PS — I am busy helping Anon in Canada. BBL when things aren’t so busy with that and work.
AuthorFell
http://www.mindfully.org/Health/2006/LSD-Albert-Hofmann7jan06.htm
Happy Belated Birthday! Ol’ Dr Hofman turned 102 a couple weeks ago!
What Don’t We Know About the Pharmaceutical Industry? A Freakonomics Quorum
[W]e’ve gathered up some willing and able candidates – Dr. Stuart Apfel, Zola P. Horovitz, Dr. Harlan Krumholz, Ray Moynihan, and Dr. Cyril Wolf – and asked them the following question:
What’s something that most people don’t know, pro or con, about the pharmaceutical business, whether from an R&D, economic, or political perspective?
Dr. Harlan Krumholz, professor of medicine, epidemiology, and public health at Yale:
Science and the public good in a capitalist society depend on the free flow of unbiased information, but it doesn’t always work that way. Events are revealing that many pharmaceutical companies, along with their consulting academic physicians, have engaged in practices that obscure or misrepresent information about their products. Does the public realize the depth of these practices, and their implications for patient care?
Zola P. Horovitz, Ph.D, pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry consultant, and member of the board of drug companies including Biocryst Pharmaceuticals, Phyton, Genaera Corporation, and Avigen:
My answer to this question is this: that the United States is subsidizing prescription drug prices for the rest of the world. Most people do not realize that when a prescription is paid for in the U.S., the payer (the patient, his or her insurance company, or the government) is subsidizing the cost of that same prescription in most countries outside the U.S. The pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies price their products to get a return that will support research and development to discover new products. Almost all major new drugs are discovered and developed by these companies, and most are located inside the U.S.
Dr. Cyril Wolf, practicing physician and prescription sales researcher:
The best kept secret by the retail pharmaceutical industry is the obscene profits made on generic drugs by the large chain stores. Whereas brand name drugs are all purchased, and therefore sold, for around the same price, generics are obtained for a fraction of that cost. The price at which the generics are sold is determined by the sellers, who thus have the ability to make exorbitant profits on these drugs.
Dr. Stuart Apfel, founder and president of Parallax Clinical Research and chief medical officer at Elite Pharmaceuticals:
For the majority of people, the great appeal of biomedical science is the potential benefit it presents to human beings through curing disease, extending life, and improving the quality of life. As is generally well-known, biomedical science has achieved much in extending our knowledge of the complex biological processes that make up all living organisms, including ourselves. […]
Market forces will always drive the actions of pharmaceutical companies, which are, after all, businesses like any other. However, society as a whole will benefit from greater risk taking and increased efforts to bridge the divide between laboratory science and the clinic.
Ray Moynihan, co-author of Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients:
What a lot of people may not know is that for some time now, pharmaceutical company marketing strategies have focused on promoting illness, rather than simply promoting drugs. Underpinning many of the marketing strategies of big drug companies is a very sophisticated and comprehensive plan to widen the boundaries of illness, and create an environment in which more and more formerly healthy people are defined as ‘sick.’ The strategies have many components – the most visible being TV and newspaper ads that make us think that our ailments and inconveniences are the signs and symptoms of genuine medical conditions. A sore stomach is ‘Irritable Bowel Syndrome,’ a mild sexual difficulty is ‘Female Sexual Dysfunction,’ and overactive grown-ups now have ‘Adult Attention Deficit Disorder.’
FOR THE FULL ANSWERS READ THE ARTICLE
I love this topic…
“What happens if you are left alone in the dark in solitary confinement for days on end? The result is called sensory deprivation and the human mind struggles to cope with it.”
Sensory deprivation is a controversial subject, with allegations the technique has been used at Guantanamo Bay as an interrogation strategy. And thousands of prisoners around the world are kept in solitary confinement, often with a significant degree of sensory deprivation.
The tests are exploring the theory that sensory deprivation makes subjects much more suggestible.
Some of the first research on this subject was carried out after the Korean War in the 1950s. The Canadian military wanted to investigate what had happened to POWs who appeared at international press conferences confessing that they were war criminals. It was thought they had been brainwashed following solitary confinement.
