Family: Octuplets' mother has 6 other children
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090130/ap_on_re_us/octuplets
By THOMAS WATKINS, Associated Press Writer Thomas Watkins, Associated Press Writer
WHITTIER, Calif. – The woman who gave birth to octuplets this week already had six children but refused the option of reducing the number of embryos she was carrying last year, her mother said.
Angela Suleman said good news for her daughter is all the babies appear healthy.
"I looked at those babies. They are so tiny and so beautiful," Suleman told The Los Angeles Times on Thursday.
Suleman's daughter gave birth to the octuplets Monday at Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center but had requested that doctors keep her name confidential.
She also was counseled about the risks of her pregnancy — then in its 12th week — and about the option of aborting some fetuses when she arrived at the hospital, Dr. Harold Henry said.
Suleman said her daughter had not expected so many embryos to keep developing, but rejected selective reduction.
"What do you suggest she should have done? She refused to have them killed," Suleman told the Times. "That is a very painful thing."
Doctors had been expecting only seven babies, but an eighth was born in the Caesarean delivery.
Media knew little about the woman until a family acquaintance told CBS' "The Early Show" on Thursday that the mother is "fairly young" and lives with her parents and her six children.
Within hours, media had camped out at the family's home in Whittier, where the babies' grandfather pulled up in a minivan in the evening and briefly spoke to The Associated Press. Beside him were two children — a 7-year-old and 6-year-old — who said they were excited to have eight new siblings.
But the grandfather warned that media may have a tougher time finding the family after the babies are released from the hospital.
"We have a huge house, not here," said the man, who would only identify himself as Ed. "You are never going to know where it is."
The mother's other children are 5 and 3, and 2-year-old twins, neighbors told the Times.
The six boys and two girls are only the second octuplets born alive in the United States. The were born nine weeks premature and ranged between 1 pound, 8 ounces and 3 pounds, 4 ounces at birth.
Dr. Mandhir Gupta said seven of the babies were breathing without assistance. One was still receiving oxygen through a tube in his nose.
All babies continued to receive intravenous nutrition. They were expected to remain in the hospital for several more weeks.
It's not clear if the octuplets' mother had embryos implanted. Another option is egg stimulation through fertility drugs, which provides less control. The doctor is supposed to use blood tests and ultrasound to monitor how many egg follicles develop. If too many do, the doctor is supposed to stop the drugs.
Doctors say they are not in the business of regulating family size. But they try everything to avoid higher-order pregnancies to prevent health problems for mothers and infants.
National guidelines suggest that doctors limit the number of embryos implanted to avoid multiple births. Women are also counseled to not go through with attempting pregnancy if too many eggs have budded when they're taking fertility drugs.
Dr. James Grifo, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the NYU School of Medicine, added: "I don't think it's our job to tell them how many babies they're allowed to have. I am not a policeman for reproduction in the United States. My role is to educate patients."
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COMMENT: Why the hell was a single mother of 6 kids given any fertility treatment at all? And WTF is her father's weird statement about "we have a huge house, not here - you are never going to find us"? What is really going on here?
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Friday, January 30, 2009
Saturday, November 8, 2008
ScienceDaily (Nov. 6, 2008) — Research from the University of Pittsburgh could expand the options for controlling schizophrenia by identifying a brain region that responds to more than one type of antipsychotic drug. The findings illustrate for the first time that the orbitofrontal cortex could be a promising target for developing future antipsychotic drugs—even those that have very different mechanisms of action.
The study will be published during the week of Nov. 3 in the online edition of the journal Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, with a print version to follow.
Bita Moghaddam, a professor in the Department of Neuroscience in Pitt's School of Arts and Sciences and the paper's lead author, found that schizophrenia-like activity in the orbitofrontal cortex—a brain region responsible for cognitive activity such as decision making—could be triggered by the two different neurotransmitters linked to schizophrenia: dopamine and glutamate. Brain activity was then normalized both by established antipsychotic medications that regulate only dopamine and by experimental treatments that specifically target glutamate.
