The Mission in Afghanistan: Poppy Protection?

Posted on May 12, 2008 by RagBlog


Marines Stuck Protecting Opium in Helmand
By Barnett Rubin / May 8, 2008

An AP story quoting me about the deployment of U.S. Marines to Garmser District, Helmand Province, Afghanistan is making the rounds on the Internets, and mostly being misinterpreted by conspiracy theorists who think it shows that the US government (or the “Bush crime family”) is engaged in drug trafficking. A surprising number of them seem to be Ron Paul supporters. I thought I would try to explain what I think this story is about and what my quoted comments meant.

The nub:

The Marines of Bravo Company’s 1st Platoon sleep beside a grove of poppies. Troops in the 2nd Platoon playfully swat at the heavy opium bulbs while walking through the fields. Afghan laborers scraping the plant’s gooey resin smile and wave.

Last week, the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit moved into southern Helmand province, the world’s largest opium poppy-growing region, and now find themselves surrounded by green fields of the illegal plants that produce the main ingredient of heroin.

The Taliban, whose fighters are exchanging daily fire with the Marines in Garmser, derives up to $100 million a year from the poppy harvest by taxing farmers and charging safe passage fees — money that will buy weapons for use against U.S., NATO and Afghan troops.

Yet the Marines are not destroying the plants. In fact, they are reassuring villagers the poppies won’t be touched. American commanders say the Marines would only alienate people and drive them to take up arms if they eliminated the impoverished Afghans’ only source of income.

Many Marines in the field are scratching their heads over the situation.

Read the rest of it here. / Informed Comment: Global Affairs

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Breaking: Attack on Iran Inevitable?

Posted on May 12, 2008 by RagBlog

War With Iran Might Be Closer Than You Think
By Philip Giraldi / May 9, 2008

There is considerable speculation and buzz in Washington today suggesting that the National Security Council has agreed in principle to proceed with plans to attack an Iranian al-Qods-run camp that is believed to be training Iraqi militants. The camp that will be targeted is one of several located near Tehran. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was the only senior official urging delay in taking any offensive action. The decision to go ahead with plans to attack Iran is the direct result of concerns being expressed over the deteriorating situation in Lebanon, where Iranian ally Hezbollah appears to have gained the upper hand against government forces and might be able to dominate the fractious political situation.

The White House contacted the Iranian government directly yesterday through a channel provided by the leadership of the Kurdish region in Iraq, which has traditionally had close ties to Tehran. The US demanded that Iran admit that it has been interfering in Iraq and also commit itself to taking steps to end the support of various militant groups. There was also a warning about interfering in Lebanon. The Iranian government reportedly responded quickly, restating its position that it would not discuss the matter until the US ceases its own meddling employing Iranian dissident groups. The perceived Iranian intransigence coupled with the Lebanese situation convinced the White House that some sort of unambiguous signal has to be sent to the Iranian leadership, presumably in the form of cruise missiles. It is to be presumed that the attack will be as “pinpoint” and limited as possible, intended to target only al-Qods and avoid civilian casualties.

The decision to proceed with plans for an attack is not final. The President will still have to give the order to launch after all preparations are made.

Source / The American Conservative / Information Clearing House

Also see“Bomb Bomb Iran, Surgical Strike Dept,” The Rag Blog, May 4, 2008.

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Cindy Sheehan on Mother’s Day

Posted on May 12, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Cindy Sheehan outside the White House on Nov. 7, 2006. Photo by Ben Schumin.

Mother’s Day 2008: Peaceful Idealism v. Political Pragmatism
By Cindy Sheehan / May 11, 2008 / Mother’s Day

As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace…
(From Julia Ward Howe’s 1870 Mother’s Day Proclamation)

Sadly, this is the fifth Mother’s Day since Casey was killed in Iraq on April 04, 2004. The people who told me that “time will heal” were wrong, or maybe it just takes more time? I have spoken to many mothers who buried their child years ago, however, that tell me it does not get any easier. I suspect the mothers who have buried children are probably right.

On this Mother’s Day, though, I am reflecting on all kinds of moms. Some women never have children and it seems that their lives are complete. Some women desperately want to have children, but for some reason, cannot. Some women have lost their only child to the ravenous war machine and they somehow go on. One specific mother has her family intact and can callously sign blank checks to pay for war (that are really nothing but death warrants for other people’s children) with only the life and health of her political party in her heart. Another mother can talk about “obliterating” an entire innocent country filled with mothers and children without even blinking her eyes that only shed crocodile tears at the appropriate moments.

