Violent Contradiction

Beneath the Fig Leaf: Why 99 Percent of Psychiatrists Should Receive the Death Penalty

2012-01-25T00:49:00.043-05:00

Serial adulterer and national morality adviser Newt Gingrich recently proposed the death penalty for drug dealers, including those exclusively dealing marijuana.

There's a small monumental gaping hole in this plan, one described by clinical psychologist Bruce E. Levine:

"Chemists consider psychiatric prescription drugs and illegal mood-altering drugs all to be psychotropic or psychoactive drugs. Cocaine and ADHD drugs such as Adderall and other amphetamines affect the neurotransmitters dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine; and antidepressants used in combination also affect the same neurotransmitters. Not only are prescription psychotropics and illegal psychotropics chemically similar, they are used by people for similar reasons, including taking the edge off their discomfort so they can function.

This statement cannot be refuted. Facts:

If psychiatry's methodology-free and medically-baseless methods worked, psychiatry would quickly run itself out of business.
Therefore, curing a patient violates every psychiatrist's profit motive and would amount to blasphemy against the corporate state faith, from which none are immune. In some cases, this fact appears unknown consciously; in other cases, malpractice in which the psychiatrist is almost guaranteed to successfully defend himself again, is the norm.
The difference between a drug dealer and psychiatrist? (1) Drug dealers don't charge $100 or more per fifteen minute appointment on top of the drugs they sell. (2) The drugs they sell have known effects that perform as promised. Dangerous? Yes, but less dangerous than psychiatry's ever-shifting drug cocktails, which fail and fail.
Nearly every psychiatric drug is psychologically and/or physically addictive. The tranquilizers prescribed, benzodiazepines, without question have proven themselves the most addictive substances on earth, with the longest and most vicious withdrawal imaginable. Almost no patient is informed of this fact, as psychiatrists either ruthlessly prescribe them anyway or never bother learning the facts. And where would they learn them? In their "medical school," psychiatrists receive roughly eight hours of addiction training. How can this be? Look to the funders of those "medical schools." You'll find drug manufacturers everywhere.
Drug dealers don't claim to "heal" anyone. They don't claim to be "doctors." They don't claim to have attended "medical school." They don't claim anyone has a "cocaine imbalance."
Back to Bruce E. Levine, who correctly labels psychiatry a "diversion from societal, cultural and political sources of misery." Further, he states that the "mental health profession not only has financial value for drug companies but it has political value for those at the top of societal hierarchies who want to retain the status quo."

While no one claims a cocaine imbalance exists, it's hardly a surprise to read the "research conclusion" that cocaine users " " How startling; everyone better focuses under the influence of cocaine. Ever sat in on a cocaine-fueled conversation? The value of mops becomes a riveting topic.

Such a conclusion seems to justify the existence of the ADD diagnosis. In a hyperized society, no one avoids a diminished attention span: We live in the Land of Diversions. I don't question the existence of ADD or the effectiveness of the drugs used to treat it; however, let's deal spades only: ADD treatment almost always amounts to highly "cut" (i.e., diluted by baking powder or similar substances as a way of increasing supply) cocaine. From any perspective, prescriptions for ADD treatment is a legal means of selling an illegal drugs.

And while drug dealers don't claim a cocaine imbalance exists, psychiatrists outrageously continue telling patients the completely-refuted fairy tale that their depression is the result of a chemical imbalance, i.e., insufficient serotonin. This lie has been crucified again and again, but it keeps coming back out of its cave. Once considered messianic, antidepressants -- or rather, those who prescribe them in concert with a belly full of lies -- belong back on the cross.

Why antidepressants work for anyone remains a guessing game. Does guesswork support the rampant administration of a drug class proven to have nothing more than a placebo effect, except in the case of major depression?

Consider the National Institute of Mental Health stats, according to which 16.5 percent of the U.S. adult population battles lifelong Major Depressive Disorder, while 8.7 face the black dog for one year, plus 2.3 percent experiencing lifelong Dysthymia (i.e., Depression Lite) and 2.5 facing the greyhound for one year.

Strangely, roughly 57 percent of the black-dogged population receive "minimally adequate treatment," compared to approximately 67 percent of those forced to live with a greyhound. Logic and the simplest understanding of human nature, would predict the mirror image of those numbers, with the deeply depressed seeming far more likely to seek treatment than their less-depressed counterparts. Hmm...

According to the NIMH, 30 percent of the population experienced depression as of 2005. Applying the greater percentage of those receiving treatment (67 percent) to the benefit of the NIMH's credibility and the U.S.-Census-reported adult population of 234,646,609, the NIMH determined that 70,393,983 Americans experienced depression. Of those, at best (or worst) 67 percent sought treatment, with the NIMH's calculation of the grand total number of adult Americans seeking treatment per year optimistically (or pessimistically) rounding out to 47,163,969.

The fantastic but never reported results? According to my calculations, soon to be proven an underestimate, 20 percent of American adults received "adequate treatment" for depression per year.

However, by 2006, it was popularly reported that ((((((((((SHOCK)))))))))) . Yet far less coverage was given to the corrected calculation of NIHM's figures: "The National Institutes of Health provides a long list of mental health statistics for Americans, some of which are eye-popping. 'An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older -- about one in four adults -- suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year."

Interestingly, Dr. Richard O'Connor, Ph.D., claimed in 1999 that "Almost 20 percent of Americans have depression, most without knowing it."

So, is it the "startling" 10 percent or barely-reported 20 percent of Americans who suffer depression per year? After reading the following, it seems but cannot be proven that 10 percent of Americans experience depression each year and either never seek treatment or "don't know" they're depressed, while 10 percent both know they're depressed and seek treatment: "10 percent of Americans over age six now take antidepressants" [Time Magazine, August 18, 2011].

With 10 Percent of Americans Taking Antidepressants, the

Following Antidepressants Have Justified the

Filing of Major Class Action Lawsuits

Prozac; Lexapro; Zoloft Effexor; Paxil; Celexa; Pristiq

I'll take the cocaine.

As to the confusion regarding how many Americans experience depression per year, the 10 percent figure seems to arisen from a blatant misinterpretation of the NIMH's statistics. It's 10 percent figure relates to "people experiencing major depressive disorder, dysthymic disorder, and/or bipolar disorder." It's a bit difficult to "misinterpret" the figure considering the title of the NIMH web page reporting it: "Any Mood Disorder Among Adults." On the other hand, why do the NIMH's web pages specifying the specifics of depression indicate that 20 percent of adult Americans alone bear the melancholic burden?

More importantly, why are so many Americans depressed? For one, it's impossible to walk into a psychiatrist's office and not receive a diagnosis and one or more prescriptions. It's obviously presumed you require treatment because you sought treatment. That kind of "thinking" must be taught in Logic for Psychiatrists 101.

Second, it's likely many Americans become depressed because their lives cannot possibly measure up to the depressingly comical, nonexistent standards propagated as "real America" in every single form of media. Envy's just another word for on the way to the quacker.

Time for a War Against Psychiatric Drugs

End the Idiotic War Against Illegal Drugs Worse than Legal Drugs

Psychiatry cannot cure an individual's justifiable "neuroses" when those "symptoms" are merely accurate, if painful, recognitions of the actual problem: Living in absolute alienation within a diseased society." Unwilling to lose profits in the name of truth, psychiatry drugs patients into "adapting" to imposed societal sickness.

On that note, I make no excuses for myself; I walked into the psychiatric trap knowing it had failed me before, and yet I gleefully accepted benzodiazepines. I knew better than not to check them out via the Physician's Desk Reference (which may be on the desk or bookshelf of physicians but not psychiatrists). Sill, they proved hangover-free and apparently harmless. I was in for a surprise. But so is a much larger population of patients who've no reason to know better, no research at hand to warn them, and no experience to understand that psychiatrists are malpracticing psychopaths who thrive just as psychopathic corporate object-humans climb the ladder.

Thus, "self-medication" is utterly understandable even to the clueless drones who still believe they live (or ever did live) in a democracy.

Unlike psychiatry's drugs, particularly anti-psychotics, illegal drugs at the least provide relief and, if taken with care, rarely kill anyone. Unfortunately, addiction causes irrational drives for more and more of any substance. The exact same phenomenon occurs in those taking psychiatric drugs. Worse, no illegal substance causes the increased odds of committing suicide to the point that even the Big Pharma-owned FDA demands a warning to that effect for every antidepressant. Suicide: That's one hell of a side effect for any "antidepressant."

CONCLUSION

Psychiatrists are Worse than Illegal Drug Dealers

and

Deserve the Death Penalty in 99 percent of cases

and

Drug Dealers Should at Most Be Sentenced to Misdemeanors

because

Drug Users Know the Dangers and Minimize Them

Pay the Price for Voluntary Poor Choices

and

Those Who Claim to Most Want Government "Off Our Backs"

actually

Wish the Government

(a subsidiary of the corporate state)

To Become a Nymphomanical Femme Fatale Sodomizer

and

Waiting for the Kill

a/k/a

The Ever-More Transparent and Ruthless Social Control

necessitated by

The At-Last Diminishing Effects of Spectacles

say hello to

Drone Surveillance, Corporate Armies and Once-Secret Weapons

openly deployed on American streets and elsewhere

The Orwellian Shift

requiring

The Shedding of Your Blood

The Blood of Your Masters

Facebook: The Anti-Social Network

2012-01-06T13:22:00.001-05:00

What follows is a modified version of the diatribe I posted after having decided I must decrease my Facebook presence. I have not entirely abandoned Facebook despite itself. No, I'm forsaking life on Facebook. I cannot live or "live" there anymore, with the neighbors always watching, eyes visible through the slats in their office window blinds, and any one of them a potential member of the FBI Bobby Brady Detective Club. Think I'm joking?

What'd he think, the FBI would tell him the truth? Why, last time I checked, this little "community outreach effort" included the opportunity to report "terrorist activity." Yes, good idea: If UPS happens to leave a box on your hated neighbor's porch, you know what to do.

I suppose they realized that was a bit blatant. No problem. Instead, anonymously denounce your Facebook friends here.

To the point:

Every day, Facebook edges closer to nothing but social control, a network of spies circa Berlin,You Know When. Call it the Gossip Gestapo. You know how it works. Unload anything you like about anyone: No secrets kept here because the gossip is, of course, virtual, as harmless as FarmVille.

Meanwhile, the Global Village of Idiots lauds the freedom of speech even as it rolls over at the constantly barked command to

WATCH
WHAT
YOU
POST
ONLINE!

Facebook seems to encourage open communication, but its very design and structure encourages an environment of anti-communication, from people who post such major events as having taken a breath to the blithering, ulcer-inducing black noise of any Facebook "debate."

In a corporatist state unveiling the wizard as the spectacles fail to dazzle, we're increasingly pitted against each other right down to the sexual moment. Drone missiles hover above. Once-secret weapons appear on the streets of New York City.

Welcome to the Orwellian Shift. Welcome to Facecrime.

Me? I never Bellyfeel a thing.

Labels and Images (Part II): New and Improved Oppression

2011-12-24T13:10:00.000-05:00

Is this "real"or real?

Walking Essays: A Definition

Back to our walk. The second half of this walking essay, like any good walk, requires digression but also definition.

The walking essay can be defined as nothing more than the conscious pursuit of diversions from the essay's central plan: "Let's start on Fifth Avenue and head north." Every diversion renders every walk a unique tone, mood, recogoniton, and conclusion.

The walking essay is the essay in every case except academia and those who cannot shake the academic infection.

Imagined vertically, the walking essay simulates the act of climbing a tree. Rather than choosing a single tree trunk for trajectory, the walking essay concerns itself with the tree's branches. This magnifies the trees spatial possibilities. The same tree can be climbed hundreds of times, every climb creating variations on a theme. In this way, a child climbs one tree again and again, each climb different from all preceding climbs.

If constrained to the trunk itself, any child would soon find other trees or objects to climb, take a horizontal route, or engage in the infinite possibilities of play, which remain infinite until a child is told or realizes the absolutely predictable and final limitation of death. Play spits in the eye of death's certainty, refuses its relevance to right now. Every child is a happy nihilist until the justified fears wrought by the unnecessary and invented hell of status, respect and all the other conniving code words sentence that child to one of two lives, the pursuit of those pathetic "worldly" goals or the means to survive denying them. Either path is a trap.

The wandering essay adds an organic variable to death by suggesting that the conclusion of our lives may be both inevitable and the ultimate betrayal of our "journeys," "mindfulness," "hero's quest," and psychiatric "treatment," but what takes place beforehand remains undetermined so long as we recognize the ways in which our supposed lords and masters determine our future, cursing us to lives as bland and cheap as their products: Dollar Store existentialism.

Writing essays with academically-arthritic hands conveys information and only information. The "gold standard" of "objective" information creates only lies. Such essays equate the kind of thinking with which conspiracy theorists "explain" their ridiculous speculations: The overabundance of information provides the costume one wears whenever engaged in "objectivity's" guise. "I believe whatever makes me happy," someone once told me. I thought, "Don't leap on that kind of faith or you're going to crack your head on the riverbed's rocks."

Consider the opening two sentences in Montaigne' Chapter LI: Of the Vanity of Words: "A rhetorician of times past said, that to make little things appear great was his profession. This was a shoemaker, who can make a great shoe for a little foot." From this beginning, Montaigne walks to a distant statement:

'Tis to much purpose to go upon stilts, for, when upon stilts, we must yet walk with our legs; and when seated upon the most elevated throne in the world, we are but seated upon our breech. The fairest lives, in my opinion, are those which regularly accommodate themselves to the common and human model without miracle, without extravagance.

Death forbids all from reaching a summa summarum of their many walks: walks of life; walking walks; walking essays; walks that walked the talk. Those writers possessing strong enough immunity systems of the imagination resist academic infection. However, they never reach a conclusion sans contradiction because death interrupts. Does a contradiction-proof conclusion exist despite the impossibility of anyone living long enough to find it?

No. Contradiction is the truth's steam engine and the reason why so many spurn the unavoidable position of the relativist: If a tree seems to change every time a child climbs it, then it has changed for that child. What seems true to each person is considered and acted upon to an extent that requires relativism. Life is like family: Encountering the dreaded relative ensures that relative's presence. But death breaks its sorry promise when we recognize all the constructed "absurdities" as the basis of "life," not life. In this way, death gives us an erotic and euphoric return to childhood's happy nihilism.

