Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Caribbean Medical Schools

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/23/nyregion/23caribbean.html?hp=&pagewanted=all
New York Medical Schools fight to prevent Caribbean medical school students from completing part of their core education in NY hospitals alongside US medical students.

Monday, December 20, 2010

Top Secret America

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/monitoring-america/

Nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators.

The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation's history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.

Saturday, December 18, 2010

In Defense of Disgust

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/12/in-defense-of-disgust
Is the emotion of disgust a result of natural selection? Surely in part it must be. But does evolution give us a complete picture?

The Crisis of the American Intellectual

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/12/08/the-crisis-of-the-american-intellectual/
Our intellectual life is becoming reactionary: opportunities are viewed as threats, hopes as dangers, progress as the unraveling of all that is beautiful and true

Friday, December 10, 2010

Hitchens on Populist Claptrap

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/01/hitchens-201101
Forfeiting a both-houses Republican victory, rational conservatives ignored or excused the most hateful kind of populist claptrap (e.g., the fetid weirdness of Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project). The poison they’ve helped disseminate will still be in the American bloodstream when the country needs it least.

All the President's Captors

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/opinion/05rich.html
Does Obama suffer from Stockholm Syndrome?

Friday, December 3, 2010

A Proposal to Classify Happiness as a Psychiatric Disorder

From the Journal of Medical Ethics (1992).  J Med Ethics 1992;18:94-98 doi:10.1136/jme.18.2.94
Original link: http://jme.bmj.com/content/18/2/94
PDF link: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0BxfPsH53fxUSNjQyMjhlNzctMGQ0NS00ZjA4LTllNjEtYTVhZDIyOGU0N2Zl&hl=en&authkey=CPfiw8oF



Freedom of Speech?

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2010/12/banishing-wikileaks.html
Amazon ceased to host the Wikileaks website on its servers.  Oh, the irony of a bookseller thwarting free speech.  I wonder how many Americans know the difficulty Al Jazeera had (has) in finding distribution channels in the US -- Comcast and others refused to carry it.