So I’ve been hanging out at the government run Health and Wellness Centres lately.

Not for any sort of legitimate reason, mind you, I just lounge in the waiting area so-as to upset the squares and remind them of what a Free Man looks like.  Anyway I was reading The Party Line, a free magazine for the Canadian Mental Health Association, when I came across the following quotes:

The WHO ranks mental disorders as the number one disability claim in Canada, with depression being the most common.  These disability claims have been on the rise for the last 10 years… “While we don’t have the data to say why, we know that most people are suffering from mental health problems and going off work because of it.”

and:

Alberta’s Institute of Health Economics found Canada lags behind most developed countries in the amount of money it spends treating mental illness… Some hope lies with the creation of the Canadian Mental Health Comission in 2007, charged with improving and standardizing care for Canadians dealing with mental illness…

Wonderful. “We don’t know what’s causing the problem, we don’t even really know what the problem is, but we know for a fact that throwing money at it is the solution.” Here’s a free tip: more studies aren’t going to tell you what’s happening.  To understand that you need to look at your methodology.  And as for more funding, dollars to donuts says that’ll only cause the levels to rise even faster.

The problem with Psychology is that there’s too much vagueness, too much room for variation.  Let’s take ADHD.  The criteria for Diagnosis are:

Six or more of the following symptoms of inattention have persisted for at least six months to a degree that is maladaptive and inconsistent with the developmental level:

1. often fails to give close attention to details or makes careless mistakes in schoolwork, work, or other activities
2. often has difficulty sustaining attention in tasks or play activities
3. often does not seem to listen when spoken to directly
4. often does not follow through on instructions and fails to finish schoolwork, chores, or duties in the workplace (not due to oppositional behaviour or failure of comprehension)
5. often has difficulty organizing tasks and activities
6. often avoids, dislikes, or is reluctant to engage in tasks that require sustained mental effort (such as schoolwork or homework)
7. often loses things necessary for tasks or activites at school or at home (e.g. toys, pencils, books, assignments)
8. is often easily distracted by extraneous stimuli
9. if often forgetful in daily activities

**Actually, it’s a little more complex, but don’t worry about that right now.**

The first problem is obvious.  ‘Often’ isn’t really a thing. It isn’t really a criteria.  Heinlein once said “Anything that can’t be expressed in numbers is just an opinion.” You can just tell that he would have loved these guys.

But at least it gives us some structure, right?  A language we can use to discuss these things, subjective though they may be. ‘Bipolar’ might be more a question of degree, rather than a black-or-white quality, but when we can isolate different conditions such as Depression, Schizophrenia, Narcissism, and ADHD from, say, Tourette’s -

1. Both multiple motor and one or more vocal tics have been present at some time during the illness, although not necessarily concurrently. (A tic is a sudden, rapid, recurrent, nonrhythmic, stereotyped motor movement or vocalization.)
2. The tics occur many times a day (usually in bouts) nearly every day or intermittently throughout a period of more than 1 year, and during this period there was never a tic-free period of more than 3 consecutive months.
3. The disturbance causes marked distress or significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
4. The onset is before age 18 years.
5. The disturbance is not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., stimulants) or a general medical condition (e.g., Huntington’s disease or postviral encephalitis).

Well goddamn.  Guess they’re not really all that distinct, are they?

Part of the problem is that Psychology is a ‘high level’ science.  Unlike Physic or Chemistry – or even Neurology – Psychology deals with complex patterns occurring in variable environments.  Figuring out a good hypothesis is bad enough, trying to test it is going to be even worse.  But just because something’s hard, doesn’t mean you get to fall back on Opinion.  Meteorology’s hard too, but when a Meteorologist calls something a Cumulus cloud, he’s not only referring to a distinct and actual phenomenon – he’s also making predictions.

Yeah, we all like to complain about the weather forecast, but what those guys do is still pretty phenomenal [science pun].  Sure as hell beats the pants off of any tribal Shaman’s guess.  And as if that’s not enough, they’re humble enough to assign percentages to their predictions – a tacit admission that they could be wrong.

The Psychologist, on the other hand, makes statements that are both arrogantly certain and uselessly vague – he definitely has this disorder, and he’ll probably reoffend – while at the same time refusing to offer an empirical basis for these claims.

Q: What’s the difference between the DSM IV and the DSM I?

A: The former has enough disorders to cover everybody, while the latter existed during an era when classifying Homosexuality as a disorder was socially acceptable. (What, you thought they performed an experiment to prove it wasn’t?)

Q: What’s the difference between the DSM IV and Freud?

A: Penises.

