what they did was intimately tied to their faith. Indeed, it would not have happened if they had been Christians, Jews, atheists, Hindus, or Shinto. Is it unfair? Sure, just as it is unfair that if I walk up a dark street behind a strange woman who is alone that she will quicken her pace to get away from me.
Initial media reports of the incident did not include the disturbing details about what happened after they boarded US Airways flight 300, but the story quickly went national with provocative headlines: "Six Muslims Ejected from US Air Flight for Praying." Yes, they were praying--but let's be clear about this. The very last human sound on the cockpit voice recorder of United flight 93 before it screamed into the ground at 580 miles per hour is the sound of male voices shouting "Allahu Akbar" in a moment of religious ecstasy.
Experiments Like This Fascinate Me
Especially if others get to be the guinea pigs. I still can't believe this experiment is happening in Europe of all places:Are streets without traffic signs conceivable? Seven cities and regions in Europe are giving it a try -- with good results.
On the one hand, this very un-European notion of personal responsibility and spontaneous social order is very gratifying. We've been telling the Europeans for a couple of centuries that it is possible for a society to operate without Big Brother telling you how to think, breathe, sleep, and walk. This doesn't mean that the results are always wonderful. In exchange for the right of most adults to own guns--and to defend themselves--I will agree that we probably have a few more murders than they do. I'm not being sarcastic when I say, "a few" because along with more criminals using guns who might otherwise do so, we have more civilians defending themselves from thugs, armed with guns, knives, clubs, or fists.
Drachten in the Netherlands has gotten rid of 16 of its traffic light crossings and converted the other two to roundabouts.
"We reject every form of legislation," the Russian aristocrat and "father of anarchism" Mikhail Bakunin once thundered. The czar banished him to Siberia. But now it seems his ideas are being rediscovered.
European traffic planners are dreaming of streets free of rules and directives. They want drivers and pedestrians to interact in a free and humane way, as brethren -- by means of friendly gestures, nods of the head and eye contact, without the harassment of prohibitions, restrictions and warning signs.
A project implemented by the European Union is currently seeing seven cities and regions clear-cutting their forest of traffic signs. Ejby, in Denmark, is participating in the experiment, as are Ipswich in England and the Belgian town of Ostende.
The utopia has already become a reality in Makkinga, in the Dutch province of Western Frisia. A sign by the entrance to the small town (population 1,000) reads "Verkeersbordvrij" -- "free of traffic signs." Cars bumble unhurriedly over precision-trimmed granite cobblestones. Stop signs and direction signs are nowhere to be seen. There are neither parking meters nor stopping restrictions. There aren't even any lines painted on the streets.
"The many rules strip us of the most important thing: the ability to be considerate. We're losing our capacity for socially responsible behavior," says Dutch traffic guru Hans Monderman, one of the project's co-founders. "The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people's sense of personal responsibility dwindles."
Still, a traffic sign is a bit different from those other laws. A traffic sign identifies rules of the road that can help people to figure out who goes first at a traffic light. Yes, some people will use a clearly identified right of way as an excuse to be rude--but there are also times when knowing who goes first at the intersection also means that both drivers don't unintentionally go forward at the same time. In a sense, a traffic sign, by defining the conventions, can increase politeness.
An experiment worth watching. Perhaps it will spread to other areas of European life as well.
Family Problems
A discussion of Neanderthal behavior over at Ann Althouse leads to this sad comment:Hmm....Short,(under six feet) hairy, poor hyigene, with primitive problem solving skills and an inordinate fascination/fear of fire...
Nearthandal man didn't evolve, he just married into my family.
Birthday Card
As my son's notation observed, "Radiocarbon dating is old. Not you." There are worse things to get on your 50th birthday card.
Progressives
Do you remember learning about the Progressive Era when you were in school? My recollection was that they were good hearted sorts who were trying to make America a kinder and better place--or at least, that's how the textbooks portrayed them. But as I spent more time learning about history by reading primary sources, I've seen a lot of indications that give me reason to suspect that the textbooks we used were written by modern Progressives, who would prefer not to examine the legacy of the crowd in charge 1900-1916. For one thing, Social Darwinism was in full swing, and while Progressives sometimes disagreed with the the Social Darwinist view of appropriate governmental action with respect to the poor (let them starve), they didn't fundamentally dispute the Social Darwinist point of view.
