Later On

Very interesting op-ed by Timothy Egan in the NY Times:

Hanging front and center inside the classroom of the grade school I attended were pictures of two men: Pope Paul VI, and John F. Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic president. Each was revered almost without question, although we were taught that one could never tell the other what to do in their separate realms.

My experience was not unique. And so it was jarring to many Catholics to hear last month of a bishop in Providence, R.I., advising a Kennedy to refrain from receiving communion because of a public policy position the congressman had advocated in Washington.

History has always been a strong subject in Catholic education, but Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence seems to have forgotten much of his, or at least failed to learn the lessons as they applied to American democracy.

It was John Kennedy, of course, who was forced to defend his faith before a roomful of skeptical Protestant ministers in Texas, two months before he was elected in 1960. In high school, the Jesuits had us memorize that speech.

“I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish,” candidate Kennedy said, “where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches of any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general population or the public actions of its officials.”

It is no small irony, then, that Rep. Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island, now the only member of Congress from America’s most prominent Catholic family, had his faith questioned by Bishop Tobin for his pro-choice position on abortion…

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Not ready for prime time.

Here they are:

1. Canned tomatoes
2. Corn-fed beef
3. Microwave popcorn
4. Non-organic potatoes
5. Farmed salmon
6. Milk produced with artificial hormones
7. Conventional apples

And here is why.

Very interesting report by Shari Roan in the LA Times:

It’s not surprising that an intensive six-month training program for children with poor reading skills improves their performance, as a new study has demonstrated. The unexpected finding is that the skills program actually spurred brain changes that could be the underpinnings for the children’s progress.

The study, published today in the journal Neuron, was lauded by the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Thomas R. Insel. The NIMH funded the research.

"We have known that behavioral training can enhance brain function," Insel said in a news release. "The exciting breakthrough here is detecting changes in brain connectivity with behavioral treatment. This finding with reading deficits suggests an exciting new approach to be tested in the treatment of mental disorders, which increasingly appear to be due to problems in specific brain circuits."

The study’s authors, from Carnegie Mellon University, randomly assigned 35 children to an intensive remedial reading program and 12 children to a control group receiving normal classroom instruction. The children in both groups were poor readers. A group of 25 children who were rated average or above-average readers was also studied. The researchers used an imaging device called diffusion tensor imaging to look at the children’s white matter, the substance in the brain that is key to communications throughout the central nervous system.

At the start of the study, …

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This is good news: Karen Kaplan at the LA Times:

"Cluster headache is probably the most severe pain known to humans. Most female patients describe each attack as worse than childbirth."

You’d think that such an excruciating condition would require some mighty strong medicine. But a study coming out today in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. — the source of the statement above — concludes that cluster headaches can be treated by inhaling pure 100% oxygen.

Cluster headaches affect about 0.3% of the general population, according to the study. The National Institutes of Health says the debilitating headaches can strike daily for weeks at a time.Other sources say the bouts can last for months before patients go into remission.

Migraine drugs such as Imitrex (sumatriptan) are typically prescribed to stop the pain, but there are limits on daily usage. A small study of 15 patients has found that inhaling high-flow oxygen for 15 minutes was helpful. A trio of researchers from the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London decided to test the therapy more rigorously.

They found 76 patients who suffered cluster headaches and treated them for four attacks. They were asked to inhale either pure oxygen or normal air (which includes 21% oxygen) through a face mask for 15 minutes. Neither the patients nor the providers knew which odorless, colorless gas was being administered.

But there was a difference. When asked to rate their pain relief, …

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When the military is not trying to sweep PTSD under the rug, they are also putting in places rules to hinder its treatment. James Dao and Dan Frosch report in the NY Times:

Pfc. Jeffery Meier, who struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder and drug addiction after two deployments to Iraq, got an appointment in August to see a psychiatrist at Fort Carson, Colo.

But when he arrived for his first session, he was asked to sign a waiver explaining that under certain circumstances, including if he admitted violating military laws, his conversations with his therapist might not be kept confidential. He refused to sign.

Private Meier, who is seeking a medical discharge from the Army, was given counseling anyway. But he says he never opened up to his therapist, fearing that actions taken in the heat of battle might be disclosed to prosecutors. “How can you go and talk about wartime problems when you feel that if you mention anything wrong, you’re going to be prosecuted?” he said in an interview.

