Year: 2007
California DBSA Conference
Posted on August 26, 2007 in DBSA Support Groups and Conferences
It’s going to be in southern California, at the Ontario Marriott on October 12th and 13th. Here’s the brochure and here’s the registration form. (Pssst to Jane: Tom Wootton’s going to be there.)
Friday Xenartha Blogging – Wandering Sloth
Posted on August 26, 2007 in Xenartha
OK, I got nagged into doing this by a fan.
A pet two-toed sloth got loose in Michigan, but returned home unexpectedly.
Here’s a better version of the story.
Boom at Noon
Posted on August 26, 2007 in Weather
A boom at noon, then enough rain to darken the pavement in large phantom puddles. This time California hijacked the water machines that run west to Texas. We still didn’t catch up with Las Vegas and Phoenix.
More showers in the evening. Flashes of crystal falling in the night.
[tags]weather, Southern California, thunderstorms, storms[/tags]
Today is International Dadaism Month
Posted on August 26, 2007 in Festivals
DADA!
See [[International Dadaism Month]] and [[Dada]].
Housekeeping
Posted on August 25, 2007 in Site News
Just went through my blogroll. If you visit this site and don’t see your blog listed, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment with the info here.
His Penis Stays Silent
Posted on August 25, 2007 in Milestones Scoundrels Violence
Arthur Bremer is scheduled to be released from the Maryland State Penitentiary soon. The younger generation may not remember the former janitor who shot [[George Wallace]] and turned him into the time’s political [[Ironside_(TV_series)|Ironsides]]. Even though he made an insanity defense, [[Arthur Bremer|Bremer]] hasn’t spent any time getting psychological care and he has turned down a psych evaluation that the Secret Service requested. This didn’t deter the Maryland parole board from letting him go in a few weeks.
Assassins are a hair’s breadth from the rest of us, a distance that we find disturbing. Yet there are reams of material written about them and the crimes they committed. After serial killers, they are the archdemons of true crime, erasing with a single bullet or a bomb the political focus of cities, states, and nations.
Unlike other events of the type, I can’t tell you where I was when the word got out that Wallace was shot. I would have been in eighth grade and the news might have come from one of my working class white schoolmates. San Bernardino was a railroad town back then. A lot of families rode the [[Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe]] west from Texas and the Deep South to the terminal. White boys wore white t-shirts and growled at the black students who they thought were taking over their turf and having an easy life.
For them, the attempt on George Wallace — the angry white voter’s candidate — signaled something like [[Helter_Skelter_(Manson_scenario)|Helter Skelter]], the bigot’s wet dream of a final showdown with the Negro. School leaders put an extra-tight cap on violence in those months. The shooting was not discussed as a current affair. The California primary happened, [[George McGovern]] won, Wallace got most of his votes out of Orange County, and then it was on to the convention.
It was surprising that we did not have an outbreak of violence as we had had the year before. A gang of white students and a gang of black students met in the corridors of the last line of classrooms. Ninth graders organized the affair, consciously thinking of the impression that they would leave on their younger schoolmates. The explosion was short. We eagerly listened to eyewitnesses who could tell us who hit who and what teachers arrived to end the fracas. The riot was a widely known secret before it happened. No one told the school administration what was up. For several days, there were lock-downs where lunches were moved about and students held in classrooms.
All the breath of those pubescent teenagers piled up between the desks. No talking was permitted, but news got around anyways, usually during gym period. Boys in reversible white and red t-shirts told stories. The most chilling was that a guy had brought a gun and put it in his locker to use on “the niggers”. Growing up, it was not the terror of gangstas that moved me but of the prides of Texas and Oklahoma who were leaning on the wire fences waiting for the signal to begin Helter Skelter.
Arthur Bremer was an anomaly, a white man who stalked [[Richard M Nixon]] and Wallace. I don’t think my peers knew what to make of him. He didn’t kill liberals. His diaries spoke of his attempted murder as a passage into manhood. My cohorts never spoke of him as a traitor as their father’s might have, but as a mystery, a man who wore dark glasses. Bremer shot their champion and for a moment, at least, they shut up, before turning their support to the new angry white man’s candidate, Nixon.
[tags]assassins, assassinations, Arthur Bremer, Bremer, parole, paroles, crime, mental illness[/tags]
Walking in Space While Staying on the Ground
Posted on August 23, 2007 in Body Language Spirituality and Being
My body
Is walking in space
My soul is in orbit
With God face to faceFloating, flipping
Flying, trippingTripping from Pottsville to Mainline
Tripping from Mainline to MoonvilleOn a rocket to
The Fourth Dimension
Total self awareness
The intentionMy mind is as clear as country air
I feel my flesh, all colors mesh– Walking in Space, Hair
Recent science suggests that putting your senses out of sync with one another can take you to a place that seems other than where you are. A new technique makes it possible for people to have out of body experiences without resort to drugs or New Age thinking. Some clever wiring and placement of video cameras is all that is required:
Last year, when Dr. Ehrsson was, as he says, “a bored medical student at University College London”, he wondered, he said, “what would happen if you ‘took’ your eyes and moved them to a different part of a room? Would you see yourself where you eyes were placed? Or from where your body was placed?”
