WOMEN, SEXISM & SOCIETY: From Sirens to Sluts, Angels to She-Devils...

“The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says: "It's a girl.” -Shirley Chisholm

“SEX game gone wrong,” “sex game gone awry,” “sex-mad flatmate,” “sex-crazed killer.”

That’s from just the first three minutes of the ABC News special on Amanda Knox last week, a veritable drumbeat of sexual shaming that leaves no doubt about what elevated a college student accused of murder into an object of international fascination, titillation and scorn.

It wasn’t the crime itself. It was the supposed conspiracy of her libido, cast as proof that she was out of control, up to no good, lost, wicked, dangerous. A girl this intent on randy fun was a girl who couldn’t be trusted and got what was coming to her, even if it was prison and even if there was plenty of reason — as the eventual reversal of her initial conviction made clear — to believe that she might not belong there.

“Knox knew, it seemed, no boundaries, leaving a vibrator in a transparent washbag and enjoying one-night stands,” wrote Tobias Jones in a 2011 article in the British newspaper The Observer. One-night stands? How could she?!? Of course if a guy has one of those, it’s a triumph: all the pleasure, none of the commitment. And boys, after all, will be boys.

We’ll never know precisely what happened on the night in Perugia, Italy, in 2007 when Meredith Kercher, 21, was killed. Knox, her housemate, was found guilty, then acquitted and will soon, despite the profoundly flawed case against her, face another trial. The Italian judicial system works about as smoothly as the Italian government.

But we know this: the double standard concerning men’s versus women’s sexuality not only survives but thrives, manifest in the enduring notoriety of “Foxy Knoxy,” whose memoir was published on the same day last week that the ABC News special aired. Keep the rest of her story the same but make her a man in the midst of erotic escapades abroad. Are we still gawking? Is ABC trumpeting Diane Sawyer’s exclusive sit-down with the lascivious pilgrim?

Similar questions can be asked about Jodi Arias, 32, whose murder trial in Arizona was winding down last week. The Arias case hasn’t made quite the leap from the tabloids into the mainstream that Knox’s did. But HLN, the cable network on which Nancy Grace fulminates, has enjoyed a ratings bonanza with its saturation coverage of the courtroom proceedings.

Arias has admitted to stabbing, shooting and slashing the throat of a former lover: an act of self-defense, she unpersuasively claims. And while his death was certainly grisly enough to explain a baseline of media interest, the amount of attention it has received stems from the courtroom juxtaposition of the defendant, outfitted in nerdy eyeglasses and a frumpy hairstyle, and evidence of what a steamy, pliable playmate she was. It stems from pictures of her genitalia that she let her lover take, audiotapes of the phone sex that the two of them had — and that she recorded. It stems from the shock and censure of such potent female desire.

Knox and Arias aren’t just women accused of murder. They’re minxes accused of murder, sitting in their courtroom seats with scarlet letters emblazoned on their chests, no jury needed to pronounce them guilty of wantonness at the very least. For men, lust is a tripwire. For women, it’s a noose.

I’ve heard quite a bit lately about David Petraeus’s road to redemption. I’ve heard less about Paula Broadwell’s. Yes, he’s the more public figure, but the disparity also reflects the way their affair was often portrayed in the first place. He strayed; she preyed. He was weak; she was wily. He was the fly, she the spider.

Let’s bring a few other recent news stories into this. Let’s indulge in a few hypotheticals.

WHAT if it had been Antonia Weiner who took to Twitter and there had been a different architecture to the image she tweeted? Would she be able even to entertain the idea of a political comeback? And would the spouse standing dutifully by her be seen as a brave and magnanimous stalwart, the way Huma Abedin is viewed in some quarters, or dismissed by one and all as a pitiable pushover?

Had a Southern governor named Marcia Sanford been entangled with a Latin lover when reputedly hiking the Appalachian Trail, would she today be her party’s nominee for an open Congressional seat? We know the answer, and we know that Wilhelmina Clinton and Newtina Gingrich wouldn’t have rebounded from their infidelities as robustly as Bill and Newt did.

Men get passes, women get reputations, and real, lasting humiliation travels only one way. The size and scope of that mortification, despite many decades of happy talk about dawning gender equality, are suggested by recent news stories of one teenage girl in California and another in Nova Scotia who hanged themselves after tales or cellphone pictures of their sexual violation circulated among peers. It’s impossible not to wonder if shame drove them to suicide, and it’s impossible not to ask what sort of world allows the victims of such assaults to feel more irredeemably branded — more eternally damned — than their accused assailants by all appearances do.

I’ll tell you what sort: a world in which there’s a cornucopia of synonyms for whore and slut and no comparably pejorative vocabulary for promiscuous or sexually rapacious men. A world in which Knox’s vibrator and the lingerie she was said to have bought in a Perugia store were presented not just as newsworthy but as germane to the charge of murder against her: referendums on her character, glimmers of her depravity, clues to precisely how a good girl went bad. A world in which her erotic appetite made her a “man eater,” as the Italian press wrote and as the rest of the world more or less parroted. A world in which her tally, scribbled on a sheet of paper in her prison cell, of seven sexual partners in all of her life was seen as sensational. A similar count for a guy in his early 20s would provoke not derision but disagreement: swordsman or slacker?

