Scandalous

Tony Platt's The Scandal of Cal: Land Grabs, White Supremacy, and Miseducation at UC Berkeley is an interesting read.  Much of the material is familiar, but the book does root Phoebe Apperson Hearst's inveterate collecting of physical artifacts, including lots and lots of human remains, and the consequent need to display and store them at the heart of the university's problems.  It's similar to how her social and philanthropic rival Jane Stanford's morbid obsession with her dead relations was the original intended focus of the junior university on her farm.  Then again, no one repeatedly tried and ultimately succeeded in gruesomely killing Hearst with rat poison. 

The Security Apparatus Is REALLY Stupid

About six years ago, I was forced to chat with some Colombian psychiatrist as part of some nonsense.  She was ADAMANT that psychiatry was a PhD program in the US like in Europe and other countries.  I tried to gently explain that something like psychology or neuroscience would be a related PhD but that psychiatry was considered a medical specialty here, but she wasn't having ANY of it.

The Security Apparatus Loves Counterproductive Torture

It looks as though the law school formally informally known as Boalt Hall has finally removed the Botero paintings of US atrocities at Abu Ghraib that were on display.  I think they should go the other way and display all 56 paintings that the artist donated to the university's art museum due to Berkeley's supposed commitment to free speech and civil liberties.  It would kind of be a contemporary equivalent of Orozco's epic La epica de la civilizacion americana permanently displayed in the basement of Dartmouth's library.  I hung out all night around the campus just to see them one time, and it was quite worth it.

After all, it's not as though there are people at or near Berkeley's law school who have horrifically enabled discredited CIA-sponsored psychological torture that has no useful purpose and only serves to disgrace our nation and its government by exposing its fundamental hypocrisy and cruelty.  And if they were originally from Canada, it would be even worse, given the atrocities committed at McGill.

The Security Apparatus Loves Homophobia and White Supremacy

When I was a kid and even adult, the security apparatus HATED that I watched good movies that I enjoyed.  Instead they wanted me to watch movies targeted to immature five-year-olds that were filled with bigoted content.  The most hilarious instance is when they forced me to watch a movie with the world record for gay panic jokes.  They also did not like that I did not appreciate blackface, which isn't surprising given that one of the handful of movies that my father took us to or even saw himself in a theater after 1976 is so racist that Disney won't even let anyone see it.  I'm sure the security apparatus is distraught that Disney has gone woke and removed the minstrelsy elements from Splash Mountain.

Wow, He Was Right about Almost Everything!

He's generally forgotten now and was probably most recently remembered by those who know of him for his revealed racism and antisemitism, but I was reminded by reading Hofstadter on anti-intellectualism of how influential H.L. Mencken once was.  Apparently, he was right about pretty everything!  Or at least about how things were in 1930 and except for the racism and antisemitism.  From his Wikipedia bio:

As a scholar, Mencken is known for The American Language, a multi-volume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States. As an admirer of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he was an outspoken opponent of organized religion, theism, censorship, populism, and representative democracy, the last of which he viewed as a system in which inferior men dominated their superiors.^[2] Mencken was a supporter of scientific progress and was critical of osteopathy and chiropractic. He was also an open critic of economics.

"Eight Is Enough" S2:E7 The Bard and the Bod

I vaguely recall when some shampoos had beer in them (an internet search shows that there was a Body on Tap brand in the late '70s), but in this episode Nancy (the pretty Bradford daughter) is rehearsing lines with her sister for a play in which Joanie will appear nude.  Nancy then proceeds to crack open a can of beer and casually pours it over her head over the kitchen sink.  Was this a real thing?  

Mathematics or Rheumatoid Arthritis

I'm sure it's a set-up, but I always appreciate how the fine people at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences carefully differentiate between the actual Nobel Prizes they award and their other fine prizes.  I mean, I'm sure the Crafood Prize in Mathematics or Rheumatoid Arthritis or the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economics in Memory of Alfred Nobel have their place, at their level, but no serious person is going to be confusing them with Nobels, no matter of self-promotion by economists notwithstanding.  After all, I've never heard anyone say they aspired to be a respected economist but found the work too difficult and settled for being a world-renowned mathematician or theoretical physicist, although the converse is so commonplace to be cliche (although they usually express it as wanting to do something more practical).  The one exception is Ed Witten, who was an undergraduate history major and then worked on McGovern's presidential campaign before realizing that he would never understand US politics and ended up getting his PhD in physics from Princeton and becoming his generation's Dirac.  

Thus, as Alfred Nobel's great-grandnephew expressed it, the Economics Prize remains "a PR coup by economists to improve their reputations."  Hayek even argued in his acceptance speech that the prize should not exist, saying, "The Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess. ... This does not matter in the natural sciences. Here the influence exercised by an individual is chiefly an influence on his fellow experts; and they will soon cut him down to size if he exceeds his competence. But the influence of the economist that mainly matters is an influence over laymen: politicians, journalists, civil servants and the public generally."  

Of course, the most hilarious thing is that they literally had to change their rules after John Nash won to specify that the prize was for work in the social sciences.  I guess Nash's work was too mathematical, and the economists were concerned that one day they would no longer be winning their own prize.  Nash, of course, never thought about winning the prize whereas he was pissed off for the rest of his life about not winning a Fields Medal, which in some ways is more prestigious than a Nobel, and it's said it may have contributed to his mental collapse.

Ed Witten, of course, won a Fields Medal, even though he's primarily viewed as a physicist.  Then again, he's not human.

