Simple Truth Research Articles

On Romantic Love: Simple Truths about a Complex Emotion, by Berit Brogaard

On Romantic Love: Simple Truths about a Complex Emotion, by Berit Brogaard

The Paradox of Sustainable Development: A Critical Overview of the Term and the Institutionalization Process

Although the concept of sustainable development is not new it has acquired new impetus since early 80s, becoming one of the most debated and written subjects in the recent years. Intellectuals as well as ordinary mortals all across the globe are engaged in this debate. United Nations, international agencies, NGOs, national institutions, governments and civil societies are actively participating in this intense debate. Purpose of this paper is to bring out the concept and paradox of sustainable development, to provide a brief overview of global negotiations on this subject, to have a look at the prevailing ground realities despite plethora of negotiations and declarations and to highlight simple truths of human behaviour based on ancient wisdom. Most of these simple truths have remained obscured under the shadow of plethora of documents and declarations written in highly technical and unintelligible jargons.

The impact of advertising fresh milk has on consumers' behaviour of the Thessaloniki City population

Milk holds a special position among animal and plant fruit, due to the fact that it is an exclusive food for human and mammals alike, in their first stage of life. This product, however, is the key element in man's nutrition not only in its first stage of life, but later as well. It is the most full, simple and natural food, because it includes ingredients like fat and lactose, which provide human with energy, proteins and minerals that contribute in its structural components. Furthermore, it includes enough vitamins and minerals in order to fulfil the necessary biochemical procedure. Consumers usually ignore the simple truths of milk's great nutrition as food. This lack of information is covered by advertisement, as advertisement informs consumers about the special characteristics of a product, in order to convince the consumers to buy it. The results from a quality research extracted important conclusions, which together with the literature review were used for the questionnaire's development and the conduction of the quantitative research. By this research, the results that come up show the effect of advertisement of fresh milk has on consumer's behaviour of the residents of Thessaloniki.

Tragedy and Celebration: The Novel in 2015

THE FRENCH REVIEW, Vol. 90, No. 1, October 2016 Printed in U.S.A. Tragedy and Celebration: the Novel in 2015 by William Cloonan 2015 was an awful year for France. It began with the terrorist killings at Charlie Hebdo and l’Hyper Cacher (7–9 January) and ended with the mass murders of 13 November. In the middle and at the end the Extrême droite progressed in polls and elections, the level of chômage just barely declined, and more than the usual amount of malaise seemed to infiltrate French life. It was a time which made Yeats’s lines in“The Second Coming”—“The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity”—seem like a simple truth statement. While it would have been a gross exaggeration to describe the French as living in fear, one could certainly say that the country was in shock, numb. The literature of 2016 will certainly begin the process of digesting and reflecting the events of this annus horribilis, but the novel in 2015 appears largely untouched by the wanton brutality and political stalemate which characterized the year. What stands out in the fiction of 2015 is a more celebratory element, specifically the celebration of the centenary of the birth of Roland Barthes. As Tiphaine Samoyault’s Roland Barthes chronicles in vivid detail, Barthes is something of an anomaly in the history of French letters. Born in 1915, he was a gifted, albeit sickly student whose recurring bouts with tuberculosis prevented his taking the examination for l’École normale supérieure, one of the major pathways to academic success. His illness also handicapped his efforts to pursue a doctorate. Nevertheless, this man sorely lacking in the educational baggage considered essential in the profession, managed to advance in the academic hierarchy, avoid the many potential pitfalls, and eventually achieve the ultimate recognition, a professorship at the Collège de France. Barthes was a talented essayist who aspired to be a novelist,a gay man at once discrete and overt,a Marxist who largely shunned political activism, an inspired teacher who did not enjoy reading his students’ papers, and a friend and colleague to the leading intellectuals of his era. By all accounts he was a kind and gentle man who managed to hold his own in intellectual discussions and amid the academic infighting surrounding him. Two accounts of Barthes, written by former students and published this year, clearly stand out. Chantal Thomas’s Pour Roland Barthes is the less personal of the two. It deals with Barthes’s lifelong love affair, often tempestuous, with language. 43 For Thomas language was certainly his primary tool, but it is also an important, if implicit theme in all his writings. Antoine Compagnon’s L’âge des lettres is more personal since in addition to being Barthes’s student, he collaborated with him on several projects. While Compagnon’s affection for his friend is deep, it does not cause him to lose his critical perspective. In a narrative Compagnon qualifies as“plus ou moins sincère” (129), he expresses his displeasure with Sur Racine (1963), and is hardly unqualified in his praise of other works by his former teacher. His respect for Barthes is such that it is in no way diminished by an occasional difference of opinion. Sur Racine has had a curious afterlife in 2015. In this controversial work, Barthes proposed that in Bérénice Titus never really loved Bérénice, or at least not as much as he loved gloire. Nathalie Azoulai’s novel, Titus n’aimait pas Bérénice provides belated support to Barthes’s contention. It is the story of a woman jilted by a man for allegedly exalted reasons that she does not accept. She finds echoes and consolation in the seventeenth-century dramatist’s work, and eventually solace in speculating how a writer from so long ago with such different values, could nonetheless express so forcefully her feelings of loss and betrayal. After being shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt, Titus n’aimait pas Bérénice was awarded the Médicis. The Goncourt went to Mathias Énard’s Boussole. At the center of...

