Obama's "Love Letter" to the CIA Distorts Historical Truth

by Sherwood Ross

One can only wonder what prompted the incredible absurdities written by President Obama in his April 16^th love letter to the employees of the Central Intelligence Agency(CIA). It not only absolves CIA torturers from prosecution on the grounds that they were only following orders, (the same defense employed by Nazi hoodlums at the Nuremburg war crimes trials after World War Two,) but his laudatory statements about The Agency fly in the face of the historical record. Obama’s letter surely will go down in history as one of the most disingenuous documents ever to appear under the presidential seal. Worse, it strongly hints the American public has elected another in that long line of imperial presidents stretching back to William McKinley.

To anyone with a nodding familiarity of the history of The Agency, the greatest balderdash of all is Obama’s statement to employees that “Your work has informed every President dating back to President Truman and it protects our people.” In fact, "misinformed "would be a much better description of the CIA's intelligence product as its egregious errors have misled presidents so often on so many major events there are periods when it seems to have gotten nothing right and everything wrong.

President Truman feared the CIA would degenerate into an American “Gestapo,” (Truman’s word) and, far from protecting the American people, the CIA’s lawless methods have inflamed much of the civilized world against America.

Don’t take my word for that! During the administration of President Lyndon Johnson, the CIA’s own inspector general issued a report excoriating the Agency for its use of terror methods. In his book “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA,” New York Times reporter Tim Weiner writes: “The report implicated every living CIA officer who had served as chief of the clandestine service---Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, Richard Helms, and Desmond FitzGerald---in conspiracies to commit murder.” (This is the Agency Obama says upholds our laws?)

About the same time, then Secretary of State Dean Rusk ordered his intelligence chief Tom Hughes to conduct his own probe of the CIA’s covert operations. Hughes reported back, Weiner writes, “that buying foreign politicians, supporting foreign coups, and running guns to foreign rebels could corrode American values. He proposed that the United States should cut covert action ‘to an irreducible minimum.’”

One wonders why a nation that President Obama celebrates as “a nation of laws” whose administration “will always act in accordance with the law” in the same document declares, “I have fought for the principle that the United States must carry out covert activities…” What kind of principle is that to fight for? Neither Moses descending from Sinai or Jesus on the Mount uttered any words that justified the sort of criminal conduct the CIA in our times conceals under the rubric of “covert action.”

Quite the contrary! Just imagine the hell and misery the Middle East would have been spared if President Eisenhower had not agreed to the CIA’s plan to overthrow the elected government of Iran in 1953! Imagine what the people of Chile would have been spared if President Nixon had not okayed the CIA plot to overthrow the elected president, Salvador Allende, in 1973! Imagine! Imagine! All across Latin America, from Argentina to Guatemala, in a score of nations, hundreds of thousands of innocent people would be alive today if the CIA had not financed, armed and abetted militarists that overthrew elected governments and then inflicted a reign of terror on the citizenry.

After the CIA’s extensive history of crimes from drug-running to subverting free elections to torture to assassination, for President Obama to praise The Agency and indicate he endorses its covert activities should set off alarm bells around the world.

As for Obama’s statement “The men and women of our intelligence community serve courageously on the front lines of a dangerous world,” one must ask how much courage it takes for an illegal posse of CIA thugs to kidnap an unarmed civilian off the streets of, say, Milan, Italy, and transport him to another country for torture? How much courage does it take to beat up a man tied in a chair or to slam a man’s head into a wall when his hands are tied behind his back? Forgive me if this smells a whole lot like cowardice, not courage. The unlimited “rendition” spree authorized by the last President Bush was nothing new for the Agency, either. Weiner writes the CIA had been running “secret interrogation centers before---beginning in 1950, in Germany, Japan, and Panama. It had participated in the torture of captured enemy combatants before---beginning in 1967, under the Phoenix program in Vietnam.” Folks, this has been a rogue agency from its inception.

By failing to prosecute the CIA officials’ criminal practices of rendition and torture and declaring his administration “will stand by them,” Obama betrays his sworn obligation to uphold the Constitution of the United States, a document that enshrines human rights and makes the Geneva Convention, among other treaties, the supreme law of the land. The CIA is an agency with a long and ugly history of crimes and atrocities perpetrated on a global scale. The world would be better off if the President abolished it, rather than commended it. To fail to prosecute its current crop of gangsters, much less to shower them with public praise, is an act of gross misfeasance.

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COMMENT: There is no such thing as lying in the service of The Good.

