Friday, April 09, 2004

Two on Digging Into the Mind

Here are a couple of interesting pieces delving into psychology.  First, at the New Statesman, we have a Peter Watson written piece titled “Why psychiatry has failed.”  The piece was written in July 2002.  An excerpt.

“One hundred years ago, in The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud unveiled the unconscious, and “the psychological century” was born. It has turned out to be a huge disappointment. The gene and the quantum were conceived at the same time as Freud conceived the unconscious; yet, although they have led to sophisticated technologies, psychology and psychiatry, by most standards, are failures. More people than ever are on anti-depressants; drug abuse is rampant; psychotherapies don’t work; our jails are fuller than ever.”

Next, we have a piece published at The Edge, which is a conversation with Martin Seligman.  The piece is titled “EUDAEMONIA, THE GOOD LIFE A Talk with Martin Seligman.”  An excerpt.

“Clinical psychology, social psychology has, in our lifetimes, been able to relieve an enormous amount of suffering, notes Martin Seligman. “Can psychologists can make people lastingly happier?,” he asks.

“We are able to look at the causal skein of mental illness and unravel it, either by longitudinal studies — the same people over time — or experimental studies, which would get rid of third variables…We’re able to create treatments — drugs, psychotherapy — and do random assignment placebo control studies to find out which ones really worked and which ones were inert.” But, he notes that one result of this success is that 90% of the science in psychology is now based on the disease model, and this has resulted in three costs:

“The first one was moral, that we became victimologists and pathologizers. Our view of human nature was that mental illness fell on you like a ton of bricks, and we forgot about notions like choice, responsibility, preference, will, character, and the like. The second cost was that by working only on mental illness we forgot about making the lives of relatively untroubled people happier, more productive, and more fulfilling. And we completely forgot about genius, which became a dirty word. The third cost was that because we were trying to undo pathology we didn’t develop interventions to make people happier; we developed interventions to make people less miserable.”

Both pieces make for interesting reads.

Posted by John Venlet on 04/09 at 09:00 AM
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An Adventure in Tech Support

So, yesterday, was pretty much eaten away, for myself, with chasing the tail of a tech problem.  My computer is a DELL Inspiron 8600.  It’s a nice laptop, a gift from the lovely Melis.  Aesthetically pleasing to look at, the computer and the lovely Melis, the feature I enjoy most, about the computer, is its wireless capacity.

Anway, I had been having problems with the No Treason (NT) site, and only NT’s site, loading correctly.  When I would click over to the site, I would receive the first couple of sentences from the most recent post, but none of the background, or other posts.  When I would hit my refresh key, I would receive even less of NT’s posts, and could view HTML code and what not, but I could not get the entire page to load.  So I called DELL tech support.

I got right through to DELL, actually a young lady in Alabama, informed her of my problem and fussed around for 45 minutes or so, to no avail.  She recommended I call Microsoft for tech support.  When I reminded her that the software was factory installed, and DELL is responsible for tech support on factory installed software, she informed me that since she couldn’t figure it out, the only thing I could do was contact Microsoft.

I called Microsoft.  Need I tell you what I was informed after 30 minutes on the phone with them?  Yes, I needed to contact DELL tech support for assistance with this problem.  I once again call DELL.  This time I get a young lady down in Texas.  I explain to her the hoops I’ve jumped through so far, all to no avail of course, and ask if she can figure this out.  After reviewing the previous call’s notes, and some additional fussing around, I still have the same problem.  The call ends with a recommendation to contact, you guessed it, Microsoft.  Time spent, an hour and a half.

So I call Microsoft, once again.  I explain to Microsoft the issue, again, the results, none, and ask if they can help figure this out.  The reply is, yes, they can, for a fee of 35 bucks, which can conveniently be charged and work commenced immediately.  I pony up the 35 bucks and end up talking with Sunvi, in New Delhi, India.

I spend an hour and a half on the phone with Sunvi, and let me tell you, this guy was sharp.  He knew his way around the insides of a computer and had a grasp of software issues that was voluminous.  An outsourcing success is the way I would describe my experience with Sunvi as a representative for Microsoft.  So, Sunvi determines what the problem is.  The problem is a McAfee software called Privacy Service.  If that software is uninstalled, I can access NT without any problem.  Sunvi recommends dumping McAfee and installing Norton or some other software.

Since I have already spent money on McAfee, I decide to get ahold of them to determine if they can solve this issue.  I first think of calling them on the phone for tech support.  This is not a cost effective solution.  Meaning, they want to charge me, by the minute via a 900 number.  I don’t consider this servicing an already paid customer.  The other options McAfee offered were email support or live chat.  I choose chat.

