via Dangerousminds
Behold Alex Jones wildly gesticulating while screaming about how the Bilderbergers smoke DMT to contact clockwork elves who will then use the hadron particle collider to rip a portal through the universe, after which the elves will stream into our dimension en masse and direct the Pentagon to install virtual reality tanks, connected to cybernetic components, for all American citizens. Apparently this is why the Bible has instructed us to not do drugs.
"I don't need DMT to see how evil these globalists are."
Setting the utter hilarity of the above rant aside, I don't actually endorse much of Jones's material given his probable affiliation with the neofascist Knights of Malta organization, as well as the overall fear-mongering and xenophobia that goes on at his site. What really did it for me was his open support of the far right Minuteman Project, an "immigration reform" group which was allegedly responsible for the murder of an entire immigrant family, including a 9-year-old girl. In truth, any social organizer who is genuinely concerned about the disenfranchisement of regular people by "global elites" will take notice of the routine theft of immigrant children by federal agencies, an atrocity which results in permanent estrangement for those children who are handed over to U.S. adoption agencies when their parents are deported.
Even so, I had to post the above video because it is probably the most spectacular meltdown I've ever seen and, besides, isn't it quite interesting when Jones mentions how he was let into the Pentagon's psychological warfare department on multiple occasions? Honestly, the guy reminds me of some of my otherwise decent, bigoted Texan relatives so I can't help but like him despite the fact that he is laughably ineffective at organizing any kind of "culture of resistance".
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Friday, March 16, 2012
Psychologists and Torture, Then and Now
by Laura Melendez-Pallitto and Robert Pallitto, March 06, 2012
source:Antiwar.com
History repeats itself, Marx famously warned, first as tragedy and then as farce. In the case of U.S. torture psychologists, the “tragedy” occurred half a century ago when CIA-funded psychological research on electroshock treatment, sensory deprivation, and the like found its way into the Agency’s counterintelligence interrogation manual. The 1963 KUBARK manual and its later iterations were used widely by U.S. intelligence and disseminated to other governments in Latin America and Southeast Asia. The “farce” was played post-9/11, as psychologists became involved once again in aiding counterintelligence interrogators....The KUBARK manual cites Albert Biderman and other research psychologists as sources for the “scientific findings” that support its conclusions. Biderman, who died in 2003, was known for his studies of U.S. personnel captured by the Chinese during the Cold War. He examined the ways in which the Chinese military induced false confessions — often outlandish and implausible ones — from U.S. prisoners. Whatever one thinks today of the validity and cogency of that literature, the government used it to legitimize tactics and propositions that go well beyond the claims of the literature itself. KUBARK instructs interrogators to use protocols titled “Ivan Is a Dope,” “Alice in Wonderland,” and “Mutt and Jeff.”
...KUBARK does not describe in detail the ways in which psychological interrogation methods (“clean torture,” as Darius Rejali calls it) are done. KUBARK merely recognizes that “chemical and electrical” methods are available (though it may be more specific in the redacted portions). To see how sensory deprivation and electroshock treatment actually work on the psyche of subjects, we must look outside KUBARK itself, at the research findings of scientists and the accounts of victims themselves. Naomi Klein interviewed one such victim, who unwittingly became a research subject for Dr. Ewen Cameron of McGill University (a psychiatrist) while Cameron was treating her as a psychiatric inpatient. Cameron administered drug and electroshock therapy on his patient that left permanent, devastating injury. Many years later, she discovered the cause of her injuries when she learned of a legal settlement by the CIA paying unwitting experimental subjects for the damages they suffered. By then, she had become completely disabled as a result of her “treatment.”
