Prints of darkness

A reader - alas not a fan - of this blog has recently contested my assertion that contemporary law does not recognise the agency of spiritual entities (eg courts don't blame ghosts or demons for theft, assault and other crime). Sorry, evading responsibility by blaming misbehaviour on Baron Samedi, Casper the Ghost, Elvis or the gremlins just won't work except as an indication of mental problems.

That non-recognition was illustrated in today's ABC report regarding Rachel Hadley, labelled tabloid-style as 'Mum killed toddler to 'expel evil spirits''.

Rachel Cherie Hadley stood on her son's chest and mouth to expel evil spirits, court heard.

A court has found a mother was psychotic when she killed her two-year-old son by standing on him.

The Supreme Court in Adelaide received psychiatric reports that Rachel Cherie Hadley stood on her son's chest and mouth to expel evil spirits.

The doctors said she thought she was curing him, rather than killing him.

An autopsy found the toddler died from asphyxiation.

Unsurprisingly, the court did not find that the two-year-old had been inhabited by a denizen from the Pit. Instead, the fatal footprints reflected his mother's mistaken, tragic belief.

Justice Kevin Duggan found his mother was mentally incompetent when she killed him. ... The woman's lawyer, Bill Braithwaite, said there would be no application for her release, meaning she is expected to be kept in a mental health facility."

Erasure

From 'Sexual Reorientation', a paper by Elizabeth Glazer (Hofstra University Legal Studies Research Paper No. 10-30) -

Ten years ago, Kenji Yoshino wrote about the "epistemic contract of bisexual erasure", the tacit agreement between both homosexuals and heterosexuals to erase bisexuals. While the tenth anniversary of the publication of Yoshino's article is reason enough to revisit the topic of bisexual erasure, the recent storm of same-sex marriage litigation presents an even more pressing reason to revisit the topic.

Lately, it seems more homosexuals than heterosexuals are erasing bisexuals, and more overtly than at the time Yoshino identified the phenomenon of bisexual erasure. Because the fight for same-sex marriage recognition is a fight to fit into the guarded category of marriage, members of same-sex relationships and their advocates have an interest in fitting into a stable sexual orientation category, which bisexuality is not. This Article, at the very least, hopes to make the bisexual slightly less invisible from legal scholarship at a time when the threat of bisexuality, and the erasure of bisexuals, seem to have intensified. More ambitiously, this Article introduces terminology that serves as a first step toward making bisexuals - along with other individuals along the continuum of sexual orientation who are even more invisible than bisexuals - visible.

This new terminology distinguishes between an individual's "general orientation" and an individual's "specific orientation". An individual's general orientation is the sex toward which the individual is attracted as a general matter. An individual's specific orientation is the sex of the individual's chosen partner. In many cases the two orientations are identical, but for bisexuals who partner with only one person the two orientations necessarily differ. While introducing new words will not solve the problem of bisexual invisibility, it might allow those who have struggled with asserting their bisexual orientations - those who were in a relationship with a member of the opposite sex and later wished to partner with a member of the same sex (or vice-versa) - to do so without having to recant their previous relationships. This terminology describes an individual's sexual orientation with reference to her status as well as her conduct. It also describes her sexual orientation individually as well as relationally. Moreover, in addition to ameliorating the problem of bisexual invisibility, distinguishing between individuals' specific and general orientations will help to debunk commonly believed myths about bisexuals, bridge the gap between diametrically opposed sides of the stalemated same-sex marriage debate, and clarify the purpose of the LGBT rights movement by broadening the concept of sexual orientation.

Perhaps, of course, we might be wary about putting people into boxes (rather than merely closets) and humane - for want of a better word - if they fail to meet our expectations regarding 'fixity' or affinity.

Exasperation

Having delivered my ANZSOG seminar paper on 'Identity Theatre: Rhetoric and Reality in Contemporary National Identity Schemes' I'm playing catch-up with reading, including Ronald Desiatnik's Without Prejudice Privilege in Australia (LexisNexis Butterworths, 2010), Culture Crisis: Anthropology and Polotics in Aboriginal Australia (UNSW Press, 2010) edited by Jon Altman & Melinda Hinkson and John Willinsky's The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship (MIT Press, 2006).

