Death of Comedy

Harry & Paul (originally titled Ruddy Hell! It's Harry & Paul) is a British sketch comedy show starring Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse. It was first broadcast on BBC One on 13 April 2007 and ran until 2nd December 2012 Even though Harry and Paul were "poking fun" at stereotypes, we would be hard pushed to see comedy like this on TV today due to all the PC nonsense. The sketch with the Filipino maid angered the Filipino government so much they started a campaign to condemn the sketch and eventually the BBC Director General had to officially apologise. This is a selection of some the sketches that angered the public, but of course are the most funny, cut into one episode.

Why This Man Served 32 Years in Prison for Weed

George Martorano served 32 years in prison for weed — and then opened a CBD café in Philadelphia when he got out.

Related

How I spent 32 years in prison | George Martorano

What facing 200 prison years taught me about happiness | Shaun Attwood

Number One Hypocrite

Dystopia, 2008

This has been built for you and me

Maniacal annihilation machine

Using fear to keep you in control

"Every one else is the terrorist"

That's what you've been sold

And you buy it?

Yes you fucking do

You buy everything in site

You eat everything they are feeding you

You buy a piece of poisoned happiness

And suckle system's boob

Your freedoms nothing more than a lie

And America is killing you

Seems like we aid in every war

And we're friends with whom we abhor

Always at the expense of the poor

If it were the rich

There would be no more war

Rape and conquest feed your kids

Gets you "things" things you equate with freedom

If you want an SUV, we'll have to kill some children

And you don't fucking care

As long as you are not impaired

Giving money to the system

To enlist the poor and kill them

It's the American way.

And you're a fucking slave

And the simple fact is this:

You're the fucking terrorist

And I'm trained like you

Dumbed down through church and school

In the end it's just my luck

I'm a product of where my parents fucked

I'm american because my parents fucked! (In America)

(I'm not American)

Scientific Psychiatry & Big Pharma

William Bramley Excerpts from The Gods of Eden, p.354-363

 

One of the earliest centres of ‘scientific psychiatry’ was Leipzig, Germany. There a man named Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) established the world’s first psychological laboratory in 1879. Until that time, universities usually placed the study of psychology in their philosophy departments because of a lingering belief that there exists a spiritual side to man. It was Wundt’s contention, however, that psychology belonged in a biological laboratory. To Wundt, human beings were only biological organisms to which there were no spiritual realities attached. He therefore considered his approach ‘scientific’ rather than philosophical.

Wundt’s theory about the mind was that human thought is caused by external stimulation bringing about bodily identification with other stimuli which the body had received and recorded in the past. When this identification occurs, the body, or brain, mechanically creates an act of ‘will’ which responds to the new stimulus. There is no such thing as self-created thought or free will. To Wundt and his followers, man was but a sophisticated robot-type organism.

Wundt’s ideas were based upon experiments conducted in his laboratories and elsewhere. Some of those experiments revealed that one could produce the physiological manifestations of different emotions by applying electronic stimulation to different parts of the brain. Experimenters erroneously concluded that the brain must therefore be the source of personality because it triggers the physical manifestations of emotion and thought. The fallacy in this is applying external stimulation. In other words, the brain centres are not self-triggering except in a very limited sense. The experiments proved that it takes something else, something external, to trigger those brain centres. What, then, triggers those centres when the experimenter is no longer applying his electrodes? There must be another external source – a missing element. That missing element appears to be the spiritual entity which produces its own energy output. Although Wundt and others used the experiments to ‘prove’ a pure biological basis to human thought, the results were, in fact, subtly pointing in the opposite direction.

Erroneous or not, the stimulus-response model of behaviour developed at Leipzig quickly became the ‘new wave’ in psychiatry and received considerable support from the influential figure in scientific psychiatry for 40 years. The Leipzig labs attracted many students from around the world, many of whom later became prominent names in psychiatry...

