Lots of different things came in. Cyberspace seems to be in shock. I'm praying for some e-friends who seem completely unhinged--and I do not mean Scott Adams. A woman on whom I used to rely for level-headed scientific comments is now screaming, providing no context, that she thinks MAGA is Hamas, reminding me of nothing so much as the abortion survivor in Surfacing silently screaming that all her Canadian friends are "Americans." Be careful out there Gentle Readers...
Christian
Only Christian? No reference to certain followers of other monotheistic traditions? Yah right.
Introverts
What an annoying article this is! Here's an extrovert claiming emotional "needs," probably a real howling need to spend some time alone trying to find out whether she can grow the missing brain circuits she so badly needs to have, pestering a friend for attention. Having grown up in a culture that preached that a good friend should be endlessly available for these energy vampires to drain, the friend finally ,kindly, patiently, with heroic Christian charity, writes a polite letter telling Little Miss Needybritches that she "needs to protect her bandwidth." A silly bit of new slang, yes, but its silliness ought to be disarming, at least giving Miss Needybritches something to smile at while she works on emotional maturity. At this point, among Christians at least, the whole body of believers needs to step up to support and protect the friend who is defending her boundaries in such an excessively charitable way. (Conventionally, introverts just let ourselves be drained and let ourselves be drained until, drained of all charity altogether, we screamed "No! Get out of my life!" and took out restraining orders against the pests we'd been claiming as friends.) The church needs to be saying loudly and clearly, "Much respect to the kind, good, patient, virtuous, and wise friend," and to Needybritches, "Don't speak another word until you're reayd to express gratitude for your friend's forbearance and compassion." Instead, they're likely not only to let Needybritches vent a feeling that her friend ought to feel guilty about giving her such a gentle and temperate brush-off, but to support the toxic view that friends are just there to be drained forever.
No. Extroverts need to be trained from infancy that they can never just demand anyone's attention, that they must always think of their approaches to other people as supplications for attention and they'd better have something to offer in return, that their pushing forward for attention when they don't see clear invitations to do so is something badly wrong with them and they need to shut themselves in their prayer closets and pray for God's help to restore what is missing inside their heads. The point of "balance" between these fellow believers is the kind letter delivered before the point of screaming and taking out restraining orders has been reached. Extroverts must never, never, never be allowed to find fault with people who snub them kindly; that is a violent act that begs for a violent response. If you are an extrovert and someone kindly says "Go away and leave me alone," you must shut your mouth until you are ready to say "Thank you for your patience."
Mental Health Crisis
If we have any readers in Hartford, Connecticut, the 11th of October might be a good day to stop by the State House. That's the day when a local school board has to defend its decision to say no to a temporary grant that would set up a "behavioral health" clinic that would hand out dangerous psychopharmaceutical medications to children without their parents' knowledge or consent.
For those who came in late, it's long been known that many popular prescription medications tend to produce a weirdly complete pattern of thinking in about one out of twenty users. It's sometimes called Prozac Dementia, but any SSRI and possibly some other medications have similar effects. The pattern consists of (1( awareness of physical pain from muscle cramps (a massage therapist can feel these cramps, and they're extremely intense and hard to treat), then (2) pseudomemories that seem to explain the pain, often involving bizarre torture rituals that include sodomy, and then (3) a decision to commit homicide-suicide, usually explained as some sort of revenge or alternatively as a way to protect others from what the patients now believe happened to them. (Often it couldn't have happened--someone who "remembers" being tortured at school "remembers" the torture taking place in a building that never existed, or by a person who was never there.) People like a Harvard student Joseph Glenmullen treated can get to stage 2 in hours, but people who are aware of the nature of the syndrome, like Lauren Slater, may be able to avoid reaching stage 3 at all. However, as homicide-suicide has become an epidemic since the 1980s when Prozac came onto the market, almost all young people who commit or attempt homicide-suicide are using SSRI antidepressants--a few may still be using illegal drugs instead, and a rare few, like one of the two boys at the Columbine school, are sucked into a homicide-suicide scheme by peer pressure.
It's long been documented that "suicide prevention" clinics that have worked to distribute antidepressants (to people who have threatened suicide, and/or people who have called a hotline in search of free counselling) are associated with an increased incidence of suicide int he communities where these hotlines are active.
It's long been documented that depressed patients who are not treated with antidepressants--who either receive counselling alone, or are not treated at all--may be boring but are almost never dangerous, while depressed patients who are treated with these drugs are dangerous to themselves and others due to the risk of homicide-suicide. While many people use antidepressants for years without developing the mental syndrome that leads to homicide-suicides, one out of twenty people will report at least the pain and/or the pseudomemories...and these people are most likely to be the younget patients. Children are more likely to develop Prozac Dementia than adults.
And the industry denies, but patients and doctors agree, that these antidepressants are addictive and will generate a backlash of more serious depression when people stop taking them. Many patients and their psychiatrists see no reason not to expect the taxpayers to supply them with daily antidepressant pills for life. The pharmaceutical industry naturally just loves that fun fact!
