Author: stevekuusisto

I couldn’t climb high enough
& now you hold in air like visible ideas,
Wishes mostly, ones the horse may have had
Dreaming in his stall under his night blanket.
It is foolish, addressing you
For you are shining in another world.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

I found the following story on the NPR iPhone App:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/12/01/143017520/foster-kids-even-infants-more-likely-to-be-given-psychotropic-drugs?sc=17&f=1001Foster Kids Given Psychiatric Drugs At Higher Rates
by Jenny Gold
Kaiser Health News – December 1, 2011Children in foster care are significantly more likely than other kids to be given mind-altering drugs, according to a study of five states released Thursday by the Government Accountability Office.The report, which focused on children in the Medicaid program, also found that foster kids were more likely to be prescribed five or more psychotropic drugs at an age and at doses that exceed the maximum FDA-approved levels — both of which carry serious health risks.Some 3,841 infants under age one were prescribed a psychotropic drug in the five states the report looked at. Seventy-six of them were in foster care. Experts say there’s no good reason for infants to take such drugs, the GAO notes.The report “confirms some of my worst fears,” Sen. Thomas R. Carper, D-Del., said in a Senate hearing on the issue Thursday, adding that states and the federal government have not done enough to monitor the problem.The two-year investigation in Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon and Texas found that foster children were prescribed psychotropic drugs at rates 2.7 to 4.5 times higher than other children in Medicaid in 2008. Psychotropic drugs include those used to treat ADHD, anxiety, depression and psychosis.In total, the five states spent more than $375 million in Medicaid funds for psychotropic drugs for both foster and non-foster children.The higher prescribing rates don’t necessarily mean that states are acting inappropriately, the GAO points out. Psychotropic drugs have proven effective in treating mental illness, and the higher rate could be “due to foster children’s greater exposure to traumatic experiences and the unique challenges of coordinating their medical care.”A recent study in the journal Pediatrics also found that foster children are prescribed multiple antipsychotics at higher rates than other children.Ke’onte Cook, a 12-year-old from Texas who testified at the Senate hearing, was on up to five drugs at a time while in foster care, including for bipolar disorder. The drugs made him irritable and exhausted, he said, caused a loss of appetite and “put me in a lights-out mode 15 minutes after I’d taken them.” Cook was adopted two years ago, and is now off all of the medications he was on while in foster care.”I think putting me on all of these stupid meds was the most idiotic thing I experienced in foster care, and the worst thing someone could do to foster kids,” Cook said. “I was upset about my situation, not bipolar or ADHD.”The Child and Family Services Improvement and Innovation Act, passed in September, requires states to come up with protocols for appropriate use of psychotropic drugs for foster kids. But the GAO says that’s not enough: HHS should create nationwide guidelines to “help states close the oversight gaps we identified and increase protections for this vulnerable population.”HHS agreed with the recommendations in written responses to the report. [Copyright 2011 Kaiser Health News]To learn more about the NPR iPhone app, go to http://iphone.npr.org/recommendnprnews

Sent from my iPhone

“There are two kinds of taste,” said William James, “the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.” I think it’s safe to say that contemporary American politics is entirely about the emotions of recognition. The GOP is officially the party of entrenched hatreds; the Democrats are trapped in cathectic demonizations. The public, watching the 24-7 cable news has acquired the taste for emotive confirmation and you don’t have to be an artist to know that isn’t going to get you very far. 

In the art world emotions of surprise are not prescriptive–that is, they can be spurred in a variety of ways. Sometimes the artist is the enfant terrible, troubling the public nerve (the bourgeoisie) with outrageous pictures–Robert Mapplethorpe comes to mind, but so does Walt Whitman and Baudelaire. While the city elders of Cincinnati fumed about Mapplethorpe, America was starting to take on the AIDS epidemic despite the log-jammed emotions of recognition, the old confirmatory and small minded emotions. 

Sometimes the artist simply shows us what was already there but shows it to us in a fresh way. I’ll argue that Theodore Roosevelt did this when he created our national parks; Ansel Adams did it with his photographs; the poet Robert Bly does it in his lovely short poem “Watering the Horse”. 