...The relationship goes both ways, however. While the drafters of KUBARK certainly utilized the research results to further interrogation objectives and to instruct interrogators in other countries, the researchers themselves certainly derived benefits from the relationship. Alfred McCoy notes that CIA operatives attended conferences in order to develop relationships with research psychologists, luring them with promises of research funding...Incredibly, some of the research results from the early years of mind-control studies resurfaced post-9/11 in training protocols for Guantanamo interrogators. In 2008, The New York Times reported that Biderman’s 1957 “Chart of Coercion,” which indicates the ways that communist interrogators used such coercion to induce false confessions, was provided verbatim to trainees in 2002....Three psychologists in particular have come to the attention of the media in recent years: Drs. Leso, Jessen, and Mitchell. All three have allegedly been involved on some level (research, training, consultation, and even participation) in coercive interrogation. All three are licensed psychologists in different states. Although licensed psychologists and human rights groups have filed complaints, to date none of their licenses have been revoked. Nor have they received any kind of reprimand for their alleged involvement in torture. more:
source:Antiwar.com
History repeats itself, Marx famously warned, first as tragedy and then as farce. In the case of U.S. torture psychologists, the “tragedy” occurred half a century ago when CIA-funded psychological research on electroshock treatment, sensory deprivation, and the like found its way into the Agency’s counterintelligence interrogation manual. The 1963 KUBARK manual and its later iterations were used widely by U.S. intelligence and disseminated to other governments in Latin America and Southeast Asia. The “farce” was played post-9/11, as psychologists became involved once again in aiding counterintelligence interrogators....The KUBARK manual cites Albert Biderman and other research psychologists as sources for the “scientific findings” that support its conclusions. Biderman, who died in 2003, was known for his studies of U.S. personnel captured by the Chinese during the Cold War. He examined the ways in which the Chinese military induced false confessions — often outlandish and implausible ones — from U.S. prisoners. Whatever one thinks today of the validity and cogency of that literature, the government used it to legitimize tactics and propositions that go well beyond the claims of the literature itself. KUBARK instructs interrogators to use protocols titled “Ivan Is a Dope,” “Alice in Wonderland,” and “Mutt and Jeff.”
...KUBARK does not describe in detail the ways in which psychological interrogation methods (“clean torture,” as Darius Rejali calls it) are done. KUBARK merely recognizes that “chemical and electrical” methods are available (though it may be more specific in the redacted portions). To see how sensory deprivation and electroshock treatment actually work on the psyche of subjects, we must look outside KUBARK itself, at the research findings of scientists and the accounts of victims themselves. Naomi Klein interviewed one such victim, who unwittingly became a research subject for Dr. Ewen Cameron of McGill University (a psychiatrist) while Cameron was treating her as a psychiatric inpatient. Cameron administered drug and electroshock therapy on his patient that left permanent, devastating injury. Many years later, she discovered the cause of her injuries when she learned of a legal settlement by the CIA paying unwitting experimental subjects for the damages they suffered. By then, she had become completely disabled as a result of her “treatment.”
...The relationship goes both ways, however. While the drafters of KUBARK certainly utilized the research results to further interrogation objectives and to instruct interrogators in other countries, the researchers themselves certainly derived benefits from the relationship. Alfred McCoy notes that CIA operatives attended conferences in order to develop relationships with research psychologists, luring them with promises of research funding...Incredibly, some of the research results from the early years of mind-control studies resurfaced post-9/11 in training protocols for Guantanamo interrogators. In 2008, The New York Times reported that Biderman’s 1957 “Chart of Coercion,” which indicates the ways that communist interrogators used such coercion to induce false confessions, was provided verbatim to trainees in 2002....Three psychologists in particular have come to the attention of the media in recent years: Drs. Leso, Jessen, and Mitchell. All three have allegedly been involved on some level (research, training, consultation, and even participation) in coercive interrogation. All three are licensed psychologists in different states. Although licensed psychologists and human rights groups have filed complaints, to date none of their licenses have been revoked. Nor have they received any kind of reprimand for their alleged involvement in torture. more:
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Call of Apathy: Violent Young Men and Our Place in War
The following account was written by an anonymous soldier with combat experience:
source:Mediumdifficulty
Disclaimer: I am not an academic. I have no education past the age of 16, so my writing may be rough. What I do have is an entire adulthood of military service, which I terminated recently when I decided I wanted more money for doing the same job.
I am a private military contractor, and I have an issue with the depiction of war in videogames — or more specifically, the soldiers in those games. When I say soldier, let me be clear that I am talking about the Infantryman and the Special Forces operator, as I have next to no knowledge about anything outside of this relatively small percentile of service personnel. Unfortunately, the vast majority of games featuring the military focus on these frontline combat troops in “realistic” action. And that’s where we get problems.
Imagine a war game where you could only move at a slow walking pace...This war game has a prone button like Call of Duty, but your character takes 2-3 seconds to change position. Every time you press it, the animation gets slower because your character becomes more and more tired. Every mission is set in the same level. They each take 12 hours to complete. Sometimes, absolutely nothing happens. Other times, your lead guy gets blown up and you spend the next hour or so casevac’ing [ed note: casualty evacuating] him while under fire.