So some people, at least one of whom is known to stand to profit from the increased sale of psychopharmaceutical drugs, want to treat children's "behavioral health" by handing out supposedly anonymous questionnaires asking, in that horribly sensitive and empathetic tone, "Have you ever thought about hurting yourself?" One valid answer to this question is "You mean, thought that by doing things like riding a motorcycle without a helmet I might hurt myself?" or else "I'm not suicidal, if that's what you're trying to say." The questionnaires don't allow that. The students have to fill in "yes or no" answers for computer scoring. Then they can be cornered by a clinician and given a scare story about how they have a horrible disease called depression that will only get worse if they don't accept the help they need, right now, here, pop this pill...
Er. Um. Does anyone seriously think, at this point, that it's the students who have major mental health issues and need to be in a psychiatric hospital?
Important details of the news story are at:
In the same general category, Congress moves toward a financial penalty for some other dangerous lunatics...
The UN exists to mediate between nations and prevent wars. Much good they've done for Russia and Ukraine. Much they've done for Hamas and Israel. How can people who are so useless as a mediation service even think about being allowed to do anything but mediate? The best argument I can think of for keeping the UN in the US at all is that, if they don't pull their sorry selves together, start mediating, and put anything else out of their minds, we can have the CIA escort them out of here. Business class flights, one bag, and we jollywell know where they go when they get off the plane!
Music
Does this Chinese zither piece sound like autumn wind and falling leaves to you?
Hearing the Promised Land in this Romanian piece may be more of a stretch, but Martin Rizley cites the music as the inspiration for his poem.
Here is another zither piece from Wu Fei, expressing mourning for the state of the world this week.
Poetry
Here' the poem Martin Rizley wrote about George Enescu's orchestral music, linked above.
Technology
This is strictly a conundrum (and an example of the pantoum form). The last thing this web site wants is, once the Electoral College has voted, to waste any more time on recounting the popular vote.
Reality check: The laptop on which I type these things does not have an annoying voice-robot, but it does have a time and temperature function. It tells me what the weather's like outside. Sitting on a screened porch, I don't really need this information from the computer, but it's worth noting that the computer is quite often wrong. That's because it's reporting the official readout from the weather station fifteen miles away. Thus it consistently shows a temperature that tends to run 5 or 6 degrees warmer than the real temperature here (three degrees because it's down on the riverside, two or three more because it's closer to overpaved and overcrowded Kingsport). The computer also reports that it's raining at the weather station, typically about half an hour before the storm reaches the Cat Sanctuary if it's moving in our direction at all, and often reports clear skies by the time it's raining hard here.
So computers are never infalllible sources of informaiton about reality; they report that segment of reality that is fed into them.
So, what does it mean if, despite the corporation's notorious leftist bias, Alexa says the 2020 election was stolen? To whom did Alexa say this, when, where, and on what authority? The questions are interesting but, no matter how much better off The Economy might be today if Trump had won, Alexa is not and never will be really qualified to judge elections...
Nevertheless, I enjoyed the pantoum.
Virginia
I can't just rubber-stamp the CHD petition. I do think we need not to expand wireless telecommunication; there are places in Virginia's Ninth District where you can't get a cell phone signal, and where the local people like it that way--they don't want phones. Whatever the mechanism may be, whether wildlife have "Electro-Magnetic Sensitivity" or whether the corporations spray poison around their wireless towers or what, there is a correlation between wireless towers and loss of wildlife biodiversity. Our big attraction, for tourism and for many of the people who actually choose to live here, is biodiversity and that natural, unspoiled, low-tech look. Anything that threatens our landscapes is likely to cost as many jobs as it ever brings in. So no, I don't want any further proliferation of "5G" wirelesss communication. We already have the problem of unwanted "updates" attacking serviceable, Internet-free computers and damaging good hardware and software. The best way to prevent sabotage of the electronics people do choose to own is to block contact with the Internet in places where people don't want the Internet.
But 9f course Congressman Griffith's Republican backers don't understand the economic importance of "pristine," or at least "pristine" looking, landscapes. All they see is corporations holding out grants that would do so much for their personal economies...
I'll say this to Congressman Griffith. T-Mobile has been dangling grants in front of people for many years. Both of the times my virtual bookstore came within sight of having its own street address, the investor who was prepared to buy the building was looking at one of their grants for immediate ROI. I've looked at those grants myself. They are tempting, very tempting, for small bookstore owners. Books, computers, music, tourism, even the community service mission--so many wholesome things can so easily be associated with "communication" and cell phones. And I'm all in favor of cell phones--if they work as phones, which the new ones Verizon is shoving at us do not. But of course T-Mobile's goal is not just to sell cell phones but to sell more wireless towers, and local people do not want that. I don't want that myself, so how can I blame the other people who wanted to undercut the businessman and shut down the ministry? What price a one-time boost for the economy, when our almost-clean rivers where you can still catch a fish, our mountain-sheltered and tree-filtered air, our quirky little freshwater shellfish, are in danger?
"Greenness" is our big economic asset. No short-term profit is worth risking our Green appeal.
Still, even more than Gate City does not want 5G wireless, I think we don't want nuclear reactors in Wise County. "But this would be a new, untested kind of nuclear reactor that's never had an accident...yet!" Let's give it a hundred years in Utah and then, if there still have been no accidents, we can talk about allowing one...out in the Swamp corner of Virginia...but not, ever, in Wise County.
Those who can rubber-stamp the CHD petition, which is by and for people who believe Electro-Magnetic Sensitivity is a serious health problem for humans, can find it here:
Zazzle
My new mug design...y'know, these are collectible mugs. Why not collect them all?
Not mine, but isn't it cute?
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