Over the years, I've been disappointed to read very sympathetic newspaper accounts of speeches by early birth control advocates--and these advocates weren't looking out for the right of women to choose--they were in terror that blacks were going to outreproduce whites. Margaret Sanger is the best known of this bunch, but she was by no means alone. Democratic newspapers (back then) like the San Francisco Chronicle were running editorials in the early 1920s about "Race Suicide"--and they didn't mean the Human Race. That well-known liberal, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., wrote the decision in Buck v. Bell (1927), upholding the right of state governments to forcibly sterilize the feeble-minded in pursuit of what another progressive of the time would call the Master Race.
I've mentioned previously my amazement that Albert Deutsch's classic The Mentally Ill in America took a strong position in support of state coercion in support of this model of eugenics in the 1937 edition. Even in the 1949 edition, written after the horrors of where this took Europe became apparent, Deutsch was unprepared to admit that this had been a terrible mistake, to give this kind of power to the government. Once a New Dealer, always a New Dealer, it seems.
Gerald N. Grob's The Mad Among Us: A History of the Care of America's Mentally Ill frequently mentions the overlap between Progressives and the leadership of the psychiatric community.Members of the specialty shared with other early twentieth-century Progressive activists a belief in the possibility of creating a new rational social and moral order that would eliminate existing flaws and alleviate human suffering. Some Progressives emphasized the environmental roots of evil and injustice and urged broad social and economic reforms to destroy them. Other Progressives insisted upon the need for coercive measures, including the exclusion of "undesirable" immigrants, a ban on intoxicating liquors, an end to sexual licentiousness, and in extreme cases the involuntary sterilization of defective individuals to rid society of "evils." Whatever their ideological persuasion, all were driven by the belief that human destiny could be altered by conscious and purposive action. [p. 141]
True enough, human destiny could be "altered," but the twentieth century, and especially the War on Poverty, argue that "altered" doesn't necessarily mean "improved." The unwillingness to acknowledge that evil isn't just the result of bad institutions, but often a choice that individuals make, was and is one of the greatest flaws of the Progressive perspective.
Describing a speech by Thomas W. Salmon "a psychiatrist destined to play an important role in the mental hygiene movement" just before World War I:The new psychiatry, he proclaimed, would reach beyond the walls of the asylum and play a crucial role "in the great movements for social betterment." Psychiatric jurisdiction transcended the severe and chronic mental illnesses. On the contrary, psychiatrists had to lay out a new research and policy agenda. Psychiatry, Salmon insisted, had responsibilities that included mental hygiene, care of the feebleminded, eugenics, control of alcoholism, management of abnormal children, treatment of criminals, and the prevention of crime, prostitution, and dependency. [p. 152]
I'm reminded of a debate some years ago in which the Libertarian Party candidate for U.S. Senate, David P. Bergland, asked the other candidates to explain what the government's role was in increasing individual freedom. The incumbent, Senator Alan Cranston, gave a response that said that essentially the government needed to intervene in every area of human interest and activity with the exception of religion to make everyone free. I don't think Cranston (or about 90% of the voters) saw how absurd the answer was.
I've read that part of why Progressives back then took that name is that they believed that the traditional laissez-faire approach to government that we generally associate with "conservatives" was based on a false perception that governments couldn't be trusted with power. Progressives believed that an evolving society required a more activist government, and that human being had progressed enough that the dangers of governmental abuse really weren't present anymore--or at least, not enough to justify being stuck in an Englightenment-era straitjacket. Certainly, the policies that they promoted back then fit this delusion. Progressives today are suffering that same set of delusions.
More About the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator
I mentioned a few days ago that HP Technical Support came through with the correct drivers to get my new dv5220 notebook to talk to an external monitor. I also mentioned that it didn't support any higher resolution on the external monitor than on the notebook's panel: 1280x800, even though the Intel chipset can go much higher.
Let me retract that. It turns out that there are several different graphics options with the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator driver--at least, the version that goes with Windows XP. Since it wasn't immediately obvious how to set this up, I'm documenting it here for someone else who searches for Intel 950 or Graphics Media Accelerator, and wants to know how to do this.
Under Graphics Properties, Display Devices, you have three choices: Single Display; Multiple Display (Intel Dual Display Clone); Multiple Display (Extended Desktop). It defaults to Intel Dual Display Clone, which means that whatever is on the built-in display goes onto the external monitor, and at that resolution. You can use Fn F4 to change to external monitor only, built-in display only, or both.
