Mental Health Care IS Part of Health Care

The state of mental health services in NC is beyond appalling. It has gotten so bad that it's truly a public health emergency. There are counties where you can't access any mental health services at all, and in others, you have to wait weeks to get any help. And Medicaid and the CAP program are cutting eligibility for assistance statewide.
So I was interested to see this over at No Blood for Hubris:

Let them eat cake? No, let them make tea
I work with people (adults and children) who have chronic complex PTSD and dissociative disorders, many of whom self-injure, and many if not most of whom have suicidal ideation, and some of whom are actively suicidal. Meaning that sometimes they act on their thoughts.

When I, as their clinician, think they are a danger to themselves or others, part of a safety plan we've put together includes going for an evaluation at a hospital or crisis center. I don't just send people to the ER on a whim, because that would be, well, idiotic, would it not? Generally, I try to speak with someone there to express my concerns, and my familiarity with my patients' patterns. If they listen to me.

Lately, that hasn't been so much the case. And I am discovering many of my colleagues are having similar experiences. Seems like, more and more, people who should be inpatient are not being admitted, whether it's because of having poor insurance with poor benefits, or I'm not sure what.

It is often very hard for people who are a danger to themselves or others to admit that. So the act of actually going to an ER and saying, yes, I have been having those thoughts, and yes, I am afraid I will act on them, is really quite a step forward, clinically-speaking. For someone to respond to that admission in a trivializing way, as in the "Oh, it's not so bad, why don't you just go home and make a cup of tea" (which actually just happened, I kid you not) gatekeeper incident, is completely unacceptable.

Obama, who is quite ready to spend on physical infrastructure (roads, bridges, etc.) needs to spend money on shoring up our social infrastructure -- mental health and child welfare, doing it from the bottom up, not from the top down. More services, not fewer. More services for the most endangered.

Are we hypnotized, as a nation, by some weird gender-biased kinda frame? Bridges and roads are visible, strong, real and manly and tough? Minds are invisible, weak, fickle, unreal, not truly existent, thus unworthy of making a top priority?

Memo to Obama: "For God's Sake, strap on a pair and get to it"

By Mike Whitney
Smirking Chimp

This is bad. 10.2% unemployment. 16 million people out of work. Payrolls have been slashed 22 months in a row. The real jobless rate is now 17.5%. These are Great Depression numbers. Unemployment benefits have been extended, but policymakers still resist jobs programs. Why? Why no federal work programs? Why no WPA?

The dot.com boom fizzled and the housing boom is kaput. Greenspan's bubblenomics has flopped. There's no driver for new jobs. We handed-over the economy to the private sector, and they blew it up. The supply-side, trickle-down, free market dogma turned out to be a fraud. We are all poorer and the economy is broken. Now we need jobs, good paying jobs with benefits. Government jobs. We need big government not big bubbles.

The Democrats are clueless. Their deepest convictions appear on the screen of a teleprompter and then vanish in a flash. It's a party of phonies led by a poseur. President Milquetoast, a charismatic orator with zero guts. What good is a man who believes in nothing? What good is a man who won't fight for what's right?

Consumer credit is shrinking at record pace, $14.8 billion in September alone, 7.2 percent annually. When credit shrivels and wages stagnate, the economy tanks. It's as simple as that. It doesn't matter how much liquidity the Fed pumps into the stock market, the patient is dying. The economy needs stimulus, and lots of it. Any fool can see it.

Consumer prices have been gobsmacked by deflation. The consumer price index (CPI) has declined for six straight months, the longest slide since 1954. And it's getting worse. The banks can't lend because (according to the IMF) they're still holding onto $2.8 trillion in rotten mortgage paper. The banks will be on the fritz for a decade or more. That means less demand, fewer jobs, more misery.

Obama's remedy? Expand the war into Pakistan.... Read the rest.

What Do Blind People See When They Dream?

By Vicki Santillano
From Divine Caroline:

There’s a dream I had years ago that has always stayed with me, mostly because it was so unlike anything I’d experienced before. I dreamed that I was sleepwalking down a hallway painted in the most vibrant colors I’d ever seen and covered in an unrecognizable, hieroglyphics-like language. Upon waking, I marveled at my brain’s ability to create such fantastic imagery that I’d never seen in real life. And then I wondered what brains come up with when their hosts have never seen anything in real life.

I’ve heard people ask questions like, “Do blind people dream?” The simple answer is yes, of course they do. Most land mammals—including our pets—can dream, so why should a lack of sight affect someone’s ability to do the same? The way blind people dream is quite unique, but dream they do, just as frequently as anyone else. On the other hand, “Do blind people see in their dreams?” has a much more complex answer.

