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Year: 2007

Insert a Trite Metaphor for a Corral #70

Posted on December 18, 2007 in Roundup

square433This is back because the well is drying up and life glides over a platinum plain, pretty but not very interesting. It’s better to do it this way than to make an attempt at erudite comment when the thing itself suffices.

Mean Kitty Song

Posted on December 18, 2007 in Cats Video

The Third Front

Posted on December 17, 2007 in Immigration

War with Afghanistan, Iraq, and now — Mexico?

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What Who?

Posted on December 17, 2007 in Culture

square432Time for me to reveal a guilty pleasure: I’ve watched nine out of the ten Doctor Whos. (Number eight is still not on dvd/vhs.) And over the years, I have formed my opinions about which I like best and, more importantly, which companions I have liked. So in the spirit of my Ideal Star Trek Crew post, here are my choices:

Top three Doctors:

  1. Tom Baker – pretty much defined Doctor Who for me
  2. Sylvester McCoy – just the slightest hint of crankiness, but not overwhelming
  3. (tie)David Tennant and Christopher Eccleston – David brings back the Doctors of old and Christopher breaks off in new directions

I won’t list worst Doctor because they were all good.

Top three Companions

  1. Leela – looks good in skins and handy to have in a fight. Definitely not a screamer.
  2. Rose and Mickey (you can’t have Rose without Mickey — he’s more than “the tin dog”) Love Rose because she came with a family. May have screamed.
  3. Brigadier Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart – the head of UNIT, a pre-Torchwood organization dedicated to fighting aliens. Never screams.

Worst Companions

  1. Jo Grant – blonde dimwit. A screamer.
  2. Mel – red haired dimwit. Supposedly a computer programmer. A screamer.

Companion My Cats Dislike the Most

K9 – the tin dog

Best Enemies

  • The Master – Until Season Three we thought he was dead
  • The Cybermen – they think they are doing the universe good by removing emotions and putting brains in stainless steel bodies
  • The Daleks – YOU WILL TALK! EXTERMINATE!

Best Exit of a Doctor:

Christopher Eccleston

Best Exit of a Companion:

  1. Adric – crashed into a planet trying to thwart the Cybermen
  2. Tegan – Just had enough after encountering the Daleks and walked out somewhere in time. The “fuck this” exit.
  3. Rose – tragically separated from the Doctor into another Universe as Daleks and Cybermen were sucked into The Void.

Best Theme Music

Has there been any other?

Love to hear your opinions on this matter.

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I Don’t Heart Huckabee

Posted on December 17, 2007 in Campaign 2008

square431Mike Huckabee, former Baptist preacher, is the man of the moment as Republicans prepare to cast their ballots in the decidedly-to-the-Right Iowa caucuses. He’s on the record as wanting to put AIDS sufferers in quarantine. Perhaps he wants to do the same for homosexuals? Who else? Worry because he lets his religiopolitics determine whether individual sex criminals should be released with disastrous results. Check this story in the Arkansas Times about the preacher who would be president.

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Bipolar or Just Spoiled?

Posted on December 16, 2007 in Bipolar Disorder Morals & Ethics Psycho-bunk

`Oh, don’t bother me,’ said the Duchess; `I never could abide figures!’ And with that she began nursing her child again, singing a sort of lullaby to it as she did so, and giving it a violent shake at the end of every line:

`Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes:
He only does it to annoy,
Because he knows it teases.’
CHORUS.
(In which the cook and the baby joined):–
`Wow! wow! wow!’

While the Duchess sang the second verse of the song, she kept tossing the baby violently up and down, and the poor little thing howled so, that Alice could hardly hear the words:–

`I speak severely to my boy,
I beat him when he sneezes;
For he can thoroughly enjoy
The pepper when he pleases!’
CHORUS.
`Wow! wow! wow!’

square430 Columnist John Rosemond thinks he knows what is best for toddlers and that is the rod. If his children have not yet escaped him, Rosemond may well be a good candidate for a Social Services intervention because he believes that there is no such thing as “Early Onset Bipolar Disorder”, just spoiled kids.

Especially intriguing is the Papolos’ list of “very common” symptoms for EOBD, including separation anxiety, tantrums, defiance, hyperactivity, inattentiveness and mood swings. Those “symptoms” will be familiar to anyone who has lived with a toddler.

Seemingly, the Papoloses would have us believe that behaviors associated with toddlerhood are actually manifestations of a disease that should be treated with drugs that have pronounced negative side effects (e.g., nausea, diarrhea, severe drowsiness, significant weight gain) as soon in the child’s life as possible….

In nearly every case (I actually know of no exceptions), these kids were cured of their criminal tendencies in short order by parents who did not suffer this abuse, parents who administered not drugs but quite old-fashioned discipline.

