Movies/books changing Society/ Politics (Mainly Society)

Upon arrival at a mental institution, a brash rebel rallies the patients together to take on the oppressive Nurse Ratched, a woman more a dictator than a nurse.
R.P. McMurphy and many other isn't even in any mental condition, Example The chief is just quiet, billy is just stuttering and some of the other guys there only have a short fuse.

This movie bring out questions like, "How is it in our mental institutions?"
"Is it right to lobotomies/use shock therapy against R.P. McMurphy, even doe he and many others was not in any mental condition?"
"Isn't a human without no personallity better off dead?", it only costs money to have a "brain dead" corpse waking around!
This is sadly something we generally are not aware of.
[More info look in the spoilers down below]

This movie changed Mental institutions in the us and europe and how we think of them.

Mankind finds a mysterious, obviously artificial, artifact buried on the moon and, with the intelligent computer HAL, sets off on a quest.


One word NASA.
This movie changed space technique as we know it, it has given us gadgets and ideas.
This movie is still ahead of our time, even if it was released 1968.
[More info read below in spoiler]

A New Orleans DA discovers there's more to the Kennedy assassination than the official story.

"Who killed JFK was it Lee Harvey Oswald or was it a conspiracy?"
This is probably the most famous "unsolved" murder in history.

John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories

Two imprisoned men bond over a number of years, finding solace and eventual redemption through acts of common decency.

"Should a prisoners who have been in the prison for x years have an option to stay or leave when his/her time is up?"
A prisoner who been in jail for so long that the prison is his home and even if he got out, he can no longer adapted to the new society.

In 1997, following the publication of articles by Maciej Zaremba in the Dagens Nyheter daily, widespread attention was given to the fact that Sweden once operated a strong sterilization program, which was active primarily from the mid 1930s until the 1970s. A governmental commission was set up, and finished its inquiry in 2000.
The eugenistic legislation was enacted in 1934 and was formally abolished in 1976. According to the 2000 governmental report, 21,000 were estimated to have been forcibly sterilized, 6,000 were coerced into a 'voluntary' sterilization while the nature of a further 4,000 cases could not be determined. However, the 40,000 or so socio-medical cases are contested, and Zaremba and others argue that they were more in the interest of society than individual women. The Swedish state subsequently paid out damages to victims who contacted the authorities and asked for compensation.
The program included all known criteria for sterilization, including a loosely phrased "social" indiciation. In 1922 the State Institute of Racial Biology was founded in Uppsala and in 1927 Parliament began to deal with the first legal provisions on sterilisation. A new draft was produced in 1932, already taking into account sterilisation for general socio-prophylactic reasons, and even without the consent of the person concerned. The draft was adopted in 1934. Another law, passed in 1941, was more far reaching, included a social indication and did not include any age of consent limit.
From 1950, the number of eugenic sterilisations under the 1941 legal provisions gradually decreased. It is possible but not proven that the Swedish sterilizations targeted travellers. These were sometimes viewed as a separate race or ethnic group. The Swedish Racial Hygiene Society had been founded in Stockholm in 1909, and the 1934 works by Alva and Gunnar Myrdal was very significant in promoting the eugenic tendencies in practical politics.The authors theorized that the best solution for the Swedish welfare state ("folkhem") was to prevent at the outset the hereditary transfer of undesirable characteristics that caused the individual affected to become sooner or later a burden on society. The authors therefore proposed a "corrective social reform” under which sterilisation was to prevent "unviable individuals” from spreading their undesirable traits.
In Sweden, sterilization is only compulsory before sex change. This last compulsory sterilization has been criticized by several political parties in Sweden. The Christian Democrats is the only party in the Parliament of Sweden that is in favor of keeping compulsory sterilization.

