The Triffids - Born Sandy Devotional
9 minutes ago
Friday 27 August 2010
Fixing A Hole In The Head
Film Review
I have to make a confession. I have a soft posterior fontanelle. When I press on that spot, my head indents noticeably — enough that you can actually see it. Furthermore, I frequently feel a sort of need to do this. And when I do it, it seems to help me feel less sleepyheaded and more focussed. If I'm feeling a bit woozy, it helps me feel less so. And, indeed, sometimes I feel as though I'd like to drill right into it — as though there is some sort of psychic G spot hungering to be stimulated and satisfied. Naturally, I've been intrigued by trepanning — the practice of intentionally drilling small holes in the skull.
Of course, trepanners don't necessarily aim for the fontanelle, although the spot is name-checked in A Hole in the Head, this wonderfully amusing award-winning 55 minute documentary on the topic. Indeed, since many of the contemporary enthusiasts for the practice do this DIY... while looking at themselves in the mirror (sort of like shaving!) — the front of the head seems to be favored.
In fact, a couple of minutes into A Hole in the Head, we are confronted with a clip from a 1970 film — Heartbeat in the Brain — that was made showing Amanda Feilding's self-trepanation. Feilding — the attractive English doyenne of contemporary trepanning and a leading figure in British '70s psychedelia — freshly trepanned, stares into a mirror, her face patched and speckled with blood, looking as happy and satisfied as Sooky Stackhouse after a long night with Bill Compton and Eric Northman. As she wipes blood from her teeth, there's the faint hint of a smile.
Fans of grisly medical shows will definitely find satisfaction in this film. The most disturbing scene, which is also toward the beginning of the film and runs for several minutes, shows an African woman's fully exposed brain matter being drilled by a witch doctor.
But shock is not the point here — or at least it's not the entire point. The film is also informative. Toward the beginning, A Hole in the Head examines the history of trepanning — including the archeological evidence for the existence of the practice in various "primitive" cultures, as well as at various points in European culture where it was variously used as a "cure" for physiological problems and for "letting the demons out" for patients suffering from mental problems.
The film primarily focuses on the contemporary trend for self-trepanation, which seems to be centered largely in Great Britain among psychedelic types. There is even a quote from Paul McCartney from a 1986 interview in Musician in which he talks about how John Lennon seriously considered fixing (to get) a hole in his head and asked McCartney to join him. The ever wily McCartney replied: "You go first" (or words to that effect.)
The operant theory here is that the process increases "blood brain volume," leaving the trepanned person smarter, happier and a little bit high... permanently. Testimonies from the people with the holes in their head are balanced out by interviews with skeptical neuroscientists, who pretty much all agree that the claims made by the advocates are absurd. (One younger neuroscientist believes that it's vaguely possible that their could be some slight enhancement from increased blood flow, but that it needs to be tested, scientifically.) The believers sound happy; the skeptics sound amused (and sane), and many who watch this documentary will likely be all of the above.
As for myself, despite my soft fontanelle, I will put my faith, for now, in the neuroscientists and not take a drill to my skull.
R.U. Sirius @'h+'
Australian of Year Patrick McGorry calls for a republic
Australian of the Year Patrick McGorry has criticised Australians for failing to seriously address the issue of a republic.
He likened the country to a 27-year-old who just won't leave home -- "a Gen Y nation".
Delivering the annual National Republican Lecture in Canberra last night, Professor McGorry said Australia needed to "emerge from its prolonged adolescence" and become a republic sooner rather than later.
Professor McGorry, who was chosen as Australian of the Year for his 25 years of service to youth mental health, said he saw parallels between his work with young people and Australia's path to full nationhood.
"Australia's adolescence has lasted more than 100 years since Federation," he said.
On the election campaign trail in north Queensland last week, Julia Gillard said she wanted Australia to become a republic when the Queen, now 84, no longer reigned, and said she planned to lead a national debate on the form the republic should take if she were re-elected prime minister.
"I would think the appropriate time for this nation to move to being a republic is when we see the monarch change," Ms Gillard said.
Asked yesterday if she would consider a referendum on a republic before the Queen died if there were a big enough public push for change, Ms Gillard responded that the issue was "not a priority".
"The Prime Minister supports a republic for Australia but it is not a priority at this time," Ms Gillard's spokesman said.
Tony Abbott, who was at the centre of the pro-monarchist cause in the 1999 referendum that rejected the notion of change, said last week he was certain Australia would never abandon the monarchy in his lifetime.
His spokeswoman said yesterday: "I've got nothing to add to his answer of last week."
But other prominent Australians, including Wayne Goss, Greg Barns and Mungo MacCallum, expressed their strong support for Professor McGorry's Republican appeal.
"While we have come far, we need to finish the journey by showing the world -- and, more importantly, ourselves -- that we proudly and independently stand on our own two feet," former Queensland premier Wayne Goss said.
But David Flint, national convener of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, said comparing Australia to an adolescent was "curious".
"We are one of the world's oldest and stable democracies, we have a Constitution which has been successful," Professor Flint said yesterday.
"Nations aren't individuals on a psychologist's couch . . . nations exist on sound institutions, and it would be foolish to change those institutions purely on the basis of a flippant psychologist's analogy."
