Category: reflections

The AARO Finally Has a Website And is it Part of a Zero-Sum Game?

The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) finally has a website—more than a year after it was formed.

It looks like there’s an intriguing message in the section “Coming Soon: US Government UAP-Related Program/Activity Reporting.” It says AARO will accept reports of UAP from current government employees who know of any programs or activities related to UAPs dating back to 1945.

One sentence tells you “This form is intended as an initial point of contact with AARO; it is not intended for conveying potentially sensitive or classified information.  Following the submission of your report, AARO staff may reach out to request additional detail or arrange for an informational interview.”

Several other sections provide further information and pictures and videos on UAP.

I wonder if all this is a reaction to the House Oversight Committee Hearing on UAP on July 26, 2023. Either the website has been under construction for all of last year and was just finished a couple days ago or it was just thrown together recently.

This makes me think of a couple of things, one is Dr. George Dawson’s blog post “Is This An Episode of the X-Files?” The other is an X-Files episode itself, “Zero Sum” which Sena and I just saw a couple of nights ago. We don’t remember seeing it when it first aired in 1997. You can read the Wikipedia article about the episode.

The gist of it is that Assistant Director Skinner makes a deal with the Smoking Man in which the latter will save Agent Scully’s life (she’s dying of cancer related to alien experiments) if Skinner hides the death of a postal worker who was killed by a swarm of bees carrying smallpox. This is part of a complex plot by a group called the Syndicate which is either trying to work with extraterrestrials to either exterminate the human race or save it (depending on which episode you watch) by using bees as a vehicle to transmit either smallpox or a vaccine to cure the Black Oil, which screws you up pretty bad. Part of this is my interpretation because the storyline sometimes is not clear about this to me.

Anyway, the back-and-forth actions and reactions of the characters, especially Skinner and the Smoking Man, are pretty good examples of a Zero-Sum game, loosely defined in that neither gets much of an edge on the other as they both try to counter each other’s efforts in what is probably just a power struggle from the Smoking Man’s perspective and a desperate effort to save Scully’s life from Skinner’s perspective.

Anyway, I wonder if the UAP reporters and the government (including the AARO) might be in some kind of zero-sum game. UAP reporters try to get the government to admit that Extraterrestrial Biological Entities (EABs) and Extraterrestrial spacecraft exist. But the government denies it. Neither side ever seems to get much further ahead of the other.

Why Can’t I Wear Blue After Labor Day?

I have a few thoughts on the upcoming Labor Day weekend. It occurs to me that Labor Day often evokes images of blue-collar workers. On the other hand, I think in a broader view of the holiday, most of us can think of ourselves as working toward improving our society no matter whether our jobs are in the white-collar or blue-collar sector.

Many eons ago, I was a blue-collar worker. I was a surveyor’s assistant and drafter for a consulting engineers’ company in Mason City, Wallace Holland Kastler Schmitz & Co. (WHKS & Co.). I got attached to my job because it was the first real job I ever had.

I was proud of what I did, even though I didn’t make much money. I had to travel around the state a lot. I lived at the YMCA and ate all my meals in cafes because I was often out of town on jobs and when I was not, there was no kitchen in my tiny sleeping room at the Y.

I wore blue jeans and tee shirts, flannel shirts when I wasn’t out in the hot sun. I liked being outside except when the ragweed was out in the late summer. I had bad hay fever. I tried desensitization shots, but all they did was make my arm swell up. Winters were cold, especially if I had to stand in one place for a long time, either holding up the rod or running the gun.

I was mostly a rear chain man and rod man early on, but moved up to “running the gun” which meant operating the level and theodolite, the former for measuring elevations and the latter for measuring angles. I was proud of my job.

It took me a while to transition from blue-collar to white-collar mindset. In college, I often returned to work for WHKS during the summer breaks. That was where I formed my identity.

Some aspects of the job were simple. You hammered a stake, an iron property marker, or a frost pin if the ground was frozen. Measuring distances, angles, and elevations were often repetitive tasks, yet satisfying because they marked progress toward a concrete goal, like building an airport runway, establishing the outline of a tract of farmland, or raising a bridge. As one of my bosses on the survey crew put it, the work helped you see “the lay of the land.”

Land surveying, mapping, and drawing up plans set my perspective on life when I was a young man. At one time, that perspective made me think I wanted to be an engineer. I respected engineers because they built the subdivisions, highways, dams, and other real things from ideas.

