New Scientist: Brain tumour causes uncontrollable pedophilia

After he was remanded to psychiatric care, he complained of balance problems and a MRI scan revealed an egg-sized brain tumour. Further tests found the man was also unable to write or copy drawings and was unconcerned when he urinated on himself.

"Psychiatrists are the only medical professionals who don't routinely examine the malfunctioning organ." -- Daniel Amen. That made sense before they could examine the brain. Now they've got MRI that shows the structure of the brain and SPECT scans that show activity levels in different parts of the brain.

Removing the tumor restored his normal behavior. A recurrence of the tumor brought back the inappropriate behavior. I'm not sure I agree with the word "uncontrollable" in the title. I guess you could say that it's all in his head!   

9:49:26 PM  comment []    

Christopher Hitchens: So Long, Fellow Travelers

The most depressing thing, for me at any rate, has been to see so much of the Left so determined to hamper this process, which is why, after 20 years, I have given up my column in the Nation magazine. The Left has employed arguments as contemptible as those on whose behalf they have been trotted out. It maintained that any resistance to ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo would lead to a wider war, chaos and/or the rallying of the Serbs to Milosevic. It forecast massive quagmires and intolerable civilian casualties. If this sounds familiar, it may be because you are hearing it again now and heard it last year from those who thought the Taliban-al Qaeda base in Afghanistan was not worth fighting about.

But the element of bad faith in the argument is far worse than the feeble-minded hysteria of its logic. In the Balkans, those on the Left and Right who favored intervention could not live with the idea that Europe would permit the extermination of its oldest Muslim minority. At that point, the sensibilities of Islam did not seem to matter to the Ramsey Clarks and Noam Chomskys, who thought and wrote of national-socialist and Orthodox Serbia as if it were mounting a gallant resistance to globalization. (Saddam, of course, took Milosevic's side even though the Serb leader was destroying mosques and murdering Muslims.)

Now, however, the same people are all frenzied about an American-led "attack on the Muslim world." Are the Kurds not Muslims? Is the new Afghan government not Muslim? Will not the next Iraqi government be Muslim also? This meaningless demagogy among the peaceniks can only be explained by a masochistic refusal to admit that our own civil society has any merit, or by a nostalgia for Stalinism that I can sometimes actually taste as well as smell.

9:33:13 PM  comment []    

Shaky Radio

On Friday, I started getting this in my events log:

Can't upstream because "Can't evaluate the expression because the name "urllist" hasn't been defined."

OK. Did I make a change? No. I did a quick Google search for it and only got a couple of hits, none that answered the question. I shrugged and returned to my regular life, in progress. It broke spontaneously, maybe it'll fix itself spontaneously.

It didn't. I searched within the Radio Userland forum for the error, and found a thread that seemed promising. It suggests checking your #upstreaming.xml file. OK.

Lo-and-behold, I've got two. One called #upstreaming.thunderer.xml. This one had the information so I could ftp to my server. The other had information about upstreaming to radio.xmlstoragesystem.com, whatever that is. And its update date was 10/18/2002. What a coincidence! Renaming the old one back to #upstreaming.xml, then kicking Radio solved the problem.

Wonder what happened?

8:17:42 PM  comment []    

NYTimes: A Boon for Nonprofits With Software Needs

But through a relatively new online software store for nonprofit organizations called DiscounTech, Mr. Bongiovanni, the center's business manager, is able to buy leading software like Norton Antivirus and Microsoft Office XP for about 10 percent of the original retail price. That means instead of paying the $500 or so he might spend on each copy of the Microsoft Office XP suite of word-processing, scheduling, spreadsheet and other applications, Mr. Bongiovanni pays only a $60 administrative fee to CompuMentor, the nonprofit organization in San Francisco that created DiscounTech. That way, he said, the agency can spend its money on technology consultants, instead of software, to get the most out of the technology.

When I worked at Microsoft, we employees could purchase software licenses for non-profits for $5 each. And since it was a charitable donation, they'd match the donation, essentially making it $2.50 a seat. You did need to buy a physical package as the first license for each product, but they matched that too.

NPOs aren't going to _buy_ software most of the time anyway. With the choice between piracy and cheap legality, you go for the market share!   

7:46:50 PM  comment []    

Liars

Because they are liars.