When we chart and lament the persistence of sexism in society, we look to the United States Congress, where women are still woefully underrepresented. We look to corporate boardrooms, where the glass ceiling hasn’t really shattered. But we needn’t look any further than how perversely censorious of women’s sex lives we remain, and how short the path from siren to slut and from angel to she-devil can be.

-Frank Bruni (Sexism and the Single Murderess, NYT, 5.4.2013. Image: Ben Wiseman,2013).

SOCIETY: Are We Becoming More Psychopathic? Yes...

"Are you sure you wouldn't like to stay just a little while longer? Just for talk?" -Norman Bates, Psycho, 1960.
 
"When you look around you at modern-day society, do you think, in general, that we're becoming more psychopathic?"

Robert Hare, the eminent criminal psychologist and creator of the widely used Psychopathy Checklist paused before answering. "I think, in general, yes, society is becoming more psychopathic," he said. "I mean, there's stuff going on nowadays that we wouldn't have seen 20, even 10 years ago. Kids are becoming anesthetized to normal sexual behavior by early exposure to pornography on the Internet. Rent-a-friend sites are getting more popular on the Web, because folks are either too busy or too techy to make real ones. ... The recent hike in female criminality is particularly revealing. And don't even get me started on Wall Street."

He's got a point. In Japan in 2011, a 17-year-old boy parted with one of his own kidneys so he could go out and buy an iPad. In China, following an incident in which a 2-year-old baby was left stranded in the middle of a marketplace and run over, not once but twice, as passersby went casually about their business, an appalled electorate has petitioned the government to pass a good-Samaritan law to prevent such a thing from happening again.

And the new millennium has seemingly ushered in a wave of corporate criminality like no other. Investment scams, conflicts of interest, lapses of judgment, and those evergreen entrepreneurial party tricks of good old fraud and embezzlement are now utterly unprecedented in magnitude. Who's to blame? In an issue of the Journal of Business Ethics, Clive R. Boddy, a former professor at the Nottingham Business School, contends that it's psychopaths, pure and simple, who are at the root of all the trouble.

The law itself has gotten in on the act. At the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping trial, in Salt Lake City, the attorney representing Brian David Mitchell—the homeless street preacher and self-proclaimed prophet who abducted, raped, and kept the 14-year-old Elizabeth captive for nine months (according to Smart's testimony, he raped her pretty much every day over that period)—urged the sentencing judge to go easy on his client, on the grounds that "Ms. Smart overcame it. Survived it. Triumphed over it." When the lawyers start whipping up that kind of tune, the dance could wind up anywhere.

Of course, it's not just the lawyers. In a recent study by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, in London, 120 convicted street robbers were asked why they did it. The answers were revealing. Kicks. Spur-of-the-moment impulses. Status. And financial gain. In that order. Exactly the kind of casual, callous behavior patterns one often sees in psychopaths.

In fact, in a survey that has so far tested 14,000 volunteers, Sara Konrath and her team at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research has found that college students' self-reported empathy levels (as measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, a standardized questionnaire containing such items as "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me" and "I try to look at everybody's side of a disagreement before I make a decision") have been in steady decline over the past three decades—since the inauguration of the scale, in fact, back in 1979. A particularly pronounced slump has been observed over the past 10 years. "College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago," Konrath reports.

More worrisome still, according to Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, is that, during this same period, students' self-reported narcissism levels have shot through the roof. "Many people see the current group of college students, sometimes called 'Generation Me,' " Konrath continues, "as one of the most self-centered, narcissistic, competitive, confident, and individualistic in recent history."

Precisely why this downturn in social values has come about is not entirely clear. A complex concatenation of environment, role models, and education is, as usual, under suspicion. But the beginnings of an even more fundamental answer may lie in a study conducted by Jeffrey Zacks and his team at the Dynamic Cognition Laboratory, at Washington University in St. Louis. With the aid of fMRI, Zacks and his co-authors peered deep inside the brains of volunteers as they read stories. What they found provided an intriguing insight into the way our brain constructs our sense of self. Changes in characters' locations (e.g., "went out of the house into the street") were associated with increased activity in regions of the temporal lobes involved in spatial orientation and perception, while changes in the objects that a character interacted with (e.g., "picked up a pencil") produced a similar increase in a region of the frontal lobes known to be important for controlling grasping motions. Most important, however, changes in a character's goal elicited increased activation in areas of the prefrontal cortex, damage to which results in impaired knowledge of the order and structure of planned, intentional action.

Imagining, it would seem, really does make it so. Whenever we read a story, our level of engagement is such that we "mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative," according to one of the researchers, Nicole Speer. Our brains then interweave these newly encountered situations with knowledge and experience gleaned from our own lives to create an organic mosaic of dynamic mental syntheses.

Reading a book carves brand-new neural pathways into the ancient cortical bedrock of our brains. It transforms the way we see the world—makes us, as Nicholas Carr puts it in his recent essay, "The Dreams of Readers," "more alert to the inner lives of others." We become vampires without being bitten—in other words, more empathic. Books make us see in a way that casual immersion in the Internet, and the quicksilver virtual world it offers, doesn't.

