neonascent

You may have heard that the US army has developed a “ray gun” capable of inflicting searing pain at long distance. They are not hiding its possible uses as a non-lethal crowd control device.

Check out this
Yahoo! news video of the US army giving a demonstration. The “mock-mob” they are directing the beam against are carrying banners with slogans like “World peace” and “Love for all”. It’s nuts, and I wonder how soon it will be before the weapon is being used against US citizens in protests.

The BBC Reports on a new study recently published in The Lancet, calling the current UK drug category system “unfit for purpose”, and proposing a replacement. The suggested replacement order drugs on the basis of nine factors of harm, such as dependence and social damage, which are weighed to form a single value. As a benchmark of the level of harm, familiar legal drugs tobacco and alcohol have been added to the index (see above). The scientists involved believe that the arbitrary nature of the current system “undermine(s) trust in warnings about the danger of drugs.”

The Academy of Medical Sciences group is currently reviewing drug research for the government, and plans to put its recommendations to ministers in the autumn. However, it does not appear the government is planning on acting on any new recommendations:

Home Office Minister Vernon Coaker said: “We have no intention of reviewing the drug classification system.
“Our priority is harm reduction and to achieve this we focus on enforcement, education and treatment.”

It is likely that government adoption of the new category system would be blocked on the basis of the incongruity between social acceptance and legality of drugs versus the drugs’ harm. It is also possible that the government is worried that such information would lead to a shift in drug use from controlled and taxed drugs to those that provide them no revenue. The UK government has significantly higher taxation on alcohol and tobacco than most other European countries, and such tax is a significant source of revenue. In the period of 2005-2006, the UK collected a combined £16 billion from tobacco and alcohol tax.

Princeton university has conducted tests on US electronic voting machines that were used in the last two elections (Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine), and found them to be (extremely) vulnerable to viruses and vote maniplulation software.

This should be absolutely no surprise what-so-ever. These machines are effectively PCs, and show less security precaution than the average Internet café computer. They are set to boot from flash memory, and presumably were not provided with malware/virus checking tools at the toll this would take on voter trust. (ie accepting the possibility of viruses is opening a can of worms).

In the Princeton demonstration video the demonstrator is careful to emphasise the criminality of the virus loader, and also the fact that what we are watching is a simulated election, but I think this is a pointed comment. I get the impression they are understating the importance of this research for interlectual impact - the audience realises themselves how easy it would be to apply this to a real election.

In a BBC News article covering Bush’s 9/11 remembrance ceremony I spotted reference to “his so-called war on terror”. I find it darkly amusing that it has taken official reports of zero link between Sadam and Al Qaeda, civil war in Iraq, continued fighting in Afganistan, etc. to change the BBCs line from “The War on Terror” to “[bush’s] so-called war on terror”.

The BBC NEWS reports on the findings of a Senate’s Intelligence Committee report: Saddam ‘had no link to al-Qaeda’.

This sort of report, reasoned and researched finding that oppose previous claims, is inevitable and unfortunately inconsequential. It doesn’t seem to have any affect, and you knew it would come out eventually. Some would say this is a case of hindsight 20/20, but when calling for a war based on supposedly concrete intelligence information that turns out to be wrong, you can’t just go “Oops”.

The BBC reports that four UN observers have been killed when their outpost was targetted by Israelly airforce.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said he was “shocked” at the “apparently deliberate targeting” of the post. Israel has expressed “deep regret”.

It seems that Israel has taken the kidnapping of it’s three soldiers as justification needed to start a full-scale regional offensive.

The targetting and wholesale bombing of Lebanese residential areas - first in southern Lebanon and now in Sidon, where refugees have been fleeing to - as an attack against Terrorism takes familiar rhetoric far past the absurd.

A few days ago I blogged a sculpture I had installed for a recent exhibition. The sculpture featured Nazi imagery (red-white banner with black icon) to point out the fascist tendencies of US government “warring against terror”, etc.

I had worried that the use of such imagery was pushing it towards the clichéd and would be considered hyperbolic - although to my mind the comparison is valuable in a media environment where perspective and historical context is as far removed as composed intellectually analysis.

Now, in an interesting twist the New York Times is reporting that neo-Nazis have infiltrated the US Military in Iraq. It seems that in the face of rising ire over the war in Iraq it is getting harder for military recruiters to fill their quotas, and they are no longer maintaining a block on racist and extremist recruits. Neo-Nazis already have an agenda to get into the military, and so are only too happy to be allowed in.

An article in the National Alliance magazine Resistance urged skinheads to join the Army and insist on being assigned to light infantry units.

“Light infantry is your branch of choice because the coming race war and the ethnic cleansing to follow will be very much an infantryman’s war,” he wrote. “It will be house-to-house, neighborhood-by-neighborhood until your town or city is cleared and the alien races are driven into the countryside where they can be hunted down and ‘cleansed.’ “

• Link to New York Times article

Via BBC:

Allied Press has obtained video and transcripts of President Bush receiving “very strong warnings” on the safety of New Orleans’ levees against hurricane Katrina. These warnings, given to the President by Michael Brown the chief emergency response official on the eve of Katrina’s landfall, stated there was a chance the levees would be broken. The president apparently responded that “We are fully prepared”.

