Richard Wright on H. L. Mencken

Richard Wright on reading H. L. Mencken for the first time, and seeing the doors of an entire world thrown open to him. 

Perhaps there should be a plaque outside the Memphis library where Wright, with his borrowed library card and note from his white boss, strode in to begin his career in literature.

The City of Toronto in one sentence...

"My experience is that if you run into any trouble, it takes several years to shut it down," Mr. Pantalone said. "It's much easier to shut down the trouble at the beginning."

Easier to shut down the trouble - and the possibilities.

 http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/toronto/story.html?id=2041772#ixzz0SQ8UD1Ni

The mysteries of psychiatry

Charles Barber, a lecturer in psychiatry at Yale, penned an engrossing article about the state of psychiatry in this month's Wilson Quarterly.

Modern psychiatry has gone through three stages, suggests Barber: the "asylum psychiatry" of the Victorians, with its confinement and involuntary lobotomies, gave way to "community psychiatry" after the invention of the first antipsychotic drug, Thorazine. Now, after an explosion in brain imaging, and the discovery of drugs such as Valium and Prozac that seem to be able to help more and more of the population, the age of "corporate psychiatry" is upon us.

Besides being a great summary of the history of psychiatry, Barber points out some of the limitations of our age of brain scans and psychoactive drugs advertised on prime-time TV.

To this day, no one knows exactly how psychoactive drugs work. The etiology of depression remains an enduring scientific mystery, with entirely new ways of understanding the disease—or diseases, since what we think of as “depression” now is probably dozens of discrete disease entities—constantly emerging. Indeed, the basic tenet of biological psychiatry, that depression is a result of a deficit in serotonin, has proven to be one that was too eagerly embraced. When this “monoamine” theory of depression emerged in the 1960s, it gave the biologically minded practitioners of psychiatry what they had long been craving—a clean, decisive scientific theory to help bring the field in line with the rest of medicine. For patients, too, the serotonin hypothesis was enormously appealing. It not only provided the soothing clarity of a physical explanation for their maladies, it absolved them of responsibility for their illness, and to some degree, their behavior. Because, after all, who’s responsible for a chemical imbalance?

Will there be a new age of psychiatry? I wonder if our increasing knowledge of the brain, and our progress in designing and refining new psychiatric drugs, will only take us so far. So many psychiatric problems may be, in part, a "problem in living" rather than a problem in chemistry.

"Why is it so dark?"

The "Finno-Ugrian world" is the topic of Anders Kreuger's fascinating and lyrical essay in Eurozine. Lying buried underneath Russia's northern forests is the heritage of its Finno-Ugrian peoples. Speakers of obscure languages related to modern Finnish, Estonian and (distantly) Hungarian, their minority culture has passed through neglect, open hostility, and neglect from Czarist through Soviet to Putin-era Russia.

Kreuger traveled to Russia's Republics of Mordvinia, Udmurtia, Mari El and Komi to see how these languages and their speakers are getting by in a forsaken corner of Russia. Encounters with suicides, non-functioning parachutes and blindness ensue. Oh, and contemporary art.

Everything you know about Pythagoras is wrong

A genuinely interesting article from the LRB about Pythagoras. Far from being the founder of mathematics, he was actually some sort of proto-L. Ron Hubbard or Shoko Asahara who used thought control techniques, arbitrary rules and far-out superman stories to convince his followers he was Apollo. Not content to abstain from beans, ponder numerology and speculate about reincarnation, his restless acolytes succeeded in seizing power in several southern Italian cities.

The article raises some interesting questions, starting from the interesting insight that the conventional legend of Pythagoras as history's first mathematician is in fact totally wrong. This was established by one giant and completely obscure book first published in 1962 as Weisheit und Wissenschaft: Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaus und Platon.

This raises the question: Why is it that so many significant discoveries in the field of classics are:

1. Established by one dedicated scholar?
   
2. Totally unknown outside the field by otherwise well-educated people?

Two anecdotes

1. The man we know as "Ivan the Terrible" is called, in Russia, "Ivan the Awesome."
2. William Wilberforce, famous abolitionist and opponent of the slave trade, was an opium addict. It makes sense if you know where he came from.
   

