The March Of Science

SADLY, word comes too late for me, but maybe you can use it:

Why Sex Doesn’t Gross You Out When You’re Aroused

Getting turned on overrides women's natural disgust response, a study suggests, making them more willing to do things they otherwise wouldn't

By ALEXANDRA SIFFERLIN  September 14, 2012 | If you think about it, sex is actually sort of disgusting, what with all the sweat, saliva, fluids and smells. So much so that a group of researchers from the Netherlands got to thinking, How do people enjoy sex at all?

According to their small new study, people — at least women — may be able to get over the “ick” factor associated with sex by getting turned on. Sexual arousal overrides the natural disgust response, the researchers found, and allows women to willingly engage in behaviors that they might normally find repugnant.

Vast Wasteland

Isabel Sawhill, "20 years later, it turns out Dan Quayle was right about Murphy Brown and unmarried moms". May 25

If you're gonna be snooty, at least learn how to hold a wineglass. 

FOR several years now I've harbored the suspicion that we're asking the wrong questions. Not "How did the Right/Republican party get so nuts?", which could be asked only by someone unfamiliar with the last sixty-five years. And not, of course, "When did the Brookings Institution go from Nixon firebomb target to Reagan pet turtle?" since everybody has one of those pocket calculators these days.

But "When did educated, well-off Americans of reasonable political mien decide they just couldn't be happy so long as the rabble were out there mongrelizing?" I'm not sure we've looked into that enough.

Dr. Sawhill is a Doctor of something-or-other; the answer seems hidden, somehow, from the casual and indolent internet researcher, but her Ph.D's from NYU, not Oral Roberts. She was once Brookings' Vice President and Director of Economic Studies, which I'm guessing is sorta like being President of the World Bank, but with Monopoly money. She was an Associate Director of the OMB in the Clinton administration (Motto: "Thank God We Were Followed By The Bush Administration, Or Our Appointments Would Look Particularly Crappy"). How then does she come to say something as crazy-assed as "Twenty years later, it turns out Dan Quayle was right"? Except, I mean, for the honor of being published in the Washington Post.

On May 19, 1992, as the presidential campaign season was heating up, Vice President Dan Quayle delivered a family-values speech that came to define him nearly as much as his spelling talents. Speaking at the Commonwealth Club of California, he chided Murphy Brown — the fictional 40-something, divorced news anchor played by Candice Bergen on a CBS sitcom — for her decision to have a child outside of marriage.  “Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong,” the vice president said. “Failing to support children one has fathered is wrong. We must be unequivocal about this. It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.” Quayle’s argument — that Brown was sending the wrong message, that single parenthood should not be encouraged — erupted into a major campaign controversy.

Here's an interesting reversal which might actually mean something: twenty years ago a political "controversy" could erupt over something a politician actually said. And today an academic--who lived through it at the time--can look back at it and get it bass-ackwards.

Twenty years later, Quayle’s words seem less controversial than prophetic. The number of single parents in America has increased dramatically: The proportion of children born outside marriage has risen from roughly 30 percent in 1992 to 41 percent in 2009. For women under age 30, more than half of babies are born out of wedlock. A lifestyle once associated with poverty has become mainstream. The only group of parents for whom marriage continues to be the norm is the college-educated. 

Well, let's raise a glass to Our Sort, then. Once we learn how to hold one.

Fer chrissakes, that wouldn't qualify as "prophecy" even if it reflected what Vice-President Potatoe Head had said. What controversy there was--and, hell, Quayle was taken about as seriously as Sarah Palin is when the mic is off--centered on Quayle's apparent confusion of a teevee character with a real person. He made a right-wing social moralist argument, and he got laughed at. Rightly so. Sure, no man is a prophet in his own country. But Dan Quayle isn't one anywhere.

Look, the misapplication of scientificalism is nothing new; it's practically a tenet of the social sciences. But it shouldn't be done so clumsily by someone who's made her living at it for forty years. I believe we can take it as a given that a thirty-percent increase in out of wedlock births in twenty years was not caused by a fictional character few women of childbearing age even remember. We might also remember that the divorce rate skyrocketed in the 1950s, the Golden Age of Ozzie and Harriet.

In later research, Ron Haskins and I learned that if individuals do just three things — finish high school, work full time and marry before they have children — their chances of being poor drop from 15 percent to 2 percent. Mitt Romney has cited this research on the campaign trail, but these issues transcend presidential politics. Stronger public support for single-parent families — such as subsidies or tax credits for child care, and the earned-income tax credit — is needed, but no government program is likely to reduce child poverty as much as bringing back marriage as the preferable way of raising children.  

Hey, no one admires the source of a good Mitt Romney talking point more than I, but to begin with, 80% of that is in finishing high school. And, to date, there's a wealth of literature somewhere which points out that no amount of sneering at unwed mothers has affected the graduation rate. Or the unemployment rate.

And nothing changes the fact that over the lifetime of Dr. Sawhill's career, Republican and centrist Democrat policies have drastically shifted wealth upwards, to those married college grads with the 2.5 children and the SUV with the trendy dog strapped to the top. The lower classes aren't the only ones who enjoy a little economic irresponsibility. They just don't fuck as many people at once.

Why don't you and Mitt work on that for a while, Doc?

Thank God Some Things Are Still Running On Schedule

I cannot be the only person in America who saw

this mook's mugshot and immediately thought of Arthur Bremer.

J. Freedom "The Only Reason To Use Some Crazy-Ass Moniker Your Hippie Parents Gave You Is Excessive Attention-Seeking" du Lac, "Jared Loughner's music choice, Drowning Pool's 'Bodies', strikes chilling chord". January 10

LIKE probably 72% of my fellow Baby Boomers in America I was, in my youth, forced to sit in a large lecture hall next to a guy in a sleeveless down jacket and listen to some schnook of an Associate Professor try to convince me that the Bandura Experiment meant something. Now, assuming by the Grace of God you weren't, here's the layout: you get Stanford to pay you a salary, plus lab coat, clipboard, and comely graduate assistants by the handful. You make a short film of a man taking a mallet to one of those bottom-weighted Bozo punching bags every Boomer was issued at birth. You show this film to a group of Boomer children between the ages of 3-6 who happen to be the progeny of Stanford University employees who have likely been tricked into signing a leasing agreement in exchange for daycare (it's 1961; perhaps the niceties weren't observed). After the movie you lead these test subjects, one by one, into an identical room containing an identical Bozo and an identical mallet. You then inform your employer that the wholly astonishing result--three-to-six-year-olds taking a handy mallet to an available thing designed for punching--proves something or other about Social Learning. *

Now, by the time I got there it was over a decade old, and showing its age; this is perhaps why the Prof could hardly summon a perfunctory enthusiasm for the thing, even at Indiana, where the Psych building still reeked of B.F. Skinner's hair oil. I don't know. It's possible his halfheartedness was dictated by academic fashion or niggling doubt, though at IU in the early 70s it still required a certain casualness bordering on the foolhardy towards One's Chance for Tenure to suggest Skinner was less than infallible; no doubt you could get away with a little of it in front of a room of uncomprehending undergrads. Judging from the grad students I was forced to serve as a hamster serves a wheel, the Sixties, even the end of College Draft Deferments, had not appreciably diminished the lure of Nazism. Or it could simply be because the thing was bullshit. I remember asking the TA at a discussion session why they hadn't had the adult in the movie do something which wasn't completely obvious, like hit the mallet with the dummy, or eat them both, and see how that worked. I think she urged me not to raise the issue on the midterm.

