Adderall for everybody. That's what the name means: A.D.D. for All.

"Modern marketing of stimulants began with the name Adderall itself."

Mr. Griggs bought a small pharmaceutical company that produced a weight-loss pill named Obetrol. Suspecting that it might treat a relatively unappreciated condition then called attention deficit disorder, and found in about 3 to 5 percent of children, he took “A.D.D.” and fiddled with snappy suffixes. He cast a word with the widest net.

All.

For A.D.D.

A.D.D. for All.

Adderall.

“It was meant to be kind of an inclusive thing,” Mr. Griggs recalled.

And what's to stop the trend toward prescribing it for everyone… to take for the rest of their life?

Lots more at the link, including the 6 question test used to see if you're likely to have A.D.H.D. I scored 14, which put me in the "likely" category, even though on a daily basis, I lock into the work I need and want to do and continue with great concentration for many hours, often to great excess. But there was no question about that, and no questions that subtracted points, so I got 4 points for saying I "very often" "fidget or squirm" when I "have to sit down for a long time." Now, I don't fidget when I'm working on my own reading or writing, but I didn't think about that, because the question said "when you have to sit down," and when I'm doing my own work, I don't have to sit down. I can get up whenever I want, and I often motorize my desk into the standing position. I only have to sit down at a meeting or when stuck in a vehicle on a long trip, so in those situations I do rebel against the constraint.

But obviously, I could get this drug prescribed easily. And anyone can. Is it still a weight-loss pill? Is that part of what's going on with Adderall?

At the Neat and Sloppy Café...

... huh? Oh.

"The Screwtape Letters" is not an egg salad sandwich.

In yesterday's Boardwalk Café, Saint Croix said:

I should have said this in the Scalia post — the devil made me not do it — but one of the interesting things about The Screwtape Letters is the insight that a devil is simply an angel with free will.

Thus if you believe in an afterlife — and an overwhelming number of people believe in an afterlife — you should acknowledge devils. They are simply angels who are in rebellion with God. Which God allows, because God believes in free will for humanity.

What a fantastic book The Screwtape Letters is.

I would pay money for Althouse to blog that book!

Pay money to get me to blog about something? That's been done... to get me to eat an egg salad sandwich. I'd written a post — back in 2005 — listing "10 things I've never done," and #2 was "Eaten egg salad, devilled eggs, or cold hard-boiled eggs" — hmm, interesting second appearance of the Devil in this post! — and somehow that led to my saying you'd have to pay me $200 to eat an egg salad sandwich, and some commenters got together and collected $200 and PayPal'd it to me, and I blogged — vlogged! — The Eating of the Egg Salad Sandwich.

But I didn't want to eat an egg salad sandwich. Reading the "Screwtape Letters" is something I would like to do. I read it years ago — and I'm old so that "years ago" in the history of Althouse is almost half a century ago — but I'd like to read it again, especially with the ability to blog it and the context of Scalia's recent remarks about it.

So I added it to my Kindle. You can add it too: here. And if you use that link, you'll be sending me a little money (without paying more). If you like this blog, you can funnel money to me by entering Amazon through the Althouse portal and buying something, anything, at some point before clicking away. But to get me to blog on specific topics, you could attempt the Egg Salad Method. That might work for some things — bloggable, vloggable things, for the right price. You could also just ask, as Saint Croix did, and it might work, if I'm interested enough. This blog is all and only about what interests me.

So I bought "The Screwtape Letters" and read a few pages last night. Here's the first thing I highlighted, and I'll put it here out of context, because you know that I like isolating sentences from their context — so sue me — for the purposes of discussion. That's what we did last winter with The Gatsby Project, which actually has one post that got the "egg salad" tag. It was the post with the "salads of harlequin designs." Remember?

I'm not saying these "Screwtape Letters" posts will only be isolated sentences in the manner of The Gatsby Project. But I am getting us started with this sentence, as the devil Screwtape advises his nephew devil on how to screw with some human being, referred to as "the patient":

"By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?"

ADDED:  I've got to put that sentence in the context of its paragraph, because as it stands, out of context, it creates the impression that the God-oriented position is the avoidance of reason and the acceptance of authority. That isn't so:

The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle on to the Enemy’s own ground. 