We hoped for the best but things turned out like always

Do you think this article will start changing their minds? I'm not holding my breath.

For more on the appeal of dictators to "progressives," read this.

"They thought they were going to get the easy A from old RoboCop"

Sick of being offered total bullshit like "Screamers," Peter Weller decided to upgrade his skills. So he went back to school to study art history and now he teaches at UCLA. I swear I'm not making this up.

Incidentally, "Screamers" was a little bit of low-budget Cancon, often available for your viewing pleasure late at night or on boring Sunday afternoons. It was filmed in Montréal, which in the mid-90s was a pretty good stand-in for a deserted, fly-blown nuclear wasteland, at least in parts of the downtown. Now, not so much. The most memorable part of the film for me was how the screenwriters managed to have their main characters smoke in the movie. They dyed the cigarettes red and claimed they were necessary to prevent radiation poisoning. This was patiently explained in a totally superflorous conversation between Weller and his co-star, whoever that was.

The Use of Knowledge in Society

A fascinating, faaascinating article about, uh, ice shortages after a hurricane in North Carolina from Michael Munger. It's got everything you need - a gratuitous mention of the awesomest-sounding cape in America (Cape Fear), rednecks, chainsaws, and the po-lice. Yeehaw!

"Vegetable Oil Mogul Hit With RPG"

For amazing crime stories, you can't beat the "Crime Watch" section of the Moscow Times. The stories of gangland killings, stabbings, rapes, arson and general calamity are entertaining in themselves, but what really keeps me reading them are the little gruesome details that are uniquely Russian. For your delectation:

• Filmmaker Murdered, Flushed Down Toilet
• Girl, 15, Kills Attacker With His Own Knife
• Man Killed By Grenade Detonated In Pocket
• Former Pilot Accused of Hawking Illicit Wine
• Landlord Dismembered 2 Victims
• Vegetable Oil Mogul Hit With RPG

It's impossible to cheat an honest man

Predictably, the Enron scandal generated more heat than light. A large company with scores of investors went bust, wiping out the savings of little guys and giving big companies who loaned to Enron a scare. The affaire Enron provided a convenient cudgel for populist politicians, who held the company up as an example of cowboy capitalism. Their analysis of the collapse blamed the greed of Enron's upper management, claiming that executives like Ken Lay, Andrew Fastow and Jeffrey Skilling had lied to investors about the financial health of the company and the numerous "special purpose entities" used to conceal a dwindling cash flow. The result of all the fallout was the massive (and massively expensive) Sarbanes–Oxley act, which attempts to smoke out "corporate criminals" by generating massive amounts of paperwork.

This analysis makes for a tidy narrative. It has all we want in a story: the (now lost) state of grace, the evil villains, the clear-cut crime and the well-deserved punishment. However, as this fascinating article by Malcolm Gladwell explains, this narrative is totally wrong and the conclusions it draws - about investors as well as executives - is completely misleading.

All the information about Enron's side deals, its "special purpose entities," its cashflow and its liabilities was right there, in black and white. In fact, the Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the story of Enron's dwindling cash flow derived all his information from publicly-available filings that any investor could request. There was no real deception- and no heroic digging for the truth. The signs that something was horribly wrong were all there for anybody to see - if they wanted to see it.

Every once in a while, scandals like Bre-X and Enron come along. And we all pretend to be shocked, shocked when the inevitable happens. But who is fooling who? The investors who lost their shirts were looking to make a quick buck without understanding anything about the company they invested in and their curiosity was drowned under a spirit of boosterism and avarice. Their investing behaviour resembled taking a flyer on the ponies rather than a business activity.

"You can't cheat an honest man; never give a sucker an even break, or smarten up a chump."

God is dead. What's for dinner?

When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible:
one thereby almost deserves to live.

- From the Nietzsche Family Circus at Losanjealous.