But the likely reason for any reticence was that several years earlier the study had been pounced upon by the Opponents of Television, and was being waved around as Scientific Proof that depictions of violence in the media led to actual violence. It's not particularly surprising to find the thing still going strong; it may be a tad depressing to find it still ambulatory all these years despite never having progressed beyond the Stupid Shit phase:

"You're never sure what caused an individual to commit a specific act," said Brad Bushman, a communications and psychology professor at Ohio State University. "But I've been doing research on violent media for 20 years, and the evidence is that it leads to aggressive behavior. It's not the only factor that leads to violence, but it's one of them."

So that took only 20 years? God bless the Computer Age. I'm really looking forward now to 2075, when you guys get to the bottom of that Judas Priest case.

Call me a dreamer, but, y'know, in twenty years of research at major US universities maybe we could have figured out a way to prevent total fucking nutjobs from walking into a Wal*Mart and walking out loaded for Democrat. Y'know, along with other contributory factors.

In addition to its ignominious past as Cooke's anthem of choice, "Bodies" was used as a tool of torture at Guantanamo Bay in 2003 when it was played repeatedly to "stress" detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi. The song has also been a battlefield anthem for U.S. troops and professional wrestlers and fighters.

And where was the US psychological community then? Oh, yeah, the APA was explicitly endorsing members aiding the torture effort. You know, professionally.

Incidentally, shut the fuck up:

In a statement posted online Monday evening, Drowning Pool said: "We were devastated to learn of the tragic events that occurred in Arizona and that our music has been misinterpreted, again.

The problem isn't that you're misinterpreted. The problem is that you're interpreted:

Dec 14, 2008
Message from Stevie

Recently, the Associated Press, has stated that Drowning Pool's music (among a slew of other songs) has been used "to create fear, disorient ... and prolong capture shock."
I would like to set the record straight to say that upon our return from Baghdad (in 2006) and after visiting our injured soldiers at the Walter Reed Medical Hospital, I commented to Spin Magazine that I take it as an honor to think that perhaps our music could be used to quell another 9/11 attack as part of a longer comment. I sincerely regret if my statement was taken out of context as supporting any specific policy or agenda. My remarks were an emotional reaction to the band's personal experiences. The band's intention has been, and will always be, to support our young men and women in uniform who put their lives on the line every day. Our performances for soldiers abroad led to the honor of being able to speak before Senate and Congressional leaders in support of extended health care rights for our returning veterans. We cherish this distinction and continue to maintain a close relationship with our military personnel and their families.
We would like to wish everyone a healthy and happy holiday season.

Stevie Benton
Drowning Pool

Dude. You're now the first metal band whose website has its own Corrections column. Call it another honor.

_________________

* In fairness, for some reason, the point seems to be that there was an increased correlation between seeing an adult pummel the thing and doing so your 3-year-old ownself; so fucking what?

Chuckles

Charles "Merkwürdigeliebe" Krauthammer, "How to Modernize Miranda for the Age of Terror". May 7

AH, yes, the Grand Old Notion that the American Right is competent and effective, despite all evidence pointing the opposite direction, because it talks like John Wayne doing An Evening with Richard Nixon. Brings back a lot of memories.

Leave us note at the beginning that Dr. Krauthammer is the intellectual force behind Bush Derangement Syndrome, a complex set of pathologies he and his colleagues at the Goldberg Flatulence Clinic identified about twenty minutes into Worst Presidency in History. And that's in his (thankfully non-practicing) professional capacity. Gives a little perspective on his amateur Constitutional Law rulings.

[We might, as long as we're at it, ask where, in (another) week dominated by his colleagues flying off the rails over immigrants, non-bombings, and, in perpetuity, The Socialism, Krauthammer's keeping his update on BDS-like manias? I'm sure the clinical world is getting anxious.]

"[Law enforcement] interviewed Mr. Shahzad . . . under the public safety exception to the Miranda rule. . . . He was eventually transported to another location, Mirandized and continued talking."
-- John Pistole, FBI deputy director, May 4

All well and good. But what if Faisal Shahzad, the confessed Times Square bomber, had stopped talking? When you tell someone he has the right to remain silent, there is a distinct possibility that he will remain silent, is there not? And then what?

Good point. We might've had to wait an extra twenty minutes for The Pakistani Taliban, Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, or Al-Sharpton in Flatbush to claim credit. No worries, though; if there's one thing this country's still good at it's drumming up blind terror and blinder analysis.

The authorities deserve full credit for capturing Shahzad within 54 hours. Credit is also due them for obtaining information from him by invoking the "public safety" exception to the Miranda rule.

Oh, surely some of the credit goes to the thousands of dedicated bloggers who dropped everything at the merest suggestion the perp was a lone white guy.

Look, what is any of that supposed to mean? Who else would deserve the credit? He was caught, evidently, by standard, detail-oriented police work aided by the sorts of resources we're paying billions in Homeland Security Bucks to maintain. A job well done; the timing was partly due to luck. Appending this stuff to the Right's Jack Bauer fantasies accomplishes exactly nothing. (Okay, it furthers the cause of conflating pissed-off but incompetent homicidal maniacs with The Legion of Doom. So I take that back. It accomplishes less than nothing.)

As for "invoking" the public safety exception to Miranda, they didn't and don't. They may have acted under the exception; Holder said they did, but that was after he'd come under fire because an apprehended criminal, and US citizen, was treated like an apprehended criminal and US citizen. You can question a subject for hours or days without reading his Miranda warning, but at the risk of losing before the bar whatever evidence you obtain. You don't "invoke" the public safety exception to do so; you use that in court as a justification for having done so. Given the timbre of such cases over the past eight years, and the extra-Constitutional powers claimed, or merely grabbed, by the Executive branch, the authorities already operate with something between a reasonable belief and a dead-on certainty that the suspect isn't going anywhere for a decade or more anyway.

But then Shahzad was Mirandized. If he had decided to shut up, it would have denied us valuable information -- everything he is presumably telling us now about Pakistani contacts, training, plans for other possible plots beyond the Times Square attack.

The public safety exception is sometimes called the "ticking time bomb" exception. But what about information regarding bombs not yet ticking but being planned and readied to kill later?

What about the very abuses the Constitutional protections are designed to prevent?

Why is that never part of the equation? Krauthammer's argument applies to any sort of criminal activity. Why not use the public safety exception to ignore Miranda altogether? The possibility for unnamed, unready, and yet unplanned conspiracies is practically infinite, and it's not restricted to "enemy combatants".

This is the worst sort of libertoonian logic wedded to Nixonian politics. It's a simple thing to propose draconian measures when you think they'll be restricted to your enemies. And it's particularly easy when you get to announce that your plan is effective, and you're not required to even suggest how such a thing is worded to assure it's only little brown men who get the pike.