"The Enemy" = God. This is the Devil's perspective.

He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below. 

So there's a distinction between "argument" and "really practical propaganda." Something rates as argument — and it works better for aligning with God — and something else is the Devil's territory. That is called "really practical propaganda." When are we to think that's argument, and God has a fighting chance, and when are we to think that's just practical propaganda, and we ought to be wary?

By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it ‘real life’ and don’t let him ask what he means by ‘real’.

A connection is made between propaganda (which is not true argument) and living in the moment, paying attention to the stream of immediate sense experiences. And true argument is connected to turning away from daily, worldly life, and attending to universal issues.

This reminds me that blogging — I said it just above — is really paying attention the stream of immediate experiences, though this form of following the stream (and creating a stream) is abstracted from one's own bodily senses, other than the vision of text and pictures on the screen and the touch of touch-typing.

I've got to admit — I've been saying it for years — that I think living in the real world and paying attention to it is exactly what one ought to do, and I am very skeptical of the kind of people who move too quickly to abstract ideals. That puts me in the position of C.S. Lewis's devils, and it's C.S. Lewis I mistrust.

How will this shutdown end?

A stalemate in a game that cannot end.

"Once the government reopens and we get the debt ceiling settled, we’ll be happy to talk to them about anything they want to talk about." (Reid.)

"This isn’t some damn game. All we want is to sit down and have a discussion." (Boehner.)

Okay, so it's not a game. But "game" is at least an apt metaphor. Or, no, it's not, because in games, where there is a true stalemate, a rule ends the game, and the players can stop playing. They don't continue to sit at the chessboard until someone concedes.

Talking and having a discussion is also a metaphor. The 2 parties in Congress are not a couple on a date that's turned into a staring contest. Or maybe Boehner is the woman endlessly imploring her man to talk about their relationship, and Reid is the taciturn man who's waiting for her to give up and do what the junior partner in a marriage is supposed to do: what he says.

Alternatively, Boehner is the man who relentlessly pursues his ex-girlfriend asking only for a chance to talk to her, and the woman — Reid — curtly informs him that there's nothing to talk about.

We instinctively turn away. And yet, the 2 sides are, it seems, waiting for Us the People to assign blame to one side or another. We're supposed to decide, and when we've conveyed our feelings, the party that anticipates losing in future elections will cave so our loathing for it doesn't grow any deeper.

But are we still watching? They need us to watch. It's their only way out. They're trying to make it interesting, with war monuments and children dying of cancer, but... look: gigantic hornets are killing the Chinese and Sandra Bullock is floating in outer space!

"President Obama’s toughest Syria hurdle: The calendar."

Oh no! Our leader, assailed by the calendar!

Obama will sit Monday for interviews for six TV news programs, which will air within an hour of what had promised to be the week’s most highly anticipated Washington event: the NFL Redskins’ season opener against Philadelphia....

If Monday Night Football pushed Obama’s address to the nation on Syria to Tuesday, odds are low for the president to have the nation’s attention to himself the rest of the week either.

The Sept. 11 anniversary comes Wednesday, the same day the Senate could vote for cloture. Yom Kippur begins Friday night.

Oh! That pesky September 11th anniversary, randomly popping up as a "tough hurdle" on Obama's — what's the metaphor? — race toward war! And this year, it's not just the usual anniversary of the day the terrorists declared war on the United States, it's now the first anniversary of the attack in Benghazi. Oh, my lord! The double 9/11 and football.

Obama won’t even have Tuesday to himself. Hillary Clinton is due to deliver a speech that afternoon in Philadelphia. Voters in New York City will head to the polls for that city’s primary elections. And the new iPhone event scheduled for that day has become an annual media spectacle.

Fate has no mercy on this man, this once-golden savior of the world! The double 9/11, football, and Hillary gives a speech in Philadelphia. A speech! In Philadelphia! (I wonder if she'll talk about Benghazi? What difference at this point does it make?) The double 9/11, football, and Hillary gives a speech... and New York has a primary... and Apple has the audacity to do another one of its PR events.