Which is worrisome, to say the least, given the current slump in reading habits. According to a 2011 survey conducted by the British charity the National Literacy Trust, one in three children between the ages of 11 and 16 do not own a book, compared with one in 10 in 2005. That equates, in today's England, to a total of around four million. Almost a fifth of the 18,000 children polled said they had never received a book as a present. And 12 percent said they had never been to a bookshop.

But if society really is becoming more psychopathic, it's not all doom and gloom. In the right context, certain psychopathic characteristics can actually be very constructive. A neurosurgeon I spoke with (who rated high on the psychopathic spectrum) described the mind-set he enters before taking on a difficult operation as "an intoxication that sharpens rather than dulls the senses." In fact, in any kind of crisis, the most effective individuals are often those who stay calm—who are able to respond to the exigencies of the moment while at the same time maintaining the requisite degree of detachment.  What I'm planning is a psychopath makeover, to find out firsthand, for better and for worse, what it's like to see the world through devil-may-care eyes. And there's nothing like a bit of competition.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (or TMS) was developed by Anthony Barker and his colleagues at the University of Sheffield in 1985. The inaugural application of TMS by Barker and his team comprised an elementary demonstration of the conduction of nerve impulses from the motor cortex to the spinal cord by stimulating simple muscle contractions. Nowadays it's a different story—and TMS has widespread practical uses, in both diagnostic and therapeutic capacities, across a variety of neurological and psychiatric conditions, from depression and migraine to strokes and Parkinson's disease.

The basic premise of TMS is that the brain operates using electrical signals, and that, as with any such system, it's possible to modify the way it works by altering its electrical environment. Standard equipment consists of a powerful electromagnet, placed on the scalp, that generates steady magnetic-field pulses at specific frequencies, and a plastic-enclosed coil to focus those magnetic pulses down through the surface of the skull onto discrete brain regions, thus stimulating the underlying cortex.

Now, one of the things that we know about psychopaths is that the light switches of their brains aren't wired up in quite the same way as the rest of ours are—and that one area particularly affected is the amygdala, a peanut-size structure located right at the center of the circuit board. The amygdala is the brain's emotion-control tower. It polices our emotional airspace and is responsible for the way we feel about things. But in psychopaths, a section of this airspace, the part that corresponds to fear, is empty.

In the light-switch analogy, TMS may be thought of as a dimmer switch. As we process information, our brains generate small electrical signals. These signals not only pass through our nerves to work our muscles but also meander deep within our brains as ephemeral electrical data shoals, creating our thoughts, memories, and feelings. TMS can alter the strength of those signals. By passing an electromagnetic current through precisely targeted areas of the cortex, we can turn the signals either up or down.

Turn down the signals to the amygdala, of course, and you're well on the way to giving someone a psychopath makeover. Indeed, Liane Young and her team in Boston have since kicked things up a notch and demonstrated that applying TMS to the right temporoparietal junction—a neural ZIP code within that neighborhood—has significant effects not just on lying ability but also on moral-reasoning ability: in particular, ascribing intentionality to others' actions.""

Credits: -Kevin Dutton (Excerpt: "Psychopathy's Double Edge," The Chronicle Review, 10/22/2012. Image: Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, "Psycho," directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1960).

History's Hangover: King Alcohol & The Prime Minister...

"For centuries, our ancestors unleashed the dogs of war under the influence of a fog of booze

The conspiracy theorists were right all along – well, nearly. There was a single entity behind the course of Western history, a single force which has controlled the people and influenced the leaders and decision-makers for the past 12,000 years. This entity wasn’t a mysterious secret group – no Illuminati, no Knights Templar, and not even David Icke’s lizards get a look in.

It was alcohol.

Before the 19th century and the beginnings of a reliable and clean water supply, the Western world made its water safe by turning it into alcoholic drinks. The addition of ethyl alcohol to water kills many of the pathogens and thus, through the brewing and vintner industries, a clean and reliable source of liquid refreshment could be obtained.

Beer was almost certainly a staple of man’s diet before the arrival of bread, being produced for at least the last 12,000 years. It is usually noted that the beer or wine drunk on a day-to-day basis was generally much weaker than the beer or wine we drink today, although recipes exist for stronger ales. These have been recreated and found to have the strength of modern wine. This strong beer was not drunk on a day-to-day basis, primarily due to economic factors – it takes twice as much grain to produce the same amount of the stronger beer.

However, the fact that the daily liquid diet contained a regular supply of beer or wine does suggest that, before the 19th century, Western society spent much of its time in an alcoholic haze.

What effect would this have had on the development of that society? In particular, how could this affect the decision-making abilities of its leaders? After all, the economic constraints on producing stronger brews would not have applied to the wealthy and powerful. Why would a nobleman, king or emperor drink the same beer as the local peasants? He would certainly have been more likely to drink the higher quality, higher alcohol versions.

It’s interesting to note that China, along with other regions of the Far East, made their water safe by boiling it and making tea. Could the differences in the development of Chinese as opposed to Western European culture be due to the lack of alcohol in the diet of the Chinese? China, after all, has remained politically unified since 221BC. Contrast this to the constant state of political flux encountered in Western Europe over the last 2,200 years.

