flow 3.flo.0 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

That would appear to be the sound of gears grinding on the smooth-gliding Obamamobile. Two process errors on the same day! The first one—failing to vet Bill Richardson properly—is forgivable. Nobody vets Richardson. Perhaps I should mention that when I was recently in Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif went out of his way to cite him to me as his favorite American politician. Anyway, with a bodies-are-buried godfather of political soul like the governor of New Mexico, you appoint him and hope that he is experienced and mature enough by now to self-police. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de That’s essentially what Richardson did here, by pulling out of the Commerce Department post—a grand-jury investigation into political favors-trading by his office boiled hotter than he had anticipated, so he took himself out before he could do himself or the President-elect any harm. Embarrassing, perhaps, but not a big deal. The Obama team’s second process error, however—failing to consult Diane Feinstein, the incoming chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee—about a decision to appoint an inexperienced fellow California pol, Leon Panetta, to head the C.I.A., well, that’s a gangly unforced error. Heads need not roll, perhaps, but one or two ought to be bowed in humility.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.

As to the Panetta appointment itself, it is unconvincing. The C.I.A. directorship is a diminished post, no longer in charge of the full intelligence community and subordinate to the Director of National Intelligence (who will apparently be Dennis Blair, a retired admiral.) Still, the C.I.A. director has four important jobs: manage the White House relationship; manage Congress, particularly to obtain budgetary favor; manage the agency’s workforce and daily operations; and manage liaisons with other spy chiefs, friendly and unfriendly. Panetta is thoroughly qualified for the first two functions but unqualified for the latter two. He seems to have been selected as a kind of political auditor and consensus builder. He will make sure the White House is protected from surprises or risks emanating from C.I.A. operations; he will ensure that interrogation and detention practices change, and that the Democratic Congress is satisfied by those changes; he will ensure that all of this occurs with a minimum of disruptive bloodletting. All good, but it is not enough. The essential problem is that Panetta is a man of Washington, not a man of the world. He’s seventy-years-old, spends his time on his California farm, and he’s been out of the deal flow, as they say on Wall Street, for about a decade; he knows California budget policy like the back of his hand, but what intuition or insight does he bring to the most dangerous territories in American foreign policy—Anbar Province, the Logar Valley, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas? Compared to his counterparts in Pakistan, Jordan, Israel, Britain, etc.—the critical relationships in national security that the C.I.A. Director alone can manage—he is a relative novice not only about intelligence operations but also about the foreign-policy contexts in which they occur. The country needs a better clandestine service. The C.I.A. has taken in an unusually talented pool of young case officers who volunteered after September 11th—probably as good a young talent pool as the government has had since the nineteen-sixties. But the agency they signed up for has been battered around and led by revolving door. Panetta may make the White House feel more secure about unfinished bureaucratic and operational reforms at Langley, but he is unqualified to forge the next-generation spy service that a country with as many enemies as this one has needs and deserves.http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de

lost 5.los.00010002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . ABOUT two years ago, a little delegation from a major investment bank arrived at my home in Beverly Hills. These nice young people were from the bank’s “wealth management division.” I told them straight away that I didn’t have anywhere near enough wealth to make their trip worth their time, but they smilingly insisted that we could help each other.http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.wordpress.com

They told me that if I invested a certain sum with them, they would make sure that a large chunk of it was managed by a money manager of stupendous acumen. This genius, so they said, never lost money. He did better in up markets than in down markets, but even in down markets he did well. They said he used a strategy of buying stocks and hedging with options.http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.wordpress.com

I protested that a perfect hedge would not allow making any money, because money made on the one side would be lost on the other. They assured me that this genius had found a way to spot market inefficiencies and, indeed, to make money off a perfect hedge.

I thanked them for their time and promptly looked up Bernard Madoff online. Nothing I saw was even a bit convincing that he had made a breakthrough in financial theory. Besides, this large financial firm was going to charge me roughly 2 percent to put my money with Mr. Madoff’s firm. I could invest my few shekels with Warren Buffett for no management fee at all.