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Beware of the boss from the black lagoon

Margaret Zsigmond
April 15, 2009

DURING this downturn watch out for the bully bosses who are relishing their power over you.

One can almost hear their tiny reptilian brains warming to the kill. You're not imagining things when you see their slime on the office floor. Catch the bully boss unawares and you will see him baring his blood-stained fangs.

If your boss is a bully, up your antidepressants and blood pressure pills and get ready for unpredictable, insane behaviour. His none-too-subtle hints that you are replaceable are going to play havoc with your sensibilities and cause your work to look second-rate as he keeps telling you it is. Any day now, he will call you into his nest and, with a gleam in his eye, tell you your services are no longer required.

That's how my bully boss sacked me. With a gleam in his eye and a lopsided smile for the entire two seconds that it took him to tell me I was redundant. After two months of treating me like the poo under his shoe, humiliating me in meetings and insinuating that my work is drivel, it had come to this. All I could do was smile and say, OK.

Later, in the privacy of a toilet cubicle, my self-esteem departs for Saturn and the thought of my smiling mother reduces me to a blubbering mess of self-pity.

Much later on, I remind myself that the targets of bully bosses tend to be high achievers. I take heart in the fact that bully bosses behave tyrannically because they are essentially inept, incapable and insecure.

But none of this consoles me. The simple fact is that my certifiably insane boss gets to keep his job while I'm relegated to a Centrelink queue.

In a further attempt to console myself, I discover that 81 per cent of bullies are managers, 84 per cent of their targets are women and 82 per cent of their targets eventually lose their jobs.

When jobs are scarce, the only people working will be bullies and their toadies. The advice columns on how to deal with these despicable people tell me to agree with them, not to react, and refuse to fight. How unsatisfactory.

No, the only other cheek he is getting is the one on my posterior. When he shouts, I'll shout back. When he snarls, I'll snarl even louder. I shall take up a threatening stance and become unreasonable. My behaviour will be deemed dangerous. Just like his - except that Security has never been asked to remove him from the premises.

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COMMENT: It is very important to always remember that the psychopaths are incompetent, and therefore are threatened by people who are competent. Upon having achieved a position of power "by hook or by crook", the psycho will then promote into management people who are not of high ability, but who have demonstrated a willingness to obey.

People of high ability may get jobs in this system, but they will be confined to specific areas, doing things the psychos need done that the psychos, being incompetent, cannot do for themselves. Usually this will be science, engineering, or technology, but even in these fields the bosses will be those who obey the stupid and frequently insane orders of the COC. (e.g., Candace Pert, author of Molecules of Emotion, said after working at the CDC that even if you were a brilliant scientist, you still had to go to the bosses for funding, who were almost all M.D.'s who knew nothing about what you were asking them to fund.)

Many "experts" in the media are the result of this process, which has been going on forever. Consider how everyone's consciousness is corrupted by this factor.

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Dallas police: Officer drew gun during traffic stop of NFL player outside hospital

By STEVE THOMPSON and TANYA EISERER / The Dallas Morning News

The Dallas Police Department confirmed Thursday that an officer drew a gun on NFL running back Ryan Moats and his wife after he stopped them to give them a ticket even as they begged to hurry to the bedside of their dying mother.

As he rushed his family to the hospital, Ryan Moats, 26, rolled through a red light. A Dallas police officer pulled their SUV over outside the emergency room at the Baylor Regional Medical Center at Plano.

“He was pointing a gun at me as soon as I got out of the car,” said his wife, Tamishia Moats. “It was the weirdest feeling because I’ve never had a gun pointed at me before under those circumstances.”

Seconds later, Ryan Moats and his wife explained that her mother was dying inside the hospital.

“You really want to go through this right now?” Moats pleaded. “My mother-in-law is dying. Right now!”

A Dallas police spokesman said that Officer Robert Powell told his commanders that he drew his gun, but did not point it. Lt. Andy Harvey said it is not unusual for officers to draw a gun without pointing it. Drawing a gun is not unusual in traffic stops where officers feel threatened.

Officer Powell could not be reached for comment.

Powell, 25, spent long minutes writing Moats a ticket and threatened him with arrest during the incident.

“I can screw you over,” the officer told Moats. “I’d rather not do that.”

The scene last week, captured by a dashboard video camera, prompted apologies and the promise of an investigation from Dallas police officials.

“There were some things that were said that were disturbing, to say the least,” said Harvey.

Moats’ mother-in-law, Jonetta Collinsworth, was struggling at 45 with breast cancer that had spread throughout her body. Family members rushed to her bedside from as far away as California.

