via Stoatmaster, via religionblog, via the St. Petersburg Times, we have a heartwarming tale of cracked-out Scientologists, genially corrupt Florida legislators, and hapless children.

Scientologists push mental health law

Opponents say the legislation takes advantage of lingering stigma and will deter parents from seeking help for their children.

By ALISA ULFERTS, Times Staff Writer
Published April 9, 2005

TALLAHASSEE – Legislation backed by an offshoot of the Church of Scientology aims to discourage public school students from seeking mental health services.

The measure would require schools to tell parents that any mental health treatment would be part of a student’s permanent record, which is true only in limited cases now.

It also would require school officials to tell parents that no medical test can diagnose mental illness, they can refuse psychological screening and that students can’t be barred from school activities if they refuse treatment.

The bills (HB209 and SB1766) are being pushed by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, or CCHR, established in 1969 by the Church of Scientology to carry out its mental health mission. Scientologists oppose psychiatry and other mental health services.

The legislation is being fought by several mental health organizations, including the state Office of Suicide Prevention.

The sponsors, Tampa Republican Sen. Victor Crist and Miami Beach Republican Rep. Gustavo Barreiro, were guest speakers recently at Scientology’s anniversary celebration. Crist touted the bill at the event and Barreiro gave the church an award for its volunteer efforts during last summer’s hurricanes.

Barreiro acknowledged that the Scientology group approached him about sponsoring the bill and wrote parts it. But he said he’s sponsoring the bill because he believes in it.

“The path of least resistance is to medicate rather than find creative ways to help kids,” Barreiro said. “What is the worst case scenario if this bill passes? We move toward the middle and medicate less.”

Said Crist: “Parents ultimately need to have control over their children’s medications.”

That an arm of the church, once so controversial that politicians avoided being associated with it, is advancing legislation to further one of its main tenets is a testament to the success of Scientology’s recent campaign to change its image.

Mary Panton, the CCHR member lobbying for the bill, said parents should worry that their children are labeled mentally ill.

“Parents aren’t told that when you accept that label it follows you for the rest of your life,” Panton said. “All we want is for the parents to have the full picture.”

But opponents say the bill could dissuade some parents from seeking treatment for a child with mental illness.

Mental illness is noted in student records only if the school is involved in treatment or the illness requires special education, according to the state Department of Education.

Opponents say the bill’s backers are taking advantage of the lingering shame over mental illness to further an anti-psychiatry agenda.

“No matter how far we have come in understanding depression as a biochemical disease, there is still a certain amount of shame attached to it,” said Donna Sicilian, supervisor for social services for the Pinellas County School District. “Bills like these, particularly with the wording that was chosen, perpetuate that.”

Sicilian, president of the Florida Association of School Social Workers, said many students need some kind of mental health service, such as counseling during divorce.

The House bill would require schools to include any mental illness diagnosis – including depression and schizophrenia – in a student’s permanent record, regardless of whether the student needs special education classes to manage the disorder.

The Senate bill, which would prohibit school officials from making any mental referrals, appears stalled.

Barreiro has been lauded by the Church of Scientology for standing up against what it calls human rights abuses promulgated by psychiatrists.

But, like the church, Barreiro says he is skeptical of the way mental disorders are diagnosed through the observation of symptoms rather than medical tests.

“It isn’t like you can take a blood test. … This is so subjective,” Barreiro said.

Barreiro said physical problems are often ignored, leading to the overuse of psychotropic drugs.

The legislation has caught the eye of Jim McDonough, who heads the state’s offices of drug control and suicide prevention.

Since speaking out against the bill in committee meetings, McDonough has been bombarded by public records requests from Scientologists asking for proof of his statement that mental illness is a biochemical disorder.

McDonough agrees that some prescription drugs – including anti-anxiety and antipsychotic drugs – are over-prescribed. But his greatest concern, McDonough said, is in ensuring that potentially suicidal teenagers have access to the mental health services.

Teenagers need to understand that mental illness is a disease that can be treated, McDonough said.

“I do resist the abuse of prescription drugs and the unmedical use of psychotropic drugs, but I absolutely believe in the medical basis of mental illness,” McDonough said.