They being Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld. Remember this, Remember Florida. They will do or say absolutely anything, regardless of it's relationship to the truth or effects on anyone else, in order to stay in power.

Anything.

So that's why this news -- that the Administration withheld information on the North Korean nuclear weapons program until after Congress had voted for the President's 'use of force' resolution.

Many of my (fellow) liberal friends who are convinced that we must go into Iraq are surprised at my ambivalence on the issue. My hesitation is that I have no reason to trust anything that comes out of the Bush administration’s mouth. They'll lie about anything that they have to lie about to do what they want to do.

I guess I'm one of those fellow liberal friends. My reaction to North Korea's bomb admission is threefold.

• Didn't everyone know they had a bomb program? Is this a surprise?
• To me the surprising thing was that they'd up and announce it, but they've been admitting interesting things for the last month or so. They're a bunch of wackos over there, but they seem to be inching in the right direction. We should probably have some patience.
• Announcing makes a lot of sense for them. We've learned that nothing creates peace faster than the bomb. The US doesn't go around attacking nuclear powers.

I also keep hearing a vague argument that we should deal with each of the "Axis of Evil" nations equally. Ridiculous! We're going to take over Iraq (soon) because the time is right. Part of that is a political calculation. Pushing the resolution through just before the election is a brazen move, but I can't fault the Republicans for playing their hand strongly. Action in Iraq will galvanize public support behind Bush. Folks in the DoD seem to think that this thing has a good chance of going very smoothly and quickly. 100% in the polls notwithstanding, there's no reason to believe that US troops won't be greeted by cheering crowds when they roll into Baghdad. The Iraqi common folk haven't done that well recently. I suspect they'll welcome a regime change. Assuming few (of our) troops and (their) civilians die, Bush comes out looking good.

Liars.

Are they liars? Maybe. Is diplomatic posturing lying? I suspect we may have already quietly informed Arab leaders that any chemical or biological attack on the US or its allies traced back to any Muslim nation will cause us to retailiate by nuking Mecca. Is that a lie? Probably. I doubt we'd do it, but what Arab leader would want to risk it?

I don't think they're baldfaced liars. Probably only thinning-on-top-faced liars. Hell Christopher, they are purebred members of the species scumbaggus republicans! They've made it clear from the first post-election days in Florida that they have no shame and that they play to win, and let the courts and public opinion decide what's "fair".

Lying or good politics? It's not always a clearcut distinction. If Al Gore had won -- oh, that's right, he did win. Try again. If Gore were in office, he'd spend tremendous amounts of energy and political capital trying to figure out what was fair and how we could justify acting. Gore had the more refined moral position in Florida, and Bush had the more effective tactics. Now that we're at war (how many terrorist attacks last week?), I don't want a leader who worries about doing things delicately.

We've got the advantage, so we should take it. Within the bounds of "civilized" warfare, we should use everything we have and crush our opponents like bugs.

And for Bush and his cronies, that's what they think about politics. They have the advantage and they should take advantage of it. Use 9/11 as an excuse to open up ANWR for the oil barons. Use 9/11 to push though all manner of bad legislation. No, they don't have any shame. They only care about results.

As a liberal, I hate their domestic policy and love their foreign policy.

Why Iraq and not North Korea?

• Iraq doesn't have the bomb. As I said above, we don't attack nuclear-armed countries. We also don't attack liberal democracies (i.e., countries that have more than one name on the ballot). I'd rather we NOT attack Iraq in 10 years because they've become a liberal democracy than because they have nuclear weapons.
• North Korea doesn't have any oil. It doesn't provide a single blessed thing that's important to our economy. Iraq does.
• Iraq is the easier country to take over. Location, location, location!
• Fighting in Iraq will cause only minimal economic dislocation. Saudi Arabia's chip foundaries and auto plants won't get messed up. The fools don't have any!
• Conquering and governing Iraq pays for itself. Lift the sanctions and open the oil taps. New series on Al-Jazeera: The Baghdad Hillbillies.
• Iraq presents a clearer danger to the US.

When liberal whiners complain that "it's about oil", they nod their heads and say, "Yes, of course. You have a problem with that?" Unlike 404 days ago, unlike six months ago, unlike even three months ago, I find that I don't have a problem with it either. We're at war.

12:31:09 AM  comment []