He is not alone in his wariness. Many soldiers, lawyers and mental health workers say that the rules governing confidentiality of psychotherapist-patient relations in the military are porous. The rules breed suspicion among troops toward therapists, those people say, reducing the effectiveness of treatment and complicating the Pentagon’s efforts to encourage personnel to seek care.

The problem with the military rules, experts say, is that they do not safeguard the confidentiality of mental health communications and records as strongly as federal rules of evidence for civilians. Both systems say therapists should report patients when they seem a threat to themselves or to others. But the military rules include additional exceptions that could be applied to a wide range of suspected infractions, experts say…

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Had a very good evening, thinking over goals. I realized that for each day, I need to focus on only three things:

1. What I eat — not only in selection of foods, but also in keeping both lunch and dinner small.

2. What exercise I get — I want to do a good amount of exercise each day.

3. What projects I tackle — project size is limited to what I can do in an hour or so, and a project is something that reduces entropy in my personal world and makes things somewhat better for me. Examples: cooking a recipe, culling books and other possessions, working on my writing, organizing cabinets, and the like. In time, the projects should make a noticeable difference.

What I eat

So long as I’m picking out what to eat, I might as well follow the USDA guidelines:

3-5 servings of veggies (Brussels sprouts today)
2-4 servings of fruit (Clementines, recently)
2-3 servings of dairy (best for calcium content: yogurt and ricotta)
2-3 servings of protein (meat, soy, beans, nuts—today it’s salmon)
6-11 servings of carbs (morning cereal plus perhaps one potato)
small amount of fat

By picking the lower bound for each category, I can keep the total small. I’m using less olive oil, doing more steaming, but still use a small amount.

I figured out, BTW, why it’s important to make a list and shop from that: if you try to remember the things to buy, when you get to the store, you’ll start worrying that you’re going to forget something and you start scanning the shelves for things you might need—and when I do that, I end up with duplicates and with food in the fridge that I eventually have to throw out. But if I list only what I actually need and buy only that, I’m home free.

The list can, of course, allow you to pick from a category. For example, you might want 8 oz of fish, and you look over the fish they have to see what is most appealing, on sale, etc. Or you might want two bunches of leafy greens—at the store you look over that section of produce to see what looks best.

What exercise I get

I’m doing the Nordic Track daily (just 7 minutes currently, though adding 10 seconds a day), and alternate Tai Chi and Pilates ball exercises. Miriam Nelson’s weight training I’ll do every three days, and once my knee is better, I’ll walk every day but Sunday—but only for a couple of blocks initially. I’ve done today’s Nordic Track (7 min 20 sec) and I’ll do some Tai Chi (from a DVD) this morning.

What projects I tackle

Man, there are a lot. Today’s: bring all the weights into the bedroom and set it up for the Nelson exercises (which includes putting away the stack of clothes on the bedroom chair); take two boxes of books to the library to donate; and do grocery shopping (from a list, natch).

Simpsons Duke 3 Best is a fine brush and Dr. Moss’s favourite. (He lives in Canada, thus the spelling.) It created a fine lather from The Soap Opera Himalaya shaving soap with shea butter, and the Vision with a much-used Swedish Gillette still carried off a very smooth and easy shave. Pashana was a great finish, and I’m ready for the day.

This is the bursitis that I have:

A third bursa of the knee is called the “anserine bursa.” It is located on the lower inner side of the knee. This bursa most commonly becomes inflamed in middle-aged women. This condition is referred to as anserine bursitis. Anserine bursitis is particularly common in those who are obese. These patients can notice pain in the inner knee while climbing or descending stairs. Anserine bursitis is generally treated with ice, rest, and oral antiinflammatory and/or pain medicines, although cortisone injections are also given.

Note the cause: obesity. There’s a “Fat is Fine” movement (that may not be the name, but it is the sentiment) of fat people who believe that obesity is just fine and any judgment against it is culturally determined. Not so. Obesity clearly puts additional strain on joints, tendons, and muscles. Nothing good about that.

Since it’s inflammation, I’ve been taking an NSAID (non-steroid anti-inflammatory drug—to wit: Advil) and also putting an ice pack (actually, a pack of frozen pearl onions) on the sore (inflamed) area, and I have been giving it a rest: no walking save what is absolutely necessary. I would guess that all traces will be gone in a week and hard to detect by Friday. Whereupon I begin walking again, but only 10 minute walks to start with, and I’ll hold it there for a while. (Of course, I’ll continue the Nordic Track as well, along with the weight exercises.)