Quality: The Ever-Expanding Oppression by Illusion

I shall now take another detour to arrive at the main idea this two-part walk must convey. Many and better writers have identified the intentional, reactionary and profitable image (or representation) of reality as a means of denying us reality. My point differs. If the results of our being exposed to the quantity of images cannot be denied as a constructed means of erasing realty, leaving us helplessly high and dry and filled with the false conclusion that the world is "absurd," the process reaches full bloom via the never-ending "improvements" of imagery.

Example: Blu-Ray DVD's not only appear more real than what they depict, exaggerating our sense of this deflated and "absurd" world, but they also cause an almost instinctual need to purchase what it takes to play the next "improved" format. Sheared of reality, we seek the ever-strengthening illusion of reality.

Now comes the return of the 3D DVD, slightly enhanced but not too different from the first 3D films. This forms a capitalist loop in which those essentially trained into obsession with sound and vision quality regularly buy new copies of movies or records they already own. The most shameful and transparent tactic is the sale of records and films "remastered" until they bear no relation to their original form. For instance, today's "remastered" Vertigo never existed until now. It's a different film, for all intents and purposes painted, better-looking in the sense of a whore or the many celebrities mutated by plastic surgery into slightly less-aged Frankensteins.

From Tech Republic:

The movie industry and movie theaters try to force us to only be able to watch some of their top movies in 3D (and pay extra for it). TV makers are forcing 3D into all of their new top-of-the-line LED TVs (and trying to make us to pay extra for it). Content companies are now making their Blu-ray/DVD/Digital Copy bundles include 3D discs (and trying to make us pay extra for it). Game companies such as Nintendo are integrating gimmicky 3D into their new systems. Mobile computing vendors such as HTC and LG are even trying to put 3D into their smartphones and tablets.

I propose that with the approach of infinite computer memory, something similar to the process described in the above excerpt will continue unabated until everyone becomes schizophrenic, lacking any break whatsoever from a contrived "superior" environment that will overwhelm our current delusion that nature still exists. Technology long ago replaced nature. When you find a little supposed "nature" in, say, Central Park, do you ever realize it's as constructed as the subway system, a technical achievement of projection no different from larger-than-life screens featuring the "news"? Have you ever realized, as have I, that a semi-close-up of a person's head on a large screen monitor is bigger than your own skull?

The best way to recognize all of this is to watch high definition color documentaries regarding World War II. While of course no one saw the world in black and white, then or ever, we can't help but believe they did. Computer-enhanced footage of that war does dispel that delusion but creates another. A World War II veteran would say, "It never looked like this, either."

Hyperrealism as art always left me with mixed feelings, and perhaps it should. To look at something "as real as the real" revealed the disappearance -- the conquering and colonization -- of reality by representation more real than real. Still, it also served those who created the necessity of that recognition. Even if recognized, few of us -- I'm not one -- can continue adapting to ever-better illusions of reality. We're drowning in the dreams of aristocrats, nightmares for us, from which we can only escape by accepting terminal bafflement.

Put it this way: If The Wizard of Oz were remade today by a perceptive director, Dorothy would without hesitation proclaim the wizard as far better than life in Kansas, especially without the overlaying high definition "Kansas" to which she would compare the wizard now.

This is the Age of Quotation Marks. Nothing is real, nothing permitted, and yet we're told and believe we're "free." Free to do what? We can think and imagine anything we like. We're doppelgangers of our contrived hyper-reality. This simultaneously is and isn't a Blu-Ray and/or 3D version of The Matrix.

We walk the plains of flat imagery, audio surrounding us, and neither our "reality" nor our "lives" can withstand the lack of quotation marks. We're all junkies now. Get your fix on Route 66; no matter that it ceased to exist. You can always watch "restored" footage that depicts the same road as it never existed when it did exist.

Labels and Images (Part I): The Innocence of the Bourgeois

2011-12-17T13:10:00.000-05:00

First step in this walking essay: Why the absence? I've determined I can only chain myself to one major project at a time. "Minor" works must be sacrificed except when enough energy remains to supply them maximum voltage. Production for the sake of production renders me another manufacturer of cheapjack goods.*

Containers

That I can now see my previous work habits as production brings me to he direction of this walk. We cannot change our primary and constructed environment, nor can we even see the abandoned environment known as nature. Only what has not been manufactured now appears to us as artificial. Hence, nature is quasi-experienced on vacation or in gardens, both manufactured and artificial, existing in containers. If we experienced the actual natural world, we would panic, for the natural world tautologically can only be natural if absolutely uncontained.

Since cursed by consciousness, humans have lived in containers: their own bodies. Soon, their bodies were contained, whether in houses or concentration camps, etc. Those containers were contained within communities, contained within towns and cities, contained within counties and states and provinces, contained within nations. In the past few decades, we found ourselves in a new container entirely different from all others, for the container cannot be seen yet has a structure of some sort, which we call the Internet, preceded and now joined by the projections of television, which contain us within narratives. Rarely do we sense our containment, for doing so would drive us mad. A container confines its containee no matter its size, shape or form. These containers form our constructed environment, which gradually eliminated the original environment until the constructed environment achieved dictatorship over reality as humans perceive it.

Compare the photo in the top-left corner (left, below) to the original image (right, below):

Of course, neither photo is real, but which is the original photo and which seems more representative of our constructed reality? Did paste in the green sign in the right photo or delete it in the left photo? Whatever your opinion, the image to the right is the original. The image to the left underwent an hour of my trying to make it both more "real" and more appealing. But notice something else: The containers aren't invading nature. Instead, nature is invading the containers. The photo itself contains the image of the containers. Our eyes capture the containers. But a disturbing photo may "capture" us. We call such images "arresting." More about this in Part II.

As the world becomes ever more manufactured and less and less manufactured by workers (replaced by machines or what amounts to "Third World" slave labor), we must dismiss the term "bourgeois," for it denies the fact that those labeled as such remain as confined as the "proletariat." They may possess more money, luxury goods, etc., but they remain confined and perhaps all the more so because of their "rewards," won by jobs no less insecure and humiliating than factory work. They're workers every bit as disposable as day laborers. In a created "recession" that disguises the permanent future of global capitalism, even a revolutionary gesture can only come from the unemployed. All others will await losing everything, as would anyone but adrenaline junkies and psychopaths, for risk taking to the boiling degree is always predicated by having nothing left to lose in the risk.

In such circumstances, the "true proletariat" has no job. The word "bourgeois" becomes meaningless. And in any case, only the "bourgeois" called anyone "bourgeois," for the word did not exist in the vocabulary of those who were not "bourgeois." But we've passed that age. We're "all grows up now."

"Bourgeois" is hereby replaced and eradicated by "pre-unemployed." No one's waiting for Godot; they're waiting to be told to go. To get out. To hit the bricks. Because you are going out.

Fired salesmen will prove the most efficient guerrilla partisans.

*If it seems I've disappeared, I have disappeared, though I remain wrapped and visible like H.G. Wells' Invisible Man. Emotionally, I've also undertaken the role of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Publicly, I'm in the act of portraying a non-acting character. What you see is what you can't get, but you will get it sooner or later, in this order:

Project 1: A multimedia presentation featuring the masterful material and ideas contributed by the collaborator who invited me to handle production. This piece locates and reveals new insights into a performer who until now exhausted all perspectives.
Project 2: A documentary intended for mainstream distribution.
Project 3: The next novel, a hybrid sci-fi/mystery driven by sheer storytelling sheared of my previous works' tics and tremors. While Airplane Novel ranked #4 on USA Today's list of 2011's Best Independent Novels, I cannot surpass its hyper-percussive and exploded-view superstructure. I can only go forward by reversing directions. What seems a retreat will become an advance. In more ways that one.

You're the Psychologist: Psychoanalyze Me Now!

2011-11-14T14:30:00.000-05:00

The Sooty Shearwater

Doctor, I need a diagnosis.

A diagnostic label would calm my choppy waters.

I've repressed all childhood memories.

For Jungians, I take one of two forms in every dream.

Sometimes I'm a vulture, which has the best vision amongst all animals.

The rest of the time, I'm a Sooty Shearwater, the "most focused animal on the planet. This New Zealand bird flies up to 74,000 kilometers on its yearly migration, averaging more than 500 kms per day. During this largely solo annual migration, Sooty has many distractions and temptations to overcome in order to reach its incredible goal (the North Pacific)."

Below is a picture I drew in first or second grade. My mother saved it. What's that tell you?

I [weeping] can't -- I can't speak another word. Well, maybe a few more words. That's all the information I can give you. I'm so repressed that my inhalation and exhalation have reversed directions.

Diagnose me.

Please.

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world's leading questionnaire tool.

Take the Dandelion: You Think I'd Promise a Rose Garden?

2011-11-13T10:00:00.006-05:00

Yes, an image found in my "permanent record." See?

"Why don't you just be funny?" I've heard that so often I'm almost flattered...until I remember that Woody Allen married his adopted daughter, not that there's anything wrong with that, but those glasses. He started that trend. Him. I never bagged (I mean, had a brief encounter with) one of those Woody Allen gals, the type who (still!) wear the big plastic eyeglasses that probably don't even contain corrective lenses, a signal to the kind of facetious "intellectual" who'd appeal to such a person. I am flattered to have failed that mission given what succeeding entailed: wearing those glasses, for starters.

To the point, my oft-scolded "angry" posts usually appear when I'm at relative peace with myself (never more than a ceasefire), while my "happy" or "funny" posts usually appear when I'm in the process of literally falling to pieces (on certain days, you could sweep me up quite easily, no Swifter necessary -- and why is "Swifter" in spell check?). While it's true I may be a masochist and text-based sadomasochist, it's more true that when at peace, I can waste my time catching up on the latest wars and loss of Constitutional rights (at this point, tear it up and simply refer to Mein Kampf). Otherwise, I eschew the news, and I used to despise people who did the same. I can't figure out my block, much less the world. Besides, no one ever died thinking, "If only I'd read the newspaper more often; what glorious wonders I've missed."

I can't always be funny. More accurately, I can never be funny on purpose, whether for social occasions or to avoid the occasional flying kitchen utensil (women should play catch with their fathers; that might have a substantial if negative effect on domestic violence statistics). My kind of funny, and you may not find it funny, requires my being caught off guard. It's a lot like sex in that way. This time, I caught myself off guard with the above paragraph, written on the fly and copied verbatim from that website most of us visit to pretend we're socializing or farming.

Another reason is that I'm a born hypocrite. It's not that I violate my stated ethics; I haven't stated them because I don't have any. It's that whatever I believe, and the more I believe it, the more it will betray me. Like newspapers. And, sorry, God, but no take backs; you could have sunk my birth-putt, but you just had to use a 3 wood and send me into the swamp.

Even dictators disappoint me. You try to give Hitler a little impenetrable evil mystique that renders him incomprehensible as a human being and then find out he watched Mickey Mouse cartoons.

Communism. What was I thinking? Let's say it could work and produce utopia: I'm out. I'm the reason utopia can't exist and proud of it. "Share what? Chores? In the shared housing unit? What do I look like, a Communist?"

As to "democracy," I long ago sent that "idea" to the place where the Jehovah's Witness pamphlets go. "Democracy" requires the kind of belief Jehovah's Witnesses propose: We're supposed to know it's bullshit based on the following use of quotation marks:

Throw all your anxieties upon Jehovah in prayer, confident that "he cares for you."

That's pretty much how I see God myself. No need to knock on my door this Sunday.

As you can see, comedy and anger are for me the two masks of drama. I'm not worthy of tragedy. I've got fatal flaws but lack the other stuff. On the other hand -- stop the self-denigration! -- I am, as Walter Kaufmann claims tragic heroes must be -- radically alienated. I'm so radically alienated that I can't stand radicals and avoid radical surgery at all costs.

So there you have it: I can no more decide to be funny than I can decide to be angry. It just happens. If I could do those two things on cue, I'd get a face transplant and become an actor. I don't act. I'll never even give (make that "suggest you attend out of pity") another reading. I'm all about WYSIWIG. And if you still don't get it, then RTFM.

No Nation, Under No Gods or Masters: Paul A. Toth for President of America

2011-11-12T01:49:00.000-05:00

How do you run for President? According to Slate, "Technically, you don't need to fill out the paperwork until you've raised or spent $5,000 on your campaign; after that, you have 15 days to send the form to the FEC and the opposing candidates... In fact, you can dodge the whole bureaucracy if you can run for president without spending more than $5,000 of your own money. In the 1996 presidential campaign, Ralph Nader made a point of not filing a statement of candidacy; he came in fourth in the voting."

Therefore, I hereby announce myself, Paul A. Toth,

candidate for the Office of the United States Presidency,
and swear to undermine the laws of this nation.

United States Presidential Candidate Paul A. Toth

THE TOTH PLATFORM

No One Who Still

Believes in Promises Deserves One

My fellow Americans, it's time to stop gathering the 99 percent in protest and start gathering the 1 percent in mass graves. Beyond that, I propose the following humble actions upon my election:

All elected officials will immediately be imprisoned. They're guilty of something; we don't need specifics.
Corporations, en masse known as the Corporatist State, will be decimated, their wealth and goods distributed, and their Chief Executive Officers shipped to the Bikini Atoll "Concentrating Camp."
The military, no longer owned by the nonexistent Corporatist State, shall be disbanded.
All police, "security" and "soldiers of fortune" shall be terminated.
Work is abolished.
Bosses, sheared of their dimwit power, status and prostitute-wives, may play golf 24 hours a day, instead of eight.
The wealth and goods seized from the 1 percent shall be distributed equally between all remaining citizens.
The children of the 1 percent shall be distributed as free orphans in a national "population lottery."
At that point, all laws, institutions, etc., shall be abolished. The "government," a subsidiary of the Corporatist State, already doesn't exist.

Admittedly, this platform, if accomplished, may lead to an endless spectacle of violence and chaos. Nobody's perfect. But if we must live on the entertainment of violent and chaotic spectacles, let them be ours.

What happens next is up to you and human techno-nature as devolved since the dusk of consciousness.

Whatcha YOU Gonna Do

In the Funhouse?

