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| NPR has an interesting interview from someone who knows stuff about the shooter's time at Walter Reed:
ZWERDLING: I want to add something else about Hasan at Walter Reed. The psychiatrist I talked to today said that he was the kind of guy who the staff actually stood around in the hallway, saying: Do you think he's a terrorist, or is he just weird? And now, apparently, Walter Reed is in a lockdown mode where they've been instructed - all the staff has been instructed: Do not talk to anybody about this investigation, except military people. Do not talk to the FBI, because they're afraid, potentially, what if people decide investigating this that people missed potential warning signs about the guy?
and notice that when he gave a "lecture" on the Koran, it was another Muslim doc who told him he had things wrong...
Hasan apparently gave a long lecture on the Koran and talked about how if you don't believe, you are condemned to hell. Your head is cut off. You're set on fire. Burning oil is burned down your throat. And I said to the psychiatrist, but this cold be a very interesting informational session, right? Where he's educating everybody about the Koran. He said but what disturbed everybody was that Hasan seemed to believe these things. And actually, a Muslim in the audience, a psychiatrist, raised his hand and said, excuse me. But I'm a Muslim and I do not believe these things in the Koran, and then I don't believe what you say the Koran says. And then Hasan didn't say, well, I'm just giving you one point of view. He basically just stared the guy down.
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| One has some questions not being raised in the press about the psychiatrist who killed at fort Hood.
These questions won't be asked, because they are too sensitive in our"PC" world, so don't get excited when I say the unspeakable.
Indeed, that is why I'm posting it here instead of my BNN blog, at least for now: Because only a cop or a doc would wonder about these things, and even they might not be so un PC to say it out loud.
One: He was a second generation from a Palestinian family.
Most Palestinians who emigrate are Christians who fled persecution by both sides. Indeed, most Arabs in the US are Christians for this reason (although most of them are Lebanese).
Was he a convert, as first reports suggested?
This does not exclude "Jihad": after all, the first Jihadi killer in the US was a Christian: Sirhan Sirhan, who killed Bobby Kennedy.
Two: He had reports saying he didn't get along with patients. These reports go way back into medical school.
I've worked with religiously strict physicians who were so uptight they didn't get along with patients (usually I worked black or Native americans, and of course if you work in the emergency room most of those you saw were intoxicated.)
Now, most Muslim docs got along fine with our patients but I've seen a few who, if they were white Christian fundamentalists, would fit into the KKK because they would see a black or Native American face and treat them like dirt.
Yet from reports, this is a psychiatrist who chose to work with addiction. Strict Muslims don't drink, and are prejudiced against those who do....Something wrong here.
As for comments that he had been ridiculed for his religion: Yup. If you work with drunks and addicts, they will call you names. I even got a window shot out at one point. Nothing personal. They were projecting their rage at the nearest target.
The main question is: why didn't a psychiatrist recognize this? And why didn't he have insight into his own rage?
The military put him through school, and one wonders why he chose psychiatry and not Medicine or surgery.
In my medical school, half the guys who chose Psychiatry did so because they weren't very good at working with sick people, or were bad in science, or were active in politics.... and others chose it to help them get an insight into their own psyche (Psychiatrists have the highest suicide rate in medicine for example).
Yes, some chose psychiatry because they wanted to help the mentally ill, but it makes one wonder why a person who had trouble with patients chose psychiatry and then chose to work with addicts, the most frustrating aspect of medicine, and one where a strict Muslim might not have a lot of empathy for the patients.
Three: I was once suspended after a nurse accused me of making "terroristic threats". She was absent on her usual prolonged coffee break, leaving me with three patients who needed dressings etc. I mumbled I'd kill her when I found her, and the nurse, who we couldn't fire because she knew every trick in the book to stop complaints, reported me. Never mind that I was a woman, an ex missionary, and in the National Guard had a waiver not to carry a handgun and had only shot rifles a few times (I did "own" my husband's handgun: Because I bought it for him, I had to register it in my name).
I know it was done to "prove" they didn't profile "threats". The irony was that they didn't suspend me right away: They waited until the clinic was quiet and could afford to be minus one doctor. Everyone knew it was a crock of caca, but the regulations were followed, so it didn't matter (I would have quit right then, but was scheduled to retire in six months so stuck it out).
But here is a "muslim" who was defending jihadis and fighting with patients about the war, and known to the FBI, but no one intervened.
That suggests negative profiling.
Four: He was "quiet" and didn't show anger, according to one report. But then there were reports of his outbursts. This suggests passive agression, or that he "went amok" (something we see here in the easy going Philippines, when a quiet guy just goes nuts and machetes folks).
And no one saw it coming?
Five. He attended mosque every day. I suggest someone find out if they were preaching anti American pro jihadi propaganda at the mosque...and I suspect the mosque in Silver Springs MD not the one in Texas.
Most Muslims in the US are not radical, but the real danger is the Saudi extremist religion being pushed into mosques all over the world.
From Ralph Peters:
. Al Qaeda was merely the instrument of 9/11. Saudi bigotry, fanaticism and hate-mongering fostered it. Saudi funding made those attacks possible. And Saudi money continues to spread hatred wherever there's a Muslim community. Now we have a president who bows to the Saudi king. Peace be upon you . Six: He was unmarried.