"The orbitofrontal cortex is an area that's been somewhat neglected in schizophrenia research. This study should encourage researchers to focus on this brain region in imaging and other human studies, and also to use as a model for developing antipsychotic drugs," Moghaddam said. "Schizophrenia appears to be caused by very diverse and sometimes rare genetic mutations. Diverse mutations can end up causing the same disease if they disrupt the function of a common group of neurons or networks of neurons. We think that the key to understanding the pathophysiology of schizophrenia and finding better treatments is to identify these networks. This data suggests that the orbitofrontal cortex may be a critical component in networks affected by schizophrenia."
Working with UPMC neurology resident Houman Homayoun, Moghaddam first established that dopamine and glutamate could, separately, produce schizophrenia-like symptoms in the orbitofrontal cortex. They first simulated symptoms brought on by irregular neural receptors of glutamate. Studies within the last few years—including work by Moghaddam at Yale University—have shown that under-functioning glutamate receptors known as NMDA receptors can produce schizophrenia-like symptoms. Moghaddam and Homayoun found that stunting the NMDA receptors resulted in schizophrenia-like effects in the orbitofrontal cortex. The team also used a dose of amphetamine to simulate dopamine-related schizophrenia symptoms in the orbitofrontal cortex; schizophrenia is often linked to an excess of dopamine in the brain.
Moghaddam and Homayoun then tested the currently prescribed medication—a treatment developed more than 50 years ago that targets neural receptors of dopamine—and new experimental drugs that work on the glutamate system. They found that both medications normalized brain activity.
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COMMENT: Saying that schizophrenia is "linked to" dopamine tells us nothing. Linked how? What is the linkage? Gibberish.
The Medical Business talks only of "treatment" and "medication"; they are not even trying to help anyone be healthy - it is only about establishing you as a revenue stream.
People with scizophrenia should all take 100 mg of niacin each day after lunch, and strictly avoid high-copper foods, like oysters and liver.All multi-vitamins also have some copper, and should therefore be rejected in favor of separate vitamins and minerals in the proper forms at the appropriate times of day for each (vitamins C and B in the morning, zinc and magnesium at night, etc.) Although chocolate has some copper, a few ounces of high-cacao content chocolate is good for you (60-70%).
Drs Hoffer and Osmond have proven their "adrenochrome hypothesis", despite conventional doctors' claims to the contrary; however, their multi-gram doses are way too intense for most people, and they never explain why they put one person on 3 grams and another on 9, etc.
There is also the factor of "the schizophrenic family". This used to be called "the schizophrenic mother", but that was misogynistic/unscientific. Not that the whole family has schizophrenia, but that the family is severely dyfunctional, and the "schizophrenic" is the only member of their family who won't pretend everything's fine. He/she is a therefore made a scapegoat. (See, we didn't do anything wrong; son/daughter has schizophrenia - that's why he/she says such horrible things about us.) Learning about the psychopaths can be essential.
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Saturday, March 8, 2008
'Dexter' author set 'the rules,' but TV series takes its own route
By Carol Memmott, USA TODAY
Author Jeff Lindsay is no fan of horror novels, preferring biographies and historical fiction. He doesn't like scary movies and doesn't watch much TV except for the occasional episode of Dora the Explorer with his 4-year-old.
But on Sunday nights, he's tuning in to Dexter on CBS.
Dexter is based on Lindsay's novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter about a nocturnal serial killer named Dexter Morgan (played by Michael C. Hall). By day, Dexter works as a blood-spatter expert for the Miami police.
CBS picked up Dexter, a Showtime series, during the writers' strike. It has prompted some protests saying that a show that portrays a serial killer as likable — even if he kills only bad guys — has no place on broadcast TV.
What does Lindsay think of Dexter naysayers, including the television watchdog group objecting to its appearance on CBS?
"These are idiots who want to determine what we watch and don't watch," says Lindsay, who neither condemns nor defends Dexter's behavior. "I imagine that at the dark of the moon, they put on their brown shirts and go out goose-stepping."
House and CSI, Lindsay points out, are just as graphic as Dexter. CBS has had to edit out some of the adult language found in the Showtime series and in Lindsay's books. But, Lindsay says, " 'motherlover' is a pretty funny substitute for certain other words."
Lindsay is thrilled with Dexter's transformation from page to screen. "I love Michael C. Hall. When I first heard him read from the script, I thought, 'He's it. He's perfect.' "
Lindsay came up with the idea for Darkly Dreaming Dexter while attending a civics group luncheon in his home state of Florida. "An idea just popped into my head that a serial killer isn't always a bad thing." By the time lunch was over, he had outlined most of the story on a napkin.