I checked with my investment gurus, Phil DeMuth, Raymond J. Lucia and Kevin Hanley. None of us could see how Mr. Madoff could do what his friends said he could do. I politely passed and went on my way, finding my own inventive ways to lose money on a colossal scale during these last 15 months.

My point is not that I was so smart. I am not and I was not. Mistakes are a big part of my life. My point is that, as humans, we seem unable to learn from our mistakes very well.

I have never heard of an entity that could make money in all kinds of markets consistently, year in and year out. Yet we continue to believe that there will be one. It is, like much else in finance, a myth that will not die. I have never heard of a financial manager who promised to be able to defeat the markets anytime he chose and who, in fact, was able to do so. Even Mr. Buffett says repeatedly that he will have losing years and losing stretches of years. (Wow, is he right this year.)http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.wordpress.com

By the same token, I belong to a number of country and town clubs. In all of my years at them, I have never gotten an investing tip that made money. In fact, as far as I can recall, I have never gotten a tip from any source that made me money, except for my former agent’s wife mentioning Berkshire Hathaway, Mr. Buffett’s company, 30 years ago.http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.wordpress.com

The same goes on a much larger scale for the debacle of subprime mortgages. In essence, it is a much larger version of the Drexel Burnham Lambert junk-bond debacle of the 1980s. Back then, investors were charmed by the idea that the lower-ranked the bond, the more money it would make. It seemed like a great idea: there’s this little corner of the market that the big boys turn up their noses at. But in this little corner, huge money is made. It’s almost like the myth that you get great bargains in poor parts of town.

In fact, the Drexel episode should have taught us to be wary, indeed, of poorly rated debt. But it didn’t. The new version of the myth was so alluring that it drew in not just billions of dollars from lenders and mortgage bond buyers, but much more in derivatives linked to the myth.

Then there was the myth of the hedge funds. One great advantage of being 64 is that I can remember the early hedge funds of the 1960s. They, too, were supposed to turn water into wine, but they fell hard in the stock market meltdown that also laid low the Nifty Fifty — another 1960’s idea that 50 carefully selected stocks could long beat the indexes.

I can still recall visiting an early hedge fund pioneer. He had a small stereo playing rock music in his office as he tried to make millions. That’s how cool he was. I don’t know where he is now and I don’t want to know.

AND there are many other myths I could talk about, myths that we believed in and that tricked us and hurt us. But I will tell you about the main myth that’s hurting investors right now. It is well expressed by my hero, Bob Dylan, who warns against being “ nothing more than something they invest in” in the immortal song, “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.wordpress.com

We are more than our investments. We are more than the year-to-year or day-by-day changes in our net worth. We are what we do for charity. We are how we treat our family and friends. We are how we treat our dogs and cats. We are what we do for our community and our nation. If you had $100 million or $100,000 a year ago and now you have a lot less, you are still the same person. You are not a balance sheet, at least not one denominated in money, as was explained to me recently.http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.wordpress.com

Losing and making money are not moral issues so long as you are being honest. You may have a lot less money as this year ends than you did two years ago. But you are just as good or bad a person as you were then. It is a myth that money determines who you are, and if you have gotten over that myth by now, then 2008 will have been a very good year. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

tooth 9.too.001 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Scientists have looked our ancestors in the mouth and extracted a new insight about human evolution. Slowed-down tooth growth, a marker of extended childhood development in humans, emerged by only around 100,000 years ago, the investigators have found.http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US

Even fossil species treated as direct or close ancestors of Homo sapiens, such as Homo erectus and Homo ergaster, exhibited relatively rapid tooth growth, more like that of apes than of people, report anatomist Christopher Dean of University College London and his colleagues. Overall, people take 18 to 20 years to reach full growth, while chimpanzees and gorillas take 11 to 12 years.