Lanai Vasek @'The Australian'
The Power and Money behind the Tea Party
Make no mistake. The Tea Party and other right wing groups like it are not grassroots movements. They are well funded and their agenda is to keep corporations' profits high, put right wingers in power and, at the moment, unseat President Obama. Key among the corporate funders are the billionaire Koch brothers. It's basically corporate electioneering as bribery that is funding a war against Obama. The Kochs have long depended on the public’s not knowing all the details about them. They have been content to operate what David Koch has called “the largest company that you’ve never heard of.” But with the growing prominence of the Tea Party, and with increased awareness of the Kochs’ ties to the movement, the brothers may find it harder to deflect scrutiny.
@'The New Yorker'Koch Industries Reply
Thursday 26 August 2010
Johann Hari: Violence breeds violence. The only thing drug gangs fear is legalisation
To many people, the "war on drugs" sounds like a metaphor, like the "war on poverty". It is not. It is being fought with tanks and sub-machine guns and hand grenades, funded in part by your taxes, and it has killed 28,000 people under the current Mexican President alone. The death toll in Tijuana – one of the front lines of this war – is now higher than in Baghdad. Yesterday, another pile of 72 mutilated corpses was found near San Fernando – an event that no longer shocks the country.
Mexico today is a place where the severed heads of police officers are found week after week, pinned to bloody notes that tell their colleagues: "This is how you learn respect". It is a place where hand grenades are tossed into crowds to intimidate the public into shutting up. It is the state the US Joint Chiefs of Staff say is most likely, after Pakistan, to suffer "a rapid and sudden collapse".
Why? When you criminalise a drug for which there is a large market, it doesn't disappear. The trade is simply transferred from off-licences, pharmacists and doctors to armed criminal gangs.
In order to protect their patch and their supply routes, these gangs tool up – and kill anyone who gets in their way. You can see this any day on the streets of a poor part of London or Los Angeles, where teenage gangs stab or shoot each other for control of the 3,000 per cent profit margins on offer. Now imagine this process taking over an entire nation, to turn it into a massive production and supply route for the Western world's drug hunger.
Why Mexico? Why now? In the past decade, the US has spent a fortune spraying carcinogenic chemicals over Colombia's coca-growing areas, so the drug trade has simply shifted to Mexico. It's known as the "balloon effect": press down in one place, and the air rushes to another.
When I was last there in 2006, I saw the drug violence taking off and warned that the murder rate was going to skyrocket. Since then the victims have ranged from a pregnant woman washing her car, to a four-year-old child, to a family in the "wrong" house watching television, to a group of 14 teenagers having a party. Today, 70 per cent of Mexicans say they are frightened to go out because of the cartels.
The gangs offer Mexican police and politicians a choice: "Plata o ploma". Silver, or lead. Take a bribe, or take a bullet. President Felipe Calderon has been leading a military crackdown on them since 2006 – yet every time he surges the military forward, the gang violence in an area massively increases.
This might seem like a paradox, but it isn't. If you knock out the leaders of a drug gang, you don't eradicate demand, or supply. You simply trigger a fresh war for control of the now-vacant patch. The violence creates more violence.
This is precisely what happened – to the letter – when the United States prohibited alcohol. A ban produced a vicious rash of criminal gangs to meet the popular demand, and they terrorised the population and bribed the police. Now 1,000 Mexican Al Capones are claiming their billions and waving their guns.
Like Capone, the drug gangs love the policy of prohibition. Michael Levine, who had a 30-year career as one of America's most distinguished federal narcotics agents, penetrated to the very top of the Mafia Cruenza, one of the biggest drug-dealing gangs in the world in the 1980s.
Its leaders told him "that not only did they not fear our war on drugs, they actually counted on it... On one undercover tape-recorded conversation, a top cartel chief, Jorge Roman, expressed his gratitude for the drug war, calling it 'a sham put on the American tax-payer' that was 'actually good for business'."
So there is a growing movement in Mexico to do the one thing these murderous gangs really fear – take the source of their profits, drugs, back into the legal economy. It would bankrupt them swiftly, and entirely. Nobody kills to sell you a glass of Jack Daniels. Nobody beheads police officers or shoots teenagers to sell you a glass of Budweiser. And, after legalisation, nobody would do it to sell you a spliff or a gram of cocaine either. They would be in the hands of unarmed, regulated, legal businesses, paying taxes to the state, at a time when we all need large new sources of tax revenue.
The conservative former President, Vicente Fox, has publicly called for legalisation, and he has been joined by a battery of former presidents across Latin America – all sober, right-leaning statesmen who are trying rationally to assess the facts.
Every beheading, grenade attack, and assassination underlines their point. Calderon's claims in response that legalisation would lead to a sudden explosion in drug use don't seem to match the facts: Portugal decriminalised possession of all drugs in 2001, and drug use there has slightly fallen since.
Yet Mexico is being pressured hard by countries like the US and Britain – both led by former drug users – to keep on fighting this war, while any mention of legalisation brings whispered threats of slashed aid and diplomatic shunning.
Look carefully at that mound of butchered corpses found yesterday. They are the inevitable and ineluctable product of drug prohibition. This will keep happening for as long as we pursue this policy. If you believe the way to deal with the human appetite for intoxication is to criminalise and militarise, then blood is on your hands.
How many people have to die before we finally make a sober assessment of reality, and take the drugs trade back from murderous criminal gangs?
See our captain is in the news again...
England footballer wins continuation of gagging order
No wonder we have started SO badly this season, his mind is on other matters!
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