John McCain's been in Congress since before 9/11. Joe Lieberman, too (have I thanked you lately, Connecticut?). Where's the Constitutional amendment? Where's the legislation from the Homeland Security committee? This is another goddam Flag Burning amendment, something designed to swing at, miss, and let the bat fly out of your hands and hit a Democrat with. How did an entire party turn into ratfuckers?

In this case, however, Miranda warnings were superfluous. Shahzad had confessed to the car-bombing attempt while being interrogated under the public safety exception. That's admissible evidence.

Seven-hundred-fifty words on Constitutional law from "the most important conservative columnist" and he's never heard of a confession being ruled inadmissible, over Miranda or anything else? Have I thanked you lately, Washington Post?

Second, even assuming that by not Mirandizing him we might have jeopardized our chances of getting some convictions -- so what?

Yeah, I'm sure all those members of the Senate appropriations subcommittee would've leapt in unison to Eric Holder's defense.

Which is more important: (a) gaining, a year or two hence, the conviction of a pigeon -- the last and now least important link in this terror chain -- whom we could surely lock up on explosives and weapons charges, or (b) preventing future terror attacks on Americans by learning from Shahzad what he might know about terror plots in Pakistan and sleeper cells in the United States?

Wait. Do either of those options come with "Locking up Charles Krauthammer for the public good"? Or pie?

But let's assume you're wedded to the civilian law-enforcement model, as is the Obama administration.

That's the same Obama administration which has escalated the Afghan war and spread it into Pakistan in search of these guys, right? Yeah, total wimps.

At least make an attempt to expand the public safety exception to Miranda in a way that takes into account the jihadist war that did not exist when that exception was narrowly drawn by the Supreme Court in the 1984 Quarles case.

I've got a better idea. Why not use the existing Constitution (you know, the one you guys are always going on about how the Original Intent of the Founders is the only proper way to interpret it?) and simply make the War on Terra a declared war? Then you could treat them as civilians in violation of International Humanitarian Law, and they'd be subject to criminal prosecution under the domestic laws of the United States.

Oh. Never mind.

Because The Light's Better Over Here

Little Evidence Of Terror Plot In Base Killings

WASHINGTON — After two days of inquiry into the mass shooting at Fort Hood, investigators have tentatively concluded that it was not part of a terrorist plot.

S'FUNNY, but there's ample evidence to suggest that Maj. Hassan was a highly-trained devotee of the shadowy global torture network known as Psychiatry, yet nobody's asking any questions about that.

Dumpster Diving

Richard Cohen, "What if Cheney's Right?" May 12

MAYBE it was me, but I swear I checked the Times online three times yesterday, the latest being around 6 PM, for any sign of Ross Douthat. Fruitlessly, you should pardon the expression. And after I'd given up on him, and cyber-space-warped over to see if Richard Cohen was still outraged by Stephen Colbert, he finally turns up, with a May 11 byline and eighteen youth-pleasin' links in tow, or one every 41.7 words. I went over to the office bookshelves to see if I could find anyone who footnoted at that rate. Not Piaget, not Foucault, not my guide to 20th century Court decisions; in desperation I threw out the requirement of actual footnotes and grabbed Steven Weisenburger's annotation to Gravity's Rainbow, which might have reached that rate in spots, with a tail wind, but it'll take some serious counting to see if he sustains it for an entire page.

So, one, I'd already read Cohen, and I'm not going through that for nothing, and, two, I vow here and now to never read Douthat without checking every last fucking one of his hipster links, which probably means not reading him at all. We all must sacrifice in life.

And so Cohen, outraged by neither Colbert nor Wanda, for now; Cohen, outraged because the Obama administration hasn't released the torture documents like Dick Cheney now demands in order to prove what a liar Richard Cohen knows Dick Cheney to be. (That is, now knows him to be.) Because in the back of his "mind" there's a tiny voice telling Cohen that Torture just might work!

This is backed up by two pieces of evidence, neither conclusive, certainly, but which taken together might be called suggestive. For one, it is possible, while acknowledging the lexical and semantic constraints of the English language, to form the words "What" "if" "torture" and "works" into something recognized as a question by a large majority of native speakers; and, two, those dirty, smelly, dogskin-clad liberal bloggers clogging the WaPo gates are convinced that it doesn't. Which by itself is almost sufficient for a Q.E.D.:

In some sense, this is an arcane point since the United States insists it will not torture anymore -- not that, the Bush people quickly add, it ever did. Torture is a moral abomination, and President Obama is right to restate American opposition to it. But where I reserve a soupçon of doubt is over the question of whether "enhanced interrogation techniques" actually work. That they do not is a matter of absolute conviction among those on the political left, who seem to think that the CIA tortured suspected terrorists just for the hell of it.

Now you gotta admit that's the sort of reasoning no mere blogger could produce, but we'd like to mark the 25th appearance of that bizarro-world "the question of torture is moot, since the Obama administration has announced it's not planning any" routine by asking a few questions. The first, perhaps not surprisingly, is, Th' fuck is up with that? Torturing persons in custody violates the laws of the United States of America. It did so all the while the Bush administration was sanctioning it. How does a Presidential directive put the question to rest now? And this violation, not just of our law but of the very foundation of our shared notion of Justice takes place not at a moment of grave threat to Our Very Existence, but because an administration, aided and abetted by mass-market press venality, gets away with elevating a commonplace of cheap action serials to a philosophic quiddity.

[And let us take this moment to note what Cheney obviously knows, but what, having strolled several times through the bog garden of Richard Cohen's "thought", we're convinced he might not: that not only will no undisclosed memo "prove" Cheney's contention, none would ever be sufficient to dispel this nonsense. Viz, appropriately, the Shroud of Turin, which may have had no provenance before its sudden appearance in the 14th century, a shortcoming which was ham-fistedly and retroactively addressed by inventing a connection to the Image of Edessa, despite the minor difficulties that it, too, lacked provenance and was said to be some sort of magical life mask, not a shroud; which conformed, not to 1st century C.E. Jewish burial custom, but to the 14th century European; and which had nearly as many direct competitors in its day as does McDonalds in ours, but which, despite the transparent carnival geek-show aura and the apparent embarrassment of most Roman Catholics with the rudiments of a 20th century secondary education, engendered rabid belief even after being carbon-dated to that same 14th century starting point.]

Seem to think we tortured for the hell of it? Nay, sir, if you can dispel the notion, do so, and not on the abused back of that spavined warhorse, "Dirty Lefty Hippie Bloggers Think So, So It Must Be Wrong". (At this point, sir, we've been right about everything since Henry Hyde took the charge of Clinton Impeachment, Inc., so knock off the partisan rancor and Just A Lucky Guess routines.) What little we think we have learned at this point absolutely supports the idea: that Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded after he'd talked; that experienced CIA interrogators were superseded by the mysteriously-appointed team from Mengele & Starkweather, LLC, which had no interrogation experience whatsoever, but was reasonably adept at turning marginal psychological credentials* into the long-distance control of captive abuse; that the waterboarding of Khalid Sheik Mohammed begins almost immediately after his capture, despite the fact that it is now 18 months since even the Bush administration was able to figure out it needed to watch big buildings and inexplicably off-course jetliners; that the big intel from that one, and the only "foiled plot" the Cheney administration could find to tout that didn't involve cherry bombs and bogus pizza deliveries--the "Library Tower" "plot"--had already been discredited back before it passed its expiration date. For that matter, there's the treatment of Iraqi citizens under US military control, at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, abuse which was tied to little if any expectation of usable information, and none to any Ticking Time Bomb of Total US Destruction. Yes, these people tortured for the hell of it, though maybe the CIA did so only under orders. We tortured prisoners for the same reason irate 9/11 mobs attacked Sikhs, except without the Stupidity defense. Well, the Abject Stupidity defense, anyway.