Hehe and this is funny, too:
Mickey, a postman is seeing mosquitoes and fighter planes buzzing around his head and it’s frightening him.
Claire a psychology student doesn’t mind the little cars, snakes and zebras. But she gets scared when she suddenly feels somebody is in the room.
“In the dark room there is nothing to focus on,” says Prof Robbins as he monitors their behaviour. “In the absence of information the human brain carries on working and processing information even if there is no information to process and after a while it starts to create that information itself.”
No wonder when I teach people to do their visualisations most of them freak out and never pursue it.
Horizon: Total Isolation is on BBC Two at 2100GMT on Tuesday 22 January.
Bill Moyers interviews New York Times investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize-winner David Cay Johnston who says America’s system has been rigged to benefit the super-rich.
Ties into this whole shtick about the U.S. of A. going bankrupt.
Awesome: “We used to put people to death five hundreds years ago for lending money to charge interest.”
I’ve been following this as it develops. Here’s the press release:
CLEARWATER, Florida – Anonymous announced their intention to combat the activities of the Church of Scientology on Monday. A spokesperson said that the group’s goals include bringing an end to the financial exploitation of Church members and protecting the right to free speech, a right which they claim was consistently violated by the Church of Scientology in pursuit of its opponents.
This announcement came as a response to attempts by the Church to keep secret an internal video meant to be viewed only by Scientologists, featuring actor Tom Cruise. Despite their efforts, the movie was leaked and rapidly spread across the Internet. The video caused much controversy, and members of Anonymous posted a message to several of their websites proclaiming war against Scientology. Soon after, Anonymous struck at the church; they blocked access to its website, made prank calls, organized protests, distributed anti-Church pamphlets and information, and extracted secret files from the Church of Scientology and its parent company, the Religious Technology Center.
View the whole thing here.
Inspired by the release of Tom Cruise’s secret Scientology video and the Church’s attempts to suppress it, Anon promises an all-out war in the following hokey but entertaining video:
For further information, check out the Gawker post. It has some notes and links.
While this is an interesting and short read, worth its perusal, I found this little snippet quite interesting about possible solutions to help the U.S. out of its sinking situation. I’m interested in the first point, but like I said, the whole thing is worth reading:
We might possibly be saved, he explains, if the nation engages in massive, radical reform in three areas: 1) Eliminating the current income tax system and moving to a national retail sales tax of 33 percent. 2) Privatizing social security so that workers own their savings accounts and the federal government can no longer swipe funds from Social Security. 3) Launching a national health insurance program that covers everyone and relies on a system of government-issued vouchers that citizens can spend with health insurance companies.
Full article via NewsTarget, by Mike Adams
From io9:
Inflated prices trigger the pleasure centers in your brain more than fair ones. Not only is the idea of buying something expensive more exciting than buying something on sale, but you’ll actually get more genuine pleasure out of something expensive — even if it’s not worth the cost. A group of social scientists at CalTech and Stanford discovered this not-entirely-unexpected fact when they stuck people into MRI brain scanners and gave them several glasses of wine, assigning each one a random price.
In point of fact, all the wines were exactly the same. But the results of the MRI scans showed greater neurological activity in people’s pleasure centers when they were told they were drinking expensive wine. The best (creepiest?) part of all this is that the authors of the study hope to use these findings to manipulate consumers. The authors write:
Our results show that increasing the price of a wine increases subjective reports of flavor pleasantness as well as blood-oxygen-level-dependent activity in medial orbitofrontal cortex, an area that is widely thought to encode for experienced pleasantness during experiential tasks. The paper provides evidence for the ability of marketing actions to modulate neural correlates of experienced pleasantness and for the mechanisms through which the effect operates.
Yes, marketing can modulate your neurological system. You already knew that, but somehow finding out that there’s an objective truth to it in a brain scanner makes it feel more like Big Brother than Brooks Brothers.
Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness
R. Scott Bakker’s The Darkness that Comes Before (Book One of The Prince of Nothing) is a deep meditation on philosophy, religion and the state of our world. At the same time it is a top notch exemplar of the fantasy romance sub-genre.