Rosemond runs his own little website called “Traditional Parenting” and you know what that is all about. His thought for the day (December 16, 2007) states:

Parental authority must be clearly established before the full potential for affection within the parent-child relationship can be released. Unresolved disciplinary issues create stress in a family. Resolve them, and relationships will be more relaxed.

Rosemond has attracted his critics including Cambridge Center for the Behavioral Sciences writer W. Joseph Wyatt. Wyatt at first admired Rosemond, but then noticed a troubling tendency on Rosemond’s part to romanticize “Grandma’s” use of the wooden spoon and worse implements as well as a decided obstinance when it came to recognizing the value of current research on child-rearing. A choice example:

a parent wrote to Rosemond that her 12-year-old son was generally unmotivated to do schoolwork. Restrictions had not worked. The parents had attempted none of the frequently effective positive strategies such as allowing the boy to earn points toward a desired item or activity by doing good schoolwork. Rosemond, after suggesting that medication might help, seemed out of ideas. He could only suggest to the parents that they stay the course, that they resign themselves to continuing the same efforts that had already been tried and had failed. He advised the parents to “…remember what Grandma said: You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.” I’ll take a guess that the boy’s parents were disappointed with that advice.

A real whopper that Wyatt discovers is Rosemond’s theory about what causes ADHD:

What is Rosemond’s theory of its cause? It is the “flicker” of the TV screen which he contends (in the absence of any research evidence) “…compromises the brain’s ability to properly develop the structures necessary to a long attention span.” He deduced this “fact” after recalling the decade of the 1950s, when fewer people had TV and nobody was diagnosed with ADHD. This is absurd.

I agree that TV has had detrimental effects on child behavior. But the “flicker” isn’t the reason. Hasn’t Rosemond heard of the accumulating research on the influences of violent role models as seen by children on TV? And how would he explain away the 95% of children who are neither inattentive nor overly active? They watch TV too.

Rosemond is against positive reinforcement of good behavior. I find it terribly bemusing that he thinks paying children for doing basic chores such as weeding, mowing the lawn, etc. amount to teaching them that something can be had for nothing! Rosemond does not want to consider that the reverse is true: that when, for example, parents expect children to tend gardens that they have set up for their own pleasure — not the child’s — they are expecting something for nothing!

But let’s go back to the original point of the article. Is this kind of behavior just “normal toddlerhood”?

it’s hard to believe that at age 3, life with Leo was a living hell. His behavior was so bad that day care was not an option.

“The shortest time on record at day care was three hours before they called me and asked me to pick him up and said he would not be welcome back,” says his mother Kristen Massman.

Massman couldn’t understand why her son was so miserable.

“He would break furniture, hit his head against the wall continuously,” she recalls. “He would destroy his bedroom.

“I just did not enjoy being a mother.”

Leo was misdiagnosed with ADHD, which was a disaster as you might imagine.

His doctor [Papolos] believes stimulants caused Leo to spiral out of control, culminating in a horrifying crisis point.

“I was bringing him home from school. I opened the back door to help him out and he just took off and threw himself in front of an oncoming car,” says his mother.

“I remember sitting in the grass and holding him and saying “Why are you doing this? I don’t understood what’s wrong with you.'”

Leo is now on lithium, a mood stabilizer.

“I take these two in the afternoon, (and) all three of these in the morning,” says Leo, showing his pills.

“Keeping him happy now is much more important and could potentially prolong, you know, his life rather than losing him,” says Massman.

His life has turned around. His mother says all because of a clear diagnosis – one many doctors are reluctant to make. But for her and her son it was a lifesaver.

“It feels wonderful. I enjoy him now. I love being a mother. I love being his mother,” says Massman.

Just how many beatings would it take to bring this child into line with Rosemond’s program? I think we have here a non-medically trained pop psychologist who sees his turf being threatened by the new revolutions in medicine. Rosemond is not a Scientologist, but the new-fangled medical model of behavior threatens to take him out of the picture. If we can treat the problems with a pill and make the Leos of this world into happy children, what is there for Rosemond to do?

Rosemond is evidence of the terrible legacy of late nineteenth century Bible salesmen. Ignoring Jesus’s generous reaching out to youngsters when he was tired and Paul’s injunction against “scolding your children lest they lose heart”, he’s dug deep into the Book of Proverbs for his parenting counsel. “This is the only book you’ll ever need,” the Bible salesmen inveighed as they went from door to door. “This book has the answer for everything.” If you don’t like the answers from the real world, just open the leaves of the black book. And if you don’t like what Jesus and Paul have to say, just turn the pages until you find something you do like. That’s the root of the Fundamentalist Heresy which took hold of the popular Christian imagination in the course of the Twentieth Century. And in this age of careful research into the nature of the maturing of human beings, it is becoming the only source for the claims of loose cannons with leatherette-bound hearts.