When the Sightless See
In 1999, researchers at the University of Hartford set out to determine what, if anything, the blind can see while dreaming. They analyzed 372 dreams of fifteen blind individuals and found that the age of sight loss affected the visual quality of the subjects’ dreams. The study determined that people who go blind at age five or younger tend not to have visual dreams, whereas if blindness occurs about at age seven or older, chances are the blind will see some images. When people go blind between ages five and seven, their potential for dream sight could go either way...
Read the rest at Divine Caroline.

"There's no there there..."

This is exactly what the Bush administration was doing - putting out as fact claims about Iran's alleged nuclear weapon development - from dubious or anonymous sources. In other words, no verifiable source available. And it just so happened that during the reign of King Dubya, the U.S. claims about the progress of the alleged weapon program nearly always contradicted the findings of outside third party monitors.
Now, with the continuation of Dubya's disastrous helmsmanship, the same public information campaign based on fear mongering is being trotted out again. Don't we already have two unwinable conflicts on our hands? Do we really need to be ferreting out more unnecessary wars? Then there's the issue of how another unprovoked attack is going to get paid for... Are we going to borrow that money from China also?
Any attack on Iran, whether carried out by Israel or the U.S., will be seen as one and the same in the Islamic world. And the conflict will not be limited. The following piece is from Smirking Chimp:

There's No There There: IAEA Inspects Iran's Nuclear Site; Finds "Nothing to be Worried about"
By Nicole Belle

What happens after all the fear mongering that Iran is developing a nuclear weapons bunker turns out to be bunk?

U.N. inspectors found "nothing to be worried about" in a first look at a previously secret uranium enrichment site in Iran last month, the International Atomic Energy chief said in remarks published Thursday.

Mohamed ElBaradei also told the New York Times that he was examining possible compromises to unblock a draft nuclear cooperation deal between Iran and three major powers that has foundered over Iranian objections.

The nuclear site, which Iran revealed in September three years after diplomats said Western spies first detected it, added to Western fears of covert Iranian efforts to develop atom bombs. Iran says it is enriching uranium only for electricity.

ElBaradei was quoted in a New York Times interview as saying his inspectors' initial findings at the fortified site beneath a desert mountain near the Shi'ite holy city of Qom were "nothing to be worried about."

"The idea was to use it as a bunker under the mountain to protect things," ElBaradei, alluding to Tehran's references to the site as a fallback for its nuclear program in case its larger Natanz enrichment plant were bombed by a foe like Israel.

"It's a hole in a mountain," he said.

But, let's not let you get too comfortable about Iran...GuardianUK's Julian Borger comes up with a new scare:

The UN's nuclear watchdog has asked Iran to explain evidence suggesting that Iranian scientists have experimented with an advanced nuclear warhead design, the Guardian has learned.

The very existence of the technology, known as a "two-point implosion" device, is officially secret in both the US and Britain, but according to previously unpublished documentation in a dossier compiled by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iranian scientists may have tested high-explosive components of the design. The development was today described by nuclear experts as "breathtaking" and has added urgency to the effort to find a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis.

Ooooh...booga booga booga! Two things that glare out for me: one, Borger cites the IAEA unpublished report without one single quotation. Two, Borger claims the "two point implosion" is "officially secret" in the US and UK, but how secret can it be when it has its own Wikipedia page?

The media really does think you're dumb and can't figure out teh Google.

The Secret is out, and it's grim

Father Tyme over at Big Brass Blog posted about this, and so far I'm not aware of any aspect of it being discussed in the msm. The following comes from the site BoingBoing:

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:

* That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.
* That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.
* That the whole world must adopt US-style "notice-and-takedown" rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused -- again, without evidence or trial -- of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright. Read more at BoingBoing.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Is Our Dick Going Soft?
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Props to WTF is it NOW?!

Autumn in Western North Carolina

Just not this fall, because the color kinda sucked this year. So, I'm posting my pictures from last fall! Is that cheating?
The top picture is just down the road from me in Henderson County, and the other two are in Transylvania County, in the Pisgah National Forest.

Let's look at where our money REALLY goes...

Instead of the delusions and "misapprehensions" that congress appears to labor under! These figures are from an analysis of detailed tables in the “Analytical Perspectives” book of the Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2009. The figures are federal funds, which do not include trust funds — such as Social Security — that are raised and spent separately from income taxes. What you pay (or don’t pay) by April 15 goes to the federal funds portion of the budget.

The government practice of combining trust and federal funds began during the Vietnam War, thus making the human needs portion of the budget seem larger and the military portion smaller.

"Current military” includes Dept. of Defense ($653 billion), the military portion from other departments ($150 billion), and an additional $162 billion to supplement the Budget’s misleading and vast underestimate of only $38 billion for the “war on terror.” “Past military” represents veterans’ benefits plus 80% of the interest on the debt.












