Mark2

The people quoted in the book and article know what they were and were not fighting for. You must listen to them to find out. Unrestricted immigration is destroying America in many ways not the least of which is that the new immigrants tend to vote socialist – yes, even though they moved to escape the economic consequences of socialism. An Objectivist vote gets negated with each socialist immigrant. About gold and inflation: Isn’t the rising price of gold an exaggerated indicator of inflation? Exaggerated because the rising gold price also indicates the fear of future inflation, which of course differs from actual inflation. To my mind 4% per year constitutes high inflation. It’s a yearly 4% tax on savings and means the value of your savings gets cut in half every 17 years. 17 years from now you will need $200 to buy what $100 buys today. Yet when inflation is at 4% politicians boast that it’s only 4% and “we got inflation under control” – as if 4% is no problem (and what problem there could be is never caused by them). If the annual inflation rate is 5% it takes somewhat less than 14 years to cut your effective savings in half. With 6% it takes about 11 and a half years. Inflation is a major wealth killer long before “double digits” (10% or more).

OptimizedPrime needs to be more precise and less sarcastic. Which would he do first, end the welfare state or fail to close the borders? Read the UK article “This isn’t the Britain we fought for” by Tony Rennell. It’s a review of the book The Unknown Warriors by Nicholas Pringle. If these people are racists then I’m in good company. The virtue of selflessness nonsense that some of those of the WWII generation repeat is pathetic when you consider that they really were sacrificed. To get back on track, is the price of gold in dollars probably going down soon? I should trade my gold for hundred dollar bills?

FeatherFall’s linked to article on DXM tends to tell against his point, for it concludes: “Explaining OOBEs [out of body experiences] is difficult and is in my opinion currently beyond neuroscience.” I don’t have much to offer on this subject except to say I’ve always found the debunking of vitalism a boor. You only have to experience the death of a loved one to realize that life is more than a body. (Added: I don't mean to imply that there’s life after death though.) I don’t think there need be any contradiction between that and the unity of mind and body, or with the Greek idea expressed by “a healthy mind in a healthy body.”

Both. I believe Anthony Ludovici – an admirer of Friedrich Nietzsche and rather unattractive character (psychically speaking) in some respects – once wrote “Women have no taste.” Women in general. All of them. Not that I’m insinuating that one pretty piece of goods has exhibited this trait here or anything like that!

Gold at $1,800 an ounce looks a lot like inflation when ten years ago it was $275. Others have pointed out various problems with the lead post. I add the following comment on this sarcastic/ironic remark regarding immigrants: “whatever you do don’t let anybody come here and live in that massive oversupply of houses we built.” Today immigrants by and large are Third World immigrants. Collectively (of course there are individual exceptions, but as a whole) they are a drain on the economy. In today’s welfare state they receive more government benefits than they contribute in taxes or contribute in other ways. To many of the rest of us stuck in this society that means the reverse, we’re on the contributing side of the holdup. Again speaking in averages, though immigrants may take up space in a vacant house, the money they use to buy, maintain and/or rent that house comes partly from natives who are forced to give it to them. Of course all our problems can’t be laid at the feet of welfare immigrants, but the self-righteousness displayed in the above sarcastic/ironic remark is unjustified. A number of people claim to prove the pretty obvious (if you’ve ever lived in a big city) idea that today immigration is bad news. I don’t necessarily buy everything on the following websites but some of their economic articles seem to be worth a look. Each article below contains some evidence for the above: http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer?pagename=iic_immigrationissuecentersfa6e http://www.numbersusa.com/content/nusablog/beckj/march-15-2011/why-does-us-restrict-h-1b-visas-protect-american-workers.html http://www.numbersusa.com/content/learn/issues/american-workers/immigration-hurting-us-worker.html http://www.newswithviews.com/Wooldridge/frosty545.htm Chapters 7 and 8 of Alien Nation, by Peter Brimelow. A massivve PDF file of the entire book is at http://www.vdare.com/asp/countLink.asp?u_link=http://www.vdare.com/alien_nation/Alien-Nation.pdf The following article really got to me so I include it even though it’s about culture rather than economics and it combines immigration with other causes. Set aside the nonsense about the virtue of selflessness and consider the rest: “ ‘This isn’t the Britain we fought for,’ say the unknown warriors of WWII” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1229643/This-isnt-Britain-fought-say-unknown-warriors-WWII.html The ACLU has a contrary view, but don’t have much to back it up – quoting a political hack like Mario Cuomo would only convince a leftist. Other such articles quote the Farm Bureau and other government sources, not exactly unbiased. Here’s the ACLU article: http://www.aclu.org/immigrants-rights/immigrants-and-economy