I get connected via chat and start working with a guy by the name of Robert.  I inform Robert of what has taken place so far, including the fact that if McAfee’s software is uninstalled, the problem is resolved.  Robert recommends reinstalling the glitch producing software, after defragging, running scan disk and disk cleanup.  This, I am informed, will take care of the problem.  I follow the instructions to the letter after ending the chat support session which lasts about 1 hour.  I have the same problem, so I initate a chat tech support with McAfee again.  Wouldn’t you know it, I have to jump through all the same hoops with a new technician that I had jumped through less than an hour ago.  To no avail.

Needless to say, McAfee’s “Privacy Service” software remains uninstalled from my computer.  McAfee states they will contact me by email with a solution, but who knows when that will be.  The one positive aspect of this exercise in futility was my Microsoft outsourced call to Sunvi in New Delhi.  I did enjoy the banter we shared over the phone as our conversation ranged far beyond matters of tech support.  Plus, Sunvi solved the problem, though McAfee’s software is the actual glitch.

Posted by John Venlet on 04/09 at 07:43 AM
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There Are So Many Things Wrong in this Story

The headline on my ISP homepage reads “Girl, 9, Cuffed and Arrested.”  The link leads to a MSNBC posted story from AP with this headline.  “Girl, 9, cuffed and arrested over missing bunny.”  The sub headline reads “Florida police defend detention, say it was at request of victim.”

Let’s take a look at the article.  Here’s the opening.

“A 9-year-old girl accused of stealing a rabbit and $10 from a neighbor’s home was arrested, handcuffed and questioned at a police station.”

Stealing is wrong, and further into the article, you can read how the 9 year old girl, I think, realizes this because she admits taking the rabbit, but not the 10 bucks.

The second paragraph.

“A Pasco County sheriff’s deputy found the black-and-white rabbit, named Oreo, hopping around in the girl’s living room, according to the arrest report. She was read her rights and taken away in the back of a patrol car.”

Great.  The absconded property has been located.  Return the bunny to the next door neighbor girl, lecture the 9 year old a bit, and her mother, and then let the situation be handled by the girl’s mother, rather than handcuffing, reading the girl her Miranda rights, and hauling the kid away.

What does the sheriff’s department have to say about the arrest?

“Sheriff’s spokesman Kevin Doll defended the arrest, and said if the victim of a crime wants an arrest, deputies are required to act if there is enough evidence.”

Just following orders and procedures, citizens.

“Lori Ventura, the mother of the child who owns the rabbit, said the girl has been involved in other incidents and needs help.”

Indeed.  The problem here, is, the mom is basically admitting she is a rotten parent and is denying her own rights and responsibilities as parent.  She is acknowledging she is a slave to the state and abrogating the welfare of her daughter, her right, to the state also.

I can only shake my head in disgust at the lack of rationality in all the individuals involved.  Well, except for the 9 year old girl.  I can understand her lacking rationality, and a sound moral compass, but at least she admitted her wrongdoing.

Posted by John Venlet on 04/09 at 07:17 AM
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It’s Not Really a Secret

“The answer is not foreign aid, which is corrupting and often worse than useless. In many cases, it actually further impoverished an already poor country. Enriched urban elites bought luxury goods, while donated food and socialist controls drove down the local price of food, ruining the farmers on whom these subsistence economies had depended.

    We now know that the secret to curing hunger and poverty is capitalism and free trade. We have seen that demonstrated irrefutably in East Asia, which has experienced the greatest alleviation of poverty in the history of man. In half a century, places like Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea have gone from subsistence to First World status. And now free markets and free trade are lifting tens of millions of people out of poverty in India and China.”

Charles Krauthammer in a column at Townhall.com titled “How times have changed.”

Via PrestoPundit.

Posted by John Venlet on 04/09 at 06:02 AM
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Hans-Herman Hoppe in the Morning

Andy Duncan, posting at Samizdata, has finished reading Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed and has provided us with a review.  His opening remarks.

“I used to be a singer in a rock and roll band.

Well, okay, maybe not, but I was a lead guitarist in a punk rock band. I even had my Fender copy tuned so I could play the major rock chords with a single sliding finger, just like those anarcho-punk legends, Crass.

If only our band had possessed some luck, a good manager, a driving licence between us, some money, a van, and a small pet monkey named Brian, we might have made it big. Especially if the lead guitarist had actually possessed any talent.