Other missions involve you being under fire for the entire patrol. You never see the enemy, just fire at the long grass in front of you as you crawl slowly to some cover. If you get up, you will be cut down within seconds, so this process takes hours. When you reach the enemy compound, if the enemy haven’t run away, dropped their weapons, and are pretending to be farmers, or if you haven’t called in enough ordnance to flatten Mexico, you will kill them in the most horrible way imaginable. That is your incentive.
Only a violent sociopath would play this game.
We do it for real, time and time again, with no other motivation but pay, leave, and the chance to brutalise whomever we deem the “enemy”...In military videogames, you tend to get “good guy” characters that are the rough and ready types. The situation may be chaotic, but they crack on with the task in hand to the best of their ability, never let anyone down, and may or may not die in a dramatic fashion. Good, wholesome stuff.
Then there are the Tier 1 types: a more modern iteration that exists thanks to games like Modern Warfare and Medal of Honour. These stone-cold killers speak in clipped monotones, uttering the odd cool one-liner to show that although they are still human, they will never be anything but utterly professional. Both kinds of soldiers end up wrapped up in something bigger than themselves, their missions are always of utmost importance, and every action they take is ultimately justified...Good enough for entertainment, but should war be sterilised and glorified in this way? Here is the crux of my beef with the military videogame genre: None of the stereotypes exist.
...Let me give you an example. I was in Iraq in 2007. Over a 3-month period, we saw some of the bloodiest fighting since the invasion, losing more than ten men and killing hundreds of insurgents. A reporter for a very well-known men’s lifestyle magazine visited us to learn about our experiences. About halfway through his escort, an officer from the military media centre tells him that he is not allowed to speak to us anymore. He has to use stories taken from a non-combat unit earlier that day. It turned out that the officer was appalled at the jovial nature of our recollections; the story in which a vehicle commander sawed two men in half with a mounted machinegun because they were on their phones “dicking” us made him balk in particular....This is one of countless ways the military carefully shapes the public opinion of the troops. It’s a shameless PR exercise....There’s a reason the new guy always gets put on point and nobody really cares when he gets blown up, that so many incidents of collateral damage go unreported, that failed missions are spun into something positive like gathering “valuable intel,” and why only roughly 20% of combat troops ever get PTSD – when if you think about it, it should affect everyone that ever sees combat. It’s because the vast majority of us are straight up sociopaths.
Heroes are a myth. Every incident I can recall in war that created a hero was either an accident or ended up with said hero in a body bag....Here is a real scenario that should be put into a game: A friend of mine came under fire inside a compound. He followed up the shooter, who disappeared into an escape tunnel. My friend followed standard procedure and threw a grenade into the tunnel entrance before following up. When entering the tunnel, he found only the bodies of a woman and a small child, whom the terrorist had used to cover his escape.When I spoke about it to my friend years later, he recalled how pissed he was at losing the insurgent, and how bad he felt afterwards about it. He’d had his professional pride tarnished. I asked him if he ever thought about the woman and her kid and he just looked at me blankly. He didn’t even remember they were there.
This is a serious issue that needs to be addressed in videogames. How would you feel if you accidentally killed an innocent child in a game? If the words “MISSION FAILED” appeared, but then disappeared after a few seconds, leaving you to continue as normal with no repercussions. Any normal person would feel guilty, but that’s my point. Combat troops are not normal people....War is the most horrific, sickening thing mankind can inflict upon itself, fought by and large by uneducated maniacs that have no other place in the world. Videogames have the attention of the youth and can educate as well as entertain. The real horrors need to be made very public to keep the next generation from turning out like us...The world needs to be made aware of my kind: the silent majority of fighters, those that do not care about politics, religion, ethics, or anything else other than war for war’s sake...One last thought: My psychologist estimated that roughly 80% of infantrymen have an undiagnosed violent personality disorder. more:
source:Mediumdifficulty
Disclaimer: I am not an academic. I have no education past the age of 16, so my writing may be rough. What I do have is an entire adulthood of military service, which I terminated recently when I decided I wanted more money for doing the same job.
I am a private military contractor, and I have an issue with the depiction of war in videogames — or more specifically, the soldiers in those games. When I say soldier, let me be clear that I am talking about the Infantryman and the Special Forces operator, as I have next to no knowledge about anything outside of this relatively small percentile of service personnel. Unfortunately, the vast majority of games featuring the military focus on these frontline combat troops in “realistic” action. And that’s where we get problems.