Further Reading

  • Is Spanking OK? — Rosemond makes it so by saying that existing studies are questionable. Apparently, you can ask any question and the mere asking defeats whatever the findings are. What follows is a variation on the “God of the gaps” argument which Fundamentalists love to employ. You claim to defeat the arguments for nonspanking approaches simply by doubting them and then say “the only thing left over is to spank”.
  • Papolos: The Bipolar Child – I cannot say that I possess full confidence about this book having not read it, but seeing who is against it earns a recommendation here.
  • A recent study shows that close relationships with parents — where there is no fear on the part of the child in expressing her/his views, etc. — means a more independent young adult. Can such a child arise in a Rosemond household? Dare he subject his methodology to statistical investigation? Or will he cry that the deck is stacked?

[tags]morals, ethics, childcare, atheism, agnosticism, psychiatry, psychology, mental illness, bipolar, bipolar disorder, morals and ethics, psych-bunk, fundamentalism, biblidolotry[/tags]

In related news, check out how a bipolar man who also happened to be an observant Baptist fobbed himself off as a converted atheist; see how Fundie ministries exploited him.

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A Competent Advice Columnist

Posted on December 14, 2007 in Journalists & Pundits

I’ve spent the week trying to formulate this article, but the results all seem lame. So here is what I have, sans passion. Perhaps I should mark these days as low on my mood chart?

square429Many of us have an advice column that we love to follow. They range from Dear Abby to Savage Love. I’ve told myself that I’m better than these, but recently I’ve become addicted to the columns at Counselingresource.com. These are filled with stories that the regular columnists would either slough off as being too weird and impossible or merely signs of mental illness or examples of behavior that must be defended because people are all different and variety is to be defended in all its manifestations.

Of course, you can expect the explanations to be clinical, small lectures in interpersonal or abnormal psychology. There’s the ex-wife who had co-opted her son in a war against a father and his new wife, for example. Of the man who is nervous around his wife of three years because of her “horrible temper”:

A few months ago, during a fight, my wife told me that she had slept with an old boyfriend during our dating years, once when we were broken up. Normally, this type of thing wouldn’t bother me and quite frankly in the past when in other relationships I really didn’t care one bit. But for some reason this time it did bother me. Over the months I never told her that it bothered me until one night when having sex I got so heady that I lost my desire to have sex with her. The next day I told her what was on my mind and she told me that she never had slept with her old boyfriend, that it was just something to say to hurt me, which I believe. Now the problem is that for some reason I am nervous around her. I can’t figure it out. I have a great deal of anxiety with her, and I get nervous when I’m with her sexually. I get heady and worry that I’m going to lose my desire to have sex with her while in the act. This is not normal for me who only a few months ago had the desire to have sex with her every night and would normally get shot down by my wife who was more often than not not in the “mood”.

Then there’s the Mynah-bird-man:

What do you call a person that does everything someone else does? Like for instance, say I take a shower in the middle of the day my husband will do the same, if I take one in the morning he will do it too. One morning I made some bacon and toast, he did the same; I got an ice cream bar, a few minutes later he did the same. If I call a friend and talk on the phone, he will do the same and be loud so I can hear him. He always makes sure I am doing or have something he doesn’t — it’s an unhealthy competition. For example, I bought my youngest son some polo shirts; my husband went the next week and bought some, but had previously said he didn’t like them. It’s kind of spooky! My oldest son was wearing those puffy vests and my husband said he would be cold in something like that, then he went and bought 2!

Or this classic of denial:

I think I have anhedonia, meaning I can’t feel pleasure. Most pleasurable activities don’t feel any different from standing there and doing nothing. Yet, I am sure I do not have depression. I’m a high achiever, but I never feel good when I do something. It just happens and I don’t feel like I care. I don’t feel like I have any motivation, only habits that make me do things. I smile a lot and I joke a lot, goof around etc., and I can laugh. But things like going on a roller coaster, achieving things, sexual things, love, eating good food, etc. don’t make me feel any bit good. Strangely, I still feel like continuing doing those things despite that. I don’t understand this at all.

The answers are only nominally interesting for me, though I do read them. It was easy to see, for example, that the secret agent woman was mentally ill, that the man with the angry wife needed marriage counseling, and that the copycat husband was insecure but not necessarilly the victim of an organic brain dysfunction. I could only shake my head at the last letter and loved the response:

If you ever attend a Bean Soup contest, you’ll see about 45 Bean Soups…but each will taste different. Why? All are Bean Soup, but each recipe is different. There are many types of depression — each with a different neurotransmitter recipe. When depression surfaces quickly — we have intense thoughts of death/dying/suicide. Other forms of depression are slow-cooking — gradually losing our humor, energy, motivation, pleasure, interests, and enjoyment. You are describing a chronic moderate depression. You’ve also made adjustments as the depression has continued, now living a depressed and anhedonic lifestyle. Sadly, this is not uncommon in high achievers who gradually burn themselves out due to their high personal expectations.

