Hundreds of CIA Brainwash victims win claims
HUNDREDS of mentally ill patients who were subjected to barbaric CIA-funded brainwashing experiments by a Scottish doctor could be entitled to compensation following a landmark court ruling. Doctor Ewan Cameron, who became one of the world’s leading psychiatrists, developed techniques used by Nazi scientists to wipe out the existing personalities of people in his care.
Cameron, who graduated from Glasgow University, was recruited by the CIA during the cold war while working at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He carried out mind-control experiments using drugs such as LSD on hundreds of patients, but only 77 of them were awarded compensation.
Now a landmark ruling by a Federal Court judge in Montreal will allow more than 250 former patients, whose claims were rejected, to seek compensation. Gail Kastner, who underwent electroshock treatment at a Montreal psychiatric institute in 1953, and whose claim was rejected 10 years ago, successfully appealed the judgment.
Last week, Alan Stein, of Montreal law firm Stein and Stein, which represented Kastner, confirmed he was in the process of contacting former clients who could now renew their appeal. Kastner was a 19-year-old honours student suffering from mild depression when she first underwent “treatment” in 1953. On returning home she sucked her thumb, demanded to be fed from a bottle, talked in a baby voice and urinated on the floor.
She was ostracised by her affluent family, who were unable to cope with her changed state, and her marriage in 1955 quickly broke down due to her difficulties.
Full story at The Times Online
Derren Brown Interviews: The Guardian and The Times
The Guardian:
Derren Brown: ‘I’m being honest about my dishonesty’
I wasn’t sure what to expect from a book by Derren Brown, but it certainly wasn’t the great waves of self-loathing that roll out of its pages. Opening with the line, “I loathed myself again,” Confessions of a Conjuror expands into a merciless prosecution of the author’s shortcomings – “my own excruciating personality as a young magician,” the occasional “revolting burst of intellectual smugness”, and his “hateful” failure to sparkle socially in the presence of larger personalities. He recalls taking stock of himself at 30, and finding himself “full of nonsense, preposterous in many ways”. To this day, he admits that something as simple as mislaying a pen in his “monstrous London uber-pad” can trigger a whole new wave of furious self-hatred.
Brown is also, his book reveals, prone to a strange affliction of tics, rituals and other patterns of obsessive behaviour, which began in childhood with a compulsion to knock his knees together, and didn’t end there. He spent his teenage years sniffing loudly and violently, bound by a self-imposed injunction to avoid the top step of any flight of stairs, and recalls experiencing the irresistible urge, while learning to drive at 18, to “close my eyes for as long as I could get away with it”. At 39, the problem is now pretty much under control, confined to just the one tic – an occasional urge to nod his head repeatedly – although lately he has noticed that, when no one is looking, he likes to swipe a credit card down the crack in lift doors.
The author doesn’t sound at all like the coolly omnipotent, slightly cocky character we have grown used to. For a decade now, Brown has been entertaining audiences with a blend of hypnotism, magic, illusion, mind games and elaborately ambitious stunts. In 2003 he memorably appeared to play russian roulette on live TV, and last year caused even more consternation by appearing to guess the winning lottery numbers. Critics call him a fraud – an old-fashioned illusionist masquerading as a master of psychology, who passes off trickery as mind reading – but the televised stunts attract viewers in their millions, while his live stage shows sell out nationwide to fans thrilled by the audacity of his intrigue.
So I wonder which Brown I’m about to meet when I arrive at his central London apartment. The answer, it turns out, is neither of them.
The man who opens the door doesn’t even look like Derren Brown. He is much more casually scruffy and unremarkable than his stage persona – less ginger, less theatrical, less pointy-looking – with the innocuous sort of face that blends effortlessly into crowds. But there is no trace of the self-loathing oddball either; on the contrary, he seems like someone unusually at ease with himself, light-footed and comfortable, quick to laugh and instantly likable, to all appearances blithely untroubled by anything.
“I don’t play up to that guy off the TV,” he readily agrees, “because I wouldn’t particularly want to meet him in real life. That rather controlling sort of thing – I don’t think that’s a nice way of being with people, so I never for a second want to be that person. I think it’s important to be sort of nice.” He’s not very nice about himself, though, I say – not in his book, anyway. To my surprise, he looks taken aback.
(more…)
After 6 yrs, have a parrot again
Little Quaker, no name yet. Adorable: here he is nibbling Coopy’s lady.
EDIT: Great names, thank you. We have a winner: RT @baquetaUk How about Rasputin?
The function of love is to ease pain according to new brain research
Brain scans suggest many of the areas normally involved in pain response are also activated by amorous thoughts. Stanford University researchers gave 15 students mild doses of pain, while checking if they were distracted by gazing at photos of their beloved.
The study focused on people early in a romance, journal PLoS One reported, so the “drug of love” may wear off. The scientists who carried out the experiment used “functional magnetic resonance imaging” (fMRI) to measure activity in real-time in different parts of the brain.