Some of us are lucky enough to have had loving moms and some of us have had mothers who were cold and distant. Other moms are abusive, while some have been abused. Our world is made up of all kinds of women some of which are suited to be mothers some of which are suited to political life; some both: many neither.

I am a mother of four children. I planned on every one of them outliving me. When I thought of growing old, I imagined being surrounded on holidays by four children, children-in-law, grandchildren and great grandchildren. In the natural order of things, children should always bury their parents, but in our unnaturally violent, war torn world where shopping malls, schools, the streets and entire innocent nations are turned into bloodbaths, the situation is reversed and too many parents must tragically bury their children.

Today, one mother joyously watched her daughter marry at a pig farm in Crawford, TX. The mother’s husband, the daughter’s father, proudly looked on the scene that his actions have denied to so many of us. The daughter wore an Oscar de la Renta gown and it has been reported that there will be dancing throughout the night. Because of her father’s lies and greed, too many people the daughter’s age have been buried in their military dress uniforms (if there was enough of the body left to be buried) while their mothers and fathers watched in heartbroken grief as their child’s body was lowered into a cold, cold grave for eternity.

Too many mothers today in Iraq will have their babies blown to bits by American bombs or an insurgent’s last desperate act. If an Iraqi mother is fortunate enough to have all her children around her, she will be scraping for food, clean water and praying for a few minutes of electricity, or at least one day of peace and quiet.

Recently, I was confronted by a man at a farmer’s market in San Francisco. He is not “pro war” but he is pro-Pelosi because he is a “political pragmatist.” Apparently, Ms. Pelosi funding the war for another year is “politically pragmatic” because it is worth murdering tens of thousands of more innocent people so that Democrats can gain the White House and more seats in Congress. I wish I had the luxury of being a political pragmatist, but I must do everything in my power to save other mothers from the life of never ending grief that I have been condemned to by men and women some of whom are mothers and fathers who have forgotten that other people’s children are precious to their parents, too.

On Mother’s Day this year, while mothers all over America are being taken out to brunch or being served breakfast in bed, I would like us to take time out of our day to reflect on the mothers who have been harmed by the last six years of bloody wars that are waged by neocon-Republicans and paid for by complicit-Democrats. I want us in the US to remember that we are a nation, if not in a legal, moral or declared war: at least a violent occupation that seems like a war to those that have been adversely affected by it.

I am luckier than many mothers whose only child has been stolen from them for lies, because I will be surrounded by my three surviving children and their partners on Mother’s Day and we will spend the time staring at my daughter’s belly which is fat (and one week past due) with my first grandchild. My grandson will never meet his Uncle Casey but he will know him because of the love that is left in his family.

I challenge us all to reject “political pragmatism” and embrace “peaceful idealism” for the love of all the world’s children.

Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation should be enshrined in our war-soaked national consciousness as our economy, ecology and our communities are being ravaged by the rapacious war machine:

Say firmly:

“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

[Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Spc. Casey Austin Sheehan who was KIA in Iraq on 04/04/04. She is a co-founder and President of Gold Star Families for Peace and the author of two books: Not One More Mother’s Child and Dear President Bush.]

Source. / CommonDreams

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Military Moms: We Need Each Other to Heal

Posted on May 12, 2008 by RagBlog


Mother’s Day Veteran: Moms Wear Combat Boots, Too
by Eli PaintedCrow

At the age of twenty, being a mother of a three and five year-old was not easy. Being a single mom on welfare living in a cockroach-infested apartment was not living. I thought I needed to learn discipline, so I walked into the army recruitment office. I spent my 21st birthday in boot camp on a five-mile road march. Many a mom has gone through boot camp. I was no exception.

Today I work towards building a network of women, many of them mothers, who have served in the US military. We seek ways to tell the truth and speak for peace. This Mother’s Day is a time to remember the mothers serving in the military whose stories you’re not likely to hear.

In 1987 I was activated and left for Honduras. Once you put on the uniform, you’re a soldier and you do what is expected of you. You do your job and try not to think. You learn to shut your emotions off. When I returned, I didn’t talk with my sons about these life changes. You just come back, go to work, feed your kids.

In 1993 I went to drill sergeant school. Another eight weeks away from home. As a woman in the military, I had to eliminate showing any emotion or insecurity. It affected how I raised my sons. They knew what it was like to be in the military at very young ages. You lose emotions; you lose yourself and connections to others. They drove it out of me in boot camp and finished it off by sending me to Iraq. I don’t feel like a very good mom or partner these days.

My depression can be severe. Some days I can get out of bed, some days I can’t. Other times all I can do is cry. The military teaches you to accept the rules. When you have PTSD, the VA’s evaluation process seems to be the biggest obstacle to get help. Most veterans just give up.

Women are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and don’t know what is happening to them. They can’t be around their kids; they can’t control their anger or sadness and no one can get close to them. They’re suffering from PTSD but they pretend they’re all right because they don’t want to look weak.

When I started to speak about my experience, my son, a former Marine, thought I was crazy. He is still afraid for me. He thinks someone is going to kill me if I keep talking. But as a mother and a grandmother of eight, I feel there is an obligation to clear the path for our children. My tour in Iraq taught me this lesson.

It broke my heart to watch 20-year-olds walk in from patrol with faces dirty from the dust and heat — looking as if they just came in off the playground — with pictures of their loved ones on their armbands and their weapons on their backs, talking about how they just graduated high school.

Mothers cry for their babies, here and in Iraq. Mothers are the casualties that are not counted. We are the wounded that go untreated. We are also the healers that can change anything. We protect life because we give it. Send a prayer for the mothers and babies who have lost each other. This Mother’s Day remember them, remember us. We need each other to heal. And for all mothers who feel helpless because they think they can’t do anything to stop the war — if you knew the truth you would try.

Eli PaintedCrow is a SWAN co-founder and a retired vet working for peace with the Women of Color Resource Center in Oakland, CA. SWAN (Service Women’s Action Network) is a network of women veterans who have gathered to heal from the trauma of military service and war, to document our stories and to support our transformation from soldiers to peacemakers.

Source / Common Dreams

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Feminism & Women : Backlash Spectacular

Posted on May 11, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Phyllis Schlafly in action, 1979

A Doctorate for Phyllis Schlafly, Oh My….
By Katha Pollitt

Washington University is giving Phyllis Schlafly an honorary doctorate. Let me run that by you again. , the distinguished 155-year-old seat of higher learning in St. Louis, is giving an honorary degree to Phyllis Schlafly–archfoe of the Equal Rights Amendment, the United Nations, Darwinism and other newfangled notions, and the promoter of innumerable crackpot far-right conspiracy theories who called the Bomb “a marvelous gift that was given to our country by a wise God.”

Her eighty-two years haven’t mellowed her one bit: last year she blamed the Virginia Tech massacre on the English department; called intellectual men “liberal slobs”; advocated banning women from traditionally male occupations like construction, firefighting and the military; and defended men’s property rights over their wives’ vaginas (“by getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don’t think you can call it rape”). The campus is in an uproar, and no wonder. After four years of hard work, female seniors get to watch their school honor someone who thinks they should park their diplomas in the kitchen sink. Washington U might as well bring in mad misogynist Chris Matthews as commencement speaker. Oh. You mean…? No! Yes.

Tell me the backlash against feminism isn’t crackling up a storm. I try to keep my eye on the big picture and the bottom line: education, employment, autonomy, power. Surely, I tell myself, the fact that half of all new med students are female is more important than Paris Hilton’s omnipresent visage; that a woman has made the first viable run for the presidency says more about the United States than that media clowns like Matthews basically call her a crazy castrating bitch on a daily basis; or that Caitlin Flanagan, smarmy enemy of working mothers (and another big believer in compulsory sex for wives), won a National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism.

But sometimes I think we’re truly going backward, as Republican hegemony, conservative Christianity and anti-feminist media propaganda take their cumulative toll. All those judges, all that money, all that shock jockery, all those magazines obsessively following stars’ weight and baby bumps: it would be strange if they had no effect. As far as concrete setbacks go, look no further than the case of Lilly Ledbetter, whose right to sue for pay discrimination was denied by the Supreme Court last May. In a 5-to-4 decision, the Justices overturned the standard interpretation of existing law to declare that Ledbetter was twenty years too late: the victim of pay discrimination must sue within six months of the initial discriminatory act–never mind whether she knew about it (many employers, including Ledbetter’s, forbid workers from discussing their salaries; she found out she was paid less than any man at her level from an anonymous tip).

Given the realities of life, the Court has given employers the nod to pay women less, as long as they can keep the women in the dark for 180 days. In April a bill to restore women’s right to sue failed in the Senate, 56-to-42, because for some reason everything now needs sixty votes to become law. John McCain said the bill would lead to too many lawsuits (hello? all it would have done was restore the law we’d lived with for forty-four years); what women needed was more “education and training.” Because right now, women are just too dumb to merit equal pay. As Dahlia Lithwick wrote in a coruscating piece in Slate, if women take this sitting down, maybe they really are dumb.

