msb-0124 "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

msb-0124 "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

intro

Again with the offers.

"Alors les Francophones, vous attendez apres quoi exactement? L'offre est encore bonne. Joignez vous a MSBPodcast.com et creez un podcast en Francais"

"Dann die Deutschen warten Sie, nach denen genau? Das Angebot ist noch gut. Verbinden Sie hat Ihnen MSBPodcast.com und Verursachen Sie ein podcast auf Deutsch."

Well, when Homer gets on, maybe you'll be more interested. (He can't sound worse than I do. :-)

(Translation courtesy of Babel Fish [ http://world.altavista.com/ ]) speech courtesy of AT&T research [http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php ]

---- "Sunflowers and Dust" by: "Sundown Caffeine" http://www.sundowncaffeine.com/

Feedback come first, so...

I wonder if Ms. Askew ever found the MSer that she'd met in New Orleans, way back in "msb-0080 Inherent Sense of Justice", after Katrina. That was a horrible chapter in the history of this country, and its not over yet. People are "still" suffering in that part of the country.

You should contribute on my blog page [ http://multiplesclerosisblog.blogspot.com/ ].

--- "What Does It Mean" by: "Laura Hughes" http://www.myspace.com/laurahughes1

Feed forward come next, so...

This portion of the podcast was so interesting and poses so many questions that it got elevated up to the main topic.

---- "Snow Angel" by: "Laura Hughes" http://www.myspace.com/laurahughes1

Feed Me! come third, so...

Do you have a therapy, product, good or service that is of interest to MSers?

Consider advertising on this podcast.

Reminders on this segment only cost $0.03 per reminder per download of an episode. (A $30CPM targeted at MSers.)

It can/should lead to a full ad, in text, audio or video, which costs $3.00 per download.

That sounds expensive until you do the math and realize that if nobody downloads it it costs you nothing, unlike print, where you often can't even get an ad in to the specialized journals, or radio or TV where you'd just be wasting your money with the 0.0833% MSers rate of return. (That's about six times "below" the level of "statistical noise".)

But MSBPodcast is 100% in your market, and you only pay per download of your material.

No play, no pay.

Reach the MSers who would buy your therapy, product, good or service, with-out having to waste your advertising money on anyone who is "not" interested...

Send me an email at: charles (at) MSBPodcast.com

---- "Sandpaper Heart" by: "Laura Hughes" http://www.myspace.com/laurahughes1

Main topic: "Quid custodiet ipsos custodes?"

There was a fascinating article [ http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/magazine/11Neurolaw.t.html?ref=science ] in the New York Times [ http://www.nytimes.com/ ] that got me thinking about brain impairment (arising from or in conjunction with nervous system impairment in the case of MS,) and the notion if causality in the law.

Are we really legally responsible for our actions when parts of our brains are impaired by lesions caused by MS?

While I believe we remain responsible for what actions we are still able to take despite our disabilities, there are some actions which are clearly non-volitional, spastic and not of our own intent.

But there is a difference between whatever happens, uh, "lower down", where many lesions occur, with the resulting "noise on the wire", and whatever happens, "higher up", when the effects are less immediate, like knocking things over but they might be more pronounced, like an attitudinal shift in, say, suicide (helping explain a lot of what's going on in the Middle-East,) or, say, in gun control (that's a nice "hot button" topic here in the 'States. :-)

We have all noticed changes in our personalities as we transit through this disease, but how much is our own reaction to the damage inflicted by MS, against how much is "directly caused" by MS, is a matter open to interpretation.

This raises a point in law that is likely to be discussed as MS is found in at least one of the accused in the future through the brain scans that every competent defense lawyer now requests in capital cases.

Basing myself of statistics again, there are thousands of capital crimes committed every year.

In fact, you have a better chance of being a victim of some violent crime than you do of developping MS (just so you don't think I'm just pulling numbers out of my ass, I'm been all over the web slogging through some truly depressing reading in doing research for this bit. [Ah, what I do for you gentle bloggers and listeners.])

But you still have a 0.0833% chance of falling victim of a crime perpetrated by someone with MS.

Criminals are more likely to still be young enough that they would not have been too severely physically affected (and even then, the equalizer effect of a hand gun can easily be used by one who might have already have had a few mild relapsing/remitting episodes) but lesions that are strictly cerebral might still be present.

So I want to ask you: "Should the presence of MS lesions deep within the brain constitute an argument for the defense?"

---- "Full of Grace" by: "Laura Hughes" http://www.myspace.com/laurahughes1

Main Topic, part "deux"

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes," (who watches the watchers) when we ourselves are the only ones capable of watching?

I just love these kinds of metaphysical puzzles.

They force so many twists in the language as we struggle to express them in ways that are unambiguous.

The meta-problems come when we fail to realize exactly what we are talking about.

Its the age old quandary: "You might think that you understand what you heard but I don't think that you realize that what I said was not what I meant."

So what do we do about the sorry state of communications "within our own bodies"?

MS is the state of being wherein the generation of noise is internal and may be spontaneous.

This noise may interfere with our effector nerves, causing spasticity or some form or other, or our perceptor nerves, causing dead spots of sensitive spots and resulting from numbness to pain.

We have to add a third category because it interferes with our higher cognitive functions in ways that are yet to make themselves clear (if anything can ever truly be clear when dealing with subjective mental states.)

---- "Count to 10" by: "Laura Hughes" http://www.myspace.com/laurahughes1

Outro