"I was quite surprised to find that tooth enamel grew at such different rates in early Homo species, [especially] Homo erectus, compared with Homo sapiens," Dean says. In his view, this dental disparity indicates that prolonged childhood development emerged when our ancestors evolved brains and bodies similar to those of people today. Dean's group presents its results in the Dec. 6 Nature.

Steven R. Leigh, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, calls the new study "a fine piece of work with important implications for understanding the evolution of human-life histories."

In particular, Dean's data highlight the "unusual nature" of individual development in H. sapiens and Neandertals, Leigh says. He suspects that delayed dental growth accompanied a substantially longer lifespan in these species.

The scientists focused on microscopic features of teeth to establish a time scale for dental growth throughout human evolution. Children's permanent teeth grow in layers that preserve a record of their developmental pace. One sheet of enamel gets laid down daily, the process forming a criss-cross pattern inside the tooth. Ridges on the enamel surface accumulate every 8 or 9 days.

Daily enamel layers grow more slowly and therefore are thinner in people than in apes, reflecting our longer period of physical development.

Of 13 fossil teeth examined by Dean and his coworkers, those attributed to australopithecines�members of the human evolutionary family that lived between 5 million and 1 million years ago�and to three Homo species�Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, and H.

erectus�displayed signs of speedier, apelike enamel growth.

In a separate study, Spanish researchers identified a modern sequence of tooth development in an 800,000-year-old Homo species (SN: 6/2/01, p. 346: http://www.sciencenews.org/20010602/bob14.asp).

However, the new results suggest that this dental sequence occurred more rapidly than in modern people, Dean holds.

Scientists had expected that H. erectus, the first fossil ancestor with body proportions and tooth sizes like those of modern people, grew relatively slowly. Yet using measurements of the fossil teeth, Dean's group determined the time needed for tooth formation. The results indicate early and rapid growth for the teeth of H. erectus and earlier Homo species. For example, the first permanent molar, which erupts at around

6 years in modern humans and at about 3� years in apes, erupted between 4 and 4� years in H. erectus, Dean says.

The new study included teeth from a juvenile H. erectus skeleton found in Kenya and dating to 1.5 million years ago. Many researchers regard this boy, who was 5 feet 3 inches tall, as having been close to 12 years old. Evidence of more-rapid dental growth in H. erectus now places this boy at closer to 8 years old when he died, according to Dean. The earliest evidence for slower tooth growth appeared in a 100,000-year-old Neandertal specimen from an Israeli site, he adds.

A slowing of dental growth may have contributed to a tendency for the skulls of H. sapiens adults to look like larger versions of juvenile H. erectus skulls, comments anthropologist Susan C. Anton of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. Even with refined theories about tooth growth throughout human evolution, she says the developmental picture for H. erectus remains fuzzy.http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US

Tooth growth may have proceeded at varying paces in far-flung H. erectus groups, Anton suggests. For instance, African and Asian H. erectus specimens display shape differences in their skulls and teeth that may reflect disparities in the timing of enamel growth, Anton says.http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US

Nonetheless, it's now clear that the thick tooth enamel in H. sapiens develops more slowly than comparably thick tooth enamel in our ancient ancestors grew, remarks Italian anthropologist Jacopo Moggi-Cecchi of the University of Florence.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire .

engel 5.0020 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Does psychotherapy work?

Depends on what you mean by “psychotherapy.” And by “work.”

The answer matters. In trying to ascend from (as Freud once put it) “hysterical misery to ordinary unhappiness,” millions of Americans attend weekly therapy sessions of myriad kinds, at costs that can exceed $10,000 a year. Large professional edifices — psychiatry, psychology, social work, among others — are constructed atop the notion that psychotherapy works. http://sheehan.myblogsite.com If it were to be conclusively demonstrated that therapy doesn’t work, therapists would be put out of business; that’s effectively what’s already happened to Freudian psychoanalysts.