The suspicion that women are dim would explain why Oklahoma has just passed a law requiring not only that women seeking abortions be forced to view sonograms of their fetuses but that the picture be taken in the way most likely to reveal the clearest picture–often up their vaginas. In other antichoice news, an abortion ban will be on the ballot again in South Dakota, this time with narrow exceptions for rape and incest. And mark June 7 on your calendar–it’s Protest the Pill day, brought to you by the American Life League and other antichoice groups, which claim, despite the evidence, that “the Pill kills babies” by preventing implantation of fertilized eggs.

Maybe it’s good that the antichoice movement is outing itself as opposed to contraception, as prochoicers have long maintained and not many pundits have noted–but it also shows that they believe they can come out of the closet and not be dismissed as lunatics. Look for more struggles over government birth-control funding–already way down, thanks to budget cuts and inflation–as the antichoicers move the goal posts of how “life” is defined.

Yes, women are still making gains in education and–slowly–in politics and other areas. But longstanding feminist gains are eroding: battered women’s shelters, for example, are closing for lack of funds. And the advances haven’t made the difference once hoped for. There are more powerful female Hollywood executives than ever, but as Manohla Dargis pointed out in a splendid rant (her word) in the New York Times, the movies are relentlessly male-focused: the conventional Hollywood wisdom is “Women can’t direct. Women can’t open movies. Women are a niche.”

Culturally, there’s misogyny wherever you look: Grand Theft Auto IV, which offers players the opportunity to have sex with prostitutes and kill them, got rave reviews and is expected to have $500 million in sales its first week out. If there’s a pro-woman cultural event with that kind of reach and impact, I’d like to hear about it. It certainly wouldn’t be Vanity Fair’s photo of tween icon Miley Cyrus, clad in nothing but a bedsheet at all of 15 years old–or the daily media onslaught urging women to focus on their babies like a Zen master contemplating a rock–when not taking pole-dancing lessons, getting Botoxed or catching up on the latest “studies” purporting to prove that they lack the drive and brains to do anything better with their brief time on earth. Feminism, please call home!

Source. / The Nation

Thanks to Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte / The Rag Blog

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Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi : Sat Down Beside Her

Posted on May 11, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Neil Young

Neil Young spider
(Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi, female.)

Neil Young gives his name to a spider
by Roland Piquepaille / May 9, 2008

Canadian rocker Neil Young made headlines this week for appearing at the JavaOne conference and for releasing his musical archive on Blu-ray discs. But he was also honored by a East Carolina University (ECU) professor of biology, who named a newly discovered trapdoor spider Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi after the legendary rock star. According to the strict rules established by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, the second word defining a new species must end in ‘i’ if it’s named after a person. So the researcher didn’t break the naming scheme. It also was the case in 2005 when Cornell University named several beetles after Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. But read more…

A slime-mold beetle of the genus Agathidium closely related to new species named for President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. (Drawing by Frances Fawcett, Ithaca, NY)

This new trapdoor spider species has been discovered in 2007 in Jefferson Co., Alabama, by Jason Bond, an ECU professor of biology. “‘There are rather strict rules about how you name new species,’ Bond said. ‘As long as these rules are followed you can give a new species just about any name you please. With regards to Neil Young, I really enjoy his music and have had a great appreciation of him as an activist for peace and justice.’”

Bond co-wrote a paper on this new spider with Norman I. Platnick, curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

This paper was published by American Museum Novitates under the name “Taxonomic review of the trapdoor spider genus Myrmekiaphila (Araneae: Mygalomorphae: Cyrtaucheniidae).”

Here is a link to the abstract. “The mygalomorph spider genus Myrmekiaphila comprises 11 species known only from the southeastern United States. The type species, M. foliata Atkinson, is removed from the synonymy of M. fluviatilis (Hentz) and placed as a senior synonym of M. atkinsoni Simon. A neotype is designated for M. fluviatilis and males of the species are described for the first time. Aptostichus flavipes Petrunkevitch is transferred to Myrmekiaphila. Six new species are described: M. coreyi and M. minuta from Florida, M. neilyoungi from Alabama, M. jenkinsi from Tennessee and Kentucky, and M. millerae and M. howelli from Mississippi.”

For more information, here is a link to the full paper. (PDF format, 32 pages, 8.97 MB). The illustrations above have been extracted from this document.

Finally, if you’re fascinated by spiders, you should read Platnick’s World Spider Catalog. World Spider Catalog. You’ll learn that Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi belongs to the Cyrtaucheniidae family.