And as if the Psychologists weren’t bad enough, you’ve got the meat fuckers Psychiatrists riding in on their coattails, shoving snake oil and placebos down the mouths of the faithful, a shiny new colour for every shiny new disorder.  I’m not going to go into tons of detail here, since I usually try and avoid legal drugs, but feel free to check out The Last Psychiatrist’s thoughts on the matter (yes Corman, I know you hate him, and I agree that he needs to stop saying that everything’s Narcissism, but when it comes to drugs he knows his shit).

To be clear, I’m not saying anything against guys like Dr. Rob (who is awesome) – any Brain Doctor with an ounce of smarts and a sliver of soul will figure out how to counsel people at some point… but then, so will Priests, and so will Astrologers.

You know, if they kept their pseudo-science out in the fringe I’d tolerate it, same as palm readers, or people who talk about ‘energy’.  But these folks are vying to be our new Lords and Masters, deciding who’s fit and who isn’t to live with the rest of us lab rats, recreating the Rights of Man in their own image.

So what’re you supposed to do if your brain doesn’t work?  Personally I just hacked mine, turned off all the emotional dip-swithes aside from “Angry” and “Hungry”.. but if you don’t feel like doing that, there’s another option.  Ironically enough, the meat fuckers did manage to create a drug that worked, one with a thoroughly proven track record of improving quality of life, which has no long-term side-effects when used correctly… and that was the problem.  It worked.  Didn’t last 20 years before they banned it.

So do what you can, ask around, and try and find yourselves some LSD.

Vaya con Dios, folks.

For those of you unfamiliar with the event in question, which occurred at the start of the long weekend, Thunderfoot’s video will get you up to speed.

Standing up for free speech and pissing off religious zealots are always Epic Win in my book – I’m just sorry I didn’t get my drawing of Slayer, Alice Cooper, Satan, and Bon Jovi rescuing 6 year old Aysha done in time.  Guys like Thunderfoot are doing a great job of promoting Classical Liberal values in a society where Tolerance is far too often conflated with Respect, resulting in a black and vile mixture which labels Truth as Ugliness.

But at the end of the day, how much was really accomplished?

[...]

One of the many reasons I can’t stand the Insane Clown Posse is that I’m a Big-Into-Science kind of guy. I can say things like “allele variation over generations in a changing environment” without stumbling, I can explain exactly why the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is bullshit, and one time I choked a guy half-to-death for daring to utter words in my house which were deeply anti-science.

“Do you have any idea,” I whispered, staring into eyes full of white-terror, my hands squeezing his trachea, “just how badly I’ve always wanted to kill a man? And how goddamn tempting you’re making it right now?”

Let’s just say that I’m no tenderfoot when it comes to Thermodynamics.

I tell you all this, gentle reader, so that can you understand how hurt I was when I received this well-sourced comment earlier in the week: [...]

It’s been a while since I posted.  Last month was awful, and it was capped off with a trip through Canada’s socialized medical system. After my friend got a referral from an outside Expert, I arrived with him at the Emergency Room of one our nation’s Fine Hospitals. 9 hours later he was finally admitted, and they began a rigorous course of testing for Heart Disease and Swine Flu – neither of which were the reasons he’d come there in the first place.

At first I kept myself amused by playing with any of the equipment I could get my hands on, and then by casing the security systems and examining the door locks, but the security guards – complete with tazers, handcuffs, and multitools (they were far better equipped than the old men you see guarding our military bases; the closest thing they have to a weapon is a radar gun) were quick to notice a Free Man standing in their midst, and ordered me to head across the street to the bar, where my drinks were served by a young Asian girl in a bikini. [...]

President Obama’s 2010 State of the Union Address was last week, and now that I’ve had a few days to mull it over I figured I’d write about it.  No, I’m not going to talk about the specific policies he mentioned – the SOTU’s big, looking at the tactics is a waste of time.  Something like this calls for a strategic analysis.

Video here; Transcript here.

I’ve never watched a State of the Union Address before; I’ve read summaries of them, but never actually watched one.  And the first things that stood out to me about this one was the applause – the ceaseless, unwarranted, unending applause!

There were approximately one-hundred paragraphs in the address, and each one of them was followed by five to ten seconds of applause (some of it standing ovation) by the gathered political and financial elites.

You’ve got to ask yourself: what must it feel like to be the one who’s speaking? [...]

“The thing is, at some point you have to balance the rights of the individual versus the needs of society.”

His statement left me stunned.  I’d invited this tax collector into my home on good faith, and when he wasn’t praising the intricacies of World of Warcraft, he was busy uttering the vilest musings it’s ever been my misfortune to hear.

