Redemption?

Weird Al is back  . . . with a doozy of an op-ed in today's New York Times.  Ever loose with the "facts" and increasingly messianic, Al now invokes biblical references and promises of salvation . . . if you agree with his global climate disorder narrative:

"From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.

"We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands."

I'm all for cleaner air, sustainable energy and oil independence, but I don't support crippling and uncompetitive cap and trade bills.

I'm not at all surprised the NYT editors turned off the web reader comments feature on this op-ed.

20 More Days

Mr. Warmth

A couple weeks ago I was racking my brain trying to remember Don Rickles' name.  It eventually came to me.  So I was all the more delighted to read an interview about Mr. Warmth in the latest Vanity Fair.  Here's a classic Rickles story:

"Before our lunch ended, I asked if he would tell the now classic story about Frank Sinatra that famously left Carson helpless with laughter.

“It’s a true story, so help me God,” he began obligingly. “Sinatra was headlining at the Sands, and I was with this girl having dinner in the lounge. She wasn’t anybody I would bring home to my mother, but I really wanted to score big. Frank was in the lounge at his table with Lena Horne and some other celebrities and all his security guards. And my date says, ‘My God, there’s Frank Sinatra! Do you know him?’

“I said, ‘Sure, he’s a friend of mine.’ Which he was. But I made it sound like my whole life. ‘We’re like brothers!’ She didn’t believe me. So I said, ‘Wait here, sweetheart,’ and I went over to Frank’s table. ‘What do you want, Bullethead?’ he said. That was his nickname for me. I told him I was trying to impress this girl and would he do me a very big favor and come over and just say hello. He said, ‘For you, Bullethead, I’ll do it.’

"Five minutes later, Sinatra strolled over and said, 'Don, how the hell are you?'
And Don Rickles looked up and replied, 'Not now, Frank. Can’t you see I’m with somebody?' "

Head Games

Is the world coming to an end or does it just feel that way?  In the age of bubbles, trillions of debt, tea parties, eroding privacy and trust, the Taliban and Tiger Woods, IMS Health reports that in 2008 a 164 million prescriptions were written for antidepressants in the U.S., with sales of $9.6 billion.  That's a lot of pills.

As posited in my DSM IV post last week, there's a debate about whether more people are depressed because, well, they're clinically depressed, or because there's a psychiatric diagnosis, pharmaceutical company and pill ready to make them "better than well."

The New Yorker stirs the pot this time with an article Head Case which reports on two new books: Gary Greenberg’s “Manufacturing Depression” and Irving Kirsch’s “The Emperor’s New Drugs."

"Within the profession, the manual that prescribes the criteria for official diagnoses, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the D.S.M., has been under criticism for decades. And doctors prescribe antidepressants for patients who are not suffering from depression. People take antidepressants for eating disorders, panic attacks, premature ejaculation, and alcoholism.

 "The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that more than fourteen million Americans suffer from major depression every year, and more than three million suffer from minor depression (whose symptoms are milder but last longer than two years). Greenberg thinks that numbers like these are ridiculous—not because people aren’t depressed but because, in most cases, their depression is not a mental illness. It’s a sane response to a crazy world.

"Greenberg basically regards the pathologizing of melancholy and despair, and the invention of pills designed to relieve people of those feelings, as a vast capitalist conspiracy to paste a big smiley face over a world that we have good reason to feel sick about. The aim of the conspiracy is to convince us that it’s all in our heads, or, specifically, in our brains—that our unhappiness is a chemical problem, not an existential one. Greenberg is critical of psychopharmacology, but he is even more critical of cognitive-behavioral therapy, or C.B.T., a form of talk therapy that helps patients build coping strategies, and does not rely on medication. He calls C.B.T. 'a method of indoctrination into the pieties of American optimism, an ideology as much as a medical treatment.' "

I've spent my time "on the couch" and value the insights I've learned over the years as I've coped with modern life, but the cynic in me feels like there's always something corrupt and profit-oriented about the process.  So exercise has long been my default treatment.