Jonathan Engel, a professor of health care policy at Baruch College, begins “American Therapy” by asserting: “Psychotherapy works. Multiple studies conducted over the past half-century have demonstrated that two-thirds of people who engage in psychotherapy improve.” http://sheehan.myblogsite.com But then, intentionally or not, he dedicates the better part of this fascinating book to complicating that proposition.

For starters, there’s that one-third of patients who don’t get better with psychotherapy; by definition, it doesn’t work for them. And then, perhaps more damningly, there’s the one-third of patients who have been consistently shown to get better without any treatment at all.

And then there’s this: a survey published in the early 1970s found that whereas a majority (59 percent) of people who had visited a professional psychotherapist for mental distress reported having been “helped” or “helped a lot” by the consultation, much larger majorities of people who had consulted a clergyman (78 percent) or a physician without specialized psychological training (76 percent) or — get this — a lawyer (77 percent) reported the same thing. Of course, psychotherapy did develop some pretty wacky offshoots in the 1970s — primal scream therapy, rebirthing therapy and Z-therapy (which seems to have involved, among other things, poking and tickling the patient) — so maybe it’s not surprising that people got more psychic relief from their lawyers than their therapists. But while a 1974 paper by a Johns Hopkins psychiatrist criticized the “charlatans” who “preyed on the gullible and the self-deluded,” these kooky therapies were actually surprisingly effective; many of the patients who underwent them reported themselves cured. This would certainly seem to undermine the claims of mainstream professional psychotherapy to specialized knowledge of any particular usefulness. If someone can poke and tickle a neurotic patient to health, why should an aspiring psychotherapist bother to get a graduate degree? Is psychotherapy just a high-priced placebo?

Engel describes an experiment that seems to have been animated by these very questions. In 1979, a Vanderbilt University researcher named Hans Strupp divided 30 patients with psychological problems into two groups, one to be treated by trained psychotherapists, the other by humanities professors with no psychological expertise. The result? The two groups reported improvement at the same rates. “Effective psychotherapy,” Engel writes, “seemed to require little more than a willing patient and an intelligent and understanding counselor who met and spoke regularly and in confidence.”

A University of Pennsylvania study found that the most successful therapists — regardless of whether they were Freudians or behaviorists, cognitive therapists or Z-therapists — were honest and empathic and connected quickly and well with other people. (Krupp’s humanities professors may have fared so well because they were chosen based on how well likedthey were.) Studies like Krupp’s rattled the foundations of the field and, as Engel puts it, “shook therapists’ confidence in their own rectitude.” But, as Engel takes pains to remind us, if twice as many distressed people improve with therapy as without it — as studies consistently show — those are still pretty good odds for psychotherapy.

The question of effectiveness is only incidental to Engel’s main goal, which is to tell the story of how, over the course of less than 100 years, psychotherapy went from being an obscure treatment for ­upper-middle-class Jews in fin-de-siècleVienna to being a staple of mainstream American medical practice and a fixture of our popular culture. Mining both medical journals and the popular press, Engel spins a richly textured tale of psychotherapy’s rise.

Naturally, the story begins with Freud, a thoroughly unlikely candidate to become the progenitor of anything distinctly American. He visited the United States only once, in 1909, and found the country rather barbaric. Practical-minded Americans, for their part, would not seem to have provided a receptive audience for his arcane theory of mind, with its id, ego and superego, and its references to Oedipal crises, castration complexes and penis envy. But the most eminent American psychologists of the day — G. Stanley Hall at Clark University, James Jackson Putnam at Harvard, Adolf Meyer at Johns Hopkins and, later, Harry Stack Sullivan, of the Washington School of Psychiatry, among others — embraced and promoted Freudian theory. Psychoanalysis, Engel observes, “seemed to be compatible with a strain in the American zeitgeist,” and the psychoanalytic establishment here “rigidly stood by the Freudian canon for decades” after his death.