“I mean, you’ve got to think about China – we need to compete with their worker class, and we won’t be able to do that without locking up citizens for victimless crimes.”

China.  Now there’s a moral barometer.  I stifled my gag reflex with another shot of whiskey while he continued prattling.  Soon enough he’d leave, I told myself, wander off somewhere in search of a young boy whose ear he can gently sodomize with a rolled up sheaf of Bible passages…

Where did this fool get these ideas?  The Truth is so much simpler.  By some chance alignment of the planets – or maybe just a natural outcome of evolution – the best organizations for our species, political and economic, are within a hair’s breadth of our intrinsic morality.

And morality’s easy.  You want to know the secret?

[...]

I was walking down Glasgow Street, two blocks off of Duke, when the pills began to kick in.  “You’re looking a bit light-headed,” said the merchant who was eyeing me, “Don’t worry about that,” I said, “I’ll be fine.  I’m a professional.  Just hurry up with that damned bagel.” The clocks were striking nine, as I recall, and the cold April air was doing nothing to improve my temperament.  My blood’s not thick enough for this part of Oceania, I’ve never been able to wake up properly in this climate.  The pep pills have a tendency of giving me the shakes but they’re the only way to cope with this weather-induced mental clouding.  Not that this mattered to my Editor, of course, and truth be told it didn’t matter much to me, either.  I’m a journalist, goddamnit, and I go wherever the story takes me.  For the past two years that place had been this rotten hole of a city they call London; Party Central and chief city of Airstrip One.

Just then a calamitous roar washed over my ears. “Good god, man,” I yelled at the merchant, “Don’t you know who that is?  That voice playing on your telescreen there?  Who authorized this transmission?”  Of all the things to play, on this date, at this time – what sort of monstrous saboteur was running this show? And how did he know I would hear it?

“If you don’t already know who it is, then I’m not going to say it!” The Prole’s eyes were squinted in confusion, his mouth agape at knowledge which was clearly beyond his ken. “I personally saw that folder incinerated.  What sort of game are you playing here, mister?  Answer me, damnit!” [...]

I really like this image.  It neatly sums up my feelings about the current political climate with a minimalist, visceral approach.  But at the same time there’s an implicit premise here which can be used to justify the current regime.  It’s best summed up by one Ed Giorgio:

“We have a saying in this business: ‘Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.’”

[Sources indicate that after the interview Giorgio proceeded to savagely rape a howler monkey before defecating on the Bill of Rights.]

With monsters like this in government, we’re lucky to have clear thinkers like security expert Bruce Schneier out there spreading the gospel.  As he has frequently said:

Security and privacy are not opposite ends of a seesaw; you don’t have to accept less of one to get more of the other… Too many wrongly characterize the debate as “security versus privacy.” The real choice is liberty versus control… If privacy and security really were a zero-sum game, we would have seen mass immigration into the former East Germany and modern-day China. While it’s true that police states like those have less street crime, no one argues that their citizens are fundamentally more secure.

Most people won’t just accept a radical statement like that.  After all, the government’s told us that it’s a dichotomous choice, and why would they lie to us?  So with that in mind I’ve designed a little thought experiment to demonstrate why liberty is positively correlated with security, it’s not the inverse. [...]

I’ll be honest folks, I don’t like mentioning this – on the one hand, the beast that betrays freedom creeps, it comes on from all sides, attacking those that nobody cares about…

But Goddamnit, I just don’t like talking about the smoking bullshit.  I’m biased about it all.

So instead, let me tall you about Robin Hanson.

The man ain’t no true Libertarian – 90% of the time he agrees with us, but the other 10% of the time, well…

He believes in efficiency, not liberty.  Nine times out of ten he’ll say freedom is the true route, but that extra time he’ll sell us all for a bit more corn.  The worst part of all of it is that he’s smarter than me.  I really hate saying that.

But taking that into consideration, it’s interesting to read what his meta-analysis says about smoking.  Apparently, according to this smart prick, it takes 2-4 [timestamp]s…

Want the dates?  Read the Article!

For the record, don’t misrepresent him; he’s been taking a lot of flak from the pro-anti-smoker folks, so don’t misquote him, and be a dick.  Otherwise I’ll find ya’.

Well thank God, the damned thing’s finally over.  Eleven months of peace before another one of these awful holiday seasons rolls around , complete with its tacky displays, embarrassing traditions, and the constant insistence that you stretch your face into an ugly, manic grin.

I cannot begin to tell you how much I hate Christmas.

But it did get me thinking a lot about Consumerism – and what better day to talk about it than Boxing Day?*

[...]