Much Nothing About Adieu: The Auto-Memoir of Paul A. Toth

2011-11-11T20:29:00.000-05:00

Paul A. Toth in 2011

Prologue

I've been -- oh, I don't know -- places I've been, places I've been again and again the last few months, and again and again for decades before that, places that bear not repeating by repeating them in time and space or memory or language, but what we have it what we have to work out

to work out work out to work out

...why as of late I relive the worst moments of my life as if researching a memoir.

Antilogue

au·to·bi·og·ra·phy (n.): 1. An account of a person's life written by that person.
mem·oir (n.): 1. An account of the personal experiences of an author. 2. An autobiography.

Why don't they write autobiographies any more? "Memoir" wins by four.

I prefer a brief auto-memoir produced by automatic writing.

au-to-ma-tic wri-ting (n.): Writing performed without conscious thought or deliberation, typically by means of spontaneous free association or as a medium.

au-to me-moir (n.): An account of a person's life written by that person without conscious thought or deliberation, typically by means of spontaneous free association or as a medium.

The Auto-Memoir

Pages 1 - 200 : : : : : : :

Page 201: The End

What was MY

????????????????????

Next, a stolen portrait of me, in that it does not portray me but, because I say it does, it does

resemble

me

my portrait

as I was before

now as I am

This used to no this was I wasn't at all yes at last here I am as I was

Here I wait not yet here I am almost here I am still here I am now

Are You a Psychopath? Skip the Test; Researchers Say, "Yes!"

2011-10-18T16:28:00.007-04:00

The Ten Commandments? Daddy, I was gone that night.
Yeah, yeah, I'm real sorry, like it's my fault.
Do whatever the hell you want. Think I care?
Jesus Christ, I got a little high on mushrooms.
You're damn right I'm proud I got away with it.
I feel like tearing somebody's head off.

It's hard to believe the Village Voice would publish the following article, harder still to believe the researchers in question have yet to be fired by their employer (University of British Columbia) for posting nude photos of themselves between rounds of throwing dice for their "statistics," and hardest of all to believe I'm not quoting from The Onion. Still, this cloud has two silver linings. First, my financial inability to at least prove useless in an academic career won't go to the waste of an academic career. Second, I'm now honored the University of British Columbia rejected my MFA application. (Okay, okay, I applied; I was accepted, too, but I came to all five of my senses and wrote another version of my future, which at least wouldn't involve producing committee-approved "literature" while absorbing some buffoon's personal philosophy that would no doubt propose John Updike as America's greatest writer, at which point I would have pulled my brains from my anus and choked myself with my own contaminated neurons).

To understand the following, you must proceed to the following preceding. "Psychopath," despite being absent from the Bad News of Psychiatry's Diagnostic Bible, has become the next-generation diagnosis. Gradually, its definition has been broadened until now book after book and article after article will soon have everyone convinced that their bosses, coworkers, lovers, and anybody else, except themselves, are psychopaths. We've been through this with the continuing "knock on a psychiatrist's door and you're bipolar" trend. Being bipolar brings with it cache, for, according to modern folklore, every dead legend in every field sooner or later has mood swings attributed to their skeletons. The resulting logical fallacy: X was a bipolar genius; I'm bipolar; therefore, I'm a genius. First, X wasn't bipolar and, even if X was bipolar, it was of a form generated by force of emotion and intellect: An unintentionally but still self-created series of euphoric epiphanies and empty melancholies. You write Leaves of Grass and see if the explosion of all your fertility doesn't find you awakening to an empty garden.

Back to the latest diagnostic trend, which psychiatrists have chosen to define a number of different ways. I will present a definition from a usually-useless site I normally avoid because it narrowly defines the psychopath in the classic manner, rather than some new checklist guaranteed to have everyone fearing their evil when they would have been better left alone to their neutral robotic lives: "The study of the psychopath reveals an individual who is incapable of feeling guilt, remorse or empathy for their actions. They are generally cunning, manipulative and know the difference between right and wrong but dismiss it as applying to them."

The bolded phrase describes the cold cave of the psychopathic heart. And, no, I'm not a psychopath. Psychopaths attack; I have anxiety attacks. Psychopaths are free of guilt; I must have forgotten being raised by a Catholic-Jewish mother. True, I don't "believe" in ethics or morality, for whomsoever claims otherwise violates both far more than do I: Conviction shall be the death of us all. And from whence would these commandments come? Am I to take my morals from a madman on a mountain hyper-hallucinating from the mushrooms he just ate? I think not.

We're almost to the good part, but first, you must have a few questions, and here's your answers:

FAQ: PSYCHOPATHS & PSYCHIATRY

Q: Why would psychiatrists broaden the definition of a diagnosis that doesn't exist in their own diagnostic manual, and why would they want to identify more people as being psychopaths when they claim psychopaths can't be treated no matter what you call them?

A: For once, they'll have an excuse.

Our Story Begins

Here's the kind of research that diagnostic trendiness encourages. Anything will take and usually does (your wallet, your trust, or both) when science apes religion and makes a monkey's ass of itself.

Excerpts from the following article have been indented, followed by my as-always correct analysis:

Researchers at University of British Columbia have been studying how convicted killers (including 18 "certified psychopaths") speak, in hopes of helping detectives identify suspects via social media, online postings, texts, and, of course, the traditional interrogative methods, too.

• Psychopaths tend to use the past tense more frequently, perhaps to suggest detachment from the crime.

OR... The suspect merely demonstrated proper use of verb tense. Correct Sherlock deduction: "This guy's innocent. By definition, a psychopath feels no guilt and would have no reason to distance himself from a crime. And he speaks English real good." Correct research conclusion: Use of the wrong tense would only prove someone is psychotic, not psychopathic, such as describing what happened yesterday as happening tomorrow.

• Look out for frequent "uhs" and "ums" -- they might indicate it's difficult to talk about an event -- or they might just indicate someone uncomfortable with speaking.

OR... A psychopath would not experience, much less express, discomfort since, by psychiatric definition, psychopaths experience absolutely no fear or anxiety. Correct Sherlock deduction: "Here, sir: I apologize for your arrest. I can't stand it all anymore. Take this gun and blow my head off." Correct research conclusion: "We don't understand the definition of a psychopath. Why are we studying them? Let's get jobs at Wal-mart."

• Psychopaths more frequently use "cause-and-effect words" like "so" and "because."

OR... Proving that psychopaths, like anyone under interrogation, guilty or not, may use logic to explain what happened or "happened." Correct Sherlock deduction: None to be drawn. Correct research conclusion: "We don't understand the definition of a psychopath. Why are we studying them? Let's get jobs at Wal-mart."

• They also speak a lot about material needs -- what they ate, money, etc. -- instead of love, family, or other social needs.

OR... They're Americans. Correct Sherlock deduction: None to be drawn. Correct research conclusion: "We don't even understand the definition of a psychopath. Why are we studying them? Let's get jobs at Wal-mart."

To believe these idiots actually published such "results." By definition, a psychopath is too cunning to be "caught" off guard and online. The psychopath would be the first to watch what he posted online for that very reason.

Anyone with a high school degree (GED's accepted) has already realized the way to identify psychopaths entails looking for what they never say or write. They never say, "Sorry." They never mumble, "I shouldn't have done that; my fault." They never ask, "How are you?" They never reply to a true psychopath, "Huh? No, I don't need a switchblade, handgun, pair of handcuffs, and a rope." They never post the following personal ad: "SWM searching for women in isolated locations. Prefer multiple partners and ladies with carpal tunnel syndrome and zero arm strength. No guns, dogs, burglar alarms, security cameras, knives, ex-husbands, ex-boyfriends, ex-girlfriends with shaved heads, large gay male friends who wear leather and work out twice a day. I like to go for long walks on the beach, have violent sex, and then strangle people. Call me on my Blackberry."

Occupation of the Dead Zone: Thoughts on Democracy's Climax

2011-10-12T13:07:00.006-04:00

For several weeks, I've followed the occupations with interest divided between admiration and disgust. At first, I suggested (without encouraging or inciting same) that provoking the police and other forms of "violence" was not only justified but crucial. However, I've changed my view. Have I become the meek lamb? No, I do not sell what fur I still possess. Instead, these occupations have proved to the most successful protest in American history entirely based on nearly-flawless operational, strategic and tactical planning.

I admire above all the endurance of both the occupation and its participants. And should this movement maintain momentum, it will accomplish my lifelong dream: The Corporatist State will emerge in all its subcontracted military lack of glory. It will come from above, on the flanks...everywhere.

Unfortunately, one illusion mars the overall fine record of protestors: The incredible acceptance of the democratic myth. Democracy is the stuff of masturbation; capitalism is sex. Masturbation is an empty and sterile act; therefore democracy as an idea lived as long as a single Greek masturbator. Look at Greece now.

Capitalism will spike your drinks and date rape you without a blink of its all-seeing eye. Yes, capitalism is a demonic stud on Viagra, cocaine, amphetamines, and, of course, ecstasy, hung like a bull market and filled to the gills with sperm polluted by rivers of the sociopath's genetic markers.

All that I write is proven alone by the corporate financing of the New York City Police. How can it possibly be Constitutional when corporations purchase public protection for its private use? Because there is no operational Constitution; however, you can view the mummy through glass.

Here, then, are the ways in which Constitutional rights have been eliminated, cleverly but not perfectly, visible for those who looked and listened:

Pharmacy datebase laws make a mockery of the "right to privacy," ever since the Supreme Court upheld (no doubt literally buying the defendant's (State Attorney of Vermon, et al.) argument" that Vermont's pharmacy database and "prohibitions safeguard medical privacy and diminish the likelihood that marketing will lead to prescription decisions not in the best interests of patients or the State." And there you have it. Ever wonder why on Sunday, in most places, alcohol for some unknown reason must be sold later than on any other day? Because Monday is Produce or Else Day, and so late Sunday liquor stores benefit not you but precisely the State -- that is, the corporatist state. The same sis true of the pharmacy databases now in nearly every state. Your doctor-patient relationship and treatment are now legally, willfully and irrationally violated, suspended, botched, and delayed by pharmacists, who happen to be the biggest source of pharmacy drug theft in the nation and, when not stealing, are as reliable as an AOL chat room for medical advice. They should have access to these things and these things only: orange bottles; labels; pens; pill counting machines (which in a better world would release pharmacists from their uselessness); and, of course, that true American Idol, the cash register.
The right of employers to fire all but government employees was again upheld by the Supreme Court to the following supreme obliteration of the First Amendment: "If your employer is a private entity, the First Amendment offers you no protection from being fired on account of what you say." Of course, this now extends to online postings made off the clock, allowing your employer to literally and legally stalk you and, since you have zero rights, fire you for anything you post online (excepting a couple of states). Who has freedom of speech? The aristocracy.
The "right to assemble" is a farce; rather, it's been reduced to a privilege extended or not the based on the population of badged psychopathic . Boston proves the "right to assemble" is completely arbitrary; being arbitrary, it does not amount to a right. It's the equivalent of a cop deciding whether he'll write a ticket or give you a break. Care to bet a night in jail on those odds?
I could go on but won't depress you further.

Now, let's look at the one Constitutional right the corporatist-state protects to the utmost: the right to bear arms.

Q: Why does the corporatist-state so protect the right to bear arms?

A: The corporatist-state wants you to kill yourself.

Don't believe me? Can't blame you. Believe this: "Fact: In 2007, the U.S. firearm suicide total was 17,352, an increase from the 2006 national gun suicide number of 16,883."

To shoot any government official would of course lead to felony charges and the most draconian penalties possible. Thus, we are not defending each other from some future threat to democracy -- you can't protect what doesn't exist -- but rather an efficient means of killing ourselves and hunting animals with brains the size of almonds instead of going to the grocery store.

Okay:

When you speak of democracy, your

"logic" proves a fallacy.

The first and perhaps only goal of occupiers, then, must continue to be endurance. How can anyone fall again for the optimistic version of Nazi propaganda -- "Change!" -- which so many of us did, including yours truly still wearing my dunce's cap, mainly out of the desperate yet misplaced sense that it couldn't possibly get any worse than President -X. Well, it has. How so? An idiot has no poker face; a charismatic player will take you on as a best friend while lifting your wallet and stealing your identity, all the while cheerfully accepting nickel and dime poker game "losses."

Unless the occupations fizzle, the wolves shall appear in wolves' clothing. So, in this final spasm of a pseudo-democratic process, everyone will utterly lose the capacity to deny the fact that we live in a democracy. We'll suddenly see exactly why we never have voted and never will vote for "change," except, of course, change for the worst for the many and the best for the few...no, not even the "one percent."

My prediction, solid as the gold standard:

As the sickening cockroach and lice infested mechanics that once drove the spectacles expose themselves, we finally awake and realize democracy was a figment of capitalism's ruinous imagination, a femme fatale who lifelessly feigned orgasms while lying still and bored as the Statute of Liberty, only to roll over and apathetically blow cigarette smoke like teargas across our eyes and her empty field of projected American dreams -- only, wait: The teargas is real. And so it was that capitalism raped us and democracy never once spread her dead legs, much less issued a anything but prerecorded moans of pleasure. The Goddess of Whores known as Democracy is and always was dead, the regeneration of our Virgin Mary-like sightings no trickier to produce than next election's lying promises, keeping the lottery junkie's scratch-off cards stocked, and running the three-ring circuses that have gone the way of a drug abandoned by the most Pollyannish addicts. The aristocrats must be a abuzz seeing that a few shiny lights and trinkets haven't hypnotized this protest into a permanent slumber. Now they have two choices: Abandon the spectacle and roll out the tanks or know our worldwide colonies one and all will see through their idiot dreams of "freedom" in the most effective system of social control on earth.

Now: Awake! Let it fall.

"But," you say, "do you promise this fall to come shall at last give us cause to hope?"

I'm sorry: Unlike the Founding Fathers, I cannot tell that lie.

My Address to Wall Street: Help Us Fuck Up Staatsfuhrer Rick Scott

2011-10-05T21:44:00.007-04:00

Note: If allowed to speak in St. Petersburg or Tampa, proposed occupation zones near Bank of America locations, this is the speech I forwarded to the organization. It's probably not pretty enough a picture, but we're not living in paintings; we're living in digital representations.

