Year: 2007
New Theme
Posted on August 5, 2007 in Site News
Yes, I took the picture. Great luck. Check out the new theme at Vox Nortona as well.
Signs of Republican Negligence
Posted on August 5, 2007 in Negligence
REVISED
Check out this blogging which shows that only three pieces of the bridge needed to fail.
Katrina Minnesota style. For years, the Republican Congress and the Bush Administration ignored the warnings of civil engineers that bridges across the country needed refitting, replacing, and maintenance. Can you believe the audacity of John McCluelessCain to attempt to blame it on this Congress? How many bills did you sponsor to correct this problem?
There’s an awful lot to be fixed after all these years of Republican misrule. And more will die because of it.
[tags]video, bridge collapse, Republican negligence, do nothing Republican Congress, disaster[/tags]
UnTrueHope
Posted on August 3, 2007 in Bipolar Disorder Psycho-bunk
Check out this article about a fraud in the name of vitamin-based bipolar remedies committed by Truehope in Calgary.
Also see Truehope Nutritional Support’s dubious cures for mental illness.
Sometimes I Shout
Posted on August 3, 2007 in Anxiety Memory Reflections
Sometimes I shout at memories. Until recently, I thought this was a bad thing — a psychoses that demanded my isolation from the rest of the human race. First, I realized, that it seldom if ever happened when I was with other people. Second, the shouts didn’t draw me deeper into the bad experience, but woke me up to the present. I could see the details of the bedroom ceiling, remember that I was not in the embarassing situation. I saw the strange behavior as an ally. The mind, I now believe, strives for normality. Sometimes I shout at myself to bring myself back.
Hanging Britney High
Posted on August 3, 2007 in Bipolar Disorder Celebrity Journalists & Pundits Psycho-bunk
Pop icons appear to be something we run away to when the hard questions of life threaten to upset our conservatism — when it comes to evaluating our own motivations, our own living, our own complicity in the groupthink that buries women and men in absurd and painful roleplaying. Pax Nortona, July 27, 2003
Britney, Britney. Was it that long ago when I apologized to you for calling you a whore? I stand by what I said — the bit about how everyone jumped on you for being sexually promiscuous after [[Justin Timberlake]] (who is due to have a big show on HBO this Labor Day weekend) leaked the fact that he’d pierced that private place of yours. Remember how they turned this cad into some kind of whistleblower? Now it seems that you’re the subject of a new bit of celebrity analysis and I have mixed feelings about what is being said.
CBS News 13 out of Sacramento quoted two psychological professionals who declared that Britney’s impassioned behavior indicates that she suffers from a mood disorder, maybe [[bipolar disorder]]:
Recently, Spears’ actions have rivaled even her February head-shaving melt-down. Last month she jumped into the ocean wearing nothing but her underwear, and the next day she raised many eyebrows with her conduct during a photo shoot for OK! magazine. According to the magazine, she ruined thousands of dollars worth of clothes and even made off with some. At one point she was grooving to Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” and the next she was storming off.
The analysis sounds fair to me, but why must this become a news story? I check the news on Britney: It’s the usual stuff about how she can’t get along with people and acts oddly, such as the San Francisco Chronicle’s revelation that she tried to get her son’s teeth whitened. We love to detest her almost as much as we love to detest space alien Michael Jackson. But here I ask you: does the possibility that she is bipolar take the fun out of observing her?
I suggest that this is just more icing on the cake that nega-fans of Britney savor. The question we should ask of such reports is what do they do for the potential patient? I doubt that this story will lead Britney to seek out a psychiatrist for one thing. I doubt that it will move other potential sufferers of the disease to seek help. It’s another of those hit pieces that exist only for the purposes of pseudo-intellectual masturbation. Britney is a star and a star is important, the logic goes: so we must punish her with public shame.
The Information Age brings us a heavy load of drivel such as this. The ones who pay the cost are the celebrities who, in the case of Spears, may be fragile. “Bad Mom” is the journalistic tag line for Britney stories. I doubt that any of the compassion due to her as a sufferer of bipolar disorder will be granted as she continues to be hectored by the keyboardists of the scandal follies.
The use of “bipolar” as an explanation for bizarre behavior disturbs me on another level: the actions of this star become a poster child for what we bipolar sufferers “must be like”. So it becomes safe to turn Britney into a sort of criminal, a whiner who uses mental illness as a stone for hammering others.