I have broken most of these rules myself. I present: Blog Don’ts. Most of you already know all of these already from years ago when it was called “netiquette” and no one followed it either, but I felt like writing them down because I am a bitter asswipe who is full of darkness.

1. Announce your departure or hiatus to the world. “Goodbye my Internet Friends Forever” is always a mistake. If you want to leave or go on a break, just do so. When you announce it, people feel that you’re begging for compliments. Also, if you don’t absolutely mean it, you look like a total idiot when you come back the next day and post that “What Pokemon are you” quiz. And if you’re trying to avoid evil stalkers, you just gave them free information; don’t ever do that!
2. Post opinionated material and ask people not to disagree with you. If you didn’t want people to disagree with you, why’d y’all post it on the Internet? You can get one way communication by yelling at your cat. If it’s on a weblog with comments open, you just started a conversation with primates, who are more ornery.
3. Post stuff about your job without locking it. Getting fired is only one of a number of exciting things that will happen as a result.
4. Ask the Internet for expert advice on serious matters (health care, food safety, wild animals, firearms, nutrition, the Law, explosives, taxes). Everyone has an opinion and no one is an expert and no one will be there for you when the coatimundi bites your epiglottis off or the Secret Service arrests you on 53 felony counts of interstate impersonation of a veterinarian. Either look it up somewhere real, or pay someone professional.
5. Post a shocking or funny story without checking it on Snopes.com or another usually reliable third party first. You’re not helping anyone by spreading Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt even if cutting and pasting looks so easy. Also, they’re all going to laugh at you, they’re all going to laugh at you.
6. Post cryptic hints of some important or disturbing event. “And now I’m off to sob into my pillow about things that must remain unsaid”. “And my new crush on someone about whom I cannot reveal anything is making me crazy.” People will then ask you what is going on, and if you don’t answer you’re just being a tiresome tease. Eventually people will just stop paying attention to you even when your hair is on fire, because burned out. Coy is the lose.
7. Ask for help if you don’t want it. If you say things like “If I could only make this thing better about my life I’d be so happy. Doesn’t anyone care?” you will, if you’re lucky enough to have friends, get responses full of advice. The advice may be dumb or dangerous or useless, but it’s not meant to be, and you just invited it. Be nicer to the people who respond.
8. Post lists of things not to do, or people will quote them at you in the future, the bitches.

I am 40 going on 17

If Eric Rudolph hadn’t been a white guy bombing abortion clinics, would he have been allowed to “reach a plea deal” and avoid execution? I mean, seriously. Here’s a terrorist bomber who attacked the Olympics and he’s cutting deals with the prosecutors?

Yes, this is a troll.

From various sources:

German Country New Wave (real video)

Found Footage Film Festival Preview (quicktime)

TV Carnage (see clips on individual pages, especially the songbird from A Sore for Sighted Eyes)

You’re thanking me now.

I hijacked an mp3 from Tex, if anyone wants it.

Got nastygram from “Certegy”, who wants $19.38 from me because of a “dishonored check” to Netflix.

Look at Netflix’s site. They have accurate information for me but will not honor it, because they say Certegy says I’m a dishonorable check writer type of person.

Call Certegy. Drone tells me he can do nothing, cannot see transaction information, I must contact Netflix and correct my info.

I go to correct my information, re-enter all information, Netflix once again says that I am dishonorable and that I must contact Certegy.

I call Certegy again. After 15 minutes on hold, I explain to John that I am not dishonorable, and that I wish to find out why they think I am, and that this is serious because their nastygram says that they are going to put me in the database of bad people and I won’t ever be able to have ice cream again. John claims that he knows nothing except that a transaction was refused. John stonewalls me, then claims to be giving me to a supervisor.

After another 15 minutes on hold, I get someone’s voice mail. I leave a message.

I then cancel my Netflix membership after giving them alternative credit card billing information. Because I don’t want any more service like this and I’m out of cash lately, I also cancel Gamefly..

From the WSJ. How, exactly, is this different from a regular capitalist mutual fond that makes money? Is it just that it panders to Foxnewsian neofascist dumbasses, or that it actually tries to be, you know, evil?

New Mutual Fund Aiming To Beat Back Social Activism

NEW YORK — One mutual fund is mad as hell, and it’s not going to take it any more.

