Joseph P Farrell – As regular readers here may have noted, in the past few days I’ve been following a variety of topics, mostly to do with education, but a few concerning the Lunacy Index (which is my little measure of the insanity of the political left in this country, which is to be distinguished from the Hysteria Index, which is my measure of the pathology of the political right in this country.

You’ll note that because our two party system is really a one party system of the hard left, and the soft left, that oftentimes these indices overlap.) This article was shared by Mr. V.T., and I am blogging about it simple because it uniquely ties together all the themes I’ve been blogging about the past few days – quackademia, the surveillance state, the Lunacy Index – in one tidy Gorgon’s knot of insanity:

Whole New Level of Creepy: MIT Creates Wireless Device That Can Detect Emotions, Heartbeat and Breathing Patterns (link)

Now I have no difficulty believing that MIT (or anyone else) would be developing technologies for the remote sensing of an individual’s emotional state. In fact, if anything, my problem with this article is the implication that this technology is so underdeveloped as to be a kind of “remote polygraph”, a way of reading physiological changes  remotely that goes little behind simply noting them, and guessing what the individual’s state of mind might be. I would argue (a task for another day, alas) that the technologies have already far exceeded these rudimentary capabilities, and have indeed blogged in the past about them. They exist. They are real.

And they are unbelievably frightening in their potential.

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