Fox News Is Not Coming to Canada - For Now

Really great news from Canada:

As America's middle class battles for its survival on the Wisconsin barricades -- against various Koch Oil surrogates and the corporate toadies at Fox News -- fans of enlightenment, democracy and justice can take comfort from a significant victory north of Wisconsin border. Fox News will not be moving into Canada after all! The reason: Canada regulators announced last week they would reject efforts by Canada's right wing Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, to repeal a law that forbids lying on broadcast news.

In your face, Harper! In your face, Fox News! Yay for my fellow Canadians who have proven yet again that they deserve the name of civilized, progressive people.

Just consider how bankrupt today's Conservatives are if they freely admit they need lies to support their agenda:

Harper's attempts to make lying legal on Canadian television is a stark admission that right wing political ideology can only dominate national debate through dishonest propaganda. Since corporate profit-taking is not an attractive vessel for populism, a political party or broadcast network that makes itself the tool of corporate and financial elites must lie to make its agenda popular with the public.

I'm glad that Canadians showed Fox News exactly where it can stick its ridiculous propaganda. Of course, now we have to prepare for yet another assault on Canadian laws guaranteeing that newscasts are limited to broadcasting news instead of spreading lies.

Thank you, Angie, for sending me the link to this hopeful article!

The Future of Unions

Ezra Klein has written a great column about unions titled "How unions can be more than a legacy institution." He offers an honest look at why unions have been so unpopular in recent decades. We all know that only 7% of private sector workers are unionized today. This number went down dramatically since the 1970ies when over a quarter of all private sector employees were members of a union. 

Today's crisis in Wisconsin, says Klein, has offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the unions to gain the sympathies of the public and make themselves attractive to larger numbers of the population. In order to do so, unions have to recognize and renounce practices that have caused so much popular resentment against them:

If unions are to not just survive, but to actually flourish again, they need to create an identity beyond being a protection service for people who aren't very good at their jobs.

 As I mentioned before, I used to be a union organizer for the graduate students at my university. Our union achieved many important things. However, there came a time where I couldn't, in good conscience, associate myself with it any longer. The union consistently tailored all of its decisions, policies and strategic goals to the needs of the underachievers. Those who believed they needed 8 to 10 years to complete their doctoral program were supported and celebrated as true scholars while those of us who wanted to graduate as soon as possible could not get our needs taken into consideration by the union. The culmination of this drive towards turning us all into underachievers was a forceful union campaign to abolish grades for graduate courses and the union's passionate conviction that it is unacceptable for professors to fail graduate students at their comprehensive exams. 

For some reason that I still haven't been able to grasp, many unions operate under the assumption that all workers contribute equally and that no employee can be lazy, incompetent and stupid. Any system that is based on this set of beliefs is bound to fail. It will reward the underachievers and punish hard workers. Unions often prevent people who have done a particularly good job to be rewarded. (I have seen this happen at the school where I work right now, so don't tell me it doesn't happen.) As a result, productive people will end up carrying the load of their lazy colleagues while getting no reward for it. How soon, do you think, the quality of everybody's performance will drop? 

Unions should abandon the pernicious idea that nobody is better, more intelligent, more hard-working and more worthy of being rewarded than anybody else. They should remember that their goal is defending the rights of live human beings and not some robots that always act the same and produce work of the same quality. If anything will save the unions, it is the recognition that while people should be equal, they will never be the same.

Film and Literature

In class we are watching a movie based on the novel I'm considering analyzing in my next article. As a result, I'm rereading the novel at the same time as I'm showing the movie in class. I'm noticing more vividly than ever how poor, how lackluster, how limited are the artistic means of even the best film as compared to literature. The cinematic version is so heavy-handed, so gauche in comparison with the literary text.

Still, the movie was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Foreign Movie category while the novel it is based on is generally recognized as not being nearly the writer's best work.

