Awesome Video

Sarah Palin is taking on Republicans

Sean Hannity’s softball interview with Sarah Palin was devastating (1 2). If she can’t give substantive answers to leading questions from one of the biggest hacks on FOXNews, she will die under any real scrutiny. Worst?

HANNITY: Explain when you were governor and, as governor of Alaska, how you took on your own party.

PALIN: Yes.

HANNITY: There’s this — you know, you still have a very high approval rating, but there are people that still weren’t happy about it. How did you take on your own party, specifically? And do you think you’d be able to do that, as well, in Washington?

PALIN: Well, I just recognized that there — as John McCain talked about on the campaign trail, also — it doesn’t matter which party it is that is just kind of creating the good-old-boy network and the cronyism and allowing obsessive partisanship to get in the way of just doing what’s right for the people who are to be served. And I just recognized that it’s not just the other party. Sometimes it’s our own party that just starts taking advantage of the people.

And I felt compelled to do something about it, decided to run for office, got in there and with that mandate that I believe the people had just given me, via their vote, they expected the changes to take place, that reform. And we’re living up to that. And as we do, we are ruffling feathers.

She was asked twice to explain specifically what she had done to “take on [her] own party” and she answered with “Yes” (meh?) and some vague generalities. Hannity wasn’t even trying to trip her up, he was genuinely interested and sympathetic. The most demeaning thing about it is that a lot of her supporters aren’t even expecting much out of her.

Republicans and Racism

According to a poll published by Gallup on August 4, Republicans think that racism against whites is more widespread than racism against blacks. I thought this was a pretty interesting result. About as interesting as the poll that shows that most people are at their best in the morning.

Holy Sh*t

Over at National Review’s Corner blog, Mona Charen publishes this email on John McCain’s VP pick, assuming that it represents a person stating their actual viewpoint.

Sarah is real!!! What a fabulous contrast with Obama, who is not real. Sarah is from America. Obama is not.

Sarah gives me hope for America, because of who she is, not because of any group she “represents.”

More valuable than pearls is a woman who likes to fish and hunt.

Personally, I thought it was a pretty good joke. … On the other hand, maybe it is real. The joke interpretation is the gracious one, I’m afraid.

A Hang of a Cackle

Every day I get the Oxford English Dictionary’s Word of the Day. Some are interesting, others are boring, still others are funny. The Word of the Day for August 6 was boet. Under the first definition, “A brother. Also prefixed to a man’s first name as an informal title,” is this example:

1974 ‘BLOSSOM’ in Darling (Durban) 8 May 91 ‘What you mean ouma?’ My boet gives out a hang of a cackle.

Silver Nanowires

I was reading an article in C&EN about a cell phone that Nokia wants to produce that is made out of protein and stumbled on something really cool. Some proteins, in high enough concentrations, can spontaneously form long fibers (called amyloid fibrils) that are ultra thin. In humans, when this happens it often causes diseases like Alzheimer’s, but there are other uses too (spider webs are an example).

The article mentioned an Israeli scientist, Ehud Gazit, who used this process to construct the thinnest piece of wire ever. He made a hollow tube out of the proteins and then added a solution of silver. A wire formed inside of the tube, and then he digested the protein with an enzyme. Incredible.

Koala Bears and Eucalyptus

Apparently, increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere causes the eucalyptus tree to form tannins and other antinutrients at an increased ratio relative to the proteins that the koala bear needs to support itself.

New research shows that the level of toxicity in the leaves of eucalyptus saplings rises, and their nutrient content falls, when they are exposed to higher levels of carbon dioxide.

“What currently may be good koala habitat may well become, over a period of not so many years at the rate that carbon dioxide concentrations are rising, very marginal habitat,” said Ian Hume, Emeritus Professor of Biology at Sydney University, who carried out the research.

…

The animals would be unable to adapt to the greater toxicity of gum tree leaves, Prof Hume said after presenting his findings at an Academy of Science conference in Canberra. “I don’t think they’ve got enough time to do that, nowhere near enough time to do that,” he said.

Man, This guy is stylish

The Myth of Mental Illness

I just finished reading The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas Szasz, and I don’t have my Shelfari account anymore, so I might as well post a review here.

In six words: Szasz is a mighty dull writer. I will slog through almost anything, but it took vigor to make it to the end of this one. Style takes a back seat to incoherence. Szasz loves to be obscure, and he hates it when people get the point of what he trying to say. Nevertheless, I will be brave and try to piece together his argument.

It goes something like this:

The discipline of psychiatry is committed to the self-image of being a serious scientific/medical profession. As a result, the behaviors and life problems which psychiatrists study must (by definition) be viewed as true medical diseases with organic causes. Any contrary view would take psychiatry out of the realm of medicine. It would mean that drugs and other medical interventions in a hospital setting are not the correct treatments. This can never be acknowledged by the dons of psychiatry.

Szasz argues, at tedious length, that instead of being diseased, people with mental ‘illnesses’ are just living a different sort of life from the rest of humanity. They have problems adjusting to the demands of society, but they are not ill in some easily treatable way. Indeed, the very ‘illnesses’ they appear to have are actually a primitive sort of body/mind language that communicates to others (and perhaps to themselves) the pains and sufferings they can’t articulate using ordinary language in social settings.

The bottom line, according to Szasz, is that people who are mentally ‘ill’ should take responsibility for their own return to normalcy. Psychiatrists and psychologists can only aid a person’s self-initiated recovery, and it is beyond their power (and always will be) to provide a simple ‘cure’ in the form of a drug, for example.

In the interest of full disclosure: I have a psychiatrist and I take medication for a serious mental illness (if you want to call it that). I’m not ready to drop either, but I think there may be something to Szasz’s argument.

It’s all the rage now to say that mental illnesses are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain (serotonin and dopamine mainly), which can be corrected by the proper prescription of drugs that affect those chemicals. There are a couple of problems with this theory:

1) There does not seem to be any real difference in the levels of serotonin and dopamine (or any other neurochemical) between ‘healthy’ individuals and ‘mentally ill’ ones. If there were a pattern, they could devise a test to screen people for these diseases. Alas, they cannot.

2) Although the drugs they use to treat major depression, bipolar, etc. do affect the levels of these chemicals, it does not seem to matter in which direction you push them, up or down. Selective Serotonin Uptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) like Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil are massively popular in America for treating anxiety and major depression, but in Europe an important drug for the same conditions is the Selective Serotonin Uptake Enhancer (SSRE), tianeptine.

What is really going on here? Do they really understand how these “chemical imbalances” are supposed to work in the brain? Do depressives need both more and less serotonin in their synapses? As I learn more about the subject, I grow more skeptical. Even the drug company literature is not reassuring (invariably, they state outright that the mechanism of action of the drug is unknown). I know I can’t do this alone, but I’m not sure the drugs are helping much, maybe there is a reason for that.

wtf?

The House intelligence committee report on the 2008 Intelligence Authorization Act carries this interesting little commentary on a section regarding the CIA Inspector General:

The Committee was dismayed at a recent incident wherein the Intelligence Community failed to inform the Congress of a significant covert action activity. This failure to notify Congress constitutes a violation of the National Security Act of 1947. Despite agency explanations that the failure was inadvertent, the Committee is deeply troubled over the fact that such an oversight could occur, whether intentionally or inadvertently.

The Committee firmly believes that scrupulous transparency between the Intelligence Community and this Committee is an absolute necessity on matters related to covert action. The Committee intends this audit and reporting requirement to act as a further check against the risk of insufficient notification, whether deliberate or inadvertent.