Letters to the Editor
blunderdog
Published Letters: 509 Editor's Choice: 10
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Hornet Driver Just Convinced Me...
[Read the article: National Review's new tough guy, Mark Hemingway]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...the US military must fucking suck.
After those 4 wars lost where someone managed to blow up something American, plus the loss in Bosnia, the loss in Afghanistan, and now a quagmire in Iraq.
What kinda track record is that?
Maybe it's not a good idea to be projecting our power all over the globe if we're going to end up losing all these wars all the time.
I definitely don't remember any bullies from grade school who got beat up every week after starting trouble with people much smaller and weaker than themselves.
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@ Anonymous 6:50pm
[Read the article: Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Isn't it possible that Bush et al were WRONG, without turning them into machiavellan war mongers?"
Unfortunately, no.
The White House dumped a boatload of intelligence data on the Senate Intelligence Committee when asking for authorization to attack Iraq. The committee reviews the same intelligence the President is seeing, within limits. The Senators were not shown this specific piece of intelligence which denied WMDs in Iraq, and not for any procedural or security reason. That is known as a "lie of omission."
Since the WH had provided incredible amounts of intelligence to everyone who was privileged to get it, there can be no suggestion that it was impractical for the WH to have shown others the information. The WH specifically did not include, amongst the mountains of intelligence shown to the Senate (or Powell, or who-knows-who-else), this one report. The WH did not provide this information even though it would have been procedurally trivial. In hindsight, we know the intelligence NOT shown to Senate was credible and accurate.
Here's the crux: hiding information from the people you are supposed to be "informing" so that they will make a decision which you favor.
This is not a sophisticated technical point. It's a basic and widely understood human value about honesty.
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"Political"
[Read the article: Tom the Dancing Bug]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The nice thing about Ruben's comics is that they're so allegorical that they can ALWAYS be viewed as political if you want.
I read this one as a joke about the fact that the US managed to put Dubya in the Oval Office. A dumb, deserting, wannabe good ole boy drunkard who had never accomplished anything in his life was made Commander in Chief of the most powerful military on the planet.
It's far easier to take as a joke. Otherwise, one might be inclined to weep.
On the other hand, it provides hope to all the other losers (like myself) who haven't done much with our lives. Once I'm old enough, I think I got a decent shot at President these days. Used to be I thought you'd have to KNOW stuff and be able to speak English. Or at least have a track-record that demonstrates one's ability to govern well.
Dubya's proof positive that that's not the case.
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ALL Anti-depressants Increase Suicide Risk...
[Read the article: Girls' suicide rates soar]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...in patients who are severely clinically depressed.
People who are severely clinically depressed generally don't have the wherewithal to _actually_ kill themselves. They're virtually lifeless. (No value judgement in that--I spent a good coupla years in similar states.) If you can get a severely depressed person to remember to bathe and eat regularly, you're making progress.
When you start administering anti-depressants to ANY severely depressed individual, it is crucial that they be very closely monitored, because the "improvement" to their mood can often be sufficient to motivate them to end their lives, but not sufficient to improve their mood to the point where they won't think about it.
What happened here seems obvious to me. A few years back, a bunch of alarmist press about use of anti-depressants being a "trigger" to suicide convinced the masses (who'd rather quibble over the latest American Idol than take an informed interest in mental heath issues, even when their children are involved) that anti-depressants are BAD. Parents and commentators became irrationally oppositional to use of SSRIs in young people, and the prescription rates dropped.
An increase in suicides is to be expected when society chooses to withhold effective medicine for non-medical reasons.
As for why this recent increase only appears to have affected girls, I think there's a good feminist investigation to be made there. I think girls are pressured far more intensely to conform to the latest short-term fashion/trend than boys, who appear to be able to fall back on virtually any historical "male" mystique without fear of social rejection. I see young men who are every bit the "greaser" my father was, for example, even though there don't appear to be as many "good girl cheerleaders" as there were in my parents' generation.
To understand this, it needs to be examined, which I doubt will ever happen. But it sure would be nice to compare the rates of increase and decline of use of SSRIs for both sexes over the past 15 years. I'd hypothesize that girls went through a significantly greater flow and ebb than boys did, which is why the changes in relative suicide rates would differ significantly.
Personally, I see a lot greater harm in overprescribing amphetamines and Ritalin to kids with behavioral problems than anything that ever came out of big pharma's marketing of Prozac. It's worth reading some of the books from the period, like "Listening To Prozac" and "Talking Back to Prozac," because they're just so radically divergent in their efforts to understand the drugs. It was pretty clear to this reader where the rhetoric went off the rails.
(I'm not a physician or practicing pharmacologist. I studied a fairly rigorous pre-med track in the early 90's, which was a great time to start examining the great success of the SSRIs, and I've been treated with a couple of them for awhile, so I'm reasonably informed.)