I respected my teachers at WHKS, but couldn’t do the math. And they respected my change of heart.

I eventually became a doctor, after a short stint as a medical technologist in clinical laboratory medicine. You’d think, given my hands-on background, I would have become a surgeon, but I wasn’t made for that either.

I learned basic things at WHKS like being steady, reliable, and focused. I had to learn other things to be a doctor, especially a psychiatrist. On the other hand, in this white-collar environment, especially in a research-oriented academic medical center, I often looked and acted more like a blue-collar worker.

One of the Family Medicine residents who rotated on the psychiatry consultation-liaison service left me a gift of a fireman’s helmet. It fit my head and my approach to psychiatry in the general hospital. What I did mostly was put out the fires, metaphorically speaking, of behavioral eruptions related to delirium which were caused by medical problems. Often, I had to apply blue-collar approaches in a white-collar world. So, can I wear blue after Labor Day?

Happy Labor Day.

“I Have a Dream” Speech 60 Years Later

Today is the 60th anniversary of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C.

I was too young to remember it. However, I have a deep appreciation of the meaning it has not just for Black people, but for all of us. It’s not difficult to broaden the implication for all people.

My personal reflection about this started this morning with a look at one of my primary school class pictures. I’m the handsome guy 2nd from the left in the top row. The other kids of color in the photo are Latino.  

The photo shows not just a group of kids. It also illustrates, just by chance, pretty closely the percentage of black persons in the state of Iowa as of the 2021 U.S. census, about 4%. Historically though, in the county in which I was living at that time, the percentage of nonwhite persons was listed at 0.4%. This was a 28% drop from the previous decade. In 1980, the percentage of Black people in the state was only 1.8%. As near as I can tell from the web, the current percentage of Black people as of the most recent data is 3.74% (possibly as of 2021).

My father was black and my mother was white. In Iowa, the law against miscegenation (marriage between blacks and whites) was repealed in 1839. On the other hand, my parents got their marriage license in 1954 in Watertown, South Dakota—which was 3 years prior to when that state repealed its law against interracial marriage. Right below the license, though, is a certificate of marriage marked State of South Dakota in Codington County. It certifies that my parents were married in Mason City, Cerro Gordo County in the state of Iowa.

I’m not going to try to puzzle that one out. My mother kept a lot of old photos and legal records that anchor me in my personal history.

I have photos of my father with me and my brother, Randy. I also have photos of my mother with me and my brother.

What I don’t have are photos of all of us together. It’s understandable to ask why. I wonder if it has something to do with the culture and mindset of the time. Why was it not possible to find someone, black or white, to snap a family photo of us together?

We can pass legislation repealing anti-miscegenation laws as well as other laws to protect civil rights. That is a necessary (but perhaps insufficient) step toward non-exclusion of certain groups of people from basic human rights.

Ashley Sharpton, who is an activist with the National Action Network and daughter of Reverend Al Sharpton, said that Americans need to “turn demonstration into legislation.”

I agree with her. On the other hand, I also wonder what more has to happen in the minds of all of us to turn legislation into transformation—of our personal implicit biases, which are not in themselves always bad or inescapable.

And since we’re into rhyming, what about asking another question? Can we turn demonstration into legislation while encouraging transformation without bitter confrontation?

The Thing About Identity

I was searching on the web for something about my co-editor, Robert G. Robinson, MD, for our book Psychosomatic Medicine: An Introduction to Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry, published in 2010.

The reason I was searching for something about him was that I’ve had difficulties finding anything on the web lately about doctors I had worked with years ago and admired—and the search revealed they had died. It has been a little jarring and got me thinking about my own mortality.

My search didn’t turn up any obituary about Dr. Robinson, but I found a couple of interesting items. One of them is, of all things, a WordPress blog item, the About section. It’s dated April 2012. I’ve seen it before. It’s supposedly about a person named Dr. Robert G. Robinson, MD and the only thing on it is his name and affiliation with The University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. Every WordPress blog has an About section. I have one and I’ve been blogging since 2010.

There’s no entry in the About section for him on WordPress. However, there was another item on the web that looked like it was a blog (It’s another blogging site called About.me), and it was labeled as an About section.  It was a biographical summary of his academic and scientific career. Of course, it was impressive. At first, it looked like he was planning to write a blog, which could have been very educational because he’s an extremely accomplished psychiatrist with a very long bibliography of published articles about psychiatric research, a lot of it about post-stroke syndromes.

