My ADDled Thought Process As Illustrated By Surfing Through Wikipedia

Chicken. Chicken is quite possibly the funniest word in the English language. No? Anyway, the chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus) is a domesticated fowl. As one of the most common and widespread domestic animals, and with a population of more than 24 billion in 2003, there are more chickens in the world than any other bird. Humans keep chickens primarily as a source of food, consuming both their meat and their eggs.

Conventional wisdom has held that the chicken was domesticated in India, but recent evidence suggests that domestication of the chicken was already under way in Vietnam over 10,000 years ago.

Conventional wisdom is a term used to describe ideas or explanations that are generally accepted as true by the public or by experts in a field. The term implies that the ideas or explanations, though widely held, are unexamined and, hence, may be reevaluated upon further examination or as events unfold.

India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: भारत गणराज्य Bhārat Gaṇarājya), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world.

Vietnam (pronounced /ˌviː.ɛtˈnɑːm/; Vietnamese: Việt Nam), officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (Vietnamese: Cộng hòa xã hội chủ nghĩa Việt Nam), is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. With a population of over 86 million, Vietnam is the 13th most populous country in the world.

Between March 1965 and November 1968, aircraft of the U.S. Air Force had flown 153,784 attack sorties against North Vietnam, while the Navy and Marine Corps had added another 152,399. On 31 December 1967, the Department of Defense announced that 864,000 tons of American bombs had been dropped on North Vietnam during Rolling Thunder, compared with 653,000 tons dropped during the entire Korean Conflict and 503,000 tons in the Pacific theater during the Second World War.

World War II, or the Second World War (often abbreviated WWII or WW2), was a global military conflict which involved most of the world’s nations, including all great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. The war involved the mobilization of over 100 million military personnel, making it the most widespread war in history. In a state of “total war,” the major participants placed their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities at the service of the war effort, erasing the distinction between civilian and military resources. Over seventy million people, the majority civilians, were killed, making it the deadliest conflict in human history.

The start of the war is generally held to be September 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland and subsequent declarations of war on Germany by most of the countries in the British Empire and Commonwealth, and by France.

Following several German-staged incidents (like the Gleiwitz incident, a part of Operation Himmler), which German propaganda used as an excuse to claim that German forces were acting in self-defense, the first regular act of war took place on 1 September 1939, at 04:40, when the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) attacked the Polish town of Wieluń, destroying 75% of the city and killing close to 1,200 people, most of them civilians.

This invasion subsequently began the Second World War. Five minutes later, the old German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish military transit depot at Westerplatte in the Free City of Danzig on the Baltic Sea. At 08:00, German troops, still without a formal declaration of war issued, attacked near the Polish town of Mokra. The Battle of the Border had begun. Later that day, the Germans attacked on Poland’s western, southern and northern borders, while German aircraft began raids on Polish cities.

The invasion decimated urban residential areas, civilians soon became indistinguishable from combatants, and the forthcoming German occupation (both on the annexed territories and in the General Government) was one of the most brutal episodes of World War II, resulting in more than 6 million Polish deaths (about 20 % of the country’s total population, and over 90 % of its Jewish minority) – including the mass murder of 3 million Poles in extermination camps like Auschwitz, in concentration camps, and in numerous ad hoc massacres, where civilians were rounded up, taken to a nearby forest, machine-gunned, and then buried, whether they were dead or not.

Soviet occupation between 1939 and 1941 resulted in the death or deportation of over a million or former Polish citizens, when all who were deemed dangerous to the Soviet regime were subject to Sovietization, forced resettlement, imprisonment in labor camps (the Gulags) or murdered, like the Polish officers in the Katyn massacre.

The Katyn massacre, also known as the Katyn Forest massacre (Polish: zbrodnia katyńska, ‘Katyń crime’), was a mass murder of thousands of Polish military officers, policemen, intellectuals and civilian prisoners of war by Soviet NKVD, based on a proposal from Lavrentiy Beria to execute all members of the Polish Officer Corps. Dated March 5, 1940, this official document was then approved (signed) by the entire Soviet Politburo including Joseph Stalin and Beria. The number of victims is estimated at about 22,000, the most commonly cited number being 21,768. The victims were murdered in the Katyn Forest in Russia, the Kalinin (Tver) and Kharkov prisons and elsewhere.