Imagine a war game where you could only move at a slow walking pace...This war game has a prone button like Call of Duty, but your character takes 2-3 seconds to change position. Every time you press it, the animation gets slower because your character becomes more and more tired. Every mission is set in the same level. They each take 12 hours to complete. Sometimes, absolutely nothing happens. Other times, your lead guy gets blown up and you spend the next hour or so casevac’ing [ed note: casualty evacuating] him while under fire.
Other missions involve you being under fire for the entire patrol. You never see the enemy, just fire at the long grass in front of you as you crawl slowly to some cover. If you get up, you will be cut down within seconds, so this process takes hours. When you reach the enemy compound, if the enemy haven’t run away, dropped their weapons, and are pretending to be farmers, or if you haven’t called in enough ordnance to flatten Mexico, you will kill them in the most horrible way imaginable. That is your incentive.
Only a violent sociopath would play this game.
We do it for real, time and time again, with no other motivation but pay, leave, and the chance to brutalise whomever we deem the “enemy”...In military videogames, you tend to get “good guy” characters that are the rough and ready types. The situation may be chaotic, but they crack on with the task in hand to the best of their ability, never let anyone down, and may or may not die in a dramatic fashion. Good, wholesome stuff.
Then there are the Tier 1 types: a more modern iteration that exists thanks to games like Modern Warfare and Medal of Honour. These stone-cold killers speak in clipped monotones, uttering the odd cool one-liner to show that although they are still human, they will never be anything but utterly professional. Both kinds of soldiers end up wrapped up in something bigger than themselves, their missions are always of utmost importance, and every action they take is ultimately justified...Good enough for entertainment, but should war be sterilised and glorified in this way? Here is the crux of my beef with the military videogame genre: None of the stereotypes exist.
...Let me give you an example. I was in Iraq in 2007. Over a 3-month period, we saw some of the bloodiest fighting since the invasion, losing more than ten men and killing hundreds of insurgents. A reporter for a very well-known men’s lifestyle magazine visited us to learn about our experiences. About halfway through his escort, an officer from the military media centre tells him that he is not allowed to speak to us anymore. He has to use stories taken from a non-combat unit earlier that day. It turned out that the officer was appalled at the jovial nature of our recollections; the story in which a vehicle commander sawed two men in half with a mounted machinegun because they were on their phones “dicking” us made him balk in particular....This is one of countless ways the military carefully shapes the public opinion of the troops. It’s a shameless PR exercise....There’s a reason the new guy always gets put on point and nobody really cares when he gets blown up, that so many incidents of collateral damage go unreported, that failed missions are spun into something positive like gathering “valuable intel,” and why only roughly 20% of combat troops ever get PTSD – when if you think about it, it should affect everyone that ever sees combat. It’s because the vast majority of us are straight up sociopaths.
Heroes are a myth. Every incident I can recall in war that created a hero was either an accident or ended up with said hero in a body bag....Here is a real scenario that should be put into a game: A friend of mine came under fire inside a compound. He followed up the shooter, who disappeared into an escape tunnel. My friend followed standard procedure and threw a grenade into the tunnel entrance before following up. When entering the tunnel, he found only the bodies of a woman and a small child, whom the terrorist had used to cover his escape.When I spoke about it to my friend years later, he recalled how pissed he was at losing the insurgent, and how bad he felt afterwards about it. He’d had his professional pride tarnished. I asked him if he ever thought about the woman and her kid and he just looked at me blankly. He didn’t even remember they were there.
This is a serious issue that needs to be addressed in videogames. How would you feel if you accidentally killed an innocent child in a game? If the words “MISSION FAILED” appeared, but then disappeared after a few seconds, leaving you to continue as normal with no repercussions. Any normal person would feel guilty, but that’s my point. Combat troops are not normal people....War is the most horrific, sickening thing mankind can inflict upon itself, fought by and large by uneducated maniacs that have no other place in the world. Videogames have the attention of the youth and can educate as well as entertain. The real horrors need to be made very public to keep the next generation from turning out like us...The world needs to be made aware of my kind: the silent majority of fighters, those that do not care about politics, religion, ethics, or anything else other than war for war’s sake...One last thought: My psychologist estimated that roughly 80% of infantrymen have an undiagnosed violent personality disorder. more:
Friday, March 2, 2012
Human Medical Experimentation at Edgewood Arsenal
source: CNN via Cryptogon
The moment 18-year-old Army Pvt. Tim Josephs arrived at Edgewood Arsenal in 1968, he knew there was something different about the place.
