There are those who may feel I've been a little too hard on the Bush and Cheney. But, I promise that any flaming fudge bags they may have received definitely did
not come from me.
How can I say this? My commentary about the presidency of George W. Bush is mild compared to what awaits if Hillary Clinton is elected president. I was planning to change my party affiliation to independent after the primaries anyway, but I ramble...
•
Eric Blumrich says it better:
Let me make it clear: Anyone would make a better president than Bush. I'll even go so far as to say that (with the exception of Giuliani and Thompson) any of the republicans running for the highest office will make a better president than Bush. However- that's not really saying much, as a moldy cup of ramen noodles would make a better commander-in-chief than Bush has been.
Considering that the republican party is so much out of public favor that it is likely to show up on "The Surreal Life" as Bronson Pinchot's roomie, it's all but certain that the democrats will capture the white house. Further, with resignations and scandals heralding an all-out collapse of the republican congressional delegation, the democrats have a fair chance to gain a fillibuster-proof majority in both houses of congress.
The only thing that could stop this from happening, is if Hillary Clinton gets the democratic nomination.
Good old Eric—after all these years, we still have no points of disagreement.
•
It's a joke story. Right?Barry Bonds was indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice Thursday and could go to prison instead of the Hall of Fame for telling a federal grand jury he did not knowingly use performance-enhancing drugs.
It's not a joke story. In fact, to hear the TV network guys tell it Thursday and Friday, it's the biggest story of all time: a grown man playing a kid's game with a stunning record of hitting home runs is looking at up to 30 years in jail for lying under oath about taking steroids. Have we all just suffered profound brain death? Am I the only one who sees the infinite inanity of this incredible and absurd nonsense?
Has public discourse devolved to a point that it's a contest from one story to the next of how many invalid, inconsequential premises we can stack? This story doesn't belong in a court, and it doesn't belong as a matter of primary concern for Washington:
In Washington, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said: "The president is very disappointed to hear this. As this case is now in the criminal justice system, we will refrain from any further specific comments about it. But clearly this is a sad day for baseball."
The sad part is that there are people who are so unbelievably stupid that this is the most important business, the biggest issue, in their sad, little lives—and I'd cry my eyes out about it except that I'm laughing so hard when I think about how one would need a lifetime to nurture, cultivate and master the uneducated, dimwitted ignorance needed to think this is a matter requiring a second's thought or a single spoken word. Truly the drug war and antidrug message has been so oversold, it goes beyond extremism to life-and-death fanatacism.
How, then, should Bonds be penalized? If only we could torture him up to the point of death while subjecting him to hard manual labor and starvation, then nurse him back to health, while scourging him with a cat-o-nine tails, then execute him at day's end and resurrect him overnight to repeat the punishment and drive home the tragic horror of his sinful crime with each new day. But somehow, it's just not enough. Shouldn't anyone who can say the words "Bonds," "drug" or "steroid" be summarily executed by torture chamber? Well, why the fuck not...
...or perhaps we could nuke our own country over and over and over to purge the impurity from this virginal land, satiating the psychopathic authoritarians who so wholeheartedly believe this humliating and unnecessary episode has some point, and sets a worthy precedent. It makes me completely ashamed to be a member of the human race.
• THEN, I got THIS deplorable piece of shit in e-mail entitled "THE JOB - URINE TEST" with the comment someone made, "This makes so much sense!!!!"
(I sure would like to know who wrote this one! They deserve a HUGE pat on the back!)
I HAVE TO PASS A URINE TEST FOR MY JOB... SO I AGREE 100%
Like a lot of folks in this state, I have a job. I work, they pay me. I pay my taxes and the government distributes my taxes as it sees fit. In order to get that paycheck, I am required to pass a random urine test with which I have no problem. What I do have a problem with is the distribution of my taxes to people who don't have to pass a urine test.
Shouldn't one have to pass a urine test to get a welfare check because I have to pass one to earn it for them? Please understand, I have no problem with helping people get back on their feet. I do, on the other hand, have a problem with helping someone sitting on their ASS, doing drugs, while I work. . . .
Can you imagine how much money the state would save if people had to pass a urine test to get a public assistance check? Pass this along if you agree or simply delete if you don't. Hope you all will pass it along, though... Something has to change in this country--and soon!
How authoritarian and servile. Is this supposed to be funny? No, the uneducated author is serious, and points out what is wrong with the drug war. By calling it a "war," the law embedded the idea that civil liberties can be thrown out of the window, that there would be shooting, and the related killing, even of innocent bystanders, was legitimate and part of the cost of fighting The Last Ultimate Evil.© What's wrong with this logic is the same thing that's wrong with our system of criminal justice. People on juries want to inflict injustice on others because they themselves have suffered injustice. Issues, facts and evidence just don't matter. A "crime" was committed. Someone was arrested. Whether or not the defendant was the perpetrator is irrelevant. The matter is disposed of, and the juror is exonerated of blame, if the maximum penalty is assessed. The juror never considers how
he would feel if
he were a falsley accused defendant. He doesn't consider that an innocent person suffers and a guilty person escapes judgment, nor care. And, whether or not the issue is a proper one for adjudication is certainly
never a consideration.