The impact of advertising fresh milk has on consumers' behaviour of the Thessaloniki City population

Milk holds a special position among animal and plant fruit, due to the fact that it is an exclusive food for human and mammals alike, in their first stage of life. This product, however, is the key element in man's nutrition not only in its first stage of life, but later as well. It is the most full, simple and natural food, because it includes ingredients like fat and lactose, which provide human with energy, proteins and minerals that contribute in its structural components. Furthermore, it includes enough vitamins and minerals in order to fulfil the necessary biochemical procedure. Consumers usually ignore the simple truths of milk's great nutrition as food. This lack of information is covered by advertisement, as advertisement informs consumers about the special characteristics of a product, in order to convince the consumers to buy it. The results from a quality research extracted important conclusions, which together with the literature review were used for the questionnaire's development and the conduction of the quantitative research. By this research, the results that come up show the effect of advertisement of fresh milk has on consumer's behaviour of the residents of Thessaloniki.

Writing Biography

Writing Biography Trevor Jones (bio) Lincoln’s Billy Tom LeClair The Permanent Press http://thepermanentpress.com 176 Pages; Print, $28.00 “A feeling of failure is not the same thing as failure.” —Vernon Howard “You are afraid of failure because you have no idea what you mean by success.” —Vernon Howard “Remember what I said about biographies. Booksellers ought to bind up some blank pages, and then every man could write the biography he wanted or needed.” —Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln’s Billy While it might seem odd to begin a review on a fiction book about Abraham Lincoln with an obscure and irascible mystic, the joining threaded themes of truth and self-awareness have to stand in stark contrast against the inevitable details and noise of the world. Lincoln’s Billy follows the story of a lesser figure in Lincoln’s life, his former law partner and confidante Billy Herndon, who in later years attempted a biography of Lincoln, less as the grand statesman of Union and weighty pronunciation and more the witty and melancholic yokel, prone to “hypos” of manic-depression and vulgar jokes. Iconoclasm is a strong word, connoting high drama and even finality: “breaking of icons” conjures a raw violence and a frantic, singular gesture. Lincoln’s Billy is anything but of course. Rather we have here a slim, sophisticated novel of research, comedy and the complications of writing biography. Equal parts wink wink and artfully placed ellipses, the novel delights in trading off between finding [End Page 18] the voice of Lincoln through layers of tales and anecdotes, and watching the voice of Billy Herndon continue a long slide through frustration, failure and the muddles of reconstructing a life according to Herndon’s “truth” on paper. Whereas other anti-hagiographies love scandal for the sake of the headline shocker, the thrust of simple truth telling seems to buoy Leclair’s Herndon on a trajectory with more than a few bumps in the road (i.e. Mary Todd Lincoln) that betrays a vanity of sorts. So then, while we often lazily talk about figures of history having “feet of clay” at times it does not occur just how hard clay really gets and how hard it can be to break it apart, albeit out of love and friendship and not spite. In Lincoln’s Billy, Leclair gets this and more. Tom Leclair’s work has always encountered biography with a fascination of failure, and Herndon’s failure at getting Lincoln right marks less some spectacular fall, but documents a labor of love that doesn’t quit. Through years of disappointment and offense at the sycophants surrounding Lincoln’s fresh corpse cause him endless vexation, we have to take Herndon’s testimony he means well as an axiom: without it, we can’t get any further at Lincoln the larger-than-life. However, on Leclair’s part this strategy is brilliant, as Herndon’s Everyman in all his Everydayness allows more trust, intimacy and historical plausibility than some other “objective” account. With someone like Lincoln, looming over the war, Emancipation, civil rights and so on, it’s very easy to forget this once was a young man who may have visited the bawdy houses of New Orleans and whose rude Illinois air at times didn’t sit well with the American establishment. Herndon’s task, indeed what he sees as his duty, is to portray Lincoln in truth because he believes that is what Lincoln would’ve wanted. While the reader may remark on the proximity to Billy’s quest to write a non-hagiography, Leclair pivots on the dramatic irony. This is a project doomed to the dustbin. One scene expands on Leclair’s constructions and telescopes throughout the novel, Herndon’s guesses and wonders at Lincoln’s education. The two discuss Emerson’s “transparent eyeball,” and the exchange as follows: Lincoln: “So I don’t understand this ‘transparent eyeball.’” Herndon: “That’s because your eyeball sees the world as a bunch of hogs to be driven, Mr. Lincoln. The transparent eyeball gives you intuition, unclouded insight into the profound inner workings of other men and nature.” I’d get out my copy of “Nature...