"The extent to which the propaganda machinery of a country has been brought under the control of one organization or a group of related organizations is a useful measure of the degree to which absolutism dominates it, of the extent to which democracy has been eliminated." -- New York Times' analysis of Nazi propaganda circa 1937

All of us, right now, are living in what I call the Orwellian shift. We're going from a soft to a hard tyranny, and we're going there fast. The high-speed train to economic fascism is the ownership of the United States government, not to mention the State of Florida government, by corporations like the one before which we stand today: Bank of America, which received $25 billion dollars of our tax dollars and another $100 billion in loan guarantees. And how did it repay us? According to the Huffington Post, "Three days after receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, Bank of America Corp. hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business officials to organize opposition to the U.S. labor community's top legislative priority." That bill was the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). The bill would have simply "allowed workers to form a union either by holding a traditional election or having a majority of employees sign written forms."

And Bank of America cheated its customers again and again and again. Bank of America has been sued over and over again and lost plenty of those lawsuits. They've been charged with delaying transactions to create so-called late fees until a $20 fine turns into a $100 debt before you take your next trip to the ATM. But it's nothing new. Consumer Affairs reported that in 2004, "A San Francisco jury found that Bank of America illegally raided the Social Security benefits of a million customers and awarded damages that could exceed $1 billion."

Bank of America is one wheel on America's death train. There's a thousand others, each bearing a corporate logo. Meanwhile, throughout the Wall Street occupation, the police act as if in service to a U.S. banana fascist government. Many of us fall under the label of surplus labor. We're no longer considered citizens but units of production. We're no longer citizens of a democracy if we ever were; the government now acts as a subsidiary of a corporatist state.

To drive this message home, consider these words spoken many years ago: "Those of us who had interests in private undertakings were excluded from the control of public affairs -- and the simple act of owning shares in a private company would be enough." Guess who spoke those words? Adolf Hitler. The U.S. government is itself ethically substandard to Nazi Germany. Surprised? Why? Great-Grandpa Bush and plenty of other corporatists invested in Nazi Germany. Think about that next time you step in a Ford.

And yet, how many times do we hear from the lips of a government man that we must take personal responsibility for the financial disasters that strike us again and again while politicians and their owners and puppeteers take none? They do it all in the name of America's one true religion: capitalism.

What got us here? Politicians have always been purchased in the United States, but from the mid-20th Century onward we have witnessed a massive acceleration of this process. We might do better to simply place political candidates on the stock exchange.

Who can stop this butchery of whatever shards of democracy remain? The Supreme Court ruled that campaign-finance control violates free speech. Yet the very same Supreme Court allows employers to terminate each and every one of you for absolutely anything you post online. Your employer can virtually stalk you off the clock at will.

Here in Florida, the Governor -- or should I say Staatsführer? -- Rick Scott just signed legislation making it easier for employers to fire employees "with cause," meaning, "See ya, and don't bother filing for unemployment."

I can't help but think again of the Third Reich every time I hear the mantra, "Watch what you post online." When I combine knowing anyone can be fired for anything they post online while politicians accept bribes under the banner of free speech, I say to everyone who doesn't need a job: You have no freedom of speech. You can't afford it. "You're lucky to have a job," right? You've heard it a thousand times. So watch what you post online!

We don't even have the freedom to walk Wall Street without being pepper sprayed. Whether protesting or simply passing by true protestors, you may be viciously attacked or ensnared by nets as if you're starring in an episode of Wild Kingdom. Do you think a single politician will stand up for you?

But I have freedom of speech right now because I have no job. I'm finishing my master's degree. I've published four novels. I have the ability to speak my mind without fear -- until, that is, I graduate and return to the job market. Then I know what's coming. It won't be a job. No one will tell me the reason I'm not hired.

"Hush, hush: It's constitutional anyway."

Yet even when we congregate in unprecedented numbers, in an unprecedented action, the media barely covers the event and, when it does, pays not one word to the mission or the message but only the spectacle of police brutality.

Yes, the spectacle, the spectacle: Spectacles everywhere, like Rome, to deceive and manipulate us. But it's not working anymore. They're coming down hard and they're going to come down harder. Just like Ford Motor Company financed the Nazis, Bank of America will finance a corporatist-fascist state. The Wall Street occupation likely triggered that Orwellian shift I mentioned. Who called fascism nothing but failed capitalism? Mussolini. Everywhere you look, it's fascism in the making.

We're going to have to buy our freedom collectively. We're going to have to purchase it with hard cash. We can no longer trust any existing party to protect a single one of our interests. A Democratic president bailed out Bank of America. A Democratic president skewered Social Security. At least I didn't vote for George W. Bush. And I don't see any reason to vote again, not when I know every candidate is playing pocket pool with his corporate overlords.

So let it all come spilling over the levee, just like it did in New Orleans, where a corporate army fired on U.S. citizens in a U.S. city and without official military authorization. That's the future. Let's see it all. Pull down the curtains, Mr. Wizard, we'll soon jackhammer your yellow brick road of gold out of existence. Goodbye, Oz: See you in the flames.

More Self-Nauseating Self-Promotion: Airplane Novel Interview

2011-10-05T11:14:00.000-04:00

Yes, I'll never finish promoting quality to the slobbering masses of illiterate pixel addicts WATCHING WHAT THEY POST ONLINE so they don't lose the JOBS THEY'RE LUCKY TO HAVE as they produce useless products and then consume same upon their arrival home. I can't provide the boilerplate for their pancake-and-syrup books, if they read at all, but I can consider writing myself into the calligraphy of my own obituary: UNKNOWN WRITER DIES IN ACT OF SELF-IMMOLATION WHILST BALANCED ATOP WASHINGTON MONUMENT, THEN SPREADS OWN ASHES AS CHARRED CORPSE PLUMMETS TO EARTH.

From an October 3, 2011 interview for which

I will not profit anyone else to publish here or

anywhere else given I've yet to and never will

profit from the subject matter at hand.

Hieroglyphs for Idiots: Drogen der Shrugs nicht!

2011-09-26T13:20:00.001-04:00

In the destruction of true communication, our reduction to sound-bitten dialogue and orgiastic discussion threads of triviality or hostility completely severed from any reason to communicate at all, will be found the demise of the blood and tears literature written by the few driven by some motive beyond ego and profit. Even all the joy of a Henry Miller would today die unknown in the name of demographic monomania.

My own introduction to this follow-up from yesterday's entry originated as a Facebook status post. But I was allowed enough words in the news feed limit to summarize my upset: Not a single one of my two to three values is shared by the majority population. We are down to the two R's: reading and 'rithmetic. Don't confuse the latter with rhythm because the musical use of mathematics will send you directly to the jail of anonymity, in which all who bleed are persecuted by the ignorance in which they're engulfed: the instilled lack of curiosity; the trained obedience to bestseller charts as sources of what books and music to buy; the smear of the mirror.

I suggest that we free publishers of their sole occupation and simply let the population present writers a list of books the public will buy. A simple questionnaire will do: Let the fingers dial the demographic. This much we already know to expect: sympathetic characters; domesticalia sheared from a planet; and, above all, redemption.

Save us, Jesus! Why didn't You leave an autobiography or, better yet, memoir? You could have written it during Your days in the Judean desert, but You senselessly relied upon non-God/humans to convey the tale. They left varying accounts, producing relativity in the New Testament itself! Yet Your memoir would have outsold that New Testament, sending the latter and heftier text to the remainder tables.

And so it started long ago. Power relies upon confusion, and the creation of a confused population has been mastered to such a degree that no one even senses their own confusion. Every attempt to supplant language with math and science leaves even those with techno-aptitudes no means of communicating confusion. "Confusion" has no corresponding term in their 350-word vocabularies, only a gesture: the shrug.Ask anyone any question involving anything beyond what happened today and yesterday, current woes, the health or deaths of relatives, etc., and the shrug shall answer.

The Internet, our great and designed-to-fail global word monosyllabic fuckathon, only increases our subjugation to facile arguments and trivial intercourse, such that we may type LOL and IMHO and : ) and ; ) and so on until future archeologists will suspect we reverted to imbeciles trying to replicate hieroglyphs and, in the process, ruining even that as a means of escaping our incommunicable disease.

Yes, go and teach the young to understand books. Dream of buttressing their still-breathing curiosity. Insist a book is not a book but a means of altering consciousness more dangerous than any drug. Then you will discover that language is not amongst the nation's self-proclaimed "high needs." You, therefore, cannot even teach, a hopeless cause under administrative guard and the requirement of loyalty oaths!

Go your merry way. The roiling and unfurling future-now threatens only those who speak. Those who shrug present the very garden so ripe for fascist picking. You will not be plucked. Books will not be burned because the population would only shrug: "Not enough spectacle for us!" And this the very reason for the Orwellian Shift: The spectacle has begun to fail. Saturation point nears. A nap proves a threat, dreams beyond social control. Slap them awake!

"Gibt es ein Polizeirevier hier in der Nähe? Der Baum ist in dem starken Wind umgefallen!"

My Life of Absolutely Zero Utilitarian Value

2011-09-24T14:08:00.005-04:00

Born into the collapse of the Industrial Age and its slow-to-arrive predecessor, the Age of Digits, I can count on no fingers what I've left to offer society and on less than no fingers any reason to do so. Like anyone, I have moments of unwarranted guilt about how little I've produced in terms of what society thinks it needs and wants. Work? Do not speak to me of work: My many years of unemployment involved hours of voluntary and unpaid toil incalculably more numerous than the hours you may have spent and for which you were, to an of course lesser degree, compensated.

I have neither zest nor aptitude for mathematics and science specific. Biology 101 merely confused me into a state that proved valuable for my invaluable (both connotations, emphasis on "unpaid") writing. Calculating a tip proves the outward expression of my mathematical ability.

All to say I do not qualify for any job of any "benefit" to anyone. I recently and ridiculously even subjected myself to a book that combines various emotional traits to suggest possible careers. The more "practical" list featured all the jobs for which I'm unfit, each and every one a subservice to the world technic and thereby impossibly beyond my capabilities. The others? All careers that provide alternative conclusions to the song, "Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be ___________." Example: DJ. Work for dreamers and wannabes and therefore no improvement whatsoever over "being" a writer.

With federal loan limits approaching long before (so far) the estimated date of a fatal coronary or, in the better case, being fatally stabbed for the intentional outrages and provocations of Airplane Novel ("Look, ma: no link"), I face the sickening prospect of finding a job. E.M. Cioran spoke what I myself often wondered far before reading his description: "I don't understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams." They exist only to disappoint us. Cioran, again: "I am: therefore, the world is meaningless."

For those who possess the skills to make petty contributions to this Age of Digits and its probing fingers of molestation, do you really think you make a difference? You make a difference only in the most negative possible manner, feeding your little calculations to the Orwellian momentum. Only tears, if you've the necessary non-mechanical resources hidden somewhere, would suggest the possibility you're human...in some slight way.

And with that, my pessimism finds restraint, for if I contribute nothing -- if only nothing can be contributed beyond what "improves" the Orwellian treadmill beneath our feet -- then I have, like a physician, at least done no harm.

Special Guest Post: Down the Memory Hole with Steve Shell -- Being Digitally Disappeared

2011-09-15T19:35:00.002-04:00

Today, I'm providing readers a break from my aggravating optimism;

yes, I do know I say, "It'll all work out in the end,"

and, "There's plenty of fish in the sea," and,

"It could always be worse" at least five times per entry.

Hence, this special report from Violent Contradiction's

digital comrade,

L i m i t e d H a n g o u t

"Beware what you post online," goes current conventional wisdom, "because it'll be on the Internet forever."

Old convictions, embarrassing photographs, blog posts and social networking pages -- we hear stories everyday of people being haunted by their digital pasts.

Which makes it all the more curious why a Google search of once-renowned radio personality Steve Shell yields no results.

Gone are Shell's Facebook page, his radio show's Web site, his LinkedIn, Twitter and Flickr accounts.

It's one thing for a person to decide he's done sharing his life online and closing his accounts, but no private citizen has the power to wipe out the cached versions of his online life.

Which begs the questions: Who is digitally disappearing Steve Shell.

The Pre-Fascist Drone: Will You Listen? Then Go to Lunch!

2011-09-13T12:23:00.004-04:00

It's everywhere you look, pre-fascism in which Mussolini's definition of fascism prevails: "Failed capitalism." To become a teacher, I must provide a "written statement of loyalty to Florida and the USA." And now this from CNET: "... one North Carolina county is using a UAV equipped with low-light and infrared cameras to keep watch on its citizens. The aircraft has been dispatched to monitor gatherings of motorcycle riders at the Gaston County fairgrounds from just a few hundred feet in the air--close enough to identify faces--and many more uses, such as the aerial detection of marijuana fields, are planned." And what else is planned, I'd like to know?

I'll no longer ask how much more this population will take; it will clearly take anything whatsoever lying on a sofa, cushioned by noise, nonsense, spectacle. Democracy, lying in the grave of its miscarriage, provides no solutions. And worse, I see quasi-"progressive" Michael Moore is about to present a "more autobiographical film," as if all of Moore's films aren't ultimately autobiographical and always about him more than his subject, with Moore constantly pining for nothing more than his unionized upbringing. That's his entire motivation, yet he has the absurd audacity to propose "democratic socialism," an impossibility, as the solution. Note to Michael Moore: A sizable number of voters still consider Obama, who might as well have run as a Republican, a socialist. Next option? Go home, move back into your childhood home, and vanish.

Of course, we already know corporate armies occupied the streets of New Orleans during the Katrina aftermath and even shot at and likely killed citizens without any official military leadership present. Now we have drones circling the skies. Meanwhile, we must WATCH WHAT WE POST ONLINE for fear of being fired, and rather than recognizing this as a subtle eradication of the First Amendment for all but those who need not work, this warning is greeted with celebration by employees: "I'm lucky to have a job." I'd hate to see your bad luck.

Soon, all of the U.S. will match London, with every square inch monitored by cameras. You won't see barbed wire, stormtroopers, or swastika flags: That's all too obvious. It's transparent, but you can see the glimmer of Saran Wrap around the ultimate product, if you look. You can hear the sounds of pacifying music everywhere you go, if you listen. Whether or not you believe that we "live" in a corporatist nation rapidly expanding into its true and final fascist state no longer depends on facts but whether you can stand the realization of those facts.

And this? Why, that's not a pretty little hummingbird but the shape of things to come, a future drone already in pre-production. Other plans include drones the size of insects, which will operate in swarms. Remember the killer bee scare? Perhaps one clue to future means of social control is to look closely at disasters promoted by the media, for they may serve the imaginations of those who will one day invent, in this case, a million electronic bees to stalk us out of any worthy existence.