But, alas, this punk dream faded, as it did for a million others, and my brush with anarchy submerged itself for another twenty years. However, much to my surprise it resurfaced again last year, a little rusty but largely unscathed, when it experienced a depth charge blast from Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s mental mind bomb, Democracy: The God That Failed.”

I like a good “mental mind bomb.”  Get a cup of coffee for this one, it’s a longer post.

Posted by John Venlet on 04/09 at 05:15 AM
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Ancient Greece

I have not, yet, made it to the European continent in my worldly travels.  I wrote a friend, the other day, that even the dirt is historic.  With that in mind, I found the National Archaeological Museum of Athens virtual tour very satisfying.

Via Fred Lapides.

Posted by John Venlet on 04/09 at 05:00 AM
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An Obituary

I don’t read obituaries, much.  The obits in our local paper lack color, and in no way present any of the zest for life individuals who have passed beyond what we currently ken may have had, or squandered.  Colby Cosh has penned an obit for Terry Johnson, a fellow “flophouse” tenant and writer, dead at age 44.  A short portion of Colby’s paean.

“All things considered, he did well to make it so far. Terry was so defenceless against the basic demands of life that he never, to anyone’s knowledge, owned a winter coat during the time he lived in Edmonton. A fellow housemate made an annual ritual of frogmarching him to the barber to get his Karl Marx beard and his spirit-of-‘68 hair hacked at. No piece of furniture in the common area of the house lacked for holes made by his cigarettes. He had the barest acquaintance with bathing and probably none, in his adulthood, of dentistry. He made do, defiantly. Somehow he acquired a whole wardrobe of other people’s clothing; one got the distinct impression he didn’t get it from Goodwill or Value Village, but that he just somehow gravitated home from the pub wearing a bowling shirt with “Larry” on the breast pocket.”

Posted by John Venlet on 04/09 at 04:53 AM
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Thursday, April 08, 2004

There’s No Way This Thing Could Hide in Your Keyboard

The dreaded camel spider.  I wonder if they can spit like a camel?  Dang, that’s a big spider.  It would be interesting to see a camel spider mix it up with a bird eating spider.

Via Dean at Dean’s World.

Posted by John Venlet on 04/08 at 05:55 AM
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What About My Interest?

Skip Oliva has an interesting piece posted this morning at Citizens for Voluntary Trade.  Skip titled his piece “The Religion of Politics,” and in the piece lays out his reasoning why he thinks “pragmatism is killing America.”  From Skip’s piece.

“In each of the three examples mentioned above—pornography, obscenity, and antitrust—the government seeks to restrict personal liberties and individual rights by invoking the “public interest.” The government can prosecute individuals for possessing or trading sexually explicit materials because it’s not in the “public interest.” Words and pictures deemed obscene by five unelected regulators can be banned from privately-owned television networks because it’s in the “public interest.” Businesses and individuals lose their right to enter into private contracts when such agreements violate the “public interest.”
What is the “public interest”? It’s nothing more than special-interest politics. It is the replacement of individual rights with group rights, where groups fight for control of the government to impose their will upon other groups. It is a perpetual cycle of influence-peddling, parasitism, and avarice.”

Posted by John Venlet on 04/08 at 05:26 AM
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Wednesday, April 07, 2004

Had by HAMAS

Henry Siegman, writing for the Financial Times (FT), pens a piece titled “Sharon’s gamble could trigger holy war.”  He ends his piece on this note.

“The insistence by Mr Sharon and so many Israelis that Sheikh Yassin deserved his fate is beside the point. To be sure, Hamas had no right to demand immunity for someone who provided religious legitimacy for the brutal killing of Israeli civilians. But if the assassination is transforming Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians into a religious war, the Israeli civilians in whose name Mr Sharon carries out these extra-judicial killings may yet pay a far more bitter price.”

I’ve got news for Mr. Siegman.  To HAMAS, the conflict they have with the Israelis is, and always has been, a holy war.  Sure, HAMAS, and other Palestinian factions, know the politically correct phrases to throw around about pre-existing borders, Palestinian sovereignty and what not, but when the sauce pan is on the stove, reducing to the correct consistency, HAMAS is exhorting death to Israelis based on religion not borders.  There is no “could trigger a holy war” to what is happening in Israel and Palestine, the trigger is taped down on full automatic holy war already.

You can read Siegman’s entire piece at Liberty & Power: Group Blog, FT is by subscription only.

Posted by John Venlet on 04/07 at 10:07 AM
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Drop Kick Dog

I love dogs.  Big dogs, small dogs, lap dogs, mutts, dogs are just all around great critters, at least as far as I’m concerned.  The title to this post is a term I used to affectionately refer to little lap dogs.  I don’t know if I will any long after reading this story.  The story reports on some individuals who actually used a Yorkshire Terrier as a drop kick dog.  Some uprights are just useless.

