I forget names and faces of people sometimes, including those of my relatives. This is very embarrassing of course, but I don't think it's realistic to be expected to remember a couple of hundred names of your nearest relatives. And if that's not bad enough, we keep adding new relatives to the old ones because people have a bad habit of getting married and having babies. I love my relatives and all, but some of them I see more often, others I don't see often enough and I get confused with names, languages and faces. It's worse when I go home, there have been a few times that someone has approached me and said "zorkie?!" followed by "don't you remember me?!" The answer is obviously "no, I have no idea who you are" but what usually comes out is "um..."

Anyway, as unpleasant as those encounters are, they're far from being a "horror".

If you have experienced the horror of someone at a party greeting you as an old friend when you have no idea who they are, imagine how it must feel to have that inability to recognise people day after day throughout your life.

Scientists are on the brink of understanding far more about the condition, prosopagnosia, which can make it difficult, sometimes impossible, to recognise faces. Dr Brad Duchaine, a lecturer at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London has published a study to show there is a very small, separate part of the brain that allows people to recognise faces.

Help for people who forget faces

Iran:'Israeli repression worse than Holocaust'. So I guess Israel has built concentration camps with gas chambers and ovens where Israelis burn Palestinian women and babies and old people, and where Palestinian men are laying near death, starved and exhausted from forced labour. It all makes sense now.

The plight of Palestinians under Israeli occupation is far worse than what Jews ever suffered under Nazi Germany, Iran's Islamic regime argued Sunday, according to AFP.

"The repressive actions of the 'Zionist' regime against the Palestinians are worse than the Holocaust," Iran's Foreign Ministry Spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters.

"What is happening on occupied Palestinian land is far more painful than the Holocaust," he added, accusing Israel of "using the Holocaust as blackmail" in order to justify its actions.

The comments came the day after Iran's hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeated his view that Nazi Germany's mass killing of Jews was a "myth" and that Palestinians and Iraqis were suffering a "real Holocaust", AFP noted.

Asefi said it was "necessary to determine the scale" of the Nazi Holocaust.

Slate's Michael Kinsley turns in an excellent piece on the shameful American performance in the MohammadoodleGate Kerfuffle. I have no comment other than my complete agreement with his damning of our lack of spine.

By contrast, in a spectacular exercise of self-censorship, almost every major newspaper in this country is refraining from publishing the controversial Danish cartoons, even though they are at the center of a major news story that these papers cover at length every day. The Danish paper that originally published the 12 cartoons has apologized and editors in France and Jordan who published some of them have been fired. In tomorrow's paper, you're more likely to see a picture of Anne Frank or Hitler or both in bed with Eleanor Roosevelt, all three of them naked and performing unconventional sex acts, than you are to see a perfectly respectful picture of the Prophet Mohammed. An editorial in the Times on Wednesday said that not publishing the cartoons was "a reasonable choice" since they would offend many people and "are so easy to describe in words." I am looking at a front page photo in today's Times (as I write on Thursday) of Mariah Carey singing into a microphone. Words do it justice, I think.

(...)

The shameful American position on all this is boilerplate endorsement of free expression combined with denunciation of the cartoons as an "unacceptable" insult. When three protesters died this week in a confrontation at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, an American spokesman there said that Afghans "should judge us on what we're doing here, not on what some cartoonist is doing somewhere else." But the limits of free expression cannot be set by the sensitivities of people who don't believe in it. How can President Bush continue to ask young Americans to sacrifice their lives for freedom in the Muslim world, if he won't even defend freedom verbally when forces from that world are suppressing it in our own?

Table for two?

We'll start you with a light and lively glass of Gloria Ferrer Sonoma Brut Sparkling Wine, and a creamy veloute...

Rest in peace, Tracy Pierce. Tracy was a husband and a father who got kidney cancer and died in tremendous agony at the age of 37 because his slimy health insurance company, First-Health Coventry, refused to cover his treatments. They even denied him oral morphine for pain relief in his agonizing final week. What the hell is wrong with these people?

Something is seriously wrong with this picture.

If you pay insurance premiums, as Tracy did, and the calamity against which you were insuring yourself comes to pass, as it did, your insurance should pay up, already! This company's absurd denial of not only treatment for his condition, but even of pain relief in his final hours, is amazingly callous and coldhearted. His poor wife, Julie, had to watch him die for fifteen months, begging and pleading along with his doctors the whole time for the insurance company to do its job.

There need to be murder charges against First-Health Coventry. That's no hyperbole. They murdered Tracy Pierce. The article has another story of a child with leukemia who was nearly murdered by these criminals; the only thing that saved Nathan Crabtree was that his mother was luckily able to obtain Blue Cross/Blue Shield insurance. BC/BS immediately paid for Nathan to be treated; First-Health Coventry called the leukemia treatment that Blue Cross/Blue Shield paid for unreservedly and at once "experimental", the same reason it refused to pay for Tracy Pierce's treatment. The goddamn evil sons of bitches spent precious months while Nathan's cancer spread and the poor boy suffered, stonewalling and refusing treatment that another company approved at once.

No wonder Motley Fool, an investment website, says Coventry continues to turn heads-they're murdering their customers for the sake of the almighty dollar, and profiting richly off the misery they're imposing on their fellow Americans. First-Health/Coventry is nothing more than a scam. They collect premiums, and refuse care. I would love nothing more than to see their entire executive team marched to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for their corporate serial killing in pursuit of profit. I wonder how many other people like Tracy they've killed in order to wow Wall Street and "turn heads".

This is so fucking wrong, it makes me sick.

Thousands of Katrina Victims Evicted! blares the AP headline. Bush administration makes thousands of victims homeless! OMFGWTF!

If you manage to read a few more paragraphs before rushing off to post this on your Daily Kos diary as the latest example of the Bush administration's heartless, callous disregard for the victims of an epic natural disaster, you will discover that these poor victims ignored, avoided, and stonewalled FEMA officials trying to help them for a very long time. FEMA went to each and every hotel room that it was paying for six times trying to help those in danger of eviction file for an extension of their federal help. 80% of these "thousands" have already made other living arrangements, which I suspect would have turned this sensational headline into "a couple of hundred Katrina evacuees refuse to accept further help from the government." But that wouldn't be very useful to bash the administration over the head with.

In Washington, Arabian horse judge and all-around incompetent crony appointee Michael "I got it at Nordstroms, are you proud of me?" Brown has been licking his wounds, and has decided that he will lash out at Bush to save his own bacon on the Hill. Hey Brownie-yes, you can go home now. Stick to what you know, horse-boy.

Bush is the real terrorist hurricane.

February 12

Lyana, yoohoo!