In these times America needs a leader who trusts emotions of surprise rather than the talk radio and poll driven emotions of confirmation. I think President Obama should talk more often to our current poet Laureate, W.S. Merwin. Let’s surprise the nation with boldness, which is what the people are desperately waiting for. 

By Andrea Scarpino

Homemade cat food: meat, eggs, vitamins all whizzed together into a concoction only a cat would eat. Except my cats won’t eat it, just look at me with evident disdain and concern. And when they do venture to taste what I’ve put in the bowl, they insist on violently vomiting it up—and then some. It has to be a medical miracle of sorts that they’re producing so much vomit while eating so little. Yesterday, one vomited an obscene amount on a cushion that he has now spent hours obsessively licking even though I cleaned it up. This morning, he vomited on an empty egg carton I had put on the floor near the back door to recycle.

Homemade. Because I’ve decided that I should make more ethical choices in what I feed my cats. The pet food industry is essentially a dump for all the meat by-products that aren’t fit for human consumption. And much of it contains ingredients like grains that cats shouldn’t be eating anyway.

I’m also worrying a lot these days about CAFOs—contained animal feeding operations. Basically, small concrete and metal areas where hundreds to thousands of animals are contained and raised to be slaughtered. The Environmental Protection Agency defines a CAFO as “agricultural operations where animals are kept and raised in confined situations” and which “congregate animals, feed, manure and urine, dead animals, and production operations on a small land area.”

Notice the definition doesn’t include the word “farm.” Because they’re not farms; they’re production lines, feedlots. The EPA says a large CAFO can include 10,000 or more pigs, 55,000 or more turkeys, 125,000 or more chickens. Confined, remember, in metal and concrete, with drainage ditches leading urine, feces, blood, dead animals, hair, antibiotics, spilled feed to vast lagoons of waste.

This worries me for many reasons: the health of the people who work and live near these operations, who wake each morning to fumes released from the waste lagoons; the environmental costs of raising so many animals in such poor conditions; the health costs to the humans who consume these animals; the harm to the animals; the ethics of it all. And my possible support of CAFOs through what I feed my cats.

Even though I don’t eat meat, even though I only consume organic and free-range dairy products (although there are a host of complexities there), could I be supporting CAFOs by buying cat food with “chicken by-products”? Most likely.

So I bought two pounds of local farm-raised organic ground chicken and mixed it with a vitamin powder made for cats. It smelled vile. I may or may not have gagged while processing it. But this would be the only way to ensure, I reasoned, that I wasn’t supporting a CAFO. Except my cats won’t eat it. Or eat it and vomit profusely—out of spite, I’m convinced. Essentially, I’ve fed them nothing but McDonald’s for 13 years and now, suddenly, I’m changing the rules.

Of course, I think I’m changing the rules for the better. But no one seems to be able to convince the cats.

Andrea Scarpino is a frequent contributor to POTB. You can visit her at:

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Here is a story: a watchmaker survives the war. He comes home having lost all interest in time. This is the oldest tale in the world. I thought of this just yesterday when I heard Vice President Biden talking to NBC’s Ann Curry about the need for American businesses to hire war veterans. The vice president is correct. But a job alone isn’t enough. The United States must double down on its efforts to help veterans with the psychological damage that warfare inflicts. Oh this is an old tale and we are still telling it. 

Of course it's good to be precise. Blindness, even when suffused with light isn't always easy. One morning while on a trip alone to Europe I woke with a profound head cold. I'd been traveling for days, first in Austria, then in Scandinavia. Now I was with my guide dog in an unfamiliar room in Helsinki's Hotel Hesperia. The room was black. It's only window faced north. Without daylight the place was like a tunnel, a brune chasm, and  dangerous with its Finnish modern furniture. I lay in the bed listening to the beating of my heart. I was waking like a cartoon coyote who has walked off a cliff but stays aloft. There was something wrong with my heart. My heart was too noisy. It sounded like a Cuban bata drum. My heart was making a deep and hollow sound I'd never heard before. And what was that? Was that the noise of my viscera? A splenetic hurdy gurdy? What the hell was happening? Then it dawned on me: I was deaf.