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

Cannibalizing a Child's Life

Have you noticed those creepy Facebook pages and Twitter accounts where women use pictures of their children instead of their own as avatars? I've always been completely creeped every time I would see a huge, bald head of a baby sending tweets couched in very adult language. Amanda Marcotte writes very well about this phenomenon:

This generation leaches itself of sexuality by putting the innocent face of a child in the place of an attractive mother. It telegraphs a discomfort with even a minimal level of vanity. Like wearing sneakers every day or forgetting to cut your hair, it is a way of being dowdy and invisible, and it mirrors a certain mommy culture in which its almost a point of pride how little remains of the healthy, worldly, engaged, and preening self.

Amanda believes that this happens as a result of 

this growing pressure for women to compete in the game of self-sacrifice and self-abasement to prove their motherly love.

I have to say that, as much as I like Amanda's article, I'm not sure she is right here. All this self-sacrifice is just for show. In reality, what such mothers do by assuming their children's identities is cannibalize those kids' existences. A child is denied any life of their own outside the all-consuming Mommy. She has appropriated the baby's life and will now live the baby's life instead of him or her. On the popular new show Toddlers and Tiaras we see parents who exorcise the frustrations of their drab existences by decking their poor toddlers in all kind of ridiculous adult clothes, covering them with make up, and exhibiting them to the public like little animated dolls. In the blogosphere, we read breathless accounts of parents who report ecstatically on how well they manage to control their children's every breath. On Dr.Phil, we hear how mothers of teenagers are praised for invading every inch of their children's lives.

Women engage in such cannibalizing efforts more often than men. This happens because women frequently renounce any attempt at having a life of their own. Carving out an identity, finding your place in life, getting people to value your contribution to the world is hard. It requires a daily effort at personal, intellectual, professional, and spiritual growth. Who needs all that trouble if you can simply cannibalize the existence of a small child who has no power to resist you?

The Mystery of "Whoonga"

According to a disturbing BBC news story, South African drug addicts are stealing medication from HIV+ people and using it to get high:

'Whoonga' threat to South African HIV patients

"Whoonga" is, allegedly, the street name for efavirenz (aka Stocrin), one of the most popular antiretroviral drugs. The pills are apparantly crushed, mixed with marijuana, and smoked for its hallucinogenic effects.

This is not, in fact, a new story; Scientific American covered it 18 months ago and the BBC themselves did in 2008 (although they didn't name efavirenz.)

Edit 16.00 pm: In fact the picture is even messier than I first thought. Some sources, e.g. Wikipedia and the articles it links to, mostly from South Africa, suggest that "whoonga" is actually a 'brand' of heroin and that the antiretrovirals may not be the main ingredient, if they're an ingredient at all. If this is true, then the BBC article is misleading. Edit and see the Comments for more on this...

Why would an antiviral drug get you high? This is where things get rather mysterious. Efavirenz is known to enter the brain, unlike most other HIV drugs, and psychiatric side-effects including anxiety, depression, altered dreams, and even hallucinations are common in efavirenz use, especially with high doses (1,2,3), but they're usually mild and temporary. But what's the mechanism?

No-one knows, basically. Blank et al found that efavirenz causes a positive result on urine screening for benzodiazepines (like Valium). This makes sense given the chemical structure:
Efavirenz is not a benzodiazepine, because it doesn't have the defining diazepine ring (the one with two Ns). However, as you can see, it has a lot in common with certain benzos such as oxazepam and lorazepam.

However, while this might well explain why it confuses urine tests, it doesn't by itself go far to explaining the reported psychoactive effects. Oxazepam and lorazepam don't cause hallucinations or psychosis, and they reduce anxiety, rather than causing it.

They also found that efavirenz caused a false positive for THC, the active ingredient in marijuana; this was probably caused by the gluconuride metabolite. Could this metabolite have marijuana-like effects? No-one knows at present.