On March 17, the Moatses had gone to their Frisco home to get some rest. Around midnight, they received word that they needed to hurry back to the hospital if they wanted to see Collinsworth before she died.

The couple, along with Collinsworth’s father and an aunt, jumped into the SUV and headed back toward the hospital. They exited the Dallas North Tollway, just down the street from the hospital.

Moats turned on his hazard lights. He stopped at a red light, where, he said, the only nearby motorist signaled for him to go ahead. He went through.

Powell, watching traffic from a hidden spot, flipped on his lights and sirens. In less than a minute, he caught up to the SUV and followed for about 20 more seconds as Moats found a parking spot outside the emergency room.

Tamishia, 27, was the first out. Powell drew his gun and yelled at her to get back in.

“Get in there!” he yelled. “Let me see your hands!”

“My mom is dying,” she explained to him.

Powell was undeterred.

“I saw in his eyes that he really did not care,” Tamishia Moats said. “Honestly, I don’t think I cared that he had a gun pointed at me. My train of thought is that I’m going to see my mom in the hospital before she dies.”

Tamishia Moats and her great-aunt ignored the officer and headed into the hospital.

“It was almost like a movie,” she said, “It felt like we had robbed a bank or something.”

Ryan Moats, who stayed behind with the father of the dying woman, said Powell also pointed his gun at him. He said he put his hands on the car because he was afraid that he might get shot.

“I put my hands on the car so he couldn’t say I reached for something,” Ryan said. “He didn’t ask me to put my hands on the car. I just did it to try to protect myself. I was pleading with him.”

He tried to explain the situation to the officer.

“I waited until no traffic was coming,” Moats told Powell, explaining his passage through the red light. “I got seconds before she’s gone, man.”

Powell demanded his license and proof of insurance. Moats produced his license but said he didn’t know where the insurance paperwork was.

“Just give me a ticket or whatever,” he said, beginning to sound exasperated and a little argumentative.

“Shut your mouth,” Powell told him. “You can cooperate and settle down, or I can just take you to jail for running a red light.”

There was more back and forth.

“If you’re going to give me a ticket, give me a ticket.”

“Your attitude says that you need one.”

“All I’m asking you is just to hurry up.”

Powell began a lecture.

“If you want to keep this going, I’ll just put you in handcuffs,” the officer said, “and I’ll take you to jail for running a red light.”

Powell made several more points, including that the SUV was illegally parked. Moats replied “Yes sir” to each.

“Understand what I can do,” Powell concluded. “I can tow your truck. I can charge you with fleeing. I can make your night very difficult.”

“I understand,” Moats responded. “I hope you’ll be a great person and not do that.”

Hospital security guards arrived and told Powell that the Moatses’ relative really was upstairs dying.

Powell spent several minutes inside his squad car, in part to check Moats for outstanding warrants. He found none.

Another hospital staffer came out and spoke with a Plano police officer who had arrived.

“Hey, that’s the nurse,” the Plano officer told Powell. “She said that the mom’s dying right now, and she’s wanting to know if they can get him up there before she dies.”

“All right,” Powell replied. “I’m almost done.”

As Moats signed the ticket, Powell continued his lecture.

“Attitude’s everything,” he said. “All you had to do is stop, tell me what was going on. More than likely, I would have let you go.”

It had been about 13 minutes.

Moats and Collinsworth’s father went into the hospital, where they found Collinsworth had died, with her daughter at her side.

The Moatses, who are black, said Wednesday that they can’t help but think that race might have played a part in how Powell, who is white, treated them.

“I think he should lose his job,” said Ryan Moats, a Dallas native who attended Bishop Lynch High School and now plays for the Houston Texans.

Powell was hired in January 2006. Assistant Chief Floyd Simpson said Powell told police officials that he believed that he was doing his job. He has been re-assigned to dispatch pending an investigation.

“When people are in distress, we should come to the rescue,” said Simpson. “We shouldn’t further their distress.”

Collinsworth was buried Saturday in Louisiana.

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COMMENT: No, You Are Not Free to run a red light, even if you are trying to see someone in a hospital, and even if the "only nearby motorist" waves you through.

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Drugmakers' push boosts 'murky' ailment

By MATTHEW PERRONE, AP Business Writer

WASHINGTON – Two drugmakers spent hundreds of millions of dollars last year to raise awareness of a murky illness, helping boost sales of pills recently approved as treatments and drowning out unresolved questions — including whether it's a real disease at all.

