Category Archives for Uncategorized

Tripping With Mary Poppins.

From the Dec 24, 2004 New York Times:

Poppins on the Loose: Lock Up Your Children
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

Mary Poppins, in memory, is the ideal nanny. With her cartoony eyelashes, slightly Carnaby style and jauntily splayed feet, she delivers that polemic about sugar, turns chores into pleasure and wins infatuated devotion from her charges. The mother is not threatened by her, the father is not attracted to her and – all in all – the Poppins stint with the Banks family is the most edifying nanny story in a genre that is currently characterized by tales of anxiety and woe.

That’s at least how I remember Walt Disney’s “Mary Poppins,” which had its premiere in 1964 and went on to win five Academy Awards. The reality is somewhat different. If it’s been awhile, see for yourself on the Disney Channel, which will televise the remastered version in convenient time for the movie’s 40th anniversary, the release of the DVD and a new musical that opened earlier this month in London.

In this trippy, effects-heavy, pro-pollution movie – soot is a source of great amusement – the nanny does indeed represent a blessing for Mr. and Mrs. Banks, but not because she’s good at her work (you even get the feeling it’s not a career with her), but because she whisks the kids out of their hair and then manipulates the parents into changing their ways.

She spends no time giving the kids lessons or overseeing their homework. After first cleaning their room, they do almost no chores, and even the room-cleaning is done mostly by magic. Mary Poppins (Julie Andrews) is rather like the nannies on “Nanny 911” and “Supernanny” in that she doesn’t patiently care for children year in and year out; rather, she bosses around an entire family according to modish philosophies of child rearing and then, with a flourish, she’s gone.

The movie is set in 1910, in part among chimney sweeps and the bankers in high, hard collars, but the 60’s come through in just about every scene. If those who most exemplified that decade were the activists and the sybarites, this movie is clearly on the side of the sybarites – the hippies.

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Remember everything, understand nothing.

From the Dec 20, 2004 Los Angeles Times:

Sharper minds

by Melissa Healy, Times Staff Writer

It would be hard to imagine improving on the intelligence of computer engineer Bjoern Stenger, a doctoral candidate at Cambridge University. Yet for several hours, a pill seemed to make him even brainier.

Participating in a research project, Stenger downed a green gelatin cap containing a drug called modafinil. Within an hour, his attention sharpened. So did his memory. He aced a series of mental-agility tests. If his brainpower would normally rate a 10, the drug raised it to 15, he said.

“I was quite focused,” said Stenger. “It was also kind of fun.”

The age of smart drugs is dawning. Modafinil is just one in an array of brain-boosting medications — some already on pharmacy shelves and others in development — that promise an era of sharper thinking through chemistry.

These drugs may change the way we think. And by doing so, they may change who we are.

Long-haul truckers and Air Force pilots have long popped amphetamines to ward off drowsiness. Generations of college students have swallowed over-the-counter caffeine tablets to get through all-nighters. But such stimulants provide only a temporary edge, and their effect is broad and blunt — they boost the brain by juicing the entire nervous system.

The new mind-enhancing drugs, in contrast, hold the potential for more powerful, more targeted and more lasting improvements in mental acuity. Some of the most promising have reached the stage of testing in human subjects and could become available in the next decade, brain scientists say.

“It’s not a question of ‘if’ anymore. It’s just a matter of time,” said geneticist Tim Tully, a researcher at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y., and developer of a compound called HT-0712, which has shown promise as a memory enhancer. The drug soon will be tested in human subjects.

The new brain boosters stem in part from research to develop treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, spinal cord injuries, schizophrenia and other conditions. But they also reflect rapid advances in understanding the processes of learning and memory in healthy people.

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Psychiatric casualties of war.

December 16, 2004 New York Times

A Flood of Troubled Soldiers Is in the Offing, Experts Predict

By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 – The nation’s hard-pressed health care system for veterans is facing a potential deluge of tens of thousands of soldiers returning from Iraq with serious mental health problems brought on by the stress and carnage of war, veterans’ advocates and military doctors say.

An Army study shows that about one in six soldiers in Iraq report symptoms of major depression, serious anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder, a proportion that some experts believe could eventually climb to one in three, the rate ultimately found in Vietnam veterans. Because about one million American troops have served so far in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Pentagon figures, some experts predict that the number eventually requiring mental health treatment could exceed 100,000.

“There’s a train coming that’s packed with people who are going to need help for the next 35 years,” said Stephen L. Robinson, a 20-year Army veteran who is now the executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, an advocacy group. Mr. Robinson wrote a report in September on the psychological toll of the war for the Center for American Progress, a Washington research group.

“I have a very strong sense that the mental health consequences are going to be the medical story of this war,” said Dr. Stephen C. Joseph, who served as the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs from 1994 to 1997.