Beyond that there's been little research on the effects of efavirenz in the brain. This 2010 paper reviewed the literature and found almost nothing. There were some suggestions that it might affect inflammatory cytokines or creatine kinase, but these are not obvious candidates for the reported effects.

Could the liver be responsible, rather than the brain? Interestingly, the 2010 paper says that efavirenz inhibits three liver enzymes: CYPs 2C9, 2C19, and 3A4. All three are involved in the breakdown of THC, so, in theory, efavirenz might boost the effects of marijauna by this mechanism - but that wouldn't explain the psychiatric side effects seen in people who are taking the drug for HIV and don't smoke weed.

Drugs that cause hallucinations generally either agonize 5HT2A receptors or block NMDA receptors. Off the top of my head, I can't see any similarities between efavirenz and drugs that target those systems like LCD (5HT2A) or ketamine or PCP (NMDA), but I'm no chemist and anyway, structural similarity is not always a good guide to what drugs do.

If I were interested in working out what's going on with efavirenz, I'd start by looking at GABA, the neurotransmitter that's the target of benzos. Maybe the almost-a-benzodiazepine-but-not-quite structure means that it causes some unusual effects on GABA receptors? No-one knows at present. Then I'd move on to 5HT2A and NMDA receptors.

Finally, it's always possible that the users are just getting stoned on cannabis and mistakenly thinking that the efavirenz is making it better through the placebo effect. Stranger things have happened. If so, it would make the whole situation even more tragic than it already is.

Cavalcante GI, Capistrano VL, Cavalcante FS, Vasconcelos SM, Macêdo DS, Sousa FC, Woods DJ, & Fonteles MM (2010). Implications of efavirenz for neuropsychiatry: a review. The International journal of neuroscience, 120 (12), 739-45 PMID: 20964556

The Mystery of "Whoonga"

According to a disturbing BBC news story, South African drug addicts are stealing medication from HIV+ people and using it to get high:

'Whoonga' threat to South African HIV patients

"Whoonga" is, allegedly, the street name for efavirenz (aka Stocrin), one of the most popular antiretroviral drugs. The pills are apparantly crushed, mixed with marijuana, and smoked for its hallucinogenic effects.

This is not, in fact, a new story; Scientific American covered it 18 months ago and the BBC themselves did in 2008 (although they didn't name efavirenz.)

Edit 16.00 pm: In fact the picture is even messier than I first thought. Some sources, e.g. Wikipedia and the articles it links to, mostly from South Africa, suggest that "whoonga" is actually a 'brand' of heroin and that the antiretrovirals may not be the main ingredient, if they're an ingredient at all. If this is true, then the BBC article is misleading. Edit and see the Comments for more on this...

Why would an antiviral drug get you high? This is where things get rather mysterious. Efavirenz is known to enter the brain, unlike most other HIV drugs, and psychiatric side-effects including anxiety, depression, altered dreams, and even hallucinations are common in efavirenz use, especially with high doses (1,2,3), but they're usually mild and temporary. But what's the mechanism?

No-one knows, basically. Blank et al found that efavirenz causes a positive result on urine screening for benzodiazepines (like Valium). This makes sense given the chemical structure:
Efavirenz is not a benzodiazepine, because it doesn't have the defining diazepine ring (the one with two Ns). However, as you can see, it has a lot in common with certain benzos such as oxazepam and lorazepam.

However, while this might well explain why it confuses urine tests, it doesn't by itself go far to explaining the reported psychoactive effects. Oxazepam and lorazepam don't cause hallucinations or psychosis, and they reduce anxiety, rather than causing it.

They also found that efavirenz caused a false positive for THC, the active ingredient in marijuana; this was probably caused by the gluconuride metabolite. Could this metabolite have marijuana-like effects? No-one knows at present.

Beyond that there's been little research on the effects of efavirenz in the brain. This 2010 paper reviewed the literature and found almost nothing. There were some suggestions that it might affect inflammatory cytokines or creatine kinase, but these are not obvious candidates for the reported effects.