Joseph Stalin (18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953) was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953. In the years following Lenin’s death in 1924, he rose to become the leader of the Soviet Union.

During the late 1930s, Stalin launched the Great Purge (also known as the “Great Terror”), a campaign to purge the Communist Party of people accused of sabotage, terrorism, or treachery; he extended it to the military and other sectors of Soviet society. Targets were often executed, imprisoned in Gulag labor camps or exiled. In the years following, millions of ethnic minorities were also deported.

The Gulag or GULAG was the government agency that administered the penal labor camps of the Soviet Union. The term is infamous for its association with remote places where prisoners were kept and sometimes disappeared. The camps housed all types of criminals, but are well known as mechanisms for repressing political opposition and for holding political prisoners.

Gulag is the acronym for The Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies (Russian: Главное Управление Исправительно-Трудовых Лагерей и колоний; Glavnoye Upravlyeniye Ispravityel’no-Trudovih Lagyeryey i koloniy) of the NKVD. Eventually, by metonymy, the usage of “Gulag” began generally denoting the entire penal labor system in the USSR, then any such penal system.

There were at least 476 separate camps, some of them comprising hundreds, even thousands of camp units. The most infamous complexes were those at arctic or subarctic regions. Today’s major industrial cities of the Russian Arctic such as Norilsk, Vorkuta, Kolyma and Magadan, were camps originally built by prisoners and run by ex-prisoners.

The Gulag Archipelago (Russian: Архипелаг ГУЛАГ, Arkhipelag GULAG) is a book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn based on the Soviet forced labor and concentration camp system. The three-volume book is a massive narrative relying on eyewitness testimony and primary research material, as well as the author’s own experiences as a prisoner in a Gulag labor camp. Written between 1958 and 1968 (dates given at the end of the book), it was published in the West in 1973, thereafter circulating in samizdat (underground publication) form in the Soviet Union until its official publication in 1989.

Infinite Jest is a 1996 novel written by David Foster Wallace. The lengthy and complex work takes place in a semi-parodic future version of North America. The novel touches on the topics of tennis, substance addiction and recovery programs, depression, child abuse, family relationships, advertising and popular entertainment, film theory, and Quebec separatism. And samizdats.

In 2005, Time magazine included the novel in its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present.

The novel derives its name in part from a line in Hamlet, in which Hamlet refers to the skull of Yorick, the court jester: “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!”

In addition to being the title given to the fictional film central to the story, reviewers have also considered the title a “sly wink at the book’s massive girth.”

Wallace’s working title for Infinite Jest had been A Failed Entertainment.

The novel’s primary locations are the Enfield Tennis Academy (“ETA”), Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House (endnoted “Redundancy sic” in the text), and a conversation between a Quebec separatist double agent and his contact in the U.S. “Office of Unspecified Services”, outside of Tucson, Arizona. ETA and Ennet House are separated by a hillside in suburban Boston, Massachusetts. Many characters are students or faculty at the school or patients and staff at the halfway house.

Some of the most commonly abused drugs in the world today are those derived from the Opium poppy. These types of drugs are often referred to as “opioids.” Opioids can produce a feeling of euphoria, and this effect, coupled with physical dependence, can lead to recreational use of opioids by some individuals.

Opioids have long been used to treat acute pain (such as post-operative pain). They have also been found to be invaluable in palliative care to alleviate the severe, chronic, disabling pain of terminal conditions such as cancer, and degenerative conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis. Contrary to popular belief, high doses are not required to control the pain of advanced or end-stage disease, with the median dose in such patients being only 15 mg oral morphine every four hours (90 mg/24 hours), i.e. 50% of patients manage on lower doses, and requirements can level off for many months at a time despite the fact that opioids have some of the greatest potential for tolerance of any category of drugs.

