Links With Your Coffee - Saturday
- DIRECT Ezine for Democrats
A weekly must read.
- Democratic Socialists? You Bet!
- Right-Wing Radio Host Gets Waterboarded, and Lasts Six Seconds Before Saying It's Torture | AlterNet
Okay Hannity, now it's your turn.
- The making of the Alien vs Predator Chess Scene
What do you think? Will they be playing at the National Open in June.
- Circle Jerk at the Square Dance: Top Ten Tuesdays: Why are we leaving the Republican party? (tip to Arnold)
- ‘We did not know that child abuse was a crime,’ says retired Catholic archbishop
Today we learn that a retired Catholic Archbishop in the US is claiming in a soon-to-be-published memoir that he did not comprehend the potential harm to young victims or understand that the priests had committed a crime.
- The Placebo Effect
The term “placebo effect” is unfortunate; it leads to misunderstandings. Placebos themselves don’t have any effect. They are inert: that’s what placebo means. The word placebo comes from the Latin for “I please.” You can think of it as the opposite of “I benefit.” What we really mean by “the placebo effect” is not some mysterious effect from giving an inert treatment, but the complex web of psychosocial effects surrounding medical treatment. Those effects occur with effective treatments too, not just with inert treatments.
Mark Crislip, MD, thinks the placebo effect is a myth. “I think that the placebo effect with pain is a mild example of cognitive behavioral therapy; the pain stays the same, it is the emotional response that is altered … Ain’t no such thing as a placebo effect, only a change in perception.”1 He’s correct in saying that the placebo effect does nothing to change the pain signals in the nerves. But most people think the change in perception is the placebo effect and is worth pursuing.
- You can't write that number; in fact, you can't write most numbers. : Good Math, Bad Math
- Perfectly Normal | Mark Fiore's Animated Cartoon Site
Comments
Okay Hannity, now it's your turn.
Waterboarding is torture ... again and again and again. The big lesson here is that right-wing blowhards have to do this one at a time. We are learning nothing new about waterboarding, of course. We're being given an extended lesson on the make-up of people who simply can't accept that they are wrong. The question is, will any of them begin to question anything else they believe? Or will it be, 'OK, OK, I was wrong about waterboarding, but it is inconceivable that there are other utterly unfounded beliefs that I hold that are also wrong.'
As has been pointed out again and again, the US has demanded the death penalty whenever other countries tortured US troops with waterboarding.
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