Mark these words in blood: The Weimar Republic is about to fall again, only this time, everyone, not "only" Jews, will be marked for abuse, enslavement and quite possibly death, all under the banner of surplus labor.

Wringing Jargon's Neck

2011-09-05T22:40:00.005-04:00

"Bloated Vocabulary"

I cannot bear another word of philosophical jargon. Any philosopher who cannot practice the profession without that coded language is merely another specialist of the worst kind: One who solves nothing but knows a specialized language, like psychiatrists. For that reason, I've deleted my own jargon as previously presented in the now-defunct Violent Contradiction Glossary. Why should you need a glossary to understand a word I write? Writers who expend their efforts to display the extent of their vocabularies make me vomit. Discombobulate with plain English; that's not a matter of Strunk & White simplicity but rather presenting naked complications and contradictions. No need to robe them in baroque garb. A philosopher whose work must be parsed like a legal document is more worthless than a lawyer and more dangerous, for a lawyer concerns the self only with monetary rewards, while the philosopher seeks the reward of our minds. Sorry: That's a buried treasure.

PDMP in the Sun: The Complete Chronicles of the Florida Prescription Drug Monitoring Program

2011-09-03T11:35:00.005-04:00

This is a complete revised version of my investigation into the Florida Prescription Drug Monitoring Program. Let's begin at the federal top with some insight into a far-broader database supported by the Obama administration, which also supplies two federal grants to help states implement pharmacy databases:

"The Obama administration's electronic health records database law is a major threat to anyone who wishes to keep some or all of their health information private. As Deborah C. Peel, founder of Patients Privacy Rights wrote in the Wall Street Journal last fall:

"'In the past five years, according to the nonprofit Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, more than 45 million electronic health records were either lost, stolen by insiders (hospital or government-agency employees, health IT vendors, etc.), or hacked from outside.' This danger is being almost totally ignored by the media and public officials. Among the potential victims: Anyone with a drug or alcohol problem, past or present; anyone with a sexual disease; anyone who has had an abortion" [my italics].

It's not enough that a relatively low number of overdose deaths per year provides the supposed reasoning behind invading each and every citizen's doctor-patient relationship and in many cases modifies their treatment and/or criminalizes them for addictions to drugs that the doctor (typically a psychiatrist, so, to be precise, not a true physician) never told them was addictive, much less the extent of its addictiveness. That's to say, every single tranquilizer, all classified as benzodiazepines (with the exception of barbiturates, nearly extinct as treatment yet remarkably allowed for use by "rapid detox" centers for...withdrawal from benzodiazepines), are well-known to cause withdrawal more intense than withdrawal from heroin.

Furthermore, the ostensible purpose of the laws is to rid the nation of "pain medication mills," clinics that shell out drugs like Oxycontin for invented complaints, gaining business by "underground" word of mouth. Yet these clinics could be shut down by precisely-worded legislation. Instead, imprecisely-worded legislation has led to pharmacists mistaking themselves as physicians, assuming powers never given to them by pharmacy database laws, and applying those laws to every prescription as they desire. Why? Perhaps they suffer from stethoscope envy, knowing they're merely pill counters, provable by the fact that no question asked of them receives a trustworthy answer, and anyone can now consult a drug interaction checker online. Therefore, the pharmacist has become an absolutely useless profession, a title without meaning, except that visiting one is now akin to visiting a local Gestapo post.

This is the case in Florida, and Florida's pharmacy database law is the subject of all that follows. It should be taken into consideration by every citizen, for no matter how a pharmacy database is constructed and implemented, privacy is being invaded regardless of opposite rulings regarding HIPPA. But something much more important is at stake: Pharmacists act as doctors, interrupt and disrupt and even terminate treatment (which can be fatal in many cases) at will, while physicians and psychiatrists must now contend with chain store pharmacies questioning them. The patient becomes liable to criminalization and, in the very best outcome, may well end up in a bottom-of-the-barrel detox center that knows nothing about such drugs as benzodiazepines.

The situation described below is local. The problem is national. And it's going to go a lot further than prescription databases. I once worked for an attorney. If you happened to have lived where I did, I might have read about your sexual diseases, your abortions, and, yes, your addictions or "addictions." If the town had been smaller, and I had some reason to use that information against you, nothing would have stopped me. But, again, privacy comes second to health, and the issue is this: Law enforcement wants to get its hands on more "criminals," legislators always have a financial stake in the passage of these laws, and, in the case of Florida, the corruption that serves as the true purpose of the database hasn't been explored by a single Florida newspaper or television station.

Therefore, I have followed the tracks of Florida's pharmacy database law as far as my resources allow. This is the full story of that I found with a lot of time spent but not much effort.

Note: This version does not include links or photos. For supporting links and photos that originally appeared, please see the individual posts: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; The Unbelievable Conclusion.

Statutory Rape in Florida

The true crime unveiled by this investigation is that those who claim to want "big government off our backs" always jump the line and put "big government" on our backs, so long as it's not assisting us in any way. While social programs have been skewered to the point that those without the very best health insurance plans are forced into understaffed and utterly-incompetent detoxification processing plants, or prison, a massive supply of persons deemed in need of drug rehabilitation is created. If that's not bad enough, most of those soon to be deemed "doctor shoppers" and "addicts" will now be stigmatized and criminalized for treating their real problem: emotional disorders for which zero government programs exist. Tragically, the underlying emotional problems will exist at an intensified level once these average citizens -- and one of them could be your grandmother -- are traumatized by prison and/or improperly-handled withdrawal syndromes.

Sometimes no thesaurus will pave a way 'round cliches. Thus, we must always follow the money in any political decision made in this country: "Democracy" has become, if it was ever anything else, nothing but a subsidiary of the corporatist state.

Amassing Mass Confusion (Author Possesses a Poetic License)

On January 1, 2010, Florida finally passed The Common Pharmacy Database statute. Soon, the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP) was implemented.

Before I continue, let me alert you that the following is a mystery wrapped in a conspiracy concealed in quantum semantics saturated by contradictions watering the evil garden of power beneath a sun radiating shadows hiding the black roses blooming by the thousands in the name of profit shrouded by a single over-riding facade of a purpose. Complicating matters is a flood of red herrings pointing to red herrings, only these red herrings have been dyed to appear in every color but red, creating the void in which utterly-arbitrary medical decisions are made by technicians in lab coats who overrule at will the orders of those not much more qualified than themselves, imposing a tyranny upon the entire population of Florida, all to supposedly address a loophole in the law that allowed "pain clinics" to dispense Oxycontin like psychiatrists dispense antidepressants.

Plain English

Having textually run amok, let me restate the above in one sentence: The PDMP was never necessary because legislation could have sealed the pain clinic loophole.

Warning: The following mystery unwinds at the pace of a Henry James' novel, but it's going to get very interesting. You won't read these facts anywhere but here, though they're lying naked in the Florida sun on I-75.

Secret Journey

The database program's own webpage admits, "The statute authorizing the PMDP [Prescription Drug Monitoring Program] specifically does not allow the use of state appropriations for establishing the PMDP." Curiously, the statute instead did "authorize the establishment of a non-profit organization, which was incorporated as The Florida PDMP Foundation, Inc., to conduct fund-raising for the program." In other words, "This is a crucial issue, but not crucial enough to raise taxes." So how is it possibly Constitutional for a state law to be passed based on funding by a non-governmental entity?

Care to guess the The Florida PDMP Foundation, Inc.'s mission? Third prize goes to stopping "'pill mills' that prescribe and/or dispense pain relievers with at best a cursory exam to people who often see multiple physicians for the same 'ailment.'" Second prize goes to a supposed concern that "nearly seven Floridians are lost every day to prescription drug overdoses." First prize goes to the bottom dollar answer: "$15 billion is the estimated economic cost of prescription drug abuse and diversion shouldered by Floridians in 2009."

And just who funds the foundation? Let's look at the three sponsors thanked on the foundation's site via their super-sized corporate logos.

The Profiteers

First, there's Automated HealthCare Systems, which connects two dots: "Our ezDispense™ medication dispensing software, powered by AHCS, provides the tools to our physician partners to remain in compliance with all state and federal regulations as well as prescription drug monitoring programs. ezDispense™ electronically tracks all pedigree papers, lot numbers, expiration dates and controlled substances with line item reconciliation. Our software also identifies the location, physician, dispenser, cost, profit and date of all medications dispensed." Holmes, methinks I've determined the AHCS' motivation.

Next, Millennium Laboratories. Somehow, a red herring escaped extermination by Millennium Laboratories, which entirely profits from a single service: "We offer urine testing for numerous drug classes or individual drugs, with the option of several panels or a customized solution." In Florida, guess who's watching you piss in a cup?

Finally, Aegis PainComp Testing Services: That's "Comp" as in "Compliance." Know where we're going with this? You got it: Drug testing. Why? Get nabbed, head to detox or jail, and do have your urine collected on the way by one of the above three companies.

It's all about the urine.

Civil War

Puzzlingly, Aegis is currently suing Millennium for "false advertising and unfair competition." And there's more: Aegis claims Millennium "lured in physicians with illegal kickbacks and defrauded government health care programs."

But Aegis may not play so fairly, either: "The company owned by the husband of 6th District Congressional candidate Diane Black is suing Republican opponent Lou Ann Zelenik in an attempt to stop a campaign advertisement. In the lawsuit filed Thursday morning in Davidson County Circuit Court, Aegis Sciences Corporation, a drug testing company owned by Dr. David Black, claims that ads run by the Zelenik campaign will damage the business and its reputation and asks for a temporary restraining order to keep the ads from airing. The ads allege Diane Black helped her husband's company obtain a $1 million state contract."

These certainly sound like the respectable backers one would seek for an ostensibly government health care program, don't they? And it all looks like a job for none other than...

The Real Keyser Söze: Duane Morris LLP

One page deeper into the site and we learn that the foundation is headquartered at the law firm of Duane Morris LLP, which, amongst other activities, boasts: "Our attorneys regularly advise on Stark and anti-kickback issues and have developed unique ways for physicians to share in ancillary revenue in compliance with federal and state regulations." Another achievement: "We have defended nursing homes, home health agency and ancillary service provider clients under investigation for Medicaid fraud, advising them on appropriate responses to subpoenas and strategizing to minimize the risk of an adverse outcome." And the law firm proudly broadcasts its having "Represented three nonprofit community hospitals and resulting 'community benefit foundations' in connection with the sale of hospital assets to for-profit hospital chains."

Interesting use of quotation marks around the phrase "community benefit foundations," obviously mocking such liberal causes. But isn't that exactly the kind of do-good organization The Florida PDMP Foundation, Inc. claims to be? Let's return to the foundation's site and check it out.

To Be Or Not to Be for Profit?

A Truly-Moot Question

At first, it seems the foundation at least wants to feel like it has a message of love: "The Foundation consists of both community and business leaders working to save lives through fundraising for the PMDP to combat the deadly consequences of drug abuse and diversion." But without so much as a yawn, this follows, "The Foundation is comprised of a state county sheriff, a President of a Florida-based health care company, an officer of a bank located in Florida, a former director of the Office of Drug Control, the CEO of a company that conducts educational training and an attorney focused on assisting this non-profit. That attorney would be Duane Morris, who, as we've seen, normally doesn't look so kindly upon non-profit organizations. In fact, his motto seems to be, "For the right hourly billing rate, I'll decapitate Jesus Christ and prove my actions legal, then counter-sue the estate of Jesus Christ."

As proof, the Duane Morris Institute offers businesses on-site training in a number of areas, one of which includes..."Substance Abuse: Detection and referral; work rules; development of drug and alcohol testing policies; return-to-work agreements " Relevance? Duane Morris seems awfully involved with drug testing companies, just awfully. For instance, he represented "a drug testing company and its employee, in administering a drug test that found cocaine in plaintiff's urine and resulted in the revocation of plaintiff's taxicab operator's license."

The Loop

The connections are clear. Duane Morris LLP, which specializes in defending the most ruthless business practices conceivable and seems to have a fetish for drug testing, heads the The Florida PDMP Foundation, Inc., funded by drug testing companies, which in turn funded the Florida Pharmacy Database, and without which funding even Republicans would never have passed the legislation.

Obviously, through a law conjured to supposedly address Oxycontin pill mills, but which instead is being applied to every single prescribed medication in Florida, the real intention of the database is to shove innocent citizens, including those addicted by proxy due to emotional and/or health issues, into the criminal "justice" system or the rehabilitation racket, both of which will provide plenty of business for drug testing companies. And we know which three drug testing companies will be getting most of that business, don't we?

Don't Ask Alice: Yes, the PDMP Affects You

Sooner or later, you'll need a prescription in Florida, one without the slightest addictive qualities, and you'll be denied that prescription for whatever reason the pharmacist may decide. By the supposed logic behind the law, you are being denied the right to drive because a certain number of Florida citizens die in car accidents. But by the real logic behind the law, you're being pulled over and stopped for speeding whether or not you were speeding or even driving because someone supported a law through a foundation funded by manufacturers of police radar equipment. Make sense? If not...

The Human Tollbooth

Power-Mad Pharmacies and Gutless Psychiatrists

Here's one example of the type of people deciding you can't get a prescription filled: "Lake City police said they arrested a pharmacy employee Wednesday in connection with the theft of $1,775 worth of prescription pills from the store.... The theft occurred at the CVS Pharmacy at 2233 SW U.S. 90."

But it gets a little trickier than that. Here's a little something from the National Institutes of Health:

With respect to robberies, burglaries, and other losses through shoplifting, employee pilferage, and “sneak thefts” by professional thieves from pharmacies, distributors, hospitals/clinics, treatment programs, or any other business or organization where controlled substances are stored... Some 37.3% of these occurred through night break-ins, 23.1% through employee pilferage, 14.3% through in-transit losses, 6.4% through armed robberies, and 18.6% through “all other” mechanisms...

Not bad: Our blindingly-illuminated Pharmaceutical Moral Agents scored #2 in the run for the Heisman Trophy of drug stealing!

And what has ConsumerAffairs.com to report about these noxious pseudo-professionals determining who gets what prescription when?

But surely a big company like CVS has a way to reduce the number of errors to nearly zero? We'd like to think so but the accounts we hear aren't very encouraging. In addition to the general mishaps below, we have a growing collection of consumer complaints about potentially serious errors including wrong counts, wrong dosage, the wrong drug and mistaken identity. The service pharmacy patients and their caregivers receive also leaves a lot to be desired.