Whilst alcohol was discovered in China, and a certain, limited amount of drinking did take place, the Chinese did not actually have a choice in the matter. Half of the population lack the enzyme necessary for alcohol metabolism and therefore alcoholic drinks could never take their place as the safe alternative to water. Just as the development of Western culture could be rooted in the mind-altering affects of alcohol, so the insular development of China, which so puzzled Jared Diamond in his classic Guns, Germs and Steel, could be rooted in tea drinking.

Meanwhile, the leaders of Western society were fuelling their day-to-day lives with copious amounts of high-strength alcoholic drinks. In a curious reversal of current fortune, the Tennent’s Super and Special Brew brigade were once the men in charge!

Thankfully, the introduction of tea, coffee and cocoa in the 17th century allowed a shift away from alcohol as the primary source of safe water. Allied with later concerns over the health issues of drinking alcohol and a steady supply of safe drinking water, the powers that be were able to wean themselves from their daily fix.

Once we accept that the Western world was in the hands of alcoholics, it becomes easier to explain much of the behavior of our most famous leaders. It cannot be denied that our history is littered with selfish, violent, arrogant, stubborn, libidinous, unsteady, unpredictable and over-confident rulers. It is surely no coincidence that these character failings are the same ones as those manifested by people when drunk. The historians of Western civilization can no longer gloss over the simple fact that alcohol controlled all the decision-makers. Its grip on the current world is often considered dangerous, but this pales into insignificance when we look at the control it exerted over our ancestors. It’s high time history’s secret hangover was exposed."

- Paul Gilham,("The Hangover of History," ForteanTimes, August 2003. Image: -John Warner Barber, Engraving, "King Alcohol & The Prime Minister,"Library of Congress, 1800s).

Don Draper Calling...

"I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting..."

- Frank O' Hara ("Meditations In An Emergency," N. Y., Grove Press, 1957. Image: Business Card: Sterling Cooper Advertising, New York, NY 1960).

Mirror Reflection: The Doppelgänger On The Other Side...

"For the bubble-headed young Narcissus of myth, the mirror spun a fatal fantasy, and the beautiful boy chose to die by the side of a reflecting pond rather than leave his “beloved” behind. For the aging narcissist of Shakespeare’s 62nd sonnet, the mirror delivered a much-needed whack to his vanity, the sight of a face “beated and chopp’d with tann’d antiquity ”underscoring the limits of self-love.

Whether made of highly polished metal or of glass with a coating of metal on the back, mirrors have fascinated people for millennia: ancient Egyptians were often depicted holding hand mirrors. With their capacity to reflect back nearly all incident light upon them and so recapitulate the scene they face, mirrors are like pieces of dreams, their images hyper-real and profoundly fake.

Mirrors reveal truths you may not want to see. Give them a little smoke and a house to call their own, and mirrors will tell you nothing but lies.

To scientists, the simultaneous simplicity and complexity of mirrors make them powerful tools for exploring questions about perception and cognition in humans and other neuronally gifted species, and how the brain interprets and acts upon the great tides of sensory information from the external world. They are using mirrors to study how the brain decides what is self and what is other, how it judges distances and trajectories of objects, and how it reconstructs the richly three-dimensional quality of the outside world from what is essentially a two-dimensional snapshot taken by the retina’s flat sheet of receptor cells. They are applying mirrors in medicine, to create reflected images of patients’ limbs or other body parts and thus trick the brain into healing itself. Mirror therapy has been successful in treating disorders like phantom limb syndrome, chronic pain and post-stroke paralysis.

“In a sense, mirrors are the best ‘virtual reality’ system that we can build,” said Marco Bertamini of the University of Liverpool. “ The object‘inside’ the mirror is virtual, but as far as our eyes are concerned it exists as much as any other object.” Dr. Bertamini and his colleagues have also studied what people believe about the nature of mirrors and mirror images, and have found nearly everybody, even students of physics and math, to be shockingly off the mark.

Other researchers have determined that mirrors can subtly affect human behavior, often in surprisingly positive ways. Subjects tested in a room with a mirror have been found to work harder, to be more helpful and to be less inclined to cheat, compared with control groups performing the same exercises in non-mirrored settings. Reporting in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, C. Neil Macrae, Galen V.Bodenhausen and Alan B.Milne found that people in a room with a mirror were comparatively less likely to judge others based on social stereotypes about, for example, sex, race or religion. Dr. Bodenhausen said.

“A byproduct of that awareness may be a shift away from acting on autopilot toward more desirable ways of behaving.”

Physical self-reflection, in other words, encourages philosophical self-reflection, a crash course in the Socratic notion that you cannot know or appreciate others until you know yourself.

The mirror technique does not always keep knees from jerking. When it comes to socially acceptable forms of stereotyping, said Dr. Bodenhausen, like branding all politicians liars or all lawyers crooks, the presence of a mirror may end up augmenting rather than curbing the willingness to pigeonhole.

How can we be so self-delusional when the truth stares back at us? “Although we do indeed see ourselves in the mirror every day, we don’t look exactly the same every time,” explained Dr. Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. There is the scruffy-morning you, the assembled-for-work you, the dressed-for-an-elegant-dinner you.

“Which image is you?”

“Our research shows that people, on average, resolve that ambiguity in their favor, forming a representation of their image that is more attractive than they actually are.”

