GETTING OUT WITH DIGNITY

Iraq is George Bush's mess. His failures are not America's failure or our soldiers' failure, not your or my failures. Iraq is the blunder of a poorly educated and stupid man who did a very stupid thing. A man so stupid should never have become president. We have a choice. If America re-elects him and keeps our troopers in Iraq, then the mess becomes America's mess too. But if we kick the bum out and tell the world that we don't support his stupidity, then America is saved from being blamed for Bush's ignorance. Toss Bush out, turn Iraq over to the UN and get out. Let's be right on this one.

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." —Albert Einstein


ERASING THAT DAMN LOVE AFFAIR

Many movie buffs have probably seen Jim Cary's “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and wondered “What the hey?” I’ve talked with more than one person who responded like that. But, guess what? I think I’ve discovered the exact book passage which gave the writer his idea for the movie and, maybe, I’ve even tracked down a phone call he made to check his facts with the scientist/author who wrote the book. All of this is, of course, just a surmise on my part. I’m not a detective nor a psychic, but the coincidence is just too much not to share.

“Studies of fear conditioning have also revived interest in a strange but possibly very significant phenomenon in memory research—reconsolidation.... if you take a memory out of storage you have to make new proteins (you have to restore, or reconsolidate it) in order for the memory to remain a memory. One way of thinking about this is that brain that does the remembering is not the brain that formed the initial memory. In order for the old memory to make sense in the current brain, the memory has to be updated. This work has stimulated a lot of interest from both scientists and lay persons. One man called and asked whether it might be possible for him to eliminate the memory of his ex-wife by blocking protein synthesis in his brain while thinking of her.” The passage comes from a book called "Synaptic Self" by Joseph LeDoux, on p.161.

Also in the movie, the female character with the many-colored hair seemed to change as the movie progressed; she became more conservative. Certain pieces of dialogue were also repeated in different surroundings and circumstances. Those moments are also explained by current research into the brain, consciousness and personality, which show that every time we call up a memory and restore it, new protein must be manufactured for that memory. In short, the memory must be updated to fit into the new (or current) brain which had recalled it. Whoever made “Eternal Sunshine” was at least reading in the same realm of research as the author of Synaptic Self works in.