I personally don’t have to prove my claims to Eiuol, and in this case I’m not going to because the subject is disgusting. Why is argument even necessary? What happened to reduction to absurdity when you don’t even have to reduce it? I’m here to help you by applying several high voltage jolts of electricity across your skull, sending surges of high current through your hapless brain, to make it all better. You can’t satirize this horror.

My point is not Eiuol’s. Eiuol assumes that depression is an organic problem. I was referring to – and this was obvious to the astute reader – demonstrably organic problems. Is depression ever and primarily an organic neurological problem? Psychiatrists don’t seem to know. The arguments I’ve seen run along these lines: Nothing was wrong with him except he was depressed. We tried this drug that messes with his biochemistry. He seemed better. Now we can push him around. It’s as stupid as that. Except that I added the last bit. Even without the last bit it’s stupid. Eiuol doesn’t want “people writing off an entire medical field because of bad practitioners.” People should write off the entire pseudo-medical field of electroshock and every practitioner. Though they all ought to be prosecuted for mayhem and sent to prison, unfortunately that’s very unlikely to happen. However suing individual ones for a substantial sum has been done and should be encouraged. This whole subject is depressing. People are routinely brow-beaten and coerced and tricked into alleged psychiatric treatments. Why trust anything people associated with this say?

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors muck around with so-called neurotransmitters. I use the crude phrase “muck around” advisedly. Obviously that premise is wrong and I never supposed it. There might be an organic problem such as a disease. A diseased organ is not going to function properly. It’s their funeral, they can try whatever they want. The trouble is they can’t trust many psychiatrists’ advice. In fact most depression is psychological in nature, not a physical problem. Positing “nothing else works” turns the advantage of drugs into a vacuous tautology. Perhaps? I know about insulin therapy from reading about its use on James Forrestal, the first U.S. Secretary of Defense. The nurses notes of his stay at Bethesda Naval Hospital in 1949 make horrifying reading. (I got interested in Forrestal because of an interest in government corruption. It’s now certain he was assassinated, though he made so many enemies it’s hard to tell by whom.) I’m afraid I can’t reply to that with even a semblance of courtesy. As for Dreamspirit’s story, it makes me very angry. She shouldn’t have had to go through that experience. I’m glad it had a happy ending even if justice wasn’t done to the MALICIOUS psychiatric IDIOT, like dropping him down a well or something. I mean a well you wouldn’t be drinking from anytime soon.

It wouldn’t have any obvious repercussions in engineering or science. The problem is interesting for several reasons though. Setting aside proving it, the statement is so simple a child can understand it. It’s been tested or proved to be true for all numbers up to 17 * 2^58 – about 4,900,000,000,000,000,000 – so it’s almost certainly true. Yet people interested in such puzzles, and there a lot of smart people in that class, so far haven’t been able to prove it for any general number. Bryan Thwaites, a British mathematician, has offered a £1000 reward for a proof.

