Things are really getting out of control

I just heard about the advertisement in the above video from a friend who saw it on TV tonight. It's an ad for what's known in the pharmaceutical industry as an atypical antipsychotic drug.

Psychiatric drugs can help - if and only if they're used properly.

Too many psychiatric professionals don't use them properly. It's much easier and cheaper to carelessly toss a prescription at patients than to sit down with them and get to the actual source of their troubles.

One reason for this indifferent approach to medicating peoples' minds is insurance industry pressure on doctors to do medicine on the cheap.

Another is pharmaceutical companies' aggressive marketing tactics.

Still another is laziness on the part of too many psychiatric professionals.

Marketing antidepressants like headache remedies was bad enough. Marketing powerful and potentially dangerous anti-psychotics on television is rather disturbing.

Now, I've heard from one professional that judiciously applying so-called "homeopathic" doses of Abilify can do wonders for difficult cases of depression. What I worry about is doctors who hear clients talk about something they've seen on TV, and then just indifferently scrawl them out a prescription for it.

If you do believe you're suffering from a genuine psychological or psychiatric disorder, choose a therapist who listens to you, and isn't trigger-happy with medication. They can be tough to find, but they are out there.

Just remember that successful treatment for depression often happens gradually, not overnight. It can be frustrating to think that nothing's happening, but subtle, cumulative changes can manifest themselves almost without your knowing it. Here again, a knowledgeable therapist can be worlds of help.

Remember also that human feelings are not diseases.

Recommended reading:

http://tinyurl.com/cqfgao
http://mindfreedom.org
http://bipolarblast.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/catys-story/
http://www.freedom-center.org/

Names. Lives. Not numbers.

“The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.” - Joseph Stalin

I viewed the AIDS quilt at Broome Community College today. It’s hard not to feel sad when you look over each panel, lovingly crafted by the relatives and friends of AIDS victims. Victims who didn’t live to see better treatments for HIV/AIDS. Victims who never lived to see a cure, which as of this writing still hasn't been found. The ignorant and mean ones among us regard the terrible pandemic which ended these lives years before their time as a sign from above that love and pleasure are abominations. The rest of us feel our heads spin at the thought of so many promising lives lost for no reason.

The AIDS Quilt was the brainchild of San Francisco AIDS activist, Cleve Jones. Like many others, Jones was upset at the way Reagan-era America painted this then-new pestilence as divine punishment and its victims as human trash or worse. Many AIDS victims of the 1980's didn't even receive proper funerals. He and his co-organizers wanted to drive home the point that AIDS casualties were friends, relatives, parents, co-workers, not statistics in a seemingly endless body-count but people. People who loved and were loved by friends, relatives and life-partners. People whose loved ones were certainly devastated by their slow, excruciating deaths. The quilt, which rapidly expanded beyond the point at which the entire thing could easily be viewed in one place, traveled to dozens of American cities.

I last saw the quilt at a local high school in the early 1990's. Like the panels shown here, most were simple celebrations of the lives of those lost. Others included a call to action for social justice. One which sticks in my mind from that exhibition almost two decades ago was one which contained an embroidered mandala which on closer inspection turned out to be composed of ejaculating penises arranged in a circle. It made a huge impression on me that here in the middle of the worst sexually-transmitted disease epidemic since the emergence of syphilis, in the middle of the worst anti-sex backlash since the Comstock era of the late 19^th century, friends of this one particular victim were not shunning sexuality, nor holding up their loved one’s death as a warning to sexually-active people, but actually celebrating sexuality, affirming life, affirming pleasure. Life, this simple artistic statement said, is not an underground shelter which we cram ourselves into while we wait indefinitely for the storm to pass, it’s meant to be lived, enjoyed. In the era of “just say no”, of yuppiedom, with its overemphasis on overwork and in-your-face conspicuous consumption, this was a radical idea. It still is today.

(Loyalty oath department - I’m a more or less ordinary straight person, one who recognizes that the same kinds of people who persecute or marginalize gay men and women for being what they are can mess with us just as easily. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, remember the hoo-haw over emergency contraception, also known as “Plan B”?)

It's always somewhere else, it's always someone else...

This is the kind of thing which, most of us think, always happens someplace else. Today, it happened right here.

