Even the New York Times gets it right occasionally. Some enterprising reporter there has not yet received their indoctrination that psychiatrists can do no wrong. Here’s an article about Drug company money paid to psychiatrists. The gist is that psychiatrists who take the most money from drug companies making antipsychotic drugs are the ones that prescribe those same drugs to children the most often. The article is based on publicly available information in Minnesota.

The house where L. Ron Hubbard lived in Phoenix, Arizona in 1952 has been restored to the way it looked then, including many of the original decorations, furniture, carpets, drapes and so on. It is (from what I’ve heard from people who visited it) like stepping into a time machine to the early 1950s. 1952 was the year L. Ron Hubbard’s research led him inexorably to the conclusion that the human mind (the subject of which was covered in his book “Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health” was only one part …

David Kaiser, MD, (a psychiatrist) wrote an article in 1996 that makes the claim that “psychiatry has quite literally lost its mind”. Here’s the text of his article about biologic psychiatry and the problems with it.

This practicing psychiatrist comes right out and says the same thing that CCHR has been saying for some time: “I believe significant harm is being done to patients under the guise of modern psychiatric treatment.”

He oughta know.

I couldn’t stand sitting at the computer through another beautiful afternoon, so Marie and I headed out for a walk. These were some of the photos I took as I hiked and she rode her horse (“Heavy”) up the hill behind our house to the lookout:
Foxglove View

Stonecrop-Covered Rock Face

Stonecrop Flowers

Sword Ferns

All in all, it has been a beautiful day….

Yes, I KNOW that’s mis-spelled. This cartoon from M.E. Cohen says it pretty well:

This video from CBCNewsWorld called “Global Warming Doomsday Called Off” held my attention for its entire 44 minutes. It’s posted there on utube in its entirety, minus only commercials. If you want to know what all those crazy disbelieving skeptics are using for data–those crackpots who don’t share a belief in the near-universal “let’s blame mankind for global warming” faith–then watch the video.

It turns out that 1877, about the time when accurate scientific weather observations were first being made, was the coldest year in the last few thousand years. So of course things have gotten …

L. Ron Hubbard wrote a lot of books. I have several bookshelves groaning under the weight of his books, and I re-read them at least once a decade, as I do C.J. Cherryh, Iain M. Banks, Robert Silverberg, and Vernor Vinge.

From time to time I’ve seen blog postings from people who should know better, dismissing Hubbard as a “hack” or a “bad SF writer”. As this post will demonstrate, they couldn’t be more mistaken.

When I was a teenager (back before dirt), I first read his “Ole Doc Methuselah” tales and asked the Jospehine County librarians to keep an …

I get a weekly email from “Cecile”, called the Optimism Newsletter. It is unfailingly optimistic and I find myself looking forward to it every Friday after the weekly barrage of bad news from regular news sources. That and Randy Casingham’s “This is True” newsletter (in which Randy re-phrases news stories, adding his own hysterically funny punchlines), make up most of the “Good News” emails I get in a week.

Today Cecile quoted Will Durant:

Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge,

 …

The NY Times, furthering its attempts to demonize George W. Bush and the GOP, buried the story of the breaking up of the plot to blow up JFK airport on page 30 of its Sunday editions, between the obits and the chess collumn. It was good news (albeit a bit scary) and it directly related to the War on Terror, and it directly related to New York. How could they not feature it on page one?

Rich Galen called it “editorializing by placement”, and I’d have to agree with him on that.

I respect what one fed-up citizen named Ben Hansen (aka M. I Bonkers) is doing to bring some humor to his exposés of various psychiatric abuses in the state of Michigan. Documents he obtained under the Freedom of Information Action (FOIA) show alarming increases in psychiatric drug use and drug-induced movement disorders in children under 5 years old in Michigan. Quoting his article here:

During a 10-month period from January 2006 to October 2006, Michigan Medicaid statistics show:

* 100%increase in children under age 18 on 3 or more mood stabilizers.
* 100% increase in children …