By redefining the nature of thought and behaviour, scientific psychiatry also redefined the nature of mental abnormality and its cure. Methods to bypass human free will and intellect (behaviour modification) were explored and developed. Because human beings were viewed as strictly biological-chemical-electrical organisms, all mental illnesses were said to be the result of physiological processes somehow going ‘out of kilter.’ Experimenters theorised that mental illness could be cured by strictly physiological means, such as with drugs, shock treatment or brain surgery. It was believed that such treatments could remedy the chemical or electrical ‘imbalances’ and thereby cure the mental illness itself.

Out of these theories arose a multibillion dollar drug industry which pours out huge quantities of mood-altering drugs every year. These drugs are designed to relieve every mental ill from ‘can’t get to sleep at night’ to violent psychosis. In addition, many psychiatrists use special machines to send electrical shocks through a person’s brain. Some may even resort to brain surgery. Now that we have had almost half a century to observe these cures in action, we can ask: have they benefited mankind? Is the world a saner place today than it was 50 years ago? To answer these questions, we might do well to analyse the cure most often prescribed by psychiatrists:  psychotropic (mind-affecting’) drugs.

Psychotropic drugs are a mammoth industry. They comprise a large portion of the total prescription drug trade which in 1978 amounted to an estimated $16.7 billion wholesale value in global sales by U.S. manufacturers alone. This figure does not even include sales by Swiss and other European manufacturers...

This epidemic drug use is not an accident. Powerful psychotropic medications are energetically promoted to the medical community in glossy Madison Avenue advertisements in such publications as the American Journal of Psychiatry an through workshops and seminars sponsored by the drug companies.

Justified criticism has been levelled against drug-oriented psychiatry because of the number of patients who actually deteriorate as a result of their psychiatric treatment. For example, a surprisingly large number of people who commit apparently senseless acts of violence, such as shooting sprees and other grisly headline-grabbing acts, are people who were previously treated with psychotropic drugs. John Hinckley, Jr., for example, was under the influence of Valium when he attempted to assassinate U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Such coincidences are usually explained as an indication that those people were already mentally deranged before the violent episodes and, at worst, the drugs were simply not able to help them. On the other hand, critics point out that such individuals were often not violent before their treatment, but became violent only afterwards. Did psychiatric treatments actually worsen their mental states to the point of their going completely psychotic?

.....

 

 Example

Thorazine, which is promoted as a medication for handling psychotic adults and children, belongs to a class of drug which has been known to cause the following:

...psychotic symptoms, catatonic-like states, cerebral edema [excess brain fluid], convulsive seizures, abnormality of the cerebrospinal fluid proteins...NOTE: Sudden death in patients taking phenothiazines [the drug classification to which Thorazine belongs] (apparently due to cardiac arrest or asphyxia due to failure of cough reflex) has been reported but no causal relationship has been established.

The last sentence in the above quote is a remarkable bit of doublespeak. It states that giving someone this class of drug has coincided with their suddenly dying, but the manufacturer denies that there is any evidence that the drugs were responsible for the deaths! No doubt it was just an extraordinary coincidence that some people have had cardiac arrests or cough reflect failures at the time of taking the drug. Fate must indeed work in mysterious ways...

The implications of this are significant. These drugs [also Surmontil, Haldol, Stelazine and Norpramin] have been known to sometimes seriously worsen a person’s mental state or cause mental problems far more severe than those the patient began with!

.....

It  is argued that the number of people who are helped by the drugs far exceed those who are worsened. Advocates cite statistics showing that drugs enable many patients to leave psychiatric institutions sooner and return to the community. Psychotropic drugs seem to enable some people to keep their psychological symptoms under control enough for them to lead useful lives in society. The question is: at what cost are these apparent benefits being obtained?

.....

Psychiatry boasts a low ‘cure’ rate, but a high ‘maintenance’ rate. As long as factories churn out pills, drug ‘maintenance’ can continue.

.....

“If psychotropics are slamming thousands of people every year into a deeper psychological morass because of dangerous side effects, we can see that drug-oriented psychiatry risks pushing a society to ruin; yet psychotropics constitute the main form of therapy in most psychiatric institutions today.

.....