What was planned as a short and decisive intervention in Iraq has become a grueling counterinsurgency that has put American troops into sustained close-quarters combat on a scale not seen since the Vietnam War. Psychiatrists say the kind of fighting seen in the recent retaking of Falluja – spooky urban settings with unlimited hiding places; the impossibility of telling Iraqi friend from Iraqi foe; the knowledge that every stretch of road may conceal an explosive device – is tailored to produce the adrenaline-gone-haywire reactions that leave lasting emotional scars.

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Wising up to volunteering for the military.

December 17, 2004 New York Times

Guard Reports Serious Drop in Enlistment

By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, Dec. 16 – In the latest signs of strains on the military from the war in Iraq, the Army National Guard announced on Thursday that it had fallen 30 percent below its recruiting goals in the last two months and would offer new incentives, including enlistment bonuses of up to $15,000.

In addition, the head of the National Guard Bureau, Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, said on Thursday that he needed $20 billion to replace arms and equipment destroyed in Iraq and Afghanistan or left there for other Army and Air Guard units to use, so that returning reservists will have enough equipment to deal with emergencies at home.

The sharp decline in recruiting is significant because National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers now make up nearly 40 percent of the 148,000 troops in Iraq, and are a vital source for filling the ranks, particularly those who perform essential support tasks, like truck drivers and military police.

General Blum said the main reason for the Army National Guard’s recruiting shortfall was a sharp reduction in the number of recruits joining the Guard and Reserve when they leave active duty. In peacetime the commitment means maintaining their ties to the military with a weekend of service a month and two weeks in the summer.

Over the last 30 years, General Blum said, the Guard has counted on these soldiers with prior military service for about half of its recruits. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, however, many of these soldiers have been hesitant to join the Guard because of the increasing likelihood that America’s citizen-soldiers will be activated and sent to Iraq or Afghanistan for up to 12 months. Indeed, many of the active-duty soldiers the Army would like to enlist in the Reserves have recently fought in Afghanistan or Iraq, and some have no inclination to do so again.

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Living under fascism.

From http://austinuu.org/sermons/2004/2004-11-07-LivingUnderFascism.html:

Living Under Fascism

A sermon by Davidson Loehr
7 November 2004
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
http://www.austinuu.org

PRAYER:

This is usually the Veterans Day service. I had planned to devote the prayer to veterans because, as a Vietnam veteran, veterans are very dear to me.

But there will, unfortunately, be many more chances to address the plight of our soldiers and our veterans. This week I, and many here, grieve for the pain of Cathy Harrington over the murder of her daughter just six days ago.

Today, let us pray that all who suffer may find some peace. May all parents, relatives and friends of lost or dead children find light at the end of their dark and fearful tunnels.

May those who terrify and endanger us and our children be brought to justice.

And may we once again find or create that necessary but fragile web of interrelatedness which alone can give us both safety lines and safety nets as we go – whether bravely or timidly – into our future.

Amen.

SERMON: Living Under Fascism

You may wonder why anyone would try to use the word “fascism” in a serious discussion of where America is today. It sounds like cheap name-calling, or melodramatic allusion to a slew of old war movies. But I am serious. I don’t mean it as name-calling at all. I mean to persuade you that the style of governing into which America has slid is most accurately described as fascism, and that the necessary implications of this fact are rightly regarded as terrifying. That’s what I am about here. And even if I don’t persuade you, I hope to raise the level of your thinking about who and where we are now, to add some nuance and perhaps some useful insights.

The word comes from the Latin word “Fasces,” denoting a bundle of sticks tied together. The individual sticks represented citizens, and the bundle represented the state. The message of this metaphor was that it was the bundle that was significant, not the individual sticks. If it sounds un-American, it’s worth knowing that the Roman Fasces appear on the wall behind the Speaker’s podium in the chamber of the US House of Representatives.

Still, it’s an unlikely word. When most people hear the word “fascism” they may think of the racism and anti-Semitism of Mussolini and Hitler. It is true that the use of force and the scapegoating of fringe groups are part of every fascism. But there was also an economic dimension of fascism, known in Europe during the 1920s and ’30s as “corporatism,” which was an essential ingredient of Mussolini’s and Hitler’s tyrannies. So-called corporatism was adopted in Italy and Germany during the 1930s and was held up as a model by quite a few intellectuals and policy makers in the United States and Europe.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago (in “The Corporation Will Eat Your Soul”), Fortune magazine ran a cover story on Mussolini in 1934, praising his fascism for its ability to break worker unions, disempower workers and transfer huge sums of money to those who controlled the money rather than those who earned it.

Few Americans are aware of or can recall how so many Americans and Europeans viewed economic fascism as the wave of the future during the 1930s. Yet reviewing our past may help shed light on our present, and point the way to a better future. So I want to begin by looking back to the last time fascism posed a serious threat to America.

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