For several decades after Freud’s visit to America, psychotherapy remained at the margins of American culture; mental illness was still a little discussed, and highly stigmatized, phenomenon. World War II changed that: when 12 percent of draftees — nearly two million men — were rejected for “neuropsychiatric” reasons, it profoundly altered the American perception of mental illness; psychiatric problems became, in some sense, normal. William Menninger, who was serving as chief psychiatrist of the United States Army, noted that “people are beginning to see that damage of the same kind can be done by a bullet, bacteria or mother-in-law.” After the war, terms like “repression” and “inferiority complex” began cropping up in movies and best-selling novels. “Where the public once turned to the minister, or the captain of industry, or the historian or the scientist,” one social critic observed, “it is now turning more and more to the psychiatrist.” http://sheehan.myblogsite.com (Engel writes about the fascinating battle lines drawn between psychiatrists and the clergy during this time, with their diametrically opposed notions of guilt.)

When Time magazine put Freud on its cover in April 1956, the psychoanalytic moment in America had arrived, and for the next several decades psychoanalysts largely dominated the mental health field. But even as Freudians occupied the top echelons in the psychiatric institutes and the medical school residency programs, and the psychoanalytic idiom was tightly woven into the culture, more and more studies were calling into question the effectiveness of the psychoanalytic enterprise. In 1975, the behavioral psychologist Hans Eysenck declared (controversially) that “Freudian theory is as dead as that attributing neurotic symptoms to demonological influences, and his method of therapy is following exorcism into oblivion.”

The death warrant may actually have been written earlier, in the 1950s, on the first prescriptions for Thorazine, an anti­psychotic medication so effective that it became known as “the drug which emptied the hospitals.” Though Freud himself anticipated the age of biological psychiatry (in 1938, he wrote “the future may teach us to exercise a direct influence, by means of particular chemical substances, on the amounts of energy and their distribution in the mental apparatus”), the realization that drugs could so successfully treat some forms of mental illness thoroughly discombobulated the psychoanalytic profession. If drugs worked, that implied an organic, or medical, basis for neurosis, which in turn challenged some of the basic assumptions of psychoanalytically oriented therapy. If mental illness was due to some physical anomaly in the brain, wasn’t the best way to treat the illness by directly addressing that anomaly, with a pill? By the mid-1960s, the psychiatric establishment was moving definitively in a pharmaceutically oriented direction.

Meanwhile, the advent of even better drugs like Prozac (which went on the market in 1987), and the proliferation of cognitive therapies, in which the patient works with a therapist in a focused way to change maladaptive ways of thinking, further diminished Freud’s standing; repeated controlled studies clearly showed both drug and cognitive therapies to be effective in ways that psychoanalysis, with its hours on the couch, has not been shown to be.Though some Freudian analysts continue to practice today, Engel writes, they resemble “nothing more than a fanatical Essene sect, living apart in the wilderness where they could continue to seek truth in the master’s writings.”

Engel describes how factors like changes in the structure of health insurance shaped (and often distorted) psychiatric care, and his book is studded with fascinating tidbits like this one: in the mid-1960s, two buildings on the corner of 96th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan had as many analysts as Minnesota, Oregon, Delaware, Oklahoma, Vermont, Wisconsin and Tennessee combined.

Engel gestures at, but doesn’t directly address, some of the most interesting questions prompted by the rise of psychotherapy. Is the enormous growth of the field over the last century simply a case of supply surging to meet demand, or does the volume of neurosis fluctuate over the years? Are anxiety and alienation always symptoms to be treated, or are they sometimes appropriate — even healthy — responses to the vicissitudes of late modernity? Is psychotherapy an art or a science, a subcategory of humanism or of biology?

