Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2008

Merkwuerdige Liebe, Herr Doktor

September 7, 2003 at 8:32 pm | In yulelogStories | 4 Comments

This via the ever-excellent Wood’s Lot, who got it from Harper’s Index:

Amount the Defense Department has lost track of, according to a 2000 report by its inspector general : $1,100,000,000,000
Ratio of this amount to the rest of the world’s military budgets combined : 2:1
Approximate number of accounting systems in use at the Defense Department : 2,300
Percentage change since 2001 in the median annual compensation of CEOs of major U.S. defense contractors : +79
Change since March 2001 in the number of working-age Americans who are neither working nor looking for work : +3,600,000
Average salary of a state legislator last year : $30,300
Average amount spent lobbying one : $130,000

There’re lots of other interesting facts on this site: take a look.
And an aside and PS: I love Wood’s Lot, but I wish the site would load more quickly and with fewer burbles. (Sorry, I’m re-watching Dr. Strangelove as I type, you know, Burbleson Air Force Base, etc. etc. George C. Scott, you chew gum like an open book!) A couple of times I have had to use an ueber-trick to kill the browser application after Mark’s Lot hung it up: go to “terminal,” find application # and type kill -9 [#of application]: poof!, and start over. Hungh. I guess he just has too many good links and thinks — poor Exploder overloads.
Onwards:
Something else I saw that friends in California will appreciate: Califoracle. Factoid or fiction-as-real?
A few days ago I pointed to a couple of articles that I expected to dissect more fully, but never did because I underestimated the drag of everyday tasks, and my own sloth (…which is considerable). One of them was this article in Adbuster, which really caught my attention because it’s about girls, a topic close to home: my daughter is 9, one of my UK nieces is a dissatisfied 30-something who was on Big Brother before going back to real life, the list goes on: over 50% of the people I care about are (or were) girls. This article is by Oliver James, a clinical psychologist and author of They F**k You Up (this points to a lukewarm review). He begins by citing “a really weird fact: affluent British 15-year-old girls are now twice as prone to anxiety and depression as their poorer neighbors.” It comes from comparing yourself endlessly to others, and “never being satisfied with yourself or what you’ve got.” As James notes,

Comparing to other people is a part of the human condition. If we want to be better at something, we naturally look toward people who have already achieved what we aspire to. Equally, if we want to cheer ourselves up, we gain succor from observing less accomplished performers than ourselves.

Key to this strategem of comparing is “discounting.” When you compare yourself to someone indisputably better, you avoid falling into despair by “discounting,” that is, putting the other person’s excellence into context. You say to yourself, “well, he’s better because….[fill in the blank].” When you compare yourself to someone worse off, you probably don’t “discount” and just enjoy being better off. The economic structures of our advanced media-saturated capitalism, however, exploit the comparison instinct to the point of no return:

As a result, affluent 15-year-old girls are liable to say in all seriousness that they hope to be as successful as Madonna or Posh Spice, directly comparing themselves and apparently oblivious to the extreme improbability of it ever happening. Feeling they almost know these women and encouraged by song lyrics and autobiographies that promise “you too can be anyone you want to be,” the girls make no discount for what has made the stars stand out.

In Madonna’s case, for instance, she is a Machiavellian workaholic who has used money and status to compensate for a terribly disturbed early childhood. As for Posh, she obsessively craves attention and was willing to do anything to be famous. Without these pathologies, a normal girl is unlikely to be prepared to go through the awful distortions necessary to achieve stardom.

Equally destructive is the fact that, when these increasingly perfectionist girls read their usually excellent exam results, or look at their pretty faces and nubile bodies in the mirror, they fail utterly to enjoy what they see. Instead, they look at others who are better than them in some minute regard (“better at math,” “bigger boobs,” “more friends”), and feel like failures. Worst of all, when they hear of others who have done worse or see girls less pretty, they shrug it off, discounting the evidence that all their work has not been in vain: their best is never good enough.

I have a daughter, so this kind of stuff makes me pay attention. James’s conclusion is very apropos, too:

Money can even be made from restoring the chemical imbalance in our brains that results from these overheated ambitions and false identities, selling pills and therapeutic services to the damaged and subordinated. Capitalism does very nicely at both ends. It creates misery, and it cures it. Our inner lives foot the bill.

There was a flurry of media attention paid to mental illness last week, which drove me crazy in a particular way — the Canadian press had several articles in the Toronto Star and the Globe & Mail, and CBC Radio had a couple of interviews with mental health experts. It seems we’re in the midst of an epidemic: 1 in 10 respondents show signs of depression or drug, alcohol dependence. (This article is about on par with something from the National Enquirer; just my opinion of course.) Ok, I visited the Mood Disorders Society of Canada to take their Self-Administered Screening Tool for Bipolar Disorder and learned that I’m probably afflicted with that mental illness. (I already knew from earlier tests, taken in Boston on the subway — the kind that recruit for the big teaching hospitals, Mass. General Hospital, etc., that I suffer from depression…. heh-heh.) The 15-minute assessment en passant will never be a replacement for the real talking cure. There’s a problem with the questions on the tests, and especially with the assumptions: viz., if you have a mental illness, you not only can take a pill, you should take one. On the other hand — oh, illuminated moment — the CBC Radio interviewee pointed out, passionately, that there is this thing she calls “environmental depression,” i.e., mental illness caused by the impossible conditions imposed upon the individual.
You know, the kind of thing lab researchers do to white mice to make them go ape-shit.
Now why in heck would we want to take our meds to adapt to a newer, flashier hamster wheel?