If you don't get your prescription, guess who's dropping it tonight with a few beers and a pharmacist technician.

Next Stop: Walgreens

Flying the Swastika High as the Sky

Let's not forget Florida's other main drug chain, that being Walgreens. We already know Walmart's political agenda. I am not eternal; I just resemble a vampire.

Let's check out just one page of consumer complaints against Walgreens. I'll just quote a few, but I suggest you read the entire page linked in the last sentence, just for laughs and tears. The following comments are posted verbatim:

The prescription is written as medically necessary for valium. I called this to the attention of the attendant at the drive-in window. The attendant wasn't happy in having to take care of the problem, but asked me to return in 15 minutes. After returning to the pharmacy at 2:11pm they gave me the prescription for valium. I arrived home at approximately 3:00pm and when I went to put my pills up I noticed that I was 30 pills short. I had this same problem 2 months ago and reported this incident as well.

Was this the point of the database? Or was it just to drive us even more insane? After all, what better way to rid the country of surplus labor?

Called pharmacy on Sunday between 4:30 and 5:00 P M, May 20, 2007, to check the status of a prescription refill. Was put on hold for 25 minutes. Nobody in pharmacy would pick up the phone to answer my questions. Was unable to get a refill for insulin for over three days, which created a dangerous situation. I plan to take my business elsewhere.

Good luck, because you're only other choices aren't much better. Apparently, those trained to count pills can't even get that right (for the same reason the "foundation" didn't get "its" mission "right" -- though of course its true mission was highway robbery...of urine trails)

Justice is Served

Just Rewards for an Unjust Law

Here's a happy result of the drug database, in place only a few months so far: Pharmacy robberies are on the rise. That's just the tip of this melting earth. I can't legally condone breaking the law, but I can say this: Too bad.

And do you really think Floridians care if Oxy users drop dead? Think again. They wanted one thing and one thing only, and that's more blacks in jails, and maybe some white trash. And now, they're going to pay for whining their way to this legislation. Now, better Florida citizens may have lost a son or daughter to drug abuse. This law would not have saved them. Even if it does, it's like treating a tragic teenager driver fatality by forcing every single citizen to drive 24 hours a day with a cop on their bumpers.

A fraction of pharmacy shoppers are truly "drug seeking." That fraction matters not to pharmacists. I'll rely on personal anecdotes. My girlfriend today was interrogated by a CVS pharmacist too stupid to know that 60 mgs of Celexa is the proper dose when Celexa is used to treat OCD. I was denied less of my total prescription for an antidepressant, went without any antidepressants for days because my psychiatrist was out of town, and finally had to settle for Paxil so that I could afford the total amount of pills -- unless, that is, CVS stole a handful.

Pharmacists in Florida should be provided a Hitler mustache to be worn at all times while on duty. NO ONE ON EARTH ABUSES ANTIDEPRESSANTS. Except, perhaps, pharmacists, who probably think antidepressants are opiates.

But then, comon sense wasn't the purpose...was it?

Step A to Step B: To criminalize and/or institutionalize as many people as possible for PISS PROFITS. How low can you go? Death row...or just a urinal?

Enough grounds exist for a Supreme Court challenge of this law by the ACLU to bury all the world's unknown soldiers. If caught up in this bullshittery, fight it to the last appeal. Head to Mexico. You are being screwed by politicians "worried about your possible overdosing" when they will drive by without notice as you purchase sixteen bottles of scotch....from CVS or Walgreens. No questions asked.

But I'm asking questions, and I'm not done.

From My Readers

Three comments, posted verbatim. We're not here for typing lessons. I also won't post the authors' names; of course, we all know we'd better WATCH WHAT WE POST ONLINE.

Comment #1. THis treatment of patients is not secluded to Florida alone. I have experienced "going cold" as well. I live in Colorado and experience Migraine headaches daily. I take some pretty huge pain killers daily. I changed pharmacy's for convenience and was automatically placed on a watch list. I am a legal junkie. These are the only drugs that allow me to function. Why can they arbitrarily assume that I have a problem without looking deeper? Fuck the computers that have made me a number. Thank you for shining a light on this problem. Not everyone is doctor shopping. Not everyone is a deviant because of the drugs they are forced to be on.

Comment #2. Yup... more evidence of the corporate conspiracy to keep the general population ignorant, addicted and poorer yet. This class, which includes about 80% of the population, is expendable. There are too many poor to really worry about yet. Once they quit reproducing so the available workforce declines, they will become more valuable and thus, the social programs will change to include rehab rather than jail. Nice job, Paul

Comment #3. paul,you know it,i am an experienced "coconspiritor" because of having (and having had,and having still) severe depressions,suicidal behavior,anxietydisorder,alcohol- and drugabuse. at last i can say that it becomes more and more a staasi experience to order and go fetch your medications via the docters and then,pharmacies,all of which seem instructed to reduce,at all costs,all costs. so a third degree investigation on the counter of an pharmacy isn't exceptional anymore. as you may well know,i am not the one they are hurting with these methods,being worse than the biggest LA-exhibitionist. i almost drag them from behind the desk. i have no problem with that,nor with abrasive comments in general. they can all go --.

Refresher Class

We've learned that the Florida Pharmacy Database Law, which the state thought so important it refused to pass the law without private funding, was indeed funded by The Florida PDMP Foundation, Inc., led by Duane Morris LLP, funded by three corporations that just happen to be involved in drug screening or "employer drug education" (Automated HealthCare Systems, Millennium Laboratories, and Aegis PainComp Testing Services), "employer drug education" also being a business in which Duane Morris happens makes extra bucks as if he needs any more of them, with the assistance of a "state county sheriff, a President of a Florida-based health care company, an officer of a bank located in Florida, [and] a former director of the Office of Drug Control..."

Before completing this investigation, let's make clear one thing the Florida State Pharmacy Database Law proves along with the fact that laws can now be purchased:

Welcome to The Corporatist State of America

~ or ~

Willkommen zum Unternehmenszustand von Amerika

I include a German translation because, for instance, what did Florida try to get away with nine years ago? "In 2002, Florida legislators amended the state's drug law, eliminating the requirement that prosecutors prove mens rea, or criminal intent, as part of obtaining a conviction. Florida was the only state in the nation to not require mens rea as part of a drug conviction."

But there's always a second chance.

This piece will focus on those involved with or who directly "work" for the The Florida PDMP Foundation. Let's begin with...

The Case of Two Sheriff's -- Make That -- How Many Sheriffs?

Red Herring!

Unlike the foundation's web page statement, there's more than one sheriff heavily involved in the passage of the Florida Pharmacy Database Law. First, our red herring. "The Pinellas County Sheriff's Office narcotics diversion task force has been named the Investigative Unit of the Year by a national nonprofit organization focused on curbing prescription drug abuse." Care to guess the name of the "nonprofit" organization? Yes, the PDMP Foundation, corporate sponsored to the bone.

Ah, how proud we are of a law purchased for us in the name of corporate interests! Sheriff Coats' other priority issue involves something called sweepstakes' cafes. Well, he's on par with his priorities, if not the golf course.

Unsurprisingly, the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office seems to have a few small problems of its own. First, there's this matter of minor police misconduct: "Deputy Todd J. Pierce, of the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office (FL), was arrested on Jan. 25th 2006 on one count of lewd and lascivious molestation and one count of lewd and lascivious battery. The victim was a 15 y/o girl who attended the same high school that Deputy Pierce was assigned to as a School Resource Officer...Deputy Pierce has remained on PAID leave since Dec. 30th 2005" [my italics but not my all caps]. I wonder if Sheriff Coats will make police molestation of children one of his pet projects? After all, he's apparently got a lot of free time on his hands.

Or he could take up the cause of inmate abuse: "A Pinellas County Sheriff's Office detention deputy has been fired for failing to summon medical help for a dying jail inmate last year and lying about it in agency records. Deputy Jimmie Davis, an 11-year veteran, ignored complaints from Kyle Donald Howard and other inmates that 24-year-old Howard was violently ill and vomiting, according to an internal affairs report released this week...In Davis' most recent performance evaluation in January 2010, supervisors determined he met agency standards in all categories except 'judgment'" [my italics]. Is that a joke?

Yes, it seems that -- with his good Christian heart -- Sheriff Coats really ought to take up the cause of inmate abuse: "The allegations were startling: that three black detention deputies at the Pinellas County Jail were treating white inmates harshly while favoring black inmates. A five-month internal investigation by the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office that was released this week never proved or disproved claims of racial preference — claims that were made by inmates and fellow deputies. But in the end, two detention deputies were suspended after investigators determined they had violated policies governing the treatment of inmates. The third deputy — around whom many of the complaints swirled — resigned in February before the investigation was finished."

I think I'll stay out of Pinellas County.

So, while Sheriff Coats wastes his time (no doubt on the taxpayers' clock) assisting a for-profit nonprofit organization, and breaking up "sweepstakes' cafes," inmates under his watch find themselves being beaten and/or unnecessarily dying on a regular basis. But that's okay: They're probably addicts, and they deserve it: Right, Sheriff Coats?

Green Herring!

But I was wrong. The actual sheriff on the foundation is Sheriff Al Lamberti. Thanks, Al: Now I've got more work to do. And even more: "Broward Sheriff Al Lamberti, Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, Winter Park Chief Brett Railey, Lake Mary Chief Steve Bracknell and Oviedo Chief Jeffrey Chudnow are among 29 who pledged to contribute money seized during criminal cases. This came at the urging of Attorney General Pam Bondi, a database supporter."

Let me get this straight. Money seized from what can only be drug deals ("criminal cases"), which would be money belonging to the state's residents, not so technically, is being spent on a law that the state refused to fund with taxpayer dollars? Exactly what law gives sheriffs the right to contribute public money to a private fund? What prevents them from contributing it to police parties? Oh, wait, they already do that. Nevertheless, why not contribute the money to, say, a training seminar to prevent prisoner beatings and deaths? How about contributing the money to true and affordable detoxification and rehab centers, rather than malpracticing processing plants like Sarasota's First Step?

Fun in Broward County

I don't have the time to investigate every sheriff and his county in Florida, so let's just take a look at Broward County, since that's where Sheriff Al Lamberti, secretary of the The Florida PDMP Foundation, happens to work and where what comes closest to being Florida's only actual city -- Miami -- happens to be located:

Broward County Sheriff's Office Found 100% Liable in Serious Accident, But Pays Nothing: "The policeman who smashed into [plaintiff's] car was speeding to arrive at work on time."

Police abuse continues to be a major civil liberties problem in Florida, particularly in poor communities and communities of color (and there's plenty more fun cases at that ACLU link): "In Miami, a mentally ill Vietnam veteran yielding a pocketknife was shot 17 times by a city police officer who fired his 40-caliber semi-automatic weapon from about four feet away. The shooting occurred in the midst of a federal grand jury inquiry that led to the indictment of several City of Miami police officers accused of planting guns to cover up unjustified shootings. In Escambia County, in Florida's Panhandle, there have been 14 fatal shootings involving Escambia Sheriffs deputies since 1994."

Police Brutality [in Broward County] Rarely Ends With Punishment for the Cops: "New Times investigated four citizen complaints of excessive force lodged with BSO's Internal Affairs in the North Lauderdale District in 2008 and 2009. All of them involved beatings severe enough to land victims in the hospital. Multiple witnesses testified that deputies struck first. They say the beatings were unprovoked or excessive for the circumstances. Internal Affairs eventually dismissed all of the cases. None of the deputies involved in the beatings was disciplined."

When Florida cops beat the hell out of you, don't expect any pain medication because that would raise a red flag on the PDMP funded in part by... drug money.

That's enough for sheriffs. This may be giving them non-drug kicks.

The Other Florida PDMP Foundation Members

One by one:

David Bowen, Chair

Why, that would be David Bowen of our old friend Automated Healthcare Solutions, one of the PDMP's three corporate sponsors. Missing in action is pal Jim Slattery of Millennium Corporation.

William Janes, Director

That's Colonel William Janes, former director of the Office of Drug Control in Florida, which no longer exists. Who's General, now, Colonel? Or are you ex-General ex-Colonel William Janes?

Now let me get this straight: Florida has such an immense drug problem that every single Florida citizen's private doctor-patient relationship is to be violated by this database, yet the Office of Drug Control has been terminated? Get the picture, Colonel? Because I do.

Sharon Kelley, Director

This would be the CEO of Associates in Emergency Medical Education. You mean there's a purely health-related professional on this team? Not quite: "While completing her 'pre-med,' Sharon served as a Tampa police officer and has utilized this background in the development of numerous lectures provided for medical and legal professionals as well as community organizations which include teachers, coaches, and church groups."

You're not still thinking this a health issue, are you?

Rene Bruer, Director

At last, our bank man. His bio: "René's career began with service in the United States Marine Corps, and continued in the public and private sectors where he advised policy makers and leaders of Fortune 100 companies on financial and economic matters. He holds Series 7, Series 66 and state Life, Health and Variable Annuity licenses and is a registered representative of INVEST Financial Corporation. Contact René today to help with your retirement, estate or business planning, and investment management decisions." Yes, Governor Scott, perhaps you should contact him before signing another law in which you have a personal stake (more on that below).

J. Rodman Steele, Treasurer

And now emerges Duane Morris LLP's man on the job: "J. Rodman Steele practices in all areas of intellectual property law, including patents, trademarks, trade secrets and copyright law."

What interesting credentials for an attorney asssisting a for-profit nonprofit organization to -- how shall I put it? -- deal in drugs? Oh, yes, perhaps that has something to do with the three corporate sponsors with businesses that all happen to involve the business of drugs.

Becki Poston

She used to -- get this -- work as the Executive Director of the Florida Board of Pharmacy and the Florida Drugs, Devices and Cosmetics [my italics] program. I wonder if, in that previous position, she just happened to have ever worked with anyone from Automated HealthCare Systems, Millennium Laboratories, or Aegis PainComp Testing Services?

Erika Marshall

Same previous job, same question.

Lucy Gee

Ditto, ditto.

Florida Governor Rick Scott

According to CNN, a July 1, 2011 law took effect thanks to the efforts of Florida Staatsführer Rick Scott: "Saying it is 'unfair for Florida taxpayers to subsidize drug addiction,' Gov. Rick Scott on Tuesday signed legislation requiring adults applying for welfare assistance to undergo drug screening."

