MonthJanuary 2008
I love this topic…
“What happens if you are left alone in the dark in solitary confinement for days on end? The result is called sensory deprivation and the human mind struggles to cope with it.”
Sensory deprivation is a controversial subject, with allegations the technique has been used at Guantanamo Bay as an interrogation strategy. And thousands of prisoners around the world are kept in solitary confinement, often with a significant degree of sensory deprivation.
The tests are exploring the theory that sensory deprivation makes subjects much more suggestible.
Some of the first research on this subject was carried out after the Korean War in the 1950s. The Canadian military wanted to investigate what had happened to POWs who appeared at international press conferences confessing that they were war criminals. It was thought they had been brainwashed following solitary confinement.
Hehe and this is funny, too:
Mickey, a postman is seeing mosquitoes and fighter planes buzzing around his head and it’s frightening him.
Claire a psychology student doesn’t mind the little cars, snakes and zebras. But she gets scared when she suddenly feels somebody is in the room.
“In the dark room there is nothing to focus on,” says Prof Robbins as he monitors their behaviour. “In the absence of information the human brain carries on working and processing information even if there is no information to process and after a while it starts to create that information itself.”
No wonder when I teach people to do their visualisations most of them freak out and never pursue it.
Horizon: Total Isolation is on BBC Two at 2100GMT on Tuesday 22 January.
Bill Moyers interviews New York Times investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize-winner David Cay Johnston who says America’s system has been rigged to benefit the super-rich.
Ties into this whole shtick about the U.S. of A. going bankrupt.
Awesome: “We used to put people to death five hundreds years ago for lending money to charge interest.”
“The notion of a prism represents the first challenge to our early worlds of concrete time and space. A device that fragments light, and reveals a space within a solid known quantity, seems to us an expansion of dimension. As we get older, we realize the expansion of dimension occurs within ourselves as we assemble a more complex view of the universe.
Metal music as art is composed of sound and lyrics and imagery. The pure aesthetic expands as we analyze it and recognize that it is beauty found in chaos; the songwriting expands as we see that its narrative motivic composition is more poetic than the looping closed circuit cycle of rock or pop; the keyless melodic nature of it becomes in our fertile minds a sense of construction not by a “third party” of rigid harmonic theory but by the unfolding narrative. Metal music like all great art begins by appearing simple, but opens to reveal greater complexity when we look into the dimension that it creates for itself.
From this alone, we might conclude that metal is prismatic in the same way modernist classical composers and the ancient Greek plays that bonded song to poetry to theatre were. Two more elements demand our consideration: that metal represents an escape from the karmic cycle as described by numerous philosophies, and that it inspires mythic imagination in the way both Sophocles and Wagner did.”
(via The Dark Legions Archive)
(see also “Metal as Refutation of the Enlightenment” via Death Metal)
“The United States has blocked the release of a landmark assessment of oil and gas activity in the Arctic as it prepares to sell off exploration licences for the frozen Chukchi Sea off Alaska, one of the last intact habitats of the polar bear. Scientists at the release of the censored report in Norway said there was ‘huge frustration’ that the US had derailed a science-based effort to manage the race for the vast energy reserves of the Arctic. The long-awaited assessment was meant to bring together work by scientists in all eight Arctic nations to give an up-to-date picture of oil and gas exploitation in the high north. In addition to that it was supposed to give policy makers a clear set of recommendations on how to extract safely what are thought to be up to one quarter of the world’s energy reserves.
Speaking yesterday from Tromso, one of the report’s lead authors, who asked not to be named, said: ‘They [the US] have blocked it. We have no executive summary and no plain language conclusions.’ Earlier this month, the Bush administration drew widespread criticism when it said it would auction off 30 million acres of the remote Chukchi Sea which separates Alaska from Russia on 6 February. The sale to oil and gas companies has been rushed through before Congress can complete efforts to protect the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act, a move which could complicate efforts to sell its habitat to oil majors.”
(via Common Dreams)
Geneva France walked out of federal prison with $68 and a bus ticket home. That’s all the government had to offer a woman who had served 16 months of a decade-long prison sentence for a crime she didn’t commit.
The mother of three returned to her family, but her youngest child — who was 18 months old when France was sent to prison — didn’t recognize her.
And France, 25, had no home to return to.
Her landlord had evicted her from the rental during her incarceration, and everything she owned had been tossed on the street.
France’s case is the nightmare scenario for a system that critics say sometimes dispenses justice differently for rich and poor.
It shows how easy it is for the government to get convictions in cases built on shaky investigations.
I’ve been following this as it develops. Here’s the press release:
CLEARWATER, Florida – Anonymous announced their intention to combat the activities of the Church of Scientology on Monday. A spokesperson said that the group’s goals include bringing an end to the financial exploitation of Church members and protecting the right to free speech, a right which they claim was consistently violated by the Church of Scientology in pursuit of its opponents.
This announcement came as a response to attempts by the Church to keep secret an internal video meant to be viewed only by Scientologists, featuring actor Tom Cruise. Despite their efforts, the movie was leaked and rapidly spread across the Internet. The video caused much controversy, and members of Anonymous posted a message to several of their websites proclaiming war against Scientology. Soon after, Anonymous struck at the church; they blocked access to its website, made prank calls, organized protests, distributed anti-Church pamphlets and information, and extracted secret files from the Church of Scientology and its parent company, the Religious Technology Center.
View the whole thing here.
Inspired by the release of Tom Cruise’s secret Scientology video and the Church’s attempts to suppress it, Anon promises an all-out war in the following hokey but entertaining video:
For further information, check out the Gawker post. It has some notes and links.
Looking through the Technoccult Myspace, it seems like Twelve Monkeys is the most popular movie with Technoccult readers. Twelve Monkeys was based on the short film La Jet?e by Chris Marker.
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