I admit that I have become an addict, I who scoffs at the conventional columnists. We won’t see much of Dr. Joseph Carver in newspapers across the land. He inserts facts and understanding where the others inject their own variety of political correctness and venom.

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Friday Xenartha Blogging – Crawling Sloth

Posted on December 14, 2007 in Xenartha

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The Lori Drew Blog Hoax Got Me

Posted on December 11, 2007 in Blogging Scoundrels Suicide The InterNet

The whole issue of sham personas and the relationship of parents to their offspring’s Internet lives remain worth exploring.

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Counselor’s Creed

Posted on December 11, 2007 in Therapy

If you wonder just what you’re supposed to be getting out of therapy, perhaps this might help explain:

1. I will give you my undivided attention. However, I cannot be your parent, spouse, or lover, nor can I be master or servant. I’m just me, and I’ll be as real as I can.

2. I will make my values known to you, and will endeavour to be professionally competent at all times.

3. I will be available for you, as time permits. I am human too, and have my limitations. I get tired, bored, angry, annoyed, depressed, restless, etc. Therefore, please do not place unrealistic demands upon my schedule and my abilities. I might suffer “burnout.”

4. It is important to discuss your goals with you. What brought you here ? What do you hope to achieve ? What expectations do you have ? How committed are you about finding solutions?

5. I will help you find the answers that are right for you, but I cannot give you advice or information (except when appropriate.) I cannot do your growing for you. You must find your own answers during and outside the process of therapy. I will accept you and your behaviour every step of the way. I accept that your values will often differ from mine. I respect all cultures and orientations, and will confront any prejudices and biases I find within me.

6. As a counsellor, I can only take you as far as I have been willing to go in my own life.

7. I am strong enough not to feel disturbed or frightened by your words and behaviour.

8. I will not put my personal needs above yours. I will not exploit you. Also, I will not charge a fee for missed sessions if you give me enough advance notice.

9. I respect your privacy within limits set by law, and your right to informed consent.

10. The value of research work will not override the value of our working relationship.

11. I will ask myself, “What are my values, where did they originate and how will they affect my counselling style ? How might my own problems obstruct my work as an effective counsellor? How courageous and willing to take risks am I ? Am I willing to do what I encourage my clients to do ? What keeps me from being as open, honest and real as I might be ? How do others experience me ? How sensitive am I to the reactions of others ?

12. I will do my best to help you get more out of life. If I sense, however, that there is no progress being made I will inform you.

[tags]counselling, psychotherapy, mental health, mental illness, psychology, psychiatry, therapy[/tags]

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Wish List

Posted on December 9, 2007 in Lucre

My wish list is up under Around Here in the blogroll.

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Knott’s Berry Farm – The Ghostrider

Posted on December 9, 2007 in Travels - So Cal

The initial reaction…words cannot describe it. Quite simply said GhostRider’s one incredible ride!

square427Our tickets said we could start as early as 10 am, but I’m not one to go out to a theme park as the south end of a storm that is devastating Oregon and Washington is pushing through the region. So we went later in the day, ate the Christmas dinner that Lynn’s company had shelled out for, and then walked around Walter Knott’s fantasy mining town.

They said “No one with heart or nervous conditions” so, having both, I had to go on the Ghostrider.

The picture that they took somewhere in mid-ride tells it all. I couldn’t get my seatbelt to fasten, so I pulled down the lap bar and just pressed it down so that it wouldn’t come up. Lynn closed her eyes for the entire ride. Yes, on an attraction which is supposed to induce terror — where you are supposed to scream all the way as you watch yourself tumble down chute after chute — she clamped her lids so she wouldn’t see the adrenaline-pumping dives and turns. I didn’t dare close mine: being six foot four, I am used to bumping my head on things and I just didn’t want to whack mine on one of the wooden overhead crossbars. “It’s supposed to be rickety” one of Lynn’s coworkers told me, but I never noticed.

The distinct fall nearly to the ground caught me offguard. I thought about my unfastened safety belt and the crossbeams that we kept diving through. Oh my head! What if the beast threw me? What if I stretched my neck too far and got the crown of my skull lopped off? I never screamed. In a dark way, I enjoyed the rolls and thunders, the threatening tunnels and violent turns. Just when I found myself praying that the miserable experience would end, it did. We rolled into the station and got out.

Next to the exit is where we saw the photograph: Lynn with a blank, eyes-shut face like she was undergoing thorasic surgery with only local anesthesia and me leaning into her, fearful for my head.

We should have bought the photo.

My heart took it just fine and I didn’t have the slightest inkling of a panic attack. Nor did I blow chow on disembarking. Only a muscle in my back complained. Damn, it was fun.

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