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Send to friendby Brent Bedford
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| Phineas Gage holding the iron rod |
The 1848 case of dynamite-worker Phineas Gage has puzzled neuroscientists for more than a century. Despite his miraculous survival, the loss of his left frontal lobe produced marked changes in poor Phineas’ personality. A strange, new, aggressive personality pattern emerged, dominated by self-seeking and self-aggrandizing behavior noted as irregular by friends and family who knew him before the tragic accident. His physician Dr. Harlow described the change:
“His contractors, who regarded him as the most efficient and capable foreman in their employ previous to his injury, considered the change in his mind so marked that they could not give him his place again. He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint of advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinent, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operation, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible. In this regard, his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was “no longer Gage.”
It may seem odd to be pointed out, but it is notable, that Phineas Gage did not go on to become a Presidential candidate, or President-elect. And can’t we all be grateful that the 19th century was not defined by a decorticated commander-in-chief? What person, who lacked an intact frontal lobe, could actually think forward 150-600 years, without fear, the way a President must, the way Lincoln could, and did?
To return to the controversy of Phineas Gage’s possible qualification for U.S. President. What surprised many about his accident, was that after the steel rod was propelled with the force of an explosion straight through his head, Gage was able to stand up all by himself, walk to a cart, and even ask to be taken to the hospital. After his recovery, all his senses remained intact, and Gage was declared to be “perfectly normal”. Phineas Gage’s recovery still gives hope for rehabilitation by victims of tragic accidents which didn’t have to happen. But nobody proposed to make him a President.
Today, the new Imperial Law imposed by the British Empire since Kennedy's assassination, is an effective ban that no Presidential candidate who has the ability or potential to access and rely upon the creative powers of their own mental processes could be allowed to succeed.1For background on the development of this specific imperial policy, compare the British East India Company's Roman Law scholar, Henry Maine, with the discussion by Shelley. Maine gained the attention of the Empire with his 1856 piece "Roman Law and Legal Education", published in Cambridge Essays. His argument there, on law, is a disgusting embellishment on the notions of language held common by Jeremy Bentham and the Imperial Cults of Ancient Rome, alike. His policy on law, and the discussion of law, will lead the reader straight to the Roman Emperor Nero, and nowhere else. For a proper, efficient notion of law and legislation, only Percy Shelley's discussion could counter the evil influences of the ideology of British Agent, Henry Maine. If this were to happen, an appropriate response to reversing this general breakdown crisis might be effectively acted upon. This policy is made more secure by the fact that, since the assassination of John F Kennedy the consistently downward trends in the physical economy have rendered the likelihood of such qualifying candidates more and more improbable. With Obama, this law has been taken to the extreme.
Has Obama sufferred from any decorticating events in his background, which would explain his failed Presidency, or the British Empire’s support of his incompetence in leading the United States? None that are yet commonly known. But then again, many of the lobotomies given in the 1950s and 1960s were performed in such a way that no scars were left. The orbitoclast, the instrument of choice used by leading leucotomists, left no scars, as the severing of the frontal lobes was accomplished through the nasal cavity. The orbitoclast eased into the brain with the light tapping of a mallet.
The decline of lobotomies was not due the substitution of more effective methods, either. Practitioners of lobotomies, soon lost the credibility to profess curative powers over personality disorders and frail nerves, when patients resulting behavior was often more radical and undesired than before. What began to emerge, was a growing recognition similar to the one made by the acquaintances of Phineas Gage, that severing the cortex into halves, or parts, forever prevented from interacting as a functional whole, tended to make the patient’s personality tragically worse: it was common for a lobotomy patient to be described as at some times euphoric and uninhibited, pursuing gratification without regard for consequence. Many patients ate whether hungry or not, and became fat. Patients lost the ability to plan effectively for the future or to sustain goal-oriented activities. One very able cook, after receiving a lobotomy, could no longer follow recipes, and when sent to purchase ingredients at the store, instead disappeared for long periods of time, completely forgetting to buy the food.
While the symptoms of Narcissistic Personality Disorder perfectly match the behavior and performance of President Barack Obama, insight into the functional link between this disorder and the brain is either being suppressed, obscured, or has not been established as is commonly posited by psychiatric professionals.2Child Psychoanalysis has been a key feature of the Tavistock Institute's program of psychological warfare. In a similar fashion, the Chicago School of Behavioral Economics is based on the importation of the Tavistock model into the United States, under the direction of Bertrand Russell. For its utility in controlling populations during the frequent economic crises of liberal free-trade, this work restored continuity to the related pre-WWII eugenics and Hitler projects of Prescott Bush and his social circles at Yale. This Chicago project, known originally as simply Behavioral Sciences, emphasized the infantile psychological state, and worse, not in order to guarantee the healthy creative maturation of the adult, but as a substitute model for creative adult behavior. This overlapped with the developing insights into Narcissistic Personality Disorder. For a clinical discussion on this disorder, the language employed comes directly from the child psychoanalytic school of Object Relations Theory, of Melanie Klein, John Bowlby, and Mary Ainsworth. This line of thought drew many from Tavistock to Chicago, which eventually became an authority of its own on the poorly-understood Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Valerie Jarrett's mother, Barbara Bowman, for instance, helped found Chicago's child-psychiatry Erikson Institute, which may explain her ability to handle the insane, Barack Obama. The mechanisms of this Personality Disorder, however, do explain all of Obama’s failures, as well as his need to rely on an inflated, grandiose sense of his self, with absolutely zero basis to be found in reality per se. These same mechanisms of Barack Obama’s personality, and also the performance of the disgusting, and universally hated Republican Candidates, do find their basis in the absence of, or refusal to use and depend on, those higher cognitive functions which at the very least require a functional cortex in order to occur. And that is to speak merely of the brain. We have yet to uniquely identify the creative potential of humans by simply referring to the functions of the brain. Nor could we, for the necessary, creative nature of the human mind does not lie in the brain. Even less so in the likely hollow cavities of brainless Presidents, or brainless Presidential candidates alike.
That’s why the assassination of JFK affected the entire nation, and still affects the nation today--its security, its optimism, and its survival. How do people respond to the challenging prospect of sending a Woman to Mars, or developing economic platforms inside Lunar tunnels, with their brains alone? What aspects of this Renaissance in Physical Economy from Mars have they already experienced, as such? And how does the Earth as a whole respond to the cosmic radiation which it is continually receiving from our Sun, and which permeates the entire economic phase space unifying the orbits of Earth, its Moon, and Mars, and beyond?