I imagine this exchange between the ravening journalists and her publicist:
“Britney Spears, you have been found guilty of being a ditz.”
“My client suffers from bipolar disorder.”
“Well that explains it. And we’re still going to hang her high.”
[tags]bipolar disorder, Britney Spears, mental illness, punditry[/tags]
A Sedated Brain
Posted on August 2, 2007 in Anger Bipolar Disorder Blogging Psychotropics
I wonder: does my sense that I don’t have much to write about or will to charge my words with vigor come from the numbing effect that the drugs I take have on my brain or from my loss of fight, of anger, of the desire to stake my writing on deeply held aggression? At first I suspected the former, but now, I suspect the latter. Except it may be that I am just too cautious about reserving my rage? Or else do I avoid people who piss me off?
[tags]bipolar disorder, rage, anger, psychotropics, pharmaceuticals, drugs and writing, drugs, writing, brain, the brain, blogging[/tags]
Designer Mice
Posted on August 2, 2007 in Genetics Strange
Scientists at Johns Hopkins University have managed to create schizophrenic mice for the purpose of testing pharmaceuticals. Before this advance, researchers were obliged to inject the little mousies with PCP to simulate a psychotic break.
The gene was isolated in 2001 from the DNA of a large Scottish family whose members are prone to depression and schizophrenia. Other studies found the same mutation in Finnish and American families affected by mental illness, suggesting it might play a role in many cases of schizophrenia.
Over the past two years, scientists have also discovered similar DNA mutations in strains of mice bred for scientific research. The mice exhibited symptoms common to schizophrenic people, such as poor memory and odd behavior, and the animals seemed to respond to antipsychotic drugs.
The Hopkins scientists opted to insert the human version of the DISC1 gene into mouse DNA. The results were mutant mice that exhibited behavioral problems and had structural abnormalities in their brains similar to those found in human schizophrenics.
Designer mice aren’t a new thing: many researchers rely on the “Type A” mouse, the classic white mouse. There is even a special brand of white mouse known as the AJ which is the purest of the pure and a product of Jackson Laboratories in [[Bar_Harbor_(town)%2C_Maine|Bar Harbor]] (pronounced Ba Ha Ba), Maine. Neurologically impaired mice became a fashion among hobby breeders for a time when waltzing mice became a popular, if perverse pet.
One of the great wonders of the human species is that we’ve jumped into evolution as an active participant. Our skill in first breeding and then genetically altering the [[House_mouse|house mouse]] for multiple ends is just one of the things that makes us an intellectual wonder. It may be our oddest domestication, a creature bred neither for food or labor, derived from a household pest. The mouse just sits in its plastic box waiting for the needle. “Here, experiment on me.”
New Podcast
Posted on August 2, 2007 in Podcasts
A new podcast has been posted at Vox Nortona.
Still not at the level of expertise that I desire, but that will come.
Podcast 01 Remastered
Posted on August 1, 2007 in Podcasts Site News
I’ve added music and moved the central focus of my podcasting to Vox Nortona.
Another podcast, recalling the disaster of the last few days that kept me offline will appear by the end of the week.
The Myth of the Hunting Frontiersman Debunked
Posted on July 28, 2007 in History Reading
From Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture by Michael A. Bellisiles:
….one of the most popular and persistent visions of the American past is that every settler owned a gun in order to hunt — “to put meat on the table” is the oft-repeated phrase. This is a very strange perception. Hunting is and always has been a time-consuming and inefficient way of putting food on the table. People settling a new territory have little time for leisure activities, and hunting was broadly understood in the European context to be an upper-class leisure activity. One of the most significant advantages that European settlers enjoyed over their Indian competitors for the land of North America was their mastery of domestic animals. If a settler wanted meat, he did not pull out his trusty and rusty musket, inaccurate beyond twenty yards, off the hook above the door and spend the day cleaning and preparing it. Nor did he then hike miles to the nearest trading post to trade farm produce for powder and shot. To head off into the woods for two days in order to drag the carcass of a deer back to his family — assuming that he was lucky enough to find one, not to mention kill it — would have struck any American of the Colonial period as supreme lunacy. Far easier to sharpen the ax and chop off the head of a chicken or, as they all did in regular communal get-togethers, slaughter one of their enormous hogs, salting down enough meat to last months. Colonial Americans were famously well fed, based on their farming, not their hunting. [p. 103]
Quote that to your friendly NRA mythologist.
