Brains, Sluggish With Tryptophan

[elfs]

Krauthammer: In The Old Days, Politics and the Market Weren't Entwined!

In what has to be the strangest article I've seen yet in the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer writes:

In the old days -- from the Venetian Republic to, oh, the Bear Stearns rescue -- if you wanted to get rich, you did it the Warren Buffett way: You learned to read balance sheets. Today you learn to read political tea leaves. If you want to make money on Wall Street (or keep from losing your shirt), you do it not by anticipating Intel's third-quarter earnings but by guessing instead what side of the bed Henry Paulson will wake up on tomorrow.

Because, as we all know, the Medicis had nothing do to with the financial system. They were all about power. Money they could care less, right? The article makes all the obvious points about the wealthy currying political favor to keep their money or make more, so it's hardly interesting, but really, does Krauthammer really think Americans have forgotten the lessons of the rail barons?

Kristol: Bush ought to give Medals of Freedom to America's Torturers!

As any interrogator who has examined the record will tell you, torture does not work, does not give good results, and creates an environment in which our enemies have no moral qualms about torturing our own guys. The US's incessant middle finger at the UN Convention Against Torture has made us a moral pariah even among the West.

So Bill Kristol's utterly insane "not only should our torturers be pardoned, they should be given Medals of Freedom," is all the more damning for the far right's culture. Kristol worries about "demagogic or politically inspired prosecution by some seeking to score political points." How about legal prosecutions seeking justice, Bill, or isn't that part of your vocabulary?

Whatever happened to justice in this country?

What Girls Want

In an explanation of the Twilight phenomenon, this little review scares the bejeezus out of me:

One of the signal differences between adolescent girls and boys is that while a boy quickly puts away childish things in his race to initiate a sexual life for himself, a girl will continue to cherish, almost to fetishize, the tokens of her little-girlhood. She wants to be both places at once–in the safety of girl land, with the pandas and jump ropes, and in the arms of a lover, whose sole desire is to take her completely. And most of all, as girls work all of this out with considerable anguish, they want to be in their rooms, with the doors closed and the declarations posted. The biggest problem for parents of teenage girls is that they never know who is going to come barreling out of that sacred space: the adorable little girl who wants to cuddle, or the hard-eyed young woman who has left it all behind.

Comments

Dumb stories, it's true...

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

But so is the remarkably persistent tryptophan myth. I've seen debunkings of it for years, but it's nearly as sturdy as the "8 glasses of water" myth.

I guess it's another one of the "Mom stories" that everyone wants to believe.

Re: Dumb stories, it's true...

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

I remember a long time ago running across an article on tryptophan and its soporific properties, and the conclusion was that it could be used as a sleeping pill... as long as you could swallow it... with a picture of the size of pill that was needed to contain enough tryptophan to put an average human to sleep, which was considerably bigger in diameter than the wrist of the person holding it (just tryptophan, a binder, and preservatives; trying to get that much from eating turkey would require you to eat about fifty pounds of turkey meat, IIRC).

Re: Dumb stories, it's true...

[fallenpegasus]

I know that 8 glasses of water is a myth.

On the other hand, I feel better when I'm that hydrated, especially when I'm working out hard.

It's HARD to drink so much water as to injure yourself, it's easy to drink too little, and being a little bit too hydrated is better than being a little bit low.

I used to work for a bone marrow transplant program....

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

We had patients on all kinds of meds for various conditions in addition to their cancer meds, and at least twice we had to admit folks because they'd drunk too much water. Marathon runners have also had problems with it.

A healthy person doing normal exercise should be fine, but the sedentary cubicle potatoes I've seen with signs at their desks reminding them to drink their 8 glasses or even using enormous, specially marked water bottles, are really taking things to extremes unnecessarily.