“Upright: noun : a by and large bipedal companion, also referred to as a human being.”

Upright definition via Rod’s Alter Ego.

Dog story via Drudge.

Posted by John Venlet on 04/07 at 09:02 AM
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More on Scientology’s Coziness to the IRS

On March 25th, I noted the story of Michael Sklar suing the IRS for what appears to be the same tuition write-off benefit that Scientologists have secretly arranged with the United States Internal Revenue Service.  A write-off Sklar has been denied, and that I could use.  I titled that post “F*cking IRS.  (Sorry about that language, Mum, I don’t use it all the time.)

Today, at Townhall.com, Ben Shapiro has a piece up, regarding the above mentioned case, titled “L. Ron Hubbard has better lobbyists than God.”  An excerpt I particularly enjoyed.

“What exactly are Scientologists writing off? Thousands of dollars worth of pure baloney. As authors Andrew Breitbart and Mark Ebner detail in their fascinating book, “Hollywood, Interrupted,” Scientology itself is a load of psychedelic babble, and an expensive load at that. It costs over $300,000 to reach the top levels of this cult. “Auditing”—the service that the IRS allows Scientologists to write off—is a method of purging “thetans.”

Breitbart and Ebner describe what thetans are: “Over 75 million years ago, in a universe far, far away, evil alien overlord Xenu captured all the rebel souls by calling them in for tax auditing and, after injecting them with a mixture of glycol and alcohol, they were transported in B-1 bombers to earth and flung into volcanoes. Then the volcanoes were exploded with neutron bombs. The souls of these immolated aliens, called body thetans (thetan is L. Ron’s word for souls), now cling to us like nasty body lice, through reincarnation after reincarnation, and can only be removed through hours of auditing at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Wouldn’t it be cheaper just to buy a lifetime supply of RID or to put in a sheep dip?

Posted by John Venlet on 04/07 at 08:20 AM
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Personal Values

Would you sign a statement, required by your employer, requiring you to value something you did not value?  I wouldn’t.  What if you would be fired if you did not sign such a statement.  Would you sign then?  I wouldn’t.  The Washington Times reports on just such an event in an article titled “Worker opposed to gays wins suit.”

Of course the headline is phrased in such a way as to make the individual opposed to homosexuality seem heartless, cruel, and just so old-fashioned.  Come on guy, get with the program, opposition to homosexuality is so 1960’s.  But let’s look at a couple of excerpts from the story.

“Mr. Buonanno objected to language in a new employee handbook issued in January 2001 that said “each person at AT&T Broadband is charged with the responsibility to fully recognize, respect and value the differences among all of us,” including sexual orientation. He was fired after refusing to sign a “certificate of understanding” acknowledging that he agreed to the policy.”

Before you state hammering on Mr. Buonanno for being a homophobe, consider this.

“Mr. Buonanno felt his Christian beliefs prevented him from valuing or agreeing with homosexuality, which he views as a sin, but he pledged not to discriminate against or harass anyone, said John W. Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute, the group that represented Mr. Buonanno.”

Knock Mr. Buonanno’s Christian beliefs all you want, even non-Christians may not value homosexuality.  Requiring anyone to sign such a statement of value is akin to early church practices requiring individuals to sign statements of acceptance of the pope, and the church’s rule, or be burned at the stake.

Posted by John Venlet on 04/07 at 07:49 AM
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What’s The Frequency, Baby?

So, I’m on the back porch this morning having a cup of joe after reading this article regarding the benefits of frequent ejaculation as a preventive medicine against prostrate cancer.  The lovely Melis, who has just returned home from travel, joins me.  I casually bring up her willingness to assist me in preventing contracting this medical malady, and refer to the article linked above.  Her comment, “You’re on your own, baby.  I hope your medical insurance is paid up.”  Dang it.  I love that girl.

Via Jon Henke at Questions and Observations.

Posted by John Venlet on 04/07 at 07:22 AM
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Political Faith

Duncan Frissell, The Technoptimist, commenting on John Kerry’s commenting regarding his Catholic faith.

“Why don’t faithless Catholic politicians simply say that they are imposing their beliefs on us but that those beliefs are not the beliefs of their church; that (in fact) they don’t share most of the beliefs of their church; and that they only maintain the pretense of faith for crass political advantage.”

Posted by John Venlet on 04/07 at 06:10 AM
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