In Persia, part of their government called the Guardian Council, the presence of which makes their Democracy partly theocratic, has disqualified thousands of liberal candidates from running for Parliament in upcoming, elections, including several incubents. The remaining liberals in their government are preparing to resign en masse in protest, and the E.U., which trades with Iran, is applying pressure. Interestingly, their electoral entity is run by liberals, and said that it won't respect the disqualifications. Ali Abtahi, our favourite (only?) politician blogger in Iran, considers it to be dishonest that the council wasn't willing to admit that it was aiming to disharm the reformists, and instead disqualified them by trumped-up charges of corruption. I wonder if the presence of the GC serves a similar structural purpose for their government as seperation of powers does for the American government.

Speaking of American politics (nice segue there, eh?), former secretary of the treasury for BushJr (pbuh) Paul O'Neill has told some things to the press that haven't endeared him to the current administration. He charged that BushJr was intent on war with Iraq before the September 11th bombings, something we all really knew anyhow, but it's good to have it on record. Asked some of the hairy questions after O'Neill's interview, BushJr admitted as such. I do have some liberal friends who still approve of the war, and to you, I'm going to join with Abtahi in saying that if you can't do it honestly, it's not usually something worth doing, in politics. It doesn't redeem if it turned out well (and frankly, I don't think it has), the fact is that BushJr's reasons for the war have danced all over the map, and that's no way to run a supposed democracy. The WTC bombings should not have been used as a throwaway excuse for war like it was. Closing on O'Neill, he made a totally unnecessary but fun comment that BushJr's cabinet meetings were "like a blind man in a room full of deaf people". That reminds me of a picture in Time magazine I currently have open on my dining room table of BushJr and his cabinet all praying together before a meeting. More inspiration to get that nut out of office... I'm pleased that Powell has indicated that he won't serve under BushJr again if he gets elected. General Clark, incidentally, is willing to go much further than O'Neill. Interestingly, we're starting to see a bit of blame-shifting, as the war might be starting to be disowned by the agressors (Britain under Blair and the U.S. under BushJr) -- Blair's starting to emphasize that he really wanted peace all along, and BushJr is, as far as I know for the first time, this week now starting to talk about how another Iraq war was Clinton's plan all along. The thing is, I don't think he can really go any further in this direction without sacrificing a lot more credibility -- unless he's willing to admit that he's an idiot and a puppet, BushJr won't be able to pose the war as 'not his fault'.

An interesting development in Catholicism reminds me of the first line of a song... o/~ They installed a condom dispenser at the Vatican Yasser Arafat said he'd never wear that hat again ... o/~ -- Foremen, Hell Froze Over

In my neuropsych class yesterday, the teacher made us a fake cake shaped and coloured to resemble a human brain (it was very cute, although it wasn't exactly my kind of cake), and also handed around (in baggies) slices of real brain. The class is small (around 20 people), and we're going to have speakers and patients come in to talk -- within the next two weeks, someone with a lesion in the face-recognition area of their brain will come in, and we'll ask questions. I think I have a good one lined up -- I want to know if their lessened ability to do deep analysis of human faces damages their notion of human facial aesthetics (drawn from seeing a special on TV about how human aesthetics gives people favour in everyday life), which actually connects to something a friend just IM'ed me -- The Uncanny Valley, which he thinks might explain why people dislike clowns.

Another thing we saw in class was someone who had a callosotomy (brain-hemisphere-bridge severing surgery), and apart from a number of other fascinating effects was the effect of them fabricating stories when asked to reintegrate data from their now-uncommunicating areas of brain. In each example, they made up plausable but false stories that neatly swept away what would otherwise be mysterious additions of knowledge that they, from their perspective, shouldn't know. This seems to me to really emphasize that 'making things make sense' plays a big role in how our brain works, and in that sense, it should be considered a major philosophical principle in the exploration of the brain. I'll have to see if it remains useful as I continue in the field :) It fits nicely into some studies on memory I recall where people remember distinct but internally consistant versions of the same event. Memory is perhaps like history -- writing a consistant story out of the scraps and parts we're left after the fact. Also on the topic of such a surgery, I find myself wondering ... callosotomy (my fingers keep wanting to type collosectomy, argh!) is typically done to eliminate the reflection of seizures between the two hemispheres of the brain. The seizures still happen after the callosotomy, but are less severe because they can't spread as far. I'm wondering if a device could be implanted that would, on demand, temporarily inhibit transmissions across the corpus colossum in times of seizure, similar to how a pacemaker stabilizes the heart.. Perhaps such a device would make severing the connection unnecessary. Of course, it's a much finer-grained thing to selectively block transmissions across a region of neurons than to simply provide an impulse to the heart, but it would be awesome if it could work.

Even conservatives can get bitten by media consolidation. Here's demonstration that something akin to nationalism can arise in very different contexts -- read all the pages ... the guy won't *touch* Coke bottles, and drinks nothing but Pepsi.

Incidentally, bittorrent totally rocks.

And, because you likely won't hear it anywhere else, and because this is sacred wisdom, I present to you .. Debb's secret rules for line selection in a supermarket (please don't use this to get advantage over us when we're shopping)..

People not to get behind when picking supermarket lines
• people whose carts are packed full in many layers
• really old people
• people with a checkbook or food stamps (checks and cash are faster)
• people with more than two coupons
• those who look like they're going to haggle or argue over prices
• smokers (frequently they'll need the cashier to go get them more cigarettes from a seperate area)
• people with unlabeled produce (cashier'll need to look it up)