So zero shampoo is not the answer for me—or most people. The idea that your hair will naturally rebalance after a period of not washing is “an old wives’ tale,” noted Joshua Zeichner, the director of cosmetic and clinical research at Mount Sinai Hospital to me via email. Moreover, it’s not good for your scalp, which does need to be cleansed now and then to stay healthy. “This no-shampoo movement has been a problem,” dermatologist Rebecca Baxt told me. She’s seen an uptick of people coming in with dead skin built up on their scalps, which itches and flakes, and ironically looks kind of dry, which can further feed the no-washing cycle. From a doctor’s perspective, the scalp skin is what you’re really caring for when you wash your hair.
For some reason, folks on the right have extremely short memories when it comes to acts of right-wing political violence. This is especially the case when they are in the middle of a propaganda campaign to make "the left" look violent. A long thread with lots of pix follows.
What saves time, and I think I mentioned this in my recounting of the 2013 road trip, is that the US has sane and normal speeding laws. On interstate highways, the big ones that criss-cross the nation, you can drive at least 80 miles per hour (about 130 kph) before there is the slightest chance of a speeding ticket. And there are no speed cameras. Either the police catch you that day, then and there, or you don’t get a ticket.Because I had only posted earlier this year about how I didn't realise the American road death rate was so high, I thought this sounded suss.
And you know what? All that revenuers’ propaganda about Australia’s ridiculously low speed limits promoting safety is guff. Compare deaths over distance travelled and Australia is no bastion of safety.
It is a tale of two Catholic churches. One is focused on social justice, welcoming migrants, helping the poor, protecting the environment, defending the virtues of the European Union, and building bridges rather than walls. It proudly sports a cosmopolitan identity and talks about diversity and inclusion. It firmly opposes leaders like Salvini and U.S. President Donald Trump, whose ideology is one “that always ends badly—it leads to war,” as Pope Francis said in a recent interview with the daily La Stampa, adding that he’s concerned “because we hear speeches that resemble those of Hitler in 1934.” The poster child of this Catholic Church is Greta Thunberg, the Swedish environmental activist whose initiatives have been blessed by the pope.
The other Catholic Church stresses the importance of tradition and defending the so-called Judeo-Christian West from mass immigration, pledges to protect the traditional family, and fights permissive laws on abortion and LGBT rights. It is skeptical of a bureaucratic, highly secularized EU and believes that Christianity thrives in a world organized around nation-states as opposed to supranational organizations. This faction fears that the current Vatican leadership may eventually turn the church into a progressive NGO.
In this highly polarized ecosystem, both sides claim to represent the true faith. And both sides are struggling to find a political home. Italy’s government crisis reveals a deeper tectonic shift in the Catholic world that has left many devout voters with no political home. In Italy, 74 percent of the population identifies as Catholic, but only 27 percent of those are actively practicing. In the recent election for the European Parliament, more than half of practicing Catholics didn’t vote.
They stressed the importance of logic, “facts,” “truth,” “science” and “nature” much more than Northern rhetoricians did. They chided their adversaries for being romantic idealists, ignoring the “experience of centuries.” Josiah Nott, a surgeon who laid out the purported science behind black inferiority, held that questions like slavery “should be left open to fair and honest investigation, and made to stand or fall according to the facts.” They claimed that they were the ones who truly had black people’s best interests at heart, thanks to their more realistic understanding of human biology. “No one would be willing to do more for the Negro race than I,” John Wilkes Booth wrote shortly before he assassinated Lincoln. He alleged that any pragmatist could see that freeing black people into a cold, cruel world would actually cause their “annihilation.” Slavery, another Southern thinker argued, was natural, because if whites could work the sweltering South Carolina rice fields, they would. The “constitutions” of black men, on the other hand, were “perfectly adapted.”Now, I think it is probably fair to note that realising this doesn't detract from some ideas of the Left being legitimately bad arguments that ignore the facts of nature - the most obvious modern ones surround the extremes of identity politics, like the suggestion that sportswomen should not claim unfairness when transexual men start winning all events. (I'm also sympathetic to the line that a certain basic form of capitalism - whereby people like to organise around, and profit from, things they can do well - is a natural tendency of human society, which explains why far Left attempts to suppress it completely are always doomed to fail.)
They loved hyperbole. Events were “the most extraordinary spectacles” that had “ever challenged the notice of the civilized world,” “too alarming” and threatened “to destroy all that is valuable and beautiful in the institutions of our country.” All over, they saw slippery slopes: Objecting to the extension of slavery into new territories, Lincoln’s longtime position, would lead inexorably to miscegenation.
