Best of the Web:


Health

Best of the Web: The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?

Cuckoo's Nest
© United Artists/PhotofestLan Fendors, Louise Fletcher, and Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, 1975
The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth
by Irving Kirsch
Basic Books, 226 pp., $15.99 (paper)

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America
by Robert Whitaker
Crown, 404 pp., $26.00

Unhinged: The Trouble With Psychiatry - A Doctor's Revelations About a Profession in Crisis
by Daniel Carlat
Free Press, 256 pp., $25.00

It seems that Americans are in the midst of a raging epidemic of mental illness, at least as judged by the increase in the numbers treated for it. The tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007 - from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling - a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children, well ahead of physical disabilities like cerebral palsy or Down syndrome, for which the federal programs were created.

A large survey of randomly selected adults, sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and conducted between 2001 and 2003, found that an astonishing 46 percent met criteria established by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for having had at least one mental illness within four broad categories at some time in their lives. The categories were "anxiety disorders," including, among other subcategories, phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); "mood disorders," including major depression and bipolar disorders; "impulse-control disorders," including various behavioral problems and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD); and "substance use disorders," including alcohol and drug abuse. Most met criteria for more than one diagnosis. Of a subgroup affected within the previous year, a third were under treatment - up from a fifth in a similar survey ten years earlier.

Nowadays treatment by medical doctors nearly always means psychoactive drugs, that is, drugs that affect the mental state. In fact, most psychiatrists treat only with drugs, and refer patients to psychologists or social workers if they believe psychotherapy is also warranted. The shift from "talk therapy" to drugs as the dominant mode of treatment coincides with the emergence over the past four decades of the theory that mental illness is caused primarily by chemical imbalances in the brain that can be corrected by specific drugs. That theory became broadly accepted, by the media and the public as well as by the medical profession, after Prozac came to market in 1987 and was intensively promoted as a corrective for a deficiency of serotonin in the brain. The number of people treated for depression tripled in the following ten years, and about 10 percent of Americans over age six now take antidepressants. The increased use of drugs to treat psychosis is even more dramatic. The new generation of antipsychotics, such as Risperdal, Zyprexa, and Seroquel, has replaced cholesterol-lowering agents as the top-selling class of drugs in the US.

Vader

Best of the Web: The Ugly Truth: video Of Libyan rebel beheading Gadhaffi soldier and other Nato war crimes

Image
NATO has been pumping propaganda out of Libya to justify its "humanitarian war" against the government of Moammar Gadhaffi. Until now, NATO has succeeded in large part because ordinary citizens around the world have no access to direct intelligence on which to base their own opinions.

As the former CIA Asset who covered Libya at the United Nations from 1995 to 2003 during negotiations for the Lockerbie Trial, I am compelled to break past that propaganda to examine actual evidence.

Responding to numerous requests, I am sharing primary evidence that I receive daily from sources inside Tripoli. Video documentation comes from Libyan refugees, collected by a fact finding commission called "Global Civilians for Peace in Libya."

The fact-finding team includes Europeans, Africans, Americans and international human rights attorneys, who are preparing allegations of War Crimes against NATO. Judging from these videos, financial damages that NATO will be required to pay Libya should be stupendous, indeed.

Above all, it's clear that NATO grossly misrepresented its arguments at the United Nations, in order to justify military action. Britain and France trusted bad intelligence from unreliable sources, trying to gain power from the conflict.

A more careful investigation shows that it is the NATO backed Rebels who are guilty of atrocities - not Gadhaffi's soldiers at all. Sanctions should be thrown out, and NATO should shift its military forces to back Gadhaffi in defending the Libyan people.

Comment: In a response to two readers doubting these videos were from Libya, Susan Lindauer posted:
American viewers are hindered by not understanding the Arab language. In Arabic it's clear who's who. There's other indications, like the pistol sodomy of the civilian wearing green - That's Gadhaffi's colors.
[...]
All the videos are from Libya. How do we know for sure they're definitely Libyan? Libya has its own Arabic dialect that's distinguished from other Arab countries - like American English vs. British English. Also the Libyan family has identified the beheaded soldier as husband/son/brother.

It's hard to face that we're supporting such wretched & monstrous human beings. That's why you have to see these videos. We've got to know honestly the sort of Rebel Allies that we have taken cause for. They're butchers.



Sun

Best of the Web: Electric Universe: Which Came First?

sun
© Jo DahlmansA coronal mass ejection erupts from the Sun.

Electric currents create magnetic fields in the Sun.

"Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" Asking this question always gets a chuckle from a group of kids who haven't been asked that before. For adults, it confirms their conviction that unanswerable questions must be laughably ignored. For a farmer who gets into the egg business by purchasing a group of laying hens the answer is easy. "My chickens came first; that's how I got my eggs."

Solar astrophysicists who try to explain what causes coronal mass ejections (CMEs) have a similar conundrum: "Which came first, the change in electric current, or the change in the solar magnetic field?" Until the present day there has been no mention of electric currents in space by solar astronomers. There has been no acknowledgement whatever that electric current is needed to create magnetic fields or that it even exists.

In 1908 Kristian Birkeland suggested that electrical flows from the Sun caused the auroral displays that we see. Astronomers such as Sidney Chapman ridiculed him. When it came to descriptions of solar coronal mass ejections and similar phenomena, all we have heard about for decades was that magnetic fields move around and twist - their "magnetic lines of force" come together, touch, and then fly apart carrying matter with them. This is called "Magnetic Reconnection." Solar astronomers never mention electric currents. We are to believe that magnetic fields do it all by themselves, without help.