Cheney, though, is adamant that the very measures that are now deemed illegal did work and that, furthermore, doing away with them has made the country less safe. Cheney said this most recently on Sunday, on CBS's "Face the Nation." "Those policies were responsible for saving lives," he told Bob Schieffer. In effect, Cheney poses a hard, hard question: Is it more immoral to torture than it is to fail to prevent the deaths of thousands?

It's curious--okay, it isn't curious--how, under the hand of a master punditaster, the argument jumps from one pocket to another so clumsily that a nine-year-old magician would be embarrassed by it. Oh, woe is me! Could torture possibly work? And suddenly when it does it saves thousands. Presumably because millions is considered a mite gaudy.

Not Remarkable, too, then, how the argument shifts its ground again when we turn back to results: not saving thousands in imminent peril, but disrupting plans, which, had they succeeded, would have proven Cheney's point. Assuming, that is, that you accept it in the first place.

What really is remarkable is how grown men are supposedly stumped by a junior-high essay question. Somehow we're all in a quandry over that Ticking Time Bomb, but we're never at a place where torturing the suspect's wife and children would get us the info that saves millions. We're never even at the point where waterboarding fails us, but bolt cutters applied one digit at a time ride to the rescue. It's like The Godfather re-edited so all the violence is off-screen. No, in fact, it is the fact that we try to keep our little kink clean in public which is most suggestive:

Cheney is barking up a storm on the efficacy of what can colloquially be called torture.

Yes, that quaint little colloquialism torture. Not like those nasty partisan bloggers, with their rough talk, and their insistence on calling beatings and animal attacks and multiple scalpel cuts by their real names, and bringing up the fact that colloquial waterboarding is why we colloquially executed other country's war criminals. Which just ruins the fantasy.

In political terms, Cheney has been a free man ever since he eschewed any presidential ambitions. He became the most impolitic of politicians and continues in that role, taking neither a vow of penitence nor a vow of silence in his vice presidential afterlife. He says the issues are too important for him to be, as is traditional, mum.

He is right about that. The run-up to the disastrous Iraq war was notable for its smothering lack of debate. That served us poorly then and it would serve us poorly now if people who know something about the utility, not to mention the morality, of enhanced interrogation techniques keep their mouths shut. The Obama administration ought to call Cheney's bluff, if it is that, and release the memos. If even a stopped clock is right twice a day, this could be Cheney's time.

Oh, right; suddenly we need an open and free-ranging debate, sez Richard Cohen, who--stop me if you've heard this one before--wore out two sets of pom-poms cheering the Iraq war before that became untenable and he had to blame Democratic presidential candidates for falling for Bush's case. Y'know, we not only believe that someone with Cohen's track record is unfit to tout the odds that Cheney may have accidentally been right about something; we think somebody who writes Richard Cohen's column once a week has no moral standing to discuss anyone else's use of torture.

________
* aren't they all?

Psychologists? Check. Ex-Army? Check. Think Consuming Coca-Cola™ Is Sinful? Check. Okay, The Program's All Set.

SCOTT C., presently on such a roll he's practically a one-man double-play team, brought us word last Friday of Michael "The Audie Murphy of the Glorious Patriotic Internet De-Pantsing of Scott Beauchamp" Goldfarb jumping on another burning tank to strafe The National Socialist People's American Broadcasting Company:

ABC runs a report showing the names and faces of two CIA contractors who may have had a role in the waterboarding of KSM and Abu Zubaydah. The network apparently outsourced this report to a freelancer named Matthew Cole, whose record in Nexis includes just three bylines...

That's forty-seven words, and our two major contentions are already smoking hulks, which, I believe, in Weekly Standard parlance is known as "par", if not "earning your bonus".

We'll get to that in a moment, but first, could someone please explain to me what is gained by typing "KSM" without ever committing to "Khalid Sheikh Mohammed"? Is it the time savings? Sheesh, I type 35 wpm with a strong tailwind, and it must take me all of two seconds. Not only can I spell it now, I can give you two variants. "Abu Zubaydah", who is never "AZ" for some reason, I have to look up every time. Is it the illusion of being an Insider? The sweet, sad nostalgia for childhood's lost GI Joe or walkie-talkie? The faint tightening of the scrotal sac at the thought of piercing bound, naked, hairy brown men?

Okay, the answer is d) all of the above; I knew it all along. So let's begin: one, ABC reveals the identities of two CIA contractors, which will lead to Goldfarb demanding to know--rhetorically, since his possession of the "real" answer is already built into the question--whether the Obama administration will investigate the leaking of their identities; two, it turns over contol of its entire news operation to a leftist reporter with an obvious agenda and almost no experience...

-- two stories for Salon (one of which about "how Bush administration aid to Pakistan helps fund insurgents who kill U.S. troops"), and one for the San Jose Mercury News just two days after 9/11 reporting "anxiety about a backlash" among Muslims, who assure the reporter that the attack "has nothing to do with Islam."

which is the point at which we start to get really curious, since we'd already clicked the link to the ABC story and seen "Brian Ross" at the top of a tripartite byline, with ABC producer Joseph Rhee riding the caboose.

This, of course, doesn't mean Ross' name wasn't basically just slapped on Cole's work; we don't know, and neither does Goldfarb. What it most certainly does mean is you've got Ross bringing the story to ABC's table, a guy who is something less than a raging Bolshie, and something less than a believable reporter, but Goldfarb ignores him, for some reason. Which leads us to do a bit of searching. We don't have Nexis, though we believe it exists, even though Goldfarb says it does. We do have the Google. We type "Matthew Cole". There's a confusion of 'em. We type "Matthew Cole salon". The fourth link mentions The New York Observer, Wired and GQ on his resumé, alongside Salon; typing "Matthew Cole wired" gets us his home page, which links to stories in New York Magazine, Details, ESPN, and Congressional Quarterly as well. Now, I'm not sure what Nexus sets you back per month, but I think The Google's free. Although it's likely my own search took a lot longer, especially as it had so many more items to find.

But these are small potatoes, and not particularly new; we were even more curious about the insistence those names had been leaked, something we were just about to explore when the next paragraph sucker-punched us.

Cole repeats the now throughly debunked claim that Zubaydah and KSM were waterboarded 83 and 183 times respectively.

Now, we pride ourselves in remaining fairly-well informed, politically, for someone who also gets a modicum of fresh air and occasional exercise not related to chasing those damn Henderson brats off the lawn. Yet somehow the thorough debunking of the 83/183 waterboardings stories had escaped us. Perhaps because we don't have Nexus. So back to the free search grind, which, we're surprised to learn, doesn't exactly confront us with cascading debunkings but does, eventually, lead to a FAUX story from last Tuesday, in which "a U.S. official with knowledge of the interrogation program" told The Fair and Balanced Network that it was all a big misunderstanding; that's 83 and 183 pourings of water, not sessions. Geez, we're not barbarians!