In the U.S., doctors virtually never prescribe opioids for psychological relief (with the narrow exception of anxiety due to shortness of breath), despite their extensively reported psychological benefits, and the widespread use of opiates in depression and anxiety up until the mid 1950s. There are virtually no exceptions to this practice, even in circumstances where researchers have reported opioids to be especially effective and where the possibility of addiction or diversion is very low — for example, in the treatment of senile dementia, geriatric depression, and psychological distress due to chemotherapy or terminal diagnosis

Pethidine (INN) or meperidine (USAN) (commonly referred to as Demerol) is a fast-acting opioid analgesic drug.

Pethidine is indicated for the treatment of moderate to severe pain, and is delivered as its hydrochloride salt in tablets, as a syrup, or by intramuscular or intravenous injection. For much of the 20th century, pethidine was the opioid of choice for many physicians; in 1983 60% of doctors prescribed it for acute pain and 22% for chronic severe pain. Pethidine’s efficacy as an analgesic was discovered almost accidentally; it was synthesized in 1939 at an IG Farben laboratory as an antimuscarinic agent.

I.G. Farbenindustrie AG was a German chemical industry conglomerate. Its name is taken from Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG (lit. Community of interest of the dye industry). The company was formed in 1925 from a number of major companies that had been working together closely since World War I. During its heyday IG Farben was the fourth-largest company in the world, after General Motors, U.S. Steel and Standard Oil.

During World War Two, IG Farben built a factory (named Buna Chemical Plant) that produced synthetic oil and rubber (from coal) in Auschwitz, which was the beginning of SS activity and camps in this location during the Holocaust. At its peak in 1944, this factory made use of 83,000 slave laborers. The pesticide Zyklon B (infamous for its use in gas chambers during the Holocaust), for which IG Farben held the patent, was manufactured by Degesch (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung), which IG Farben owned 42.2 percent of (in shares) and which had IG Farben managers in its Managing Committee.

According to Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, bunker 1 held 800 people, and bunker 2 held 1,200. Once the chamber was full, the doors were screwed shut and solid pellets of Zyklon B were dropped into the chambers through vents in the side walls, releasing a toxic gas. Those inside died within 20 minutes; the speed of death depended on how close the inmate was standing to a gas vent, according to Höß, who estimated that about one third of the victims died immediately.

Johann Kremer, an SS doctor who oversaw the gassings, testified that: “Shouting and screaming of the victims could be heard through the opening and it was clear that they fought for their lives.” When they were removed, if the chamber had been very congested, as they often were, the victims were found half-squatting, their skin colored pink with red and green spots, some foaming at the mouth or bleeding from the ears.

Zyklon B is still in production in the Czech Republic in the factory Draslovka Kolín a.s. in the city Kolín under the tradename Uragan D2, sold for eradicating insects and small animals.

Due to the severity of the war crimes committed by IG Farben during World War II, the company was considered to be too corrupt to be allowed to continue to exist. The Soviet Union seized most of IG Farben’s assets located in the Soviet occupation zone, as part of their reparation payments. The Western Allies however, in 1951, split the company up into its original constituent companies. The four largest quickly bought the smaller ones. Today only Agfa, BASF, and Bayer remain, Hoechst having in 1999 demerged its industrial chemical operations to Celanese AG and merged its life-sciences businesses with Rhône-Poulenc’s to form Aventis.

Aventis is a pharmaceutical company and was once a competitor of Novartis. Novartis is the pharmaceutical company that produces Ritalin. Ritalin is the most common and popular treatment for ADD.

Attention-deficit disorder is a neurobehavioral developmental disorder, primarily characterized by “the co-existence of attentional problems and hyperactivity, with each behavior occurring infrequently alone.” While symptoms may appear to be innocent and merely annoying nuisances to observers, “if left untreated, the persistent and pervasive effects of ADD or ADHD symptoms can insidiously and severely interfere with one’s ability to get the most out of education, fulfill one’s potential in the workplace, establish and maintain interpersonal relationships, and maintain a generally positive sense of self.”

It has been estimated that about eight million adults have ADHD in the United States. Untreated adults with ADHD often have chaotic lifestyles, may appear to be disorganized and may rely on non-prescribed drugs and alcohol to get by. They often have such associated psychiatric comorbidities as depression, anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, substance abuse, or a learning disability.

The end.