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Filed under: Sarah Palin
“Alaska Governor Sarah Palin pardoned a turkey Thursday ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday but another turkey didn’t fare as well.
Warning: video could be disturbing to viewers
The governor was being interviewed by a local television news station while the work of the Triple-D Farm and Hatchery continued. That’s when Governor Palin found herself in a less than desirable spot for the interview.
Just minutes after pardoning one turkey, a farm worker began processing another turkey just a few feet behind her, plainly visible in the background of the video.”
via kare11.com | Twin Cities [thanks, walker]
Filed under: psych
In an abbreviated version of the argument they expound in their book The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Misery Into Depressive Disorder, psychologists Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield say that the epidemic of depression arises from changes in the definition of the disorder, and specifically the loss of context. There is a bereavement exclusion but it is the only place where psychiatrists recognize that there is a difference between a ‘normal’ reaction to a painful loss and a depressive disorder. In fact, in my training, the ‘naive’ comment, “You would be sad too if that was going on in your life” was presented derisively as the caricature of ignorance about depression. The ‘bible’ of psychiatric diagnoses, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), currently in its fourth edition, devalued the time-honored recognition by physicians that the context in which symptoms arose was an important considderation in determining whether what the person was experiencing was normal. This goes hand in hand with other pressures in my field to medicalize and pathologize normal emotional reactions, of which I have written with concern here in the past.
Filed under: Uncategorized
“People will post pictures with their credit cards but with the name and number greyed out,” said Stefan Savage, a professor at the University of California, San Diego who helped develop the software. “They should have the same sensitivity with their keys.” ‘
via MSNBC
Filed under: medicine
Pyridostigmine
“The Gulf War illness was real and was caused by pyridostigmine bromide pills taken by U.S. troops to neutralize the effects of nerve gas attacks and by exposure to neurotoxic insecticides, according to a VA advisory panel.”
via MedPage Today
Filed under: WoT
Ilan Goldenberg:
“Al Qaeda’s narrative is now under siege and it’s clearly uncertain about how to react. The election of the first African American President, one with a Muslim father, flies in the face of this narrative. It shows America as an open and tolerant society - not the oppressive empire Al Qaeda would like to portray. In fact, the overwhelmingly positive international reaction to Obama’s election is proof of the the threat Al Qaeda faces. ..
Thus, it’s not surprising that Zawahiri has resorted to calling Obama a “house negro” to try and paint him as just another American President. But this is clearly more a defensive and weak message than effective propaganda that might actually work.”
via Huffington Post
Filed under: 2008 Elections
“…a slick right wing site that claims the liberal media and ignorant voters are the only reason a guy with “limited experience, extreme liberal positions and radical political alliances could be elected President.” Are you serious? African chanting to start a video attacking Obama?! And then interviews with a handful of Obama supporters to “prove” they are ignorant? Why don’t we interview the millions of Americans who think Obama is a Muslim to prove the media has a right wing bias? Ignorance has no party allegiance.”
Related:
- Youth Told That Barack Obama Goes Both Ways (Gawker)
- Right-wing bloggers see their chance (Middletown Mike)
- “How Obama Got Elected” & The Right’s Delusions (Oliver Willis)
Filed under: Uncategorized
Filed under: 2008 Elections
Sam Smith:
via Undernews
Filed under: psych
According to British psychologist Daniel Freeman, nearly one in four Londoners regularly have paranoid thoughts. Freeman is a paranoia expert at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College and the author of a book on the subject.
Experts say there is a wide spectrum of paranoia, from the dangerous delusions that drive schizophrenics to violence to the irrational fears many people have daily.
“We are now starting to discover that madness is human and that we need to look at normal people to understand it,” said Dr. Jim van Os, a professor of psychiatry at Maastricht University in the Netherlands…”
via Las Vegas Sun
Filed under: Bush
- make it harder for the government to limit workers’ exposure to toxins,
- eliminate environmental review from decisions affecting fisheries,
- and ease restrictions on companies that blow up mountains to get at the coal underneath them.
Other midnight regulations in the works include
- rules to allow “factory farms” to ignore the Clean Water Act,
- rules making it tougher for employees to take family or medical leave
- and rules that would effectively gut the Endangered Species Act.
Most regulations are subject to public input; such is the sense of urgency that the Administration has brought to the task of despoliation that the Interior Department completed its “review” of two hundred thousand public comments on the endangered-species rules in just four days, a feat that, one congressional aide calculated, required each staff member involved to read through comments at the rate of seven per minute. “So little time, so much damage” is how the Times recently put it.”
via The New Yorker
Ganzfeld experiment
This is a special issue on the ‘Neuropsychology of Paranormal Experiences and Beliefs’
Contents include:
- The paranormal mind: How the study of anomalous experiences and beliefs may inform cognitive neuroscience (Peter Brugger, Christine Mohr)
- Visual attentional capture predicts belief in a meaningful world (Paola Bressan, Peter Kramer, Mara Germani)
- Sentences with core knowledge violations increase the size of N400 among paranormal believers (Marjaana Lindeman, Sebastian Cederström, Petteri Simola, Anni Simula, Sara Ollikainen, Tapani Riekki)
- Apophenia, theory of mind and schizotypy: Perceiving meaning and intentionality in randomness (Sophie Fyfe, Claire Williams, Oliver J. Mason, Graham J. Pickup)
- Believing in paranormal phenomena: Relations to asymmetry of body and brain (Günter Schulter, Ilona Papousek)
- Paranormal experience and the COMT dopaminergic gene: A preliminary attempt to associate phenotype with genotype using an underlying brain theory (Amir Raz, Terence Hines, John Fossella, Daniella Castro)
- Event-related potential correlates of paranormal ideation and unusual experiences (Alex Sumich, Veena Kumari, Evian Gordon, Nigel Tunstall, Michael Brammer)
- The transliminal brain at rest: Baseline EEG, unusual experiences, and access to unconscious mental activity (Jessica I. Fleck, Deborah L. Green, Jennifer L. Stevenson, Lisa Payne, Edward M. Bowden, Mark Jung-Beeman, John Kounios)
- Ganzfeld-induced hallucinatory experience, its phenomenology and cerebral electrophysiology (Jirí Wackermann, Peter Pütz, Carsten Allefeld)
- Magical ideation and hyperacusis (Stéphanie Dubal, Isabelle Viaud-Delmon)
- Psychological aspects of the alien contact experience (Christopher C. French, Julia Santomauro, Victoria Hamilton, Rachel Fox, Michael A. Thalbourne)
Highlights include:
- part of the variance of strength of belief in paranormal phenomena can be explained by patterns of functional hemispheric asymmetry that may be related to perturbations during fetal development
- an inconclusive attempt to correlate a specific phenotype concerning paranormal belief with a dopaminergic gene (COMT) known for its involvement in prefrontal executive cognition and for a polymorphism that is positively correlated with suggestibility.
- a study concluding that (a) religious people have a stronger belief in meaningfulness of coincidences, indicative of a more general tendency to maintain strong schemata, and that (b) this belief leads them to suppress, ignore, or forget information that has demonstrably captured their attention, but happens to be inconsistent with their schemata. <