Well, at this point I'm not sure it's even necessary to go on, since we obviously don't torture people, and I've been a fool to question FAUX, the Bush administration, the CIA, and the Standard all these years. This leaves clearing up who leaked the identities of two CIA-associated medical professionals who were only trying to Save America Herself. By now I'm so thoroughly versed in googling I've thinking of trying the Advanced Search, but I type in "Mitchell Jessen" first and, Lo! and Behold! the two, both former military officers who had been involved in SERE, the simulated torture of military personnel for training purposes, and who were known as The Mormon Mafia have, in fact, been in the news and connected to the CIA torture program since 2005 at least, when James Elmer Mitchell was interviewed by Jane Meyer for this piece in The New Yorker; both men, their company, their rather remarkable lack of credentials, and the, er, shocking circumstances of their swift rise to prominence in the highly competitive emerging field of Bio-Electrical Interface Applications Consulting, all featured prominently in stories in Vanity Fair (by Katherine Eban) and Salon (by Mark Benjamin), in 2007, at which time they were said to be under investigation by the Bush Defense Department.

(Incidentally, the reasonable reader could have understood from the first sentence of that ABC piece, which references a new focus on the two, that ABC wasn't revealing their identities, their CIA connections, or anything else. In fairness to Mr. Goldfarb, it really isn't all that easy to make shit up constantly.)

Investigate the Leakers! Y'know, I went to grade school, through fourth grade, with a kid named Roger Knox. He was considered "slow" in the book larnin' department, but I thought he was the funniest and wittiest ten-year-old around. We combined forces on an unofficial, hand-lettered class newspaper--he drew the comics--which landed me in my first pot of political hot water. And every so often he'd suddenly turn his desk upside down, and start scribbling on the seat with crayons while gobbling handfuls of school paste. The teachers would just declare an early recess and march us off quietly. This is, no doubt, what ought to have been done with the whole Phony MSM Outrage Gotcha! Cult long ago, and perhaps now should expand to include the Flotsam That Used To Be A Political Party altogether (though I'd personally opt for at least one straightforward report on the real Swiftboating/Kerngate business in the hopes it might dilute Phony MSM Outrage Gotcha! of the Week by 10% or so).

We will leave Mr. Goldfarb to shriek about fluoridation, low-hanging power lines, and snooty squash-court reservation clerks; it was good, though, to be reminded of Mitchell Jessen (I'd seen, and forgotten, Eban's Salon piece, back in the day when this seemed like heaping dirt on a still-dangerous Cheney-Bush regime, instead of digging dirt up).

And it's interesting to reconsider how, in addition to the enormity of ignoring the law, raging concerns over our security, and the importance of rationality and semantic consistence to our daily well-being, and torturing in our names; in addition to lying about it and concocting legal wormholes to wriggle away through; in addition to ignoring all evidence of torture's ineffectiveness and then co-opting the actual intel accomplishments of standard interrogation techniques, to consider, I was saying, just how fucking puerile and stupid and sordid the whole business was. You just wanna torture somebody, waterboarding's been on the menu for centuries. What we need to ask ourselves is what sort of "experts" "devise" (or "reverse engineer", in an absurd attempt to pretend crossing "Jesus" off the script of a pretend torture session, and replacing it with "Mohammed" in a real one constitutes expertise) the naked anthill, pee-pee photographin', suppository-obsessed and feces-smeared, Sammy-Hagar-turned-up-to-11 playground routines while imagining they're doing anything other than torturing people in custody? Let's say it again: you can either piss your pants on a daily, if not hourly, basis over the SPECTRE of global terrorism, or you can defend this sort of Laurel and Hardy meet Dr. Strangelove and discover they all have an abiding interest in psychosexual infantilism. Not both. We may have been paying Mitchell Jessen $1 M/yr tax free. A little street recognition should be small price to pay. We're entitled to know who approved this little government-sponsored Musical Theatre for Sexual Psychopaths program. Not to mention locking 'em up.

Echo Chamber

WE'RE always a day behind on Daily Show/Colbert viewing around here; the first run is on too late for my Poor Wife, especially for the nine months of the year that Indiana is on Newfoundland Time, plus she's a read-until-lights-out type. So it was yesterday evening when we saw Monday's quickie Colbert appearance of Slate's Emily Yoffe, erstwhile global climate change denier, now the world's leading non-expert authority on a psychological disorder that doesn't exist*.

And I'm reasonably sure it was Emily Yoffe, because we've been watching old Larry Sanders Shows recently, and Mimi Rogers is much better at faking sincerity. And I don't think Scientologists go around touting psychological disorders, even the risible or indefensible. But it might have been. Both women have that hyperthyroid stare and pasted-on public smile, either of which taken alone is more disturbing than a little narcissism, and which manage to escape the easy public opprobrium of professional yentas by merest historical chance: because Phrenology, Mesmerism, and Anthropometrics evolved into the study of emotional traits instead of physical features. I don't want to get into a long historical discussion here, so let's just say the money was better, and it's proven slightly more difficult to laugh off.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder! I suppose we should be grateful that it's difficult nowadays for these people to get a license to hack the offending area of the brain loose and suction it out through the nose, or hook the afflicted up via jumper cables to old Army field telephones. NPD--of course it's a fucking acronym--was added to the Psychological Liturgical Calendar in 1980. Before that we had to make do with saying, "Jeez, she's stuck up!" or "Boy, what an asshole!" Another sparkling example of how modern psychology, like the old Soviet system, solves problems you wouldn't have otherwise.

And 1980 does not really come as a surprise to us, since contemporary psychology and Reaganism go together like Pam Anderson and Whatever Loud and Talentless Tattoo Model She's Presently Dating. Prior to Reagan, psychology was just about at the point of admitting that the two things it did well--the two things it did at all--namely, running behavior tests on captive college freshmen and keeping people locked up indefinitely, with or without trial, were really of use only to the people who periodically re-wrote entry-level college psychology texts.

Yes, it was a great time to combine Authoritarianism, Small-Town Snoopery, and a supple and utterly valueless willingness to trumpet any sort of public behavior that promised to put you back in the majority. It was in the 1980s that we decided that the sort of people who might actually benefit in some way from the machinations of modern psychology would actually be even better off turned loose on the streets to fend for themselves. This was, I think, merely fortuitous, in that the Reagan administration was just trying to trim the books of any federal spending that appeared to help people who weren't donors. This was also the time when we expanded the disposable incomes of the well-off, and convinced them via Public Service Announcement that their surly teenagers were like two fried eggs on drugs. This fortunately kept us from having a lot of spare psychologists hanging around with nothing to do, and over the past twenty-five years has made Making Young People Less Inconvenient a growth industry to match Producing Unarmored Combat Vehicles, Unfettered Near-Banking, and Herbal Supplement Informercials.