The Extended Desktop mode is for when you want a really big desktop that spreads onto both displays. I don't use this.
The Single Display mode is the one that I wanted, although it is a bit confusing. At first glance, this means that you get one or the other, but really, it means that you are splitting resolution control. Once you have selected this, you can select either Monitor or Notebook. Once you select one of these, select the Display Settings tab to set the resolution and color depth for which display you want. Then hit OK.
Now go back, select Single Display mode, and pick the other choice of Monitor or Notebook. Then go to the Display Settings tab, and set the resolution and color depth for this display.
The net result is that my notebook operates in 1280x800 32-bit color mode, and when I use Fn F4 to switch to the external display, it can used an entirely different resolution. I'm currently using 1280x1024 32-bit color mode, but it has options all the way up to 1600x1200 (although this particular monitor won't go that high).
A Life Without Hope
An acquaintance is confronting a difficult decision. He has a longstanding neuropathy problem that causes him considerable pain--but the surgery that might solve it has about a 10% chance of killing him, or leaving him paralyzed. This would be a difficult decision under the best of conditions--but for a person who believes that this life here is all there is--this must be a hard decision indeed. Pray for Ron. This can't be easy.
Feeling Much Better
It's amazing what a day doing nothing more strenuous than sleep and watching reruns of Home Improvement and Law and Order can do for you. This is a good thing; I'm turning 50 tomorrow, and my family has planned a lunch at a Thai restaurant in Meridian in celebration.
The Brave New World of Manufacturing
Instapundit is rather enthused about Amazon's plan to virtualize manufacturing:Beyond that, the hot talk in tech is creating "platforms" that entrepreneurs can use to quickly and cheaply build whole companies — the way PlayStation is a platform for video games, or Windows is a platform for software applications. That's what Salesforce is trying to do. So are Microsoft and others.
Not so fast--this is a bit more complicated than the article makes it sound, and my own manufacturing business (on a small scale), has given me considerable insight into this matter. There are already companies out there like eMachineShop that let you upload a product specification and they machine it for you. But as with everything, you pay for it--and you pay pretty heavily.
What's new about Amazon is the leap to physical products. This might be one of those evolutionary milestones, like when the first fish crawled up on land, or Jimi Hendrix discovered feedback on his electric guitar and altered the path of rock music. (Those being events of equivalent importance.)
Amazon's platform will be the first to include physical distribution. "You could notify us to expect inventory from you, tell us when to pick it (from warehouse shelves), and we'll send it to any address," Bezos says. "We've spent 12 years getting good at these things, so why should somebody else have to start from scratch?"
Bezos' idea cracks open an intriguing can of worms. Why shouldn't an established manufacturer do the same, leasing out factory space and industrial design teams and its expertise the same way? Sure, there are limitations. Factories aren't as flexible as warehouses or data centers, which can handle business from just about any industry. So a manufacturer's markets would be narrower.
Unlike software, which can be downloaded and therefore has no intrinsic raw materials, shipping, or manufacturing costs, tangible objects present a whole host of complexities. Sure, you can farm all this out--but as you do, you discover why most companies building real world products are continually making the decision whether to build or buy particular components--and revisiting that decision as the scale of production changes.
The capital investment for manufacturing tools is usually large enough to encourage subcontracting--but the profits your suppliers make impair your profitability severely. This is why no rational person makes his own car. Yes, you could build a sedan by buying all the parts you want, but the costs of buying one alternator, one engine, one transmission, are startling compared to buying 100,000 of them at a time.
The biggest problem, however, remains not manufacturing, but successful marketing. I've managed to make sales of my products in the U.S., Canada, Britain, Spain, Australia, and New Zealand, thanks to the ubiquity of the Internet and targeted advertising in places such as Astromart. Getting into broad distribution channels is the one area where I have not yet been successful, and at least partly because I haven't been prepared to do the high bucks advertising for magazines like Astronomy and Sky & Telescope--at least partly because I am unsure if the market is large enough to justify the enormous capital. That is the one part of the equation where Amazon might actually have some hope of fundamentally changing the equation.
Sick
Don't expect much of anything here today. I can't tell if this is a cold or a sinus infection, but the doctor has me on Augmentin in the event that it is a sinus infection. All I want to do is sleep.
ECT
I've updated my discussion here with an account from a reader who is going through nursing training, and recently observed ECT being done for patients for whom no other depression treatment had worked.
