The Fate of the Krel

In Forbidden Planet, it was the fate of the Krel to achieve the ability to create objects with the force of mind alone, and thus to unleash their monsters from the unconscious onto their civilization, destroying it in one night of unimaginable madness.

It takes us a bit longer, but good things often do require more time.

From The Globalist:
http://www.theglobalist.com/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=9554
Limbaugh, Lipitor and the Incivility of American Political Life (Part I)
By Edward Bernton | Tuesday, March 06, 2012

Rush Limbaugh's rant about the purported sex life of a female law student may have been nothing more than a ploy to boost his radio show's ratings. But perhaps the angry rhetoric is emblematic of a larger issue affecting American civic life. As Edward Bernton points out, the rise of political incivility has coincided with the widespread use of drugs like Lipitor...

Perhaps not coincidentally, these developments (like the phenomenon of road rage) parallel the unprecedented widespread use of potent new drugs by millions of men and women over the age of 40. These drugs are called statins, and include the commercial blockbusters Lipitor, Zocor and Crestor, which now account for over $30 billion a year in global pharmaceutical sales...

A large study by Bristol-Myers Squibb, known as PROSPER, showed that patients over age 70 who were at high risk but didn't yet have heart disease saw no cardiovascular benefit from taking statins, and had no decrease in mortality. Yet the immense yearly expenditures on marketing statins has assured that over the past decade most of the medically insured, over-50 population of the United States has been prescribed statins...

Overlooked in the developed world's rush to medicate cholesterol to lower and lower levels have been profound questions about the relationship between cholesterol and cognitive function, mood and behavior. The pre-statin scientific literature provided numerous hints of a link between low (or lowered) cholesterol and violent death, as well as aggression. Reducing cholesterol reduces levels of serotonin, a critical brain neurotransmitter, and low brain serotonin is well known to be linked to violence, impaired impulse control and aggression in both humans and animals..

Dr. Beatrice Golomb, lead researcher on the single U.S. study currently investigating the side effects of statins (including effects on cognition and behavior), published an alarming medical paper in 2004. This "case report" study documented personality changes involving extreme aggression and irritability (including road rage incidents and homicidal impulses), which occurred in six patients (four male and two female) on cholesterol-lowering drugs. The personality changes resolved when the patients stopped the drug. In four patients, they recurred when doctors assured the patients that the changes could not be statin side effects and restarted the drugs.

A study published in 2000 looked at the cholesterol measurements of 79,777 individuals and subsequent police records for violent crimes. The study found that violent criminals had significantly lower cholesterol than others identical in age, sex, alcohol indices and education...

These dramatic behavioral responses to statins may represent the tip of a much larger iceberg. While only a small percentage of patients may be unusually susceptible to the behavioral effects of lowered cholesterol, how likely are scientists and physicians (not to mention patients) to associate less pronounced increases in aggression and irritability with a medication their doctor prescribes for their heart?...

Read 'em and weep.
And so it goes...

--