Source. / ZDNet

Thanks to Harry Edwards / The Rag Blog

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J. Gilles : Medical Means Toxic

Posted on May 11, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


Public health and the pharmaceutical myth
By Janet Gilles / May 11, 2008 / The Rag Blog

Onward with the lesson that medical means toxic, the FDA cannot approve a drug without establishing the level at which it will kill half the cats, rats, and mice in the study.

We have a very serious public health problem in this country. Meanwhile, in an environment where our foods contain little or no nutrition BECAUSE of government subsidies to junk food, “progressives” demand free pharmaceuticals for everyone:

Over 300 Doctors, Health Professionals Call For Healthy Farm Bill

“The Farm Bill is fundamentally a public health bill,” said Dr. Benjamin of the American Public Health Association. “Its long reach affects the food security of our nation and, in turn, our health.”

The letter, sent to Chairs and Ranking Minority Members on the House and Senate Agriculture Committees, targets policies in previous Farm Bills that have helped make the calorie-dense foods Americans already over-consume – namely cheap starches and highly processed foods made from added sweeteners and oils derived from corn and soybeans – some of the cheapest to buy.

“Our communities are flooded with cheap, unhealthy foods that ultimately are helping drive healthcare costs through the roof,” said Dr. David Wallinga, director of the Food and Health Program at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

Source. / Public Health Action

And check out the following.

There are articles like this about all the major drugs, because, as I say, they are toxic.

By definition.

That is what a pharmaceutical is, a toxic substance.

Somehow the popular conception is that they have been proven safe by FDA, but actually, no.

They are proven toxic.

Paxil, Lies, and the Lying Researchers Who Tell Them

A bombshell has just appeared in the International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine. The subject of the paper is Paxil study 329, which examined the effects of the antidepressant paroxetine in adolescents. The study findings were published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in 2001. These new findings show that I was wrong about Paxil Study 329. You know, the one that I said overstated the efficacy of Paxil and understated its risks. The one that I claimed was ghostwritten. Turns out that due to legal action, several documents were made available that shed more light on the study. The authors (Jureidini, McHenry, and Mansfield) of the new investigation have a few enlightening points. Let’s look at the claims and you can then see how wrong I was, for which I sincerely apologize. The story is actually worse than I had imagined. Here’s what I said then:

Article [quote from the study publication]: Paroxetine is generally well-tolerated and effective for major depression in adolescents (p. 762).

Data on effectiveness: On the primary outcome variables (Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression [HAM-D] mean change and HAM-D final score.

I went on to bemoan how the authors took differences either based on arbitrary cutoff scores or from measures that assessed something other than depression to make illegitimate claims that paroxetine was effective. Based upon newly available data from the study, here’s what happened.

• The protocol for the study (i.e., the document laying out what was going to happen in the study) called for eight outcome measurements. To quote Jureidini et al: “There was no significant difference between the paroxetine and placebo groups on any of the eight pre-specified outcome measures.” So I was wrong. Paxil was not better on 4 of 8 measures — it was better on ZERO of eight measures. My sincerest apologies.

• Another quote from Jureidini and friends: “Overall four of the eight negative outcome measures specified in the protocol were replaced with four positive ones, many other negative measures having been tested and rejected along the way.”

Let’s break this thing down for a minute. The authors planned to look eight different ways for Paxil to beat placebo. They went zero for eight. So, rather than declaring defeat, the authors then went digging to find some way in which Paxil was better than a placebo. Devising various cutoff scores on various measures on which victory could be declared, as well as examining individual items from various measures rather than entire rating scales, the authors were able to grasp and pull out a couple of small victories. In the published version of the paper, there is no hint that such data dredging occurred. Change the endpoints until you find one that works out, then declare victory.

How About Safety?

I was incensed about the coverage of safety, particularly the magical writing that stated that a placebo can make you suicidal, but Paxil could not. I wrote:

It gets even more bizarre. Remember those 10 people who had serious adverse psychiatric events while taking paroxetine? Well, the researchers concluded that none of the adverse psychiatric events were caused by paroxetine. Interestingly, the one person who became “labile” [i.e., suicidal] on placebo – that event was attributed to placebo. In this magical study, a drug cannot make you suicidal but a placebo can. In a later document, Keller and colleagues said that “acute psychosocial stressors, medication noncompliance, and/or untreated comorbid disorders were judged by the investigators to account for the adverse effects in all 10 patients.” This sounds to me as if the investigators had concluded beforehand that paroxetine is incapable of making participants worse and they just had to drum up some other explanation as to why these serious events were occurring.