Key components of the industry-funded buzz over the pain-and-fatigue ailment fibromyalgia are grants — more than $6 million donated by drugmakers Eli Lilly and Pfizer in the first three quarters of 2008 — to nonprofit groups for medical conferences and educational campaigns, an Associated Press analysis found.

That's more than they gave for more accepted ailments such as diabetes and Alzheimer's. Among grants tied to specific diseases, fibromyalgia ranked third for each company, behind only cancer and AIDS for Pfizer and cancer and depression for Lilly.

Fibromyalgia draws skepticism for several reasons. The cause is unknown. There are no tests to confirm a diagnosis. Many patients also fit the criteria for chronic fatigue syndrome and other pain ailments.

Experts don't doubt the patients are in pain. They differ on what to call it and how to treat it.

Many doctors and patients say the drugmakers are educating the medical establishment about a misunderstood illness, much as they did with depression in the 1980s. Those with fibromyalgia have often had to fight perceptions that they are hypochondriacs, or even faking their pain.

But critics say the companies are hyping fibromyalgia along with their treatments, and that the grantmaking is a textbook example of how drugmakers unduly influence doctors and patients.

"I think the purpose of most pharmaceutical company efforts is to do a little disease-mongering and to have people use their drugs," said Dr. Frederick Wolfe, who was lead author of the guidelines defining fibromyalgia in 1990 but has since become one of its leading skeptics.

Whatever the motive, the push has paid off. Between the first quarter of 2007 and the fourth quarter of 2008, sales rose from $395 million to $702 million for Pfizer's Lyrica, and $442 million to $721 million for Lilly's Cymbalta.

Cymbalta, an antidepressant, won Food and Drug Administration approval as a treatment for fibromyalgia in June. Lyrica, originally approved for epileptic seizures, was approved for fibromyalgia a year earlier.

Drugmakers respond to skepticism by pointing out that fibromyalgia is recognized by medical societies, including the American College of Rheumatology.

"I think what we're seeing here is just the evolution of greater awareness about a condition that has generally been neglected or poorly managed," said Steve Romano, a Pfizer vice president who oversees its neuroscience division. "And it's mainly being facilitated by the fact the FDA has now approved effective compounds."

The FDA approved the drugs because they've been shown to reduce pain in fibromyalgia patients, though it's not clear how. Some patients say the drugs can help, but the side effects include nausea, weight gain and drowsiness.

Helen Arellanes of Los Angeles was diagnosed with fibromyalgia in September 2007 and later left her job to go on disability. She takes five medications for pain, including Lyrica and Cymbalta.

"I call it my fibromyalgia fog, because I'm so medicated I go through the day feeling like I'm not really there," Arellanes said. "But if for some reason I miss a dose of medication, I'm in so much pain."

A single mother of three, Arellanes sometimes struggles to afford all her medications. She said she is grateful that a local Pfizer sales representative occasionally gives her free samples of Lyrica "to carry me through the month."

The drugmakers' grant-making is dwarfed by advertisement spending. Eli Lilly spent roughly $128.4 million in the first three quarters of 2008 on ads to promote Cymbalta, according to TNS Media Intelligence. Pfizer Inc. spent more than $125 million advertising Lyrica.

But some say the grants' influence goes much further than dollar figures suggest. Such efforts steer attention to diseases, influencing patients and doctors and making diagnosis more frequent, they say.

"The underlying purpose here is really marketing, and they do that by sponsoring symposia and hiring physicians to give lectures and prepare materials," said Wolfe, who directs the National Data Bank for Rheumatic Diseases in Wichita, Kan.

Similar criticisms have dogged drugmakers' marketing of medicines for overactive bladder and restless legs syndrome.

Many of the grants go to educational programs for doctors that feature seminars on the latest treatments and discoveries.

Pfizer says it has no control over which experts are invited to the conferences it sponsors. Skeptics such as Wolfe are occasionally asked to attend.

The drug industry's grants also help fill out the budgets of nonprofit disease advocacy groups, which pay for educational programs and patient outreach and also fund some research.

"If we have a situation where we don't have that funding, medical education is going to come to a screeching halt, and it will impact the kind of care that patients will get," said Lynne Matallana, president of the National Fibromyalgia Association.

Matallana founded the group in 1997 after she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. A former advertising executive, Matallana said she visited 37 doctors before learning there was a name for the crushing pain she felt all over her body.

A decade later, her patient advocacy group is a $1.5 million-a-year operation that has successfully lobbied Congress for more research funding for fibromyalgia. Forty percent of the group's budget comes from corporate donations, such as the funds distributed by Pfizer and Eli Lilly.