Arrow Down

Best of the Web: National Amnesia is a Growing Epidemic

The Declaration of Independence is a poor excuse for an obscure historical document. It's not the Magna Carta or the Peace of Augsburg. Its name is so straightforwardly functional, it almost makes you wonder why the Founders weren't more imaginative.

Yet only 35 percent of American fourth-graders know the purpose of the Declaration of Independence, according to the 2010 results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The findings of the test - administered to representative samples of fourth-, eighth- and 12th-graders - are another dreary recitation of the historical ignorance of America's students.

Only 20 percent of fourth-graders, 17 percent of eighth-graders and 12 percent of 12th-graders were proficient in history. More than half of 12th-graders were categorized as "below basic." Only 22 percent of 12th-graders knew that North Korea was allied with China during the Korean War. Education expert Diane Ravitch notes with dismay that 40 percent of these students were already eligible to vote when they took the test, and all will be eligible within a year.

They are the symptoms of a country engaged in a long process of erasing its memory. For decades, we have been congratulating ourselves for a broad-mindedness that is really a self-destructive national amnesia.

Nuke

Best of the Web: Fukushima - Message of an angry French expatriate

This video was removed/censured as well as fifty other videos posted on the channel of this French expatriate in Japan named Alex.

Come support him on his YouTube page:

http://www.youtube.com/user/playbacklapompe


With English subtitles

Camera

Best of the Web: US: Storm looking like giant tidal wave sparks sideways lightning bolts

Image
© Mike Hollingshead/SolentThis extraordinary photograph captures the incredible moments a 'supercell' storm reared up against a backdrop of lightning
A huge storm rears up like a giant tidal wave, sparking horizontal bolts of lightning.

Mike Hollingshead took this snap in Nebraska, USA.

The storm chaser, 35, said: "I've seen some cool storms but this one takes the cake."

Meteor

Best of the Web: Missing the big picture: U.S., Russia fight over asteroid "that could destroy Earth"

Image
© Unknown
Barely two weeks after the failure of a doomsday prediction by a United States (U.S.) based preacher, Russia and U.S. scientists are at war over another perceived threat to human existence.

The danger this time is not an apocalyptic occurrence, but the smacking of the Earth by a giant asteroid in five months time.

The potentially perilous space rock is known as Asteroid 2005 YU55, a round mini-world that is about 1,300 feet (400 metres) in diametre.

According to U.S. scientists, this asteroid will approach the Earth within a scant 0.85 lunar distances in early November.

Due to its size, and the way it will whisk by so close to the Earth, an extensive campaign of radar, visual and infrared observations are being planned.

Comment: We won't comment on NASA's blind and hardheaded wishful thinking here. It should be clear by now to everyone with two neurons firing that we can't rely on "scientific authorities" to provide us with straight and truthful answers, not to mention solutions. But we do want to comment on a tendency of scientific bodies and newspapers who quote them to miss the big picture and show abysmal ignorance when it comes to threats from space. It's one thing to ridicule the issue by zeroing in on loonies who declare that the end is nigh, but not doing proper research and seeing that the ongoing and increasing threat does exist, and in fact can have quite dire consequences for our civilization, is another.


Vader

Best of the Web: France proposes industrial-scale content filtering

Image
Today a French government committee is expected to pronounce an opinion on a new proposal to filter and block web content.

The French media are suggesting that it represents industrial-scale filtering. Indeed, the proposal is the most far-reaching one we've seen to date. It is certainly over-broad and puts at risk both freedom of expression and free trade.

The French government proposes to give various ministries the power to order ISPs and web hosts to block content. Blocking orders could apply to commercial and non-commercial content, and potentially also to advertising and search engines.

It is all set out in a Decree which amends the existing law on electronic commerce. The Decree has been sent to the Conseil

Nationale du Numérique for an opinion, which is due today .

Cow

Best of the Web: Does Meat Rot In Your Colon? No. What Does? Beans, Grains, and Vegetables!

Image
© gnolls.org

How many times have we all heard this bunk myth repeated?
"Humans can't actually digest meat: it rots in the colon."

And its variant: "Meat takes 4-7 days to digest, because it has to rot in your stomach first."
(Some variations on this myth claim it takes up to two months!)
Like most vegetarian propaganda, it's not just false, it's an inversion of truth. As the proverb says, "When you point your finger, your other three fingers point back at you." Let's take a short trip through the digestive system to see why!

A Trip Through The Human Digestive System (abridged)

Briefly, the function of digestion is to break food down as far as possible - hopefully into individual fats, amino acids (the building blocks of protein), and sugars (the building blocks of carbohydrates) which can be absorbed through the intestinal wall and used by our bodies.

Propaganda

Best of the Web: 9/11 and The Orwellian Redefinition of "Conspiracy Theory"

conspiracy theory
© Global Research
While we were not watching, conspiracy theory has undergone Orwellian redefinition.

A "conspiracy theory" no longer means an event explained by a conspiracy. Instead, it now means any explanation, or even a fact, that is out of step with the government's explanation and that of its media pimps.

For example, online news broadcasts of RT have been equated with conspiracy theories by the New York Times simply because RT reports news and opinions that the New York Times does not report and the US government does not endorse.

In other words, as truth becomes uncomfortable for government and its Ministry of Propaganda, truth is redefined as conspiracy theory, by which is meant an absurd and laughable explanation that we should ignore.