Vulcanised

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Sugar pills or anti depressants?
Today’s claim that some anti depressant drugs are little or no better than pretend pills for all but the most severe kinds of depression poses some interesting questions about medicine on the NHS...

Depression is all in the mind. Some depressed people come to see their MPs. They may have a genuine case for an MP, but sometimes they are externalising their unhappiness. I take the problem they tell me they have seriously, but sometimes have to explain that I do not think anything can be done about it as I do not wish to raise false expectations. It is a pattern I well remember, from years of family experience. The depressed person often thinks there is an objective external cause of the unhappiness. If they can change their job, their home, the conduct of their wife or husband, their friends or their neighbours, they believe their unhappiness will vanish. All too often they discover that having made the change they are still unhappy, so the search for another cause begins and the pressure for another change builds up to try to appease the depression gods.
I posted a comment to this over eight hours ago and it still 'awaits moderation'. I suspect it won't get published at all -  possibly because the previous one I sent him was, shall we say, slightly offensive. Anyway, if the silly old Vulcan won't publish my comment I'll have to do it myself, here:

Firstly, this research says little about what goes on in the medical profession and a lot about what goes on in research departments of universities. We are inundated with ‘reseach’ results and we pick out the ones that we rather like the sound of, as you have done here. Remember how we were advised to only eat two eggs a week? Whoops! Or how Type A personality posed a greater risk of heart attacks? Whoops! To say nothing of the research that has been shown to be based on poor methodology or even fraud.

Secondly, your comments on depression betray a deep ignorance. Depression and unhappiness are not the same thing. Miserable people are everywhere and there are plenty of cheerful, even funny, depressives - check out most comedians. However, you can be forgiven for your views. After all some years ago a brilliant young psychiatrist, Garth Wood, wrote The Myth of Neurosis - Overcoming the Illness Excuse (very popular in many circles) where he said much the same thing as you have. He claimed that unless you satisfied certain very strict criteria you weren’t ‘really’ depressed and should jolly well buck your ideas up. If you were functioning and not losing weight etc then you certainly weren’t depressed. A few years later in fine physical health, tanned and on holiday he killed himself using the suicide kit he had kept in his briefcase for several months. Maybe he just needed a break. Oh, wait! he was on holiday when he did it. Whoops!
Now, where did I put my Prozac?

UPDATE: Fair dos, my comment was posted after waiting 24 hours to be approved, and he even  added a short reply.



Second Brain? I should get this one sorted out first!

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Squarespace changed a few things around a while back and no longer keeps a tally of the posts on this site. I suspected I was around the 4,000 mark but there was no easy way to find out.

Earlier this evening I signed up to SecondBrain, a content aggregator which brings together user generated content from sites like Flickr, Blogger, YouTube and several others and shares it with others, in a similar way to how you can on Facebook, Myspace and other social networks. It looked quite interesting so I thought I'd try it out. I was able to import all my Squarespace posts and after completing the process SecondBrain informed me that it had imported a total of 4,123 items.
 
So, as yesterday was my fourth anniversary with Squarespace, I've averaged just under twenty posts a week since February 2004. Add on the 500 or so with my previous, defunct, blog host, Sparkpod, and you get about 4,650 posts since I started almost five years ago. Then add 1,500 Twitter updates, a few dozen Tumblr posts, a couple of hundred assorted comments, some scattered WP and Blogspot sites, about 12,000 bookmarks not to mention emails...!  Jeez, think of all the useful things I could have been doing during all that time :(

On the bright side, almost all of it will be available at one place fairly soon.

Whoopee!


Get stuck in!

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Hillary Clinton supporter stabs brother-in-law
A MAN stabbed his own brother-in-law over a Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama argument...Jose Antonio Ortiz, a Clinton supporter, allegedly stabbed his brother-in-law Sean Shurelds in the stomach after they argued over the race for nomination. Shurelds, 41, an Obama supporter, told Ortiz his candidate was “trashing” Clinton, in reference to a string of recent victories by the Illinois senator in preliminary voting in various states. Ortiz replied that “Obama was not a realist” before the argument, in the kitchen of a Pennsylvania home, turned physical. After some mutual choking and punching, the 28-year-old allegedly stabbed Shurelds in the stomach. He has been charged with aggravated assault, among other charges, while Shurelds was flown to a nearby hospital, where he was admitted in critical condition.
That's an idea, Hillary and Barack, in the kitchen, carving knives at dawn.

Dignity in death

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Dying at home scheme's cash plea
A leading charity says plans to help more terminally ill people die at home under a pioneering nursing scheme are at risk due to a lack of funding. Marie Curie Cancer Care says £2m more a year would allow it to extend a scheme which has more than doubled the number spending their last days at home. The warning comes as a YouGov survey suggests more than 70% of people would feel happiest dying at home. But fewer than one in seven think they would get the care they need.

Please think about making a donation:




Thieving bastards

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Secret report reveals massive MEP fraud
A report on the misuse of expenses by MEPs is likely to be kept secret by the European Parliament despite growing calls for it to be made public. The internal audit exposes money-making scams without naming individuals and shows “embezzlement and fraud on a massive scale”, according to the MEP who revealed its existence. But parliament insiders said that today’s meeting of the budget control committee would not result in publication because senior figures were afraid of setting a precedent on publishing confidential auditors’ documents.
"afraid of setting a precedent on publishing confidential auditors’ documents"

But that is EXACTLY what needs to be done. How else will we have openness and transparency? Sheesh! Sometimes I think I must have come here from another fucking planet! If that is the case, please, pleeeeeease - I want to go home!!

