True Virtual Torture II

Now, the Guardian Unlimited site has put up an article about out-of-body experiences, but with an upbeat interpretation, perhaps befitting the somewhat more liberal Guardian:

Scientists develop technique to induce out-of-body experiences

· Breakthrough could be used in remote surgery
· Virtual reality games may also be improved

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But, let not these happier, humanistic visions conjured by the Guardian for this new experimental technology deter us from our main objective, that of giving our very own, beleaguered Pentagon, CIA and [redacted] a new lease on [redacted] for the War on Terrorism.

Since George W. Bush was caught with his pants down on 9/11, the first thought that evidently came to his mind was "how can we torture these bastards". Now, this may not be literally true, but it's quite plausible considering Bush's Ming the Merciless role vis-a-vis the Texas death row inmates, some 131 of them, who perished on his watch. In one case, Bush parroted a condemned woman's pleas to live with derision. [Note the article linked to was written in 25 Oct 2000, and ends with the following prescient paragraph:

"Such confidence in the face of the evidence borders on the deranged. Three decades ago, a president [Johnson] refused to change course, and it cost thousands of American lives. In two weeks, the nation may elect a president [Bush] with a similar hubris. If Bush will not change course on the death penalty, there is no telling what he will not change course on if elected president."

Bush has done little to refute these notions, which were simply based on a common-sense reading of his character. Perhaps it's unfashionable to draw such conclusions (or listen to them), but this modest prediction certainly spades Bush at the roots.]

Bush, was caught with his pants down a month earlier, when it was disclosed that on 09 Aug 2001 he essentially tabled a PDB (Presidential Daily Briefing) titled Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the U.S, and then covered up its existence, then its title, then its content until 2004, based on an impaired notion of the public's right to know. But, this PDB was merely one of a many-months-long period of ignoring warnings, the first having been delivered on 24 Jan 2001 by to his terrorism tsar du jour, Richard Clarke.

One gets the impression that this August pants-down moment was largely motivated by the super-cool strategy that the Bush 43rds had to erase the lingering affection over half of the electorate still held for President Clinton, as evidenced by Gore's popular victory in 2000. This strategy was, simply ignore or reverse anything his antecedent had uncovered or stood for, paying attention to absolutely nothing but the baldly political gains to be had from doing so.

Now, given the President's desire to thrash the truth--or life--out of anyone who might pass for a "terrorist" in the eyes of admiring citizens scared to death by the prospect of further attacks, we can justifiably wonder how the Bush administration went about stirring up enthusiasm for these heretofore unsportsmanlike notions. I am not, of course, privy to the "Decider's" decision-making paraphernalia, but I have found an article that seems to show that The New York Times had some part in this. It was published on 05 Nov 2001 and was titled Torture Seeps Into Discussion By News Media, by Jim Rutenberg. [The link points to my saved Times Select copy, so I'm not sure it will be available on-line without a subscription. Happily, library copies of the Times are not subject to this policy of imprisoning information.]

The gist of this article/op-ed piece is that: Wow, all the sudden, everybody in the news media was, at the start of November 2001, discussing the possibility of using torture, very much in the manner described in Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent, or at least it seemed so to me at the time. Now, even though the mass media often seem to be a craven crowd of copy-cat cowards, it seems just a bit strange that Newsweek, CNN, Fox, the Wall Street Journal, and others, were all consumed with having a "serious debate" about a wholesale abandonment of the rule of law.

Now, you could argue that everybody was talking torture back then and that this justified an article, or even made it imperative to write about, in the interest of informing the readership. Yes, but. The article is little more than a group of sound-bites from people standing on one side or the other of the "torture issue". For instance, the following statement is attributed to Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter ("considered a liberal") and couched in the following way:

''In this autumn of anger,'' he wrote, ''even a liberal can find his thoughts turning to . . . torture.'' He added that he was not necessarily advocating the use of ''cattle prods or rubber hoses'' on men detained in the investigation into the terrorist attacks. Only, ''something to jump-start the stalled investigation of the greatest crime in American history.''

It is odd, because the whole discussion Alter is having with himself makes no specific reference to any man or men who are not giving information. That is, it seems entirely hypothetic. How is this "news"? In my opinion, it's not news at all. Instead, it, and the rest of the article, is a rhetorical slight-of-hand that describes nothing (no real thing), while at the same time making torture the subject of attention. That is, it is simply an example of "talking up" an idea, which functions to desensitize the reader, making it easier to propose the same or more drastic departures from traditional practice later on.

I believe that this sort of thing is employed all the time by news outlets that are large and respected enough to have a profound effect on the events of the day. It's not exactly propaganda, for no agenda is laid out explicitly and we're not told which "side" of the issue to take. However, bringing up the prospect of "serious doubts" by "respected journalists" about a taboo and illegal activity (torture) without some countervailing and weighty opinion is irresponsible, for the breezy tone seems to diminish the perils of altering the status quo.

This is illustrated later in the article by the following passage:

Mr. Alter said he was surprised that his column did not provoke a significant flood of e-mail messages or letters. And perhaps even more surprising, he said, was that he had been approached by ''people who might be described as being on the left whispering, 'I agree with you.' ''

So here we have the issue settled by an self-selected group of lefties, a kind of Object Lesson that implies that we readers, lefties by dint of reading the Times, shouldn't be embarrassed about our secret support of torture because others have already signed off on it, albeit in a whisper.

Surely, editors at the Times should resist the pressure or temptation to publish such subversive rubbish, and tighten up their journalistic standards when writing about such nebulous subjects. The importance of doing so is clear: The Bush Administration took the lack of a widespread outcry at articles such as these as an implicit go-ahead to pursue the matter to their liking.