The most important thing to know about them, they held, was that they were not the oppressors. They were the oppressed. They were driven to feelings of isolation and shame purely on the basis of freely held ideas, the right of every thinking man. Rep. Alexander Sims (D-S.C.) claimed that America’s real problem was the way Southerners were made to suffer under “the sneers and fanatic ebullitions of ignorant and wicked pretenders to philanthropy.” Booth’s complaint, before he shot Lincoln, wasn’t that he could no longer practice slavery, something he’d never done anyway. Instead, he lamented that he no longer felt comfortable expressing “my thoughts or sentiments” on slavery freely in good company.
In 2014, Jonas Anshelm and Martin Hultman of Chalmers published a paper analyzing the language of a focus group of climate skeptics. The common themes in the group, they said, were striking: “for climate skeptics … it was not the environment that was threatened, it was a certain kind of modern industrial society built and dominated by their form of masculinity.”
The connection has to do with a sense of group identity under threat, Hultman told me—an identity they perceive to be under threat from all sides. Besieged, as they see it, both by developing gender equality—Hultman pointed specifically to the shock some men felt at the #MeToo movement—and now climate activism’s challenge to their way of life, male reactionaries motivated by right-wing nationalism, anti-feminism, and climate denialism increasingly overlap, the three reactions feeding off of one another.
“There is a package of values and behaviors connected to a form of masculinity that I call ‘industrial breadwinner masculinity.’ They see the world as separated between humans and nature. They believe humans are obliged to use nature and its resources to make products out of them. And they have a risk perception that nature will tolerate all types of waste. It’s a risk perception that doesn’t think of nature as vulnerable and as something that is possible to be destroyed. For them, economic growth is more important than the environment” Hultman told Deutsche Welle last year.The deep irony is that the other ideology that bulldozed over nature in the interests of economic growth is the communism that the wingnut Right spend the rest of their limited brain cells panicking about as secretly taking over the world under the guise of "cultural Marxism" and "socialism".
The corollary to this is that climate science, for skeptics, becomes feminized—or viewed as “oppositional to assumed entitlements of masculine primacy,” Hultman and fellow researcher Paul Pulé wrote in another paper.
Chappelle speaks out against Michael Jackson’s accusers, stating in no uncertain terms that “I do not believe these motherf.......s” to whistles and cheers of approval from the audience. An assortment of his hotter takes plays like an exoneration wishlist: Kevin Hart’s a good guy, Louis CK never did anything wrong, and even if the King of Pop did prey on innocent children, “I mean, it’s Michael Jackson.”I mean, really? Surely it is only due to an expectation that the guy on stage is funny that people would find that crack about Jackson's accusers a laugh-out-loud thing? It's not even a joke, as such.
But if no-confidence passes, who gets to tell the Queen what to do? Does Johnson tell her to just call an election, and one after 31 October? Does a caretaker unity government enter after him and say "no, we are governing and we will just pass this Act delaying Brexit and then go to an election"? Does Scotland knock at her door and say "we'll be leaving the kingdom, thanks very much. And Balmoral is going to become an upmarket spa and holiday resort."What's next? Parliament will return from recess to sit for a short session next week, during which lawmakers are expected to take steps to block a no-deal Brexit in the limited time they have.
- Option 1 is a legislative fix forcing the government to seek another extension from the EU, but there are no binding Brexit bills currently on the agenda.
- Option 2 is a vote of no-confidence, which would give MPs a window of 14 days to form a caretaker unity government with the express purpose of blocking no-deal.
- Option 3 is a general election, assuming anti-no-deal lawmakers can't gather enough support to form a government. But Downing Street officials have already said that Johnson would likely hold any snap election after Brexit has been completed on Oct. 31.
In recent years there has been a surge in studies looking at the biologic effects of different kinds of fasting diets in both animal models and humans. These diets include continuous calorie restriction, intermittent fasting, and alternate-day fasting (ADF). Now the largest study of its kind to look at the effects of strict ADF in healthy people has shown a number of health benefits. The participants alternated 36 hours of zero-calorie intake with 12 hours of unlimited eating. The findings are reported August 27 in the journal Cell Metabolism. ...
"We found that on average, during the 12 hours when they could eat normally, the participants in the ADF group compensated for some of the calories lost from the fasting, but not all," says Harald Sourij, a professor at the Medical University of Graz. "Overall, they reached a mean calorie restriction of about 35% and lost an average of 3.5 kg [7.7 lb] during four weeks of ADF."