The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon: Toward a Political History of Madness, by Laure Murat

The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon: Toward a Political History of Madness, by Laure Murat, translated by Deke Dusinberre. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2014. xiii, 288 pp. $45.00 US (cloth). First published in French in 2011, Laure Murat's highly acclaimed work has been translated and published for an English readership. The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon is a story of the manifestations and interpretations of madness amidst the political turmoil of France between 1789 and 1871. As she states, revolution provided not only a screen for the projection of delusion but also a space for its translation (p. 158). On the surface, this might seem like a simple truth; nineteenth-century psychiatry was notoriously subjective at best, and moralistic at worst. And yet the text quickly reveals itself as an impressive attempt to uncover the political history of madness. Taking a middle ground between the extremes of anti-psychiatry and Whiggish apologists, Murat's text outlines how both psychiatrists and their patients were deeply implicated in the dramatic political events of their age. After a brief and useful Foreword by David A. Bell, the work begins with a Preamble that functions both as a love letter to the archives and as an explanation of methodology. A cultural historian, Murat is comfortable with the limitations of the psychiatric archives, including its gaps, its coded language, and inconsistencies. Instead of crunching the numbers, she explores a personalized selection method that follows the more detailed and original cases of delusions (p. 15). The first chapter begins with how the spectre of the Terror and its ultimate symbol, the guillotine, plagued the nightmares of the mad. Murat details the many inmates of the asylum haunted by images of the guillotine, and notes that modern psychiatry in France was born at the same moment as the guillotine (pp. 33-34). Vivid depictions of victims' balls and images of guillotine earrings help situate the asylum within its social and cultural context (pp. 26-27). Asylum or Political Prison interrogates the relationship between these two institutions, and explores the politics of how people were institutionalized by the revolutionary state. While Murat does not follow a simple Foucauldian interpretation in her work, it is clear that despite the elimination of the infamous lettres de cachet, asylums were still used to incarcerate society's more problematic citizens. Yet for many of those citizens, freedom was already forfeit. The infamous Marquis de Sade, for example, entered the Charenton asylum only after a series of prisons (pp. …

Being asked to tell an unpleasant truth about another person activates anterior insula and medial prefrontal cortex.

