The Red Queen’s Race

I began the week with three amendments on my Amended docket, and finished an Office Action on the earliest filed of them, after which another case appeared on my Amended docket, bringing the total back to three, although this newest isn’t exactly an amendment, but an Appeal Brief, appealing my final rejection of the case. Then an amendment appeared on my Expedited docket, so I’m up to a total of four cases, one of them Expedited.

Early in the week, I finished a new rejection on the one Request for Continued Examination application on my Regular New docket. Friday evening, I finished an Office Action on the oldest non-RCE Regular New application, so it’s been a productive week. There is now one biweek left in the third quarter, so I will need to continue being productive.

Lawrence Wright on Wars, Cults, and Panics

There was a podcast (you can read the text or, I presume, listen) on Reason, about America’s wars, cults, and panics. A man named Lawrence Wright talks about foreign interventions, about Scientology, and about the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s. There is much to be learned about human weirdness, and in particular, I might mention Mr. Wright’s take on what brought the Satanic and child molestation panic pretty much to an end: insurance companies refused to pay for extensive therapy for “multiple personality disorder” supposedly caused by ritual abuse, so there were no longer wards full of people bamboozled (at least in some cases they had been bamboozled) by mental health quacks into thinking that any problems in living they had were the result of sexual molestation by Satanists. If so, health insurance companies, which are not universally beloved, may have done some real good in the world, in addition to saving themselves money.