The TV series' first season, now being aired on CBS, was based on Lindsay's first Dexter novel. Showtime's recently concluded second season was not based on Lindsay's novels, nor will the third be.
The creative separation between the scripts and his novels allows Lindsay (who co-wrote four other novels published in the 1990s) to write without considering how his books might translate to TV. A character who died in Season 2 of Showtime's Dexter, for example, is still alive in the fourth Dexter book, which Lindsay is now writing. Says Lindsay: "I know what an adaptation means."
Writers for the series, says executive producer John Goldwyn, create their own stories but stick to the spirit of Lindsay's creation. "Jeff gave us an incredibly rich template for all the characters, most profoundly and specifically the character of Dexter. Jeff, with that book and with that character, has established the rules. By that I mean 'The code of Harry (Dexter's adoptive father),' a very important thing — the idea that the kills are always righteous in their own way. That he does terrible things to even worse people. But also that kind of diffidence that lurks in his heart — 'Am I good? Am I bad? Can I have feelings, or do I not feel? I don't believe I feel?' — and yet in many ways he behaves very empathetically."
And as more TV viewers get to know Dexter, the popularity of the books may grow, too. The CBS broadcast premiere on Feb. 17 averaged 8.2 million viewers, roughly eight times more than the pay-cable Showtime audience. (Last Sunday's CBS viewership was 6.9 million.)
Lindsay, 55, who lives in South Florida, has been married for 20 years to writer Hilary Hemingway. Her father was Leicester Hemingway, Ernest's younger brother. Lindsay and Hilary knew each other as children, when their families took sailing vacations together. Their three daughters are 18, 12 and 4.
But Dexter is the man in his life. "I plan to keep writing about Dexter until someone tells me to knock it off."
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
THREE-YEAR STUDY AT SEVEN MAJOR UNIVERSITIES FINDS STRONG LINKS BETWEEN ARTS EDUCATION AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
Washington, DC, March 4, 2008 — Learning, Arts, and the Brain, a study three years in the making, is the result of research by cognitive neuroscientists from seven leading universities across the United States. In the Dana Consortium study, released today at a news conference at the Dana Foundation’s Washington, DC headquarters, researchers grappled with a fundamental question: Are smart people drawn to the arts or does arts training make people smarter?
For the first time, coordinated, multi-university scientific research brings us closer to answering that question. Learning, Arts, and the Brain advances our understanding of the effects of music, dance, and drama education on other types of learning. Children motivated in the arts develop attention skills and strategies for memory retrieval that also apply to other subject areas.
The research was led by Dr. Michael S. Gazzaniga of the University of California at Santa Barbara. “A life-affirming dimension is opening up in neuroscience,” said Dr. Gazzaniga, “to discover how the performance and appreciation of the arts enlarge cognitive capacities will be a long step forward in learning how better to learn and more enjoyably and productively to live. The consortium’s new findings and conceptual advances have clarified what now needs to be done.”
Participating researchers, using brain imaging studies and behavioral assessment, identified eight key points relevant to the interests of parents, students, educators, neuroscientists, and policy makers.
1. An interest in a performing art leads to a high state of motivation that produces the sustained attention necessary to improve performance and the training of attention that leads to improvement in other domains of cognition.
2. Genetic studies have begun to yield candidate genes that may help explain individual differences in interest in the arts.
3. Specific links exist between high levels of music training and the ability to manipulate information in both working and long-term memory; these links extend beyond the domain of music training.
4. In children, there appear to be specific links between the practice of music and skills in geometrical representation, though not in other forms of numerical representation.
5. Correlations exist between music training and both reading acquisition and sequence learning. One of the central predictors of early literacy, phonological awareness, is correlated with both music training and the development of a specific brain pathway.
6. Training in acting appears to lead to memory improvement through the learning of general skills for manipulating semantic information.
7. Adult self-reported interest in aesthetics is related to a temperamental factor of openness, which in turn is influenced by dopamine-related genes.
8. Learning to dance by effective observation is closely related to learning by physical practice, both in the level of achievement and also the neural substrates that support the organization of complex actions. Effective observational learning may transfer to other cognitive skills.