With that in mind, I can now set up some new goals at HabitForge.com.

Strong Women Stay Young has a simple weight routine using dumbbells. I just went through my first time. I’m more out of shape than I realized. At least I’m now taking some steps. For me the key remains: focus on today and what you do (and eat) today. Forget about tomorrow.

And each “today” that arrives, I focus on small meals and some exercise. (Probably will do the dumbbells just on MWF—I’ve learned my lesson on going too fast.)

Now to clean up the kitchen from last night’s dinner.

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald has some very interesting comments about the interview below.

This is an outrage, but so many things these days are. Still, it’s a shame that people are attacking abortion clinics when the debt-raters are so much more deserving of attacks. David Segal in the NY Times:

When the financial crisis began, few players on Wall Street looked more ripe for reform than the Big Three credit rating agencies.

It wasn’t just that Moody’s Investors Service, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings, played a crucial role in the epochal housing market collapse, affixing their most laudatory grades to billions of dollars worth of bonds that went bad in the subprime crisis.

It was the near universal agreement that potential conflicts were embedded in the ratings model. For years, banks and other issuers have paid rating agencies to appraise securities — a bit like a restaurant paying a critic to review its food, and only if the verdict is highly favorable.

So as Washington rewrites the rules of Wall Street, how is the overhaul of the Big Three coming? It isn’t, finance experts say.

“What you see in these bills are Botox shots,” says Joseph A. Grundfest, a professor of securities law at Stanford Law School. “For a little while, everyone is going to be frozen into a grin, and then the shots are going to wear off.”

What explains the timidity of Congress’ proposals? This is not a case of lobbyists beating back ideas that might hurt their clients, say those close to the discussions. Instead, Congress is worried that bold measures may backfire. The Big Three, by allowing companies and public entities to raise money by issuing debt, are an essential engine in the country’s vast credit factory, and given the still-fragile condition of the equipment, lawmakers are reluctant to try anything but basic repairs, patches and a new alarm system.

In addition, legislators say, there is little consensus about what a top-to-bottom renovation should look like.

Under bills that legislators are currently considering, the rating agencies will have to contend with greater oversight, stiffer rules about disclosure and a provision that would make it easier for plaintiffs to sue the firms. But nothing in the laws tackles the critic-for-hire problem or threatens the 85 percent market share that Moody’s, S.& P. and Fitch now enjoy.

“It’s fair to say we knew we were taking on a problem with no silver bullet,” said Representative Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania, the chairman of the Financial Services subcommittee that has led reform efforts in the House. “I’m convinced that we’re getting more control over the rating agencies than ever before but not at all sure we’ve developed the perfect system.” …

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Via Transform, an excellent article with useful graphics in Foreign Policy. Here’s the first page (click to enlarge, click again for maximum size):

It sounds like legalization to me. Steve Rolles at Transform Drug Policy Foundation:

From the Wall Street Journal today we learn that the Czech Republic is to join the growing list of countries decriminalising adult personal possession and use of small quantities of cannabis, and in the Czech case various other plant based drugs:

The interim Czech government, led by chief statistician-turned-Prime Minister Jan Fischer, Monday took another step towards making casual marijuana smoking a worry-free affair.

Fischer’s cabinet defined what constitutes “small amounts” of cannabis for personal use, clarifying the country’s new penal code that from next year decriminalizes cultivation and possession of the plant by individuals.

As of Jan. 1 ordinary Czechs can grow up to five marijuana plants or have several marijuana cigarettes in their pockets without fear of criminal prosecution. Previously what constituted a small amount was not specified and the police and courts loosely interpreted the penal code case by case, often resulting in incarceration of home growers.

• Full story from the WSJ
  
• See story on the decision from Czech news agency CTK.

We really need some reform and regulation of the financial industry. Take a look at this article by Chris Adams in McClatchy newspapers:

Forget too big to fail. In the eyes of federal regulators, many Wall Street firms are too big to punish.

During the past three years, some of the nation’s largest financial firms have been accused by the government of cheating or misleading clients and ripping off tens of thousands of consumers of their investments.

Despite these findings, these financial giants got, sometimes repeatedly, special exemptions from the Securities and Exchange Commission that have saved them from a regulatory death penalty that could have decimated their lucrative mutual fund businesses.

Among the more than a dozen firms that have gotten these SEC get-out-of-jail cards since January 2007 are some of Wall Street’s biggest, including Bank of America, Citigroup and American International Group.

