The Past lies upon the Present like a giant’s dead body. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables So much went wrong, so much blame to spread around, so little time… Bush trip to Switzerland called off amid threats of protests, legal action Washington Post By Peter Finn February 6, 2011 A planned trip to […]
I ran across this piece about Scott Bloch today, a familiar name from the Bush era. It’s not such an important story – just wrangling about his sentence. But it reminds me how crazy things were during the Bush years. He was a Republican operative in charge of the whistle-blower protection office whose job it […]
I don’t think they’re ready to go home just yet. That "gradual transition idea" [As Mubarak Digs In, U.S. Policy in Egypt Is Complicated] doesn’t seem to have been met with much enthusiasm. My read is that it took a very long time for them to get to the point where a small spark would […]
West Backs Gradual Egyptian Transition New York Times By KAREEM FAHIM and MARK LANDLER February 5, 2011 CAIRO — The United States and leading European nations on Saturday threw their weight behind a gradual transition in Egypt, backing attempts by the country’s vice president, Omar Suleiman, to negotiate with opposition groups without immediately removing President […]
There is an ancient Zen teaching: the master points up at the moon and asks the student: "What is this?" The student replies "that is the moon." The master corrects him: "No. That is a finger pointing at the moon." Psychiatry as a Clinical Neuroscience Discipline Journal of the American Medical Association 2005:294(17):2221-2224 by Thomas […]
In writing about evidence-based medicine, I’ve run across or been sent a lot of interesting information. One such article was in Wired [Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness]. It’s really good, and has a lot of information I hadn’t run across. Of particular interest – the part about Al Francis, Editor of the DSM […]
Amid Arab protests, U.S. influence has waned: Articles like this one kind of piss me off. An American hegemony in the Middle East was a dream of Dick Cheney and the Neoconservatives [including the Bushes]. With the fall of Russian Communism, we were going to jump into the ring and claim Sole Superpower Status, ignore […]
The Second Coming W.B Yeats Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full […]