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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.