As several of the consortium members stressed at today’s news conference, much of their research was of a preliminary nature, yielding several tight correlations but not definitive causal relationships.
Although “there is still a lot of work to be done,” says Dr. Gazzaniga, the consortium’s research so far has clarified the way forward. “We now have further reasons to believe that training in the arts has positive benefits for more general cognitive mechanisms.”
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Saturday, February 9, 2008
Let There Be Markets:The Evangelical Roots of Economics
by GORDON BIGELOW
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COMMENT: This article by Gordon Bigelow is amazing, and should be read by everyone in its entirety. - Jeffrey
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Economics, as channeled by its popular avatars in media and politics, is the cosmology and the theodicy of our contemporary culture. More than religion itself, more than literature, more than cable television, it is economics that offers the dominant creation narrative of our society, depicting the relation of each of us to the universe we inhabit, the relation of human beings to God. And the story it tells is a marvelous one. In it an enormous multitude of strangers, all individuals, all striving alone, are nevertheless all bound together in a beautiful and natural pattern of existence: the market. This understanding of markets—not as artifacts of human civilization but as phenomena of nature—now serves as the unquestioned foundation of nearly all political and social debate. As mergers among media companies began to create monopolies on public information, ownership limits for these companies were not tightened but relaxed, because "the market" would provide its own natural limits to growth. When corporate accounting standards needed adjustment in the 1990s, such measures were cast aside because they would interfere with "market forces." Social Security may soon fall to the same inexorable argument.
The problem is that the story told by economics simply does not conform to reality. This can be seen clearly enough in the recent, high-profile examples of the failure of free-market thinking—how media giants have continued to grow, or how loose accounting regulations have destroyed countless millions in personal wealth. But mainstream economics also fails at a more fundamental level, in the way that it models basic human behavior. The core assumption of standard economics is that humans are fundamentally individual rather than social animals. The theory holds that all economic choices are acts of authentic, unmediated selfhood, rational statements reflecting who we are and what we want in life. But in reality even our purely "economic" choices are not made on the basis of pure autonomous selfhood; all of our choices are born out of layers of experience in contact with other people. What is entirely missing from the economic view of modem life is an understanding of the social world.
This was precisely the diagnosis made five years ago by a group of French graduate students in economics, who published their dissent in an open letter that soon made minor headlines around the world. In the letter the students declared that the economic theory taught in their courses was hopelessly out of touch, absorbed in its own private model of reality. They wrote:
We wish to escape from imaginary worlds! Most of us have chosen to study economics so as to acquire a deep understanding of the economic phenomena with which the citizens of today are confronted. But the teaching that is offered ... does not generally answer this expectation.... [T]his gap in the teaching, this disregard for concrete realities, poses an enormous problem for those who would like to render themselves useful to economic and social actors.
The discipline of economics was ill, the letter claimed, pathologically distant from the problems of real markets and real people.
The students who offered this diagnosis in 2000 were from the most prestigious rank of the French university system, the Grandes Ecoles, and for this reason their argument could not be easily dismissed. Critics who accuse economists of embracing useless theory usually find themselves accused of stupidity: of being unable to understand the elegant mathematics that proves the theory works. But the mathematical credentials of these students were impeccable. The best of a rising generation were revolting against their training, and because of this the press and public paid attention. Orthodox economists counterattacked, first in France and then internationally. Right-wing globalist Robert Solow wrote a savage editorial in Le Monde defending standard economic theory. The debate became so protracted that the French minister of education launched an inquiry.
Economics departments around the world are overwhelmingly populated by economists of one particular stripe. Within the field they are called "neoclassical" economists, and their approach to the discipline was developed over the course of the nineteenth century. According to the neo-classical school, people make choices based on a rational calculation of what will serve them best. The term for this is "utility maximization." The theory holds that every time a person buys something, sells something, quits a job, or invests, he is making a rational decision about what will be most useful to him, what will provide him "maximum utility." "Utility" can be pleasure (as in, "Which of these Disney cruises will make me happiest?") or security (as in, "Which 401(k) will let me retire before age eighty-five?") or self-satisfaction (as in, "How much will I put in the offering plate at church?"). If you bought a Ginsu knife at 3:00 A.M., a neoclassical economist will tell you that, at that time, you calculated that this purchase would optimize your resources. Neoclassical economics tends to downplay the importance of human institutions, seeing instead a system of flows and ex-changes that are governed by an inherent equilibrium. Predicated on the belief that markets operate in a scientifically knowable fashion, it sees them as self-regulating mathematical miracles, as delicate ecosystems best left alone.