“It just did not look like a military base, more like a hospital,” recalled Josephs, a Pittsburgh native. Josephs had volunteered for a two-month assignment at Edgewood, in Maryland, lured by three-day weekends closer to home.
“It was like a plum assignment,” Josephs said. “The idea was they would test new Army field jackets, clothing, weapons and things of that nature, but no mention of drugs or chemicals.”
But when he went to fill out paperwork the morning after his arrival, the base personnel were wearing white lab coats, and Josephs said he had second thoughts. An officer took him aside.
“He said, ‘You volunteered for this. You’re going to do it. If you don’t, you’re going to jail. You’re going to Vietnam either way — before or after,’” Josephs said recently.
From 1955 to 1975, military researchers at Edgewood were using not only animals but human subjects to test a witches’ brew of drugs and chemicals. They ranged from potentially lethal nerve gases like VX and sarin to incapacitating agents like BZ.
The military also tested tear gas, barbiturates, tranquilizers, narcotics and hallucinogens like LSD...Days before his Edgewood duty ended, in February 1968, Josephs was hospitalized for days with Parkinson's-like tremors, symptoms he said have followed him on and off throughout his adult life...In his mid-50s, Josephs was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, a progressive neurological condition that forced him to retire early. Medications cost $2,000 a month, which he was paying for out of pocket.
The moment 18-year-old Army Pvt. Tim Josephs arrived at Edgewood Arsenal in 1968, he knew there was something different about the place.
“It just did not look like a military base, more like a hospital,” recalled Josephs, a Pittsburgh native. Josephs had volunteered for a two-month assignment at Edgewood, in Maryland, lured by three-day weekends closer to home.
“It was like a plum assignment,” Josephs said. “The idea was they would test new Army field jackets, clothing, weapons and things of that nature, but no mention of drugs or chemicals.”
But when he went to fill out paperwork the morning after his arrival, the base personnel were wearing white lab coats, and Josephs said he had second thoughts. An officer took him aside.
“He said, ‘You volunteered for this. You’re going to do it. If you don’t, you’re going to jail. You’re going to Vietnam either way — before or after,’” Josephs said recently.
From 1955 to 1975, military researchers at Edgewood were using not only animals but human subjects to test a witches’ brew of drugs and chemicals. They ranged from potentially lethal nerve gases like VX and sarin to incapacitating agents like BZ.
The military also tested tear gas, barbiturates, tranquilizers, narcotics and hallucinogens like LSD...Days before his Edgewood duty ended, in February 1968, Josephs was hospitalized for days with Parkinson's-like tremors, symptoms he said have followed him on and off throughout his adult life...In his mid-50s, Josephs was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, a progressive neurological condition that forced him to retire early. Medications cost $2,000 a month, which he was paying for out of pocket.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Neuroscience of Psychic Phenomena: updated again 2/29/12
source: Reality Sandwich
Much of this information has been covered here already but it's nice to see common sense confirmed by academia for once. Of course, psychiatrists involved with the MK Ultra Project have been well aware of these occurrences for over half a century now but don't expect the documented history of their experiments to be published by the scientific establishment anytime soon. The following article needs some editing but it also publicizes academic research necessary for understanding the nature of military behavior modification programs. Illustrating this point is a quote from the neuroscientist, Diane Hennacy Powell, who was interviewed for the author's radio show: "Unfortunately, psychic research has never received adequate funding and the situation is even worse today in this economic climate. Some of the most compelling research was supported during the Cold War by various branches of US military intelligence, which felt that it could not afford to let the Russians become more advanced in this area. Some of this research was declassified in 1995 and there is still a wealth of information that is classified".
In this episode of Esoteric Voices, Diane Hennacy Powell talks about her research into the neuroscience of psychic phenomena. It started with her seeing a patient who started giving her a psychic reading that contained too much accurate information for her to ignore. She wondered how it was possible for people to know these types of things, and why there was a higher incidence of it occurring with people who are usually described as mentally ill.
One of the problems with researching psychics from a neuroscience perspective is that they are wary of having their brains scanned and risking exposure to radiation. What Powell did to overcome this was to look at already existing brain scans of patients who had higher incidents of psi experiences, which included people diagnosed as being bi-polor, having symptoms of ADD, or autism as well as people who have had head trauma, vivid dreams, or synesthesia.