SEC rules permit corporate lawbreakers to apply for what are known as Section 9(c) waivers from one of the agency’s harshest penalties — effectively shuttering the violator’s mutual fund operations — but regulators never rejected any of these firms’ applications. While the firms were punished in other ways, they were spared from what some claimed would be "severe and irreparable hardships."

In fact, the last time the SEC’s staff could recall a waiver being turned down was 1978. The SEC declined to comment in detail on its decisions, however.

Despite the massive securities frauds of the past decade, the SEC is coming off a period of stagnant enforcement. The Government Accountability Office, Congress’ investigative arm, reported this year that SEC enforcement workers have felt overwhelmed by their caseloads and undermined by SEC leaders hesitant to levy heavy punishment.

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Granted that’s a weird connection, but it’s true: the Right is in a self-induced panic that their guns will be taken away, and they attribute the plot to disarm civilians to all sorts of spectres, one of them being healthcare reform. James Ridgeway in Mother Jones:

Right-wingers have long viewed health care reform as a cover for various dastardly liberal plots—from killing off grannies and unborn babies to ushering in a socialist state. Now, pro-gun activists see yet another hidden agenda: Health care legislation, they say, threatens their right to bear arms.

The accusation comes from Gun Owners of America, a 300,000 member group that proudly advertises itself with a quotation from Ron Paul: "The only no-compromise gun lobby in Washington." The GOA sits well to the right of the National Rifle Association, which it tends to dismiss as a pack of sell-outs. Yet, like the Tea Partiers who draw Republican congressional leaders to their racially tinged protests against "National Socialist Health Care," the GOA could influence the reform debate. GOA has thrown itself wholeheartedly into the battle for the soul of the GOP, pledging to help oust "RINOs" and other insufficiently trigger-happy Republicans in the 2010 primaries—and to go after conservative Democrats, too.

No version of the reform legislation mentions firearms. But that hasn’t stopped the Virginia-based group from raising the alarm about what it calls the "anti-gun ObamaCare bill." The GOA has fixated on the proposal for a nationwide system of electronic health care records, which, it says, "will most likely dump your gun-related health data into a government database…This includes any firearms-related information your doctor has gleaned or any determination of post traumatic stress disorder or something similar, that can preclude you from owning firearms."

In other words, better record-keeping and information-sharing might lead some people to be denied gun permits on the basis of serious mental illness. Presumably, this could include people like Seung-Hui Cho, the student who gunned down 32 people in the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre. Less than two years before the shooting, a judge had declared Cho "an imminent danger to himself because of mental illness" and ordered him into psychiatric treatment. But Virginia failed to supply this information to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, so Cho was able to purchase two semi-automatic pistols in local gun stores, along with two 10-round magazines of ammo on eBay. After the massacre, even George W. Bush willingly signed a new gun control bill—the first in 13 years. But GOA doesn’t think insanity is necessarily incompatible with gun ownership.

One of the group’s email alerts was titled "ObamaCare Could be Used to Ban Guns in Home Self-Defense." The premise, as described by PolitiFact, is that in order to keep costs down, bureaucrats "will target people who have ‘excessively dangerous’ behaviors that officials believe will raise the cost of health care." The legislation’s "special ‘wellness and prevention’ programs," the GOA warns, "would allow the government to offer lower premiums to employers who bribe their employees to live healthier lifestyles—and nothing within the bill would prohibit rabidly anti-gun Health and Human Services [HHS] Secretary Kathleen Sebelius from decreeing that ‘no guns’ is somehow healthier." (Sibelius earned GOA’s unending wrath when she vetoed concealed-carry gun legislation as governor of Kansas.) "It is even possible that the Obama-prescribed policy could preclude [insurance] reimbursement of any kind in a household which keeps a loaded firearm for self-defense."

These far-fetched extrapolations are quickly spreading beyond the GOA’s membership. The Washington Examiner quoted Dave Kopel, research director of the libertarian Independence Institute of Colorado: "The more you socialize costs, the more you empower the argument that the government has the authority to control private behavior." Kopel continued, "I don’t see anything in the bill that stops HHS from saying people get higher premiums for unhealthy habits such as owning a gun or a handgun."

With Republicans sticking to the party line against health care reform, the GOA is going after vulnerable Democrats…

Continue reading. It’s preposterous but many gun-owners are convinced that there is a vigorous and active plot to take their weapons.

