The stupid...sometimes it's hard to take...

It may be down the memory hole pay wall by now, but the New Yorker had an article up last week about college kids taking speed...only they weren't calling it speed, and they were couching it an updated version of the language that was use in the 60s to describe physician prescribed pep pills. 

Not long ago, I met with Anjan Chatterjee, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania, in his office, which is tucked inside the labyrinthine Penn hospital complex. Chatterjee’s main research interests are in subjects like the neurological basis of spatial understanding, but in the past few years, as he has heard more about students taking cognitive enhancers, he has begun writing about the ethical implications of such behavior. In 2004, he coined the term “cosmetic neurology” to describe the practice of using drugs developed for recognized medical conditions to strengthen ordinary cognition. Chatterjee worries about cosmetic neurology, but he thinks that it will eventually become as acceptable as cosmetic surgery has; in fact, with neuroenhancement it’s harder to argue that it’s frivolous. As he notes in a 2007 paper, “Many sectors of society have winner-take-all conditions in which small advantages produce disproportionate rewards.” At school and at work, the usefulness of being “smarter,” needing less sleep, and learning more quickly are all “abundantly clear.” In the near future, he predicts, some neurologists will refashion themselves as “quality-of-life consultants,” whose role will be “to provide information while abrogating final responsibility for these decisions to patients.” The demand is certainly there: from an aging population that won’t put up with memory loss; from overwrought parents bent on giving their children every possible edge; from anxious employees in an efficiency-obsessed, BlackBerry-equipped office culture, where work never really ends.

Chatterjee told me that many people who come to his clinic are cognitively preoccupied versions of what doctors call the “worried well.” The day I visited his office, he had just seen a middle-aged woman, a successful Philadelphia lawyer, who mentioned having to struggle a bit to come up with certain names. “Here’s an example of someone who by most measures is doing perfectly fine,” Chatterjee said. “She’s not having any trouble at work. But she notices she’s having some problems, and it’s very hard to know how much of that is just getting older.” Of course, people in her position could strive to get regular exercise and plenty of intellectual stimulation, both of which have been shown to help maintain cognitive function. But maybe they’re already doing so and want a bigger mental rev-up, or maybe they want something easier than sweaty workouts and Russian novels: a pill.

Recently, I spoke on the phone with Barbara Sahakian, a clinical neuropsychologist at Cambridge University, and the co-author of a December, 2007, article in Nature, “Professor’s Little Helper.” Sahakian, who also consults for several pharmaceutical companies, and her co-author, Sharon Morein-Zamir, reported that a number of their colleagues were using prescription drugs like Adderall and Provigil. Because the drugs are easy to buy online, they wrote, it would be difficult to stop their spread: “The drive for self-enhancement of cognition is likely to be as strong if not stronger than in the realms of ‘enhancement’ of beauty and sexual function.” (In places like Cambridge, at least.)

See what I mean? Take a pill to make yourself "more."  Now I happen to be in the camp that would say it is possible to use technology to alter our behavior - this is in some ways self-evident: a pair of running shoes makes it easier to run.  A Wing Chun dummy enables one to practice Wing Chun without a partner.   A swimming pool helps one practice swimming. 

There are limits to this though.  Technology will extract a kind of "karmic debt" with everything else - it then becomes a question of one's willingness to use the technology at the price of the karmic debt.  I'm having a cup of coffee. If I want coffee in the future I'll have to make more soon - and the whole host of behaviors of having coffee come with the coffee.  If I have it late at night I can't sleep.   A technology that makes us feel happy all the time robs us of honing the skill of using depression, sadness and grief to benefit all.  The same goes for other kinds of technologies besides the chemical. 

You get the point. Speed kills now just as it did then.  Taking that crap won't make us all John McAfee, but we might be something repugnant anyway.

Those responsible for violent political rhetoric DO have to bear responsibility for their words

Kyle says:

There is no political party to blame for the horrible shooting that took place outside Tuscon, Arizona yesterday. The man, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, was by all accounts a very disturbed person, with a history of bizarre theories and schizophrenic like paranoia. Not more than an hour after the sad event took place, the social media sites such as twitter and Facebook ran ramped with rumors that he was a leftist or that he was a extreme conservative. Both sides hurled unfounded rumors on top of outright lies, to support their case that it was the other side which was the voice of violence and derangement that caused this man to do what he did...

The only difference between those disturbed and twisted individuals, whose only goal was to make political gains out of this sad situation and Jared Lee Loughner is that he acted out his insanity with a gun. And yes, those on the right, or a least those trolling as if they were on the political right grew more callous, more twisted and more pathetic as the whole thing unraveled. People died at the hands of a disturbed man, and this wonderful social media thing that we have now, gave a forum for people to say things that they wouldn't have the guts to say to someone in real life....or has it?

Yet, let us not forget in any way that Jared Lee Loughner wasn't the first crazed person in recent memory to express violent insanity in the memes of right wing ideology. Most recently, before Loughner there was Byron Williams, Jerry Kane, and Richard Poplawski. So I'm not willing in any way to let the right wing off the hook for this; it is true that Loughner's insanity is his own, but the fact of the matter is, Adolf Hitler is still responsible for Mein Kampf. And he's also responsible for the other Nazi horrors, even if others pulled the trigger.

