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Using Magnets To Turn Off the Brain's Speech Center
An editor for the Telegraph, Roger Highfield, recently volunteered to allow a UK researcher to shut off the speech center of his brain with a high-powered magnetic pulse. Regular speech is controlled by a section of the brain called Broca's area. Once the precise location is determined in the subject, a magnetic pulse can temporarily disrupt speech without impairing other cognitive functions. The link contains a video in which you can watch Highfield stutter and twitch while attempting to recite a nursery rhyme. A later test shows that he's able to sing the rhyme without difficulty, since singing is controlled in a different part of the brain (as you may remember from Scott Adams' speech disorder). Researchers believe that the ability to stimulate or quell activity in specific areas of the brain may help in treating conditions like epilepsy and migraine headaches.
There, I fixed that sentence for you. What I wondered was what else these guys were zapping while they were finding the subject's Broca area. Maybe they convinced him it was safe, but they'd have to do a whole lot of talking to convince me.
I'd have to think that forensics units would have a harder time tracking down the person who fired an EM pulse. They've gotten pretty good at matching bullets to guns.
What if the government decided to do away with the fourth ammendment and declare it was their right to search and seize simply becuase they're fighting a war against a noun?
What if the government decided to completely ignore the right to legal representation and a free trial because they were holding you in a special, magical place where they decided those rules didn't apply?
What if the government started shipping people off to be tortured by third party nations so they could pretend they weren't doing it themselves.
What if the government wrote a statement that said certain forms of torture was OK, completely refused to list what those forms are, then pretended to be shocked when, exactly as intended, junior troops did what was expected of them?
What if the government could demand your library and bookstore records and had a special way of doing it where, legally, no one was ever allowed to report they'd been demanded, let alone fight the demands?
Or, the classic "crazy" one: What if the government was secretly spying on your phonecalls? Don't tell me there are laws against that. They could do it if they really wanted, right?
You want me to keep going?
The government tends to do the insidious crap because, exactly as they've done with most of the above, they can then deny they're even doing it for several years until the weight of evidence becomes completely overwhelming then they stop that one specific thing and start the next one.
You cut someone's tongue off, you've left a really big piece of physical evidence that sickens and outrages the world.
You toss someone in jail without trial, in normal circumstances, and a lawyer seeking to make a name for themselves is on your ass within months.
Pull the shady crap like suspending habeus corpus and you've got years before they even get it reinstated and can begin trying to get the guy you jailed back out.
Keep shipping him off to Syria or Egypt for "questioning" and you get to torture, whilst claiming innocence, the whole time.
Insidious works far better than blunt.
Continuing the insidious theme:
The British government is having major issues with a cleric they can't deport because he might face torture but who they can't make charges stick on in England.
Blunt option: Jail without trial. They tried that, it caused outrage. They had to release him.
Subtle tinfoil hat option: Zap him with a magnet. "Oh, the poor dear's had a stroke. He can't preach anymore. How awful." Then you take him to a nice secure hospital to protect him from the people who might do him harm and you keep repeating. Problem solved. You're helping him, not harming him.