Primarily, first, as in first the cause, then the effect. With Diana’s thyroid treatment, first the thyroid problem was solved, consequently the other problems caused by it were solved. With Prozac and Haldol the side-effect is the effect. Again, Haldol is a controlling drug. It debilitates the taker. It may be more comfortable for those surrounding the taker that he be degraded, but the doctor shouldn’t fool himself into thinking he’s helping the guy. Prozac and other SSRIs temporarily cut back communication within the brain. In other words they just gum things up, render the taker less than fully conscious. That’s how they work, it’s what they do and what you get. Not long ago doctors defended “insulin therapy” – artificially induced insulin shock, or hypoglycemia – as beneficial to the victim. Then there was electro-shock, which is making a comeback today, and worse “treatments” that the psychiatric establishment has endorsed over the years. The stock of the psychiatric profession is way down so don’t take their word for how beneficial something or other is. At this time if a person needs to be restrained, physical restraint is far better for him. If someone is in such a bad way that he must be physically restrained forever to prevent him from killing himself, he’d be better off left alone. If he really is a threat – not just an inconvenience – to others, then he must be physically restrained forever. Then if a mistake be made – or the man railroaded into that situation by his enemies – he can enjoy a speedy and complete recovery. Forced administration of Haldol and similar drugs is analogous to the death penalty. After a while it’s as difficult to undo. Wouldn’t you prefer to live in a society where you could not legally be forced to submit to psychiatric treatment, even if you were alleged to be a criminal?

I haven’t followed bluecherry’s link – don’t care for Diana’s blog – but her story as told in his post illustrates my point. When something physical has a mental effect it is a coarse, unsubtle one. Note that Diana’s physical problem did not primarily involve the brain. Psychoactive drugs such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or Haldol would only have damaged her health. I gather the problem was with her thyroid gland. The two are quite different. Thyroid excretions have been identified and the cause and effect known. Mucking around with brain chemistry is a shot in the dark. This insinuates that pills are part of the solution. Comparing the brain to a car stuck in the mud and drugs to ramming it, is a revealing analogy. The knowledge about and action of many medicinal psychiatric treatments are just that crude. Surely there are benign ways to take a person out of themselves, nondestructive ways, ways that don’t involve electric shocks, metabolic shocks, or other physiological assaults. Doubtless some people are beyond help and the best a doctor can do is control them for the safety of others. But the doctor shouldn’t fool himself into thinking he’s doing it “for the patient”. A straightjacket and padded cell would be far better for the man than Haldol. After the former he will recover in short order as good (or bad) as he was before.

The author added the following to page two of his paper:

Naturally, but are these valid treatments, are the medications helpful or harmful? That’s the disputed point here. Certainly these medications exist. Assuming they are beneficent instead of malevolent, the fact that they are over-prescribed is clear too. The executive secretary where I used to work once held a birthday party for her son with eight others attending. From talking to their mothers she learned that five of them were on Ritalin. That’s a small sample and you can’t draw the conclusion that 5/8 of public school boys are on Ritalin, in fact the actual over-all percentage is less, but you can conclude that a lot of them are. Do 20% of boys really suffer from whatever Ritalin is supposed to help? How did the boys 50 years ago, when by all accounts kids were happier and learned more, cope without Ritalin? Not that that everything was rosy fifty or a hundred fifty years ago. After about two months of first grade (no kindergarten back then) little Thomas Edison came home in tears: his teacher said he was “addled.” His mother home-schooled him from that day on. What are the chances of a Thomas Edison getting dosed with Ritalin today? Many parents get browbeaten into it, being far too trusting of school authorities and doctors in white smocks. Perhaps Ayn Rand would be the first to admit that she was not an authority on non-philosophical subjects, but one doesn’t need to be an authority to recognize a confusion of categories: mental and physical, psychological and physiological. It’s true that the latter can -- very crudely -- influence the former, but when it comes to something subtle like depression or anxiety the notion of a drug for it is suspicious on its face. The history of so-called experts in psychology is replete with their malicious horrors -- ‘blunders’ doesn’t cover it. I gather from earlier posts that “irreversible” here means “not self-curable.” Perhaps not put as well as it might be but the point is clear: psychological problems are not diseases in the sense of the flu or diabetes. Even if some apparent psychological problems are caused by a physio-chemical problem, to repeat, it’s unreasonable on its face that something subtle like depression or anxiety is often of physio-chemical origin. The analogy between healing a broken bone and recovering from depression is only that, an analogy, and of very limited applicability. Here’s a good book on the psychiatric use of drugs: Toxic Psychiatry by Peter Breggin, M.D.