Letter Never Sent Tell me when to go.

Ape ‘learns to talk’:

A chimp who has grown up among humans may have developed the ability to talk, claims a research team from the US.
The findings, published in New Scientist magazine, may come under fire from other scientists.

But they may further challenge the long-held belief that apes have no language ability.

Kanzi, an adult pygmy chimp, is kept at Georgia State University in Atlanta, and, like many other primates, can communicate by pointing at symbols.

However, researchers recently noticed that he was also making gentle noises while he interacted with humans.

By studying many hours of videotape, Dr Jared Taglialatela and Dr Sue Savage-Rumbaugh spotted four distinct sounds that accompanied particular actions, corresponding to “banana”, “grapes”, “juice” and “yes”.

Gates gives $100m to fight HIV, $421m to fight Linux

Sure, they know its a dangerous vaccine. Sound reasoning on their part. Too bad we can’t trust our government not to fund biological weapons like this.

Another option, Frist said, is for Congress to extend the Federal Tort Claims Act to those involved in smallpox vaccinations. Under this approach, the federal government would defend any lawsuit brought and pay any damages. The case would be tried in federal, not state, court, and be heard by a judge not a jury, he said. In addition, there could be a ban or limit on punitive damages.

Naturally, they are eager to also further erode jury trials.

Agriculture Dept. OKs irradiated meat in school lunches

Makes sense in a way. You gotta have some way to kill the E. Coli that get mixed in with the cow feces you’re eating in your meat. I’m glad I’m a vegetarian. No ethical qualms, no feces, no animal flesh in my body.

Found at WhatReallyHappened.com:

I love this image of an autograph of Robert Oppenheimer who helped created the first atomic weapon. It has a bomb with an X drawn over it that says “NO”.

Americans Still Getting Fatter – Study:

About 59 million people, one in every three U.S. adults, are now obese and the number of overweight children has tripled in the last two decades, according to studies published on Tuesday.

“The problem keeps getting worse,” said Tommy Thompson, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

“We’ve seen virtually a doubling in the number of obese persons over the past two decades and this has profound health implications. Obesity increases a person’s risk for a number of serious conditions, including diabetes, heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure and some types of cancer,” he said in a statement.

I’ve been reading some bits on the web about Otto Rank, one of Freud’s pupils who later went his own way.

Rank also tackles the difficult issue of artistic creativity. On the one hand, Rank says, the artist has a particularly strong tendency towards glorification of his own will. Unlike the rest of us, he feels compelled to remake reality in his own image. And yet a true artist also needs immortality, which he can only achieve by identifying himself with the collective will of his culture and religion. Good art could be understood as a joining of the material and the spiritual, the specific and the universal, or the individual and humanity.

This joining doesn’t come easily, though. It begins with the will, Rank’s word for the ego, but an ego imbued with power. We are all born with a will to be ourselves, to be free of domination. In early childhood, we exercise our will in our efforts to do things independently of our parents. Later, we fight the domination of other authorities, including the inner authority of our sexual drives. How our struggle for independence goes determines the type of person we become. Rank describes three basic types:

First, there is the adapted type. These people learn to “will” what they have been forced to do. They obey authority, their society’s moral code, and, as best as they can, their sexual impulses. This is a passive, duty-bound creature that Rank suggests is, in fact, the average person.

Second, there is the neurotic type. These people have a much stronger will than the average person, but it is totally engaged in the fight against external and internal domination. They even fight the expression of their own will, so there is no will left over to actually do anything with the freedom won. Instead, they worry and feel guilty about being so “willful.” They are, however, at a higher level of moral development than the adapted type.

Third, there is the productive type, which Rank also refers to as the artist, the genius, the creative type, the self-conscious type, and, simply, the human being. Instead of fighting themselves, these people accept and affirm themselves, and create an ideal, which functions as a positive focus for will. The artist creates himself or herself, and then goes on to create a new world as well.

Look at this new bullshit disorder I just heard of, Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Something new to give kids medication for. I’m really concerned about the amount of medicating that goes on with kids. You take kids who may indeed have real reasons why they’re acting out and you dope them up and flatten their emotions. Symptoms your child may have Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD):

1. Often loses temper
2. often argues with adults
3. often actively defies or refuses to comply with adults’ requests or rules
4. often deliberately annoys people
5. often blames others for his or her mistakes or misbehavior
6. is often touchy or easily annoyed by others
7. is often angry and resentful
8. is often spiteful and vindictive

That sounds like about 3 out of 4 kids I know. Quit putting money in the hands of drug companies and psychiatrists. Stop doping your kids. One thing you have to remember, doctors don’t know everything. It’s just their job to look like they do.

Deprivation of Physical Affection as a Main Cause of Depression, Aggression and Drug Abuse. A good website. I read some things like this when I was into Wilhelm Reich. I like his stuff but I still don’t know what to make of his orgone theory.

This site also has the famous Time-Life documentary Rock a Bye Baby (1970):

The Time Life documentary “Rock A Bye Baby” describes the influence of different practices in infant treatment and child rearing on emotional development, both in humans and in monkeys.

In the beginning, it is noted that the contact of the child to the mother represents the first socio-emotional interaction the child experiences and lays the fundamentals for its later behaviors. We learn that social animals isolated from their mothers and receiving no nurturing physical affection develop severe depression and can die from such deprivation. In addition, maternal-infant isolation that leads to sensory deprivation can cause developmental brain damage. These facts show that mother love has a neurobiological basis that is essential for life.

Next we are introduced to Harry Harlow’s experiments with surrogate mothers which have shown that monkeys raised alone in an environment without mother and peers prefer to be with a cloth-covered mother surrogate without a milk bottle rather than with a wire-cage surrogate mother that provides a milk bottle, even when hungry.

They even cling to their cloth-covered wooden dolls when they are frightened and they experience the same emotional stress other social animals experience when isolated from their surrogate mothers. These experiments show that the need for a loving relationship (percepted, in this case, by the “fur”) is stronger than the mere need for food even when hungry. Thus, love-hunger is stronger than food-hunger.

From eWeek:

As Apple Computer Inc. draws up its game plan for the CPUs that will power its future generations of Mac hardware, the company is holding an ace in the hole: a feature-complete version of Mac OS X running atop the x86 architecture.

According to sources, the Cupertino, Calif., Mac maker has been working steadily on maintaining current, PC-compatible builds of its Unix-based OS. The project (code-named Marklar, a reference to the race of aliens on the “South Park” cartoons) has been ongoing inside Apple since the early days of its transition to the Unix-based Mac OS X in the late ’90s.

Sources said more than a dozen software engineers are tasked to Marklar, and the company’s mainstream Mac OS X team is regularly asked to modify code to address bugs that crop up when compiling the OS for x86. Build numbers keep pace with those of their pre-release PowerPC counterparts; for example, Apple is internally running a complete, x86-compatible version of Jaguar, a k a Mac OS X 10.2, which shipped last week.