But guess what business Rick Scott tried to get into while the getting was good? You got it: drug testing. Continuing from CNN: "Controversy over the measure was heightened by Scott's past association with a company he co-founded that operates walk-in urgent care clinics in Florida and counts drug screening among the services it provides. In April, Scott, who had transferred his ownership interest in Solantic Corp. to a trust in his wife's name, said the company would not contract for state business, according to local media reports. [Right.] He subsequently sold his majority stake in the company, local media reported." Sold as in profit. You can't lose for losing in this game.

And now, let's test the Speed of Corruption.

The Unbelievable Conclusion

Let's see...It would affect me by requiring me to hand over my precious bodily fluids for pennies on the non-existent dollar?

Florida's Sunshine Law: Corruption in Broad Daylight

2011-08-30T13:23:00.002-04:00

As noted in my posts regarding the Florida Drug Database Corporatist State Profit Grab, not only has the foundation paying for that law privately funded it solely for its own financial interests, but Florida Staatsführer Rick Scott stood to gain from it based on his own investment in a drug testing company -- but for some reason, unlike the aforementioned foundation, someone bothered checking to see whether Scott had any questionable motivations. Nevertheless, to ensure he will reap still more profits or at least plenty of campaign contributions from his database cronies, he recently signed a law requiring drug tests for those receiving "welfare." How quickly the government moves when it joins forces with its overlords:

Let's see...It would affect me by requiring me to hand over my precious bodily fluids for pennies on the non-existent dollar?

Disgraceful Lies Behind the Florida Pharmacy Database Exposed, Part 3: It's Piss for Profit

2011-08-25T17:56:00.005-04:00

The PDMP: Making Drug Deals By The Book

Since we last met, we learned that the Florida Pharmacy Database Law, which the state thought so important it refused to pass the law without private funding, was indeed funded by The Florida PDMP Foundation, Inc., led by Duane Morris LLP, funded by three corporations that just happen to be involved in drug screening or "employer drug education" (Automated HealthCare Systems, Millennium Laboratories, and Aegis PainComp Testing Services), "employer drug education" also being a business in which Duane Morris happens makes extra bucks as if he needs any more of them, with the assistance of a "state county sheriff, a President of a Florida-based health care company, an officer of a bank located in Florida, [and] a former director of the Office of Drug Control..."

Before completing this investigation, let's make clear one thing the Florida State Pharmacy Database Law proves along with the fact that laws can now be purchased:

Welcome to The Corporatist State of America
~ or ~

Willkommen zum Unternehmenszustand von Amerika

I include a German translation because, for instance, what did Florida try to get away with nine years ago? "In 2002, Florida legislators amended the state's drug law, eliminating the requirement that prosecutors prove mens rea, or criminal intent, as part of obtaining a conviction. Florida was the only state in the nation to not require mens rea as part of a drug conviction."

But there's always a second chance.

This piece will focus on those involved with or who directly "work" for the The Florida PDMP Foundation. Let's begin with...

The Case of Two Sheriff's -- Make That -- How Many Sheriffs?

Red Herring!

Unlike the PDMP's web page statement, there's more than one sheriff heavily involved in the passage of the Florida Pharmacy Database Law. First, our red herring. "The Pinellas County Sheriff's Office narcotics diversion task force has been named the Investigative Unit of the Year by a national nonprofit organization focused on curbing prescription drug abuse." Care to guess the name of the "nonprofit" organization? Yes, the PDMP Foundation, corporate sponsored to the bone. Here's Happy Sheriff #1:

And here he is again when the law -- if it can be called that -- was passed:

Ah, how proud we are of a law purchased for us in the name of corporate interests! Sheriff Coats' other priority issue involves something called sweepstakes' cafes. Well, he's on par with his priorities, if not the golf course.

Unsurprisingly, the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office seems to have a few small problems of its own. First, there's this matter of minor police misconduct: "Deputy Todd J. Pierce, of the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office (FL), was arrested on Jan. 25th 2006 on one count of lewd and lascivious molestation and one count of lewd and lascivious battery. The victim was a 15 y/o girl who attended the same high school that Deputy Pierce was assigned to as a School Resource Officer...Deputy Pierce has remained on PAID leave since Dec. 30th 2005" [my italics but not my all caps]. I wonder if Sheriff Coats will make police molestation of children one of his pet projects? After all, he's apparently got a lot of free time on his hands.

Or he could take up the cause of inmate abuse: "A Pinellas County Sheriff's Office detention deputy has been fired for failing to summon medical help for a dying jail inmate last year and lying about it in agency records. Deputy Jimmie Davis, an 11-year veteran, ignored complaints from Kyle Donald Howard and other inmates that 24-year-old Howard was violently ill and vomiting, according to an internal affairs report released this week...In Davis' most recent performance evaluation in January 2010, supervisors determined he met agency standards in all categories except 'judgment'" [my italics]. Is that a joke?

Yes, it seems -- with his good Christina heart -- Sheriff Coats really ought to take up the cause of inmate abuse: "The allegations were startling: that three black detention deputies at the Pinellas County Jail were treating white inmates harshly while favoring black inmates. A five-month internal investigation by the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office that was released this week never proved or disproved claims of racial preference — claims that were made by inmates and fellow deputies. But in the end, two detention deputies were suspended after investigators determined they had violated policies governing the treatment of inmates. The third deputy — around whom many of the complaints swirled — resigned in February before the investigation was finished."

I think I'll stay out of Pinellas County. In fact, if I had the money, I'd get the hell out of Florida, but what can you do?

So, while Sheriff Coats wastes his time (no doubt on the taxpayers' clock) assisting a for-profit nonprofit organization, and breaking up "sweepstakes' cafes," inmates under his watch find themselves being beaten and/or unnecessarily on a regular basis. But that's okay: They're probably addicts, and they deserve it: Right, Sheriff Coats?

Green Herring!

Let me get this straight. Money seized from what can only be drug deals ("criminal cases"), which would be money belonging to the state's residents, not so technically, is being spent on a law that the state refused to fund with taxpayer dollars? Exactly what law gives sheriffs the right to contribute public money to a private fund? What prevents them from contributing it to police parties? Oh, wait, they already do that. Nevertheless, why not contribute the money to, say, a training seminar to prevent prisoner beatings and deaths? How about contributing the money to true and affordable detoxification and rehab centers, rather than malpracticing processing plants like Sarasota's First Step?

Fun in Broward County

Broward County Sheriff's Office Found 100% Liable in Serious Accident, But Pays Nothing: "The policeman who smashed into [plaintiff's] car was speeding to arrive at work on time."
Police abuse continues to be a major civil liberties problem in Florida, particularly in poor communities and communities of color (and there's plenty more fun cases at that ACLU link): "In Miami, a mentally ill Vietnam veteran yielding a pocketknife was shot 17 times by a city police officer who fired his 40-caliber semi-automatic weapon from about four feet away. The shooting occurred in the midst of a federal grand jury inquiry that led to the indictment of several City of Miami police officers accused of planting guns to cover up unjustified shootings. In Escambia County, in Florida's Panhandle, there have been 14 fatal shootings involving Escambia Sheriffs deputies since 1994."
Police Brutality [in Broward County] Rarely Ends With Punishment for the Cops: "New Times investigated four citizen complaints of excessive force lodged with BSO's Internal Affairs in the North Lauderdale District in 2008 and 2009. All of them involved beatings severe enough to land victims in the hospital. Multiple witnesses testified that deputies struck first. They say the beatings were unprovoked or excessive for the circumstances. Internal Affairs eventually dismissed all of the cases. None of the deputies involved in the beatings was disciplined."

You get the picture:

When Florida Cops Beat the Hell Out of You,
Don't Expect Any Pain Medication

Thanks to the Florida Pharmacy Database
Funded By Drug Money

That's enough for sheriffs. This may be giving them non-drug kicks.

The Other Florida PDMP Foundation Members

We'll take them one by one.

David Bowen, Chair

Why, that would be David Bowen of our old friend Automated Healthcare Solutions, one of the PDMP's three corporate sponsors. Missing in action is pal Jim Slattery of Millennium Corporation.

William Janes, Director

That's Colonel William Janes, former director of the Office of Drug Control in Florida, which no longer exists. Who's General, now, Colonel? Or are you ex-General ex-Colonel William Janes?

Now let me get this straight: Florida has such an immense drug problem that every single Florida citizen's private doctor-patient relationship is to be violated by this database, yet the Office of Drug Control has been terminated? Get the picture, Colonel? Because I do.

Sharon Kelley, Director

This would be the CEO of Associates in Emergency Medical Education. You mean there's a purely health-related professional on this team? Not quite: "While completing her 'pre-med,' Sharon served as a Tampa police officer and has utilized this background in the development of numerous lectures provided for medical and legal professionals as well as community organizations which include teachers, coaches, and church groups."

You're not still thinking this a health issue, are you?

Rene Bruer, Director

J. Rodman Steele, Treasurer

Becki Poston

She used to -- get this -- work as the Executive Director of the Florida Board of Pharmacy and the Florida Drugs, Devices and Cosmetics [my italics] program. I wonder if, in that previous position, she just happened to have ever worked with anyone from Automated HealthCare Systems, Millennium Laboratories, or Aegis PainComp Testing Services?

Erika Marshall

Same previous job, same question.

Lucy Gee

Ditto, ditto.

And Now, Pissing Our Pants With Laughter, Presenting
The Winner Of The Florida Drug Dealing Contest:
Governor Rick Scott's Own Private I-Da-Ho

The joke's on us, of course. According to CNN, a July 1, 2011 law took effect thanks to the efforts of Gov. Rick Scott: "Saying it is 'unfair for Florida taxpayers to subsidize drug addiction,' Gov. Rick Scott on Tuesday signed legislation requiring adults applying for welfare assistance to undergo drug screening."

But guess what business Rick Scott tried to get into while the getting was good? You got it: drug testing. Continuing from CNN: "Controversy over the measure was heightened by Scott's past association with a company he co-founded that operates walk-in urgent care clinics in Florida and counts drug screening among the services it provides. In April, Scott, who had transferred his ownership interest in Solantic Corp. to a trust in his wife's name, said the company would not contract for state business, according to local media reports. [Right.] He subsequently sold his majority stake in the company, local media reported." Sold as in profit. You can't lose for losing in this game.

And still, a warning:

ALL OF YOU,

ALL OF YOU,
MENTIONED ABOVE

WILL BE TRACKED,

NOT SMEARED,
BUT TRACKED BY ME TO THE
SMEAR OF YOUR WHEELS GREASED

BY THE BLOOD OF YOUR PRISONERS

AND THE PROFITS YOU MAKE

PISS

Love Your Obsessions

2011-08-23T18:36:00.002-04:00

Somehow, despite millions killed in wars during its short existence, a Great Depressin, and now the Everlasting Recession, Americans have come to believe not in optimism but that they should be optimistic...no matter what. This attitude was no more broadly projected than by the overinflated shadow of Reagan. The ruler proved the exception, for who else more assailed the Soviet Union since Kennedy, just another fortunate son over whom the sun shone until that day -- tragic, yes -- but let us not forget the examined record reveals as much monkey business as occurred under any other administration, call it Camelot or not.

This optimism glows at the the imagined end of all psychotherapeutic and psychiatric roads: One day, every patient believes, he or she will be socially at ease, walk proud and tall, and resemble no one so much as Norman Vincent Peale, with or without breasts. But no, I tells ya, it's that optimism that creates our pessimism, for it's constantly bullied, proven wrong, beaten to pulp and not of the fictional variety, until we...take two of these and pay a hundred dollars next month.

To paraphrase Schopenhauer, those without hope lack fear. Unfortunately, that's a dangerous remedy, for those without fear have a good reason to lack hope: They're likely to kill themselves... and soon.

This paradox is the source of all anxiety. To surrender: No good. To achieve a sunny life? Good luck. All are beset, no more so than now, when all but the aristocracy nearly cringes for fear of the next bill or even a knock on the door: "Now what?"

Isolated we become, and I am one of the isolated, yes, I could not be more isolated were it not for Christina. Lacking her, I would speak only to myself, as I no longer possess a phone and don't miss it.

Great expectations! Always Be Expecting, that's the American motto. "Something is coming. Just you wait! You'll see. You'll turn the corner. It could always be worse and nobody ever said life was supposed to be easy and money only grows on trees in certain nations with warmer climates and potent foliage. Buy a banana republic!"

I've only one solution to offer, and it's been offered in other contexts. I steal words but nonviolently so.

Stop Chasing!

Yes, there's nothing coming that didn't already pass a hundred times. We're like train watchmen. There it goes and here she comes, then... silence. If opportunity knocks, it's always someone else's opportunity. That's why it's best and easiest to mind your own business, since most of us have no businesses.

"Good morning, sir."

The boss looks up with the wrath of holy faith and says not a word. Perhaps he nods.

"Ah, he nodded. I won't be fired today!"

These mark but a few reasons I abandoned the Marxist "solution." I still feel dialectical materialism has much to offer in the way of pest identification, but it doesn't control the insects and never will. Further, in the digital age, we can only hope for anarchy, and not a working anarchy -- I'm no utopian! -- only a failed anarchy. You see, failed anarchy is successful anarchy. We need a rest, not more arrests. We need a good sound collapse with remarkable events to endanger our lives and make them seem worth keeping.

All in all, we've had it too easy. We need a good kick in the ass, and the sad thing is, we've already gotten it. Why do you think apocalypse predictions prove so popular? Just admit it: You want the apocalypse, you want it now, and you couldn't care less if you'll be amongst the upward floating.

So while we await the one and only solution to the otherwise null set capitalist equation, I suggest reading J.G. Ballard's Crash, a little Georges Bataille, some Henry Miller, and, when all else fails, BREAK GLASS and access your...

Mental First Aid Kit: Love Your Obsessions

Object X

2011-08-20T14:49:00.001-04:00

Hell will be born with the noosphere. Saturn and Neptune, now downloading. But here, we're imprisoned by goods. Three in the morning, knuckles ache while grabbing at some cable, mind calculating what could possibly have disrepaired Object X since last night: oxygen, perhaps. Drag on a defrag. Bookmark every site: All will be read...later. A surfeit of neural desires. Curious George offering dangling modifiers: Read this, that, this. Movies half-watched, disks piling, except the asexual fetishes, the documentaries, easy on the mind for lack of looking for the hook that caught my lip so that I might slip a chip and steal for writing purposes. The digital weekend always brings Monday's razor burn. Shave some time. Collect interest until overwhelmed into satiated monotony. All words lie languid on such days. Let sleeping sentences snooze ellipses...