What is it about our reflected self that it plays by such counter-intuitive rules? The important point is that no matter how close or far we are from the looking glass, the mirror is always halfway between our physical selves and our projected selves in the virtual world inside the mirror, and so the captured image in the mirror is half our true size.

When we gaze into a mirror, we are all of us Narcissus, tethered eternally to our doppelgänger on the other side."

-Natalie Angier (Excerpt:"Mirrors Don’t Lie. Mislead? Oh, Yes", NY Times, 7.22.2008, Image:- Parmigianino (1503-1540), Self-Portrait From A Convex Mirror, Oil On Convex Panel, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, 1524).

NOTE: "In order to investigate the subtleties of art Parmigianino set himself one day to make his own portrait, looking at himself in a convex barber's mirror." The painting stunned Renaissance Italy. It shows the artist at the age of about 21, romantic, his unkempt face unmanly, even feminine. It emphasizes the fantastic nature of his talent, of his right hand that draws and makes a world. As a celebration of the artist as a young man. The painter looks at us, at the mirror, boldly - this is the artist as hero. But what makes the painting unique is its gimmick. Spectacularly, Parmigianino has not only studied himself in a convex mirror but reproduced what he sees." -Jonathan Jones, (GuardianUK 1.18.2003).

The McNews Hour: "And That's The Way It Is..."

The tentacle-like growth of clandestine advertising in American TV shows in the form of product placement has taken another controversial step with the introduction of McDonald's products into regional news programs.

Several TV outlets have begun to sell the fast-food giant the right to place cups of its iced coffee on to the desks of news anchors as they present morning current affairs shows.

Typical is Fox 5 News in Las Vegas, an affiliate of Rupert Murdoch's Fox television network. Two cups of coffee, their cubes of ice glinting in the studio lights, now daily stand before the channel's morning presenters. The presenters conspicuously do not drink from the cups, which is just as well - the cups contain a bogus fluid and fake ice to prevent the cubes melting.

The New York Times has reported that similar deals to place McDonald's products in news shows are up and running in TV stations in Chicago, Seattle and New York.

Product placement has become a huge branch of advertising in the US, creeping into all areas of entertainment television. Not only are products seen on camera, they also make their way into drama scripts, such as an episode of the popular soap, The OC, which had one character talk about having "a9.com'd" a friend on the day the internet search company A9 launched a Yellow Pages service of the same name.

Advertising and broadcasting content have become increasingly blurred, with new reality TV show, What I Like About You, pitting young women against each other to compete for an acting slot on an advert for Herbal Essences. The ad is then broadcast in a break during the show.

This is the first time product placement has percolated through to news broadcasts. Journalism ethics groups have protested it is another erosion of standards.

"There has been in broadcast journalism certainly, and arguably in all journalism, a drifting away from the standards of straight news in the direction of entertainment," said Roy Peter Clark of the school for journalists, the Poynter Institute.

Fox 5 News has declined to reveal how much it is being paid by McDonald's for the six-month promotion. The station's news director, Adam Bradshaw, said that the product placement was only allowed in programs that were appropriate, including later morning shows with an accent on lifestyle.

"I would not put it on a straight newscast like my 5 or 10pm news," Bradshaw said.
The other potential difficulty with the new trend in TV news was conflict of interest. Bradshaw said the McDonald's deal would in no way impede the station broadcasting negative news concerning the food chain.

"News is news. Sales is sales. If there's a story about McDonald's we would report on it just like anyone else," he said.

He added that in such cases he would remove the coffee cups from the newscasters' desks, in a similar way to the pulling of adverts for airline companies during newscasts that report an air crash. TV stations across America are suffering from a downturn in advertising, partly due to the challenge of the internet and partly due to the country's more recent economic troubles.

In a harsh financial climate, many are turning to new cash streams, such as Fox 5 News's latest innovation.

- Ed Pilkington ("McMorning Las Vegas, Here's The News," The Guardian UK, 7.23.2008, Image: -mcdowalla22,DeviantArt.com, 2007-08).

On Clowns & Coulrophobia: The Terror Of Bozo

"There is nothing laughable about a clown in the moonlight." -Lon Chaney, Sr.

Coulrophobia is defined as an extreme fear of clowns. Coulrophobia was conceived during the 1990s and originates from the Greek words Koulon (limb) and Kolobathristes which translates as"one who goes on stilts." The central fear trigger is the clown's appearance which masks the identity of the wearer and suggests a hidden and/or potentially sinister personality.

- VioletPlanet, Image: -Larry Harmon as Bozo The Clown (Mr. Harmon was one of a few Bozos but not the original. Bozo The Clown was created by Capitol Records executive Alan Livingston for recordings in 1946. The late Vance "Pinto" Colvig was the first person to play the clown and Bob Bozo Bell was one of the most popular and prolific Bozos. -International Clown Hall Of Fame/AP).

Five Uncanny Predictions: Earth Before The Dawn Of 2001...