Turns out I missed a couple things. Based on looking at an internal document and doing some calculations, Jureidini et al. found that serious adverse events were significantly more likely to occur in patients taking paroxetine (12%) vs. placebo (2%). Likewise, adverse events requiring hospitalization were significantly disadvantageous to paroxetine (6.5% vs. 0%). Severe nervous system side effects — same story (18% vs. 4.6%). The authors of Study 329 did not conduct analyses to see whether the aforementioned side effects occurred more commonly on drug vs. placebo.

Funny how they had time to dredge through every conceivable efficacy outcome but couldn’t see whether the difference in severe adverse events was statistically significant.

One quote from the discussion section of the paper sums it all up:

There was no significant efficacy difference between paroxetine and placebo on the two primary outcomes or six secondary outcomes in the original protocol. At least 19 additional outcomes were tested. Study 329 was positive on 4 of 27 known outcomes (15%). There was a significantly higher rate of SAEs with paroxetine than with placebo. Consequently, study 329 was negative for efficacy and positive forharm.
But the authors concluded infamously that “Paroxetine is generally well-tolerated and effective for major depression in adolescents.”

Enter Ghostwriters. Documentary evidence as shown on indicated that the first draft of the study was ghostwritten. This leaves two roles for the so-called academic authors of this paper:

They were willing co-conspirators who committed scientific fraud.

They were dupes, who dishonestly represented that they had a major role in the analysis of data and writing of the study, when in fact GSK operatives were working behind the scenes to manufacture these dubious results.

Source. / Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry: A Closer Look / April 28, 2008

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Happy Mothers’ Day! (A little birdie told me.)

Posted on May 11, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Omigod! A feelgood animal video on The Rag Blog!

Posted May 11, 2008 / The Rag Blog

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Just Another Day in Baghdad

Posted on May 11, 2008 by RagBlog

Iraq’s secret war of widows deepens
By Agence France-Presse / May 10, 2008

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Ducking bullets and dodging car bombs may be part of daily life for millions of Baghdadis but behind black veils yet another struggle is being waged — the battle of war widows — to keep young families alive.

Iraqi housemaid Um Haidar wears a black scarf as a sign of mourning since her shop-assistant husband was gunned down two years ago. Their 10-year-old son is now working and out of school.

Um Haidar, 35, is among an estimated one million Iraqi war widows trying to eke out a living. Official figures estimate that one in six women aged 15- 49 is widowed.

Um Haidar’s son left school after his father’s death and works at a Baghdad barber’s shop. He brings in much needed dinars to support his four-year-old sister.

“I wear black, not only because I’m sad and grieving but also because of the bad security in Iraq. Everything is bad and we face the killing and bloodshed every day in our life,” she said.

Some women wear the black abaya, or the all-covering head-to-toe dress, fearing attacks from Islamic fundamentalists who insist that women should cover up and not appear in bright colors.

But for Um Haidar the real battle is to put food on the table for her children with no man to support her. The deepening sectarian violence is not making it any easier for the vulnerable.

“Since I lost my husband, I am fighting to make a living for my family,” she said, adding that only a few supported her.

Widow Wafaa Faraj, 38, a mother of two girls aged 13 and eight, has moved in with the family of her late husband, Mohammed.

She lives in a small room on the first floor of the house with just one bed. The room has a television set in a corner and minimum furniture that includes a small desk for her daughter to study.

“I can barely manage to live,” she said. “I’m living in a bad situation. There is no one to take care of me, or my two daughters. I work hard every day to be sure that my little daughters have dinner before they go to sleep.”

Her policeman husband was killed by a sniper at Al-Mutanabi street in central Baghdad. She said the police later told her that her husband’s killer was a Kuwaiti national.

“I was against the war and I will be against it always, I hate the war because it made many women lose their husbands, and many Iraqi children became fatherless,” Faraj said.

She is also bitter with US forces, who number more than 150,000 deployed across the country and are still battling militiamen, amid increasing sectarian violence that is also taking a heavy toll among civilians.

“The US forces came to Iraq to make us live in freedom, but we didn’t find freedom, we find killing and bloodshed every day and everywhere,” she said.

Read all of it here. / Inquirer.net

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Peace Action for Mother’s Day

Posted on May 11, 2008 by RagBlog


As Julia Ward Howe wrote in her Mother’s Day Proclamation, “Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have taught them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs” To commemorate this original Mother’s Day call to Action, Peace Action invites you help protect American youth from the Pentagon’s predatory and illegal recruitment tactics. You have the power to fight the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB).

STEP 1: Educate Yourself and Your Family
The ASVAB is given to more than a half million public high school students every year under the guise of “career testing”. Unfortunately ASVAB only tests for military careers and all of the results from the four-hour test, along with sensitive personal information, are released to military recruiters – unless schools take steps to protect student privacy.