“Truth” has been used as a baseline condition in several functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of deception. However, like deception, telling the truth is an inherently social construct, which requires consideration of another person's mental state, a phenomenon known as Theory of Mind. Using a novel ecological paradigm, we examined blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) responses during social and simple truth telling. Participants (n = 27) were randomly divided into two competing teams. Post-competition, each participant was scanned while evaluating performances from in-group and out-group members. Participants were asked to be honest and were told that their evaluations would be made public. We found increased BOLD responses in the medial prefrontal cortex, bilateral anterior insula and precuneus when participants were asked to tell social truths compared to simple truths about another person. At the behavioral level, participants were slower at responding to social compared to simple questions about another person. These findings suggest that telling the truth is a nuanced cognitive operation that is dependent on the degree of mentalizing. Importantly, we show that the cortical regions engaged by truth telling show a distinct pattern when the task requires social reasoning.

The Patient as Text: Literary Scholarship and Medical Practice in Margaret Edson's Wit.

The experience of an English professor dying of ovarian cancer in Margaret Edson’s play Wit shows that both literary and medical discourse obfuscate and objectify rather than promote communication of “simple human truths” that dignify life and death.

Not Knowing a Cat is a Cat: Analyticity and Knowledge Ascriptions

It is a natural assumption in mainstream epistemological theory that ascriptions of knowledge of a proposition p track strength of epistemic position vis-a-vis p. It is equally natural to assume that the strength of one’s epistemic position is maximally high in cases where p concerns a simple analytic truth (as opposed to an empirical truth). For instance, it seems reasonable to suppose that one’s epistemic position vis-a-vis “a cat is a cat” is harder to improve than one’s position vis-a-vis “a cat is on the mat”, and consequently, that the former is at least as unambiguous a case of knowledge as the latter. The current paper, however, presents empirical evidence which challenges this intuitive line of reasoning. Our study on the epistemic intuitions of hundreds of academic philosophers supports the idea that simple and uncontroversial analytic propositions are less likely to qualify as knowledge than empirical ones. We show that our results, though at odds with orthodox theories of knowledge in mainstream epistemology, can be explained in a way consistent with Wittgenstein’s remarks on ‘hinge propositions’ or with Stalnaker’s pragmatics of assertion. We then present and evaluate a number of lines of response mainstream theories of knowledge could appeal to in accommodating our results. Finally, we show how each line of response runs into some prima facie difficulties. Thus, our observed asymmetry between knowing “a cat is a cat” and knowing “a cat is on the mat” presents a puzzle which mainstream epistemology needs to resolve.

Economic top–down evaluation of the costs of energy storages—A simple economic truth in two equations

Energy storage is a key technology for increasing energy efficiency and a more extensive integration of renewable energies. Besides technical and physical limits, cost uncertainty is a major barrier to the development and utilization of energy storage systems. In this work, an economic top–down approach has been worked out following the assumption that the maximum acceptable costs of energy supplied by a storage should not exceed the cost of energy from the market. Thereby, maximum acceptable storage capacity costs are calculated from the interest rate assigned to the capital costs, the intended payback period of the user class (e.g., industry or building), the costs of energy from the market, and the annual number of storage cycles. The main findings of the top–down evaluation are: first, for a fixed cycle period, the maximum acceptable storage capacity costs depend on the user’s economic environment. Second, seasonal thermal energy storage with up to 2 cycles per year requires storage costs below 3€·kWhcap−1 in the building sector and below 0.4€·kWhcap−1 in the industry sector, respectively. Third, short-term storages with for example 300 cycles per year allow 300 times higher storage costs. Therefore, if the annual number of storage cycles is sufficiently high, several energy storage technologies are economically viable. In this case, systems should be compared with regard to technical or physical attributes.