But when I looked at the social media links on the WordPress page, it led to a picture of someone who is definitely not the Robinson I know. This person was a “Certified Rolfer.” Remember Rolfing? It’s a form of deep tissue massage developed in the 1970s. The Dr. Robinson I know was never involved in Rolfing.

I’m not sure what happened with the WordPress and other blog items, but it looked the WordPress section was a case of mistaken identity. The most recent genuine item on the web about him is a 2017 University of Iowa article about his receiving the Distinguished Mentor Award.

I hope somebody doesn’t get confused by that WordPress mistake.

Then, I happened to come across an article that, at first, I didn’t recognize. The link on the search page listed Dr. Robinson’s name. It’s on the Arnold P. Gold Foundation website for humanism in medicine. The title is “Are doctors rude? An Insider’s View.” It didn’t have my byline under it. It took me a minute, but I soon recognized that I wrote it in 2013. At the bottom of the page, I was identified as the author.

At first, I thought it was a mistake; there was a place for an icon that at one time had probably contained a photo of me, but it was missing. It’s my reflection about a Johns Hopkins study finding that medical interns were not doing basic things like introducing themselves to patients and sitting down with them.

This was not a case of mistaken identity. But I got a little worried about my memory for a few seconds.

Anyway, I was reminded of my tendency to have trainees find a chair for me so I could sit down with patients in their hospital rooms. I later got a camp stool as a gift from one of my colleagues on the Palliative Care consult service. It was handy, but one of my legs always got numb if I sat too long on it. It broke once and I landed flat on my fundament one time in front of a patient, family, and my trainees. The patient was mute and we had been asked to evaluate for a neuropsychiatric syndrome called catatonia. The evidence against it was the clear grin on the patient’s face after my comical pratfall—and because of the laughter that we could see but not hear.

One of the points of this anecdote is that it’s prudent to be skeptical about what you see on the internet. The other point is that parts of your identity can hang around on the web for a really long time, so it’s prudent to be skeptical about how permanent your current identity is.

How the Metta Prayer and the Shower Juggle Are Alike

I’ve been practicing mindfulness meditation since 2014, when I became uncomfortably aware of how unpleasant I was becoming on the job and elsewhere. I called this “burnout.” The word still works as an explanation although it was and is sometimes still an excuse.

I learned about the Lovingkindness meditation or the Metta Prayer during the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course I took almost a decade ago.

I used to pray when I was a child. I read the Bible and prayed. I viewed the act of prayer as a request to God back then. And I still probably regard the Metta Prayer as a kind of bargain between me and the cosmos or whatever it is I think of as a higher power.

Just because I say the Metta Prayer doesn’t mean that anybody’s going to treat each other differently. It doesn’t make people get up and square dance together. However, the caution about not expecting others to change just because you say the Metta Prayer doesn’t mean that the practice would not enhance a sense of community—if enough people did it.

There are dozens of scripts for the Metta Prayer easily accessible on the web. The part of it that is directed to those with whom I’m having a difficult time is tricky. Often enough, my goal is to use it as a way of somehow changing the person I’m having difficulty with. It’s the same way I used prayers as a child.

That’s a mistake, but at least I’m aware of it. Prayer is not a request for God or the cosmos to intercede on my behalf so that life won’t be so difficult for me sometimes.

I have trouble remembering that I’m not really a role model, especially nowadays. I’m just an old retired guy who was difficult to work with and needed to change, despite my status as a psychiatrist. I tell dad jokes and clown around but I’m still an old guy with problems—like just about every other old guy.

So, I’m still off and on practicing the Metta Prayer. I’ve noticed that practicing mindfulness is a lot like practicing juggling, which I’ve been doing for almost a year now. I still can’t do certain tricks, like the shower juggle. I can do about three or four throws and drop the balls, sometimes on my head (which is why I wear safety goggles!). And I still tend to use prayer like I’m negotiating a deal to get rid of my faults and troubles.

But I haven’t given up practicing the shower juggle. And I haven’t given up on the Metta Prayer.

Remembrance of Dr. William R. Yates MD

I was thinking about the Clinical Problems in Consultation Psychiatry (CPCP) learning sessions which was introduced to me by one of my first teachers in the University of Iowa Dept of Psychiatry, Dr. William R. (Bill) Yates.

I had originally been thinking of posting one of my own CPCPs that I presented in 2015. It was about the psychosocial adjustment of patients to ostomy.

