Police Brutality

School of Shock

Wow.

This is an article about a real school in MA that shocks kids with behavior disorders as part of their "treatment plan". The kids, some as young as nine years old, are hooked up to an array of electrodes 24/7 and shocked for any bad behavior.

To quote one part, it says "Marguerite Famolare brought her son Michael to the Rotenberg Center six years ago, after he attacked her so aggressively she had to call 911 and, in a separate incident, flipped over a kitchen table onto a tutor. Michael, now 19, suffers from mental retardation and severe autism. These days, when he comes home for a visit, Marguerite carries his shock activator in her purse. All she has to do, she says, is show it to him. "He'll automatically comply to whatever my signal command may be, whether it is 'Put on your seatbelt,' or 'Hand me that apple,' or 'Sit appropriately and eat your food,'" she says. "It's made him a human being, a civilized human being."

It sounds to me like it made him an obediant robot, complying to any command.

Lara (http://www.blogger.com/profile/11480095954577891278), sent this article to me in a comment on the blog below this.

Check it out by clicking the title of this blog, going to the comments section of my last blog, or copying and pasting this into your browswer window:

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/school_of_shock.html

More Tasers

What the fuck is going on with the cops?

Seriously.


Another article here, where cops tasered a fifteen year old autistic child.

http://www.comcast.net/news/national/index.jsp?cat=DOMESTIC&fn=/2007/09/20/768988.html&cvqh=itn_teen

Couch Surfing

Check this link out:

http://www.couchsurfing.com/index.html?index=1

Couch Surfing is an international network of people allowing you to stay on their couch for free when you travel. Look around the website and read the FAQ. It is a great idea.

Student Tasered at John Kerry Event

There are several different videos of this on the internet, some longer than others. I chose this one because of the relatively high quality of the video. However, this one does not show the student's entire rant on the microphone. If you want to see any of the other versions, just go search YouTube. There are a bunch of them. The guy does talk longer than he is supposed to, and is clearly riled up, but is that a reason to shoot him with a taser? I think this is another instance of police brutality. The sick part is that John Kerry is on the stage making jokes about it in the background, not even doing anything to solve the problem.

Does this remind you of anything? How about the Iranian UCLA student that was tasered multiple times for being in the university library without a student ID card?

Homophobia

Read this article immediately:

WASHINGTON -- Psychoanalytic theory holds that homophobia -- the fear, anxiety, anger, discomfort and aversion that some ostensibly heterosexual people hold for gay individuals -- is the result of repressed homosexual urges that the person is either unaware of or denies. A study appearing in the August 1996 issue of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association (APA), provides new empirical evidence that is consistent with that theory.

Researchers at the University of Georgia conducted an experiment involving 35 homophobic men and 29 nonhomophobic men as measured by the Index of Homophobia scale. All the participants selected for the study described themselves as exclusively heterosexual both in terms of sexual arousal and experience.

Each participant was exposed to sexually explicit erotic stimuli consisting of heterosexual, male homosexual and lesbian videotapes (but not necessarily in that order). Their degree of sexual arousal was measured by penile plethysmography, which precisely measures and records male tumescence.

Men in both groups were aroused by about the same degree by the video depicting heterosexual sexual behavior and by the video showing two women engaged in sexual behavior. The only significant difference in degree of arousal between the two groups occurred when they viewed the video depicting male homosexual sex: 'The homophobic men showed a significant increase in penile circumference to the male homosexual video, but the control [nonhomophobic] men did not.'

Broken down further, the measurements showed that while 66% of the nonhomophobic group showed no significant tumescence while watching the male homosexual video, only 20% of the homophobic men showed little or no evidence of arousal. Similarly, while 24% of the nonhomophobic men showed definite tumescence while watching the homosexual video, 54% of the homophobic men did.

When asked to give their own subjective assessment of the degree to which they were aroused by watching each of the three videos, men in both groups gave answers that tracked fairly closely with the results of the objective physiological measurement, with one exception: the homophobic men significantly underestimated their degree of arousal by the male homosexual video.

Do these findings mean, then, that homophobia in men is a reaction to repressed homosexual urges, as psychoanalysis theorizes? While their findings are consistent with that theory, the authors note that there is another, competing theoretical explanation: anxiety. According to this theory, viewing the male homosexual videotape may have caused negative emotions (such as anxiety) in the homophobic men, but not in the nonhomophobic men. As the authors note, 'anxiety has been shown to enhance arousal and erection,' and so it is also possible that 'a response to homosexual stimuli [in these men] is a function of the threat condition rather than sexual arousal per se. These competing notions can and should be evaluated by future research.'

Article: 'Is Homophobia Associated With Homosexual Arousal?' by Henry E. Adams, Ph.D., Lester W. Wright, Jr., Ph.D. and Bethany A. Lohr, University of Georgia, in Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol. 105, No. 3, pp 440-445

New Author

Sometime in the near future, I will be adding another author to this blog. My friend Alex, who has already regularly contributed to this blog behind the scenes, will soon become a fellow "author". I feel that this will add another dimension to the blog, another viewpoint, and will also assure that it will be updated more frequently. After all, two heads is better than one. When reading future posts, be sure to check out who published what.

Dark Days

I actually saw this documentary a few years ago and I just remembered it the other day.

It is called "Dark Days" and it is about a community of squatters living underground in an abandoned subway tunnel in New York.

This is a must-see. It has amazing cinematography and the soundtrack, by DJ Shadow, is awesome.

Check it out.


EDIT: Here is a link to the full documentary. My friend Alex found it.

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=7162991383052101447

Surprising Facts

These facts are from my biology professor.

20% of the worlds people who live in highest income countries consume 86% of worlds resources.

Four quarts of oil can cause an eight-acre oil slick.


And these are the most surprising ones:

If everyone in the US recycled just 1/10 of their newsprint, we would save the estimated equivalent of 25 million trees a year.

Americans throw away 25 MILLION plastic beverage bottles EVERY HOUR, even though recycling plastic saves twice as much energy as burning it in an incinerator.

Americans throw out enough paper each year to build a 12-foot high wall from New York City to L.A.

Into The Wild

I want to see this: