Discussing your penis in court doesn’t stay funny for longOn the morning of his 42nd birthday, Stephen Harrell was arrested outside a liquor store on Century Boulevard in Inglewood, handcuffed, and hauled off to face the screwiest charge ever leveled at him in his admittedly checkered career with the criminal justice system. He was accused of concealing four rocks of cocaine in his foreskin. To be more precise, he was accused of wrapping the rocks in individual clear plastic bags, placing them all in another black bag, shoving them halfway up his penis and then keeping them snugly in place for at least an hour between the time of his arrest and the time that three Inglewood cops strip-searched him. The whole package was variously described by the arresting officer as being "bigger than a marble" and having roughly the same diameter as a dime. Let me point out to those of you unendowed with male genitalia that we are talking about an almost unfathomable world of pain here, not to mention physical elasticity of a truly extraordinary kind. (Those of you with male genitalia have probably crossed your legs already.) Nothing in Harrell's long resume as a petty criminal and drug user suggests he was ever in serious contention for the cast of Puppetry of the Penis. Or, as Harrell himself put it in one of his first interviews with his defense attorney: "I may be big, but I ain't no horse." So far, just a funny story. But it only gets more bizarre on closer examination. The arresting officer, Patrick Manning, claims he saw Harrell drop a crack pipe from his waistband as soon as he became aware of his patrol car. That, at least, was the pretext for the arrest. But Harrell didn't apparently think of dumping the cocaine – assuming he ever had it in the first place. Officer Manning noticed nothing unusual about the way Harrell was walking, and once he had cuffed him and put him in the patrol car he didn't report any wriggling or gasps of pain. The public defender eventually assigned to Harrell, Eleanor Schneir, had the bright idea of downloading some penis diagrams off the Internet and asked Officer Manning and the two colleagues he took with him into the strip-search room to show the trial jury where exactly the bulge had been. Curiously, each policeman put it in a different place. One said it was at the top, beneath the foreskin proper, while the other two put it further down and to the side. In one diagram the package was almost all the way to the base of the penis – which makes one wonder just how endowed with male genitalia the police officers themselves can have been. Schneir had great fun buying up gourmet gumballs from her local grocery store and waving them at the jury, with a dime taped to the side for size-comparison purposes, just to emphasize the preposterousness of the allegation. She cited no less an authority than Seinfeld to question whether any penis could withstand the cold of the strip-search room without succumbing to the dreaded male problem of shrinkage, which would surely have shaken the incriminating package loose all by itself. At a certain point, it seemed Harrell was home free, and Schneir was confident enough to berate the prosecution for subjecting him to an embarrassing public spectacle. As she told the jury: "He has to sit here and hear me, his lawyer, his advocate, a woman, argue to a jury of 12 strangers that his penis is too small for this to be possible – what could possibly be more humiliating than that?" Things took an unexpected turn, however, as a batch of photographs of Harrell's genitalia was released to the court and appeared to show that he was circumcised. From Harrell's point of view, this might have looked like a pretty good defense – how, after all, can anyone conceal drugs in their foreskin if they don't have one? In reality, though, the photographs unleashed a furor in the courtroom and changed the terms of the debate entirely. Suddenly, it was not the Inglewood PD whose honesty was under scrutiny but rather Harrell's, as the defendant was accused of yanking his foreskin back for the camera in an attempt to conceal it. In the single most surreal sequence of the trial, Officer Manning bragged that he knew all about the flexibility of uncircumcised penises because he used to play baseball for the Atlanta Braves (he was a 1999 draft pick later sidelined by a knee injury) and frequently showered with players from Colombia and Central America who not only had foreskins but were frequently "silly" with them. Manning told the prosecutor he saw players pull down their foreskins and dance around for as long as 20 minutes. Schneir wasn't going to let this one go. "I'm a little confused," she said disingenuously. "I was always led to believe that men in showers go to great lengths not to look at each other's penises, and you're telling me you looked for 20 minutes?" Members of the jury started guffawing. Manning said sheepishly that he hadn't exactly looked for 20 minutes. So Schneir asked him how long he had looked for – 15 minutes, 10 minutes, 5 minutes? Eventually, Manning said he’d looked at one penis for one minute. Schneir deadpanned: "Okay, we're all dying to know: whose penis was it?" For all the courtroom humor, from here on out the trial started slipping out of the grasp of the defense. The deputy district attorney suggested the only way to resolve the circumcision question was to have Harrell re-examined by a medical professional. Harrell told the court he'd had quite enough people looking at his penis and refused. The judge, Deirdre Hill, then instructed the jury that they were free to interpret this refusal as a form of self-incrimination. Schneir tried valiantly to argue that the circumcision question made no difference to the plausibility of the police's story. But the damage was done, and the jury came back with a guilty verdict. That, of course, is the way so many petty crime cases go. Given the choice between a defendant of dubious character and the testimony of uniformed police officers, juries will almost always side with the police. The Harrell case reflects many of the uglier aspects of law enforcement in Los Angeles: a poor, black, relatively harmless delinquent picked up, handcuffed and stripped by white officers, and lumbered with a serious felony charge for which he has just been sentenced to six years and six months behind bars. Without the allegation of cocaine in his penis, he would have been looking at a misdemeanor and a $100 fine. There is some evidence to suggest that Officer Manning, for one, finds escapades like the apprehension of Stephen Harrell to be a bit of a hoot. Interviewed by a Myrtle Beach, South Carolina newspaper when he first made the leap from baseball to policing, he said patrolling the streets of Inglewood was not entirely unlike competitive sports. "To me, it's almost like a game," he said. "I've had a great time so far."
Quote from: superpartner on April 16, 2008, 12:57:44 PM[...] (Karl H. Pribram is an emeritus professor of psychology and psychiatry at Stanford University and Radford University. Board-certified as a neurosurgeon, Pribram did pioneering work on the definition of the limbic system, the relationship of the frontal cortex to the limbic system, the sensory-specific "association" cortex of the parietal and temporal lobes, and the classical motor cortex of the human brain.) Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions. Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions.But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram’s holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm’s theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is “there” is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality? Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion. We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram. [...][...]In 1973, what has come to be known as the Pribram-Bohm Holographic Model was non-existent. But the Seattle think tank, Organization for the Advancement of Knowledge (OAK), lead by Richard Alan Miller and Burt Webb were able to synthesize the work of Northrup and Burr on the electromagnetic nature of the human being with Dennis Gabor's work on optical holograms and come up with a new notion – a holographic paradigm. In "Languages of the Brain" (1971), Pribram had postulated that 2-dimensional interference patterns, physical holograms, underlie all thinking. The holographic component, for him, represented the associative mechanisms and contributed to memory retrieval and storage and problem solving.[...]
[...] (Karl H. Pribram is an emeritus professor of psychology and psychiatry at Stanford University and Radford University. Board-certified as a neurosurgeon, Pribram did pioneering work on the definition of the limbic system, the relationship of the frontal cortex to the limbic system, the sensory-specific "association" cortex of the parietal and temporal lobes, and the classical motor cortex of the human brain.) Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions. Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions.But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram’s holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm’s theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is “there” is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality? Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion. We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram. [...]
Quote from: schrödinger on May 13, 2008, 01:45:14 PMQuote from: superpartner on April 16, 2008, 12:57:44 PM[...] (Karl H. Pribram is an emeritus professor of psychology and psychiatry at Stanford University and Radford University. Board-certified as a neurosurgeon, Pribram did pioneering work on the definition of the limbic system, the relationship of the frontal cortex to the limbic system, the sensory-specific "association" cortex of the parietal and temporal lobes, and the classical motor cortex of the human brain.) Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions. Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions.But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram’s holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm’s theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is “there” is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality? Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion. We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram. [...][...]In 1973, what has come to be known as the Pribram-Bohm Holographic Model was non-existent. But the Seattle think tank, Organization for the Advancement of Knowledge (OAK), lead by Richard Alan Miller and Burt Webb were able to synthesize the work of Northrup and Burr on the electromagnetic nature of the human being with Dennis Gabor's work on optical holograms and come up with a new notion – a holographic paradigm. In "Languages of the Brain" (1971), Pribram had postulated that 2-dimensional interference patterns, physical holograms, underlie all thinking. The holographic component, for him, represented the associative mechanisms and contributed to memory retrieval and storage and problem solving.[...]That it is feasible to manipulate human behavior with the use of subliminal, either sound or visual, messages is now generally known. This is why in most of the countries the use of such technologies, without consent of the user, is banned. Devices using light for the stimulation of the brain show another way how the light flashing in certain frequencies could be used for the manipulation of human psychic life. As for the sound, a report on the device transmitting a beam of sound waves, which can hear only persons at whom the beam of sound waves is targeted, appeared last year in the world newspapers. The beam is formed by a combination of sound and ultrasound waves which causes that a person targeted by this beam hears the sound inside of his head. Such a perception could easily convince the human being that it is mentally ill. The acts presented in this article suggest that with the development of technology and knowledge of the functioning of human brain new ways of manipulation of human mind keep emerging. One of them seems to be the electromagnetic energy. [...]
