unreasonable.org

In honor of this fine spring day, Tom Lehrer's "Poisoning Pigeons In The Park". "Spring is here, spring is here, life is skittles and life is beer."

(My mom introduced me to Tom Lehrer's work. Also to George Carlin. I do love my mom.)

Sarah Palin's husband Todd Palin has Native American ancestry, Yup'ik and Curyung. It recently came out that their grandson, Tripp Palin Johnston, is an enrolled member of the Curyung Tribal Council -- and receives free federal health care through Indian Health Services and the Alaska Native Medical Center. (Comments on that story claim that all of the Palin kids are enrolled and get taxpayer-supported health care, but I cannot confirm that at this time.)

Sarah Palin earned Politifact's "Lie of the Year" when she claimed that government-run health care would end up with "death panels" sending the elderly and disabled to their doom. But it looks like she just wanted to scare the rest of us off, make sure that there were plenty of government benefits to go around for her family and not let us riff-raff in on the deal.

Socialized medicine for the grandkids of the rich and powerful, while the rest of us get sick and go broke thanks to private health insurance. Yep, that's the greed and hypocrisy of the GOP we know and love.

The LA times reports on the death of Walter Fredrick Morrison, the inventor of the Frisbee.

I don't know if he was a Frisbeetarian or not, but he brought a lot of simple joy into the world with a silly little invention. Well done, Mr. Morrison.

A recent study by San Diego State University psychology professor Jean Twenge looked at Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) test results for high school and college students from 1938 through 2007. (The results will be published in a future issue of the Clinical Psychology Review.) The MMPI is one of, if not the, most popular personality tests, which measures (or claims to measure) people's mental health along ten different axes.

Twenge found that in 2007, five times as many people surpassed the threshold to be considered to have mental health issues as did in 1938. Especially high were the increases in hypomania and depression. And this doesn't even consider the vast numbers of people taking antidepressants and other meds that alleviate the symptoms the MMPI asks about.

Now, add to the fact that as a nation we're going crazy, the fact that we're exporting our model of mental health to the rest of the world. We've been aggressively preaching that "mental illnesses" should be considered a "brain disease", in the theory that this would help remove the stigma around them.

According to the research of Professor Sheila Mehta of Auburn University, though, this in not actually the result: considering mental illness as a neurological defect actually tends to make other people treat the sufferer less kindly. Mehta has actually studied how other people treat those they believe have a "brain disease", versus those who they believe have a psychosocial problem. She says, “Viewing those with mental disorders as diseased sets them apart and may lead to our perceiving them as physically distinct. Biochemical aberrations make them almost a different species.”

This may be why schizophrenics in the United States and Europe, where the "brain disease" idea holds sway, have a significantly higher relapse rate than those in other countries. More "primitive" notions of mental illness may actually help keep the troubled individual in the social group, and religious beliefs that attribute their problem to "evil spirits" or somesuch may allow for calmness and acquiescence and a less stressful response.

I posted previously about the strange case of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who was in Hiroshima on a business trip on August 6, 1945 and his hometown of Nagasaki of August 9th, and thus was the only known survivor of both nuclear massacres.

Yamaguchi has died after a battle against stomach cancer. According to NPR,

Last month, Avatar director James Cameron visited Yamaguchi. Cameron is considering making a film of an upcoming book by Charles Pelegrino, The Last Train From Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back.

After meeting with Cameron and Pellegrino, Yamaguchi told The Mainichi Daily News that he believed it is the director's "destiny" to make a film about the bombings.

A week or so ago, I found myself in a conversation about the nature of mental health diagnosis. I've always found it interesting how no one is "hysterical" any more -- if you read books on psychology from a few decades ago, there's a great deal of discussion about that condition, where as it seems that now it's almost never discussed. I've always taken that as an indicator of how at least part of the concept of "mental illness" is a social construction.

However, I stumbled across this abstract of a paper in the journal Social Science & Medicine, which notes "Experimental and clinical studies of nonhumans and humans reveal somatic and behavioral effects of hypervitaminosis A which closely parallel many of the symptoms reported for Western patients diagnosed as hysterical and Inuit sufferers of pibloktoq ['arctic hysteria']. Eskimo nutrition provides abundant sources of vitamin A and lays the probable basis in some individuals for hypervitaminosis A through ingestion of livers, kidneys, and fat of arctic fish and mammals, where the vitamin often is stored in poisonous quantities." [emphasis added. -tms]

Excessive vitamin A is well known to be toxic, and can result in birth defects, liver abnormalities, and CNS disorders. There's also some evidence linking excessive intake with osteoporosis, but the picture is not clear.

Me, I get a paper cut and I'm done. But some people are just tough. Like this guy, who got stabbed in the chest during a robbery attempt, then walked into a diner with the five-inch knife sticking out of him, sat down, and ordered a cup of joe while waiting for the ambulance.

Another story from the "why do they put so many lunatics on police forces"? file: a plainclothes cop drew his gun on a bunch of people having a snowball fight in D.C., after he (or his car, not clear) was hit by a snowball.

From the ThinkGeek catalog, cheack out this Tauntaun Sleeping Bag, commemorating the scene in The Empire Strikes Back where Han Solo saves Luke Skywalker from freezing by slitting open the belly of Luke's dead tauntaun (sort of a horse-like giant snow lizard...) and placing Luke inside the warm carcass.

See also the New York Times story on how this product came to be.

On my net wanderings I found this image of a woman holding a "Teabagging 4 Jesus" sign.

This is the first firm example I've come across of the teabaggers actually using the term "teabagging". I've been using it and find it appropriate due to the presence of teabags and the pathetic nature of the participants in the act (when the best you can do to express your political views is throw teabags around, you deserve to be the butt of jokes), but up until now I've regarded it as a term that Rachel Maddow and other pundits stuck on them -- appropriately, but still not one of their own selection.

To see this confused, flag-waving woman claim to be "Teabagging 4 Jesus", though, well, res ipsa loquitur.