"Our music is about the revival of a healthy German self-esteem."

It's almost a classic of the newspaper trade: Sceptical journo interviews Rammstein, trying to get them to admit that they're all a bunch of fucking Nazis. Rammstein plays along by dressing in pressed chinos and polo shirts and expressing their total bewilderment that anybody could mistake their music for protofascist ubermensh-pop.

I asked Lorenz whether the allusion to the Nuremberg Rally was intentional. Pique played over his odd, pointy features. “There is no reference to the Nuremberg rally. This is the first time I’ve ever even heard of that. It never would have dawned on me. We purposely did a video without people and symbols. I think it’s a very nice video. It’s almost my favorite video. The ants are so cute.”

These things just write themselves.

Science is great

1: Psychopharmacology (Berl). 2002 Mar;160(2):213-9. Epub 2001 Dec 20.

Modulation of the effects of alcohol on driving-related psychomotor skills by chronic exposure to cannabis.

Wright A, Terry Ph D. School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham UK.

RATIONALE:
Many previous studies have reported that alcohol and cannabis produce additive psychomotor effects in acute combination, but few have explicitly tested whether chronic exposure to cannabis, in the absence of acute administration, alters the effects of alcohol on psychomotor performance.

OBJECTIVES: To test whether long-term cannabis use modulates the effects of alcohol on psychomotor skills and self-reported mood and sensation.

METHODS:
Regular cannabis users (minimum: daily use for at least 3 years) and infrequent users (maximum: once-monthly use for at most 3 years) were matched for sex, age, alcohol intake and other drug use (14 participants in each group). Participants received alcohol (females 0.35 g/kg; males 0.45 g/kg) and placebo drinks. By urinalysis, only regular users tested positive for metabolites of Delta(9)-tetrahydrocannabinol; breath alcohol levels were similar between groups. Participants were tested on a computerised tracking task that has been used to screen drugs for adverse effects on driving. The task involved tracking a moving target on a computer screen while simultaneously responding to occasional presentations of stimuli in the periphery of the screen.

RESULTS:
Tracking accuracy was similar for both groups after placebo, but alcohol caused a significant deterioration in performance among infrequent cannabis users relative to regular users. These changes were mirrored by significant changes in self-reported scores for dizziness, measured by visual analogue scales. Alcohol slowed reaction times, but not differentially between groups.

CONCLUSIONS:
For psychomotor skills relevant to driving, chronic cannabis use (in the absence of acute administration) does not potentiate the effects of alcohol. In fact, the superior tracking accuracy of regular users relative to infrequent users after alcohol, and their lower scores for dizziness, suggest that chronic cannabis use may instead confer cross-tolerance to specific effects of alcohol on behaviour.

“(It is a) much more complex token. There are edge markers. It’s textured. It’s got a swirling edge,”

The Toronto Transit Commission roars into the 21st century with a bold technology upgrade: A new style of token!

These state-of-the-art tiny metal discs are equipped with the latest in... Well, nothing. The TTC lost $10 million in fares over the previous two years due to one token counterfeiting ring. I had a roommate who made his own by cutting up pennies with an "as seen on TV" pair of scissors.

The Toronto Star article goes on to add that $7 million is pissed away every year in counterfeit Metropasses, token scams, and enterprising souls who take a shortcut over top of the turnstiles - a remark the article blandly reports is "Just under 1 per cent of the system's total revenue."

How about them newfangled cards with their fancy prepaid fares you can buy in advance, fill up when you need from an ATM-style machine and not lose in the smallest corner of your jeans' front pocket?

The Moscow Metro has a more efficient, technologically advanced fare collection system than that of Canada's largest municipal transport network. It also has terrifying metal gates that automatically shoot out and crush your balls if you try to use a card that has run out of prepaid fares.

But they're not going to tell you what special metals this technological marvel is made from. So all you backyard alchemists can fuck off!

Why don't we privatize municipal transport to encourage innovation and better service, so that ridership will increase and car usage will go down?