Perhaps the country would have been better served by journalists wondering less about why the zeitgeist suddenly swirled around torture, and instead followed the scent back to the source(s) in the White House--and did some old-fashioned reporting to expose the calumnies being perpetrated there in 2001.

True Virtual Torture I

Everybody's favorite quasi-liberal newspaper of record, The New York Times, featured a fascinating article that the Pentagon must be working on right now, or should be, as this is a marvelous way for them to snatch a badly-needed bit of credibility from the jaws of incredulity.

Essentially, researchers have finally tackled the pressing (or at least metaphysically pressing) issue of the "out-of-body experience". You know, that feeling some have whilst in labor, of looking down from the far corner of the labor room ceiling at herself and her significant other panting away at Lamaze breathing, or perhaps under the baleful but entertaining influence of nitrous oxide, turning a painful extraction into a Head Trip of the Forth Kind. Well, it turns out that it wasn't just your fevered imagination but, no, it doesn't mean that your virtual eye was actually floating just below the drop ceiling, either.

Your ordinary, standard-issue human brain (without special psychic or other guru-level certification) manages the altogether neat trick of fooling it's host into thinking that it is not simply a few pounds of pudding contemplating the universe from within a vat affectionately called "the skull". Instead, the illusion that usually pertains is that we inhabit a physically contiguous meat-robot, to whom we are forever bound in a love-hate relationship of such familiarity that we address it on a first-name basis as "my body".

However, this cozy relationship can be disturbed by various means, either accidental, or now, experimentally. When the various cues from body and mind don't add up in the expected way--bam!--there you are, looking at your usual body from the ceiling again
...until--blat!--you're inside your usual body, as usual. This is alternatively described as entertaining or terrifying, depending on whom you ask.

The problem with (non-experimental) out-of-body experiences was they are rather all-to-often burdened and obscured by occult interpretations, which often form in the minds of blokes both impressionable and blighted with the typical non-education that most people seem to labor under now-a-days.

The fact that such eerie stuff is now experimental eerie stuff is a Good Thing because it takes some wind out some of the crazy-making interpretations of out-of-body experiences, which will presumably remove OOBE from the realm of the unverifiable and personal and will eventually place it in the realm of treatable conditions.

I just hope that people will be allowed to savor some of these experiential distortions anyway, if they choose. But, given the moral outrage generated by huffing and puffing idiots about LSD, mescaline and peyote, to the detriment of research into their actions, a better understanding of brain function, and possibly more humane ends for the terminally ill, out-of-body experiences are possibly headed for a last stand of their own, and on their own last virtual legs, too.

But not before out-of-body experiences experience a last hurrah due to the forward-looking researchers at the Pentagon. If they are not at it already, they should be, even if they have to get the idea from this heretofore unnoticed blog. (I can offer the Pentagon a reassurance right off the bat: We strive here to be As Straight as Time's Arrow, so, No need to ask...). In the spirit of the cutting-edge economic approach that did in John Poindexter in Aug 2003, rather unfairly, I think (which I'll elaborate at some later date) this newest psycho-physiological research could evolutionise the brutish business of torture right the hell out of the namby-pamby laps of those ethically-challenged philosophes in Geneva, who purport to hold some sway over the manly doings of the U.S. Government in [redacted] ... all buried as deeply as possible in [redacted] levels of National Security [redacted].

Now, it's interesting that one researcher described in the article, Dr. Olaf Blanke, is a neuroscientist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland. Not Geneva, but close enough, and Blanke is a pleasantly auto-redactant name... He is described as "stroking" people on the back with a "stick". This sounds innocent enough, until you recall that in Singapore, strokes are the units of caning, their controversial way of altering behavior by scarring the buttocks. Although the efficacy of caning is unknown, it doubtless hurts. But isn't that the whole point. Huh?

Hmm. Sounds as it this might have some application in the secret [redacted].

From the article:

"A separate set of experiments was carried out by Henrik Ehrsson, an assistant professor of neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm."

"Last year, when Dr. Ehrsson was “a bored medical student at University College London,” he wondered, he said, “what would happen if you ‘took’ your eyes and moved them to a different part of a room.”

Now, this fellow seem ripe for a career in, or perhaps is already in the employ of [redacted], because the CIA, at least by reputation, is capable of moving eyes, or other arbitrary pairs of spherical objects that you so quaintly thought had been "part of your body" just moments ago, and, yes, move them across the room, sometimes a room the size of a warehouse in a remote location. The only problem is that sometimes it proves rather more difficult to move them "back to where they belong".

The article continues:

"Then Dr. Ehrsson grabbed a hammer. While people were experiencing the illusion, he pretended to smash the virtual body by waving the hammer just below the cameras. Immediately, the subjects registered a threat response as measured by sensors on their skin. They sweated, and their pulses raced. They also reacted emotionally, as if they were watching themselves get hurt."

Now we are moving very close to a full, but still virtual, disclosure that this is the "New Torture" everybody has been praying for so fervently within the Bush Irreality. [A footnote: The fact that Dr. Ehrrson uses a hammer as his weapon of choice is easily explained by his being a Swede; it's a simple case of Thor-atavism, with Thor being, of course, the no-nonsense Norse god of Thunder, the original hammer-thrower. Thor, however must have been a bit dim, like his namesake, Tom The Hammer DeLay, as he only ended up hanging his name on Thursday. Freya, on the other hand must have been more ... persuasive, rating Friday, with TGIF (Thank Gods Its Freya), being one of the most powerful mimes of the post-modern era...]

Anyhow, all of this suggests that the operant phrase in the Pentagon is, or shortly shall be, "True Virtual Torture". More later.