This morning, a gunman wielding a high-powered rifle invaded the American Civic Association building on Front Street in Binghamton, NY. He shot several people and took dozens of others hostage before finally turning his weapon on himself. 12 hostages were killed in the attack. Follow the hyperlink above for a more detailed account of the attack. The American Civic Association, where the attack took place, was the place which held a festival each year featuring the music, dance, theater and last but not least, food of many nations. My parents would take my siblings and I there each year. It was an unpretentious place staffed by friendly and often unassuming people. Never did I ever suspect that it could become the scene of a massacre.

Nut-jobs with weapons attacking innocent people for no apparent reason is unfortunately nothing new. I was a kid when I heard radio news coverage of Charles Whitman’s August, 1966 shooting spree from the University of Texas tower. He sniped randomly at passers-by and at police for over 90 minutes before being killed himself. This attack is celebrated in song by Kinky Friedman in The Ballad of Charles Whitman. Now, by this time in my life I’d seen and heard reports of violent crimes on the radio and on the evening news. I’d heard on the news about murders being committed for profit, to silence potential trial witnesses or as revenge. My grade-school-kid mind could not fathom why anyone would kill strangers, one after the other, whom he’d never met and who had certainly never done him any harm.

Some of you may also remember the infamous 1984 San Ysidro Massacre, sometimes jocularly referred to by the locals as the “Big Mac Attack”, in which James Oliver Huberty dressed up in combat fatigues, drove to a local fast-food restaurant and killed several people before being killed himself by police sharpshooters. And I’m sure you’ve heard by now about the gunman who shot up a Unitarian Church in Kentucky on July 27th of last year as the children of church members were staging a performance of the play, Annie.

The block of Front Street on which today’s attack took place has had a colorful history. A 19th-century Gothic home on its eastern side was washed away in the flood of 1935. A local amateur photographer snapped a picture of the house just as it heaved over backwards into the swollen Chenango River. In the 1990's, a family-planning clinic on that block which provided abortions was the scene of constant, theatrical demonstrations by the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, who very thoughtfully opened up a “crisis pregnancy center” across the street. Downtown Binghamton has had its share of entertainment too. As former Binghamton resident and cultural visionary R.U. Sirius wrote in a discussion on the WELL:

“...I had a friend who took over the local Nixon [presidential re-election campaign] headquarters in the name of the Zippies (Yippies with an extra zip) with an unloaded BB gun on Halloween in 1972. It was a scene straight out of Rebel Without A Cause. The cops were ready to shoot up the place when another friend of mine stepped up and coaxed him out of the building”.

Not all the details of this random act of violence are available yet.Whatever was going on in the gunman’s mind shortly before he started killing people at random, we can only guess. A friend’s therapist had one of the victims as a patient, and naturally, she was pretty torn up about this. I've been alternating between numbness and disbelief all day today. Now this whole thing’s just beginning to sink into my head. I wonder if I’m going to be able to sleep tonight.

My heart goes out to the families and friends of the attacker’s victims.

Saying goodbye to an old friend

It’s the end of an era. Whether we like it or not.

Last month, my friend Brian (not his real name) who I’ve known since the early 1980's got word that the chain which runs the camera shop he’s worked at as a salesman for almost a quarter of a century was declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy. This meant that his store would be closing at the end of this week. It not only means that Brian is now among the many thousands trying to set up a livelihood in the current economy, it means that the town his store was located in, a college town with dozens of photography students, will now be without a proper camera store. Consider what that loss means to a student who needs materials or equipment for a project that’s due in a few days, a professional who needs extra gear for a particular job, or anyone who needs technical advice from someone other than the salesman in the big-box store who was selling running shoes or toasters the previous week.

When I bought my first digital camera, I went to Brian’s store. I knew that I’d be paying a bit more than I would if I shopped online. I also knew I’d get something from Brian that I’d never find at Amazon.com, Buy.com or anyplace else in cyberspace - solid, personal technical advice. Advice from a man who has been working with cameras since his teens, who has observed the transition from film to digital. Who has seen which brands and models of cameras come in for repairs most frequently, who could look at a problem picture and immediately tell you what had gone wrong and what could be done about it. Who knew which kinds of digital media were reliable and which were to be avoided. When my digital camera developed problems with its image sensor, it was Brian who informed me that the manufacturer was recalling that particular model and walked me through the recall process. When I wanted to have my old film camera fixed, he referred me to a local camera repair shop (itself a rare and dying breed).