The features a brief review of 'Wrapped in Data and Diplomas, It's Still Snake Oil' by Katherine Bouton in the NY Times offers a brief review of Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks (Faber, 2010) by Ben Goldacre.

Bouton comments that -

Ben Goldacre is exasperated. He’s not exactly angry — that would be much less fun to read — except in certain circumstances. He is irked, vexed, bugged, ticked off at the sometimes inadvertent (because of stupidity) but more often deliberate deceptions perpetrated in the name of science. And he wants you, the reader, to share his feelings.

Let's just say I do.

Bouton goes on to explain that Goldacre's -

initial targets are benign. Health spas and beauty salons offer detox footbaths for $30 and up, or you can buy your own machine online for $149.99. You put your feet in salt water through which an electrical charge runs. The water turns brown, the result of electrolysis, and you’re supposedly detoxed. Dr. Goldacre describes how one could produce the same effect with a Barbie doll, two nails, salt, warm water and a car battery charger, thus apparently detoxing Barbie. The method is dangerous, however, because of the chance of getting a nasty shock, and he wisely warns readers not to try his experiment themselves.

Goldacre reportedly offers more than just spirited debunking of nonsense -

The appearance of “scienciness”: the diagrams and graphs, the experiments (where exactly was that study published?) that prove their efficacy are all superficially plausible, with enough of a “hassle barrier” to deter a closer look. Dr. Goldacre ... shows us why that closer look is necessary and how to do it.

You'll get a good grounding in the importance of evidence-based medicine (the dearth of which is a “gaping” hole in our culture). You'll learn how to weigh the results of competing trials using a funnel plot, the value of meta-analysis and the Cochrane Collaboration. He points out common methodological flaws: failure to blind the researchers to what is being tested and who is in a control group, misunderstanding randomization, ignoring the natural process of regression to the mean, the bias toward positive results in publication. "Studies show" is not good enough, he writes: "The plural of 'anecdote' is not data".

Indeed. I doubt that Dr Goldacre is a fan of Grof and Laszlo.

Bouton comments that -

Goldacre has his favorite nemeses, one of the most prominent being the popular British TV nutritionist Gillian McKeith, whose books and diet supplements are wildly successful. According to her Web site, “Gillian McKeith earned a Doctorate (PhD) in Holistic Nutrition from the American Holistic College of Nutrition, which is now known as the Clayton College of Natural Health.” (The college closed in July of this year.) Clayton was not accredited, and offered a correspondence course to get a Ph.D that cost $6,400. She is also a "certified professional member" of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants, where, Dr. Goldacre writes, he managed to get certification for Hettie, his dead cat, for $60. Ms. McKeith has agreed not to call herself 'Dr.' anymore.

Perhaps my dead moggie - Ervin of World Futures would presumably describe her as "no longer living in the familiar form in this world but ... alive nonetheless" - a certification. So very useful in this universe and other parts of the metaverse.

As I've commented elsewhere, nonsense can be dangerous.

Sometimes bad science is downright harmful, and in the chapter titled 'The Doctor Will Sue You Now', the usually affable Dr. Goldacre is indeed angry, and rightly so. The chapter did not appear in the original British edition of the book because the doctor in question, Dr. Matthias Rath, a vitamin pill entrepreneur, was suing The Guardian and Dr. Goldacre personally on a libel complaint. He dropped the case (after the Guardian had amassed $770,000 in legal expenses) paying $365,000 in court costs. Dr. Rath, formerly head of cardiovascular research at the Linus Pauling Institute in Menlo Park, Calif., and founder of the nonprofit Dr. Rath Research Institute, is, according to his Web site, "the founder of Cellular Medicine, the groundbreaking new health concept that identifies nutritional deficiencies at the cellular level as the root cause of many chronic diseases".

Dr. Rath’s ads in Britain for his high-dose vitamins have claimed that “90 percent of patients receiving chemotherapy for cancer die with months of starting treatment” and suggested that three million lives could be saved if people stopped being treated with “poisonous compounds.” He took his campaign to South Africa, where AIDS was killing 300,000 people a year, and in newspaper ads proclaimed that “the answer to the AIDS epidemic is here.” The ads asked, "Why should South Africans continue to be poisoned with AZT? There is a natural answer to AIDS". That answer was multivitamin supplements, which he said "cut the risk of developing AIDS in half."