"Psychiatry has also been damaged by some embarrassing exposés, such as David Rosenhan’s famous article “On Being Sane in Insane Places” (1973), which described the inability of hospital psychiatrists to distinguish mentally ill patients from impostors. The procedure used to determine the inclusion or exclusion of diagnoses in the D.S.M. has looked somewhat unseemly from a scientific point of view. Homosexuality, originally labelled a sociopathic personality disorder, was eliminated from the D.S.M. in 1973, partly in response to lobbying by gay-rights groups. The manual then inserted the category “ego-dystonic homosexuality”—distress because of the presence of homosexual arousal or the absence of heterosexual arousal. Further lobbying eliminated this category as well. Post-traumatic stress disorder was lobbied for by veterans’ organizations and resisted by the Veterans Administration, and got in, while self-defeating personality disorder was lobbied against by women’s groups, and was deleted.

"The recommendation from people who have written about their own depression is, overwhelmingly, Take the meds! It’s the position of Andrew Solomon, in “The Noonday Demon” (2001), a wise and humane book. It’s the position of many of the contributors to “Unholy Ghost” (2001) and “Poets on Prozac” (2008), anthologies of essays by writers about depression. The ones who took medication say that they write much better than they did when they were depressed. William Styron, in his widely read memoir “Darkness Visible” (1990), says that his experience in talk therapy was a damaging waste of time, and that he wishes he had gone straight to the hospital when his depression became severe."

I'll look for something to post soon about Tiger's sex addiction and treatment.

Tweedledee &

On The Ground

After reading The Weekend Interview about Temple Grandin in last Saturday's Wall Street Journal, I watched the HBO Films production with Clare Danes playing Temple Grandin.  What an inspiring human being.   A few key quotes from the WSJ interview:

"You know what working at the slaughterhouses does to you? It makes you look at your own mortality."

"When I was younger I was looking for this magic meaning of life. It's very simple now," she says. Making the lives of others better, doing "something of lasting value, that's the meaning of life, it's that simple."

"Ok, now I'm seeing a mother saying your book helped my kid go to college—that's meaning. Or my kid got a job because of one of your lectures—that's meaning. Or a rancher comes up and says that piece of equipment works really well—that's meaning. Concrete, real stuff. On. The. Ground."

NYC circa 1924

The New York Times reported today on some new features on the NYCityMap web site.

It is a wonder.

"Just follow these simple instructions: At the NYCityMap Web site, click on the camera at the top of the page and move the slider beneath it back to 1924. The interactive city of 2010 fades away to reveal an aerial view of the five boroughs assembled from photographs that have been digitally stitched together.

"The effect is not as simple as it sounds. The old city doesn’t merely replace the new one. It seems to resurface from within it. Gone are Manhattan’s perimeter highways — the F.D.R. and the West Side Highway. On the east, the blocks run right up to the water’s edge, and on the west, they terminate in a hardworking dockside, with ships at berth where Battery Park City now stands.

"But the real fun begins as you zoom in, descending to a helicopter’s height above the streets. Begin in the now — zooming in to the block-level view on Madison Square Garden — and then slide back to 1924. Out of the rubble of its own destruction rises the old Penn Station, only 14 years old, just coming into its stride.

"Alas, we cannot zoom any closer than that rooftop view, or we might be able to look down onto the sidewalks themselves and catch a glimpse of those former New Yorkers, all caught up in the vividness, the newness of their vanished present."

DSM IV

Nearly 20 years in the making, the American Psychiatric Association is preparing an update to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition, or DSM V.

This is no small matter given that the DSM is used to diagnose and treat mental illness, leading to all sorts of outcomes, good and bad.

In an article in The Wall Street Journal titled Prescriptions for Psychiatric Trouble, Dr. Sally Patel, a psychiatrist at Yale, presents the pros and cons.

"The problem is that the changes don't really advance psychiatry. Worse, some are prescriptions for trouble. One of the most controversial is the creation of a diagnosis called 'psychosis risk syndrome.' Granted, the motivation is laudable: to identify adolescents or young adults at risk for developing serious mental illnesses marked by hallucinations and delusions. What doctor wouldn't want to intervene early to ward off an affliction like schizophrenia? But a diagnosis believed to foreshadow a full-blown psychotic illness has the potential to be highly stigmatizing. That is especially unfortunate if the labeled individual does not even go on to develop such an illness—and the chances of that are estimated at about 70%, according to a 2009 Journal of Clinical Psychiatry review paper, 'Intervention in Individuals at Ultra-High Risk For Psychosis.'

"To complicate matters further, treatment is not especially effective in forestalling psychotic illness in the minority destined to develop it. And since we don't know who those people will be, otherwise healthy kids will be exposed to potent antipsychotic medications and their side effects, such as diabetes and weight gain."

More diagnoses means more pharmaceutical treatment.

"How do we know, for example, that a person diagnosed with major depressive disorder (the formal designation for pathological depression) is not actually suffering from a bout of natural if intense sadness brought on by a shattering loss, a grave disappointment or a scathing betrayal?"

In college I read the work of Dr. Thomas Szasz, including The Myth of Mental Illness.  Since its publication in 1960, Szasz has been dismissed as a crank by many in the APA, which makes his positions all the more important when a psychiatrist who led the revisions to DSM IV today warns of yet more diagnostic overreaching.

"The DSM V would dramatically raise the rates of mental disorder in the general population," said Allen Frances, head of the team that revised the fourth edition of the manual. "Some of the new diagnoses would be extremely common and pharmaceutical marketing would amplify the risk of their being found. This means, of course, that a lot of otherwise normal people will be medicated."

Bye Bayh

Dodd, Dorgan, Kennedy . . . and now Bayh.  When a decent centrist like Bayh throws in the towel, even after apparent 11th-hour interventions by Obama and Emanuel, you know the playing field has tilted.  I find no fault with his logic, only admiration. 

“After all these years, my passion for service to my fellow citizens is undiminished, but my desire to do so in Congress has waned,” he said. “My decision was not motivated by political concern,” he added. “Even in the current challenging environment, I am confident in my prospects for re-election.”

“But running for the sake of winning an election, just to remain in public office, is not good enough,” Bayh said. “And it has never been what motivates me. At this time I simply believe I can best contribute to society in another way: creating jobs by helping grow a business, helping guide an institution of higher learning or helping run a worthy charitable endeavor.”

From The New York Times:

"In the past two years, Mr. Bayh has been focused on budget and fiscal issues and frustrated some of his colleagues by balking at the Democratic budget proposals. According to analysis by The Times of Mr. Bayh’s voting history, Mr. Bayh has voted with a majority of the Democratic caucus roughly 71 percent of the time during the 111th Congress – the lowest percentage of his career. He has also been the Senate Democrat least likely to vote with the party this Congress."

Drinking Games

Malcolm Gladwell connects the dots between culture and drinking in an insightful article - Drinking Games - in The New Yorker magazine.

"There is something about the cultural dimension of social problems that eludes us.  When confronted with the rowdy youth in the bar, we are happy to raise his drinking age, to tax his beer, to punish him if he drives under the influence, and to push him into treatment if his habit becomes an addiction.  But we are reluctant to provide him with a  positive and constructive example of how to drink.  The consequences of that failure are considerable, because, in the end, culture is a more powerful tool in dealing with drinking than medicine, economics, or the law.

Nowhere in the multitude of messages and signals sent by popular culture and social institutions about drinking is there any consensus about what drinking is supposed to mean."

I don't agree with his "nowhere" claim.  For most people, drinking at celebrations like a wedding, at a business dinner, or pairing wine with food at the family dining table are all good examples of social institutions.   And when done right they enhance the event and experience.  It's the doing right part that's a challenge for many.

What Type are You?

Psychoanalysis on the web.  Very clever.  Click here and tell the shrink who you are and get a free analysis.