The epidemic use of psychotropic drugs creates yet another significant problem. Drug abuse is considered one of today’s major social ills. Drug abuse is considered one of today’s major social ills. Law enforcement agencies spend an enormous amount of time and money to combat it. The fight against drug abuse is based on the philosophy that people should not take illegal drugs to alter their moods or mental states. Modern psychiatry defeats this campaign. Drug-oriented psychiatry tells us: Feeling depressed? Take a drug. Feeling too happy (manic)? Take a drug. Feeling unable to cope? Take a drug. Feeling too able to cope (megalomaniacal)? Take a drug. Feeling confused and uncertain? Take a drug. Feeling too certain (delusional)? Take a drug. Can’t sleep? Take a drug. Too sleepy? Take a drug. Seeing things that aren’t there (hallucinations)? Take a drug. Not seeing things that are there? Take a drug. Maintenance-oriented psychiatry promotes the very attitude upon which the illegal drug trade flourishes: want to feel better mentally and emotionally? Take a drug. The great irony is that some of the very same ‘conservative law and order’ judges and lawmakers who demand stiffer penalties against illegal drug pushers are among those who are quickest to set up the legal machinery for committing people involuntarily to mental institutions where drugs as powerful as anything on the illegal market are routinely and openly used...

.....

Have philosophies of strict materialism brought about a flourishing psychiatric profession which is bringing about greater sanity to patients, practitioners and the world as a whole? Sadly, the answer seems to be no. Psychiatry started on the right track when it discovered that the mind could be cured of its inorganic ills by confronting past hidden traumas, but it failed to develop that discovery beyond the crude and haphazard techniques used today in psychotherapy. Psychiatry was derailed when it began to mask mental problems for bypassing individual free will in favour of stimulus-response manipulation (behaviour modification). It is perhaps time to move away from the strict materialist perspective, to get off the drugs and to begin restoring a sense of respect for the free will and intellect of human beings. We may then be able to truly start back on the road to genuine mental, social and spiritual recovery for the human race.

HarperCollins, New York, U.S., 1989.

Know Your Product

Australian punk band The Saints

From the album Eternally Yours, 1978

 

 

(Yeah
All right
Sing it up, west coast
Too much!)

I'm just sitting in my chair when a voice comes on the air
Says "Why don't you try it? You'll feel all right!"
"Got some great new brand of smokes, cool your head and clear your throat
"Keeps you young, yeah, so in touch."

Cheap advertising, you're lying
Never gonna get me what I want
I said, smooth talking, brain washing
Ain't never gonna get me what I need

"Our new soap that's peachy keen saves your soul and keeps you clean
"It's recommended, used by the Queen
"Gonna improve your IQ, help in everything you do
"It's economic, don't cost too much."

Said advertising, you're lying
Never gonna give me what I want
I said, smooth talking, brain washing
Ain't never gonna get me what I need

(I said take it
Come on
Soul man
Let's shoot the professor!
Alright!)

I'm just sitting in my chair when a voice comes on the air
Says "Why don't you try it? You'll feel all right!"
"It's a great new brand of smokes
"Cool your head and clears your throat
"Keeps you young and so in touch."

Said advertising, you're lying
You're never gonna give me what I want
I said smooth talking, brain washing
You're never gonna get me what I need

(What do I care?
Yeah! Hey man
Where's the professor?
We need him now!
Gonna tell you 'bout them
Yeah we take it all the way 'round the world
For that west coast feel
Yeah man
Yeah everything, let it out
It's not what you love
Look out on the radio
All right
Yeah
Yeah...)