Bakker’s interest in philosophy becomes apparent from the start. He opens with an epigraph from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, and the first character we meet, Anas?rimbor Kellhus, is an embodiment of Nietsche’s ideals. Nietzsche argued, among other things, that independence is for the strong, that ‘There are heights of the soul seen from which even tragedy ceases to be tragic,’ and that the search for truth cannot be done humanely. Bakker’s Kellhus not only shares these views, they are the essential stuff of his character. That such Nietzschean attitudes exert a certain irresistible pull is undeniable, and this accounts for the exquisite darkness Bakker weaves through his story. As Kellhus, raised by the ascetic survivors of the First Apocalypse, the D?nyain, begins his impossible quest, he proves himself a superman of Nietzschean dimensions, with a steely conscience and a heart made of brass. What, Bakker seems to be asking, would happen to a man who is physically and mentally superior when he, as Nietzsche puts it, assumes the displeasure of trafficking with ordinary men?
Yet Kellhus soon finds himself faced with another claimant to the mantle of the superman, the Scylvendi barbarian Cnai?r urs Ski?tha. He, more than Kellhus, represents the Dionysian aspect of the superman Nietzsche dreamed of with great relish-a man for whom all is permitted, as all is permitted in nature. Kellhus gains his superhuman abilities from D?nyain philosophy that attempts to master the deterministic principle of the ?Logos’ and strives for a Schopenhauerian denial of desire that Nietzsche would have frowned upon even as he’d be marvelling at the supermen the D?nyain had become. Cnai?r, on the other hand-as his ‘prize’, the concubine Serw? comes to realize-looks ‘down on all outlanders as though from the summit of some godless mountain.’ Like Kellhus, he is beyond morality, but unlike Kellhus he indulges his ‘bestial appetites.’ Bakker paints a picture of two supermen with divergent philosophical perspectives, and the reader is left to wonder which of these is the more monstrous-the one who is brutal in his appetites, a Dionysian beyond good and evil like a force of nature–or the one who manipulates those around him as if they were chess pieces while single-mindedly pursuing his own goal, committing and permitting acts of cruelty, heartlessly capitalizing on the hopes and fears of the ‘herd’ around him?
While some might wonder what would motivate Bakker to revisit a philosophy of morality which seems to have been thoroughly discredited in the hands of the Nazis, the fact remains that the debate-between those inclined to see a certain rightness in a Nietzschean outlook, in accordance with which the ‘superior’ individual or group of individuals is permitted, nay obligated, to arrogate superior rights to himself or themselves, and those who see morality as derived from maxims such as those set out by Kant (whom Nietzsche vilified), who argued that wishing others well was a human duty whether or not one liked the others-has not been wholly put to rest, particularly in the arena of international politics, the realpolitik.
Bakker, while pondering these Nietzschean supermen, also constructs a fascinating civilization from which such individuals emerge: His sub-created world of E?rwa lurches into Holy War. Maithanet, the Shriah of the Thousand Temples (the linguistic markers of whose name and title suggest Islam), declares what is essentially a Crusade to regain the lost holy city where the Latter Prophet, Inri Sejenus (whose name suggests the crucified Christ), taught. While the Thousand Temples is an attempt to reconcile all religions by declaring all deities ?aspects of the God’, it is the Kianene, whose culture is modelled on that of the pantheistic Hindus, who are the strict monotheists of E?rwa and who reject the teaching of the Latter Prophet (and who also happen to possess the holy city where he taught, Shimeh). Bakker strengthens the identification between the Thousand Temples and the Abrahamic religions with his interchangeable use of the terms ‘holy war’ and ‘jihad’ and by describing the capital of the Thousand Temples in a fashion that evokes Jerusalem. By incorporating Goddess worship and a Germanic tree-worshipping element, Bakker also makes clear that the object of his meditation is not any specific religion, but the religious impulse itself.
Bakker has at least one glove off when he offers an epigraph from Ajencis, an ancient E?rwan philosopher, at the start of Chapter Fifteen: ‘Faith is the truth of passion. Since no passion is more true than another, faith is the truth of nothing.’ In that chapter the sorcerer-spy from the ridiculed Mandate school of sorcery, Drusas Achamian lectures the pious crusader Proyas on the nature of faith: ‘There’s faith that knows itself as faith, Proyas, and there’s faith that confuses itself for knowledge. The first embraces uncertainty, acknowledges the mysteriousness of the God. It begets compassion and tolerance. Who can entirely condemn when they’re not entirely certain they’re in the right? But the second, Proyas, the second embraces certainty and only pays lip service to the God’s mystery. It begets intolerance, hatred, violence….’