If there is a whiff of creationism around this idea, it is no accident. By the time the term "economics" first emerged, in the 1870s, it was evangelical Christianity that had done the most to spur the field on toward its present scientific self-certainty.
When evangelical Christianity first grew into a powerful movement, between 1800 and 1850, studies of wealth and trade were called "political economy." The two books at the center of this new learning were Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) and David Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817). This was the period of the industrial transformation of Britain, a time of rapid urban growth and rapidly fluctuating markets. These books offered explanations of how societies become wealthy and how they can stay that way. They made the accelerated pace of urban life and industrial workshops seem understandable as part of a program that modern history would follow. But by the 1820s, a number of Smith's and Ricardo's ideas had become difficult for the growing merchant and investor class to accept. For Smith, the pursuit of wealth was a grotesque personal error, a misunderstanding of human happiness. In his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Smith argued that the acquisition of money brings no good in itself; it seems attractive only because of the mistaken belief that fine possessions draw the admiration of others. Smith welcomed acquisitiveness only because he concluded—in a proposition carried through to Wealth of Nations—that this pursuit of "baubles and trinkets" would ultimately enrich society as a whole. As the wealthy bought gold pickle forks and paid servants to herd their pet peacocks, the servants and the goldsmiths would benefit. It was on this dubious foundation that Smith built his case for freedom of trade.
By the 1820s and '30s, this foundation had become increasingly troubling to free-trade advocates, who sought, in their study of political economy, not just an explanation of rapid change but a moral justification for their own wealth and for the outlandish sufferings endured by the new industrial poor. Smith, who scoffed at personal riches, offered no comfort here. In The Wealth of Nations, the shrewd man of business was not a hero but a hapless bystander. Ricardo's work offered different but similarly troubling problems. Working from a basic analysis of the profits of land ownership, Ricardo concluded that the interests of different groups within an economy—owners, investors, renters, laborers—would always be in conflict with one another. Ricardo's credibility with the capitalists was unquestionable: he was not a philosopher like Adam Smith but a successful stockbroker who had retired young on his earnings. But his view of capitalism made it seem that a harmonious society was a thing of the past: class conflict was part of the modern world, and the gentle old England of squire and farmer was over.
The group that bridled most against these pessimistic elements of Smith and Ricardo was the evangelicals. These were middle-class reformers who wanted to reshape Protestant doctrine. For them it was unthinkable that capitalism led to class conflict, for that would mean that God had created a world at war with itself. The evangelicals believed in a providential God, one who built a logical and orderly universe, and they saw the new industrial economy as a fulfillment of God's plan. The free market, they believed, was a perfectly designed instrument to reward good Christian behavior and to punish and humiliate the unrepentant.
At the center of this early evangelical doctrine was the idea of original sin: we were all born stained by corruption and fleshly desire, and the true purpose of earthly life was to redeem this. The trials of economic life—the sweat of hard labor, the fear of poverty, the self-denial involved in saving—were earthly tests of sinfulness and virtue. While evangelicals believed salvation was ultimately possible only through conversion and faith, they saw the pain of earthly life as means of atonement for original sin.* These were the people that writers like Dickens detested. The extreme among them urged mortification of the flesh and would scold anyone who took pleasure in food, drink, or good company. Moreover, they regarded poverty as part of a divine program. Evangelicals interpreted the mental anguish of poverty and debt, and the physical agony of hunger or cold, as natural spurs to prick the conscience of sinners. They believed that the suffering of the poor would provoke remorse, reflection, and ultimately the conversion that would change their fate. In other words, poor people were poor for a reason, and helping them out of poverty would endanger their mortal souls. It was the evangelicals who began to see the business mogul as an heroic figure, his wealth a triumph of righteous will. The stockbroker, who to Adam Smith had been a suspicious and somewhat twisted character, was for nineteenth-century evangelicals a spiritual victor.
* The definitive source here is Boyd Hilton's masterful book The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785-1865.