Full details over at BBC News
FOX FAIL: The planet Jupiter confused for UFO
DISCOVER Blogs reports: “ I know a lot of the media do their best when it comes to reporting science and astronomical-related stories, but sometimes they seem to go way out of their way — or, more accurately, not go out of their way at all — to report nonsense.
Case in point: Fox News in New York City. Yesterday, there were UFO reports from all over the city. Not to keep you in suspense, but those UFOs were actually hundreds of balloons released on Broadway to celebrate a visit by Madrid officials. You can see more about this by my friend Ben Radford and at Science-Based Parenting.
Pay attention around 35 seconds in. That star she spends a lot of time talking about is the planet Jupiter.”
To see their full story along with further evidence of really awful reporting check out Bad Astronomy.
Councils urged to avoid tax breaks for Scientology
Communities Secretary Eric Pickles has urged councils, including two in London, not to give special tax breaks running into hundreds of thousands of pounds to the Church of Scientology.
Mr Pickles said he did not believe the majority of voters would want their councils to give favoured tax treatment to the organisation, whose celebrity members include actor Tom Cruise.
He said local authorities should take account of the rulings of the Charity Commission, which in 1999 rejected an application for registration as a charity after finding that Scientology was not a religion.
According to The Guardian, at least four authorities – the City of London, Westminster, Birmingham and Sunderland – have given rate or tax relief to the church in relation to buildings in their areas.
In a statement, Mr Pickles said: “Tolerance and freedom of expression are important British values, but this does not mean that the likes of the Church of Scientology deserve favoured tax treatment over and above other business premises.
“The Church of Scientology is not a registered charity, since the Charity Commission has ruled that it does not provide a public benefit. Nor are its premises a recognised place of worship.
“Councils may award charitable relief. They should take into consideration the Charity Commission’s rulings when weighing up whether to do so. I do not believe the majority of the public would want their own council to be giving special tax breaks to such a controversial organisation.”
A Church of Scientology spokesman told The Guardian: “Scientology is very popular with those who have visited our churches, met with Scientologists and observed or utilised our numerous community activities that effectively address drug abuse, illiteracy, declining moral values, human rights violations, criminality and more.
“Local council authorities, Government bodies in this country and many others, and the European Court of Human Rights have all recognised the religious nature of Scientology or the fact that Scientologists are actively helping those in their communities as a direct reflection of their religious beliefs.”
The Platypus Can Poison You 80 Different Ways
“The platypus is a bit like a fruitcake. Shove a bunch of leftover genes in there, mix it up and send it to your relatives see what kind of animal you get.
That’s kind of the approach evolution used when designing this odd creature’s venom; scientists have just determined that the venom contains over 80 different toxins in 13 different classes. The poison can kill small animals, and can leave humans in pain for weeks. The venom is delivered through a barb on the male’s foot–it’s thought that the fellas use the poison during mating season to show dominance.
At least three of the toxins are unique to the platypus and the rest are strikingly similar to proteins from a variety of animals including snakes, lizards, starfish, and sea anemones. It seems that some of these toxins have evolved separately in different animal lineages to perform the same function, a process called convergent evolution. The study’s lead author, Wesley Warren, told Nature News:
Warren says that this probably happens when genes that perform normal chores, such as blood coagulation, become duplicated independently in different lineages, where they evolve the capacity to carry out other jobs. Animals end up using the same genes as building blocks for venom because only a subset of the proteins the genes encode have the structural and functional properties to become venoms, he adds.
Learning more about how these toxins attack our system and induce inflammation, nerve damage, muscle contraction, and blood coagulation, could teach us how to design drugs with these effects (like coagulation for hemopheliacs), or their opposite (like new pain relievers).”
Read more at Discover Magazine
What Happens When Water is Dropped Onto Water-Repelling Carbon Nanotubes?
“Even though not all of you will understand what “superhydrophobic carbon nanotubes” actually are, everyone will appreciate this video of water droplets shot at varying frame-rate speeds of up to 3,500fps. Except for Martians, perhaps.
Several water droplets were filmed in super slo-mo, as they dropped onto a “superhydrophobic” (massively water-repelling) arrangement of carbon nanotube molecules, which as you know are used in all sorts of materials, including nanotechnology. The water droplets were released at different impact velocities, showing how they react to the surfaces—either by splitting, bouncing, rolling about or even merging together in a big ol’ lovefest of H2O.”
Via Gizmodo (Thanks Julie H)
Household junk Recycled into Portrait Masterpieces
“For the last decade, Zac Freeman has been saving pieces of household junk that would one day become a part of his masterfully intriguing art collection. He wanted to give his two dimensional portraits three dimensional value by using glue to meld everything from bottle caps, nails and old keyboard pieces onto a board to create faces that can only be seen from a distance. Zac has shown his work in exhibitions across the country.”
See more at Home Design (Thanks Christopher C)