The Free Enterprise Action Fund, a new fund with a stock portfolio of about $4 million, says it is the first with the main goal of promoting “the American system of free enterprise.”

Founded by Steven Milloy, a columnist for FoxNews.com and The New York Sun, the fund aims to get good returns for investors while – in his words – evening the score with leftist forces that are chipping away at business. Culprits include corporate management, mutual funds and other groups that promote so-called corporate social responsibility.

“Businesses are being pressured by radical politicized left-wing activists to do things not in the best interest of the whole free-enterprise system,” said Milloy, also an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and publisher of junkscience.com, a commentary site that bears the motto: “All the junk that’s fit to debunk.” “We want to be a counterforce to the activists,” Milloy added.

apparently liberal investors are a threat?

Make the evil SPHERE from the Phantasm movies.

Or just get a tattoo.

DUSK IN FIERCE PAJAMAS

by E.B. White

Ravaged by pink eye, I lay for a week scarce caring whether I lived or died. Only Wamba, my toothless old black nurse, bothered to bring me food and quinine. Then one day my strength began to return, and with it came Wamba to my bedside with a copy of Harper’s Bazaar and a copy of Vogue. “Ah brought you couple magazines,” she said proudly, her red gums clashing.

In the days that followed (happy days of renewed vigor and reawakened interest), I studied the magazines and lived, in their pages, the gracious lives of the characters in the ever-moving drama of society and fashion. In them I found surcease from the world’s ugliness, from disarray, from all unattractive things. Through them I escaped into a world in which there was no awkwardness of gesture, no unsuitability of line, no people of no importance. It was an enriching experience. I realize now that my own life is by contrast an unlovely thing, with its disease, its banalities, its uncertainties, its toil, its single-breasted suits, and its wine from lesser years. I am aware of a life all around me of graciousness and beauty, in which every moment is a tiny pearl of good taste, and in which every acquaintance has the common decency to possess a good background.

Lying here in these fierce pajamas, I dream of the Harper’s Bazaar world, the Vogue life; dream of being a part of it. In fancy I am in Mrs. Cecil Baker’s pine-panelled drawing-room. It is dusk. (It is almost always dusk in the fashion magazines.) I have on a Gantner & Mattern knit jersey bathing suit with a flat-striped bow and an all-white buck shoe with a floppy tongue. No, that’s wrong. I am in chiffon, for it is the magic hour after bridge. Suddenly a Chippendale mahogany hors-d’ – uvre table is brought in. In its original old blue-and-white Spode compartments there sparkle olives, celery, hard-boiled eggs, radishes-evidently put there by somebody in the employ of Mrs. Baker. Or perhaps my fancy wanders away from the drawing-room: I am in Mrs. Baker’s dining-room, mingling unostentatiously with the other guests, my elbows resting lightly on the dark polished oak of the Jacobean table, my fingers twiddling with the early Georgian silver. Or perhaps I am not at Mrs. Baker’s oak table in chiffon at all-perhaps instead I am at Mrs. Jay Gould’s teakwood table in a hand-knitted Anny Blatt ensemble in diluted tri-colors and an off-the-face hat.

It is dusk. I am dining with Rose Hobart at the Waldorf. We have lifted our champagne glasses. “To sentiment!” I say. And the haunting dusk is shattered by the clean glint of jewels by Cartier.

It is dusk. I am seated on a Bruce Buttfield pouf, for it is dusk.

Ah, magazine dreams! How dear to me now are the four evenings in the life of Mrs. Allan Ryan, Junior. I have studied them one by one, and I feel that I know them. They are perfect little crystals of being-static, precious. There is the evening when she stands, motionless, in a magnificent sable cape, her left arm hanging gracefully at her side. She is ready to go out to dinner. What will this, her first of four evenings, bring of romance, or even of food? Then there is the evening when she just sits on the edge of a settee from the Modernage Galleries, the hard bright gleam of gold lamé topping a slim, straight, almost Empire skirt. I see her there (the smoke from a cigarette rising), sitting, sitting, waiting. Or the third evening-the evening with books. Mrs. Ryan is in chiffon; the books are in morocco. Or the fourth evening, standing with her dachshund, herself in profile, the dog in full face.