Some delightful after-market add-ons for the Prius.

Very interesting article by Bruce Bower in Science News. One thing that leapt out at me was the depression risk associated with low extraversion, which I would guess that I have. (Another risk factor—a parent’s death while one is still a child—was also present.) The article begins:

Medications frequently prescribed for depression may not lighten a person’s mood until they brighten his or her personality. A new study suggests that the antidepressant medication paroxetine, or Paxil, fights depression most effectively when it first modifies two personality traits that predispose people to this mood disorder.

The two traits, high neuroticism and low extraversion, have already been linked to depression. Depressed patients taking Paxil reported much greater change in these traits, as assessed via scores on personality tests, than patients given placebo pills. The difference was notable even after accounting for the extent to which each treatment diminished standard measures of depression, says psychologist Tony Tang of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Patients who experienced especially pronounced personality change during four months of Paxil treatment displayed a particularly low depression relapse rate over the next year of treatment, Tang’s team reports in the December Archives of General Psychiatry.

“We propose that modern antidepressants work partly by correcting the long-term personality risk factors for depression,” Tang says.

Like many other researchers and clinicians, Tang’s group initially suspected that personality changes observed during treatment with SSRIs (short for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) such as Paxil occur as a result of alleviating depression. But the new findings suggest that Paxil exerts an independent effect on personality that contributes to the lessening of depression.

“This is more evidence than I’ve seen before that personality changes drive antidepressant responses, but it’s still a small study,” remarks psychiatrist Andrew Leuchter of the University of California, Los Angeles.

As measured on a standard personality questionnaire, …

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The Bureau of Indian Affairs for decades took as its mission screwing over Native Americans. But now justice—very delayed justice—may be on the way. Charlie Savage in the NY Times:

The federal government announced on Tuesday that it intends to pay $3.4 billion to settle claims that it has mismanaged the revenue in American Indian trust funds, potentially ending one of the largest and most complicated class-action lawsuits ever brought against the United States.

The tentative agreement, reached late Monday, would resolve a 13-year-old lawsuit over hundreds of thousands of land trust accounts that date to the 19th century. Specialists in federal tribal law described the lawsuit as one of the most important in the history of legal disputes involving the government’s treatment of American Indians.

President Obama hailed the agreement as an “important step towards a sincere reconciliation” between the federal government and American Indians, many of whom, he said, considered the protracted lawsuit a “stain” on the nation.

As a presidential candidate, Mr. Obama said, “I pledged my commitment to resolving this issue, and I am proud that my administration has taken this step today.”

For the agreement to become final, Congress must enact legislation and the federal courts must then sign off on it. Administration officials said they hoped those two steps would be completed in the next few months.

The dispute arises from a system dating to 1887, when Congress divided many tribal lands into parcels — most from 40 to 160 acres — and assigned them to individual Indians while selling off remaining lands.

The Interior Department now manages about 56 million acres of Indian trust land scattered across the country, with the heaviest concentration in Western states. The government handles leases on the land for mining, livestock grazing, timber harvesting and drilling for oil and gas. It then distributes the revenue raised by those leases to the American Indians. In the 2009 fiscal year, it collected about $298 million for more than 384,000 individual Indian accounts.

The lawsuit accuses the federal government of mismanaging that money. As a result, the value of the trusts has been unclear, and the Indians contend that they are owed far more than what they have been paid…

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Not, of course, in areas where the Obama Administration, in the person of Eric Holder, is struggling mightily to keep opaque and uninvestigated. What are they hiding? We’ll eventually know. We know enough now to suspect strongly that 3 Guantánamo detainees were murdered by guards. (The cover story is too weak to stand, and the record of the "investigation" shows that the investigation carefully avoid asking questions.)

But, still: some transparency is better than none. Jennifer LaFleur has the story at ProPublica:

Open-government advocates got an early holiday gift from the White House today.

The Office of Management and Budget gave federal agencies the detailed directive on transparency that President Barack Obama called for on his second day in office.

The 11-page directive sets out specific tasks for agencies and gives them deadlines. (Despite the 2008 date on the memo, it was not issued by the Bush administration.) It also calls for agencies to use technology to distribute information proactively, rather than forcing people to file Freedom of Information Act requests. Federal agencies process hundreds of thousands of FOIA requests each year.

From the looks of this new road map to transparency, federal officials will have to get busy. Among the tasks agencies must do within the next 45 days: …

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