To find out, Dr. Ehrsson asked people to sit on a chair and wear goggles connected to two video cameras placed 6 feet behind them. The left camera projected to the left eye. The right camera projected to the right eye. As a result, people saw their own backs from the perspective of a virtual person sitting behind them.
Using two sticks, Dr. Ehrsson stroked each person’s chest for two minutes with one stick while moving a second stick just under the camera lenses — as if it were touching the virtual body.
Again, when the stroking was synchronous people reported the sense of being outside their own bodies — in this case looking at themselves from a distance where their “eyes” were located.
Then Dr. Ehrsson grabbed a hammer. While people were experiencing the illusion, he pretended to smash the virtual body by waving the hammer just below the cameras. Immediately, the subjects registered a threat response as measured by sensors on their skin. They sweated and their pulses raced.
They also reacted emotionally, as if they were watching themselves get hurt, Dr. Ehrsson said.
People who participated in the experiments said that they felt a sense of drifting out of their bodies but not a strong sense of floating or rotating, as is common in full-blown out of body experiences, the researchers said.
I suppose that this is not recommended for people who have heart conditions.
My out of body experiences usually occur when I am in bed, coming down from a major anxiety episode. [[Xanax]] can accelerate the sensations. The top of my head feels like it separates and whirls on its own while the rest of my body turns like a suckling pig without the pain of the heat.
“the sense of having a body, of being in a bodily self,” is actually constructed from multiple sensory streams, said Matthew Botvinick, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Princeton University, an expert on body and mind who was not involved in the experiments.
Usually these sensory streams, which include vision, touch, balance and the sense of where one’s body is positioned in space, work together seamlessly, Prof. Botvinick said. But when the information coming from the sensory sources does not match up, when they are thrown out of synchrony, the sense of being embodied as a whole comes apart.
The brain, which abhors ambiguity, then forces a decision that can, as the new experiments show, involve the sense of being in a different body.
The news may disappoint those who thought they had magical powers, but for me it just demonstrates how wondrous — in a scheming sort of way at times — the universe can be. Never ceases to amaze me how some people expect fantastic explanations when reality is so darned beguiling.
[tags]New Age, out of body experience, spirituality, brain, nervous system, body language[/tags]
Bipolar as Boss
Posted on August 23, 2007 in Bipolar Disorder Class
Having bipolar disorder isn’t going to threaten your job if you’re the boss.
Suicide Watch on the Gulf Coast
Posted on August 23, 2007 in Disasters Suicide
More and more survivors of Hurricane Katrina are thinking of suicide as nothing to little is done to patch things up after the catastrophe.
The survey is a follow-up to one done six months after the hurricane, which found that few people in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama – about 3 percent – had contemplated suicide in the storm’s aftermath.
That figure has now doubled in the three-state area and is up to 8 percent in the New Orleans area, according to Ronald Kessler of Harvard Medical School, lead researcher for the Hurricane Katrina Community Advisory Group.
More people also showed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, 21 percent of those interviewed this year compared to 16 percent in the earlier survey.
It’s not surprising, said Karen Binder-Brynes, a New York psychologist who specializes in PTSD.
“It’s a community that’s in terrible distress. It’s not like other things where, once everything’s over, everything’s getting rebuilt,” she said.
Kessler team interviewed 1,000 people last year and was able to track down 800 of them for this year’s survey. The latest survey is not yet ready for publication, but Kessler said the preliminary results for suicide and PTSD were striking.
Kessler said that in the months after the Aug. 29, 2005 hurricane, an underlying optimism protected many people from suicidal thoughts. Now, that optimism has worn thin – something the earlier report warned could happen if rebuilding didn’t keep pace with expectations.
The next move in the continual shell game of disaster relief will undoubtably come from administation apologists who will have a word or two to say about these expectations: look for the word “unrealistic” to hit your local spin doctor’s fax machine soon.
Am I a Militant Agnostic? Dunno.
Posted on August 22, 2007 in Humor? Spirituality and Being
Check out Stu Savory’s list of religious bumperstickers he’d like to see.
Note to Stu: If you lived in California, you’d see some Buddhist stickers.
On Conspiracies and Confederacies
Posted on August 22, 2007 in Reflections
Real conspiracies happen, but I believe that they are rare. Confederacies look like conspiracies on the surface and they are quite common. In the article about crackpot, one flamer (who got deleted in the moderation queue) attempted to trump me by calling me a conspiracy theorist. It’s an old trick that people who don’t have anything substantive to say in rebuttal use.