"The elegant thing about strict ADF is that it doesn't require participants to count their meals and calories: they just don't eat anything for one day."
Numerous studies have shown that children who eventually come out as gay, lesbian, or bisexual—scientists call them pre-homosexual, or pre-GLB kids—demonstrate more childhood gender nonconformity in their speech, body language, and choice of activity than their pre-straight contemporaries do. These reports have also produced evidence of a “dosage effect”: The more gender nonconformity someone shows in childhood, the more likely they will identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual as an adult.I am not surprised at what the studies say - it fits in anecdotally with what a lot of parents and gay adults have said about recognizing they were "different" from a young age - but I didn't really know it had been studied much.
“The link between childhood gender conformity/nonconformity and adult sexual orientation is one of the strongest relationships between a childhood trait and an adult ‘phenotype’ that’s been demonstrated in all of psychology,” Richard Lippa, a psychology professor at California State University at Fullerton, told me via email. While the link is not foolproof––not all tomboys will be lesbians; not all boys in dresses will be gay––Lippa says it is “quite strong.” (The scientific calculus for transgender people, he says, is “more complex.”)
Kids—especially pre-GLB kids—need room to explore their own identities. Yet because society presumes queerness to be inherently sexual, adults think that a preteen who plays up his gender nonconformity could not possibly be doing so voluntarily. Critics instead see adults in and aligned with the LGBTQ community as sexualizing children by exposing them to what a National Review writer calls a “deeply and perversely erotic subculture.” Conservative media have accused Wendy Napoles of endangering her son. After news reports indicated that Desmond’s performances had caught a convicted pedophile’s eye (as if it’s a young boy’s fault that pedophiles exist), some people called child protective services on her. But the people who have deemed drag too risqué for preteens have yet to support alternative ways in which queer kids like Desmond can publicly express themselves without fear.
The director Achim Freyer once informed me that sleeping during Wagner simply means listening on a different level.is this piece at the Washington Post.
Washington: A Jamaican national was detained for nearly three months in the United States after bringing in bottles of honey from the Caribbean island that customs agents mistakenly believed to be liquid methamphetamine.
Leon Haughton had visited family back in Jamaica every Christmas since taking up residence in Maryland about a decade ago, the Washington Post said Friday, retracing his Kafkaesque entanglement in US customs and immigration bureaucracy.
Haughton's long ordeal began December 29 at Baltimore-Washington International Airport when customs agents had a dog sniff his bags.
Inside they found three bottles duly labeled as honey that Haughton, a 45-year-old father of three, uses to sweeten his tea.
According to the charging document, the agents suspected him of transporting liquid methamphetamine, and placed him in detention.
Laboratory results from Maryland took more than two weeks to arrive: they were negative. Haughton thought that was the end of it. He was wrong.
The bottles were sent to a second laboratory in Georgia after the first was judged to be insufficiently equipped to analyze the liquids.
Although he had a green card granting him legal residence in the United States, Haughton's arrest set in motion a detention process with the US immigration service.
His lawyer had enormous difficulty contacting immigration authorities - and for good reason.
Here's a link to the story at Gulf News.The US government had been partially shut down as a result of a budget impasse between President Donald Trump and Democrats over his demand for funding to build a wall on the border with Mexico.
An international organization of Catholic exorcists said Thursday that the existence of Satan as a real and personal being is a truth of Christin doctrine.
“The real existence of the devil, as a personal subject who thinks and acts and has made the choice of rebellion against God, is a truth of faith that has always been part of Christian doctrine,” the International Association of Exorcists said in an August 22 press release.
The organization’s release came in response to recent remarks on the devil from Jesuit superior general Fr. Arturo Sosa, SJ, which the organization called “grave and confusing.”
The exorcists said they released their statement to provide “doctrinal clarification.”
Sosa made headlines earlier this week when he told Italian magazine Tempi that “the devil exists as a symbolic reality, not as a personal reality.”
The devil “exists as the personification of evil in different structures, but not in persons, because is not a person, is a way of acting evil. He is not a person like a human person. It is a way of evil to be present in human life,” Sosa said.
Citing a long history of Church teaching on the nature of Satan, including several citations from Pope Francis and his recent predecessors, the exorcists’ organization said that Catholics are bound to believe that Satan is a real and personal being, a fallen angel.