Numerous studies had previously demonstrated semantic activation of single words under conditions in which subjects had no phenomenal awareness of the stimulus, as we noted in our reviews. However, no priming study had shown that multiple words, presented subliminally were capable of semantic activation... A recent study by Draine (1997) has cast considerable doubt on the proposition that multiple words presented subliminally can be comprehended. In his work, Draine established that priming effects of word pairs are a function of individual word meanings, rather than their combined meaning. For example, the pair of words "Not Dirty" was perceived to be evaluatively negative. The impact of the prime was uninfluenced by its negation. Draine concluded that two-word grammatical combinations are beyond the analytic powers of unconscious cognition. (see also Greenwald and Liu, 1985).
Too many bold posts, I'd say.. Your avatar, schel, illustrates best the concept of "moderation" that some "members" of this board are better off applying...
Quote from: per hair on August 02, 2008, 02:27:48 PMThe Lyrics:Quote I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.See how they run like pigs from a gun, see how they fly.I'm crying. Now, a lot of songs by The Beatles have these "subliminal" messages. Here it is another weird one from Beatles:The Beatles', "Revolution 9"The Lyrics:Quote Right! Right! When you play the track backwards, it sounds like someone screaming, "Get me out! Get me out!"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PG0wksBzKScA subliminal message is communicated below the conscious level of perception. By nature, you will not be aware of receiving one. Backmasking, an audio technique in which sounds are recorded backwards onto a track that is meant to be played forwards, produces messages that sound like gibberish to the conscious mind. Gary Greenwald, a fundamentalist Christian preacher, claims that these messages can be heard subliminally, and can induce listeners towards, in the case of rock music, sex and drug use. However, this is not generally accepted as fact.The manual for the popular sound program SoX pokes fun at subliminal messages. The description of the "reverse" option says "Included for finding satanic subliminals."Following the 1950s subliminal message panic, many businesses have sprung up purporting to offer helpful subliminal audio tapes that supposedly improve the health of the listener. However, there is no evidence for the therapeutic effectiveness of such tapes.Subliminal messages have also been known to appear in music. In the 1990s, two young men died from self-inflicted gunshots and their families were convinced it was because of a British rock band, Judas Priest. The families claimed subliminal messages told listeners to "do it" in the song "Better by You, Better Than Me". The case was taken to court and the families sought more than US$6 million in damages. The judge, Jerry Carr Whitehead, ruled that the subliminal messages did exist in the song, but stated that the families did not produce any scientific evidence that the song persuaded the young men to kill themselves. In turn, he ruled it probably would not have been perceived without the "power of suggestion" or the young men would not have done it unless they really intended to.Subliminal messages can affect a human's emotional state and/or behaviors. They are most effective when perceived unconsciously. The most extensive study of therapeutic effects from audiotapes was conducted to see if the self-esteem audiotapes would raise self-esteem. 237 volunteers were provided with tapes of 3 manufacturers and completed post tests after one month of use. The study showed clearly that subliminal audiotapes made to boost self-esteem did not produce effects associated with subliminal content within one month's use. The effectiveness of any subliminal message has been called into question time after time and has led many to one conclusion, namely: that the technique does not work, as Anthony R. Pratkanis, one of the researchers in the field puts it: "It appears that, despite the claims in books and newspapers and on the backs of subliminal self help tapes, subliminal-influence tactics have not been demonstrated to be effective. Of course, as with anything scientific, it may be that someday, somehow, someone will develop a subliminal technique that may work, just as someday a chemist may find a way to transmute lead to gold. I am personally not purchasing lead futures on this hope however."
The Lyrics:Quote I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.See how they run like pigs from a gun, see how they fly.I'm crying. Now, a lot of songs by The Beatles have these "subliminal" messages. Here it is another weird one from Beatles:The Beatles', "Revolution 9"The Lyrics:Quote Right! Right! When you play the track backwards, it sounds like someone screaming, "Get me out! Get me out!"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PG0wksBzKSc
I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.See how they run like pigs from a gun, see how they fly.I'm crying.
Right! Right!