I searched widely and in vain on the web for any recent information about what Dr. Yates was doing now. I was surprised and saddened to discover his obituary. He died on January 19, 2023 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

As the obituary says:

He served on the faculty at the University of Iowa for Psychiatry and Family Medicine before becoming Professor and Chair of Psychiatry at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine in Tulsa. After retiring, he continued to dedicate his time as a volunteer research psychiatrist at OU and the Laureate Institute for Brain Research where he also served on the board of directors. He authored over 100 scientific manuscripts that were published in peer-reviewed journals.

He was an energetic, a great teacher, had a great sense of humor, and was easy to get along with. He published in many scientific journals and taught many trainees. He was an avid bird watcher and his blog Brain Posts highlighting neuroscience research findings is still visible on the web.

He published the paper along with a chief resident on problem-based learning used on the psychiatry consult-liaison service in 1996, the year I graduated psychiatry residency and joined the faculty at The University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics (Yates, W. R. and T. T. Gerdes (1996). “Problem-based learning in consultation psychiatry.” Gen Hosp Psychiatry 18(3): 139-144.) You can read the abstract for it along with a description of the CPCP at the link above which takes you to my April 19, 2019 blog post “Clinical Problems in Consultation Psychiatry.”

When he was the leader of the psychiatry consult service, we were still using paper charts and his staffing comments were always very brief and encapsulated the assessment and plan succinctly without wasted verbiage—contrasting with my long-winded note.

His remarks about his role at Laureate Institute for Brain Research is still accessible:

“I work part-time as a research psychiatrist for the assessment team at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research. We do research diagnostic assessments for a variety of imaging, genetic and biomarkers studies in mood, anxiety and other brain disorders. I also provide review and analysis of neuroscience research on my blog Brain Posts that can be found at www.brainposts.blogspot.com. You can follow me on Twitter @WRY999. I also use my blog and Twitter feed to share my bird photography images.”

I respected and admired Dr. Yates, as I’m sure many learners did. I will always remember Bill as a gifted scientist and teacher.

I think a fitting tribute would be to go ahead and post my CPCP on the psychosocial adjustment of patients with ostomy. One of the most interesting articles in the bibliography is how the mindfulness meditation approach to that adjustment can be very helpful. The website United Ostomy Association of America website is also informative.

The presentation is also limited to a dozen slides. I often encouraged learners to keep the number of slides to a managed number so the presentations wouldn’t run too long. I called my slide sets the Dirty Dozens.

Many thanks to Dr. William R. Yates and my condolences to his family.

Hawaii Memories

The wildfires in Maui are so devastating. We wish everyone the best. We also had a wave of nostalgia back to 1997 when we visited the Hawaiian Islands on our first vacation in a long while after I finished my psychiatry residency in 1996.

The plane trip was very long and what I remember most about it, flying all the way from Iowa, was the terrible case of bilateral airplane ear which lasted for a couple of hours after we landed in Honolulu. After that, things got a lot better. It was a long time ago, so the memories are a little hazy.

We remember the bus from the airport stopped at the hotel where the tour guide got out to check the reservations for all of us. It was very hot because the bus driver didn’t want to let the vehicle run so as to allow the air conditioner to cool us off. We were probably the youngest members of the tour group. It was the oldest who complained the loudest, finally convincing the bus driver to start the bus to cool everybody off.

After we arrived at the hotel, it was also the oldest members who had the energy to go out and see Don Ho perform. When they got back, they said he got drunk, but he was able to sing “Tiny Bubbles.” We were too exhausted to go. The oldest group members were often the most energetic.

We went a great little restaurant in either Kauai or maybe it was in Hilo, Hawaii (the Big Island) and got plates of huge shrimp. They were shorthanded on servers and several members of the tour group (again the older ones) pitched in to help out.

We saw the Kodak Hula Show in Honolulu on the island of Oahu. I read a little about it and the show nearly closed in 1999, but it was taken over by the Hogan Family Foundation for three years at a cost of half-million dollars per year. The show closed in 2002 so that the money could be used to fund educational programs.

Of course. we also visited the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. One of our tour group members who was a veteran of that war wept as he read the names. We became friends with him and his wife and sent each other Christmas cards for a few years afterward.

We saw the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Gardens in Hilo, Hawaii. It’s huge. It was a tribute to the Japanese immigrants to The Big Island who helped build its agricultural history beginning in 1868.