In December of 1900, John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. wrote: “These prophecies will seem strange, almost impossible. Yet, they have come from the most learned and conservative minds in America. To the wisest and most careful men in our greatest institutions of science and learning I have gone, asking each in his turn to forecast for me what, in his opinion, will have been wrought in his own field of investigation before the dawn of 2001 - a century from now. These opinions I have carefully transcribed:"Prediction #8: Aerial War-Ships and Forts on Wheels. Giant guns will shoot twenty-five miles or more, and will hurl anywhere within such a radius shells exploding and destroying whole cities. Such guns will be armed by aid of compasses when used on land or sea, and telescopes when directed from great heights. Fleets of air-ships, hiding themselves with dense, smoky mists, thrown off by themselves as they move, will float over cities, fortifications, camps or fleets. They will surprise foes below by hurling upon them deadly thunderbolts. These aerial war-ships will necessitate bomb-proof forts, protected by great steel plates over their tops as well as at their sides. Huge forts on wheels will dash across open spaces at the speed of express trains of to-day. They will make what are now known as cavalry charges. Great automobile plows will dig deep entrenchments as fast as soldiers can occupy them. Rifles will use silent cartridges. Submarine boats submerged for days will be capable of wiping a whole navy off the face of the deep. Balloons and flying machines will carry telescopes of one-hundred-mile vision with camera attachments, photographing an enemy within that radius. These photographs as distinct and large as if taken from across the street, will be lowered to the commanding officer in charge of troops below.

Prediction #10: Man will See Around the World. Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span. American audiences in their theatres will view upon huge curtains before them the coronations of kings in Europe or the progress of battles in the Orient. The instrument bringing these distant scenes to the very doors of people will be connected with a giant telephone apparatus transmitting each incidental sound in its appropriate place. Thus the guns of a distant battle will be heard to boom when seen to blaze, and thus the lips of a remote actor or singer will be heard to utter words or music when seen to move.

Prediction #16: There will be No C, X or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary. Spelling by sound will have been adopted, first by the newspapers. English will be a language of condensed words expressing condensed ideas, and will be more extensively spoken than any other.

Prediction #18: Telephones Around the World. Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world. A husband in the middle of the Atlantic will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her boudoir in Chicago. We will be able to telephone to China quite as readily as we now talk from New York to Brooklyn. By an automatic signal they will connect with any circuit in their locality without the intervention of a “hello girl”.

Prediction #20: Coal will not be used for heating or cooking. It will be scarce, but not entirely exhausted. The earth’s hard coal will last until the year 2050 or 2100; its soft-coal mines until 2200 or 2300. Meanwhile both kinds of coal will have become more and more expensive. Man will have found electricity manufactured by waterpower to be much cheaper. Every river or creek with any suitable fall will be equipped with water-motors, turning dynamos, making electricity. Along the seacoast will be numerous reservoirs continually filled by waves and tides washing in. Out of these the water will be constantly falling over revolving wheels. All of our restless waters, fresh and salt, will thus be harnessed to do the work which Niagara is doing today: making electricity for heat, light and fuel.

-John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. (Excerpted 5 of 29 predictions: “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years”, Ladies Home Journal,December 1900, Image: "Earth From The Moon: A Different Perspective On the Harvest Moon", Science and Analysis Laboratory, NASA-Johnson Space Center. "The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth." Apollo 11 Mission, 7.16.1969).

Consuming Passions: The Age Of Heroic Consumption...The Tyranny of Money...

The age of heroic consumption is surely drawing to a close. The inspiration of those whose principal virtue is the money that permits them to lay claim to a disproportionate share of the earth’s resources is being by-passed in a world where a population of 9 billion must be accommodated by 2050.

The price tag on the possessions of the wealthy — their 20 million dollar mansions, 5 million dollar yachts, extravagant couture and priceless jewels, their private jets and lives apart from the great majority of humankind — are rapidly losing their power to enchant the rest of us. In an age when scientists, humanitarians and moral leaders are exhorting human beings to look to our impact upon the earth — and not solely in relation to the carbon footprint — it has become obsolete to gaze with breathless admiration upon individuals dedicated to the proposition that a whole world should be dying of consumption, and not just the 1.6m who perish from tuberculosis each year.

The GREATEST THREAT to GLOBAL STABILITY comes NOT from the POOR but FROM the RICH. This startling proposition runs directly into another received idea, which is that the risk of disorder is a result of excessive materialism. What we suffer from is not a surfeit of materialism, but a deficiency of it; for if we truly valued the material basis upon which all human systems depend, we would exhibit a far greater reverence for the physical world we inhabit. If materialism means respect for the elements that sustain life, then we are gravely wanting in it. What is sometimes referred to as “materialism” is actually something else: perhaps a distorted kind of mysticism which believes we can use up the earth and still avoid the consequences of our omnivorous appetites.

This is why the gross consumers of the age will be scorned as the pitiable destroyers of the sustenance, not only of the poor of today, but of everyone’s tomorrow. It is natural for people to want to do the best for their children, but this is generally interpreted as leaving them a private monetary inheritance; but if the other side of this legacy is a befouled world, the enjoyment of today’s privilege may become the curse of the future. In any case, there is a great deal of humbug in pious concern expressed for our children’s children, since this rarely prevents those who give voice to such tender sentiments from living as though there were no tomorrow. “Live the dream” has become the cliche of the hour; although it requires no great wisdom to understand that dreams realized soon turn to ashes.

Everything that can be done to bring the age of heroic consumption to its close should be done. This means the promotion of a different understanding of wealth. The myriad aspects of a truly rich and fulfilled life should be rescued from the tyranny of money. Perhaps we have not entirely forgotten that the most joyful and exhilarating of human occupations derive from self-reliance, self-provisioning, not only in the basic goods that sustain life, but also in satisfactions that arise from the cost-free resourcefulness of ourselves and others.