Happy Birthday Abe

 

Here are the electoral college results from the 1860 election. 

                    

In the 2004 election, the northeast and west coast electoral college was solidly for Democrats while the south and midwest was for Republicans, though the votes by county presented a much different picture.

 

 

Jefferson Market

Our old neighborhood, painted in 1917 by John Sloan, notable Ash Can School painter.

Captured here too, by camera, in 1905.

 

Oh What A Feeling

Fresh off the tarmac

With stuffed animals named Twitch, Grind, Splodge and Pop, what's not to love?

Fly Fishing with Darth Vader

Leave it to The Weekly Standard's Matt Labash to earn the trust and access to the likes of Marion Berry, Kinky Friedman, Al Sharpton and Dick Cheney to serve up his first-hand, personal experiences in his new book, Fly Fishing with Darth Vader: And Other Adventures with Evangelical Wrestlers, Political Hitmen, and Jewish Cowboys.

As reported in the WSJ:

"Telling trout purists you're chasing lowly catfish with a fly rod is tantamount to telling Heidi Klum that what you're really attracted to is bearded women with no teeth," Mr. Labash writes in a collection of his magazine pieces called "Fly-Fishing With Darth Vader." (D.V. would be Mr. Cheney.) To Mr. Labash's surprise, the vice president seemed interested in his venture into fly-rod debasement. "Perhaps he sensed a kindred spirit," the writer muses. "Remaking the Middle East as a Western democracy versus chasing catfish on a fly—each of us is addicted to some pet implausibility.

The two men eventually get together on the South Fork of the Snake River near Mr. Cheney's Wyoming home.  The vice president is revealed as a gifted mimic of Washington figures (impressions that are quickly put off the record), a wry witness to the trappings of high office (divers are on hand for the excursion, he explains, "in case I fall out of the boat"), and an appealing companion. Mr. Labash ends up thoroughly liking the warmonger: "Don't get me wrong," he writes. "I feel sick about it.

P.S.  Labash's Weekly Standard column Down with Facebook last March was a classic.  The best line was a relevant quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Crack-Up": "It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory."

A Mighty Wind

The Cape Wind tempest seems headed to an April "decision" by U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. Salazar recently visited the area and met with project proponents and opponents, including Martha's Vineyard's Wampanoag Indians, who have made an 11th-hour claim of a "sacred place" to block the project.

The forces at work for and against Cape Wind are many and powerful, and the issues complex. One would think northeast liberals and conservatives would march together to support a wind farm that promises to provide cheaper and cleaner energy, and reduce "global warming."  The project forecasts annual savings of 113 million gallons of oil and to offset a million tons of carbon dioxide every year.  Well, not if the turbines will be visible (with the help of binoculars) from the deck of your waterfront summer cottage on the Cape, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket.

Opponents, including the Kennedys, Kerrys and Romneys, are concerned about their water views and property values.  The WSJ reviewed the book Cape Wind in May 2007, excerpted here:

"From Sen. Kennedy's compound five miles away, a 417-foot tower appears about as tall as the thumbnail at the end of your outstretched arm. It makes you wonder how Cape Wind's opponents would react if a developer planned a pharmaceutical factory in, say, Hyannis -- civil disobedience, perhaps? Exquisitely catered, of course."

Here are computer simulations of the aesthetic devastation, as seen from the coastlines of Martha's Vineyard  and Nantucket.

The Daily Show got to the crux of the story.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Jason Jones 180 - Nantucket
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Happiness

Happiness.  That's something we can all use more of, especially these days.

I've read the Dalai Lama's book The Art of  Happiness.   Now there's a new book about happiness in your work - The Business of Happiness - 6 Secrets to Extraordinary Success in Life and Work.  It's co-authored by Ted Leonsis of AOL and Redgate Communications fame; and  a Leonsis business associate, NMH classmate and friend, John Buckley.  I'm looking forward to reading it.