Could the liver be responsible, rather than the brain? Interestingly, the 2010 paper says that efavirenz inhibits three liver enzymes: CYPs 2C9, 2C19, and 3A4. All three are involved in the breakdown of THC, so, in theory, efavirenz might boost the effects of marijauna by this mechanism - but that wouldn't explain the psychiatric side effects seen in people who are taking the drug for HIV and don't smoke weed.

Drugs that cause hallucinations generally either agonize 5HT2A receptors or block NMDA receptors. Off the top of my head, I can't see any similarities between efavirenz and drugs that target those systems like LCD (5HT2A) or ketamine or PCP (NMDA), but I'm no chemist and anyway, structural similarity is not always a good guide to what drugs do.

If I were interested in working out what's going on with efavirenz, I'd start by looking at GABA, the neurotransmitter that's the target of benzos. Maybe the almost-a-benzodiazepine-but-not-quite structure means that it causes some unusual effects on GABA receptors? No-one knows at present. Then I'd move on to 5HT2A and NMDA receptors.

Finally, it's always possible that the users are just getting stoned on cannabis and mistakenly thinking that the efavirenz is making it better through the placebo effect. Stranger things have happened. If so, it would make the whole situation even more tragic than it already is.

Cavalcante GI, Capistrano VL, Cavalcante FS, Vasconcelos SM, Macêdo DS, Sousa FC, Woods DJ, & Fonteles MM (2010). Implications of efavirenz for neuropsychiatry: a review. The International journal of neuroscience, 120 (12), 739-45 PMID: 20964556

Who Robs Women of Sexual Desire?

Ancient cultures knew that female sexual desire was a lot more potent than that of men and that female bodies were a lot more adapted to experience sexual pleasure. Greek mythology, the great Eastern tradition of story-telling, One Thousand and One Nights, and a wealth of Medieval sources agree unanimously that female sexuality is a lot richer than male. We all know the myth of Tiresias, the blind sage of the Ancient Greek mythology who experienced being both male and female:

When Zeus and Hera had a disagreement on which sex enjoys the most pleasure during intercourse they decided to let Tiresias judge, since he had experienced both. Hera insisted men enjoy sex more, while Zeus claimed the opposite. Tiresias then said, that if sexual pleasure could be put on a scale from one to ten, then men were at one, and women at three times three.  

In Eastern stories, male and female genies often hold debates and conduct experiments to determine who needs and enjoys sex more. The answer, in every single case, is women.

As someone who comes from a different culture, I was quite shocked to discover that in the US the discourse that poses female lack of interest in sex as normal has won the day. Americans keep coming up with convoluted explanations as to why women in this country are less interested in sex than men. This is the most recent attempt I have found:

It's an indicator of how male-dominated our society is that the fact that women have diminishing libidos and don't seem to care that much about it is treated as the problem, when in fact it's merely the symptom of a larger problem--that women feel overworked, underpaid, underappreciated, understimulated, and shamed about their bodies.

There is a very good, progressive sentiment behind the above-quoted post. It doesn't take into account, however, that cultures which were a lot more male-dominated than this one never had a problem of diminishing female libidos. Ancient Greeks can hardly be considered beacons of female liberation. Neither can the pre-Xth century Indian and Persian storytellers who contributed to the creation of 1001 Nights (and, consequently, the entire Western tradition of story-telling in the Middle Ages.)

This is an extremely Puritanical society that is very prissy about sexuality. I know that Americans have managed to talk themselves into believing that their culture is "permissive" and even "raunchy." However, any outsider immediately notices just how sexually deprived, constricted, and uncomfortable about anything that has to do with sex this society is. 

P.S. As I was finishing this post, I was watching a TV show that diagnosed a young man with something called "a severe addiction to sex" which, according to the show, is "a mental illness." People who watch porn, masturbate, and have sexual fantasies "should be monitored at all times" because "they are sick and need help." I rest my case, people.