Hmmm....ultra religious man... passive aggressive...in the Army Medical Corps...
All three of those things suggest he was a closeted gay. (Randy Shilts once described an Army hospital where the flirting resembled a gay bar...but in the "don't ask don't tell" days, no one wants to bring up all those gay male nurses any more than one wants to bring up lesbians with guns).
Gays who have conflicts often chose places with strict rules to help them hold in their "evil" impulses: Which is why so many fled to monasteries and the priesthood, and then came out of the closet when the sexual revolution occurred.
A closeted gay working in a hospital however would be like a gay in some monasteries: constant temptation, and a gay subculture.
It would be interesting to hit the gay bars in Silver Springs and find out who knew the guy, and if he was sending off signals either negative or positive to his gay collegues...but with "don't ask don't tell", I doubt anyone will talk to a reporter.
Another hint that he might be a closeted gay is that no woman would have him.
Well, he could just be a nerd...or highly dedicated to his profession...but even nerdy docs usually have nurses or secretaries who seduce them for their annual income.
But then we read this:
"He wanted a wife more religious than him," Faizul Khan told the Daily News. "She had to pray five times a day. She had to wear the hajib. He was a young, good looking guy and a physician but he couldn't find anybody." Hmm...wants a perfect "woman", not a real one...male chauvenist pig, or just one who wants a show wife, not a human being?
Even if he was not gay, he had some major sexual conflicts going on.
So maybe someone should talk to the female nurses and secretaries who worked with him, and see how he interacted with them, either negatively or positively....
So there you have it. A guy full of rage against the world, but whose rage might have been from family rejection or from self loathing because of his sexual conflicts.
Mix with a Saudi propaganda machine in the mosques, and propaganda machines from the radicals in the middle east that will stoke his paranoia, and voila, instant "amok".
notice I didn't say anything about the war? Well, it was because he never went to the war...
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| A couple weeks ago, I saw an article saying that the US Air Force found they had less accidents and more alertness if they fed high fat meals to their pilots.
I presumed this was due to the ability of fatty fools to equalize the blood sugar (which tends to go up and then down after a high carb meal).
The Hopkins team, reporting Oct. 29 in Neuron, reveals how palmitate, a fatty acid, marks certain brain proteins -- NMDA receptors -- that need to be activated for long-term memory and learning to take place. The fatty substance directs the receptors to specific locations in the outer membrane of brain cells, which continually strengthen and weaken their connections with each other, sculpting and resculpting new memory circuits. Moreover, the researchers report, this fatty modification is a reversible process, with some sort of on-off switch, offering possibilities for manipulating it to enhance or even, perhaps, erase memory. I'm not sure what this means, but other studies show that the big "say not to transfat" fad might have some problems.
Transfats do NOT increase the rate of diabetes, for example, and the substitute being mandated by the health police in New York and other places may not be safe either:
The Malaysian-Brandeis collaboration compared trans-rich and interesterified fats with an unmodified saturated fat, palm olein, for their relative impact on blood lipids and plasma glucose. Thirty human volunteers participated in the study, which strictly controlled total fat and fatty acid composition in the subjects' diet. Each subject consumed all three diets in random rotation during four-week diet periods. This study further confirmed previous studies in animals and humans, indicating once again that trans fats negatively affect LDL and HDL cholesterol. Surprisingly, the interesterified fat had a similar, though weaker impact on cholesterol. "In this study we discovered that trans fat also has a weak negative influence on blood glucose.
in the meanwhile, the "bad evil food of the day" this week is high fructose corn syrup.
my take? Better nourished kids may be partly due to fast foods, but the ability of people to feed their children is a good thing...it leads to taller kids here in Asian, and increased IQ's...but it also leads to obesity.
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| We all know about Dr. McCoy's tricorder.
Well, now GE is producing a mini ultrasound machine.
V SCAN
Called Vscan, the clamshell designed gadget is aimed at doctors, and possibly would-be parents who could use it in their office or in the field to check the progress of unborn babies or other medical instances, rather than sending their patients to a specialist department for a scan.
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| via Physorg:
young men who voted for McCain or Barr, your testosterone level dropped when they lost.
But if you voted for Obama, it stayed the same.
Uh, who is Barr, and how did they find a statistically significant number of young men to enter into the study?
Two: The study was done at Durham NC (DUKE U) and Ann Arbor (Michigan).
Heh. I didn't know that any republicans lived in Ann Arbor.
But the "results", that testosterone drops, is not a new idea.
The findings mirror what other studies have found in men who participate directly in an interpersonal contest -- the winner gets a boost of testosterone, while the loser's testosterone drops.
 and then there is this pseudo scientific "survey" that showed
In a post-election questionnaire, the McCain and Barr backers were feeling significantly more unhappy, submissive, unpleasant and controlled than the Obama voters. what does that mean? Controlled? Submissive?
and the other question: If the young were so happy about an Obama victory, and if "winners" usually have a testosterone spike, then why didn't the Obama supporters have an increase in their testosterone level?
Place anti Obama joke here.
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