If I'm lucky, I'll find more happiness . . . and maybe I can own an NHL hockey team some day like Ted's first-place Washington Capitals.  One can always wish.

Super Bowl Commercials

Git yer fill here of 38 years of the best.

From 1969 . . . Let Noxema cream your face.

DC Whiteout

Capitol Hill snowcam!

Don't be doctrinaire

Well said, then and now. 

Oh Lord, won't you buy me . . .

I've been a Canon shooter for years, having done PR for their camera and video divisions in the 80s and 90s.  But I'd really like to shoot with the new Leica M9, like my school chum John B.

The Leica Song
Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Leica M9 ?
I’m done shooting Nikons, I want to shoot prime.
It’s full-frame or nothing, and a big LCD,
And manual focus, please explain that to me.
Oh Lord, how I wanted a Leica M8,
But now I am grateful that you made me wait.
Worked hard all my lifetime, to get what is mine,
Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Leica M9.
Oh Lord, do this one thing, this one thing for me,
And Lord I’ll review it – I’ll do it for free.

©2009 David Bennett

Out of Business

Add the employees of the My Obama Shop in DC's Union Station to the ranks of the unemployed.

According to U.S. News and World Report, sales tanked along with Obama's popularity and the store was boarded up.

 "This time last year, the Obama Store was teeming with customers. Ideally situated in the basement of Washington’s Union Station, the store was filled with consumers eager to buy anything with Obama’s likeness while others took pictures of the life-size cut-outs of the president and first lady. Now, the Obama store is boarded up.

How quickly things change in a year. The Obama store was capitalism at its most brilliant rawness; find a market and exploit it quickly. The store made possible one-stop shopping for all of your tacky Obama merchandise needs. T-shirts! Hats! Calendars! Hand-warmers! Keychains!  The store carried every imaginable product with the words 'Obama' and 'commemorative,' except, notably, the Obama Chia Pet."

Carol Channing and The Who

 

No, they're not on tour together, but according to The New York Times their performances are part of the evolution of the greatest show on earth, the Super Bowl halftime show.

"Bill Curbishley, the Who’s manager for 39 years, jumped at the chance to play. Performing at the Super Bowl, he knows, means reaching about 100 million television viewers, a great way to promote the band’s new greatest hits album, publicize a coming tour and reach fans who might know the Who only because its songs are heard on the “CSI” television shows.

“I don’t think it will sell millions and millions of albums, but it will definitely have an impact,” Curbishley said. “If you get into people’s consciousness, it helps.

The results are often immediate. In the week after Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers performed at the Super Bowl two years ago, sales of the band’s greatest hits album tripled, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Their songs also climbed the charts before the Super Bowl because of commercials publicizing the halftime show during playoff games."

In an intreview with Billboard, Pete Townshend said the band would play a Who medley:

"We're kinda doing a mashup of stuff," the guitarist tells Billboard. "A bit of 'Baba O'Riley,' a bit of 'Pinball Wizard,' a bit of the close of 'Tommy,' a bit of 'Who Are You,' and a bit of 'Won't Get Fooled Again.' It works -- it's quite a saga. A lot of the stuff that we do has that kind of celebratory vibe about it -- we've always tried to make music that allows the audience to go a bit wild if they want to. Hopefully it will hit the spot."

Meanwhile, Protect Our Children is protesting The Who's appearance due to Townshend's 2003 arrest for downloading child pornography.

C'mon Uncle Ernie, can you say wardrobe malfunction?

Pee Wee Gets an iPad

Pee-wee Gets An iPad! from Pee-wee Herman

The Weary Kind

Saw and loved the film Crazy Heart, starring Jeff Bridges.  Great movie, story and performances, especially by Bridges who's already won the best actor nod at the Golden Globe and SAG awards.

Loss, regret, whiskey, sobriety and redemption.  It's all there.  Starman's Scott Hayden should finally win an Oscar.

Is it a coincidence that Ryan Bingham, the songwriter of The Weary Kind, is also the name of George Clooney's character and star turn in Up and Away?