Here's Bill Clinton's old press secretary Mike McCurry:

“How do you hold the attention of the American people when it is increasingly hard to do so with the distractions of the NFL season and religious holidays and back-to-school nights?” 

Increasingly? Is football new? Is going back to school new? Is Yom Kippur new?! (Note: Only 1.7% of Americans are Jewish.)

“This is the challenge of the presidency, the ability to gather the nation around a common campfire is just not there anymore. You have to go for the sporadic bursts of attention and deal with the perpetual A.D.D. that people have.”

And now we are to be blamed for A.D.D.! People are tired of 12 years of war. It's not A.D.D. to react with an instinctive "no" to another war, a war that should have been explained already.

Why would a normal person — with a normal attention span — believe that Obama will tell us something new on Tuesday? Why didn't he look us in the eye and explain everything clearly when he first proposed it or when he said he was submitting the question to Congress? It's not A.D.D., it's common sense to reflexively turn away.

Timing has worked against the White House from the very start. The Aug. 21 attack that prompted the administration to gear up for a Syria strike left Obama violating his predecessor’s key rule on selling the public on a war: Don’t do it in August.

Politico writes as if war is funny and the real issue is the little things that bug Obama.

"Republicans... are a bunch of dead white people. Or dying white people."

Said the college professor, secretly videoed by a student in the back row, now playing on YouTube, linked by Twitchy.

And I say: Look out all you professors. Anything you say may be taken out of context and posted on YouTube. Your hyperbole and casual humor and reenactments of the arguments of others will look quite different as the world looks over the shoulders of the captive audience you think you're talking at. The back row is no longer the back row. There are a million more rows behind that, full of people with no motive to act like they respect you.


And by the way, if you live in Wisconsin and are at least 60 years old, you have a legislature-given privilege to attend — free of tuition — classes at the University of Wisconsin.

Welcome to the future. Feel free to rant about the Panopticon wherein you find yourselves, but please at least notice you are here.

I feel like recording myself teaching and taking my own quotes out of context, as I paraphrase some argument that's made in a case, putting it in starker words to reveal problems lurking within the carefully framed language of lawyers and judges. I'd like to demonstrate how easy it would be to make me sound like a monster. (And I'm saying that partly to inoculate myself! I've got paraphrase paranoia.)

The man in the video — which I chose not to embed — is said to be a creative writing teacher. Who knows what he was up to? Maybe cranking the kids up, trying to get juices flowing. Come on, somebody, get angry. Look alive.

It's an old game. Waking up the students, but the professors need to wake up. Those students who look sleepy and blank to you all have videophones and they may be wide awake and 10 steps ahead of you.

"Scandal! Caught playing iPhone game at 3+ hour Senate hearing - worst of all I lost!"

Tweets John McCain, who was photographed playing video poker during the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the proposed military attack on Syria.

Is it okay to play games to deal with tedium when the subject is war? If caught in the act, is it better to apologize and stress the seriousness of the hearing or to crack a joke? Worst of all I lost.... worst of all, you are taking us to war!

To be honest, if I needed to pay attention to John Kerry's talking, it would help to play video solitaire. I wouldn't want to be seen doing it, though, if I were a decisionmaker, but I do understand how this minimal, partial diversion of attention keeps you mind from drifting into thoughts that would interfere with listening.

"Do I really like reading?"

"Perhaps it is a failure of attention—there are times when I notice my own distraction while reading, and can, in a way, feel myself forgetting. There is a scarier question, one that might seem like asking if one is good at breathing, or walking. Am I actually quite bad at reading after all?"

"People with higher IQs are slow to detect large background movements because their brains filter out non-essential information."

"From previous research, we expected that all participants would be worse at detecting the movement of large images, but high IQ individuals were much, much worse."

I'm interested in this subject: Things really smart people are especially bad at.

Obama's 1979 prom photos.

Here.

ADDED: At the top of Memeorandum right now, we see this snapshot of what America is paying attention to:

Pay attention.

"By the time you get to be a big fancy adult with a career and a house, your daily routine is basically just a collection of unconscious habits..."