But the story Engel does tell is plenty interesting and his conflicted view of Freudianism well worth absorbing: the most influential school of therapy in American history may not have worked very well as a treatment — but it did revolutionize how we think about the human mind. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.

secret 5.sec.002005 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Fifteen years ago, scientists at the National Institutes of Health reported that malformed prions—proteins that can trigger lethal illnesses including mad cow disease—remain on soil surfaces for at least 3 years. Now, scientists report why rain doesn't flush away the prions: The proteins bind almost irreversibly to clay. http://louisjsheehan.blogspot.com





In fact, clay can "retain up to its own mass of ... prion proteins," says Peggy Rigou of the National Institute of Agronomic Research (INRA) in Jouy-en-Josas, France. http://louis5j5sheehan5.blogspot.com





Her team added sheep prions to pure clay, sandy soil, and loam. Positively charged parts of the protein molecules bound to the negatively charged surface of the clay that was present in all the soil samples. Extensive washing failed to dislodge the prions. However, when the chemists treated the mixtures to make the proteins negatively charged and then ran an electric current through each mixture, the prions migrated off the clay particles.http://louis4j4sheehan4.blogspot.com

Freeing the prions was a major achievement, Rigou notes, because it enables scientists for the first time to measure prion concentrations in soil. Until now, no technique could confirm that intact prions were present in soil. In an upcoming Environmental Science & Technology, her team reports that the new procedure permits detection of concentrations as low as 0.2 part per billion.

Soils might acquire prions from animal wastes or carcasses. Scientists' concern is that livestock might ingest infected clay particles while eating grass or drinking from mud puddles, Rigou says. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

rockies 44.roc.22299991 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Climate change expected to occur in the coming decades may cause forests in northern stretches of the U.S. Rockies to stop absorbing carbon dioxide and even to release some to the atmosphere, exacerbating the planet's warming.

Trees pull carbon dioxide from the air as they grow. Much of the carbon from that gas is stored in wood and foliage, but some ends up in material littering the forest floor and in the underlying soil. From there, it can make its way back into general circulation, says Céline Boisvenue, an ecologist at the University of Montana in Missoula. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG

She and her colleague Steven W. Running used computer models to estimate how three climate-change scenarios might affect carbon storage at forest sites in Idaho, western Montana, and northwestern Wyoming.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG

The good news: By 2089, the growing season in the forests will be at least 3 weeks longer than it was in 1950. The bad news: Over that same period, higher temperatures will cause the trees to suffer water stress—slowing or stopping their growth—for an additional 8 weeks each year. Even under a climate scenario with higher precipitation than at present, trees will have insufficient water for 54 more days each year in 2089 than they did in 1950.

By the year 2020, under a scenario with reduced precipitation, dieback of trees and decomposition of leaf litter at three of the six studied sites will cause the forests to emit more carbon dioxide than they absorb. By the year 2070, the forests at five of those sites will be net producers of carbon, says Boisvenue. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

nanoparticles 99.nan.00003 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Bacteria found lurking in the bowels of an abandoned Wisconsin mine might have a role in cleaning up toxic metals. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO A new study shows that these bacteria make compounds that cement minute metallic particles into balls that naturally drop out of contaminated water.

As part of their metabolic cycles, certain bacteria that live in watery, oxygenfree environments take up one type of sulfur-containing chemical, a sulfate, and transform it into another type, a sulfide, that they then release. The sulfide binds to metals dissolved in water to form nanoparticles.

John Moreau of the U.S. Geological Survey in Middleton, Wis., and his colleagues studied the activity of such bacteria in a flooded lead-and-zinc mine. They discovered that zinc sulfide nanoparticles "were being scooped up and glommed together into spheroids," he says. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO

The larger spheroids tend to settle out long before they get into the water supply.

The researchers found that, by weight, proteinlike material formed 10 to 15 percent of the metal spheroids. In lab tests, zinc sulfide nanoparticles clumped when placed in contact with the amino acid cysteine, a protein component. The team reports its findings in the June 15 Science. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO

Scientists had previously come across metal spheroids in other oxygen-deprived environments and had proposed that heat, pressure, or magnetism might have formed the balls. Moreau and his colleagues now say that the bacteria can do double duty, creating a sulfide that leads to nanoparticle formation as well as making the proteinlike compounds that appear to promote nanoparticle clumping. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire