Psych News

New Mental Health Czar Criticized Agency She Will Head
On August 3, The U.S. Senate confirmed psychiatrist Elinore F. McCance-Katz as the Department of Health and Human Services first Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Abuse, a post created by the 21^st Century Cures Act. McCance-Katz will oversee the Substance Abuse and Mental Health and Services Administration (SAMHSA) where she once worked, and will coordinate substance abuse and mental health programs in more than 100 federal agencies. In an editorial last year, http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/depression/federal-government-ignores-treatment-needs-americans-serious-mental-illness McCance-Katz criticized SAMHSA for, among other things, the "…questioning by some at SAMHSA as to whether mental disorders even exist — for example, is psychosis just a 'different way of thinking for some experiencing stress?'"

"Electroceuticals" Mind Control in Sheep's Clothing
Last year, the Wall Street Journal https://www.wallstreetdaily.com/2016/03/10/electroceuticals-glaxosmithkline-gsk/ heralded the arrival of "electroceuticals" a portmanteau of "electronics" and "pharmaceuticals" coined by big pharma's GlaxoSmithKline. Electroceuticals would implant electronic devices about the size of a grain of rice into the brain to "modulate neural signals" directly. While electronic pacemakers, defibrillators and cochlear implants have proven helpful to patients, billions are now being bet on electronic brain implants as a replacement for the heavy hand of psychopharmaceuticals with their no-better-than-placebo results, skyrocketing cost, unpredictable and often lethal side effects, and competition by generic drug equivalents. But nothing about electroceuticals is new except the name.

Everybody Must Get Stoned
Now that 26 states and the District of Columbia have some form of legalized marijuana, the psychiatric establishment is warning that use of the substance can lead to mood swings, paranoia, psychosis, and addiction http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/substance-use-disorder/cannabis-induced-psychosis-review To treat these symptoms, antipsychotics such as Olanzapine and Haloperidol are recommended. Olanzapine is also used for schizophrenia, and side effects include: confusion, coma, mental changes, uncontrolled muscle movements, trouble talking, aggression, dizziness, high blood pressure, and seizures." https://www.drugs.com/cdi/olanzapine.html Haloperidol has side effects including hallucinations; mental or mood changes, abnormal thinking, anxiety, depression https://www.drugs.com/cdi/haloperidol.html , involuntary grimacing, sucking, and smacking of lips, etc. https://www.nami.org/Learn-More/Treatment/Mental-Health-Medications/Haloperidol-(Haldol) Is marijuana a gateway drug? The first director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse says it is. 

12-Step Program to Wean America from its Prescription Drug Addiction

   1. Rescind the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, or have drug companies pay into a US Treasury Account to remove the FDA from the direct receipt of pharma fees for drug evaluations.

2 2. Make direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription pharmaceuticals illegal.

3 3. Make off-label use of prescription pharmaceuticals illegal, including prescribing drugs to children which are approved only for adults.

4 4. Clearly label any drug whose action is mental as a psychopharmaceutical. Physicians who administer psychopharmaceuticals to patients as "something to relax you, or make you more comfortable," without informing the patient that the drug's action is primarily mental (example Versed administered prior to colonoscopies to induce amnesia) will be charged with a criminal act. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/nearly-half-of-antidepressants-not-prescribed-for-depression-study/ psychopharmaceuticals are now prescribed by primary care physicians off label for pain, insomnia, stomach disorders, etc.

5 5. Require the FDA to collect data on the effectiveness of drugs, especially psychopharmaceuticals, and if they are no more effective than placebos, they must be removed from the market.

   6. Reduce the proprietary period of a pharmaceutical from 17 years to 7 years, and make it a crime to pay drug manufacturing companies to not create a generic equivalent of a proprietary drug after the 7-year period has elapsed.

7 7. New drugs similar to ones already established as safe and effective must prove they are safer and more effective than the established one. Manipulating a molecule is not enough.

8 8. Make it a crime for a physician or an FDA employee to receive gifts, stipends, speaker fees, etc., from pharmaceutical companies or regulated medical industries.

9 9. Make the FDA follow its mission, and treat any FDA collusion with regulated industries as a criminal offense.

1 10. Make pseudoephedrine and related drugs – which are used to manufacture methamphetamine – available by prescription only as a schedule III drug. Oregon and Mississippi have already done this with spectacular effects in reducing meth arrests and crimes.

1 11. Require the makers of pharmaceuticals which are showing up in the water supply (examples: birth control hormones, antidepressants, etc) to develop ways to clean them from sewage and water supplies and fund the removal efforts.

   12. Require pharmaceutical companies to educate physicians and patients on how to stop taking a drug, and develop ways to mitigate the withdrawal symptoms of patients who wish to stop taking a drug such as an antidepressant or antipsychotic.

Are You Conservative? Blame your Brain

I heard the rumblings of political psychiatry recently on National Public Radio. Now political psychiatry is nothing new in the world, or even in the United States. The old Soviet Union slapped a "crazy" label on political dissidents and sent them away to psychiatric prisons. And the so-called "Siberia Bill" of 1956 would have established a million-acre psychiatric reservation in Alaska with less restrictive commitment procedures. 

Every dictator or crackpot ruler who wishes to invalidate his opposition will claim said opposition is psychotic. Why would anyone of sound mind seek to undermine such a workers' paradise and such a benevolent and caring Dear Leader?

The NPR  Morning Edition segment titled "Hidden Factors in your Brain Help to Shape Beliefs on Income Inequality" http://www.npr.org/2016/01/05/461997711/hidden-factors-in-your-brain-help-to-shape-beliefs-on-income-inequality  cited some research studies that purport to show opinions are simply a matter of brain function. It is a rather short leap from that statement to "The people who believe X are crazy. The people who believe Y are sane."

So according to this research, opinions are the result of brain function. The study compares "egalitarian thinking" (which is good) with "hierarchical thinking" (which is bad.) Drunks like hierarchical thinking, according to the story, and the drunker they are the more hierarchical they are. The more evolved they are, the more egalitarian (which is good, remember) and thus more sane. So people with hierarchical opinions – Republicans for example – are apelike cretins which is proved by research, remember, and only Democrats are highly evolved and caring.

So the conclusions one is left with, is that people who tolerate income inequality – where productive people can become wealthy providing useful products and services while bums who produce nothing of value stay relatively poor– are insane and have something wrong with their brains.

Now that we have established a "brain based" cause-and-effect relationship for political opinion, we can perhaps begin to "normalize" those hierarchical brains out there for their own good, give them pharmaceuticals and mental health "treatments." NPR is on the bandwagon publicizing this stupid research, and as usual the socialist agenda keeps chipping away at sanity, but that's only a hierarchical opinion barking away at the moon. 

NSA Spying is Fruition of 20-Year Old Clinton Clipper Chip Proposal

Many people appear shocked that government would spy on electronic communications without a warrant. But a May 1994 article from Government Technology magazine explored the Clinton Administration's Clipper Chip surveillance proposal and the elements of that controversy sound very similar to the current Edward Snowden revelations. The government needed access to private communications to stop terrorists and drug dealers, said Clipper Chip proponents. There should be a back door in all encrypted communications, and the government would never allow unbreakable encryption. Here's the story, 20 years later.

Woodstock of Cyberspace
By Wayne Hanson

A British official, opposing a proposal to enact a freedom of information policy, said “It would encourage ill-informed criticism” of the government. A proponent countered that it would “make the criticism much less ill-informed.” — National Public Radio

From the self-proclaimed “Digital Queers” to the U.S. Department of State, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to the New York Times, the anointed gathered in Chicago for The 1994 Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, described by one participant as "the Woodstock of cyberspace."

There were tie-dyed shirts and funky tennis shoes, three-piece suits, briefcases and backpacks, nose rings and pinky rings. The White House, The FBI, the NSA, the IRS, corporations, lawyers, news media, academics and students from the John Marshall Law School, all with a stake in "Cyberspace Superhighways: Access, Ethics and Control," the title of this year's conference.

During the conference I talked to a janitor from Notre Dame, a physicist from Fermi Labs, A Canadian privacy commissioner, the director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a city employee from Eugene, Ore., a professor from Tulaine University, an executive of IBM, the director of Seattle’s Public Information Network, and many more.

The opening keynote was given by David A. Lytel, information infrastructure specialist for the Executive Office of the President, Office of Science and technology Policy, who had the unenviable task of defending the Clinton Administration’s push to put a back door on all encrypted communications.

Listeners lined up at the CFP’s traditional open mike for a shot at Lytel. Snide, irreverent, irascible and downright nasty, there were impassioned speeches, mean-spirited questions and personal attacks as well as some fine-tuned debate and elegant proposals. It felt like democracy.

Privacy advocates — galvanized by a perceived betrayal of some of their own raised to high station in the Clinton administration — went online and collected 50,000 signatures opposing Clipper. Simon Davies, however, proposed that the "privacy mafia" make a bold move. "Get away from your computer screen," he pontificated (He stood at the lectern dressed as the Pope — nobody said this was a dull conference) "Something as wrong in a free socienty as the Clipper Chip proposal," he said, should result in 5 million signatures rather than 50,000. The problem? Electronic petitions on "the net" are fine, but guess what — to really do the job, you're going to have to beam down out of cyberspace and take on the real world.

As these privacy "away teams" beam down to the real world, they are going to have to meet — some for the first time perhaps — real people. they're going to have to lobby in non-virtual reality in schools, and to what Davies called "mother's clubs."

Davies was introduced as a threat to government, and received applause and cheers. He concluded that privacy could very well die, that we would could become subjects of information slavery, and that unchecked, government, was leading us into a new dark age.

The solution, he proclaimed, was an alliance between privacy advocates and consumer advocates. Privacy is after all, he said, a consumer issue.

Phil Zimmerman concurred in the dark designs of government. Zimmerman — the developer of PGP public-key encryption which could be outlawed if the government gets its way with the Clipper chip — said that the individual once had a chance. Government, he said has changed from a huge slow Brontosaurus “without a fancy nervous system,” into a Tyrannasaurus Rex with computerized reflexes. The mice underfoot don’t have a chance.

Zimmerman said that now is the window of opportunity. Communications in the future will use "encryption we control, or  encryption the government controls."

Zimmerman said it's not hopeless. A recent Time CNN poll revealed that 80 percent of respondents don't want Clipper. Currently, export restrictions and patents are being used by the government, said Zimmerman, to slow the spread of public key encryption like PGP. Give the government its head, he explained, and unbreakable encryption will be outlawed, leaving only the government brand with the government back door.

PGP is now marketed in a legal industrial-strength version by Viacrypt of Phoenix, Ariz
According to presenters at CFP, the need for Clipper is suspect. Most drug or terrorism cases — cited by the government as the basis for Clipper — are broken by informants inside organizations such as the group who bombed the Trade Center in New York. Lytel countered with a list of cases he said were broken by legally obtained wiretaps that would be impossible if criminals used the new unbreakable encryption modes such as PGP.

Nobody likes to see criminals go about their business unhampered. But as in the case of drive-by shooters whose lousy aim kills plenty of innocent bystanders, well-meaning attempts to stop the bad guys can result in plenty of innocently bystanding civil liberties shot full of holes. If Clipper rules, then it may be impossible for citizens to be assured that their communications are secure. It seems that the government should play fair and if they want to tap computer communcations, they should go back to the drawing board and figure out how to break PGP and other public key encryption. That's the American way.

The next step is real-time voice PGP, which Zimmerman is now working on. Will criminals want to use it? probably. Should the government outlaw it? Probably not. The decisions we make now will be with us for a long time. In the information age, where we live, work and play on computer networks, communications will be the core of our society.
The next step, said Zimmerman, is to:

• Pass the Cantwell Bill, which will remove the export restrictions, and allow PGP and other public-key encryption to be exported. This will allow international companies to use it, and will speed its adoption. Foreign governments wouldn’t use American communications equipment if it came with guaranteed access by the U.S. government.

But Zimmerman, himself currently the subject of a grand jury investigation for supposed export violations, has developed something called PGP, for "pretty good protection," a supposedly unbreakable encryptions scheme that is public domain. It went on the Internet, was eagerly grabbed by thousands of Internet users and has become defacto standard, perhaps soon to become an Internet standard.

Medicine's Subjective Parasites: Psychiatry and The Fifth and Sixth Vital Signs

When visiting a doctor, whether in an office or hospital, nurses will take vital signs. The four objective signs are heart rate, temperature, blood pressure and respiration rate. However, two new subjective vital signs are level of pain, and self-described depression. "On a scale of zero to 10, ten being the most severe, what is your level of pain?" the nurse may ask. That question, simple as it seems, opens the door to opiate prescriptions that may not be needed, and such self-diagnosis leads to prescriptions -- paid for by the government or private insurance -- of high-demand drugs.

Coincident with the addition of the fifth vital sign, death by prescription overdose has overtaken automobile crashes as the leading cause of accidental death, and the heavy narcotics sitting in home medicine cabinets are an attractive lure for illicit use by others in the family, or can end up for sale on the Internet or out front of the local high school. An 80 Mg pill of Oxycodone, for example, has a street value of around $40. The price is driven by the demand for a cheap high, not any excape from physical pain. In Florida, pain clinics operate largely unregulated, and getting a prescription for narcotic pain relievers is as simple as going in, describing some fake pain, and walking out with a prescription for a dangerous narcotic.

Now, "depression" is being added as the "sixth vital sign." Recently, I was hospitalized for a motorcycle accident. At home, recuperating, a deep wound on my foot was slow to heal, got infected, etc. I got pain medications to help me sleep, and the home health nurse asked me if I had experienced any depression. Well of course. I had visited the basement of emotional reactions: I was angry that somene had rear-ended me in traffic, destroyed my motorcycle, put me into surgery and then the hospital, made me miss work, having to use a walker or crutches and lay on the table in the doctor's office while he did "Sharp debriesment" of the open wound. I was dizzy at times from a concussion and the drugs, and my broken ribs hurt. Having to have my wife help me with simple tasks, on and on. Of course I had experienced some depression, I think anyone would. But it was related to something I was dealing with and was as natural as getting wet goes with rain. But had I said yes I had experienced depression, I would have been prescribed a phychopharmaceutical to cheer me up. A happy pill that -- according to the black box warnings -- could cause me to go into a rage or kill myself. I said no, no depression, because I know a lot about happy pills and there was no way in hell that I wanted to walk down that road.

Today in the waiting room of my primary care doctor, I saw a poster asking about depression. There were three levels. "Normal," "Worn Down" and "Overwhelmed," each accompanied by the appropriate bored or less happy or really unhappy face. Many of the people in the waiting room were in walkers on crutches, or had some physical problem. They were in a doctor's office, they had a right to be depressed without some self test leading to a very expensive happy pill that most likely would be paid for by Medicare or Medicaid, and carried a black box warning about potential suicide or uncontrollable rage.

These heavy pain killers were originally intended for people in incredible pain, going through the last stages of cancer, for example. Now, anybody can obtain them with the "right answer" to the fifth vital sign.

These fifth and sixth vital signs will become more and more significant as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) covers all Americans with insurance, and there will be millions of homeless and unemployed people with insurance to cover narcotics for the fifth vital sign and anti depressants for the sixth. If you had to pay for these drugs, you might not want them unless they were critical to your well being. But now, answer "8" to the pain question, or "yes" to the "worn down"or "overwhelmed" question, and bingo you have ready access to addictive dangerous and highly unpredictable drug paid for by the taxpayers of America.

This adding on of subjective measures to an objective science is not unprecedented. While the practice of medicine is built on objective study of anatomy and objective measurement of indicators such as heart rate, temperature and blood pressure, psychiatry has become a subjective parasite on the good name of medical practice and the help it has brought to people around the globe.

Psychiatry's ailments, however, have no objective measures and are voted on by psychiatrists and entered into a book called the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual" which is now going through its latest revision. The link to medicine is the theory that chemical imbalances in the brain cause such things as depression, mania, and other mental problems, but no scientific evidence exists that this is true -- it is a convenient lie to cloak psychiatric voodoo in the robes of medical legitimacy. Over time, we've dispensed with other phony sciences like phrenology (head bump diagnosis) chanting and banging on gourds, appealing to Zeus and so forth, even though those practices had some limited success in curing psychosomatic ills. But psychiatry has so far managed to blend in with the medical sciences, perhaps because psychiatrists must have a medical degree and know something at least about anatomy.

The combination of the ACA and the fifth and sixth vital signs are a perfect storm of no responsibility and will lead to a society even more drugged and asleep than it is today. A human being, hooked on heroin, meth, Oxycodone, Methodone, Prozac, Zoloft, or any one of hundreds of such potions and pills is a slave very much like the slaves of the pre-Civil War South. They are owned by the drug companies, they can be sexually abused, beaten, starved, forced into prostitution or crime by the pushers that profit from their servitude. The society tolerates their servitude and in fact profits from it as pharmaceutical stocks rise and more and more human slaves are added to the rolls. And finally, they are punished by withdrawal if they attempt to excape their servitude, and death if they overdose in an ever-increasing need for relief from their plunge into the depths of despair and addiction.

When asked for the fifth and sixth vital signs, beware. Your answer could make you a slave for the rest of your life. If you need help for a problem in your life, find a friend, priest, minister, rabbi -- someone who will listen to you. Beware the psychiatrist or physician who would slap a label and a bar code on you, hand you a prescription and call out "next."

Waving Pop Tarts and Other Offenses

A seven year old, waving a pop tart and saying "bang bang" was a very serious matter to Maryland school officials who suspended the boy. This is a lesson in seriousness, the kind of seriousness brought about by school shootings or drugs in schools. When confronted with seriousness, we often throw out deliberation and good sense and substitute "zero tolerance" measures that get pop-tart-waving children or those with Tylenol in their backpacks expelled from school.

Zero tolerance measures may begin with good intentions -- after all, they are designed to counter drugs, guns and other dangerous things -- but we know what the road to hell is paved with. There is a kind of lazy relief in not confronting a problem, in not making a decision based on the "greatest good" for the situation. And there's risk in making decisions, "what if it doesn't work out and I get in trouble?" It's easier and less stressful to just follow verbatim some rigid policy.

True, computers operate that way, they follow their programming, their rules exactly. But our lazy relief at doing the same thing is a kind of apathy and every time an individual fails to act in a rational manner, the door opens for some new legislation to "solve" that new problem, and puts everyone under a structure that dictates what actions may or may not be taken under such and such conditions. We get frustrated at kids using drugs so any drug, even an aspirin gets a kid booted from school. We are so revolted at school shootings that we boot a 7 year old for waving around -- as his father termed it -- "a danish."

Human beings -- in spite of the success of our digital technologies that basically operate on yes/no switches -- can weigh intangibles in an analog fashion to come to a decision that sits somewhere on a scale between "a really bad idea" and "Nobel Prize-winner." A word to the kid that he should eat his pastry pistol or lose it would probably have sufficed. But no, suspension is the only choice because we've got a zero tolerance policy for guns -- and gun shaped pastry -- in schools. It only makes sense to a computer, or a legislator or somebody who is afraid to lose their job if they don't adhere to the policy.

Human beings make mistakes when they launch into making decisions on their own, and those mistakes become the motive for some really bad legislation. "Activist judges" don't follow the law and so more laws are passed to further restrict the decisions they can make. On and on, a gradual calcification, a smaller and smaller window of actual decision-making that can be left to individuals.

There is a decent purpose for laws and rules, however. They are the generally agreed-upon rules of conduct that a society has found to be useful in promoting survival, and so those laws and rules are enforced for the good of the society. That process -- justice -- is applied to members of the society who make personal choices that cause harm to themselves or others.

Ethics, however, has to do with those personal choices. Someone turns in a watch they found in the dressing room, not because they will be arrested if they don't, but because they feel it is the right thing to do. They take care of their families, pay their bills, tithe to their church, work hard, etc. They most often don't need justice, and are not motivated by fear of it. These are the people you never hear about in the news. "Man pays bills on time," is not a news item. "Couple married 50 years" is on the back pages, "Kid cleans up schoolyard," might be noted in passing. And there are millions upon millions of those "non-stories," every day in this country that are never reported. "Nothing Stolen During Street Fair," "Millions of Americans Never Arrested."

But if we get lazy and our ethical decisions flabby, plenty of people are willing to take the job of telling us what to do. "If it feels good, do it," was the mantra of a generation that went off the ethical rails with drugs and promiscuity and American society is still paying for it, still trying to solve the problems it created, 50 years later. Now, if you don't feel good, you need an anti-depressant, but shrinks and pharmacists are the dealers and it's all legal. The government even pays for it. And it's not your fault.

Our new mantra is: "It's not your fault, you have a chemical imbalance." In this society, you are seen as a sort of consuming computer, a stimulus-response machine driven by your chemicals, marketing and advertising, incapable of reasoning. You are seen as a product of your environment, an expression of your body's DNA, the effect of your parent's mistakes and the chemicals in your brain. You have no ability to make good decisions, and must be protected from yourself by a benevolent government that knows what's best. Protected against obesity, trans fats, soda, evil businesses, stress, sports injuries, accidents on and on. Everything is OK, you no longer have to take risks or make difficult decisions -- those create stress, which increase the drain on our national health system. So take a pill will you?

OK, way too serious! I do have some bad news however -- It is your fault! You are ultimately responsible for the good things and the bad that result from your actions. If your kid is suspended from school for waving a loaded pop tart, you can raise hell and should. If you feel stress, it's not your chemicals, it's something that you need to deal with and are avoiding. If you are obese it's not McDonald's fault for making stuff taste good, it's you being a pig. Go get some exercise like you know you should, and stop feeding your face. And if you feel like you really are a stimulus-response machine driven here and there by wind and chance, get religion. It's about you as a spiritual being, not a body full of chemicals and trans fats rolling downhill to the cemetery. That should cheer you up some.

From the Monkey to the Democrat

The way I see it is that we have at least two well-developed views of America. The first is a direct descendent of the Founders where government was the enemy, they thought they were in charge and they told us what to do. They wore red coats and wouldn't go away so we had to shoot them. We were the militia, those farmers with guns who did the shooting.

Once the redcoats left, we got together in groups and argued about who was in charge, but not much shooting, except for a few duels to honor the French who helped us. We keep guns to let people know we haven't forgotten and that we are still a force to be reckoned with. We watch Fox news and we'll give up our guns when you pry them from our cold dead fingers.

The second major view is that we have evolved, from the monkey to the union member to the Democrat, and we are all kind of sophisticated now, live in big cities, believe that global warming means we should live in the park, heat with compost and listen to National Public Radio.

Having evolved, we look down on the gun-toting monkeys as cretins, whatever those are, and define the word "militia" as "the military." To continue our sophisticating ways, we take from the rich and give to the poor. We tax sinful activities -- like smoking, drinking, gambling, burning gasoline and being productive -- to send a message of disapproval and to pay for our beneficence -- whatever that is -- to the poor, the dispirited, the depressed, the gender bent, the addicted, the many victims of a cruel fate meted out by the most wealthy and productive and fair-minded country in the history of the world.

The first view excludes those who don't share the first view. They just want to be left alone with plenty of space around them so someone with the second view won't move in next door or walk on their lawn.

First view parents say "tough it out," and "rub dirt on it," to their children's troubles, maybe take them to boxing or martial arts classes, while second view parents take kids to get medication and hire lawyers to sue bullies.

The second view warmly embraces the poor the broken, the dispirited, the criminal, the unemployed, the shiftless, the addicts, the criminals, the crazies, and those with a propensity to the many vices the flesh is heir to.

The first view sees that as completely unfair, because all those losers vote Democratic and the ranks of loserhood are growing. The second feel it is our burden to shoulder, and drag them from their TV sets down to the polls to vote, because after all, they are just poor weak creatures who need good examples, and in exchange we get tons of votes.

Both first and second views spend money like drunken sailors, no matter what they say. The first view spends like crazy on the military because we want to keep bad people from moving in next door to America. And the first view wants to hammer the dictators, the terrorists, the redcoats, the drug dealers and other bad people.

The second view believe we must make the wealthy and productive shoulder the burden of the losers, and so invent programs that provide food, pharmaceuticals, housing, abortions, caring, sharing, and other necessities of life to their charges. We believe we must all get along, and pass hundreds of laws to force us to do that. Cumbaya.

The first view folk see the country as swerving to the left, closer and closer to the socialist state with the red flag. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," which -- while camouflaged as warm and fuzzy, requires a heavy government fist to enforce -- penalizes the productive and rewards the unproductive, and was the idea that gutted the USSR, Cuba and all such warm and fuzzy and broke economies.

The second view folks disagree, citing Euro-socialism as workable and dignified and very very sophisticated. Nothing as sophisticated as an English accent or Greek bailouts. The first view folk put stickers on pickup bumpers that say "Socialism is great until you run out of other people's money."

Can we all get along? No. The views are too different. The second view media do not understand the first view reality, and denigrate it, calling for compromise or partial surrender, or just waiting for the old white guys like Clint Eastwood to die off, for the dawning of a glorious socialist spring where the government tells you what to do, but everything is free.

It's too late for good manners. The first view is angry and itching for a fight. The second view is in charge for now and, smiling indulgently from Mt. Supermajority, will plunge leftward ignoring the first view perspective. They think they are in charge and they tell us what to do, and as in olden times, we're having us a Tea Party.