First from The Washington Post….
They look back with blue or Brown eyes or no eyes at all: Glimpses of the Island of the Dolls in Mexico City
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-s ... 6c1a2d80a5The dolls are nailed to walls, nailed to trees, beheaded and impaled on bamboo stakes. Some are headless, some are heads alone, and some have heads that are twisted around backward, “Exorcist”-style.
They are muddy, filthy, burned and smashed. They look back with blue eyes or brown eyes or no eyes at all. A blond Disney princess in a blue dress smiles, tacked to a wall. A plastic knee swings in the wind.
The Island of the Dolls is muddy and smells faintly of manure from the surrounding cow fields. It is not a happy place, but it attracts a steady stream of the curious, who disembark from party boats plying the 50-plus miles of Mexico City’s famed Xochimilco canals.
Anastasio Santana will tell you the story for $2. After his uncle, Julian Santana, found a drowned girl here in 1950, a doll washed ashore. He hung it up to appease the dead girl’s spirit. But then some pretty unpleasant haunting started, and Julian began hanging more and more dolls from the trees to ward off the spirits of lots of dead girls.
The photos are very creepy...
And just a little something different from Vox….
A human head transplant would be reckless and ghastly. It’s time to talk about it.
Two surgeons based in China say such surgery is “imminent.”
http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/4/ ... -bioethicsRecently, the media has been abuzz with news that Sergio Canavero of Italy and his colleague Xiaoping Ren of China plan to transplant a human head from a living person onto a donor cadaver. The two surgeons — who portray themselves as pioneers defying a stodgy medical establishment but are considered reckless renegades by many peers — say the head donor will be someone with a degenerative disease, whose body is wasting away while his or her mind remains active.
The body donor, meanwhile, will likely be a someone who died of severe head trauma but whose body was left unscathed. The researchers claim to have been perfecting the technique on mice, a dog, a monkey, and, recently, a human cadaver. Originally, they predicted a fall 2017 transplant but now just say it is “imminent.”
Canavero has moved the intended surgery to China because no American or European institute would permit such an operation. “Western bioethicists needed to stop patronizing the world,” he told the South China Morning Post. In contrast, he suggested, “Chinese President Xi Jinping wants to restore China to greatness” by providing a home for such cutting-edge work.
The announcement has been met with significant skepticism, to put it mildly. The implausible claims and radical proposed operation deserves “not headlines but only contempt and condemnation,” wrote Arthur L. Caplan, head of the division of medical ethics at the New York University School of Medicine, in the Chicago Tribune in December.
X3