The Big Event and Unrealistic Reportage
Posted on July 26, 2007 in Journalists & Pundits Mania
The New York Post has been dancing around the story of one William Johns III (no middle name? Amazing!) who got off his meds last year (oh the timeliness of it all) and tried to grab a little boy from his mother. Bipolar is news and the Post, in the tradition of [[Spiderman|Spiderman’s]] [[J._Jonah_Jameson|Jameson]], has been wearing out the wires of its Net connection with the escapades of the Drink Shrink, aka the Mad-Doc son.
We shouldn’t let the Murdochization of bipolar reportage distract us from a very salient issue, namely what to do about those of our number who are in severe psychoses. Studies show that overall, bipolars and other sufferers of mental illness have a lower tendency towards violence than the regular population, but when you separate out those in severe psychosis this number turns upside down. Johns went off his meds. For what reason? Apparently because the patch was uncomfortable. Setting aside his cognitive understanding of the disease, he chose to wing it. And the result was an attack on an unsuspecting woman.
America is a strange country where a high crime rate (due to the ready availability of guns) does not faze the public. Yet when a bipolar goes on the rampage it makes front page news, giving those of us who conscientiously take our meds the same bad name as those who don’t. Revealing that you are bipolar is as big a party killer as saying your colostomy bag just sprang a leak. There needs to be some intelligent policing of those who won’t take their meds that can identify those on the precipice of psychosis without inhibiting the freedom of those who make an effort.
Strangely, the laws which protect us from forced hospitalization if we are neither violent or suicidal were largely crafted to protect members of cults. During the seventies, many parents were upset at the tactics of groups such as the [[Moonies]] who would isolate potential members for months at a time while they practiced [[brainwashing]]. Parents of adult children would use the sanity provisions of law to extract cult members from the compounds and submit them to [[deprogramming]].
The tabloid version of the “Bipolar Problem” doesn’t consider this history. Instead it blares a charge against unrestrained psychotics while not proposing a solution. Making it appear that the whining of the family will triumph over a videotape and psychiatric good sense sells papers. At the same time, it puts we who suffer from bipolar disorder in an unsettling place.
I am reminded here about the hysteria generated in the wake of [[Nine Eleven]] when Americans were tormented and teased into granting a blank check to an administration which, before the event, had done decidedly nothing to face the problem of terrorism. Then instead of improving our foreign relations, we adopted a policy which destroyed our credibility in world affairs. If an unmedicated, psychotic bipolar commits an act on the level of the World Trade Center bombing, what can we expect? Better medical care? Or a return to the horrific hospitals of former days?
A lasting solution demands a public health initiative of the sort that neoconservatives and privatized health insurance do not want. Our standardized-tests-crazed educational establishment, for one, does nothing to teach children and teenagers about the symptoms of our illnesses. Organizations such as NAMI and DBSA occasionally invade the schools for this purpose, but it is not enough. Not only do people need to be educated in recognizing the symptoms, but they have to learn how to talk to people who are in episode.
Laura’s Law has been touted in California and elsewhere as an answer to taking care of those who want treatment but are denied it or those who refuse it despite their being gravely ill. So far, only one California County — Los Angeles — has implemented the act. We here in Orange County, for example, keep hearing the promises that Laura’s Law will be put into operation but so far have seen no action. Perhaps the problem ought to be handled at a state rather than a county level but neoconservative pressures to decentralize and cut taxes makes this unlikely.
So in the meantime, we watch and wait for the Big Event that will result in us being locked up. Every time there is an incident involving a mentally ill person in the media, reactionaries proclaim draconian measures to prevent any of us from living on the outside. We laughed at the ideas they promoted about terrorism and foreign affairs until Nine Eleven benumbed us and allowed them to sneak in their obscene and ill-founded agenda of Ever-Lasting War. Can we afford to just sit around, seeing no response to the yellow journalism of the Post and ABC News?
Suffice to say that histrionic solutions aren’t going to make the disease go away or further the cause of recovery.