By the 1820s evangelicals were a dominant force in British economic policy. As Peter Gray notes in his hook Famine, Land, and Politics, evangelical Anglicans held significant positions in government, and they applied their understanding of earthly life as atonement for sin in direct ways. Their first major impact was in dismantling the old parish-based system of aiding the poor and aging, a policy battle that resulted in the Poor Law Amendment of 1834. Traditionally, people who could not work or support themselves, including orphans and the disabled, had been helped by local parish organizations. It had been a joint responsibility of church and state to prevent the starvation and avoidable suffering of people who had no way to earn a living.
The Poor Law nationalized and monopolized poverty administration. It forbade cash payments to any poor citizen and mandated that his only re-course be the local workhouse. Workhouses became orphanages, insane asylums, nursing homes, public hospitals, and factories for the able-bodied. Protests over the conditions in these prison-like facilities, particularly the conditions for children, mounted throughout the 1830s. But it did not surprise the evangelicals to learn that life in the workhouses was miserable. These early faith-based initiatives regarded poverty as a divinely sanctioned payment plan for a sinful life. This first anti-poverty program in the first industrial economy was not designed to alleviate suffering, nor to reduce the number of poor children in future generations. Poverty was not understood as a problem to be fixed. It was a spiritual condition. Work-houses weren't supposed to help children prepare for life; they were supposed to save their souls.
Looking back two centuries at these early debates, it is clear that a pure free-market ideology can be logically sustained only if it is based in a fiery religious conviction. The contradictions involved are otherwise simply too powerful. The premise of the unpleasant workhouse program was that it would create incentives to work. But the program also acknowledged that there were multitudes of people who were either unable to work or unable to find jobs. The founding assumption of the program was that the market would take care of itself and all of us in the process. But the program also had to embrace the very opposite assumption: that there were many people whom the market could not accommodate, and so some way must be found to warehouse them. The market is a complete solution, the market is a partial solution—both statements were affirmed at the same time. And the only way to hold together these incommensurable views is through a leap of faith.Victorian evangelicals took a similar approach to the crisis in Ireland between 1845 and 1850—the Great Hunger, what came to he known as the potato famine. In office at the time of the first reports of starvation, the Tory administration of Robert Peel responded with a program of food supports, importing yellow cornmeal from the United States and selling it cheaply to wholesalers. Corn was an unfamiliar grain in Ireland, but it provided a cheap food source. In 1846, however, a Whig government headed by Lord Russell succeeded Peel and quickly dismantled the relief program. Russell and most of his central staff were fervent evangelicals, and they regarded the cornmeal program as an artificial intervention into the free market. Charles Trevelyan, assistant secretary of the treasury, called the program a "monstrous centralization" and argued that it would simply perpetuate the problems of the Irish poor. Trevelyan viewed the potato-dependent economy as the result of Irish backwardness and self-indulgence. This crisis seemed to offer the opportunity for the Irish to atone. With Russell's backing, Trevelyan stopped the supply of food. He argued that the fear of starvation would ultimately be useful in modernizing Irish agriculture: it would force the poor off land that could no longer support them. The cheap labor they would provide in towns and cities would stimulate manufacturing, and the now depopulated countryside could be used for more profitable cattle farming. He wrote that his plan would "stimulate the industry of the people" and "augment the productive powers of the soil."
There was no manufacturing boom. Roughly a million people died; another million emigrated. The population of Ireland dropped by nearly one quarter in the space of a decade. It remains one of the most striking illustrations of the incapacity of markets to run themselves. When government corn supplements stopped, and food prices rose, private charities and workhouses were overwhelmed, and families starved by the sides of roads. When British leadership put its faith in the natural balance of an open market to create the best outcome, the result was disaster. Evangelicals like Trevelyan didn't look smart and pious after the famine; they looked blind to human reality and desperately cruel. Their brand of political economy, grounded in evangelical doctrine, went into retreat and lost influence.
