What's Better In The News For Lobotomies, Wiretapping, And Green Peace

    What's better with lobotomies is that Thorazine replaced lobotomies in the mid 1950s. For the most part, Thorazine, the first anti-psychotic medication, also ended the barbaric practices of electroconvulsive (shock) treatment, hot then cold water hosings, high pressure water hosings, and insulin induced comas. The Wall Street Journal has revealed that almost 2,000 veterans of World War ll in Veterans' Administration (VA) hospitals received lobotomies. Most were done from 1947 to 1950. The overriding decision for a lobotomy appears to have been to control violence.
    There were two kinds of lobotomies. The usual one was for the surgeon to fold back the skin of the patient's forehead, saw to holes into the skull, insert a spatula-shaped knife into the brain and then twist the spatula. This would destroy the brain fibers between the prefrontal area (the area right behind the forehead) and the rest of the brain.
    The second method was to insert an ice pick beneath the upper eyelid, through the bony eye socket, and into the brain. This was a simple procedure, and we know of a psychologist with a Master's Degree whom the physicians let perform such an operation on a patient.  This was not at a VA hospital but at a state mental hospital.
  A presidential panel has offered 46 proposals to the president that could result in big changes in the way the United States pursues intelligence gathering. The pendulum is about to swing again in spying. It swung too far under President Clinton who insisted that foreign spies basically had to be Boy Scouts to be hired by the United States. This led to 9-11. Americans must recognize that we successfully fought World War lll against the Soviet Union, and that we are currently in World War lV against the Islamofascists. This war will be over when the Muslims reform Islam to purge the hate from the Koran. The hate is essentially found in the command by Allah to kill the infidel. We Christians got over that bias and now it's time for the Muslims.
    Russia is hosting the Olympic Winter Games in Sochi this February. In order to look like a more civilized nation, a bill has been passed which would grant amnesty to those convicted of  "hooliganism." This will, if anything is certain in Russia, result in the two members of the Pussy Riot Band being released before serving their last three months of a two year sentence. More significantly, it will probably result in charges being dropped against thirty Green Peace members arrested after they tried to board a Soviet offshore oil platform in the Arctic.
    These commentaries are based on news from the Wall Street Journal, America's most trustworthy national newspaper.
    Peter Nickerson