The video is damning given that four days after the storm Bush commented: “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.”

Monochrom has just blogged regarding the burying of a Lancet Report on Iraqi death toll. The report seems to be methodologically sound, and based on their findings they conservative conclude that most Iraqi deaths are from US “operations” rather than insurgent/”terrorist” activities.

It’s definitely worth at least a quick scan in order to understand the politics and get an idea of how reasonable the claim seems to be. I’m sure most are aware that the Lancet is one of the oldest and most respected peer-reviewed medical journals in the world, and does not okay material lightly.

Unfortunetly, the Z Commentary Online article loses some of its authority with the following:

Their most significant finding was that the vast majority (79 percent) of violent deaths were caused by “coalition” forces using “helicopter gunships, rockets or other forms of aerial weaponry,”

So far so good…

and that almost half (48 percent) of these were children, with a median age of 8.

(my emphasis) Now, reading further on we find that their definition set for children is under 15. As median is the central value in a range this is tautological, and presumably masquerades for “average age of 8″ to give the article and report a little more emotional impact. Of course it is quite possible the average age is much lower, but from here there is no way for us to know either way.

Regardless, this does not effect the actual and weighty conclusions of the Lancet report.

• Link to Z Commentary Online: Burying The Lancet Report

Recent studies by psychologists at McGill University, as part of a followup to an original study by Harvard University psychiatrist Dr. Roger Pitman, have been using a drug to reduce the emotional effect of traumatic memories. The drug - a Beta blocker known as Propranolol - reduces the strengthening effects of stress hormones on the formation of memories, and thus is being studied as a treatment for victims of traumatic events such as those suffering Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. (Associated Press, via Globeandmail.com article)

The effects of administering the drug do not to remove the memory altogether - there is not the amnesia such as in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - but instead reduce the emotional impact the memories. Perhaps surprisingly, the article does not examine the philosophical issues of seperating significant life-events from affect, though I think the use of such a drug echoes what I consider to be a serious problem in the field of Abnormal Psychology (ie Mental Illness).

Diagnosis of mental illness is not based on a concrete body of rules; in reality mental disorders are added and removed as society’s concept of what is normal changes:

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association, is the handbook used most often in diagnosing mental disorders in the United States and internationally.

[…]What is and what is not considered a mental disorder changes over time. For example, several decades ago homosexuality was commonly considered a mental disorder, and it was listed in the DSM as such. Today, homosexuality is seen by most psychologists and psychiatrists as a normal sexual orientation. (Wikipedia - Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder)

A vivid illustration of the relativity of mental illness is that the guidelines for diagnosis always include disruption of either work, or a “normal” social life. God forbid we have citizens unable to work! The diagnosis for Borderline Personality Disorder mainly revolves around the occurance of “mood swings, emotional reasoning, disrupted relationships and difficulty in functioning in a way society accepts as normal”, which seems to uncannily reflect the lives of most disillusioned youth - at least those I know! The need for normalcy through pharmaceutical treatment has gone so far that more than a couple of weeks mourning is “cured” by proscribing Prozac:

[Psychiatrist Richard] Schwartz concludes drugs like Prozac can be used to enforce certain cultural behaviors, resulting in conformity. He explains a scenario where society enforces a set of cultural norms concerning the mourning period of a widow over her husband. At what point is the duration of sorrow considered to be abnormal, and, consequently, requiring treatment? […]Certain societies have certain expectations. If a person violates the established pattern, then the society considers him “ill” and that he needs treatment. (From a paper on the prevalence of Prozac use, “Perpetually Prozac”, Matt Tsou)

And even the drug used in this particular study is being considered for more questionable benefits; Propranolol is being tested for stage fright.

The psychological explication of memory formation used as a basis for the recent studies mirrors a philosophical perspective on subject formation (ie. formation of a sense of a coherent self). While psychologists describe a re-evaluation of memories at the point of remembrance, some philosophers talk of Self as a constantly changing coherent narrative, built from retrospective rationalisation of ones past actions.

“Each time you retrieve a memory it must be restored,” he said. “When you activate a memory in the presence of a drug that prevents the restorage of the memory, the next day the memory is not as accessible.”

The effects of sabotaging this process of self-formation are potentially devastating to one’s self-knowledge. Indeed Leon Kass, Chairman of the US President’s Council on Bioethics considers it unhealthy, stating that painful memories serve a purpose and are part of the human experience. While traumatic experiences such as rape or warfare can be profoundly devistating themselves, there is certainly much need for debate lest the current trend towards a mediacated “normal” population is realised. As is recently very common, parallels can be drawn with certain distopian scenarios such as the use of Soma in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World…