 Written by Ed Kuepper and Chris Bailey

Persons Unknown

By the Poison Girls

From the album Total Exposure, 1981

Viktor & Rolf Parfums

This is a message to Persons unknown

Persons in hiding, Persons unknown

Survival in silence, isn't good enough no more

Keeping your mouth shut, head in the sand

Terrorists and saboteurs, each and every one of us

Hiding in shadows, Persons unknown

Hey there Mr. Average, you don't exist you never did

Hiding in shadows, Persons unknown

Habits of hiding soon will be the death of us

Dying in secret from poisons unknown

This is a message to Persons unknown

Strangers and passers-by, Persons unknown

Turning a blind eye, hope to go unrecognized

Keeping your secrets, Persons unknown

Housewives and prostitutes, plumbers in boiler suits

Truants in coffee bars, who think you're alone

Big men on building sites, sick men in dressing gowns

Agents in motor cars who never go home

Women in factories, one parent families

Women in purdah, Persons unknown

Wild girls and criminals, rotting in prison cells

Patients in corridors, Persons unknown

Statistics on balance sheets, numbered and rubberstamped

Blind and invisible, you're lost in your homes

Liggers and layabouts, lovers on roundabouts

Wake up in the morning with Persons unknown

Accountants in nylon shirts, feminists in floral skirts

Nurses for when it hurts, Persons unknown

Astronauts and celibates, deejays and hypocrites

Liars and lunatics, Persons unknown

Hopefuls on football pools, teachers in empty schools

Kids into heroin not yet full grown

Typists and usherettes, black men who can't forget

The lonely who long for Persons unknown

Closet idealists, baldheaded realists

Rastas and bikers, the voice on the phone

Pimps and economists, royalty and communists

Rioters and pacifists, Persons unknown

Visionaries with coloured hair, leather boys who just don't care

Garter girls with time to spare, Persons unknown

Judges with prejudice, dissidents and anarchists

Policemen deal dirty tricks to Persons unknown

Strikers and pickets, collectors of tickets

Radical architects, the queen on her throne

Soldiers in uniform, sailors and stevedores

Beggars and bankers, Persons unknown

Football crowd hooligans, bunking off school again

Workers down tools again, United's at home

Smokers with heart disease, cleaners of lavatories

The old with their memories, Persons unknown

Flesh and blood is who we are

Flesh and blood are what we are

Flesh and blood is who we are

Our cover is blown...

Bonus

The Saints - Private Affair, 1978

You say that you got the answers
You heard 'em all on the telephone
And now you're tellin' everybody
This living co-op ain't a business zone, c'mon

We've got new thoughts, new ideas, it's all so groovy
It's just a shame that we've all seen the same old movies

And now you think you got a first in fashion
New uniforms, we all look the same
A new vogue for the now generation
A new profit in the same old game, c'mon

We've got new thoughts, new ideas, it's all so groovy
It's just a shame that we have seen the same old movies

And you think you can't run and hide what you've done
But don't you know? No-one cares after the first million, c'mon

And now you think you got a first in fashion
New uniforms, we all look the same
A new vogue for the now generation
A new profit in the same old game, c'mon

We've got new thoughts, new ideas, we're all so groovy
It's just a shame that we've all seen the same old movies

So you think you can't run and hide what you've done
And don't you know? No-one cares after the first million, c'mon

It's a shame
'Cause not everybody wants to look the same
And not everybody wants to think the same
And not everybody wants to act the same
And I say everybody don't wanna be the same

Written written by and C. Bailey E. Kuepper

World Citizen - I Won't Be Disappointed

By David Sylvian 

Version 1

What happened here?
The butterfly has lost its wings
The air's too thick to breathe
And there's something in the drinking water.

The sun comes up
The sun comes up and you're alone
Your sense of purpose come undone
The traffic tails back to the maze on 101

And the news from the sky
Is looking better for today
In every single way
But not for you

World citizen

World citizen

It's not safe
All the yellow birds are sleeping
Cos the air's not fit for breathing
It's not safe

Why can't we be
Without beginning, without end?
Why can't we be?

World citizen

World citizen

And if I stop
And talk with you awhile
I'm overwhelmed by the scale
Of everything you feel
The lonely inner state emergency

I want to feel
Until my heart can take no more
And there's nothing in this world I wouldn't give

I want to break
The indifference of the days
I want a conscience that will keep me wide awake

I won't be disappointed
I won't be disappointed
I won't be.