Total Outlays (Federal Funds): $2,650 billion
MILITARY: 54% and $1,449 billion
NON-MILITARY: 46% and $1,210 billion





The Government Deception

The pie chart below is the government view of the budget. This is a distortion of how our income tax dollars are spent because it includes Trust Funds (e.g., Social Security), and the expenses of past military spending are not distinguished from nonmilitary spending.

What's up with the swine flu data?

Even though some progressives seem to view concerns about the hastily manufactured swine flu vaccines as "anti-government paranoia", they refuse to acknowledge some very basic issues with the whole swine flu drama. These would include:
1) It literally materialized virtually overnight - a hybrid flu strain that could not possibly have mutated into its current incarnation naturally. It has elements of three distinctly different viruses originating in divergent regions of the world.
2) This new vaccine has been rushed to market with no clinical testing, with no safety data, and no list of all its components available to the public. And who exactly benefits financially from all this?
3) There is no actual test data available that indicates the people said to be experiencing the swine flu actually have this variant of flu.
4) Why the rush? Why is this a "public health emergency"? So far, it hasn't been nearly as lethal as the standard variety of seasonal flu strains.
5) If this flu is allegedly a threat because of its ability to mutate into a more lethal form, then the vaccines are going to be pointless anyway. If the virus mutates as rapidly as what they say, by the time the vaccine is produced the virus will have already mutated into different strains which the vaccine will be useless against.
And finally - dear gawd - is there anyone still out there who remains so immensely credulous and idiot-simple that they think whatever the government tells them must be true? It would seem there are, amazingly enough.
Anyway, catch this clip from BrassCheck TV:

No truth talk will be tolerated...

Government Advisor Fired for Saying Alcohol is More Dangerous than Drugs
By Allison Kilkenny
From Smirking Chimp:

The Guardian reports that Professor David Nutt, the British government's chief drug adviser, has been fired after claiming that ecstasy and LSD are less dangerous than alcohol.

So continues the journey to failure first instigated by the British and United States government four decades ago when the two governments implemented their long and pointless "Wars on Drugs."

If you're one of the 34 percent of admirably plucky and stubborn Americans who don't think the War on Drugs is failing, perhaps examining the idiotic way in which the British government handles drugs will inspire you to see the flaws in supporting laws that arbitrarily dictate what substances human beings can and cannot ingest.

Read the rest...

Talk about scary shit - the "Hell House" phenomenon

Intensive mind control programming using psychological terror techniques is something that I find very frightening. Especially when I see so many vulnerable children being subjected to it. Is the bottom line agenda here really about "saving" people - or is it something much less altruistic? And what's up with that nasty, gleeful You're going to H-E-L-L, and I'm N-O-T, nah nah nah nah nah! shit? That smug, sanctimonious, schoolyard posturing makes me want to wipe those self-satisfied smirks right off their faces.

BrassCheck TV brings this disturbing trend to light with a couple of must-see video clips.
"There are hundreds, maybe now thousands of "Hell Houses" built across the country each year to celebrate Halloween.
Good Christian kids get to play rapists, drug addicts and murderers to scare other good Christian kids into submitting to the will of...
The will of whom exactly?
The only clear winner in this game is the whacko "minister" running the show.
Google "Hell House documentary" for the full story."

JurassicPork going down

It ain't right, people.

Pass it on.


Send some love to Welcome Back to Pottersville.


-From No Blood for Hubris.

This is exactly how I feel...

but have never been able to articulate quite so clearly. What a relief to see that I'm not the only one, and to realize there must be many of us "out there" who sense this same sense of disconnect from the mainstream norms of our culture.
I don't know what's even true about our lives in this milieu, not really. With multi-national corporations programming our very reality for us 24/7, and the forces of the elite puppeteers determining how we sway and dance in every area of life, how do we decipher what's "real" versus what's corporate psy-ops?

The Iron Cheer of Empire
By Joe Bageant
Excerpt:
"..There is a flickering screen or monitor in front of and between every citizen of the mediated society of watchers. Whether we watch television or other media matters not, we dwell among the watchers in a surveillance society of our peers. We dress appropriately, speak middle class English, not urban street slang or redneck, and look as prosperous as possible, or as hip as possible, or as learned or pious or whatever within our peer groups, and for outsider groups. No jokers, smokers or midnight tokers allowed in Mainstream American society and culture, which consists of working, consuming and "appearing to be," but never purely being.

We flow willingly through the transactional circuitry of the wealth economy like ghosts, optimistic and eerily cheerful, encountering one another through the hierarchical commodity affinity groups we call our peers, people who consume the same things we do, and have the same purchased identity and "lifestyle" we do. Swimmers in a sea of mass produced goods and mass produced identities through consumption of those goods, we strive for uniqueness, but not very hard, lest we lose the commodities we've acquired..."