Wow, Randy Really Violates Professional Ethics

Wow, "Randy" Randy Canterbury really violated the professional standards of psychiatry as expressed in the Madrid Declaration on Ethical Standards for Psychiatric Practice.  These standards were adopted by the World Psychiatric Association (granted, their founding president was a torturer for the CIA) in August 1996 so they should have been fresh in his mind.  Among other things, Randy violated the following ethical standards -

3. The patient should be accepted as a partner by right in the therapeutic process. The psychiatrist-patient relationship must be based on mutual trust and respect to allow the patient to make free and informed decisions. It is the duty of psychiatrists to provide the patient with all relevant information so as to empower the patient to come to a rational decision according to personal values and preferences.

5.  When psychiatrists are requested to assess a person, it is their duty first to inform and advise the person being assessed about the purpose of the intervention, the use of the findings, and the possible repercussions of the assessment. This is particularly important when psychiatrists are involved in third party situations.

6.  ... Breach of confidentiality may only be appropriate when required by law (as in obligatory reporting of child abuse) or when serious physical or mental harm to the patient or to a third person would ensue if confidentiality were maintained; whenever possible, psychiatrists should first advise the patient about the action to be taken.

7.  Research that is not conducted in accordance with the canons of science and that is not scientifically valid is unethical.

Bjorn Again

It wasn't until it came up about a year on Pandora that I realized that the "2 Broke Girls' theme was a) an actual song and b) by those Scandinavian guys with the whistling song.

First Wednesdays

The guy in DC Lottery's ubiquitous First Wednesdays ads kind of looks and acts like Chicago/Howard College Bowl legend John Edwards.

Lavender Scare

PBS stations will be showing the excellent "The Lavender Scare" documentary about the federal government's brutal discrimination against gay employees this month for Pride.  It's chilling to see a retired FBI agent proudly recount that he spent the bulk of his 30 year career spying on federal government employees at gay bars in the DC area so that their careers and lives could be ruined for absolutely no purpose.

I can't imagine that people would be so jar-droppingly stupid and thoroughly bigoted as to replicate such colossal stupidity and horrific waste of resources! 

Ethics

When I was in grad school, we had to listen to an annual lecture that was ostensibly on ethics - things like not making up data or running a million regressions and then just cherry picking the few significant results.  It was incredibly painful because everyone knew management was systematically violating the the actual ethical code that we were all required to follow - 

The expression "basic ethical principles" refers to those general judgments that serve as a basic justification for the many particular ethical prescriptions and evaluations of human actions. Three basic principles, among those generally accepted in our cultural tradition, are particularly relevant to the ethics of research involving human subjects: the principles of respect of persons, beneficence and justice. 

1. Respect for Persons. -- Respect for persons incorporates at least two ethical convictions: first, that individuals should be treated as autonomous agents, and second, that persons with diminished autonomy are entitled to protection. The principle of respect for persons thus divides into two separate moral requirements: the requirement to acknowledge autonomy and the requirement to protect those with diminished autonomy.
An autonomous person is an individual capable of deliberation about personal goals and of acting under the direction of such deliberation. To respect autonomy is to give weight to autonomous persons' considered opinions and choices while refraining from obstructing their actions unless they are clearly detrimental to others. To show lack of respect for an autonomous agent is to repudiate that person's considered judgments, to deny an individual the freedom to act on those considered judgments, or to withhold information necessary to make a considered judgment, when there are no compelling reasons to do so. (emphases added)  

Oh well, we all knew that Ewen Cameron had systematically violated the Nuremberg Code (despite having been a psychiatrist at Nuremberg) and that Maitland Baldwin had engaged in and facilitated all manner of heinous torture (despite being a scientific officer and branch chief at NIH), so the thoroughgoing hypocrisy wasn't surprising.

Of course, I've also heard utterly ridiculous defenses of such egregious ethical violations.  I once had someone actually claim that these basic ethical principles only apply to officially designated research studies and that people could safely commit atrocities otherwise, this despite the fact it had been repeatedly stressed that this ethical code was rooted in Kant's notion of the categorical imperative.  Even though this person had probably never read a word of Kant in their life they still felt supremely confident in arguing that the categorical imperative was not categorical!

Where's My Trip to London?

For whatever reason, over the last 25 years people have come to overwhelmingly refer to the South Asian political party as the Indian National Congress, its full name, or INC instead of as the Congress Party.

"Let's Play the Scene!"

I happened to notice James Karen as the LA newscast director on "The China Syndrome" this morning.  I always enjoy seeing him on "Eight Is Enough" as Sacramento newspaper editor Elliot Randolph.  The character has a certain smarmy WASP charm to him.  It's similar to his past-his-prime movie director Wally Bruce auditioning ingenue Naomi Watts for a role in "Mulholland Drive."

The American Religion

Hofstadter devotes much of the first half of his work to explaining how evangelical Christianity provided the basis for American anti-intellectualism.  Of course, some sects took this anti-intellectual impulse to an extreme.

"Lower-class religions are likely to have apocalyptic or millennarian outbursts, to stress the validity of inner religious experience against learned and formalized religion, to simplify liturgical forms, and to reject the idea of a learned clergy, sometimes of any professional clergy whatsoever.

America, having attracted in its early days so many of Europe’s disaffected and disinherited, became the ideal country for the prophets of what was then known to its critics as religious “enthusiasm.” The primary impulse in enthusiasm was the feeling of direct personal access to God. Enthusiasts did not commonly dispense with theological beliefs or with sacraments; but, seeking above all an inner conviction of communion with God, they felt little need either for liturgical expression or for an intellectual foundation for religious conviction."