I saw a face
It was a face I didn't know
Her sadness told me everything about my own

Can't let it be
When least expected there she is
Gone the time and space that separates us

And I'm not safe
I think I need a second skin
No, I'm not safe

World citizen

World citizen

I want to travel by night
Across the steppes and over seas
I want to understand the cost
Of everything that's lost
I want to pronounce all their names correctly

World citizen

World citizen

I won't be disappointed
I won't be.

She doesn't laugh
We've gone from comedy to commerce
And she doesn't feel the ground she walks upon

I turn away
And I'm not sleeping well at night
And while I know this isn't right
What can you do?






Version 2

There goes one baby's life
It's such a small amount
She's un-American
I guess it doesn't count

Six thousand children's lives
Were simply thrown away
Lost without medicine
Inside of thirty days

In the New York harbour
Where the stock's withheld
It was the price we paid
For a safer world

World is suffering
World is suffering
World is suffering
World citizen

In Madhya Pradesh
Where they're building dams
They're displacing native people
From their homes and lands

So they hunger strike
'Cause they believe they count
To lose a single life
Is such a small amount

In the name of progress
And democracy
The concepts represented in name only

[Refrain:]
His world is suffering
Her world is suffering
Their world is suffering
World citizen

World citizen

And the buildings fall
In a cloud of dust
And we ask ourselves
How could they hate us?
Well, when we live in ignorance and luxury
While our super powers practice
Puppet mastery

We raise the men
Who run the fascist states
And we sell them arms
So they maintain their place

We turn our backs
On the things they done
Their human rights record
And the guns they run

[Refain]

My world is suffering
Your world is suffering
Our world is suffering
World citizen

Who'll do away with flags?
Who'll do us proud?
Remove the money from their pockets
Scream dissent out loud?

'Cause God ain't on our side
The shoe won't fit
And though they think the war is won
That's not the last of it

Disenfranchised people
Need their voices heard
And if no one stops to listen
Lose their faith in words

And violence rises
When all hope is lost
Who'll embrace the human spirit
And absorb the cost?

Not one life is taken
In my name
In my name

[Refrain]

My world is suffering
Your world is suffering
Our world is suffering
World citizen

Not one life is taken
In my name
In my name

World citizen (x4)

His world is suffering
Her world is suffering
Their world is suffering
Our world is suffering

World Citizen (x3)

© 2003 by David Sylvian/Opium (Arts) Ltd

Recorded live in Italy 10 April 2003, during the Fire In The Forest tour, 2003-2004.

In performance: David Sylvian, Steve Jansen, Masakatsu Takagi (projection images - live mix). DV footage by Yuka Fujii for Osmosis

Bonus

Zero Landmine

Music by Ryuichi Sakamoto and lyrics by David Sylvian, 2001

This recording was created to promote awareness of the problem of landmines and to promote a ban on landmines. Proceeds from the CD of the recording went towards de-mining efforts and other related funds.

This Is My Home
The Land Of My Mother
The Place I Play
With Sisters And Brothers
The Trees Are Rooted
In The Ground Beneath
Take Away The Violence
Give The Earth Back Its Peace

This Is Our World
Our Common Salvation
It Knows No Borders
It Serves No Nation
The Same Sun Shines Equally
On Those Beneath
Take Away The Violence
Give The Earth Back Its Peace

There's Fire In The Ground
In The Space Between The Trees
In The Forests and Fields
On Pathways, In Dreams

The Stars Are Whispering
To The Ground Beneath
Take Away The Darkness
Give The Earth Back Its Peace

Who Painted The Green Grass Red
With Danger
Who Coloured The Big Sky Blue
With Sorrow
A Strong Wind Carrying Fear
And Anger
Came And Went And Stole Tomorrow

This Is My Home
The Land Of My Mother
The Place I Play
With Sisters And Brothers
The Trees Are Rooted
In the Ground Beneath
Take Away The Violence
Give the Earth Back Its Peace

The Same Sun Shines Equally
On Those Beneath
Take Away The Darkness
Give The Earth Back Its Peace

Like Trees We're Rooted
In the Ground Beneath
Take Away the Violence
Give the Earth Back Its Peace

Give The Earth Back Its Peace