Like a Twitter pal said, imagine throwing a fit because Denmark refused to sell Greenland to you and touting the fact that an ally said Israelis love you like you’re the second coming and having those things *not* be your most alarming statements of the week....Look, the Trump cultists are never going to abandon him - you can see that on Twitter and comments rubbishing Allahpundit's take - but there is surely a substantial number of GOP congress people who can be pushed past their support of convenience for him into actually starting to talk about a replacement less obviously profoundly ignorant and flighty (I'm being very restrained with my descriptions) with someone like Pence, perhaps?
He’s never going to accept that the Fed is independent from partisan politics by design, but he could at least restrain his scapegoating of Powell by not comparing him unfavorably to communist China’s supremo, a guy who operates actual concentration camps. Trump’s willingness to speak warmly about the world’s worst bad guys while excoriating domestic politicians in the most acidic ways has lost most of its power to shock after his bromances with Putin and Kim Jong Un, but not all of it.
But wait. He was saving the Big Crazy for his response to China’s new retaliatory tariffs on American imports
“Our great American companies are hereby ordered.” Every day brings new material for a game of “What if Obama said it?” but purporting to order U.S. companies not to do business with China is championship-round stuff. I wonder which White House advisor got stuck explaining to him that he doesn’t actually have the power to do that. Just like I wonder when we’re going to start hearing about sanctions on China, which would be like dropping an atomic bomb on the economy....
This past week is going to get its own chapter in all of the self-serving post-Trump “I never really liked him” memoirs written by his cronies eager to rehabilitate their image once he’s gone.
Much of the work of modernity involved escaping the conspiracy of history itself, in which people are damned and doomed from the start. What they strove to become, instead, were people with a future; persons, bearers of rights, of sovereignty, with control over their destinies; citizens in secular nation states. They also understood themselves as objects and organisms, subject to natural laws. Nineteenth-century intellectuals offered all manner of secular explanations for misfortune in the realm of the physical and biological sciences, from the modelling of the weather to the germ theory of disease, and in the realm of the emerging social sciences, from economics to eugenics. This change coincided with rising rates of literacy and the growth of public schooling: the democratization of knowledge. By 1881, when Guiteau shot Garfield, rules of evidence – ideas about the relationship between facts and arguments, ideas once confined to courts of law and chemical laboratories – had spilled out to the new profession of journalism and the new popular genre of detective fiction. Suddenly, everyone had a theory, about almost everything. The misery of humanity became a crime everyone could solve.I have comments moderation on, and its wildly unlikely that any of Graeme's ones will get through.
The most popular scapegoat, it turns out, is other people. Between the mid-eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, a period during which emerging nation states sorted the world’s peoples into “nationalities”, most conspiracy theories in the US and Western Europe involved threats to the nation by people who weren’t so easily sorted. The most notorious of these theories concerned an alleged international conspiracy of Jews, people with ties across national borders. “Pulling the strings behind the scenes, dominating the new system of modernity, the Jew becomes the cause of every catastrophe”, claimed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which first appeared in Russia in 1903, was distributed throughout the US by Henry Ford in the 1920s, and assigned as a textbook in German schools from 1933. Much the same claim appeared in The Jewish Peril, a pamphlet issued by the British government in 1920 and written, in part, by Nesta Webster, who tied the Jewish conspiracy to the Bavarian Illuminati of the eighteenth century.
Arguably, there is just this one conspiracy theory, an endlessly recycled version of antisemitism, as the political scientist Thomas Milan Konda suggests in Conspiracies of Conspiracies: How delusions have overrun America. The Jewish conspiracy theory served as the template for nearly all that followed, from anti-communist and anti-homosexual panics and purges to race-based nationalism and xenophobia of every stripe, down to Islamophobia, the demonization of refugees, and the detention of immigrants. In the 1930s, the American fascist and disciple of Nesta Webster, Elizabeth Dilling – the founder of the Patriotic Research Bureau and author of the Red Network (which branded even the YMCA a communist front) – delighted audiences with her fake Yiddish accent, at a time when critics of FDR denounced the New Deal as the “Jew Deal”. By way of a mysterious “hidden hand”, the theory alleges, Illuminati or Jews or Bolsheviks or communists or gay people, or whoever, secretly run most national governments and aspire to world domination. “There are 200,000 Communist Jews at the Mexican border waiting to get into this country”, the housewife and America Firster Agnes Waters announced in 1942. “If they are admitted they will rape every woman that is left unprotected.”