"... You make coffee, commute by car, attend meetings and answer e-mails, shop in certain stores, watch TV and repeat. It becomes effortless."

Your brain goes into autopilot. Unfortunately, this also means it becomes hard to make changes.

But different habits, while being equally effortless, tend to add up in a good way over time. If you have a $50,000 take-home pay but are in the habit of living on $25,000 and investing the rest, that will put you ahead by about $350,000 every 10 years after compounding. A habit of biking instead of driving can keep you lively and fit into your 80s while saving you hundreds of thousands of dollars as well.

The key thing to remember is once you establish the habit, it becomes effortless and even pleasant to stay in the groove — even while your friends think you are some kind of unimaginably frugal bike-riding superhero.

I think the key is to be selective about where to make the cuts. Where are the places where you can change the habits and actually improve your life? The $4 latte may be worth it to you if that's how you get yourself out of the house and into a public place where you encounter other people and moderate loneliness into manageable solitude. A month of daily lattes might correspond to one item of clothing that gives you a moment of manic elation but then gets lost in your closet amongst scarcely dissimilar items.



Also, I'd say: Wake up and pay attention. I love normal, routine days, but the pleasure of ordinary days is lost if routine equals "a collection of unconscious habits." Be conscious and notice the experience of the things you do habitually. Live. If you do that, you should notice the components of your routine that aren't worth having. Where are you spending money out of proportion to the good it does for you personally?

The linked article is about a personal finance blogger ("Mr. Money Mustache") who "retired" at age 30. What does "retirement" mean"?

According to me, retirement means you no longer have to work for money. You then proceed to do whatever you like, without regard for whether or not it earns you money.

Some of what you do can be called "work," but the point is, you're not doing it for the money — and that kind of work is especially satisfying. You know you're doing it for its intrinsic value.

So where will you cut back? It seems to me (and to Mr. Mustache) that eating out and traveling are highly questionable activities. Like us, he largely eschews restaurants and does big American road trips for vacationing.

The NYT on CNN: "The Pressure to Be the TV News Leader Tarnishes a Big Brand."

An article by David Carr focuses on CNN's incorrect report last Wednesday that there had been an arrest in the Boston bombing. Carr is sympathetic:

The incrementalism and vamping required to fill the hours — “Again, as we have been saying, Anderson ... ” — makes everyone desperate to say anything vaguely new.

Throughout the week, I saw anchors and reporters staring at their phones, hoping a new nugget might arrive to give them something to say.... And the live environment means that at a certain point, the bosses have to quit shouting into the ear piece, trusting their staff and crossing their fingers.

Oddly — but not surprisingly — the article ends with Obama. I say "not surprisingly" because all roads lead to Obama. Everything is about Obama. But I say "oddly," because the story is about CNN, journalism, and the Boston bombing. There should not be a sense that these themes are resolved by looking to what Obama thinks or what it means for Obama.

“In this age of instant reporting and tweets and blogs, there’s a temptation to latch on to any bit of information, sometimes to jump to conclusions,” [Obama] said, his face turning sour as he spoke. 

Here's the video, in case you want to check the accuracy of "his face turning sour as he spoke."

“But when a tragedy like this happens, with public safety at risk and the stakes so high, it’s important that we do this right. That’s why we have investigations. That’s why we relentlessly gather the facts.”

Like everyone else, the president wants to have a press that is equal to the people it serves. He wants CNN to be good.

Equal to the people... that questionable flattery came out of nowhere. Like we're passive receptors of the news, and the news ought to honor us, The People. The press must serve. I'd say we're pretty active — especially with new media in the mix — and we choose what, if anything, we want to read or listen to. It's a market. Especially now. We have the media we deserve. CNN's problem isn't that we're not watching. If their desperate response is to trash their brand, they did it for the ratings, and if the brand is trashed, they'll probably lose ratings. But if CNN gains ratings, because people want to hear the latest rumors and take the risk that they're wrong, then that kind of reporting is exactly what we deserve.

But back to Obama. This emphasis on not talking so much and waiting for the investigation: "[I]t’s important that we do this right. That’s why we have investigations." That can also be a way of saying: I know you're all very excited about this right now, but please calm down, don't criticize the government for not doing enough, trust us, and when enough time has passed, you probably won't be thinking about this anymore.