"Tragically," as Dr. Goldacre writes, Dr. Rath found a willing ear in Thabo Mbeki. Despite condemnation by the United Nations, the Harvard School of Public Health and numerous South African health organizations, Dr. Rath’s influence was pervasive. Various studies have estimated that had the South African government used antiretroviral drugs for prevention and treatment, more than 300,000 unnecessary deaths could have been prevented.

You don’t have to buy the book to read the whole sorry story, which is readily available online. Dr. Goldacre believes in the widest possible dissemination of information. But if you do buy the book, you'll find it illustrated with lucid charts and graphs, footnoted (I’d have liked more of these), indexed and far more serious than it looks. Depending on your point of view, you’ll find it downright snarky or wittily readable.

Christine Corcos meanwhile points to a follow-up to the Charna Johnson case in Arizona (weird, but alas no weirder than claims in World Futures) and highlights Christopher Buccafusco's 43 page 'Spiritualism and Wills in the Age of Contract' [PDF]. As I've indicated elsewhere in this blog, Australian courts do not respect the authority of statements supposedly delivered from the dead (or undead) via a medium and, irrespective of pious expressions by exponents of akashic holism, are unlikely to do so in the near future.

Injury and compensation

The NSW Government has announced 'in principle' support to recommendations in the report [PDF] by the Honourable Michael Campbell QC, a retired Supreme Court judge, regarding compensation for women who lose an unborn child as a result of a criminal act.

The report follows an incident in which a NSW woman lost her unborn child after being hit by a vehicle whose driver was charged with multiple offences, including aggravated dangerous driving causing grievous bodily harm. NSW Attorney General John Hatzistergos indicated that -

After the incident, the Government appointed the Honourable Michael Campbell QC to undertake a review of laws to determine if current offences allow the justice system to respond appropriately.

The Campbell Report concludes that the current offence provisions and sentences do allow the justice system to respond appropriately to criminal behaviour that leads to the death of a foetus.

For example, as a result of the 2005 legal change known as 'Byron's Law', a person who deliberately inflicts grievous bodily harm upon a pregnant woman, causing the destruction of a foetus, faces 25 years in jail – the same maximum as manslaughter.

The severity of the sentence gives recognition to the trauma suffered by expectant mothers who lose an unborn child as a result of being a victim of crime.

The 2005 change to the Crimes Act 1900 (NSW), through the Crimes Amendment (Grievous Bodily Harm) Act 2005 (NSW) codified the decision in R v King (2003) NSWCCA 399.

In that decision the court held that an injury causing the destruction of a foetus could constitute infliction of grievous bodily harm upon the mother. The subsequent codification amended the statutory definition of grievous bodily harm to include "the destruction (other than in the course of a medical procedure) of the foetus of a pregnant woman, whether or not the woman suffers any other harm".

The Campbell Report recommends that consideration be given to -

- amending the Victims Support & Rehabilitation Act 1995 (NSW) to include the loss of a foetus, so as to provide for compensation to victims who lose an unborn child as a result of a criminal act; and,

- establishing a scheme to provide for the payment of the funeral costs of a stillborn child, in certain circumstances, lost as a result of a criminal act.

A woman who loses a foetus as a result of criminal conduct could receive victims' compensation without the need to establish psychological injury.

Sexting

The Sydney Morning Herald today reports,somewhat excitedly, on the aftermath of DPP v Eades [2009] NSWSC 1352, characterised as Australia's first sexting case.

Damien 'Ezzy' Eades is caught up in legal history but perhaps not in the way he would have liked.

The 20-year-old from Sydney's western suburbs is at the centre of Australia's first 'sexting' case, after a schoolgirl sent a nude photo of herself to his mobile phone. The maximum penalty he faces is a two-year jail term.

We might perhaps start by asking whether there's a need to refer to Mr Eades - apparently guilty of the crime of residing in the western suburbs - as 'Ezzy'.