Pfizer gave $2.2 million and Lilly gave $3.9 million in grants and donations related to fibromyalgia in the first three quarters of last year, the AP found. Those funds represented 4 percent of Pfizer's giving and about 9 percent of Eli Lilly's.

Eli Lilly, Pfizer and a handful of other companies began disclosing their grants only in the past two years, after coming under scrutiny from federal lawmakers.

The message in company TV commercials is clear. "Fibromyalgia is real," proclaimed one Lyrica ad. Researchers who've studied the condition for decades say it's not that simple.

Since the 1970s, Wolfe and a small group of specialists have debated the condition in the pages of medical journals. Depending on whom you ask, it is a disease, a syndrome, a set of symptoms or a behavior disorder.

The American College of Rheumatology estimates that between 6 million and 12 million people in the U.S. have fibromyalgia, more than 80 percent of them women. It's not clear how many cases are actually diagnosed, but Dr. Daniel Clauw of the University of Michigan said pharmaceutical industry market research shows roughly half are undiagnosed. People with fibromyalgia experience widespread muscle pain and other symptoms including fatigue, headache and depression.

After 30 years of studying the ailment, rheumatologist Dr. Don Goldenberg says fibromyalgia is still a "murky area."

"Doctors need labels and patients need labels," said Goldenberg, a professor of medicine at Tufts University. "In general, it's just more satisfying to tell people, 'You have X,' rather than, 'You have pain.'"

While Goldenberg continues to diagnose patients with fibromyalgia, some of his colleagues have stopped, saying the condition is a catchall covering a range of symptoms.

Dr. Nortin Hadler says telling people they have fibromyalgia can actually doom them to a life of suffering by reinforcing the idea that they have an incurable disease.

"It's been shown that if you are diagnosed with fibromyalgia, your chances for returning to a level of well-being that satisfies you are pretty dismal," said Hadler, a professor at the University of North Carolina, who has occasionally advised health insurers on how to deal with fibromyalgia.

Hadler said people labeled with fibromyalgia are indeed suffering, not from a medical disease but from a psychological condition. Instead of drugs, patients should receive therapy to help them "unlearn" their predicament, he said.

Research by the University of Michigan's Clauw suggests people with fibromyalgia experience pain differently because of abnormalities in their nervous system. Brain scans show unusual activity when the patients experience even minor pain, though there is no abnormality common to all.

Clauw's work, however, illustrates the knotty issues of drug company funding. He has done paid consulting work for the drugmakers, and he's received research funding from the National Fibromyalgia Research Association, which receives money from the drugmakers.

While Clauw acknowledges that Lyrica and Cymbalta do not work for everyone, he has little patience for experts who spend more time parsing definitions than helping patients.

"At the end of the day I don't care how you categorize this — it's a legitimate condition and these people are suffering," Clauw said.

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COMMENT: The cause is known; Dr. John Lowe has established - via the scientific method - that fibromyalgia is a subset of hypothyroidism. That is why treating it as a rheumatoid issue leaves patient's chances "dismal". His critique of the psychological explanation is especially devastating; you can't "unlearn" hypothyroidism.

"Dr. Lowe has determined that some 90% of fibromyalgia patients have thyroid disease. The thyroid diseases include primary hypothyroidism, central hypothyroidism, and partial peripheral cellular resistance to thyroid hormone. Most hypothyroid patients fully recover when they undergo the metabolic rehabilitation that Dr. Lowe originated and developed. And most fibromyalgia patients with thyroid hormone resistance markedly improve or fully recover when they go through metabolic rehab.

Dr. Lowe is firm that he has determined the underlying mechanisms of most patients' fibromyalgia. Peter Warmingham of Thyroid UK pointed this out in 2002 in his article titled "Fibromyalgia has been solved" (Fibro Focus Supporter, 3:1-3, 2002)."

http://drlowe.com/jcl/biojcl.htm

The drug companies' business model is to establish you as a revenue stream, and then grow that revenue stream; you getting healthy is a threat to their bottom line.

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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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New Target In Brain For Treating Schizophrenia Identified

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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'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."

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COMMENT: The idea that a born psychopath can be turned into a good person just by being given some guidance by a father with a conscience is a proven lie; just the latest attempt to position psychopaths as heroes in the minds of a polluted and confused public.

Now, if you'll excuse me, it's the dark of the moon, so I have to put on my brown shirt and go out goose-stepping.

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