The phrase "political economy" itself began to connote a cruel disregard for human suffering. And so a generation later, when the next phase of capitalist boosterism emerged, the term "political economy" was simply junked. The new field was called "economics." What had got the political economists into trouble a generation before was the perception, from a public dominated by Dickens readers, that "political economy" was mostly about politics—about imposing a zealous ideology of the market. Economics was devised, instead, as a science, a field of objective knowledge with iron mathematical laws. Re-modeling economics along the lines of physics insulated the new discipline from any charges filed on moral or sentimental grounds. William Stanley Jevons made this case in 1871, comparing the "Theory of Economy" to "the science of Statical Mechanics" (i.e., physics) and arguing that "the Laws of Exchange" in the marketplace "resemble the Laws of Equilibrium."
The comparison with physics is particularly instructive. The laws of Newtonian mechanics, like any basic laws of science, depend on the assumption of ideal conditions—e.g., the frictionless plane. In conceiving their discipline as a search for mathematical laws, economists have abstracted to their own ideal conditions, which for the most part consist of an utterly denuded vision of man himself. What they consider "friction" is the better part of what makes us human: our interactions with one another, our irrational desires. Today we often think of science and religion as standing in opposition, but the "scientific" turn made by Jevons and his fellows only served to enshrine the faith of their evangelical predecessors. The evangelicals believed that the market was a divine system, guided by spiritual laws. The "scientific" economists saw the market as a natural system, a principle of equilibrium produced in the balance of individual souls.
When Tom DeLay or Michael Powell mentions "the market," he is referring to this imagined place, where equilibrium rules, consumers get what they want, and the fairest outcomes occur spontaneously. U.S. policy debate, both in Congress and in the press, proceeds today as if the neoclassical theory of the free market were incontrovertible, endorsed by science and ordained by God. But markets are not spontaneous features of nature; they are creations of human civilization, like, for example, skating rinks. A right-wing "complexity theorist" will tell you that the regular circulation of skaters around the rink, dodging small children, quietly adjusting speed and direction, is a spontaneous natural order, a glorious fractal image of human totality. But that orderly, pleasurable pattern on the ice comes from a series of human acts and interventions: the sign on the gate that says "stay to the right," the manager who kicks out the rowdy teenagers. Economies exist because human beings create them. The claim that markets are products of higher-order law, products of nature or of divine will, simply lends legitimacy to one particularly extreme view of politics and society.
Because the neoclassical theory emphasizes calculations made by individuals, it tends not to focus on the impact of external and social factors like advertising, education, research funding, or lobbying. Consumer behavior, for an orthodox economist, is a kind of perfect free expression. But as any twenty-three-year-old marketing intern, or any six-year-old child, can tell you, buying things is not just about the rational processing of information. The Happy Meal isn't about satisfying hunger; it's about the plastic toy. Houses aren't for shelter, they are for lifestyles. Automobiles aren't transport, they're image projectors. Diamonds aren't ornaments, they are forever. We buy things partly based on who we are, but at the same time we believe that buying things makes us who we are and might make us into someone different.
Critical voices within economics have been making this complaint at least as far back as Thorstein Veblen, the late nineteenth-century economist best known for his theory of "conspicuous consumption." In The Theory of the Leisure Class, and in a series of essays in the 1890s, Veblen showed that patterns of consumption and work broadly conform to the boundaries set by class and culture. Neoclassical economists acknowledge that the wealthy some-times buy things just to show off, but they insist that regular people under normal circumstances buy only what they intrinsically desire. Veblen saw that it was impossible to understand individual economic choices without understanding the world in which those choices were made.
A helpful, if disquieting, example comes by way of the twentieth-century anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, who, in his book Culture and Practical Reason, points out that the entire structure of U.S. agriculture "would change overnight if we ate dogs." What Sahlins means is that the powerful social prohibition against using pets as protein will always condition consumer choices. American children and teens do not decide individually that they will for all their lives spare American dogs from the abattoir. This choice is made for them by the historical world into which they are born. They are no more free to eat dog than they are to wear buckskins to basketball practice. As economist Anne Mayhew recently observed, even consumers at the bottom of the wage scale, with absolutely no discretionary income, choose the necessities of life with a common-sense awareness of how their choices will be perceived by neighbors, family, and the wider social world.
