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Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

Saturday, January 1, 2011

1 January - OpEd Surfing

I was right and the Worst. Psych. Prof. Ever. was wrong

Back when neurosciences was still the bastard child of the Psychology and Biology departments, I got my ass handed to me in a most humiliating way by a Psych professor who didn't much care for us bio types .I needed the class and he taught it, so I took it. Part of that class involved field work in a long-term care facility for Alzheimers patients. I was instantly horrified the minute I walked into the place because all the patients seemed to be chemically restrained. It was as if they had been switched off. 

I suggested that perhaps instead of just medicating the hell out of those patients and warehousing them, perhaps there was a better way to handle them. Since there seems to be regression involved in the disease, and since the patients tend to hold onto their long-term memories but can't form new ones, I wondered if an alternative to medications might be something as simple as offering familiar toys for some of these patients. I wondered if something that simple, cheap and safe might help calm some of the more agitated cases and reduce the need for medications.  

If Dr. Freeman hadn't died a couple of years ago, I would email him this article from today's New York Times, along with a "boo-yah, beeotch" note.  

Best Music of 2010

Slow Money: Reconnecting the Economy to Soil, Biodiversity and Food Quality
 http://www.motherearthnews.com/nature-community/slow-money-ze0z10zhir.aspx#ixzz19p9WgsuU

 Could there ever be an alternative stock exchange dedicated to slow, small and local? Could a million American families get their food from CSAs? What if you had to invest 50 percent of your assets within 50 miles of where you live? Such questions — at the heart of “Inquiries Into the Nature of Slow Money” — represent the first steps on our path to a new economy. 

We need small ideas. Beautiful ideas. Beautiful because they lead to a large number of beautiful, small actions — the kind alluded to by Wendell Berry: “Soil is not usually lost in slabs or heaps of magnificent tonnage. It is lost a little at a time over millions of acres by careless acts of millions of people. It cannot be solved by heroic feats of gigantic technology, but only by millions of small acts and restraints.”
There is another kind of erosion at work, just as surely, here: erosion of social capital, erosion of community, erosion of an understanding of our place in the scheme of things.


What Do Afghans Think of the War? Ask Them!

: join a live audio call happening until 7 pm ET January 1st. Or just listen to the live stream.

A Special Report on the BP Gulf Oil Spill
The BP narrative is nothing but a corporate-created illusion – a web of fabrication spun in collaboration with the US Federal Government and Mainstream Media.  Big Oil, as well as the Military-Industrial Complex, have aided and abetted this whole scheme and info blackout because the very future of the Oil & Gas Industry is at stake, as is the future of the US Empire which sprawls around the world and requires vast amounts of hydrocarbon fuel.
Should the truth seep out and into the mass consciousness – that the GOM is slowly but surely filling up with oil and gas – certainly many would rightly question the integrity, and sanity, of the whole venture, as well as the entire industry itself.  And then perhaps the process would begin of transitioning the planet away from the hydrocarbon fuel paradigm altogether.

Royal Bank of Canada Steps Away from Tar Sands With Support for First Nation Rights

Welcome Back to Pottersville 

Friday, December 31, 2010  Our Dick CheneyROFLMAO )


 THE 'REAL DEATH PANELS'

Arguably the most offensive and outrageous political lie of 2009 was the notion that the Affordable Care Act included "death panels." It didn't.

 The American Enterprise Institute's Norm Ornstein explained today that the "real" death panels were created by "Republican administrations in states such as Arizona and Indiana."

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