But is it racist? Many individuals are having a go at me on twitter for questioning whether calling an Indigenous man an “ape” is actually racist and not just rude. For many people it seems self-evident that is is racist. But nobody can say how or why. The “best” story I’ve heard is that Social Darwinism ranks “people of colour” below animals.but comes pretty close.
Private investment funds are circling Australia's Clean Energy Finance Corporation hoping for a sale of the $10 billion government-owned organisation, as its head flags a major shift in how taxpayer funds are used to support the booming industry.I bet that Liberals were not predicting a success when it was established.
In an interview that will spark debate over whether the fund should be privatised like its counterpart in Britain, CEFC chief executive Ian Learmonth said he would shift his focus to strengthening the grid's reliability because banks had become more comfortable financing large-scale wind and solar projects....
The CEFC was established under the Gillard government in 2012 to spur investment in the sector while it introduced a carbon pricing scheme. Touting Australia's clean-energy credentials to Pacific leaders, Prime Minister Scott Morrison last week called it "the world's most successful green bank"....
Mr Learmonth said as the utility solar and wind-power renewables market had matured, more private capital had flowed in. The CEFC earned $350 million last year from maturing loans, which have been written on a commercial basis allowing for a transfer to private entities if required.
Her key findings reveal that twin beds:
The backlash against twin beds as indicative of a distant or failing marriage partnership intensified in the 1950s and by the late 1960s few married couples saw them as a desirable choice for the bedroom.
- Were initially adopted as a health precaution in the late nineteenth century to stop couples passing on germs through exhaled breath.
- Were seen, by the 1920s, as a desirable, modern and fashionable choice, particularly among the middle classes.
- Featured as integral elements of the architectural and design visions of avant-garde Modernists such as Le Corbusier, Peter Behrens and Wells Coates.
- Were (in the early decades of the 20th century) indicative of forward-thinking married couples, balancing nocturnal 'togetherness' with a continuing commitment to separateness and autonomy.
- Never entirely replaced double beds in the households of middle-class couples but, by the 1930s and 1940s, were sufficiently commonplace to be unremarkable.
- Enjoyed a century-long moment of prominence in British society and, as such, are invaluable indicators of social customs and cultural values relating to health, modernity and marriage.
One Condoms has introduced the limited-edition “super sensitive” rendang-flavoured condoms to commemorate Malaysia’s upcoming independence day on Aug 31.I perceive certain practical issues with the whole flavoured condom thing - especially if it is on the spicy side. But the readers can contemplate that without my assistance.
This is the fourth release in the company’s quirky Malaysian series, which began in 2016 and includes flavours such as nasi lemak, teh tarik and durians.
According to the Malay Mail, the condoms will only be available on the market for a limited period. The site quoted a statement released by One Condoms manufacturer Karex that the idea behind the local flavours is to break the stigma and get people comfortable to talk about sex.
“The end game is simple — pleasurable sex in a safe holistic way which is the ultimate objective of our iconic Malaysian series, now proudly in our fourth year.”
If ever there was a case in need of High Court correction, this is it. The future of the Commonwealth depends on it.Um, yeah. I'd like to hear how.
....a second jury of dupable vigilantes eager to convict the self-same but, by then, notorious George Pell and an appeals court which this morning raised preposterous hearsay to the level of DNA and CCTV.Hearsay? I don't think this scintillating dissector of judicial wrongs even knows the first thing about the legal terminology.
Since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party won power in India five years ago, lynchings of the country's minorities have surged. In February, Human Rights Watch reported at least 44 such murders between May 2015 and December 2018. Hundreds more people have been injured in religiously motivated attacks.
Most of the victims are Muslims, members of the country's largest religious minority. They comprise about 15% of India's 1.3 billion people. Other victims include lower-caste Hindus and Christians.
Most of the attackers are devout Hindu men, known as "cow vigilantes," who take it upon themselves to enforce beef bans. Some of them claim ties to the BJP. Last year, a BJP minister met with a group of men convicted of a lynching and draped them in flower garlands.
....
Article 15 of India's constitution prohibits discrimination based on religion. Human rights groups are lobbying for the creation of a specific hate crimes law, but none exists in India yet.
....
Before he died, Khan was able to describe his attackers to police. Six men were arrested. Charges against them were dropped, then reinstated, and the case remained in limbo for two years — until last week, when a court acquitted all of them, citing lack of evidence.
Instead, Khan was charged posthumously with cow smuggling. Police say he didn't have a permit to transport cows across state lines. Khan's two sons, who were with him that day, await trial — and if convicted, face the possibility of up to five years in prison.