This is why the A-listers, the celebs, the fat cats, the big spenders, the conspicuous consumers do not represent a “lifestyle” to be emulated at all costs, but serve as warning of the spector of depletion and exhaustion awaiting us within a short space of time. When Thorstein Veblen wrote his Theory of the Leisure Class at the end of the 19th century, he saw “conspicuous waste and show” as a replacement for “earlier and more primitive displays of physical prowess”. Even his caustic insights could not anticipate the degree to which the ornamental in-utility of the very rich would lead them to become pioneers of planetary demolition.

Of course, downgrading the exploits of the major culprits in ransacking the earth is easier said than done. Cultures are not, as journalists and politicians sometimes suggest, to be discarded or “changed” at will. But sooner or later, a reduction in the abuse of the elements of life will be forced upon the world. If it proves impossible to take preventive action in this regard, we shall soon enough be overtaken by events — oil wars, water wars, even more brutal conflicts over land than we have already seen, food wars, social disruption, rioting and breakdown, such as the World Bank has already detected in some 37 countries in the last two years, will be the form in which the relentless plunder of the planet will resolve itself.

Just as the age of heroic labor — the Stakhanovite idea of selfless dedication to the building of Communism — perished, so heroic consumption — that equally selfless dedication to sustaining capitalism — has also had its day. Stakhanovites were so called after a coalminer in the Soviet Union in 1935 who exceeded his work quota by 14 times the fixed level, producing 102 tons of coal in six hours. This became a kind of “spontaneous” official policy in the construction of Socialism.

How laughably old-fashioned this now sounds. And how swiftly things that appear immutable can change. It should be our ambition to ensure that the work of predatory individuals upon the fruits of the earth comes to appear as archaic and futile as the sacrifice of human energies in the Soviet Union to release the resources which, according to Marx, “slumbered in the lap of social labour”.

Heroic consumption, unlike heroic labor, requires no official sponsorship. The incentive to get rich is so deeply embedded in Capitalism, that it has been seen as an expression of human nature itself. The first task in achieving a decent security for all people on earth is to affirm the distinction between human nature and the nature of Capitalism.

Human beings want, above all, TO SURVIVE. The moral and social elevation of the wealthy and their profligacy suggests that they are prepared to sacrifice even this hitherto imperishable goal for the sake of transforming the beauty and value of the world into a wasteland.

-Jeremy Seabrook (Excerpt:"Consuming Passions",The Guardian/UK,6.10.2008. Image: -Antonio Petruccelli: One of the most famous and sought-after Fortune Magazine covers depicting the chaos and financial ruin left in the wake of the Stock Market Crash of 1929, Issue: June, 1937).

Eyewitness To History: Crazy With Fear In San Francisco...

I had $600.00 in gold under my pillow. I awoke as I was thrown out of bed. Attempting to walk, the floor shook so that I fell. I grabbed my clothing and rushed down into the office, where dozens were already congregated. Suddenly the lights went out, and every one rushed for the door.

Outside I witnessed a sight I never want to see again. It was dawn and light. I looked up. The air was filled with falling stones. People around me were crushed to death on all sides. All around the huge buildings were shaking and waving. Every moment there were reports like 100 cannons going off at one time. Then streams of fire would shoot out, and other reports followed.

I asked a man standing next to me what happened. Before he could answer a thousand bricks fell on him and he was killed. A woman threw her arms around my neck. I pushed her away and fled. All around me buildings were rocking and flames shooting. As I ran people on all sides were crying, praying and calling for help. I thought the end of the world had come.

I met a Catholic priest, and he said: 'We must get to the ferry.' He knew the way, and we rushed down Market Street. Men, women and children were crawling from the debris. Hundreds were rushing down the street and every minute people were felled by debris.

At places the streets had cracked and opened. Chasms extended in all directions. I saw a drove of cattle, wild with fright, rushing up Market Street. I crouched beside a swaying building. As they came nearer they disappeared, seeming to drop out into the earth. When the last had gone I went nearer and found they had indeed been precipitated into the earth, a wide fissure having swallowed them. I was crazy with fear and the horrible sights.

How I reached the ferry I cannot say. It was bedlam, pandemonium and hell rolled into one. There must have been 10,000 people trying to get on that boat. Men and women fought like wildcats to push their way aboard. Clothes were torn from the backs of men and women and children indiscriminately. Women fainted, and there was no water at hand with which to revive them. Men lost their reason at those awful moments. One big, strong man, beat his head against one of the iron pillars on the dock, and cried out in a loud voice: 'This fire must be put out! The city must be saved!' It was awful."

-G.A. Raymond (EyewitnesstoHistory.Com: "A Narrow Escape," Eyewitness Account of The Great San Francisco Earthquake, The Palace Hotel, SF, 5:15AM, 4.18.1906 Image: San Francisco, Bush & Market Street Intersection Post-Quake, Library of Congress, April 18, 1906).