But the thing that got to me about Ms Yoffe's reverse-Scientologist performance Monday night was the urgency with which she pushed John Edwards as the poster-boy for this pseudo-disorder. He outed himself by having an affair! she insisted, before babbling on about his hair-combing proclivities. The Slate piece goes even deeper into non-clinical diagnosis by rank amateur:

John Edwards outed himself as one when forced to confess an adulterous affair. (Given his comical vanity, the deceitful way he used his marriage for his advancement, and his self-elevation as an embodiment of the common man while living in a house the size of an arena, it sounds like a pretty good diagnosis.)

Yes, yes it does, and I'd like to offer my congratulations, except you just congratulated yourself enough for both of us, and the rest of the globe.

Lessee, we've got A) inability to distinguish the trivial from the serious; B) willingness to swallow silly propaganda pieces provided they reinforce your own point of view; and C) spouting Class Traitor nonsense that doesn't survive a minute's reflection. Is "Journalist" an analytical category yet?

So we've turned to Yoffe's actual piece while our concern over whether a Colbert booker got fired over her appearance is still fresh. And there's Edwards, still being pushed to the fore, still having his marriage analyzed by long distance by a careerist scrivener who's never met him or his wife, whose diagnosis is confirmed by the subject himself, which seems a smidge self-defeating, if not a confirmation of the whole thing as a sort of late-20th century materialist version of a round of slumber-party OUIJA. And that paragraph ends with the classic philosophical conundrum:

And what other malady could explain the simultaneous phenomena of Blago and the Octomom?

To which we are brave and ignorant enough to answer, well, that might depend on if you mean "Blago" and "Octomom" personally, or the massively stupid fifteen minute's entertainment either provided the easily amused. But in either case we'd like to offer the possibility of "Stupidity", "Venality", and "News coverage that unceasingly dives for the Bottom while the Bottom unceasingly recedes". There. Didn't have to pretend I knew what made either of 'em tick, didn't have to pretend I gave a shit anyway, and didn't have to read any pop psychology texts.

A small theme has developed; let's count the politicians who get mentioned here, and ignore, for the moment, the fictional characters from The Sopranos, The Wizard of Oz, and The Wall Street Journal. Edwards the Poster Boy. Blago the Hairdo. Ah-nuld the Insufficient Budget Squeezer. And, of course--surely you didn't imagine otherwise?--Clinton the Dick.

It's interesting: we start off using this junior-high analytical category on Wall Street, but that disappears before the opening paragraph is over. Then we bring in four politicians, none of whom has any noteworthy connection to, or power over, the economic meltdown--except the one who's being blamed for the perpetual constitutional and crackpot tax-cutting religious parties cluster-fuck that is California's--and we haply have some Op-Ed guy from the Wall Street Journal and Dr. Chuckles Merkwürdigeliebe Krauthammer standing by to help with the sidewalk psychoanalysis. Not a mention of the major political party which turned the Myth of Narcissus into a parable for Eternal Economic Reflected Sunshine. Hmmmm. Though now that I think about it, it is damn near impossible to find a single Republican who fits the bill, aside from that guy in Cali they elected without realizing his was quoting from his own movies.

For that matter, nothing about Botox and Boob Lifts, nothing about Religion, nothing about People Who Pretend Expertise Where There Is None Just To Get On Teevee. Hardly surprising. Hey, Ms Yoffe: I promise not to analyze your marriage via the aether if you'll promise to publish an honest photo of your shoe closet.

__________

* or does, but fuck it; these are the people who told me, as a youth, that "while Marihuana is not physically addicting, it is psychologically addicting," Psychological Addiction being a category unknown until the previous Marihuana is Addicting business had proven, oh,absolute bullshit is the scientific term, I think, and carrying all the philosophical weight of any other concept made up on the spot to cover Your Venal Lying Ass. These same people will be happy to tell you that You Like Sex Too Much, provided you've demonstrated a willingness to be gulled that completely. It is probably true that a large number of people consumed by "narcissist tendencies" have some difficulty maneuvering through Life, in no small part because such maneuvering generally includes pleasing some employer or other supervisor who's at least as narcissistic as you. We note that this is also the case with people who are inordinately fond of Twinkies, or Jesus, and nobody ever suggests that Haley Barbour would be President otherwise.

It's Like You're Readin' My Thoughts, Man.

Sarah Kershaw, "Look Closely, Doctor--See the Camera?" August 27

OKAY, I'm no expert, but I think that if you're writing a piece about paranoid psychosis it's best not to introduce the same character twice in succeeding paragraphs in a slightly different guise:

“Most likely these people would be delusional anyway,” said Dr. Joel Gold, a psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York, who said he saw five patients at the hospital from 2002 to 2004 with Truman Show delusion. Dr. Gold and his brother, Dr. Ian Gold, the Canada research chair in philosophy and psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal, came up with the term “Truman Show delusion.”

“But the more radical view is that this pushes some people over the threshold; the environment tips them over the edge,” said Dr. Joel Gold, who is a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at New York University. “And if culture can make people crazy, then we need to look at it.”

Emphasis mine.  Of course, it might help matters if said character didn't speak in self-anhilating sentences, but, hey, he's a psychiatrist. You're the one who opened the box.

The delusions are fueling a chicken-and-egg debate in psychiatry: Are these merely modern examples of classic paranoia fed by the current cultural landscape, or is there something about media like reality television and the Internet that can push people over the sanity line?

Trick question, right?

Are we taking audience questions? Because I'd like to know if the coffee and doughnuts are for everyone, or if they're just virtual, and, as a follow-up, th' fuck are you going on about?

Because unless everyone's lying to me, it's 2008. Mass media's been bedeviling us for a century now; psychiatry even longer. (Did you know Uncle Siggy and Nicola Tesla were born two months apart? And they're both Austrians? Neither did I. And they've both been used by a succession of crackpots to excuse practically anything. But only one was a cokehead.)

Maybe you could have gotten around to this a little sooner, when all the paranoids thought Harding and Cox were speaking to them through the walls, or the contents of Fibber McGee's closet threatened them every time they turned a doorknob. You know, before we were all subjected to Jim Carrey? I know, I know, Science proceeds at its own pace. So too, presumably, does psychiatry. But there comes a time when we have to question Knowledge for its own sake and the pretense of expertise where there is none. I mean, it's one thing when the promise of Safe Uses of Atomic Energy fails to pan out; it's quite another to still have a nuclear power industry dedicated to lobbying the government to ignore the perils it subjects the rest of us to, fifty years after the fact.

And here's the thing about that, for me, at least: I can at least see some of Big Nuke's argument. What's yours? Psychology seems to have turned its entire supply of what Jonathan Miller called "the charismatic panoply of modern professional power" to the service of The Almighty, as in Dollar, since--not surprisingly--the election of Ronald Reagan. In that time we've deprived millions of people of their right to walk around loose because human beings like to smoke a little reefer, while turning mental patients out to live, and die, on the streets. We've decided that modern concepts of mental or emotional competence simply get in the way of a sufficiently satisfying level of applied 17th century penal practices, and we've reduced legal considerations of sanity to a sentencing footnote in many cases. We've executed people who had the mental competence of nine-year-olds.  Where's psychiatry been while all this was goin' on? Not on the ramparts, unless by that you mean the front lines of convincing every parent whose child tokes a doobie or develops a case of sassmouth that he urgently requires your ministrations, please pay in advance. We continue to "educate" vast segments of the population with methods that are hopelessly foreign to them, and then blame them for their failure. For godsakes, the learnéd men and women of the biological sciences, geology, and paleontology take their precious time to fight the good fight over crackpot state and local school boards injecting Jesus into science texts. Where's psychiatry on the dehumanizing effects of cookie-cutter education, of treating high school students like criminals, of the shameful discrepancies between rich and poor?

It is, apparently, busy writing books on whether we're being driven insane by reality television. For chrisakes, Doc, just watch for half an hour.  

Y'know, I Read The Thing Over Three Times, And I'll Be Damned, But That's What He Said.

David Brooks, "The Rank-Link Imbalance." March 14

HEY, I'm the first to admit there are some things no one should do for money:

They go through the oboe practice, soccer camp, homework marathon childhood. Their parent-teacher conferences are like mini-Hall of Fame enshrinements as all gather to worship at the flame of their incipient success. In high school, they enter their Alpha Geekdom. They rack up great grades and develop that coating of arrogance that forms on those who know that in the long run they will be more successful than the beauties and jocks who get dates.

Then they go into one of those fields like law, medicine or politics, where a person’s identity is defined by career rank. They develop the specific social skills that are useful on the climb up the greasy pole: the capacity to imply false intimacy; the ability to remember first names; the subtle skills of effective deference; the willingness to stand too close to other men while talking and touching them in a manly way.

For some time I've been toying with the idea that a strong undercurrent of our present social troubles is traceable to the collapse of the hegemonic Freudianism of the 30s through the 50s. On the one hand it was by and large a colossal mound of horseshit with a generous dollop of sexism and racism on top, but on the other was still more useful than the idiocy that tried to move into the resultant vacuum even though it was obvious that "vacuum" was both an improvement and unlikely to be improved upon. I think this especially at times when concepts such as "Projection" seem like just the ticket.  I mean, you gotta squirm a little as David Brooks, Republican insider, despoiler of forests, visiting professor at Duke, and television intellectual, pretends to be Joe Lunchcart clucking--more in sorrow than anger!--at the ruins of the Temple of Ozzy Mandus XIV, even if you're laughing your ass off at the time.  

That quote comes as part of a prissy little column on Eliot Spitzer that, among its other notable non-achievements, manages not to mention Eliot Spitzer, nor the high price of high-priced call girls. This is apparently meant to convince the reader that Brooks' water-added-ham-fisted pop psychoanalysis is the result of some serious musing on Our Times. It doesn't.

(Contrariwise, the smart boys on the "Left" used the opportunity to ponder Whether Prostitution Should Be Legalized, leading me, at least, to hope the practice of combining the temporalty of headline news with one's tiniest cerebral events continues into warmer weather, as it might provide us with the recipe for Matt's Favorite Potato Salad.)

Call me a skeptic, but I find it impossible to believe that such a large segment of the typing public is so utterly without feck when it comes to Sex and What People Might Do To Get Some. I mean, c'mon, I personally understand Larry Craig as far as that goes, though I wouldn't want to be seated next to him. Maybe the Young Guns of The Blogging House are still young and gunish enough to hope (irrationally, to judge by appearances) that a free sugar donut might fall out of this evening's sky and land on their dicks, but Brooks is as middle-aged as I. Oboe practice and grade competition and Alpha Male Bullshitism are not required to explain Eliot Spitzer's taste for pussy. It's pussy. Millions of Americans of any or all genders and every socio-economic strata enjoy some on a regular basis, whether or not they played soccer at the academy. For chrissakes.  None of these guys has ever gone to a strip club (which, to us, is a hell of a lot more perverted than paying for some close companionship)?  

At least with Freud we paid equal attention to what sort of pervert pretended he didn't understand what the attraction was.

And When I Find The People Responsible I'm Gonna Kill 'Em, Julienne 'Em, Put 'Em In Baggies, And Stuff Them Into Women's Shoes.

Pot smoking linked to psychotic disorders
Heavy marijuana use doubles the risk, new research finds.

By Jia-Rui Chong
L.A. Times Staff Writer

July 27, 2007

People who smoke marijuana daily or weekly double their risk of developing a psychotic illness over their lifetime, according to a study published Thursday.

Among all cannabis users, including sporadic experimenters and habitual users, the lifetime risk of psychotic illness increased by 40%, the report said....


The study by Zammit and colleagues, published in the medical journal the Lancet, reanalyzed data from seven long-term studies on psychotic illnesses and marijuana involving 61,000 participants.

The researchers filtered out about 60 factors, such as preexisting mental illness and the use of other illicit drugs, and considered IQ and social class, to try to isolate the effect of marijuana, Zammit said.

Most of the studies that were analyzed indicated a range of increased risk for frequent users from 50% to 200%, with the average being about 100%, or double the risk, [Dr. Stanley] Zammit said.

The researchers also studied the relationship between marijuana use and mood disorders, such as depression and bipolar disorder. They analyzed 22 studies involving 52,000 participants.

The researchers found that any marijuana use increased the lifetime risk for mood disorders by about 40%, and weekly or daily use increased the risk by about 50%.

RESEARCHERS at Cardiff University also said they were unable to conclusively link heavy marijuana use to the so-called "one sentence, one paragraph" craze currently sweeping Los Angeles and other centers of "hippie" culture.

It Stands For Shut The Fuck Up

I'M not even bother asking about the wingnuts: the Sadly, No! Institute observes the raging lunacy that is Debbie Schlussel; Roy spots both the Your Problem is Obvious Ace O. and the Your Obvious Problem Has Been Compounded by Years as a Carnival Charlatan John Derbyshire; T.Bogg lands us D'nesh D'Souza, possible winner by acclamation, who manages somehow to recast the Virginia Tech massacre as an excuse for 19th Century British Colonialism and 16th Century theology (of a sort). We simply note--we're reaching for plaintive here--that the damage is obviously irreversible and whether it has as its root cause the "conservative" self-commitment to that isolation ward in the clouds these past twenty-five years, or that has merely somehow bumped the blender setting from "Aerate" to "Frappé". We leave the question to more skilled minds, possibly in the Future, assuming people in the Future would care to revisit, which, on the whole, I don't.

This looks like a good place to note that the various and sundry calls for some sort of Mental Health Industry solution, frequently but not exclusively envisioned as including a 21st Century synthesis of the Soviet system and the biography of Frances Farmer, fall a bit short when one considers that Cho was actually in these people's hands, and a fat lot of good it did anyone.

No, rather, if the Media refuses to share a neck, let's ask now, 72 hours later, "What have we learned?" And let's save time by answering, "Nothing."

Which is precisely what we were going to learn. Okay, there's some possibility he could have been "involved" with some political cause or other, which fact is 1) going to be uncovered by police work, not Tucker Carlson (I mean "Tucker Carlson" as a synecdoche there, but let's add, "especially not" by Tucker Carlson): and 2) if some sort of connection is uncovered it is almost certain to be disputable. And yet the teevee keeps shoveling oats without noticing the horse choked to death some time ago. The wingnuts had their shining moment with the video-game, Shred Metal, and anti-Christian motives of Klebold and Harris, most of it made up on the spot or High-Pass filtered like the smoke from a Baghdad firefight; they'd missed out when Bob Dole's instant Encyclopedia Brown solution to the Murrah Building ("Looks like the work of A-rabs to me,") proved overly optimistic.