On romantic love: simple truths about a complex emotion

Preface Chapter 1: Letter from a Friend Chapter 2: The Chemistry of Love Your Brain on Crack Beliefs and Brain Chemistry Taking the Drug Away Addicted to Grief Emotional Pain Stress, Pimples and Gray Hair Love and Hate Chapter 3: The Philosophy of Love Love as an Emotion Basic and Complex Emotions The James-Lange Theory The Conjunctive Theory of Emotions The Connection Problem The Problem of Emotional Responses to Fiction The Perceived-Response Theory Chapter 4: Irrational Love Does the Idea of Irrational Love Make Sense? You Call It Madness, I Call It Love Irrational Compassionate Love Love as a Moral Emotion Love as a History Love and Personal Identity Is Love Unconditional? Love and Personal Identity Love and Sex Chapter 5: Relationships and Insecure Attachment Avoidant Attachment Style Secure Versus Insecure Attachment Avoidant Attachment Anxious Attachment Childish Relationships Jealousy and Anxious Attachment Attachment and the Relationship Theory Can Attachment Styles Change? Familiar Love Attachment Love Can Animals Love? The Other Dimension of Sex Chapter 6: Our Unconscious Affections Opponents of Unconscious Affection Unconscious Affect Unconscious Love In Your Dreams Is Love a Disposition Chapter 7: He Is Just Not That into You (And Other In-Between Cases) Prototype Theory Non-Monogamous Love as In-Between Cases is a Gradable Verb He's Just Not That Into You Ambivalence Chapter 8: How To Fall Out of Love Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche Psychoanalysis and Talk Therapy Emotional Regulation and Avoidance Behavior The Repetition Technique Prolonged Exposure Therapy Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Deep Relaxation and Meditation Heartbreak and Placement Conditioning The Sinclair Method Out, Damned Spot: Using Soap to Wash Away Your Negative Feelings Emotional Regulation as a Route to Happiness The End: The Heart Wants What It Wants References

‘A simple historical truth’: Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip in Menachem Begin's ideology

Begin's ideology with regard to Judea, Samaria and Gaza was based on historical, theological and security related grounds, leading him to conclude that the Jewish people have an eternal, sacred right to the land. This was the basis for his settlement policy as prime minister and for the Palestinian autonomy proposal he made – both meant to prevent a division of the Land of Israel.

The Justification of the Basic Laws of Logic

Take a correct sequent of formal logic, perhaps a simple logical truth, like the law of excluded middle, or something with premises, like disjunctive syllogism, but basically a claim of the form φ.1 Such a sequent attributes the properties of logical truth or logical consequence to a schematic sentence or argument. This paper aims to answer the question of how beliefs in such attributions are justified, on both its descriptive and normative interpretations; I aim to say when we generally take ourselves to be justified in forming such beliefs, and to make it plausible that beliefs formed this way really are justified. We can ask such questions about many domains (e.g. unobserved matters of fact Hume [9]) but there are special difficulties for answering them in logic. Some of the difficulties stem from the fact that logic is thought to be necessary and a priori; it is difficult to account for both a priori justification, and justification for thinking that something couldn’t have been otherwise. Moreover, it is often thought that logic is epistemically basic; we normally think that it is permissible to presuppose logic in the justification of our beliefs in other domains—engineering and arithmetic, for example, and even in justifying everyday common sense beliefs— yet we are not supposed to presuppose claims from these other domains when justifying our beliefs about logic. Logical beliefs come first, epistemologically speaking.

Dreaming of Michelangelo: Jewish Variations on a Modern Theme by Asher D. Biemann (review)