UPDATE: As well as another data point!
Decline and Fall of American Civilization, Part 32,303
Obscene Christmas tree ornaments--"pornaments." This is the sort of thing when I was young that would have been considered "so cool" by 14 year olds out to provoke their parents. But I get the impression that the market for these "pornaments" is adults--or at least 14 year olds who have physically grown up, but haven't matured.
AP Stands For Associated Prevaricators
I'm glad to see mainstream newspapers discussing that Associated Press is refusing to admit that making up atrocities in Iraq and quoting non-existent people is a bad thing:The Associated Press is embroiled in a scandal. Conservative bloggers, the new media watchdogs, lifted a rock at the AP.
What should bother liberals about this, aside from little details like fraud, is that to the extent that the news media strengthen the hand of Islamofascists, it makes the coming battle that much more apocalyptic. Liberals might regard the destruction of George Bush and the Republican Party as worth the short-term losses to Islamofascists.
Curt at Floppingaces, www.floppingaces2.blogspot.com, led the charge. He thought there was something strange about an AP report, and took a second look at it, then a third look. He and others blew the lid off it. The AP is making up war crimes. But the resulting stink in the blogosphere has barely wrinkled a nose in the mainstream press. The ethics-obsessed Poynter Institute seems to be oblivious to it.
It has to do with the AP’s Iraqi stringers and an oft-quoted Iraqi police captain named Jamil Hussein. Problem is, the Iraqi police say Capt. Hussein does not exist. The Iraqi police and U.S. military say an incident described in an AP report - Iraqi soldiers standing by as people were burned alive in a mosque - didn’t happen. Another AP-reported incident, U.S. soldiers shooting 11 civilians, also never happened, the military says.
When the AP was forced to acknowledge this situation, it did so in a story about a new Interior Ministry policy regarding false reports. The AP buried the fact that its own false report prompted this new policy.
The AP stands by its reporting.. The AP has cast “Capt. Jamil Hussein” simply as someone not authorized to speak, and AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll has sniffed morally: “Good reporting relies on more than government-approved sources.”
The AP has another Iraqi stringer problem. Photographer Bilal Hussein is in U.S. custody, and the AP has been clamoring indignantly for his release. AP reports have buried the U.S. explanation that Hussein is being held without charge because - quite aside from producing photos that showed him to be overly intimate with terrorists in Fallujah - he was in an al-Qaeda bomb factory, with an al-Qaeda bombmaker, with traces of explosives on his person when he was arrested.
The AP, of course, has been delivering unbalanced reports about U.S. national politics for some time, as when President Bush, whom AP reporters despise, is barely allowed to state his case on an issue before his critics are given twice as much space to pummel him. The AP, once a just-the-facts news delivery service, has lost its rudder. It has become a partisan, anti-American news agency that seeks to undercut a wartime president and American soldiers in the field. It is providing fraudulent, shoddy goods. It doesn’t even recognize it has a problem.
More About The Non-Flying Muslims
The non-flying imams police report is available in full here. I am increasingly inclined to think that this is an intentional effort to intimidate us into not asking any questions when Muslims act suspiciously on a plane.
Probably Only Interesting to Idahoans
Maybe only of interest to Idaho bloggers. The New York Times has a list of bloggers who are being given money by politicians. I was not surprised to see that most of them are on the left; generally, bloggers on the right don't need to be paid to blog. I was quite surprised to see that Julie Fanselow, aka Red State Rebels, received $1300 a month from the Larry Grant campaign, and an unknown amount from the Jerry Brady for Governor campaign. At a minimum, this tells me that Grant clearly has no notion of a sensible cost-benefit ratio.
I'm sorry, but there is no blog in Idaho that has enough readership and influence to justify $1300 a month--not even mine. I can see perhaps $100 a month or even $200 a month might be somewhat justifiable as a way of trying to sway a small but probably unusually intelligent set of Idaho voters, but $1300 a month? The Grant campaign was clearly awash in more money than they knew how to sensibly spend.
UPDATE: Adam Graham reports that the New York Times report is misleading--that Julie Fanselow's payment was for a wide range of services--not a direct subsidy to Red State Rebels.
Psychiatry
I mentioned in the previous post about the barbarism of psychiatry in the middle of the 20th century. Sad to say, but at least they were on the right track--they believed that mental illness--at least the psychoses--were physiological in nature. Unfortunately, the Freudian influence eventually won control of the APA--and they were, at least with respect to diseases such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and a number of the other serious problems, completely on the wrong track.