In the United States approximately 40,000 people were lobotomized. In Great Britain 17,000 lobotomies were performed, and the three Nordic countries of Finland, Norway and Sweden had a combined figure of approximately 9,300 lobotomies. Scandinavian hospitals lobotomized 2.5 times as many people per capita as hospitals in the US. Sweden lobotomized at least 4,500 people between 1944 and 1966, mainly women. This figure includes young children. In Norway there were 2,500 known lobotomies.In Denmark there were 4,500 known lobotomies, mainly young women, as well as mentally retarded children.
By the late 1970s the practice of lobotomy had generally ceased, but some countries continued to use other forms of psychosurgery. In 2001 there were, for example, 70 operations in Belgium, about 15 in the UK and about 15 a year at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, while France had carried out operations on about 5 patients a year in the early 1980s.

This retrospective survey aims at describing patients subjected to prefrontal lobotomies and the general treatment conditions at Umedalen State Mental Hospital during the period 1947-1958. Data collected from psychiatric and surgical medical records was analysed using quantitative and qualitative content analysis. A total of 771 patients subjected to lobotomy during the years 1947-1958 were identified. From these, a sample of 105 patients was selected for the purpose of obtaining detailed data on socio-economic status, diagnosis, symptomatology, other psychiatric treatments applied before the pre-frontal lobotomy operation, time spent in hospital before operation, praxis of consent and mortality. The diagnosis of schizophrenia was found in 84% of the 771 lobotomized patients. The post-operative mortality was 7.4% (57 deaths), with the highest rate in 1949 (17%). The mean age of the patient at the time of operation was 44.8 years for females and 39.5 years for male patients. The average length of pre-operative time in hospital for females was 10.7 years and for males 3.5 years. It remains unclear why this mental hospital conducted the lobotomy operation to such a comparatively great extent. Factors such as overcrowding of wards and its status as a modern mental hospital may have contributed.

Insulin shock therapy or insulin coma therapy (ICT) was a form of psychiatric treatment in which patients were repeatedly injected with large doses of insulin in order to produce daily comas over several weeks. It was introduced in 1933 by Polish-Austrian-American psychiatrist Manfred Sakel and used extensively in the 1940s and 1950s, mainly for schizophrenia, before falling out of favour and being replaced by neuroleptic drugs.

Insulin coma therapy and the convulsive therapies (electro and cardiazol/metrazol) were collectively known as shock therapy. Although insulin coma therapy had disappeared in the USA by the 1970s, it was still being used at that time in some countries, such as China and the Soviet Union.

The futuristic epic 2001: A Space Odyssey influenced many to fall in love with the limitless possibilities of space exploration. The movie sparked imaginations and provided a realistic preview of what our future in space might look like.

When 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered 40 years ago, living and working in space full time was science fiction. Today, three resident crew members are aboard the International Space Station 365 days a year operating one of the most complex engineering projects in history. The station is helping us push the boundaries of 21st century science, technology and engineering.


2001: A Space Odyssey shows an imagined version of our future in space, some of which has come to pass:

• One of the most notable visions is the large, low Earth orbiting, revolving space station in the film. Although the shape is different, today's space station is permanently crewed and international.

• Flat-screen computer monitors that were unheard of in 1968 are now commonly used on the space station.

• The film imagines glass cockpits in spacecraft, which are now present on the flight deck of the space shuttle.

• The film also envisions in-flight entertainment in space. Today there are DVDs, iPods and computers with e-mail access.

• Another famous scene from the movie depicts an astronaut jogging in space. Aboard the International Space Station, exercise in space is routine. In April 2007, 210 miles above Earth, astronaut Sunita Williams ran the Boston Marathon while in orbit.

• Although some of the things in the film are not yet realities, some of them are in the works. For example, although we haven't yet colonized the moon, NASA has a plan in place to return to the moon by 2020 and maintain a presence there. Other ventures in space, such as hotels in orbit and routine tourist space travel are being planned by commercial spaceflight companies.

Along with the 40th anniversary of 2001: A Space Odyssey, this year also marks the 50th anniversary of NASA.

As we finish constructing the station, we're working to return to the moon and then journey to Mars and beyond. We are part of the wonderful future that visionaries such as Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick imagined 40 years ago.