So as John Cole says:

Want to watch a Republican freak out? Utter the following statement:

“This shooting demonstrates that we really need to tone down the violent political rhetoric.”

Then watch the freakout begin, even though there is nothing partisan or pointed about that statement. “Why are you pointing fingers? Both sides do it! Why are you blaming Sarah Palin?”

And then my personal favorite: “He was just crazy!”

No shit. You have to be crazy to walk into a crowd of people and start spraying bullets, killing a bunch of elderly people and a little kid. That is crazy.

The point we have been trying to make for the last couple of years is that Republicans need to stop whipping up crazy people with violent political rhetoric. This is really not a hard concept to follow. There are crazy people out there. Stop egging them on.

Right wing media discourse in this country is in the hands of a few, and they can pretty much drive the direction of the current Republican Party.  They have been putting way too much vitriol into the political discourse; their currency is resentment and anger.   It is not surprising then to see resonances of this in the actions of the alienated and insane.   And those responsible for creating that which resonated in these alienated and insane folks should be held accountable.

Update:

I saw – god, on Twitter! – the most apt responses to this position I’ve seen yet, from some sociologist in Madison WI, no less: blaming this on insanity is a form of “ableism,” which I take to mean the implicit denigration of those with disabilities. Furthermore, it occludes the fact that violence in America IS a social problem, and, I would also add, a public health problem (obviously Ms Giffords’ health has been greatly compromised by this violence).

It's an interesting conundrum: psychosis and responsibility, but yes, putting this on "insanity" is a compartmentalization that does not do justice  to the reality.

The 3 Poisons Can Get Have Odd Side Effects

Don't mess up renditions of "My Way" at karaoke bars in the Philippines.

I believe it was Soen Nakagawa who said even tabloids could be read as sutras...

And I swear that I have read descriptions of stuff like this in the Dhammapada and in other sutras. It seems to reek of the 3 poisons...

Human remains have been found near a home where investigators were searching for the body of a missing man who won millions of dollars in the lottery nearly four years ago, Florida sheriff's officials said.

Abraham Shakespeare, a 43-year-old truck driver's assistant, has been missing since April - though he wasn't reported missing until November. He had won a $31 million lottery jackpot in 2006, opting for a lump sum payment of nearly $17 million...


The remains were found at a home owned by the boyfriend of Dorice Moore. Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd has previously called Moore a "person of interest," though she has not been charged. Judd has characterized the case as a homicide.

On Dec. 5, Moore told The Ledger newspaper that she helped Shakespeare disappear, but now wants him to return because detectives were searching her home and car and looking for blood on her belongings.

Ever hear of Henry Mittwer?

This is the kind of life, like the lives in of people in my wife's family, that leaves you in awe about how one person could take all the garbage he took and still keep going.

Henry Mittwer was born in Yokohama in 1918. His father was an American film distributor who first came to Japan in 1898 as a seaman en route to the Spanish-American War being waged in the Philippines...

An early but formative experience was the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, which killed more than 30,000 in Yokohama alone. Mittwer, then 5, remembers grasping his mother in terror as they ran from a house that was convulsing around them. The family had to camp out in their yard for several days before their house was again fit for habitation...

From 1942 Mittwer lived in five of the 10 internment camps the U.S. War Relocation Authority had thrown up in scarcely inhabited areas of the western U.S. for nearly 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-American detainees. Some of them had as little as one-eighth Japanese ancestry...

After the war, the Mittwers eventually returned to Los Angeles. However, beset by lung disease, job dissatisfaction and the news that his mother had died in 1955, before he was able to visit her in Japan, Mittwer became increasingly depressed.

About that time, he met Zen priest Nyogen Senzaki, one of the early proponents of Zen practice in the U.S. He became drawn to Zen teachings and started regular meditation sessions "to clear the cobwebs from my brain."

In 1961, Mittwer finally returned to Japan alone, becoming a disciple of the chief abbot of Kyoto's Myoshinji Temple, Daiko Furukawa. At Myoshinji, Mittwer assisted with visiting American priests and with the young acolytes who were in the temple's care. He said matter-of-factly, "One day I was asked, 'Why don't you become a priest?' So I was tonsured."

After the abbot's death, he met Hirata Seiko, the abbot of Tenryuji, who invited him to become his student. His family finally joined him in 1965 and they lived together on the temple grounds...

Mittwer professes no bitterness about his wartime experiences, saying merely, "You have to take it as an experience, one of many in one's life."

He said he tries to lead his life according to the deceptively simple words of the worldly (and often ribald) Buddhist priest and poet Ikkyu, who wrote, "Don't do bad things; do good things."

Ikkyu's words are deceptively simple indeed, especially since it is more than possible, once a bad thing has been done, to try and do more bad things. But that arises out of an attachement to the bad things, or rather to the repulsion of the bad thing.