"Post-autistic economics" (PAE) is the name now taken by those few economists who hope to rescue the discipline from the neoclassical model; the name is an homage to the dissident French students, whose manifesto called the standard model "autistic." It is a hilariously apt (albeit mildly offensive) diagnosis, and it could be just as well applied to Homo economicus himself, the economic actor envisioned by the neoclassical theory, who performs dazzling calculations of utility maximization despite being entirely unable to communicate with his fellow man. Not all PAE economists oppose the premises of the dominant neoclassical school, but they all agree that neoclassical theory cannot stand on its own. In other words, they agree that economics must begin to recognize the social—what the dissident economist Edward Fullbrook calls "intersubjectivity"—and, in the process, give up its pretense to scientific completeness.
Until it does, generations of college students will continue to have their worldviews irreparably distorted by basic economics courses, whose right-wing ideology hides behind a cloak of science. The first evangelicals fought for free trade because they thought it would encourage virtuous behavior, but two centuries of capitalism have taught a different lesson, many tunes over. The wages of sin are often, and notoriously, a private jet and a wicked stock-option package. The wages of hard moral choice are often $5.15 an hour. Free markets don't promote public virtue; they promote private interest. In this way they are neither "free" (that is, independent of human influence) nor uniformly helpful in promoting freedom. Market trends are not truly indicative of the kind of society that Americans wish to create for their children. Consumer demand—for gated homes, exurban sprawl, or fluorescent-dyed sugar titration kits called cereal—does not reflect democratic political choice. If indeed economics is this society's most authoritative version of its own story, ours is a notoriously unreliable narrator.
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COMMENT: Did you catch that? Helping people would be violating God's plan. Holy Shit! Millions of people in this country don't even realize that they've been infected with this twisted insane evil way of thinking.
Since reality exists, if humans - who are born into the world totally dependent - are not provided with the resources necessary to meet their needs, then they cannot function properly, and cannot do the things that produce success. What qualities does that environment select for?
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Wednesday, January 30, 2008
ABC Show Will Go on, Over Protest by Doctors
ABC said on Monday it would include a disclaimer about the plot line of the debut episode of the drama “Eli Stone,” which links childhood vaccines to autism, and direct viewers to a government Web site that discredits such a link.
ABC’s decision follows a call by the American Academy of Pediatrics for ABC to cancel the opening episode of “Eli Stone,” which is scheduled to be broadcast at 10 p.m. Thursday.
In a letter to ABC executives on Friday, Dr. Renee R. Jenkins, the president of the pediatrics academy, warned that the episode “could lead to a tragic decline in immunization rates.” The first episode portrays a lawyer who wins a case against a drug company on behalf of a mother who believes that a preservative in a vaccine caused her child’s autism.
The link between a vaccine preservative called thimerosal and autism has been debated for much of the last decade, but many scientific studies have failed to show any causal link between the two.
The letter from the pediatrics group followed an article in The New York Times last week highlighting the episode. Greg Berlanti, a co-creator and executive producer of the series, said that executives at neither ABC nor its ABC Studios production unit had any qualms about the episode, which he said he believed showed both sides of the argument.
Most public health organizations believe there is only one side, however. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the Institute of Medicine and the World Health Organization are among the organizations that have studied and rejected possible links between autism and the preservative in vaccines.
“Many people trust the health information presented on fictional television shows, which influences their decisions about health care,” Dr. Jenkins wrote. Her letter said that beginning in 1998 in Britain, “erroneous reports linking the measles vaccine to autism prompted a decline in vaccination and the worst outbreak of measles in two decades, including the deaths of several children.”
ABC will present a written notice and voice-over saying: “The following story is fictional and does not portray any actual persons, companies, products or events.” A second card will direct viewers to the Center for Disease Control’s autism Web site, www.cdc.gov/autism.
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Comment: Vaccines are an attack on the human race.
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Friday, January 4, 2008
12-year-old catches 551-pound bull shark in Florida waters
January 2, 2008WEST PALM BEACH, Fla.—A 12-year-old Connecticut boy may be the new Florida state record holder for catching the heaviest bull shark.
Aidan Murray Medley had a spent a half day at sea Tuesday when he reeled in the 551-pound bull shark just north of the Palm Beach Inlet.
The seventh-grader at Eagle Hill School in Greenwich was in Palm Beach County on vacation with his family. They plan to submit his catch for a new state record.
Florida wildlife officials say the current record set in 1981 was a 517-pound catch at Panama City Beach.
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COMMENT: Sharks are our fellow predators; predators are supposed to hunt prey animals, NOT other predators.
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