Lots of chain stores, drugstores and supermarkets still have film-processing labs where you can get prints and enlargements made of digital or conventional photos. Trouble is, the self-service print-making kiosks all operate in idiot mode. They all are programmed to function as if everyone who uses them is a rank amateur who needs to have all of his or her work “enhanced”. This can be frustrating for good photographers who have a certain kind of image quality in mind and don’t want their pictures messed with. The teenaged minimum-wage-slaves behind the counter can’t override the idiot-mode programming and will not hesitate to tell you so. Brian knew how to make the print makers behave. I've had him make exhibition-grade prints for me. Obviously he cannot provide me with that service any longer.

Personal service in retailing is being superseded by “customer service” from a back-office halfway around the world whose employees often know barely enough English to read the printed scripts pertaining to the most common problems. If your particular problem isn’t listed on any of the scripts - lotsa luck. Point-of-sale technical assistance? Forget it. The way things are progressing, genuine technical advice will only be had by logging onto web forums such as photo.net. No one bothers fixing digital gear when it fails not only because the mediocre build-quality of much of it leaves little “fix” in it but because a new and improved model is always one mouse click away, for less than the cost of the repair. We have finally arrived in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which it is always better to end than to mend.

Photo Creative Commons 2009 by PMG.
Non-comm, attrib, no derivs.

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Can I run Second Life on it?

Just to show that personal computing is a lot older than we think, this ad from the January 1959 issue of Electronics Illustrated magazine offers for sale an analog computer with not much more power than a ten-dollar calculator but which was probably very advanced for its time.

Analog computers you’ll recall were the predecessors to the digital ones we now know and love (or hate with a passion!). Judging by the photo in the ad, the unit handles data using 5 or 6 metal-shell vacuum tubes. Yup, that’s right, tubes, just like the ones in your guitar amp or antique radio. Transistors at the time were just beginning gain mass-market acceptance, and it would be another 11 years before microprocessors as we now know them would make their appearance and put us on the road to personal computing, digital audio and video, and annoying cell phone ringtones.

Can’t find anything on the web about this particular model. The grid of black dots in the picture is probably an array of pin jacks for the patch cords which were used to program the thing, sort of like the way early synthesizers were programmed. The “display” was the analog meter which you see at the machine’s upper right hand corner. A far cry from the machine you’re viewing this blog on, certainly, but a necessary step in the evolution of the digital world we now inhabit.

What is morality? (What is reality?)

Photo Creative Commons 2009 by Pinkmoose.

I haven't got much to post this week. A few items in the can, but they're not yet ready for prime time.

In the meantime, that doesn't mean that I can't bring outrageous, maddening things to your attention. Under the heading of "religious dogma before common decency", I bring you a news report about a situation which sounds like something out of Monty Python.

Declaring that "life must always be protected", a senior Vatican cleric has defended the Catholic Church's decision to excommunicate the mother and doctors of a nine-year-old rape victim who had a life-saving abortion in Brazil. ...

... The controversy represents a PR nightmare for the Vatican. The unnamed girl's mother and doctors were excommunicated for agreeing to Wednesday's emergency abortion yet the Church has not taken formal steps against the [alleged rapist, the girl's] stepfather, who is in custody. ...

The entire story can be read here.

And speaking of Monty Python...

"This is Paul Harvey - Good Night!"

When I was a kid, I used to hear the late Paul Harvey every so often on the only top-40 AM rock station in town (there was only one at the time, but that changed with the advent of FM album-rock). I didn't recall him harping on right-wing topics, but I didn’t pay too much attention to politics back in the day. “Smooth” was not the word for Mr. Harvey. His voice had a jarring, jagged quality which grabbed you the way a car alarm would. Not to say that it was irritating, far from it. What kept me glued to the radio was not merely his selection of unusual, nay, weird human interest stories but his delivery. The man could manufacture the kind of suspense normally reserved for final baseball scores or election returns even when he was talking about something fairly trivial. To me he was not so much a commentator as a storyteller. He worked his magic on everything from breaking news stories to humorous anecdotes. A lot of the things I heard him say would have been right at home around a campfire. Turn off the TV, Paul Harvey’s in the house!

Mr. Harvey was of the old school of radio journalism. Although he was every inch a conservative, and while he socked it to the loyal opposition every chance he got, I remember him taking the high road, or at least a higher one than most right-wing talk show hosts do today. I simply cannot picture Paul Harvey telling a progressive “Shut up, you punk!”, as I’ve heard one such modern-day AM-radio garbage-mouth do. On one of Kermit Schafer's "Bloopers" albums, there's a recording of him reading a particularly risible human-interest story, then totally cracking up on-mic, and never recovering. Can you even imagine Rush Limbaugh, Anne Coulter or Michael Savage doing that?