As an 18-year old Mr Eades, in 2008, worked at a KFC outlet. He exchanged text messages, including "a hot steamy one" with a 13-year-old girl with whom he had become friends. Eades sent a photo of himself naked from the waist up, duly reproduced on the front page of the online SMH. The child expressed a liking for that snap, explaining "I do like so I only got to send one of top half sorry for the slow reply but I'm in the shower." Eades reportedly responded "Send whatever you want bottom even better." Ouch! By now the sound of ringing alarms should have been knocking the chicken out of the deep-fryer. The girl, with just a dash of common sense, indicated that "Well I will take it now but none will be sexy after all it is a picture of me."

The SMH reports that -

The girl then says she has taken about four and doesn't know what to send.

Eades says to send the best. ''Your choice," he texts.

Girl: "OK I'm about to send one so don't laugh even though you probably want."

She then sent a full frontal photograph of herself naked which she had taken holding her mobile in her hand.

When the girl's father checked her mobile phone, he went to the police. Eades was charged with incitement of a person under 16 to commit an act of indecency towards him. He was also charged with possession of child pornography.

Things were now looking bad for Mr Eades, charged under ss 61N(1) and 91H(3) of the Crimes Act (NSW).

When the matter came before Magistrate Daniel Reiss at Penrith Local Court in March last year, the magistrate dismissed both charges. Mr Reiss said that the photo itself was not indecent and that he was not able to take into account the background context of the text messages which he noted did suggest "a sexual aspect behind his request".

Magistrate Reiss also said there was no evidence that the relationship progressed beyond friendship, a consideration evident in R v Murray Colin Stubbs [2009] ACTSC 63, an ACT online grooming case cited by several Information Law students regarding questions of evidence and intention. In considering s 91H the magistrate held that "the sexual context" had to be determined from the photograph itself, finding that there was no sexual activity depicted in the photograph - 'simply a photograph of the complainant standing naked in a bedroom "and there is no posing, no objects, no additional aspects of the photograph which are sexual in nature or suggestion".

The Director of Public Prosecutions appealed, under the Crimes (Appeal and Review) Act 2001 (NSW), over the "act of indecency" charge, with James J of the Supreme Court ruling that the magistrate had erred. Mr Reiss should have taken into account the sexual nature of the text messages, Mr Eades's intention, and the age difference between Eades and the girl.

The matter was referred back to the Local Court to be heard again, with leave for an appeal by Mr Eades being granted in Eades v Director of Public Prosecutions (NSW) [2010] NSWCA 241. The NSW Court of Appeal has dismissed that appeal, ordering him to pay costs. We might infer that NSW Legal Aid has picked up the tab. Onwards to the Local Court for a fresh hearing.

A perspective on vexed questions regarding child poronography is provided by the decision in DPP (Cth) v Ison [2010] VSCA 286 and DPP v Smith [2010] VSCA 215.

the company of the dead

From Deborah Solomon's 28 October NY Times review of Grant Wood: A Life (Knopf, 2010) by R. Tripp Evans -

Wood was only 50 when he died of pancreatic cancer in 1942. His posthumous reputation was its own forlorn drama; critics and art historians who should have known better wrote him off as a propagandist for conservative values. He was accused of fostering a shrill nationalism that was actually compared to the unalloyed evil of the Third Reich. After the war, the art historian H. W. Janson asserted that "the Regionalist credo could be matched more or less verbatim from the writings of Nazi experts on art". In 1962, when Janson published his now classic textbook on the history of Western art, he made no mention of Wood.

Wood had to wait for the arrival of postmodernism and its assault on the official story of art before he could be rehabilitated. Now he is back, and it says something about the folly and failures of art history that it took the special claims of gender studies to bring Wood's life into view in our time. Evans wants to convince us that Wood longed for what he could not have — but a longing for men was not what made him distinctive or memorable. He longed for the company of the dead and tunneled back through time in his enchanting and elegiac paintings. He deserves to be remembered as one of the essential eccentrics of ­American art.

Solomon comments that -

In interviews and profiles, Wood was inevitably described as a "shy bachelor", and Evans states confidently in his introduction that the artist "spent most of his life masking — not always successfully — his homosexuality". But a man who stifles his desires to the point of near extinction cannot accurately be called gay, and by the end of the book the reader has no idea whether Wood was ever intimate with a man. Affairs are hinted at, but the author is unable to document them; Wood himself claimed to be innocent of carnal satisfactions. One of his friends is quoted in the book recalling a night when Wood seems to have confessed to being chastely asexual, which is not implausible.