I believe that somewhere, for some reason, one of the dictionary usage boards decided to remove the lunacy insinuations from the definition. Other dictionaries (have you noticed how their definitions often seem to sound nearly exactly alike?) looked over their shoulders and followed suit. “Well, the Zounders Dictionary changed the definition, so should we” is how the thinking must have gone. There was a general movement and that resulted in everyone doing it. Conspiracy? Did they all get together and agree to change the word? No, confederacy in that all the dogs began running in the same direction for pretty much the same reason.
It’s sad that some netizens don’t appear to want to put the work into understanding and making the distinction. But I guess I’ll chalk that up to insecurity.
On the Meaning of Crackpot
Posted on August 22, 2007 in Crosstalk Words
This article is meant to remove discussion about the meaning of the word “crackpot” from Bad Astronomy Blog.
I got into a discussion over on another blog recently about the nature of the word “crackpot”. Does it refer to a person who is mentally ill or not? I thought it did, but then I had a dictionary shoved into my face, to wit: a person who is eccentric, unrealistic, or fanatical..
I did a little more research on the components of the word. The American Heritage Dictionary (online) says that the word is a formation of crack(ed) and pot (meaning “skull”). I did a little more research and found that the term cracked — aside from its violent, breaking connotation and a few others — meant Informal. eccentric; mad; daffy. (Dictionary.com) Cracked also means to become mentally unstable as in “to crack up”. But dictionary after dictionary insisted that crackpot was not a term used to suggest mental illness.
In a departure from the mainline dictionaries, NTC’s Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions gives us “A fake; a person with strange or crazy ideas.”
But I have a lot of dictionaries and one of them is a massive copy of the 1971 edition of the Webster’s New International Dictionary. Here I found this definition:
one given to erratic, irrational, or lunatic ideas (p. 528)
The only place that I had to search deeper than that was my Oxford English Dictionary and, alas, since my edition its historical investigation in the 1920s, it did not contain the word “crackpot”. However it did have a few interesting definitions of “crack” including:
10. A flaw of the brain, a craze, an unsoundness of mind.
15. A crack-brain*, a crazy fellow.
To add a final note, my edition of Roget’s Thesaurus includes the word “crackpot” as a synonym for “lunatic”.
So what happened between 1971 and the present day? A social revolution that didn’t manage to excise the word completely, but attempted, instead, to alter its meaning. Let’s go back to crack + pot. A crack(ed) pot (skull) signifying someone who has been injured in the head. Brain-damaged or a person who wasn’t all there. The usage panel behind the 1971 dictionary had no problem with this slang usage. Then came a revolution which mandated that either the official definition be changed or those using it give it up.
Like the n-word, crackpot was one of those which possessed a certain perjorative snap to it. Evidence was mounting that the mentally ill did not lose all faculties nor were their ideas worthless. The rise of a new chemistry meant that many conditions were controllable. And with the settling down of many patients, we got a better look into how the unsound mind worked. Bipolar disorder, for example, turned out to be a matter of acceleration or deceleration of thought and impulse control. Intelligence tests showed that bipolar sufferers matched well against those who were not afflicted and in one type of intelligence — associational intelligence — smarter. You could make a case that the term crackpot as a synonym for mentally ill person was nothing but a crude pejorative and, as such, should be eliminated from the civil, thinking person’s language.
What’s more there was a constituency with supporters willing to speak out when it was being maligned by this [[slanguage]].
But the sharpness of those cees and those kays was just too much to let go. So a mean kind of political correctness sneaked in. Crackpot had long enjoyed use in political and scientific circles. Its users just couldn’t give it up. So somewhere between 1971 and the present, a revision took place in which all references to lunacy were excised. A whole history of usage was denied just to keep this bit of meanness in the English language.
A certain kind of disingenuousness is required, I think, to believe that this word has lost all its lunatic connotations. “Oh, we just mean eccentric” we’re told as if the term is completely void of antagonism. History has known many eccentrics, men and women with odd little hobbies that sometimes proved to be scientifically valid and sometimes were unrealistic: I would not call all of them crackpots. Nor would I call all eccentrics unrealistic. Occasionally, they caught on to reality better than the rest of us.
Crackpot is just a mean word used by mean people to put down others. And while some dictionaries have deleted references to insanity from their definitions, I believe that those who use it know damn well that the meaning is still there and understood. We don’t accept the argument that someone can use nigger because it is dialect and I don’t think we should accept that crackpot doesn’t mean insane person or nutcase because of the user’s alleged ignorance of its etymological history or the whitewash given it by contemporary lexicographers.