"It's like they are trying to erase us — erase all of my people," Jaibuna says in the muddy courtyard of their family farm.
....
Some Indian analysts say the situation in India is comparable to the post-Civil War period in the United States, when many white people looked on as black people were lynched.
"The similarities with the American lynchings of the late 19th century are striking," says Prabhir Vishnu Poruthiyil, a business professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay who has studied corporate India's lack of response to hate crimes.
"Most of the upper-middle class that populate[s] the corporate classes, they're also upper-caste Hindus," Poruthiyil explains. "Even if they don't agree with the lynching itself, they might be OK with the idea of stopping cow slaughter. It's a slippery slope."
As a child in Mumbai, Ayyub survived Hindu-Muslim riots in 1992 and 1993, which killed several hundred people. But she says what's happening now feels worse, because it's not a "spur of the moment" outpouring of anger. There are very specific targets.
"Now lynchings are organized on social media," Ayyub says. "People send messages to each other, saying, 'Hey, this household has beef in their fridge, let's go attack them."
Prior to 2002, this insurance was a mandatory feature of all domestic building contracts.
HIH Insurance Limited, a major provider of Home Warranty Insurance, was placed into administration in March 2001 and left the insurance market.
In 2002, in response to a failure from other insurers to fill the gap left by HIH, State Governments agreed to exempt builders from providing this type of insurance in buildings above three stories.
For high-rise builders, who don't need to qualify for this insurance and also had the incentive of rising land prices, speculative apartment developments started to look like attractive investments as they didn't need to qualify for this kind of insurance.
Take the now infamous Opal Tower.
Publicly available documents put the cost of this development at around $215 million. If all 392 apartments were sold at their advertised price of between $800,000 and $2.5 million each, the developers have potential to make a profit on this project of around $165 million dollars, or a 77 per cent return on their investment.
Or take the Prima Pearl skyscraper in Melbourne.
The builder was paid $230 million, to build 680 "designer" apartments. Labour and materials worth $338,000 was used per home and each sold for an average cost of $1,000,000.
Quite the tidy profit for its developer. Shame about the creaking.
President Trump responded to Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen‘s message to the United States that Greenland is not for sale by tweeting Tuesday evening that he's postponing their scheduled meeting. A White House spokesman later clarified that the president's entire trip to Denmark had been canceled, per AP.Economic genius and cult member Steve Kates was fully on board. Of course.
In the nineteenth century, neurosyphilis was one of the most ubiquitous and fatal forms of degenerative mental illness known to psychiatry. Termed general paralysis of the insane, it was widely supposed by early practitioners to be caused by bad heredity, ‘weak character’ or moral turpitude. That changed in 1913, when Japanese bacteriologist Hideyo Noguchi, working at Rockefeller University in New York City, found traces of Treponema pallidum — the spiral-shaped bacterium responsible for syphilis — in the brains of deceased people with general paralysis. At the time, as many as one-third of patients in mental hospitals had symptoms that could now be clearly traced back to syphilis (A. M. Brandt Science 239, 375–380; 1988).
...the discovery that general paralysis was a symptom of a sexually transmitted disease galvanized subsequent generations of psychiatrists. They embarked on a quest, still largely unfulfilled, to find biological foundations for other mental disorders, especially grave conditions such as schizophrenia. Only later would it become clear, as the authors point out, that neurosyphilis is “an unsuitable model for anything clearly unrelated to infection or inflammation in the frontal and temporal lobe regions”....
The age of Freud was also the age of syphilis. Freud, and psychoanalysis more generally, focused on suppressed sexual fantasies and traumas because, for patients then, the shameful and terrifying spectre of syphilis hung over every sexual encounter like “the sword of Damocles” ....
The history of neurosyphilis bequeathed a tendency to indulge in excessive reductionism. That of hysteria encouraged a tendency to indulge in excessive psychologism. And both psychiatry and neurology were left the poorer. As the authors argue, the majority of patients seen by practitioners in both fields are afflicted with what they call “in-between states” — forms of distress informed by both biology and biography. The book is in this sense a plea for neurology and psychiatry to repair ruptures, join forces and do justice to the experiences of their patients.
Fake Chinese police cars spotted in Perth and Adelaide amid pro-Hong Kong ralliesSome joke...
Authorities are investigating after fake Chinese police cars were spotted in Adelaide and Perth amid pro-Hong Kong demonstrations across Australia, but the owner of one of the cars has told police it was a "joke".