DREAMING OF MICHELANGELO: JEWISH VARIATIONS ON A MODERN THEME By Asher D. Biemann. Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 2012. 180 pp. 3 illustrations.How can religion tolerate art? What is the value of art compared to the simple truth, to the justice of plain religion?It is customary to regard the European Jewish enthusiasm for art as Bildung: the and intellectual education through which Jews became citizens of the world. What if this intense connection with art-expressed through collecting, scholarship, travel, and all forms of production-was not just a way into secular culture, a distraction from Jewishness, but an empowering and ennobling form of religiosity? The premise of Asher D. Biemann's study is that cultural eroticism has something essential in common with the religious experience. Religion not only tolerates art; it is, as Hermann Cohen wrote, always nurtured by art. But can modern Judaism, undergirded by the second commandment and the prophets' rebukes, embrace something called statue-love? It ultimately depends on what is meant by love.The widespread Jewish fascination with Michelangelo's in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome forms the heart of this imaginatively composed inquiry. The primal scene is of course Sigmund Freud's experience visiting and writing about this statue between 1901-1914 (The of Michelangelo, 1914), which has spawned volumes of commentary. Yet Freud's obsession was not sui generis. From the nineteenth century on, pictures, replicas, and literary impressions of the seated Hebrew lawgiver with his ominous gaze and horned head were omnipresent in Jewish society; figured in belles lettres, injournalism, in Jewish living rooms. In effect, by the time Freud wrote his essay, and even earlier, when Tchernichovski wrote the famous Hebrew poem Before a Statue of Apollo (1899), confronting a statue [had become] a modern Jewish genre.But what was the nature of this fascination? Freud was not alone in finding Michelangelo's to be more awesome, complex, and genuine, than his scriptural counterpart. Biemann discusses in detail the responses of Guiseppe Revere, a Triestene Jewish poet, and the writer Salomon Steinheim, who moved to Rome in 1849. Most unforgettable is Steinheim's dramatic sketch, in which the prophet actually takes the artist to task for his decisions (what evil demon, what buffoon . . . gave you the idea of these horns?) before shattering the statue with a lightening bolt: ('You shall not make a graven image'... 'and yet you have sculpted one of ') Biemann argues, however, that Freud, Steinheim, and others were not aesthetic idolaters but Jewish Pygmalians: they beheld the statue as an uncanny Other and dreamed of its awakening. The statue was ambiguously alive, revelatory, at once a symbol of origins and of mortality; it returned their gaze and created them. Jews did not love the statue as much as they wanted it to love them back. The Jewish dream of a moving Moses was of a kind with the plastic aesthetics of Winckelmann, Lessing, Heine and others, but Biemann identifies something more: a type of statue-love that was unchristian, unromantic, unmodern, unrequited-a love known firsthand by the people whose God commands them, Love me! (Rosenzweig).The theater of Jewish statue love is, of course, Italy. Biemann's first chapter gives account of modernjewish Italophilia as expressed in the works of numerous Jewish German thinkers and poets. …

Full Moon Night, and Entering the Hills

Full Moon Night, and Entering the Hills Ya Shi (bio) Translated by Nick Admussen (bio) Full Moon Night Currently I cannot say that I understand the valley understand the petal-like, windborne unfolding of her confession full moon night in the underbrush, ladybugs flutter like the grains of stars falling into the valley’s wet creases someone says: the full moon can trigger a kind of savage snow . . . I believe that this is a simple truth: tonight when the biting cold of silence crushes my stone house. And shadows of branches steal in through the window the oak desk that’s so fragile I am forced to love it has exploded just a little bit (from the glossy maroon crook of the elbow off to coarse distance) once I dried it out under the overfilled moon hoping it could become pregnant with deep, whirl-rippled blood just like my flesh, awakened by the vast sky wandering an empty valley listening to the mountain’s secret, copious spill [End Page 18] Entering the Hills If you quail before your masterdo not be afraid to seek wisdom in nature! —Hölderlin Please believe that the rays of light at nightfall have damp antennae. Carrying ancient books in both arms like a prize I walked out of the shade of uninterrupted numbers past the distant indifferent voices of the Mass. A tuft of wild grass turned gold in the gradually deepening dusk, durable twinkling with potential that’s hard to quantify. And the light wind caressing the cheek brings the gem clatter of spring water, a shrinking scent of flowers vast amounts of dust from the vault of heaven. It is so good to stay in this empty valley! A curlew alights on a ball-round stone before me silent, secret heat wound around its breast like a thick, curved compass needle. I stop to watch branches stretch freely among the dusky corners of the earth— flame in such detail draws the old, fogged mirror of early night. [End Page 19] Ya Shi Ya Shi is the author of four collections of poetry and one of prose, including a special issue of the magazine Blade devoted to his work. He is a winner of the Liu Li’an prize and has served as the editor of several influential unofficial poetry journals. A graduate of Beijing University, he is currently a professor of mathematics and lives outside the city of Chengdu. Nick Admussen Nick Admussen is an assistant professor of Chinese literature at Cornell University. He has translated the work of Zang Di and samizdat poet Genzi, as well as the poetry and prose of Liu Xiaobo. His own poetry has recently appeared in Fence and Sou’wester. He blogs on Chinese poetry in American life for the Boston Review. Copyright © 2015 Middlebury College Publications