Powell wrote a book called The ESP Enigma which reported her findings into the nature of consciousness. She found that psychic people tend be have more dominant right brains, and to that they have more activity in their limbic system, which is related to dreaming and emotional processing. She also found that DMT tends to activate the limbic system, and that it's present in our pineal gland or Third Eye, it's the active ingredient of ayahuasca, and that it's usually secreted during out-of-body or near-death experiences. more...
also related:
The ESP Enigma: The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena by Diane Hennacy Powell offers a 'science-based' look at psychic phenomena.
source: The Daily Telegraph of London, via Dianehennacypowell.com
In layman-friendly style, Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell, a practicing psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and contributor to the Institute of Noetic Sciences, posits that the world is in the middle of a paradigm shift in its understanding of consciousness...From that jumping-off point, Dr. Powell combs through decades of published studies, experiments, investigations by the CIA, anecdotal evidence of psychic experiences, accounts of prophetic dreams, work by famous psychics such as Edgar Cayce, and the conclusions of Carl Jung and Albert Einstein on consciousness and the illusion of time...Psychic phenomena appear to be real and a potential in everyone, Dr Powell concludes, and she places blame on Western culture’s left-brained dominance for its failure to function more intuitively and psychically...And this psychiatrist, who also trained at the Institute of Psychiatry in London and served on the faculty of Harvard Medical School before going into private practice, can hardly be labelled a New Age loon. As she puts it, “[T]urning a blind eye to psychic phenomena is no more an option than refusing to believe that spacecraft landed on the moon simply because we cannot explain the physics that made such a feat possible.”
Much of this information has been covered here already but it's nice to see common sense confirmed by academia for once. Of course, psychiatrists involved with the MK Ultra Project have been well aware of these occurrences for over half a century now but don't expect the documented history of their experiments to be published by the scientific establishment anytime soon. The following article needs some editing but it also publicizes academic research necessary for understanding the nature of military behavior modification programs. Illustrating this point is a quote from the neuroscientist, Diane Hennacy Powell, who was interviewed for the author's radio show: "Unfortunately, psychic research has never received adequate funding and the situation is even worse today in this economic climate. Some of the most compelling research was supported during the Cold War by various branches of US military intelligence, which felt that it could not afford to let the Russians become more advanced in this area. Some of this research was declassified in 1995 and there is still a wealth of information that is classified".
In this episode of Esoteric Voices, Diane Hennacy Powell talks about her research into the neuroscience of psychic phenomena. It started with her seeing a patient who started giving her a psychic reading that contained too much accurate information for her to ignore. She wondered how it was possible for people to know these types of things, and why there was a higher incidence of it occurring with people who are usually described as mentally ill.
One of the problems with researching psychics from a neuroscience perspective is that they are wary of having their brains scanned and risking exposure to radiation. What Powell did to overcome this was to look at already existing brain scans of patients who had higher incidents of psi experiences, which included people diagnosed as being bi-polor, having symptoms of ADD, or autism as well as people who have had head trauma, vivid dreams, or synesthesia.
Powell wrote a book called The ESP Enigma which reported her findings into the nature of consciousness. She found that psychic people tend be have more dominant right brains, and to that they have more activity in their limbic system, which is related to dreaming and emotional processing. She also found that DMT tends to activate the limbic system, and that it's present in our pineal gland or Third Eye, it's the active ingredient of ayahuasca, and that it's usually secreted during out-of-body or near-death experiences. more...
also related:
The ESP Enigma: The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena by Diane Hennacy Powell offers a 'science-based' look at psychic phenomena.
source: The Daily Telegraph of London, via Dianehennacypowell.com
In layman-friendly style, Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell, a practicing psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and contributor to the Institute of Noetic Sciences, posits that the world is in the middle of a paradigm shift in its understanding of consciousness...From that jumping-off point, Dr. Powell combs through decades of published studies, experiments, investigations by the CIA, anecdotal evidence of psychic experiences, accounts of prophetic dreams, work by famous psychics such as Edgar Cayce, and the conclusions of Carl Jung and Albert Einstein on consciousness and the illusion of time...Psychic phenomena appear to be real and a potential in everyone, Dr Powell concludes, and she places blame on Western culture’s left-brained dominance for its failure to function more intuitively and psychically...And this psychiatrist, who also trained at the Institute of Psychiatry in London and served on the faculty of Harvard Medical School before going into private practice, can hardly be labelled a New Age loon. As she puts it, “[T]urning a blind eye to psychic phenomena is no more an option than refusing to believe that spacecraft landed on the moon simply because we cannot explain the physics that made such a feat possible.”