All that matters is the opportunity to have the pleasure of arbitrarily hurting someone with the sanction of the law finally presented itself. Receiving pleasure from inflicting pain on another person is one of the
hallmarks of psychopathy.
__________
I have a confession. I've been trying to figure out a way to transition into this topic for almost three months, and this is a pretty good place for it. I read a great article about the mechanism of violence (in individuals) in the early 1970s. In late August, I went searching for it online, not expecting to find it. There is good news and bad news.
The good news is, unbelievably, I found the article:
New Clues To The Causes of Violence by Gene Bylinsky, originally published in
Fortune January, 1973. There was discussion in those days that if the medical community could understand people's tendency toward violence, perhaps it could be controlled, and crime and war would become things of the past.
The bad news is, I became so disillusioned and jaded reading it again after all these years, but especially by my search for it, I haven't had much urge to research and write since then. I made what, two posts here in the month of September? All this time I've thought about how silly it is to be blocked by such things, although the point is arguable. I felt sad and discouraged, because I was in my first year of college when it was published, and I believed that by this time we would learn how to stifle the impulse in some people to resort to violence, whether irrational, as part of the act of committing a crime (as in aggravated robbery) or as a means of settling a dispute (as in unnecesarily joining in or starting a war).
The article discusses different approaches to the study of the causes of violent behavior, like family history, behavioral, cultural and socioeconomic. Most of the article deals with the interesting idea violent behavior results from changes in brain enzymes and extraordinary architecture of certain brain structures. There is the implicit hint, then, that violence is the product of an internal mechanism some people can't control, a suggestion with which I agreed and still do, and that this mechanism could be brought under control—and that the world could suffer fewer violent crimes and maybe, eventually, no more war.
I felt discouraged by my search for this article because 34 years later, not only has the optimistic promise of less violence in the world not been realized, but when one goes looking for problem-solving information about violence, it is almost wholly absent. Instead, you find endless support groups and nonprofits begging for a handout. Even the groups' specialties give reason to be disheartened: help for victims of crime, families of murder victims, abused spouses, and even parents who have been abused by their children, if you can believe that, but nowhere did I find help for children who are abuse victims. There must be some. That is what I was looking for specifically, hoping it would provide some insight, and I couldn't find one. Similarly, I didn't go past my initial, cursory search for articles dealing with the subject of violence, its causes and treatment or even casual advice. Again, they must exist.
However, this was a hot topic 34 years ago. If the study had attracted the interest of enough of the right people, the most basic search criteria should have yielded more material than one could read in a lifetime. But, it just isn't there.
Understand how exciting this subject is:
Other novel approaches may emerge from studies that are under way. For example, development of a vastly improved brain-wave recording machine, now in progress at Tulane, would enable doctors to detect signals of trouble from deep in the brain without surgically implanting recording electrodes there. It may also become possible to treat damaged deep-nerve networks ultrasonically, thereby avoiding surgery.
It is clear that much more specific therapies than those in use today are needed for people who have brain damage. Vernon H. Mark and Frank R. Ervin observe in their recent book, Violence and the Brain: "Hoping to rehabilitate such a violent individual through psychotherapy or education, or to improve his character by sending him to jail or by giving him love and understanding–all these methods are irrelevant and will not work. It is the malfunction itself that must be dealt with, and only if this fact is recognized is there any chance of changing his behavior."
Remember, it's at this point in time the conservative agenda decreed punishment as the cure for all ailments, the drug war was born, domestic oil was declared depleted and that we would get it from OPEC, and we
must move from a manufacturing to a service economy. Today, you see how all that hasn't worked out.
The time it takes to study this article is time well spent. Here is a sample:
Until a few years ago, scientists knew comparatively little about the intricate inner mechanisms of the brain that initiate and control violence. These mechanisms lie deep in an inaccessible area called the limbic system, wrapped around the brain stem, as shown in the drawing on page 136. In the limbic system, the hypothalamus stands out as the single most important control center. Regulating many of man's primitive drives, its networks of nerve cells, or neurons, direct not only aggressive and violent behavior but also the states of sleep and wakefulness, as well as sexual and feeding behavior. The front part of the hypothalamus contains networks of nerve cells that promote calmness and tranquillity. The back part regulates aggression and rage.
Nearby lies the almond-shaped amygdala, which restrains the impulses from the hypothalamus. Another close-by structure, the septum, seems to inhibit messages from both the hypothalamus and the amygdala. The cerebellum, the large structure at the back of the brain, filters sensory impulses. The hippocampus, a short-term memory bank in front of the cerebellum, is importantly involved in ways that brain researchers do not yet adequately understand.
All these structures are functionally as well as anatomically interrelated. Electrical signals, arising in response to sensory or internal cues (e.g., sight or thought), speed along nerve pathways to activate or block the function of other nerve cells. Chemicals such as noradrenaline and dopamine, which are normally present in the brain and are known as neurotransmitters, apparently ferry these electrical signals across the tiny gaps between nerve cells, called synapses, to such control centers as the hypothalamus. At the same time, the neurons are constantly bathed in waves of background electrical activity. In still unknown ways, this background "music" apparently conveys information, too. [...]