The 'Visible' Injury No One Sees

The diagnosis of concussion/mTBI has become a symptom only diagnosis and symptom only treatment injury over the years. This seems an inappropriate course of therapy for this common and worldwide injury. Concussion/mTBI is underestimated by not only the patients sustaining this injury, but the physicians, therapists, trainers, family members and athletes in the chain of evaluation and those self-reporting symptoms, but also every child athlete, parents of those child athletes and their ‘coaches’. The ‘coaches’ may also be parents and have an inappropriate need to see their child athlete succeed at all costs, even to the detriment of the child’s future. This urge to excel at the cost of future health and our young athletes and soldier’s future functionality and potential societal contributions needs to be muted and the right thing done for our future as well. It is fact and simple truth that when the symptoms resolve, there may still be an injured brain that has not healed. The injury is simply not visible, and must be made to be visible. Injury visibility is done by common CT and MRI for most other wounds or injuries, but it is also fact that common CT scan and MRI do NOT make concussion/ mTBI visible. CT and MRI however make other skull injuries visible, such as bleeds, fractures, and brain infrastructure injuries. When the patient with concussion/mTBI is sent back to prior to injury activity based on regular CT or MRI with symptom resolution he/she may still have an injured brain, and when back at ‘usual’ violent or athletic activity may sustain a re-injury of a partially healed prior brain injury, or a new injury on top of the older unhealed injury. This can be devastating to the patient, and doubly so for our children athletes. In concussion/mTBI, normal medical practice and standard of care seems swept aside, and the patient may be sent back to activity before objective proof of brain healing. Those patients with continued symptoms (post-concussive syndrome) are usually kept safely from activity until symptoms are resolved, but again sent to ‘action’ sans objective proof of brain healing.

Deflating ‘Race’

ABSTRACT:‘Race’ has long searched for a stable, suitable idea, with no consensus on a master meaning in sight. What I call deflationary pluralism about the existence of race recognizes that various meanings may be true as far as they go but avoids murky disputes over whether there are races in some sense. Once we have rejected the notion that racial essences yield innate cognitive differences, there is little point to arguing over the race idea. In its place, I propose the idea of socioancestry, which jettisons racial thinking yet recognizes the social dynamics of color. For example, Black Americans, many of whom have traceable non-African ancestry, constitute an Africa-identified, socioancestrally black subgroup. ‘Race’ talk is not needed to sustain legitimate color-conscious approaches to social identity and social justice. Long-standing fixation on the race idea has obscured the simple truth that visible continental ancestry is the root of the social reality of color consciousness.

ChemInform Abstract: The Combined Fragmentation and Systematic Molecular Fragmentation Methods

AbstractReview: 38 refs.

The Case for Defamatory Opinion

The law should not allow revenge porn in the name of the First Amendment, just as it should not allow private citizens to purchase AK-47’s in the name of the Second Amendment. Citizens can abuse fundamental rights just as governments can infringe them. At some point, courts have to acknowledge that the First Amendment was not intended to give people a fundamental right to trash an individual’s reputation while seeking cover under the self-serving blanket of opinion and taste. It is one thing to stroll into a courthouse with a shirt that says Fuck the Draft, but quite another to calls someone a Nazi War Criminal. Statements like this poison the marketplace of ideas with the vitriol of immodest jackasses and can, in some circumstances, cause reputational harm. For too long, courts and commentators have reacted in knee-jerk fashion to any attempts to regulate or provide remedies for speech that causes severe and lasting injury. At the same time, however, the courts have founds ways, such as through the “secondary effects” doctrine, to uphold statutes that, as a practical matter, restrict speech. The courts need not go through such legal gymnastics to restrict in one breath what should be regulated in the next.Justice Anthony Kennedy has stated that “[t]he remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth.” Truth is not considered a remedy when courts classify a statement as pure opinion, and pure opinions involving private issues and citizens should not receive the First Amendment’s blessing. Simply put, where truth cannot provide a remedy, the law should.