Sunday, February 26, 2012
More Than Human? The Ethics of Biologically Enhancing Soldiers
By Patrick Lin, via The Atlantic
Our ability to "upgrade" the bodies of soldiers through drugs, implants, and exoskeletons may be upending the ethical norms of war as we've understood them.
If we can engineer a soldier who can resist torture, would it still be wrong to torture this person with the usual methods? Starvation and sleep deprivation won't affect a super-soldier who doesn't need to sleep or eat. Beatings and electric shocks won't break someone who can't feel pain or fear like we do. This isn't a comic-book story, but plausible scenarios based on actual military projects today....
As you might expect, there are serious moral and legal risks to consider on this path. Last week in the UK, The Royal Society released its report " Neuroscience, Conflict and Security." This timely report worried about risks posed by cognitive enhancements to military personnel, as well as whether new nonlethal tactics, such as directed energy weapons, could violate either the Biological or Chemical Weapons Conventions...what's needed is an upgrade to the basic human condition. We want our warfighters to be made stronger, more aware, more durable, more maneuverable in different environments, and so on. The technologies that enable these abilities fall in the realm of human enhancement, and they include neuroscience, biotechnology, nanotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence, and more.
While some of these innovations are external devices, such as exoskeletons that give the wearer super-strength, our technology devices are continually shrinking in size. Our mobile phones today have more computing power than the Apollo rockets that blasted to the moon. So there's good reason to think that these external enhancements someday can be small enough to be integrated with the human body, for an even greater military advantage.
Ethical and safety issues
Established standards in biomedical ethics-such as the Nuremberg Code, the Declaration of Helsinki, and others-govern the research stage of enhancements, that is, experimentation on human subjects. But "military necessity" or the exigencies of war can justify actions that are otherwise impermissible, such as a requirement to obtain voluntary consent of a patient. Under what conditions, then, could a warfighter be commanded (or refuse) a risky or unproven enhancement, such as a vaccine against a new biological weapon? Because some enhancements could be risky or pose long-term health dangers, such as addiction to "go pills", should military enhancements be reversible? What are the safety considerations related to more permanent enhancements, such as bionic parts or a neural implant?
Military-civilian issues
As history shows, we can expect the proliferation of every military technology we invent. The method of diffusion is different and more direct with enhancements, though: Most warfighters return to society as civilians (our veterans) and would carry back any permanent enhancements and addictions with them. The US has about 23 million veterans-or one out of every 10 adults-in addition to 3 million active and reserve personnel, so this is a significant segment of the population. Would these enhancements, such as a drug or an operation that subdues emotions, create problems for the veteran to assimilate to civilian life? Would they create problems for other civilians who may be at a competitive disadvantage to the enhanced veteran who, for instance, has bionic limbs and enhanced cognition?
In contrast, cognitive and physical enhancements aim to create a super-soldier from a biomedical direction, such as with modafinil and other drugs. For battle, we want our soft organic bodies to perform more like machines. Somewhere in between robotics and biomedical research, we might arrive at the perfect future warfighter: one that is part machine and part human, striking a formidable balance between technology and our frailties.
In changing human biology, we also may be changing the assumptions behind existing laws of war and even human ethics.
Our ability to "upgrade" the bodies of soldiers through drugs, implants, and exoskeletons may be upending the ethical norms of war as we've understood them.
If we can engineer a soldier who can resist torture, would it still be wrong to torture this person with the usual methods? Starvation and sleep deprivation won't affect a super-soldier who doesn't need to sleep or eat. Beatings and electric shocks won't break someone who can't feel pain or fear like we do. This isn't a comic-book story, but plausible scenarios based on actual military projects today....
As you might expect, there are serious moral and legal risks to consider on this path. Last week in the UK, The Royal Society released its report " Neuroscience, Conflict and Security." This timely report worried about risks posed by cognitive enhancements to military personnel, as well as whether new nonlethal tactics, such as directed energy weapons, could violate either the Biological or Chemical Weapons Conventions...what's needed is an upgrade to the basic human condition. We want our warfighters to be made stronger, more aware, more durable, more maneuverable in different environments, and so on. The technologies that enable these abilities fall in the realm of human enhancement, and they include neuroscience, biotechnology, nanotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence, and more.
