Month: July 2005

Parkinson’s drugs can mess you up big time:

Scientists at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, have found that certain drugs used to treat Parkinson’s disease can cause patients to become addicted to gambling. The drugs, called dopamine agonists, also have been found to boost patients’ appetites for sex, food, and alcohol.

“This is a striking effect,” said J. Eric Ahlskog, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic. “Pathological gambling induced by a drug is really quite unusual.”

In one case, a 54-year-old married pastor gambled daily at the local casino, hiding his losses from his wife.

In another, a 41-year-old computer programmer who had never gambled in his life became “consumed” with Internet gambling.

In a third, a 68-year-old man with no history of gambling lost more than U.S. $200,000 at casinos over a six-month period.

I wonder if that’s this guy’s problem, or this guy’s, or this ones; this guy for sure.

Uh-oh:

THEY may look like lovable pets but Britain’s estimated 9m domestic cats are being blamed by scientists for infecting up to half the population with a parasite that can alter people’s personalities.

The startling figures emerge from studies into toxoplasma gondii, a parasite carried by almost all the country’s feline population. They show that half of Britain’s human population carry the parasite in their brains, and that infected people may undergo slow but crucial changes in their behaviour.

Infected men, suggests one new study, tend to become more aggressive, scruffy, antisocial and are less attractive. Women, on the other hand, appear to exhibit the “sex kitten” effect, becoming less trustworthy, more desirable, fun-loving and possibly more promiscuous.

Interestingly, for those who draw glib conclusions about national stereotypes, the number of people infected in France is much higher than in the UK.

Time to kill the damn cat.

It strikes me that the calls for the prosecution and/or firing of Karl Rove are a bit premature. At most, we have reason to believe that Rove may have committed a technical violation of a law regarding covert agents, not a substantial one, by mentioning that Joe Wilson’s wife was a CIA employee.

It’s certainly not clear that Rove knew that Plame had at one time been in covert ops, or that he made the connection between her and her husband in order to damage her career in any way. And it’s not even clear that Rove technically violated the law, as Plame was a desk-jockey at the time of Rove’s converstations with Matt Cooper and Rove apparently didn’t know of her former role as a covert agent.

So once again, our conspiratorial friends have failed to deliver the goods after attributing nefarious motives and dire consequences* to Rove. Rather than seeking retaliation against Plame, Rove was simply trying to cut Wilson down to size in the face of claims that Cheney selected him for the mission that confirmed Saddam’s attempts to buy uranium in Niger.

(*On Air Anti-America, RFK Jr. claimed that at least one agent was killed as a result of Plame’s blown cover.)

There are two major theories about the roots of Jihadi terrorism. One theory, subscribed to by the anti-American left, holds that jihadis are mainly upset about US foreign policy choices such as support for the continued existence of Israel and the Jewish people generally, rejection of the Kyoto Treaty, historic support for anti-democratic regimes in the Islamic world, stationing troops in Saudi Arabia, and for generally being a capitalistic, imperialist entity that exploits Third World people and prevents the emergence of the ideal Socialist Utopia.

The other point of view (held by Neo-Cons and others) holds that religiously-based terrorism arises in the Middle East because the economies and social structures of ME nations don’t provide anything like full employment for young men, village life is crumbing, there is a massive flight to the cities by unemployed young men without roots or affiliations in the cities, and there’s an enormous jealousy of the West where standards of living are higher, morals are looser, women have rights, etc. According to this view, the young jihadis join together at the mosques since they’re without family or friends, where they’re lead by members of professional-class families who were educated in the West where they were radicalized in mosques run by mullahs who blame the sad condition of ME societies on Zionists and Crusaders who keep the Muslim down. The children of the professional class and the villagers share the same dilemma: they can’t find work, and without it they’re unable to marry.

Peaceniks propose to win the war on terror by appeasement, often proposing the notion that simply accelerating the two-state solution and driving more hybrid cars will do it. Critics maintain that appeasement implies the extermination of the Jewish people (or at least the destruction of Israel), the elimination of women’s rights in the West, mass conversion of Christians to Islam, and the imposition of Sharia Law on the West. Proponents of development, especially the Neo-Cons, propose to inject market dynamics into the ME and to replace autocratic political structures with representative government. Their opponents accuse them of seeking simply to line Halliburton’s pockets with lucrative oil contracts.

Of course, nobody knows which side is right as we don’t really have the data one way or another to conclusively disprove either theory. But supposing that the Neo-Cons are wrong and spreading liberal democracy to the ME doesn’t reduce terrorism, at least we’ve exported our best values and improved some lives a bit. If the other side is wrong, we’ve destroyed the basis of our civilization for nothing.

It’s not a hard choice, really, and you don’t have to worry about flypaper theories or WMDs to decide where you stand.

Victor Davis Hansen explains the jihadis’ motivation:

Autocratic regimes, statist economies, gender apartheid, corruption, the absence of a free press — all that and more retard economic growth from the Gulf to Morocco. In response, theocratic regimes like the Taliban and the Iranian mullocracy blame the West for their own self-inflicted misery and inadequacies. But more often, clever dictators such as a Baathist Saddam, the Saudi Royal family, an Egyptian kleptocracy, or the Pakistani military regime allow Islamicists some rein, if not covert support, to deflect blame from their own failures onto the United States and the “Jews.”

A shamed Islamic street — ill-housed, ill-fed, and ill-informed — is nourished on the mythology that a purer creed and a return to the 8th century alone can reclaim past glories of the caliphate, and stop the decadent intrusion of Western consumerism and popular culture.

So when terrorists strike in London — or Bali, New York or Madrid — they operate on a variety of assumptions. Middle Eastern governments may publicly deplore their methods, but privately sigh relief that al-Qaeda agents are still not yet after their own heads. Islamicist ganglia go deep into the central nervous system of the Pakistani intelligence service, not to mention the House of Saud…

Fourth, and most important, the terrorists and their supporters understand that in a strange way the West is not only split, but also increasingly illiberal as well. It has lost confidence in its old commitment to rationalism, free speech and empiricism, and now embraces the deductive near-religious doctrines of moral equivalence and utopian pacifism. Al Qaeda’s supporters will say that Thursday’s victims were killed because of Afghanistan or Iraq. Westerners will duly repeat the dull refrain that “Bush lied, thousands died” in their guilt-ridden search for something we did to cause this.

And so, rather than focus our attention on the madrassas and the mosques that preach hatred, we will strive to learn more about Islamic culture, as if our own insensitivity were the true culprit. Our grandfathers could despise Bushido — Japan’s warrior cult — without worrying whether they were being unfair to Buddhists; we of less conviction and even less courage, cannot do likewise.

In short, we now know what to expect from the London bombings and the others to follow. There will be no effort to punish the states that subsidize al Qaeda. Critics will cling to the myth that the British got what they had coming. The primary obsession of many Westerners will be to extend sensitivity to Islam, not the victims of those who kill in its name. And all will be consoled that just a few dozen were harvested this time.

Pay attention, this will be on the test.