Parsnips remain unbuttered

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Dan Hardie: Iraqi Employees: Fine words, shabby deeds
Here is the Prime Minister on the subject of Iraqi ex-employees of the British Government, speaking in the House of Commons on October 9th, 2007: ‘I would also like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the work of our civilian and locally employed staff in Iraq, many of whom have worked in extremely difficult circumstances, exposing themselves and their families to danger. I am pleased therefore to announce today a new policy which more fully recognises the contribution made by our local Iraqi staff, who work for our armed forces and civilian missions in what we know are uniquely difficult circumstances.’
So, just how many Iraqi ex-employees have been evacuated from Iraq since that speech was made, almost five months ago?

NONE

Via Justin, who reproduces Dan Hardie’s piece in full and adds this: Please read it, act upon it and, if you have your own blog, spread the word. This truly is a repugnant state of affairs. Thank you.


Sticking it to the 'Nam man

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Alexander Cockburn: The Mushrooming Clouds That Hang Over McCain
Until last week John McCain's political handlers had been complacently sketching out their basic strategy: to portray Obama as a mere novice in statecraft, devoid of those powers of mature wisdom and sober judgment with which the seasoned McCain is so richly endowed.

The problem here for McCain is that he's a dunderhead in statecraft, devoid of self control, capricious in moral standards and an imbecile in his lack of political judgment. Across the past four days these deficits have all come home to roost. Often, the deadliest wounds a scandal can inflict are on the second, third and fourth days, as the follow-up stories disclose " troubling new disclosures", "apparent contradictions" and the like.

True to this pattern, each successive day since the New York Times finally disgorged ­ at least partially -- its story last Wednesday, has brought fresh disasters, particularly as the Washington Post and Newsweek play catch-up. As it progresses, the Iseman affair scandal discloses him as an idiot (the view of his horrified staff in 1999 as McCain, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee paltered with the attractive 32-year old communications lobbyist), a liar (in his denials he met with Lowell "Bud" Paxson, the media operator for whom Iseman was working) and a hypocrite (in thundering against lobbyists and their employers, while traveling in their private planes, taking their money and doing them favors).
Ouch!



Let them eat cake?

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High food prices may force aid rationing

The United Nation’s agency responsible for relieving hunger is drawing up plans to ration food aid in response to the spiralling cost of agricultural commodities. The World Food Programme is holding crisis talks to decide what aid to halt if new donations do not arrive in the short term.

The WFP crisis talks come as the body sees the emergence of a “new area of hunger” in developing countries where even middle-class, urban people are being “priced out of the food market” because of rising food prices.

The warning suggests that the price jump in agricultural commodities – such as wheat, corn, rice and soyabeans – is having a wider impact than thought, hitting countries that have previously largely escaped hunger.  “We are seeing a new face of hunger in which people are being priced out of the food market,” said Ms Sheeran. Hunger is now “affecting a wide range of countries”, she said, pointing to Indonesia, Yemen and Mexico. “Situations that were previously not urgent – they are now.”

In response to increasing food prices, Egypt has widened its food rationing system for the first time in two decades while Pakistan has reintroduced a ration card system that was abandoned in the mid-1980s. Countries such as China and Russia are imposing price controls while others, such as Argentina and Vietnam, are enforcing foreign sales taxes or export bans. Importing countries are lowering their tariffs.

Food prices are rising on a mix of strong demand from developing countries; a rising global population; more frequent floods and droughts caused by climate change; and the biofuel industry’s appetite for grains, analysts say. Soyabean prices on Friday hit an all-time high of $14.22 a bushel while corn prices jumped to a fresh 12-year high of $5.25 a bushel. The price of rice and wheat has doubled in the past year while freight costs have also increased sharply on the back of rising fuel prices.

You gotta love that man!

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Charlie Brooker
The moment anyone tells me they're going skiing, I start to dislike them. This is because I've constructed my own imaginary version of a skiing holiday in my head: it involves a fistful of self-satisfied bastards called Dan and Izzy and Sam and Lucy sharing a chalet together, drinking wine while listening to Mark Ronson on Izzy's iPod speakers, taking 15,000 photos of each other guffawing and pulling silly faces, and occasionally venturing outside to slide down a hill on a pair of glorified planks, at which point with any luck they hurtle headlong into a tree, snapping at least three limbs in the process, and the holiday ends with them lying on their back, twitching like a half-crushed spider, exposed shards of shinbone gleaming in the winter sun as they scream for an air ambulance at the top of their idiot lungs.

Brilliant!

Pass me my gun!

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I'd have more chance of being allowed to stay and care for my frail mother if I was a foreign criminal
All Deborah Phillips wants to do is care for her increasingly frail 80-year-old mother. She has no intention of claiming benefits and would save the taxpayer the cost of helping to look after another elderly woman. But because Miss Phillips was born in the United States, moving to England when she was three, she has been refused permission to stay and must leave the country with her seven-year-old daughter Alexandra by the end of April. When that happens her English mother Betty Phillips will be left alone.

Her mother lost her husband Phil, 77, who suffered from Alzheimer's, in May 2005. She has had two small strokes and suffers from arthritis, heart trouble and hypertension. She is also prone to stress and anxiety. Miss Phillips, who has been turned down four times for permission to live permanently in this country, insists her mother is too frail to take to the U.S. Her mother, a former teacher, is English and her late father was American. Miss Phillips came here as a small child in 1963 when her father retired from the U.S. Navy. She speaks with an English accent and went to school and college in Hull.