STEP 2: Educate Your School About Option 8
Most schools don’t know the ASVAB is primarily a military recruiting tool. After all, the military markets it as a public service, a free “Career Exploration Program” to assist kids in finding appropriate career paths. More importantly, most schools aren’t aware of “ASVAB Release Option 8,” which allows schools to have the military proctor the test while keeping scores and personal information private.

STEP 3: Take Action in Your School District.
Four of the nation’s largest school systems have already been persuaded to protect student privacy by selecting Option 8. Privacy advocates in Maryland recently passed legislation requiring public high schools to notify each student and their guardian of their right to prevent students’ names and contact information from being released to military recruiters (Senate Bill 428).

Peace Action has already supported successful campaigns to protect students from predatory military recruiting across the country, contact us for help doing this work in your community.

Whether you’re a mother or a father – or a grandparent – or someone without children but concerned about the future let’s rise to Julia Ward Howe’s original call to “promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”

Let’s use the influence that we have in our own communities to protect all our children. Let’s all write to our School Boards, Superintendents, and Principals telling them about the ASVAB and Option 8.

Never before has such a simple campaign been so effective. We can end the occupation of Iraq by ending the occupation of our nation’s public schools – Take this important Peace Action Today.

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R. Baker : Liu and the Liquidity Crisis

Posted on May 11, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


Recession and the Liquidity Trap
By Roger Baker / May 11, 2008 / The Rag Blog

A year ago, on May 9, 2007, Henry C. K. Liu wrote an article for the Asia Times titled “Liquidity boom and looming crisis.”
So far Liu’s predictions have been mostly accurate in terms of predictive trends, although the global financial crisis he foresees has been contained for the time being.

The crisis he describes is a liquidity trap in which traditional Keynesian stimulation of the economy by the federal reserve has lost its previously strong effect, due largely to the financial problem being global. Trying to stimulate the domestic economy destabilizes the global economy; this is the basis of the trap. Enough federal stimulation to reflate the domestic economy may easily lead to self-accelerated dollar devaluation, hyperinflation, ending in a global depression.

The severe US recession that Lui forsees in the opening portion of his essay has now become a reality. The credit crisis has deepened and spread broadly enough to require an emergency bailout of Bear Stearns by the federal reserve. As Liu anticipated, high interest rates last year cooled the economy and are now leading the fed to try to try to restimulate a depressed US economy using easy credit, but so far without much impact as inflation grows worse.

The Fed’s stated goal is to cool an overheated economy sufficiently to keep inflation in check by raising short-term interest rates, but not
so much as to provoke a recession. Yet in this age of finance and credit derivatives, the Fed’s interest-rate policy no longer holds dictatorial command over the supply of liquidity in the economy. Virtual money created by structured finance has reduced all central banks to the status of mere players rather than key conductors of financial markets. The Fed now finds itself in a difficult position of being between a rock and a hard place, facing a liquidity boom that decouples rising equity markets from a slowing underlying economy that can easily turn toward stagflation, with slow growth accompanied by high inflation…

The trap is if the fed creates enough liquidity to stimulate the domestic economy, it leads to inflation and dollar devaluation, which then raises oil prices, etc. Higher oil and food prices then depress and deflate the US economy, thus requiring even more liquidity to be created.

Finally the Chinese, already choking on shrinking dollars and suffering from their own inflation, will decide to dump a tidal wave of US treasury notes. Nothing material is backing the dollar despite its key status in world trade. There are huge foreign dollar reserves that will be cashed in at some point and will flood into the world economy and amplify the desire to unload dollars and exchange them before they devalue any further:

…A liquidity trap can be a serious problem because the world is still
plagued with excess liquidity potential: massive foreign reserves held
by central banks, bulging petrodollars, hedge funds and private-equity
funds, massive increases in global monetary base, $4 trillion in
low-yielding Chinese bank deposits ready for release for higher
yields, $5 trillion in low-yielding US time deposits maturing, $10
trillion in low-yielding Japanese financial net worth, plus $27
trillion in medium-yielding US household financial net worth waiting
to be monetized for aggressive yields. A global liquidity trap of with
$50 trillion of idle assets will implode like a doomsday machine…

If I see a weakness in Liu’s economic analysis, it is perhaps that he is not so conscious of the key role of US oil addiction, which weakens the US economy relatively more than its industrialised competitors.

Further validation of some of the same trends anticipated by Liu may be seen in the following piece by Michael Klare on the end of the US as a global superpower due to oil addiction. The USA sends to the Arabs and other oil producers $1.5 billion a day to satisfy its oil addiction. The Arabs are probably just as likely to cash in and send their shrinking dollars flooding into the world economy and with as little warning as are the Chinese. I think Iran just said that it intends to start selling its oil for Euros. Here is a snip from Klare:

“An oil-addicted ex-superpower” by Michael T. Klare, May 10, 2008.

….While our economy is being depleted of these funds, at a moment when credit is scarce and economic growth has screeched to a halt, the oil regimes on which we depend for our daily fix are depositing their mountains of accumulating petrodollars in “sovereign wealth funds” (SWFs) – state-controlled investment sources of wealth. At present, these funds are already believed to hold in excess of several trillion dollars; the richest, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), alone holds $875 billion…

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Both Sides Will Claim They Aren’t Prejudiced

Posted on May 11, 2008 by RagBlog

Americans are in utter denial about this topic. But I see it and hear words from white mouthes that instantiate it every single day of the week. And I don’t see this changing here anytime soon. It is too ingrained, and it is handed down from one generation to the next the way a family heirloom might be passed to younger generations. Just another sign of a sick society.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog


Acknowledging the Race Chasm
By David Sirota

When it comes to race, American politics is as polarized as a red and blue election map. On one side are those who try to distract from the issue; on the other side are those who work to sensationalize it. As this campaign season shows, what unifies both is bigotry.

Take the reaction to my recent In These Times article about Barack Obama winning states with either very small or very large black populations, but losing most states in the middle.

Those results, while troubling, aren’t surprising. In very white states, racial themes are simply not part of the political dialogue, and a black candidate therefore faces fewer inherent disadvantages. In states with large black populations, race is a major political force, but the African-American vote is big enough to offset a racially motivated white vote. It is in the Race Chasm — the states whose populations are more than 6 percent and less than 17 percent black — where race is a political issue but the black vote is too small to counter a racially motivated white vote.

The trend continued in the last few weeks, with Obama losing two states in the Race Chasm (Pennsylvania and Indiana) and winning one outside the Chasm (North Carolina). Nonetheless, the response to this phenomenon by some in the intelligentsia has been willful ignorance.

The Atlantic Monthly’s Reihan Salam said the data are not driven by race, but by Hillary Clinton’s “waitress-mom sensibility sell[ing] well in these regions.” The New America Foundation’s Michael Lind said the evidence does not reflect America’s historic black-white divide, but instead Germanic and Scandinavian migration patterns (I’m not kidding). This is typical behavior from the Establishment’s “serious” thinkers. When confronted with race, they become ostriches and shove their heads in the sand.

The news industry and politicians, on the other hand, are happy to discuss and exploit race, whether by manufacturing controversy (think Jeremiah Wright) or by promoting racists (think MSNBC hiring Pat Buchanan, or Republican senators re-electing Trent Lott to a leadership position). The media and political elites aren’t ostriches — they behave like minstrel show producers, portraying African-Americans as subhuman, alien and unimportant, except for their entertainment value.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, for example, differentiated between “regular people” and black people. Pundits refer separately to the “working class” and to African-Americans — as if they are mutually exclusive. Hillary Clinton this week claimed, “Obama’s support among working, hardworking Americans, white Americans, is weakening” — the implication being that non-white Americans are lazy. These terms — “regular,” “working class,” “hardworking” — have become euphemisms for “whites,” who are subsequently billed as the only ones who matter.

Think I’m imagining that last part? Then you weren’t watching ABC’s “Nightline” last week. The Jeremiah Wright brouhaha may be roiling the black community, correspondent David Wright said, “but the real question now is what do white voters think.” That’s right — according to “Nightline,” painful questions in the black community aren’t “real.”

Such denigration happens all the time, and you can tell it is rooted in bigotry because the black vote is — by any mathematical measure — crucial. Political scientist Tom Schaller notes that if Clinton had won slightly more African-American votes, she might be winning. And black turnout for Democrats could decide general elections in many key swing states. Yet, we are still told “the real question” is only what white voters think.

Some will read this and go on pretending the Race Chasm doesn’t exist, while others will keep insisting that the black vote is irrelevant. Both sides will claim they aren’t prejudiced. But racism, whether from ostriches or minstrel show producers, is racism — and it will persist until we recognize it and reject it.

David Sirota is a senior editor at In These Times and a bestselling author whose newest book, “The Uprising,” will be released in June of 2008. He is a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network — both nonpartisan organizations. His blog is at www.credoaction.com/sirota.

Source / In These Times

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