While some of these innovations are external devices, such as exoskeletons that give the wearer super-strength, our technology devices are continually shrinking in size. Our mobile phones today have more computing power than the Apollo rockets that blasted to the moon. So there's good reason to think that these external enhancements someday can be small enough to be integrated with the human body, for an even greater military advantage.
Ethical and safety issues
Established standards in biomedical ethics-such as the Nuremberg Code, the Declaration of Helsinki, and others-govern the research stage of enhancements, that is, experimentation on human subjects. But "military necessity" or the exigencies of war can justify actions that are otherwise impermissible, such as a requirement to obtain voluntary consent of a patient. Under what conditions, then, could a warfighter be commanded (or refuse) a risky or unproven enhancement, such as a vaccine against a new biological weapon? Because some enhancements could be risky or pose long-term health dangers, such as addiction to "go pills", should military enhancements be reversible? What are the safety considerations related to more permanent enhancements, such as bionic parts or a neural implant?
Military-civilian issues
As history shows, we can expect the proliferation of every military technology we invent. The method of diffusion is different and more direct with enhancements, though: Most warfighters return to society as civilians (our veterans) and would carry back any permanent enhancements and addictions with them. The US has about 23 million veterans-or one out of every 10 adults-in addition to 3 million active and reserve personnel, so this is a significant segment of the population. Would these enhancements, such as a drug or an operation that subdues emotions, create problems for the veteran to assimilate to civilian life? Would they create problems for other civilians who may be at a competitive disadvantage to the enhanced veteran who, for instance, has bionic limbs and enhanced cognition?
In contrast, cognitive and physical enhancements aim to create a super-soldier from a biomedical direction, such as with modafinil and other drugs. For battle, we want our soft organic bodies to perform more like machines. Somewhere in between robotics and biomedical research, we might arrive at the perfect future warfighter: one that is part machine and part human, striking a formidable balance between technology and our frailties.
In changing human biology, we also may be changing the assumptions behind existing laws of war and even human ethics.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
US Miltary funds research into neurological processes involved with compromising core values
Given the disturbing history of military behavior management experiments, research into the neurological basis underlying the abandonment of core personal values will undoubtedly be applied in mass psychological warfare, particularly within the domain of the mainstream media. In light of widespread disapproval of the ballooning defense budget, militaristic propaganda of this variety has become necessary for convincing both the public and military service members that mass civilians casualties, reinforced by torture and the suspension of habeas corpus, are the only ways to ensure domestic security.
source:Science Daily, via Cryptogon
The Price of Your Soul: How the Brain Decides Whether to 'Sell Out'
ScienceDaily (Jan. 22, 2012) — A neuro-imaging study shows that personal values that people refuse to disavow, even when offered cash to do so, are processed differently in the brain than those values that are willingly sold.
Sacred values prompt greater activation of an area of the brain associated with rules-based, right-or-wrong thought processes, the study showed, as opposed to the regions linked to processing of costs-versus-benefits.
Berns headed a team that included economists and information scientists from Emory University, a psychologist from the New School for Social Research and anthropologists from the Institute Jean Nicod in Paris, France. The research was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.
"We've come up with a method to start answering scientific questions about how people make decisions involving sacred values, and that has major implications if you want to better understand what influences human behavior across countries and cultures," Berns says....Research participants who reported more active affiliations with organizations, such as churches, sports teams, musical groups and environmental clubs, had stronger brain activity in the same brain regions that correlated to sacred values. "Organized groups may instill values more strongly through the use of rules and social norms," Berns says. more...
source:Science Daily, via Cryptogon
The Price of Your Soul: How the Brain Decides Whether to 'Sell Out'
ScienceDaily (Jan. 22, 2012) — A neuro-imaging study shows that personal values that people refuse to disavow, even when offered cash to do so, are processed differently in the brain than those values that are willingly sold.
Sacred values prompt greater activation of an area of the brain associated with rules-based, right-or-wrong thought processes, the study showed, as opposed to the regions linked to processing of costs-versus-benefits.
Berns headed a team that included economists and information scientists from Emory University, a psychologist from the New School for Social Research and anthropologists from the Institute Jean Nicod in Paris, France. The research was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.
"We've come up with a method to start answering scientific questions about how people make decisions involving sacred values, and that has major implications if you want to better understand what influences human behavior across countries and cultures," Berns says....Research participants who reported more active affiliations with organizations, such as churches, sports teams, musical groups and environmental clubs, had stronger brain activity in the same brain regions that correlated to sacred values. "Organized groups may instill values more strongly through the use of rules and social norms," Berns says. more...
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