Violence and the Teenage Brain

Thom Hartman has some very interesting things to say about the teenage brain and violence today. Some 24 year year old called him and he said when he was fourteen he used to play video games all the time. But Hartman said back in the nineties the games were more cartoon like and not as explicit as today in 3 D. Hartman familiarized us all with the three demilenizations of the brain. The nerves of the brain have a coating of milen around them to protect them and the more entrenched the pattern is the more milen builds up. But three times in the young there is a flood of a substance called “milen” that destroys the nerve pathways of the brain and you flush brain cells out of the body in your urine. Of course when you do this the brain actually shrinks but it becomes more efficient in handeling data. The first demilenazation takes place at age seven and before this it’s a “magical” world for kids where you actually believe all that Disney movie clap trap. Kids lose their belief in Santa Clause around age seven. Personally I remember it was Easter of 1958 when me and [Al Owens] has gotten up in the pre dawn hours of Easter and [Al Owens] says “You know the Easter bunny isn’t real. In fact come to think of it, Santa Clause isn’t real”. I sat back and thought about it a bit and thought “That makes sense”. So it was the first Christmas after we moved from east Westchester (or whatever you call it) that I still believed in Santa Clause. But I didn’t believe in the flying reindeer or going down the chimney. I was sensible, like the girl in the Hippopotamus song. I believed Santa came in through the front door. I remember it was the last Christmas in Westchester when I asked my Mom “How does Santa Clause know if we’ve been good or bad” and my Mon said ‘He has spies”. I was already in the first grade back then. (We moved from Westchester on Halloween night) At any rate Hartman says that if you’re going to learn music (which I did. My parents bought me that xylophone thing in mid 1956) or if you’re going to learn another language, before seven is the time to do it because if you learn it then you won’t speak it with an accent. But if you learn after seven you’ll always speak it with an accent. Also in kids who learned prior to seven the parietal and temperal lobes of the brain light up, but after seven it’s the occipital lobe that is active, because you have to think of word assotiations in terms of pictures. At any rate a lot of childish nonsense gets flushed down the toilet at age seven. There are changes at thirteen and also around age twenty when your “world view” and personality changes. This could be what they mean when they say that “Your brain isn’t fully formed when you’re a teenager”. What they mean is that excess brain cells haven’t yet been flushed down the toilet. This may be why they say people “get mature and responsible” at age of twenty or so and no longer have that rebellious “juvenile” personality. But if you stimulate the violence centers of the brain excessively before a certain age, then you will keep that violence with you always. This means a ten year old should not be playing extreme video games of violence because the brain will go ahead and create a “violence center” as a valued center of knowledge. This is why Bush’s “wars of choice” in Iran and Afghanistan are a bad thing because children exposed to this violence will carry it with them the next sixty years, and provide fodder as future recruits. I found this little essay of Hartman utterly fascinating. This may account for what I’ve called “The Jesus gene”. Why is it Mark Bove’s four boys all turned out to be such holy rollers? It’s because they had been propagandized as small toddlers and onward. For a person like me or Pete Richards or Jim Cooper or Jim Klein or Bobby Hayden or Henry, it took an extrordenary chain of events to make us Christians. For some people a stint in prison is that “extrordenary event”- . Whatever it is, it had to be something that came as a shock to the normal brain patterns to disrupt the brain patterns after they had been established. In my case I think moving here caused a de milenization. Because suddenly Chrisstian belief in the hereafter “no longer made sense”. My writing style was different in the nineties than now, and I should provide examples of it.

Ravi Batra says that this “Monitization of the national dept” that Judy predicted last week, was in fact a bad thing to do. Personally I think it’s pretty smart. It is about the only thing we’ve got left. But detractors say that will only drive up oil and energy prices and make corporations and banks richer. As I said in a previous posting “If China thinks our dollar is undervalued, why is it they’d rather have our money than our goods. If they don’t trust the dollar shouldn’t they fix it so we have to pay more dollars for their goods, if we buy them at all, and they can get our stuff on the cheap. But that doesn’t happen. They refuse to raise the valuation of the dollar in relation to ours. So like I say “Put your money where your mouth is”. I think inflation is the last thing we have to worry about. It’s akin to someone with 115 over 75 blood pressure smoking a cigarette. The effect on cartiac stimulation is near nill. Now they’re saying some children got sick eating canibus laced brownies. They got nauseous and rappid pulse rates, and are being checked out by medical personnel. I think the only good way to restore American industry is for the senate to ratify laws passed in the House the past two years. Of course they can change the rules to majority rule in the Senate in January, but won’t all bills “die” at the end of this congressional term? That’s my understanding of constitutional law. There will be no large reserve of House passed bills just waiting to be ratified by the Senate come January. We need to legislate prohibitions against certain practices that are anti US economy. But the Republicans like the status quo too much to do anything to keep US industry on its downward track.

We need to be reminded that stock prices are not really related to corporate profits or CEO salaries. If you invest in a stock you are not "giving the corporation money". The exception to this rule where the corporation gets the money is in an I P O or initial public offering of common stocks. Otherwise - the only one you are paying is the guy who sold the stock to you at the other end of the brokeraged sale. Stocks can easily sell for several times "book value". This makes the individual owners richer but not the piggies in the corporation. The stock market in fact is still in what would be the doldrems at the end of any other big recession. The highs were over 1400 on the D J I. But individual C E O's at the top get more money than they would deserve than the price of their stock would indicate. A rise in stock price does not increase corporate capital. These come from reinvested dividends, if there are any. Technically every stock owner has a say in corporate policy. You get share allocated votes. In a sense corporations are a democracy. However it's the big pension fund and mutual fund managers that make all the decisions. Most votes are controled by huge blocks of stock no individual investor could hope to compete with. Conversely if the market were to crash, book value of the corporation would not necessarily go down. But if profit and loss statements are adverse they could have a major cash flow problem. But I think it's fair to say that except for the first few months of the recovery, stock share owners are not making any killing in windfall profits. I gave a "buy" indication in October of 2009 and I never retracted that and I am not retracting it now. Personally I don't think it's a particularly good time to buy either comon stocks or precious metal futures. Stocks pay dividends though, and they are superior to T bills. People pay for comodities what they Expect them to be worth at the delivery date. For the most part you are not competing with idiots and if something appears really obvious, look again. - - - - - (and now for the Abbey Road tape splice)

OK, what we’re doing with this file now is to format the thing for the blog right here in Word and then transfer the formatting tword the blog so I’ll know it will it will stick. Then I’ll go back and change the formatting back to normal when I’m done.