Barbarism & Psychiatry
Most educated Americans know about electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and prefrontal lobotomies--two procedures widely used in the middle of the 20th century for treating mental illness. I did not realize the extent to which psychiatry engaged in what sounds suspiciously like 20th century versions of witch doctoring until reading Gerald N. Grob, The Mad Among Us, pp. 178-89, which has a discussion of the enormous range of just shocking treatments for mental illness that were widely used in the middle decades of the 20th century.
Fever therapy, in which mental patients were purposely infected with malaria, because an Austrian doctor had noticed that "mental symptoms occasionally disappeared in patients ill with typhoid fever." Adding to my shock is that mental hospitals, when taking blood from mental patients infected with malaria, did so even if the donor was infected with syphilis. Since about 13% of mental hospital inmates in the U.S. at the time were there because of syphilitic insanity, this was pretty common.
Another therapy involved inducing insulin shock, because an Austrian doctor had noticed "mental changes in diabetic drug addicts whom he had treated with insulin in 1928." This involved putting the patients into a diabetic coma, and then bringing back out with sugar. Of course, this was dangerous; diabetic coma had a mortality rate "between 1 and 5 percent."
A Hungarian doctor noticed that "epileptics rarely became schizophrenic" so that he administered a drug called metrazol "to induce convulsions." This wasn't quite as dangerous as insulin shock therapy, but "convulsions led to various fractures and respiratory problems."
A Portugese doctor introduced lobotomy as a treatment for mental illness in 1935--and like all these procedures developed by the enlightened and scientific Europeans, it was rapidly adopted in the U.S.
The quality of the studies that claimed that these treatments were effective was very low. The doctors administering the treatments were also the doctors evaluating the before and after condition of the patients, and the sample sizes were often quite small.
The horror.
UPDATE: By the way, I should have mentioned that ECT, while overused at one point, is still occasionally used for severe depression, and it does seem to help. I don't think anyone still has any understanding of why--which should make you nervous. Of course, a lot of treatments were originally used because they worked, but we had no idea why. Aspirin, for example.
UPDATE 2: John Simutis, one of my readers, is going through nursing training right now, and emailed me an account of watching ECT performed:My last clinical rotation last year was Psych, and I was at Herrick Hospital in Berkeley.
UPDATE 2: Another reader provides this data point:
Part of the treatments for SOME patients was ECT, and we were required to observe a session; I observed two, and also worked with three different patients who were receiving that treatment.
We were required to observe specifically to counter the "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" imagery. That's very powerful, and has nearly nothing in common with current practice.
The preparation and care before and after is identical to surgery, with pre-procedure documentation and consents, and pre- and post-procedure monitoring. During the procedure, the patient is anesthetized to lose consciousness, then paralyzed with drugs to prevent movement; an anesthetist/physician administers the drugs and manually ventilates (breathes for) the patient. The drug dosages are very carefully calculated using the patient's weight, age, and any prior experience with the drugs; it is critical that the paralyzation drug wears off before the unconsciousness drug. The patient gets a 1-time use mouthguard, similar to sports equipment. There is no general 'seizure' during the application of current. Afterward, the patient is monitored for recovery from the anesthetic and for possible adverse effects; usually this takes about an hour of 1 nurse to 1 patient care, similar to what you would see in an ICU.
The patients I worked with who received ECT were severely depressed. Each was voluntarily in the hospital, and each signed a consent form authorizing the treatment. As voluntary patients, each could withdraw at any time, and both chose to continue through the planned series of treatments (approximately every other day, if I recall correctly).
The older of the two experienced some short-term memory loss, while the younger avoided that. Both changed from essentially no verbal communication when I first met them to full sentence and full paragraph conversation; at least for the time I was able to observe, they seemed to be helped by their ECT treatments.
Permanent staff at the hospital told us that ECT generally has little benefit outside a select number of those diagnosed with depression, and ECT is not used there for patients with other primary diagnoses.
Having only been aware of the movie portrayal, the difference surprised the heck out of me.I know a woman who went through ECT. I do not wish to give details, for
obvious reasons, but one of her children died in an accident at home, and she went into a very deep and unrelieved depression. ECT apparently got her at least started on the road to recovery. It's been some years since I saw her, but the last time I did she was shopping for things for the wedding of her youngest daughter and was doing fine.