We visited the Wailua River State Park Fern Grotto Area and the Waimea Canyon in Kauai. The latter is also known as The Grand Canyon of the Pacific. I think Kauai was where I first tried coffee-flavored ice cream—Kona coffee, I’m sure. It remains one of my favorites, next to plain vanilla.

We got a few photos of the Iao Needle in the Iao Valley on Maui. We went to a big luau, but I can’t remember exactly where it was. I remember I was coming down with a head cold and had a runny nose. We tried poi, and I’m afraid I didn’t find it very tasty—and it had nothing to do with cold.  Maui was the final island to see on our itinerary. I think we saw the huge Banyan Tree in Lahaina because we have a picture of a very large tree with Sena standing in front of it.

The 150-year-old Banyan Tree was charred in the fire, but it’s still standing.

Terry Trueblood Garden of Natural and Not So Natural Things

On a balmy day we went for a walk on the Terry Trueblood trail. There was a cool breeze in contrast to the brutal humidity lately. There was a mix of natural beauty and some not so natural sights.

The flowers were gorgeous as usual. But we also saw stacked stones close to the shore of the lake. I should say there were a couple of stacked stones and one which was made of tree branches that reminded me of the Eiffel Tower.

That was the first time we’ve ever seen stacked stones there. I looked up the topic of stacking stones on the web and there’s disagreement about whether it’s a good thing or not. Some say it disturbs the natural order of things while others say it pays homage to nature.

We saw a couple of people out on the shore and one of them kicked over one of the piles. I guess that’s one person who doesn’t like rock stacking.

We also saw a pair of black hands stamped on the sidewalk. What’s that about? Some say that black hands are about death, criminality, or even the Black Lives Matter movement. I don’t know what it means.

And a couple of the large stones along the edges of the parking lot were shoved out of place. Who knows why. They looked very heavy. It probably took a lot of work to move them, and for no apparent reason. It reminded me of the rocks, some of which weigh several hundred pounds, that seem to move by themselves across the desert in Death Valley Park, leaving trails behind. There’s a natural explanation for it, involving the interplay of ice, wind, and water. I’m pretty sure humans moved them.

Anyway, there was plenty of natural beauty along the trail. They were the only source of wonder we cared about that day.

Wings in the Garden

We’ve got more videos of birds and a butterfly (which I think is a swallowtail) in our garden. The catbirds and oddly, song sparrows (I thought they were rare in our part of the country?) are turning out to be regular visitors. They like the mulberries and spend a lot of time preening. They visit every day and they’re always a welcome sight.

The Lesser-Known Quote by Wonko the Sane

A couple of days ago, Sena and I were playing cribbage and she thought she had a higher scoring hand than she actually did. She immediately realized it and scored it right. She commented that, at first, she thought she saw something she didn’t actually see. I quipped that “First you have to see it.” She thought that was pretty funny.

I actually said that because I remembered a quote from Wonko the Sane in Douglas Adam’s book “So Long and Thanks for All the Fish.” Wonko is a guy who lives “outside the asylum” because he saw the instructions on a box of toothpicks and thought it was so bizarre that he didn’t want to live in a society which needed that kind of instruction.

Now, you can find a lot of references on the web for the quote that arises from the toothpick instruction:

“It seemed to me, said Wonko the Sane, that any civilization that so far lost its head as to need to include a detailed set of instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.” Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.

You can even buy tee shirts printed with this quote. But that’s not the Wonko the Sane quote I was thinking of. In fact, I’m not the only one who thought of it and the first person I want to give credit to for calling attention to it is a WordPress blogger whose name seems not discoverable on his blog, but instead has the title Eppur Si Muove. It’s Latin and it means “…and yet it does move.” It’s attributed to Galileo who muttered it after being forced to recant his claim that the earth moves around the sun.

The quote is:

But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that…. So the other reason why I call myself Wonko the Sane is so that people will think that I am a fool. That allows me to say what I see when I see it. You can’t possibly be a scientist if you mind people thinking that you’re a fool. ~ Wonko the Sane, from So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams.

The blogger who wrote the post entitled it “Wonko the Sane—On Being a Scientist…”

Seeing what’s really there is very difficult to do. I’m fettered by expectations, desires, prior misinformation, and so on. Often, I see what I want to see rather than what’s there.

The toothpick quote gets more interpretations often by writers who sound like they trying to prove something. What’s even more interesting than them (and funnier) are the great number of actual instructions on how to use toothpicks, even how to do tricks with them.

What seems impossible to find are actual instructions for how to see.