I'm saying that because that's what I heard after the Benghazi attack. And it's the talking point Dianne Feinstein brought to "Fox News Sunday" this week. The moderator Chris Wallace had just given Congressman Peter King an opportunity to restate his questions about whether "we are letting our guard down" and whether "this attack should have been prevented" and whether there ought to be "more effective surveillance inside the Muslim community." King spoke, ending with the line "If you know a certain threat is coming from a certain community, that's where you have to look," and  Wallace asked Feinstein for her "reaction to that."

FEINSTEIN: Well, that's exactly where they will look. I mean, I -- I don't think all of this is very helpful. I think the important thing is to get the facts. Let the investigation proceed. The FBI has very good interrogators. They know what they are doing. I believe that they will put a case together that will be very strong....

Don't talk. We have some very good people working on this out of your view. You don't know the facts. You are not an expert. There will be an investigation....

Please, everyone: Shelter in place.

"I sort of panicked. I thought I was going through an anxiety thing because so many people were coming after me."

Said Ian Bay, a skateboarder and wearer of headphones at the 4/20 marijuana celebration in Denver, who suddenly saw hundreds of people running toward him.

"Anthony Weiner eyeing run for mayor of New York City."

Count the phallic symbols in the photo illustrating this headline.

AND: Compare this puff piece in the NYT Magazine: "Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin’s Post-Scandal Playbook." It begins:

One day in early February, I met Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin for breakfast at the Gramercy Park Hotel, one of their regular joints, just a few blocks from their apartment on Park Avenue South. The first thing Weiner said when I sat down was that their 13-month-old son, Jordan, had just moments ago taken his first step. They were both giddy, kvelling with baby-pride, especially Weiner, who, with all his free time, has become his son’s primary caretaker....

They're kvelling. I'm gagging.

IN THE COMMENTS: CatherineM said: "Wow, so I guess he moved out of Forest Hills. No need since he's not representing a district anymore. So, I guess he's loaded if he's in Gramercy." Yeah. Good point. Where did all that money come from? Maybe the answer is in that NYT article, but the one bite of that cream puff was too much for me.

ADDED: To try to answer my question "Where did all that money come from?" without slogging through the whole thing, I searched the entire article text for various words: money, income, wealth, salary. Nothing. I resorted to "pay." "Pay" came up twice. Here:

"'You’re not paying enough attention to me'... And, I would then maybe play out, you know, if they told someone else that I was not paying attention to them anymore...."

Ha. That's just Weiner talking about his idiotic scandal that we're supposedly "post."

1 in 5 school-age boys have ADHD.

That's the diagnosis anyway.

“Those are astronomical numbers. I’m floored,” said Dr. William Graf, a pediatric neurologist in New Haven and a professor at the Yale School of Medicine. He added, “Mild symptoms are being diagnosed so readily, which goes well beyond the disorder and beyond the zone of ambiguity to pure enhancement of children who are otherwise healthy.”

And even more teenagers are likely to be prescribed medication in the near future because the American Psychiatric Association plans to change the definition of A.D.H.D. to allow more people to receive the diagnosis and treatment. A.D.H.D. is described by most experts as resulting from abnormal chemical levels in the brain that impair a person’s impulse control and attention skills.

Possible side effects from the drugs: "addiction, anxiety and occasionally psychosis."

Possible side effects from viewing youthful spirit as abnormal: ????

Possible side effects from skewing academic competition with performance-enhancing drugs: ????

"Columbia professor strips down to underwear in bizarre lesson to help baffled students learn quantum mechanics."

"'In order to learn quantum mechanics, you have to strip to your raw, erase all the garbage from your brain, and start over again,' Prof. Emlyn Hughes said. Against a backdrop of 9/11 and Holocaust images, he remained in a fetal position as two people dressed as ninjas blindfolded stuffed animals."

"Um, nothing you’ve learned in your life up til now is in any way going to help prepare you for this.... I’ve been tasked with the impossible challenge of teaching you quantum mechanics in one hour."