Scientists Find "Blogging Brain "

Research at the University of Iowa has found that people with damage to the front right lobes of the cortex have a tendency to develop hoarding.

“Hoarding was defined as abnormal if it was extensive, the squirreled items were not useful or aesthetic and the individual was unwilling to discard any of their collection. Some of the patients had filled their homes with vast quantities of junk mail or broken appliances, for example.”

I’ve always thought that blogging was the perfect displacement activity for the obsessive – a brief surf can show you how people are filling their blogs with vast quantities of useless observations and half-working thoughts. The web journal format allows mountains of words to build up, and as there is little or no cost involved, there is no need to edit or throw out the broken badly-formed entries. So blogs build up and gain mass like huge houses full of endless rooms of discarded mental junk, to be returned to again and again by the person doing the writing…

Meanwhile there have been serious and welcome developments for human rights in the UK over the last week. Foreign nationals have been held in Britain’s Guantanamo, Belmarsh without charge or trial, and denied information as to the evidence against them for the last 3 years. The Law Lords, whose job it is to effectively decide our unwritten constitution and it’s labrynthine legal workings, have found that the same human rights must apply to these individuals as to British citizens. Now tthey will have to charge them or let them go. The awful truth is that like the inmates of Guantanamo, many of the “terrorists” in Belmarsh show signs of severe mental illness having been so brutally confined.

As far as I know the UK is the only place in the so-called “free world” (it’s expensive ! what are they on about?) where you don’t need to carry I.D. and this is a fabulous freedom that we are all loathe to give up. It means I can be naked and law-abiding, after all.

Undaunted by a revolt rumbling in their ranks, the government are pressing ahead with the introduction of I.D. cards using the same excuse as ever – terrorism. The arguments which demolish this rationale are many and well-articulated, but the main one as far as I am concerned is that any terrorist worth his salt is going to be able to get forged documents, and all this does is initiate a new market for the forgers. Inspection of I.D. cards will replace genuine inspection of the person; and this excercise in population control will actually make it easier for the organised criminal to cross borders unimpeded.

So the new Home Secretary Charles “I Ate All The Pies” Clarke (who last week replaced David “Little Lad” Blunkett amidst tears, recriminations and emails) now makes it his first task in office to push through legislation that 18 years of Conservativism and 30 years of the IRA failed to achieve, and he has a mammoth task on his hands with large parts of our 3 party system up in arms against it. Once people realise that they will be forced to pay £85 for something they don’t need, doubtless more concerted popular resistance will begin. We Brits just don’t like being forced to part with cash for no clear benefit. It was the Poll Tax that did for Thatcher.

I suspect that collectively the government has sustained damage to it’s right frontal cortex and that they are starting to hoard useless attitudes which they have collected from discredited amoral right-wing administrations. After all, they have been banging their heads blindly against one another and against the General Public wot voted for ’em (twice) for 7 years now.

It’s the folly of the left turning right.