If there's anything more unseemly and less indicative of reasonable intellect that the Wall-to-Wall blathering it's the constant leaping at whatever gets spewed out as a result in support of someone's pet Unified Societal Breakdown Theory. If we were to find Cho's writings expressed an admiration for bin Laden, Hitler, or Borat this would mean, precisely, what? And to save time, we'll answer: the same thing as a fourteen-year-old girl scribbling "Mrs. John Krasinski" all over the front of her notebook. When you catch the accomplices, or when you get the wedding invitation, you have confirmation. Before that all you have is a problem managing your hysteria.

He hated rich people! So fookin' what? Half the rich people I know hate rich people. If you hate rich people, debauchery, and indolent Youth, maybe, just maybe, a major college campus is not your ideal spot, and if you choose instead to seethe until one day your head explodes, well, what the fuck does it matter what you were seething about? If Cho had turned out to be gay, would that be an argument against civil unions? (Note I'm not asking here if it would be advanced as one; that's a given.) If he was a registered Republican is that an argument against tax cuts? It's bad enough looking for an elephant in a matchbox. We find a matchbox and shout, "Hey, now we know the elephants have been here!"

Still, NBC broadcasting that Manifesto crap could, conceivably, be in the running for New Low if such a thing were still possible. I'm not arguing that it shouldn't be shown. I'm arguing that in a just world it wouldn't be Steve Capus' decision to make, as he would be a regional talent coordinator for Girls Gone Wild or somesuch. It's not a question of its newsworthiness, and I reject the idea this somehow "rewards" the killer or "encourages other budding nutjobs". It's that no decent person or organization would have broadcast this stuff, if at all, before people had the chance to bury their dead. NBC did so because it had had to turn the materials over to the police, and it suspected it would lose its Exclusive in short order. We are not merely ill-served by this sort of thing in an information sense or by its lack of human decency; we are choking the life out of the ability to respond rationally and with due deliberation. I realize that the combination of cupidity, stupidity, and the Cult of Perpetual Grievance once looked promising, but it's past time to move on.

Dry Your Eyes, My Little Friend

Monday I'm driving home with Sparky in the truck bed and the CD ends and I'm just a couple miles from home so I hit the button for the radio and catch the last five minutes of Fresh Air, and it's the guy who wrote the cover story about Neurolaw in the Sunday Times Magazine, and he pisses me off in about forty-five seconds. He's talking about taking part in these studies pinpointing where certain activities are located in the brain, and he's a bit too gung-ho about it for my tastes to begin with. And then he says something like this (which I'm cribbing from the article):

Two companies, No Lie MRI and Cephos, are now competing to refine f.M.R.I. lie-detection technology so that it can be admitted in court and commercially marketed. I talked to Steven Laken, the president of Cephos, which plans to begin selling its products this year....“In lab studies, we’ve been in the 80- to 90-percent-accuracy range,” Laken says. This is similar to the accuracy rate for polygraphs, which are not considered sufficiently reliable to be allowed in most legal cases. Laken says he hopes to reach the 90-percent- to 95-percent-accuracy range — which should be high enough to satisfy the Supreme Court’s standards for the admission of scientific evidence. Judy Illes, director of Neuroethics at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, says, “I would predict that within five years, we will have technology that is sufficiently reliable at getting at the binary question of whether someone is lying that it may be utilized in certain legal settings.”

Now, first of all, let me assure you that thirty years ago people were saying exactly the same thing about the polygraph. "In the hands of the right operator it's 98% accurate". "In a few years it will be admissible in court." The world is not likely to run short of people who admire the reason-like efficiency of the standard fascist model anytime soon.

And second, let me ask the first question that pops into my head, and you guys tell me if you've already thought of it. Okay? Here:

What the fuck should we do about the pathological liars who make the laws in the first fuckin' place?

Okay, okay. We can and should expect anything whatsoever from people determined that making more money for themselves is the highest order of human achievement. It'd be nice to read some future-is-just-around-the-corner piece that suggested some new electrical gadget we could stick them into.

And yeah, sure, research is research, as Doc Mengele used to say. If it doesn't happen here it'll happen in Korea or France or Lumbago, and, anyway, you don't ever know where these things lead. Maybe it will serve to rationalize laws, spur economic justice, remove Bronze Age belief systems and the wars that follow them around. Sure.

But what I see is how it's being sold. And it's not being sold to you, dear reader, although in the five minutes I heard Mr. Rosen was being a little cagey on that point, talking about using fMRI to back divorce case contentions. It's not divorce court claimants who'll benefit, despite the Era of Universal Bliss that would undoubtedly usher in. It's governments. It's lawyers. It's multinational corporations. It's the people for whom sticking a probe in you and shutting you into a box is all in a day's work.

The article actually frets a bit about how the technology might make us less likely to execute people:

To suggest that criminals could be excused because their brains made them do it seems to imply that anyone whose brain isn’t functioning properly could be absolved of responsibility. But should judges and juries really be in the business of defining the normal or properly working brain? And since all behavior is caused by our brains, wouldn’t this mean all behavior could potentially be excused?

Oh, well, we can always fix it in software.

Is the impetus to do away with civil rights not moving quickly enough? Is waterboarding too messy, too "controversial", too first decade of the 21st century? Or is it just that the materials are too cheap and readily available?

Don't you have anything better to do? Isn't global climate change, the threat of nuclear annihilation, unaffordable health care, contaminated food supplies, wars, plagues, earthquakes, and the exploitation of children enough for you to chew on, or at least enough to give you pause? Could you at the very least try doing something about people who find fart jokes endlessly entertaining? Demonstrate some small amount of expertise, then work up from there? I mean, the track record of psychiatry is not exactly all that great. Mussolini has you beat by a train schedule, and Alabama actually stopped enslaving people before you did.

It's a prime example of what Jonathan Miller once called "the charismatic panoply of modern professional power". It's the Holy Grail. the Little Chromium Switch Here that controls everything, so long as the interpretation of its secrets remains safely in the hands of our vaunted government scientists.

"C'mon, Mr. Luddite," I hear you say--and I do, too--"get yourself a cell phone, download some ringtones, and plug into the 21st century for what little part of it you have left. Surely you admit to scientific progress? Right? They're discovering how your brain operates, where you process information, what the difference is between authentic and false memories. We're goin' back to the Moon, we're gonna make ourselves a bunch of perfectly spherical ball bearings, and there's a rainbow party at eight."

Okay, okay. The future can take care of itself. This isn't Colossus: The Forbin Project, nor even A Clockwork Orange. What disturbs me is that in the midst of the Bush administration we can still gleefully imagine that if we just give the government enough information it will protect us from terrorism, mendacious spouses, and bicycle thieves, let alone how a generation removed from Birmingham and Selma we can insist that The Law can be trusted to be impartial. Truth is binary only when we drastically restrict the conditions under which we observe it.

As for psychiatry, well, remember on Star Trek when Bones McCoy would get a snootful of Xendorkian brandy or somesuch, and start wailing how "in the 20th Century they actually cut people open! Like Proterian butchers!"? Just remembering back a few decades is all I'm askin'.