So I live the lives of other people in my fancy: the life of the daughter of Lord Curzon of Kedleston, who has been visiting the Harold Talbotts on Long Island. All I know of her is that she appeared one night at dinner, her beauty set off by the lustre of artificial satin and the watery fire of aquamarine. It is all I know, yet it is enough; for it is her one perfect moment in time and space, and I know about it, and it is mine.

It is dusk. I am with Owen Johnson over his chafing dish. It is dusk. I am with Prince Matchabelli over his vodka. Or I am with the Countess de Forceville over her bridge tables. She and I have just pushed the tables against the wall and taken a big bite of gaspacho. Or I am with the Marquis de Polignac over his Pommery.

How barren my actual life seems, when fancy fails me, here with Wamba over my quinine. Why am I not to be found at dusk, slicing black bread very thin, as William Powell does, to toast it and sprinkle it with salt? Why does not twilight find me (as it finds Mrs. Chester Burden) covering a table with salmon-pink linens on which I place only white objects, even to a white salt shaker? Why don’t I learn to simplify my entertaining, like the young pinch-penny in Vogue, who has all his friends in before the theatre and simply gives them champagne cocktails, caviar, and one hot dish, then takes them to the show? Why do I never give parties after the opera, as Mr. Paul Cravath does, at which I have the prettiest women in New York? Come to think of it, why don’t the prettiest women in New York ever come down to my place, other than that pretty little Mrs. Fazaenzi, whom Wamba won’t let in? Why haven’t I a butler named Fish, who makes a cocktail of three parts gin to one part lime juice, honey, vermouth, and apricot brandy in equal portions-a cocktail so delicious that people like Mrs. Harrison Williams and Mrs. Goodhue Livingston seek him out to get the formula? And if I did have a butler named Fish, wouldn’t I kid the pants off him?

All over the world it is dusk! It is dusk at Armando’s on East Fifty-fifth Street. Armando has taken up his accordion; he is dreaming over the keys. A girl comes in, attracted by the accordion, which she mistakes for Cecil Beaton’s camera. She is in stiff green satin, and over it she wears a silver fox cape which she can pull around her shoulders later in the evening if she gets feeling like pulling a cape around her shoulders. It is dusk on the Harold Castles’ ranch in Hawaii. I have risen early to shoot a goat, which is the smart thing to do in Hawaii. And now I am walking silently through hedges of gardenias, past the flaming ginger flowers, for I have just shot a goat. I have on nothing but red sandals and a Martex bath towel. It is dusk in the Laurentians. I am in ski togs. I feel warm and safe, knowing that the most dangerous pitfall for skiers is color, knowing that although a touch of brilliance against the snow is effective, too much of it is the sure sign of the amateur. It is the magic hour before cocktails. I am in the modern penthouse of Monsieur Charles de Beistegui. The staircase is entirely of cement, spreading at the hem-line and trimmed with padded satin tubing caught at the neck with a bar of milk chocolate. It is dusk in Chicago. I am standing beside Mrs. Howard Linn, formerly Consuelo Vanderbilt, formerly Sophie M. Gay, formerly Ellen Glendinning, formerly Saks-Fifth Avenue. It is dusk! A pheasant has Julian Street down and is pouring a magnificent old red Burgundy down his neck. Dreams, I’m afraid. It is really dusk in my own apartment. I am down on my knees in front of an airbound radiator, trying to fix it by sticking pins in the vent. Dusk in these fierce pajamas. Kneeling here, I can’t help wondering where Nancy Yuille is, in her blue wool pants and reefer and her bright red mittens. For it is dusk. I said dusk, Wamba! Bring the quinine!

Perilous Bug Is Creeping Onto the Streets
Once confined to hospitals, drug-resistant and potentially deadly staph infections are rising among general population, study finds.
By Charles Piller
Times Staff Writer

April 7, 2005

Drug-resistant staph infections, once largely confined to hospitals, are far more common in the general population than previously thought, according to a study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The study examined more than 1,600 cases of the infection caused by a strain of Staphylococcus aureus in Baltimore, Atlanta and Minnesota. Nearly one-fourth of those patients required hospitalization.

In recent years, the potentially deadly infection has been detected in jail inmates, sexually active gay men and professional athletes.

The latest study, conducted by researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and several other institutions, confirmed that the organism was now circulating widely in the general population.
we’re DOOOOOOOMED again!