The hotel room was an intricate evasion. My heart pounded. I felt my way forward with fingers and naked toes. My damned heart was Edgar Alan Poe's tell tale heart, beating from beneath the floor. And to make matters worse I hadn't left a night light on. The room was as dark as a theory of life. 

"Vidal," I said, for Vidal was my guide dog at the time, "we've never been in such a black hole!" 

My voice sounded like bees. I shouted. I couldn't make out any syllables or consonants. 

I hit my head on a door. I groped for a wall switch. I imagined that light would solve everything. But when I flipped the switch I was still deaf and the room was just formlessly yellow. 

Outside on Mannerheim Street I walked about in the thin April light hearing only my heartbeat. Vidal knew his job. He stopped at curbs, watched traffic. Without the ability to hear cars I had to guess when to step into the road. Vidal had to use his skills in "intelligent disobedience" and prevent me from making bad decisions. Without my ears I had to rely on my canine companion like never before. "Thank goodness," I thought, "guide dogs are trained to stop their owners from walking into harm's way."

We wandered for a long time without direction. Light expanded in my eyes and was more of an obstacle than I had ever noticed before. The absence of hearing made the brilliant fog seem like an ocean. My feet became disconnected from my ankles. I felt as if I was coming apart in a light beam. My heartbeat clattered in my head like the hooves of a frightened beast. Vidal pulled me, shunting left or right to avoid people or machines I couldn't see. Stumbling down the sidewalk in the center of a large Scandinavian city I felt frighteningly alone. I began to sweat. 

Vidal and I returned to our hotel. We made our way to the elevator and then to our room where I sat down and cried. I wept though I sensed that tears would make my situation worse. What could I do? I couldn't use my talking computer for email and I couldn't use the telephone. Obviously I would have to write notes and hand them to strangers. This cheered me up. I thought of Beethoven. The only problem was that I couldn't read notes in return and accordingly I'd have to rely on the clear comprehension of my readers. How long was this Helen Keller state going to last? I fed the dog and went to sleep and stayed in bed for eighteen hours. 

The next day I handed an elaborate note to the desk clerk who in turn got me a cab, guided me by my elbow and told the driver to take me to a clinic. I handed out notes wherever I found myself, held my hands up to my ears to suggest how little I was hearing. And the doctor gave me pills and elixirs and after another day and night I returned to the hearing world with a strange sensation that a plug had been removed–bilge water suddenly drained out of me. I could hear the TV that I'd left on for illumination. Tony Blair was talking to university students. Thank God for Tony Blair! Oh that lovely man! I didn't mind that he was lying about the war. His voice was the lyrical antithesis of solitude. In the end it's voices that confirm us. 

 Mithraic coins, pre-Roman, before consciousness, deep in a mineral blank, there were always two. “Let me give you my two cents worth,” said God, who gave each man a talent–the wise man saw there were two coins there, always two. As for me, I’ve just risen from sleep. I don’t remember my dream. But damn if I haven’t got two cents to rub together. 

Watch Anderson Cooper Friday on ABC.

From our friend Laura Castle:

Anderson Cooper is doing a program on child abuse at 10:00 a.m. Friday on ABC. There is a horrible book on raising children called "To Train Up a Child" by Michael and Debi Pearl. They advocate whipping babies on their bare skin, using whips, belts and tree branches and they recommend whipping a child as young as three until he is "totally broken." The Pearls are fundamentalist Christians who live on a farm in Tennessee. Their book has been implicated in the deaths of three children whose parents followed its teachings. Anderson Cooper is bringing this horror to the public's awareness.

I came home and lay on the bed. The house was empty, no one was home. My dog lay down beside me. Outside I could hear rain in the trees, rain mixing it up with the last leaves. What a day it had been. Human misunderstandings, people reliving their old wounds, each room a proscenium arch. I fell asleep then. And I don’t know why but I dreamt I was in Norway and it was spring and I was walking an old ox up a hill, the two of us happy in the way of human-animal kinship that we had lived through another winter.