In such moments particularly, but throughout the work generally, Bakker demonstrates a fine control over the literary conventions of romance and fantasy. He knows that the romance hero is to be the carrier of the values of the reader, and he plays with the time-honoured rule of creating a hero who is unrecognized nobility, the heir to a lost throne, and, of course, young and handsome. His shifting of the action from Kellhus to the low-born, portly and middle-aged Drusas Achaiman defies conventions associated with romance heroes from Sir Gawain to Luke Skywalker. And, in Cnai?r’s unapologetic carnality (and that of other characters, notably Esmenet and Serw?), Bakker’s fantasy further shows its contemporariness. Yet, despite these aspects to his work, he may yet be out of step with current fantasy audiences.
Guy Haley makes the matter-of-fact assertion in the pages of SFX Magazine that fantasy is more and more becoming female-audience-driven and this accounts for the soap-opera flavour of successes in the genre since the 80s. Bakker does achieve the soap opera effect in giving us characters we want to follow, but he undermines his own effort to reach out to a female audience by making his only three female characters all appear whorish. That there is some element of truth in the depictions of Esmenet, Serw?, and Istriya, grand dam of House Ikurei of the Nansur Empire, that women will be able to connect with is something that Bakker is gambling on.
There is another potential problem with the book: there’s no conclusion. Bakker leaves us hanging in the midst of an action scene and offers an unsatisfying epilogue populated entirely by characters who have never appeared before and who ponder the significance of the book’s final, unfinished events. In this way, Bakker fails to demonstrate the whole of the storyteller’s craft-i.e. the ability to bring a story to a resounding, exhilarating and real conclusion. He makes things even harder on himself because, by buying into the multi-volume format, he places himself at the mercy of editors who will push him relentlessly to produce the next book. If, like Sean Russell in his Swans’ War cycle, Bakker does not significantly shape Book Two, he risks everything. Let’s hope he doesn’t succumb to the pressure and release something beneath both the promise and execution of this excellently written work.
But all this forecasting and foreboding cannot take away from the achievements of this book. Throughout, Bakker not only reveals that he is an expert storyteller, but he touches on deep philosophic issues in such a way that any reader will grasp the fundamental principles being tested against each other. He offers us a dark mirror for our strife-torn world, a mirror in which we think we see God when all the while we are only seeing ourselves.
Patrick R. Burger (Books in Canada)
Mark Devon, the author:
I began thinking about emotions while studying evolutionary theory at Harvard University.
Learning that adaptations do not evolve unless they help survival, I reasoned that each emotion must have a purpose that helped survival. If I could identify an emotion’s trigger, I could also identify its purpose.
Applying that thought to each emotion, I wrote The Origin of Emotions. [Available as a free PDF download. Or you can purchase a hardcopy for ease of reading.]
The following are excerpts from the book:
‘Maternal love stops when a child is 33 months old. Mothers maximize their reproduction by focusing on the next child when the current child can feed itself. By 33 months, children can feed themselves if food is available. They can walk and their first set of teeth have completed eruption.’
‘Men only love a woman for 42 months, which covers 9 months of gestation and 33 months of post-natal care. Both sexes maximize reproduction by starting a new reproductive cycle with a new partner when a child can feed itself.’
‘Revenge encourages victims of rule breaking to always retaliate, whether it helps them or not. The more victims retaliate, the fewer rule breakers there are. The fewer rule breakers there are, the more efficient a group is.’
‘Pride is triggered by higher rank, not high rank. Rookies feel pride, but veteran all-stars do not. Recent nursing graduates feel pride, but doctors nearing retirement do not.’
‘Humiliation is triggered by lower rank, not low rank. The only criminals who feel humiliation are first-time offenders. Every CEO feels humiliation when they retire.’
‘You feel affection when you see or hear features that separate humans from other primates, such as the sight of white eyes or the sound of talking.’
‘When you maximize your happiness, you do what is best for the species.’
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