Armchair Musings
j7uy5 | October 7, 2007
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 20th
century. She ties this theory to…
j7uy5 | September 30, 2007In 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.…
j7uy5 | September 28, 2007The 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…
j7uy5 | September 26, 2007I 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…
j7uy5 | September 16, 2007CNN 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…
j7uy5 | September 1, 2007
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…
j7uy5 | August 3, 2007I
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?…
j7uy5 | July 20, 2007
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…
j7uy5 | July 11, 2007
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.…
j7uy5 | July 9, 2007
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…
j7uy5 | June 14, 2007This
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…
j7uy5 | June 10, 2007This 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, 2007
Compared 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…
j7uy5 | May 28, 2007I 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.1133398
Resistance to certain scientific ideas derives in large
part from assumptions…
j7uy5 | May 23, 2007This
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…
j7uy5 | May 18, 2007Each
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 TODAY
The
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…
j7uy5 | May 15, 2007Often,
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…
j7uy5 | May 6, 2007(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…
j7uy5 | April 25, 2007OK, 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…
j7uy5 | March 17, 2007
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.…