Le Manifeste de Toth

2011-08-06T20:20:00.002-04:00

1. My mind, having reversed positions, turned blue skies red, then red skies colorless, less than white.

2. All opposition and revolt bends to the aristocracy's will like spoons to a mentalist.

3. Ideas require tongues or hands. Reality amputates both from itself.

4. Democracy is an abortion. It cannot live or die, having never been born.

5. Communism diagnoses the malignant tumour of capitalism and operates like a blind surgeon.

6. Gavrilo Princip.

7. I am one amongst the drowning pool of surplus labor, the 21st Century's Jews, proud of my heritage, all consequences secondary.

8. Lady Justice can neither be honored nor violated. Incapable of being seduced by an imaginary, statuesque whore, I break no laws out of disrepect for the law.

9. Earth last! Only a constructed environment remains to destroy.

10. Every belief is a leaf awaiting autumn.

Mind, Paper, Electricity: Babbitt, Fargo and You

2011-08-05T23:36:00.005-04:00

I thought I'd stumbled upon a secret, but as usual I'm not as smart as I think I am, which is a lot less smart than I like to think I really am, and even less smart than others think I think I am, and still less smart than others think I am.

It started like this: I've been reading Babbitt, and I had a suspicion (it wasn't sneaky at all) that Sinclair Lewis' novel just had to have influenced the Coen Brothers' Fargo. The first clue: I kept thinking that William H. Macy would be perfect in the role of Babbitt. I couldn't figure out why. But after two hundred pages, I had a sudden ingenious realization that Babbitt's dialogue as written by Lewis remarkably mirrored that of Fargo's Jerry Lundegarad: "Gosh" and "Gee" combined with a not-so-polite quest for the nonexistent American dream.

Add to the evidence this list of establishments visited by Mr. Babbitt and cohorts: "Twelve minutes of conference on the state of hotels in South Bend, Flint, Davton, Tulsa, Wichita, Fort Worth, Winona, Erie, Fargo, and Moose Jaw." (Note: My home "town" of Flint makes the list. It was a town then.)

So I checked my Original Thesis Score via Google and not so many results down located this confirmation of why I'm retarded according to the GED: "Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) is a typical American Middle Class climber, a Babbitt who would have been the olive in Minnesotan Sinclair Lewis' Martini." Hat's off to consumer reviewer "macresarf1's"; at least a professional beat me to punching my clock.

And there's more. Leslie Dunlop of CityPages noticed the connection, too, when commenting upon Minnesota's possibly-paranoid sense that it was the target of Lewis' satire: "So, if the state still feels the sting of Lewis's barbed tongue -- the Coen Brothers' Fargo seems a recent embodiment of his legacy -- the roving, red-haired writer couldn't escape the region's clutches, either." Lewis, born in Minnesota, seemed none too proud of it -- I know the feeling; as mentioned, I'm from Michigan, far too close for comfort whether you're from Minnesota or Michigan -- and, as Dunlop notes, located his Main Street in "Gopher Prairie, Minnesota." (Yes, Garrison, I get that connection, too, but I've no time for folk music loving liberals. Those days are over.)

Just to hint where he stood on home soil, Lewis had this to say about Minnesota: "A state like this needs more eccentrics and more Jews." Well put. The same could be said about the entire country, except New York City, where real and faux eccentrics prove so numerous that they not only elude but eradicate description.

I found plenty more references in line with my guess, but so far none directly attributed to the Coen brothers, who've forgotten their first names. It just goes to show that social realism is a hell of a lot more interesting than realism as most contemporary fiction writers perceive the latter. "Realism" as perceived by most contemporary novelists is that of MFA graduates. Sinclair Lewis perceived the social realism of a nation eating itself alive one tendon at a time. Remarkably, the meal's not over yet, even though Babbitt was published in 1922. Two thumbs up!

Disgraceful Lies Behind the Florida Pharmacy Database Exposed, Part 2: The Human Tollbooth

2011-08-04T00:34:00.030-04:00

GET OUT OF OUR BODIES
GET OUT OF MY HEAD

Last Episode...

Apparently, commenting readers who accessed a more straightforward, journalistic version of this article via The Nervous Breakdown (entitled "The War Against Urine") just couldn't deduce what they -- in a virus-like manner-- insisted upon calling my "thesis." There's no "hypo," and there's no "thesis," only proof of the following:

The Florida pharmacy database was installed, they say, mainly to stop Oxy mills.
Instead. it now encompasses every drug.
The law itself gives no power to pharmacists and their technicians to overrule doctor's orders, only the right to raise red flags about possible "doctor shopping" (now so broadly applied that a second opinion may get you a jail sentence) and "drug seeking behavior." Yes, I'm at a pharmacy. I'm seeking a drug, Sherlock.
Nevertheless, without any interference, pharmacists and their technicians are using every possible power never given them to refuse refills not just of "addictive" drugs (except alcohol, of course; they've the BEST lobbyists in D.C.) but all drugs.
As outlined in Part1 of this piece, all of this happened due to the obvious self-interests of a few corporate, legal, financial, and lawyerly types -- a goon squad hiding behind a "foundation" -- to enact a nice little scheme: "We get the piss tests; you get your database." Otherwise, the database never would have been funded.

First Stop: Chain Drug Stores

Pharmacists and their Technicians:

First in Line to Rob You and Their Masters

My, look at the type of people deciding you can't get a prescription filled. Here's one account:"Lake City police said they arrested a pharmacy employee Wednesday in connection with the theft of $1,775 worth of prescription pills from the store.... The theft occurred at the CVS Pharmacy at 2233 SW U.S. 90."

But it gets a little trickier than that. Here's a little something from the National Institutes of Health:

With respect to robberies, burglaries, and other losses through shoplifting, employee pilferage, and “sneak thefts” by professional thieves from pharmacies, distributors, hospitals/clinics, treatment programs, or any other business or organization where controlled substances are stored... Some 37.3% of these occurred through night break-ins, 23.1% through employee pilferage, 14.3% through in-transit losses, 6.4% through armed robberies, and 18.6% through “all other” mechanisms...

But surely a big company like CVS has a way to reduce the number of errors to nearly zero? We'd like to think so but the accounts we hear aren't very encouraging. In addition to the general mishaps below, we have a growing collection of consumer complaints about potentially serious errors including wrong counts, wrong dosage, the wrong drug and mistaken identity. The service pharmacy patients and their caregivers receive also leaves a lot to be desired.

If you don't get your prescription, guess who's dropping it tonight with a few beers and a pharmacist technician.

Next Stop: Walgreens

Fly the Swastika as High as the Sky

The Hitler Masturbaters

Well, we'd better not leave out Florida's other main drug chain, that being Walgreens. We already know Walmart's political agenda. I am not eternal; I just resemble a vampire.

Let's check out just one page of consumer complaints against Walgreens. I'll just quote a few, but I suggest you read the entire page linked in the last sentence, just for laughs and tears. The following comments are posted verbatim:

The prescription is written as medically necessary for valium. I called this to the attention of the attendant at the drive-in window. The attendant wasn't happy in having to take care of the problem, but asked me to return in 15 minutes. After returning to the pharmacy at 2:11pm they gave me the prescription for valium. I arrived home at approximately 3:00pm and when I went to put my pills up I noticed that I was 30 pills short. I had this same problem 2 months ago and reported this incident as well.

My God, sounds like criminals trying to prosecute non-criminals! Was this the point of the database? Or was it just to drive us even more insane? After all, what better way to rid the country of surplus labor?

Called pharmacy on Sunday between 4:30 and 5:00 P M, May 20, 2007, to check the status of a prescription refill. Was put on hold for 25 minutes. Nobody in pharmacy would pick up the phone to answer my questions. Was unable to get a refill for insulin for over three days, which created a dangerous situation. I plan to take my business elsewhere.

Justice is Served

Just Rewards for an Unjust Law

GOOD: YOU GET WHAT YOU ASK FOR

AS A CHAIN STORE PHARMACY EMPLOYEE
"JUST FOLLOWING ORDERS"

And Now: The True Victims

Do you really think Floridians care if Oxy users drop dead? Think again. They wanted one thing and one thing only, and that's more blacks in jails, and maybe some white trash. And now, they're going to pay for whining their way to this legislation. Now, better Florida citizens may have lost a son or daughter to drug abuse. This law would not have saved them. Even if it does, it's like treating a tragic teenager driver fatality by forcing every single citizen to drive 24 hours a day with a cop on their bumpers.

A fraction of pharmacy shoppers are truly "drug seeking." That fraction matters not to pharmacists. I'll rely on personal anecdotes. My girlfriend today was interrogated by a CVS pharmacist too stupid to know that 60 mgs of Celexa is the proper dose when Celexa is used to treat OCD. I was denied less of my total prescription for an antidepressant, went without any antidepressants for days because my psychiatrist was out of town, and finally had to settle for Paxil so that I could afford the total amount of pills -- unless, that is, CVS stole a handful.

Pharmacists in Florida should be provided a Hitler mustache to be worn at all times while on duty. NO ONE ON EARTH ABUSES ANTIDEPRESSANTS. Except, perhaps, pharmacists, who probably think antidepressants are opiates.

THE FLORIDA DRUG DATABASE

IS AN ORGY OF CORPORATE SCAMMING

COURTESY OF THE FLORIDA STATE GOVERNMENT,

ALLOWING ABJECT FASCIST BEHAVIOR BY

KNOW-NOTHING PHARMACISTS,

AND IS ALREADY CAUSING

MORE DAMAGE THAT IT WILL EVER PREVENT

But then, that wasn't the purpose...was it?

Yes, Step A to Step B: To criminalize and/or institutionalize as many people as possible for PISS PROFITS. How low can you go? Death row...or just a urinal?

THIS LAW AND ALL OTHERS LIKE IT
ACROSS THE NATION

SHOULD BE IMMEDIATELY
CHALLENGED BY THE ACLU

AS UNCONSTITUTIONAL EVEN THOUGH
THE SUPREME COURT IS ANOTHER
ONE OF "DEMOCRACY'S" LYING MASKS:
WHERE IS THE ACLU?

Enough grounds exist for that challenge to bury all the world's unknown soldiers. If caught up in this bullshittery, fight it to the last appeal. Head to Mexico. You are being screwed by politicians "worried about your possible overdosing" when they will drive by without notice as you purchase sixteen bottles of scotch....from CVS or Walgreens. No questions asked.

I'm asking questions, and I'm not done. I'm not done with the lot of you: Aegis Sciences, Automated HealthCare Systems, Duane Morris LLP, Florida Common Pharmacy Database, Florida PDMP Foundation, Millennium Laboratories, Walgreens, CVS, and everyone involved in the Florida Common Pharmacy Database. That's not grammatically incorrect... You don't deserve colons, much less semi-colons. You are being disemboweled by this research into what the media has so far spared you, that being your own lies.

The Final Word Belongs to My Readers

Three comments, posted verbatim. We're not here for typing lessons.

I also won't post the authors' names; of course, we all know we'd better WATCH WHAT WE POST ONLINE.

Comment #1. THis treatment of patients is not secluded to Florida alone. I have experienced "going cold" as well. I live in Colorado and experience Migraine headaches daily. I take some pretty huge pain killers daily. I changed pharmacy's for convenience and was automatically placed on a watch list. I am a legal junkie. These are the only drugs that allow me to function. Why can they arbitrarily assume that I have a problem without looking deeper? Fuck the computers that have made me a number. Thank you for shining a light on this problem. Not everyone is doctor shopping. Not everyone is a deviant because of the drugs they are forced to be on.

Comment #2. Yup... more evidence of the corporate conspiracy to keep the general population ignorant, addicted and poorer yet. This class, which includes about 80% of the population, is expendable. There are too many poor to really worry about yet. Once they quit reproducing so the available workforce declines, they will become more valuable and thus, the social programs will change to include rehab rather than jail. Nice job, Paul

Comment #3. paul,you know it,i am an experienced "coconspiritor" because of having (and having had,and having still) severe depressions,suicidal behavior,anxietydisorder,alcohol- and drugabuse. at last i can say that it becomes more and more a staasi experience to order and go fetch your medications via the docters and then,pharmacies,all of which seem instructed to reduce,at all costs,all costs. so a third degree investigation on the counter of an pharmacy isn't exceptional anymore. as you may well know,i am not the one they are hurting with these methods,being worse than the biggest LA-exhibitionist. i almost drag them from behind the desk. i have no problem with that,nor with abrasive comments in general. they can all go --.

YES: JUST SO THEY DON'T ASEXUALLY REPRODUCE

Airplane Novel: The Only 9/11 Novel Worth Reading [Digg]

2011-07-08T09:46:02-07:00

The South Tower's letter to you, describing 9/11 from the ultimate perspective, unleashing events from everything you know.

Video Trailer: Airplane Novel by Paul A. Toth - The Only 9/11 Novel Worth Reading [Digg]

2011-06-24T22:26:14-07:00

Featuring Cary Grant in the role of the novel's narrator, the South Tower. Enter a mural of words that for the first time releases events from memory and cliché. This is THE 9/11 novel. Don't miss it. Release Date: On or about July 15, 2011. See www.airplanenovel.com for news, video, music, and more. A Midwest Book Review "Reviewer's Choice."

Obama's Payoff to the HMOs [Digg]

2010-08-01T22:06:55-07:00

We've been had, I know it's over. Sometimes I'm happy it got easy to laugh out loud.

Tired of FarmVille? Try Glengarry Glen RossVille! [Digg]

2010-08-01T21:57:50-07:00

It's time to get those salesmen moving with a little ABC and a kick in the ass. Play Glengarry Glen RossVille NOW!

Aristocracy Eradication Front [Digg]

2010-07-29T20:43:51-07:00

What shall be done with America's aristocracy, which hoards the nation's wealth and prevents the slightest social progress? Here's the answer. It ain't pretty, but it's prettier than the present.

Blasphorisms: Unacceptable Words of Wisdom [Digg]

2010-07-23T08:19:31-07:00

When you're tired of the bullshit, these little sayings will boost your spirits with humor and joie de vivre.