Fortunately for the advance of knowledge about human aggression, the limbic systems of animals have recently been found to bear an amazing functional resemblance to that of man. So laboratory experiments with animals (notably monkeys, cats, and mice) underpin the still limited investigations of aggression systems in the human brain.
Using fine electrodes inserted into animal brains, researchers have induced a fascinating range of aggressive behavior. Cats that normally do not attack rats, for instance, will stalk and kill a rat when stimulated in a certain area of the hypothalamus. On the other hand, a cat stimulated in anothei nearby region of the hypothalamus may ignore an available rat and attack the experimenter instead. Destruction of the nucleus of the amygdala will turn a friendly cat into a raging beast that claws and bites without provocation, because the signals from the hypothalamus are no longer dampened by the amygdala. [...]
Further evidence of the cerebellum's role in violence comes from the work of A. J. Berman, a neurosurgeon at Mount Sinai Medical School and the Jewish Hospital in Brooklyn. He has successfully modified autistic and aggressive behavior in isolation-reared monkeys by removing presumably abnormal sections of cerebellum that deal with the reception of sensory signals. In one experiment, Berman performed similar surgery on two monkeys called Ding and Dong, who had fought viciously and continuously. The operation turned Ding into a submissive animal, while Dong remained as aggressive as ever. Berman attributes the difference to the location of the surgery. Some tissue was removed from the midline section of Ding's cerebellum while the excision on Dong was microscopically closer to the side of that brain structure.
Berman suggests that his finding may one day be relevant to treating humans. "Walk into the back wards of any mental institution," he says, "and you'll find children whose behavior is identical with that of Harlow's monkeys."
All these and many other experiments have led a number of scientists to conclude that people who behave overaggressively may have an abnormality in the mechanism by which they perceive pleasure. In animals reared in isolation, as in pathologically violent people, the impulses resulting from the stimulation of movement and skin sensations may not be reaching their normal destinations in the brain. The feeling of pleasure may thus be experienced only partially or not at all.
This may explain, among other things, why both institutionalized children and monkeys brought up in isolation generally rock back and forth for hours on end and respond violently if touched. Adults with damaged pleasure systems similarly may be trying to derive pleasure from the rough physical contact involved in violent acts; they may, in effect, be seeking an additional stimulus. Researchers have also found that electrical stimulation of pleasure centers in the brain eliminates feelings of rage, because the brain seems to contain rival nerve systems that suppress opposing emotions chemically and electrically.
This theme of individuals with exceptional or damaged brains receiving pleasure from violence or inflicting pain on others, or in other ways people without brain damage or extraordinary brain architecture experience pleasure recurs in the many articles I've read. You may find some of the articles linked
here of interest.
Most of them, however, simply describe aberrant behavior as a means of reaching a diagnosis. Think about the possibilities. If Bush and Cheney had electrodes implanted in their brains, when they start talking about starting a new war, we could just give them a little juice (zzzzzt!) and presto, no more war talk.
Bonds probably could have made it to the Baseball Hall of Fame without steroids, but he decided differently. Could he be an addictive personality? If so, the solution would be to derail the mechanism of that behavior. Much of the trouble he's in has happened because he wanted to hide prohibited or possibly illegal drug use. The assumption social condemnation and criminal indictment combined with long jail sentences are necessary things may be personally satisfying to people with abnormal brains who derive pleasure from others' suffering, but as a means of deterring the behavior in defendants or others they have proven through time to be not only totally ineffective, but very expensive to society.
Wouldn't something cheaper, faster and effective be better? Of course. But so long as the punishment remedy is so oversold as to be the only thing anyone can imagine, the cycle of crime and punishment remains unbroken—and we fight wars and build prisons forever, in spite of thousands of years of history showing wars and prisons don't do anything but cost lives and money.
When someone I know lands in jail or dies of substance misuse, I grieve over the tragedy of it, and the tragedy of so many people having so little or such poor education that we've known a long time how to change it, but lack the collective knowledge and will to do it. Because of this very thing, the United States will be over its head in debt for the rest of my life, and subject to economic collapse. Changing federal leaders won't help when the change is to just more of the same.
__________
Update: I got a trackback on this item from
this website, which didn't make much sense—but hey, I thought, "man, I have the next Nobel prize in literature in the bag." So, I went to the site and put a "thanks for the shout" message in their moderated comments. Then I found that the site was using some software called Blogdigger to find material. I guess this program also posts what it finds without operator intervention, because most of their articles have little or nothing to do with debt. That program must be a wonderful thing to see in action, despite the fact it doesn't work. Maybe it will pick this article up again, since I put in the link back to their site. So, the moderator must have seen my comment and realized the material wasn't appropriate, and he pulled the link and the trackback on this site. I wasn't aware such things happen! Oh well. Bylinksy's article has meant a great deal to me as time has gone by, Nobel notwithstanding.