"The San Francisco Earthquake of April 18, 1906 ranks as one of the most significant earthquakes of all time. Today, its importance comes more from the wealth of scientific knowledge derived from it than from its sheer size. Rupturing the northernmost 296 miles (477 kilometers) of the San Andreas fault from northwest of San Juan Bautista to the triple junction at Cape Mendocino, the earthquake confounded contemporary geologists with its large, horizontal displacements and great rupture length. Indeed, the significance of the fault and recognition of its large cumulative offset would not be fully appreciated until the advent of plate tectonics more than half a century later. Analysis of the 1906 displacements and strain in the surrounding crust led Reid (1910) to formulate his elastic-rebound theory of the earthquake source, which remains today the principal model of the earthquake cycle."

-Ellsworth, W.L., Lindh, A.G., Prescott, W.H., and Herd, D.G., "The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake And The Seismic Cycle in Simpson, D.W., and Richards, P.G., eds., Earthquake Prediction: An International Review "(Maurice Ewing Series 4): Washington, American Geophysical Union, p. 126-140, 1981).

Gore Vidal’s Article of Impeachment...High Crimes & Misdemeanors...

On June 9, 2008, a counterrevolution began on the floor of the House of Representatives against the gas and oil crooks who had seized control of the federal government. This counterrevolution began in the exact place which had slumbered during the all-out assault on our liberties and the Constitution itself.

I wish to draw the attention of the blog world to Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s articles of impeachment presented to the House in order that two faithless public servants be removed from office for crimes against the American people. As I listened to Rep. Kucinich invoke the great engine of impeachment — he listed some 35 crimes by these two faithless officials — we heard, like great bells tolling, the voice of the Constitution itself speak out ringingly against those who had tried to destroy it.

Although this is the most important motion made in Congress in the 21st century, it was also the most significant plea for a restoration of the republic, which had been swept to one side by the mad antics of a president bent on great crime. And as I listened with awe to Kucinich, I realized that no newspaper in the U.S., no broadcast or cable network, would pay much notice to the fact that a highly respected member of Congress was asking for the president and vice president to be tried for crimes which were carefully listed by Kucinich in his articles requesting impeachment.

But then I have known for a long time that the media of the U.S. and too many of its elected officials give not a flying fuck for the welfare of this republic, and so I turned, as I often do, to the foreign press for a clear report of what has been going on in Congress. We all know how the self-described “war hero,” Mr. John McCain, likes to snigger at France, while the notion that he is a hero of any kind is what we should be sniggering at. It is Le Monde, a French newspaper, that told a story the next day hardly touched by The New York Times or The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal or, in fact, any other major American media outlet.

As for TV? Well, there wasn’t much — you see, we dare not be divisive because it upsets our masters who know that this is a perfect country, and the fact that so many in it don’t like it means that they have been terribly spoiled by the greatest health service on Earth, the greatest justice system, the greatest number of occupied prisons — two and a half million Americans are prisoners — what a great tribute to our penal passions!

Naturally, I do not want to sound hard, but let me point out that even a banana Republican would be distressed to discover how much of our nation’s treasury has been siphoned off by our vice president in the interest of his Cosa Nostra company, Halliburton, the lawless gang of mercenaries set loose by his administration in the Middle East.

But there it was on the first page of Le Monde. The House of Representatives, which was intended to be the democratic chamber, at last was alert to its function, and the bravest of its members set in motion the articles of impeachment of the most dangerous president in our history. Rep Kucinich listed some 30-odd articles describing impeachable offenses committed by the president and vice president, neither of whom had ever been the clear choice of our sleeping polity for any office.

Some months ago, Kucinich had made the case against Dick Cheney. Now he had the principal malefactor in his view under the title “Articles of Impeachment for President George W. Bush”! “Resolved, that President George W. Bush be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate.” The purpose of the resolve is that he be duly tried by the Senate, and if found guilty, be removed from office. At this point, Rep. Kucinich presented his 35 articles detailing various high crimes and misdemeanors for which removal from office was demanded by the framers of the Constitution.

Update: On Wednesday, the House voted by 251 to 166 to send Rep. Kucinich’s articles of impeachment to a committee which probably won’t get to the matter before Bush leaves office, a strategy that is “often used to kill legislation,” as the Associated Press noted later that day.

-Gore Vidal (TruthDig, 6.12.08)

Yves Saint Laurent: Dazzled Yet Sober...

"I have known fear and the terrors of solitude. I have known those fair-weather friends we call tranquilizers and drugs. I have known the prison of depression and the confinement of hospital. But one day, I was able to come through all of that, dazzled yet sober.

-Yves Saint Laurent (1936-2008, Stated upon his retirement in January, 2002. Image-Berry Berenson: Edie Baskin in the celebrated YSL Pantsuit, 1972).

VIDEO: The Future? Now You Know...

WATCH VIDEO HERE: "Shift Happens"
(Running Time: 6 min.)

-Michael Arnold, ( "Shift Happens", Originally a PowerPoint presentation by Karl Fisch, Director of Technology for Arapahoe High School,Centennial, Colorado, 2007. Image: William Smellie (1697-1763). Library. Engraving shows the gravid uterus when labor is somewhat advanced, A Sett of Anatomical Tables, with Explanations and an Abridgement, of the Practice of Midwifery. London printed: [s.n.], 1754. University of Virginia, Historical Collections: Claude Moore Health Sciences).