I talk to the trees, and they talk back to me

From Jenni Diski's spirited 32(21) LRB (4 Nov 2010) review of Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World (Blue Door 2010) by HRH the Prince of Wales, Tony Juniper & Ian Skelly -

Since the late 19th century a particular kind of nature spirituality has been dear to the hearts of the half-educated, or angry, or ineffectual (if only in their own heads) English and Anglo-Irish upper classes and landed gentry. It derives in part from Neoplatonism mixed with naturalistic pantheism and more than a dollop of Jungian spiritus mundi; also in part from a general feeling that the lovely world into which they were born entitled has been spoiled by, well, too many people and machines, and life being made warmer and easier, and all that sort of unpleasant thing. From the 1890s onwards there was the Rosicrucians-Golden-Dawn-Hermetic mob, picked up by Yeats and friends, Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy, and various ladylike adaptations of Eastern philosophies; later the pro-Fascist Jorian Jenks joined Lady Eve Balfour's Soil Association as well as Kinship in Husbandry, started by the enthusiast for early Nazism Rolf Gardiner; Kathleen Raine converted from a modernist poet to found the Temenos Academy (current patron the Prince of Wales), with its Ten Basic Principles: 'Acknowledgment of Divinity', 'Spiritual Vision, as the life-breath of civilisation' etc. In the 1970s the wealthy businessmen and members of the Clermont Club Teddy Goldsmith and John Aspinall (the latter more concerned for his captive tigers than their keepers who were occasionally killed by them, and for nanny murderers than the murdered nanny) started the Ecologist magazine, supported by Laurens van der Post (spiritual mentor to the Prince of Wales), which suggested in its first issue that it might be an idea to offer the public 'a bounty for submitting to sterilisation'.

What makes me think of this darker side of the history of English ecology and nature-loving is partly the Prince of Wales's own frequent references to some of those organisations, people and ideas (the Emerald Tablet of Hermes and the (apocryphal) Gospel of Mary Magdalene get super-large-print quotes, along with Fritz Schumacher, Gandhi and St Augustine), but also his repeated use of phrases like 'ancient wisdom', 'the golden thread', 'integrated medicine' and his insistence that the world has been going to rack and ruin ever since Galileo was so stubborn about the planets and that awful Francis Bacon wrote The New Organon to usher in the Enlightenment with its terrible materialism. Only 400 years after this disaster, along came modernism, which HRH identifies exclusively with brutalism and quotes as its exemplar, not just Le Corbusier, but more importantly in his view, Marinetti (more Futurist, I think, than Modernist). And with all this unnatural badness, and the Industrial Revolution too, the ancient wisdom handed down by 'the people' has just plain disappeared. Except for a knowing few, the masses have lost the golden thread, stopped listening to the harmony of the spheres, rejected beauty and love ('no brain-scanner has ever managed to photograph a thought, nor a piece of love for that matter') and forgotten how to live according to the natural all-controlling rhythm of the planet. ...

This ancient wisdom stuff is ineffably silly. When and where was it taken seriously? Most of 'ancient' history consists of small populations making a subsistence living in the only way they could with the technology available to them. There never was a non-materialist time, except in the world of magic and the kind of religion and social organisation that made sure the peasants provided a tithe to keep the priestly authorities free to think up theology, and the worldly elite capable of protecting and grabbing land for themselves. Good stories are essential to people, of course, but everyone lives (and always has) within their means when they have to, and beyond them (think potlatch as well as credit cards) when they can. For all the talk of the good, spirit and Nature Herself, I suspect that what HRH is really missing is feudalism. And here's an awful thought for those who are taken with treading Nature's path: if as the natural beings we are, we have developed technologies that allow us to fulfil material wishes that might cause the planet to give up the ghost, then are we not just doing the work of Nature Herself?

As readers of this blog might suspect, Mr Windsor has received the thumbs up from quantum holism guru Ervin Laszlo -

A remarkable vision of a Prince with a remarkable and timely vision of his own — a book to read both by those who take an interest in the life and work of the Prince of Wales, and those who take an interest in, and a measure of responsibility for, our common future.